“New Urbanists think Charleston is a pattern book, but really it is what happens when the descendants of British colonials don’t have air conditioning. Charleston is a lesson in emergence, not DPZ urban design.”

It is very difficult to engage politicians without The Pretty Pictures. You know what I mean–the highly idealized and stylized renderings of the project embellished with lots of theoretical peripatetic people, with lots of disposable time and income milling about on a Chamber-of-Commerce beautiful day. It doesn’t matter that a prospective tenant won’t be able to stay in the black. You can even say something like “you and I both know the final result is not going to look like The Pretty Pictures.” They may even acknowledge this. But still they want the Pretty Pictures. Because the Pretty Pictures fulfill the human desire for clairvoyance.

“New Urbanists think Charleston is a pattern book, but really it is what happens when the descendants of British colonials don’t have air conditioning. Charleston is a lesson in emergence, not DPZ urban design.”

It is very difficult to engage politicians without The Pretty Pictures. You know what I mean–the highly idealized and stylized renderings of the project embellished with lots of theoretical peripatetic people, with lots of disposable time and income milling about on a Chamber-of-Commerce beautiful day. It doesn’t matter that a prospective tenant won’t be able to stay in the black. You can even say something like “you and I both know the final result is not going to look like The Pretty Pictures.” They may even acknowledge this. But still they want the Pretty Pictures. Because the Pretty Pictures fulfill the human desire for clairvoyance.

The problem with that is that the process of urbanization employed before the 20th century was of course a spontaneous order, in other words nobody really understood how it worked. It had spontaneously come into existence thanks to the fact that on open land you could go from anywhere to anywhere, and from there all that was needed to keep it working was a few constraints on development. But with a more advanced transportation system like what is required for cars that spontaneous growth process is no longer workable, and so urbanization had to be conducted with whatever processes science most understood. Those turned out to be greatly inferior to the complexity of a spontaneous city.

The problem with that is that the process of urbanization employed before the 20th century was of course a spontaneous order, in other words nobody really understood how it worked. It had spontaneously come into existence thanks to the fact that on open land you could go from anywhere to anywhere, and from there all that was needed to keep it working was a few constraints on development. But with a more advanced transportation system like what is required for cars that spontaneous growth process is no longer workable, and so urbanization had to be conducted with whatever processes science most understood. Those turned out to be greatly inferior to the complexity of a spontaneous city.