Liwen's post on Emergence

Emergence

Liwen Zhang

The word emergence has strong biological ties that link very successfully to the ways in which we view our cities. Upon looking up the word on dictionary.com, I realize the connotations that emergence has with evolution. In Gould and Lewontin’s critique of adaptationist theories, they very interestingly bring up the issue of architectural constraints that tend to be ignored in discourse upon topics in biology. Gould and Lewontin state that academics tend to rely exclusively on Darwin’s theory of adaptation and evolution alone. This is problematic, firstly because it is a big misinterpretation of what Darwin himself had intended and secondly such negligence could potentially rule out a whole array of new possibilities that could only be unraveled by taking on constraints, such as history and architecture, into account.

Gould and Lewontin’s piece transitions purposefully into Jane Jacob’s reading of the city. Jacobs views the city as a problem of organized complexity, one upon which has to be analyzed as “interrelated into an organice whole” (Jacobs, 433). Jacobs puts into question the current paradigms of urban planning, where the mapping out of statistical master plans leads to a general top down approach to planning. Her descriptions of the way planners think about the cities, the “remote telescopic view”, which de Certeau later proclaims as the “panorama city”, effectively makes the complexities of the cities immediately readable and reduced to mere statistics.

Jacobs’ sophisticated reading and analysis of the city is powerful as she manages to find authority through an anti-expert persona, one upon which she privileges “ordinary people in cities” to have advantage over the experts, in this case, the planners. Perhaps what is most peculiar about this chapter in her book is how she ends it- on an environmentally optimistic note, one upon which she concludes that “big cities and countrysides can get along well together” (Jacobs, 447). Perhaps seeing that a biological theme is prevalent throughout the whole article, Jacobs found the need to tie the piece together with reference to nature. Upon finishing the article, I cannot help but feel that it is very environmentally deterministic. According to Jacobs, the “lively, diverse [and] intense” environments of cities are what will be the solution, per say, to the proposed “problem” as opposed to a “dull, inert” city (Jacobs, 338). This is problematic because Jacobs’ fails to take into account that upon shaping the environment, particular social classes are privileged over others, thus overlooking the socioeconomic conflicts that are inherent within such a “problem”. Thus it may not be a surprise then, when critics conclude that Jacobs’ writings, despite being influential, eventually led to conservative planning.