MACROCOSMOS:
THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES
Internet technology has impacted how we live in many ways, changing patterns of human interaction, transforming everything from commerce to politics, from entertainment to journalism to interpersonal relations; in short it has become the de-facto public realm, substituting much of what we do in the actual world with a simpler more efficient way to do it virtually. The Occupy movement seemed at first to invert this trend: it used the Internet to activate civic centers across the US. But was its ultimate effect the opposite? Did it instead confirm our fears that the very places that once formed the core of our urban experience have become irrelevant to most of us? Has the internet succeeded in rendering the city as we know it meaningless?
TECHNOLOGY
Technology has played a significant part in the development of cities from the very beginning. One of the first cities was Jericho, settled as the earth began to warm after the last ice age and agriculture was discovered. The springs around the city created a fertile plain, but one that flooded easily. A wall was constructed to keep the city dry; but it also proved valuable as a defense against marauding outsiders. The walls of Jericho became more and more elaborate as techniques of warfare became more sophisticated.
Eventually the walled city spread to Asia Minor and Europe, evolving a variety of species that incorporated such innovations as battered walls, crenellation, and moats. Byzantine cities such as Venice and Genoa secured themselves using different methods: in Genoa, the city was surrounded by a double wall forcing access to the city through a relatively small passage in the harbor, which gave the city a strategic advantage; Venice went a step further and forced all access to the city to occur over water, which, together with its location at the head of the Adriatic, enabled it to become the dominant political and economic connection between Europe and the Muslim world. It thrived for centuries, until warfare technology evolved to the point that Napoleon could conquer it in 1787.
Cities like Florence and Paris kept building new walls further out as their thriving economies pushed them into the surrounding lands. Eventually, as the political and economic status gained equal footing with military, the walls were no longer needed. In fact in the 18th and 19th centuries, the enemy was not as often invaders from the outside, but insurrectionists from within. Napoleon III used the rationale of improving the health of the city to engage Baron Haussmann to create the present urban structure of Paris, the grand boulevards connected by “etoiles,” which accomplished three tasks simultaneously: they discouraged the insurrectionists certainly (the Paris Commune of 1871 notwithstanding); but they also introduced an efficient new sewer system, and ultimately created an underlying structure for the city that facilitated the spread of the Metro, all of which created the Paris that we know today.
In New York, it was also the urban structure – the grid – that facilitated the construction of its subway at the turn of last century. But it was the arrival of the telephone as well as the elevator that transformed New York into a vertical city. In Los Angeles, which had been a series of villages connected by the largest urban-rail system in America before the arrival of the automobile – an event that, while enabling LA’s horizontally expansion to be as quick and thorough as its economy would allow, also transfigured it beyond recognition.
And what might a city of the internet look like? So far every city has had to adapt to it in small ways: the loss of book stores, record stores, libraries and post offices; but what new urban artifacts will emerge? Will any city be transformed by the technology? Or be born of it? One can imagine a world in which the wealthier 1% live in “lifestyle” cities – those devoted to shopping, playing, or cultural activities – while the poorer 99% live in “drone” cities – those devoted to the support and maintenance of the 1%.
But another reality may already be already unfolding before us. In Megatrends, John Naisbitt predicted a correlation between “high tech” and “high touch.” In cities across America this is happening; a trend is emerging toward embracing authenticity. Perhaps propelled by the Internet’s ubiquity, there is a new appreciation of the hand-crafted object, the fresh produce of farmer’s markets, a vibrant street culture. Could it be that the flattening effect of the internet has inspired a desire for the dimensional? That the global reach of the world-wide-web has compelled us to become more intensely local?
The ubiquity of the internet reminds us that technology alone does not create these cities; there are always other places that have many of the same elements in place – London and Paris during the emergence of underground rail; Chicago and New York at the birth of the skyscraper; Detroit and Los Angeles during the rise of car culture – but why does one city expand beyond expectations – or reason – while the other remains relatively intact or even withers?
EVOLUTION
Technology-driven urban transformations are clearly the exception. In the evolution of cities, most change occurs in small ways, almost invisibly. Cities are constantly remaking themselves through millions of tiny gestures performed by individual citizens on a daily basis. In this way, a city lives. It is what evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan call autopoietic in that cities are constantly adjusting themselves to adapt to changing conditions. In Microcosmos, they write, “this modulating ‘holisitic’ phenomenon of autopoiesis, of active self-maintenance, is the basis of all known life.”
Margulis and Sagan argue that although we live in the Macrocosm, which makes up the visible world, all our basic life functions – including evolution – occur at the level of the Microcosm – the ecosystem of micro-organic cells that, in the human body alone, constitute more that ten-times the number of human cells. These cells, mostly bacteria of some sort, are of unknown origin with a mysterious function because they are unable to survive outside their human ecosystem. What is clear is that these microbes undergo a complex series of interactions – signaling, communication, reproduction, transpiration, even fermentation – that result in byproducts necessary to sustain the human body.
This is also true for macrobes in nature. A forest is an ecosystem of macrobes – trees, shrubs, grasses, etc. – and each of these macrobes is itself an ecosystem much like the human body. The question is, if we understand that ecosystems occur at all scales, can we begin to see the city as a sort of ecosystem, one created through the interaction of human macrobes? Certainly the physical byproducts of such interactions – architecture and infrastructure – are not themselves living organisms; but does that mean that the city as a system – as an ecosystem – cannot act in an autopoietic manner?
Consider then the Metrocosm, an ecosystem at the urban scale made up of human macrobes in constant interaction whose residue is the city itself. The metrocosm evolves to survive, just as any ecosystem does. It is constantly changing in order to remain the same. And it does so through two related mechanisms: adaptation and mutation.
The metrocosm adapts in much the same way a forest does: through successionism. But while a forest adjusts its ecosystem plant by plant, reacting to changing environmental conditions, the city does so building by building. In fact, every building can be seen as the result of a specific interaction between particular individuals – the developer, the city, the contractor, the architect – and it takes on an appearance that reflects this unique interaction. Thus in any building it is possible to read the intent of the city planners, the economic strategy of the developer, the current construction conventions, as well as whatever style the architect chooses to employ. The city is legible in its architecture. And because development tends to occur during times of economic expansion, the city becomes an archive of successive economies.
The metrocosm can also mutate. Mutation is an extreme form of adaptation and is facilitated through technology. It is what occurs when a political/economic environment calls for extraordinary change at exactly the moment that the technology is there to make it happen. Think of the sewers, boulevards and Metro system in Paris; the street grid, subway system, and elevators in New York; the car in Los Angeles: each metrocosm was able to transform itself toward its desired future precisely when the technology to do so became available.
CITIES
This is why the metrocosm looks the way it does: its buildings reflect the styles in vogue during successive economies, while its urban form and infrastructure reflect the ascendant technology at the time of its greatest economic expansion -- which is not always good news.
Take Los Angeles, a place simultaneously beautiful and horrific; both reimagined and ruined by the automobile, LA defies easy categorization. In his recent book, “No More Play,” architect Michael Maltzan interviews a number of people across the city to get their assessment of the place, but few are able to give a definitive answer. Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture considers LA not to be a city, yet to be somehow urban; pressed to name this brand of urbanism, he called it “intermediate utopia.”
Perhaps Los Angeles is not a city in the conventional sense; but it is a metrocosm. If we embrace the metrocosm as an ever evolving, self-maintaining, and self-preserving system, then the notion of whether it is a city or not becomes irrelevant. The important thing to recognize is that, as a metrocosm, it has the best chance of survival the more adaptable it is.
This is the problem with places like the city of Irvine, California. Designed for the car, virtually every decision was guided by the intent to make life as convenient for the driver as possible, from the size and shape of the roads and freeways, to the location and layout of shopping centers, to the layers of exclusivity within gated residential communities. It may seem to work, for now; but what happens when as-yet-unimagined technologies arrive? Not only is the structure of the master-planned community fixed, but in Irvine the CC&Rs restrict the ability to adapt. Irvine could forever be stuck in a late 20th century, car-centered mentality. Adapt or die: its only hope for survival may be to be swallowed up in the ever-expanding Southern California metrocosm extending from the Ventura County line, all the way down to Camp Pendleton at the southern border of Orange County.
I am convinced that the future of the metrocosm lies in the complete opposite direction of Irvine – the ability to adapt freely. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Netherlands. Because of its relentlessly artificial topography, The Dutch metrocosm known as the Randstad, which includes cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague, was forced to adapt to survive – which has made it naturally more open to change, more inclined to welcome new technologies, and why the entire country is such an exciting place to watch as world culture transitions from one technology to the next.
