Blinded by technological sophistication

Yesterday, Abbas Raza mentioned urban planner James Rouse who “designed and built the [...] city of Columbia [Maryland], the largest planned community in America”. The post includes a link to a page about Columbia on the Rouse Company website. I haven’t read it, but I would be interested in reading about how well they succeeded. Most cities are the result of the interactions of its inhabitants over the years, which is why successfully planning and building a city is difficult. City planners usually can only guide the evolution of the city, and the best of intentions can disturb the balance (at least locally) of the city as an ecosystem.

On a similar note, I listened to a radio program this weekend – an interview with someone that partly talked about how, over a period of a couple of hundred years, Swedes have learnt how to effectively build houses that are well-suited to the local climate. Most notably, the houses kept warm during the long cold winters. The recent decade, or so, there’s been much talk about bad new housing – poorly built houses, that quickly develops mold problems due to leaks. One striking example is the newly built Moderna Museet (the modern museum), that closed in 2001, three years after having opened. The personnel had health problems within months after having moved in. According to their info page they are scheduled to open early next year, preliminary.

I associated this with a passage in Complexity, where Mitchell Waldrop writes about how vast buildings such as churches and cathedrals were built several hundred years ago, without being able to do strength calculations on the selected materials, for instance, which is something that is seen as vital today. Christopher Alexander has also talked about this (see my post Pattern language, team culture over at Irrational Software), also pointing to the fact that great cathedrals such as Chartres and Notre Dame, weren’t the work of a single master builder – which makes it even more fascinating.

To me it seems that along with technological sophistication, something is lost. As we gain the tools to analyze and make careful plans, we lose the sensitivity that is vital for adaption and learning to take place. In a sense, we blindfold ourselves. The skill and knowledge that allowed the creation of a Notre Dame was the result of hundreds of years of adaptation; of learning from mistakes. It might be that Columbia is a successful city, I don’t know, but if that’s the case, I’m convinced that the planners must have exercised a tremendous amount of sensitivity to the subtle dynamics of cities that have evolved over centuries.