The Furtherfield “P2P” interview by Lawrence Bird contains a passage about the critique of and by the emergent practitioners of ‘peer to peer urbanism’.

Michael Mehaffy, co-author with Bio Urbanism founder Nikos Salingaros, of an essay on Geometric Fundamentalism, has written commentary on that passage.

Here is a repeat of the Q & A first, followed by Mehaffy’s commentary:

Q: One interesting question is what forms of urbanism come out of p2p thinking. The movement is in the process of thinking this through, in fact a definition of p2p urbanism was just published by the “Peer-to-peer Urbanism Task Force” (http://p2pfoundation.net/Peer-to-Peer_Urbanism). This promotes, in general terms, bottom-up rather than centrally planned cities; small-scale development that involves local inhabitants and crafts; and a merging of technology with practical experience. All resonant in various ways with p2p approaches. But this statement also provokes a few questions: It calls for an urbanism based on science and function; in fact it explicitly promotes a biological paradigm for design. At the risk of over-categorizing, isn’t this a modernist understanding of design — or if not, how is it different? This document also refers to specific schools of urban design: Christopher Alexander, and also New Urbanism. On the side of socio-economics though, New Urbanism has been criticized (for example in David Harvey’s Spaces of Hope); some see it as nostalgic and in the end directed at a narrow segment of the population. Christopher Alexander’s work on urban form has also been criticized as, being based on consensus, restrictive in its own ways. In fact, might not p2p principals call for creation of spaces that allow dissent and even shearing-off from the mainstream? Might there be a contradiction built into trying to accommodate the desires for consensus and for freedom? Contradiction can be a source of vitality, certainly in art; but it can raise some tensions when you get to built form and a shared public realm.

A: I cannot speak for the bio- or p2p urbanism movement, which is itself a pluralistic movement, but here’s what I know about this ‘friendly’ movement. I would call p2p urbanism not a modernist but a transmodernist movement. It is a critique of both modernist and postmodern approaches in architecture and urbanism; takes critical stock of the relative successes and failings of the New Urbanist school; and then takes a trans-historical approach, i.e. it critically re-integrates the premodern, which it no longer blankly rejects as modernists would do. I don’t think that makes it a nostalgic movement, but rather it simply recognizes that thousands of years of human culture do have something to teach us, and that even as we ‘progressed’, we also lost valuable knowledge. Finally, I think there is a natural affinity between the prematerial and post-material forms of civilization. The accusation of elitism is I think also unwarranted, given what I know of the work of bio-urbanists amongst slumdwelling communities. However, I take your critique of consensus very seriously, without knowing how they answer that. You are right, that is a big danger to guard for, and one needs to strive for a correct balance between agreed-upon frameworks, that are community and consensus-driven, and the need for individual creativity and dissent. Nevertheless, compared to the modernist prescriptions of functional urbanism, I don’t think that danger should be exaggerated.

Commentary by Michael Mehaffy:

“This interview excerpt touches on a number of crucial issues. I would like to take up several of them.

I like the term “trans-modernism,” because it implies we are indeed left with the aftermath of modernism, and its roots in modern technology gone awry (as post-modernists also recognize) but that we must transcend it (as PMs do not). (In fact I recently outlined a comparison of the three on several points of key divergence, which I attach.)

Where the crucial departure lies, I think, is in this question of function. Notice that Lawrence Bird completely assumes a modernist or post-modernist idea of a “biological paradigm” – as metaphor, or as a rigid ordering scheme of one kind or another. This is the modernist way of thinking: “rational” or its mirror image, “post-rational” (which is merely rational in reverse, i.e. nihilism. In effect, rationality is all there is, but somehow, it doesn’t work.)

But I suggest that those of us in this, ah, emerging movement, take the biological paradigm as something wholly different. It is a teacher, a guide, about how processes work in nature – how they function. And we, being nature, specifically human nature, have salient lessons to draw. In fact we learn that we have been exceedingly stupid – drawing on one limited form of abstract knowledge, and the realm that it illuminates (simple “mechanical” processes) while we have been ignorant and profligate in other realms. And as a result we have done tremendous damage to the systems on which our well-being depends.

So “science” here is not a formula, a rigid template to apply in a mechanical fashion, as it was for, say, Le Corbusier. (More on that in a moment.) It is, again, a guide, a lens, a way of looking at what is going on and teasing out what is most important. Of finding our way back to a path that promotes our well-being and, you could say, our satisfaction in living. (In a way that is durable, and draws on deep parts of ourselves – not the superficial titillation that is at the same time squandering our heritage.)

Science, linked to philosophy, and to action with a disciplined effort of understanding.

So what does this have to do with how people live in cities, and either get along, or have conflicts; how they promote a state of relative justice, or of oppression; how they promote the long-term viability of the settlement (and human settlements in general), or hasten its (their) demise?

I think it has everything to do with it. A city or town is a physical structure that either promotes, or hinders, our ability to be well together. Just as a body, if it is healthy, has the ability to promote our further well-being, but if it is ill, may profoundly limit all that we can do subsequently.

And in the case of cities (with more than a little relation to the biological analogy of health) that in turn is dependent on how it is structured – its actual structure, and the processes that give rise to that structure.

Of course, the “function” of an ecosystem, in one sense, is to be sustainable – and they often do it for many thousands or even millions of years. We don’t draw an exact analogy here to cities, because ecosystems use means that we would not want to use – e.g. predation, starvation and so on. But there are still very strong analogies to learn from.

The most important is the concept of adaptive morphogenesis. That, very simply, is the process that shapes a form so that it does the best job (or, to be specific, the best optimal job, which is slightly different) in performing its function. If it is a wing, that function is flight (and there may be other related functions, like stability on the ground).

But of course the mechanist error is to assume that “function” is out there, as an abstract goal, perfectly defined and able to be targeted in linear fashion. This is a colossal error – perhaps THE colossal error of modernity. In fact the form is evolving, and so is the function! Because of course as soon as one creature changes, all the others have to change in response, shaping the “fitness landscape.” Everything is continuously mutually adaptive and dynamic.

When it comes to cities, something similar is going on. This means that all our efforts at rational planing in the normal sense are futile – we are constantly responding after the fact to a condition that is ever changing, and in the old saying, “closing the barn door after the horse has gone.”

This is why P2P urbanism is not only a good idea – it’s essential. Something very much like this process has been the way that the best cities have been shaped (best being defined as well-adapted, complex, and generally, well-loved by most people, especially their residents).

And by the way, beauty is a function. More specifically, it’s an adaptive ability that we humans have to detect things and spaces that promote our well-being. But like any adaptive ability, it can be shaped and distorted. We can become intoxicated by exotic forms of beauty that distract from the real problems at hand. We can become intoxicated by the beauty of abstractions, of ideas. This is very dangerous stuff. It;s what Le Corbusier did when he thought he was being “functionalist” by making buildings with cruise ship columns and port holes, for buildings that did not need to go whooshing down the street, or hold up against crashing waves. Or for buildings that looked like grain elevators, as though human beings were grains of rice. Dangerous image-factory stuff.

Having said that, a word about some top-down things that ARE appropriate – and a related word about “nostalgia.” First, from an evolutionary point of view, the idea that every form must be new is the sheerest nonsense. There is a reason that the porpoise “copies” the dorsal fin of the shark, in a completely separate process of evolutionary morphogenesis. They both have a very similar (though very complex) problem to solve, even though it’s 300 million years later. The porpoise does not say, “oops, I mustn’t be nostalgic for the shark’s shape, that would be pastiche – I need creative freedom to come up with something new.” The porpoise solves the problem and arrives at the same general solution – though for very complex reasons.

Similarly, nature is full of echoes, recapitulations, repetitions, and also, some novelty (though it is generally slow in coming, and those times when it is fast are often disagreeable for the animals involved). And often, these recapitulations occur around certain kinds of structures – the dorsal fin is a good example. In mathematics these points of convergence are called attractors.

It is possible (and in a sense, done by DNA) to create a kind of top-down scaffolding, a framework structure that is predictable, but on which less predictable local adaptations occur. In a garden, this is what a trellis does – it serves as the scaffolding for the emergent organisms to grow up on.

But for the gardener, this is only one of the things that must be done. There is also the preparation of the soil, the planting of seeds, the watering, pruning, weeding and so on.

Something very much like this has to be done for cities, I think. We need tools to encourage and manage bottom-up growth, with only a little top-down framework for it. (e.g. public transportation, perhaps – but even that can be planned incrementally, and more bottom-up.)

This is a long-winded way of saying that what the New Urbanists do is not (necessarily) nostalgia, or top-down. It can fit perfectly well with a trans-modern, “biological,” p2p approach to the city.

And a corollary is that the assumptions about novelty, creativity, and city-as-art that underlie what most architects do today, especially the avant-garde, are incredibly damaging and perverse. (But they/we are not alone in contributing to the catastrophe – just egregiously bad enablers.)”