The American lawn uses more resources than any other agricultural industry in the world. The American lawn could feed continents if people had more social responsibility.
Why should it be indecent to have anything useful in the front half of your property or around the house where people can see it? Why is it low-status to make that area productive? The condition is peculiar to the British landscaping ethic; what we are really looking at here is a miniature British country estate, designed for people who had servants. It has become a cultural status symbol to present a non-productive facade. The lawn and its shrubbery is a forcing of nature and landscape into a salute to wealth and power, and has not other purpose or function.
The only thing that such designs demonstrate is that power can force men and women to waste their energies in controlled, menial, and meaningless toil.
Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, “neighborhood” is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.
We shall have something solid to chew on if we think of city neighborhoods as mundane organs of self-government. Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government. And our successes are successes at localized self-government.
My article “Off the Grid… and Back Again? The Recent Evolution of American Street Network Planning and Design” has been published by the Journal of the American Planning Association and won the 2020 Stough-Johansson Springer Award for best paper. It identifies recent nationwide trends in American street network design, measuring how urban planners abandoned the grid and embraced sprawl over the 20th century, but since 2000 these trends have rebounded, shifting back toward historical design patterns.
While the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes.
Just as there is no definite system within which the solution is to be found, and the boundaries of the problem are elastic and tend to expand with each round of solution, so too there is often no final solution, yet each cycle of input and solution is worth the effort. A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all.
I suppose the heart of systems engineering is the acceptance that there is neither a definite fixed problem nor a final solution, rather evolution is the natural state of affairs. This is, of course, not what you learn in school, where you are given definite problems which have definite solutions.