The built environment and social empathy.
The Godmother of contemporary urbanism – Jane Jacobs
Whether we like it or not when it comes to towns and cities we are all in it together. The choices that we all make – how we travel, how we shop, how we work, how we socialise, how we live – affect not only our own lives but the lives of those around us. Despite towns and cities sometimes looking like chaotic places, they are in fact highly organised. Incredibly complex, but still highly organised. And this is because each person in a city is making their own rational choices about how best to go about their lives. The sum total of all these choices can sometimes look chaotic when viewed casually from a distance but this is an assumption that simply isn’t true.
As Jane Jacobs wrote:
‘To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an aeroplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.’
It is fear of this imagined-chaos that leads built environment professionals to attempt to rationalise our towns and cities. To organise and sort them. If they are allowed to succeed, to create a place where a person feels that they no longer share their city with anyone that doesn’t have the same income, gender, age, class, religion or race as them, that a town or city will break down socially. When a place actively isolates its people from one-another, when we no-longer appreciate that it is the sum-total of its parts that makes a place great, it is destined to fail.
As Jane Jacobs wrote:
‘To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an aeroplane engine, the entrails of a dissected rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are understood as systems of order, they actually look different.’
It is fear of this imagined-chaos that leads built environment professionals to attempt to rationalise our towns and cities. To organise and sort them. If they are allowed to succeed, to create a place where a person feels that they no longer share their city with anyone that doesn’t have the same income, gender, age, class, religion or race as them, that a town or city will break down socially. When a place actively isolates its people from one-another, when we no-longer appreciate that it is the sum-total of its parts that makes a place great, it is destined to fail.
