This article was downloaded by: [Simon Fraser University]On: 18 November 2014, At: 08:36Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

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Designing the City of Reason:Foundations and Frameworks by AliMadanipourJon Lang aa Masters in Urban Development and Design Program, University ofNew South Wales , Sydney, Australia E-mail: © 2009 Jon LangPublished online: 21 Oct 2009.

To cite this article: Jon Lang (2009) Designing the City of Reason: Foundations and Frameworks byAli Madanipour, Journal of Urban Design, 14:4, 567-569, DOI: 10.1080/13574800903265421

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13574800903265421

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to bring biodiversity to the attention of movements like ‘smart-growth’ and ‘NewUrbanism’ engaged with the creation of sustainable urban environments, but notnecessarily fully informed about or engaged with ecological issues. Like Kahn,Nature in Fragment’s contribution lay in that it argued that scientific knowledge andprinciples (such as scientifically informed land-use paradigm) were key tomanaging the interface of environmental sustainability and urban change.

In the concluding chapter, ‘Achieving urban and global sustainability’, Kahnseeks a compromise in looking at the ways by which urban growth and economicdevelopment can have a tempering impact on environmental degradation.There is an appreciation, a growing one, that environmental health and quality are“key components of daily life” (p. 137), but that we will get there later rather thansooner. There is another area where the book makes an exciting contribution andthis is in spite of its immediate appeal to readership in the US; it recognizes theimportance of collective global action in the search for urban and globalsustainability.

References

Johnson, E. A. & Klemens, M. W. (2005) Nature in Fragments: The Legacy of Sprawl (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press).

Lucas, C. (2008) Letter: Black cloud over EU climate change deal, The Guardian, 20 October.

Samer BagaeenSchool of Environment and Technology

University of Brighton, UKEmail: Samer.bagaeen@uclmail.net

q 2009 Samer Bagaeen

Designing the City of Reason: Foundations and FrameworksAli MadanipourLondon, Routledge, 2007, £27.99 (pbk), £85.00 (hbk), 342 pp., ISBN-10:

041542092X; ISBN-13: 978-0415420921 (pbk), ISBN-10: 0415420911; ISBN-13:

978-0415420914 (hbk)

If George Orwell had been writing about science rather than politics and artin his paper ‘Politics and the English Language’, he would surely have selectedthe word ‘reason’ as another that has so many meanings that it is meaningless.The advantage of that, he suggested, was that we could engage in seeminglyerudite discussions without really saying anything. Often we use the term tosimply denote that we approve of something. If we like it, it is rational; if we donot, it is not. As Madanipour notes in the Introduction to his book, reason is oftennarrowly defined and is used pejoratively. The book shows that it does not need tobe nor should it be. He argues for its redefinition and for us to be aware of thelimitations of reasoning, particularly in the planning and designing of cities.

“Reason is the human faculty that through intuition and calculation, makesjudgements about, and provides accounts for, what to believe and how to act”(p. 3; see also pp. 252 and 280). In urban planning and design one of the problemshas been that we jump from description to prescription without understandinghow the world functions or on what basis we build that understanding. This book

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is about the different world views that have underpinned our models of thefunctioning of the world. These models have formed the basis for the designparadigms that have guided our thinking about what the city can and should be.What may seem rational given one understanding of the world may well beirrational using another. Some of these differing views have been more powerfuland enduring than others. Most have internal contradictions. A prime one isthat people have viewed themselves as part of nature but have also soughtmastery over it.

In this book the development of the discussion about the way in whichdifferent interpretations of what is rational has affected planning and designphilosophies is divided into two parts. The first describes the development ofrational thinking based on world views and the second, following the Cartesianmethod, subdivides the urban experience into its constituent parts based on howwe experience the world around us.

In ‘Part 1, Foundations’, Madanipour traces the, perhaps increasingly,scientific view of the world from one based on supernatural foundations to one inwhich the city is viewed as a social phenomenon—the ‘city of people’. Along theway he takes the reader through a series of approximately chronological steps inthe development of world views that have shaped concepts of rationality.From supernatural foundations the discussion passes on to the development ofrational foundations, the development of technological foundations, naturalfoundations to the final step, the social foundations.

The ‘city of temples’ is the city of reason based on supernatural foundations.In a number of parts of the world designing rationally based on a beliefin supernatural forces is still important and such a model underlies much of thethinking of the rest of us. With the renaissance came a more human-centredview of the world with people at its centre. The designed city Madanipour callsthe ‘city of clocks’. The rational city based on a technological world view is the‘city of machines’. Based on this world view the urban environment has been andwill be shaped by the technology of transporting people, goods and messageseither through rational planning or the result of market forces, another sort ofrational planning. Out of this view came a narrow model of the functions of citiesand rational planning based on it. The rational ‘city of sights and sounds’ is onebased on resolving the tussle between people and nature, the rejection of the cityand of the embracing of nature. This step brings us to the ‘city of people’—designing rationally with and for people in their context.

Redefining the concept of rationality and recognizing its limitations is reallythe subject of the second part of the book, ‘Frameworks’. Our lives are structuredby our participation in one behaviour setting followed by another according to thetime of day, the week and the seasons of the year. Time segments our lives and thespaces that we inhabit. Planning cities based on this observation is certainly oneway, but Madanipour argues that segmentation can lead to alienation. There isindeed much supportive evidence for this analysis. These topics form the heart ofthe first two chapters of the second half of the book

“All rational actions in city design have been imbued with value andimagination” (p. 208), but there is also the need to give evidence for thepositions we take when making statements about what the future cityshould be. All designing involves making distinctions that are value laden,but we need to be able to argue for the distinctions that we make. The

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assignment of values and the connecting of individual actions are the topicsof the penultimate two chapters of the book. They deal with the processesof competition and collaboration that form the basis of city design.

The final chapter of the book brings the reader to a synthesis of the ideaspresented in the preceding observations. Today the city of reason is a robust city; itis shaped by many reasoners working under uncertainty about the knowledge basefrom which they work and uncertainty about the future. The search for certaintymay underlie the search for rationality but rational thinking acknowledgesuncertainty. Madanipour concludes with a warning: urban design will fail when ituses only one form of reasoning. We need to continually question what we do.

One of the strengths of the book is the correlating of differing concepts ofaction to concepts of rationality and their philosophical origins. It shows howconcepts of reason have evolved from the ‘city of temples’ based on supernaturalfoundations to the necessity of providing “convincing accounts for beliefs, valuesand actions” today. In doing so it demonstrates that ultimately we owe much toPlato and Aristotle. The names of philosophers who followed them and whodeveloped concepts of rationality and of reasoning parade through the book; thereare fewer names of designers or references to design paradigms. I would haveliked to have seen more explicit links between concepts of rationality, designphilosophies and urban design paradigms, but that is my prejudice.

I really enjoyed reading this book and learnt much from it. It provides aframework for me to organize much that I have learnt about urban history and theconscious effort to shape cities in particular directions. It is a pity that it was notavailable 40 years ago when I began my academic career! It might have helped meto avoid certain dead-end lines of thinking. I suspect that the book will appealmost to those urban historians and urban design scholars and professionals whoalready have a sound grounding in the history of urban design paradigms.Novices will, nevertheless, learn much from reading the book. It makes easy andentertaining reading. These attributes do not obscure the extraordinary scholar-ship that has gone into producing it.

Reference

Orwell, G. (1946) Politics and the English language, Horizon, London, April; reprinted in G. Orwell

(1961), Collected Essays, pp. 353–367 (London: Secker & Warburg).

Jon LangMasters in Urban Development and Design Program

University of New South Wales, Sydney, AustraliaEmail: jonl@unsw.edu.au

q 2009 Jon Lang

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