In this essay, I write about the natural state of rivers and floodplains, and why confining rivers within levees manufactures catastrophic conditions from the scale of individual plant and animal habitat and reproduction up to the reshaping of the continental interface with seas and oceans. I also offer examples of other ways to live adaptively with the river rather than fight against it.
I wrote something about what a lawn does the moment you stop mowing, based on what I see in the Kansas City region and surrounding areas. This is not as a how-to, but is trying to explain why the meadow is the system's natural equilibrium, and the lawn is the state we spend fossil fuels every week to hold in place. A normal ecosystem invests energy to keep complexity alive, but with a lawn we invest energy to keep complexity suppressed.
Here is my latest baseball and urban design essay. In this, I discuss the new Kansas City baseball stadium and argue for the city, the Royals, and the corporate owner of the site to make the conditions that will integrate the stadium into the neighborhood through incremental development of the surrounding lots rather than a cataclysmic mega project. Baseball as an urban institution will endure more when the stadium project does not enclose the site and activate it only on game days but works as a catalyst for the development of a neighborhood with a ballpark rather than a ballpark entertainment district.
Here is a follow up to my previous article about Signboard Hill and Crown Center. Here I talk about the Crossroads as a contrast to the development pattern at Crown Center. Next week I will extend the discussion to talk about considerations of the new baseball stadium at Crown Center.
In this essay I discuss the history of Signboard Hill and Crown Center in the context of incremental urban growth versus mega-project reshaping of parts of the city.
James Scott's concept of legibility, the state's need to make complex social arrangements administratively visible and controllable, has a spatial dimension that deserves more attention. The built environment offers some of the clearest examples of what legibility destroys.
Kowloon Walled City is the extreme case. By the standard metrics of planning, including fire safety, sanitation, structural integrity, and legal tenure, it failed dramatically. But it also produced an extraordinarily dense relational fabric, a dynamic informal economy, and a spatial intricacy that has generated decades of documentation and fascination. Its neighbor, the Tung Tau Estate, a government housing tower complex built during the same time period, adequately met the standard planning metrics Kowloon failed, but has generated almost no cultural or documentary record at all. The planning measurements that condemned one and validated the other are structurally incapable of identifying the qualities that distinguish them. To clarify, the point is not that Kowloon Walled City was a good place to live, but that its spatial conditions (unmeasured by standard metrics) enabled complex, evolving human interaction.
What interests me is the epistemological dimension: we have built an entire evaluative apparatus that measures what industrial production provides and is silent about what it destroys. The metrics are not neutral instruments applied to a pre-existing reality. They are legibility devices that construct the reality they claim to measure, classifying living neighborhoods as slums and structurally dead housing as adequate.
The harder question: is the destruction of spatial vitality a contingent outcome of bad planning decisions, or is it a structural consequence of the organizational logic that governs how environments are produced? If the centralized, standardized, and industrial speed making process necessarily eliminates the qualities that incremental adaptive growth produces, then the problem isn't reformable through better design. It's embedded in the mode of production.
I explore this in the linked article and will make the connections more explicit as I develop future articles in this series. I'm interested in perspectives from anyone working at the intersection of critical theory and the built environment, particularly around Scott, Lefebvre, or Harvey.
Informal, incrementally grown areas tend to have more lively urban conditions than centrally planned areas, even when the centrally planned areas are materially superior by every conventional metric. In particular, Kowloon Walled City, while rightly considered a poor environment from standard metrics of fire safety, sanitation, crime, etc, also had a lively community with a dynamic internal economy. While it's former neighbor, the government housing tower complex, Tung Tau Estate, exhibits little of the liveliness and none of the economic vitality, but does provide an adequate housing environment by those same metrics that Kowloon fails. We really only use standard metrics to evaluate the quality of built environments, but we don't have explicit metrics to measure where the Walled City succeeds but Tung Tau fails. The difference appears to be in the making process itself. Incremental, adaptive growth generally makes environments alive, while centrally planned and mass-produced urban spaces largely make environments with much less life.
Jane Jacobs identified the same pattern in her example of Boston's North End being classified as a slum in need of urban renewal intervention, while simultaneously being a vibrant, safe, and tight knit community.
Similar observations can be made regarding the favelas in Rio de Janeiro versus the "tower in the park" government housing projects. Though, I have heard there is now gentrification taking place in certain favelas in Rio. Would Kowloon Walled City be gentrifying if it were still extant?
The harder questions are: Can urban planning make places as dynamically interlocked as Kowloon or the favelas while also providing adequate material conditions by conventional standards?
Here is the first in a series of substack articles that will analyze the human built environment through the lens of cognitive science, ecology and thermodynamics, felt experience, and enclosure of the commons. In this article I discuss the experience of the contemporary suburban baseball complex versus the archetypal neighborhood field or sandlot. The transition is largely driven by the same capitalist logic that attempts to enclose and commodify most experience.