Simplicity and Complexity in Design for Transportation Systems and Urban Forms

Abstract

A metaphor of balance simplifies and guides transportation planning in Los Angeles and Sydney. Striving for balance, it calls for more or less of particular types of systems without examining whether those elements should instead be reconfigured. Urban consolidation plans in Sydney, as part of an effort to bring about this balance, illustrate what Christopher Alexander calls the yearning for the physical and plastic characteristics of the past. The diverse and overlapping urban interaction patterns of the automotive age-which the plans fail to recognize as natural and not to be transcended by physical planning manipulations-show why Sydney needs a more sophisticated approach. Transportation planners must move from attempting to shape lifestyles in ways which cannot succeed to appreciating the many dimensions of how people have chosen to live and interact across space and how this relates to their aspirations for life in the future.