Grand Strategy Annex

11th February 2012

Post with 3 notes

Cities: the Constructive Kluge

I’ve just started to listen to the book on CD version of Edward Glaeser’s The Triumph of the City, which I wrote about shortly after starting this second blog, since I had just read a review of this book. I am happy to say that the book is much better than the review, which just goes to show that one ought never to give too much credence to reviews.

I particularly enjoyed this quote:

“Many of the ideas in this book draw on the wisdom of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, who knew that you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul. She understood that the people who make a city creative need affordable real estate. But she also made mistakes that came from relying too much on her ground-level view and not using conceptual tools that help one think through an entire system.”

I have many times referenced Jane Jacobs in my own ruminations, so it was interesting to see that this is one of Glaeser’s important influences. I was even more interested in Glaeser’s characterization of Jacob’s perspective as “ground level,” as this touches on what I recently wrote in Nazca to Ica:

The two perspectives offered on the Nazca lines by the tower and an airplane flyover also reminded me of a point that I imperfectly attempted to make in my post on Epistemic Orders of Magnitude, in which I employed aerial photographs of cities in order to demonstrate the similar structures of cities transformed in the image of industrial-technological civilization. This similarity in structure may be masked by one’s experience of an urban area from the perspective of passing through the built environment on a human scale — i.e., simply walking through a city, which is how most people experience an urban area.

Now, in light of what I have subsequently written about constructivism, I might say that our experience of a built environment is intrinsically constructive, except for that of the urban planner or urban designer, who must see (or attempt to see) things whole. However, the urban planner must also inform his or her work with the street-level “constructive” perspective or the planning made exclusively from a top-down perspective is likely to be a failure. Almost all of the most spectacular failures in urban design have come about from an attempt to impose, from the top down, a certain vision and a certain order which may be at odds with the organically emergent order that rises from the bottom up.

One could say, then, that Jacobs accepted the intrinsically constructive “ground-level view” of urbanism without supplementing that point of view with a non-constructive view from on high, which Glaeser suggests can be attained through the use of “conceptual tools.”

Glaeser also worried aloud about, “Why do so many smart people enact so many many foolish urban policies?” This immediately made me think of the book to which I just finished listening, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind by Gary Marcus. Here’s one of my favorite quotes from Marcus’ book, in partial answer to Glaeser’s rhetorical question:

“Put the contamination of belief, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning together, and you wind up with a species prepared to believe, well, just about anything.” (p.57)

This is all too true, but, of course, natural selection puts a brake the scope of belief, since if a belief becomes too maladaptive it will contribute to negative selection pressure — something that Marcus knows well, as the book is very much imbued with the spirit of evolutionary psychology, though he makes several explicit criticisms of the discipline throughout his book.

But if the human mind is a kluge, haphazardly assembled, with layers of functionality stacked on top of older layers sometimes at cross-purposes to that which is built on top of it, certainly the city is the ultimate kluge. I have observed many times that planned cities are usually the result of utopian schemes that in implementation all too often become dystopian nightmares. The healthy, thriving, successful city is a kluge — as is the economy that drives it.

Tagged: Edward GlaeserThe Triumph of the CityJane Jacobsconstructivismconstructivecitycitiesurbanurbanismkluge