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I live in the city (as does more than half of humankind), and I love the colors, forms, and manic creative energy of this coral-reef like false ecosystem which we humans have built for ourselves. As much as I love cities, though (especially my beloved home of Brooklyn), I feel like they could be ever so much better. Cities tend to be terrible places for non-human lifeforms (with a handful of striking exceptions like pigeons)…and most urban places are also pretty unhealthy for the human inhabitants as well. Not only are cities engineered with minimal interest in ecology but the structure of cities comes to mirror the social problems of the societies which create them (almost universally this involves an elite caste leeching away the vast majority of resources through a rigged hierarchical system they have devised). Technological and agricultural problems also etch themselves indelibly into the structure of cities. Thus we have the deadly smog-choked car-culture cities of 20th century America…the human sacrifice temples of MesoAmerica…the desicated & starved cities of the desert…the slave cities of the ancient worlf…and on and on.
In many times and places, clever and driven people have tried to solve these problems by planning out entire cities beforehand. Obviously, all cities are planned at some level, but this generally involves multi-generational building and lots of half-completed projects, strange work-arounds, and odd organic muddles where unexpected or unintended factors override the planners’ visions (insomuch as they planned for anything other than immediate utility). Thus, the great cities like Shanghai, Paris, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and NEW YORK are the collaboration of innumerable minds working together (often at cross-purposes) across many different eras. The end result betrays a lot of compromise and muddling though. I am not talking about that sort of thing right now. Instead I am talking about cities which are the result of a single monomaniacal vision.
Here is a straightforward example of a planned city from Northern Italy in the late Renaissance. This is Palmanova, a star-fort community built by the Venetian Republic in 1593. The city was made possible as a result of the Venetians’ great victory at Lepanto in (a battle which also spawned a lot of the best battle paintings) and the designer, Vincenzo Scamozzi, made sure to incorporate the great military innovations of the late 16th century into the plan. Palmanova was located near the Slovenian border–the eastern front of Christendom’s great war with the Ottoman Empire–and the community is therefor built within a nine-pointed polygon made of earth and mortar to protect the inhabitants from the artillery of the day. Additionally, the city was designed with Thomas More’s recent literary hit “Utopia” in mind so that artisans, merchants, soldiers, and farmers would be housed in a style which placed them on an equal social footing (although the Palace of Provveditore is somewhat more, um, palatial than the ordinary residences). The town’s cathedral is near the central plaza and, despite its baroque beauty, it has a shortened campanile so that enemy gunners could not easily focus on it.
But things went a bit awry for Palmanova right away. Despite the new city’s elegance and the lofty ideas of the founders, nobody wanted to live there. By 1622, the Venetian planners who had created Palmanova were forced to pardon criminals and offer them free building lots in order to populate the town. Building slowed to a snail’s pace. The focus of international conflict changed, and Venice’s glory receded. The full plans were not completed until between 1806 and 1813 (when the Napoleonic wars brought renewed relevance to fortifications).
Palmanova is hardly a failure. You can live there today and aerial photographers dote on the place. Yet it didn’t usher in a new era of egalitarian polygonal fortress cities either. The factors which the planners saw as most important were superseded by the rapid pace of progress or they were proven to be matters of baroque fashion rather than universal values. To address the concerns of today we would not build this sort of place (although I find it strikingly beautiful and I admire the style and the idealism of its planners). Later this week we will look at some more planned cities from history which didn’t have the same sort of success. Maybe if we focus on some of these real world examples we can think about what would improve the cities of tomorrow.
The appetizer for the first dinner I ate in New York City was an artichoke baked with Parmesan, crumbs, and olive oil. It was the first time I remember eating an artichoke (although I must surely have eaten some anonymous slimy dip in the 80s). It was delicious! Artichokes are still one of my favorite foods and they still remind me of how exciting it was to be in New York for the first time. But personal recollections aside, what is an artichoke? The answer is as amazing and unexpected as the vegetable itself.
The first time I tried to cook an artichoke, I bought a couple of likely specimens and included them with my grocery purchase: the poor teenage grocery clerk grabbed them from the conveyor belt like they were tomatoes and then screamed. It turns out that artichokes are a sort of thistle: they have sharpened spikes on the edges of their leaves (I’m really sorry the clerk hurt her hands: I would have warned her if I had only known she was unfamiliar with artichokes). Domestic artichokes (Cynara cardunculus var. scolymus) are a variety of cardoons–wild thistle flowers which are native to Italy, Spain, and North Africa. Cardoons are part of the aster family (along with daisies, scottish thistles, and sunflowers) and were eaten by humans in prehistory. It is unclear whether the Greeks and Romans domesticated the spiky plants (although they certainly knew of cardoons), however by the middle ages Muslim farmers were breeding the vegetables to be bigger and tastier.
Cardoons are hardy perennial flowers which grow up to 1.5 meters (60 inches) in height and produce purple flowers from a large spiky capitulum. The capitulum is the portion of the artichoke which we eat. If it is allowed to sprout into a flower, it becomes dry, leathery, and inedible unless you are a ruminant (in which case, why are you reading this?). The world’s farmers currently grow about 1.4 million tons of artichokes a year–the vast majority of which still come from Italy. There is even a delicious artichoke bitter liquor made of artichokes!