Which is a bigger point - universality

Riddle me this: what if there are no universal truths? Standards and measures imply a universality that is not always there. To make an even bigger point, I think my fundamental assumption about how the world works is that non-universality is the norm, whereas you think universality is the norm. Which makes sense - the more technical something is, the more universalities there are and engineering has books upon books full of standards and universal truths.

But you could contrast that with, say, architecture. The Sieg Hall could not have been designed with any universal design truths so that it would always be called beautiful. If you move it to another city, country or continent, its design might be called anything from atrocious to amazing. There are little to no universal truths in something as complex and subjective as taste. And where complexity reigns, standards just become temporary beliefs that fade away as time passes and taste changes.

So one function of those maps is navigation, which has a technical solution and can thus be standardized. Pretty much any GIS data source is in WGS84 - a mere 43 years old. However, the secondary function it has, which is to communicate and understand communal spatial relations is completely dependent on culture and resources available. Ain't no CS nerd gonna crack that.

A lot of problems in urban planning are implemented in a technical manner - contours, TTS, building height, soil contaminant limits, drainage capacities, parking limits...you name it. And urban planners tried their damnest to capture everything in universal truths. One of the goals of the now-hated postwar housing plans was to figure out the universal truths in urban planning. It seemed like a good idea: once you nail down how people want to live in a city, you can build the perfect city efficiently and with less resources. Here, a quote from my gateway drug to urban planning, loosely translated by me from the Dutch version:

"Around 70 to 80 families was devised as the modular unit for urban planning and the building block of developments. A neigborhood block would then be designed for this 'one living unit', form directly following social function. This one block would then be repeated again and again and again, as if it were a stamp and the city a form."

Yeah, that strategy didn't work out. People's attitudes and tastes (which indirectly define real estate, policies, and urban planning) are just too complex and changing to capture in such universal truths. Pretty much every universal truth they found back then doesn't apply now anymore, or doesn't apply in rural areas, or doesn't apply in low-income neighborhoods, or [insert reason that makes things less simple]. I've heard the analogy that urban planning practice is often like playing billiards on a ship: once you think you have your shot lined up, the ship tilts and all the balls start to roll again.

Urban planning at its most interesting is about operating in a solution space that everyone can have an opinion on and can also changes over time and wherein your progress rarely converges to a standard. Despite millennia of cities we still haven't built a nearly-perfect one. But we have found a nearly-perfect way to measure time. Doesn't that say a lot?