| Introduction |
By Nikos. A.Salingaros This book addresses the needs of professional urbanists who wish to understand how and why cities are successful or not, depending on their form, components, and substructure. It marks the beginning of a revolution in urban science. My approach has been to discover those principles underlying what we observe as phenomena, and to justify them on theoretical grounds. Although a scientific approach to urbanism is being undertaken by several groups of scholars, the discipline itself is mainly driven by unproven (and demonstrably false) principles that are taken on faith. This is a call to arms for those concerned with the built environment -- mankind needs to shape and repair its cities following some proven logic, rather than dogma masquerading as rationality. A living city differs radically from what we have built in the twentieth century. Each chapter consists of one of my papers in Architecture and Urbanism, each a publication in its own right. As I am receiving numerous requests right now for a textbook of urbanism based on my research, I am very happy to offer the community an on-line printable collection of these articles, organized into an overall whole. Until I can find the time to incorporate other material into a monograph, the present collection will serve as a coherent presentation of my ideas. The need is ever so pressing, as no such treatment of the underlying principles of urban form and structure exists at the present time. Architects and urbanists whom I know and have learned from offer insights into how cities develop; I can strongly recommend Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order, and Léon Krier's Architecture: Choice or Fate. I have tried to look at cities from different perspectives, and to combine those rather distinct aspects into one broad picture. Starting with urban networks (Chapter 1), which I feel provide the foundation for a healthy urban fabric, I argue that a living city depends on an enormous number of different paths and connections. Furthermore, the evolution of an urban region from "dead" to "alive" is sudden. Turning to the way the built environment interacts with people, I try to explain why some urban spaces are used, while others are avoided (Chapter 2). An information field generated by surrounding surfaces determines the position of paths and activity nodes. The distribution of pathlengths and subelements in any living system (including a living city) follows an inverse-power scaling law -- there should be only a few components of large size, several of intermediate size, and very many of small size. This result is so important that a separate chapter is devoted to it (Chapter 3). The human mind establishes a deep connection with the environment by processing geometrical information (Chapter 4). The design on pavements thus connects human beings to surrounding structures by acting as a vehicle for conveying meaning. The mathematical qualities of meaningful environments are precisely those that manifest themselves in fractal subdivisions. Alexandrine "patterns" encapsulate information about recurring design solutions and human activities (Chapter 5). A technique for linking observed patterns together combines patterns on urban interfaces to define a permeable urban region essential to any living city. A city needs to be understood as a complex interacting system (Chapter 6). Coherence in city form comes from assembling components hierarchically, using intense local couplings together with long-range connections that reduce disorder. Coherence can only come about from the correctly interactive geometry. An elementary description (Chapter 7) summarizes how fractal structure distinguishes between human and inhuman cities. Further analysis of a living city as a system of systems looks at how different types of urban systems overlap to build up city complexity (Chapter 8). The imposition of modernist geometrical typologies on the world's cities caused damage to much more than just the urban fabric. Those typologies are intentionally destructive, because they aimed to replace the traditional urban fabric altogether. Moreover, they have been further identified by the rest of the world as an aggression on traditional cultures -- leading to a flaring-up of anti-western sentiment with global repercussions (Chapter 9). Having outlined the complexity of urban systems, we need to know how to build them. Christopher Alexander uses "patterns" to aid in urban design (Chapter 10). This method allows inhabitants of a particular neighborhood to participate in planning their own environment. Contemporary cities lack the two mathematical qualities characteristic of all living structure -- connectivity, and fractal subdivisions. It is essential to distinguish between the two, since techniques required to reconnect the urban fabric are different from those that make it more fractal (Chapter 11). Cities are systems of informational architecture (Chapter 12), where information exchange includes visual input from the environment, personal contact, telecommunications, as well as the movement of people. We will appreciate the connective structure of living cities -- and the suggestions of all my urban papers -- only when we realize what a city actually does. I have been privileged to work with Christopher Alexander over the last twenty years, learning architecture and urbanism from someone who genuinely understands them. At first, I was helping as a scientific sounding-board while Alexander was writing his book The Nature of Order, then I was gradually seduced by the profound connections between human creations on all scales and the fundamental structure of the universe that Alexander showed me. The world needs to understand how matter, artworks, buildings, and cities are put together; not only so as to create new ones, but especially to stop destroying its accumulated treasures by imposing sterile images spread by the media. In communicating my vision of the architecture and urbanism of the twenty-first century to those who are in the best position to implement it, I find a serious obstacle. Contemporary architectural and urban thought is very narrowly focused on images, archetypal forms, intellectual games at the cost of user accommodation, and an irrational insistence on "high-tech" materials. These are all superficial concepts. The training of architects and urbanists does not include learning any analytical methods, although this was never so until later in the twentieth century. That is the reason why architects and urbanists today have such a hard time conceptualizing structures in terms of their underlying organizational principles. At present, trying to discuss architectural and urban laws with architects inevitably leads to incomprehension and controversy. (The important exception is the Neo-traditionalists and New Urbanists, whose ideas and projects are rapidly gaining respect). Architecture and urbanism are still in a prescientific stage. Architectural and urban "theories" are a matter of personal preference, and in Orwellian fashion, the one with the strongest political support suppresses all the others. But this is totalitarian -- the laws of form and organization are universal, and cannot be made up arbitrarily. They permit an infinite variety of different structures that establish a human connection, though there is also a larger infinity of structures that thwart it. These ideas resonate with ordinary people's assessment of what's good and bad in the built environment. Every sensitive human being feels that something is wrong with twentieth-century cities. Unfortunately, the power to make choices is still entangled with vested interests and the proximity to legislators. Those are influenced by famous architects who are pushing their own agenda. We need to contrast two incompatible worldviews. The one underlying modernism and its postmodernist and deconstructivist offspring ignores human beings, and creates an alien built world. Its principles are essentially anti-life; they work to replace nature by a sterile concrete and asphalt hell. (This is not due entirely to the materials, but is a principal effect of the geometry, since alien forms can also be created using traditional materials). The opposite movement, in which human values and feelings are paramount, is consistent with our newly-found interest in the natural environment. This new movement towards a more humane built environment is going to establish a bond with people who feel marginalized and displaced by modernist architecture and urbanism. We cannot pretend (as do academic architects today) that architecture has no scientific basis -- it has. Most architects just don't know it. Nor can we ignore the effects of architecture on human beings. Past societies that embraced antiscientific principles were committing an act of self-destruction. Architects do not have the power to alter the environment -- their clients do, from individuals, to corporations, to governments. Unfortunately, business leaders and politicians are seduced by flashy images and high-sounding statements from popular architectural gurus. The media are in large part responsible for propping these people up. The world has been influenced by propaganda to believe that what is currently fashionable represents modernity and the "Spirit of the Age". Is contemporary architecture a mirror of our rapidly deteriorating social values, or is it rather the other way around? Scientific results from the last decade have immediate implications for architecture, and they support the vision of a humane built environment proposed by Christopher Alexander, Léon Krier, Prince Charles, and many others. We are now beginning to understand how both organic and inanimate matter organizes itself into higher-level complex wholes. Results from physics, complexity theory, hierarchy theory, systems analysis, computer science, artificial intelligence, and fractals are converging to give a new, profoundly intricate picture of the universe. This picture is the opposite of what we see in most of twentieth-century architecture and urbanism. Natural structures have a remarkable parallel in the way the great historical buildings and cities put materials together to generate a connected, coherent whole. The misuse of science by modernist and postmodernist architects needs to be clarified. One reads in architecture textbooks how modernism is based on logic and the scientific method, but that is a nasty and deliberate falsehood. In fact, modernism eschews scientific inquiry, and imposes ideas from above -- it is an arbitrary, totalitarian style based on images and intolerant personal opinions. The founders of modernism had only a very sketchy grasp of nineteenth century scientific ideas, which they misused to prop up their theories. They did not even understand the science of that time -- relativity and quantum mechanics -- although they and their propagandists imagined and exploited nonexistent connections to relativity theory. Modernism's logical foundations can be traced instead to certain pseudoscientific concepts that were popular around the turn of the century with politicians of both the extreme right and the extreme left. These provided the specious logic that "proves" the superiority of pure forms over more complex ones with a hierarchical structure; that demands the segregation of interdependent components and functions; and that justifies the destruction of what is not deemed to be pure enough. The continuing misuse of the epithet "rationalist" for this kind of architecture -- which is totally irrational -- is tremendously misleading. Those ideas disdain humanity and human complexity. They call for the elimination of complex elements of society, as justified by a narrow, simplistic logic, and were later to give birth to the horrors of the Second World War. Postmodernism opposes modernism without correcting its faults. The postmodernist vocabulary of images is not joined to any conception of structural coherence. Postmodernism is a stylistic play -- a superficial juggling act -- carried out in a deliberately perverse manner so as to avoid generating organized complexity. Going even further, deconstructivist architects actively seek to create disorganized complexity, or chaos, and think that this is scientifically fashionable. They misunderstand the goal of Chaos theory, which is to discover ordered patterns in apparently chaotic situations. It is known that the human mind fails to grasp disorganized complexity, so that such constructions generate anxiety and a strongly negative physiological response. Architecture and urbanism are an extension of the human mind to the hierarchical ordering of artificial structures. For several millennia, mankind has generated organized complexity to a degree proportional to its level of intellectual development. The twentieth century has denied this process, and we have started to reverse it. Just as we shape our environment, however, our environment shapes us. A society that coexists with both chaos and oversimplified alien forms loses its ability to establish connections; to organize disorder into understandable patterns; and to interpret complex phenomena by their essentials -- in short, its ability to reason. Therefore, one might argue that current architectural and urban fashions represent an intellectual retrograde in the evolution of the human species. Architecture is actually not as important in its total impact as Urbanism. By removing urban complexity, the simplistic modernist ideology has destroyed our cities. That is analogous to trying to simplify an organism by removing pieces of its body that you don't understand -- you will be left only with its skeleton. We can somehow survive in ugly buildings, but our life has been totally changed by the shape of new cities, and for the worse. Society is affected by how people can interact on a daily basis, and that depends on the networks, roads, and city structure. The idea of creativity in modernist architecture and urbanism is a myth. There is no freedom; every design and building is judged by how closely it follows certain rigid prototypes established in the 1920s. If it doesn't do so, it is attacked by the profession, and ridiculed in the media. There exist regions of the world today, which have older, coherent buildings and urban spaces. These include buildings as well as paths, pieces of walls, and architectural ornament that we connect to. They are in danger of becoming lost, because people don't realize their value to our civilization. People and governments with newly-found wealth want to replace their heritage, including anything that looks old, because it reminds them of the past. This dangerous practice is entirely analogous to animal species becoming extinct because the last representatives are killed off. We cannot reconstruct a Dodo from a photograph; neither can we build living cities from photographs. The urban experience is a physical one, not a visual one. Most of us don't have any idea of what it feels like to be in a great urban space. As soon as those spaces are gone, we will have lost the last examples. |
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