The above-liked article by Eric Jaffe in The Atlantic Cities (brought to my attention by Heath Rezabek) begins with an analogy between contemporary urban studies and 19th century natural history, which latter was a vast collection of facts with no unified thread to draw them all together.
Depending on whom to speak to, the unifying thread of natural history became either evolutionary biology or genetics, and the idea is that urban studies needs to move beyond tallying facts and get at the underlying structure of cities.
This article focuses on William Solecki's call for a new science of urbanization, but of course there have been many efforts in the direction of a quantitative treatment of urbanism.
An article in the New Yorker a few years ago, A Physicist Solves the City, discusses Geoffrey West's theory of cities, while less than a year ago I wrote about some recent work on the mathematical modeling of subways, as reported in a BBC story, Subways 'share universal structure', research suggests.
One person who commented on the above-linked story, Louis Merlin, wrote:
A fascinating idea, but likely a futile one. Cities are creations of human societies, and I would guess that a universal science of cities is as likely as is a universal sociology of institutions.
Several commentators suggested that it was impossible to formulate a rational and systematic theory that could encompass anything as irrational and human as a city. This isn't my argument this the effort to create a science of cities. Several others noted (as I just noted above) that work like this has been going on for some time.
What seems to me to have been neglected here is the fact that sciences emerge when someone has an intuitive insight and gives this insight a definitive formulation that can be used an a research program by others.
This is paradigmatically the case with Darwin and natural selection, with Einstein and relativity, and Cantor and set theory -- even, I might add, Adam Smith and economics. Not all sciences conform so perfectly to this model, but a great many do.
This is an unfashionable view to hold. I seem to be suggesting a "great man" theory of history, and to be taking an individual out of their intellectual and cultural context. But I think that this approach has gone too far, and has inspired revisionist historians to seek earlier sources where there are few or none, since some sciences are created more or less ex nihilo by one man, as Aristotle created logic.
The relevance of this to the present topic is that a true science of urbanization and urbanism will not come from calling for a systematic study of cities, nor from conferences and seminars on the topic. A science of cities will emerge when some individual has a penetrating insight into the nature of cities, formulates this in a clear yet deep principle, and others take this principle and apply it.
Cities must await their definitive theoretician. Of course, the best way to come to such a striking insight is to immerse oneself in the discipline and to read one's precursors obsessively, as Darwin was versed in natural history and Einstein was versed in the physics of his day. So the intellectual context is, as we say in logic, a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the emergence of a definitive theoretical formulation. The sufficient condition is intuition.
It is the definitive insight that we seek, or we await.