He described a chasm between people who see the world through a “single central vision” and those who “pursue many ends, often unrelated and even contradictory.”
Architecture is a Fox’s discipline. It sits between capital, politics, infrastructure, climate, design, engineering, art, psychology, and economics. Its task is to hold these domains together, manage complexity, and, at its best, make spaces and places in which we can live better together.
Between 1984 and 2003, psychologist Philip Tetlock, led an extensive study comparing the predictions of 284 experts, who he categorized as either Foxes or Hedgehogs. He found that a Hedgehog is “more likely to be overconfident … and slow to change their minds when they are wrong,” whereas a Fox “uses a variety of analytical tools, is more likely to be self-critical, and more likely to update their beliefs in response to new information.”
Responding to wider trends in professional services, architecture embraced specialization. In doing so, it has lost influence by steadily narrowing its scope. The discipline has allowed, and at times encouraged, scope to be subsumed by adjacent professions: transport planners, urban designers, cost consultants, interior designers, fire safety consultants, project managers, and a multitude of engineering disciplines. Today, the architect is one consultant among many. Foxes squeezed uncomfortably into Hedgehog costumes.
The benefits of specialization in any profession can be immense. Noticing this, and in response to wider trends across professional services, it seemed like the rational thing for architects to do. Medicine gives us a sense of how specialization can be beneficial, and at the same time, risk missing the bigger picture. Few people would choose a generalist to perform critical heart surgery. But narrow specialism also comes at a cost, as it can leave no one answerable for the whole.
Like human bodies, cities are complex. Making them better places to live requires a knowledge of the past, careful observation of the present, and flexible hunches for what the future looks like.
Over-specialization, especially in professions such as architecture, means the value of the Fox is overlooked and undervalued. We continue to break down our cities into component parts and give each of those parts to Hedgehogs to optimize: housing driven by yields, streets by flow of traffic, buildings by fire safety codes, public space by maintenance costs.
In the U.S., there are up to two billion parking spaces, creating the surreal situation in many places where more land is devoted to parking cars than to housing people. This is what can happen when Hedgehogs optimize parts and forget the whole.
Instead of seeing rain as a nuisance to be expelled, a Sponge City follows the flow of water and where it ends up creates wetlands, swales, and swamps. By using the land to soak up and store water, the city creates a landscape that slows water down during wet periods and releases it during dry periods, like a sponge.
Yu’s skill as a Fox was not just to make this technical and philosophical leap, but to then have the architectural skill and political influence to turn it into hundreds of new sponge-like public spaces, breathing new life into cities around the world from Chongqing to Copenhagen, Bangkok to Karachi.
Cities are too large, too complex, and too important to be left to Hedgehogs alone. Architects matter not because they have mastered a specific instrument, but because they can bring the orchestra together, and in doing so make our cities better places to live.
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