Rule Two: Recognize Patterns in Urban Environments

Abstract

As in so many things, Jane Jacobs was the first to clearly identify our tendency to oversimplify the complexity of the city and why she advanced the practice of looking for patterns in the complex tapestry of the city instead. In her seminal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs devotes the concluding chapter to this issue.1 In “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” drawing on the work of Dr. Warren Weaver, Jacobs argues that cities have a number of observable patterns of use, each one understandable on its own, but because each one is linked to so many others, one can never fully understand the complete workings of the entire network, even though it’s obviously true that all these patterns are somehow related.2 What we can know for sure is that cities are not pure disorder but are unified and functioning wholes—wholes that are more or less efficient and more or less complex, but still wholes. The fact that we do not have the mental capacity to fully decode this unified whole does not mean that the parts we don’t understand have no value. Obviously they must.