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The Death of Urbanism. Marcus White
Читать онлайн.Название The Death of Urbanism
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9783887789114
Автор произведения Marcus White
Жанр Зарубежная прикладная и научно-популярная литература
Серия The Practice of Theory and the Theory of Practice
Издательство Bookwire
In 1859 Ildefons Cerdà produced plans for the extension ‘Eixample’ to Barcelona. Cerdà proscribed building heights, a carefully considered spatial structure and urban character with a direct relationship between streets and buildings, delicately balanced pedestrian and vehicular movement systems with in-ground and above ground services, and rigorous rules to ensure the protection of urban amenities such as light and air.
We will come back to Cerdà later, but for now, it is worth contemplating the level of careful consideration employed by Cerdà in the 1800s in contrast to the kind of globalised urban chaos described by Koolhaas or the monotonous, treeless, sidewalkless urban wasteland of Tarneit in Melbourne.
Urban decomposition
The death of urbanism is manifested in the slow death of many cities that are occurring around the world. We can find apparent evidence of the death of cities if we take an anthropomorphic approach and compare the human body to the city – a popular analogy with architects from Vitruvius, da Vinci, through to Le Corbusier. The death of urbanism might be confirmed if we think about the posthumous human body decomposition. The decomposition of the human body occurs in three phases. Firstly, autolysis (self-digestion), which begins immediately after death and involves circulatory systems consisting of cardiovascular (heart), pulmonary (lungs), systemic (arteries, veins, and vessels). The human body begins to eat itself – membranes in cells rupture and release enzymes that begin eating the cells from the inside out. If urbanism is indeed dead, we might think about the way many cities’ transport systems have ground to a halt. Despite having undergone numerous ‘urban surgery’ attempts to prolong the life of most major cities via procedures such as freeway bypasses (coronary bypass) and road widenings (stents), commute times in many cities have increased well beyond the ‘inflection point’ of a 45 minute commute time limit.
The next phase of decay is bloat. Leaked enzymes from the first phase produce gasses that de-densifies the corpse leading to the body to double in size. Clear examples of cities that are very much in the bloat phase of decomposition can be found in North America including Atlanta, Boston, St Louis, Orlando and Houston, and in Australia Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne spring to mind.
Finally, active decay and skeletonisation, where the liquefied internal organs are released from the body as it begins skeletal decomposition. For examples of how this plays out in urban form, see post-industrial European cities such as Turin and Frankfurt, more extreme cases in the rust belt cities in North America such as Detroit or, even more extreme, Katamatite in Australia which has about as much life-blood flowing through it as Guillermo del Toro’s portrayal of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen in the movie Hell Boy.
Good grief
Urban design and urbanism have struggled to come to terms with the aforementioned losses, while also struggling with a myriad of other perceived or impending losses including the loss of environmental stability, loss of affordable housing options, loss of design control or influence, and a loss of urban amenity.
In this book, we will explore various key urban design paradigms transitioning through a (mis)appropriation of Swiss-born psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross’ ‘five stages of grief’ from her seminal book, On Death and Dying – What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy & their own families (1973). The book is based on her research with terminal patients, dealing with loss in the post-modern world. In her book, Kübler-Ross explores multiple different types of emotional state, complex and dynamic types of grief, and coping mechanisms of people with incurable conditions. She touches on patients grieving past losses of health, mobility and independence, past losses of family members who had died, whilst also looking at losses and worries for their families, as well as the future loss and fear of death. She also traverses various emotional responses from patient’s families as they try to make sense of and cope with their imminent loss. Kübler-Ross’ book tackles these complex and mixed elements of past, present and future losses and a multitude of players by formulating the well-known concept of ‘five stages of grief’. In our book, we will use these five stages as a loosely fitting construct to traverse recent urban design paradigms and responses to the aforementioned urban losses.
Our analogy of applying the ‘stages of grief’ to urban design paradigms, is used in part as a narrative device, structuring our review of paradigms and design approaches, and partially as an attempt to give a new insight into the complex, pessimistic world of post-optimistic urban design.
The topic of urbanism cannot be tackled in a traditional ‘pure research’ manner, is not necessarily singular or elegant and needs to take on board many facets and juxtapose many seemingly ill-fitting ideas. Just as Kübler-Ross’ stages were not supposed to represent a formulaic linear progression, as Ira Byock M.D points out in the 2013 anniversary edition preface, our five stages are not strictly chronological nor mutually exclusive. And we will not strictly adhere to the death metaphor and will at
times foray into pseudoscience and philosophy, design technology analysis, and popular culture.
Of course, this is not the first book that uses the themes surrounding death and grief to explore cities. In the early 1960s Jane Jacobs, (or ‘gentrification Jane’ as she is known in many unaffordable inner-urban suburbs where historic neighbourhood preservation quickly translated into pricing out low-income populations), wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in which she critiques the planning and architecture of the 1950s leading to the ‘death’ of traditional North American cities. This book was highly influential throughout the 60s and 70s being treated with bible-like reverence and in some places, still haunts university syllabus presented as a contemporary theory even today. There are quite a few critical themes, including densification and land-use diversity in Jacob’s book related to urban grief that we will be returning to throughout the latter chapters of this book.
The five stages of grief are: ‘denial’; ‘anger’; ‘bargaining’; ‘depression’ and ‘acceptance’. These five stages are used as chapter headings, under which we symptomatically categorise design paradigms into the particular stages of grief. We will discuss key concepts of urban ‘loss’ that inform each of these paradigms and the design approaches and procedures used by each.
On urbanism (that is not dead or dying)
Before we launch into the five stages of grief, we feel it is useful to give a little bit of historical context discussing key themes of ‘healthy’ urbanism – connectivity, aesthetics and urban liveability to help frame the different urban design paradigms. We will talk a little about the birth of urbanism and the relationship between a population’s needs and human aspirations or ‘desires’, the urban design paradigms, and the methods and procedures used by architects, urban designers and policymakers.
The city is not the manifestation of someiron law [but rather] the result of changinghuman aspirations (Lynch, 1981).
The connected city: pack-donkey versus the 2D grid
Pre-Renaissance cities are generally described as either having grown organically – ‘the pack donkey’s way’ or having derived from a two-dimensional grid plan.
The pack-donkey meanders along, mediatesa little in his scatter-brained and distractedfashion, he zigzags in order to avoid largerstones, or ease the climb, or gain a