INTRODUCTION
the technocratic justification for wide-scale urban renewal closely paralleled the growing popular faith in rational systems and thinking machines.
By the I940s, some planners were talking about multinucleated urban growth patterns, downplaying the importance of a central business district for the life of the city.
The Bunker Hill renewal project in downtown Los Angeles was one of the largest and most dramatic in the country
Urban renewal was as much psychological as physical.
Urban renewal was a corrective process. It was meant to destroy decades of ingrained experiences and perceptions of the city and replace them with a stable, reliable, distant image.
Norbert Wiener described as operative: "Operative images, which perform
the functions of their original, may or may not bear a pictorial likeness to it.
Whether they do or not, they may replace the original in its action, and this is a
much deeper similarity"
replace the urban imagery of chaos and degradation with one of order and function.
the spectatorship associated with the operative city produced a functional aesthetic through the assemblage of logically consistent mechanical parts. Possession was still important; only now, the city was constructed through a spectator's ability to possess and control its functionality.
THE ROAD TO RENEWAL
the newly granted power of imminent domain allowed the city to condemn the building and take it from the owner at below-market rates.
In short time, the rhetoric of redevelopment translated to the new rhetoric of "renewal."
The premise ... was that if a large enough parcel was cleared and built anew, natural urban processes would extend the positive effects of development outward. If the development area was too small, however, renewal efforts would not be successful.
THE BATTLE OF BUNKER HILL
Bunker Hill came to symbolize confusion, corruption, convalescence, and the degradation of values.
the city was no longer seen within this constructivist context. It was presented as something that could be presented all at once- completely within the parameters of human understanding. Accordingly, if the city as a whole was "subject to human mastery and control," then the city could be produced from scratch. Whatever could be understood could be manufactured.
The war demonstrated that technology could easily overwhelm the intentions of its creator. Left unchecked, progress could be dangerous. For this reason, technological displays turned away from speculation and toward control.
THE OPERATIVE IMAGE
Norbert Wiener's 1948 book, Cybernetics.
study of how systems communicate with themselves in order to maintain internal cohesion, and how they interact with other systems.
People, cities, and societies were no different than machines.
he called the result of any system's production of another system an of operative
image. Every system creates in its own image- God and man, man and machine.
little emphasis on the specific architectural references in each of the structures-only on their combined function as urban image. The operative image was the foundation of a Concept-city that sought to distance the spectator from his central position of aggregator
Heidegger - This is how the modern world is knowable. The world is an image capable of existing alongside and not within experience. the world conceived and grasped as picture = World Picture
Just as machines were programmed to represent human thought, so were cities tasked with the challenge of representing urban function.
MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
If scientists cracked the code of human thought, the mind could be rendered a useful servant instead of a persistent antagonist.
Descartes believed that objects were totally contained in the outside world and known to the mind only through their representations.
Turing test - versatility, Universal Machine
The modern city should be able to pass Turing's test: it should be programmed to make its creators think that it is thinking. Through scientific planning it can solve urban problems and increase economic value far more efficiently than any human advisors.
OUTCOME PREDICTION AS URBAN DESIGN
This rational city stemmed from an urban planning discourse most notably initiated by Le Corbusier's Radiant City (1970). All activities were logically separated in Radiant City; leisure and commerce were physically removed from one another in order to assure order and easy maintenance of the urban plan.
The master plan was conceived as a Universal Machine, organizing the outputs of each part and building an information structure based on their activities- all within the careful structure of a controlled environment.
Mumford's The City in History (1961), Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( r 9 6 r) was strongly influential in the growing antagonism toward urban renewal.
Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City (1960) suggested possibilities for human intervention into the operative city. Cognitive Mapping
Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, in their book Collage City (1978)
urban problems should not be understood as issues of "simplicity" or "disorganized complexity,"
both of which characterized modern science. Instead, she argued, the city was a manifestation of organized complexity- a complex system quite distinct from Forrester's characterization. Organized complexity was not entirely predictable; it had order, but part of that order was its lack of predictability. The sidewalk was, by design, unpredictable.
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