In the current the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes "We Built This City: What we can learn from a long-reviled master of 'urban renewal" which is a long-winded review of Lizabeth Cohen's Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age. (which I have not read). Gopnik is seemingly perplexed and ends this way: "What aspects of Ed Logue's legacy do we really want to revive? Essentially it's the intentions not the edifices."
The review meanders between discussions of projects that Logue was involved with and very general discussions of cities. The discussions do not mesh because the problem of scale is not addressed.
More than anyone, Sandy Ikeda has pointed out that Jane Jacobs' criticisms of planners (like Logue) is that they did not pay adequate attention to the fact that cities are beyond the design capabilities of humans. "Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos, On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order." (Jacobs, 1961). Could Hayek have said it any better?
We are indebted to clever designers for creating almost anything within reach. But their human capabilities only scale up so far. City planners (and many others, especially their architect colleagues) simply presume that their design skills can be scaled up and up. Alain Bertaud recently published Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Precisely.
Bertaud notes (p. 7). "Some urban regulations are indispensable. I only advocate periodically auditing urban regulations to eliminate the ones that are irrelevant and malignant." Yes. The folks in City Hall can do nothing about climate change which is a global commons. But they can posture and grandstand. Trouble is that this is not an innocent error. Road diets can kill people.
The review meanders between discussions of projects that Logue was involved with and very general discussions of cities. The discussions do not mesh because the problem of scale is not addressed.
More than anyone, Sandy Ikeda has pointed out that Jane Jacobs' criticisms of planners (like Logue) is that they did not pay adequate attention to the fact that cities are beyond the design capabilities of humans. "Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos, On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order." (Jacobs, 1961). Could Hayek have said it any better?
We are indebted to clever designers for creating almost anything within reach. But their human capabilities only scale up so far. City planners (and many others, especially their architect colleagues) simply presume that their design skills can be scaled up and up. Alain Bertaud recently published Order without Design: How Markets Shape Cities. Precisely.
Bertaud notes (p. 7). "Some urban regulations are indispensable. I only advocate periodically auditing urban regulations to eliminate the ones that are irrelevant and malignant." Yes. The folks in City Hall can do nothing about climate change which is a global commons. But they can posture and grandstand. Trouble is that this is not an innocent error. Road diets can kill people.
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