Aesthetic Limitations: My own plan ... mixed with everyone else's

But what we have to express in expressing our cities is not to be scorned. Their intricate order—a manifestation of the freedom of countless plans—is in many ways a great wonder. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p391)

Call it “intricate order;” call it “emergent order.” Those who study systems, such as ecosystems, observe some semblance of order - just as Jane Jacobs describes it in cities.

We’ve all got our own agency - not the organization, but the plan of action. Despite the mess of such a mashup, an order does emerge. To explain this order, Jacobs borrows a bit from her contemporary, Kevin Lynch. Tomorrow I’ll pull in a bit of the language he uses concerning imageability and the five identifiers we use in composing our own cognitive maps. I’ll still be grounding it in Jacobs’ chapter on visual order, as well as more from Norwood, Ohio.

We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more understandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is. “Visual order: its limitations and possibilities,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p391)

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World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 - Burnham’s White CityJacobs is a bit scornful, again, bringing up the “nineteenth century utopians” in this chapter. That would be Ebenezer Howard and his Garden City gang. She also pulls in Daniel Burnham and his City Beautiful brethren under that moniker. Without getting into the nitty gritty concerning these movements and their influence on modern city planning, suffice it to say that both movements rely on excessive control over individual agency by one or few.

Howard’s agenda is unabashedly socialist - not in itself a bad thing, but horrible when it comes to the systems that make a city develop and operate. You might rebuff me here and state that even capitalist, market-driven economies require a certain degree of control over individual agency, such as protecting property. However, there’s still places in this world where additional flexibility creates forms of emergent order that are worth studying, such as the shanty towns that spring up despite the interests of the property owners of the underlying land.

Burnham somehow manages to be worse than Howard. It’s his definition of beauty - of artificial civic agglomeration at the center of the city - that ignores urban order. Where Howard proposes a vision for new cities, Burnham’s vision claims to cure existing cities.

Perhaps Burnham’s one of those architects who hates cities. Or, perhaps he’s failed to identify the right problem (ask a fruitful question).