Cities can't be managed, and that's what keeps them so vibrant.
We spend all this time thinking about cities in terms of their local details, their restaurants and museums and weather. I had this hunch that there was something more, that every city was also shaped by a set of hidden laws.
I don't know anything about this city or even where it is or its history, but I can tell you all about it. And the reason I can do that is because every city is really the same.
Sometimes, I look out at nature and I think, Everything here is obeying my conjecture. It's a wonderfully narcissistic feeling.
In the city's labyrinth, invisibility can quickly trump visibility.
Rulers of cities have always had an interest in visibility, both in representing their power and in controlling people by seeing them.
It would be tempting to say that if Le Corbusier embraced an emphatic, even ominous type of visibility, Jacobs insisted on the power of the invisible, the nooks and crannies, the intimate spaces of homes and private lives. But the truth is that Jacobs argued for a different kind of visibility, that of active life in neighborhoods and on busy, pedestrian-friendly streets.
Anonymity is, perhaps, the most universal experience of invisibility within the modern city.
Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance -- nothing more. But to lose oneself in a city -- as one loses oneself in a forest -- that calls for quite a different schooling. It is a particular and poignant form of freedom to walk a vibrant urban quarter without aim and with openness to all, unobserved, invisible, or more precisely, caught in the shifting, kinetic exchange of sights and sensations ...
The captains of industry also had ambitions to endow the pursuit of profit with noble purpose. The architecture of commercial buildings often reached for monumentality through the use of rich materials and traditional architectural elements. Department stores, those quintessential sites of the emerging urban consumer society, wrapped their truck and barter in layers of ornament and allegory. Philadelphia's Wanamaker's building, now a Macy's, features a towering pipe organ in a multistory atrium -- a Vatican of commerce indeed!
