Can a city be tuned like a piano? When J.S. Bach composed "The Well-Tempered Clavier," he demonstrated that a new process of tempering notes and playing multiple keys at once could make music more pleasing. Jonathan F.P. Rose has written The Well-Tempered City to argue that tempering, or balancing, certain qualities within cities can make urban centers more resilient, prosperous, and harmonious. Rose identifies important attributes of successful cities and assembles a dizzying array of historical facts—but his grasp of human nature is tenuous, and his confusion about the purpose of cities weakens any argument for tempering, however innovative that process may be.
Structurally, the book is beautiful. Rose marries simplicity with complexity, so his work embodies a principle he frequently extols. Five broad sections cover the essential "qualities" of well-tempered cities: coherence, circularity, resilience, community, and compassion. The book's chapters teem with examples not only from the urban renewal mainstays of New York and Detroit but from a diverse array of historical epochs and regions. Rose treats readers to a whirlwind archaeological tour, building his argument with case studies ranging from Neolithic Turkey to the pre-Columbian Great Plains. This is the book's greatest strength, and the overall effect suggests a timelessness to the five qualities Rose identifies. However, like the cities it describes, the book's complexity is overwhelming at times. Rose likes lists. Most of them, like his oft-mentioned "nine C's"of healthy communities, are unwieldy and forced.
Rose's purpose is to suggest how "to align economic, technological, and social advances with the well-being of humans and of nature." Human nature, however, gets short shrift. Consequently, despite beautifully arranged examples, there is an air of unreality to his conclusions. A few tiles from his mosaic: he affirms a Tibetan village's polyandry as an ecologically responsible form of population control and asserts confidently that climate change is the cause of Syria's civil war. To be fair, Rose only offers these as minor examples—but he offers them. Their inclusion indicates a lack of regard for widespread, deeply rooted, powerful ideas like exclusivity in marriage, religious fervor, national interest, and ethnic identity. Worse for Rose, this failure to incorporate certain ingrained propensities of human nature into his tempering method suggests that his approach to cities is incomplete. This is a problem, as his book's conceit is to envision a harmonious, all-inclusive system that emphasizes "wholeness."
In a work devoted to development of cities, civilizations, and societies, it is further surprising that Rose spends almost no time on the thought of Plato or Aristotle. In 400 pages, Aristotle is mentioned three times and Plato only twice. Aristotle's idea of a city's ultimate goal, the pursuit of the virtuous life, is not mentioned at all. For Rose, a city's goal is technological and ecological harmony, "the well-being of its wholeness." One cannot help but feel Rose seeks a smoothly functioning city for the sake of a smoothly functioning city. But this state of affairs could correspond as easily to a monstrous regime as to a benevolent one.
As if to guard against this, Rose urges that a city be infused with "compassion." Then, he writes, "all its paths will be paths of peace." Compassion. Peace. Lofty promises. The path to such a city is made possible by shame badges to enforce mandatory recycling, patent taxes, and "collective governance systems" that will fairly allocate resources, like water, to everyone.
Such measures will have externalities. Some might be intrinsically at odds with human nature. Far from civil harmony, that could create quite a cacophony.