Health and Design - Polycentric Urbanization Image & Action - Lars Lerup by dialive

Polycentric Urbanization Image & Action Lars Lerup

health&design

Publisher Anhalt University of Applied Sciences Department 3 Bauhausstraße 5 06844 Dessau Fon +49(0)340 - 5197 1531 Fax +49(0)340 - 5197 1599 www.afg-hs-anhalt.de

Editors Prof. Alfred Jacoby Dr. Gunnar Hartmann

Layout/Design Henry McKenzie

Printing Solid Earth Print Production, Berlin

Polycentric Urbanization Image & Action Lars Lerup

A general introduction to the Health & Design series at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Urbanization and Healthcare A Hot Zone for Urgent Attention by Analysts, Providers, Planners and Patients. The key to successful breakthroughs in science is not that diverse actors cooperate in so-called trading zones but that they feel the urgency to do so—driven by the visceral threat of losing a war or of a raging disease such as Ebola. The urgencies of everyday urbanization are many, but they are often invisible, hidden behind veils of politics and opinion. This makes it hard to find an audience for any one of them—the crisis posed by the Anthropocene may be the best example, and healthcare is not far behind. Consequently, we are focusing on health as a topic of considerable urgency for all urbanites—particularly in countries experiencing a contracting welfare state combined with an aging population. Health, sickness, and care form one cluster of the interacting oscillations that are now reverberating through steadily urbanizing countries. In healthcare, it is chronic disease, rather than acute disease, that puts the greatest pressure on urbanization since it requires repetition in its treatment—not just of medical procedures, but also in the use of urban infrastructures, from the physical to the virtual. The polycentric urbanization of Germany is particularly complex: even as the historically central cities have internally dispersed, old dormant settlements have grown to form vast polycentric domains, though rarely for the purpose of improving service. Instead extraneous reasons, such as land price, politics, and entrepreneurship, lie behind polycentric development, resulting in either extreme agglomeration and duplication or its opposite, desertification, as in cases of regions with no hospitals. In turn, this has fueled a new urgency for solutions—with urbanization now viewed as the constant repair of collateral damage from relentless change. Under the rubric of Bild & Handlung, the research group under which umbrella these publications are published has collected research from the entire analytical force field— from narrative to gravity models—to propose the humble beginnings of a trading zone. Prof. Alfred Jacoby Prof. Dr. h.c. Lars Lerup Dr. Gunnar Hartmann

Polycentric Urbanization Image & Action Bild & Handlung Under the umbrella of Bild & Handlung—Image & Action—we focus on the process of urbanization. We assume that any analytical window directed at this process will spawn images that serve as the basis for action covering a vast agenda, from urban planning to the placement of specific functions. All analytical windows are attempts to produce visible imagery to optimize action. By using a panoply of image-guided technologies, doctors operate inside human bodies; in a similar way, urbanists are guided by imagery to operate inside the urban “body.” Both practices seek to create clearings in areas of enormous complexity. Leading by necessity to the production of deliberate abstractions of the actual, the analytical windows project images of commensurate limitation. These embedded limitations suggest that we must develop a large assortment of analytical windows to reach effective descriptions of processes always in flux— whether a living human or an urban body. As urbanists, we have shifted our general focus from the traditional preoccupation with the materialized City to the process of urbanization, now seen as a multitude of operational assemblies (city, art district, subdivision, downtown, park, health care apparatus), all exercising some form of agency. This, in turn, has led us to a wider investigative scope, ranging from institutions, built space, geography, and economics to an arsenal of analytical technologies.

After the City Even as they directed the analytical window toward the City, two previous books still entertained in their margins the suggestion that the City is no longer a viable central focus. The city has become but a single phenomenon, albeit a dominant one, in an array of many others within the fabric of total urbanization. This may at first appear as an insignificant perceptual shift, but once we acknowledge that the concentration on the city implicitly accepts a sedentary, centralized phenomenon, then the change of focus to urbanization shifts our attention to advancement, to the process of creating an ever-expanding footprint. Although our work has moved back and forth between the outer and inner edges of urbanization, it has always been drawn, as if by an invisible hand, toward the centrifugal forces of the city. However, with increasing evidence of a polycentric pattern in urban growth, the city’s very center is imploding. With this collapse, the natural focus on the city dissolves. Suddenly, a middle landscape with multiple centerlike agglomerations has replaced the bull’s-eye of the traditional city. The troublesome internal paroxysms that have unsettled the sedentary nature of the center (and torqued our analytical windows) rapidly change in character when we see their turbulence as the very nature of urbanization.

Urbanization’s sweeping virtual force pulsates through the existing built environment as a never ending, lowgrade oscillation, leaving abandoned agglomerations—in various states of socio-economic and physical decay.

Polycentric urbanization is viewed here as a swath of materiality governed by a complex dynamic of “agglomeration” and “dispersion”—reflecting the tendency of the urban domain to fluctuate between opposites—yet it functions as a single fabric. In an attempt to tame our unease with the rumbling at the center, we have tentatively investigated this vacillating tendency under various rubrics: the activity surface, the holey plane, the ripped fabric. Yet once we accepted the troubled flow, it became clear that all urbanization is characterized by an internal restlessness that never finds repose—particularly so in the last two and a half centuries. Urbanization’s sweeping virtual force pulsates through the existing built environment as a never ending, low-grade oscillation, leaving abandoned agglomerations—those that have lost their previously symmetrical economic and social importance—in various states of socio-economic and physical decay.

Conceptual Conceptual

Actual Actual Figure 1. Monocentric Vision vs. Polycentric Reality

Left behind as life and activity find new centralities to motivate and occupy their energies is a strange, ghostlike fabric. But not for long. Soon new waves rumble back through to revitalize the abandoned realms. This curious in-and-out may be a reflection of the implosion and explosion earlier theorized by Henri Lefebvre, but now it has become a constant. Unlike Lefebvre, though, we think the tendency of urbanization to variously grow thick and thin is not the privilege of capitalist development, but a fundamental “genetic” characteristic of human association. It can be found in a Mesoamerican city like Teotihuacán (thriving between 100 BC and 250 AD) as well as in all modern metropolises—or in entire countries, like Germany, where this urban fluctuation is a fact. However, what is clear is that under capitalist development, this characteristic oscillation has reached warp speed, expanding rapidly to involve the entire planet. In 1968 in an urban studies class at MIT, Aaron Fleischer, a pioneer in the field of computer applications, suggested that the best model of the world is the world, and that the second best model is a black box into which you feed a minimal set of data able to reproduce the world at the other end. Although clearly an unachievable goal, the tenets of this dictum drive all attempts to produce models of the world. And since the first model is ludicrous, we end up with the second—the simpler the better, provided the outcome is reasonably satisfactory. The urban environment has been the beneficiary of many such models, ranging from the scientific to the descriptive. Each model necessarily projects a partial image of the world—always predisposed toward a certain frame of reference, always an abstraction—yet these incomplete models have served as planning tools since the first concerted efforts were made to guide change. Those models that proved successful then become analytical windows, reflecting some actionable aspects of the workings of the urban situation under scrutiny. Despite these valiant efforts, though, we are still far from a successful all-encompassing model of urbanization. To understand how “world making” operates in a swath of polycentric urbanization, we must resort to a whole series of analytical windows, particularly those concerning geography. From this, we then derive a set of equations that more or less clearly reveal networks producing change, in line with the observation of Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987) that the stirrup “occasioned a new figure of the man-

Figure 2. Total Polycentricity

horse assemblage” and so produced a changed warfare.1 By firmly connecting the rider to the saddle that is connected to the horse, and therefore allowing the rider to direct the inertia of the entire assembly via the lance toward the enemy, the stirrup had often lethal results. This association of physical objects with humans and animals constitutes a “physics of packs,” a science of matter shaped in “flight.” In this light, we can now view the spread of urbanization since the Industrial Revolution as a new Nomadology,2 a second coming, where Genghis Khan’s droves of horses have been overtaken by phalanxes of cars and all their associated objects and behaviors. The thunder of hooves felt on the steppes has been exchanged for the constant din of the freeway—both symptoms of the internal oscillations of the nomadic. These assemblages (droves and phalanxes) are shaped by passions; they are figures of desire. Urbanization (and its side effects, such as the Anthropocene) may today have replaced war as the dominant change agent in the earth’s existence.

The thunder of hooves felt on the steppes has been exchanged for the constant din of the freeway—both symptoms of the internal oscillations of the nomadic. Urbanization (and its side effects, such as the Anthropocene) may today have replaced war as the dominant change agent in the earth’s existence.

The impact of any thickening of the urban fabric is violent: often secretive at first, this coagulation later proves devastating to the existing built environment around it. New development resembles a theater of war, crowded by itinerant steel and concrete crews, masons, carpenters, and electricians, all of whom appear in the same types of trucks that transport actual combatants in the conflicts whose images now crowd our television screens. These waves of development constitute the physics of urbanization. The only stabilities remaining are the striated subdivisions, whose sedentary existence is held in place by zoning. These grids confine the turbulence of the larger nomadic terrain, driving densities and vortical flows. Strangely, at least in terms of commercial transactions, the nomadic vortex is the smooth eye of the storm, while the surrounding sleepy grids are coursed through by real estate fever—the shock of the new—as an assembly of unknowns rises out of the hurricane’s eye. In the meantime, the media repeatedly, in words and image, describes the new as “progress” to smooth its impact, in an incorporeal transformation of the “city.” Peace and tranquility eventually are restored, if just on the surface. Yet the newness itself often fades 1 Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 399. 2 Ibid., 351-423.

Closing the book on the city is to leave behind its musty interiority and to open our investigations instead to the oscillations of urbanization, to the expanses of a vast exterior, and to the shattering of the traditional analytical windows. What this perspective has in store we don’t know, and at first we may not see it clearly, but once we embrace the multiagency of urbanization, the new will appear.

fast, subject to the eternal oscillation of urbanization as it seeks ever newer ground. Tenants move into the newly conquered territory even as urbanization’s perpetual instability flows in turmoil around it. Soon the itinerant workers have saddled up to leave for the next theater, where the architects have already drawn the plans. The dictum “everything must move” can now be safely replaced by “everything moves.”3 Unfolding as a slow-motion oscillation, urbanization is an arena of persistent conflict, with occasional flare-ups manifesting in vertical and horizontal agglomerations, whose collateral repercussions spread outward until they are met by counteraction or “distance fatigue.” Closing the book on the city is to leave behind its musty interiority and to open our investigations instead to the oscillations of urbanization, to the expanses of a vast exterior, and to the shattering of the traditional analytical windows. What this perspective has in store we don’t know, and at first we may not see it clearly, but once we embrace the multiagency of urbanization, the new will appear. In conclusion, the pragmatic consequence of operating under the auspices of urbanization is that the new is always just ahead, driven by relentless change. All forms of sedentary thinking are immediately suspect. Time now unavoidably enters all attempts at description and action. Models must acknowledge that the necessary abstractions housed in the black box act as friction, often reducing actual time to a slow-motion reenactment and pushing results away from the real, while lowering utility accordingly.

Window & Image Models of the Real Saddled with the odious interference of time in abstraction, we must go back and revisit the models, now as analytical windows projecting images of the complex doings of urbanization. As suggested, this requires a shift from the (relative) stability of the city to the liveliness of urbanization. The restless middle landscape lies before us. It defies all but crude understanding. The two favored everyday perspectives—the view from the road and the view from the air—each projects different images. The view through the 3 Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture, 1994-2009, eds. Luke Bulman and Jessica Young (Houston: Rice University School of Architecture, 2009).

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Figure 3. 24-7 Stim & Dross

windshield reveals an articulated profile, revealing clusters of megashapes4 and flat in-betweens. Seen from the air, the articulated profile turns into an irregular oceanic surface—despairingly referred to as “sprawl.” Unlike the traditional city, with its center of twenty-four-hour activity surrounded by concentric bands of diminishing activity, the polycentric other is pervaded by lacunae of inactivity contrasted with intensity. When stillness occurs, darkness engulfs the area where movement ceased and provides contrast with the light that appears when the activity switch is flicked back on. Discontinuity is the basis of polycentric dispersion.5 It finds expression in Stim & Dross.6 In the view from above, the analytical window is roughly divided in two, with parts shared equally by landscape and built-up areas, whereas in analyses of the traditional city, landscape is mere affectation. The juxtaposition of the naturally grown and the built is what characterizes the middle landscape—das Zwischenstadt (or Mittellandschaft), as first theorized by Thomas Sieverts in 1997—which can be appreciated from the air above the city in regions like the Ruhrgebiet and from a satellite in space over a country like Germany.7 On the scale of the city, the built is not central to the polycentric domain’s structure and organization—its very architecture—as it is in the traditional city. The built instead is sidelined, put out to pasture, set in the garden. Here the highway is the dominating physical structure, while technologically enhanced networks form the dominating virtual structure. In this field view, the house, despite its symbolic importance, is slightly out of focus, making the in-between the conceptual pivot around which life turns. Distance, or rather time, is the fundament of this essentially nomadic space. The same can be said for the region, replacing “house” with “city” and “garden” with the largely agricultural “in-between.”

4 Lars Lerup, After the City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000), 58-61. 5 This is the same discontinuity that the authors of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey saw as an antidote to destruction in the atomic age. Houston remains the ideal expression of these sentiments set forth in 1945. As science historian Peter L. Galison has shown in “War Against the Center,” Grey Room, no. 4 (2001): 7-31, the authors of the Survey argued for “protection through space” by the dispersal of all military targets. (Grey Room is a journal of MIT Press.) 6 Lerup, After the City. 7 Thomas Sieverts, Cities without Cities: An Interpretation of the Zwischenstadt, English ed. (London: Spon Press, and New York: Routledge, 2003).

Time-Geography In these dispersed domains, whether inside the city or outside in the region, the overcoming of distance to seek out community and service is complexly intertwined with the making of distance to seek out privacy. In the car-dominated middle landscape, distance becomes a daily preoccupation. New agglomerations steadily encroach on the in-between and begin to encumber the dream of overcoming distance. The “one-hour commute” is de rigueur. Time and geography become one. The polycentric domain is not dominated by space but by time-distance. A post-geographical era commences. Melvin Webber suggested in the early 1970s that here we will form community independent of propinquity. Although not (yet?) quite the case, the middle landscape cuts off the city from its ancient pedestrian conception and, by joining time and space (distance), allows situation-sciences like geography and history a dramatic rejuvenation. Torsten Hägerstrand, a little-known Swedish geographer, was already eloquently pursuing this union in his concept of time-geography in the 1950s, long before the development of true sprawl. He writes that time-geography “is inspired by notation, which is related to the formulas of chemistry and to musical notations. Notation emphasizes the bindings between base elements like formulas in chemistry, and it seeks to describe configurations in space and their succession in time, in a way that musical notation describes a streaming mass of sound.”8

Time and geography become one. The polycentric domain is not dominated by space but by time-distance. A post-geographical era commences. Although not (yet?) quite the case, the middle landscape cuts off the city from its ancient pedestrian conception and, by joining time and space (distance), allows situationsciences like geography and history a dramatic rejuvenation.

The similarity between “the bindings between base elements” and the role of the in-between—the holes in the urban fabric—in dispersed urbanization is striking. Hägerstrand points out that in science when an object is taken out of its context and isolated, the forces that impinge on it in space and time are removed. This leads to “much loss of understanding” (a scientific affliction that lingers). Architects, developers, and builders operating in suburbia have acted similarly, ignoring the very ground that makes their enterprise possible. Every project, every house, and every subdivision is on its own.

8 Torsten Hägerstrand, Om Tidens Vidd och Tingens Ordning, eds. G. Carlestam and B. Sollbe (Stockholm: Byggnadsforskningisrådet, 1991), 133. Translation from Swedish by Lars Lerup.

Figure 4. Time-geography, Flow, and Network

Time-geography attacks this limitation by suggesting that the most central issue in the situation-sciences is how human beings, society, technology, and nature “engage each other in repeatedly new configurations.”9 In the polycentric arena, concentration on projects (subdivisions, malls, etc.) has led to a failure to engage the context of the entire region, which is best demonstrated by the sprawling of the same projects or, more importantly, in the urbanization process itself. Dispersion usurps the in-between so as to forestall potential conflicts between “incompatible uses” (in denser cities, this is resolved by zoning) and simultaneously ignores the overall functioning of the city. By purposely not minding the gap, sprawl has become the solution to the development equation. This is the true libertarian ground—beyond zoning, beyond government—since the organization of groups of objects, such as a set of subdivisions, is left to individual initiative. Hägerstrand poetically refers to this understanding of objects in space as “objects beyond objects,” and their intricate and complex doings as “events beyond events,” and their manifestations in society, we might add, as humans beyond humans.10 These are the kernels of urbanization, and their interaction defines the physics of urban development.

Time-geography attacks the pruning of complexity by suggesting that the most central issue in the situationsciences is how human beings, society, technology, and nature “engage each other in repeatedly new configurations.”

In Hägerstrand’s exploration of the time-dependent territory—of the in-between—he recognizes three domains: the substrate11 (ground or site in architectural and geographical terms), the medium (air and water), and the populations of humans and other physical entities (including “stones and made things, such as chairs, pens and cars”). In the Zwischenstadt of Houston, this conception takes on special meaning, since our substrate is the peculiarly impenetrable gumbo-soil, carved by the foul water of the engineered bayous, while our air (the other medium) is as thick as liquid and equally humid, an ectoplasm in itself. Back in the generic middle landscape, the sudden appearance of recognizable polycenters adds a time-perspective, which, in turn, gives order to the sprawling city. Hägerstrand suggests a diorama-like diagram that 9 “griper in i varandra i ständigt nya figurationer.” Ibid., 113. 10 Hägerstrand uses these two images to succinctly describe space: you stand next to an object and beyond that is another, and another until they disappear over the horizon, in terms of time you imagine one event behind another one, and so on. 11 French winemakers refer to this as le terroir.

Figure 5. Suburban Leapfrogging

allows us to see the city in history: “First we place an observer in the middle. Outwards from the observer follow things beyond things. But these are the result of appearances (births) that do not occur all at the same time. This requires us to add an axis of time. That which appears now and at the same time may have had a varied existence.”12 Houston has a history, one speeded up by extreme urbanization and a foreshortened time-perspective. Here the coarseness of development—a result of its tendency to leave gaps, to jump across space (so-called leapfrogging), and to refuse to be encumbered by whatever lies in the way—allows an entire range of agglomerations to reveal the past of the city. Thus, a fragment of an earlier African-American settlement in the Fourth Ward lies almost intact next to downtown. In that fragment, tightly packed shotgun houses, replete with front porches and a resident population occupying them, define a narrow street grid. Despite their disrepair, they exude obvious efficiency and communal charm.

“First we place an observer in the middle. Outwards from the observer follow things beyond things. But these are the result of appearances (births) that do not occur all at the same time. This requires us to add an axis of time. That which appears now and at the same time may have had a varied existence.” - Torsten Hägerstrand

Packing Placed hard against the downtown buildings and parking lots, the historical remnant known simply as the Fourth Ward stares back at us. From 1839 until 1905, “wards” defined the city council districts of Houston. After a new system of representation was adopted in 1905, the term “ward” continued to be used to identify the characteristic neighborhoods within each of the former districts, especially by residents of Houston's oldest African-American neighborhoods in the former Third, Fourth, and Fifth Wards. Closely packed around a narrow grid of streets, the Fourth Ward defies middle landscape principles by harkening back to the traditional city. “Material things,” writes Hägerstrand, “are thus packed variously,” producing demands on the living that we more or less willingly engage.13 Proxemics (a notion developed by E.T. Hall14 and what past writing has called American Distance) is predicated on socially constructed packing. Houses sitting nearly in the middle of a lot some twenty blocks away from the Fourth Ward produce a totally different “material dependence” from that in the historical African-American neighborhood. The question of material dependence, what in German is called the 12 Hägerstrand, 133. 13 Ibid., 132. 14 Edward T. Hall, The Hidden Dimension (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966).

Sachzwang meaning the force or influence of the thing on us (and we on it), is complicated and vague, a field of exploration for object-oriented ontology with its belief that everything exists equally. Most practitioners involved with architecture believe that the environment affects its users—inadvertently suggesting a kind of physical determinism. Thus, a Fourth Ward shotgun house, where you must go through each room to reach the next, will have a different effect on family life than the single-family house with corridors serving each separate room. The same goes for a densely packed community served by a grid of streets and its opposite, a subdivision with winding roads and large lots with houses set far back on them. Again architects and planners (silently) expect a different effect on human comportment. Because this expectation is based largely on belief, the actual outcome is currently open to speculation—we have here images of belief versus images of action. In the implied interactions of these varying habitats lies the motor of urbanization. The interactions between humans and things range from the visual to the haptic and now include the virtual (telephony and Internet communication) cut loose from the physical world. Loosely packed populations (of humans and material) depend more on actual and virtual networks than do the denizens of the Fourth Ward. Here the street still exists; here the front porch still functions. What happens when the ancient street is erased and residents replace face-to-face interaction with blogs and e-mail? What occurs when the human face is a mere speculation and language is the only test of reality? Is this the inevitable evolution of polycentric distance, where we have overcome distance for good while remaining safely apart and invisible—existing as mere zeros and ones in computer speech? A World under Construction We must hope for the huge remedial effect the improved networks have had on the loosely packed polycentric conurbation. The telephone developed as a result of ever greater distances between the actors in a diminished physical network—satisfying an eternal craving for direct, personal interaction. It has now been bested by social media, that disembodied flicker on millions of portable screens. Yet even as the television, and later the computer, replaced the porch, the latter may well have returned as a cell phone. In addition to material and energy, products of information, knowledge, and social interaction require individuals (each on their own smartphone) to carry and

exchange them. As Hägerstrand points out, a book is a mere assembly of signs unless a human reads it. In fact, today’s often virtual flows of exchange that engage with substrate, medium, and “populations” may even include a fourth category, mental processes, since so many of our capabilities seem to be genetically imprinted and therefore are shared by many, if not all. Consequently, even if we stand absolutely still in a room, our minds are at work and uniquely so at each instant (since we do not have total recall). Layering all these forces, the world at hand offers up an astonishing complexity that we will never fully understand. To think of it as a static, embedded, unchanging structure is no longer possible. “We and the world around us are under constant construction,” writes Hägerstrand in conclusion. The two worlds, the outside one and the one in our mind, are mixed and stand in relation to each other in such “a rich way that the interactions are impossible to fully describe.”15 The time-geography emerging from this excursion reveals the necessity to triangulate between geography (points and lines), morphology (space and form), and the assemblages of objects and behaviors (organization and management) to allow further understanding of “the multitude of errands” performed by “the multitude of populations” in the polycentric domain—millions of agents, from humans to energies, coursing through ethers, walls, windows, wires, elevators, tunnels, sidewalks, and parking garages, all on their separate, yet obscurely orchestrated, errands. It is worth noting the eerie echo of “packing” and “a world under construction” in Gilles Deleuze’s work on “assemblage.” Although enigmatic, the theory suggests that the packing of humans and objects is a heterogeneous, fluid, transitory affair—mere patchwork. In turn, we can expand Hägerstrand’s “packing of objects” to include not just houses and pens and cars, but utterances, signs, happenings, and events, all packed, as it were, to form multiscaled and contingent clusters. These are not organic, deeply interdependent metabolisms, but instead messy assemblies of disparate parts, each component on its own errand. But they still somehow result in various forms of collective agency (as we saw in the case of the stirrup and lance above). There is no reason to believe that shifting from the analysis of a unified center-based city to polycentric urbanization is going to be simple.

15 Hägerstrand, 141.

Figure 6. Central Place Theory (Walter Christaller)

Urban Algorithms Economic Geography Hägerstrand’s time-geography serves as one descriptive bookend to the array of analytical windows whose flickering afterimages help construct a world forever on the move. At the other end of the analytical expanse are the mathematical constructs that project distinct and hyperreal abstractions of the same unruly world. These constructs are ruled by Geoinformatics,16 the latest version of the location sciences that increasingly relies on digital spatial data acquired by remotely sensed analytical windows. This wide expanse from flux to the fixed seem hopelessly incompatible. The time has come to close its ranks. The descriptive bookend for the “fixed” end of the spectrum may be best presented by Central Place Theories (CPT). All algorithmic descriptions attempt to capture various movements in the polycentric domain— now in the name of science—to turn urbanization’s actions into predictable activity patterns. A rudimentary reconstruction of the many such algorithmic analytical windows that have emerged in the study of the city is now necessary. In the spirit of the vitality and predominance of the capitalist city, “economic geography” has come to dominate the array of available windows.

Always mathematically based, and narrow by design and inclination, economic geography has focused on the location of industries; movements of transportation; processes of gentrification; establishments of trading routes; workings of ethnic and gendered economics; the study of city form, center, and periphery; and globalization.17 16 Geoinformatics has been described as “the science and technology dealing with the structure and character of spatial information, its capture, its classification and qualification, its storage, processing, portrayal and dissemination, including the infrastructure necessary to secure optimal use of this information” or “the art, science or technology dealing with the acquisition, storage, processing production, presentation and dissemination of geoinformation.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Geoinformatics. 17 The most authoritative work on the ‘science of cities’ is a recent book by Michael Batty, The New Science of Cities. (MIT Press 2015). He draws on mathematics, complexity theory, social physics, transportation theory, regional science and various forms of economics, suggesting that previous emphasis on places in space must be augmented with the complex of flows and networks. The result is a master work (much too technical for this general overview) that requires its own separate discussion. However, it is clear that the ‘dismal sciences’ of the city have a new analytical window truly representative of the evident complexity of urbanization.

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Figure 7. Th端nen Rings

One of the first economists may have been Johann von Thünen whose nineteenth-century studies of marginality still have some bearing on agricultural economics.18 He concluded that land rent on an isolated state is dependent on the yield as constrained by production expense and market price, which is, in turn, constrained by freight rate and distance to market. Inadvertently, von Thünen follows Fleischer’s dictum of “minimal data to produce the most” by using the limit case for his calculations. In fact, the “isolated state” focus fits elegantly into the repeated and persistent central focus on the city (while we are reminded of Hägerstrand’s disparaging remarks about the resulting “loss of understanding”). It is perhaps best illustrated by Walter Christaller’s version of CPT developed in Germany during the Nazi era.19 What characterizes all these geographic equations is their algorithmic dependencies: If City A is located twice the distance (2d) from City B as City B is from City C, there will be half the interactions that we can expect between City B and City C, which is half the distance (d) away. Here is a set of interdependent relations rather than an assemblage or opportunistic packing. The difference between the actual (represented by time-geography in its attempts to describe the actual) and the CPT world produced by the black box is often an arena of contention among geographers, sociologists, and economists, while a more productive position would be to see that difference as a potential trading zone, one producing filmic descriptions that incorporate the narrativity of time-geography with the clarity and efficiency of the gravitational equation. Gravity Models Since Christaller’s CPT, an array of gravity and spatial interaction models has evolved. Kingsley Haynes and Stewart Fotheringham write: “Spatial interaction is a broad term encompassing any movement over space that results from a human process. It includes journey-to-work, migration, information and commodity flows, student enrollments and conference attendance, the utilization of public and private facilities, and even the transmission of knowledge. Gravity models are the most widely used types of interaction models. They are mathematical formulations 18 See “Thünenschen Ringe” at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Thünensche_Ringe and the diagram at http://media.m-vp.de/ assets/4528/thuenische-kreise_normal.jpg. 19 See “Christaller—Central Place Theory,” A Quantum City, at https://blogs.ethz.ch/prespecific/2013/05/01/diagrams-christallercentral-place-theory/

Figure 8. Agglomeration Economics

that are used to analyze and forecast spatial interaction patterns.”20 Widening the polycentric perspective to regional urbanization, the basic gravitational model includes several cities of various sizes that are various distances apart—each a polycenter (here played by an entire city). The interaction (commerce, migration, information, and commodity flows) between these cities is dependent, represented “as a ratio of the multiplied populations over the distance between any pair of cities.”21 Under Reilly’s Law of Retail Gravitation,22 the equation avoids all disturbing factors such as, say, prevailing cultural inclinations (i.e., a conservative government backed by elderly voters that form clusters of power and capital), age and gender bias (i.e., a high percentage of unemployed youth), historical legacies (the tulip “bubble” of Amsterdam23 and/or one-industry towns such as Volkswagen in Stuttgart), and political power (exerted by an interest group or a development concern and local banks). Clearly some of the influence of such factors can be translated into metrics and so greatly enhance the sophistication of the standard gravity model. However, outside the logics of interaction, our understanding of the nomadic drive of urbanization, which expands one of the (smaller) cities and greatly shrinks the other (larger) city, remains elusive. Yet the most odious “flaw” in gravitational models (as seen by sociologists) is their complete reliance on “unbounded rationality, willpower, and selfishness.” This is particularly problematic when the unbounded exteriority of urbanization enters the equation. Illustrated by Edward Lorenz’s butterfly effect (rooted in Chaos Theory)—upturning all equations and challenging all forms of prediction—this suggests that unforeseen events and “misbehavior” can (and will) have dramatic effects on the rationalist models of human behavior. This moves us one step closer to a new branch of economics that begins to show its face below.

“Spatial interaction is a broad term encompassing any movement over space that results from a human process. Gravity models are the most widely used types of interaction models. They are mathematical formulations that are used to analyze and forecast spatial interaction patterns.” - Kingsley Haynes and Stewart Fotheringham

20 Kingsley E. Haynes and A. Stewart Fotheringham, Gravity and Spatial Interaction Models (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1984), 9. 21 Ibid., 12. 22 Refers to William J. Reilly’s formula developed in 1931 making the argument that big box stores may be acceptable at long distances if the stores are large enough to supply most needs in a particular retail sector. 23 The Dutch tulpenmanie of 1637 illustrates how popular delusions and crowd-thinking can distort the entire economy of a city or a country, and leave legacies lasting for centuries, thus distorting power relations.

Agglomeration Economics Seemingly more pertinent to urbanization than CPT are the analytical windows opened on agglomeration itself. Driving along one of the arteries in a polycentric city, motorists inevitably run across the cloverleaf of four gas stations gracing all corners at a crossing of a perpendicular artery. The price similarities of such stations at those intersections expose the importance of the economies of scale and network effects (caused by operating in what earlier writing refers to as the Speedzone), but they also reveal the disincentives to engage in a price war within such an agglomeration. A prime example of agglomeration economics at work, revealing why similar functions tend to develop in one area, is provided by the Texas Medical Center in Houston. Here eleven competing hospitals fight over the same ever-expanding, yet precious territory. The center serves as a giant centrifuge, producing a concentric turbulence that keeps everyone on their real-estate toes. The limits and effects of this turbulence are (so far) impossible to capture in an analytical window, although economies of scale and network effects claim to reveal the very motor of change and expansion that is so central to the polycentric apparatus Behavioral Economics It is only with the advent of behavioral economics, however, that the competitive spirit and its opposite, risk aversion, can be used to modify and possibly replace some of the narrower analytical windows ruled by unbounded rationality, willpower, and selfishness—not to mention other assembled assumptions, such as endless access to credit, perfect markets, local politics, and regulation and similar forms of friction. An early proponent of this type of “soft” economics is Herbert A. Simon, who eloquently expounded on the science of design in his 1969 book, The Sciences of the Artificial, as well as on the modeling of complex systems directly relevant to the exploration of the “analytical window.” Clearly in a capitalist society, economic science has been long at the forefront, giving economists a leg up on theorists in political science and sociology by claiming scientific expertise in both those fields. Again it is mathematics that has largely ruled economics, always within the boundary of the three rationalist assumptions. Enter Richard Thaler, a professor at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and suddenly a fundamental doubt about the highly reductive analytical window focused on totally rational agents is introduced:

“Well,” he essentially says, “that’s not how folks behave in reality.” In his most recent book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics (2015), he presents a radically new perspective on the interaction between humans and their economic decisions. No longer entirely rational but instead prone to “misbehavior,” human doings, it turns out, are not easily predicted. In fact, policymakers may have to resort to nudging people to do the “rational thing.” Clearly this type of indirect interference has proliferated in popular economic media. The “U.S. Nightly Business Report” produced by CNBC explores the ups and downs of stock markets, indices, and particular stocks, while making it clear that the reports are not intended as advice, although they may easily be taken as such. Western television and print media is replete with various forms of purported non-advice that actually serves as a series of nudges.

Thaler suggests that what economists have seen as irrationality is a fact of life that in the end must be reflected in new sets of equations or, more productively, by nudging the economic actor to act more rationally, closer to the assumed behaviors of past equations.24 Critics suggest that this constitutes a form of paternalism that is not commensurate with a liberal democracy. Yet others suggest that behavioral economics as portrayed by Thaler is the next step in the natural progression in the methods of neoclassical economics, which is now attempting to get closer to actual economic behavior, thus enabling models closer to reality. Reflections of this behavioral turn can be seen in the blurring of rational and subjective, as well as in hiring practices and salary policies. The growing influence of Thaler’s theories is reflected in his increased authority and the greater use of behavioral economics in government and commerce. Nudging is becoming an established method of encouraging more rational behavior. One resounding success has been getting people to save for retirement by requiring them to opt out of (rather than sign up for) income diversions into company 401Ks. Other attempts have been less successful. In the end, Swagel’s concern that behavioral economics may give rise to “heavy-handed paternalism” is to be expected from a liberal perspective, given that stock market practices have clearly made use of “recurrent irrationality” for pecuniary advantage. An increasingly predictable market eventually run by 24 See Philip Swagel, “A Nudge Too Far: Paternalism and the Pitfalls of Behavioral Economics,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 94, no. 6: 142-147.

The success of physics and its players—theorists, experimenters, and instrument makers—lies in their capability to each maintain their integrity while reaching common cause by forming hybrid coalitions— trading zones—to achieve scientific breakthroughs.

altruistic robots—the final stage of behavioral rationality—which results in a totally flat playing field, would not be to the liking of Wall Street. Big Data The next stage of behavioral economics will have Big Data at its disposal, which will potentially greatly improve on the images of urbanization by building data banks of statistical proof, underpinning particular presuppositions and thus achieving more predictability. 25 The application of behavioral economics to the organization and management of the polycentric city or region seems particularly promising, since additional data will help animate the often obscure clusters of apparent activity in that realm. This, in turn, will allow analysts to project new and more intricate behavior patterns that can be used to reanimate dormant gravitational models. By opening the fields of predictive analytics to both ends of the force field, from time-geography to Central Place Theory, we are likely to come much closer to a realistic image of the rambunctious field of urbanization. Closely connected to the digital enterprise of Big Data is Geoinformatics, also based on recent digital development, including advances in long-distance sensing using satellites such as Google mapping. These developments have direct bearing on the location sciences and many similar fields of application, including urban planning and land use management, in-car navigation systems, virtual globes, public health, local and national gazetteer management, environmental modeling and analysis, military decision-making, transport network planning and management, agriculture, meteorology and climate change, oceanography with a coupled ocean and atmosphere modeling, business 25 Predictive analytics encompasses a variety of statistical techniques from modeling, machine learning, and data mining that analyze current and historical facts to make predictions about future, or otherwise unknown, events. In business, predictive models exploit patterns found in historical and transactional data to identify risks and opportunities. Models capture relationships among many factors to allow assessment of risk or potential associated with a particular set of conditions, guiding decision making for candidate transactions. The defining functional effect of these technical approaches is that predictive analytics provides a predictive score (probability) for each individual (customer, employee, healthcare patient, product SKU, vehicle, component, machine, or other organizational unit) in order to determine, inform, or influence organizational processes that pertain across large numbers of individuals, such as in marketing, credit risk assessment, fraud detection, manufacturing, healthcare, and government operations including law enforcement. Predictive analytics is used in actuarial, retail, travel, marketing, financial services, insurance, telecommunications, healthcare, and so on. See “Predictive Analytics,” at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_analytics.

location planning, architecture and archeological reconstruction, telecommunications, criminology and crime simulation, aviation, biodiversity conservation, and maritime transport.26 It is clear that situation-sciences have come a long way since their humble beginnings in geodetic surveying. Despite the incorporation of sophisticated digital sensing, however, the tendency for these diverse science disciplines to operate in silos has resulted in competing rather cooperating interests. As we have suggested above, the time has come to remedy this stalemate.

Action Common Cause A model of such cooperation between disparate fields and professions has been eloquently described by Peter Galison, a historian of science, in his Image & Logic, where he writes that science cultures participating in the production of data are extraordinarily diverse, ranging from “Wilson and Powell’s engagement with Victorian themes of clouds, volcanoes, and photography...to the uneasy relationship between engineers and physicists and in the weapons laboratories of World war II....” He adds, “I have tried to emphasize the distinctness of the identities of these different groups (theorists, experimenters, and equipment builders) and the complex dynamics by which common cause is made between and among them.”27

It is clear that situation-sciences have come a long way since their humble beginnings in geodetic surveying. The tendency for these diverse science disciplines to operate in silos has resulted in competing rather cooperating interests. As we have suggested above, the time has come to remedy this stalemate.

Success in any science or industry relies on a complex mesh of people, technology, and economic conditions. A well-chosen strategy is one important aspect of achieving such endeavors. However, it is understood that one 26 M. Ehlers, “Geoinformatics and digital earth initiatives: a German perspective,” International Journal of Digital Earth, vol. 1, no. 1 (2008), see abstract at http://www.tandfonline. com/doi/abs/10.1080/17538940701781975. “The scientific field of Geoinformatics encompasses the acquisition and storing of geospatial data, the modeling and presentation of spatial information, geoscientific analyses and spatial planning, and the development of algorithms and geospatial database systems. It is the position of the author that these tools from Geoinformatics are necessary to bridge the gap between Digital Earth models and the real world with its real-world problems (‘connecting through location’). It is, however, crucial that Geoinformatics represents a coherent integrated approach to the acquisition, storage, analysis, modeling, presentation, and dissemination of geo-processes and not a patchwork solution of unconnected fields of activity. Geoinformatics is as such not a part of Geography, Surveying, or Computer Science, but a new self-contained scientific discipline.” 27 Peter Galison, Image & Logic: The Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

essential precondition for strategic success is fruitful collaboration among the various players. Since this is a subject that is generally not given attention in studies of urban theory, we turn here to Galison and his work on science and the working relations among physicists in the twentieth century. Galison suggests that the success of physics and its players—theorists, experimenters, and instrument makers—lies in their capability to each maintain their integrity while reaching common cause by forming hybrid coalitions—what he calls trading zones—to achieve scientific breakthroughs. These sites of interaction between highly diverse equals is the “social, material, and intellectual mortar” that allows the otherwise disparate traditions of experimentation, theorizing, and the building of instruments to come together. About these hybrid forms of practices and their attempts “to coordinate action and belief,” he writes, “I take it to be the sign of vibrant life, not fragility, that the material culture of the laboratory is in flux through changing modes of collaboration, techniques, simulations, and disciplinary alliances.”28 In the trading zone site—partly symbolic and partly spatial—the local coordination of action and belief allows groups “to agree on the rules of exchange even if they subscribe utterly different significance to the objects of exchange…[resulting in] local coordination despite global differences.”29 This, we suspect, occurs, despite each profession’s pidgin or Creole mode of expression, through the employment of what Michel Foucault called a “grey language.” Galison recounts a peculiar moment, in the heat of WW II, when theorists, experimenters, and equipment builders created a hybrid site by employing what would be known as the “radar philosophy.” Here, the emergence of a highly flexible trading zone was prompted by a demand from the War Department to radically advance the radar capabilities of the U.S. military. Galison writes, and we paraphrase, that an ideological democracy emerged, where the players had come to see coordination among their efforts as the central feature of the new physics.30 The particular science dialects or jargons—the Creoles 28 Ibid., 838. 29 Ibid., 783. 30 Ibid., 829.

and pidgins—of the three groups that normally “cut up the world” (Kuhn) were under pressure from above to be momentarily abandoned or modified to allow the project to rapidly and radically advance. This is not to say that such linguistic domains are not at the same time powerful ways of advancing each practice, what Galison calls the “positive dynamics of contact languages.” Consequently, the trading zone for improving radar capabilities had had to be respectful of these “border languages” and their respective achievements while also pushing for a common solution. In the end, Galison suggests, the “imposed orchestration” of the huge wartime laboratories allowed the players to overcome effective firewalls through an emphasis on “heuristic argumentation” over more systematic demonstrations. This led theorists, experimenters, and instrument makers to allow the newcomers of electronic and mechanical engineering to play a decisive role.31

A corollary urbanization design trading zone would thus be characterized by “both its stubborn physicality and its mathematical abstraction,” now regarded as an urban physics.

Galison notes that the flux of a hybrid collusion is not a sign of fragility, but a sign of vibrant life, as “the material culture of the laboratory” changes its “modes of collaboration, techniques, simulations, and disciplinary alliances.” A corollary urbanization design trading zone would thus be characterized by “both its stubborn physicality and its mathematical abstraction,” now regarded as an urban physics. The need to find a productive balance between the undeniable presence of the material residue of urbanization and abstract analysis will always haunt a trading zone— draped in the ephemeral boundary-setting of economics. Numerous philosophical dilemmas also haunt our site, forcing us back to “the grey language” and the need for new concepts since we have no other way to talk about the production of physical objects. The harrowing realization that despite its undeniable physicality, the “urban fabric” about to emerge as the residue of the urbanization process cannot be grasped without, in this case, a common language—one that is generous enough to allow the presence and functions of the various pidgins— forces us to admit that “we need concepts and language to talk about the real.”32 Finally, we suggest that urbanization’s twenty-first-century “radar philosophy” must begin to operate under the auspices of “climate change”—addressing the ominous 31 Ibid., 834-837. 32 Ibid., 840-843.

Anthropocene. The urgency shared by the need to improve radar in war and the need to confront urbanization as a slow-motion conflict, separated by over fifty years of continuous and relentless change, is an essential motivation; without it, the firewalls between the players will never be broached. The “greening” of all building practices may prove to be a similarly unique moment in our culture, where advances of the type seen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century result in a series of inventions that will fuel the twenty-first century. It is time for a “catastrophic change,” no longer simply to make life easier, but to help us survive. Although urbanization is not as robust as science, with its variety and relatively independent parts, new alliances under the rubric of green building will force players with goals as divergent as “profit” and “accessibility for all” to begin a conversation. Because of existing internal strengths, a new low-impact urbanization may evolve, counterintuitively based on the disunification that Galison calls “the intercalation of different patterns of argument.” Under the rubric of Bild & Handlung, the research group under whose umbrella this paper is written has already gathered research from the entire force field—from narrative to gravity models—to create the humble beginnings of a trading zone. The common focus on health care, exemplified by dialysis, is an ideal trading situation, developed, on the one hand, by Gunnar Hartmann in his exploration of the mapping of time-distance and, on the other, by Lothar Koppers’s use of Geoinformatics to improve efficiency in the technical service of dialysis machines. A rich narrative describing the arena of dialysis in Germany has yet to be written, but with access to banks of data measuring the highly orchestrated “service” of the dialysis centers and providing a possibly less detailed demographic analysis of its patients, combined with a measure of futurism, we may arrive at a much more complete understanding of the distribution of this particular branch of health care, now viewed as an integral expression of the relentless process of urbanization. When applying the trading zone concept, there are distinct advantages to focusing on specific activities, such as health care, and on an existing polycentric territory, whether the intense agglomerations of the Ruhrgebiet or a more widely diffuse arena such as the gravitational apron around the city of Munich. In describing the provision of dialysis in any of these domains, we benefit 32

Geo-informatic engineer

Behavioral economist

Regional planner

End user

Figure 9. Urbanization Trading Zone

from an already existing pattern of clinics and machines that is based on some form of location analysis. With the intention of fine-tuning this distribution, we can simultaneously explore historical experience, demographics, projected future growth of an aging population, patient profiles, emerging technologies (patient navigation devices, etc.), behavioral nudges, and Geoinformatic equations—all as the outcome of negotiations within the trading zone. Coda The key to the success of the “radar experiment” was not the trading zone but the urgency—the visceral threat of losing the war. As has been suggested, urbanization is a slow-motion war-like conflict. Sometimes it unfolds on a grand scale, as in the case of Baron Haussmann’s assault on the essentially medieval Paris, and other times it shows in the everyday oscillations of the modern metropolis. The urgencies of everyday urbanization are many, but since they are often obscure and hidden behind the veils of politics and opinion, it is hard to find an audience for any one of them—the Anthropocene is probably the best example of an urgency being denied. However, in our project, we have focused on health care for the simple reason that it is close to home far all urbanites—particularly in an age where the effects of a receding welfare state have combined with a larger aging population. The issue of health, sickness, and the care is thus seen as one of the many oscillations of urbanization that reverberates—with urgency—throughout the entire area. The particular case of chronic disease—often sidelined by current health care business models—stands out. The economic pressure on the providers in this field is acute, suggesting that the care of chronic patients must find new avenues of optimization, benefiting not just providers but patients. For urbanization, “chronic illness” implies the same endless repetition of medical procedures, but here in reference to the repetitive use of all urban infrastructures, from the physical to the virtual. The polycentric city is particularly complex since the previously centralization facilities of the past have been dispersed—rarely for the purpose of improving on service, but more often for extraneous reasons such as land price, politics, and entrepreneurship. Often the result is extreme agglomeration and duplication or its opposite—desertification. Hence we find ourselves caught in a new urgency: urbanization as a constant repair of the collateral damages of the slow-motion conflict.

List of Illustrations Figure 1. Figure 1. Monocentric Vision vs. Polycentric Reality. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Figure 2. Total Polycentricity. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Figure 3. 24-7 Stim & Dross. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Figure 4. Time-geography, Flow, and Network. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Visualization concept of time-geography based on Parkes & Thrift (1978), after Dagens Nyheter (1976). Figure 5. Suburban Leapfrogging. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Figure 6. Central Place Theory (Walter Christaller). Illustration by Walter Christaller, “System der zentralen Orte in Süddeutschland (1933).” Figure 7. Thünen Rings. Illustration by Gunnar Hartmann and Henry McKenzie. Based on Johann Heinrich von Thünen’s model of agricultural land use (1875). Figure 8. Agglomeration Economics. Illustration by the author and Henry McKenzie. Figure 9. Urbanization Trading Zone. Illustration by the author, Gunnar Hartmann, and Henry McKenzie.

Health & Design series at Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung at Humboldt-Universit채t zu Berlin