Cities are BLANK

Source: Orig­i­nally posted at Aribra.com

Cities are _____. Cities are organic. They are like plants. Cities are like ecosys­tem. Cities are jun­gles. Cities are like bac­te­r­ial colonies. Cities are fortresses against the per­ils of nature. Cities are machines, engines of cul­ture and progress. Cities are like libraries, or like a liv­ing museum.  Cities are amuse­ment parks, and on and on. The abil­ity to describe a city, or some aspect of it, really knows no boundary.

A recent com­par­i­son of the city I found is to that of a bat­tle­suit (as if we really need any war ref­er­ences to frame the devel­op­ment of our cities). More to my lik­ing is this study con­ducted by Mark Changizi, a neu­ro­bi­ol­ogy expert and assis­tant pro­fes­sor in the Depart­ment of Cog­ni­tive Sci­ence at Rens­se­laer, which sug­gests cities are orga­nized like human brains.

Ever since I started my for­mal urban plan­ning edu­ca­tion way back in 2004, I’ve encoun­tered as many metaphors and sim­i­les to describe cities as there are, well, cities. This way of under­stand­ing these places of uncer­tainty — strange, I’m sure com­ing from an architect/planner — allows us to draw asso­ci­a­tions from other sys­tems and enti­ties to per­haps con­sider how our cities may be improved in ways that bet­ter suit our needs and desires.  It is the uncer­tainty inher­ent in our cities that allows for such a broad com­par­i­son of their con­stituent parts, as well as their totality.

The power to visu­al­ize the city as some­thing that it is not, but exhibits some like­ness to a char­ac­ter­is­tic or process of an unre­lated sys­tem or entity is an essen­tial tool in test­ing ideas, new or old, for how we orga­nize, cre­ate, use, main­tain, regen­er­ate, and ulti­mately define our built envi­ron­ment. This act of defin­ing becomes even more com­plex con­sid­er­ing that cities are already the result of lay­ers upon lay­ers of pre­vi­ous exper­i­men­ta­tions, some suc­cess­ful and oth­ers less so.

Fram­ing our cities in this way, how are we to pro­ceed? Well, there are cer­tainly as many strate­gies for that as there are metaphors of the city, and it’s not as sim­ple as start­ing over as the mod­ernists would have had us believe.

There’s a Johnny Cash song (writ­ten by Wayne Kemp) that offers a com­pelling metaphor for cities, which I’ve writ­ten about before, here. In One Piece at a Time (1976), Cash describes a Cadil­lac built from parts slowly acquired over many years work­ing in the fac­tory. As the car’s design changed over the course of those years (1949 to 1973), so too did the cor­re­spond­ing com­po­nents that gave the car its over­all form. As a result, Cash’s Cadil­lac was a hybrid of all those dis­parate com­po­nents, mod­i­fied and assem­bled into a unique identity.

Cities are bit dif­fer­ent though, and they can never be fully described by any one metaphor or sim­ile. Instead, we need all of them. Like Cash’s Cadil­lac, cities can be con­cep­tu­al­ized by many com­par­isons that are mod­i­fied, tested, and assem­bled over time. Cities like this will not look exactly like the utopian dream machines on the draw­ing boards, but more like the ever-adapting psy­chobilly assem­blages they really are.

So, what dif­fer­ent, cobbled-together ways is your city like?