The Poverty of Economicism

Debates between planning experts and Neo-liberal economists are often frustrating. Recently I almost spoiled my winter holiday by engaging in a never-ending discussion (in Twitter!) on so-called alternative costs in urban development. The economic argument–as we know–is that in addition to the building costs of public buildings we should make clear to the decision makers also their alternative costs, the money lost when the land is not sold to the highest bidder. Some would go even further, stating that we should compare these costs with the costs of other public investments, such as schools or elderly care. This argument is particularly used by populist politicians who are against any kind of cultural building that they see 'elitist'.

The public library Oodi (designed byALA architects)

My argument, on the other hand, is that in order to make informed decisions, the decision makers should also understand the values that are generated by urban development. As an example we can consider one of the recent modern buildings in Helsinki, the new central public library Oodi, which has been praised for its architecture and as a new type of public space for the citizens. It has also been internationally recognised as a symbol of the Finnish institution of public libraries. Clearly, in addition to the building and alternative costs, also these positive impacts should be made visible. But this is not easy, since even many of the economic costs and benefits are indirect and have no geographical borders. Public libraries are an important part of the Finnish educational system, which includes free public schools, free vocational education and free universities. These will produce educated workforce, innovations and entrepreneurship in the long run, which are necessary for foreign investments and a thriving economy. The international recognition of the country as a successful welfare state with well-educated people and interesting architecture can also promote tourism and other industries.

But this is just the economy. Even if one could calculate the long-term economic benefits of the library–which is not easy to do in a reliable way–works of architecture are not simply factories to produce workforce or advertisements to promote tourism. They have a value of their own. For me (as an architect and philosopher), it is not difficult to see the difference between values and benefits. We clearly have values in research, in literature, in music, in the fine arts, in social relations–and in architecture and urban design. These are not determined by the copies sold, the number of people attending concerts, or the price of the paintings. If we want to know the value of a work of art or research, we need to ask the experts. We have no alternative. And they will not give us a monetary value that could be part of a cost-benefit analysis.

It seems, however, that economists don't even have such a concept of value, which means that no discussion is possible and results in a dead end. It reminds me of Wittgenstein's famous observation that one cannot see the the limits of one's world and language, since one would have to be able to 'measure' them from the outside, and this is exactly what cannot be done while being inside. Later, if we get more education and experience, we are able to see the limits of our former self. But not before.

In the economists' world, money is the measure of all things. Their conceptual framework consists of costs and benefits, consumer preferences, investment, returns, cost-effectiveness etc., and it does not include a plurality of values, which is so typical in cultural disciplines. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. All disciplines are limited, either in their scope or in their perspective. A geologist has nothing to say of human psychology or sociology. The problems arise only when experts of one field fail to see the limits of their discipline, trying to colonise the whole world within their conceptual cage. In other words, the problem is not with economics, which is a perfectly respectable social science within its limits, but with economicism. This term refers to the attempts of managing the whole world with the conceptual framework and methods of economics. Or in our case, trying to understand and reform urban planning and architecture with something like cost-benefit analysis.

Before discussing this concept in more detail, I need to admit right away that economics is not the only discipline with this problem of colonisation. My own discipline, architecture and urban planning, is equally guilty of such grandiosity. Master planners and 'starchitects' tend to see the world in terms of aesthetics; structural rationality or functionality do not alone qualify for great architecture, and although economic considerations are necessary, they do not determine the quality of architecture or urban design. Again, this is a problem only if one tries to neglect the input of other disciplines, such as ecology, sociology, history, geography or–indeed–economics. This attitude has a similar name: aestheticism.

But let us return to economicism. One of the most famous representatives of the current Neo-liberal economics is Edward Glaeser. He could even be called a 'starconomist' or 'celebrity urbanologist' as Jamie Peck suggests (Peck 2016). For our purposes he is an ideal case, since his father was an architectural historian and curator of the Museum of Modern Art, and thus he can be assumed to have some understanding of architecture. In addition, he has attempted to draw the line between architecture and economics in his address to the American Association of Architects, which was published in the Architectural Review in 2011. This short text deserves some close reading (for those who do not know, this is a detailed method used in literary criticism and philosophy).

This is how he writes about his father: "My father was an architectural historian, who through my childhood was a curator at the Museum of Modern Art. I never inherited one-twentieth of his aesthetic gifts, but I continue to have a healthy admiration for them and for the genius of great architects."

In this statement he admits that there are qualitative differences between people's abilities to make aesthetic judgments, and that his skill is more than twenty times inferior to his father's; they are not simply two equal tastes or opinions. Whether it is a gift from God or developed through education and experience is not evident, but it is also not relevant here. He further says that he has "healthy admiration" for these gifts, as a civilised person should: admitting to be inferior in certain skills and knowledge but also that they are real. In matters of the quality of architecture, thus, one should rather consult his father or any other equally talented and educated person. Let us keep this in mind.

Before this personal judgement, however, he tries to distinguish the architectural expertise from economics with the following words:

"This perspective may help to explain the different approach that economists and architects take towards building a new skyscraper on Manhattan's Madison Avenue. The architect may ask whether the building will be beautiful, on its own or in its neighbourhood; he may ask whether the structure's form is true to its function, or whether it will inspire or depress.

None of these questions–or any like them–will occur naturally to the economist. Indeed, the economist will ask not whether the skyscraper should be built, but rather whether the government should allow the skyscraper to be built. Economists have no business judging the aesthetics of the proposed structure, any more than it is our business to ask whether people should buy long or short skirts, or read Proust instead of Joyce."

At first this sounds clear: architects are asking and trying to answer questions that economists don't even ask, because it is not their business. The last sentence is curious, however: he compares the questions of aesthetics to consumer preferences, long or short skirts and Proust vs. Joyce. Does he mean to say that aesthetic qualities are just like any consumer preferences? This interpretation would hardly represent "healthy admiration". It is also curious that he first gives an example of the 'lower end' of consumption (long and short skirts) but also another example of the 'higher end' of cultural products, Proust and Joyce, two of the most important but also difficult authors. If he had used Dan Brown instead of Joyce, would the economist still have no business in judging between them? Maybe so (except perhaps @filsdeproust, but not even him as an economist). A cultural critic or literature scholar would have no difficulty in saying that they are not even in the same territory. They would not say that people should read Proust instead of Dan Brown, rather to the contrary: if you are not motivated or don't have the necessary basic education, you should not even try. But if you have, it makes sense to read Proust instead of Dan Brown, if you want to get something out of your reading.

It seems that we are approaching the key issue. Glaeser continues: "Skyscrapers may also impose costs on third parties. Some views may be blocked. City streets may become congested. An older building, which brings delight to millions, may be destroyed by new development. One approach to these costs, which are not naturally paid by the building's developer, is to impose impact fees, as in some places in California. Typically, regulation has been used to achieve the same ends, because it is simpler and easier to enforce."

Thus, developing the city in any way you like creates "externalities" in the economist's vocabulary, but they can be compensated with "impact fees". However, cities are rather using regulation, because it is "simpler and easier to enforce". For architects and urban planners, however, "regulation" of urban development is simply urban planning, and the objective of this activity is to create a good, functional, sustainable and beautiful city. If the city fails in this endeavour and ends up in a bad, non-functional, unsustainable and ugly city, no impact fee will make it good, functional, sustainable or beautiful again. These qualities are simply lost, no matter how much money you pay to those who suffer.

This is the the plurality of values mentioned earlier, which seems to be one of the main differences between economics and the cultural disciplines. If the economist, however, has a healthy admiration of other fields, he cannot simply impose his vocabulary on them. How can we judge, then, whether the skyscraper should be built, how many stories it should have, and whether the existing old building should be demolished? Here we find a much less humble Glaeser:

"Economists don't typically think that the government should be forcing people to embrace more beautiful building, in part because we don't trust the tastes of our elected policy-makers. Some kings and emperors have been patrons of genius, but others have not. Does the track record of public architecture in the US really suggest that our policy leaders are preternaturally gifted judges of great building? Even when respected architects get to make decisions, the results can often be distinguished buildings that are despised by locals, such as Kallman, McKinnell & Knowles' Boston City Hall. That outcome is hardly ideal."

Thus, according to Glaeser and his fellow economists, elected policy makers cannot be trusted in matters of beauty, but neither can respected architects. Who is to make this judgment, then? The economists? But as he already said, this is not the business of economists. The general public? Is aesthetics just a matter of consumer preferences? Farewell to Proust (and Joyce), enter Dan Brown?

The picture is now becoming clearer. Glaeser sees that he needs to be able to say something about beauty or historical value in order to argue against regulations that would not allow the imaginary skyscraper or demolition of the old building. But because he is not willing to ask someone like his father (which would be interdisciplinarity, not colonialism), he has only poor alternatives. He has to claim that there is no such thing as informed expert opinion of aesthetic or historical value, only consumer preferences. Or he has to claim that, unlike economists, the experts of the other fields cannot be trusted. "I believe that many cities regulate too much, by restricting land use or by preserving historic areas that aren't all that historic or all that beautiful." But in that case he has to give the power of judgement to himself, the one with less than twenty times the understanding of someone like his father. Or he has to redefine the concepts of aesthetic and historical value by using the conceptual framework of economists. In other words, he has to claim that experts in architecture and history do not actually know their field, only pretend to know it. Because they are not economists.

Since somebody would certainly take this text to be against economists, let us return to my own profession, architecture and urban planning. When I started studying architecture forty years ago, I had already graduated in philosophy, economics and history and theory of art from the University of Turku. Thus it was a little bit easier for me to 'measure' the limits of architectural thinking from the outside. Yesterday I had another discussion in social media on the social impacts of architecture, and I noticed that the doctrine of environmental determinism is still alive and kicking in the professional circles. That is, architects often believe that certain solutions in the built environment–such as forcing people to meet each other in staircases or creating nice meeting places and urban squares–would by themselves promote community development. Apart form some celebrity sources (such as Jan Gehl), these believes are not based on any research in social sciences. Colonial tendencies–refusing to listen to those who know–simply leads to poor understanding, not to any kind of 'democratic' epistemology. 

In both cases, I would rather opt for interdisciplinarity.



References 

Glaeser, Edward (2011) The Only Way is Up. Architectural Review, Vol. 230, Issue 1376.
Peck, Jamie (2016) Economic Rationality Meets Celebrity Urbanology: Exploring Edward Glaeser's City. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 40, Issue 1.

Post-Cappuccino City

Industry is the key concept in understanding contemporary cities and their planning. Industrialization meant the growth and expansion of cities and the emergence or new cities around large factories.  It also meant land speculation, overcrowded housing and poor sanitary and environmental conditions. These are the illnesses that modern urban planning set out to cure; they became its fundamental ethos. The solution was to get the industry out of town, and even out of the country as it turned out. No thanks to planners and their functionalist principles only, but to the globalisation of the economy.  As industrial production (following urban farming that was cast out earlier) had left, only shopping, parties, culture and office work remained. Enter the post-industrial city, the cappuccino-city.

The city of Tampere in Finland is a prime example of this development. It grew around the Tammerkoski rapids in the 19th Century. The crown jewel was the cotton mill established by the Scottish industrialist James Finlayson in 1820. It used to be the largest cotton mill in the Nordic countries, and the industrial production in the middle of the city lasted until the 1990s. Back then, making of things was still part of urbanity. Not anymore: although the heritage buildings are still there, and the area employs some 3000 people (approximately the same number as in the industrial period), the businesses and functions are very different: shops, restaurants, coffee shops, offices, museums. The post-industrial city is an alienated city: there is no direct contact between the consumer and the producer. At the same time, there is a growing arrogance among the post-industrial urbanites: the cities are seen as the engines of national economies, the centres of high productivity. But productivity of what, if not food or things? One could turn the argument around: without the industries producing things and the farms producing food 'out there', there would be nothing to shop or nothing to eat in the restaurants.

This paradox can be explained by what Saskia Sassen called 'command centres'. The cities are not independent, they are totally dependent on their hinterlands (national and international). They have, however, taken control. There is not a single coffee bean produced in New York, London or Singapore, but these are the centres where futures of coffee are bought and sold. And, of course, these are the places where the self-confident brokers are drinking their cappuccino in a fancy coffee shop in former industrial premises.

But is this the 'end of history', and if not, what would be the next step? Interestingly, scholars have started discussing the possibility of 'urban re-industrialization' or getting industrial production back to cities. Krzysztof Nawratek, who originally coined the term 'cappuccino city' in 2012, has organised several conferences on the topic, and his recently edited book "Urban Re-Industrialization" (Punctum Books 2017) has emerged out of these. But what would urban re-industrialization be? Naturally it must be post-functionalist, as I have wanted to call it elsewhere (di Marino & Lapintie 2017), that is, not based on the functional division typical of early modernist planning. Making of things, not just digits, must be re-allowed in the urban environment. If this can be done, all the other positive features of urbanity will follow: co-existence, proximity and synergy.

What would make this possible? There are several trends that have been widely discussed but not so much in this overall context. One of them is 3D-printing, or in general the decentralisation and customisation of production. If production can be done closer to the customers, responding to their individual tastes, even inviting them so see how their items are produced, why then take the trouble of organising overseas mass production? Decentralised production does not need large factory spaces, to say nothing of 'cities within cities' that industry complexes like Finlayson represented. Customers, not just workers are welcome.

Secondly, the global environmental requirements have become more central than the earlier environmental health targets. If the solution of the early modernists was to re-locate polluting industries out of the city, now these industries have to become cleaner anyway. New technologies and production processes can make it possible to adapt production to the requirements of the urban environment by avoiding smells and unnecessary noise. Interestingly, one of the factories around the Tammerkoski rapids, the Tako board mill,  has succeeded in continuing its production in the city centre by changing its production processes.

Thirdly, since recycling of materials has become a necessity for all kinds of industrial production, it would make sense to take care of recycling closer to where consumption happens (and the corresponding waste is produced). An example of this is the Industri[us] project described by Christina Norton in the aforementioned book, in which temporarily vacant sites are taken to use by a collaborative of designers and users working with waste materials ("up-cycling").

Fourthly, the city is a possible site where re-emergence of arts and crafts can happen. Even if handicraft cannot compete with the lower prices of globalised industrial production, it can provide higher quality and longer life-time (even over generations). As we know, the urbanites are ready to pay higher prices for branded products, even if the quality would not correspond to the price. Handicraft can provide a more genuine promise, particularly if the producer is known and visible in the city.

Thus urban re-industrialization is not just a day-dream (nor a nationalist political ideology), but there are some real windows of opportunity that are open for progressive urbanism. However, the authors of "Urban Re-Industrization" are also worried if this is just another chapter of the neo-liberal city. For Nawratek, the "Industrial City 2.0" is much more, "the opposite of the contemporary city, based on the extremely individualistic philosophy of competition." It is " the city based on overcoming selfishness and on the construction of a new, inclusive community..." (p. 68). I would not quite share this optimism, but I find the concept very interesting and the emerging urban economies worth following. Importantly, it may open our eyes and invite us to re-think the feeble arguments of the Neo-urbanist agenda in urban planning.

Nawratek, Krzysztof (2017, ed.) Urban Re-Industrialization.  Earth, Milky Way: Punctum Books.

di Marino, Mina & Kimmo Lapintie (2017) Emerging Workplaces in Post-Functionalist Cities. Journal of Urban Technology, Vol. 24, Issue 3,

Three invisible things in Finnish planning I: ecology

One of the main problems of contemporary planning is that it is done in silos: the various experts and decision makers all have their specific interests and practices, which are confined within thematic and geographical areas. Even if integration is the buzz-word, it is not easy to make it real. There is a certain path-dependency in urban and regional expertise: each profession has its own history of combining knowledge with power, and it is also important to defend one's position in the planning commission. Who is needed, and what kind of knowledge is relevant? There is nothing self-evident in this. Different countries have used different experts; in Finland for instance, there is no actual planning profession, but planning is done by architects, landscape architects, civil engineers, planning  and urban geographers, among others. They all have different educational backgrounds and, correspondingly, different priorities.

On the other hand, urban and regional governance is also confined within specific geographical areas. The cities are drawing their detailed and structural or master plans - mainly blueprints - and the regional authorities consider regional policies and land-use. At the moment the current government of Finland is planning a major new reform in regional governance, in which independent regions (with elected councils) would take care of social and health-care services, as well as regional land-use plans. The existing independent municipalities (many of which are too small to take care of their ageing population) would be left with local municipal plans and educational and cultural services. Whatever will be the result of this reform, one problem seems to persist: the different authorities take good care not to step on each others' toes. Helsinki is careful not to suggest anything for the other cities of the metropolitan area (Espoo, Vantaa and Kauniainen), to say nothing of the larger urban region - and vice versa.

People - in contrast - are not confined. They may be living in one municipality and working in another - nay, they may be living and working in several municipalities and even city regions at the same time, changing their home and workplace as soon as it fits their purposes. They may have primary and secondary homes for both living and working, which is made possible by fast computer networks everywhere. In addition to the home and the office, they may occupy libraries and coffee shops for multi-local working. They would also like to use services according to their preferences and accessibility, but here they face a problem: urban and regional governance has no way of dealing with this fluidity and complexity. From the governance point of view, people are still conceived to be more or less fixed, with one place and neighbourhood of residence determining their local taxes, their public services, their local and national identity, and their political citizenship.   Thus the functional urban region is not corresponding to the institutional framework that is supposed to govern it. This incongruence is only partly remedied by the voluntary agreements between the national and the local states, the so-called MALPE-agreements, trying to integrate land-use, transportation, services and the economy.

With nature we have another wicked problem at hand. Before the concepts of sustainable development and ecology came so widespread in planning discourses, the main functions of green areas and networks were recreation and preservation of endangered species and cultural landscapes. They fitted nicely with the overall scheme of functionalistic land-use planning, allowing the confinement of a suitable amount of green around or within the more profitable functions of housing, industry or transportation. At the same time they could be dealt with as structural elements connecting housing with recreational functions. Surely they were understood as having ecological roles as well, as e.g. corridors for species or water retention areas, but not necessarily analysed as such.

How different is our understanding of the urban and regional green today, after decades of research on green infrastructures, ecosystem services, health effects, micro-climates, stormwater management etc. that urban ecology is dealing with. Not so different as one might expect. The two functions of recreation and preservation still dominate the field: we are debating on how much green can be sacrificed for urban development, which areas should be preserved, and what form the green network should take. The main points seem to be too difficult to handle: the avoiding of the juxtaposition of urban development and urban green, the understanding of urban ecology in systemic terms (and not as end-states that can be represented with two-dimensional maps), and addressing the different qualities of the urban green and the respective ecosystem services. An urban forest and a golf course are both green, but they provide very different services, both ecologically and socially.

The issue, thus, does not seem to be the existence or the amount of knowledge, but the way that urban reality is conceptualised through this knowledge, whether it is scientific or professional. And if so, dealing with the complex and dynamic urban reality at hand requires re-concpetualisation, and this is exactly what we are interested in.

Publications:

Libraries as transitory workspaces and spatial incubators

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. 2015 In : LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE RESEARCH. 37, 2, p. 118-129

Emerging workplaces in the post-functionalist cities

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. Forthcoming in JOURNAL OF URBAN TECHNOLOGY.

Exploring the concept of green infrastructure in urban landscape. Experiences from Italy, Canada and Finland

Di Marino, M. & Lapintie, K. Forthcoming in LANDSCAPE RESEARCH.

 

Growth and green in the age of Web 2.0

In our Urban Laboratory this autumn, we decided to study Urban Growth and Ecosystem services in the age of Web 2.0. Three topics, seemingly different, but intimately connected. You can hardly find a planning project that does not destroy some of the urban green. People, however, tend to like their parks, forests and fields, and so the conflict is ready. How do planners cope with it? The easy solution - too often heard - is that they couldn't care less, since the residents are simply a bunch of NIMBYs, opposing everything that sounds like planning, with no respect for the hard realities of urban development, namely growth.

Could there be an alternative? This is not an easy question, but we may approach it from two perspectives. First, we need to get rid of the assumption that urban growth is a natural phenomenon, something that simply happens like weather or flooding, and which we should only be prepared for. It is also made by us: we invite people into our cities by providing housing, services, jobs, and a good living environment - including the urban green. If people like it, it must be something valuable (in fact its value to us as human animals can even be proved scientifically, but let us not go into that, at least not yet).

My point here is that we are in fact actively designing the qualities of our cities, we are not forced to react to some natural force. Politics of emergency ("there is no alternative") is not the right answer here. We could even decide not to grow, but this would come at a price: housing and property prices would probably go skyrocketing. I am not suggesting this, but rather a different mindset. Cities are made for hundreds, even thousands of years. They may grow, thrive and decline innumerable times during their history, and we should try to avoid shortsightedness in their planning.

But the urban green is not only liked by people, it also has a logic of its own. This may be a second problem in our traditional mindset: we tend to see construction as if a drawing on top of a green background; it is what is left over after planning. Thus it is no wonder that our cities often consist of small, unconnected patches of green, in addition to some larger recreational areas. It is interesting to compare this relationship with other urban functions. We don't think that streets are what is left over after the buildings are erected. And we don't think that ideal sites for housing are those that remain between industrial plants. But why do we think in this way when the urban green is considered? Like streets, they do - or should - form networks. Like housing areas, they are homes for several species. Like industrial plants, they produce food and materials for us. And like schools and shops, they do provide us services - the ecosystem services. And believe or not, these services are, for us, a matter of life and death.

#AaltoUrbanLab
Urban Lab in Facebook


Some additional food for thought:

Hansen, R., Frantzeskaki, N., McPhearson, T., Rall, E, Kabisch, N., Kaczorowska, A., Kain, J-H., Artmann, M. and Pauleit, S., 2015. The uptake of the ecosystem services concept in planning discourses Ecosystem Services, vol.12, pp. 228-246.

Maes, J., et al., 2014. More green infrastructure is required to maintain ecosystem services under current trends in land-use change in Europe. Landscape Ecology. 1-18. doi: 10.1007/s10980-014-0083-2

Niemelä J., Saarela ,S.R., Söderman T., Kopperoinen L., Yli-Pelkonen V. Väre S., and Kotze, D.J., 2010.Using the ecosystem services approach for better planning and conservation of urban greenspaces. A Finland case study. Biodiversity Conservation 19:3225-3243

From Ivory Tower to Neoliberalism

In the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP) congress last week, there was an interesting roundtable organised by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI). You might have expected it to be a local debate about planning in the UK, but it turned out to be a more general discussion on the role of research in the context of planning practice and politics.

The event had its motivation in the observation that planning has been under attack by the neoliberal government in the UK, according to which planning represents needless and even harmful restrictions to the market economy and economic growth. In their attempt to defend planning against this accusation, the representatives of RTPI had designed a research agenda that would help them to demonstrate that planning can in fact promote economic growth. Unfortunately they had not found much help to from academic research, which has mainly concentrated on criticising neoliberalism. This is why they have started to promote and organise research that would give them suitable weapons in their 'war' against neoliberalism - the market itself cannot be beaten.

The invited members of the academic community were not so enthusiastic. In her memorable comment Simin Davoudi told the story of Alan Turing and his seemingly useless ideas, which however ended up in deciphering the German code Enigma (and thus shortening the 2nd World War) and - as if by chance - the design of the first electronic computer. The ways of science and researchers are mysterious: you never know what you get - but you need to give them leeway.

At first sight this seems like the age-old dichotomy between the Ivory Tower of academics and the down-to-earth attitude of the practitioners. However, the issue of the role and responsibility of research is worth readdressing in these turbulent times, when the university is no longer the self-evident fortress of disinterested research that it used to be. Well, perhaps it never was, if we believe Foucault, according to whom 'truth is a thing in this world'. But it is fair to say that societies are more than ever in the process of redefining the role of the university: we should form more partnerships with industry, and we should prepare our students to meet the requirements of working life rather than - though this is never explicitly said - making them critics of the established order.

Considering this context, the need for practitioners to defend their professional role is understandable, but a research agenda that is in effect positioned inside the neoliberal political framework would not only squeeze research into instrumentalism, but it would also give weapons to the opponents of professionalism. Even if we would no longer believe in the Durkheimian view of professions as moral fortresses, they are professions exactly because of their relative freedom to define their own commission. The day when doctors of medicine are no longer allowed to define health - but only politicians - we are in trouble. And the same is true of planners and the good environment.

Again referring to Davoudi, the original motivation of planning and the measure of its success was not GDP but the health and happiness of people, their access to good and affordable housing, etc. The fact these early aspirations now seem outdated or idealistic tells something of our contemporary society and politics.  And this is exactly what research should address.

Architecture of thought: Urban Design from a can of beer

This is the English version of my existing blog in Finnish called Mahdolliset kaupungit, which means pretty much the same as possible cities. The two do not correspond to each other, however, although they look alike. I will not directly translate any of the texts, but I will address some of the issues in both blogs, such as the ontology of cities, the burden of functionalism, smart cities, homelessness, and urban ecology. The reason for writing also in English is, of course, to reach a wider audience, but also because many of my friends and colleagues do not speak this strange language of five millions or so - and I don't expect them to learn it, as it is one of the most difficult languages of the world.

As you may have guessed, this blog is about cities, about what they are, about their planning and design, and about the people and cultures that they accommodate. This is both a professional and an academic blog, which tells something about what I do, being a professor of urban and regional planning in Aalto University, Finland. However, these posts are not academic essays in the traditional sense; I am also taking liberties in telling you stories from my personal experience, and I will also comment on things that I have read and what is happening in the field. Whenever I am directly using others' work (or my own published work), I will give references, but not all the time.

In this first post, I will try to describe my basic understanding of what cities are all about: that they are not big things, or big things on the move, but possibilities. Before doing this, however, I need to tell you something about myself, since my perspective to cities may sound rather strange to you. I started my academic career in the University of Turku in South-West Finland, studying subjects like theoretical and practical philosophy, economics, and theory and history of art. This may seem like a crazy combination, and it was. During the time of academic freedom of the late 1970s you could, however, freely choose. Actually I thought that economics would give me a job that philosophy or art never would, but it turned out that I was wrong. So I moved over to architecture that is a much more practical profession.

Studying architecture in Tampere University of Technology was, however, somewhat of a cultural shock to me. Having accustomed to reflection, analysis and argumentation, I suddenly found myself surrounded by people who couldn't care less of reflection, analysis or argumentation. They just did. The astonishing feature of Finnish architects, in contrast to many of their European colleagues, is to jump to conclusions, that is, design, without even analysing the problem. This is also their main strength, since they have no fear. One of my colleagues won a major competition in Copenhagen together with his friends without having much education in urban design, or much knowledge of the city for that matter. So they had to learn how to design cities pretty fast, in addition to the equally strange language of the Danes.

But it quickly became clear to me that this was not my cup of tea. There was, however, one professor, Jorma Mänty, who was interested in theory, in addition to being a professor of urban planning. Planning seemed to be less straightforward, since you don't have ready-made projects, and you need to consider the people, the economy, and the social realm that you are dealing with. Getting things built is not always the best option. So I turned to architectural theory and planning, and I spent some years as a practicing consultant after my graduation, until I returned to university in 1993, to lead a research project on ecological cities. From 1999 I have worked as professor of urban and regional planning, first in Helsinki University of Technology and, after its merger with two other universities, in Aalto University.

This short description of my background might help you to see the way that I am approaching cities and their planning. The triad of philosophy, architecture and planning has made me what I am, which means that I am particularly interested in what an earth are we thinking as we are planning and designing our cities. The architecture of thought, you might say.

But I also need to explain the meaning of the name of my blog. Let me do it with a story. In Finland, we have this odd tradition of socialising by inviting people to have a sauna bath (together, naked), and then discussing and drinking beer after it. Once we were wrapping up one of our courses in a sauna owned by the student union of our university.  In addition to our course of urban planning, I knew that the students had already taken a course on urban design (called Urban Space), so I asked them what they understood by urban space. Nobody even tried to define it.

I don't blame them. Students of architecture usually take space to be something that has a form, which can then be designed to have a different form. It is not material, since it seems to be between the material things like buildings. It may have some meanings, such as being intimate or pompous, in addition to its form. It is where people go, but the people are not needed to define the space in the first place. So the students naturally suspected that I was playing a trick on them. Which I was.

As they did not respond, I tried to explain my own understanding of urban space. Since there was no blackboard in the sauna, I used what I had, an empty can of beer in front of me. I changed its position on the table and said that they were hardly surprised to see that it could also take this different place on the table. Which meant, I suppose, that they already knew, before I moved it, that it could have taken this new position, although they had no idea that it would be moved, or where I was going to move it. So, in perceiving the can of beer, they had not only perceived a physical object in the place where it happened to be, but also the many possible places that it could take.

I don't know whether any of the students understood what I was talking about. My assistant lecturer certainly did not, since he suggested that I should make a video clip where the can would  be moving back and forth, like commuting cars between housing and workplaces. This was, of course, a total misunderstanding of the idea. It was not the actual movement that mattered, but the possibility of movement. And if you have a power to move, you also have a power to not move. Even cans can have that sort of power.

This may sound self-evident, but it is not. Philosophers know that I am talking about the difference between actuality and possibility that goes back to Aristotle and through the scholastics to modern philosophy of possible worlds. I am not going to discuss that, however, at least not yet. What I am trying to do is to show the way from the can of beer to urban design.

The city could be thought of as a big material object. Architects could think of it like a big building, with streets resembling corridors, central parks the atrium, and squares the rooms. No big difference, just the scale. But in both cases, we need to take into account the movement of people. The things are not fixed, they are changing all the time in space, so we are speaking of a spatio-temporal reality. Like the flowing water, people move through corridors or streets and take places in rooms and squares. This is still easy, since we may observe what they are doing, at a certain moment, or during a certain period of time. Being and moving is real, because it can be observed. Esse est percipi, as Berkeley would say.

But what if we include in our world the realm of the possible? This is something that you cannot observe. You could see the can in its original position, and then again in its new position. But you cannot see the many possible positions on the table that it has. Does it mean that you can only see the fixed can and its movement, and you have to imagine the other possible positions? Hardly, since you can always imagine the can floating in the air, but this is not one of its physical possibilities. No help from psychology here.

But what if we think of cities as realities that include not only things (the buildings, the trees, the pavement, the cars) and their recorded movement, but also their possibilities? Instead of the cars commuting back and forth, we would have the drivers considering whether to take the car or the bus, or where they should be heading and which road to take. The driver would have a set of different options to choose from. If we make it very unpleasant or expensive to take the car, he will not take it. He is not stupid. Unless of course if you forget the driver and see the flow of traffic as a natural force, like rivers. Then you will end up building more roads and lanes, in order to avoid congestion. But as we know, they will again be filled with cars. Why? Because more drivers will consider it a good idea to take the car.

Again, this may sound like a simple thing, but it is not. Urban researchers want to study the empirical reality (because at least that is real, not speculation), by observing the mobility of people and cars, and asking about their preferences through surveys. But there is no way of observing what they could have done, or what they should have done. In time the scholars will develop theories of how cities develop, what kind of patterns they exemplify, and how the housing market leads some districts to prosper and others to decline, for instance.

For planners and architects, the reality consisting of possibilities instead of actualities seems much more natural. The basic assumption behind every act of planning and design is that the future is not determined; why else should we plan for it, and not just expect for it to happen? So there must be a belief in other possibilities than only the ones that we see before our eyes, and where things seem to be going.

The thing is, however, that not everything that is possible is easily seen. My students could easily figure out where on the table the beer could be. But those developing our cities cannot so easily see what the cities could be. The realm of possibilities is infinite, even if we respect the physical (or economic, or ecological, or political, or social) context. The future of cities, the possible cities, cannot be seen. They have to be made visible. They have to be designed.


Kimmo Lapintie (2007) Modalities of Urban Space. Planning Theory, Vol. 6, ss. 36-51.

(This is a scholarly article I once wrote about space as possibilities. Unfortunately it is not freely available unless your institution has subscribed to the journal)