What I learned about urban design from Edward Said

I have a narrow focus. I have an intellectual framework which is so limited as to make even me laugh. I'm a hedgehog rather than a fox (which former animal btw is not a type of porcupine. The hedgehog is part of the insectivore family; the porcupine is part of the rodent family.)

I'm simple. I see virtually all urban issues through the lens of the Three Rules of urban design. That may be a slight exaggeration but not a whole lot. I look at a street in a commercial district and the first thing I notice is whether it has on-street parking and where lies the building in relation to the sidewalk, assuming that there is a sidewalk.

I look at the central problem of urbanism as how to create pedestrian-oriented cities. The key to creating such cities is understanding and applying the Three Rules. To put it another way, you dont get pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods by having a growth management boundary (though such a boundary may very well be a good idea). You get pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods by building pedestrian-friendly buildings, which means building according to the Three Rules.

Following the Three Rules will indeed precipitate a whole host of other change. For instance, state highway departments would be forced to manage those generally oppressive urban arterials (e.g. Highway 99 on the west coast and Highway 1 on the east) not as urban highways but as urban streets.

Shaping the city starts with understanding and applying the Three Rules. All else is peripheral. So that is my narrow approach.

You can laugh; I do. But it's not really a laughing matter; I take city-building seriously.

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My first English Composition teacher at Columbia was a guy named Edward Said. He's famous now. But then, in the autumn of 1963, he had just received his Ph.D. and stormed into our section, elegant in wide-lapelled suit, with an intensity I still remember. He was an excellent teacher, though as I look back on it now I wonder how he could possibly have found it comfortable --- and bourgeois comforts is what this blog is all about: who is fool enough to disdain bourgeois comfort? --- to be at a place with the demographics of Columbia University in the City of New York? And to have stayed there these many years? There is a story there.

At any rate, Edward Said was a rigorous and interesting teacher. I took several courses from him even though I had only passing interest in English literature. (I had seized like a dog on the convenient bone that it is better to take the teacher, not the subject.)

One of the most striking things he said was along these lines. It may not be a surprising insight for an adult but for a teenager --- and we freshmen were indeed hardly out of boyhood --- but one day that fall Said sat on the edge of the desk and asked us this simple question, and of course I paraphrase:

"Have you ever had a conversation with someone who always had the answer? No matter what you say, they always can refute you. Theyve always got an answer. And what seems like a pretty good answer?"

By this time we all had enough sense to nod only dimly so as to avoid attracting attention. Duh. "Yes.":

"Have you ever thought about why they are so successful at debate?"

"Duh."

"Well it's simple. You find such people --- those who always have what looks like a cast-iron bulletproof answer --- among groups who take part in a fully-formed and rounded ideology. Catholic priests, Communist organizers, zealous adherents to an ideology --- any of them will be able to take your question, digest it within their intellectual framework and spit it back. Their intellectual system is powerful enough to handle any challenge. Or so it appears. Theyre hard to talk to, hard to beat in argument because their system has an answer for every question. So when you talk with someone like that, what do you do?

Not a head moved.

"Well it is simple. You examine their first principles. You determine what foots their ideology. You go to the bottom, determine the root ideas, their assumptions, their intellectual prime mover. Everything they say will flow and must in some way be consistent with those first principles and assumptions. And then you decide if those first principles have validity for you, if they make sense, then fine; you agree. If not, you fight back on the basis of whether their first principles are valid or reasonable to you or can be justified. Dont work at the top level application. Dig down to the root. But in any case, if you understand their first principles, you are forearmed and can see through them."

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It was obviously a striking-enough lesson --- and with a source which adds an amusing irony especially insofar as I have many times applied it to his own writing --- that I remember it now forty years later.

So now you too are forearmed with regards to City Comforts Blog.

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Brian's Education Blog links.

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UPDATE 12/20/03:

Another blogger mentioned this post and I left this comment on his blog as I realized on re-reading my own post that someone might take offense:

Btw, I hope no one takes offense at my mention of Said's inclusion of Catholic Priests. (On reflection, btw, he might have actually said Jesuit Priests.)

But I am quite sure that he did say it because, being Jewish and young and somewhat sheltered, I had had very little contact with Catholics at all and so was struck by both his inclusion of them as idealogues and also by his respectful manner; he spoke of them as people of substance even if one did not follow their faith.