Jaime Garretón’s cybernetic theory of the city and its system: a missing link in contemporary urban theory

Abstract

Garretón’s “Una teoría cibernética de la ciudad y su sistema” (A cybernetic theory of the city and its system) was published in 1975 by Nueva Visión publishing house in Buenos Aires, a moment when the seminal criticisms against the modernist urban theory of the sixties led by Team 10 were becoming concrete proposals for updating and eventually overcoming its shortcomings. Yet, despite remaining unpublished in English and hence relatively unknown worldwide, few publications in the field compare in scope to Garreton’s cybernetic theory. The reason is straightforward: like Shannon’s mathematical theory, this work amounts to a general theory of the city. Thoroughly informed by system thinking, whose trademark rule of thumb was described by Luhmann as “drawing distinctions” to guarantee the autopoiesis of a determined system, Garretón’s chief objective was to draw distinctions that would guarantee the autopoiesis of the urban system. In doing so, he discovered three fundamental urban laws, namely: the law of urban communication, the law of urban attraction, and the law of urban circulation. This, in turn, allowed him to clearly distinguish a universe that had thus far remained undetected by urbanists and that he called the non-city Universe: the human-made universe that nevertheless does not belong in the urban universe. This paper argues that this allowed him to rediscover and update the ancient and lost art of city-making: not an art of making buildings, roads, and infrastructure in general but rather, the art of building, knitting, fostering, and sustaining communities and whole societies by means of or with the aid of buildings.