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Open Forms

The Closed System and the Brittle City

The cities everyone wants to live in should be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, be supported by a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and also do their best to heal society’s divisions of race, class and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in.

Cities fail on all these counts due to government policy, irreparable social ills, and economic forces beyond local control. In these ways, each city is not its own master. Still, something has gone wrong – radically wrong – in our conception of what a city itself should be. Imagining the good city became ever more difficult as planning become legalistic and bureaucratic after World War II – Paris in 1960 had a far thicker rulebook than it did in 1870. This presents a paradox.

Today’s planner has an arsenal of technological tools – from lighting to bridging and tunnelling to materials for buildings – which urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to imagine: we have more resources to use than in the past, but we don’t use these resources very creatively.

This paradox can be traced to one big fault: the overdetermination of both the city’s visual forms and its social functions. The technologies which make possible experimentation have been subordinated to a regime of power which wants order and control; in the grip of rigid images and precise delineations, the urban imagination lost its vitality. Now, nearly a century on, with even greater technical abilities, we need to loosen up the city; we need to imagine an open city in which experimentation is possible, one which is friendly to informality, one which is open.

A portent of the paralysed imagination about cities appeared in Le Corbusier’s ‘Plan Voisin’ in the mid-1920s for Paris. The architect conceived of replacing a large swath of the historic centre of Paris with uniform, X-shaped buildings; public life on the ground plane of the street would be eliminated; the use of all buildings would be coordinated by a single master plan.

‘Plan Voisin’ froze the city by eliminating unregulated life at street level; instead, people were to live and work, in isolation, higher up. This vertical dystopic experiment became reality in various ways. The plan’s methodology shaped public housing from Chicago to Moscow, housing estates which came to resemble warehouses for the poor. Corbusier’s intended destruction of vibrant street life was realised in suburban growth for the middle classes, with the replacement of high streets by monofunctional shopping malls, by gated communities, by schools and hospitals built as isolated campuses.

The result of overdetermination is what could be called the Brittle City. As their use changes, buildings are now destroyed rather than adapted. The average lifespan of new public housing in Britain is now forty years; the average lifespan of new skyscrapers in New York is thirty-five years. It might seem that the Brittle City represents openness of a sort, the new sweeping away the old, but change of this sort is malign. In the United States, people flee decaying suburbs rather than reinvest in them; in Britain and continental Europe, as in America, ‘renewing’ the inner city most often means displacing the people who have lived there before. ‘Growth’ in an urban environment is a more complicated phenomenon than simple replacement of what existed before; growth requires a dialogue between past and present, it is a matter of evolution rather than erasure.

This principle is as true socially as it is architecturally. The bonds of community cannot be conjured in an instant, with a stroke of the planner’s pen; they too require time to develop. Today’s ways of building cities – segregating functions, homogenising population, preempting through zoning and regulating the meaning of place – fail to provide communities the time and space to evolve, which is needed for growth.

The Brittle City is a symptom of society operating on a large scale as a closed system. This view of society has two essential attributes: equilibrium and integration.

The closed system ruled by equilibrium derives from a pre-Keynesian idea of how markets work. It supposes something like a bottom line, in which income and expenses balance. In state planning, information feedback loops and internal markets are meant to ensure that programs do not ‘overcommit’, do not ‘suck resources into a black hole’ – such is the language of recent reforms to health services, familiar again to urban planners in the ways that infrastructure resources for transport get allocated. The limits on doing any one thing really well are set by the fear of neglecting other tasks. In a closed system, a little bit of everything happens all at once.

Second, a closed system is meant to be integrated. Ideally, every part of the system has a place in the overall design; the consequence of that ideal is to reject, to vomit out, experiences which stick out because they are contestatory or disorienting; things that ‘don’t fit’ diminish in value. Planning in the urban environment can practise repressive integration by emphasising context – a polite but potent word to cast suspicion, repressing anything that doesn’t fit in, ensuring that nothing sticks out, offends or challenges.

Emphasis on integration discourages experiment; as the inventor of the computer icon, John Seely Brown, once remarked, every technological advance poses at the moment of its birth the threat of disruption and disfunction to a larger system. So too in a city.

The twin sins of equilibrium and integration bedevil plans for education, welfare services or corporate vitality as much as in the Brittle City; moreover, the sinning sisters appear in both state capitalism or state socialism. The closed system betrays the twentieth-century bureaucrat’s horror of disorder.

The social contrast to the closed system is not the free market, nor is the alternative to the Brittle City a place ruled by developers. The cunning of neoliberalism speaks the language of freedom while manipulating closed bureaucratic systems for elites’ private gain. The true counterbalance of the closed system involves a different kind of social system.

The Open City

An open city works like Naples, a closed city works like Frankfurt.

The idea of an open city is not my own: credit for it belongs to the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in the course of arguing against the urban vision of Le Corbusier. She tried to understand what results when places become both dense and diverse, as in packed streets or squares, their functions both public and private; out of such conditions comes the unexpected encounter, the chance discovery, the innovation. Her view is reflected in the bon mot of William Empson that ‘the arts result from overcrowding’.

Jacobs sought to define particular strategies for urban development, once a city is freed of the constraints of either equilibrium or integration. These include encouraging quirky, jerry-built adaptations or additions to existing buildings; encouraging uses of public spaces which don’t fit neatly together, such as putting an AIDS hospice square in the middle of a shopping street. In her view, big capitalism and powerful developers tend to favour homogeneity: determinate, predictable and balanced in form; the role of the radical planner is therefore to champion dissonance. In her famous declaration, ‘if density and diversity give life, the life they breed is disorderly’.

If Jane Jacobs is the urban anarchist she is often said to be, then she is an anarchist of a peculiar, conservative sort. Her spiritual ties closer to Edmund Burke than to Emma Goldman. She believes that an open city is slow moving; people best absorb and adapt to change if it happens step by lived step. This is why Naples or New York’s Lower East Side, though resource-poor, still are sustainable and why people care deeply about them. They have lived into these places, like nesting. Time breeds attachment to place.

The cities we know today, outside the European orbit, are fast moving; the urbanisation of Asia, Latin America and Africa has occurred in decades, not centuries. The drivers of fast time – developers, investors, national actors – want their cities to be closed in form; that is, to be quantifiable, determinate, balanced and well-integrated. The investor knows what he or she is getting.

If we want urban development to be open, we cannot counter these forces simply by saying ‘slow down’ or ‘wait’. Jacobs’s Burkian sense of time, accompanied by her championing of small businesses, hasn’t much traction in the face of today’s political economy. Instead, resistance to the closing of the city makes countervailing designs all the more important.

In my own thinking, I’ve wondered what kinds of physical forms might resist the closed city and empower the open. The plans presented by Pablo Sendra in this book explore the physical infrastructure which might do so. Above ground, there are three kinds of ‘urban DNA’ configurations that can be deployed in a situation of rapid, massive urban development. These three forms in an open city are 1. passage territories; 2. incomplete objects; and 3. nonlinear narratives.

Passage territories

I’d like to describe in some detail the experience of passing through different territories of the city, both because that act of passage is how we know the city as a whole, and also because planners and architects have such difficulty designing the experience of passage from place to place. I’ll start with walls, which seem to be structures inhibiting passage, and then explore some of the ways edges of urban territory function like walls.

Walls

The wall would seem an unlikely choice; it is an urban construction which literally closes in a city. Until the invention of artillery, people sheltered behind walls when attacked; the gates in walls also served to regulate commerce coming into cities, often being the point at which taxes were collected. Massive medieval walls such as those surviving in Aix-en-Provence or Rome furnish a perhaps misleading general picture; ancient Greek walls were lower and thinner. But we also mis-imagine how those medieval walls themselves functioned.

Though they shut closed, they also served as sites for unregulated development in the city: houses were built on both sides of medieval town walls; informal commerce with black-market or untaxed goods sprung up nestled against them; the zone of the wall was where heretics, foreign exiles and other misfits tended to gravitate, again far from the controls of the centre. These spaces would have attracted the anarchic Jane Jacobs.

But they were also sites which might have suited her organically focused temperament. These walls functioned much like cell membranes, both porous and resistant. That dual function of the membrane is, I believe, an important principle for visualising modern urban living forms. Whenever we construct a barrier, we must equally ensure the barrier is porous; the distinction between inside and outside has to be breachable, if not ambiguous.

The typical contemporary use of plate glass for walls doesn’t do this; true, on the street you see what’s inside the building, but you can’t touch, smell, or hear anything within; the plates are usually rigidly fixed so that there is only one, regulated, entrance within. The result is that nothing much develops on either side of these transparent walls: as in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building in New York or Norman Foster’s new London City Hall, you have dead space on both sides of the wall; life in the building does not accumulate here. By contrast, nineteenth-century architect Louis Sullivan used much more primitive forms of plate glass more flexibly, as invitations to gather, to enter a building or to dwell at its edge; his plate glass panels function as porous walls. This contrast in plate glass design brings out one current failure of imagination in using a modern material so that it has a sociable effect.

The idea of a cellular wall, which is both resistant and porous, can be extended from single buildings to the zones at which the different communities of a city meet.

Borders

Ecologists like Stephen Jay Gould draw our attention to an important distinction in the natural world, that between boundaries and borders. The boundary is an edge where things end; the border is an edge where different groups interact. In natural ecologies, borders are the places where organisms become more inter-active, due to the meeting of different species or physical conditions. For instance, the shoreline of a lake, where the water meets solid land, is an active zone of exchange; here organisms find and feed off other organisms. The same is true of temperature layers within a lake: where layer meets layer defines the zone of most intense biological activity. Not surprisingly, it is also at the borderline where the work of natural selection is most intense, whereas the boundary is guarded territory, as established by prides of lions or packs of wolves. The boundary establishes closure, whereas the border functions more like a medieval wall. The border is a liminal space.

In the realm of human culture, territories consist similarly of boundaries and borders – in cities, most simply, there is a contrast between gated communities and complex, open streets. But the distinction cuts deeper in urban planning.

When we imagine where the life of a community is to be found, we usually look for it in the centre of a community; when we want to strengthen community life, we try to intensify life at the centre. The edge condition is seen to be more inert, and indeed modern planning practices, such as sealing the edges of communities with highways, create rigid boundaries lacking any porosity. But neglect of the edge condition – boundary thinking, if you like – means that exchange between different racial, ethnic, or class communities is diminished. By privileging the centre, we thus weaken the complex interactions necessary to join up the different human groups the city contains.

Let me give as an example a failure in my own planning practice. Some years ago, I was involved in a plan to create a market to serve the Hispanic community in Spanish Harlem in New York. This community, one of the poorest in the city, lies above 96th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Just below 96th Street, in an abrupt shift, lies one of the richest communities in the world, running from 96th down to 59th Street, comparable to Mayfair in London or the 7th Arrondissement in Paris. Accordingly, 96th Street itself could function either as a boundary or a border. We planners chose to locate La Marqueta in the very centre of Spanish Harlem, twenty blocks away, and to regard 96th Street as a dead edge where nothing much happens. We made the wrong decision. Had we located the market on 96th Street, we might have encouraged activity which brought the rich and the poor into some daily commercial contact. Wiser planners have since learned from our mistake and on the West Side of Manhattan sought to locate new community resources at the edges between communities, in order, as it were, to open the gates between different racial and economic collectivities. Our prioritisation of the centre proved isolating; their understanding of the value of the edge and border has proved integrating.

I don’t mean to paint a Panglossian picture of such ventures in planning: opening up borders means people of different strengths are exposed to competition. Borders can serve as tense rather than friendly sites of exchange – evoking some of the predatory quality of border conditions in natural ecologies. But taking that risk, which planners are now doing under more explosive conditions in Beirut and in Nicosia, is the only way, I believe, in which we can create conditions for a socially sustained collective life in cities; ultimately, isolation is not a true guarantor of civil order.

The porous wall and the edge as border create essential physical elements for an open system in cities. Both porous walls and borders create liminal space – that is, space at the limits of control, limits which permit the appearance of things, acts and persons unforeseen yet focused and sited. Biological psychologist Lionel Festinger once characterised such liminal spaces as defining the importance of ‘peripheral vision’; sociologically and in an urbanistic sense, these sites operate differently than those places which concentrate difference in a centre; on the horizon, at the periphery, at the border, differences stand out since one is aware one is crossing out of one territory into another.

Incomplete Form

This discussion of walls and borders leads logically to a second systemic characteristic of the open city: incomplete form. Incompleteness may seem the enemy of structure, but this is not the case. The designer needs to create physical forms of a particular sort that are ‘incomplete’ in a distinctive way.

When we design a street, for instance, so that buildings are set back from a street wall, the space left open in front is not truly public space; instead, the building has been withdrawn from the street. We know the practical consequences – people walking on a street tend to avoid these recessed spaces. It’s better planning if the building is brought forward, into an interplay with other buildings; though the building will become part of the urban fabric, some of its volumetric elements will now be incompletely disclosed. There is an incompleteness in the perception of the object.

Incompleteness of form extends to the very context of buildings themselves. In classical Rome, Hadrian’s Pantheon coexisted with the less distinguished buildings which surrounded it in the urban fabric, though Hadrian’s architects conceived the Pantheon as a self-referential object. We find the same coexistence in many other architectural monuments: St. Paul’s in London, the Rockefeller Center in New York, the Institut du monde arabe in Paris – all great works of architecture which stimulate building around them. It’s that stimulation, rather than the fact that the surrounding buildings are of lesser quality, which counts in urban terms: the existence of one building is sited in such a way that it encourages the growth of other development around it. And now the buildings acquire their specifically urban value by their relationship to each other – they become, in time, incomplete forms if considered alone, by themselves.

Incomplete form is most of all a kind of creative credo. In the plastic arts it is conveyed in sculpture purposely left unfinished; in poetry it is conveyed in, to use Wallace Steven’s phrase, the ‘engineering of the fragment’. Architect Peter Eisenman has sought to evoke something of the same credo in the term ‘light architecture’, meaning an architecture planned so that it can be added to or, more importantly, revised internally over time as the needs of habitation change.

This credo opposes the simple replacement of form which characterises the Brittle City, but it is a demanding opposition – a tension seen, for instance, when we try to convert office blocks to residential use.

Nonlinear Narratives

Cities do not build linearly over time: their shapes twist and turn as historical events alter the ways people live in them. But all too often, the ville is planned as though particular projects can be developed in a sequential fashion, moving from conception to completion with a minimum of alteration along the way. It’s certainly necessary to reduce costs for material and labour by calculations made at the start, and you cannot build an airport or a sewage system by trial and error. But these are vast constructions. At the level of the house, the school, the office or the store, smaller scale allows for the structures to shift in form as uses or users change.

Incomplete forms enable this alteration to occur physically. Massed together in an assemblage, these incomplete forms allow nonlinear development of the cité to occur. For example, in London, this massing of mutable buildings occurred in the Spitalfields neighbourhood in the East End, as weaving and weavers brought to London by French Huguenots in the seventeenth century gave way to tailoring and Jewish tailors, who moved from Eastern Europe to London in the late nineteenth century; in the early twentieth, construction workers from the West Indies began to arrive and in the mid-twentieth, it was Bangladeshi and Indian small businessmen. The assemblage of flexible building forms allowed the different groups to make their way in the same space. Until the gentrification of Spitalfields drove out most of these immigrants, they contrived informal ways of coexisting which matched the adaptive uses of the physical forms.

No one planned this history; Spitalfields never put out a sign saying ‘immigrants are welcome here’. Nonetheless, planners can learn from such spontaneous growth. In our small projects, we can work reflexively. That means focusing on the stages in which a particular project unfolds. Specifically, we must try to understand what elements should happen first, and the consequences of this initial move. Rather than a lockstep march toward achieving a single end, we should look at the different and conflicting possibilities which each stage of the design process might entail. Keeping these possibilities intact, leaving conflictual elements in play, opens up the design system.

If a novelist were to announce at the beginning of a story ‘here’s what will happen’ – what the characters will become and what the story means – we would immediately close the book. All good narrative has the property of exploring the unforeseen, of discovery; the novelist’s art is to shape the process of that exploration. Likewise with the urban designer’s art.

In sum, we can define an open system as one in which growth admits conflict and dissonance. This definition is at the heart of Darwin’s understanding of evolution; rather than the survival of the fittest (or the most beautiful), he emphasised the process of growth as a continual struggle between equilibrium and disequilibrium; an environment rigid in form, static in programme, is doomed in time; biodiversity instead gives the natural world the resources to provision change.

That ecological vision makes equal sense for human settlements, but it is not the vision which guided twentieth-century state planning. Neither state capitalism nor state socialism embraced growth in the sense Darwin understood it in the natural world, in environments which permitted interaction among organisms with different functions, endowed with different powers.

I’d like to conclude by making a connection between the systematics of the open city and the politics of democracy. In what sense could the forms I’ve described contribute to the practice of democracy?

Democratic Space

When the city operates as an open system – incorporating the principles of porosity of territory, incomplete form, and nonlinear development – it becomes democratic not in the legal sense, but as a tactile experience.

In the past, thinking about democracy focused on issues of formal governance; today, it focuses on citizenship and issues of participation. Participation is an issue which has everything to do with the physical city and its design. For example, in the ancient polis, Athenians put the semicircular theatre to political use; this architectural form provided good acoustics and a clear view of speakers in debate; moreover, it made possible the perception of other people’s responses during debates.

In modern times, we have no similar model of democratic space – and certainly no clear image of an urban democratic space. John Locke defined democracy in terms of a body of laws which could be practised anywhere. Democracy in the eyes of Thomas Jefferson was inimical to life in cities; he thought the spaces it required could be no larger than a village. His view has persisted. Through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, champions of democratic practices have identified them with small, local communities and face-to-face relationships.

Today’s city, which is big, is filled with migrants and ethnic diversity, a city in which people belong to many different communities at the same time – through their work, families, consumption habits and leisure pursuits. For global cities like London and New York, a key issue with citizen participation is how people can feel both physically and socially connected to others whom, necessarily, they cannot know. Democratic space means creating a forum for these strangers to interact.