The “ubiquitous (urban) principle is the need of cities for a most intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support, both economically and socially… The science of city planning and the art of city design, in real life for real cities, must become the science and art of catalyzing and nourishing these close-grained working relationships.” (Jane Jacobs)

This passage, so early in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, speaks to an inner truth about the city that is still far from accepted in the way we plan and build cities: that the city is not merely a product of economics, and is not mechanistic. There are values tied to the proportions of our bodies, the way we interact, the intangibles of “constant mutual support” that cannot be accounted for in an equation. They also have the tendency to sound frivolous and indefensible when not spoken and defended by the genius of Jacobs herself.

But it remains to be seen, and has nowhere been proven by Jacobs, that we can actually deliberately create the relationships she examines. Years of study of the city have not necessarily made Jacobs better able to create a better city than a planner, just as years of study of ecology does not necessarily enable an ecologist to successfully create an ecology. It is a fundamental problem with urbanism, this discord between thought about the city and the building of the city. The building is left to the practical, the unimaginative, the conventional. We can read their lines in the city. It reeks of their mediocrity. And yet for all we know they’ve done a better job than any of the theorists ever could. Because of the scale of the urban problem, just fully comprehending the city can be overwhelming. It is this scale we must attack and diminish. As Rem Koolhaas argued in “Whatever Happened to Urbanism?” it is the scale and complexity of the problem of the city that handcuffs us, paralyses us in the face of our own incompetence.

“Thus, when travelling in the territory of Ersilia, you come upon the ruins of abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.” (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)

Christopher Alexander talks about intricate relationships between things and people in the city in “A City is Not a Tree”. He tries to describe them. He introduces sets, series, formulas. He talks about the lattice structure that might enable you to map them and think about them. But the study of the city is not science. Cannot become stifled and controlled by the all-powerful academics, journals, and jingoistics of the scientific world. Alexander’s example becomes so complicated and convoluted that it defies understanding except by the most advanced and dedicated. People love simple truths, and planners and designers are no exception.

The city, unlike science, is truly for everyone. The lay opinion in science is worthless, useless, derided and mocked. The “lay” opinion of the city is the lives of its lovers, its saints, its enemies. It is never worth less than what a planner or designer has to say. But how can this be balanced? Everyone can’t be right, can they? They can’t all have their say. At some point, the professionals have to take over. Right? So we have “public consultations”, community meetings, councillors messing with planning policy. And we drown the voices of the city with the cries of those bored and angry enough to actually show up to the meetings.

Regardless of whether the city is a problem in organised complexity, in most cases it is simply too complicated for those of us who must make decisions to comprehend. Jean Kerr once said, “If you can keep your wits about you when everyone else is losing theirs, it’s just possible that you haven’t grasped the situation.” Now in the case of the city, that attitude might seem defeatist, but one can’t help but wonder how much this is the case in the city. Many trained professionals and “experts” give evidence, present ideas and findings, and are forced, by the very natures of the processes, to always sound like they know exactly what’s going on. In fact, the more the public is involved, the more the professionals have to sound like they know what’s going on.

When the novelist, the poet, the artist, the botanist, the bum, the prostitute, the drug addict, the planner, the ecologist, the arborist, the businessman, the architect, the politician, the senior citizen, the child, the policeman, the clerk, the single mom, the poor, the immigrant can all come to the table equally, and move forward together, and be able to actually accomplish something in a timely fashion, then will the city of compromise finally work. It’s hard to know whether such a process can ever work, or imagine what it would have to be like and what kind of city would result. Is it even worth the trouble?

In the meantime ground is ceaselessly breaking on development after development, based on none of these principles, serving none of these interests – driven by a narrow vision of the profitability of catering to a selfish middle class who should be demanding better. In the market-driven development economy, the consumer is supposed to have that power. But in reality, in whose image are we making the city? Homebuyers have gotten used to what suburban urbanism is all about – unaware perhaps that they are driving its form (literally). Is the challenge now to present a new vision of the city that they will be willing to buy into? Or will that once again serve no interest but their own?