I agree with all this. Big Bang Urbanism – what a great term.  Those ground up utopian visions are the lifted trucks of the architecture world – often technically proficient, yet generally ridiculous, public displays of ‘boldness’ or ‘vision’.  (Sadly, this isn’t a problem only suffered by select urban schemata, coughcalatravacough.)

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a lecture by Amale Andraos of workAC, hoping to hear more about their new book, 49 Cities.  It may be the single greatest collection of architectural ego ever assembled (yes, it’s on my to-buy list).  I was struck by how much control over the lives of the inhabitants the architects wanted to wield.  Each of the designs was intimately tied to an assumption about how people would live in the city.  In the Q&A I asked Ms. Andraos to talk a little bit more about the societal implications of the projects: briefly (because I was taking poor notes) her response was that yes virtually all of these cities had a grand utopian scheme encompassing the way of life of their dwellers; this is requisite and good.

Of course, the issue with this is that the way of life so integral to these cities doesn’t exist – it is a fabrication created by the designer, in the best cases before the architecture of the city, and in the worst cases, as a justification for their super-formal aspirations.  Absolutely, architects need to play the role of anthropologist, tailoring our solutions to the folks who will use them – but Big Bang Urbanists have it backwards.

To be clear, I adore good speculative architectural and urban projects. Nor am I afraid of scale (bonus quote from the workAC lecture: “Ecology is not about nature, it is about scale”), or even of a certain amount of societal intervention – this isn’t an argument that designers should cater to existing norms and preferences no matter how harmful.  I just don’t see much use in solipsistic projects culled from nothing other than the designers own conception of what the perfect city ought to look like, how the perfect city dwellers ought to live like.   We must begin with the city we have, engage it on its own terms.  Or, as Rob once said when talking about Landscape Urbanism, “I’ll go to my grave defending the value of speculative work, but I think that for landscape urbanism to be the revolutionary shift away from modernist urbanism it claims to be, it must find expression in the world of developers and Wal-Marts, as well.”  Indeed.  Because people often like where they live(!) already.  An incremental approach to urbanism, far from lacking ambition, looks opportunistically at our developed landscapes with open eyes.  Designing a Big Bang Utopia is the less ambitious approach, as it renders null the most difficult work of the urbanist – that of developing adaptive tactics which are responsive to preexisting conditions.