BY ZACH MORTICE
An abandoned island in the Venice lagoon. Local Code by Nicholas de Monchaux, published by Princeton Architectural Press, 2016.
In his new book, Local Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities, the University of California, Berkeley architecture and urban design professor Nicholas de Monchaux develops new tools for the mass customization of underused and vacant urban lots, highlighting the limits of inflexible systems thinking. His book charts a way forward with an eye on past failures, and new possibilities founded in corrective measures that have proved to work.
American cities? first encounters with data, he writes, happened after World War II. That?s when protocomputing power, developed by the military and Cold War consultancies such as the RAND Corporation, merged with tabula rasa modernist urban planning. These binary solutions to complex built environments (remembered most vividly as Robert Moses-style urban renewal that tore down anything old and dirty) became what de Monchaux calls the book?s ?Brothers Grimm villain, appearing in disguises throughout,? across three critical essays. There?s the obvious Jane Jacobs counterpoint, an exploration of Gordon Matta-Clark?s time as a fellow connoisseur of vacant lots with his Reality Properties: Fake Estates project, and the story of Howard Fisher, an early developer of Geographic Information Systems, the standard computer mapping system used for displaying Earth surface data. Earl...