15 April 2011
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Every town, as least in the contiguous United States, is the same. Each has its own name but almost none of the names are unique, or even novel. Rome, Syracuse, and Utica are all in New York, and Paris, Detroit, and Fredericksburg are in Texas. And they’re all the same. There’s even a town called Utopia, Texas, but other than the fact that its name is not as apt as, say, Plains, Texas, or not as vague as Uncertain, Texas (or is it Louisiana?), it’s the same as every other town. Apparently, the settlers of Utopia went with their second choice; they only abandoned their original idea, Montana, Texas, after realizing it had already been taken. The best we can say about towns in the United States is that they’re annoyingly redundant—the worst is that they’re soul-crushingly monotonous, corporate cubicles writ large: manifestations of the stark, narrow homogeneity that arises from mass production.
On a recent drive through towns near Austin, Texas, I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by the suffocating sameness of each school, main street, courthouse, and cluster of shops and restaurants. There are no delineating features to distinguish one town from another (even the pool of high-school mascots only includes a handful of species—mostly types of bulldogs, wild or quasi-domesticated cats, or beasts of burden, with an occasional carnivorous bird or member of the caniformia suborder), and so all towns blend into one sprawling, desolate labyrinth, complete with dead-ends, high walls, and no clear path or method of escape.
All the houses look the same. All the schools look the same. All the water towers look the same. Not only is getting lost in such a sea an easy task, but after consideration one can safely conclude that disorienting people must be the point of such architecture. Or, perhaps, the designers of this congruence resigned themselves to the following question: “If every town is the same, why would anyone need to know where they are?”
Of course, there are several theories attempting to explain the ubiquity of the same design among all towns, including, notably, those of Bill Hillier, Jane Jacobs, and William H. Whyte. For the sake of brevity, however, let us entertain one notion that should be obvious but is often overlooked: we design towns in a way that mimics our own internal biological structures. Towns are, in fact, often described as if they are systems of organs; municipal centers have “hearts,” “spines,” and “major arteries.” They even have traffic “circulation,” much like blood circulation, which can be “clotted” or “spilled over” into other areas. We even talk about cities that are “living” or “dying,” based on their “growth.” All of this language indicates the description of a living organism. Conversely, we often speak of components of our own cells as if they exist in an urban center; we call mitochondria the “factories” and the endoplasmic reticulum the “highway system” of the cell. The cell also has processing plants (golgi apparatuses), trash collectors (lysosomes), and even a downtown information/business district (the nucleus).
This relationship between internal and external structures, long known to many architects, city planners, and neuroscientists, was first brought to my attention by an art professor at Lafayette College, Ed Kerns. During my senior year (2004-2005) I studied with Professor Kerns as a studio art major and learned of his then up-coming and now-completed collaborative project called “Word, City, Mind.” The goal of the project was to combine the disciplines of science, computer technology, and fine art into a synthesis that could extract their common themes, languages, and insights. One of the main underlying currents of the exhibition was the connection between the physical brain, its “digital” processes, organic structures, and city architecture. Layering maps of medieval towns with scans of neuron networks revealed striking similarities in their design and functions.
But wait, if towns are constructed to mimic organic structures, and organic structures function so efficiently, why do contemporary towns fail to inspire on so many levels? Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we used to build towns organically—or, more accurate still, that they arose organically, out of the parameters of geography, population needs and fluctuations, and the development of cultural institutions. Towns grew in this manner for most of the history of civilization, only recently being re-appropriated into Cartesian grids, meant to squeeze the largest number of people into the smallest area and facilitate the distribution of technological commodities. Suburbia is, after all, a post-war concept, not even a century old, and indeed, without electricity or internal combustion, there is no need for such standardized grids—no need for the homogeneity of mass-produced architecture.
Therefore, as with all irksome or harmful aspects of our present state of affairs, we have industrial civilization, corporate capitalism, and, if I may insert a subjective bias, a pusillanimous lack of creativity to blame. Our own cells are beautiful, functioning structures, almost magical in their organization and scope, that have been crafted by eons of natural selection. Why mess with such a design?
The only consolation is that when oil runs out, municipalities will be again redesigned—this time retrofitted to accomplish functions on human, walkable scales. Without oil, there will, of course, be less people, and with less people who don’t have cars or electricity, the obsolete grid can be demolished. In its place, people can build towns that are connected to their particular land-bases, both logistically and culturally. People can build towns that, finally, after years of triteness, matter.
These future revivalists (pardon the oxymoron) will have to play football during the day, of course, but the lack of lights will be offset by the diversity of the towns represented. Imagine a Cambrian explosion, of sorts, of team mascots. The Albino Cave Salamanders vs. the Fightin’ Seventeen-Year Cicadas? Count me in.
ex pede herculem 