Book Review- 8 page
DEDICATION

For Peter Calthorpe, who inspires me to look outward to see the form of cities,

and Diana Calthorpe Rose, who inspires me to look inward, toward wisdom and compassion.

CONTENTS

PART ONE: Coherence The Metropolitan Tide Planning for Growth Sprawl and Its Discontents The Dynamically Balancing City

PART TWO: Circularity The Metabolism of Cities Water Is a Terrible Thing to Waste

PART THREE: Resilience Natural Infrastructure Green Buildings, Green Urbanism

PART FOUR: Community Creating Communities of Opportunity The Cognitive Ecology of Opportunity Prosperity, Equality, and Happiness

PART FIVE: Compassion Entwinement

PREFACE

WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN, Philip Johnson, an influential architect and advisor to Governor Nelson Rockefeller, asked my father, Frederick P. Rose, a public-spirited apartment-house builder, for his thoughts on how to redevelop New York City’s Welfare Island. Now known as Roosevelt Island, this narrow strip of land in the East River between Manhattan and Queens was long the domain of the city’s outcasts, first housing a penitentiary, then a “lunatic asylum,” a smallpox isolation ward, and two welfare hospitals for chronic diseases. My father took me there in 1968, and as we stood among the shells of abandoned buildings in the weedy, trash-filled landscape, he asked, “What would you do with this?”

I have been trying to answer that question ever since. In the 1960s cities in the United States began sliding

into decades of physical, social, and environmental decay. Following the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1968, African American neighborhoods across the country burned, fueled by a century of segregation and neglect. Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River, thick with oil and sludge, caught on fire, an image that reverberated from the cover of magazine as a symbol of the pollution choking the nation’s cities. Increased crime, hard drugs, declining schools, and decaying transportation systems pushed America’s middle-class families to the suburbs, exacerbating the gap between a city’s wealthy and its workers. City tax bases declined, interest rates rose, and many urban centers began to teeter on the edge of insolvency.

I grew up in the suburbs, but I was drawn to nearby New York City because it was gritty and alive with what the

architect Robert Venturi called “complexity and

contradiction . . . messy vitality,”1 throbbing with street life and jazz, blues, and rock and roll.

I spent the summer before I visited Roosevelt Island in New Mexico, working on the excavation of a thousand-year-old Anasazi village. It was built of adobe bricks made from the earth, its buildings aligning with the rising sun on the spring and fall equinoxes. The ruins lay on a high mesa alive with plants, insects, small mammals, and birds. As we settled into the rhythms of nature, everything fitting together into a living, dynamic wholeness, I could feel the flow of her mysterious patterns although they were far too complex for me to understand. They were also ultimately too complex for the Anasazi. The climate changed and centuries of drought devastated their cities.

Jane Jacobs, one of the great urban thinkers of the twentieth century, said, “Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they

represent a complex and highly developed form of order.”2

After that summer, I set out to find that order. I sensed that its seeds were in many places—in biology and evolution, in physics and quantum mechanics, in religion and philosophy, in psychology and ecology, in the histories of cities long gone, and in cities now emerging. My goal was to integrate lessons from these varied sources in order to understand how to make cities whole. And my inspiration was a master of making wholeness: Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach’s music weaves together depth and delight in an endlessly unfolding tapestry, infused with wisdom and compassion. Listening to his music, I have a sense of the grandeur of nature, ever moving toward harmony. But it is also an urban music, written in the cities of Weimar, Köthen, and Leipzig.

, which Bach wrote in two sections, or books, in 1722 and 1742, provides a great map of counterpoint, an instruction manual for composers and

performers organized into patterns of unearthly beauty, a vast integration that demonstrates both the perfection of the whole and the role of the individual within it. In each book Bach moves through all twenty-four major and minor keys in a series of preludes and fugues, weaving them together into a sublime ecology of sound.

was composed to prove that a new system of tuning notes, tempering, should replace a system that had reigned for two thousand years. Prior to the late seventeenth century each musical scale of notes used in European music was tuned slightly differently, in keeping with the theories of Pythagoras. The great Greek mathematician proposed that the ratios of the distances between the planets were the same as the ratios between musical notes, a theory he called “the harmony of the spheres.” Tuning each musical key to these planetary proportions created beautiful scales within a given musical key, but generated notes that were slightly out of tune with the notes of every other key. If two different keys were played together the result was excruciating to listen to. Pythagoras’s tuning system, which came to be called “just intonation,” remained unchallenged for two thousand years, limiting compositions to just one key.

The solution, to tune the notes “in between” Pythagoras’s perfect pitches, was first proposed by the Chinese prince Zhu Zaiyu, in his book

, which was published in 1580. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit monk, famed for his travels to China, recorded the concept in his journal and brought it back to Europe, where the idea gestated. In 1687, the German organist and music theorist Andreas Werckmeister published a treatise on the mathematics of music in which he described a system that became known as Werckmeister temperament. Through tempering, each key’s notes were tuned in a way that sounded pleasing when more than one key was played simultlaneously. Werckmeister’s system reflected another Greek philosophy, the “golden mean,” which sought the desirable middle between two

extremes. The founder of the theory of the golden mean was none other than Theano, wife of Pythagoras!

In 1691, Werckmeister proposed a tuning system he called “ ,” or well temperament. It was designed to solve the problem of musical circularity. In the just intonation system, if one started on a cyclical journey through the keys, each slightly out of tune with the prior one, when the journey came back to the beginning, the circle would not close. Werkmeister’s well-tempered system, which in the twentieth century became known as equal temperament, was designed so that the distances between notes were in proper proportion, so that the end of a circle was consonant with the beginning.

The contemporary composer Philip Glass notes, “Without a well-tempered system, one could not move from the key of A to the unrelated key of E flat without going out of tune. And thus, one could only play music in one key at a time. Well temperament opened up all of the keys to a composer.”

Bach believed that God had created a sacred architecture of the universe, and that his mission as a composer was to express its magnificent form through music. The well-tempered tuning system unshackled Bach, allowing his music to flow across keys in ways that no one had ever explored before.

was composed to align our highest human aspirations with the sublime harmony of nature. It is a model of the task we have today in designing and reshaping our cities.

The world’s first cities were founded on sacred sites, built around temples, and often designed in a plan that, like Bach’s music, was organized to reflect the architecture of the universe. They were filled with art and sanctuaries, animated with ceremonies that gave meaning to the lives of their inhabitants.

The mission of these early communities’ designers was to align people with the principles that gave birth to life, morality, order, and wisdom. As settlements grew, their

priests, the most trusted members of the community, became responsible for overseeing storehouses for grain and other goods. They developed governance systems to help carry out three primary responsibilities: to provide for the protection and prosperity of their residents, to oversee the fair distribution of resources, and to maintain a balance between human and natural systems in order to increase well-being.

Today’s cities are technical marvels, reflecting civilization’s enormous scientific strides. Human creativity has produced unimagined power and prosperity, although that prosperity is not equally distributed. Yet most of our cities have lost their original higher purpose.

The goal of this book is to knit these threads—our technical and social potential and the generative power of nature—back together, toward a higher purpose for cities. In a time of increasing volatility, complexity, and ambiguity, the well-tempered city has systems that can help it evolve toward a more even temperament, one that balances prosperity and well-being with efficiency and equality in ways that continually restore the city’s social and natural capital. Many of these qualities are already at work today in cities around the world. The purpose of this book is to show how they might come together.

INTRODUCTION

I WAS BORN IN 1952, when the world’s population was 2.6

billion.1 Since then it has almost tripled in size. In 1952 only 30 percent of the world’s people lived in cities, but

now more than half do,2 and by the end of the twenty-first century that number will grow to 85 percent. The quality and character of our cities will determine the temperament of human civilization.

In 1952 conditions in many European cities were not unlike those in the developing world today. In one of Europe’s southernmost cities, Palermo, the capital of Sicily, reconstruction after a devastating war was stalled by corruption; lacking affordable housing, families camped in nearby caves while the Mafia built a concrete jungle of suburban sprawl, paving over parks and farms, bribing and threatening local officials with so little regard for building and zoning codes that the result became known as the Sack of Palermo.

To the north, in Germany, 8 million of the 12 million people displaced by war remained refugees, without proper housing or work. To the west, London was shrouded by the “Great Smog,” a lethal fog of sulfurous coal smoke that killed twelve thousand people in the worst air pollution event in London’s history. And to the east, in Prague, the show trial of Rudolf Slánský, accompanied by Stalin’s torture and execution of Jews, and their expulsion from the government, hardened the cold war lines between the Soviets and the West.

The prevailing view at the time was that economic growth was a key solution to the world’s problems. Spurred by the

American Marshall Plan, the postwar period in Europe gave rise to the greatest economic expansion in its history, overcoming starvation, providing work and homes for countless refugees, funding social services, and generally improving the quality of life for tens of millions of people. The United States also experienced extraordinary growth. Manufacturing wages tripled from their depression-era lows, America’s middle class expanded, and the populations of many cities rose to new peaks. However, the focus on economic growth alone was not sufficient to generate true well-being.

The 1950s were not a good time for nature. The growth of the world’s cities was fueled by voracious consumption of natural resources: mountains were mined, forests cut, oceans fished, rivers dammed, and groundwater was sucked from the earth—all at a rapidly accelerating pace. There was little thought given to waste. Salinated groundwater, polluted rivers, and stripped topsoil reduced nature’s capacity to regenerate herself, ultimately making the task of feeding and provisioning our cities harder. Although many of the world’s cities grew in the 1950s, the planning for that growth was often shortsighted, ignoring the lessons learned from thousands of years of city-making.

Look at almost any city in the world and you’ll find that the part planned and built in the 1950s is probably its least attractive. Historic plazas became parking lots, rivers were covered and turned into highways, cheap “International Style” office buildings replaced beautifully crafted ones, and vast, efficient, soulless housing estates were built at the city’s suburban edges, disconnected from work, shopping, culture, and community.

Certainly, by the mid-twentieth century, many nineteenth- century neighborhoods needed renewal. In Berlin’s Wilhelmina Ring, thought to be the largest tenement cluster in the world, tiny, teeming apartments were heated by charcoal, and only 15 percent of apartments had both a toilet and a bath or shower. In St. Louis, Missouri, 85,000 families lived in overcrowded, rodent-filled nineteenth-century buildings, many

with communal toilets. New York City’s Lower East Side was the most densely populated neighborhood in the world, contributed to significant health and safety issues. These neighborhoods needed regeneration.

After World War I, the dominant approach to the design of urban renewal grew out of the ideas of the Swiss-French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, known as Le Corbusier. In 1928, Le Corbusier and a group of like-minded colleagues formed the International Congresses of Modern Architecture (CIAM), to formalize and disseminate their view of city-making. In 1933 they declared the urban-planning ideal to be the “Functional City,” proposing that urban social issues could be solved by a planning and building design that strictly segregated use according to function. Like Bach, Le Corbusier sought to express the architecture of the universe in his work. “Mathematics,” he wrote, “is the majestic structure conceived by man to grant him comprehension of the universe. It holds the absolute and the

infinite, the understandable and the ever elusive.”3

Inspired by Pythagoras’s golden ratio, Le Corbusier proposed it as the ideal basis to determine the proper distances between buildings, and as the ratio between a building’s height and width. The result produced isolated, evenly spaced towers, which were set in unadorned parks.

The Functional City approach was adopted all over the world. Historic, messy, vital city neighborhoods filled with dense streets lined with shops and apartment buildings were condemned, torn down, and replaced with Le Corbusier’s “towers in the park,” antiseptic, orderly, tall new apartment buildings with tiny kitchens and bathrooms, separated from one another by green but unusable open spaces. Shops and workshops were limited; these were only places to live. Outside Amsterdam the concept was demonstrated in Bijlmermeer, a complex constructed in the late 1960s of thirty-one ten-story octagonal apartment buildings to house 60,000 people with not a shop to serve them, separated from the city by a wide expanse of parkland.

Bijlmermeer.

The Soviet Union found the Functional City concept particularly appealing, and engaged many of the CIAM architects during the Great Depression. Their ideas were applied at scale after World War II as an inexpensive way to rebuild war-torn cities, and to accelerate Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe. In January 1951, the Moscow party boss Nikita Khrushchev called together a conference on construction, proposing that the people’s housing should be constructed with cheap, prefabricated concrete panels. The next year the Nineteenth Party Congress made the prefabrication of massive housing projects the law of the land, while preserving the option for luxury dachas and government buildings to be handcrafted.

Despite the Soviet Union’s receptivity to their ideas, World War II drove many CIAM members to the United States, where they became deans of the nation’s leading schools of architecture. The principles they taught guided the design of the nation’s urban renewal program. In the 1950s new housing projects like St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe, designed by Minoru

Yamasaki, won architectural awards for their stark formality. In 1954, Dick Lee, the newly elected mayor of New Haven, Connecticut, adopted the Corbusian model of urban renewal and promised to make New Haven a model city. New Haven’s efforts to replace old neighborhoods with brutally modern architecture received national attention, and won many design awards, but by the late 1960s they had largely failed because they concentrated poverty, isolated residents from services, and limited opportunity for small businesses.

In addition to housing, economic development—the creation of businesses and jobs and the improvement of living standards—is an important element of urban renewal. The prevailing urban economic model of the mid-twentieth century often focused on the development of a few large projects to revitalize a city’s downtown. These deeply subsidized large shopping malls or convention centers often failed because planners didn’t recognize that economic vitality functions at several scales in an overlapping, complex system. The small business—the musical instrument shop, the fabric store, or the corner grocer—is as essential as new housing and grand mixed-use centers. New Haven condemned blocks of older historic buildings to clear and build a downtown shopping mall, which struggled. As the area lost its vitality, its office buildings were only partially occupied and rents dropped. By the end of his term in 1969, Dick Lee said, “If New Haven is a model city, God help America’s

cities.”4

In 1970, I arrived in New Haven to attend Yale University. It was an unsettled time. One of the first American cities to industrialize in the late 1700s, New Haven was losing middle- class jobs as manufacturers moved to the nonunion South, or offshore. The Vietnam War was dividing the nation. A persistent recession, rising interest rates, and increasing urban crime were hastening the decline of America’s cities, and in New Haven the murder trial of the Black Panther Bobby Seale exacerbated racial tensions.

The goal of my undergraduate studies was to understand and integrate several big ideas: the nature and workings of the human mind, the functioning of social systems, and the way that the amazing miracle of life evolves toward ever- increasing complexity in the face of entropy and decay. My hypothesis centered on the notion that the same principles that increase the well-being of human and natural systems could also guide the development of happier, healthier cities.

Perhaps the most important ecologist of the twentieth century, the eminent biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, was then a Sterling professor at Yale. He graciously agreed to meet with me and discuss these early ideas that grew into this book. In 1931, when he was twenty-eight years old, Hutchinson set off for the Himalayas, to the high Tibetan land of Ladakh, where he studied the ecology of its lakes and its Buddhist culture. Hutchinson was the first to propose the idea of an ecological niche, a zone in which species and their environment intimately co-evolve, nested in ever-larger systems.

When Charles Darwin added the phrase “the survival of the fittest” to his fifth edition of at the suggestion of the economist Herbert Spenser, by “fittest” he didn’t mean “strongest”; he was referring to those species that fit together best. The magnificent tendency of nature to evolve toward the increasing fitness of its parts lies at the heart of nature’s ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Hutchinson’s concept of ecological niches provided a useful way to think about neighborhoods as nested in the systems of the city, its region, the nation, and the earth. Those that fit best thrive.

Hutchinson was also prescient about climate change; in 1947 he predicted that the carbon dioxide released by human activity would alter the earth’s climate. If this, the planet’s largest system, was threatened, then all the ecosystems nested within it would also be at risk. By the 1950s Hutchinson linked biodiversity loss to climate change.

He was also the first natural scientist to explore the intersection of cybernetics (information feedback control systems) and ecology, describing how energy and information flow through ecological systems. Together with the later work of Abel Wolman, who proposed that cities have metabolisms just as natural systems do, Hutchinson provided me with elements that I would eventually integrate into an understanding of cities as complex adaptive systems.

In January 1974 I took off on my own journey to the Himalayas, starting in Istanbul and working my way across Asia as a bus mechanic. In the harsh winter I stood at the gates to the Afghan city of Herat, feeling the extraordinary tidal flow of history. Herat, which had grown to greatness as part of the Persian Empire, was captured by Alexander the Great as his armies swept through to the east, destroyed, and rebuilt as a Greek city. Herat was next conquered by the Seleucids as they expanded out of India to the west, then by Islamic invaders from the east, and so on through history. Standing there, I could feel how the tides of civilizations also contribute to the DNA of our city-making. It also became clear to me that in order to understand cities, I had to learn their histories.

I also set out to understand the larger regions in which they were nested. In the fall I entered graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to study regional planning with Ian McHarg, who had published a groundbreaking book,

McHarg proposed mapping the natural, social, and historic patterns of a region in layers and then looking at the layers together to see how they affected one another. But what I was yearning for was not yet being taught, a more integrative framework that became known as complexity.

One of the reasons that the world is so volatile and uncertain is that the world’s human and natural systems are deeply complex, and complex systems can amplify volatility. To understand complexity, we should first understand its cousin, complicatedness.

Complicated systems have lots of moving parts, but they are predictable—they function in a linear fashion. And although the inputs and outputs of a complicated system may vary, the system itself is essentially static. For example, think about New York City’s water supply system. Water is collected in upstate reservoirs and, powered by gravity, streams though large aqueducts toward the city. Once the water reaches the city, it flows through thousands of pipes and valves and ends up in the taps of millions of apartments and homes. This system has many elements, but they all function in a linear path from input to output. Essentially, New York City’s water supply system has not changed much over the last 150 years. While the flow of water from the reservoir to a sink will vary depending on the state of the valves along the way, the structure of the system itself is pretty static. Linear systems tend to have very low volatility, and are very predicable.

Complex systems have lots of elements and subsystems that are all interdependent, so that each part influences the others. It is very hard to predict the outcome of an input into complex systems. The interactions of complex systems can amplify or mute inputs. The global economy is a complex system. That’s why in 2011, when Greece threatened to default on half of its $300 billion debt, the global stock markets declined by a trillion dollars, almost seven times the actual amount at risk. Nature is the earth’s most complex system. And perhaps the most complex human-made systems are cities.

Wicked Problems

In 1973, facing a series of intractable planning issues, the University of California, Berkeley, planning professors W. J. Rittel and Melvin Webber published “Dilemmas in a General

Theory of Planning.”5 They observed that the scientific rationalism of the 1950s, which proposed that science and

engineering could solve all urban problems, hadn’t worked out, and that city residents were resisting everything planners recommended. People were sitting in to halt the urban renewal that was supposed to clear blight, and to stop the construction of urban highways that were supposed to make transportation more efficient. City residents didn’t like new school curriculums, and they didn’t like public housing. Even Minoru Yamasaki’s failed Pruitt-Igoe was demolished in a widely televised series of implosions in 1972. Everything planners tried wasn’t working. What was wrong?

Rittel and Webber’s conclusion was an early contribution to the emerging field of complexity, although they didn’t describe it that way. They characterized problems that science and engineering could solve as ones, problems with clearly defined goals and pragmatic solutions. These are called complicated problems in this book. Rittel and Webber observed that the larger issues facing cities had no clear solutions because each intervention improved circumstances for some residents, but made things worse for others. And there was no clear framework for deciding what outcomes were the most equitable, or fair. They concluded that it was almost impossible to balance efficiency and equity. They wrote that the “kinds of problems that planners deal with, societal problems, are inherently different from the problems that scientists and perhaps some classes of engineers deal with. Planning problems are inherently wicked.”

Wicked problems are ill defined and rely on “elusive political judgment.” They can never be solved. Every wicked problem is a symptom of another problem. And every intervention changes the problem and its context.

The unpopularity of city and regional planning in the 1970s emasculated it. Instead of proposing transformational visions, most planners became process managers; implementing the zoning codes that fragmented cities rather than integrating them into a coherent whole. And city planners were also slow to recognize that they were subject to larger forces outside their control.

The World’s Largest Blackout

New Delhi, the capital of India, is among the largest and most populous cities on earth, connected not only to other cities on the Indian subcontinent, like Mumbai and Calcutta, but also to Dubai, London, New York, and Singapore. It is home to superb medical centers, diverse global businesses, a dynamic IT sector, and thriving tourism, all of which have increased its prosperity and created a rapidly growing, well- educated middle class.

On Monday, July 31, 2012, India’s northern electrical grid shuddered, staggered under its load, and then collapsed. New Delhi was paralyzed. Traffic jammed; trains, subways, and elevators froze in place; airports shut down; water could not be pumped; and factories seized up. An estimated 670 million people lost power, approximately 10 percent of the world’s total population. The most obvious cause was that demand for electric power outstripped supply; New Delhi has a hot, humid climate, and as it has become more prosperous more of its people expect to live and work in air-conditioned spaces, creating huge spikes in demand during summer months. But the underlying causes are more complex and intertwined.

The world’s climate is changing, generating extreme weather, including the kinds of record-breaking temperatures that drove up New Delhi’s use of power-hungry air- conditioning. Climate change has also led to shorter and later monsoon rains, reducing the flow of water through hydropower plants, cutting their electrical output. India’s increasingly large and prosperous population is also driving up the nation’s demand for food, and for the energy needed to produce it. In the 1970s, India’s farmers switched from locally adapted seeds to modern “green revolution” hybrids, which required much more water to grow. Faced with less rainfall, farmers turned to electrical pumps to lift deep groundwater to irrigate their crops. As demand for water increased, the water table dropped, requiring more and more energy to pump it from deeper and deeper wells.

India’s overtaxed energy infrastructure lacks the sophisticated software and controls to balance supply and demand. To make matters worse, 27 percent of India’s electricity supply is lost in transmission or stolen. Instead of reducing its energy needs with smart systems, conservation, and efficiency, India is increasing its supply, becoming the world’s largest builder of coal-fired power plants. It’s a pact with the devil, as burning coal only accelerates the climate change already threatening so many …

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