Book review: "The Well-Tempered City"

I grew up in the suburbs, but I was drawn to nearby New York City because it was gritty and alive with what the architect Robert Venturi called "complexity and contradiction... messy vitality," throbbing with street life and jazz, blues, and rock and roll.--Rose (2016), p. x

Planner Jonathan F.P. Rose has produced a prodigious book detailing the interwoven nature of the many facets of cities. The inspiration and model is Johann Sebastian Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722, 1742), described as both a musical composition and a work of persuasive rhetoric. Bach was promoting a new system of tuning notes that--unlike that which had been in place for 2000 years--enabled harmonization across keys. In the work "Bach moves through all twenty-four major and minor keys in a series of preludes and fugues, weaving them together into a sublime ecology of sound" (p. xi). Just as a masterful composition like The Well-Tempered Clavier requires harmonization of notes and themes, individuals "over the long run will benefit more by contributing to the success of the larger system" than by pursuing narrow self-interest (p. 11).

Cities, like composers, can either blend the many dimensions of human well-being or (as in the Pythagorean system of tuning) set them against each other. Rose argues in his first chapter--a conviction familiar to any reader of Holy Mountain--that global megatrends like globalization, connectivity, terrorism and migration have made harmony urgently important. Probably it always has been, but in the period of economic growth following World War II, it was easy to ignore. Now things have gone VUCA, an American military acronym standing for "volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity" (pp. 14-15).

Most of the book builds a model of a well-tempered city describing five qualities that, taken together, should see us through whatever lies ahead:

1. coherence, "integrating systems" (p. 66) that connect humans with each other, with nature and with ultimate reality into a coherent whole. American zoning and sprawl produce the opposite of this
2. circularity, thinking in terms of regeneration instead of linearly, particularly when it comes to consumption of scarce resources like food, water and oil
3. resilience, ability to respond to stress and volatility by changing to a more adaptive mode
4. community, "a deeply interconnected metabolic web of families, communities and cognition" (p. 277), including adequate housing and economic opportunity. He cites Putnam's ideas of bonding capital and bridging capital as well as Woolcock's addition of linking capital that connects people across different social classes
5. compassion, a "desire to relieve the suffering of all beings" through which we find an overarching purpose such as improving the lives of children or the health of nature

Rose's book is replete with historical examples and draws on a wide range of knowledge to show that, in a VUCA world, cities need to be ready for anything, which means recognizing how things are connected before it's too late.

• Chapter 1: New Delhi suffered a massive power outage in 2012 because climate change has led to hotter summers and less rainfall, so less water is available to produce food and hydro-electric power just as a larger and more well off population is demanding more of it, requiring more coal-fired power which exacerbates climate change not to mention air pollution. Add in poor infrastructure and an inefficient government and you have a recipe for disaster, which in fact is what occurred.
• Chapter 10: Freddie Gray grew up poor in housing whose historically rigid segregation was actually named "the Baltimore idea" after his native city. Even as racism became less overt, the barriers to opportunity it had created replicated themselves as substandard conditions and interracial suspicion. Young Freddie's exposure to lead paint left him contributed to developmental disabilities and behavioral problems that led to his tragic encounter with the police.

The book covers enough topics that it could serve as an introduction to urbanism, but the associations and connections make it rewardingly provocative for the seasoned urbanist as well. For example, in Cedar Rapids our school district is facing a financial imbalance substantial enough that it is considering closing up to a third of our elementary schools. There are arguments for this strategy, such as cost savings can refit the other schools or even build new ones as was recently done in Kansas City. But reading Rose makes me immediately skeptical of such a siloed approach. How will this affect housing patterns (will anticipating sprawl reinforce it?) and the most vulnerable children? How much will transportation to the new schools cancel the cost savings from closing the old ones? How resilient will these decisions prove 20 or 40 years into a VUCA future? Are there better ways for our community to promote the well-being of all children? Can the city and the school district find ways to cooperate to achieve resilience in the face of unreliable state funding? Note that none of this is possible without the connectedness and compassion he commends, without which we're merely scrambling for short-term advantage.

The Well-Tempered City" blog: http://www.welltemperedcity.com/blog/