In the most recent of its annual “Year in Ideas” issues, the New York Times Magazine devoted a lengthy feature article to the topic of how cities function and how we understand them. Entitled “A Physicist Solves the City” the article purports that the physicist Geoffrey West has, in the few short years he has been studying urbanism, solved the “problem” that is the city. On the Times website the article was listed as the most read magazine article for some weeks, and it appears to be well-disseminated among popular media outlets and especially on science and technology websites. Despite proposing to have radically reinvented the field in which architects and urbanists work, the article appears to have garnered little attention among commentators and blogs from within architecture and urbanism. Perhaps the article’s lack of substance explains professionals’ reluctance to engage with the implications of West’s work. Nonetheless, it is crucial for those of us interested in the serious study of urbanism to look closely at the article, if only because many of the assumptions it advances strike me as undermining an understanding of cities as complex and important things.

Perhaps never before has the search for a totalizing “urban science” been more inappropriate.Throughout the article, author Jonah Lehrer continually refers to “the city” (though never a specific one) and how it is a “problem.” This characterization seems symptomatic of a larger trend occurring when popular media sets its gaze on our cities and our collective “urban future.” I’m talking about articles that lead off with the statistic, “In 2008, for the first time ever, more people live in cities than not” and then go on to presume that “thus, the earth’s collective urban future has now arrived.” Articles of this sort tend to invoke the terms “cities” and “urban” in pre-packaged, discrete and generic terms on which we are all supposed to agree. Such reductive definitions belie a much more complex reality of “urban” places that are neither discrete, uniform, nor comparable by the same metrics. Further, such an approach should be read as dangerous to all of us who see cities as phenomena formed at the collision of dynamic economic, historical, social, political and ecological forces.

Instead of recognizing cities as the products of these complex forces, the object of West’s study is purposefully contextless and unspecified. Describing how he applies his scientific principles to a specific city he’s studying, he says, “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.” West goes on to qualify this assertion by saying that, essentially, the differences between cities that we so often discuss are merely superficial, material ones, related to how a city functions rather than to each city’s unique history.

After stripping the city of its context and all of the attendant complexities in which social scientists deal, West is finally able to realize an “urban science” that has until now been elusive. In his scenario, there has been no serious study of the city, necessitating his invention of the field of urban science akin to how Kepler advanced physics in the 17th century with his theory of planetary motion. As C. Emory Burton puts it in his letter to the Times, “West could hardly invent it [urban science], because social science — particularly the field of urban sociology — has been working on this for many decades.” And urban sociology is by no means alone: urban anthropology, economics, geography and number of other disciplines in the social sciences have investigated cities, not to mention the interdisciplinary field of urban studies. The failure of one discipline to account totally for the study of the city is not a failure of methodology, but rather the recognition of the dynamism of cities and the different ways in which they can be read according to our different experiences of, and interests in, them.

This leads to the broader problem facing those interested in cities who recognize that “urban science” cannot totally explain the city and, more generally, those who believe that social relations cannot be observed through a microscope. Surely statistical analysis and demography are important aspects in understanding urban areas, and aspects about which the reductive powers of the “hard sciences” have much to teach. But to listen to West struggle with the problem of whether his prototypical amorphous city is itself an organism or not is painful. Cities are amalgamations of forces natural as well as man-made and cannot be viewed objectively from a disembodied viewpoint; cities cannot be objectively observed any more than human consciousness can. They are not organisms external to us but rather dynamic and ephemeral assemblages of which we are a part.

If some of us cringe when hearing West recount that, “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,’” it is because, while making foundational contributions to the field of urban economics, we are most indebted to Jacobs for the recognition that much of the study of the city is about understanding perspective, and the realization that our experience of the city is inextricable from our subjectivities. Her criticism of modernist planning retains relevance today for how it elevated the power of individual observation of the city over that of objectivist viewpoints of the city. An imminent task before those of us interested in studying cities is to read the broader forces at work on the city through the lens of our individual experiences of the world.

In interpreting our “urban future,” the territory has never been more ambiguous and uncharted than it is now, as cities find themselves at the collision points of global shifts in capital, governance, demographics, climate change as well as political and cultural identity, and each in different ways. Perhaps never before has the search for a totalizing “urban science” been more inappropriate. Perhaps never before has asserting the importance of human experience and embodiment in studying the city been more important. The stakes are no less crucial than making our cities more sustainable, but also debating what kind of cities we want to live in, and making those visions into reality.

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Eric Peterson sometimes writes things and sometimes designs things. He is a former project associate of Urban Omnibus and lives in Brooklyn.

Image: Coruscant at night. Rendering by Yannick Dussealt for LucasFilm LTD’s Star Wars Episode III Revenge of the Sith

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Taco Bell sign in Georgia

A few days ago I wandered through a gigantic Barnes & Noble in a Baltimore mega-mall. Overwhelmed by the acreage and options, I drifted down the aisles: Literature. Astrology. Manga. Cooking. Investing. When I saw a section labeled ‘Urban Fiction’, I got excited and rushed toward it, imagining a bookshelf bursting with paranoid novels by JG Ballard, Don Delillo, Luc Sante, and Georges Perec. Instead, the shelves were lined with pulp paperbacks: Ride or Die Chick 2, Thug Lovin’ and The Dopeman’s Wife. It was a sharp reminder that the word ‘urban’ is remarkably elastic.

Urban. Is it a positive or a negative word to you? Does it conjure images of a bustling business center or grim housing projects? Does it describe a physical environment or does it suggest a lifestyle?

I often wonder how growing up in a Detroit suburb defined — and distorted — my perception of the city. Although we lived only seven miles north of Detroit, my parents rarely went downtown in the 1980s. I remember the ker-chunk of the doors locking whenever we crossed Eight Mile Road. “It’s safer,” my dad said. And so I began to conjure elaborate and bloody scenarios of masked robbers ripping open the doors of our Pontiac and dragging us onto the pavement. This was my introduction to the city.

In high school, I snuck into Detroit every chance I got. Sometimes I went to late-night parties in clubs and factories. More often, I simply drove around aimlessly and looked at things (much like I do these days, now that I think about it). The city was forbidden and therefore fascinating. After a few successful trips downtown, my childhood fear of the city was replaced by fetishistic teenage awe: the city was exciting, aspirational, and (to deploy another tricky word) underground. Although my sense of all things ‘urban’ became positive, it remained warped and unrealistic until I actually lived in a city. I wonder how this experience compares to someone raised in New York, Chicago or San Francisco. Imagine being a kid with a MetroCard, a lot of mobility, and no fear.

Urban decay. Urban radio. Urban legend. Urban slang. Urban renewal. Urban chic. ‘Urban’ is a screwy word, loaded with axe-grinding and assumptions. We bring our personal baggage to it. Same with ’suburbia’, ‘rural’ and ’sprawl’. As Robert Bruegmann writes, these terms aren’t so much “an objective reality as a cultural concept”. Writing about the repopulation of the Lower East Side in Sprawl: A Compact History, Bruegmann argues:

Gentrification at the center and sprawl at the edge have been flipsides of the same coin. In a typically paradoxical situation, no matter how much the new, more affluent residents profess to like the ‘gritty’ urban character of the place, so different in their minds from the subdivisions of the far suburbs, what makes the neighborhood attractive today are less the things that are actually traditionally urban but those that are not. The most important of these are sharply lower population densities, fewer poor residents, less manufacturing activity, and the things that the Lower East Side finally shares with the suburbs: reliable plumbing, supermarkets with good produce, and a substantial cohort of middle-class residents.

It’s a provocative comparison, although Bruegmann’s confusion of ’traditionally urban’ with ‘poor’ is a red flag. Bruegmann downplays the reasons people enjoy living in the Lower East Side (and he seems primed for a cage match with James Howard Kunstler). Plumbing and produce aside, I believe people move to cities for three obvious reasons:

1. To be freed from the demands of the car
2. To enjoy dignified building stock.
3. To be close to other people (and hence have more options for work, food, friends, etc.)

The last item is the most important. As William H. Whyte observed in his series of groundbreaking films from 1979 called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, “The number one activity is people looking at other people.”

Watch the entire series here. It may seem a little old-timey at first, but stick with it. After five minutes, Whyte’s narration hits a stride that becomes oddly soothing and addictive. Many thanks to Candy Chang and Jan Chipchase for turning me on to Whyte.

Whyte’s work endures because he connects distinct urban behaviors to the shape of our buildings, plazas, and sidewalks. He connects social behaviors to physical space and vice versa. There is no agenda with Whyte. There is no baggage if you stay curious.

This post originally appeared on KinoSport, the notebook of James A. Reeves. Reeves is a writer, educator and designer. He is currently working on a book about America called ‘The Awful Making of an Optimist.’ He lives in Greenpoint.

The views expressed here are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.