The Urban Generalist

It's been a while since I last posted, mainly because I was finishing up my second term. I have spent the past year working on my Master's degree in Urban Planning: this means lots of reading, writing, researching and collaborating with an interesting group of people from diverse backgrounds. Jane Jacobs and many others have tirelessly promoted diversity (of residents, income levels, land use, etc) as a fundamental characteristic of the healthy city. I would take this a step further and say that diversity among city-builders is equally important.

The city is a complex and constantly evolving organism. It does not react singularly to change, but as a synthesis of the many autonomous agents sometimes called the citizenry. A city's life involves the interplay of society and politics, the economy, small and large businesses, the ability (or disability) to move about, resource availability (or scarcity) and a whole host of other issues. It is no wonder that mayors rarely achieve their mandate (although we'll save our 'weak mayor' system for another post) with so many interests competing for attention. Urban planners are generalists by necessity, then. A senior planner recently told me that to be effective in the profession is to be a 'man of the world', a somewhat dated expression that nonetheless captures the generalist spirit: open-minded, pluralistic, polymathic. In this way, the planning profession can be seen to occupy the sparsely inhabited end of the generalist-specialist spectrum.

As noted in another post, our modern existence relies on a network of interconnected specialists: the goods we buy, from a stick of gum to an Ipod to a new house, were produced by multiple individuals engaged in specialized tasks. Frederick W. Taylor, observing factory-workers at the turn of the last century, realized that by breaking tasks down into smaller and smaller components, great efficiencies could be realized. This kind of industrial rationalism has had a lasting legacy, and while there is no shortage of detractors, scientific management has unquestionably produced great benefits for many of us in the form of healthcare, leisure time and a seemingly endless array of consumer products. However, specialization has a darker side: by framing problems through a narrow lens, the specialist inevitably produces limited solutions. In city-building, such single-mindedness can be disastrous.

The housing projects of the 1960s spring to mind. Well-intentioned policy-makers mistook the symptoms of poverty for its causes: by razing old rental stock thought of as slums and replacing it with new, 'humane' housing complexes, the poor would have dignified and municipally monitored accommodations. Of course, the legacy of such projects is well-known: their construction was disruptive and effectively fragmented the invisible networks within existing communities; they are often segregated from the city, creating instant ghettos and reinforcing the cycle of poverty; and their cloistered design often interrupts the existing street pattern, reducing walkability and snarling traffic. By narrowly focusing on housing provision as a solution to poverty at the expense of its root-causes, the result was blunt and ineffective.

A similar process is at work in the engineering profession. Duany and Kunstler have written extensively about how modern city-building often revolves around a set of prescribed and accepted engineering standards designed with the narrow purpose of moving traffic as efficiently as possible. Such an approach ignores all the other subtleties of the urban environment such as the relationship of buildings to each other, the pedestrian's experience and use of the street, the mix of building types and uses, street furniture and landscaping, etc., etc. This kind of thinking results in wide, multi-lane roadways, seas of parking and precludes the human scale of building we love about old Europe, but are too intimidated by the authority of the engineering profession to undertake ourselves.


A recent set of projects by first-year engineering students at the University of Toronto exemplifies this approach. The intersection of Dundas St. and Spadina Ave is one of the busiest in the city: the sidewalks are teeming with pedestrians and vendor's stalls, and both roadways must accommodate streetcars, automobiles and bicycles. It also has a higher than average pedestrian collision rate. A team of well-meaning and undoubtedly intelligent students came up with a solution: pedestrian bridges over the roadways. If your sole intention is to 'solve' the problem of pedestrian collisions, this provides an ample solution. However, like minimum road widths and setbacks prescribed by engineers elsewhere, this solution ignores other important aspects of city-building: quality of the public realm, connection of pedestrians to the street/buildings/other pedestrians, importance of views, etc. By creating an armature in the sky, the engineers are saying, "The street is primarily a conduit for automobile traffic. Pedestrians endanger themselves and hinder the flow of traffic, therefore they need to be removed from it in a rational fashion."

Let me be clear: I understand that this is a project by inexperienced students. God only knows that I have produced similarly narrow work in my academic career. My point is that over-specialization will inevitably result in blunt, coarse-grained planning decisions when finer detail is called for. Undoubtedly, we need specialists who are experts in their field. However, urban planners must also possess the qualities of a generalist and the ability to think circumspectively: cities are after all, as social historian Mark Girouard writes, one of humanity's most complex and enduring creations. By its very nature, the urban living arrangement precludes singularity of mind or action.