Urban Design Is a Plastic Manifestation of an Underlying Worldview
By Ramon Gras (Co-Founder at Aretian) and Jeremy Burke (Co-Founder at Aretian)
The perceived scaffolding of urban, architectural, and engineering design that makes up the built environment of urban settlements is a plastic, aesthetic, and functional manifestation of the underlying worldview of every society. This is the core premise behind ‘City Science: Performance Follows Form’ (Actar Publishers, 2023), the new publication by the Aretian team out of Harvard university (authors and contributors Ramon Gras, Jeremy Burke, Fernando Yu, Gauthier de la Ville de Baugé, Céleste Richard), a book that presents a theoretical framework and an AI-based analytical approach to raise the quality of urban diagnostics, city and architecture design, and economic development, whilst presenting 100 global city profiles through the lens of this new method.
On the one hand, the morphological composition (city form) of an urban space reveals the Weltanschauung, values, and sense of beauty of a given society. The architectural forms, structural shapes, selected materials, street layouts, and activity programming constitute an ever-evolving dynamic system that can be analyzed through the lens of complex systems and network theory principles. The urban phenomena is the result of the dynamic relationship between city dwellers and the built environment they shape around them to inhabit. We can classify the creative class of a given society between artists and artisans. Artists combine the objective techniques and scientific approaches required to incept a work of art with the creative and subjective perception and sensitivity embedded in their design, by which they metaphorically communicate a sense of purpose, relationships, and values. In other words, artists create and advance culture, whereas artisans diffuse, propagate and convey an existing, inherited culture. In the realm of urban design, the resulting artifact is an always dynamic complex system where citizens interact, collaborate, and communicate with one another to solve the complex problems facing society.
On the other hand, the development of a network theory-based City Science analytical methodology enables us to evaluate the relationship between city form and space programming and the quality of life of citizens in an evidence-based, data-driven manner. By creating a series of measurable, benchmarkable, universal key performance metrics describing the urban design efficiency and sustainability, the accessibility to urban services and amenities from any given point of a city, and the economic dynamism enabling prosperity, we can ascertain the empirical relationships and point in the direction of potential underlying causal mechanisms. Such an approach permits not only an ontological classification of different urban development patterns based on their shared features and idiosyncratic characteristics, but also the development of predictive power, making it possible to reduce uncertainty and increase the quality of urban design, space programming, and economic development decision-making processes.
The analysis of the structural, causal relationships between city form and urban performance reveals to what extent and how a given urban design model contributes to or hinders the living opportunities, talents, and quality of life of citizens. The City Science methodology presented in this book is grounded on network theory and complex systems modeling, and it allows for disentangling the complex and subtle, delicate yet structural and causal relationship between the quality of a given urban space and the subjective experiences of people living within it.
The processes by which we can model any given city in terms of its networks of urban infrastructure design, industries, and talent can equip urban leaders with thorough analytical tools to inform accurate and insightful territorial diagnostics. They can also hint at both the types of best practices that, once tailored for a specific context and urban setting, can inform quality urban design solutions and the malpractice decisions that should proactively be avoided. The establishment of a series of analogies between archetypal network growth patterns and urban design strategies illuminates not only the morphological properties and dynamics inherent to each type of development, but also the aesthetic personality and subjective impact on the individual and social psyche. The Small World City, the Radial City, the Linear City, the Reticular City, the Organic City, the Atomized City, the Random City, the Garden City, the Monumental City, and the Fractal City tend to present a myriad of topological, morphological facets, which crystallize in their fractality, entropy, and overall aesthetics.
Great masters of thought such as Kant, Schopenhauer, Heleno Saña, and Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, already suggested the intimate yet subtle and nontrivial relationship between aesthetics and ethics. Kant’s Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen deliciously unravels the subtle differences between beauty and sublimity and traces the delicate connection between the intrinsic nature of a person, collective, or space and the aesthetic manifestation it projects outwards. For its part, Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung doubles down on Kant’s intuition and asserts that behind any aesthetic projection there is an underlying worldview grounded on certain ethical principles, even if assumed as a matter of fact. Heleno Saña enriched that hypothesis by hinting in the direction of suggesting that every person exudes a particular vibe or aura, which, more often than not, vocalizes in a visual manner his or her personality and values. Finally, we can cite the Comte de Buffon, postulating in his celebrated proposition that “Le style c’est l’homme même”. Similar conclusions can be drawn when we observe the intimate, yet often shared, subjective impression that a façace, a solemn column structure, a beautiful window, a thriving street, or a beautifully designed city projects onto the people who visit a particular site.
Moreover, the ontological classification of city development patterns and the ability to measure their impact on the quality of life of citizens does not only present material consequences, such as inducing or facilitating certain types of relationships and socialization; it also enlightens the subjective experiences that people perceive when they visit or live in a city, district, borough, or architectural space. The systematic analysis of 100 global cities presented in this book portrays the specific strengths, weaknesses, risks, and opportunities of different patterns of urban and economic development strategies and how to extract generalizable, global insights that can illuminate any given urban development problem.
Three core urban networks define the idiosyncratic nature of cities and the quality of the human networks that inhabit and operate within them: the networks of talent, industries, and urban design. The first two urban systems summarize the nature and qualities of the structural relationships between citizens and visitors alike. The last one describes the physical properties of the built environment that surrounds us and subtly conditions our individual and social psyche. The higher the quality of those three urban networks, the higher the chances of a given person to fruitfully thrive within the community. The resulting qualities of such society can be indirectly estimated by means of urban performance metrics, which quantitatively measure the quality of the three urban networks, in terms of their urbanization efficiency and quality, the collective knowhow and ability to access critical services and amenities, and the underlying social networks enabling for the knowledge economy to advance, hence creating new products and services that propel the prosperity, the human potential, and the quality of life of the community. This book presents a deeper dive into five core hypotheses, and valides in an evidence-based manner their respective theses.
Generally speaking, each archetypal urban development pattern embodies a set of aesthetic, moral, and functional values that can be modeled and better understood. However, two of those systems deserve close attention: the Lognormal-based model and the Scale-Free urban network. Lognormal and Poisson-based urban development patterns are the most frequently observed city design typology, since they describe organic growth patterns that do not require substantial skill or design qualities. Organic growth models tend to respond to hyperlocal needs at the expense of the overall urban system quality, and generally speaking they embrace and induce an oligarchic worldview and relationship pattern. Oligarchic systems are very often encountered, yet they tend to replicate inherited inequalities and present two major setbacks: they tend to both marginalize the most vulnerable segments of society, whilst hindering the potential of the most virtuous and capable citizens. Scale-Free urban networks, on the contrary, present two major advantages: they both inclusively integrate the most vulnerable segments of a given society, while empowering the most talented and promising individuals. Scale-Free urban networks tend to be structured around highly fractal, self-similar systems, composed of nested hierarchies of individuals dynamically collaborating within a merit-based system.
By integrating art and science in city design and urban development, we can tailor the design and decision making for every city and cultural context, hence deliberately chiseling the built environment so that we subtly yet solvently contribute to unleash the most noble latent forces in society, thus contributing to raise the quality of life of citizens, and create more prosperous, egalitarian, and freer communities around the world.
