Converging Parallel Geographies: An Analogy for Placemaking

I mentioned on the Urbanology podcast the two parallel geographies of the internet and the actual physical landscape of cities. I talked about how the internet would actually advance urbanism and clustering because of web 2.0's evolution as an agent of self-organization. We're still people, we still have human needs. We'll never be the automatons interacting only by computers. Unless of course, you think it's possible to mate and reproduce via these here interwebs.

Therefore, we're amending our creation of the internet to further align and enhance our other great human invention, cities. The two parallel geographies are converging, enmeshing. Unlike what Joel Kotkin thinks, that the internet will enable all of us to live in far flung suburban locales, that they're diverging. I also think Kotkin's university and academic credentials are essentially made-up and underwritten by dubious economic forces, but that's another story.

Here are two maps:

The internet...

And the syntactical integration map of London...

They're quite predictably similar when accounting for the variations in physical geographic features. The internet has no such problems. They both measure and map the connections between people, places, and things.

This is how IT types are more inherently and intuitively in tune with how cities function (or dysfunction). It is about direct connections of many interconnecting things. However, in the physical geography, proximity still and will always matter. Until we learn to teleport. And likely even then.

What's apparent in both is that there are two hierarchical gradients at work (both created through processes of natural self-organization - ie people empowered to meet their own wants and needs). You have the meta-gradient which covers the entire organism, the city (which vary in scale in competition with other cities). There is less overall value the further away you are from everything.

Within that there is an internal hierarchy of places or hubs where google is the equivalent to the internet as Times Square to New York.

But please, dopey students and deluded professors, continue to tell me that Times Square is what it is because of LED boards. If that was the case Victory in Dallas would be jumping.

The reason it isn't is because Dallas gets the formula backwards. It should go like this:

In terms of self-organized living systems:

Purpose --- > Interconnections ---- > Elements

Similarly, with the internet & cities that same formula could be described thusly:

Emotion (need & want) --- > Integration --- > Accommodation (then decoration)

This is why 99% of designer types are utterly clueless and/or arrogantly deluded. And it's not entirely their fault. They're people. We are drawn to the immediate, the tangible. The things we touch and see, ie the Elements. As the late Donella Meadows wrote in Thinking in Systems, Elements are the least consequential.

Trying to change an entire city by adding a "name-brand" building is like trying to build a snowflake by hand.

We see websites but we don't see the internet. We see Morphosis buildings and Calatrava Bridges, but we don't see the bonds between people. We do see the infrastructure, but the dysfunctional city is the one where that invisible city doesn't align to the physical. Whatever purpose underlies the decisions made here, seems to be first and foremost moving the car. All else be damned. Such as empowering people to meet their needs without owning said car.

Rome of the centrally planned empire is bent and broken over 2000 years to mold better to human need:

The people who attempt "revitalization" via the supplication of "stuff" are under the impression that their design (or the design of their personal cult superhero (cult of personality is all-powerful in the land of the ideological)) is so great and desirable that their design will bend the world to it. This only works on a micro-scale. They attempt to provide accommodation which will then bring about integration (ie people coming to that place) and that is why most of these attempts (supply-side urbanism) fail miserably. Or at least, the return on investment is far greater than expectations or promise. And usually lower than the amount of investment. Why?

The reason is that integration, those interconnections of networks, connects people. It empowers them to meet their needs and wants. It is the release valve of demand. When you integrate networks, the return on invesment is exponential, provided it is sustainable/maintainable.

BILBAO EFFECT

The best example of this is Bilbao.

People can see Gehry's building. They can point to it. They can touch it. But it was the least influential in Bilbao's recent renaissance than anything else substantial that the city undertook. First, they repurposed. A coal/shipping town repurposed as globalization moved industrial jobs elsewhere. They focused on empowering the arts (they had a lot of people out of work, bored, and tinkering).

Because the city is an archipelago of sub-hierarchies, loosely connected, they needed to reintegrate their city's networks. They built an entirely new subway system. They expanded their port as well as their airport. They integrated these various local and global infrastructures of interconnection. All of this began 10 years before the Guggenheim, which was a mere cherry on top.

NETWORK ANALOGY

Because the same processes are at work between the internet and cities (connecting people to meet needs and wants. The root force is human emotion (need & want) for social & economic exchange (mostly), I often draw the analogy between Place and your Computer. We wish to connect to people, places, and things. Both physically and digitally. To get a computer/place to work first you have to plug it in, essentially empower it:

To multiply its value, it has to then be interconnected at larger scales...networked.

Locally, regionally, and ultimately...globally:

Here's the rub...when those connections of local, regional, and global begin to interrupt integration (roads/wires) they limit the overall value and diminish the experience. Imagine ever bigger roads and trunk cables connecting every place on the planet. Oh wait.

Value = sum of integration (local + global)

However, the infrastructure of global integration often subtracts from local integration. Imagine trunk cables plugged into every house. Similarly, highway infrastructure and airports and railroads interrupt local connectivity and therefore diminish value. This is why these things should be mitigated, meeting local neighborhood fabric tangentially.

And therefore we go wireless to minimize the overall infrastructure of our interconnections.

However, there will always be value in the local street. Because that's where the local physical interface occurs (building face, entries/retina screen), and in between, place happens:

Bringing a Knife to a Food Fight

You may recall I created this graphic comparing lively cities to empty cities where lively ones are built on a foundation of walkability:

This of course rests on our understanding that it is indeed true. And that walkability does in fact make for a better city. I can wax on about why this is so theoretically (freedom of transportation choice, efficiency of connections between and amongst goods, services, labor, talent, etc., desirability of place, etc.), but all that really matters is your opinion. Similarly, whenever I ask groups or crowds I've spoken to, I often ask, "what is your favorite city in the world?" The answers have always fallen within a very narrow range (Vancouver, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Portland, New York, San Francisco, DC., etc.).

These answers come from Sun Belt residents and it is a pretty fair assumption that these places are more walkable than the Sun Belt. In Peter Bosselmann's book Urban Transformation, he highlights all of the walkable neighborhood centers in San Francisco. 66 of them, walkable (within 5 minutes) to 50%(!) of the population of the city. Zounds! I've heard many Dallasites lament what has become of certain streets like Greenville Avenue, which once was home to a far more complex ecology of shops and business types beyond: bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, repeat.

The next question becomes, how do we get from city B (above, empty) to City A (above, lively)?

Ideologues like Joel Kotkin, whose opinion has been skewed by who knows what but likely the common Baby Boomer notion that cars = freedom and James Dean didn't actually die in a car accident, say there is no going back. Going back would NOT be progress. I'm of the opinion that 1) the next generation rejects this notion, and 2) progress also means corrections of mistakes, not wandering down the same intellectual cul-de-sac because we refuse to ask for directions. Kotkin does seem like that kinda guy, no?

Unfortunately for Kotkin, actual intellectuals who operate in the world of objective data have begun putting together various metrics and measures that show why cities are so important, and more critically for this topic, the internet is not an agent of sprawl like Kotkin thinks it is.

I've quoted these two often, but both economist Ed Glaeser and physicist Geoffrey West are arguing that density is necessary for innovation. Great. Now how do we get to density? Kotkin says, the internet allows clustering online. There is no need to cluster physically. Once again, real studies and real world prove otherwise.

First, Glaeser cites in a study in his recent book from the University of Michigan (ick, but in this case I'll hold my sports tribalist nose) where groups that cooperated in person faired far better than those who collaborated online. In fact, the online groups nearly all fell apart amongst finger-pointing, blame, etc. It sort of reminds of two things: 1) the notion posited in Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic that the inability to make eye contact between two drivers dehumanizes the interaction, makes it impersonal, and the "other" becomes the enemy. And 2) well...the chaos of online anonymity.

The other example is real world places like DUMBO that show that creative types not only like being near each other, but it makes collaboration amongst businesses easier, more efficient, and simply...better.

Web 2.0 has emerged, not as a means of spreading us apart, as Kotkin wishes, but as a methods of re-clustering. We tweet, we facebook, we geo-tag places. We text others our locations. We self-organize online so that we can self-organize in person. The internet hasn't dehumanized us, but reminded us of our humanity. It reconnected all of those missing links and interconnectivity that are lost living at the end of a cul-de-sac. We are becoming more gridded online and in person.

So....


(ideally you should be able to click to embiggen)

The emergence of the web coinciding with increased costs of driving (all of the above: gas, roads, cars, etc.), means we won't be living further away from everything and all of our needs are handled online like Kotkin suggests.

Why in the world would the internet replace the easiest and (often) the most enjoyable trips, those that are the shortest, and manageable by foot? It makes zero sense, particularly from an economic standpoint.

Instead, doesn't it make more sense that the internet, through near free transfer of electrons, allows us to replace the more DISTANT, expensive trips. In the most extreme sense, thanks to Google Earth, I can travel anywhere in the world and study any city that I want.

More likely, the internet replaces the majority of our long distant/regional trips, but of course, likely not all. For example, if I want to collaborate with my friend Kevin of FortWorthology on something. We'd likely do the majority of work online. But once a month or so, we would still likely get together, in person, for a beer (which we have done - always by train, the TRE between Dallas and Fort Worth).

The internet, and ever increasingly, our smart phones are the car of the new generation. It allows us to remain connected to friends, work, and our entire city in the way a car never could. And it, as well as its infrastructure, is far cheaper.

The question becomes, do we still want to spend billions on replacing highways? Or just work on getting everybody connected to the digital highways?