Planning Theory & Practice, Vol. 5, No.

1, 1132, March 2004

Cities as Art: Exploring the Possibility of an Aesthetic Dimension in Planning

EMILY TALEN & CLIFF ELLIS
ETalenUniversity of Illinois at Urbana Champaigntalen@uiuc.edu

ABSTRACT This article argues that the integration of art and planning has been inadequately developed, and calls for a renewed exploration of their inter-connection. City planning has had a variable relationship with art, moving between organic, civic minded ideals, and despotic notions of grandeur. Yet, rather than eschewing this history as nostalgic or irrelevant, there are ways in which a connection can be made between planning and artif art is dened in a particular way. To accomplish this, it is necessary to rst recognize that in the history of the human attempt to design cities, the loss of a connection between city planning and art is relatively recent. It is argued that the lost connection is in part a result of a rejection of modernist notions of urbanism. Spanning the history of city planning and city making, the notion of planning as art was in evidence until the mid-20th century, about the time when modernist spatial ideas took hold. It is argued that divorcing all notions of art from city planning practice and theoretical development has been detrimental to the profession. The relevance of art to city planning needs to be reinvigorated, but this will require new ways of thinking, an acceptance of traditionalism broadly dened, and may entail new conceptions about the merger of planning with recent cultural and even scientic theory.

Introduction A city cannot be a work of art, Jacobs (1961, p. 372) counselled, and most planners would probably agree. Where city planning, art and beauty were once used almost interchangeably, the current situation in planning is that the idea of art or beauty is rarely, if ever, heard. Often, planners have decried the use of aesthetics in the commodication of urban places, what Boyer disparagingly calls the aestheticization of everyday life (Boyer, 1988, p. 55). But does that mean that there is no valid connection between city planning and art or beauty, or that a connection will always be elusive? This article explores the aesthetic dimension in city planning, with the aim of demystifying the connection. It is argued that the integration of art and planning has been inadequately developed, and this article calls for a renewed exploration of their interconnection. City planning is so different from what we conventionally view as art, or even artistic process, that it is difcult at rst for contemporary planners to pinpoint the connection. For example, art is generally thought of as something that can be objectied and hung on the wall, performed on a stage or put in a park. Architecture is viewed as a ne art,
Emily Talen, Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 111 Temple Buell Hall, MC-619, 611 Taft Drive, Champaign, IL 61820, USA. Email: talen@uiuc.edu. Cliff Ellis, Graduate Program in Urban Planning, School of Architecture and Urban Design, University of Kansas, 1465 Jayhawk Blvd., 317 Marvin Hall, Lawrence, KS 660457614, USA. Email: cellis@ku.edu
1464-9357 Print/1470-000X On-line/04/010011-22 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1464935042000185044

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but usually with reference to notable individual buildings. It is generally thought that art does not need to account for its social effects in the way that city planning does, and that artists have great freedom to express personal impressions and interpretations. Art, unlike planning, may revel in pure adventure and innovation. How art is dened, then, becomes a critical point of inquiry. City planning has had a variable relationship with art, moving between organic, civic minded ideals and despotic notions of grandeur. Yet, rather than eschewing this history as nostalgic or irrelevant, there may be fruitful ways in which a connection can be made between the two processes, if art is dened in a particular way. To accomplish this, it is necessary to rst recognize that, spanning the entire history of the human attempt to design cities, the loss of a connection between city planning and art is relatively recent. In addition to an exploration of the connection between art and planning, this article explores the problems inherent in attempting to reassert this linkage, and the conceptual framework that could be used to reconnect planning and art in fruitful ways. This study focuses exclusively on the American context, since bringing in planning histories and experiences from Europe and other cultures would require a much wider treatment. Despite this limitation, the American experience illuminates the basic problem clearly; the loss of an aesthetic dimension in planning in the US was transparent. There are three main sections: a review of the history of city plannings relationship to art; a summary of the demise of the interrelationship; and nally a proposal for a framework for re-integrating art and planning. Within these sections, the ow of the argument can be condensed into three main points: 1. Up until the second half of the 20th century, aesthetic concerns played an important role in American city planning. This artistic dimension was explored in key texts by prominent city planners and realized in landmark projects. However, after the Second World War, the connection between art and city planning diminished, or devolved into a concern for the commodication of aesthetic forms to serve narrow real estate objectives. 2. The death knell of connecting planning and art was sounded by Jane Jacobs, who argued that cities cannot be viewed as works of art. However, Jacobs critique was aimed at a particular way of imposing aesthetic order on the city, the top-down application of inexible visions requiring the total, absolute, and unchallenged control (Jacobs, 1961, p. 375) of architects and planners. In so doing, she condemned all forms of art as fundamentally similar projects, and thus failed to make a distinction between contextualized and absolutist notions of aestheticism. The historical record shows that earlier planners had a greater sensitivity to the issues of context and plurality than is usually thought. 3. Divorcing all notions of art from city planning practice and theoretical development has been detrimental to the profession, and the relevance of art to city planning should be reinvigorated. This re-evaluation will require new ways of thinking, an acceptance of traditionalism broadly dened, and a willingness to explore the implications for city planning of new developments in cultural and scientic theory. What is Art? The discussion of art and city planning must begin with a denition of terms. While the denition of art can be quite elusive, the denition here involves a distinction between art dened as individualistic expression in which visual signs are used to convey ideas,

Cities as Art 13 moods, or generalized emotional experiences (Ocvirk et al., 1975, p. 6), and aesthetics, a branch of philosophy concerned with the notion of beauty. Beauty is likewise elusive to dene, but can be simply dened as a quality which gives deep satisfaction to the mind, whether arising from sensory manifestations, [or] a meaningful design or pattern (Websters, 1996, p. 184). It is this latter view of art, dened collectively, that can be relevant for city planning. Aesthetics has formed the basis and primary motivation for the merger of art and planning. Historically, this relationship was assumed. Progressive Era planners seemed to take the aesthetic denition for granted, and did not spend a great deal of time dening what they meant by it. It was not necessary to do so. Art in planning was about beauty in urban form and pattern. It was what Camillo Sitte (1889) meant in his treatise The Art of Building Cities, what Raymond Unwin (1909) extolled in his Town Planning in Practice, and what underscored Hegemann & Peets (1922) textbook The American Vitruvius: An Architects Handbook of Civic Art.

City Planning as Art There are different strains in the history of American city planning that involve the linkage between aesthetics and city planning. The primary goal in this section is straightforward: it is argued that the various strains involved were not all about centralized authority and aesthetic homogeneity, qualities that would never be acceptable to planners today. It is readily acknowledged that some notions of city planning as art are not congruent with more pluralistic views characteristic of current city planning practice. But at the same time, there is a misconception that the legacy of earlier plannersthose who were most concerned with the idea that planning and art were interconnectedwas overbearing and insensitive to context. On the contrary, the artistic notions of city planning were often context-driven. Establishing this is important because it lays the groundwork for a renewal of the city planning as art tradition. The concern for aesthetics in American cities did not start with the City Beautiful era. According to Peterson (1976) there were three antecedents to the City Beautiful, together constituting its forgotten origins and lost meanings (p. 53), all of which were smallscale and incrementalist in orientation: municipal art, civic improvement and outdoor art. They all reveal a concern for civic spirit, beauty, artfulness, order, cleanlinessin short, a respect for urbanity and the embellishment of the public realm. In the 19th century, the solution was not usually about abandonment or constructing anew, but rather about beautifying the existing in a multitude of discrete ways. This revealed an intimacy with urbanism that pre-dates Jane Jacobs by almost a century. The municipal art movement which got underway in the late 19th century was focused in particular on small-scale adornment and decorative art, stained-glass and murals in public buildings, sculpture and fountains in public places such as parks. The movement sought to improve the citys appearance through the enterprise of activated urbanity (Peterson, p. 44). Proponents admired European cities and especially Paris, but they did not condone Haussmanns approach to slum eradication. In fact, Charles Mulford Robinson, a leading proponent who later championed the City Beautiful, expressed his desire for greater articulation of the diversity of peoples, i.e. immigrants, living in American cities, lamenting that Russians and Italians live in the same sort of houses, of a style that is foreign to both, starving their own natural yearnings and depriving the city of beauty. All national characteristics are crushed to one monotonous

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level of architectural utility, until a part of the city that might be most attractive and interesting becomes the dullest of all (Robinson, 1901, p. 211). The municipal art movement was not necessarily a quest for a White City either. Municipal artists sought the judicious use of color, as a way to enliven the street (Peterson, p. 45). Many proponents wanted municipal art to be colourful in the sense of being indigenous. Art must appeal to the great masses of the public, wrote Frederick S. Lamb in 1897. It must tell the story of the human heart, whereby the daily struggle of the individual is felt and recorded (Lamb, 1897, p. 683). Municipal art proponents did, however, desire order and cleanliness. Its members detested crassness, banality, litter, billboards, and pushed for, and got, designed plaza entryways, triumphal arches, monuments in public squares, embellishments on bridges, and planned groupings of public buildings. But they generally stressed small changes. They wanted civic buildings and places adorned, but they were not interested in creating Grand Manner plans. A Chicago art historian of the period explained that the essential task was to take every element of ugliness one by one, and try to root it out (Peterson, p. 45, note 20). Small-scale change was a worthy goal. The implication of this is that the existing urbanity offered something for the municipal artists to work with, an approach fundamentally different than Haussmanns. The second antecedent to the City Beautiful is referred to generally as civic improvement, and was broader than the rst, characterizing in particular the multitude of organizations that wanted cleanliness, order and beauty in cities and sought to inspire others to want the same. The concerns of the improvement societies were eclectic. One of the organizers of the movement, Jesse Good, wrote No task is too great for these associations to undertake. They will direct the digging of anything from a sewer to a ower bed (Peterson, 1976, p. 48). By 1906, Robinson reported that there were some 2400 improvement societies in the US (Peterson, p. 53), apparently swelled by a grand civic awakening in which Americans were seeking, as the president of the American Civic Association stated in 1904, to give us here on earth in our urban habitations conditions at least approximating those of the beautiful wild into which our forefathers came a few generations ago (Scott, 1969, p. 67). The evolution of these movements into the City Beautiful occurred rapidly, but the latter movement was short-livedthe lifespan of the City Beautiful was only 10 years, generally dated as being between 1899 and 1909 (Wilson, 1989). In the City Beautiful, the interest in beauty, which was the hallmark and common denominator of municipal art, civic improvement and outdoor art, reached full owering, but was also more singleminded and grandiose, moving way beyond the earlier, more modest impulses of incremental change. It moved, therefore, from activated urbanity to contrived urbanity, with signicantly different implications. Another important distinction to make in the history of city plannings aestheticism is between formality and informality in city design. Jonathan Barnett, in The Elusive City (1986), characterizes this as the distinction between the civic art and the city beautiful strains of urban aestheticism in the early 20th century. The development of a formalized Civic Art was aligned with a revival of neo-medievalism, and included the writings of John Ruskin, William Morris and Camillo Sitte. The Austrian architect Sitte was particularly inuential, emphasizing the importance of preservation, public space, and space enclosure. Proponents of garden cities made particular use of the aestheticism of Ruskin and Morris, as exemplied by the town plans of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. The merger of art and city planning did not die out during the City Efcient, the era

Cities as Art 15 following the City Beautiful. The years between the City Beautiful and the Second World War had, at least ostensibly, a more overt interest in social goals. Scott (p. 123) describes the transformation as one of social impulses that crept into the city beautiful. What is important to note is that the city efcient era did not reject beautication as a goal. There was ample talk about the art of city planning, the happy combination of use and beauty, the integration of servicableness and charm, and that nothing is really nished until it is beautiful (Nolen, 1909, p. 1). Discussions of the art and science of city planning were still prominent in the 1930s, for example in Thomas Adams (1935) Outline of Town and City Planning. The integration of city planning and art was often tied to the issue of appropriateness. Raymond Unwin was particularly strong about this, arguing for the need to consider not whether the formal or the informal is desired, but whether the requirements of the case and the conditions of the site have been thoroughly weighed (Unwin, 1909, p. 138). One of Unwins favourite quotes was by the painter Jean-Francois Millet (18141875), who wrote: The beautiful is that which is in place (Creese, 1967, p. 40). John Nolen spoke in similar terms, and even dened beauty as tness and appropriateness (Nolen, 1908, p. 2). The view of Nolen and Unwin was that, just as the love for informality should not be allowed to degrade public convenience, so formal planning should not justify riding roughshod over property lines or the sentiments of residents and property owners (Unwin, 1909, p. 139). This thinking is what prompted Nolen, on numerous occasions, to discuss the differences between the landscape planning of Le Notre and Olmsted to demonstrate that while the underlying principles are always the same, the application of principles is usually different. The Dutch architect H.P. Berlage is another example of how early planners were sensitive to appropriateness. Berlage wrote in 1908 of the need for artistic beautication of every future community that not only embodied the quest for Unity in Plurality, but that accepted that all is governed by circumstance and relationship (from Banham, 1967, p. 144). Berlages sense of architectural order, reected in his plan-making, was derived from his view of nature as non-arbitrary: nature is ever thrifty of motifs modifying them a thousand different ways according to the condition of her creatures and their mode of life (p. 143). This was perhaps a more sophisticated view of the need for both uniformity and plurality, for an order guided by circumstance, but there is a parallel understanding of it even in the American City Beautiful. Wilson (1989, pp. 9495) gives a number of examples in which City Beautiful proponents warned of the dangers of stylistic singularity, of the problem with accepting Beaux Arts Classicism in all cases. Charles Mulford Robinson understood the choices. Having expressed the importance of unique immigrant architecture in his earlier treatise, by 1903, now in his full-bodied City Beautiful phase, he wrote that classic architecture was actually bourgeois, and advocated the use of Flemish Gothic architecture instead. There are other examples. The landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted and John Nolen wrote about the need to design public open spaces according to their specic context and purpose (Nolen & Olmsted, 1906). They spelled out six types of open spaces, three types of playgrounds, and three types of parks. Nolen was particularly interested in street design, stressing the importance of understanding the place and function of the street before prescribing its specications. It was the inappropriateness of street design relative to place and function that Nolen disdained, writing in 1908: We have curved streets where they should be straight, straight streets where they should be curved,

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narrow streets where they should be broad, occasionally broad streets where they should be narrow (Nolen, 1908, p. 7). Writing much later, in the mid-1930s, Thomas Adams, one of the most prominent city efcient era planners, tied the doctrine of appropriateness to the essence of the artistic process. He stated, As in all art it is not the name of what you do that counts but how you do it in relation to time, place, and surroundings (Adams, 1935, p. 321). He spoke of the need, therefore, for planners to be equipped with the gift of intuition. The issue of maintaining the individuality of every city was a particular concern for early urban planners, stated repeatedly as a counter response to the critique that plan-making was prone to boiler-plating. Unwin referred to the individuality of urban character as the poetry of its existence (Unwin, 1909, p. 146). In fact, the attempt to instill individuality was seen as the essential task of beautication. Nolen wrote of the need to instill love and pride in local traditions and local ideals (Nolen, 1909, p. 74), a theme he repeated often. Urban beauty was a matter of cultivating urban excellence derived from local custom. By the time Nolen wrote Civic art furnishes the most available means to express these local customs (from Scott, p. 98), Nolen had rejected the City Beautiful but nevertheless saw it as a means for accomplishing the goal of afrming local aspirations. It is the idea that the merger between planning and art necessarily entails a certain degree of authoritarianism, homogeneity, and insensitivity to context that has contributed to the dissolution between planning and aesthetics. In particular, the seeming inexibility of aesthetic ideals on the part of City Beautiful architects was criticized for stiing the creative expression of American architecture (Mumford, 1968). The issue has a long history. The attempt to accommodate diversity within uniformity was already recognized as a fundamental problem of city design in the mid-18th century (Kostof, 1991, p. 261). In the Progressive Era, the goal of planners was often to do away with uniformity and monotony in the urban landscape. Nolen stressed the view that cities differ radically, each possessing a personality that separates it from every other (Nolen, 1908, p. 2). It was this originality that planners sought to exploit, rather than letting the forces of capitalism impose a debilitating sameness. This very brief outline of some of the main currents operating in the formative years of city planning shows that city planning as a form of art has thus gone through various phases. How is it possible to gauge the importance or relevance of these ideas? The view here is that it is necessary to make a distinction between incremental, collectively oriented notions of aestheticism, and city design that is preoccupied with self-expression, individuality or the dominance of one ruling individual or institution. One is organic, uid, and derived from a pluralistic view of the city. The other is absolutist and dependent upon centralized authority. There is a world of difference between the artistic preoccupations of Baroque urbanism in, for example, 16th century Rome, and the aesthetic contributions of more modest city builders associated with the municipal arts or civic improvement movements. Yet these critical distinctions have often been obscured, most famously, by Jane Jacobs in her blanket denunciation of City Beautiful, Garden City and Radiant City planners. As will be argued, understanding the distinction between the ways in which art and city planning are connected has important implications for their re-integration. Most importantly, it is the conception of a monolithic, authoritarian view of art that is at the root of much of the current disdain for merging art and city planning. That is, the reaction against planning as art is essentially a reaction to planning as autocracy, absolutism and the misuse of power. This difference is crucial. It is a distinction between

Cities as Art 17 using art to help build cities that are satisfying and commonly recognized as possessing aesthetic value, and, conversely, using art to symbolize the grandeur and authority of the state or of a particular ideology or individual. Why did this transformation happen? Much of the blame can be placed on modernismspecically modernist urbanism, not the architecture of individual buildings for the collapse of the aesthetic project of city planning. Jane Jacobs was right to make the world aware of the problem that this had become. But Jacobs failed to distinguish between earlier ideas about aesthetics and city planning and the modernist interpretation of them. The arrival of modernist, and then postmodernist and neomodernist, architecture and urbanism made city planning as art problematic in a way that was fundamentally different from the aesthetics encountered in the earlier phases of city planning. Critiquing Modernist Urbanism A good deal of blame for the loss of an aesthetic dimension in planning can be placed on modernist urbanism. It is important to be clear that the critique here is limited to this specic notion of modernism, which is sometimes said to have started with Tony Garnier and his Cite Industrielle. Displayed in Paris in 1904, the plan was unique because it embraced the basic principles of mass production and industrial efciency and applied them to city form. It boldly rejected past historical styles and offered a machine-age community of hydro-electric plants, aerodromes and highways, all strictly segregated according to function (LeGates & Stout, p. xxxi). It also separated the building from the street and the pedestrian from vehicular trafc, a clear departure from traditional means of shaping the urban public realm. Modernist urbanism reached full owering by the 1950s and exerted a powerful effect on urban form that is widely familiar. These effects can be summarized as: the separation of land uses, the accommodation of the automobile in the form of high-speed highways, the rejection of the street and street life, the treatment of buildings as isolated objects in space rather than as part of the larger interconnected urban fabric, the encouragement of unformed space, the rejection of the traditional elements of street, square and plaza, the demolition of large areas of the city to make unfettered places for new urbanism, and the creation of enclosed malls and sunken plazas. The ideas have been referred to as the Functionalist Movement (Trancik, 1986), but were essentially the main tenets of the organized group, the Congres Internationaux dArchitecture Moderne (International Congresses of Modern Architecture), known as CIAM. As Eric Mumford recounts in his detailed study, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 19281960, the CIAM denition of urbanism was essentially a continuation of longstanding ideas that had taken hold by the 1920s, that is, the focus on efciency in city-building, the strong belief in the ability of technology to solve social problems, and the reliance on the master planner/expert to accomplish a better world (Mumford, 2000). Thus CIAM was in many ways a continuation of earlier planning ideals. However, CIAM architects, the promoters of modernist urbanism, parted company with more traditional approaches to urban reform by embracing entirely new ways of thinking about cities. Traditional and historically referenced urban forms were not allowed to be part of the new modern city. The new ideology, abstracted and free, was superior because of its newness. This meant that ideas were often taken to their extreme conclusion. Principles were abstracted, traditional methods of place-making were rejected, and architects, working under this freedom of expression, were individually

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given much credit for the ability to change society. Le Corbusiers belief that Taylorist production strategies were natural and therefore above politics (Mumford, 2000, p. 20) is indicative of the kind of city-building approach that was in fact antithetical to the more humanistic thinking of planners like Geddes and Unwin. The latter group sought individual liberation through collective enterprise, something CIAM also claimed concern for, but which CIAM arrived at through a completely different urban logic. That logic was about arranging and combining the material elements of urbanism as if they were pawns on a chessboard. In short, the CIAM movements proposal for a modernist urbanism gave expression to an anti-urbanism that went far beyond anything that had been put forward before, and crafted a supporting language that replaced all prior conceptions. While a proposed focus on collectivism, the merger of art and science, and the ability of architecture and urbanism to create social cohesion were not new or uniquely co-opted by CIAM members, CIAM transformed these in a way that was so abstract and so removed from history, local condition and pedestrian scale that they became a fundamentally different project. The denial of history was not only expedient (which indeed it was), but it was seen as a positive way to gain insight into urban reality. Despite denunciations by planners, modernism continues to dictate patterns of urban growth and form. While it would seem that no one should be more disillusioned with modernism than urban planners, the planning response to modernism seems surprisingly tentative. American planning academics have been suspicious of the New Urbanism and quite hesitant to embrace its principles. Euclidean, single-use zoning, the quintessentially modernist approach to spatial segregation and functionalism, continues to ourish. While it is recognized that planners are only partly responsible for its continued conventional application, their reluctance to seek a more wholesale rejection of zoning-cum-modernism is evident. One wonders, in fact, why the modernist planning paradigm has not been denitively abandoned and replaced with a clear alternative. The article here considers the rejection of modernist urbanism for the purpose of setting up the distinction between two notions of art, one that is appropriate to planning, and one that is not. In particular, the focus is on architecture as a form of art, and what varying perspectives of the role of architecture in city building have meant for urban planning. Further, it is believed that the rejection of art in planning is essentially a rejection of the modernist view of art in planning, not necessarily the city planning as art approach that ourished in the early decades of city planning. Thus a critique of modernism is essential to the task. Three of the most relevant critiques of modernism are considered: the cult of the individual, the phenomenon of decontextualization and the interrelated issues of fragmentation and specialization. Cult of the Individual The planning and design of cities is deeply affected by architectural theory. Thus the idea that architects are unconstrained, unfettered artists whose main responsibility is to be innovators has had a profound effect. Specically, the modernist paradigm of architect as individual genius results in a preoccupation with individuality rather than commonality, an emphasis on innovation as an end rather than a means (Krier, 1998). The heroic architect elevated to cult gure status is very much a part of current approaches to city-building. Glorication of individual architects and their buildings has always been in evidence. But under modernist urbanism, there were different consequences. Architectural projects

Cities as Art 19 by individual master planners contributed to an urbanism composed of isolated buildings, free oating in spacemegastructures in superblocks. Freestanding and competing towers vied for attention while contributing nothing to the integration of space or the urban fabric as a whole. In combination with the stripped down International Style, and the decontextualized and puried aesthetics of the Bauhaus, the principle of the high-rise set in green space eventually translated into high-rise slab housing projects that were nothing less than disastrous. Under CIAM architectural dogma, such housing projects were made to appear like the only logical, rational choice (Mumford, 2000). The current status of this phenomenon is that architecture operates under a veil of what Duany et al. (2000) call mysticism. This mystical practice is sustained by importing ideas from disciplines that are completely unrelated to architecture, and by cloaking architectural designs in inscrutable jargon (Duany et al., p. 213). In architectural schools, ideas are represented in ways that are abstract and often unintelligible, but this is accepted. The result is that the relevance of architecture for the actual construction of the American landscape is shrinking (Dunham-Jones, 2000). The vast realm of subdivision design and production building remains relatively untouched by professional architecture as it is manifested in the leading magazines and educational institutions. A cynical view is that this situation is deliberate on the part of architects: the smaller the realm of communication, the more they are able to assert control over that realm. In any case, the preoccupations of the architectural avant-garde inhabit a rareed world set apart from the mundane process of mass producing tract homes, ofce parks, and strip malls across the American landscape (Dunham-Jones, 2000). The dissatisfaction with the modernist tendency to promote individual innovation is reected in other disciplines. Indian artist Satish Kumar (1995) laments the Western, egocentric view of art, that art has been reduced to a few great masters, who become trendy and fashionable and can make lots of money for a few art dealers (p. 144). Kumar also identies the outcome of this trend, stating that we are living in an ugly world as a result of putting art in one little corner, in a compartment, or in art schools (p. 144). The thesis of Hillman & Ventura (1993) that Weve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapyand the Worlds Getting Worse mirrors this disenchantment with the cult of the individual, with self-reection and a focus on inner psyche that ultimately does not produce a better, more humane world. What does this mean for city planning? First, the constant search for innovation in architecture means that the reuse and rehabilitation of the older urban fabric is de-emphasized. This constant need for novelty also meshes with the capitalist need to sell new products and make prots. The effect of this on cities has been quite damaging. Planners have recognized this for a long time, but have somehow failed to have much effect on redirecting the quest for novelty. The result is a destructive cycle in which urban forms that were new become obsolete quickly, as currently manifested in the death of strip malls and big box chain stores that may have once been novel. Meanwhile, under-used urban spaceslost spaces and derelict buildingsmake up a signicant portion of our urban landscapes. The other way in which the emphasis on individual innovation in city-building damages cities is that it lessens the relevance of communally shared spacesspaces that have not been commercially exploited for a particular company or product. In short, it tends to de-emphasize the importance of the public realm. Where novelty and innovation in architecture were not predominant, such as in the earlier part of the 20th century, buildings were subordinate to the public realm (Kunstler, 1996). The problem with the cult of the individual, and the individual building, is that it tends to dissolve

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the public realm. Space formed by individualized buildings does not serve well as the connective tissue of cities. Decontextualization Modernist urban planning also tends to decontextualize building sites. When this happens, abstract ideas are applied to buildings as objects with little thought given to their surroundings. This was the agenda of Functionalism, championed by Sigfried Giedion in Space, Time and Architecture (1941). Unfortunately, and perhaps somewhat unintentionally, the ideas of free-owing space and pure architecture evolved into our current desolate landscape of isolated buildings in parking lots and along highways (Trancik, 1986). As a result, the importance of the spaces between buildingsstreets, pavements, courtyards, commons, greens and public squareswas ignored. This means, essentially, that modern space is anti-space (Peterson, 1980) or negative space (Alexander et al., 1975). Buildings as puried forms become the towers in a park much maligned by planners but still a common feature of todays urban landscapes. Decontextualization means that the principles of urbanism and of designing cities on a human, pedestrian-oriented scale are often ignored. This has an effect not so much on the social relationships that people form, which endure even under the most anticommunal circumstances, but in terms of what Trancik calls a collective sense of the meaning of public space (p. 11). Similarly, it encourages what Leon Krier calls the insatiable drive for autonomy, the need for a tabula rasa view of urban development. As a result, individual buildings are often out of keeping with their surroundings and even with entire sections of a city. Decontextualization evolved from the notion of functionalism, the idea that space should be pure, unbounded and free-owing. What this meant for cities was vividly portrayed in the modernist manifesto, Can Our Cities Survive? An ABC of Urban Problems, their Analyses, their Solutions: Based on the Proposals Formulated by CIAM, written by Jose Luis Sert, published in 1942, and containing the statement of principles known as the Athens Charter. Meant for the mass American public, the polemic of the functional city was strongly argued in the text, but its presentation was abstract. Details of urban form, planning and design are lacking, perhaps as a way of ensuring that the mistakes of past urbanism with its parade of mere aesthetics, would not be repeated. For, as Joseph Hudnut argued in the preface, city design in places like Paris had a basis no rmer than a logic of form and a reward no deeper than an aesthetic experience. The antidote was a city planning that was based on those processes by which material things are shaped and assembled for civic use (Hudnut, in Sert, p. iv). What is missing from the polemic is the notion of place-making, the importance of local context, and what Lewis Mumford called social and civic character (Mumford, 1968, p. 119). Goals and principles were based on scientic, rational decision-making devoid of recognition of the importance of culture and symbolism, as if progress were a matter of geometric order. The focus on speed and efciency, combined with the pursuit of a cold and sober aesthetic (Boyer, 1988, p. 282), extinguished the ability to appreciate and make use of past urban forms, existing context, and traditional principles of urbanism. Specialization and Fragmentation As a result of individualism and decontextualization, modernism produces cities com-

Cities as Art 21 posed of fragmented land uses (Barnett, 2003). This can be seen as an outgrowth of the idea that buildings are isolated objects that sit in the landscape, unconnected to a larger network of urban spaces. Not only does this sever the relationship between the inside and the outside of a building, but it results in what Trancik (1986) terms lost or anti-space, the leftover unstructured landscape found in every American city that results from under-used parking lots, windswept plazas, and leftover land along linear features such as highways. Another aspect of this fragmentation is the extreme separation of land uses into single-use zones, requiring connection exclusively through motor vehicle trips. Walking and transit become impossible within such patterns, forcing all age and income groups into dependence on the automobile (Newman & Kenworthy, 1999). In addition, travel in motor vehicles renders impossible the informal contact with other urban dwellers that occurs naturally in a pedestrian environment. Travellers are contained within high-speed moving capsules of metal and glass, and forced into an unpleasant competition for road space on crowded arterials. The organization of the urban environment in terms of the essential categories (functions) of dwelling, work, transportation and recreation was referred to by Jacobs as the act of sorting, which she saw as highly destructive. In the US, the proliferation of zoning by functional use category was already well underway in the 1920s. Toward the end of the 1920s, it gured prominently in the RPAs Regional Plan of New York and Environs, to be reinforced again when separation by function constituted the theme of CIAMs 1933 congress. Using statistics to project the amount of land needed for a particular use, this rational approach, still relied upon today, was an exercise in data manipulation for the purpose of separation, where the detailed aesthetic qualities of the built environment had become secondary or even irrelevant. In each of these waysthe cult of the individual, decontextualization, specialization and fragmentationmodernism as an aesthetic project, manifested through architecture and urbanism in particular, has failed city planning. While all of these conditions are well known to planners, planners have failed to galvanize a more concerted reaction, in part because of the aesthetic nature of these problems. In other words, because city planning has dropped its concern for the integration of art and city planning, it lacks the vocabulary and analytical tools needed to be able to address the modernist assault on its own terms. It is conceivable that if aesthetic issues were higher on the planning agenda, planners would have an easier time of differentiating aesthetics that are damaging from aesthetics that can be used to further the essential goals of city planning.

The Dissolution of Art in Planning All of the conditions of modernism outlined above may be well known to city planners. While the critiques may appear to be the rallying cry of neo-traditionalism in city planning, multiple perspectives have weighed in on the same basic set of issues (see Beatley, 2000; Birch, 2001; Garvin, 2002). What may be less well known, or at least not acknowledged, is the void that the loss of an aesthetic dimension has created. In her critique of cities as works of art, Jane Jacobs attacked the regimented regularity (Jacobs, 1961, p. 376) of modernist urbanism and its failure to appreciate the ordered complexity of great cities. But there are important

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differences between modernist and other concepts of art and how they can be used in city planning. One of the most important differences has to do with the role of the individual. Le Corbusier did not waiver from his belief in the architects grand scheme; the supremacy of the master architect and the legitimacy of imposing a single, ordered vision. The fact that this idea was fundamentally different from the notion of art espoused by many of the earlier, Progressive Era planners, is an historical fact that needs reiterating. For example, the work of Patrick Geddes in India and elsewhere reveals a planning approach that valued beauty, but was also concerned with preserving the existing, underlying forms of complex order in the city. Sitte, from whom Geddes drew inspiration, was interested in seeking out the elements of the city that produced harmonious effect, but he was also concerned with preservation. Above all, he was interested in identifying those elements of city form that produced a satisfying effect versus those that did not. This was the ongoing task of an aesthetic approach to planning, an approach to which both Geddes and Sittes methodology of empirical observation were readily addressed. Unfortunately, the separation of art and planning has been accomplished to a large extent. A review of city planning journals from 1960 to 2002 reveals that the artistic component of city planning is rarely discussed, and when it is mentioned, it is usually in the limited context of aesthetic regulations governing signs, building materials and landscaping. For several decades, commentators have noted the rejection of the aesthetic perspective in graduate planning curricula, and its replacement with various modes of statistical and economic analysis (Alonso, 1986). Contemporary urban planners seem only marginally interested in aesthetic ideas or in pursuing the underlying principles that create beautiful cities. While planners have turned away from the artistic side of urbanism, the discourse of architecture seems preoccupied with aesthetic issues, sometimes to the neglect of basic functionality and respect for the actual users of buildings. The most bizarre and transgressive ideas are routinely featured and praised in the architectural press (Langdon, 2002). Showmanship, wit, originality, intellectual gymnastics and boldness are applauded. The rejection of tradition is often embraced as the essential starting point for artistic creativity. From the earliest city improvement efforts to full scale modernism, we have thus seen two different manifestations of the idea of planning as art. Modernism, on the one hand, seeks universal, utopian forms that are free from tradition and history, whereas the earlier ideas about the art of city planning often connected to and built upon historical forms. The modernist vision of the future can be seen in Le Corbusiers Ville Radieuse or Ludwig Hilberheimers city plans of the 1920s, while earlier planners returned to the glories of Paris, Vienna, San Francisco, Charleston and Savannah. In an earlier time, art in city planning was a matter of respecting collective notions of beauty rooted in tradition, not constantly breaking away from all earlier forms in the pursuit of novel experiments. Planners can make use of these earlier models to develop an approach to city building that generates beautiful places without destroying the organized complexity of the city. The term traditionalism could be used to describe such an approach. For some, this term is negatively associated with nostalgia, small town homogeneity, theme park commodication, repressive design control and social exclusion. This need not be the case. As Krier argues, tradition and progress are not antinomical notions (1998, p. 64), and progress can be viewed as building upon and extending tradition rather than

Cities as Art 23 violently overthrowing it. But given the difculties, discourse in other disciplines can be drawn upon to help formulate an effective use of the notion of collective aestheticism. Notably, discussion about the relative merits of modernism vs. collective notions of beauty is an ongoing debate in the art world. This has surfaced in particular in debates in the US Congress about the funding priorities of the National Endowment of the Arts, which struggles to nd the proper balance between sponsorship of avant-garde shock of the new productions and more democratic, humanized, tradition-based art forms. Traditionalism should not be confused with postmodernism in planning. While postmodernism attempted, as Nan Ellin (1996) writes, to satisfy longings for community, security, intrigue and adventure lacking in modernism, the strategy of historicizing and theming did not correct these failures, and sometimes even worsened them. Planners should be dubious of a merger of planning and art that amounts to a postmodern historicizing in which style overtakes substance. Postmodernism aside, the main tension remains that between the modernist ideal of unfettered innovation and collective notions about beauty, timeless principles, and the integration between art and life. It should be emphasized that re-establishment of an aesthetic notion in city planning would not be the same as aestheticism in planning as it existed a century ago. The aesthetic project in planning would be about re-instigating the search for beauty in urban patterns and forms. This is the project of traditionalism, a term which does not describe well what earlier planners aesthetic concerns were about, but which may have some relevance for planners today. The notion of traditionalism does not imply uncritical allegiance to the past, as though one could ignore changes in technology and society, but rather a process of building upon those elements from the past that are still valid today, and that can be fused with innovations from our own time. George Santayana alluded to this process when he wrote: Ideas that have long been used may be used still, if they remain ideas and have not congealed into memories. Incorporated into a design that calls for them, traditional forms cease to be incongruous, as words that still have a felt meaning may be old without being obsolete. All depends on men subserving an actual ideal and having so rm and genuine an appreciation of the past as to distinguish at once what is still serviceable in it from what is already ghostly and dead. (Santayana, 1933, originally 1905) If dened in this way, we might expect planning to be more accepting of art. This is especially true since planning, unlike architecture, has never embraced the idea that innovation or individual artistic creativity is an end in itself. Planners have been more circumspect and grounded in the gritty realities of existing cities, and aware of the practical difculties of providing affordable housing, infrastructure and transportation for urban dwellers. Similarly, planners are usually taught to be at least somewhat sensitive to the way that individual buildings t together to form a coherent landscape, which militates against the acceptance of radically decontextualized buildings. Lessons from the Art World The notion of traditionalism as a counter-response to modernism has been debated in disciplines other than planning. By looking at traditionalism as a reaction to modernism in the art world, we might get some insights as to why a counter-proposal to modernism in city planning has not been more forthcoming. In the world of art, meaning not only

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art forms themselves but also the critiques, histories and institutions that sustain art, these issues have surfaced as fundamentally opposed cultural paradigms. On the one hand, the avant-garde embraces the notions that beauty is subjective, human nature is socially constructed, all hierarchies diminish human freedom, and that there are no fundamental realities on which to base our ideas and actions. Counterpoised to this view is the position that beauty is an objective reality with cross-cultural validity, that human beings share a nature or deep structure, that hierarchies are built into the very structure of the universe and make freedom possible, and that common or foundational realities underlie the vast diversity of human experience. Recent writings in cultural philosophy have focused on these distinctions. Frederick Turner (1995) articulates the need for a radical centre paradigm in which the objective, cross-cultural validity of beauty is recognized. Other anti-relativists have argued for a philosophy that does not separate fact from value, and in which virtues can be identied and ranked. Applied to the realm of scientic inquiry, philosopher Susan Haack (1998) has labelled the absence of this ability preposterism, whereby nding out how things really are is viewed as nothing more than a smokescreen hiding the operations of power, politics, social negotiation [and] rhetoric (p. 1). In line with these views, there is a growing movement in art that recognizes the value of traditionalist views about beauty. Its lineage includes the important work of Jose Ortega y Gasset and his book The Dehumanization of Art, rst published in 1948. In it, Ortega attacks modern art because it tends to dehumanize art, [avoid] living forms, [and] to see to it that the work of art is nothing but a work of art (p. 14). A more recent critique laments the rise of autonomous art, and the loss of a sense of aesthetics. Suzi Gablik has explored this changing conception of art through interviews with various prominent artists in her book Conversations Before the End of Time (1995). One Indian artist, Satish Kumar, argues for the resacralization of art and nature. Art is meant to dene the communal, not the individual self or the artist as a special genius. Kumar believes that The dichotomous thinking that has separated art from life, and segregated aesthetic experience to the exclusive realms of the museum, [means] that we are left to live in an otherwise ugly world (1995, p. 136). The emphasis on beauty and the traditionalist view of art is a rejection of the way in which modernist art is divorced from what Richard Shusterman (1995) calls the practice of living. Art should not be conned to wall space in a museum, Shusterman argues, and doing so is a pathetic failure of theoretical as well as artistic imagination (p. 265). Part of the traditionalist counter-proposal, then, is about developing an art that is more engaged with the needs of the world, one that is less about autonomy and the supposed freedom of isolation and individuality. This kind of integration has implications for city planning. The main tenets of traditionalism in art, as a counter-proposal to modernism, include the need for a participatory, interactive kind of art, the need to avoid separation of art and life, and the need to integrate art and nature. It is precisely these emphases on integration that can be used to support the connection between aesthetics and city planning. Traditionalism in Art vs. Traditionalism in Planning Traditionalism offers an alternative to the more negative aspects of modernism in planning, i.e. hyper-individualism, decontextualization, fragmentation, and specialization, yet it has not been widely embraced as an alternative. Based on the foregoing discussion of the difference between traditionalism and modernism in the context of art,

Cities as Art 25 what aspects of this debate could be applied to planning? Drawing on the historically rooted notion that planning and art are interlinked, what useful analogies or insights from the art world can be made in seeking to understand plannings relationship to traditionalism? Can the tenets of traditionalism found in art be similarly applied when used in a planning context? Participatory and Interactive First, traditionalism in art calls for a participatory, interactive approach. Certainly planning shares a similar concern. Some critics argue that traditionalist approaches to city design, which tend to support compact, pedestrian oriented urbanism, simply offer a new totalizing model of urban form, different from modernism in substance but still reductive and oppressive. In this view, both modernism and traditionalism embody a set of transcendent values that, in fact, have no such stable foundation. This leads to an ominous quest for what Holston (1998), in a critique of modernist planning, terms the rational domination of the future, that is, an alternative future based on absent totalities. If this is also true of traditionalism, then it is yet another attempt by master planners to avoid or ignore the contradiction and conict of real cities, and to evade the challenges of true public participation in the planning process. However, those who support traditionalism in city planning (for example, the New Urbanists), argue that public participation is fundamental to their paradigm. This is supported by the fact that traditional urbanism as a type of city form has been found to be preferred by residents of urban neighbourhoods in the US (Deitrick & Ellis, 2000) because it is comprehensible, functional, attractive, dignied, and respectful of local character. A growing body of case studies indicate that this type of planning can involve the sustained participation of local residents and produce results that respond effectively to their preferences (Jones et al., 1995; Urban Design Associates, 2003). The Merger of Art and Life Another aspect of traditionalism in art that is a response to modernism is the idea that art and life should become merged. Kumar (1995) states: How to bring art and everyday life together is the concern Integrationbecause art and life have somehow become separated (p. 138). Interestingly, with respect to city planning, Jane Jacobs (1961) sharply criticized the idea of merging art and life, and viewed this as one of the hallmarks of modernism. In her chapter on Visual Order: Its Limitations she rejected the imposition of aesthetic order from above: To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. (p. 373) This, Jacobs asserted, was the folly of 19th-century Utopians, Garden City proponents, City Beautiful planners and modernists such as Le Corbusier. In this view, cities cannot be works of art, because when vital they are shaped by millions of small acts of building, inhabiting and incremental modication, not the blueprint concepts of a master builder. For Jacobs, the planners task is to illuminate, clarify and explain the order of cities (p. 375). People tend to lack a comprehension of this order because cities lack the right visual reinforcements or they may even exhibit visual contradictions. Cities have an

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underlying order and coherence amidst seeming complexity and chaos, much the same way that the seemingly random act of leaves falling from a tree actually manifests an underlying system of order. Interestingly, Jacobs prefers precisely those emphases, suggestions and visual reinforcements that are characteristic of the traditional city, the features that modernism has tried to erase, such as the visual interruption of street vistas, cutting off the indenite distant view and at the same time visually heightening and celebrating intense street use by giving it a hint of enclosure and identity (p. 380). Jacobs sees her suggestions for enhancing the visual order of cities as tactics rather than set designs. Such tactics improve the city by bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other (p. 390). But these tactics, which are posed as an alternative to the modernist merger of art and life, are not dissimilar from the manners and rules of traditional city form (Robertson, 1981). Unfortunately, Jacobs abbreviated and polemical history of urban planning blurred together planners with quite different agendas, City Beautiful, Garden City, Radiant City, and failed to make critical distinctions between the geometrical fundamentalism (Mehaffy & Salingaros, 2002) of the modernists and the restrained but imaginative traditionalism of planners such as Raymond Unwin, John Nolen, and Eliel Saarinen. To lump all of these planners together in a single category erases critical distinctions between art as an expression of power and authority and art as an aesthetic of incremental, collective decision making. The Merger of Art and Nature Another aspect of traditionalism that has relevance for planning is the idea of merging art and nature. Many precedents for this have been documented in the history of landscape architecture (Newton, 1971), and the search for better ways to integrate city form and natural process (Hough, 1995; Condon, 1996; Condon & Proft, 1999) continues today. One approach in planning has been to link urban to rural development intensities along a continuum, and prescribe planning ideals according to this context. This is one way to merge human development (town) and nature (country). The idea of uniting rather than separating town and country was seen in the regional planning approach advocated by Geddes, Stein, Mumford and other members of the Regional Planning Association of America. More recently, transect planning (Duany & Talen, 2002) has been proposed as a way of basing urban design on an integrated theory of urbanism that relates design to context. It therefore offers an alternative approach to nding the correct balance between urban development and nature, and ties an aesthetic dimension to this integration. Planners like Patrick Geddes (1915) and Benton MacKaye (1925) made use of transects in their analysis of regions as a way of demonstrating ecological balance and the interconnection between people and their ecological region. They spoke of the need to view people, industry and the land as a single unit, emphasizing human values hand in hand with natural resources (Mumford, 1925, p. 151), part of a lineage that leads directly to Ian McHarg (1969). Transect planning is an attempt to bring the aesthetic dimension into this equation by linking the elements of urban design to their level of urban intensity. The prescribed elements of planning are based on, theoretically, nding the proper balance between natural and human-made environments along the rural to urban transect. This approach ties directly into the doctrine of appropriateness that, as argued above, was a strong factor in city planning as art at the beginning of the 20th century.

Cities as Art 27 Reconnecting Art and Planning What are the implications of the decline of art in city planning? Many planners may think of aesthetics as being incompatible with their focus on social science, economics, policy analysis and Euclidean land-use planning, but there are costs to the retreat from an artistic viewpoint. Philip Langdon argues that this shift has contributed to a loss of credibility and prestige for urban planners, who are no longer viewed as competent designers of high-quality urban places (Langdon, 1994, p. 77). There seems to be a palpable attitude that modernism has been bad for city planning, but this has not led the planning profession to accept traditionalism as a viable counter-proposal. Traditionalism is often seen in negative terms, so much so that the neo-traditionalist movement, sensing this hostility, abandoned its originally adopted term in favour of New Urbanism, which, as it turns out, was to become similarly distrusted. What is left is a landscape dominated by tacit or grudging acceptance of the status quo. While the architectural elite has embraced the cult of the avant-garde artist (Hughes, 1991; Kuspit, 1993), most planners seem to have abandoned interest in the city as a work of art. The models of social science, policy analysis and conventional land-use planning have usurped the aesthetic dimension. What is needed is a way to see the city in artistic terms, and at the same time harmonize with Jane Jacobs plea for complexity, democratic participation and incremental change. There are some avenues for planners to explore. The new science of chaos and complexity provides a door through which the city planning profession might become the guardian of civic art, while still remaining allied with the deepest and most encompassing theories of modern science. As Frederick Turner, Alexander Argyros and other radical centrists have argued, there are universal, natural classical principles underlying great cultural works. Beauty is not completely arbitrary and subjective, but rather grounded in the very structure of the universe, a universe which is orderly but not deterministic. The key point is that planners do not need to pursue randomness in order to avoid stiing forms of order. An argument can be made that traditional urbanism is more consistent with recent scientic theories about the structure of nature than the mechanistic models of modernism. Alexander Argyros has described this as follows: In other words, I am speculating that the balance between top-down, collective constraints typical of socialist forms of organization and the bottom-up individualism, freedom, mobility, eccentricity, and energy of capitalism will produce forms of social organization that most closely resemble chaos: neither random, like the shopping strip cities polluting the American landscape, nor deterministic, like the bleak cities of Marxist-Leninist regimes, but chaotic, like the great cities of the world, those marvelous and enchanting places such as Venice, Paris, Barcelona and San Francisco where the heart rejoices at the marriage of classicism and anarchy. (Argyros, 1991, p. 331) In short, beautiful cities inhabit the edge between order and disorder. They carry forward a tradition of city design that can legitimately be continued and extended. For this to happen, it must be recognized that there is no irreconcilable conict between tradition and innovation. Some have argued that innovation best happens within the context of a tradition: This involves realizing that mature dependence on tradition is the only

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E. Talen & C. Ellis way of developing ones youthful avant-garde innovations, which means determining whether they really are as original, creative, and criticalgenuinely radicalas they initially seemed to be It means linking up with the tradition one repudiated to become avant-garde. It means being willing to submit ones work for comparison with works that are traditionally regarded as historically signicant and masterful Most crucially, in identifying with tradition, the artist identies with and joins humanity. He is no longer the mocking, murderous adolescent standing outside it, but wants what it wants: happiness. (Kuspit & Gamwell, 1996, pp. 1617)

Similarly, modernist and neomodernist theories of urbanism must be scrutinized to see whether they really produce good city form, as opposed to expressing novelty for its own sake. It is time to reconsider the uncritical rejection of tradition that dominated the period from 19402000, and chart a new course. What are the implications of this position for urban and regional planning? It means that planners should not be averse to searching for those principles that enable cities to unfold as works of art. Cities need not unfold in the form of abstract, sculptural compositions or totalitarian blueprints, but rather in ways that are participatory and interactive, integrative of art and life, and sensitive to the need to merge art and nature. This may involve, for example, nding and strengthening complex, fractal patterns that allow for innite variety within a range of overarching patterns. But it also means that planners do not need to scoff at the natural classical principles of city planning that allow cities to be collective works of art unfolding through time. Such processes do not involve one size ts all or totalizing orderthere is plenty of room for variation and difference within the basic principles. Speaking a particular language that necessarily involves rules and limitations does not destroy creativity: rather, it makes creativity possible. In the same way, possessing a body of principles that capture the most essential spatial relationships required for a dignied, beautiful habitat is not a crippling limitation, but rather a basic condition for successful planning. We do not have to choose between regressive tradition or nihilistic play (Kolb, 1990, p. 17). The rules of good urbanism are capacious enough to sustain both the coherence required to compose a high-quality urban habitat and the reworkings, inventions and inspirations that keep a tradition from freezing up and stiing adaptation to changed circumstances. Neither blind traditionalism nor uncritical progressivism (Roth, 1983, p. 58) are appropriate guides in the quest for good city form, and city planning can be carried on without falling prey to either extreme. Implications for Planning Practice and Education If it is time for the profession of city and regional planning to reclaim its artistic dimension, then what might this mean in practical terms? What are the implications for planning practice and planning education? The following possibilities are offered: Planning education should include the study of great cities with the explicit goal of identifying the spatial elements that make them great (Jacobs, 1993; Moudon, 1995). Planners will have a difcult time establishing legitimacy as stewards of city form if they operate from a weak and disorganized palette of design ideas. Beauty in city design needs to be nurtured by a thorough understanding of precedents (Duany et al., 2003) along with ongoing research into what works and what does not.

Cities as Art 29 Planning students must learn how to navigate aesthetic principles through the tangles of planning law, real estate economics, political debate and social conict. Implementation in the real world of land development is the ultimate goal. Planning studios and workshops are a good way to develop such skills, and should be a part of every planning curriculum. Modernist-based Euclidean zoning needs to be replaced, and this replacement requires an adept understanding of good city form. More specically, the damaging oversimplications of conventional zoning should be replaced by regulations based upon typologytypes of buildings, streets and public spacesand the theory of the transect (Duany, 2002), which species appropriate design standards for different landscapes, ranging from the urban core to the rural periphery. While some separation of land uses is reasonable, the crude zoning districts of suburbia are far too clumsy and exaggerated to produce good urban places. Much of the beauty of old cities derives from the slow, incremental growth of urban fabric (Alexander et al., 1975; Alexander et al., 1987; Gombrich, 1965). Planners should be working to identify the best ways to emulate or approximate this complexity and intricacy in the context of the modern real estate industry, which typically in the US builds in large increments planned out far ahead of time. We need to know how the pleasing, fractal quality of great cities can still be achieved without returning to pre-modern modes of building. Planners should work to develop better tools to support the return of aesthetic considerations in city planning. For example, it may be useful to bring back the tradition of the city map which previously served as the armature for coherent town building (Solomon, 1992). Related to this, there is a need to strengthen the legal basis for aesthetic regulation. To accomplish this, planners will need to reclaim their heritage as the designers of street patterns and the three-dimensional form of blocks, lots and public spaces. Conclusion Urban planning is at a juncture where it must decide whether to press forward with the modernist project or consider other directions for city form. So far, the profession has not engaged this issue with the seriousness and gravity that it deserves. This article has argued that the merger of art and city planning was, at an earlier time, a positive approach that was more context driven and collective than is usually recognized. Consideration was then given to the issue of modernism vs. traditionalism as two very different aesthetic approaches, and it was argued that it would be fruitful for planning to consider the basis of traditionalism and its relevance to the integration of planning and art. The principles of modernist urbanism, enunciated and dramatized by the architectural avant-garde, have turned out to be based on erroneous foundations that are not even consistent with modern science (Agyros, 1991; Salingaros, 1995, 2000; Turner, 1995). An attempt has been made to shed light on the condition of modern urban planning by looking at similar debates in the world of art, where the battle between modernism and traditionalism has been stark and uncompromising. There, we nd that the cult of the avant-garde artist and the uncritical embrace of innovation, randomness and individual whim has reached the point of diminishing returns, and the validity of working within a tradition is reasserting itself. The article has also tried to cut through a fundamental confusion about the artistic

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component of city planning. Jane Jacobs was right that, in one sense, cities ought not to be treated like works of art. Cities are not paintings, sculptures or miniature models authored by a single artist. They do not thrive under totalitarian control. There must be free play for thousands of individual experiments and adaptations of the kind that cannot appear during the execution of a blueprint. But there is another conception of the city as a work of art that was in evidence in an earlier planning era. It is an art that merges our knowledge of and experience with great cities with the principles of complexity, as revealed thus far by modern science. Cities can be seen as great collective works of art unfolding through time, not in the absence of planning, but rather through a balance between overarching principles and local variation. These are the patterns that the new science of chaos and complexity continues to explore, which underpin the processes that produced the great cities of the past, and which promise to produce a more humane and rooted urban landscape in the future.

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