34 Urbanism Without Effort
Figure 1-16: Edinburgh: a laboratory of learning about the rich interplay of Scotland and England, and how the time before unification shaped urban form.
Similarly, Jackson’s “The Discovery of the Street”41 examines the wondrous and ethereal about life in cities. Through a bittersweet history of public space, from medieval markets to the modern freeway, he weaves an ambiguous tale about what has become the raison d’être of today’s urbanism—reclaiming the human and natural systems that underlie the city, as urban reemergence from within, rather than sprawl to afar. Jackson invoked a laudable challenge to the post-freeway world—a challenge reliant on urbanism without effort—to remember the importance of the first personbased, organic landscape of neighborhoods, towers, and spires lost before we can remember.42 The main point for invoking Rykwert, Mumford, and Jackson today is that in order to achieve a successful city with minimal effort—a place of congregation in the social science, rather than