A review of Petter Naess Urban Structure Matters

Naess book is one of the several examples which is possible to find in the literature dealing with territorial matters aimed at leading the analysis of complex territorial dynamics back to the reductionist models of the so-called "applied sciences", oxymoron used for referring to "technical knowledge" (as stated by Louis Pasteur already during the XIX century). Procedures for transforming people behaviour in numerical variables usable for mathematically confirming what most of the times seems obvious to any common man. However, what is quite surprising in this book is not why making so much an effort for confirming what most urban researchers and planners take for granted, but that Petter Naess – despite the conclusions of his book and its inexplicable deriving success - fails in providing a strong and coherent justification of what he claims.

It is necessary to say that reading through the almost 300 pages of “urban structure matters” it is quite hard to evaluate Petter Naess work, because most information useful for understanding the procedure and the choice of the method of his research is smartly omitted along the text. It is necessary to get to the annexes, relegated to the end of the book, for at least discovering some parts of the used procedure. Still, it is not yet possible to get the whole picture, because the research structure clearly misses some core parts. Therefore some induction is necessary: inducing the procedure through the crossing of the stated results and the technical information provided along the text and in the annexes.

It is opportune to start chronologically. It is appreciable that a technician like Petter Naess tries to give to his research a methodology, as to say an epistemic background, but the choice of the paradigm (see pages 12-13) is based on an ontological vision, which does not seem the most appropriate in current society. As a matter of fact, claiming that all matters of the universe (social and physical) have an inherent meaning and hold a truth, in general terms reminds much more of some religious believes rather than scientific visions, while historically it seems the worst way for trying to understand how and how much multiculturalism, migration, new technologies, etc. might have an effect in describing the dynamics between social groups and the urban structure of a city. It can be argued that a study aimed at helping planners in understanding the territory cannot lose its central objective for running after any cultural “clan”, but we do not dare to forget that all over Europe we are currently living a society (and not “in a society”, because we dynamically build our society day by day) which has much more to do with Einsteinian relativism rather than with Naess's Aristotelian vision. The decision of neglecting those central factors does not seem scientifically opportune, because it impoverishes the whole work, endangering the research reliability.

Despite this attempt of giving a scientific grounding to the research, the whole book is very fragmented, and reading through it, the linkage between the stated paradigm and the research is not clearly detectable. Such a fact does not only shows that in reality the book does not have a methodology, but it gives the impression that the work was done starting form the conclusions, going back choosing the mathematical regressions and models useful to achieving the pre-selected final statement, proceeding back up to the beginning, until writing some colourful ideas on ontology. It must be said that talking about ontology helped many religions to have followers, and here again this book requires a lot of faith for being accepted. A blind faith in mathematical regressions, and not enough faith in those sciences that use them in a more consonant way.
 

Naess's book suffers of two other major epistemological failures:
1) it neglects that the deterministic approach cannot be used in anything dealing with human beings (like cities), because social environments are complex, which by definition are not reducible to their elementary parts. Scientists know that “we cannot expect to describe a complex system by a field equation, because the mechanisms in complex systems are correlational rather than causal” (Salingaros, 1999) (1). Therefore a complex phenomenon (a city, or whatever happens within a city) MUST be studied globally, as a united organism, where its parts acquire a meaning only by their dynamic (and somehow chaotic) interrelation. Such interactions would escape from an analysis leading to the reduction of phenomena into its constituting parts (L. Pondy e I. Mitroff, 1979) (2), while the jazzy mechanical reassembling of those elements into some “new reality” takes to nothing.

2) Data and mathematical models are useful tools for understanding the environment only when they are regarded as they are: no more than tools, instruments to be used within a clear and scientific methodology, and functional to this methodology. They turn instead into source of unreliable (or even fake) results when they are used in the “technical way”, as to say when they are considered the goal of a research, and “truth providers”, also forgetting that mathematical models are invented (and chosen) by human beings, and therefore they are, by definition, fallacious as any other human tool and action.

In any case, going in medias res, Naess fills the 300 pages of the book with sentences derived from mathematical regressions, logarithms, etc., for demonstrating that urban structure has an important role in people's life. However, as stated by the title of the book, the goal of the research is not people, but the urban structure of Copenhagen. In other words, despite analysing people's behaviour, Naess is not interested in people, but in the urban structure. Or better said, he is interested in people as function of the territory. He uses some collected data from people for assessing the centrality of Copenhagen's urban structure, because in his model people are functional for “understanding” urban structures. Such a procedure would be fine if the data collected form the questionnaires and the travel diary were selected in terms of absolute relevance. On the contrary – and against any scientific rule and ethics - data are selected only on the base of their relevance to structural variables, chosen only if capable of confirming the a-priori statement that urban structure matters. Moreover, 1) territorial orography, 2) the accessibility of major city areas and 3) people's culture of the metropolitan Copenhagen are completely neglected. Therefore the major problem here found doesn't lie on the lack of interest in understanding people's dynamics in relation with the environment they live in, but on the several clear limits of the model (it can be labelled as “procedure” or a “technique”, but not as a method) applied in this pseudo-research, and its epistemic weakness.

The consequence of a lack of a scientific grounding is brutal: as a result of mentioned procedure, the mathematical models were disjointed from people's behaviour, and it was no more possible to find a straight correlation between data and the object of the data. Only in the light of the inconclusive quantitative technique used it is possible to understand why Naess needed to make some final interviews (only with 17 households, a useless amount for a metropolitan area like Copenhagen): it was necessary to fulfil with some meaning the void numbers deriving from a very subjective and scientifically unjustifiable selection process. At this stage, even it is not possible to confirm the sensation through the reading of the book, one cannot exclude that also the people to be interviewed were chosen on the basis of their compatibility with the mathematical model outcomes. The latter is a speculation, therefore worthless in giving robustness to this criticism.

For not social scientists it is worth highlighting that the standard procedure for leading a quantitative scientific research on people foresees a number of interviews BEFORE the research, as a scouting technique aimed at understanding the field of research and propedeutic in building an appropriate questionnaire. The interviews AFTER the questionnaire are quite a surprising novelty, and can only proof the inadequateness of the questionnaire or of the use of data collected from the questionnaire. In fact, in a comparable scientific research, 1932 questionnaires collected in an area of about 1.8 million inhabitants would have been definitely enough in studying and correctly understanding a research object (in statistics of social sciences the maximal acceptable error is 0.15, and given data are quite below this cap).

Naess technique is very tight, possibly fascinating and witching for a technician, once again legitimated in putting the nose in the wrong place. It offers very limited possibilities of choice and error, and relegates human intervention to the elimination of all variables not functional to the legitimation of the chosen assumption that urban structure matters. The rest is in the lap of regressions and logarithms. In other words, it works like any mathematical model and - as any reductionist model – it does not offer the flexibility for being adapted to different research necessities, thus escaping form the possibility of being evaluated through a different usage according to a different context. It simply does not take aboard the specific information of the place where it would be used, because all those variables would be obliterated. As any planning model, it has the right potential for being applied in any possible case, for always giving comparable outcomes, despite the analysed territory. Results that would confirm once again its pseudo validity, because it is a homoeostatic self-legitimating technique. For making a funny comparison, and leading Naess research to a more opportune context, it is like if analysing the population in South Africa one would consider a mathematical model where just white people were represented, for stating that in South Africa only live white people. Using the same technique in any other African country, not considering black people in the mathematical model, as a result it would be possible to state without any doubt that any African country be populated just by white people. Sadly enough Naess “method” works exactly like that.

According to geneticist Laurent Ségalat (2009), researches where some data are consciously neglected, or cases when it is chosen only the information that confirms what authors want to demonstrate - while what confutes their assumptions is put aside - are already clear examples of scientific fraud. Despite Naess's book, as demonstrated, cannot be labelled as a scientific product, also as a technical text it seems it cannot be excluded from the category described by Ségalat. Nonetheless, in spite of the evidences, the procedure used by Naess is way too rough and inconsistent for rising the doubt of fraud: it is clear that this book has a scientific value as much as the photocopy of a coin has an economic value, therefore it cannot be considered a fraud. Besides, both the manifest unscientific procedure used and the suspicious omission on clarifying the decision process in choosing the variables might as well be grounded on Naess lack in mastering statistical and sociological methods rather than being a conscious attempt of publishing a hoax.

Urban Structure Matters offers some other risible moments, like when doing the logarithms of people's PERCEPTIONS of distances and time-frames. I think nobody before had forced into a mathematical model people's IMPRESSIONS. Naess and his group of researchers, crossing data on travelled distances and the time necessary for covering them, found that people on foot where fast as cars. This is all but surprising, because impressions, by definition, are not quantifiable (like feelings), and even when being “perceived quantifications”, they still are impressions on possible data, and not real data. Instead of accepting the fallacy of such a procedure, Naess decided to force data even more into his model, this time (ab)using logarithms, for reducing the gap between people's PERCEPTION of space and time. (4)

To the end, Naess research not only clearly and immediately shows scientific limits, but above all the procedure at its core is ethically doubtful. It is not merely based on an inadequate paradigm (ideally the file-rouge of any research): it follows an anti-scientific procedure that leads to conclusions that are out of any value, because completely disjointed from the reality they claim representing and describing. As a human being (relegated to be a variable functional in justifying the doubtful assumption that my life and my dignity of making choices depends on territorial structure) I feel offended by Naess research; as a social scientist I feel sad in seeing technicians who keep on doing something which is clearly out of their grasp and so badly lead pseudo-social analyses; as an urban researcher I am definitely worried somebody might believe in Naess research outcomes for replicating his non-sense technique (and getting to the same non-sense conclusions, for another dangerous legitimization) or implementing some real territorial plans based on such a mystifying data-shake.

Got to this point, we must ask a question: what results can one get not omitting non-structural variables? And what is the outcome when using Naess procedure in toto but the other way around, just choosing non-structural variables? Maybe getting to the result that urban structure is useless... which is another nonsense, but valid as much as Naess book's procedure and conclusions...

As usual, «wenn die Tatsachen nicht mit der Theorie übereinstimmen, um so schlimmer für die Tatsachen!» (F. Hegel).

Notes:

(1) Nikos Salingaros, A universal rule for the distribution of sizes, 1999

(2) Pondy, Louis R., and Ian I. Mitroff. "Beyond open system models of organization." Research in organizational behavior 1.1 (1979): 3-39.

(3) SEGALAT L., 2009, La science a bout de souffle? Paris, Seuil, 107 p.

(4) I read the book years ago, and am still laughing about it. I wonder how the peer-to-peer review pre-publishing methods in Spatial Planning work... I also wonder how the so-called spatial planners think, what is taught at universities, what people (enslaved by the “put a reference” justification needs) quote in their papers, while above all I am frightened in thinking how our cities are planned, who is deciding the form and the structure of our living environments. Scary!