SPECIAL REPORT: REBUILDING THE FUTURE
URBAN PLANNING
If there are to be new rules for the new warfare, one of the first is surely this: Density kills. This realization has already triggered some calls for the end of the skyscraper and some investigation of how to build "massively redundant" ones. But the weakness that aggressors exploited on September 11 was not exclusively one of height - you can't protect cities from attack just by making buildings shorter. Density is a problem that will grow only more explosive - or infectious, as the case may be - as the wagers of fear are doled out in 21st-century currency: chemical weapons, biological agents, or the gray-goo outbreaks of nanotechnology.
The potency of most 21st-century weapons is their ability to feed off themselves exponentially: Infect 10 people in Montana with the Ebola virus and you might kill a hundred others. But infect 10 in Manhattan and you could kill a million or more. Traditional bombs obviously are more effective in dense areas, but weapons that spread like epidemics prove even deadlier as the crowds increase.
There is something deeply tragic in that formulation, because the creation of sustainable high-density cities stands as a watershed of technological achievement. After a series of energy-harnessing innovations in crop rotation and plow mechanisms enabled European towns to sustain larger populations in the first centuries of the past millennium, Europe experienced an almost unprecedented economic and technological reawakening. Good ideas, it turns out, are far more likely to die out in rural isolation; in busy city centers they prosper and spread.
The question for tomorrow's planners will be how to preserve the virtues of density while protecting city dwellers from the nonlinear, asymmetrical threat of modern warfare, wherein one person can potentially take out an entire city.
A hundred years from now, we may look back at the World Trade Center attacks and see the origins of a new new urbanism. This doesn't mean a ubiquitous suburbia or a retreat from the sidewalk culture of city living. Economies based on ideas continue to prosper in dense environments, and, provided that certain levels of safety and cleanliness persist, many people simply prefer living among the vitality and diversity of a metropolis.
To preserve urban virtues, we could put endless amounts of time and energy into constructing new walls, both figurative and literal. Indeed, the walled, tightly packed centers of many classic European cities are a response to the dominant military technology of 500 years ago - the siege weaponry of movable cannons. We could choose to build information age equivalents: ID checkpoints at city limits; high tech cordons sanitaires that automatically quarantine neighborhoods under biological attack.
Another, more promising approach would be to reject walls for a new kind of openness, borrowing from patterns of development that emerged a thousand years ago. The medieval system was one of distributed density, still visible in the hill towns of northern Italy, where a network of tightly packed, mixed-use nodes of finite size are separated by stretches of vineyards and farms. This is not the decentralized approach of edge-city sprawl: The towns in the medieval system were as full and economically diverse as today's urban cores - they simply had a limit on their overall growth, usually defined by the walls that outlined the town limits. Tomorrow's city could be built along similar lines: The density of traditional metropolitan space is distributed among nodes limited to 50,000 to 100,000 people each, separated by expanses of low-density development like parks, sports facilities, and even vineyards. Such a model would reverse the Olmsted vision of urban greenery: Rather than carve out a park in the middle of an immense city, the new model makes space for nature on the edges. Peripheral Park, instead of Central.
In medieval times, the walls protected the town population; in these future settlements, the open spaces separating the nodes will keep the city safe. Imagine a community of 2 million people, divided into 20 hubs. In a worst-case scenario, a terrorist with a backpack full of smallpox might do extensive damage to a single node, perhaps killing thousands - a horrible toll, but hardly the millions that could otherwise be vulnerable. An attack like those on the twin towers could still do a lot of damage, but there wouldn't be a centralized, symbolic node to target.
Life in such a metropolitan complex would not feel suburban, by any means: The generative force of sidewalk culture and urban density would be preserved and perhaps even enhanced. (Car-loathing urban flaneurs would certainly celebrate a return to the medieval model.) But it would be a city designed to survive the sort of attacks that are likely to become more common, a city that learned from both the decentralized systems of the Internet age and the high-density virtues of urban life. If, on September 11, the attackers inaugurated a new era of terror, the best long-term response may well be to go medieval on them.
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