CITIES ARE designed and drawn by people for people.
Not much more than a hundred years ago more cities were more beautiful than not. And now they are not. How might we explain this?
Over that same one hundred years we witnessed an exponential proliferation of life changing technologies that have had positive impacts on many lives. Some—nuclear fission, the internal combustion engine, genetic engineering, gain-of-function research--have also posed threats, some of them existential. Now we worry about technologies such as internet based social media platforms that threaten the integrity of our democracy and AI that seemingly threatens everything.
CITIES ARE NOT scientific experiments, technology beta tests, socio-economic after-thoughts or even (only) engineering projects.
These threats are not necessarily born of the technologies, they emerge from our abuse of them. We say guns don’t kill people, and Facebook doesn’t undermine democracy-- people do. In the case of guns and Facebook we might argue that poor mental health is the real culprit. And some would argue that our society suffers from poor mental health because of the lack of any kind of shared or personal spiritual life (eastern, western or whatever). It’s also true that the easy availability of tools can put them in the hands of those prone to abuse them and that the availability itself is the enabler of the bad behavior.
EARLY EUROPOEAN SETTLERS IN AMERICA sought to separate “church and state” to avoid as Roger Williams feared the corruption of religion by politics and later Thomas Jefferson feared the corruption of politics by religion.
EARLY MODERNISTS sought to associate technological advancement with metaphysical significance promising and promoting the inevitability of material and spiritual progress through technological progress.
A CONSTITUTION AND A MANIFESTO differ in that a constitution establishes a structured and yet open-ended framework for whatever the future might bring, while the manifesto attempts to will into being—or manifest—a future it thinks everyone should want.
Then there are other kinds of threats, perhaps not existential but potentially damaging, that emerge from the misuse of tools. We use them too much or for tasks for which they were not designed, or just because we can. We say to a hammer everything looks like a nail.
RHAPSODIC ROMANTIC RAPTURE on the promises of architecture (or engineering or technology) for the future are bound to crash and burn.
MEDIOCRE LITERATURE is the inevitable consequence of ideological driven narratives that seek not to reflect society but instead proselytize it.
When new tools emerge, we overestimate their potential positive impacts and underestimate their negative ones. We romanticize them, hype them and the people who create them. Silicon Valley has made some cool new tools and now entertains the prospect of a world of decentralized cryptographic cybernetic systems that will run markets and even cities and governments (like Adam’s Smith invisible hand), or singularity, a universal AI to which we will upload our minds and unify all human consciousness (like God).
Why worry?
THE CLAIM THAT COMPUTERS will create (or determine) our future is little more than ideologically driven and algorithmically totalitarian magical thinking.
In my first quarter at Stanford University, which sits at the edge of Silicon Valley (and some would say is responsible for Silicon Valley) we freshmen were all required to take a writing seminar. This was a while ago so you might think we read Melville or Hemingway or Faulkner. But instead, we read Ayn Rand. We read her novel Atlas Shrugged and another one, The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead was about an architect, Howard Roark, who was a visionary. He was heroic, romantic, revolutionary, and committed to a future without a past.
WE CANNOT EVER ANTICIPATE the unintended consequences of our technologies no matter how well intentioned they and we are.
THE NATURAL LIMITS OF HUMAN FORESIGHT constrain our ability to anticipate or predict with any kind of precision what the future has in store.
Rand’s book reads like a cardboard caricature, although not an exaggerated one of what historians refer to as the heroic period of the modern movement in architecture (1910-40). The heroes were architects like Walter Gropius and Charles Jeanneret (Le Corbusier). Howard Roark was a compilation of them. A century ago, it must have been exciting when technologies like manufactured concrete, steel and glass, the automobile and other modern marvels seemed to present new and amazing possibilities for cities, but the heroes insisted that these were more than just new tools for the toolbox with which to improve cities and instead they spelled the end of cities as we had known them. Technological innovation wasn’t enough, we needed a revolution, a future without a past and these new technologies were our ticket to that future.
SAVIOR OF CULTURE? What even does that mean and anyway this is why we should remain perennially skeptical of any claims that any architect, engineer or technologist will change the world for the better without also introducing unintended consequences that may not be for the better.
SOCIETIES SHAPE THEIR ENVIRONMENTS as much as they are shaped by them and therefore shaping an environment (architectural, technological, or otherwise) by no means guarantees a desired or predicted social outcome.
MESSIANIC TECHNOLOGISTS are repeating the mistakes of messianic architects of a century ago whose proclamations and propaganda changed the world not necessarily for the better and, we must admit by now, probably, on balance, for the worse.
The run-up to the revolution was preceded by the romantic movement in art (Blake et. al.) and the idealist movement in philosophy (Kant, et. al.) both of which adopted metaphysical aspirations far beyond what one could reasonably expect from either art or philosophy. This coincided with the unprecedented secularization of society precipitated by the Enlightenment. It's hard not to miss that the un-anchoring of daily life from religious life—the absence of any kind of daily metaphysical contemplation -- coincided with the transference of piety elsewhere in life. Whatever we in the west think of religions now they had been for centuries our only portal to metaphysics --what we might now call spirituality--until they weren’t. If it really was “the End of Faith” then we were and still are worse off for it.
EXIT STRATEGIES promoted by Web 3.0 technologists echo the manifestos of heroic modernism in their quickness to abandon cities and cities’ problems rather than seeking solutions for their repair.
In the absence of any other psychological means toward transcendence when across the 19th century and into the 20th those new technologies emerged, when in all the excitement we saw only the good and none of the bad we architects concluded that we were engaged in more than an engineering or artistic project. We were engaged in a metaphysical project, one that would through our work here on earth redeem mankind in a way never imagined, transcending all the worldly baggage of our past. We would make the future. And it would be amazing, like heaven on earth.
THAT WE ARE CONSTRAINED BY OUR BIOLOGY in the pursuit of expanding consciousness is only half an understanding, the other half being that as humans with bodies we are also enabled by our biology in ways that technology can never be.
MISPLACED FAITH in the technological accomplishments of human beings in the absence of a spiritual foundation cannot but lead to only limited success.
All this messianic thinking was, we now know, magical thinking. Our cities got worse, not better. They are messes. In all the frenzy, the crazed religious conversion, in looking for transcendence in all the wrong places, we lost our grip on common sense. Instead of recognizing and acknowledging real problems of cities to which we could apply new tools to solve we engaged in idolatry. We worshiped the tools.
NOT ALL TECHNOLOGISTS have drunk the Kool-Aid, some managing to remain both enthusiastic by the promise of new digital technologies and wary of over promising their benefits.
OUR TENDENCY to worship false gods is a (probably environmentally evolved and genetically inherited) psychological glitch we’ve been aware of for a long time.
And so yes, take it from an architect who has had to contend with that episode from our past that was the modern movement in architecture and from which our profession and our cities have yet to recover, we ought to be worried by all the technocratic rapture, the empty prophecy and forced proselytization. The bros and overlords of Silicon Valley are like the heroes of modern architecture who, buoyed by their seemingly limitless self-regard, seduced themselves and then us into believing in and then acting upon all their transcendental nonsense at the expense of our cities and us.
OVERLY WIDE STREETS that are the consequence of what used to be the symbol of the future—the automobile—have warped our sensibilities and sensitivities to pavement in places where traditionally you would find it without the imposition of plants and trees.
CITIES ACCUMULATE interventions which when oriented, configured, and scaled humanely create the framework within which the future can unfold without ever determining what that future is. It’s magical thinking that there is any kind of future out there that these kinds of interventions would impede.