Lecture 2.1 -- Sustainable American Urbanism
Transcription of the complete lectures is in process. This is a transcript of the second lecture with minimal editing for clarity.
The first lecture was an overview as to why the question of sustainability is critical to thinking through what it means to be human from now on. We are leaving the intellectual period of Modernism, which was an extremely individualistic kind of movement. It privileged the individual, it privileged the individual experience, it suggested that we could invent new forms to solve new forms to solve modern problems. We are no longer classical people, we are modern people with modern problems and it is through Modernism that we are going to propose solutions. We are seeing that this way of thinking is deeply arrogant thinking in which we, humans, are smarter than nature.
This way of thinking, that we are smarter than nature, almost no one believes it anymore. 99.9% of the serious science thinks that there is a serious problem out there, so we are largely in agreement. The old debates of individualism and modernism and its solutions, in my view, those questions are largely now irrelevant because there are more pressing problems which have to do with overall survival of the species.
So that was the frame of the first lecture. And all that is not really bad news, there is actually good news, at least in terms of urban form we have a solution to this, we know what we can to do, we have to institute it, but we know that we can do it [provide sustainable solutions].
I want to now look at another issue, which is ‘what are cities’? I’m making this argument that cities are important to sustainability, but what are cities and why are they important? They were not always there; cities are a relatively recent invention. How did they come about, and what do they do for us? Because they actually do some things for us that is very useful and is quite interesting, but not necessarily why they were built. It is this organism that has taken off on its own, that has departed from what was probably its origin (which I will talk about) into something that is doing something else.
This is a view of New York, that edge of central park, where the buildings start, and the stark juxtaposition [with Central Park].
<Slide on computer>
Let’s start with some big questions. What is a city? What makes a good city? This a course that presents an opinion, and I will be using these value laden words like “good,” and I will be making arguments that certain things are good and certain things are bad. I will try and reinforce that by proof as to why certain things work and why certain things don’t work. Typically my touchstone will be issues surrounding sustainability, which we can measure. Sometimes there will be things that we can’t measure. Sometimes there will be things which are a social good. I am going to make an argument in this class that considering the public realm is an inherent good and the public realm is something we have not done enough about in this country where we have really thought more about the private realm. We have delivered the private American house in a way no other country can deliver private space, but to some extent at the price of the public realm. To some extent we do not even know what the public realm means.
“The building cities is one of man’s greatest achievements. The form of his city is has always been and always will be a pitiless indicator of the state of his civilization.”
-- Edmund Bacon, 1967
I have actually been thinking about this gender issue, because these quotes always are said in some ‘masculine case’. It is interesting that almost any top 10 list of environmental books include Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Almost any top 10 list would include these two. And most people’s top 2 lists would include these two. They are in mine. I do not know what conclusions to draw from this, that these two classics of the environmental movement were written by women. It is actually quite interesting.
What is Bacon saying in this quote? In the city there is a relationship between the city form and us, the city’s occupants. That to some extent the city form reflects what we are like as human beings, what our values are. That if we build beautiful cities with beautiful public spaces, we value one thing, and that if we build cities that are aesthetically challenged and have other kinds of problems that we value other things. And that is not necessarily that one example is better than the other, it is simply an observation, a reflection of what we are doing.
I would go a little further and say that there is this complicated question (and debate) about the relationship between physical form and human action. This is important to what we are going to be doing in this course. There is a relationship between the shape of things (the physical form of things) and human action. But this relationship is quite complicated.
Let’s take this room for example. This room is a certain shape, and built into this shape is a certain kind of idea. There is a certain kind of agenda here. What is it? The focus is here on the speaker. What is the assumption about this person? They are the focal point, presumably they are the authority, and presumably they have earned the authority. That is the kind of built-in idea; that this relationship has some kind of validity. But we can put someone here that does not deserve to be here and this relationship would not have that validity. This is a room designed for teaching. Could we run a daycare in here? Yes, we could run a daycare in here, it’s not a very good place to run a daycare, because there are all kinds of problems, but we could run a daycare here. This is the relationship between human action and form. That there is some relationship, but it is not a clear one. But it is not, to use technical terminology, a ‘deterministic’ one. What determinism in form means is that a certain form will guarantee a certain action. The various fascist movements thought this. They thought if we build certain kinds of buildings and certain kinds of shapes we can guarantee certain kinds of actions.
I would argue that the relationship is more complex. We can build certain kinds of forms and certain kinds of cities that encourage certain kinds of actions. And we can also build certain kinds of cities that certainly preclude other kinds of actions. But we cannot guarantee it, we cannot guarantee that anything will happen.
Let’s look at a local example which to some extent will reveal the lack of place in a city like Merced, and which is typical of most American cities. Where would you go if you wanted to have a riot? Where would you go in Merced? Where is the place for that? Where is the city center? Where is the political center for the city? It is difficult to answer, right? And that is the point, that it is difficult to answer the question. When we do not have a political center, do we have an active political life?
If you were in Venice or, to some extent New York, you would know where to go to riot. In Venice the answer is absolutely clear. In Paris there were several places that have historically had riots, if you want to have a riot, that is where you go. It is built into the urban system.
The question I would pose is that if we do not have these kinds of public spaces do we preclude the possibility of having that kind of public life because we have not provided the space for it? In some societies this is intentional. For example in Beijing at Tiananmen square. Whenever a difficult anniversary comes Tiananmen Square is closed for repairs. Why is it closed for repairs? It is closed for repairs so no one can go there and have a protest because it is so clear that that is the place to go.
“The possibility that humans can flourish, achieve greater social cohesion, find higher levels of well being, and still reduce their material impact on the environment is an intriguing one.”
Prosperity without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet --Tim Jackson
This is a question that has not been posed before: this idea that we can do all these things while actually not using resources. The entire economy, the entire function of growth, has been based on using resources. This is how we have done this. And this shift, which in a sense has to happen, it is not actually clear how this is going to be brought about.
“My hope is to dispel the idea, that is so widely and uncritically held, that cities are a kind of grand accident.”
-- Edmund Bacon
This is something we will talk about when we look at more closely at the Renaissance. We will see that the city and the renaissance was really conceptualized as an object of beauty from the beginning. In the renaissance, to some extent, society was organized around what it meant to make beautiful cities. Beauty was a major public, political and commercial good. They were debating it, they were talking about it, this was a major focus of the society. It is hard for us to imagine that kind of thing now; we are so far away from it.
I’m going to take you through these 5 topics:
What cities can do
Public and Private Realm
Cities in physical form
Categories of cities
What makes a city sustainable