Welcome to flaneuring, a newsletter featuring new resources on learnurbandesign.com, insightful thoughts, and street photography.
In Inclusive Transportation, Veronica Davis argues for big changes in transportation planning to make it fairer and more connected. She illustrates how past practices have divided communities and calls for new leaders and approaches to fix this. The book outlines ways to plan transportation that benefits everyone by focusing on fairness, listening to communities, and working together.
“Healthy minds continuously integrate their differentiated parts. Mental-health issues all begin with impaired integration of the brain. Chaos theory observes that when a self-organizing system is not able to link differentiated parts, it moves to chaos or rigidity. The same happens with the mind—Siegel [Daniel Siegel, M.D., a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine] notes that almost all mental disabilities can be categorized as chaos, rigidity, or both. Cities, too, are healthier when they link their differentiated parts.
Cities can also be overly rigid or chaotic, or find the right path in between. Rigidity often arises from centralized command and control, as in Soviet cities of the mid-twentieth century, and more recently in cities ruled by Islamic fundamentalism. In such cases, there is no place for individualism or self-expression; diversity, the source of generative capacity, is repressed. Rigid urban infrastructures are incapable of readily adapting to change.
The antithesis of rigidity is the kind of chaos we find when cities lose their ability to govern, often sprawling out of control, without clear goals and direction from a well-functioning government.
Nature’s way of flowing between rigidity and chaos is to encourage the growth of differentiation, or diversity, at the same time increasing interlinkage. These qualities give rise to self-organization, which, like all aspects of nature, tends toward symmetry, balance, and coherence. Just as these characteristics enhance our personal sense of well-being, they also enhance the well-being of cities.”
Jonathan F.P. Rose, The Well-Tempered City