Corbu's famous quote is, "The house is a machine for living in." This sentiment can be seen as akin to Weinberger's first order of order: a place for everything and everything in its place.
Corbu is writing roughly in the early to middle 20th-century and is reacting to what he sees as the unrestrained, disorderly evolution of cities. Old cities like Paris kept getting the Frankenstein treatment as more and more people crowded into them following the turn of the century and the Industrial revolution. Their cobbled-togetherness could not sustain the numbers who had taken up residence there. The result: green spaces diminished, natural lighting was poor, utilities were underdeveloped and families were unable to sustain a healthy existence balancing work, family and leisure. There were just too many people mashed into these unaccommodating spaces. One way to look at this problem is to see it as gigabytes of raw, untagged data. Without the metadata, as Weinberger says, it's just a messy pile of information.
Corbu's proposal: more density. The city as he saw it was in limbo. Too many people for the resources available, but not enough to make mass-production and -consumption possible. By radically upping the density there were now enough people to make this new city of shared green space, utilities, facilities possible. His plan, therefore, called for razing the city and going vertical. Separated by massive green space are even more massive housing complexes that contain community kitchens, laundries, and childcare. It's pretty widely agreed that this sort of urban planning is a gross failure, but this idea of taking a problem, pushing it to an extreme and using it as a solution is an intriguing one.
So, how does this relate to Weinberger and his call for, "More tags! More tags!"? Well, tagging isn't necessarily a problem, but it does disrupt the functioning of the 1st and 2nd orders of order. One simply can't keep the structure of a ledger or card catalog functional with the influx of more and more metadata muddying the waters. But is there a saturation point? Is there a point where, like Jay wrote in a comment to the earlier tagging post, when the metadata becomes more important than the data itself?
Perhaps it could be said that Corbu was moving from the failed 1st order that was the structure of the old city to the bright and shiny newness of the 2nd order city. Here, elements were separated (cataloged) according to transportation, eating, leisure, etc. But this doesn't work. People don't function in the well with this sort of regimentation. Enter Weinberger, and here's where metaphors mix: he's talking about moving 1st and 2nd *information* to the 3rd order of order. What does that look like in a spatial context? Is something like that even possible in a physical realm? ...
Nuts, I've got to run to class, I'll try to tie this up after lunch...
3 comments:
"Is there a point where, like Jay wrote in a comment to the earlier tagging post, when the metadata becomes more important than the data itself?"
I think we're already there, in some cases. The other day, I saw a sidebar in a printed magazine that was a "cloud" of tags, with the size of the tag indicating the numbers of whatever was being measured (I can't remember the specifics). Because it was printed, however, that's all you got: the metadata. The data (the exact numbers being represented by the size of the tag) wasn't present at all. Is this an attempt to bring the 3rd order into the 2nd (a feat that is largely symbolic or representative, since by definition, the physical limitations of the 2nd order make the 3rd impossible)? Other attempts might include the printing of web addresses in paper-based media (newspapers, magazines, books).
I would also that organizational jobs (i.e. cataloging, my potential future profession) necessitate metadata becoming, if not more important, at least AS important as the data itself. Organizing information in a way that users can access it, cataloging books, images, texts, etc. is vitally important to the existance of, well, libraries. Until someone can systematically (or emotionally, depending on the day, I suppose) prove that catagories and metadata is not important, I am all ears.
Metadata must be a part of every organizational discussion. There are always systems for organization (even if you are like my sister who thinks that the floor of her room is really just another shelf/laundry basket/backpack/kitchen counter). Based on your post, and maybe I am reading too much into this, it almost sounds as if you are fearful of the idea of metadata becoming more important than data itself. But, why, if metadata is important, and if we are seeking to constantly improving it, does that HAVE to be a bad thing? Again, maybe I am just assuming that that is what you are saying. Hmmm...
Good post anyway--it is really causing me to think. I like 3rd order, but can I ever take that too far? How can I effectively utilize third order? How can 2nd (with all of its presuposed limitates) order integrate synergetically with third order? Is that ever possible?
But, perhaps most importantly, am I asking the right questions? And, if I am, can I alphabetize them?
Hm... I'm not focusing well on metadata right now, but I'm thinking about more density as Corbu's solution to cities that become more dense.
While planned cities/communities have tended towards failure (public housing schemes that put everyone in giant vertical towers, like Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes and Cabrini Green spring to mind), there is a strong high-density movement in the green housing movement right now. The idea, which sounds similar to Corbu's, is that if we make a smaller footprint (go vertical), live in apartments or condos instead of single-family homes (go smaller and use some shared facilities, like a basement laundry room for the building), etc, then there's more land-space for parks, etc.
This idea is exactly the opposite of suburban/ex-urb sprawl, which eats up farmland and undeveloped land and turns it into sfh turf farms, strip malls and six-lane highways. More density where people are and no density where people aren't frees up land for native plants and animals and could, in theory, help to balance ecosystems.
This idea has its problems, but as someone who has spent most of her life in rural and urban spaces (and far less time in suburban spaces), I can see lots of reasons why it's attractive.
End non sequitur.
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