SI 3 EVACUACIÓN DE OCUPANTES

talgic, deterministic, backward looking and do not deal with the urban con- dition as it is today.

Suburban nation: the rise of sprawl and the decline of the American dream describes space lacking in interaction:

In an architectural version of Invasion of

the Body Snatchers, our main streets and

neighbourhoods have been replaced by alien substitutes, similar but not the same (Duany et al., 2000:xiii)

The authors carry on to say that lack of “public discourse” is being responsible for this what. I find their vision of the spaces as somehow absent of an equivalent of the human spirit or consciousness par- ticularly interesting. This is an expression of the idea that the combination of form and process can generate something else, some difficult to express, untouchable meaning. I look further at how this ‘meaning’ might

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Figure 28 Brussels , Alastair Gordon Figure 28 Brussels , Alastair GordonFigure 28 Brussels , Alastair Gordon Figure 28 Brussels , Alastair Gordon

111 be arrived at or de-

scribed in chapter ten. While the work in this book places great emphasis on walking and walkability, there is also a great deal of emphasis placed on form. Duany and Plater- Zybeck often look to historical examples as guidelines for finding form. The logic of this approach, based on the hy- pothesis that historical cities have some richness that is lacking in contemporary sprawl, is positive in that it recognises the worth in cities that have emerged through self-organising behaviour, a thought with which I agree. But their solution, to graft the forms of historical cities onto contemporary cities is not an answer. A particular example of this is where they explain

the “precise standards” that could be coded to create a square. It must have trees at the edge; it must have grass for sports and so on, all standards “carefully derived from proven models” (Duany et al., 2000:33). The assumption here seems to be that because this form appeared in cities that are ‘good’, the typology will prove to be ‘good’ over and over, in any situation.

A core concept of complexity theory holds here for urban design: the principle of folded phase space holds that returning selected variables in one phase space to the way they were in an earlier state does not return the system as a whole to the way it was. Processes have changed, interactions have changed, and how these are changed needs to be considered as much as form needs to be considered.

The argument is often made that building cities with lots of opportunities for interaction will be good for community creation

Rather optimistically Appleyard and Ja- cobs believe a city with plentiful community in- teraction will work somehow in the manner of a Constitution, bringing not only justice and toler- ance but also democracy(1996:442). The argument I make for the design of an infrastructure of inter- action is not about creating some sort of nice, car- ing community that will emerge from these inter- actions, although a nice, caring community may be one possible result of an effective infrastruc- ture of interaction. Interaction does not ensure

that ‘good’ or caring cities and communities will emerge. Evil can be an emergent prop- erty of systems (Bella, 2006).

Salingaros, too, believes traditional urban forms can be adopted to good effect, be- cause they represent the mineralised intelligence of many minds; hundreds of years of adaptive built form, an evolutionary process where forms that didn’t work were elimi- nated, those that did were replicated (2004:229). This is an interesting argument and given Salingaros’ work as a mathematician rather than a design professional, has a stronger complexity rationale than new urbanist thinking. But the same counter argu- ment applies – that processes are different in contemporary cities and societies and so traditional forms need to be re-examined in these terms for contemporary use. It would also be helpful to consider which aspect of the form affects interaction. Rather than repro- ducing all the, say, fluted columns and statues of heroes that exist in a traditional square,

113 exactly which aspect of form is affecting the processes that are valued, or re-

garded as missing in a contemporary design,

I am not suggesting this approach can never work. The discussion that follows in this thesis is about adopting a spatial organisation that embraces many historical mani- festations. In contemporary use, however, the interactions that take place in the city are quite different to the interactions that existed in the past.

If cities are material accretions/secretions based on their flows, (De Landa 1997) differing flows would mineralise different cities. I think that a desire to recreate the tra- ditional, European type city is somehow derived from an appreciation of the fine- grained, compact city that tends to be created by the tight, densely connected networks of pre-car movement. .

The nineteen nineties saw another appraisal of the city. Instead of rejecting sprawl and the periphery, writers like Sudjic and Maspero strove to include the periphery, the edge city, into discourse (Wilson, 1995:5). This approach challenges the idea that the suburb is meaningless; that only a city centre gives a place mean- ing and asserts an anti-sprawl stance is elitist (Wilson, 1995:6). Part of the justification this is based on the ob- servation that urbanist designers can promote a com- pact, traditional, walking city while in spite of all their earnest pleas, the sprawl just keeps on happening, re- gardless of all this focus on the ‘good’ city form. Sudjic

says that where there is a choice, people very often choose not to live in “cramped city centre homes” (1992:309). Does this mean that people actually want sprawl despite the best ef- forts of determinist and neo-traditional designer dictates? We are asked “not to turn our backs on this new form…the backdrop of everyday life” (Sudjic, 1992:297). Is the sprawling city the inevitable space of the present and foreseeable future? Should we therefore give up the seem- ingly lost cause of trying to make cities ‘good’?

Sudjic argues that to ignore forces of mobility that are creating the modern city is, indeed, futile (Sudjic, 1992:305). But working with complex systems is indeed often futile; when systems are in powerful attractor states, attempts to shift the systems from these attrac- tors will fail many times. Throwing our hands up in despair, thinking that the system is teleological, that it ‘wants’ to be in a particular attractor is not the only response to deal- ing with complex systems.

So we are never in control of emergent systems, and that fact can become a scary deterrent against adopting complexity theory as a tool for urban design. In the next sec- tion, I consider the limits of what can be done in the practice of urban design and con- sider how we can design with complexity.

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6

The law of requisite variety