مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد ریشه کن کردن عقلانیت های تکاملی در طراحی شهری – الزویر ۲۰۱۸

For Jane Jacobs, diversity is a key feature for just cities. Jacobs suggests that urban spaces should embrace diversity (Jacobs, 1961). This idea can be manifest in design principles that promote diversity of a built environment (i.e. short blocks and close-grained mingle of buildings) and uses in the urban environment (Schmitt & Hartmann, 2016, p. 47). Fainstein promotes diversity as a central “guiding principle for city planners” (Fainstein, 2010, p. 3), next to equity and democracy, to achieve the just city. The idea of justice that both Jacobs and Fainstein implicitly or explicitly promote is social justice. It is acknowledged in the just city debate that social justice promotes only one concept of justice (Hartmann, 2012). So, if diversity were taken seriously, it would imply taking account for and recognising other concepts of justice. This concept goes back to a shift in spatial planning around the 1970s, when some began to see cities as wicked (Rittel & Webber, 1973), polyrational (Davy, 2008) and clumsy (Hartmann, 2012) realities in which interaction between people and spaces generated sentiments and meanings that escaped the purely rational evaluation of the ‘justness’, or ‘goodness’, of urban planning interventions. Planning theorists recognized in the last few decades that complex urban situations go beyond rationalistic reasoning (de Roo & Silva, 2010; Gunder & Hillier, 2009), since the ‘clients’ of ‘city planners’ – citizens, investors, land users – became ‘restive’ (Rittel & Webber, 1973, p. 173). In his social-constructivist analysis of spatial planning, Davy contends that urban planners tend to neglect plural rationalities and their related concepts of justice in their plans (Davy, 2008, 301). Davy contends that—due to the pure existence of other rationalities—plans need to embrace plurality. Plural rationalities, then, are a precondition for diversity such as Jane Jacobs promotes. This contribution aims to explore how diverse rationalities shape urban spaces (ultimately leading to diversity). This contribution picks up Jacobs’ claim of diversity and discusses it alongside four ideal-typical rationalities through the lens of a theory on pluralism: Cultural Theory. Mary Douglas’ Cultural Theory1 delivers a theory of plural rationalities to understand how social solidarities work. Cultural Theory is built on the assumption that every social situation can be described in terms of the four ideal-typical “cultures”, or “rationalities” (Hartmann, 2012): individualism, egalitarianism, hierarchism, and fatalism. The rationalities are assumed to be internally consistent, mutually contradictory, and jointly exhaustive (Schwarz & Thompson, 1990). This means that each rationality is rational on its own, but irrational from the perspective of the other rationalities (Thompson, 2008). They are mutually exclusive. This implies that any solution that appears perfect to one rationality is irrational from three rationalities; in consequence, combining all rationalities in a solution must lead to an imperfect solution. Cultural Theory calls this a clumsy solution (Verweij & Thompson, 2006). In consequence, urban design and the prevalent planning is based on actions resulting from and consistent with these rationalities. In Douglas (1999) words’, each rationality leads to institutions that constrain and guide acting. These institutions ensure a consistent framework which is developed and maintained through narrative to give reason, shared practices and set rules that are followed. As a result, an institutional framework of one rationality contradicts those of others. Consequently, diversity as poly-rationality leads to conflicts. To question the justice of a city means to understand how these conflicting rationalities are reconciled in the urban space.2 Here the question arises how this diversity of rationalities can be empirically observed in the urban realm. To explore how diverse rationalities shape urban spaces, we will discuss and test an analytical approach to observe rationalities in urban spaces. Considering the city and its amenities as a resource, Ostrom’s conceptualization of institutions for the management of resources will be applied. According to Ostrom, resources can be managed as different economic goods: private goods, public goods, club goods, and commons (Ostrom, 2003). The resource we will focus on is the urban space. As the good is a result of the quality of a resource and the utilization of it, rationalities influence how the use is institutionalised. In other words: different management rationalities lead to urban space with different types of goods. The existence of the diversity of those different types of goods in the built urban environment, as a corollary, indicates a certain diversity of rationalities. For the analytical approach, the types of goods in urban space provide a lens to observe the different rationalities in the diverse city.