What do we talk about when we talk about cities? | Nov 7th at 9:07am
The seats have just filled up for the opening plenary this morning, but before anyone started talking, I wanted to put out a question, the one I’ll be thinking about over the day: What do we talk about when we talk about cities?—much less cities after the age of oil. The shape of a plaza, the policies of a government, the formulas of a real estate developer? Is it a fear of change, or a desire for change? Is it about preserving the character of a neighborhood, or preserving the health of a planet? Cities have a lot of moving parts; today has a lot of speakers. There’s a Jane Jacobs line I’d never seen before posted on the wall of the exhibition accompanying the conference:
“Hundreds of thousands of people with hundreds of thousands of plans and purposes built the city. Only they will rebuild the city.”
Andrew Blum writes about architecture, urbanism and technology from Brooklyn, NY. A contributing editor at Metropolis and Wired magazines, his work can also be read at andrewblum.net.
Diana Lind on Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 10:18am
I thought that Adil Najam’s point that people who think about cities ALWAYS think about climate change, but people who think about climate change don’t always think about cities. Interesting.
Andrew Watt in Pomfret, Connecticut on Fri, Nov 14, 2008 at 2:02pm
When I think about cities, I always think about Themistocles’ comment before the battle of Salamis in 480 BC: “The polis is the people.” In other words, the people assembled makes the city, and not the infrastructure, services or networks that converge there.
By contrast, the Romans thought of their Urbs as being both people, and infrastructure. Their engineers designed the aqueducts to carry water dozens of miles from highland sources to lowland towns, through secure and defensible channels. Yet they thought as much about the termini of their water supplies as they did about transmission; every one of their gravity-fed aqueducts ended in a fountain — which relieved pressure on the pipes, aerated the water, and (as the water vaporized from the fountain and splattered the stones of the piazza around it) cooled the surrounding neighborhood.
I contrast this with the effort to build a new shoppers’ acropolis near a highway about 40 minutes south of me, where water supplies will have to be pumped uphill, and a lovely wooded height is being paved over — not for the people — but for some plutocratic scheme.