Understanding Cities

Method in Urban Design

Alexander Cuthbert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136732621
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Understanding Cities is richly textured, complex and challenging. It creates the vital link between urban design theory and praxis and opens the required methodological gateway to a new and unified field of urban design. Using spatial political economy as his most important reference point, Alexander Cuthbert both interrogates and challenges mainstream urban design and provides an alternative and viable comprehensive framework for a new synthesis.

He rejects the idea of yet another theory in urban design, and chooses instead to construct the necessary intellectual and conceptual scaffolding for what he terms 'The New Urban Design'. Building both on Michel de Certeau's concept of heterology – 'thinking about thinking' – and on the framework of his previous books Designing Cities and The Form of Cities, Cuthbert uses his prior adopted framework – history, philosophy, politics, culture, gender, environment, aesthetics, typologies and pragmatics – to create three integrated texts.

Overall, the trilogy allows a new field of urban design to emerge. Pre-existing and new knowledge are integrated across all three volumes, of which Understanding Cities is the culminating text.

1 Theory/heterology

If at first a theory is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.

(Albert Einstein)

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same god who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.

(Galileo Galilei)

Introduction: Intuition, Experience and Science

The idea of method imbues all disciplines and all regions of knowledge. In many cases, it surmounts even the idea of theory. Moving forward and getting things done is the way of the world, and this process more often than not has greater significance than contemplating why things happen as they do. This is true of the built environment disciplines, specifically architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and urban planning. All are carried out under the purview of professional organisations enshrined in their respective cocoons of practice, codes of ethics, ideologies and charters, royal or otherwise. Each has evolved in its own manner, over millennia, into the institutions we see today. With the possible exception of urban planning, they have grown out of craft-based practices, where the process of creation usually transcended its explanation. The method of production was largely inherent in the process of creating form from the raw material of nature, and contemplation over theory was largely irrelevant.

However, this does not imply that theoretical and methodological discourse was totally absent from human endeavour in these disciplines. We have inherited a whole series of texts from history, sourced from observation, imagination, intuition and experience. Beginning with Marcus Vitruvius Pollio and his treatise De Architectura, circa 27 BC, many others followed in his wake, including such luminaries as Sebastiano Serlio – Regole Generali d’Architettura, 1537; Quatremère De Quincy – Dictionaire d’Architecture, 1825; Gilbert Laing Meason – On The Landscape Architecture of the Great Painters of Italy, 1828; and Camillo Sitte – City Planning According to Artistic Principles, 1899. More recently, Bannister Flight Fletcher’s A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1897) also remains a classic. Their work still informs practice and scholarship in urban design. Despite this inheritance, these masterpieces were wholly eclectic works, brilliant but disconnected from any documented field of knowledge. Today, urban design still lacks an explanation of itself that allows any significant social identity to legitimise action and process. So far, and despite the enormous debates over scientific progress, there has been little or no attempt by mainstream urban design ‘theorists’ to locate the discipline within this overall schema, or even to offer a challenging debate as to why it should not be located in the realm of scientific advance, that is, within the natural or social sciences.

In its attempts to explain nature and the world in which we live, science has been at the forefront of human creativity for millennia. The logical as opposed to the intuitive search for knowledge had begun in the ancient cradles of civilisation: Sumeria, China, India and Africa. Here, the processes of reason and rationality had their origins, a constellation of discoveries that eventually allowed Nicolaus Copernicus to theorise the correct location of man within the universe, and his student Galileo Galilei to come up with the proof in his Dialogue of 1630. It was with these two men that the great scientific revolution of the Enlightenment began in Europe, a movement that has dominated the idea of method since that time. So it is with science that we must begin our investigation into how the form of cities has come about, and the usefulness of the scientific process to that event.

The Method of Science

The time is overdue for adding the separation of state and science to the by now customary separation of state and church. Science is only one of the many instruments man has invented to cope with his surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible, and has become too powerful, too pushy, and too dangerous to be left on its own.

(Paul Feyerabend)

The grand aim of all science is to cover the greatest number of empirical facts by logical deduction from the smallest number of hypotheses or axioms.

(Albert Einstein)

In the minds of most professionals, science represents rationality, truth, logic, fact, deduction and proof (Kuhn 1962). It provides us with incontrovertible information about the world around us. It represents the current state of demonstrable knowledge, not to be refuted except by other scientists. Science is held to have special merit owing to its authority in, for example, discovering the genetic basis for life, moving civilisation forward through technological advances, and having the capacity to cure or ameliorate a multitude of diseases, among a great many other accomplishments. It is therefore unsurprising that we accord science special privilege, and at least since the enlightenment have looked to it as a saviour, using scientific knowledge from chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy and a variety of other spheres of consciousness to solve human problems. The use of the term science has then been extrapolated into other areas of knowledge, adding credibility by way of association. At its broadest compass, we therefore have a division into natural and social sciences, where the social then adopts a mantle that may not actually reflect the complexity and appropriateness of the methods of the natural sciences.

What then is the scientific method, or indeed is there such a thing, given the immense array of phenomena to be encompassed? What separates science from other forms of explanation (for example, religion in general and creationism in particular) is usually taken to be the difference between proof and belief, or rationality and faith. Science begins by observing some part of the universe and then generates a hypothesis that is consistent with the observations that have been made. The hypothesis may be formed on the basis of several key propositions that support it. Predictions can then be formulated, and the hypothesis can be tested and modified on the basis of its ability to explain what has been observed. The testing of theories on the basis of evidence and hypothesis formation came to be known as the hypothetico-deductive method, and this method was then taught as a universally valid tool for explaining the universe, applicable to the natural sciences and across all scales of endeavour (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Model of the scientific process

Source: J.C. Moughtin, R. Cuesta and C.A. Sarris, Urban Design, Method and Technique. Oxford: The Architectural Press, 2003, p. 7, Fig. 1.3

Such orthodox conceptions of science have been termed positivist or empiricist, with so many associations and practices that it is somewhat similar to using the term capitalist to describe the global economy since the cold war thawed. Despite more recent scepticism, the positivists maintained that there was such a unity represented in the scientific method that it was equally valid for the study of nature as it was for the study of man. As man was part of nature, and it was the job of science to study nature, ergo the same methods could be applied across the entire spectrum of human activity, with some variation depending on the subject matter. The universally adopted method could then be described as having six main stages, depending on how one decides to break down the process:

• statement of a problem;
• generation of proposition(s);
• formation of a hypothesis;
• testing of the hypothesis (prediction);
• consolidation of a theory;
• application to ‘real-world’ solutions.

The same series could also be reduced to observation, hypothesis formulation, prediction and experimentation, feeding back the results to modify initial assumptions and, thence, to perfect the theory. The outcomes then become accepted as the ‘laws of nature’ and are held to be universally valid.

Paradoxically, while a central quality of science for the positivists was that it spoke the truth, and that this truth was demonstrable, another was that it also had to be falsifiable. By the very nature of the process, this fact must be transparent to all. Without it, science would have already discovered everything about a fixed and unchanging universe. Several rules follow from this – that all theories are only temporary statements, that the best theories stand the test of time as they are the most difficult to refute, and that all ‘truth’ is relative. Given this relativity, the importance of metaphysics and the residual need for imagination to be exercised, all science is limited by the burden of proof. Without it, science cannot accept any other reality. Because it is factual that science has frequently been falsified, it is then clearly arguable that scientific truths constitute only partial representations of ‘the real world’.

Even within this overall Weltanschauung, there is considerable variation as to the operation and validity of specific methodologies, where at least three appropriate methods from the natural sciences may be adopted:

1. Scientific research begins with pure observations, and generalisations or theories are produced from them.
2. Scientific research begins with a tentative theory that is expected to explain some observed phenomenon, and observations are made to test whether this theory can be accepted.
3. As observed irregularities are produced by hidden mechanisms, it is necessary to build models of mechanisms and then to look for evidence of their existence.

(Blaikie 1993: 3)

In the process of demonstrating the truth of statements, a conflict in the relationship between induction or deduction in respect to reasoning has been legion and suggests that, in fact, they are both part of the same research process. In addition, six classical positions can be identified, all of which dictate changes in the strategy of investigation, and/or methods used in analysis such as the above (Blaikie 1993: 9). These are:

Positivism	Critical rationalism
Negativism	Classical hermeneutics
Historicism	Interpretivism

Despite these variations, Blaikie states that, in effect, there remains only one central position, that of positivism, to which the others are reactions rather than new theories. In answer to the question as to whether the same methods of the natural sciences can be applied to the social sciences, only positivism answers ‘yes’. Negativism answers ‘no’. Both historicism and critical rationalism say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ in equal measure, and the last two say ‘no’. Interpretivism not only says ‘no’, it maintains that natural science and social science are qualitatively different activities, and so their methods require entirely different forms of science. As if this was not sufficiently complex, Karl Popper has noted that metaphysics also has a significant role to play in theory building (Popper 1959, Simkin 1993).

So one outcome of recent theory is that many scholars today have serious reservations in using the word science as a meaningful descriptor of theory/ method in any useful sense – ‘There is little agreement on what kinds of methods characterise science beyond the rather bland point that it is systematic, rigorous, and self-critical, and that physics and chemistry are exemplars of it’ (Sayer 1984: 14). Added to this, and despite Popper’s claim that scientific proof is impossible, and that theories can never be proven, only falsified, Chalmers suggests that this is also untrue: ‘a strong case can be made for the claim that scientific knowledge can neither be conclusively proved nor conclusively disproved by reference to the facts, even if the availability of these facts is assumed (Chalmers 1999: 11; my italics). Hence, Feyerabend’s famous claim in regard to a fixed theory of rationality (science) that, ‘there is only one principle that can be defended under all circumstances and in all stages of human development. It is the principle that “anything goes”’ (Feyerabend 1975: 5). But this statement is not a plea for the wholesale denial of responsibility, and Feyerabend’s remark is made in the context of a lifetime’s participation in the philosophy and history of scientific practice (Feyerabend 1987, 1995). Nor is it a call for wholesale ignorance to prevail; quite the opposite, as is demonstrated in his carefully argued thesis throughout Against Method that, ‘humanitarian anarchism is more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives’ (Feyerabend 1975: 5). Other similar texts have adopted the same theme on a regular ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Theory/heterology
• 2. History
• 3. Philosophy
• 4. Politics
• 5. Culture
• 6. Gender
• 7. Environment
• 8. Aesthetics
• 9. Typologies
• 10. Pragmatics
• Postscript
• References
• Index