Most of the structure that has been added since [Burning Man's 1996 revival] feels invisible to the people who come: the streets that are surveyed to be exactly 40 feet wide, the plazas that steer people together without crowding them, the 430 fire extinguishers around town, each tracked by its own QR code.
The goal now, one planner explained to Mr. Romer, is to make Black Rock City just safe enough that people can joke about dying without actually dying.
— The New York Times
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer and The New York Times writer Emily Badger explore the urban economics of Burning Man's Black Rock City while envisioning the potential relevance of the instant-city planning model amid massive, worldwide urbanization.
17 Comments
I love the premise of this article.
In the end it doesnt say very much which is a pity. The thing I miss the most is recognition of the urban form that he loves so much as something that exists in a less formal way in asia and other places and has done so for decades. As if urbanism was only just created and america has the only form that makes sense...except he is talking about dealing with massive growth in asian and african cities as the problem.
In which case why look to burning man, which is cool don't get me wrong, as the way out of ad-hoc development? The system of burning man is pretty much what is normal in tokyo for instance. Infrastructure is relatively rigid and everything else is open-ended. How else could 38 million people live in such a small area?
Wouldnt it make more sense to build on urbanism is rapidly growing places rather than impose order from outside? I guess there are other examples than tokyo to look at...
I suppose the main lesson is that grids are good. I think it's called traditional Urbanism, or just good urbanism. Where the pedestrian has a variety of ways to move and public space is created by a shared street wall. Considering the importance of urbanism in the coming years, I hope he's right and they start teaching more of this stuff. Walking is good!
it's basically a campground with marked tent pitch areas. i've been to those before they're nice. like trailer parks for middle class people on holiday. you could also compare it to a marketplace or an art fair. this doesn't seem like a remarkable idea at all, though it is indeed sensible.
so basically, platting out land along road grids isn't a challenging or controversial idea. modern chinese cities do this on a huge scale. brasilia did it, ancient beijing did it, and the historic cores of philadelphia, manhattan, chicago, la, sf, houston, and nearly all major american cities excluding boston did this. obviously it works.
the hard part which developing countries struggle with is doing it in a place where all the land is already owned and used, where rivers flood and fires spread, where vehicles compete with pedestrians and bicycles and trucks (!) for space, where the grid needs to accommodate uses more complex than single family residences, and where the people coming in have work to do and lives to live, and probably not enough money to buy their own plot of clear land, and everyone can't just leave in a few weeks before the whole place gets dirty and miserable.
yeah, that is exactly it. They did learn to not suck along the way, but other than that its a pretty simple plan. The anarchy within the grid might be more social than built. I guess the thing he is into is the fact that nobody says yes or no to whatever you want to put on a piece of land.
yes, i think he likes that libertarian approach to land use. but that works for somewhere where the only land use is temporary encampments. it's not the same in a city with various long term land uses that sometimes have incompatibility, and make much heavier demands on public space and infrastructure. someone ought to point him to Delirious New York - that was an essential theme of the book, the plug and play grid.
i suppose where the empty grid principle would be most useful is in suburban and exurban areas. a lot of development in these areas is overconstrained, yet lacks the flexibility of a gridded infrastructure network. this limits future densification and adaptation.
its pretty normal in japan to have minimal controls on land use, regardless of suburban or urban center location. It is very messy visually but also very open-ended and responsive to change in a way i find positive and useful in the face of serious changes going on. Also results in less segregation by class and status. Rich and poor live side by side. Lots of visitors h ate it however. Its not for everyone.
interesting. i've only been to kyoto and didn't notice anything surprising in that respect. are there limitations on building area, far, site coverage, etc?
I mean, isn't it obvious that Burning Man's "light urbanism" is made possible by the extreme wealth and disposable income of it's participants. Don't they realize that everyone that attends and has a camp also has a storage unit in drivable distance that contains supplies and portable infrastructure to enable a city to emerge with no other infrastructure. The article basically should instead just propose that the america's cup be used as a model for urbanism. All buildings should function like yachts...wouldn't that be a ridiculous supposition?
Mindblowingly blind article in my view....
urbanism of refugee camps... great! we're gonna figure this out people! when rich white folks do it, it's a lesson, when it's for refugees, baaaad!
money makes everything gooood!
He isnt saying refugee camps are good. He's saying that more anarchy in urban planning is needed, and that zoning is not required, as long as there are planned streets and infrastructure. His critique of slums is that they need to have infrastructure later, and its harder after the fact so not a slum porn concept in this case, as far as I can tell....
Burning man doesnt really fit the new "traditional" design ideas, which are quite rigid and exclusionary in modern practice. If anything his idea is to work against all that stuff.
You are right Orhan, it does describe a refugee camp pretty well although burning man is all pull no push, just the opposite of a camp. That he doesnt address this side of things is a pretty big omission. Not because burning man is bad, but that the model maybe only works because people have money and its ACTUALLY temporary, not like a refugee camp. Also voluntary.
When I first moved to Tokyo we lived in a Corbusien city of white blocks community that was both rich and vibrant and entirely wonderful. It looked exactly like a French slum, but everyone was working class and could afford to be civilized, so it was awesome instead. The urban plan was also very very good, which was lucky in hindsight. So yeah, money clearly matters. Even so, I think there is more to learn from burning man than money solves all things?
"the new "traditional" design ideas, which are quite rigid and exclusionary in modern practice."
Design isn't rigid, it's covenants and the like, but your point is clear. More confused by your next statement...
"It looked exactly like a French slum, but everyone was working class and could afford to be civilized, so it was awesome instead."
Are you saying Corbusian neighborhoods simply need working class folks to be awesome? So civilized.
No. Working class in japan means you have money to live a reasonable life. Forgot to Americanize my categories. It would equate to blue collar workers of 1950's USA. I was taught that Corbu fucked up everything. I was wrong. Entirely. Same experience in Germany too. White boxes are not the problem. In the end its the people and brutalization by society that is the problem. America has a lot of this, sadly.
If living in 200 sqft of a Corbusian tower is an awesomely reasonable life, more power to you. But Corb’s ideas of towers in a park surrounded by highways is a dismal failure. Your right about people, not architecture being the main problem, but architecture is what we do, so to the extent it can be done sustainably and humanely, we should learn from our mistakes. Btw, what school did you go to where Corb was a villain?
You’re all taking shots at the writer for coming off as tone deaf at times, which is understandable, but it’s not farfetched to look at festivals and events of this scale as hubs of economic and programmatic innovation. What’s more interesting is that these events are able to transform derelict or underutilized spaces into experiences that can adapt themselves to changing cultural trends or forms of socialization outside of more static or fixed urban models. Black Rock City is on BLM land for example, and takes the “leave it how you found it” rule to a bit an extreme.
There are opportunities in these types of environments for architects and designers to explore their ideas in ways that aren’t ordinarily possible through how we normally work in our day-to-day practices. Hell, people laughed at Archigram’s Instant City, Walking City, and Plug-In City projects in the 60’s and 70’s, and yet here we are, trying to make sense of why an Economist or anyone for that matter thinks these events are good for anything other than taking drugs or selfies. We now have a chance to be a part of reinventing programs that we thought were dying—public spaces that include parks, markets, fairs, festivals, and concerts.
I love Burning Man both as idea and execution. It is not (only) about drugs and selfies. Not at all. I think there are lessons to be had. Not sure they are the ones the writer talks about. And really hoping The Economist is thinking deeper than the article implies. We need new ideas for new problems. Maybe they will come from Burning Man but the article offers little insight other than the obvious. That is the bit I find dissapointing, personally.
“Anarchy doesn't scale”
And there you have it. Humans work best in small groups. We’re tribal.
Burning Man is a temporary event in an extremely hostile environment. Radial plans are nothing new (hello, Paris). You have to buy tickets to attend (so much for anarchy). The BLM has declared Burning Man a major environmental nuisance. While corporate hasn't figured out how to capitalize on it, “influencers”, models, and various self-promoters have.
This is a temporary event that depends on some 10,000 “volunteers” to manage it. I do wonder where the ticket revenue (tens of millions) goes.
Rather than being a model for anything I’d say that Burning Man is a demonstration of the full range of human behavior.
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