Cities As/ Challenges Of Complexity

In her seminal work from 1961, Jane Jacobs offered a comprehensive planning practices, characterizing it as a "pseudoscience" with a problematic replicating failed empirical approaches and disregarding successful p. 183) She made an appeal to urban planners and city policymakers and interrelated nature of the issues facing cities. Jacobs believed in comprehending and utilizing the inherent order of cities, incorporating findings from new sciences and pragmatic methods.

The background to Jane Jacobs' book is the proposed construction Village, where she lived, by New York city planner Robert Moses in the modernist urban planning ideology, which viewed cities as diseased this through large-scale infrastructural solutions, often resulting features. In contrast, Jacobs argued for the importance of social

Lower Manhattan Expressway Robert Moses image fromhttps://www.theguardian.com/ cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-32-newyork-jane-jacobs-robert-moses comprehensive critique of modern urban problematic preoccupation for ones. (Jacobs, 1993 [1961], policymakers to comprehend the complex believed that the solution lies incorporating the most insightful construction of a highway in Greenwich in 1955. Moses subscribed to diseased and sought to address resulting in the destruction of city social capital, which is linked to the physical form of the city, such as its streets, sidewalks, parks, and mix of uses. She developed a thesis valuing small-scale city neighborhoods and their unique elements and character, and drew evidence from her own neighborhood to show its transferability to other urban contexts. A central focus of her study was the role of everyday street life in urban areas, referred to as "sidewalk ballet." under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes … The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with improvisations. (Jacobs, 1993 [1961], p. 50)

Jane Jacobs introduced a novel perspective on urban planning by emphasizing the importance of the chaotic, small-scale, and social characteristics of a place, as well as diversity. This approach, at the time considered revolutionary, remains relevant today. Moses, a proponent of modernist urban planning, believed that the solution to the problems of cities was through the introduction of topdown, infrastructure-led regeneration. This perspective was challenged by Jacobs, who viewed the complexity of the lived city as being defined by its localized and social characteristics, rather than the controlled and centralized city system represented by the proposed road. The large-scale smart cities projects of today can be seen as similar in that they seek to introduce a technologized infrastructure that dominates the heart of a city's neighborhoods.

Robert Moses/

Jane Jacobs/

The Death and Life of Great American Cities image from https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/ apr/28/story-cities-32-new-york-jane-jacobs-robert-moses cities happen to be problems in organized complexity … they do not exhibit one problem in organized complexity, which if understood explains them all. The variables are many, but they are not helter-skelter, they are ‘interrelated in an organic whole’. (Jacobs, 1993 [1961], p. 433)

Jacobs challenged conventional modern city planning by arguing that it had consistently mistaken cities as problems of what she termed ‘simplicity’ and of ‘disorganized complexity’, and had tried to analyse them and treat them as such. She argued that it was not enough for administrators in most fields to understand specific services and techniques, and that instead they needed to ‘understand, and understand thoroughly, specific places’ (Jacobs, 1993 [1961], p. 410). Drawing on thinking from the life sciences she put forward a hypothesis as below where she argues that the solution lay in thinking about cities as problems characterized by unexamined but obviously interconnected and understandable relationships that could only be revealed by observing its small-scale processes.