Keywords

If we were transported from the present day to any large city of two centuries ago, London perhaps, what would we notice first? The strange way people dress or the primitive technology they use for communication and transport (pre-telegraph, those two activities not yet being distinct) or the odd way they speak? Maybe. But I bet what would strike us right away is the smell—that being bad—of all kinds in the street. The world reeked of unwashed bodies, animal waste, sewage, smoke, slaughterhouses, and piles of rotting garbage—truly, the wretched refuse of their teeming shore!

We have seen why a living city is an incubator of ideas and a principal locus of entrepreneurial discovery, innovation, and economic development. But creativity is the result of experiment, experiment involves trial and error, and trial and error entails, well, error with its accompanying failures, conflicts, and disappointments. As wonderfully creative as they are, there is no denying that great cities, like flesh-and-blood people, can be unpleasant, annoying, and sometimes dangerous. Any city that aspires to greatness will have something to offend everyone.

Viewed up close, the process of economic development via import replacement and shifting is not pretty. There are fits and starts at every stage and along the relevant margins of the division of labor. Replacing an import with a locally created substitute is the tip of an iceberg, the end of a long chain of events, and Jacobs doesn’t make all of them explicit. When local entrepreneurs find ways to profitably compete with producers in other cities, it means two things. First, a successful (for the time being) import replacement is what we see; what we don’t see is the disappointment of those who tried and failed or the travails of those who eventually do succeed. Second, we don’t see the people who lose their businesses and jobs owing to the local import-replacer and now have to scramble for new occupations. True, when the import-replacement process is working well, there is a greater volume and higher value of imports (including both familiar and new inputs and consumer goods), but the people who benefit may not be the same ones who lose. While the outcome of economic development is expanding trade, higher real per capita incomes, and greater comfort and convenience overall, it often takes time to adjust to the constantly changing reality and the messiness of it all, and not everyone experiences the benefits equally. To paraphrase Rem Koolhaas, in a living city the forces of order do manage to stay ahead of the forces of chaos but sometimes just barely (Koolhaas, 1994: 59). Which is to say that a living city is never a finished product but an ongoing process of becoming, a nexus of processes—social, economic, cultural—that interact complexly and unpredictably over time.

Someone we trust in one of our social networks gets us in touch with a person whom she trusts in a different network who offers an attractive opportunity in a distant city, and so we take it, to the distress and inconvenience of family, friends, and colleagues. Large and small, such events, as suggested in Chap. 5, could have enormous benefits socially, economically, and culturally. Even when working well, however, some of these social dynamics have wider, negative by-products such as conflict, congestion, pollution, inequality, epidemics, depravity, and crime.Footnote 1

I have been drawing some deep connections between Jacobs’s thought and that of F.A. Hayek. It shouldn’t be a surprise, then, that Hayek’s comments on urbanity sound quite Jacobsian.

Civilization as we know it is inseparable from urban life. Almost all that distinguishes civilized from primitive society is intimately connected with the large agglomerations of population that we call “cities,” and when we speak of “urbanity,” “civility,” or “politeness,” we refer to the manner of life in cities. Even most of the differences between the life of the present rural population and that of primitive people are due to what the cities provide. It is also the possibility of enjoying the products of the city in the country that in advanced civilizations often makes a leisured life in the country appear the ideal of a cultured life. (Hayek, 1959: 340)

His next observation, hinting at Koolhaas’s forces of disorder, is sobering.

Yet the advantages of city life, particularly the enormous increases in productivity made possible by its industry, which equips a small part of the population remaining in the country to feed all the rest, are bought a great cost. City life is not only more productive than rural life; it is also much more costly. Only those whose productivity is much increased by life in the city will reap a net advantage over and above the extra cost of this kind of life. Both the costs and the kinds of amenities which come with city life are such that the minimum income at which a decent life is possible is much higher than in the country. Life at a level of poverty which is still bearable in the country not only is scarcely tolerable in the city but produces outward signs of squalor which are shocking to fellow men. Thus the city, which is the source of nearly all that gives civilization its value and art as well as of material comfort, is at the same time responsible for the darkest blotches on this civilization. (Hayek, 1959: 340-1)

I begin this chapter by discussing in general terms the sources of those unpleasant by-products and then review some of the ambitious visions modern urban designers promoted and policies governments implemented to address them. I then examine their consequences, especially their unintended consequences, owing to incentive and knowledge problems.

1 Urbanization and Its Problems

Paul Seabright (2004) quotes writer Patrick Susskind (1988), who vividly describes the “atmosphere” of early Paris:

In the period of which we speak [eighteenth-century Paris], there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently sweet aroma of chamber pots…People stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from mouths came the stench of rotting teeth…The rivers stank, the market places stank, the churches stank, it stank beneath the bridges and in the palaces. The peasant stank as did the priest, the apprentice stank as did the master’s wife, the whole of the aristocracy stank, even the king himself stank, stank as a rank lion, and the queen like an old goat, summer and winter.

You get the picture. Perhaps a little exaggerated; or perhaps not.

The same population density that contributes to the diversity of land-uses and attracts people to a city also produces congestion. But as Koolhaas pointed out, culture arises from congestion, from people in close contact and communication with one another (Koolhaas, 1994). Recall that Jacobs carefully distinguishes between congestion and population density on the one hand and overcrowding on the other, where density refers to the number of persons or housing units per acre, while overcrowding means too many people per room (Jacobs, 1961: 205). Overcrowding is usually bad, while density is one of the four generators of diversity. As wealth per person increases, overcrowding tends to decrease.

Still, the problems identified with industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries appeared to many, rightly or wrongly, to stem from capitalism, urbanization, and the resulting density and congestion of cities. Contemporary critics of the living conditions of the urban poor in the mid- and late-nineteenth century paint a bleak picture.

For instance, Friedrich Engels, collaborator and friend of the father of “scientific socialism,” Karl Marx, writes graphically and passionately about the deplorable living conditions of the working poor of Manchester, England (Engels, 1845). He recounts walking through the narrow streets of squalid neighborhoods with courtyards of ramshackle dwellings where there is “a filth and disgusting grime the equal of which is not to be found”; to public outhouses whose overflow generates “foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement.” In short, he describes this district as “…a planless, knotted chaos of houses, more or less on the verge of uninhabitableness, whose unclean interiors fully correspond with their filthy external surroundings” (1845: 52). Likewise, in London he found “the very turmoil of the streets has something repulsive, something against which human nature rebels” (1845: 47), a place where, echoing philosopher Thomas Hobbes, there is “the social war, the war of each against all” (1845: 48), and where “all the disadvantages of such a state must fall upon the poor” (Ibid). Engels believed he had found a visceral illustration of the “chaos of the unplanned market.”

Speaking of London, the historian of urban planning Peter Hall cites the Reverend Andrew Mearns reporting on the quarters of the working poor, particularly after dark, and the human tragedies inside the shabby, teeming dwellings:

Every room in these rotten and reeking tenements houses a family, often two. In one cellar a sanitary inspector reports a father, mother, and three children, and four pigs! In another a missionary found a man ill with small pox, a wife just recovering from her eighth confinement, and the children running about half naked and covered with filth. Here are seven people living in one underground kitchen, and a little child lying dead in the same room. Elsewhere is a poor widow, her three children, and a child who has been dead thirteen days. Her husband, who was a cab driver, had shortly before committed suicide. (Hall, 1996: 17)

For the Reverend Mearns, perhaps the worst consequence of the poverty and physical depravation he witnessed was moral depravity. “Ask if men and women living together in these rookeries are married, and your simplicity will cause a smile” (Hall, 1996: 17). Families share their cramped domiciles with strangers, who rent their beds (and what else?) for the night and send their children into the dark, where robbery, prostitution, and incest are common. Compared to these descriptions, the dingy atmosphere of working-class London painted by Charles Dickens might seem tame. Likewise, as historian Gertrude Himmelfarb notes, “Whatever the differences…among those of all parties and classes who addressed themselves to the subject of poverty, there was a strong consensus that the primary objective of any enterprise or reform was that it contribute to the moral improvement of the poor…” (1991: 7). Although poverty and the related problems of poor housing, health, and nutrition among the working class had been diminishing in many parts of the world since 1800 (McCloskey, 2010), the rising expectations of the time made the plight of the poor more visible and far less tolerable (Ashton, 1963).

Before the late-nineteenth century, it was not widely seen as the responsibility of national governments to address such problems. These were left to the parishes or to the Church. Indeed, as historian T.S. Ashton reminds us, before literacy became common and living standards significantly improved in the mid-nineteenth century, grinding poverty and depravation were the norm and taken for granted—a common feature, not a bug (Ashton, 1963). That changed as cities generated unprecedented wealth as the young, the ambitious, and the desperate flooded into them. Largely because of that migration, despite these transitional problems in the growing industrial cities, living standards and average incomes rose to historical levels, especially after 1800 (McCloskey, 2010; World Bank).Footnote 2

This increase in measured living standards, however, typically does not include the downsides of urbanization, of the sort listed at the beginning of this chapter. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that the life expectancy of urbanites in the United States finally surpassed that of rural inhabitants. In rapidly developing Western Europe and America, the first large-scale governmental reaction in modern times can be seen in and around London and in New York City. What were these policy responses and the reasons for them?

2 The Constructivist Response: Large-Scale Approaches

Chapter 3 identified the trade-off between complexity and spontaneous order on the one hand and the scope and level of design on the other. The greater role of planning (scale and design), the less space for spontaneous complexity. To understand the role and limits of urban planning and urban interventionism, we need once again to understand the underlying reasons behind those trade-offs, reasons that center on the “knowledge problem” and the way that problem might be solved. This is a cornerstone of the social theory of both market-process and Jacobsian economics. Effective solutions to urban problems hinge crucially on the extent to which we appreciate the nature and significance of the knowledge problem and that, in fact, the failure of planning and interventionism in general is a direct consequence of the failure to appreciate or even acknowledge the existence of that problem (Ikeda, 1998).

2.1 Constructivism and “Cartesian Rationalism”

Jacobs attacks mid-twentieth-century urban planning for ignoring street-level human interactions and the influence the built environment exerts in encouraging or discouraging them. These interactions are the building blocks that form an invisible social infrastructure that is not the result of any person’s or group’s deliberate design but rather the outcome of myriad unpredictable contacts that take place in public space. To reiterate, Jacobs sees the living city as a spontaneous order (Jacobs, 1969: 3–48) and a problem of organized complexity (Jacobs, 1961: 429). A city thrives when the individual plans of its inhabitants collectively contribute to the unplanned emergence of complex and dynamic social networks. Once again, it is in this sense that as she says, “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody” (Jacobs, 1961: 238).Footnote 3

Jacobs argued that under the proper institutional conditions, the living city has a tremendous capacity to be largely self-generating, self-sustaining, and self-regulating. In other words, we create, discover, and then solve a host of social problems typically from the ground (or sidewalk) up. This is essentially the same perspective market-process economics adopts toward social orders in general. We have seen that markets and cities are complex orders that can emerge and evolve from countless individuals pursuing their own plans without central direction. Living cities and free markets both depend on property rights, norms of tolerance, and freedom of association. Both depend on inclusive social capital and trust. Where Jacobs’s analysis and market-process analysis differ, they tend to complement rather than conflict, since they both issue from the same underlying social theory.

Moreover, both Jacobs’s critique of urban planning and the economic critique of collectivist economic planning attack planners who ignore Hayek’s “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” (Hayek, 1948: 80) or Jacobs’s “locality knowledge” that city-dwellers gain in their daily experience (Jacobs, 1961: 418). They each draw on an appreciation of the epistemic and cognitive limits of the human mind.

As Jacobs says in her last book, Dark Age Ahead:

Central planning, whether by leftists or conservatives, draws too little on local knowledge and creativity, stifles innovations, and is inefficient and costly because it is circuitous. It bypasses intimate and varied knowledge directly fed back into the system. (Jacobs, 2004: 113)

In Jacobs’s critique of local central planning, it is the failure of planning authorities to understand how the design of public spaces impacts the fine-grained and intricate interactions among people who, for the most part, are strangers to one another.

Among those responsible for cities, at the top, there is much ignorance. This is inescapable, because big cities are just too big and too complex to be comprehended in detail from any vantage point—even if this vantage point is at the top—or to be comprehended by any human; yet detail is of the essence. (Jacobs, 1961: 121–2)

The economic critique of central planning of the early twentieth century covered in Chap. 3 is therefore robust in that it applies mutatis mutandis to the urban planning problems Jacobs identifies in the mid-twentieth century.

Recall from that chapter Jacobs’s account of a living city as a “problem of organized complexity.” Here is how Gene Callahan and I summarize Weaver’s three categories of scientific problems:

The first are problems of simplicity, which deal with situations involving a very few independent variables, in which the rules of ordinary algebra are appropriate. The second level are problems of disorganized complexity, which concern situations involving so many independent variables that their interactions produce random variations. Here formal statistical analysis is appropriate. Finally, there are problems of organized complexity that lie between the first two kinds of problems. This is the realm of social orders in which the movement of individual elements are not predictable but overall, non-statistical patterns are discernable. Jacobs’s and Weaver’s warning is that the methods appropriate to solving one problem should not be used for the solution of the others. (Callahan & Ikeda, 2004: 17; emphasis added)

The problem, according to Jacobs, is that “the theorists of conventional modern city planning [circa 1961] have consistently mistaken cities as problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and have tried to analyze and treat them thus” (Jacobs, 1961: 435). Which boils down to treating a living city as a machine comprehensible to the human mind, much as an experienced architect might design an efficient apartment building, or as one might approach the purely formal problem of calculating the optimal amount of light and air necessary to maintain the health of an “average person.”

Unlike problems of either simplicity or disorganized complexity, a city as a problem of organized complexity is predictable only in its general patterns and not in its specific outcomes. Just as in economics where it is not possible to make accurate point predictions about the exact rate of inflation a year from now, in urbanology it is not possible to predict precisely what a “Jacobsian neighborhood” will look like. The four conditions for diversity (i.e., mixed primary uses, short blocks, high concentrations of people, and old buildings) interact over time such that we cannot say exactly what form organized complexity will take, save that the outcome will be land-use diversity. A lot of that diversity will not be what we expect or even what we like. There is in fact no assurance that any exact pattern will emerge, no matter how much we plan for it, only that over time it will promote a sense of safety and trust that will encourage peaceful interaction in public space. But what that process generates no one can say with complete accuracy. Indeed, if we could say, it would not be a truly complex order; it would not be a living city.

The concept of organized complexity, along with spontaneous order, is a core principle of Jacobs’s social theory.

The French philosopher René Descartes—he of “I think therefore I am” fame—represents a line of thought that F.A. Hayek calls “rationalist constructivism” or “Cartesian rationalism,” which affirms “the belief in the superiority of deliberate design and planning over the spontaneous forces of society” (Hayek, 1967: 96). In a constructivist framework the world is divided into two mutually exclusive and exhaustive categories: the “natural” (e.g., a cloud) over which human reason has no direct control and the “artificial” (e.g., a clock) which human reason can design or remake at will. The category of “spontaneous order” as the result of human action but not of human design, an unplanned emergent order, does not exist. In that case, a living city, since it is clearly not natural in the sense that a cloud is natural, must be artificial or “man-made” like a clock and is therefore, despite its (man-made) complexity, in principle completely comprehensible and subject to control by human reason.

Rationalist constructivism is the social theory that came to dominate policy-making globally in the twentieth century at all levels of government, in particular at the national level in economic policy and in urban planning at the local level.

So, to treat a city as if it were a clock would be an instance of rationalist constructivism. But to view a city as anything other than a problem of unplanned organized complexity is to risk missing an essential quality of urban life and indeed all genuinely social life. Moreover, policies that follow a Cartesian-rationalist approach will have little hope of attaining their stated goals, except perhaps by sheer luck, because they will become entangled in the spontaneous complexity of a living social order—the very phenomenon they ignore—as it adjusts unpredictably to attempt to consciously direct it. The greater the scope or detail of such policy interventions, the more unpredictably entangled they become. Indeed, the consequences of constructivist policy-making can result, and have indeed resulted, in unfortunate unintended outcomes, as we will see.

2.2 Kindred Spirits

Jacobs was not alone among urbanists in characterizing a living city as a spontaneous order. Indeed, she acquired much of her understanding of cities from researchers such as urbanist and organizational analyst William Whyte (1988), whose careful studies of the various and subtle ways ordinary people use public spaces, such as plazas, led to practical conclusions for the design and placement of public plazas.

Christopher Alexander, an architect and urban theorist whom Jacobs admires, deciphers the “pattern language” shared by successful spaces in general, private and public.

A building or a town will only be alive to the extent that it is governed by the timeless way. It is a process which brings order out of nothing but ourselves; it cannot be attained, but it will happen of its own accord, if we will only let it in. (Alexande,r 1979: ix; emphasis original)

Elsewhere Alexander describes this quality as “self-maintaining” (Alexander, 1979: x), which is a feature of a spontaneous social order.

Ken-ichi Sasaki’s discussion of the “urban tactility” we experience at street level (see Chap. 3) highlights a crucial dimension of the urban experience. Recall that as we become familiar with a place, what we feel through our entire body becomes more important than just what we see.

The most important factor in the aesthetics of the city is not visuality but tactility. I consider visuality as the viewpoint of the visitor to a city, and tactility as that of its inhabitants. (Sasaki, 1998: 36)

“Tactile knowledge” is what we feel in the presence of an object: the smells of a street, the texture of a building, the grade of a hill. It is the knowledge we gain through contact or direct experience with an event or environment and is an example of Jacobs’s locality knowledge and F.A. Hayek’s local knowledge. While Sasaki focuses on our perception of physical objects, rather than the social relations with which Jacobs and especially Hayek are concerned, the significance he attaches to these perceptions is a part of Hayek’s “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place.”

The bias in twentieth-century urban planning and policy toward the car and away from the pedestrian (see the discussion of Robert Moses, below) reduces our experience of the city to the visual, insulates us from the tactile, and takes away a vital dimension of the urban environment. This in turn discourages the formation of social capital, which as we have seen is crucial for utilizing local knowledge, because there will be less meaningful contact as we tend to shun dull places.

Sasaki concludes:

City design should take the view point [sic] not of the visitor but of the inhabitant, and should not pursue a “good” form on the planning sheet, but a good feeling of tactility recognized by inhabitants, and even visitors. (Sasaki, 1998)

Similarly, recall how Kevin Lynch describes the way we spontaneously come to a common understanding of our image of a city (and its action spaces), one that is useful for navigating the complex urban environment. Once again:

There seems to be a public image of any given city which is the overlap of many individual images. Or perhaps there is a series of public images each held by some significant number of citizens. Such group images are necessary if an individual is to operate successfully within his environment and to cooperate with his fellows. Each individual picture is unique, with some content that is rarely or never communicated, yet it approximates the public image, which in different environments is more or less compelling, more or less embracing. (Lynch, 1960)

The shared images of a city among its inhabitants (and their action spaces) emerge without anyone intending it. And we have seen that while a newcomer to a city may plan a rendezvous by giving a precise street address (e.g., 1 Washington Place at 1 pm), a long-time resident might simply mention a customary spatiotemporal landmark (e.g., by the Arch at lunchtime).

What these approaches have in common—Jacobs, Whyte, Alexander, Sasaki, and Lynch—is an understanding that for planners to successfully plan they need to observe and appreciate the intricate ways in which people see and interact with the urban environment, something that completely escapes planners who treat a city as a problem of simplicity or of disorganized complexity.

2.3 The Consequences for Urban Design

In Death and Life Jacobs identifies a number of consequences of using a constructivist approach and failing to see a city as a problem of organized complexity. But I believe three are especially important for our analysis of urban planning and design, two of which I introduced in Chap. 4 but bear repeating here.

Border Vacuums

Jacobs learned her craft from several notable urbanist thinkers including Kevin Lynch. Her concept of a border vacuum parallels Lynch’s concept of an “edge” but with an important difference. First, Lynch (1960) defines an edge as

The linear elements not considered as paths: they are usually, but not quite always, the boundaries between two kinds of areas. They act as lateral references. […] Those edges seem strongest which are not only visually prominent, but also continuous in form and impenetrable to cross movement. (Lynch, 1960)

For Lynch an edge is part of what helps make a city’s image legible and its streets navigable to its inhabitants. It is likely that Jacobs adopted and expanded Lynch’s concept into what she calls a “border vacuum.”

Massive single uses in cities have a quality in common with each other. They form borders, and borders in cities usually make destructive neighbors. A border — the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory — forms the edge of an area of “ordinary” city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence. (Jacobs, 1961: 257)

That active influence for Jacobs is largely negative. A single, massive use in a neighborhood or district—e.g., a river, a park, an enormous residential or office complex, a sports stadium, a sprawling parking lot, a walled university campus—means people crowd into that area mainly or only during certain times of the day or days of the week. Secondary diversities (e.g., restaurants, dry cleaners, banks) cater mainly to those who use it during those times. When not used, however, it becomes a vacuum mostly devoid of people, making it less interesting, less populated with fewer eyes on the street, and therefore potentially dangerous. Without land-use diversity or granularity in the area, the influence of the border vacuum can radiate from the original “great blight of dullness” into the surrounding streets and public spaces, making these adjacent spaces in turn duller and less attractive. It may take some distance before the influence of livelier streets can offset these forces of dullness.Footnote 4 Although critical of private endeavors as well, Jacobs took particular aim at the massive projects of her time that were funded by taxation of one kind or another, such as urban renewal, monumental government buildings, and public housing projects: “Extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility and vulgarity” (Jacobs, 1961: 7).

This brings us to the next consequence of rationalist constructivism.

Cataclysmic Money Jacobs writes:

Cataclysmic money pours into an area in concentrated form, producing drastic changes. As an obverse of this behavior, cataclysmic money sends relatively few trickles into localities not treated to cataclysm. Putting it figuratively, insofar as their effects on most city streets and districts are concerned, … [cataclysmic money behaves] like manifestations of malevolent climates beyond the control of man— affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods. (Jacobs, 1961: 293)

As a practical matter, cataclysmic money that floods into an area often produces border vacuums. That is because public projects and public-private partnerships supported by taxation or eminent domain tend to be much larger in scale than purely private, market-based projects. And as argued in Chap. 3, other things equal, as the scale and designed complexity of a project increase, the mind of the planner increasingly substitutes for, rather than complements, the spontaneous complexity of the market process. How might revitalization occur without cataclysmic money?

Gentrification, despite its sometimes deserved bad reputation, is a way of developing or reviving a neighborhood non-cataclysmically. Indeed, gentrification—which the Merriam-Webster online dictionaryFootnote 5 defines as “a process in which a poor area (as of a city) experiences an influx of middle-class or wealthy people who renovate and rebuild homes and businesses and which often results in an increase in property values and the displacement of earlier, usually poorer residents”—is a comparatively gradual process. While the pain of disruption in the civic life of low-income residents is real, it seems to be a natural pattern in the evolution of a thriving city (Morrone, 2017). In any living city, the physical and social structures in it today, including those that are seen as historically valuable, must have displaced what was there before. It is only in static societies that institutions remain unchanged generation after generation. What compounds the hardship of gentrification, however, rather than the gentrification itself, is the lack of affordable housing in other parts of the city to which residents of gentrifying neighborhoods could move, if necessary. (In the next chapter I will discuss the regulatory constraints on residential construction that bears much of the responsibility for this state of affairs.)

Superficial Visual Order

The way an area looks, particularly from a distance or on a PowerPoint slide, is less important than the way people perceive it and, as Sasaki might say, feel it up close and personal. A city should be legible, first and foremost, to those living in it and not the planner or designer. This is about why “a city cannot be a work of art” and Jacobs’s observation that “there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities” (Jacobs, 1961: 372). So a conscientious planner is aware that the beauty of a living city is in the eyes of its inhabitants who behold it on the street, not the planner or designer who wants to shape the city according to a preconceived image.

Which is not to say of course that Jacobs sees no role for active urban planning, or even for an ideal of visual order, as long as planners respect the nature of a living city and the limits of their esthetic visions. More precisely,

In seeking visual order, cities are able to choose among three broad alternatives, two of which are hopeless and one of which is hopeful. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which look homogeneous, and get results depressing and disorienting. They can aim for areas of homogeneity which try not to look homogeneous, and get results of vulgarity and dishonesty. Or they can aim for areas of great diversity and, because real differences are thereby expressed, can get results which, at worst, are merely interesting, and at best can be delightful. (Jacobs, 1961: 229)

The first kind of visual order arises when planners impose a visual uniformity such as we find in the work of the great urban designer Le Corbusier. The second kind of visual order is what we find in Disney World. Both tend to be constructed at the same time by the same architects, designers, or planners—or by people who have grown up under the same cultural, technological, and educational influences of a particular era. Consequently, their constructions strongly reflect the temporal and stylistic tendencies of their time. The harder they try to design diversity or impose a particular order, the more fake it will feel. As Jacobs declares,

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. (Jacobs, 1961: 15)

The third “hopeful” kind of visual order evolves spontaneously over decades if not generations and from a wider variety of designers and investors, inspired by different influences. Again, like heterogeneous capital in the structure of production, the elements of the city need to fit together without an overall planner. Visual diversity can then generate order by enabling a city’s inhabitants to read and navigate, à la Lynch, its public spaces. Without that visual diversity, navigating public space would be like trying to find your way through a snowstorm. In such areas, it’s easy to get lost (and not enjoy it) and it’s hard to find your way back.

I was once trying to navigate the gray, monumental government buildings and enormous city blocks just off the mall in Washington, D.C. Visual homogeneity made the area difficult to read—this was before smart phones with GPS—largely because individual buildings were massive and hard to distinguish, so I got lost and walked several minutes before I realized I was going the wrong way. Then the only way to correct my mistake was to spend several more minutes tediously retracing my steps through the same boring, impermeable landscape, an experience shorter blocks and greater land-use granularity would have spared me.

Superficial visual order is typically the result of constructing enormous projects funded by cataclysmic money. Planners achieve visual order in this way by imposing their designs onto a large area over a short time.Footnote 6 The profound sameness is not only the result of the planners’ common generational outlook but also the result of cost constraints that make architectural distinctiveness and individual creativity prohibitively expensive.

The fundamental error is one of hubris. Humility in the face of the spontaneous complexity of the city being a rare quality among ambitious urban designers and flashy “starchitects” seeking wow factors. As a result, some combination of border vacuum, cataclysmic money, and pretended visual order, as well as a certain inflexibility in design, accompanies and often undermines the approaches of legendary urban planners and designers.

3 Constructivist Theories of Urban Planning and Design

According to Jacobs, the urban planners of her day hated cities (Jacobs, 1961: 17). Or at least they hated the messiness and seeming disorder of cities, the congestion and smoke, noise and crime, and disease and poverty they saw in them. This is an understandable and forgivable, even laudable, reaction, unless you cannot also see beyond these negatives, which accompany economic development in any city that aspires to be great. The following are four sketches of major planning theorists. All in their own way reflect the emerging constructivist-rationalist ethos of their time and who have had a profound influence on their profession.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903)

We begin with Fredrick Law Olmstead. Although a landscape architect and not an urban planner in the sense of Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, or Le Corbusier, Olmstead’s response to the “chaotic” industrial city was, like the others’, based on a firm belief in the power of “modern science” and the therapeutic powers of sunlight, fresh air, and open space. Olmstead is an example of an inchoate Cartesian rationalism that ruled much of twentieth-century planning in both the city and the economy.

A giant in landscape architecture, Olmstead famously partnered with Calvert Vaux to design New York’s two great parks: Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Contrary to the trend among many of the urban and regional planners who followed, Olmstead sought not to relocate inhabitants of the modern city to the countryside but to bring nature into the city to promote physical and mental well-being.

Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage. Foliage also acts mechanically to purify the air by screening it. Opportunity and inducement to escape at frequent intervals from the confined and vitiated air of the commercial quarter, and to supply the lungs with air screened and purified by trees, recently acted upon by sunlight, together with the opportunity and inducement to escape from conditions requiring vigilance, wariness, and activity toward other men, - if these could be supplied economically, our problem would be solved. (Olmstead, 1970: 339)

Reflecting the sensibilities of the emerging modernist social science, with its emphasis on “statistical people” as Jacobs puts it (Jacobs, 1961: 136), Olmstead relied on estimates of how much sunshine and cubic feet of fresh air the average urbanite requires and the square-footage of outdoor space they need to avoid the mental stress that comes simply from walking from place to place on crowded city streets.

We may understand these better if we consider that whenever we walk through the denser part of a town, to merely avoid collision with those we meet and pass upon the sidewalks, we have to constantly watch, to foresee, and to guard against their movements. This involves a consideration of their intentions, a calculation of their strength and weakness, which is not so much for their benefit as our own. Our minds are thus brought into close dealings with other minds without any friendly flowing toward them, but rather a drawing from them. (1970: 338)

Olmstead clearly means these astute observations to critique what he thinks is an unnecessary and unhealthy aspect of urban life, which can be removed (at least for the upper classes of society) with carefully designed and located parks. Yet, I would point out that what he highlights in this passage is in fact an example of the complexity of urban life, both on the sidewalk and in each individual human mind, which urbanites have successfully coped with for generations. No doubt most of us need occasional respite from this kind of activity. And what Olmstead means to do is to ease this hustle and bustle so that city life doesn’t scar the human body and psyche, much as sociologist Georg Simmel diagnoses the mental impact of the market economy with its exacting demands and time schedules in his famous “Metropolis and Urban Life” (Simmel,, 1903).

But it looks like the street activity that requires this kind of local skill and alertness has little value to Olmstead. Evidently not for him is Jacobs’s “eyes on the street” or the way sidewalks “assimilate children.” Instead, he speaks disparagingly of neighborhoods where there are people “a half a dozen sitting together on the door-steps or, all in a row, on the curb-stones, with their feet in the gutter; driven out of doors by the closeness within; mothers among them anxiously regarding their children who are dodging about at their play, among the noisy wheels on the pavement” (Olmstead 1970: 342). Olmstead observes the same activities as Jacobs but makes the opposite diagnosis. Where Jacobs sees healthy street life, Olmstead sees something pathological. Parks and trees are the desperately needed cure. “Air is disinfected by sunlight and foliage” (Ibid.: 339) and parks offer space for much-needed recreation “strongly counteractive to the special, enervating conditions of the town” (Ibid.: 340).

Jacobs not only appreciates, as Olmstead does not, the “street ballet,” but she also warns that “parks are volatile places” (Jacobs, 1961: 89) that can easily become border vacuums with their anti-social consequences. You cannot count on a park of any size to automatically complement the character of the neighborhood or district in which it is placed. Unless you take great care in its design and especially its location, a park can drain the life out of an area.Footnote 7 Located almost anywhere other than in Midtown Manhattan with its vibrant street life and its perimeter of primary uses, Central Park’s 840 acres would overwhelm its surroundings with its vast emptiness. In the 1960s and 1970s Central Park did indeed notoriously decline, giving the Park and the City of New York a reputation for danger and dereliction that it still has to many, mostly non-New Yorkers, despite being far less deserved today. With the greater economic vitality and growing population of New York, Central Park is today as safe as it has ever been, but it is just as potentially volatile.

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928)

Jacobs’s harsh characterization of Ebenezer Howard, an early and influential utopian urban planner, is typical of her view of the great urban planners of her day.

Howard looked at the living conditions of the poor in late-nineteenth-century London, and justifiably did not like what he smelled or saw or heard. He not only hated the wrongs and mistakes of the city, he hated the city and thought it an outright evil and an affront to nature that so many people should get themselves into an agglomeration. His prescription for saving the people was to do the city in. (Jacobs, 1961: 17)

Howard, who developed and popularized the concept of the “Garden City,” evidently found inspiration in the writings of the American economist Henry George (of land value tax fame), who, following William Cobbett, finds little to appreciate in a great city like London, comparing it to a tumor.

This life of great cities is not the natural life of man. He must, under such conditions, deteriorate, physically, mentally, morally. Yet the evil does not end here. This is only one side of it. This unnatural life of the great cities means an equally unnatural life in the country. Just as the wen or tumor, drawing the wholesome juices of the body into its poisonous vortex, impoverishes all other parts of the frame, so does the crowding of human beings into great cities impoverish human life in the country. (George, 1879: Loc 21655-21659)

Rural life fares no better. For Howard the town and country of his time, particularly of his English homeland, were each a mixed blessing. People are drawn to the two “magnates” of town and country for different reasons. The city being rich with opportunity and liveliness but overcrowded and polluted, while the country is full of healthful, natural beauty, but where life is dull, isolated, and poor. His solution is the “town-country magnate” which, no great surprise here, captures the best of town and country and sheds the worst aspects of each.

There are in reality not only, as is so constantly assumed, two alternatives—town life and country life—but a third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, withal the beauty and delight of the country, may be secured in perfect combination; and the certainty of being able to live this life will be the magnet which will produce the effect for which we are all string [sic]—the spontaneous movement of the people from our crowded cities to the bosom of our kindly mother earth, at once the source of life, of happiness, of wealth, and of power. (Howard, 1898: 247)

His carefully designed, utopian Garden City consists of 6000 acres, divided by function into zones, etched with enormous roadways forming concentric circles, and linked to similar settlements by highways and high-speed rail lines. His ambition is evidently to empty the great cities that had formed under industrial capitalism and disperse their populations across these interconnected pinwheels, each limited to a population of about 30,000 persons, which in the aggregate represents a grand, integrated Garden City. Residents live and work within a carefully planned and subdivided matrix of lots averaging 20 feet by 130 feet with plenty of open space, today we might call them “green belts,” for parks, nature, and farmland, which confine the de-densified population within predetermined districts (Howard, 1898: 315).

Garden City is a highly rationalist in concept, and looks like it, but Howard is no socialist. Private investment, not government taxation, would finance the project, and he worked out a scheme involving a sinking fund out of which the collective expenses of the Garden City would be paid (Howard, 1898: 349). This is not unlike a modern cooperative apartment arrangement of the kind found in New York City, in which residents own shares in the building as stockholders but do not own their individual apartments, instead renting their units from the building corporation.

Nevertheless, according to Jacobs, Howard’s concept of the market, consistent with the static approaches to utopias of the day, is hardly dynamic and entrepreneurial in the manner of market-process or Jacobsian economics:

He conceived of commerce in terms of routine, standardized supply of goods, and as serving a self-limited market. He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes. (Jacobs, 1961: 19)

Even so, Howard also believes that private companies should be able to compete with the city in the provision of infrastructure and city services.

Even in regard to such matters as water, lighting, and telephonic communication—which a municipality, if efficient and honest, is certainly the best and most natural body to supply—no rigid or absolute monopoly is sought; and if any private corporation or any body of individuals proved itself capable of supplying on more advantageous terms, either the whole town or a section of it, with these or any commodities the supply of which was taken up by the corporation, this would be allowed. (Howard, 1898: 352)

It is also possible (so I have been told) that Howard, in detailing the many particular structures and activities in his “sales pitch,” is merely imaging a possible development and not one that he expected would actually come about. Nevertheless, the appeal of the Garden City is that of the modern planned community, with none of the grittiness and incessant change of an innovative city, and it has had a powerful and continuing influence on urban planning.

Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959)

The decentralization idea takes a different form in Wright’s “Broadacre City,” though in essentials it remains the same. Like Howard, Wright proposes to employ new and emerging technologies in his plan, including telecommunication and even aviation in the design of his ideal quasi-city, which makes it possible for him to decentralize urban life and spread populations out over undeveloped land. Think well-planned suburbia. Where Howard dreams of creating a “town-country magnate,” Wright envisions a kind of techno-suburban magnate founded on “three major innovations”: the “motor car,” “electrical inter-communication,” and “standardized—machine-shop—production” (Wright, 1935: 377–8). Wright’s is an “organic architecture” in which “form and function are one” and “every Broadacre citizen has his own car” (Ibid: 380). With this formula and with the right sort of planner, Wright audaciously claims Broadacre City would somehow “automatically end unemployment and all its evils forever” (Ibid: 379).

While he would devolve government down to the level of the county (foreshadowing in governance if not in form what author Joel Garreau calls “edge city”), Wright is no advocate of laissez-faire. Despite talk of devolution of authority, he is highly authoritarian in the way Broadacre is created and operated: “In the hands of the state, but by way of the county, is all redistribution of land—a minimum of one acre going to the childless family and more to the larger family by the state” (Wright, 1935: 378). This is somewhat reminiscent of urbanist Peter Hall’s description of the ancient Greek polis as “minimal state socialism” (Hall, 1996: 43).

On their one-acre plots and liberated from the constraints of density by distance-annihilating transport and communication technology, residents would build single-level, low-cost “Usonia” houses out of cinder block. This technique seems to have morphed into the cement-slab, ranch-style home, complete with car port, which today sprawls across the western United States. Wright might be called, unfairly perhaps but understandably, the patron saint of low-density American suburbia, against which the New Urbanist movement would later rail. All of is this to be administered by the wise (and very visible) hand of the “agent of the state,” echoing a familiar theme:

The agent of the state in all matters of land allotment or improvement, or in matters affecting the harmony of the whole, is the architect. All building is subject to his sense of the whole as organic architecture. (Wright, 1935: 378)

Change is carefully, artfully controlled by the master architect, someone like, well, Frank Lloyd Wright.

Charles-Edouard Jeanneret a.k.a. Le Corbusier (1887–1969)

Olmstead wants to bring the country into the city, Howard to decentralize and de-densify the city, and Wright to transform the city into a techno-suburb. Le Corbusier, like Olmstead, seeks the greening and opening up (and tidying up) of the city, not by decentralizing it but by hyper-densification. Among our quartet of constructivist visionaries, Le Corbusier appears to be the most forthrightly Cartesian in his rationalism.

Nevertheless, in high modernist fashion Le Corbusier claims to construct “a theoretically water-tight formula to arrive at the fundamental principles of modern town planning” (Le Corbusier, 1929: 368–9). Those principles include what he refers to as site, population, density, lungs/green open spaces, the street, and traffic. Drawing on Howard and Olmstead, Le Corbusier intends to make cities both greener, more spacious, and denser, especially “where business affairs are carried on” (Ibid: 370). Yes, somewhat like Jacobs, he sees density as a necessary characteristic in his design of the modern city. For Le Corbusier, the problem of urban design can be boiled down to: How do you decongest a city center while increasing its density? His resolution to these seemingly contradictory goals is to construct “machines for living”: high-rise offices—his famous “towers in a park”—and multi-story residences that populate his “Radiant City.” Le Corbusier wants to save the city by modernizing and mechanizing it, but unlike Howard and Wright, he does so by packing a lot of us into specific areas. The result is a population density of 1200 persons per acre with two-thirds fewer streets and where streets are separated by an astonishing 400 yards, creating his famous “superblocks” (Ibid.: 371)! By comparison, the Upper East Side of Manhattan, one of the densest districts in New York City, has about 185 persons per acre, and the average distance between avenues is around 300 yards.

As for street legibility, Le Corbusier takes the perspective of the planner rather than the inhabitant, i.e., a highly visual perspective. He achieves visual order by homogenizing the cityscape and smoothing out the unplanned irregularities of the traditional city. As Jacobs describes it:

Furthermore, his conception, as an architectural work, had a dazzling clarity, simplicity and harmony. It was so orderly, so visible, so easy to understand. It said everything in a flash, like a good advertisement. (Jacobs, 1961: 23)

It is largely the result of accommodating the latest in transport technology: the car. This is a city made for covering macro-distances quickly at very high speed. Indeed, Corbusier states explicitly that his design perspective at ground level is that of passengers in a “fast car” speeding down a superhighway as row after row of carefully spaced, symmetrical skyscrapers whizz past (Le Corbusier 1929: 374). The problem, of course, is how people will travel the micro-distances between these widely spaced and segregated primary uses. It is unclear whether micro-distances are relevant at all in Radiant City, having been especially designed for fast, contained transport. And as some have noted, where to park all those cars and how to address the resulting congestion bottlenecks were evidently details that didn’t warrant his attention (Hall, 1996: 209).

Ken-ichi Sasaki’s exploration of urban tactility is again relevant here, what we feel in the presence of an object: the smells of a street, the texture of a building, the grade of a hill. It is the knowledge we gain from contact or direct experience with an event or environment, the “knowledge of the particular circumstances of time and place” or “locality knowledge.” In contrast, Radiant City is almost purely visual and starkly so. We experience little urban tactility from inside a car, no perspective from the street except speeding along a freeway, because the meaning of the urban environment, its legibility and detail, comes from the bird’s-eye perspective of the designing architect, of a first-time visitor and not an inhabitant of the city.

How do you attract people to the resulting mega-neighborhoods at different hours of the day and days of the week in different seasons? What would we find visually and tactilely interesting in the broad, homogenous superblock grids of what Le Corbusier calls a “City of Three Million,” to tempt us to linger in public spaces and to make informal contacts? How do Le Corbusier’s super-high densities, without short navigable blocks and nearby mixed primary uses, prompt people to serve as the eyes on the street? In their absence, how do spontaneous social networks and webs of communication form to foster the trust in public spaces that historically have done the heavy lifting of providing safety and security on the street? Without cheap, worn-down buildings, how can poor young people with fresh ideas get their start near all that brand-new density? Will we be so content in our high modernist residences, separated by great, unwalkable distances from our jobs and recreation (their Adam Smithian “necessaries, conveniences, and amusements”) that we would simply and inexplicably behave in a trusting, civil manner toward one another? Is formal policing and electronic surveillance supposed to substitute completely for the social capital that great cities have relied upon for security throughout history? Or does he assume that the inhabitants of Radiant City are just going to be nice people, that civil society will spring up ex niholo? While as we have noted, Christopher Alexander’s city is a “semi-lattice,” for Le Corbusier a city is indeed a “tree.”

His high modernist architecture ignores the essential human networks and purposes described in previous chapters and that Jacobs rightly identifies as the backbone of a living and spontaneous city. In practice, high modernist design à la Le Corbusier and those he inspires seems to have failed almost as spectacularly and tragically as the application of Cartesian rationalism in collectivist economic planning in the Soviet Union.Footnote 8 In Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, there is no space for anything as unpredictable, seemingly chaotic, and messy as a living city to emerge. Certainly no semi-lattice intermixing of primary uses. Not surprisingly then, Le Corbusier left little wiggle room for spontaneous order or unplanned, disruptive development. And so “he came to believe in the virtue of centralized planning, which would cover not merely city-building but every aspect of life” (Hall, 1996: 210). As James C. Scott observes, while Le Corbusier’s “own political affiliations in France were firmly anchored on the right, he would clearly have settled for any state authority that would give him a free hand” (Scott, 1998: 113).

For Le Corbusier, border vacuums, cataclysmic money, and pretended visual order are essential ingredients in his urban designs and combine in spectacular ways. It is perhaps fortunate, as Peter Hall remarks, that unlike Olmstead or Wright, whose plans and theories have been applied at least on some scale in structures actually built somewhere, “the remarkable fact about Le Corbusier is just how phenomenally unsuccessful he was in practice” (Hall, 1996: 211). Nevertheless, according to Hall, “the evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him….”

Ideas forged in the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s, came to be applied to the planning of working-class housing in Sheffield and St. Louis, and hundreds of other cities too, in the 1950s and 1960s; the results were at best questionable, at worst catastrophic. (Hall, 1996: 204)

These failings lie not with Le Corbusier alone. All the schemes for urban design outlined here combine those same three features on a huge scale. But Jacobs’s problem with their visions is not so much that they are grandiose. Her problem is that their grandiosity is the result of failing to grasp the nature of living cities or their significance as incubators of ideas and social change. Rather than closely observing how people in cities actually live and use public spaces, they treat the city as a problem of simplicity or of disorganized complexity that will passively accommodate their ambitions, instead of a complex spontaneous order. They leave no significant room for improvisation. The planners alone, not countless ordinary people, have the freedom to experiment. “As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge” (Jacobs, 1961: 17).

Instead, planners impose their contrived image of a city, sweeping away and tidying up the messiness, in place of the largely invisible (to them at least) social infrastructure and the action spaces that occupy our city images. What we get is Jacobs’s “dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served” (Jacobs, 1961: 15).

4 Classic Examples of Cartesian Planning in Practice

How have these constructivist approaches worked in practice? Here are sketches and critiques of prominent attempts to implement the kind of large-scale constructivist visions we have been discussing, some celebrated and some notorious. (In Chap. 9 we look at some recent attempts to rebuild cities.) For more thorough treatments of these historical episodes, I recommend reading the books cited in this section.

Baron Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891) in Paris

Baron Haussmann’s major rebuilding projects took place in the mid-nineteenth century, and so he is a precursor rather than a follower of Olmstead, Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier. I begin with him because he is a good example of the modernist urge to rebuild on an enormous scale within an already existing and highly developed modern city. Indeed, roughly between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann, Prefect of the Seine under Emperor Napoleon III, conducted one of the most massive urban renewal projects since Nero set fire to Rome.

The project was massive indeed, working among a population of similar to Nero’s Rome of over one million. To get a sense of the scale of the undertaking, according to historians Michael Carmona and Patrick Camiller (2002: Loc. 5991–2) between 1852 and 1869, Haussmann demolished 117,553 dwellings in order to construct 273,311 new ones. The principles guiding the renewal, as set forth in Napoleon III’s vision, “were intended to meet the requirements of movement, public hygiene, and elegance” (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 77). Essentially, their objective, like the planners we have discussed, was to make Paris appear cleaner and less chaotic, more beautiful to outsiders, and controllable by public authorities.Footnote 9

In the years after the economic and sociopolitical upheaval of the French Revolution, Paris, which had shrunk to around 500,000 inhabitants (Hussey, 2006: 217), experienced a rebound in both prosperity and population (although a large part of this was Napoleon III’s annexation of communes, forming eight additional arrondissements), which coincided with the crowning of King Louis-Philippe in 1830. Paris had also become a city of innovation and creativity. As Andrew Hussey observes, “It was one of the paradoxes of the era that, in spite of the continuous political and social upheavals, Paris produced a remarkable number of writers, artists and thinkers during this period” (Hussey, 2006: 230). And Carmona and Camiller:

Together with the neighboring communes of the Seine department, it was the country’s leading area for novelty and experiment. Paris was the birthplace of the artificial soda industry, gas lighting, commercial fertilizer, starch production, and the clothing industry. (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 1715–1716)

Of course, “If there were brilliant and not so brilliant successes, there were also failures, social stagnation, and downfalls” (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 1766–1767). Moreover,

The wildly increasing density in the city center left neither the time nor the space for the necessary amenities to be introduced there. Sewers were too few and their capacity insufficient; sanitation in the blocks was rudimentary, with courtyards serving as garbage dumps and latrines; the water supply system was notoriously faulty, the dirtiness of the blocks revolting. (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc 1914–1916)

And “the streets of any Parisian quartier at night were an excellent place to be robbed and killed” (Hussey, 2006: 229). Moreover, “The center of Paris, which for so many centuries had symbolized its economic, human, and intellectual wealth, was growing so impoverished that owners of rental buildings were seriously worried” (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 1894–1895).

One of Haussmann’s priorities then was the installation of streetlamps, some 20,000 in all, which helped to establish the reputation of Paris as “The City of Light.” Echoing the Reverend Mearns and other urban reformers, Carmona and Camiller report that one of the particular ideas of Napoleon III “was that well-organized urban life had a positive effect on morals; the gutting of the unhealthy old districts would help in spiritually uplifting the popular classes” (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 2034–2035). But having experienced two revolutions and several popular insurrections in the decades before coming to power, according to James C. Scott: “At the center of Louis Napoleon’s [Napoleon III’s] and Haussmann’s plans for Paris lay the military security of the state. The redesigned city was, above all, to be made safe against popular insurrections” (Scott, 1998: Loc. 867–868).

As Scott further observes, “such an undertaking could have been accomplished only by a single executive authority not directly accountable to the electorate” (Scott, 1998: Loc. 855–856). Napoleon III thus granted Haussmann enormous discretionary power.

To tackle a program of this scale, it was first of all necessary to have the administrative means. Haussmann was at one and the same time head of central state functions in the Seine department (excluding those that came under the chief of police), chief executive for the local Seine community in relation to the departmental council, and mayor of Paris. (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc 5472–5474)

Recall from Chap. 2 that in his study of the New York City street grid, author Gerard Koeppel quotes Danish-born Niels Gron:

The kind of beauty that makes Paris charming can only exist where private rights and personal liberty are or have been trampled on. Only where the mob rules, or where kings rule, so that there is at one time absolutely no respect for the property of the rich and at another time for the rights of the poor can the beauties of Paris be realized. (Koeppel, 2015: Loc 3542–3544)

However, Haussmann’s top-down style evidently focused on the form of public spaces and did not extend to how people should use the vast private spaces he was constructing. According to Carmona and Camiller:

Haussmann was interested only in public space; the inside of buildings (unless they were in official use), the private space of Parisians, was not his concern (Carmona & Camiller, 2002: Loc. 5505-5507). […] Similarly, Haussmann-style city planning never concerned itself with the functions of buildings but only with the provision of “salubrious” streets as the precondition for “healthy” blocks (or rather “houses,” as they were significantly called in this context) to be built along the way. The actual manner in which lodging, productive labor, or trade was organized inside these structures did not concern the city of Paris. (2002: Loc. 5516–5518)

In terms of the design-spontaneity trade-off, this may have left enough breathing space for that other vital dimension, time, to allow sufficient adjustment to changing conditions over the ensuing decades and a greater level of complexity to emerge than American-style functional or “Euclidean” zoning, with its rigid restrictions on land-use, would have permitted. This perhaps enabled the organic, urban processes to heal the Parisian fine structure more rapidly than otherwise.Footnote 10

John Nash in London (1752–1835)

Several decades before Haussmann, English architect John Nash was able to accomplish something in London that no one had been able to do in a dense modern city, namely, build extensive arterial roads, plazas, and boulevards without relying on the heavy-handedness or political clout of an agent such as the Prefect of the Seine. Laboriously negotiating with private entities for private purchase, Nash successfully constructed one of the first major thoroughfares in a metropolis, Regent Street. According to the Regent Street Conservation Area Directory, “Regent Street is one of the earliest and most important examples of town planning in this county” (RSD: 6). Author Peter Ackroyd reports that, presumably for the time, it was “The only successful and permanent attempt to bring uniformity and order to London’s chaos…” (Ackroyd, 2001: 513).

But as Great Britain was then a constitutional monarchy operating within a strong tradition of individual liberty, “It was not possible for Nash to create a straight boulevard in the French style due to land ownership issues” (Regent Street Directory: 6). Nash apparently had painstakingly to navigate and negotiate with the quasi-autonomous townships of which London at the time consisted, outside the City of London proper. He was not always successful. For example:

When Regent Street and Portland Street meet, before the straight run up to the Park [Regent’s Park], there is a kink in the road, caused by the refusal of the landowner to sell. (Flanders, 2015: 265)

Without the political power of the Crown or of eminent domain to draw on, Nash was left to rely mainly on his negotiating skills and the purse of his patron, the Prince Regent. Even when backed by such great wealth, planning on a grand scale is much harder without authoritarian muscle, but evidently not impossible. Unlike Haussmann (or as we will see, Robert Moses and Lúcio Costa), Nash completed a large and important public project without trampling on personal liberty.

Robert Moses in New York (1888–1981)

Haussmann’s efforts in mid-nineteenth-century Paris inspired twentieth-century urban planners in the United States. Ed Bacon in Philadelphia and Robert Moses in New York City come to mind. Moses, in particular, “The Master Builder” as he has been called, seems cast from the same mold as Haussmann in the grandness of his vision and the copious use of political power. He was a man, according to his biographer Robert Caro, who could “get things done.” Intellectually, Moses was an attentive student of Le Corbusier, especially in his efforts to retool New York City to accommodate the automobile rather than investing in mass transit. Like Haussmann, the object of Moses’s vision was the biggest metropolis in the nation, this one with a population of over eight million.

Robert Moses has been the subject of much discussion among modernist intellectuals,Footnote 11 admiring in the beginning of his career but largely disapproving toward the end, most famously by Jane Jacobs. (Although Jacobs mentions Moses by name only once or twice in her attacks on urban planning in Death and Life.)

Like Haussmann, Moses was no small thinker. His vision extended beyond the limits of the largest city in the United States to the surrounding region. He has been described as a reforming idealist as a young man, and in a sense he remained an idealist as he employed corruption while brutally wielding power in pursuit of the ideal city. Caro describes him as, “an idealist possessed, moreover, of a vision of such breadth that he was soon dreaming dreams of public works on a scale that would dwarf any yet built in the cities of America” (Caro, 1974: 4).

Like Le Corbusier, front and center in that vision is the automobile or, more specifically, widened streets and new highways to accommodate the automobile. Moses saw, rightly, the growing importance of travel by car to the wealthy and independent American lifestyle emerging in the twentieth century and transferred enormous resources to direct New York City away from its pedestrian and transit orientation to a car-based one. Moses inspired planners from Los Angeles, which had just begun to construct its now iconic tangle of freeways. He found clever and often heavy-handed ways to finance new roads, miles and miles of them, through existing neighborhoods in the city and the vast estates of the superrich on Long Island.

In addition, he exploited powers of eminent domain to take private property for highways, parks, and other public infrastructure. Architecture critic Paul Goldberger observes:

Before Mr. Moses, New York State had a modest amount of parkland; when he left his position as chief of the state park system, the state had 2,567,256 acres. He built 658 playgrounds in New York City, 416 miles of parkways and 13 bridges. (Goldberger, 1981)

Moses exemplifies as well anyone discussed so far the “expert mentality” and its flaws (Kopple, 2020). Even from his early days as an idealistic reformer, and throughout the rest of his life as a pragmatic politico, he was annoyed by “the human” element that was “constantly interfering with the mathematical perfection of his system” and determined that “it must be suppressed” (Caro, 1974: 76). As Caro notes of his early scheme to reform New York’s civil service:

Shining through all of Moses’ statements was confidence, a faith that his system would work, a belief that the personalities of tens of thousands of human beings could be reduced to mathematical grades, that promotions and raises could be determined by a science precise enough to give every one of those human beings the exact rewards he deserved. (Caro, 1974: 76)

Curiously, I have observed some activists for various causes today—advocates of sweeping policy measures to solve problems of climate change, sustainability, racial and class inequality, the opioid crisis, urban sprawl, and so on—who sneer at the very mention of Robert Moses’s name, betray an ambivalence toward Moses’s authoritarianism. On the one hand, they abhor his particular vision of a car-centered city and the insensitive, heavy-handed way he pushed his massive projects upon a largely defenseless citizenry and weak administrations. But some of them grudgingly admit his bullying, top-down approach may in fact be an effective way to implement their own idealistic visions. Cartesian rationalism in the pursuit of a worthy cause is no vice? The hard reality is that resources are scarce and not all such causes can be the government’s “top” priority (Campanella, 2011). Apparently, while Moses’s heart and head were in the wrong place, in the hands of the right kind of people with the right kind of vision, his odious methods may be necessary to reach a more progressive future. Or as Moses himself liked to say, you got to break some eggs to make an omelet.

Lúcio Costa (1902–1998) and Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) in Brasilia

In Brasilia, a fully planned and rapidly constructed capital, the City Beautiful and the City Monumental are realized on a near ideal Corbusian “open plain” in the central highlands of Brazil. Its construction was the result of a political decision and a deliberate effort to break with the nation’s colonial and coastal past. Unlike another Corbusian-inspired city—Chandigarh in Punjab, India—Brasilia was not designed by Le Corbusier, although the communal apartment blocks were based on Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse of 1935 and the superblocks on the North American Radburn layout from 1929. That responsibility fell to the Brazilians Lùcio Costa as overall designer and his former intern Oscar Niemeyer as architect. “Even so,” says James C. Scott, “Brasilia is about the closest thing we have to a high modernist city, having been built more or less along the lines set out by Le Corbusier and CIAM” (Scott, 1998: 118).Footnote 12

Each of the individual superblocks was to have a distinct style and a uniform color scheme that set it apart from the surrounding superblocks. Costa’s goal for the superblocks was to create neighborhoods and communities that were small, self-contained, and self-sufficient. (This “tree-form” of local self-sufficiency continues to be a hallmark of urban design of such figures as Léon Krier, whom we will discuss in Chap. 9, and the more-recent “15-minute city” of Carlos Moreno.) Jacobs’s insights about the design of public spaces promoting the informal mingling of strangers evidently played no part in Costa’s conception. The distances are so vast; travel by foot is out of the question, unless you happen to be marathon sprinter. Indeed, the whole is legible not from the ground but from high above, from a distance. As described by Peter Hall:

The plan was variously described as an airplane, bird or dragonfly: the body, or fuselage, was a monumental axis for the principal public buildings and offices, the wings were the residential and other areas. In the first, uniform office blocks were to line a wide central mall leading to the complex of governmental buildings. In the second, uniform apartments were to be built in Corbusian superblocks fronting a huge central traffic spine; precisely following the prescription of La Ville radieuse, everyone, from Permanent Secretary to janitor, was to live in the same blocks in the same kind of apartment. (Hall, 1996: 216)

Despite having a nearly level plain on which to arrange this ambitious construction, compromises owing to finance and politics had to be made. According to Hall (1996: 219):

Niemeyer himself, by this time, was saying that the plan had been distorted and reduced; only a Socialist regime, he felt, could have implemented it. Corbusier suffered from the same feelings much of his life: it is hard to build a City Beautiful amidst the confusion of democracy and the market.

This is reminiscent of like the great twentieth-century macroeconomist John Maynard Keynes’s comment (in the Preface to the German edition of his path-breaking General Theory of 1936) that his large-scale, top-down macroeconomic interventions into the market economy would be best suited to a totalitarian regime:

[M]uch of the following book is illustrated and expounded mainly with reference to the conditions existing in the Anglo-Saxon countries. Nevertheless the theory of output as a whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is the theory of the production and distribution of a given output under conditions of free competition and a large measure of laissez-faire. (Keynes, 1973)

The comparison is of course unfair, for the Brazil of the 1950s was not a totalitarian state in this sense. The point, however, is that constructing a capital city in such a short time—41 months!—from a unified plan is certainly not the bottom-up, spontaneous result of a people pursuing their own interests and plans. As Scott comments:

Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. (Scott, 1998:125)

The Brazilian government flooded the Brazilian Highlands with cataclysmic money to establish a monumental capital for a proud nation-state. The man-made “city” of Brasilia is, perhaps more than any other in modern history, “a work of art”—a immense tribute to pretended order—something Jacobs argued a great city could not and should never strive to be.Footnote 13

5 Concluding Thoughts

Urbanization causes serious problems that are unknown in nonurban settings and sometimes hard to imagine in today’s wealthy and highly developed cities (which have peculiar problems of their own). A great city’s problems, its messiness, are an unavoidable by-product of ordinary people who are free to try to better their situation as they see it, under conditions of scarcity, human and natural diversity, and imperfect knowledge. This entails ongoing trial and error, real disappointments, and apparent (and sometimes real) chaos. Indeed, a living city is creative not only because it is able to successfully address these problems but because it actually creates most of the very problems it solves. Novel problems, novel opportunities, novel solutions. An organism that is not continually facing fresh problems of this kind is no longer alive.

This chapter has focused on large-scale rational-constructivist responses to the problems that many believe are caused by urbanization. It analyzed and evaluated those responses using the Jacobsian concepts of border vacuum, cataclysmic money, and pretended visual order, combined with insights from market-process economics. In the context of Jacobs’s social theory, the worst errors of urban planning and policy-making stem from treating complex, dynamic social orders as a problem of simplicity or disorganized complexity rather than of spontaneously organized complexity. The results are not living cities but, as Jacobs put it, taxidermy.

The designs of Howard, Le Corbusier, and Wright (and to a lesser extent Olmstead) reflect a rationalist-constructivist mindset in which planners impose their visions onto the living flesh of a city or attempt to create new social orders out of whole cloth. Their approaches entail border vacuums, cataclysmic money, and artificial visual orders that generate deep disorder. They fail to account for the microfoundations—the norms and social institutions—that enable us to discover, solve, and cope with the inevitable problems that come with the astonishing benefits of city life. The same holds true for the practitioners of urban planning and design: Haussmann, Moses, Costa, and others we will encounter in Chap. 9. While their intent may be to bring order (as they see it) to the messiness of dynamic urban environments, their plans and policies typically fail to account for realities of imperfect knowledge, unpredictable change, and the entrepreneurial resourcefulness and frequent unruliness of ordinary people who are just trying to better their situation. In short, they do not appreciate the nature of a living city as a complex, spontaneous order.

Moreover, as Hayek (1959: 523) observes, their attitude—neglect of property rights, social networks, and markets—can be characterized as “anti-economic.” The consequence is to stifle the creativity unique to a great city.

In the next chapter I will address urban interventions that also tend to be anti-economic and anti-Jacobsian, though on a smaller scale. Among other issues, I will examine why housing affordability appears to be an ever-growing problem and what might effectively be done about it. It is of course reasonable and necessary to ask what we can do to make a living city more livable and affordable and to examine various interventions in which governments may play a greater or lesser role. But seeking to effectively improve today’s cities still demands that we appreciate their nature and significance and to try as best as we can to understand how they work and so might work better.