Organized Complexity - Work Inductively

This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. “Introduction,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p3)

Don’t be mistaken. This is a radical woman. Still.

Jane Jacobs tears apart what, up to that point, were the foundations of the still relatively young field of city planning. She accomplished that in the introduction.

She didn’t just take away the big ideas and theories of the day that shaped policymakers’ view of how cities and places work. She took away all big ideas.

City processes in real life are too complex to be routine, too particularized for application as abstractions. They are always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars, and there is no substitute for knowing the particulars. “The kind of problem a city is” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p441)

This, is radical.

Planning history (before and after Jacobs) is riddled with guiding metaphors, where the larger idea guides one’s ideas of how the city ought to work.

Take streets, for example. Everyone has heard the insidious guiding metaphor here: traffic flow. Like water.

Tom Vanderbilt has written a thoroughly endnoted, but quite readable account of Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). It’s not about flow.

To observe and understand a place, you don’t have to dive into the local library’s archives (though I just told you to understand the place’s story when inspecting processes). You don’t always need a long bibliography. The particulars you notice don’t require a footnote. They just are. Look at how they work together. It’s not up to a convenient theory or secondary sources describing what others say.

Observe the primary source. Intuit. Radical, eh?