This premise — that urban planning’s efforts to impose order risk editing out the culture, character, complexity and creative friction that makes cities cities — is a guiding theme in Messy Cities: Why We Can’t Plan Everything, a collection of essays, including Thorne’s, gathered by Toronto-based editors Zahra Ebrahim, Leslie Woo, Dylan Reid and John Lorinc. In it, they argue that “messiness is an essential element of the city.” Case studies from around the world show how imperfection can be embraced, created and preserved, from the informal street eateries of East Los Angeles to the sports facilities carved out of derelict spaces in Mumbai.
Bloomberg CityLab caught up with Woo and Ebrahim, cofounder of the public interest design studio Monumental, about why messiness in cities can be worth advocating for, and how to let the healthy kind flourish. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
You intentionally don’t give a specific definition for messy urbanism in the book, making the case that to do so would be antithetical to the idea itself. But if you were to give a general overview of the qualities and attributes you’d ascribe to messy cities, what would they be?
Leslie Woo: All of the authors included in the book brought to it some form of two things — wanting to have a sense of belonging in the places they live and trying to understand how they can have agency in their community. And what comes out of that are acts of defiance that manifest both as tiny and intimate experiences and as big gestures in cities.
Zahra Ebrahim: I think of it as where institutions end and people begin. It’s about agency. So much of the “messy” defiance is people trying to live within their cultures and identities in ways that cities don’t always create space for. We’re not trying to fetishize messiness, but we do want to acknowledge that when people feel that agency, cities become more vibrant, spontaneous and delightful.
LW: I think of the story urban planning professor Nina-Marie Lister, director of Toronto’s Ecological Design Lab, tells about fighting to keep her wild front yard habitat garden after being ordered to cut it down by the city. There was a bylaw in place intended by the municipality to control what it deemed “noxious vegetation” on private property. Lister ended up doing a public advocacy campaign to get the bylaw updated.
The phrase “messy cities” could be construed negatively but it seems like a real term of affection for the editors and authors of this book. What does it represent to you?
ZE: You can see it represented in the Bloordale neighborhood of Toronto. During lockdown in 2020, a group of local residents came together and turned a large, gravel-filled site of a demolished school into an unexpected shared space for social distancing. With handmade signage, they cheekily named the site “Bloordale Beach.” Over weeks, they and others in the community organically and spontaneously brought this imagined, landlocked beach to life, adding beach chairs, “swimming guidelines” around the puddle that had formed after a storm, even a “barkour” area for local dogs. It was both a “messy” community art project and third space, but also a place for residents to demonstrate their agency and find joy in an uncertain and difficult time.
LW: The thing that is delightful about this topic is many of these efforts are exercises in reimagining cities. Individuals and groups see a space and approach it in a different way with a spirit and ingenuity that we don’t see enough of. It’s an exercise in thinking about how we want to live. I also want to make the point that we aren’t advocating for more chaos and confusion but rather showing how these groups are attempting to make sense of where they live.
ZE: Messiness has become a wedge issue — a way to pronounce and lean into existing political cleavages. Across the world we see politicians pointing to the challenges cities face — housing affordability, transit accessibility, access to employment — and wrongfully blame or attribute these urban “messes” to specific populations and groups. We see this in the rising anti-immigrant rhetoric we hear all over the world. As an editing team, I think there was a shared understanding that multicultural and diverse societies are more successful and that when we have to navigate shared social and cultural space, it’s better for society.
This is also not all about the failure of institutions to serve the needs of the public. Some of this is about groups responding to failures of the present and shaping a better future. And some of what we’re talking about is people seeing opportunities to make the type of “mess” that would support their community to thrive, like putting a pop-up market and third space in a strip mall parking lot, and creating a space for people to come together.
You and the rest of the editors are based in Toronto and the city comes up recurrently in the book. What makes the city such an interesting case study in messy urbanism?
ZE: Toronto is what a local journalist, Doug Saunders, calls an “arrival city” — one in three newcomers in Canada land in Toronto. These waves of migration are encoded in our city’s DNA. I think of a place like Kensington Market, where there have been successive arrivals of immigrants each decade, from Jewish and Eastern European and Italian immigrants in the early 1900s to Caribbean and Chinese immigrants in the 1960s and ’70s.
Kensington continues to be one of the most vibrant urban spaces in the city. You’ve got the market, food vendors, shops and semi-informal commercial activity, cultural venues and jazz bars. In so many parts of Toronto you can’t see the history on the street but in Kensington you can see the palimpsest and layers of change it’s lived through. There is development pressure in every direction and major retailers opening nearby but it remains this vibrant representation of different eras of newcomers in Toronto and what they needed — socially, culturally and commercially. It’s a great example of where the formal and informal, the planned and unplanned meet. Every nook and cranny is filled with a story, with locals making a “mess,” but really just expressing their agency.
LW: This messy urbanism can also be seen in Toronto’s apartment tower communities that were built in the 1960s. These buildings have experienced periods of neglect and changes in ownership. But today when moving from floor to floor, it feels like traveling around the entire world; you can move from the Caribbean to continental Africa to the Middle East. These are aerial cities in and of themselves. They’re a great example of people taking a place where the conditions aren’t ideal and telling their own different story — it’s everything from the music to the food to the languages.
You didn’t include any case studies or essays from Europe in the book. Why did you make that choice, and what does an overreliance on looking to cities like Copenhagen do to the way we think of and plan for cities?
LW: When I trained as an urban planner and architect, all the pedagogy was very Eurocentric — it was Spain, France and Greece. But if we want to reframe how we think about cities, we need to reframe our points of reference.
ZE: During our editorial meetings we talked about how the commonly accepted ideas about urban order that we know are Eurocentric by design, and don’t represent the multitude of people that live in cities and what “order” may mean to them. Again, it’s not to celebrate chaos but rather to say there are different mental models of what orderliness and messiness can look like.
Go to a place like Delhi and look at the way traffic roundabouts function. There are pedestrians and cars and everybody is moving in the direction they need to move in, it’s like a river of mobility. If you’re sitting in the back of a taxi coming from North America, it looks like chaos, but to the people that live there it’s just how the city moves.
In a chapter about Mexico City’s apartment architecture, Daniel Gordon talks about what it can teach us about how to create interesting streets and neighborhoods by becoming less attached to overly prescriptive planning and instead embracing a mix of ground-floor uses and buildings with varying materials and color palettes, setbacks and heights. He argues that design guidelines can negate creativity and expression in the built environment.
In another chapter, urban geography professor Andre Sorensen talks about Tokyo, which despite being perceived as a spontaneously messy city actually operates under one of the strictest zoning systems in the world. Built forms are highly regulated, but land use mix and subdivision controls aren’t. It’s yet another example of how different urban cultures and regulatory systems work to different sets of values and conceptions of order and disorder. We tried to pay closer attention to case studies that expanded the aperture of what North American urbanism typically covers.
by Rebecca Greenwald, Bloomberg | Read more:
Image:Alfredo Martinez/Getty Images
[ed. Give me a messy city any day or even just a messy part of one. Diverse, full of surprises, interesting people and businesses, sometimes dangerous, alive with possibilities.]
