WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:02.520 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.520 --> 00:00:03.970 Commons license. 00:00:03.970 --> 00:00:06.360 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:10.660 continue to offer high-quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.660 --> 00:00:13.350 To make a donation or view additional materials 00:00:13.350 --> 00:00:17.190 from hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare 00:00:17.190 --> 00:00:18.320 at ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:24.760 --> 00:00:26.760 JULIAN BEINART: You'll recall the last class was 00:00:26.760 --> 00:00:31.880 a third of conceptual models, this one dealing 00:00:31.880 --> 00:00:38.330 with the organic shape of nature and its replication 00:00:38.330 --> 00:00:43.740 in patterning of cities. 00:00:43.740 --> 00:00:50.240 We focused on a number of examples, one of which 00:00:50.240 --> 00:00:54.560 was the work of Patrick Geddes. 00:00:54.560 --> 00:00:57.920 The second one was the work of Ebenezer Howard and the garden 00:00:57.920 --> 00:00:59.710 city movement. 00:00:59.710 --> 00:01:04.830 The third was the work of Clarence Stein in the United 00:01:04.830 --> 00:01:05.330 States. 00:01:09.770 --> 00:01:16.520 And then I did a short run through of a piece 00:01:16.520 --> 00:01:20.870 that I wrote last year for a conference in Athens 00:01:20.870 --> 00:01:24.560 on nature and the city, in which I 00:01:24.560 --> 00:01:29.945 argued that there was the most dynamic thing about cities. 00:01:29.945 --> 00:01:35.990 It is our human capacity to learn and to adapt to change. 00:01:35.990 --> 00:01:43.610 And I try to show that in the life of 70 00:01:43.610 --> 00:01:48.860 years of the Tennessee Valley Authority, 00:01:48.860 --> 00:01:52.580 the capacity to change the perspective about what 00:01:52.580 --> 00:01:54.440 nature is. 00:01:57.080 --> 00:01:59.410 Nature is no static phenomenon. 00:02:04.370 --> 00:02:07.670 It's a learning of patterns as previously 00:02:07.670 --> 00:02:11.090 identified in organic systems-- 00:02:11.090 --> 00:02:12.110 selectively. 00:02:15.032 --> 00:02:18.190 So it requires the human brain. 00:02:18.190 --> 00:02:28.310 And the Tennessee Valley Authority 00:02:28.310 --> 00:02:36.370 built 28 dams on the concept that dams, that water power, 00:02:36.370 --> 00:02:41.920 was more hygienic and would be sufficient for creating 00:02:41.920 --> 00:02:46.420 a new industrial zone in the eight states of the Tennessee 00:02:46.420 --> 00:02:49.240 Valley. 00:02:49.240 --> 00:02:54.610 65% of the power now is not generated by water. 00:02:54.610 --> 00:02:59.260 The prediction of the economic growth in this region 00:02:59.260 --> 00:03:01.580 was very low. 00:03:01.580 --> 00:03:05.320 Also, the capacity of the water to produce enough energy 00:03:05.320 --> 00:03:06.880 was low. 00:03:06.880 --> 00:03:10.120 So what happened? 00:03:10.120 --> 00:03:13.060 Coal became the substitute. 00:03:13.060 --> 00:03:17.810 Coal led to strip mining, which is as anti-natural phenomenon 00:03:17.810 --> 00:03:20.650 as you can imagine. 00:03:20.650 --> 00:03:24.250 The largest environmental disaster in the United States 00:03:24.250 --> 00:03:26.950 happened in the coal spill from one 00:03:26.950 --> 00:03:35.750 of the coal-generating plants, and so on, and so on. 00:03:35.750 --> 00:03:41.240 And we went through an argument which 00:03:41.240 --> 00:03:44.210 suggests that nature is still a phenomenon which 00:03:44.210 --> 00:03:49.200 is understood through the process of the human brain. 00:03:49.200 --> 00:03:53.705 There's no absolute correctness of nature. 00:03:56.900 --> 00:04:03.230 Biomorphism is a foolish project by architects 00:04:03.230 --> 00:04:06.650 who should understand a much broader interpretation 00:04:06.650 --> 00:04:12.110 of history and culture than to select items 00:04:12.110 --> 00:04:15.830 from array of natural forms. 00:04:15.830 --> 00:04:18.019 It's purely a selection. 00:04:18.019 --> 00:04:24.920 Yes, maybe-- we have no measurement 00:04:24.920 --> 00:04:27.800 that people are more satisfied in a forest 00:04:27.800 --> 00:04:35.160 than on Fifth Avenue in New York. 00:04:35.160 --> 00:04:37.050 We assume that to be true. 00:04:37.050 --> 00:04:39.740 I suppose we could if we got honest people 00:04:39.740 --> 00:04:42.230 in a questionnaire. 00:04:42.230 --> 00:04:44.690 But Marx was right, that the establishment 00:04:44.690 --> 00:04:48.830 of the first settlement set up a duality between country 00:04:48.830 --> 00:04:53.810 and city, which is going to take a lot of time to resolve. 00:04:53.810 --> 00:04:56.970 And it's still problematic. 00:04:56.970 --> 00:05:21.730 What I've given you today are some functional descriptive 00:05:21.730 --> 00:05:24.715 theories borrowed mainly from the social sciences. 00:05:27.240 --> 00:05:29.860 I will go through each of them with an example, 00:05:29.860 --> 00:05:35.590 and discuss what the theory is, and what it proposes, 00:05:35.590 --> 00:05:37.750 what its weaknesses are. 00:05:37.750 --> 00:05:42.250 This used to be a whole subject for a whole semester in city 00:05:42.250 --> 00:05:44.350 planning education. 00:05:44.350 --> 00:05:46.150 It's hardly dealt with now. 00:05:46.150 --> 00:05:48.100 Part of these are classical series, 00:05:48.100 --> 00:05:53.230 which no longer are interesting to anybody. 00:05:53.230 --> 00:05:59.020 The second page-- the first page deals with the application 00:05:59.020 --> 00:06:00.250 of one of these theories-- 00:06:00.250 --> 00:06:04.270 Hoyt's to Atlanta. 00:06:04.270 --> 00:06:10.450 You can see the sector theory in Atlanta, 00:06:10.450 --> 00:06:17.470 indicating the location of high-income white housing as 00:06:17.470 --> 00:06:24.250 opposed to low-income housing, following a model purported 00:06:24.250 --> 00:06:30.990 by Homer Hoyt in 1935. 00:06:30.990 --> 00:06:36.300 The next page deals with examination 00:06:36.300 --> 00:06:41.310 of two figures in Great Britain, who lived 00:06:41.310 --> 00:06:43.560 more or less at the same time-- 00:06:43.560 --> 00:06:51.870 John Ruskin, the theorist of painting, 00:06:51.870 --> 00:06:57.030 and Friedrich Engels, who we will discuss more fully in two 00:06:57.030 --> 00:07:01.980 weeks, in a week's time, one of the origins 00:07:01.980 --> 00:07:04.780 of the modern Communist Manifesto. 00:07:04.780 --> 00:07:11.910 And in 1845, at the age of 25, he 00:07:11.910 --> 00:07:16.470 wrote one of the greatest books on urbanism ever written, 00:07:16.470 --> 00:07:19.180 The Condition of the Working Class in England, 00:07:19.180 --> 00:07:22.290 which we'll discuss when we talk about the origins 00:07:22.290 --> 00:07:24.570 of the industrial city. 00:07:24.570 --> 00:07:29.460 The next page is from a diagram by Mel Weber 00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:33.330 in a book called Urban Place and Non-Place Urban Realm. 00:07:33.330 --> 00:07:39.630 This was a set of studies, which is published 00:07:39.630 --> 00:07:44.520 in this book, [INAUDIBLE],, and in another book called Cities 00:07:44.520 --> 00:07:50.760 and Space, which deal with the advent of the interpretation 00:07:50.760 --> 00:07:54.810 of different systems of communication 00:07:54.810 --> 00:07:58.650 interacting in one place. 00:07:58.650 --> 00:08:07.050 This is an oppositional position to the conventional economic 00:08:07.050 --> 00:08:12.720 models, or even physical models, of interaction, 00:08:12.720 --> 00:08:20.460 and an old model by a book called A Communications Theory 00:08:20.460 --> 00:08:26.880 of Urban Growth looking at the measurement of intersections 00:08:26.880 --> 00:08:30.780 in complementary functions in spatial form. 00:08:30.780 --> 00:08:35.774 And the last-- this is the next page-- 00:08:39.250 --> 00:08:44.890 he's from economic geography and represents 00:08:44.890 --> 00:08:46.850 population potential diagrams. 00:08:51.040 --> 00:08:55.330 And then next, we will finish with a very recent piece 00:08:55.330 --> 00:09:01.450 from The New York Times in which a physicist solves the city. 00:09:04.510 --> 00:09:09.850 This is hopefully what we will finish with. 00:09:09.850 --> 00:09:16.540 The question is, does it really make any sense at all? 00:09:16.540 --> 00:09:21.730 But we'll look at the work of these people dealing 00:09:21.730 --> 00:09:26.600 with models of complex theory at the moment. 00:09:26.600 --> 00:09:30.590 The first-- let's go through this very quickly. 00:09:30.590 --> 00:09:35.260 The first-- by the way, these breakdowns 00:09:35.260 --> 00:09:38.980 were created in this class with Kevin Lynch 00:09:38.980 --> 00:09:40.870 and follows them, to some extent. 00:09:43.840 --> 00:09:49.150 Cities are seen as unique historical processes. 00:09:49.150 --> 00:09:53.610 Each city is a unique cumulative historical process. 00:09:53.610 --> 00:09:58.060 A city can only be explained by telling a story. 00:09:58.060 --> 00:10:02.770 You cannot generalize very much about cities. 00:10:02.770 --> 00:10:05.170 What you can generalize about is the way 00:10:05.170 --> 00:10:08.950 of reading a city, the idea you have 00:10:08.950 --> 00:10:12.710 to learn the standard way of looking at them. 00:10:12.710 --> 00:10:18.190 So, for instance, Rasmussen says two chief types 00:10:18.190 --> 00:10:22.090 are distinguishable among large cities-- 00:10:22.090 --> 00:10:24.790 the concentrated and the scattered. 00:10:24.790 --> 00:10:27.220 The former is the more common on the continent. 00:10:27.220 --> 00:10:30.700 It's clearly represented by the big government seats of Paris, 00:10:30.700 --> 00:10:32.840 and Vienna, and so on. 00:10:32.840 --> 00:10:37.120 The second type is represented by the English town, which now, 00:10:37.120 --> 00:10:38.730 to many of us, seems ideal. 00:10:41.630 --> 00:10:49.330 The question of what is unique and what is generalized 00:10:49.330 --> 00:10:53.170 is different in some of these propositions, 00:10:53.170 --> 00:11:00.185 even within this proposition of the unique historic process. 00:11:03.440 --> 00:11:09.380 You have a book, like Allan Jacobs' book on streets, which, 00:11:09.380 --> 00:11:12.380 by the way, doesn't include the Nevsky Prospect, which 00:11:12.380 --> 00:11:14.360 is one of the great streets in the world. 00:11:14.360 --> 00:11:17.840 It's only streets that Allen Jacobs has visited. 00:11:17.840 --> 00:11:22.430 In science, I don't know if you can do experimentation 00:11:22.430 --> 00:11:27.620 on the basis of only what you have visited, but it's OK. 00:11:27.620 --> 00:11:33.530 We are handicapped. 00:11:33.530 --> 00:11:45.680 But the cities, the streets, that he identities, 00:11:45.680 --> 00:11:46.700 each is unique. 00:11:46.700 --> 00:11:48.830 It gives measurements of its width. 00:11:48.830 --> 00:11:53.120 It gives dimensions of the density around the street. 00:11:53.120 --> 00:11:55.670 Whereas, Bill Hillier's proposition, 00:11:55.670 --> 00:12:01.760 which I'll discuss next Tuesday amongst others, Space Syntax, 00:12:01.760 --> 00:12:04.550 looks at streets merely as linkages 00:12:04.550 --> 00:12:07.580 in a topological environment in which, 00:12:07.580 --> 00:12:12.230 if you understand the geometry of flows, 00:12:12.230 --> 00:12:15.880 you can really make generalizations about crime, 00:12:15.880 --> 00:12:19.110 about social behavior, and so on. 00:12:19.110 --> 00:12:24.740 So there's often this tension between what is conservative 00:12:24.740 --> 00:12:29.030 unique to be reproduced and what is 00:12:29.030 --> 00:12:32.030 generalizable from that phenomenon. 00:12:32.030 --> 00:12:38.000 I was on a review last January at Columbia 00:12:38.000 --> 00:12:42.200 for a project that students did in Palestine, 00:12:42.200 --> 00:12:45.980 in a small town in Palestine, sponsored 00:12:45.980 --> 00:12:54.860 by RIFAC, an NGO which is trying to establish Palestinian space. 00:12:54.860 --> 00:12:59.480 And this was a project for a small town which 00:12:59.480 --> 00:13:02.810 had had no economic base, but the students 00:13:02.810 --> 00:13:08.180 were privileged to study the town 00:13:08.180 --> 00:13:13.460 and come up with suggestions for a new economic base. 00:13:13.460 --> 00:13:18.080 All the students took the form of the city, that is, 00:13:18.080 --> 00:13:22.190 the architecture-- and even although it was only partially 00:13:22.190 --> 00:13:23.630 still in use-- 00:13:23.630 --> 00:13:27.080 as the basis for its reconstruction. 00:13:27.080 --> 00:13:30.440 There was something about its history, its presence, 00:13:30.440 --> 00:13:34.620 which needed to be adapted. 00:13:34.620 --> 00:13:44.840 So if some student, excuse me, proposed to start a herbal drug 00:13:44.840 --> 00:13:51.335 industry, they did it in an adapted shelter already there. 00:13:51.335 --> 00:13:55.400 If somebody wanted to start a new business in vinegar 00:13:55.400 --> 00:14:00.720 production in Palestine, they took an old building, 00:14:00.720 --> 00:14:04.820 and if it was not large enough, they added a small fraction. 00:14:04.820 --> 00:14:07.550 One student came along and said the biggest 00:14:07.550 --> 00:14:10.910 problem in this town is garbage collection. 00:14:10.910 --> 00:14:13.340 Garbage is not properly collected, 00:14:13.340 --> 00:14:18.670 and decays, and causes a very unhealthy feeling in the town. 00:14:18.670 --> 00:14:22.970 I'm proposing a new garbage collection center 00:14:22.970 --> 00:14:25.160 on the outskirts of the town. 00:14:25.160 --> 00:14:28.370 And he designed a mechanical instrument which 00:14:28.370 --> 00:14:30.650 collected garbage effectively. 00:14:33.800 --> 00:14:38.850 Everybody attacked the student who did this project. 00:14:38.850 --> 00:14:42.260 The historical sense of conservation 00:14:42.260 --> 00:14:48.230 and conservative appropriation was so overwhelming 00:14:48.230 --> 00:14:53.390 that the student who proposed that a city may 00:14:53.390 --> 00:14:58.040 be a place in which people can learn, and can grow, 00:14:58.040 --> 00:14:59.210 and change-- 00:14:59.210 --> 00:15:07.620 they do anyway-- there wasn't much debate about the student's 00:15:07.620 --> 00:15:08.850 proposition. 00:15:08.850 --> 00:15:09.930 I kept quiet. 00:15:09.930 --> 00:15:12.330 I should have said something. 00:15:12.330 --> 00:15:16.740 But it was in New York, and I felt like a provincial 00:15:16.740 --> 00:15:17.710 from Boston. 00:15:17.710 --> 00:15:21.570 So I had nothing to say. 00:15:21.570 --> 00:15:25.560 But it was a very good example of the postulation 00:15:25.560 --> 00:15:35.730 that the uniqueness of the historical process 00:15:35.730 --> 00:15:40.290 can withstand notions of change and growth. 00:15:42.870 --> 00:15:46.470 The fascination with the concept of learning from-- 00:15:46.470 --> 00:15:50.310 of being instructed by what you see 00:15:50.310 --> 00:15:53.460 has suggested the word "reading." 00:15:53.460 --> 00:15:56.275 Reading is used in a number of cases. 00:15:56.275 --> 00:16:00.360 It's used by the architect Giancarlo De Carlo 00:16:00.360 --> 00:16:07.660 in the ILAUD schools in Italy. 00:16:07.660 --> 00:16:14.250 And so I took two examples by two great men. 00:16:14.250 --> 00:16:22.480 John Ruskin says, number one, the vocation is seeing. 00:16:22.480 --> 00:16:27.820 He talks about growing up in a small village in England, 00:16:27.820 --> 00:16:32.350 and there was nothing to do. 00:16:32.350 --> 00:16:38.080 So he looked through the windows to the house next door 00:16:38.080 --> 00:16:42.688 and started learning how to pattern the brickwork. 00:16:42.688 --> 00:16:45.130 Now, this is something that I suppose 00:16:45.130 --> 00:16:47.170 not everybody should do. 00:16:47.170 --> 00:16:50.780 I think we have more intelligent things to do. 00:16:50.780 --> 00:16:56.620 But he talks about seeing as a constructive phenomenon, 00:16:56.620 --> 00:17:01.580 as an intellectual activity, which can be learned. 00:17:01.580 --> 00:17:03.880 It's not automatic. 00:17:07.210 --> 00:17:10.089 From a visual to the social-political, 00:17:10.089 --> 00:17:14.589 he's a professor of poetry at Oxford University, one 00:17:14.589 --> 00:17:19.420 of the most important chairs in British academia, 00:17:19.420 --> 00:17:23.319 and slowly turns his attention to the fact 00:17:23.319 --> 00:17:26.589 that there's a distinction in Britain 00:17:26.589 --> 00:17:28.195 between poverty and wealth. 00:17:31.700 --> 00:17:36.950 His last books, Fors Clavigera, is subtitled, Lessons 00:17:36.950 --> 00:17:39.058 to the Working Men of England. 00:17:42.270 --> 00:17:44.420 He takes students on Sunday morning 00:17:44.420 --> 00:17:48.050 to work and building camps outside Oxford. 00:17:51.280 --> 00:17:54.460 He sees that reading is a combination 00:17:54.460 --> 00:17:56.420 of aesthetic and moral values. 00:18:00.250 --> 00:18:03.160 He says you have to externalize the consequences 00:18:03.160 --> 00:18:04.440 of your experience. 00:18:04.440 --> 00:18:09.470 Therefore, he writes these books and has 00:18:09.470 --> 00:18:12.630 something to say about reading and memory-- 00:18:12.630 --> 00:18:16.700 how memory is an important part of the selective part of what 00:18:16.700 --> 00:18:20.810 you understand. 00:18:20.810 --> 00:18:24.375 Friedrich Engels comes to Manchester as a teenager. 00:18:27.170 --> 00:18:32.270 He's amazed at his contact with reality. 00:18:32.270 --> 00:18:34.460 First of all, you have to understand that it's 00:18:34.460 --> 00:18:37.160 important to observe reality. 00:18:37.160 --> 00:18:43.400 Reality, in his case, was the most degraded conditions 00:18:43.400 --> 00:18:49.220 of housing and sewage that the world had probably ever seen. 00:18:49.220 --> 00:18:51.810 He says, you do it with your body-- 00:18:51.810 --> 00:18:56.540 with eyes, ears, nose, and feet. 00:18:56.540 --> 00:19:00.680 Number three, you do it through the eyes of others. 00:19:00.680 --> 00:19:09.140 He had a girlfriend who was an illiterate Irish worker. 00:19:09.140 --> 00:19:12.710 He walked through the town with her 00:19:12.710 --> 00:19:14.870 and would ask her questions. 00:19:14.870 --> 00:19:18.530 I don't understand why the window's always closed. 00:19:18.530 --> 00:19:20.840 And she would say, the windows are closed, 00:19:20.840 --> 00:19:24.206 because the smell is too whatever. 00:19:27.050 --> 00:19:38.630 And then you communicate what you've read, 00:19:38.630 --> 00:19:41.660 and you go even further. 00:19:41.660 --> 00:19:47.810 In his case, Manchester was not a unique city for him. 00:19:47.810 --> 00:19:50.450 He was reading a phenomenon which 00:19:50.450 --> 00:19:54.760 had universal implications. 00:19:54.760 --> 00:19:59.620 It's interesting that under Marx and Engels, 00:19:59.620 --> 00:20:06.520 and as late as 1917, cities were not considered as significant 00:20:06.520 --> 00:20:08.905 in the Marxist dialogue. 00:20:12.590 --> 00:20:15.050 They were larger issues at hand. 00:20:15.050 --> 00:20:19.760 You had to change the structure of society, and as a byproduct, 00:20:19.760 --> 00:20:22.790 cities would change automatically. 00:20:22.790 --> 00:20:26.480 That doesn't work that way, but so was the doctrine 00:20:26.480 --> 00:20:30.800 of early Soviet Marxism. 00:20:30.800 --> 00:20:34.550 And Engels himself changed. 00:20:34.550 --> 00:20:38.810 There's a wonderful book called Marx's General recently 00:20:38.810 --> 00:20:45.230 published by an English writer, which discusses Engel's 00:20:45.230 --> 00:20:48.365 history in relation to Hegel. 00:20:51.590 --> 00:20:57.210 Engels was in the army in Berlin doing nothing. 00:20:57.210 --> 00:21:01.080 So he attended a class in religious philosophy taught 00:21:01.080 --> 00:21:02.780 at the university. 00:21:02.780 --> 00:21:07.040 At that time, religion was a fundamental component 00:21:07.040 --> 00:21:09.950 of the study of philosophy. 00:21:09.950 --> 00:21:21.200 In his class was Kierkegaard, Bakunin, the Russian anarchist. 00:21:21.200 --> 00:21:23.870 I forget the names of the others-- 00:21:23.870 --> 00:21:30.260 people who were there at the same time questioning whether-- 00:21:30.260 --> 00:21:36.500 Hegel's work had just been started to be published. 00:21:36.500 --> 00:21:43.970 And Engels, again, started adapting 00:21:43.970 --> 00:21:50.780 the purest Marxist doctrines to the reality 00:21:50.780 --> 00:21:55.970 of the situations he was facing in different parts of Europe 00:21:55.970 --> 00:21:58.160 as he traveled. 00:21:58.160 --> 00:22:06.710 The notion of historians who claim the uniqueness of cities 00:22:06.710 --> 00:22:10.280 is widespread. 00:22:10.280 --> 00:22:15.920 Writing about Venice, Mary McCarthy 00:22:15.920 --> 00:22:19.400 says, there's nothing more to be said about Venice, 00:22:19.400 --> 00:22:25.130 and quotes Napoleon, Raskin, Shelly, Proust all saying 00:22:25.130 --> 00:22:27.230 the same things. 00:22:27.230 --> 00:22:29.690 And says, I envy your writing about Venice, 00:22:29.690 --> 00:22:31.040 says the newcomer. 00:22:31.040 --> 00:22:33.750 I pity you, says the old hand. 00:22:33.750 --> 00:22:37.310 There's something a little boring about saying 00:22:37.310 --> 00:22:40.760 the same things about a city. 00:22:40.760 --> 00:22:44.840 Walter Benjamin is a much more lively character, 00:22:44.840 --> 00:22:49.560 the German philosopher who died in 1940, 00:22:49.560 --> 00:22:52.400 but wrote essays on cities. 00:22:52.400 --> 00:22:57.680 His essay on Naples is particularly interesting. 00:22:57.680 --> 00:23:02.180 Nevertheless, no city can fade in the few hours of Sunday rest 00:23:02.180 --> 00:23:05.080 more rapidly than Naples. 00:23:05.080 --> 00:23:09.110 Here's a theory of the speed at which the city changes 00:23:09.110 --> 00:23:12.140 its form from working to rest. 00:23:12.140 --> 00:23:14.060 I don't know of any other person who's 00:23:14.060 --> 00:23:19.190 ever observed the phenomenon of the speed 00:23:19.190 --> 00:23:23.760 that cities change from one form to another. 00:23:23.760 --> 00:23:32.280 He says, the well-known list of the seven deadly sins located 00:23:32.280 --> 00:23:35.730 pride in Genoa, avarice in Florence, 00:23:35.730 --> 00:23:39.570 voluptuousness in Venice, anger in Bologna, greed in Milan, 00:23:39.570 --> 00:23:42.880 envy in Rome, and indolence in Naples. 00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:52.800 He then goes on to talk about what indolence means, 00:23:52.800 --> 00:23:55.740 and porosity of buildings, and builds 00:23:55.740 --> 00:24:00.900 an incredible central structure of this place. 00:24:00.900 --> 00:24:04.280 What you do with it is not important. 00:24:04.280 --> 00:24:09.390 It's that a city is something as particular as the gestures 00:24:09.390 --> 00:24:11.340 that people make with their hands. 00:24:11.340 --> 00:24:14.790 He claims that the gestures that people make with their hands, 00:24:14.790 --> 00:24:17.820 with their nose, with their eyes, with their breasts 00:24:17.820 --> 00:24:19.440 in Naples is unique. 00:24:23.300 --> 00:24:25.520 AUDIENCE: So? 00:24:25.520 --> 00:24:31.760 JULIAN BEINART: So the extraordinary thing 00:24:31.760 --> 00:24:38.000 about Walter Benjamin is this tension between this attitude 00:24:38.000 --> 00:24:42.980 of finding the deep structural explanation of cities 00:24:42.980 --> 00:24:46.070 and being a Marxist himself. 00:24:46.070 --> 00:24:48.920 As a Marxist, like Engels, he would only 00:24:48.920 --> 00:24:54.380 see Naples as a generalized phenomenon of human experience. 00:24:56.960 --> 00:24:59.090 He would look for where poor people live, 00:24:59.090 --> 00:25:03.690 and where the forces of production were, and so on. 00:25:03.690 --> 00:25:07.970 Instead, he's attracted by this uniqueness phenomenon. 00:25:07.970 --> 00:25:10.100 Everything is unique. 00:25:10.100 --> 00:25:14.780 He writes about Paris in similar ways. 00:25:14.780 --> 00:25:17.210 Muchly is interesting in Walter Benjamin, 00:25:17.210 --> 00:25:19.580 over whom I'm a big fan. 00:25:19.580 --> 00:25:22.550 So I shouldn't criticize him too much. 00:25:22.550 --> 00:25:27.470 Here's the architectural critic, Norberg-Schulz, 00:25:27.470 --> 00:25:33.200 the Norwegian critic, who has made a-- who wrote a book 00:25:33.200 --> 00:25:37.100 called Genius Loci, which suggests, again, 00:25:37.100 --> 00:25:39.470 that every town has a genius-- 00:25:39.470 --> 00:25:40.460 not every town. 00:25:40.460 --> 00:25:43.700 He only selects a couple, and then 00:25:43.700 --> 00:25:46.940 tries to explain what the genius is. 00:25:46.940 --> 00:25:49.740 So in Prague, we read the following. 00:25:49.740 --> 00:25:52.520 "The fascination of Prague resides, first of all, 00:25:52.520 --> 00:25:55.100 in a strong sense of mystery." 00:25:55.100 --> 00:25:59.990 Big deal, you know? 00:25:59.990 --> 00:26:03.260 You have the feeling it is possible to penetrate 00:26:03.260 --> 00:26:05.420 ever deeper into things. 00:26:05.420 --> 00:26:09.890 "Streetscapes, courtyards, have an endless inside." 00:26:09.890 --> 00:26:14.840 Now, that is maybe a profound observation of Prague. 00:26:14.840 --> 00:26:21.620 But as a theory, it is terribly little. 00:26:21.620 --> 00:26:27.200 It's very much-- in Khartoum-- 00:26:29.740 --> 00:26:33.130 he says, those who visit Khartoum are immediately struck 00:26:33.130 --> 00:26:36.960 by strong quality of place. 00:26:36.960 --> 00:26:42.860 Well, am I not struck by a strong quality of place if I 00:26:42.860 --> 00:26:44.720 enter Léon? 00:26:44.720 --> 00:26:49.460 Or is there a measurement of the amount of quality that is 00:26:49.460 --> 00:26:51.770 in Khartoum as opposed to Léon? 00:26:51.770 --> 00:26:54.290 There is no attempt to generalize about cities 00:26:54.290 --> 00:26:57.120 whatsoever. 00:26:57.120 --> 00:26:59.700 If science is about generalization, 00:26:59.700 --> 00:27:02.465 this is not anywhere near scientific. 00:27:02.465 --> 00:27:07.740 It's maybe what architects do in reading or artists do, 00:27:07.740 --> 00:27:13.590 which raises a very big unresolved conflict in urbanism 00:27:13.590 --> 00:27:19.680 between if it is a function of art or a function of science. 00:27:19.680 --> 00:27:27.450 Theories are especially seen as functions, as estimates, 00:27:27.450 --> 00:27:32.370 of knowledge in science and in social science. 00:27:32.370 --> 00:27:34.350 We have not resolved-- 00:27:34.350 --> 00:27:43.720 to propose, as we end up with this piece by the physicists, 00:27:43.720 --> 00:27:47.510 on what is important to resolve in urbanism, 00:27:47.510 --> 00:27:51.030 it may be that the distinction is 00:27:51.030 --> 00:27:54.510 between learning about cities through art history. 00:27:54.510 --> 00:27:58.050 Because if you look at Prague, you think of looking 00:27:58.050 --> 00:27:59.430 at Cézanne. 00:27:59.430 --> 00:28:03.900 And although Rudolf Arnheim, the gestalt psychologist, says, 00:28:03.900 --> 00:28:07.080 that if you look at Cézanne, if you'd follow the following path 00:28:07.080 --> 00:28:11.160 with your eyes from red to yellow and back to green, 00:28:11.160 --> 00:28:16.740 and these forms all fit into a scientific explanation of what 00:28:16.740 --> 00:28:18.915 you see, that's bullshit. 00:28:25.210 --> 00:28:29.560 We accept certain truths through art. 00:28:29.560 --> 00:28:33.550 The patterning of music is studied 00:28:33.550 --> 00:28:37.240 and available for your understanding, 00:28:37.240 --> 00:28:40.860 but it is an intuitive experiential phenomenon. 00:28:44.080 --> 00:28:49.750 Much of these explanations are of that order. 00:28:49.750 --> 00:28:53.650 They don't attempt to compare the amount of mystery 00:28:53.650 --> 00:28:55.720 in Rome versus the amount of mystery 00:28:55.720 --> 00:28:57.955 in Khartoum or in Prague. 00:29:00.470 --> 00:29:02.140 Let's go on very quickly. 00:29:05.308 --> 00:29:08.370 We've got half an hour. 00:29:08.370 --> 00:29:10.570 There's a lot of reading available 00:29:10.570 --> 00:29:13.160 about each of these sectors. 00:29:13.160 --> 00:29:16.810 So I will propose that, if you're 00:29:16.810 --> 00:29:22.300 interested in any of these bodies of work, 00:29:22.300 --> 00:29:25.570 either contact me, and I'll give you more reading. 00:29:25.570 --> 00:29:28.078 That's if you need to do more reading. 00:29:28.078 --> 00:29:29.620 There's enough in this class already. 00:29:36.790 --> 00:29:43.375 The next group of work is number two, ecology of people. 00:29:48.010 --> 00:29:50.350 The idea that people, as a group, 00:29:50.350 --> 00:29:55.960 behave in ways which pattern a city 00:29:55.960 --> 00:30:04.420 is most likely to be associated, in the first instance, 00:30:04.420 --> 00:30:12.590 with the work of the German sociologists from 1900 to 1950. 00:30:12.590 --> 00:30:16.030 I'll just briefly mention them and talk a little bit 00:30:16.030 --> 00:30:18.760 about what the fundamental thinking 00:30:18.760 --> 00:30:23.410 about the nature of cities was. 00:30:23.410 --> 00:30:28.210 Max Weber in 1905-- 00:30:28.210 --> 00:30:34.300 the three are Max Weber, Georg Simmel, S-I-M-M-E-L, 00:30:34.300 --> 00:30:35.515 and Oswald Spengler. 00:30:40.180 --> 00:30:43.900 For them, cities were relatively new. 00:30:47.225 --> 00:30:50.700 You must remember that cities only grew at about 1% 00:30:50.700 --> 00:31:00.810 per annum in Europe until 1930, when parts of England 00:31:00.810 --> 00:31:03.450 grew ballistically at about 10%. 00:31:06.960 --> 00:31:11.850 But it involved a change in character. 00:31:11.850 --> 00:31:18.330 For Weber, a city is essentially a human settlement, which 00:31:18.330 --> 00:31:21.240 could be called cosmopolitan. 00:31:21.240 --> 00:31:24.750 It contains a variety of life styles 00:31:24.750 --> 00:31:27.370 and different sorts of individuals 00:31:27.370 --> 00:31:30.060 which have to coexist. 00:31:30.060 --> 00:31:35.130 He argues that the best way for them coexisting 00:31:35.130 --> 00:31:40.350 is to establish ideal typical conditions in which each state 00:31:40.350 --> 00:31:43.710 of urban life most neatly fulfills 00:31:43.710 --> 00:31:48.720 the social capacities inherent in any of the one groups. 00:31:51.230 --> 00:31:58.970 So for him, an ideal city would be the creation 00:31:58.970 --> 00:32:07.880 of a phenomenon, which has a large amount of distinction 00:32:07.880 --> 00:32:18.500 in it, and the maintenance of these social structures, 00:32:18.500 --> 00:32:23.540 competing social structures, the capacity to understand when 00:32:23.540 --> 00:32:27.110 they change and when they don't. 00:32:27.110 --> 00:32:37.080 He believes in the kind of city that he was examining 00:32:37.080 --> 00:32:40.330 in Germany at the time. 00:32:40.330 --> 00:32:45.090 Georg Simmel noticed another phenomenon of the emerging city 00:32:45.090 --> 00:32:46.260 form. 00:32:46.260 --> 00:32:52.400 And that is that it put pressure on the individual existence. 00:32:52.400 --> 00:32:57.720 The access of psychic stimulation in a large city 00:32:57.720 --> 00:32:59.430 would cause withdrawal. 00:33:01.990 --> 00:33:03.720 This is a strange concept. 00:33:07.470 --> 00:33:12.090 It maybe associates itself with people 00:33:12.090 --> 00:33:15.540 like Richard Sennett, who's spoken 00:33:15.540 --> 00:33:20.910 about the fall of public man in similar ways. 00:33:20.910 --> 00:33:27.300 That if in Simmel's case it was the withdrawal 00:33:27.300 --> 00:33:32.010 of people from the excessive stimulation of the city, 00:33:32.010 --> 00:33:35.850 in Richard Sennett's case, it's the change 00:33:35.850 --> 00:33:41.730 in the capacity of people from maintaining 00:33:41.730 --> 00:33:45.030 a state of publicness to a preference 00:33:45.030 --> 00:33:46.920 for a state of privacy. 00:33:46.920 --> 00:33:52.740 I disagree with Sennett to some extent about that observation. 00:33:52.740 --> 00:33:57.330 As I'll deal with in a subsequent class, 00:33:57.330 --> 00:34:03.090 the notion of privacy was foreign to people 00:34:03.090 --> 00:34:05.340 until the middle of the Middle Ages. 00:34:08.969 --> 00:34:14.204 But Simmel talks of this. 00:34:19.010 --> 00:34:23.708 "Whenever large numbers of people live together, 00:34:23.708 --> 00:34:26.239 there's a selfhood, a human identity, 00:34:26.239 --> 00:34:29.960 which tries to project itself in the process. 00:34:29.960 --> 00:34:38.780 Just as an example of this phenomenon, 00:34:38.780 --> 00:34:44.179 if you would wish to withdraw in Manhattan 00:34:44.179 --> 00:34:52.520 from the intense energy that the city has produced, 00:34:52.520 --> 00:34:56.960 why would you have glass on the windows of your apartment? 00:34:56.960 --> 00:34:59.210 There's been some study of the amount 00:34:59.210 --> 00:35:02.660 of glass and residential accommodation, even 00:35:02.660 --> 00:35:04.370 to the extent that-- 00:35:04.370 --> 00:35:15.770 what is the file, old film, where 00:35:15.770 --> 00:35:18.380 this man is in his apartment and he's 00:35:18.380 --> 00:35:20.163 hurt his leg so he can't move? 00:35:20.163 --> 00:35:21.080 AUDIENCE: Rear Window. 00:35:21.080 --> 00:35:22.640 JULIAN BEINART: Rear Window, yes. 00:35:22.640 --> 00:35:24.790 Who was the actor? 00:35:24.790 --> 00:35:25.790 AUDIENCE: Jimmy Stewart. 00:35:25.790 --> 00:35:28.370 JULIAN BEINART: Jimmy Stewart, yeah. 00:35:28.370 --> 00:35:34.220 Sorry, my memory is falling apart. 00:35:34.220 --> 00:35:42.260 The phenomenon that you can use glass, as glass 00:35:42.260 --> 00:35:49.010 gives you both the option of withdrawing and being public. 00:35:49.010 --> 00:35:52.370 It's an extraordinary idea. 00:35:52.370 --> 00:35:56.820 That if you really-- if Simmel were absolutely correct, 00:35:56.820 --> 00:35:59.870 we would all live in [INAUDIBLE],, or in gardens, 00:35:59.870 --> 00:36:02.990 or anything establishing ourselves 00:36:02.990 --> 00:36:08.780 outside of the turmoil of urbanism. 00:36:08.780 --> 00:36:12.320 The glass apartment block in Manhattan, 00:36:12.320 --> 00:36:19.460 allowing people to see you when you're ready to be seen, 00:36:19.460 --> 00:36:26.930 but mostly available, is a curious phenomenon. 00:36:26.930 --> 00:36:31.910 Simmel might have had something to say about it. 00:36:31.910 --> 00:36:38.810 Oswald Spengler had a typical negative view 00:36:38.810 --> 00:36:46.250 of the future of the emerging large city. 00:36:46.250 --> 00:36:52.220 He said, very popularly understood at the time, 00:36:52.220 --> 00:36:54.950 that there was something wrong, that it needed 00:36:54.950 --> 00:37:01.550 to be curtailed in size, that it's increasing 00:37:01.550 --> 00:37:05.480 heterogeneity was a phenomenon which was dangerous. 00:37:09.650 --> 00:37:14.760 He believed that cities would be destroyed. 00:37:14.760 --> 00:37:16.610 And I don't know what would replace them. 00:37:16.610 --> 00:37:22.310 But he had this similar idea to others in England, 00:37:22.310 --> 00:37:27.920 that London would be dispersed and into smaller communities, 00:37:27.920 --> 00:37:30.380 largely in the rural areas of England. 00:37:34.160 --> 00:37:37.340 A complete nonsense of an idea, but one which-- 00:37:42.060 --> 00:37:47.130 none of these people attempted to understand the sociology 00:37:47.130 --> 00:37:50.190 of an actual city. 00:37:50.190 --> 00:37:51.600 They were generalists. 00:37:54.120 --> 00:37:58.860 I'm reminded a little in reading of this of a book, which 00:37:58.860 --> 00:38:09.462 was recently published by Edward Glaser at Harvard, called The-- 00:38:09.462 --> 00:38:10.960 AUDIENCE: Triumph of the City? 00:38:10.960 --> 00:38:12.752 JULIAN BEINART: --Triumph of the City, yes. 00:38:17.310 --> 00:38:20.850 There isn't really time to discuss this book at length. 00:38:20.850 --> 00:38:23.190 But at some time in this class, I would like to. 00:38:23.190 --> 00:38:25.980 So ask me a question about it when we have more time. 00:38:28.800 --> 00:38:32.595 Its analysis is very much in the old school manner. 00:38:35.380 --> 00:38:40.520 But if Spengler proposes that cities will disappear 00:38:40.520 --> 00:38:44.690 because they are too crude, and they've 00:38:44.690 --> 00:38:51.200 deviated from decent human principles, 00:38:51.200 --> 00:38:54.260 Glaser sees the future of interaction 00:38:54.260 --> 00:39:01.860 in the modern city as the essence of its being. 00:39:01.860 --> 00:39:07.430 He proposes that a good city would intensify into action, 00:39:07.430 --> 00:39:10.220 because it's economically important, and so on, 00:39:10.220 --> 00:39:13.310 and so on, and so on. 00:39:13.310 --> 00:39:14.570 He's not an architect. 00:39:14.570 --> 00:39:18.860 So his penchant for tall buildings, 00:39:18.860 --> 00:39:24.530 residential buildings, are indiscriminate of how 00:39:24.530 --> 00:39:27.710 they are designed, and how they are modulated, and so on. 00:39:27.710 --> 00:39:32.180 It reminds me of what's happening in China, 00:39:32.180 --> 00:39:33.380 amongst other places. 00:39:35.900 --> 00:39:42.330 The Chicago school were a bunch of sociologists 00:39:42.330 --> 00:39:44.210 who took a look at the American city 00:39:44.210 --> 00:39:48.070 for the first time analytically. 00:39:48.070 --> 00:39:55.190 The concentric model of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie 00:39:55.190 --> 00:40:00.080 postulated a city, which is much like a plant phenomenon, 00:40:00.080 --> 00:40:05.300 that it increased and changed as it expanded outwards. 00:40:05.300 --> 00:40:10.100 That the city consisted of rings, annular rings, 00:40:10.100 --> 00:40:17.270 of social classes in which the dynamic was 00:40:17.270 --> 00:40:20.690 that you would move from the center to the outwards. 00:40:20.690 --> 00:40:27.500 And the inner ring is the center, the central business 00:40:27.500 --> 00:40:28.040 district. 00:40:28.040 --> 00:40:30.110 Immediately surrounding it is something 00:40:30.110 --> 00:40:33.860 called the zone in transition. 00:40:33.860 --> 00:40:41.660 Beyond that is the zone of workingmen's houses. 00:40:41.660 --> 00:40:45.020 Beyond that is the zone of better residences. 00:40:45.020 --> 00:40:47.790 Beyond that is the commuter zone. 00:40:47.790 --> 00:40:51.050 The zone of transition, that immediate zone 00:40:51.050 --> 00:40:54.980 around the central business area, is of interest. 00:40:54.980 --> 00:40:58.310 What distinguishes the American city from the European Union 00:40:58.310 --> 00:41:01.450 city in the grossest sense is the American city 00:41:01.450 --> 00:41:02.990 is city of immigration. 00:41:02.990 --> 00:41:06.090 The European city is quite the opposite. 00:41:06.090 --> 00:41:10.760 It's only been open to immigration recently, 00:41:10.760 --> 00:41:13.790 and it's struggling like hell to deal with it. 00:41:13.790 --> 00:41:15.950 America's has gone through a couple 00:41:15.950 --> 00:41:20.720 of years, if not forever, dealing with the problem 00:41:20.720 --> 00:41:22.280 of immigration. 00:41:22.280 --> 00:41:25.520 And the zone of transition in the American city 00:41:25.520 --> 00:41:28.880 was that undetermined zone, before 00:41:28.880 --> 00:41:32.480 the settled residential population took 00:41:32.480 --> 00:41:35.220 place, a zone in transition. 00:41:35.220 --> 00:41:38.065 The obvious phenomenon was that there's 00:41:38.065 --> 00:41:44.660 a zone which had a more rapid turnover than any other zone 00:41:44.660 --> 00:41:46.070 in the city. 00:41:46.070 --> 00:41:49.160 And this has actually been the zone 00:41:49.160 --> 00:41:52.460 which is been a zone of immigration, 00:41:52.460 --> 00:41:57.620 a zone of building of bypasses past the central business area. 00:41:57.620 --> 00:42:02.390 In fact, if anything, it's a better flex zone 00:42:02.390 --> 00:42:09.410 around the center of a city than the park system of Adelaide, 00:42:09.410 --> 00:42:12.560 which the organic model is so enthused about. 00:42:20.180 --> 00:42:22.760 There was a gentleman called Homer Hoyt, who 00:42:22.760 --> 00:42:25.400 during the Depression years in Washington 00:42:25.400 --> 00:42:30.560 did nothing else, without a computer, calculated rent 00:42:30.560 --> 00:42:33.590 payments in cities in the United States, 00:42:33.590 --> 00:42:35.405 particularly in Chicago. 00:42:35.405 --> 00:42:37.400 He'd written a book about Chicago, 00:42:37.400 --> 00:42:41.810 from which he developed an alternative model 00:42:41.810 --> 00:42:43.310 to the concentric model. 00:42:43.310 --> 00:42:47.300 That is, he claims that the city is really patterned 00:42:47.300 --> 00:42:50.000 on the basis of sectors. 00:42:50.000 --> 00:42:58.250 Sectors allow people to move towards higher income areas, 00:42:58.250 --> 00:43:02.690 towards open space, towards mountains, towards higher 00:43:02.690 --> 00:43:07.070 natural phenomenon. 00:43:07.070 --> 00:43:12.920 And therefore, you get a division of people, 00:43:12.920 --> 00:43:19.460 rather than occupying space concentrically, occupying space 00:43:19.460 --> 00:43:21.170 through wedges. 00:43:21.170 --> 00:43:24.680 Now, if you look at the diagram of Atlanta, 00:43:24.680 --> 00:43:29.270 you'll see some justice for his phenomenon. 00:43:29.270 --> 00:43:31.970 It applies equally well to Johannesburg. 00:43:31.970 --> 00:43:34.910 And when I do a case study with you of Johannesburg, 00:43:34.910 --> 00:43:39.440 you will see how the sector theory worked very well 00:43:39.440 --> 00:43:42.110 up to a certain point in the construction, 00:43:42.110 --> 00:43:46.100 of the organization, of the city. 00:43:46.100 --> 00:43:57.520 In the case of Atlanta, you have, as I've said before, 00:43:57.520 --> 00:44:07.020 the phenomenon here based on rent payments, 00:44:07.020 --> 00:44:08.450 justifying the Hoyt model. 00:44:14.730 --> 00:44:23.100 The Chicago school took place in the great city of Chicago. 00:44:23.100 --> 00:44:26.670 Chicago has been called the Shock City 00:44:26.670 --> 00:44:29.550 because of its rapid emergence. 00:44:29.550 --> 00:44:35.610 Chicago didn't exist in 1830, and in 1893, 00:44:35.610 --> 00:44:38.910 at the time of the Chicago World's Fair, 00:44:38.910 --> 00:44:43.890 125th of all the world's railroads passed Chicago. 00:44:43.890 --> 00:44:45.420 It's the most rapidly-- 00:44:49.440 --> 00:44:51.930 and by virtue of its rapid growth, which 00:44:51.930 --> 00:44:58.230 wasn't accompanied by government, or good government, 00:44:58.230 --> 00:45:02.040 you have a phenomenon, which I'll look into more carefully 00:45:02.040 --> 00:45:05.280 when we discuss the case of Chicago. 00:45:05.280 --> 00:45:13.110 Chicago is the most phenomenal 19th century city of all. 00:45:13.110 --> 00:45:18.540 And it's interesting that Chicago 00:45:18.540 --> 00:45:21.690 is the place where the first academic study 00:45:21.690 --> 00:45:24.680 of the social grouping of cities should take place. 00:45:28.790 --> 00:45:31.230 A lot of things happened for the first time in Chicago. 00:45:35.910 --> 00:45:41.880 Economics has paid a serious but very scant 00:45:41.880 --> 00:45:44.070 interest in location. 00:45:44.070 --> 00:45:48.900 As Paul Krugman points out, the new textbook 00:45:48.900 --> 00:45:54.360 by Joseph Stiglitz at Harvard, which is 1,000 pages in length, 00:45:54.360 --> 00:45:57.240 has the word "city" mentioned once 00:45:57.240 --> 00:46:01.410 and the word "location" mentioned once. 00:46:01.410 --> 00:46:05.640 If you want to read about it, read Krugman's views 00:46:05.640 --> 00:46:09.300 on why economics has not included location 00:46:09.300 --> 00:46:11.340 as a serious input. 00:46:11.340 --> 00:46:16.400 Read the pieces that I've suggested you read. 00:46:16.400 --> 00:46:22.710 There are two pieces by Krugman explaining 00:46:22.710 --> 00:46:29.250 why modern economics after Marshall 00:46:29.250 --> 00:46:33.870 managed very well on optimization theories 00:46:33.870 --> 00:46:39.000 without including the cost of transportation or the cost 00:46:39.000 --> 00:46:42.810 and benefits of location. 00:46:42.810 --> 00:46:46.300 He claims there's been a weakness in economic geography, 00:46:46.300 --> 00:46:51.240 which has tried to measure up to the purity of economics, 00:46:51.240 --> 00:46:55.020 of modern economics, and gives some 00:46:55.020 --> 00:47:01.350 suggestions for maybe a new post-real estate 00:47:01.350 --> 00:47:03.670 study of location. 00:47:03.670 --> 00:47:10.680 The classic allocation models are still, number one, 00:47:10.680 --> 00:47:12.130 at the regional level. 00:47:12.130 --> 00:47:19.410 The work of von Thunen, the German agronomist, 00:47:19.410 --> 00:47:22.650 who argued that the cost of transportation 00:47:22.650 --> 00:47:26.520 was a phenomenon in allocating land use. 00:47:26.520 --> 00:47:47.830 He claims that, as I've said before, around a center, 00:47:47.830 --> 00:47:50.500 the spatial distribution of crops 00:47:50.500 --> 00:47:53.740 occurs according to the yield per unit 00:47:53.740 --> 00:47:55.795 area around a central town. 00:47:59.710 --> 00:48:03.880 You end up with dairy in the center, 00:48:03.880 --> 00:48:09.820 orchards in the next ring, grain in the next ring, 00:48:09.820 --> 00:48:13.000 cattle in the next ring, and forestry furthest 00:48:13.000 --> 00:48:14.800 from the center. 00:48:14.800 --> 00:48:17.230 This is not only a function of land values, 00:48:17.230 --> 00:48:20.470 but a function of the cost of transporting goods 00:48:20.470 --> 00:48:21.120 to the center. 00:48:24.220 --> 00:48:28.840 Southern Germany, where von Thunen, and Christaller, 00:48:28.840 --> 00:48:32.290 and people like that, economic geographers' work 00:48:32.290 --> 00:48:34.690 was essentially flat. 00:48:34.690 --> 00:48:41.140 And with population growth occurring at a very low rate, 00:48:41.140 --> 00:48:46.030 the notion of a single-centered city or a distributed pattern 00:48:46.030 --> 00:48:49.480 of cities at regular intervals was appropriate. 00:48:52.840 --> 00:48:59.860 Christaller based his economic geography on the idea 00:48:59.860 --> 00:49:05.470 that they were central places, and you 00:49:05.470 --> 00:49:10.450 can see this phenomenon in Northern Italy today. 00:49:13.180 --> 00:49:19.550 If you move eastward from Milan, 30 miles from Milan is Brescia. 00:49:19.550 --> 00:49:22.960 30 miles from Brescia is Verona. 00:49:22.960 --> 00:49:27.220 Vicenza is 30 miles from Verona. 00:49:27.220 --> 00:49:32.620 Pádova is 30 miles, and Venice at the end of this horizontal 00:49:32.620 --> 00:49:35.310 east-west axis. 00:49:35.310 --> 00:49:40.750 If you go from Milano to Bologna, 00:49:40.750 --> 00:49:45.400 you have 30 miles to Pavia, then 30 miles to Parma, 00:49:45.400 --> 00:49:48.970 30 miles to Reggio, 30 miles to Moderna, 00:49:48.970 --> 00:49:51.370 and 30 miles to Bologna. 00:49:51.370 --> 00:49:55.480 On the axis from Bologna in the big triangle to Venice, 00:49:55.480 --> 00:49:58.960 [INAUDIBLE] Ferrara, which is about 30 miles from Bologna, 00:49:58.960 --> 00:50:01.510 and then historical land patterns 00:50:01.510 --> 00:50:04.150 didn't allow this phenomenon to take place. 00:50:12.930 --> 00:50:17.490 There was a big exhibition in Italy entitled, 00:50:17.490 --> 00:50:21.310 "The Culture of 999 Cities." 00:50:21.310 --> 00:50:24.690 What is interesting about Christaller's interpretation 00:50:24.690 --> 00:50:30.690 for contemporary times is that a place like Moderna 00:50:30.690 --> 00:50:34.440 produces the headquarters of Lamborghini, Ferrari, 00:50:34.440 --> 00:50:39.990 and Maserati and still is a relatively small population 00:50:39.990 --> 00:50:40.630 center. 00:50:40.630 --> 00:50:44.520 If you go to Cortona, near Arezzo, 00:50:44.520 --> 00:50:49.170 it has a bunch of things. 00:50:49.170 --> 00:50:52.740 Almost every small town has a center 00:50:52.740 --> 00:50:56.740 and a condition of uniqueness. 00:50:56.740 --> 00:51:00.300 The genius of the Italian landscape 00:51:00.300 --> 00:51:04.113 is in not developing-- 00:51:04.113 --> 00:51:06.120 well, so they argue. 00:51:06.120 --> 00:51:07.710 They haven't developed large cities. 00:51:07.710 --> 00:51:11.520 Milano is not a village, but the Italians 00:51:11.520 --> 00:51:15.480 are free to interpret things very freely. 00:51:15.480 --> 00:51:21.030 But the genius of being able to be small, and yet to be unique, 00:51:21.030 --> 00:51:23.340 and to-- 00:51:23.340 --> 00:51:28.830 I was asked to come to Ferrara once, 00:51:28.830 --> 00:51:34.020 because they started a new school of architecture 00:51:34.020 --> 00:51:35.940 run by a friend of mine. 00:51:35.940 --> 00:51:40.770 And the city was going to give them a building, 00:51:40.770 --> 00:51:43.710 and they wanted this small group of people 00:51:43.710 --> 00:51:45.660 to choose the building. 00:51:45.660 --> 00:51:48.990 They took us to a building, which 00:51:48.990 --> 00:51:53.820 they had given to the man who developed 00:51:53.820 --> 00:51:57.150 the first electronic system for the movies, 00:51:57.150 --> 00:52:01.470 and it made a film which was very popular at the time, 00:52:01.470 --> 00:52:06.210 possible prior to all of this computer stuff. 00:52:06.210 --> 00:52:09.270 There was a sense in this town that there 00:52:09.270 --> 00:52:16.110 was an appreciation of its capacity to be located locally. 00:52:16.110 --> 00:52:19.300 You bought food from the shop on the corner, 00:52:19.300 --> 00:52:22.230 but yet it had an international aspiration. 00:52:22.230 --> 00:52:24.870 And put together, all of these places 00:52:24.870 --> 00:52:27.705 constituted the Italian urban culture. 00:52:31.700 --> 00:52:36.860 It's a strange phenomenon, but it's the phenomenon 00:52:36.860 --> 00:52:38.640 which is worth noticing. 00:52:38.640 --> 00:52:42.800 And it's a phenomenon which organizes 00:52:42.800 --> 00:52:45.590 the city and the country in a different way 00:52:45.590 --> 00:52:49.640 than the very large city and the very large spatial hinterland. 00:52:52.730 --> 00:52:56.210 It's worth talking about as we develop this class a bit 00:52:56.210 --> 00:52:59.750 further, but it emanates from Christaller's work-- 00:52:59.750 --> 00:53:08.040 C-H-R-I-S-T-A-L-L-E-R. 00:53:08.040 --> 00:53:12.960 The third application of the classical economic model 00:53:12.960 --> 00:53:19.560 is in the distribution of activities in the center, 00:53:19.560 --> 00:53:25.430 in the central city itself. 00:53:25.430 --> 00:53:28.440 Here you will have the phenomenon, 00:53:28.440 --> 00:53:31.860 which seems very crude still at the moment, 00:53:31.860 --> 00:53:35.910 that they are two variables. 00:53:35.910 --> 00:53:38.250 The one is the amount of rent, the money 00:53:38.250 --> 00:53:41.880 you want to pay in rent at one access, 00:53:41.880 --> 00:53:45.450 and another axis which says the distance that you 00:53:45.450 --> 00:53:47.400 can be from the center. 00:53:47.400 --> 00:53:51.390 The argument being, that in the center, you pay higher rates, 00:53:51.390 --> 00:53:54.750 and the further out you go, the lower rent you pay. 00:53:54.750 --> 00:53:58.390 But you have to pay the increased transportation costs. 00:53:58.390 --> 00:54:04.620 So that balance will produce suburban and then 00:54:04.620 --> 00:54:08.430 exurban locations, depending on the improvement 00:54:08.430 --> 00:54:11.490 of the transportation system outwards. 00:54:11.490 --> 00:54:16.290 That you'll get movements of people 00:54:16.290 --> 00:54:23.850 as they classically make more income from the center 00:54:23.850 --> 00:54:25.290 outwards. 00:54:25.290 --> 00:54:31.320 And this is the working class people 00:54:31.320 --> 00:54:36.900 in this graph come in the former curve in the center, where they 00:54:36.900 --> 00:54:41.790 balance minimal costs of transportation 00:54:41.790 --> 00:54:45.660 and public transportation with low, medium rents, 00:54:45.660 --> 00:54:47.310 and so on, and so on. 00:54:47.310 --> 00:54:51.165 [INAUDIBLE] is here at MIT and the father of regional science. 00:54:54.480 --> 00:54:58.650 He's one of the formulators of this theory. 00:54:58.650 --> 00:55:02.460 Alonso at Harvard did versions of it-- 00:55:02.460 --> 00:55:04.065 Wingo, [INAUDIBLE] and others. 00:55:11.440 --> 00:55:14.790 Let me just say a few words about the others in this list. 00:55:30.470 --> 00:55:37.460 There have been attempts to modulate the former cities 00:55:37.460 --> 00:55:43.520 by analogies to physics, population potential being 00:55:43.520 --> 00:55:44.020 the-- 00:55:53.657 --> 00:55:55.260 let me get this correct. 00:55:55.260 --> 00:55:56.890 I often make a mistake with-- 00:56:00.976 --> 00:56:04.730 well, forget about it. 00:56:04.730 --> 00:56:07.040 We haven't got time to go into the great difference 00:56:07.040 --> 00:56:11.180 between the population potential moral, gravity 00:56:11.180 --> 00:56:14.630 models, communications, networks, and topology. 00:56:14.630 --> 00:56:18.470 I should add to that more current work 00:56:18.470 --> 00:56:25.220 in fractal and chaos theory, which 00:56:25.220 --> 00:56:30.500 if you want to read about fractals, read [INAUDIBLE].. 00:56:30.500 --> 00:56:35.630 But I estimate these as having less 00:56:35.630 --> 00:56:42.080 of a life in determining current practice in urbanism than any 00:56:42.080 --> 00:56:42.840 of the others. 00:56:42.840 --> 00:56:44.750 They're somewhat academic. 00:56:44.750 --> 00:56:50.750 Gravity models, Forester's urban systems, all of these form 00:56:50.750 --> 00:56:57.410 an attempt to use notions of proximity, 00:56:57.410 --> 00:57:03.800 not notions of income, to locate shopping centers, 00:57:03.800 --> 00:57:08.240 to make modifications to the American city. 00:57:10.790 --> 00:57:17.540 The question of decisions, linked decisions, 00:57:17.540 --> 00:57:20.300 again, here we have to look at the work of people 00:57:20.300 --> 00:57:23.660 like Forester, who claims that-- 00:57:23.660 --> 00:57:27.140 we'll see the same phenomenon in the work of John [INAUDIBLE] 00:57:27.140 --> 00:57:29.690 on Tuesday. 00:57:29.690 --> 00:57:35.990 John [INAUDIBLE] claim is that the built world is really 00:57:35.990 --> 00:57:39.110 the outcome of agreements that are 00:57:39.110 --> 00:57:41.910 made between different people. 00:57:41.910 --> 00:57:45.620 There is no city but the one that rests on 00:57:45.620 --> 00:57:49.370 made agreements, and tries to determine 00:57:49.370 --> 00:57:53.270 from made agreements what could be the form of a city which 00:57:53.270 --> 00:57:55.220 takes that into account. 00:57:55.220 --> 00:58:04.730 Jay Forester argues that social systems are currently complex, 00:58:04.730 --> 00:58:09.380 and single answers are not predictable or should not 00:58:09.380 --> 00:58:10.340 be expected. 00:58:13.190 --> 00:58:16.100 Urban systems are based on information 00:58:16.100 --> 00:58:21.110 about the important decisions that largely businessmen 00:58:21.110 --> 00:58:24.080 make in the American city. 00:58:24.080 --> 00:58:26.390 He hasn't asked anybody or studied 00:58:26.390 --> 00:58:29.030 data of any significance. 00:58:29.030 --> 00:58:34.570 He comes to simplistic resolutions, 00:58:34.570 --> 00:58:39.680 that the more the economy grows, the more poor people 00:58:39.680 --> 00:58:42.150 you will have, and things of this kind. 00:58:42.150 --> 00:58:49.010 And I'm not doing him justice in one sentence. 00:58:49.010 --> 00:58:52.220 Then the arena of conflict, which is really quite 00:58:52.220 --> 00:58:54.410 an interesting phenomenon. 00:58:57.920 --> 00:59:00.380 Much of the models that I've gone through 00:59:00.380 --> 00:59:04.910 have assumed that the city is composed of benign people 00:59:04.910 --> 00:59:08.150 making benign agreements amongst each other. 00:59:10.720 --> 00:59:14.470 Park and Burgess's model of concentric circles 00:59:14.470 --> 00:59:18.490 means that it all, like a plant, takes place 00:59:18.490 --> 00:59:24.610 without the plant having any items of conflict or conflict 00:59:24.610 --> 00:59:26.410 as a phenomenon. 00:59:26.410 --> 00:59:30.160 Whereas, in fact, for many centuries, 00:59:30.160 --> 00:59:33.430 the resolution of conflicts through the building of walls 00:59:33.430 --> 00:59:36.550 was a fundamental aspect of city form. 00:59:36.550 --> 00:59:43.035 [INAUDIBLE],, at the end of the 17th century, 00:59:43.035 --> 00:59:47.290 or the beginning of the 18th century, 00:59:47.290 --> 00:59:51.580 could design a town which could not be penetrated. 00:59:51.580 --> 00:59:54.220 So his reputation was-- 00:59:54.220 --> 00:59:59.680 Blondell taught fortification to architecture students 00:59:59.680 --> 01:00:02.455 at the academy in Paris. 01:00:05.830 --> 01:00:09.460 The people who have taken up conflict 01:00:09.460 --> 01:00:12.220 really exist on the left. 01:00:12.220 --> 01:00:16.150 There's David Gordon, who explains American suburbia 01:00:16.150 --> 01:00:20.350 by the movement of bosses to get away 01:00:20.350 --> 01:00:23.830 from workers in labor strife. 01:00:23.830 --> 01:00:29.020 You get Manual Castells in his pre-communication theory 01:00:29.020 --> 01:00:35.200 mode, who is a young Spanish Marxist who 01:00:35.200 --> 01:00:38.560 wrote something called The Wild City, in which he claims 01:00:38.560 --> 01:00:43.720 that suburbanisation is the function of surplus commodities 01:00:43.720 --> 01:00:47.980 rather than of any other form of economy. 01:00:56.160 --> 01:01:01.110 David Harvey, arguing that it's very difficult 01:01:01.110 --> 01:01:06.000 to produce social equity under capitalism, 01:01:06.000 --> 01:01:08.790 because there will always be obstacles 01:01:08.790 --> 01:01:12.540 in the way of maximizing return on capital. 01:01:18.420 --> 01:01:26.140 Lefebvre, the French sociologist who ran a journal called 01:01:26.140 --> 01:01:26.860 [FRENCH]-- 01:01:29.820 --> 01:01:33.860 I was the editor of [NON-ENGLISH],, 01:01:33.860 --> 01:01:37.130 Space and Society, which was-- 01:01:37.130 --> 01:01:41.765 I was part editor, following Lefebvre's example. 01:01:46.000 --> 01:01:49.960 All of these are looking at the way in which conflict 01:01:49.960 --> 01:01:53.860 can be assumed and resolved as part 01:01:53.860 --> 01:01:56.260 of the real existence of a city. 01:01:59.650 --> 01:02:04.060 Giancarlo De Carlo, Italian architect, 01:02:04.060 --> 01:02:11.410 used to argue that one of the functions of-- 01:02:11.410 --> 01:02:14.890 one of the ways of displaying conflict 01:02:14.890 --> 01:02:20.200 was to allow architecture to build 01:02:20.200 --> 01:02:23.680 in its appropriate fashion, but to depict 01:02:23.680 --> 01:02:27.340 the elements of conflict that are available, 01:02:27.340 --> 01:02:31.630 and to heighten the sense of conflicts in a city, 01:02:31.630 --> 01:02:35.740 but also to make it possible, in a kind of anarchic sense, 01:02:35.740 --> 01:02:39.460 for that city's resolutions to be 01:02:39.460 --> 01:02:44.760 made within a framework of understood conflict-- 01:02:44.760 --> 01:02:49.000 resolvable conflict, not revolution. 01:02:49.000 --> 01:02:56.330 So these attempts at plans sometimes 01:02:56.330 --> 01:03:00.090 manifest this, or at least. 01:03:00.090 --> 01:03:03.240 If you look at the workers' housing in Terni, 01:03:03.240 --> 01:03:08.940 for instance, you can see elements of this proposition, 01:03:08.940 --> 01:03:12.330 but it's very vague, and very generalized, 01:03:12.330 --> 01:03:15.510 and not really a powerful theory. 01:03:18.300 --> 01:03:20.940 The Marxists have not produced cities 01:03:20.940 --> 01:03:29.280 which have externalized the conflict notions which they 01:03:29.280 --> 01:03:31.665 examined in the [INAUDIBLE]. 01:03:31.665 --> 01:03:35.010 Their cities are much like any city in the world. 01:03:35.010 --> 01:03:38.400 And Chinese Marxism is certainly not 01:03:38.400 --> 01:03:41.190 producing very much from which we can 01:03:41.190 --> 01:03:44.295 learn about new city growth. 01:03:47.130 --> 01:03:51.870 So this particular theory is waiting too. 01:03:51.870 --> 01:03:54.650 Most of these theories-- 01:03:54.650 --> 01:04:00.590 let me just end off at once with this piece 01:04:00.590 --> 01:04:06.560 I gave you on the physics of-- 01:04:06.560 --> 01:04:08.000 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]? 01:04:08.000 --> 01:04:08.960 JULIAN BEINART: Hmm? 01:04:08.960 --> 01:04:10.810 AUDIENCE: The work of [INAUDIBLE]?? 01:04:10.810 --> 01:04:11.890 JULIAN BEINART: Yes. 01:04:11.890 --> 01:04:12.880 Do you know his work? 01:04:12.880 --> 01:04:13.690 AUDIENCE: Yeah. 01:04:13.690 --> 01:04:17.120 JULIAN BEINART: What do you think of it? 01:04:17.120 --> 01:04:20.806 AUDIENCE: I think it brings in an interesting perspective 01:04:20.806 --> 01:04:26.860 of all these findings on the efficiency of [INAUDIBLE] 01:04:26.860 --> 01:04:30.350 innovation of investment versus how the population grows 01:04:30.350 --> 01:04:35.876 at the same time the per capita wealth it generates. 01:04:35.876 --> 01:04:41.993 But it seems to be a bit reductionist to me. 01:04:41.993 --> 01:04:43.535 JULIAN BEINART: You know, it starts-- 01:04:43.535 --> 01:04:45.520 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] universal model. 01:04:45.520 --> 01:04:48.850 JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, it starts separating out 01:04:48.850 --> 01:04:54.340 what optimizes the functioning of a city in terms 01:04:54.340 --> 01:04:58.420 of transportation, land use, crime, 01:04:58.420 --> 01:05:02.360 and so on, which are important components to understand. 01:05:02.360 --> 01:05:07.540 But he doesn't accept the city as an environment which 01:05:07.540 --> 01:05:12.190 has speciality, or experience, or any of the things 01:05:12.190 --> 01:05:15.430 that art history-- 01:05:15.430 --> 01:05:18.070 I'm beginning to think more and more, that in order 01:05:18.070 --> 01:05:22.150 to understand urbanism, you need to study art history 01:05:22.150 --> 01:05:26.380 and perhaps forget about all of this stuff. 01:05:26.380 --> 01:05:36.010 But we all know that every city is unique. 01:05:36.010 --> 01:05:40.350 That's all we talk about when we talk about cities. 01:05:40.350 --> 01:05:43.830 But focusing on those differences misses the point. 01:05:43.830 --> 01:05:45.270 Sure, there are differences. 01:05:45.270 --> 01:05:46.740 But different from what? 01:05:46.740 --> 01:05:49.770 We found the what. 01:05:49.770 --> 01:05:53.250 There's an arrogance about the security 01:05:53.250 --> 01:06:01.050 of physics as applied to complex phenomena, such as a city. 01:06:01.050 --> 01:06:05.910 It may be that this is a new generation of thinking. 01:06:05.910 --> 01:06:08.700 I mean, they're doing it at Oxford, and Santa Fe, 01:06:08.700 --> 01:06:12.120 and there are more and more groups of complex theorists 01:06:12.120 --> 01:06:14.430 emerging. 01:06:14.430 --> 01:06:15.630 I have my doubts. 01:06:15.630 --> 01:06:18.210 I'll be too old to see any of this anyway. 01:06:18.210 --> 01:06:21.630 So I leave it to you. 01:06:21.630 --> 01:06:25.500 On Tuesday, we will look at, for the last time, 01:06:25.500 --> 01:06:30.540 in Part 1 of the subject, at four or five theories 01:06:30.540 --> 01:06:33.480 of architects, contemporary architects, who 01:06:33.480 --> 01:06:36.060 are recently deceased architects, 01:06:36.060 --> 01:06:44.010 who've made attempts, such as Space Syntax, so on, and so on. 01:06:44.010 --> 01:06:48.960 And then start from scratch with the Industrial Revolution 01:06:48.960 --> 01:06:53.750 and see what we can learn by looking carefully at phenomena.