Geoffrey West, Physicist, Solves the City!

The New York Times Magazine ran an article in the most recent issue titled, "A Physicist Solves the City." Apart from the pretension of, you know, solving a city, I have one other thing to say:

SCOOP there it is!

The article draws its topic from the report published in Nature magazine, brought to my attention by dear reader and resident Scientific Correspondent, KH. I covered it about two months ago with the slightly less ambitious title of "A Unified Theory of Urban Living."

In any case, the findings are excellent, and though the air of conscious superiority that suffuses Mr. West is a bit noxious, I doff my hat to him. Just like I do to the other self-consciously superior Mr. West.

The quick summary is that Mr. West and his collegue, Luis Bettencourt lay good claim to have discovered the urban planning equivalent of Kepler's Laws of Planetary Motion. The notion is that without knowledge of what rules govern a system, efforts to understand, assess, and make improvement to that system are inevitably hindered by the lack of a proper yardstick.

“What we found are the constants that describe every city,” [West] says. “I can take these laws and make precise predictions about the number of violent crimes and the surface area of roads in a city in Japan with 200,000 people. I don’t know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.” After a pause, as if reflecting on his hyperbole, West adds: “Look, we all know that every city is unique. That’s all we talk about when we talk about cities, those things that make New York different from L.A., or Tokyo different from Albuquerque. But focusing on those differences misses the point. Sure, there are differences, but different from what? We’ve found the what.”

"The what" has two key pieces: 1) as cities double in size, their infrastructure footprint only increases by 85%, on average. 2) As cities increase in size, per capita socioeconomic quantities such as wages, GDP, number of patents produced and number of educational and research institutions all increase by approximately 15% more than the expected linear growth. Congestion and crime do, too.

West treats point 2 as a statistical proof of Jane Jacobs' theory that cities should be built to generate diversity by building densely and facilitating easy pedestrian movement and interaction:

“One of my favorite compliments is when people come up to me and say, ‘You have done what Jane Jacobs would have done, if only she could do mathematics,’ ” West says. “What the data clearly shows, and what she was clever enough to anticipate, is that when people come together, they become much more productive.”

Geoffrey and Kanye should get in touch--two Mr. Wests re-writing the possibilities of their respective fields. And don't they know it.

Urban Planning and Safety

First, Straight Outta the Suburbs. In my digi-travels, I've read many an urban planning blog, but ones focusing on the less-sexy hinterlands are harder to come by. Quality stuff.

SOtS posted an interesting nugget from the LAPD's Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design pamphlet: the increased "natural surveillance" and eyes-on-the-street that mixed-use developments generate are in the interest of public safety. SOtS post here, LAPD pamphlet here. (pdf)

I've written here and here about why the need for better suburbs is not merely a matter of taste, and this pamphlet add another dimension: safety. Even though the LAPD pdf could use a little graphic design assistance, it's got some pointed pointers:

• Provide clear border definition of controlled space (e.g., fences, hedges, paving patterns and low walls). Avoid unassigned space. As much as possible, all space should become the clear responsibility of someone.

By way of example, most mid-century housing projects fail this test, though on a scale vastly more humongous than anything the LAPD pamphlet had in mind. Their aesthetically-driven embrace of unassigned space was a significant part of their failure, and though such projects are unlikely to be repeated (at least on that scale), it's worth reminding ourselves of the essential lessons they provide about the dialog between safety, design, and urban connectivity.

• Place activities in locations to overcome vulnerability of these activities with natural surveillance and access control of the safe area. For instance, common toilet facilities and laundry rooms should not be located in a remote corner of the site or at the end of a long nameless hallway. Locate these facilities (unsafe) adjacent to the entry or location where there is normally high foot traffic (safe).

This is perhaps more of an architectural detail, one I hadn't considered. Pomona alums, I'm thinking of the Oldenborg laundry rooms right now. Those gave me the creepers in a way that Mudd-Blaisdel's never did.

Though these warnings are useful for planners of suburban spaces (all spaces, really), I think their most urgent applications are found where someone tried to insert suburban/garden city style planning (lots of ambiguous space) into high density, high poverty urban settings. Worst mix.

Jacobs Distillation

Having finished Death and Life of Great American Cities, I have now, just now, located a convenient summation. Some chap has typed up a bunch of JJ notable quotables. Thanks, hivemind!

Here's the real clincher:

The generators of diversity

"To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common. 

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition; including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentrations ... of people who are there because of residence.

The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make. In combination, these conditions create effective economic pools of use" (151).

Downtown Danville has points 1, 2, and 3, and notably, is a major asset to the town region--a justifiable magnet for folks in the suburbs radiating around it who get bored by all the dullness. Apart from Walnut Creek, it is probably the only town center on the 680 corridor built for pedestrians. Maybe parts of Pleasanton and Livermore would take offense at that. Though I cannot speak for its brethren, I know Dt Danville was laid out before the car. Hence, the short blocks and sidewalk building frontages.

Pretty much everything else around it is chain retail behind acres of parking. Progress!