Visualizing the City

Photo: courtesy of NASA

When a lot, parcel, or property is considered a cell in the urban anatomy, it becomes easier to visualize the city as the sum of these cells and the aggregation as organic since life inhabits the nucleus of each cell. It also makes it easier to understand the question – “Is each cell a healthy part of the organism?” The answer depends on the measurement of cell content and the evaluation of its impact on the inhabitants and their neighbors; but the process needs a precise method of explanation based on these measurements so that success can be repeated and failure avoided. In the context of shelter formation, this language must have the ability to correlate future cell content; and the eventual ability to lead the aggregation of cell content toward healthy urban form within geographic limits based on a policy of symbiotic survival. It is no longer enough to recognize shelter as essential. Population growth is producing shelter sprawl that is consuming our source of life. We must learn to accurately forecast the shelter capacity of land and plan for population growth within geographic limits. Escaping to infect another planet is not a realistic solution.

Urban form has become visible with the introduction of satellite photography. As we peer through this microscope in space, think of the picture included with this note as a petri dish. The growth medium is brown, blue, and green. The white mass in the dish is a Built Domain that is growing through a process we call annexation and sprawl. (Ignore the clouds) This Built Domain is growing one property cell at a time to threaten its source of life – The Natural Domain. (I’ve just referred to it as a growth medium.) The threat is prompted by a mandate to be “fruitful” and our admiration of “growth”; but we are on a planet that is no longer a world with end, and we are no longer threatened by a lack of population.

At the present time, urban growth is a metastasizing disease on the face of the planet. We are parasites that must adopt a symbiotic role to survive. The Built Domain is a threat to our source of life. Its unhealthy cells, where they occur, are a threat to our quality of life because their content has not been correlated with a language that can repeat success and avoid failure. Annexation has been unlimited and rarely contributes to the formation of essential open space arteries. Movement and life support arteries are included to serve the Shelter Division, but open space pockets have often been an inadequate substitute for the open space arteries required.

The problem is compounded because unhealthy cells can be recognized but not diagnosed. These conditions exist because a method of measurement, evaluation, and correlation with an adequate, quantitative leadership language has been missing.

The language begins with recognition:

(1)         that there are now two worlds on a single planet,

(2)         that the Built Domain is composed of Urban and Rural Phyla,

(3)         that both phyla contain four divisions: Shelter, Movement, Open Space, and Life Support,

(4)         that the Shelter Division is served by the movement, open space, and life support divisions,

(5)         that the Shelter Division contains seven primary shelter design categories,

(6)         that design specifications identify the cellular content of each category,

(7)         that cellular content can be measured and evaluated at existing locations to build a consistent database of knowledge,

(8)         that consistent, measurable cell content can lead to the definition of healthy and unhealthy cells,

(9)         that master equations can be written to correlate and lead the behavior of cell content,

(10)      that cell aggregations can be planned and led to improve our physical, social, psychological, environmental, and economic quality of life, and

(11)       that visualization of the problem before us, and the language needed for discussion, can lead us to the symbiotic quality of life we must discover.

We have not been given the DNA we need. We must write it. The language of city design offers the opportunity to begin. My previous books have addressed this topic with a mathematically driven language of shelter planning. The final draft of my new book is substantially complete. It represents a simplified, comprehensive, and improved explanation of the design specification templates and forecast models that add precision and credibility to the discussion of shelter capacity for growing populations with geographic limits that protect their physical, social, psychological, environmental, and economic quality of life within the umbrella terms health, safety, and welfare.