A Living City Is Messy (and What Not to Do About It)

Abstract

AbstractA living city is an incubator of ideas and a congenial place for entrepreneurial discovery, innovation, and economic development. Such creativity emerges from trial and error, which entails not only successes but also failure, conflict, and disappointment. Great cities, like flesh-and-blood people, can also be very unpleasant, annoying, and sometimes dangerous. Indeed, any city that aspires to greatness will have something to offend everyone. This chapter looks at the sources of these unpleasant by-products, reviews efforts by some prominent figures in modernist urban planning and design influenced by “cartesian rationalism,” and critiques them within the Jacobsian-cum-market-process framework.