Burlington City’s new master plan (in progress) incorporates elements of the SmartCode including the creation of a Transect for the City. This Transect is being used to analyze the existing zoning ordinance and to propose new zoning classifications, urban design guidelines, and unified street design standards. The project team includes Alberto & Associates, Environmental Resolutions Inc., and Burlington County’s Office of Economic Development and Regional Planning. The plan will satisfy the requirements of the NJ Municipal Land Use Law while establishing new methods for producing Master Plans in New Jersey’s established communities.

In case anyone in the planning world hasn’t heard yet, Miami recently approved Miami 21, making it the largest city in the world to approve a form-based code.  Read about it on the Miami Herald, the Congress for the New Urbanism, Planetizen, and Streetsblog.  After four years of debate, editing, and over 100 neighborhood meetings, the commissioners voted 4-1 to pass this plan which will encourage walkability, mixed use, concealed parking, and an appropriate scale of development.  Mayor Manny Diaz said that this plan will finally allow Miami to be classified with New York, Chicago and Paris as great cities of the world.  “I’m going to tell you that history will judge us right,” he said.  The code is based on the SmartCode template, adapted to have a variety of higher-intensity transect zones for the many skyscrapers of Miami.  This vote is the culmination of years of work from Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk of the University of Miami and Duany Plater-Zyberk, as well as city staff and others.  Miami leads a growing trend of large cities adopting form-based code, with Denver close on its heels.  Miami will be a living laboratory to test the effects of form-based code on large cities.  This is the greatest victory yet for form-based codes and arguably one of the greatest for the New Urbanism movement as a whole.

Denne lille tekst rummer nogle hastigt nedfældede tanker om muligheder for formidling via skiltning.
Der er mange måder at gøre det på, det kan skaleres op og ned efter ambitionsniveau og midler. Her er opridset nogle få muligheder.

1. Skiltning på husene
Den mest simple måde at lave denne form for formidling på, er ved udelukkende at opsætte skilte på husene. Det er eks. gjort på Brogade nr. 8 i dag (Elværket). Fordelen er at det er velkendt og forholdvis billigt.
Ulempen er omvendt at det kræver tilladelse at opsætte skiltning på fredede huse, der er plads til meget få informationer på et skilt og der vil af pladshensyn oftest kun være tekst på dansk af hensyn til pladsen. Oftest er det desuden ikke en person man vil ønske at fortælle om, men snarere ejendommens historie
(I hvert fald for vores mange renæssancebygningers vedkommende. I København har flere muligheder for at lave skilte som ”Her boede H.C. Andersen fra 1872 til sin død i 1875”). Det vil meget hurtigt betyde, at der bliver brug for meget tekst. Derfor vil det være oplagt at supplere skilte med noget andet og mere. 

2. Skiltning på huse + henvisning til internet med adgang fra mobiltelefonen på stedet.
En måde at give brugerne flere oplysninger er, at henvise til internettet via skiltene på bygningen.
Det kan i princippet være et helt ordinært skilt (Som i Brogade og mange andre byer), hvor der desuden er en henvisning til hvordan brugeren kan finde ud af mere på internettet via deres egen mobil.
Det mest oplagte er at brugerne kan få informationen med det samme mens de er på stedet.
Det kan ske via brugernes egne mobiltelefoner. Der er flere måder det kan gøres på.

A. Brugeren går på internettet med sin egen mobiltelefon (krav: Adgang til internettet fra mobilen).
Brugeren taster en (mobilvenlig) url i sin telefon – der er ikke noget værre end at taste lange url´er i telefonen.
Det kunne være www.m.koege.dk/b8                      m=mobil, b=brogade, 8 er husnummeret.
Brugeren bliver nu ledt til en hjemmeside der er sat op til mobiltelefon. Der vises kun tekst på første side, men der tilbydes links til gamle billeder af huset, videoklip, lydfiler eller andet relevant.
Ulempen er at det er besværligt at taste en url i telefonen.
Det kræver at der er et skilt, der gør opmærksom på at der findes information her på stedet.
Brugerens telefon skal desuden være sat op til at kunne gå på nettet, turister skal være tilmeldt udenlandsk datatrafik (dyrt), så målgruppen er nok i første omgang danskere. 

B. Brugeren kan slippe for at taste sig vej ind til hjemmesiden, hvis de benytter sig af smartcodes.
(krav: Adgang til internettet fra mobilen + gratis program installeret på telefonen).
En smartcode er et lille ikon, der fungerer på samme måde som en stregkode i supermarkedet.
Brugeren tager med kameraet i sin mobil et billede af smartcoden og det bliver via et lille gratis program omsat til en url, som automatisk sender brugeren til den ønskede hjemmeside.

Det er en lettere måde at navigere på, da man slipper for at taste. Ulempen er at det kræver at brugeren har downloadet et gratis program på sin telefon. Det er endnu ikke så udbredt i Danmark, men meget anvendt i Japan.
I Århus har Moesgård Museum et stort projekt undervejs, der bruger denne teknologi til at bringe informationer videre. Det involverer museet, Århus Kommune, Svend Åge Madsen og mange andre partnere i byen. Der opstilles steler i byen, som har smartcodes påsat. Brugeren kan læse om projektet ved to store planchevæge i byen, hvorfra de også tilbydes download af det program, der kræves til at afkode smartcodes. Det sker via bluetooth.
Andre byer, bl.a. Horsens, har eksperimenteret med det.
Fordel: Det er nemt og programmet er gratis og kan hentes på www.i-nigma.com

Ulempe: Det er (eller må være) et meget dyrt projekt. En bluetoothnode, som sender programmet til brugeren er dyr at få etableret. Derudover skal der opstilles steler mv. Det er også en stor barriere at brugerne skal hente et program inden de kan gå i gang. Århus Festuge har også brugt smartcodes i flere år og har haft svært ved at få brugerne til at hente det ned. Men det er et superspændende projekt, som jeg glæder mig meget til at følge og forhåbentlig kan det alene i kraft af sin størrelse banke nogle døre ind.

3. Adgang via Bluetooth:
En anden mulighed, som også involverer mobiltelefoner, er at lade informationen gå via bluetooth.
Hvis brugeren har sin bluetooth tændt, vil han blive spurgt om han vil modtage informationer, når han går forbi et givent sted, hvor der er opsat en bluetoothnode. Brugeren skal selvfølgelig gøres opmærksom på at tilbuddet findes, for at få dem til at tænde for bluetooth. Det vil kræve skilte eller evt. en folder med kort over stederne og et startpunkt.
Ulempen er at det er meget dyrt at opsætte en lang række noder i byen. Det kan ikke skaleres op uden store omkostninger, hvorfor det er statisk når det er produceret. Noderne skal placeres ude i byen og have internetadgang, hvilket også vil være meget omkostningsfuldt.

4. Adgang via SMS:
En meget enkel løsning er at tilbyde brugerne information via sms. Brugeren skal gøres opmærksom på tilbuddet når han passerer et sted man ønsker at informere om. Det kan ske via et skilt på bygningen eller i bygningens vindue. Placeres skiltet inde i vinduet via en aftale med ejeren, kræver det ikke tilladelser fra Kulturarvsstyrelsen.
Der kunne f.eks. stå: Vil du videre mere, så send ”Brogade 8” til 1231.
Herefter kommer der en sms tilbage med information om stedet.
I den kan der også være link til internettet, hvilket igen er nemmere for brugeren end at taste en url i telefonen.
Lige nu har jeg lavet et lille forsøg, hvor man kan skrive ”clio” og sende det til 1231. Så får man Byarkivets åbningstider tilbage – og man slipper for at huske på dem. 

Det kan være gratis for brugeren eller der kan opkræves en lille takst, til at dække udgiften for at sende sms tilbage. Det er i øvrigt en løsning vi vil tage fat på at teste i den kommende tid på Køge Byhistoriske Arkiv, da vi har fået adgang til denne tjeneste via et godt samarbejde med PUC i Køge. 

5. Adgang fra mobil via gps
Køge Byhistoriske Arkiv er med på sidelinien i et forprojekt, der afsøger mulighederne for at formidle kulturarv på mobiltelefoner. Hensigten er at lave en web 2.0 løsning, hvor de deltagende institutioner dels formidler noget viden om et givent sted, dels får brugerne mulighed for at bidrage med viden og spørgsmål via mobil og computer.
Idealet er en open-source baseret løsning, som er gratis for andre institutioner at gå i gang med.
Det er en løsning som ikke kræver skiltning. Brugeren har en mobil med GPS og kan navigere rundt til points of interest (POI) vha. telefonen. Det sker via telefonens googlemap. Når de er ved at sted der vil vide noget om, klikker de på en prik på kortet, der indikerer at her kan du finde oplysninger. Når brugeren via sin telefon klikker på kortet, ryger de via et link til en mobil wiki. (Som wikipedia – http://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forside ) Vi vil blot benytte os af en mobilvenlig wikipedia – en såkaldt wapedia. Her finder man oplysninger, links til billeder. Da oplysningerne ligger i en mobil wiki, kan brugerne også deltage i at skabe data om stederne. Vi påtænker at etablere en redaktør, som skal godkende indlæg inden de publiceres.
Det er – meget kort fortalt – projektet som det ser ud lige nu. Der er dog en række barrierer, bl.a. teknologiske, og det en stor del af projektet at afklare muligheder og fremtidsperspektiver inden for det tekniske felt. Det ligger derfor nogle år ude i fremtiden i sin ideale form. Fordelen er at brugerne inddrages aktivt, samt at der ikke kræves skiltning, da navigationen foregår via mobilen. Open Source programmer billiggør deltagelsen for andre institutioner.

Det var en række eksempler. Listen kan gøres længere og der kan skrives mere udførligt på det. Lige nu har jeg prioriteret at få publiceret listen og forhåbentlig få respons fra andre projekter. Er du interesseret i denne type formidling, hører jeg gerne fra dig.

The Poundbury Grid, from Streets and Patterns by Stephen Marshall

When the modernists unleashed their program for simplifying cities, they did not limit themselves to redirecting existing institutions. Within the modernist ideology was implied the idea that transportation, open space and buildings were separate, isolated things and could therefore be made in isolation. This lead them to create entirely new institutions that operated independently. One of these was the Department of Transportation, also called Ministry of Transportation, or Délégation Départementale de l’Équipement, or somesuch. Its mission was clear: build roads, make them fast, clear away all obstacles and let’s drive. While the collapse of the modernist program in architecture swept away the building typologies they had invented and would later make room for the creation of such architectural artifacts as Poundbury, the transportation system they had devised continues to operate unchallenged. This system, it must be realized, is sprawl. It is the engine of urbanisation throughout the world. It does this by taking rural land and upgrading it, without any conscious realization of what it is doing, into urban land. The very existence of Poundbury, or any other New Urbanist development, is owed to this urbanization. Without it, it could not have any economy. It is therefore incorrect to refer to it as only a transportation system. It is a land production system, creating markets for land where there were none before.

Writer Alex Marshall (not Stephen) correctly diagnosed what was occurring in How Cities Work. In it, he identified the architects and planners of economic powerhouse Silicon Valley as being the state and federal transportation agencies, and invited New Urbanists to work for these agencies if they wanted to have an effective impact on the design of cities. While his book is an illuminating exploration of the processes for building cities and even lays the groundwork for an emergent theory of urbanism, by the middle chapters Alex Marshall seems to lose his mind and lays the blame for the urban mess on market ideology, Republicans and the almighty Libertarians. If only government authority over land was unrestricted, and the voters (I presume) realized that an urban planning system is a choice and not an inevitability, then once again real cities could be made instead of sprawl.

I appreciate his arguments in favor of making better, more informed, richer choices in how cities are planned. But the fact that the tone of his book radically shifts from cool, rational analysis about systems for urbanisation to anger and blame over restrictions imposed on government authority shows that he has disentangled one layer of confusion about cities only to expose another, even more entangled layer: that of land ownership and market creation. To see through that layer requires traveling back in history to the very beginning of the industrial age and farther.

Our ancestors in America lived almost exclusively as homesteaders and independent land owners. The appeal of migrating to the new world was the abundance of homesteadable land. At the beginning of the 19th century, places such as New York City were shipping towns of little importance relative to the agrarian economy. This was not the case in Europe, where the land was owned in very large estates by a small number of aristocratic families. The rest of the population lived upon the land as tenants. Cities also were estates, with those not owned by the aristocracy being owned either by the clergy or by corporations of merchants chartered in the middle ages. (The City of London somehow miraculously continues to operate by this system.)

The fact that Europeans and Americans had a vastly different starting point in land ownership affects the way they conceive of municipal authority. Because land estates always regulated tenants and built improvements such as roads to collect rents, Europeans will see the city as a public service and consider zoning and regulation as completely normal and legitimate. In America every man was his own land owner. Land rents, roads and zoning were imposed through the force of government upon those small land owners. Because of this, Americans see the city as a government interference and resist zoning and regulation.

The suburban dream, to own one’s house, has come to replace the American dream, to own one’s land. But the economic reality of owning a parcel of land and being a landowner are completely different. Our ancestors lived from their land, not simply on it. Their wealth came from their land. A house owner simply resides on his property, he does not live from it. His living is made from his participation in the life of the city, and he needs the roads in order to do that. Should the road to his house be blocked off, either intentionally or by natural accident, the house would become useless but he would not lose his living. A house owner is as much a tenant as his European ancestor. He rents the streets he lives from.

The relationship between transportation and land rents has been known forever. In the late 19th century railroad developers created new neighborhoods of cities by buying up isolated land, extending the railroad to it and then parcellating it into lots. The people of this new neighborhood lived from the railroad commute. The development of Los Angeles is famous for having been driven by streetcar companies expanding to new areas and profiting from the land they improved. The ownership of the streets was then transferred back to city corporations. It was moved from private to communal ownership, with all the pitfalls this implied.

Seeking to increase the value of their developments by adding a more restrictive layer of controls over the subdivisions they produce, developers have for the last few decades been creating home owners’ associations to provide for the roads and control covenants upon the private parcels of home owners. In doing so they have chosen to take an alternative course to municipal incorporation, but unfortunately the organizations have shown themselves to be draconian in their application of rules as banal as the height of lawns and in so doing compounded the reputation of suburban subdivisions as zones of conformity. The HOA is a cooperative ownership model that transforms subdivisions into structures as rigid as a condominium tower, without the material rigidity of the tower itself. If one is an advocate of the suburban subdivision in the name of freedom, this model seems to miss the mark.

It is indisputable that HOAs provide a good, environmental control, that home buyers wish to have. They are willing to give up control over their house in exchange for part control over the neighborhood. The developers are creating neighborhood value by tying their product into a system of rules, and in doing so increasing the demand for the individual homes. Developers are creating rules-constrained markets within the framework of the HOA, a cooperative of home owners who pay a rent to have the right to be part of this market. The HOA market itself exists within the market created by the road that integrates it to the productive economy, road which has almost certainly been created by a municipality or county administration. It is a market within a market, and both have their specific rules as to how land may be utilized.

Alex Marshall claims that market creation is the exclusive domain of government. I believe this is dangerously incorrect, not out of anti-government bias but because the organization of government places strict limits on the complexity of the markets that will be created, something that we both appear to agree is a major flaw of our urbanism. To show this, I will explain the history of one of the weirdest cities of Paris, the business district La Défense.

The most peculiar aspect of the city is its organization of land. It was founded in the late 1950’s and planned in the early 60’s in the model of utopian modernism, which meant strict separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic and rows of identical tower blocks. The master plan rapidly fell apart and was abandoned when it was realized that the companies for whom the towers were meant had no use for them in their planned shape. From that moment they were free to define what kind of tower they wanted to build, however the system of traffic separation remained. The developer proceeded to build an enormous structure (about three stories tall) over the natural ground called, roughly translated, The Slab. The Slab is the main pedestrian space that integrates all the towers into the mass transit network of metropolitan Paris and the commercial activity of the district. The centre of The Slab (seen left) turns out to be the ceiling of the gigantic mass transit station (seen middle) that distributes 150,000 people to and from their offices morning and night. The buildings at La Défense do not have any connection to land or streets, they float upon The Slab.

This project is said to be one of the flagships of the French state, but the interesting thing about this is that the state had to go around its own system of land administration in order to create it. Municipalities in France are organized around 36,600 communes whose statutes regarding urban planning and land use are strictly defined in the legislation of the administration. La Défense does not have an administration in the same sense that communes do. It was created as a national interest operation, meaning that the state, realizing that its own territorial administration system could not deal with a project of such complexity, declared a zone of territorial exception where the legislation was suspended. Instead, the land inside the zone was purchased by a developer, the EPAD, whose statutes are defined by private business law but whose majority shareholder is the state. In other words, the state had to go through the market to avoid flaws in the system of government in order to create a market unlike anything the country had seen before.

The EPAD has since operated profitably by investing in land improvements, most importantly paying to bring regional rail and metro links to the district, and selling development rights for towers that are limited by contract to certain open-ended morphologies. No one owns land there except EPAD, but private companies do own their buildings. Those buildings never could have been built had EPAD not created a market for them through the expansion of the mass transit network it paid for, and of course by building The Slab.

EPAD, an organization who was meant to last at most 20 years, celebrated its 50th anniversary this year while many people struggled with the “outlaw” nature of its existence. Proposals for reform all crash against the challenge of The Slab and how it could continue to function as a form of urbanism within the framework of standard territorial law. This territorial law is itself being questioned and most likely headed for reform, although there is no guarantee that reformed law will be competent to handle a structure of this nature. The way things are going, it’s possible that EPAD could have a longevity comparable to the City of London.

The lesson of La Défense is that for-profit enterprises can create urbanism, markets for land supported by large capital structures, provided that the law allow them to. In other economic sectors this arrangement is nothing unusual. To persuade Republicans and Libertarians of the benefit of urbanism, it suffices to make a comparison with the New York Stock Exchange company, an icon of capitalism. While the service the company provides is a means to trade stocks efficiently, this service does not come free. The NYSE occupies some valuable real estate in downtown Manhattan, and provides sophisticated computer equipment and trading services to participants. You must pay for your right to take part in the NYSE, and then obviously must pay again to buy shares. Your ability to trade shares may not be possible without the supporting capital investments of the NYSE company. The NYSE, although it creates a market, is itself competing in a bigger market, that of stock exchanges. It must be better at enabling stock trading than other stock exchanges in order to attract traders and companies, and it can itself be bought, sold, merged or spun-off as a company. The stock trades are a market that is nested within the market for stock exchanges.

For the liberal-democrat wary of such fine capitalist institutions, the work of market creation can also be done by a non-profit organization. This is what one of my favorite examples, the Wikimedia Foundation, does with its different wikis. Although the trades are free, the foundation does provide the framework for people to rapidly and easily share and structure information. A foundation which owns land could in the same way create a market for buildings by enabling its inhabitants. It is exactly such a process that Christopher Alexander described in The Oregon Experiment. By his proposal, the University of Oregon was required to provide design assistance to faculty and students who wanted to initiate building projects. This form of market would obviously put enormous power in the hands of the users and less so in those of big developers, which is the opposite of what municipal planning systems have done.

Municipal planning systems, as we have known them for the last two centuries in America, have been held up by two pillars. The grid of streets and later on the supergrid of arterials have urbanized land in a manner that favored land speculators and developers, and then the large land speculators and developers. The second pillar has been the zoning ordinance and building code, a system of bureaucratic regulations that has grown in size to the point where consultants must be hired to navigate the process. The non-professional who wants to build something in this market, if he has been lucky enough to benefit from the grid, must first understand a stack of regulations that will take him enormous effort to master. This cost evidently favors developers who have a lot to invest in building and discourages the creation of the small events, quirky house, shops and businesses, that make a city so pleasurable. Bureaucratic regulations also have the nasty side-effect of being unable to translate qualitative standards into rules, the result being a long list of quantitative regulations that produce big subdivisions, big malls and big business. The SmartCode, 60 pages long, does not improve upon this process. It makes the big subdivisions take a different shape.

The 16th borough of Paris (front) and La Défense (back). Two different markets creating two different emergent morphologies, and different environmental qualities as well. Those are choices.

The creation of the municipal system in Europe was an act of land reform, breaking down land estates that had their origins in feudal privilege. The French communes were the product of the revolution, and the municipal corporations acts of Great Britain in the 19th century put an end to quite a few “rotten boroughs.” The end of the feudal tenure system could be justly seen as progress by Europeans, and the new powers wielded by municipalities did not exceed those wielded by the previous landlords. In America the incorporation of land into municipalities, and the transfer of ever greater powers to county governments, took place at the expense of small land owners who considered themselves independent and resisted the limitations imposed upon them by new municipal regulations, while profiting at the same time from the new markets created for their land by investment in structural improvements, most of all roads. Both processes for creating municipalities have since been the monopoly of governments, and the slow action in creating, dissolving, merging and splitting cities has caused crisis in all areas. Alex Marshall points out that state governments have the authority to create and merge municipal corporations, and should make use of this authority more often, but governments only have limited attention to devote to these issues. In the early 19th century it required an act of government to charter any business corporation. The regularization of this system allowed businesses to incorporate without going through the legislative process, and the dynamic market economy we have enjoyed since has this process as one of its foundations. For some reason it was never thought of to extend the same rights to city corporations.

In their pleas to “leave things to the market” Americans severely restricted what kind of operations municipalities could undertake, and limited their authority to take action against public problems. In doing so they did not realize what kind of market was being created, and who would benefit most from it. A municipality that does more is no less of a market than one that does less. A municipality that builds a hierarchical grid of differently-scaled streets and helps non-professionals to create their own buildings would be creating a market, and ultimately an emergent urban morphology, vastly different from what limited municipalities have been allowed to create. More restrictive rules could also create environmental quality that would raise the value of the market as a whole. The municipality could be creating a better market than it currently is if it had more freedom to act.

Inventing and organizing such a municipality will itself require a process that systems of government cannot handle. This is where things truly ought to be left to the market. Independently owned and operated cities could adapt and reorganize themselves to experiment with new forms of markets. They could merge and spin-off to meet the challenges of metropolitan scale. They could buy the land that they intend to urbanize. They could regulate the land to preserve the quality of the environment and create greater neighborhood value. They could make the immense capital investments in roads, mass transit, public squares, parks and utilities that would earn them a profit in increased rents from their markets. Finally, the disintegrated land creation institutions brought about by the modernist program could be reintegrated in cities with enough authority to employ them efficiently and productively.

Sprawl would soon after be a footnote of history, along with many other urban ills.

References

How Cities Work by Alex Marshall

Streets and Patterns by Stephen Marshall

The Oregon Experiment by Christopher Alexander

There are two methods for producing fractal geometry. The first method, the decomposition, is the most easily understood. In a decomposition we apply an algorithm that breaks up the geometry of some starting point into several parts. We then re-apply this algorithm to the smaller parts created, obtain many more, even smaller parts, and continue this reiteration until we have reached the complexity limit at the smallest scale of object we can possibly make. This is how an architectural design proceeds because it reflects the way that building proceeds. A building has a hierarchy of dependencies that begins with the largest structure, the frame. The building is then built with smaller and smaller components until we reach the smallest, for example door handles and light fixtures.

The other method is the composition. In a composition we also apply an iterative algorithm, but instead of breaking down the initial geometry, we expand it. The fractal grows out instead of growing in. This is how urbanisation proceeds, by composing new streets and buildings onto an already existing web of streets and buildings, until we have reached the complexity limit of the largest city we can support.

If we look at this compositional fractal we see that the scale of the structure composed to the initial geometry increases exponentially. The largest structure comes last.

Many of the elementary cellular automatons discovered by Stephen Wolfram produce this fractal using only one dimension of instructions. Each cell, depending on its state (black or white) and the state of its left and right neighbors, applies the rule to determine its new state. A new line is written for every iteration of the algorithm on the previous line. The complexity of the structure only becomes visible when the time dimension is displayed. At their local scale, the cells are not able to “see” how their actions create the system, but their actions do in fact make something bigger than themselves. They are creating a structure by emergence, and this emergence is visible only in a dimension larger than their actions: the emergent dimension.

I believe that the distinction between building and urbanisation, that is to say the distinction between action by decomposition and composition, also defines the distinction between architecture and urbanism. Architecture intervenes on a rigid structure defined at the beginning of the process, the building, and so runs into very strict economic limits of the scale of this large structure. Urbanism has to deal with the problem of creating large structures out of all of the small scale urbanisations that are undertaken by large numbers of individuals, all seeking to build something to suit their own personal problems. It is in that sense the inverse of architecture. Urbanism takes place in the emergent dimension.

The field of urban design has gained a lot of popularity since efforts to plan whole cities were abandoned. The focus of the urbanists has shifted to the scales considered controllable: the development, greenfield, brownfield and other. The most successful of the urban designers are the New Urbanists. They have managed to produce their name-brand Traditional Neighborhood Developments in practically every city in North America. It starts off inevitably with one developer and centralized ownership of the land that will be urbanised. This land is then decomposed into streets and squares along the principles proclaimed by the New Urbanist charter, the negative of which is decomposed into lots that will be further decomposed into buildings. In terms of production processes, New Urbanist TNDs are no different than the regular, economically-unsustainable subdivisions. They belong in the realm of architecture, and what is worse, they provide no connection to the larger urban context within which they are being inserted, suburbia.

Here is the Mackenzie Towne TND at the limits of Calgary Alberta, in mid-decomposition.

And here we see the development within the larger context of southern Calgary.

What were to happen to the people who have moved into the first part of the development if the developer declared bankruptcy, as has been the case in many developments these recent times? The construction site would remain in perpetuity, and their town would be incomplete. That is the very opposite of what a city is supposed to do, to provide a complete system regardless of the chaotic course of events.

Will the people of Mackenzie Towne live a New Urbanist lifestyle? One look at the bigger scale of the City of Calgary is sufficient to say no. The development is not the relevant scale of the urban life of its inhabitants. This follows from the fact that it is only a small part of the city as a whole, but is also what makes urban design economically possible in the first place. In order to be able to undertake a decomposition at that scale, we must be composing it to a much bigger system of urban relations.

I fear that no matter how intense the efforts the New Urbanists undertake to convert local authorities to their system, they will never be able to transform cities in their emergent dimension. We will continue to see appear, alongside TNDs, gigantic commercial strips, industrial zones and office parks, which will continue to form the emergent dimension of North American cities. At their center will be the caracteristic integrator of all of these urbanisations, the one space that every inhabitant of any modern city shares, the highways.

What then is urbanism? It is the glue that sticks different urbanisations, different architectural projects, together. North America has known only two general types. For all of the 19th century, and the first part of the 20th, the urbanism of North America was The Grid: unending checkerboard patterns of streets between which were blocks that were more or less developable into anything not bigger than the block. As cities grew with more urbanisations, new streets and blocks were composed onto existing streets and blocks, and this went on until the urban chaos became intolerable and people fled to the suburbs, a flight that was enabled by the new urbanism: the highway strip. The highway strip continues to be the compositional rule that integrates all North American cities. If you look again at Mackenzie Towne, the highway that borders it seems to have no relation at all to the development. This amounts to no urbanism. The emergent dimension is empty of any structure.

The New Urbanists have launched a parralel effort, alongside the TND, to reform municipal authorities’ urbanism by inventing a building code, the SmartCode, that is supposed to fit into any city. Building codes have been the primary tool of urbanism for centuries. The reason they worked so well is that they made it possible for the smallest possible urbanisations to create large-scale structures, balancing local adaptation with large-scale solutions in order to create what we today call organic cities. Such a building code can do much to enable complexity, but it must be combined with the creation of the integrator spaces, streets, avenues and highways, that must also grow organically.

Looking over the fact that it doesn’t appear to provide any indication of what to do with highways, the SmartCode ran into the objection that it was rules, and therefore anti-market. Ironically, the market is one of the first rules-based complex systems fully investigated. Adam Smith even christened its emergent dimension with a metaphor that continues to mystify people today: the invisible hand. The invisibility of the market results in many hotly-debated political issues, for example the incomprehension with surging gas prices during hurricanes. The reasons why gas prices should rise so rapidly escape the individual perspective, and angry commuters everywhere demand from politicians that something be done to control things. That attempt at control of the market would have unexpected consequences, just as it does in the emergent dimension of urbanism. Brasilia was the most famous realisation of fully-controlled town planning ever built, but today it is ringed with favelas and functions as one city with them. The emergent dimension of Brasilia escaped the strict control of its planners.

Urbanists must, by the nature of their work, be experts at seeing things in the emergent dimension. The tools to achieve that have yet to be invented. Economic treatises crudely made the case for the economy as an emergent system, but the 200 years of economic history that followed them showed that people would not believe what they could not see. They will not believe in the SmartCode until they can see it either. The invention of the microscope made it possible to see what was too small to see. We must invent the tool that makes it possible to see what is too large to see. Only then can we truly begin to create the cities that we want, as individuals and as communities, without taking a blind leap of faith.

Reference

Sustainable algorithmic design lecture series by Nikos Salingaros.

Efter et møde om indførelsen af multimodale læringsformer på skolernes lektiecafeer, faldt snakken på mobilformidling. Her blev jeg præsenteret for en spændende løsning, der leveres af

http://www.i-nigma.com/

Systemet opretter smartcodes der kan printes ud og sættes op overalt. Der kan for eksempel sidde et lille klistermærke i et butiksvindue i eet af byens gamle huse. Brugeren finder mærket, scanner/affotograferer smartcoden via mobiltelefonens kamera og får information om det sted de står foran. Turist- og kulturhistorisk information on demand og on site. 

Et stykke downloadet software omsætter den grafiske code til enten et link til

• en hjemmeside (Du slipper for at taste en url til en mobilhjemmeside),
• et elektronisk visitkort med personlige oplysninger som kan gemmes i mobilens kontakter
• eller du kan få en tekst præsenteret direkte i telefonen.

Det er nok særligt den sidste mulighed der er interessant i denne sammenhæng. I hvert fald synes det at være den mest enkle at gå til.

Systemet har sine åbenlyse fordele og ulemper. Der er mange brugere worldwide og så er det gratis.
Ulemperne er, at det kræver at brugeren downloader et lille program (ca. 500 kb) før de kan bruge det. 
Når man går til nævnte hjemmeside på sin mobil, detekteres det dog automatisk hvilket håndsæt brugeren har (læs: mobiltelefon) og tilpasser sig modellen. Det er meget nemt og foregår helt gnidningsfrit.
Der er en række andre hindringer, men der er ingen grund til at starte der. Det er alt samme praktisk overkommeligt.

Jeg har endnu til gode at prøve det af i praksis, men vil teste det i lille skala ved lejlighed. I mellemtiden hører jeg gerne fra brugere der har testet dette system af og er meget interesseret i at dele jeres erfaringer og høre om hvilke ønsker du har som bruger af denne type information.