The cities everyone wants to live in would be clean and safe, possess efficient public services, support a dynamic economy, provide cultural stimulation, and help heal society's divisions of race, class, and ethnicity. These are not the cities we live in. This is so in part because the city is not its own master; cities can fail on all these counts due to national government policy or to social ills and economic forces beyond local control. Still, something has gone wrong, radically wrong, in our conception of what a city itself should be.
It's fair to say that most of my professional colleagues share at least the fear that the art of designing cities declined drastically in the course of the 20th century. The vernacular environments of earlier times have proved more flexible, sustainable, and stimulating than those designed more recently - which is a paradox. Today's planner has an arsenal of technological tools, from lighting and heating to structural support to materials for buildings and public spaces, which urbanists even a hundred years ago could not begin to imagine. We have many more tools than in the past, but these resources we don't use very creatively.
This is a dilemma which has vexed and defeated me throughout my scholarly and practical career. I've wanted to learn from the past but not succumb to nostalgia; looking forward has proved difficult for me, as for others; individual, innovative projects today prove difficult to bed into the fabric of cities, and incorporate into the very idea of what a city should be. I've come to think that the way forward lies in urbanists stepping out of our professional confines, drawing on other disciplines, no matter how amateurishly.
In this essay I try to do so by drawing a contrast between two kinds of systems, one closed, the other open. By a closed system I mean a system in harmonious equilibrium, by an open system I mean a system in unstable evolution. My argument is that the closed system has paralysed urbanism, while the open system might free it.
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