Modern urbanism has given us a landscape that many consider to be soulless. Everything looks the same. Nothing creates a sense of place. New Urbanism has attempted to reverse this by returning to traditional architecture and town planning forms. This was done in European new towns, under the advice of well-meaning men like the Krier brothers, in the late 1970’s, and did not succeed. While there are blocks and squares and on-street parking, the general configuration of traditional towns, the new towns did not develop the identity and personal relationships with their inhabitants that was intended with the return to traditional forms. They still experience the same population mobility that the other suburbs of the periphery experience.
The reason this happened is the same reason that New Urbanism has not caught on, despite the fact that everyone agrees with it. The New Urbanists have been focusing on outcome instead of process.
Complexity is an emergent phenomenon. This means that its outcome cannot be determined, that only the process of emergence can be determined, and the outcome must be what results from this process unexpectedly. The sense of place that we seek is not traditional town plans, although those have merits of their own, but the realization of our personalities in buildings.
Home renovation has become the cultural expression of the landed middle classes, and the propagation of the home renovation big box chains is a testament to this culture. I cannot have a single conversation with any middle aged home-owning couple without some renovation project of theirs being mentioned, and I shudder to think how conversations go when they are amongst themselves. I believe that, more than a form of consumer culture or cocooning, this trend is a reaction against the placelessness of suburban environments. As the standardized, tract homes are transformed at small scales by their residents, they come to reflect the choices and personalities of the individuals that inhabit them. This is what had been missing from the speculative, mass-produced housing that colonized the periphery and eventually exploded across the entire landscape. Once buildings have been transformed by someone, the presence of this person is felt in the building’s form. It becomes a unique historical event, and thus forms a place.
How does repetition of identical buildings come to be? The answers are in the building processes. Repetition was never seen prior to the industrial age, and even through the industrial age not all cities actually saw mass-produced housing. American cities laid out on grid patterns all have their share of row buildings, as does London. But in London the trend started with terrace housing for the aristocracy, and other centers of industrial revolution in Europe, such as Paris and Berlin, have no trace of repetition at the scale of working-class neighborhoods in industrial America. The simple fact of industrialization cannot explain this kind of urban morphology. Even today, while the construction of repetitive housing subdivisions continues in the post-industrial world, the industrializing countries such as China are constructing wildly individualized buildings inside the existing urban fabric. And in the informally economic shantycities of Africa and favelas of America, personalized building is the only rule. The latter feel more alive, although less comfortable. That living quality, the result of millions of individual acts of transformation to create fitness, is what gives a place its placeness. But in order for this quality to emerge, there must be a personally-enabling urban process at work.
Christopher Alexander theorized such processes in his Oregon Experiment, where he also wrote a scathing criticism of city plans. He described how the directors of urbanism for the University of Oregon could act to enable the creativity of the inhabitants of the university in the elaboration of new buildings that would solve their personal, individualized problems. This would be the opposite of designing a plan for the university’s expansion that would then be imposed on the inhabitants in perpetuity
The traditionalist New Towns I mentioned do have such plans, and they do forbid personal transformation on the urban fabric. This is why they remain only a product and have not grown into a place. The same fate awaits suburban subdivisions where strict HOA rules forbid changes.
Beyond those two cases, a larger problem still has to be challenged. Why is it that the processes of urbanization in our countries limit or destroy complexity, while enabling it in foreign countries? We must take a critical look at our processes, which are unfortunately often enshrined by government legislation, and replace them with those processes that enable the emergence of complexity. Only then can a new urbanism be achieved.
Placeless:
Placefull:
Reference
Alexander, Christopher and others. The Oregon Experiment.
Regional complexity and local community
January 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment
The housing crisis afflicting Britain has reached such an intolerable level that Prime Minister Gordon Brown is announcing what amounts to a nationalization of planning regulations (report via Planetizen). This comes on the heels of the mayor of Greater London being granted the power to override planning rules of boroughs in order solve the capital’s even more outrageous housing situation, as recently as 2007. The trend towards centralization of the planning process must mean that England is suffering from too much localism. Since the glorious standoff between Robert Moses and the mothers of Greenwhich Village in the 1950’s, the local area has been considered the appropriate scale for urban planning, leading in New York City to a transfer of planning rights to community boards. This transfer has not been without its drawbacks to the city. With the reputation of Robert Moses being slowly rehabilitated the pendulum may be swinging back in the other direction.
The Paris region has struggled with the same issues, having had both its Robert Moses era and now its localism era leading to the same kind of crisis London is struggling with. Legislators and senators have lately been juggling with different schemes to solve the problem of Greater Paris, all of them more or less inspired by the Greater London Authority. (The humiliating loss to London in the bid for the 2012 Olympics having provided the evidence for the superiority of London’s model.) Localism in France is notoriously entrenched, the Ile-de-France region being divided into over 1200 communities, one third of them creating the 10,000,000 people Paris metropolis. Planning a world-class capital with 1200 mayors, all out to protect their local community and identity, has to this day been achieved by layering multiple superimposed regional authorities that have fought each other in turf wars and become a remote abstraction to the citizens they are little accountable to. When finally things achieve complete irrationality, people plead for the state to step in.
What’s unusual about this situation is that it is not the first time it has happened. It is another round in a cycle whose last peak was the post-war housing crisis that lead to the regional plan of Paul Delouvrier under special orders from then-president of France Charles de Gaulle. Going back further in history, the nomination of prefect Georges Eugène Haussmann and his restructuring plan to extend the scale of Paris was preceded by a similar urban humiliation against London. Both times public opinion turned against the regional planners a decade or two into their rule, giving way to another era of localism. In the meantime their projects, the great boulevards and the Regional Express train network, became indispensable to urban life.
Over the summer I was fortunate enough to be on the planning staff of one Delouvrier’s great projects for the Paris region, the New Town of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines, today a mature city. The city has since its founding been a microcosm of the regional-local conflict. From that experience I proposed a permanent solution to the cycle, and my inspiration came from fractal geometry.
The problem to be solved is to create a division of the metropolis that is simultaneously local and regional, that allows local communities to grow through their own specific urban processes while making it possible to launch and plan projects at the regional scale. The divisions have to be simple enough internally that people can easily understand how they work, thus forbidding the layering of levels of governance and bureaucracies, the territorial mille-feuilles. The closest object that describes such an organization is the Sierpinski Carpet.
The Sierpinski carpet is an object that has structure at infinite levels of scale and can therefore solve problems that occur at the biggest and smallest scales. In real-world terms, it implies that a regional community has grown around small communities and towns, each with their own separate and contrasting scale. This organization recognizes that cities happen at all scales and harmonizes them into a coherent whole. It is a fractal, perforated city.
The city of Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines is a clear attempt, although a failed one, to create such a perforated city. The original territory, on the outskirts of Paris just south of Versailles, was a sleepy exurban territory of one small town and a handful of villages surrounded by large farming estates, when in the late 1960’s the state launched its program of new towns. Because the farming estates were concentrated in the hands of a few large farmers the state considered them easy to acquire and develop. A state-owned developer, EPASQY, was created to develop and commercialize the new town, and a special regime of planning regulations was created around the existing town and villages, preserving the local rules within them. This territorial organization had the following form:
The gray area was the territory controlled by the developer. The white pockets were the town of Trappes and the villages and hamlets of the area. The other significant aspect of this organization, and what eventually caused the hijacking of the New Town project, is the superposition of the communes divisions onto this structure. The commune is the basic element of local governance in France, created during the French revolution and static ever since. While the local mayors of the communes tried in vain to stop the plan, the arrival of suburban migrants from Paris into the new neighborhoods spelled the end of their community. In one fateful year every mayor was swept from office and replaced with more politically-savvy migrants from Paris who proceeded to create a new, suburban community from their office by blocking the plans of the state developer and acquiring the right to determine the programs of all further developments. What was to be a New Town of 500,000, an economic and political balance to Paris as the state designed it, was thus scaled down to what it is today, a suburban city of over 100,000 made up of 7 semi-autonomous and politically antagonistic communities struggling to solve regional problems since the dissolution of the developer.
Because the territory of the local communities extended beyond their urbanized area, the urbanization of this land by migrants from another community, that of metropolitan Paris, caused their community to disappear politically. This problem is the root of the housing crisis in London, Paris and rural England. Communities are not able to grow their territory as they expand, and smaller communities with territories much greater than they need must protect their political existence by restricting the production of new housing that will threaten their political future. If, by some accident, any one of the hundreds of communes of Paris were to remove density restrictions, the result would be the entire housing demand for the region channeled in this one community, creating a population surge followed by a new political paradigm. Mayors therefore naturally block new development, and will fight proposals such as Mr. Gordon Brown’s to overrule their community’s planning regulations. Their very survival as a political community is at stake. Had the New Town planners been able to create new political territories that preserved the local communities in the middle of their plan, both the local communities and the new regional community could have coexisted. Instead they both vanished in favor of artificial suburban communities in the fight over the area’s development.
Anyone traveling around the Paris region will be easily persuaded of the necessity of preserving local communities, some of which have had a distinct existence since before the middle ages. One historic town, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, has the claim of being the birthplace of the French kings. Other communities have not enjoyed political autonomy since Haussmann’s reforms, but continue to exist in fact. The village of Montmartre has enjoyed a special planning code within Paris’ planning system until recent year, as have the outer boroughs. These distinct processes were abolished in this decade’s revision of the planning system and a single planning system now regulates all of Paris in the hopes of simplifying the process. The drawback will be the loss of Paris’ distinct communities.
The solution to the dilemma of Greater Paris and its many communities would be to create a perforated fractal Paris, with distinct communities and their distinct planning processes existing autonomously within it. The most significant of these communities, and the one most people recognize as Paris, is the historic core of boroughs 1-12. This area has developed a tourism-centric economy that requires a planning process focused on strict preservation of the urban fabric, or as other Parisians call it, a museum-city. Beyond that circle begins metropolitan Paris, the space centered around the two ring highways, which faces entirely different challenges and community objectives.
Historic Paris – beloved by tourists
Metropolitan Paris – home to millions with different challenges and a different urbanism
Village of Montmartre, an enclave within Paris
Within the regional city of Paris would exist other historic cities as well as special forms of communities, such as the business city of La Défense whose unconventional urbanism preserves the economic vitality of the region. Alongside major historic towns such as Versailles and St-Denis, the territory of Metropolitan Paris would also be perforated by a constellation of villages and perhaps some entirely artificial and experimental communities.
For the legislators tasked with drawing community boundaries, such a plan will be a nightmare. How are they expected to define thousands of communities, each with their scale, and track their growth over time? The task is impossible. They have imposed the delimitation of communes in a central plan that is every bit a form of zoning as the separation of uses, and just as limiting, because that is the limit of their ability to control communities. A fractal territorial structure of thousands of communities cannot be made by legislative act, it must be an emergent outcome of autonomous communities exchanging parts of their territory until they have achieved an equilibrium that fits all of their current situations. For this the legislators must give up defining the boundaries and instead define a process by which communities are formed and grow out of other communities.
Cities have grown upon a political blueprint that did not adapt with the communities it planned for. This created regional crises that were followed by regional blueprints and then local crises. A dynamic territorial structure would not adopt a regional or local scale but all scales at once, nested within each other. Such a territorial structure would result in institutional simplicity while resolving regional complexities in its emergent dimension. Doing so implies that legislators and governments must give up their power to plan communities, an act they will be reluctant to consider.
Interesting side-note
While New York City’s growth rarely bumped into an existing community, one case was Greenwhich Village, which today continues to be an exception in Manhattan’s otherwise strict urban grid. How strange that it would be the Greenwhich Village community that would stop Robert Moses more than a century after joining the metropolis.
Update
Another story on community conflicts appears on Planetizen, this time about an Amish community being forced by a local municipality to comply with a planning process that will destroy their community. The city demands that the Amish submit engineering plans for their buildings, but traditional buildings are not engineering projects. If they start building from an engineering plan, the form the buildings take will be completely different from their traditional form, and the building culture will die out.
Categories: Commentary
Tagged: Community, complexity, fractals, Localism, London, New Towns, Paris, Planning process, Regionalism, territorial structure