Rule One: See the City as a System

Abstract

Here is a story about why it’s important for urban designers to see the city not as a machine for living, as Le Corbusier would state it, but as an organic system, as Jane Jacobs would have it. In 1954 the City of St. Louis hired Minoru Yamasaki, one of the world’s most respected architects of the time, to build a state-of-the-art housing project for the poor to be named after Wendell O. Pruitt, an African American fighter pilot in World War II, and William L. Igoe, a former U.S. congressman. Eventually the name was shortened to simply “Pruitt–Igoe,” a name that became synonymous with urban design failure.