A city that has grown without a plan is not therefore disordered. The lanes of an old quarter, which appear on a map as an accident, encode a great deal of information: where water was available, where a wall once stood, which trades needed to be near which others, how far a person could reasonably carry a load. The pattern is a record of solved problems. Its illegibility to the outsider is not a defect in the pattern but a limitation of the map. Administrative reform has nonetheless proceeded for two centuries on the opposite assumption. Straight streets, numbered plots and standard frontages were introduced not principally because they were more convenient for residents — residents frequently resisted them — but because they made a district taxable, policeable and countable. Legibility of this kind is a genuine public good; there is no serious argument for returning to a condition in which the state cannot find the people it is supposed to serve. But it is a good with a cost, and the cost falls on information that was held in the arrangement rather than in anybody’s head. That last phrase is the crux and is easily misread. The knowledge encoded in an unplanned settlement is not tacit knowledge in the ordinary sense of skills residents could describe if pressed. Much of it is not known to anyone. No inhabitant of a quarter can explain why a lane bends where it does; the reason may be a demolished structure or a drainage channel that predates living memory. The settlement solves the problem without anybody retaining the solution, and when the settlement is cleared the solution is lost, not forgotten, since it was never held. This explains an otherwise puzzling pattern in the record of slum clearance. Rehousing schemes that provide unambiguously better dwellings — more space, better sanitation, secure tenure — nevertheless produce populations that are measurably worse off on other dimensions, and the effect persists long after the disruption of the move should have faded. The usual explanations invoke community and social capital, terms that describe the symptom in the vocabulary of sentiment. A harder version is available: the residents’ livelihoods depended on adjacencies that no survey recorded because no survey asked, and the new plan optimised for the variables that had been written down. None of which establishes that unplanned settlements should be preserved as they are, a conclusion mainly attractive to those who do not live in them. The argument is about method rather than outcome. A planner who assumes that the visible disorder is disorder will destroy information at a rate that cannot be estimated, because the quantity destroyed is by definition not in the data. The appropriate response is not deference to whatever exists but a suspicion of one’s own instruments — an assumption, held in advance of evidence, that the pattern one cannot read is doing work one has not identified.
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