Have a traffic congestion problem? Just build more lanes. There is no incentive to minimize auto trips, to create neighborhoods where people can walk or bike for most of their daily needs. That would involve changing zoning codes, allowing people to start businesses in neighborhoods where they are currently prohibited, and maybe even increasing the cost of driving during peak times. We have the money, so just build more capacity.
Are sales at the big box store stagnating? Just close it and build a new one in a better location. There is no incentive to construct buildings that can serve multiple purposes or be easily adapted to another use. Achieving that resiliency would compel our economy to be less efficient and our transactions more localized, and that would change the nature of growth in our economy. So long as profit is to be made building a new store, we would be foolish to stop it from happening.
Experiencing an increase in the teen suicide rate? An epidemic of obesity? Out-of-control costs for senior medical care? No matter the problem, and no matter how bad it becomes, there is no force compelling us to evolve our habitat, to change the way we live together. Each challenge has become but a complicated problem to be worked out by someone else, through public policy or market mechanisms. We’re the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind, after all.
In our new experimental living pattern, feedback and adaptation have become meaningless. We do not perceive any need for our human habitat to harmoniously balance multiple things simultaneously. Why would we when we can just go ahead and use our resources to solve problems as we become aware of them?
This approach worked well right after World War II – perhaps too well. It allowed Americans to, for a time, address many of civilization’s nagging struggles. Through our success, however, we collectively developed a low tolerance for uncomfortable feedback and a reduction in our ability to adapt to stress.
We’re more comfortable behaving as if our cities are merely complicated. Increasingly, they are not.
Notes
1 Ann Sussman and Justin B. Hollander, Cognitive Architecture: Designing For How We Respond to the Built Environment (New York: Routledge, 2015).
2 Ibid.
3 Neil Johnson, Simply Complexity: A Clear Guide to Complexity Theory (London: Oneworld Publications, 2017).
2
Incremental Growth
Take a tentative step in the dark. If you do not run into something, you just gained knowledge. If you hit a wall, the incremental nature of your advance gives you wisdom without much lost.
Now take an abrupt leap in the dark. The gain may come at a more rapid pace, but the risk of breaking your nose is far greater. Even if successful, it is unlikely you can repeat this trick many times without serious calamity.
When there are an unknowable number of variables and feedback loops that react to and ultimately impact what we do, and when calamity is not an outcome we are willing to risk, the way to probe uncertainty is through incremental change. This is exactly the approach embodied in the traditional development pattern.
Complex, adaptive systems grow incrementally. That is the method they use to simultaneously harmonize multiple competing interests, to learn – through experimentation – what truly works and what doesn’t.
Each part of the system receives feedback to changes as they happen. Each part responds to positive and negative stressors, adaptations that impact every other part of the system. It is an approach predicated upon failure – preferably small, early failures – as a path to wisdom.
My hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota, was founded in the years immediately following the Civil War. There is a photo I obtained through our historical society that shows an early iteration (Figure 2.1). It’s a series of little pop-up shacks arranged in a line next to the train stop. The buildings are all nondescript, single-story, wood structures with minimal ornamentation. When I look at them, I see a series of little bets my ancestors made, generations ago – nothing colossal, nothing monumental, just things that might succeed or fail. The outcome of any single bet wouldn’t prove decisive.
Figure 2.1 Front Street in Brainerd, Minnesota, 1870
Looking at this photo, it’s clear what happened. Some lumberjacks and speculators, looking for a place they could start modestly and build successfully, got off the train in the middle of a forest at a spot where the railroad crossed the Mississippi river. They cut down some of the trees and planed them out for lumber. With the materials they had on hand and copying a pattern they had seen work in other places, they built those little shacks, the first iteration of a city.
This is how every city in human history up to this point had begun: a series of pop-up shacks, some hopes, and some dreams. The great cities of North America – San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, and Manhattan – all began in this way. London, Paris, Milan, and the cities of Europe, likewise. Even ancient cities, where urban DNA was in a more infantile phase, places like Alexandria, Thebes, Beirut, and Damascus, were founded in this same manner.
In North America, we built thousands of such places. For a variety of complex reasons that defy our ability to predict, project, or even fully understand after-the-fact, many of these places failed. Some combination of the wrong people, the wrong place, and the wrong time conspired to thwart those hopes and dreams. The many prerequisites needed to make it successful just didn’t come together.
It’s important to understand what happens when a place like this fails – not much. A few people suffer some, they salvage what they can, and they move on. I’m not trying to diminish their individual pain; rather, my intent is to point out the isolation of that pain from the larger society. When a place like this fails, there is no corresponding nationwide spike in unemployment. The stock market doesn’t crash. We don’t need an emergency bailout of Wall Street banks lest there be no food on the nation’s grocery shelves in a couple days. These are small, isolated bets, an opportunity to gain knowledge at low risk. In the overall scheme of things, their failure at this early stage is survivable. In fact, it’s better to fail early when the stakes are low.
In North America, we started thousands of cities as a collection of little pop-up shacks. For a variety of complex reasons that defy our ability to predict, project, or even fully understand after-the-fact, many of these places were successful. The combination of people, place, and time came together in a way that worked. When it did, something simple to comprehend, yet altogether magical, began to happen.
The city would grow. It would incrementally grow outward, incrementally grow upward, and incrementally become more intense. In time, the row of pop-up shacks is replaced with a collection of buildings that are more substantial investments. And the edge of town, where there once was bare ground or sparse settlement, is the next iteration of the pop-up shack, a small experiment to discover the next generation of success.
In the case of my hometown, the next photo of the same street comes 34 years after the first (Figure 2.2). The shacks are gone and in their place are two- and three-story wood structures. In another 40 years, those wood buildings would be replaced by buildings of brick and granite.
Figure 2.2 Front Street in Brainerd, Minnesota, 1904
A core characteristic of growing complex, adaptive systems is the incremental nature of the growth. The pace can be fast or glacially slow, but either way, change happens through many tentative steps in the dark. Historically, cities have grown incrementally on a continuum of improvement. Start with a pop-up shack and eventually get to Manhattan.
The key difference between historic development patterns and the way Americans began to build cities in the twentieth century is our capacity to skip the messy iterations and jump to what we perceive to be the perfect end. Today, we build in large leaps, and we build to a finished state. We envision the end condition – for a building, a block, or a neighborhood – and that is what we go forth and create.
When we build it, we are then done. There is no anticipation of change, incremental or otherwise. The building won’t adapt, t
he block won’t evolve, and the neighborhood won’t transform over time, at least not easily. As it is built, evermore will it be, world without end. This commitment to stasis requires a level of cultural hubris bordering on the absurd, particularly given the pace of change we’ve grown used to in all parts of our society.
Humans are not good at predicting the future. This is a lesson our ancestors grew to understand over thousands of years of living together in evolving cities. We don’t know what will happen next year, or in a decade, or a century from now. Things change. Our needs change. In a world of limits, one where we can’t just overcome our mistakes by expending endless resources, the way to avoid the fatal flaw is to build things that are adaptable, that can evolve to serve multiple purposes.
In a world without limits, there is no cost for guessing wrong. We can simply tear down and rebuild each failure, applying cultural narratives to explain to ourselves why no reasonable person could have seen that mistake coming. There is no real cost so long as there are adequate resources to overcome mistakes, or mistakes impact parts of society that can be ignored or rationalized away. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter what is built or what resources we expend in building it.
That is the difference between experiencing the city as merely complicated instead of complex. It’s also the reason why modern Americans insist it is possible to predict the future, even though humans have proven over and over that, with complex systems, it is not.
Complex versus Complicated Buildings
Complexity happened in residential neighborhoods in the same way it happened with the pop-up shacks near the railroad stop. Many traditional neighborhoods began with what we would today call a tiny home, something currently illegal in many cities. A 600-square-foot box – a 20-foot by 30-foot simple structure – could have a kitchen and dining room, a living room, bedroom, and a bath. Very simple, but also affordable, especially when built on cheaper land on the edge of town.
Visit many American neighborhoods established before the 1920s and you can still witness many of these structures, although likely not in their infant phase. That’s because they are designed to evolve, to be added on to and changed to suit different needs.
Have a child? Build an addition on the back. Have a second child? Build another story. Need extra income? Create a basement entrance and rent out the lower-level space. Have a business idea? Convert the front of the home to a shop or office. Able to save some money? Change the front stoop into a full porch.
There are an endless set of permutations that can be brought forth from the simple box, all based on the changing needs and resources of the time. Without tearing down the original structure, a home of this type could be modified to serve an individual, a family, or even multiple families. It could be a home for someone with modest means or someone who is affluent. Once established, a traditional neighborhood can always be adapted to new needs.
And critical to the way communities grow stronger over time, this approach allowed people to start with relatively little and incrementally build that into real wealth. This is all in sharp contrast to the way Americans build neighborhoods today.
Today we build individual homes, as well as complete neighborhoods, all at once, to a finished state. There is no starting small and adding on as resources allow; property is purchased using long-term financing sold into a secondary market, with banks and insurers requiring a finished product as a prerequisite to completing the transaction.
Standardization of the core product and assembly methods has made the home-building process hyper-efficient, theoretically driving down the cost per square foot. The price of a home has not gone down, however; the amount of square feet per structure has merely gone up.1 Financing mechanisms force home builders to build to a final state, and they force buyers to enter the market with a fully mature home at a high price point. The true entry-level product has been squeezed out.
Along with a higher bar to entry, zoning and building regulations keep things from evolving. Regardless of need or changing circumstance, modern zoning codes typically don’t allow single-family homes to be converted into multi-family, not even to rent out a room to a college student for some extra cash. Same with adding a business. Even if the market demand is there, zoning regulations might allow some limited home occupations, but nothing that would betray the residential uniformity of the neighborhood.
Zoning, as well as land covenants and property associations, create uniformity across each new neighborhood that is built. Not only are all homes on a given cul-de-sac built within a few years of each other, they are all built in a tight price range. Homes are clustered together by price, with a buffer between them and homes in a different price point.
Homes for the modestly wealthy, or those who can make the payments of a modestly wealthy family, are in a completely different pod from homes for the very wealthy, even though they are both wealthy by American standards. Those pods are disconnected from each other and separated by buffers, as if someone driving a Lexus would be injured by living in proximity to someone merely driving a Buick. This kind of stratification happens for all classes of society.
Modern city-building efficiently creates pods of static, monoculture development. As ecosystems, monocultures are inherently fragile. The fragility of the American development pattern is amplified by the unnatural stasis imposed: the inability to adapt to changing circumstances.
When we build a neighborhood all at once to a finished state, we have – at best – a moment of perfection, a period of time when everything works as envisioned. But even in the most perfect development, an unavoidable, yet entirely predictable, stress looms.
The homes were all built at the same time; they will all reach the end of their life cycle at the same time. Within the lifetime of the mortgage debt for the home, the homes in the neighborhood will simultaneously start to fail.
An asphalt-shingled roof will last for 25 to 30 years, and then it will need to be replaced. Because they were all built at the same time, every home in the neighborhood will need a new roof within a few years of each other. Failure to maintain the roof has serious consequences; a modern chipboard and sheetrock home will go bad quickly with a failed roof.
The siding of every home in the neighborhood will also fail at roughly the same time. Everyone’s appliances will go bad within a few years of each other. The sidewalks and driveways will crack and be overgrown with weeds, all at the same time. Building a neighborhood all at once, instead of incrementally, merely ensures that all the inevitable pressures of decline will occur simultaneously across the entire neighborhood.
And because the neighborhood is built to a finished state, because no higher use is anticipated or even allowed on the property, the only available options are stagnation and decline. In the best-case scenario, the buildings will be maintained as they are, regardless of the cost or return on investment for doing so, and the neighborhood will stagnate, not improving but not getting worse.
The more likely scenario is that, as the signs of decline start to become apparent, the more affluent in the neighborhood will move. They will do the logical thing and sell their home in the declining neighborhood and purchase another in a neighborhood they perceive to be a better investment. That will leave people with lesser financial means to struggle to maintain homes within a deteriorating neighborhood.
Ultimately the relentless pressure of time and entropy will push the neighborhood into decline. It may take a few years or a few decades, but all possible futures converge on the sole remaining outcome: decline. It’s like treading water, a binary set of outcomes – stagnation or decline – and there is no easy path back once the cycle of decline is established.
Neighborhood Renewal
The incremental approach to building neighborhoods contains a natural rejuvenation mechanism, introducing a third variable to the otherwise depressing menu of stagnation and decline: renewal. Traditional development drives renewal by improving the underlying value of land.
The value of all developed property has two components: the value of the land and the value of the improvements on the land.
Property Value = Improvement Value + Land Value
There is a relationship between the improvement value and the land value, a ratio at which an improvement makes sense given the land value. Consider two extreme instances to illustrate the point.
Manhattan real estate is extremely valuable. If there is any raw land in Manhattan, it would be some of the most expensive square footage in North America. It would be unthinkable – and not very stable over time – for someone to purchase prime real estate in Manhattan and place a mobile home on it. The absurdity of putting such a low value improvement on such expensive real estate is obvious. The highest and best use, as real estate purveyors like to describe it, is much greater.
Conversely, real estate in the second and third rings around Detroit is extremely cheap. Raw land can be acquired for far below the cost of the infrastructure that has already been provided to the site, suggesting the land actually has negative value in some places. It would be very strange for someone to buy a single lot in one of these neighborhoods and put a $10 million luxury home on it. The value of the land would not support such an investment. While it is possible that this kind of investment might happen sometime and someplace, it would be an outlier event, an exception to the rule, and not part of a general pattern of development.
Stated simply, there is a ratio of improvement value to land value that is stable. If that ratio gets too low – a situation where the land is valuable compared to the improvement on it – redevelopment pressure increases. A cheap improvement on an expensive piece of land is a prime candidate for redevelopment. Someone is likely to buy the property, demolish the existing structures, and build something new, something of higher intensity that would more closely justify the higher land value.
Strong Towns Page 3
