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Task of Urbanism

Task of Urbanism

Robert Fishman

Professor of Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning, University of Michigan

 

In this talk, I wish to introduce two further theses for debate, both implicit in my title. If we are "beyond utopia”, we have also reached the end of cities. I do not mean here that all cities are now fated to decay. I mean that we have reached the end of a whole era in history where the dynamism of civilizations was tied up with their capacity to focus their energies in great cities. The networks of communication that have arisen in the twentieth century now make possible a truly decentralized civilization where formerly urban functions are now distributed throughout whole regions. The functional necessity to concentrate trade, manufacturing, government, and culture at certain key locations now disappears, and with it the distinction between city and countryside which has hitherto defined all civilization. The tendency, therefore, of all new development is toward fragmentary, low-density development at many points simultaneously ―development that combines urban, suburban, and rural elements― what we in the United States call sprawl.

My third thesis is that the task of urbanism ―after utopia, and after the end of cities― is to create and defend a diverse plurality of forms within each region. After utopia, there can be no single model of urban or regional development. After the end of the need for cities, the continued existence of cities is now a matter of choice. We might choose to live in a post-urban environment defined by the single-family house, the automobile, the shopping mall, and television. This is already the choice of the majority of Americans, and I suspect it would be the choice of the majority of Europeans as well.

But there remains the possibility of consciously preserving the elements of diversity that exist within the region, and even adding to them. The San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon once observed that, in the past, the "urban experience" in a city like San Francisco was the by- product of the necessity to concentrate population, trade, and industry in a single very dense place. Now, he observes, it is the desire for the urban experience that enables dense cities to survive.

Cities may no longer be necessary for a technologically advanced and prosperous civilization, but they embody certain values that are difficult or impossible to achieve in a civilization without great cities. These include a sense of identity, history, public space, and social diversity. Moreover, even in the United States, a country endowed with seemingly limitless space, we have learned that it is virtually impossible to preserve open space within a region without a central city to concentrate population and activity. Urbanism after the end of cities means accepting that all the trends point toward the mess and sprawl of a privatized, decentralized environment. But urbanism after the end of cities is also profoundly and fundamentally a resistance movement: resistance to the dominant trends that threaten to reduce regional diversity. Urbanism after the end of cities means preserving great cities, small towns, and rural open spaces against trends that would otherwise engulf and destroy them.

Let me now return to Le Corbusier and the Plan Voisin in order to defend these three theses. I do not wish to dwell on all of Le Corbusier's errors: that would take me all night. But I do want to identify two of his assumptions that are implicit in the Plan Voisin and that were outmoded even by the 1920s. First, the Plan Voisin looked backward first to the nineteenth century idea of unilinear progress: that there were inevitable stages of technology and social organization, and that to achieve the next and higher stage we must ruthlessly discard the aging hulks of the old. Secondly, I must note that Le Corbusier questions everything about the form of the modern city (except for the necessity of the city itself). All of his utopian cities are capital cities, in the sense that they proceed from the assumption that society is organized around large, hierarchical organizations; total order can be achieved only when the elite can communicate face-to-face in the heart of the great metropolis. For all its glass-and-steel towers, Le Corbusier's ideal city remains within the paradigms of the nineteenth century industrial metropolis.

There were, I believe, two other urban utopians who saw more clearly the true twentieth- century trends toward decentralization: Ebenezer Howard and Frank Lloyd Wright. I am very pleased that the organizers of this conference chose Howard's 1898 plan of the "Social City" as the overall image for "the ideal city". It is indeed a remarkable graphic synthesis of a whole theory of the city and society. Ebenezer Howard was a modest London public stenographer who took it upon himself to plan the future of cities. Working only from the technology of the late nineteenth century ―the railroad, the interurban streetcar, the telephone and telegraph― Howard saw that there was no further need for the inhuman levels of concentration of the nineteenth century metropolis. Like almost everyone else who experienced the nineteenth- century metropolis in its period of most feverish growth, he regarded overcrowding as the fundamental problem. He asked the fundamental question: why crowd together in huge cities if this crowding is no longer necessary?

Howard believed that the basic social and economic trend of the twentieth century would be decentralization. If properly planned this decentralization would lead to a better way of life in "Garden Cities" of 30,000 people surrounded by perpetual green belts. The Social City diagram embodies his faith in "the marriage of town and country": overcoming the age-old distinction between city and countryside in a world of human-scaled communities in close touch with nature. The Social City would generate all the diversity of a great city without its inhuman scale.

(文章来源:[Real city, ideal city. Signification and function in modern space], “Urbanitats” NO. 7 excerpted