It's been a long time but I'm sure I remember something along similar themes being one of the essays in the back of the SimCity 2000 manual. Which now makes me all nostalgic for the days when game manuals were something existing at the confluence between readme, strategy guide and just plain good reading matter.
Robert Pirsing's second book -- Lila -- had this as a major theme. He talked about how cities, by having people living in them, created almost a new life form. Much like our bodies are just a collection of cells, that together create a new life (humans), based on emergent behaviour.
One of the reasons suburban patterns of development are a problem is because it limits adaptability. A healthy city allows for stable neighborhoods by making it feasible for someone to change jobs as needed without necessarily moving.
(This is probably not some kind of original thought on my part. I read this somewhere long ago -- though I may be mashing together two thoughts from distinct sources. I just don't recall the source/sources.)
Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent labor force to diverse work opportunities. Most of commuting and corollary congestion happens at rush hour: the time when people travel from home to work and vice versa. In the above diagram from Order Without Design, Marie-Agnes & Alain Bertaud skillfully illustrates the key connection between home, work/entertainment and speed of travel. The 15-minute city should attempt to minimize inconvenient & needless travel, while offering speedy access to jobs and amenities regardless of the place of residence. The traditional central business district is somewhat efficient in this sense; polycentric planning needs to figure out how it can keep the efficiencies of a central business district while offering the comfort of a walkable neighborhood. Even if all super-creatives work from home, that still leaves 88% of the labor force which needs to move around. Swift mobility will be a key aspect of urban living for the foreseeable future and a crucial determinant to the success of polycentric cities.
This is also why NIMBYism is such a problem. No city is static... it is either growing or dying. Often both, simultaneously. If the ability to change is constrained, the city-organism is more likely to die as conditions change.
It's just a feature of self-governance. The citizens of a city get to decide its future. A lot of people in cities will like them the way they are and resist changes they don't like. That's fine; that's democracy in action.
The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it, but the local government has no obligation to represent them. Cities that want to grow can court them instead.
Besides, there have been lots of great NIMBYs over the years. The ones that saved Paris from Le Corbusier's modernization plan "Plan Voisin"[1], or the ones that saved Seattle from having about 500% more interstates than it needed[2].
Sufficiently large cities,much like sufficiently large companies, fall into the tight hierarchical management and red tape. Basic services become more expensive and less effective.
This also mirrors large enterprises, especially in things like IT services for providing infrastructure before AWS started hollowing them out.
In large enterprises with a dozen different datacenters (often from acquisitions and mergers), I never understood why these assets were placed under the same management and policy. Instead, the opportunity to provide internal services competition was ignored, with two or even three or four different infrastructure provider services competing to serve IT systems and applications.
Likewise, in a large enough city you could have competing services for snow plowing, garbage collection, pothole maintenance, and even if you don't have consumer choice or transparency, have a relatively cheap oversight group rate and reallocate funding. School choice has been pretty popular in cities.
And when privatization occurs... why go all in? Use it for competition, not replacement. Although charter schools have been generally a failure of policy if we use that as an example of this strategy.
Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order" comes to mind, where he makes similar points WRT urban architecture and patterns of cities' growth.
Manuel De Landa made a phenomenal analysis of European cities as dissipative structures in "1000 Years of Non-Linear History", covering both ecological, geological and linguistic aspects of their development.
Cities are not all living entities, but given the right conditions they can be born. There are also however inter-dimensional predators that seek them out to consume while they are new and vulnerable, so the cities choose people who embody them to raise up as avatars and protect them.
At least, that’s the premise in N.K. Jemisin’s _The City We Became_, which I tore through quickly and am eagerly awaiting the rest of the trilogy.
Interesting perspective. I don’t think cities should be adaptable to change. Most city models should be abandoned and new models created. Features of the older model can be reused.
The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities. Like humans, habitat, wild life and environment. Here capitalism and materialism trump over stable environments for living.
Families, businesses and even nature needs stability. Stability doesn’t exclude adaptability but it requires a certain amount of static ‘non-changeablity’.
The problem at hand is: 1. Workforce has become migratory. 2. A lack of transport network and infrastructure is blurring all kinds of lines between urban, suburban and rural.
This is an uniquely American problem esp in cities where govt doesn’t invest in transportation infrastructure.
Cities should be stable. People should adaptable if they want freedom of movement. If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out. It’s an either/or situation. Such a binary approach would ensure that we have less of inequalities, unaffordability, exploitation of resources an destruction of eco systems.
Trying to be a migratory populace AND wanting to have adaptable cities is a recipe of disaster and strife as we have all seen in recent times.
> The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities
No, it's the exact opposite. Adaptable cities adapt to serve the changing needs of the people living in them. This is better just building new ones with different features when the old features are found to be inadequate because:
(1) Geography (access to fresh water, natural trade routes, climate) matters for cities, and the good places to site cities are mostly taken,
(2) The people least well served by an existing city design will naturally be the least free to abandon the city for a new one.
> . If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out
I see no rationale for this. You repeat it multiple times, but without clear reasoning.
[+] [-] Timberwolf|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dbaboci|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gogopuppygogo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hungryforcodes|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
(This is probably not some kind of original thought on my part. I read this somewhere long ago -- though I may be mashing together two thoughts from distinct sources. I just don't recall the source/sources.)
[+] [-] dbaboci|5 years ago|reply
Most importantly however cities serve as highly efficient labor markets - they connect a varied and interdependent labor force to diverse work opportunities. Most of commuting and corollary congestion happens at rush hour: the time when people travel from home to work and vice versa. In the above diagram from Order Without Design, Marie-Agnes & Alain Bertaud skillfully illustrates the key connection between home, work/entertainment and speed of travel. The 15-minute city should attempt to minimize inconvenient & needless travel, while offering speedy access to jobs and amenities regardless of the place of residence. The traditional central business district is somewhat efficient in this sense; polycentric planning needs to figure out how it can keep the efficiencies of a central business district while offering the comfort of a walkable neighborhood. Even if all super-creatives work from home, that still leaves 88% of the labor force which needs to move around. Swift mobility will be a key aspect of urban living for the foreseeable future and a crucial determinant to the success of polycentric cities.
[+] [-] _ah|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostromo|5 years ago|reply
The people that don't live there but would like to may not like it, but the local government has no obligation to represent them. Cities that want to grow can court them instead.
Besides, there have been lots of great NIMBYs over the years. The ones that saved Paris from Le Corbusier's modernization plan "Plan Voisin"[1], or the ones that saved Seattle from having about 500% more interstates than it needed[2].
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin
2. https://i.imgur.com/i158aQd.jpg
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
This also mirrors large enterprises, especially in things like IT services for providing infrastructure before AWS started hollowing them out.
In large enterprises with a dozen different datacenters (often from acquisitions and mergers), I never understood why these assets were placed under the same management and policy. Instead, the opportunity to provide internal services competition was ignored, with two or even three or four different infrastructure provider services competing to serve IT systems and applications.
Likewise, in a large enough city you could have competing services for snow plowing, garbage collection, pothole maintenance, and even if you don't have consumer choice or transparency, have a relatively cheap oversight group rate and reallocate funding. School choice has been pretty popular in cities.
And when privatization occurs... why go all in? Use it for competition, not replacement. Although charter schools have been generally a failure of policy if we use that as an example of this strategy.
[+] [-] 9214|5 years ago|reply
Manuel De Landa made a phenomenal analysis of European cities as dissipative structures in "1000 Years of Non-Linear History", covering both ecological, geological and linguistic aspects of their development.
[+] [-] filoeleven|5 years ago|reply
At least, that’s the premise in N.K. Jemisin’s _The City We Became_, which I tore through quickly and am eagerly awaiting the rest of the trilogy.
[+] [-] NoRagrets|5 years ago|reply
The notion that cities should be designed to be adaptable and are ‘living entities always changing’ comes from a world view that puts non living entities of cities like buildings and roads and infrastructure over living entities. Like humans, habitat, wild life and environment. Here capitalism and materialism trump over stable environments for living.
Families, businesses and even nature needs stability. Stability doesn’t exclude adaptability but it requires a certain amount of static ‘non-changeablity’.
The problem at hand is: 1. Workforce has become migratory. 2. A lack of transport network and infrastructure is blurring all kinds of lines between urban, suburban and rural.
This is an uniquely American problem esp in cities where govt doesn’t invest in transportation infrastructure.
Cities should be stable. People should adaptable if they want freedom of movement. If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out. It’s an either/or situation. Such a binary approach would ensure that we have less of inequalities, unaffordability, exploitation of resources an destruction of eco systems.
Trying to be a migratory populace AND wanting to have adaptable cities is a recipe of disaster and strife as we have all seen in recent times.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|5 years ago|reply
No, it's the exact opposite. Adaptable cities adapt to serve the changing needs of the people living in them. This is better just building new ones with different features when the old features are found to be inadequate because:
(1) Geography (access to fresh water, natural trade routes, climate) matters for cities, and the good places to site cities are mostly taken,
(2) The people least well served by an existing city design will naturally be the least free to abandon the city for a new one.
> . If you want cities to be living entities, then the citizens should curtail migration in and out
I see no rationale for this. You repeat it multiple times, but without clear reasoning.
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] thatsecurityguy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|5 years ago|reply