u/anthony_lackey

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.