April 28, 2020 - 11:24am
“Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood.” So wrote the famed Chicago urban planner Daniel Burnham in 1910. These words can still be found on inspirational postcards and posters, urging their readers to aim high, to think great thoughts, to reach out for the American Dream.
For Charles “Chuck” Marohn Jr., these are the words that should be placed on the gravestone of American prosperity, words of warning for future generations. Like Burnham, Marohn is also an urban planner, but in an absolutely captivating book on urban development — no, seriously — Marohn accuses the “no little plans” philosophy of being responsible for the wasteland that is the contemporary American city. For what Burnham’s much copied approach to urban planning did was imagine that it could design the perfect city from scratch, all at once, everything rationally ordered, zoned, just right. “We are the first civilisation in all of human history to have the hubris to believe that what we build is the complete product.”
For all of human history prior to the post-war explosion of American wealth and technological capability, the places that human beings gathered together grew incrementally. They adapted over time. Not the product of a single imagination, these places were able to meet diverse challenges to their existence because they grew little by little, continually building into their structures lessons learnt from previous failures. The strength of “Strong Towns” — the title of Marohn’s brilliant new book — is an emergent property, not something you can get all in one go. Human habitat is assembled incrementally, little by little and over time.
As America emerged in the twentieth century as the global superpower, it saw itself as the new world of modernism and progress, as opposed to the old world of decay, characterised by Europe. The old city was higgledy-piggledy, chaotic, dirty, organic, haphazard. The new city was rational, ordered, properly planned and laid out. Yet many of these places are now impossible to maintain and have turned into ghost towns. According to Marohn, the famous urban collapse of a place like Detroit is just the beginning. Because a great many other cities copied what they saw as Detroit’s early growth and success. There is, he argues, a great deal more social collapse still to come, collapse that is built into the whole modernist urban design project.
At the heart of Marohn’s important work of clearly Nassim Nicholas Taleb-inspired anti-fragile philosophy is the distinction between complex and complicated. A rainforest is a complex system, he argues. It is a highly adaptive ecosystem whose resilience has emerged over time and is premised on its flexibility and diversity. A complex system like this is highly adaptive to change. A merely complicated system, however, can fail when just one element of it fails. My Twitter account is full of videos of bored families who have designed complicated parlour games in which — say — a table tennis ball bounces off various carefully placed pots and pans and then ends up in a glass. It looks very clever. But if one pan is just a little off, the whole system fails. In a complex system, the failure of one part of the system can be absorbed by the whole. In a complicated system, it cannot.
Marohn’s book is a must-read. I am not sure I have ever seen so clearly spelled out the catastrophic failure of the whole modernist philosophy, and the terrible price that people are now paying for its hubris.
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SubscribePoliticians might be keener to ‘revise their views in terms of new evidence coming forward’ if the media didn’t crucify them every time they changed their minds for supposedly being ‘inconsistent’ or ‘shifty’. As ever, it’s the fault of your lot, not of the politicians.
“When the battle is over they (the Media) come down from the hills and bayonet the wounded”.
It was ever thus.
This is something that so needs saying, and then acting on. But will it be? Developers and their financial backers love massive schemes of redevelopment, government likes the sense that it is “improving”, “modernising”, “creating initiatives”. Architects love their grandes projects, contractors huge and long running schemes, and local authorities and their planning departments their ability to brag and strut. What power have the citizenry got against all that?
In Norwich, a city which by and large has escaped wrecking by the forces of improvement, modernism, and social planning, and has no high rise buildings to override its cathedral spire, there is about to be a test of will. The Anglia Square scheme ought to be an opportunity to improve things, by removing a 1960’s development, but needless to say it is to have a phallus, a massive tower to wreck the cityscape. The scheme is on the desk of Robert Jenrick, the relevant minister, who must take the final decision. The omens are not good, but let’s hope he is reading Marohn’s book…
The chances of a minister reading this or any other book are more or less zero. Indeed, most of these people give the impression of never having read a book at all.
If you want to influence Jenrick you’ll have to protest outside his office and/or home. I wish you all luck in your attempt to prevent this vandalism..
The archaeologists will tell you there have been planned towns for thousands of years. Of course, some grow beyond the original plan and some collapse.
It does not automatically imply the original plan was wrong, just that times change.
Many years ago, when the BBC was sane, it screened a comedy skit, can’t remember who by, which was the 9 o’clock news opening with the newscaster saying “There is no news today. Now: a Tom and Jerry cartoon”
And I’ve often thought, that would be such a good idea some days.
I am not sure you have, as yet, tempted me to read this book. To blame the decline of Detroit just on overweening planners is to ignore rather a lot of other things, not least of which is a minimum amount of planning control over land use outside urban centres, leading to both sprawl and white fight.(it is part of a narrative in the US where African Americans arrive at the promised land to find someone has moved it) Where I live, in Poplar is in the Lansbury Estate which, after the war was built in an attempt to move the Garden City concept into an inner urban setting. It did not totally succeed but, looking from my 12th Story view point at the low rise blocks, enclosing common spaces with small runs of shops and schools, it is came quite close.
Indefinite social distancing could be the nail in coffin of high density urban planning
Dear Peter, sorry with all due respect – dont agree. Lockdown and distancing is only about delaying virus so NHS can manage, it is not about “stopping the virus” or “preventing us getting it”. Most of us will get it. This is why Sweden so important and interesting – there they seem to be saying – need to balance econ and health and a substantial % of people will simply die before normal time -particularly older people, (exactly what is happening in UK) and also people who are obese, diabetic etc. So not about “density” – which is about sustainable development and being able to deliver affordable district renewable enegy heating and travel by walking and PT, and stopping world temperature increasing by more than 1.5/2 degress – and not about stopping Covid 19. Best wishes Marc
Hello Marc, I haven’t made any claims about the aims or necessity of social distancing or its impact on the economy. My suggestion is that that those with the luxury of choice will increasingly choose not to live in high density cities. This will not be the last pandemic, nor is it likely to be the worst. Biosecurity is likely to trump climate change as this group’s overriding concern. Low density doesn’t guarantee low transmission (see Cumbria’s CV rates) but with a forced acceleration in teleworking and a withdrawal from communal living, it seems a far more appealing place to live. Regards Peter
Hi Peter, sorry rather misunderstood – yes all you say about the those with “luxury of choice” right – and horribly illustrated by the recent big rise of private jets taking off from all UK airports. Yes also agree about “low density – low transmission”…eventually. Which is why I lament low interest in the delaying of COP 26 this year – much more important and I hope the “caring and sharing” engendered by Covid 19 will help us all prepare for the bigger challenge. Planning policy (NPPF 19) promotes high density, but both the nature of national and local politics, (a sad reflection on “our nature”) goes against sharing. Finally back to Sweden..”lagom” translated as “just the right amount” or “balanced living”, is something we still need to learn and turn into public policy – including town planning. Best wishes Marc
Boris does seem to be more in touch with the feelings of ordinary people (this could just be a clever illusion). He is also used to being criticised for his “blunders” and shrugging off that criticism. I just hope he does come back to the podium soon and start a sensible discussion on exit from lock down, rather than continuing to assert that it is not sensible to have any discussion.
The whole BREXIT debacle, which was just the latest in a long line of debacles where we lost evermore faith in our political system as a whole, has been pushed very much into the shadows. If Boris can play CV 19 in roughly the right sort of way (other than the insane insistence that we can’t discuss lock down exit without putting at risk what has been and still needs to be achieved – what do they think? start to map out exit and we will all throw house and street parties?, I think overall the govt has played the hand it was dealt reasonably well so far) then it could go a long way to reversing the trend in growing distrust of politicians. If Boris cocks it up, then I think our parliamentary democracy faces its own existential crisis.
and this is true of all big “designed” systems. In my IT career I must have wept several times at the collapse, over-budget, late or non delivery of enormous (£several billions, often) complex IT systems for the NHS or MoD. Designed for a mythical ‘normal’ or ‘average’ or ‘ideal’ user. I always followed the KISS principle (keep it simple, stupid) develop fast, get it on to people’s desks, and start tweaking as they begin to use it. Ideally, use a tool that they can use, to tweak it themselves. If they stop calling you after a few weeks, result. They may of course have given up using your rubbish solution, but at least you didn’t waste billions failing to deliver it. That all embraces principles of autonomy, empowerment, bottom up development and design, and flexibility. It also of course means that the people at the top lose control – which is perhaps the nub of the problem.
Well I don’t think America was the first country to plan their cities. There was Hausmann and Paris, for instance, and the grid like structure of many Roman cities indicated a high degree of planning. I’m sure there are many other examples.
Of course, the dreadful Robert Moses in New York was the high priest of mid-century urban vandalism, worshipped by those who would have run a road through Covent Garden and replaced Amsterdam’s canals with motorways. May they all be damned.
Indeed, the Tang Dynasty Chinese laid out Xi’an on a grid system – a precedent followed in Japan with its ancient capitals, Nara and Kyoto. Kyoto remained one of the world’s most beautiful cities until the 1960s, when the new breed of planner swept in and began to demolish much of its historic wooden cityscape in favour of concrete.
The inspiration for Ancient Rome was the Ancient Greek genius, Hippodamus of Miletus. He of the Hippodamian Plan or Grid Plan. Born about five hundred years before Pontius Pilate, Hippodamus was recently described as “the father of European urban planning” by the American, Edward Glaesar, in his seminal work, ‘The Triumph of the City’.
Particularly fine examples of the Hippodamian Plan can found at Timgad, Algeria or Lepcis Magna, Libya. On seeing them it is very much a case of,”Look on my works ye mighty and despair”.
The problem is, surely, not big plans per se. Hardly anyone regrets that Haussmann’s Paris, or St Petersburg, to name two planned cities, are (more or less) “the product of a single imagination”. And while one loves the organic qualities of Vienna’s Innere Stadt or Lisbon’s Alfama district, doesn’t one also admire the planned order and elegance of the former’s Ringstrasse or the latter’s Baixa?
Surely the problem is not urban planning per se, but the fact that a singularly arrogant kind of planning, indifferent to human preferences and blind to the lessons of the past, became de rigeur in the postwar era. I’ve long thought that the radical redevelopment of the historic cities of Europe and Asia in (mainly) the 1960s was the greatest act of artistic vandalism ever committed in time of peace; it had, as your comments suggest, a major human toll too.
“For Charles “Chuck” Marohn Jr., these are the words that should be placed on the gravestone of American prosperity, words of warning for future generations.”
So, American prosperity is dead? We should really stop reading at that point. But the rest of the article, and it seems the book it reviews, have the guilty appeal of a gruesome road accident.
The USA is acused of (or credited with?) inventing city planning. Nonsense!
All contemporary American cities are dismissed as wastelands. More nonsense! Etc. Etc.
The whole review is below Rev. Fraser’s usual standard. Overall, a book I will NOT be adding to my skyscraper-high To-Be-Read pile.
I’m more frightened of something that will happen (many losing their businesses and the jobs/families they support) than what might happen (slight increase in R0) if the lockdown doesn’t end soon.
In the event it becomes endemic and turns up every year life flu, it would be interesting to hear about the chances of developing drugs and therapies that can treat the symptoms.
Hmm – there was a comment here I wanted to read, but when I refreshed to log-in, it was gone. It was skeptical of the article. Was it cut because of that?
Giles Fraser – Tragic Hubris of Modern City Planning
Thanks for bringing this to my/our attention. But nothing wrong with “complicated” family lockdown games, because it sits in “complex” family system, and more importantly a complex system with key values. The rain forest’s complex system also has key values and rules which if broken – break its adapatability. (Yes, I am en route to “Net Zero” May 2019 UK Cttee for Climate Change). The town planning profession in uk and US, along with the development industry, (as compared to scandinavia) came very late to sustainable development – indeed so to the uk general public and therefore our politicians. Its very far from clear that we will make it and no news or concern about cancellation of Climate Change International Conf in Nov in Scotland. But back to values, principles and rules in a complex system – Sadiq Khan’s new Draft London Plan does it well, including equality, diversity, high density, ecology and biodiversity, accessibility, business and social, new and old – and regional and local. All the London Plans since Livingstone have done well – but in a London centric country, they should!
Perhaps Covid 19 will show us all that in a complex environment there are some key values and rules, (reduce by 80-100% carbon emissions to levels at 1990 by 2050), in order to give us a chance to adapt.
Best wishes.
“There’s another problem. Vaccines are already dealing with a trust problem ” anti-vaccination movements around the world have led to significant drops in the takeup of the MMR jab in the West and polio and TB vaccines elsewhere.” Too true. I know some. They’re off the scale in what they believe. If/when we get a vaccine, I think the anti-vaccers should continue isolating.
“Heads will be called for and, I fear, sacrifices offered up.” Why “I fear”. If it turns out that people/Johnson made grave mistakes, why should they be excused repercussions? Operation Cygnus. Cheltenham, Twickenham, Champions League match, no PPE, Brexit-driven decision making, no testing/isolation of incoming travellers, shaking hands, lockdown too late. Sheer incompetence. Off with their heads!
A challenging and provoking article to say the least. The notion that the pharmaceutical companies would try to produce an iLi vaccine to combat Covid-19 for philanthropic reasons is risible!! However, leaving aside cynicism and the simplistic labels of pro or anti vaccine believers, there are some critical questions needing answers. Whether or not honest answers will be given is prejudicial so the veracity of the answer will require factual backing! This is a list of important questions:
1. Who are the parties funding the Oxford Research and what are the quantum of those funds from each of the parties?
2. What is the list of tissue types (animal and vegetable) used in researching, developing and the manufacturing of the vaccine?
3. Is it intended that the vaccine be mono- or multi – valent?
4. In the case of a multi-valent injection, what testing has been carried out to establish the potential reaction of each of vaccine types against the others?
5. In respect of the answers for 3, what comparative placebo testing has been carried out in the volunteer group(s)?
6. What preservatives are used in the vaccine(s)?
7. What is the estimated percentage of vaccinated persons who will have resistance to the target iLi?
8. Who is going to accept culpability in the case that ‘something’ goes wrong? (The Thalidomide ‘perfectly safe’ regime springs to mind)
An answer to the above will be a good start; will or can it be elicited?
Perhaps hubris strikes when attempting to design a city the size of Detroit but the Garden City concept in Britain is reckoned a great success still and even Milton Keynes has its fans.