Starchitects: They’re Just Like Us!

 

Presupposed: pool access

(alternate caption: "You don't know they're not for insulating the water lines on my community build project!"

In Everyday Urbanism, Margaret Crawford writes that 

 “Everyday urbanism demands a radical repositioning of the designer, a shifting of power from the professional expert to the ordinary person. Widespread expertise in everyday life acts as a leveling agent, eliminating the distance between professionals and users, between specialized knowledge and daily experience. The designer is immersed within contemporary society rather than superior to and outside it, and is thus forced to address the contradictions of social life from close up.” 

I am neither a respected urbanism theorist nor has my writing been published in any outlet held in particular literary esteem (though the late Dirt Rag magazine did once publish a letter I wrote to its technical editor correcting a joke he’d attempted to make about writing “BOOBS” on a calculator), so it’s probably not my place to assert that there’s a problem with the above statement. But that’s kind of the assignment, so assert I will. 

I don’t think that everyday urbanism demands a shift of power “from the professional expert to the ordinary person”, I think it demands both: the synthesis of high-level academic and/or technical knowledge about societal trends, scalability of infrastructure and as much information as can be gathered about the general business of being alive according to pretty much anyone willing to serve as an expert on the matter. It’s a share, not a shift. 

I realize that what Crawford is trying to say (or, at least, what I think she’s trying to say) is that as designers we need to be better informed by the minutiae of our everyday lives because those are the sort of experiences that we, as humans, have most in common with one another, but we also need to be cognizant of the fact that even these lowest common denominators aren’t so common: for example, “ordinary life” in a midsize American city looks very different to people with and without on-demand access to an enclosed motorized personal vehicle.  It takes all perspectives, and it also takes a degree of clinical detachment and technical ability to try navigate the inherent contradictions that come with them.

 Crawford knows this: it’s clear from the way she addresses the specificity of the document that is Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. That’s why I dislike the lack of nuance in the “shifting of power” sentence: maybe it’s because I’m reading it only a few weeks after a mob stormed the capital, but this seems like a false choice between intellectualism and empathy, between knowledge and experience. 

Here’s a hot take: the ultimate precedent here isn’t a planning theory or Jane Jacobs or a City that Isn’t a Tree, it’s Seinfeld. Think about it: Seinfeld is the essential both. Take a real, very-specific touchstone, turn it into a still-recognizable abstraction of itself, then be smart about it and rearticulate it expertly.   It’s the ordinariness mixed with the expertise that makes it successful, and although not everybody has to be both you do, in fact, need both.