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Journal of Urban Design, Vol. 5, No. 3, 267290, 2000

Harmonies of Urban Design and Discords of City-form:

Urban Aesthetics in the Rise of Western Civilization

ABRAHAM AKKERMAN

ABSTRACT The cerebral theme in the layout of planned towns since antiquity has oftenreected the image of cosmic harmony and perfection, unfolding in various notions of theIdeal City. The underlying adage of much of urban design and planning duringmodernity has continued to be the paradigms of accord in science and perfection intechnology. Kindred to the notion of equilibrium in physical science, much of 20th-century urban design too has seen to it that planned city-form addresses urban growthwithin the ideal of a balanced environmental, economic or social development. The notionof the Ideal City thus has remained implicit in urban design through to the present day.The motif of the 20th-century city, however, has not been composure and equilibrium

proclaimed by the ideal. Rather, the factual contemporary city has been increasingly

characterized by disparity, neurosis and disequilibrium. The gap between a blueprint,and its factual aftermath in the city, has led the fervent observer to the discernment ofhuman fraud implanted in the mechanistic paradigm of modern city-form. The scienticremoteness of a city plan seems to have yielded a contradiction between urban existenceand human essence: the city can reasonably guarantee individuals survival, but in the

process it appears to strip them of their own authenticity. The individual, throughobservation of self and other humans within the contemporary city, discerns that theonly genuine sentiment emerging from the citys mechanistic ambience is that ofmeaninglessness, absurd, even insanity. The one humanly authentic virtue that contem-

porary city-form can still offer is not equilibrium but disequilibrium; not perfection butimperfection. Architecture of the 20th century seems to have acknowledged this distresson occasion by introducing deliberate imperfection as a design scheme. Commensurateconsideration in urban design today, however, is still missing.

Introduction

Between antiquity and the early Renaissance, urban design often reectedimages of current religious beliefs in cosmic harmony. Throughout antiquity and

the Middle Ages these beliefs were reected in notions of the Ideal City,conveying symmetry of city-form typied, for example, by the perimeters ofnew towns or newly founded colonies, often fashioned after the square or thecircle. During the Renaissance, Mannerism and the Baroque, the notion ofuniversal harmony continued to play a major role in ideal city plans and inplanned cities, frequently corresponding to congurations geared for military

Abraham Akkerman, Department of Geography, and the Regional and Urban Development Programme,University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5, Canada. Fax: (306) 966 5680. Email:

[email protected]

13574809 Print/14699664 Online/00/030267-24 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

DOI: 10.1080/13574800020006644


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268 A. Akkerman

defence (Rosenau, 1983, pp. 1415). Urban design during the industrial revo-lution and through to the 20th century, inspired by the image of success inscience, was guided by a conceited notion of planned coherence into sociospatialrenditions of balance and coordination (see, for example, Wilson, 1983). In theguise of accord, order or optimization, mechanistic equilibria became the stan-

dard in conscious urban design through much of the 20th century (e.g. Fried-man, 1962). As a central concept in mathematics and mechanics, the equilibriumhas also come to epitomize rationality in urban planning, in the conguration ofurban spaces, transportation arteries and complementary land uses. The plannedtown of the 20th century, an outcome of urban design since early modernity,thus recapitulated ancient notions of cosmic harmony as an archetype of theIdeal City (cf. Benjamin, 1972, in Buck-Morss, 1990, p. 114).

Yet, while the adherence to geometrical symmetry, for example, has often been quite useful in the planning of new Greek or Roman colonies, whereownership of land had to be clearly delineated, or in the construction of fortresstowns prior to the advent of gunpowder, the contrived equilibrium in thenewfangled planned city has yielded results that are at considerable variancefrom its avowed design objectives. Whether it be an industrial metropolis or asuburban neighbourhood, a postindustrial town or a new subdivision, a genuineperception of urban development has led to a recognition of the city that isinimical to the citys planned image. It is the discernment of disequilibrium inthe factual city, rather than the stability and composure planned for the city, that

has become the citys earmark. To fervent observers the singularity of theauthentic metropolis has been in its imbalance, absurdity and meaninglessness.These derisive qualities themselves, furthermore, have often resulted from thevery same equilibria prevailing, or sought after, in the planned city. The tension

between the authenticity of disequilibrium within the factual metropolis and theremoteness of the humanly alienating, mechanistic equilibrium emerging from acity plan led to striking reections by leading writers of the 20th century. Nocommensurate deliberations, however, emerged in urban design.

In The Castle, an incomplete novel for which Franz Kafka has been recognized

as one of the greatest of 20th-century writers, the alienation of the individual isrmly entrenched in the built form:

At every turn K. expected the road to double back to the Castle, andonly because of the expectation did he go on; he was atly unwilling,tired as he was, to leave the street, and he was also amazed at thelength of the village, which seemed to have no end; again and againthe same little houses, and frost-bound window-panes and snow andthe entire absence of human beings. (Kafka, 1992, p. 17 [1919])

Writing at the turn of the century, Kafka might well have prophesied a NorthAmerican subdivision at the centurys end. K., the novels hero, is a landsurveyor who never attains his goal of reaching the Castle where the chief

bureaucrat resides, just as Kafka himself never completes his novel. The town,with its streets leading to nowhere, and the Castle, with its bureaucrats access-ible to none, thus appear as a forgery, and the only pure realization is alienationitself. For indeed, the land surveyor, the foremost professional who sinceantiquity has measured property lots and laid new towns, has no reason to stay

in this town once all has been measured and once the towns layout has beencompleted. He forever leaves the towns of his residence behind, perpetually


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Harmonies of Urban Design and Discords of City-form 269

having to move from one territory to another to practise his profession ofperfection. Towns laid out already will have no need for land surveyors:

Youve been taken as Land Surveyor, as you say, but, unfortunately,we have no need for a Land Surveyor. There wouldnt be the least usefor one here. The frontiers of our little state are marked out and allofcially recorded. So what should we do with a Land Surveyor?(Kafka, 1992, p. 61 [1919])

More than any other realm merging art and technology, urban design carrieswith it the most commonplace impact. The tragic distortion of modernity isembodied by this merger, competent in the demolition of destitute neighbour-hoods, yet seldom able to replace them by anything but desolate perfection.Kafka calls on his reader to recognize that perfection is humanly meaningless;that an ideal is repugnant.

Interpreting such a call as a challenge to contemporary urban design broachesthe question as to whether incompleteness and imperfection in city-form carrya virtue. This study suggests that this, indeed, may be the case. Moreover, thehistorical review offered here suggests that the 20th century posed a milestonein the history of city-form. While urban design has been guided by the variousnotions of harmony throughout the ages, the alienating city of the 20th century

brought forward the longing for human authenticity, precisely through thehumanistically irrelevant attempts to keep the citys organization and infrastruc-ture in balance. The contradiction between urban efciency and human authen-

ticity perhaps has no solution. However, if urban design recognizes thisdilemma, Kafkas challenge will have been addressed: lest the frontiers of ourcities are marked out and all ofcially recorded.

Cosmic Harmony and Urban Planning in Classical Greece

The belief in cosmic harmony had been inborn in the conscious layout of citiessince antiquity. The rst sign of systematic city planning in the history ofcivilization, an orthogonal grid plan of straight streets, had appeared in Induscities as early as c. 2400 BCE. At Mohenjo-Daro 12 orthogonal city blocksmeasuring 1200 3 800 feet were formed by three 30-foot-wide avenues and twostreets crossing them at right angles. These very large blocks were subdivided byalleys up to 10 feet wide, onto which many of the houses opened. The threeavenues were identied to run north and south, with corresponding positioningin the subdivision of street blocks. It is the orienting of Mohenjo-Daro to thepoints of the compass, and the 12 blocks, apparently corresponding to the 12lunar months, that suggest adherence to a perceived cosmic order in early cities

of India (cf. Hawkes, 1973). Indian urban culture had an impact upon thedeliberate design of cities in ancient Greece, by way of Mesopotamia and Egypt,already in the 7th century BCE (Roth, 1993, p. 183). Land in both town andcountry throughout much of Classical Greece was being subdivided into uni-form rectangles, to ensure equitable land division (Jameson, 1991). Insofar aslandscape permitted, the orthogonal layout of new settlements or rebuilt oldsettlements (Figure 1) was therefore the norm in much of Classical Greece (Roth,1993, p. 191193).

In Greece too, however, the adherence to an orthogonal street pattern is

signicant due to its intriguing consistency with the Greek idea of the universe.Stemming from the practical need for the measurement of right angles to parcel


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Figure 1. Plan of Priene, c. 450 BCE.

out land, consistent development of orthogonal geometry is attributed to thephilosophical school that commenced with Pythagoras in southern Italy in 525BCE, and lasted for almost 1000 years carrying his name. It was the fortuitousunanimity of this pragmatic origin with Pythagorean geometry, and its xationwith musical form, that led to the schools canon of cosmic harmony.

This consistency can be observed also in the preoccupation of the PythagoreanSchool with the number 4 (the very rst integer which is the second power ofany other integer), with the geometry of the square and with the hypotenuse (seeBurnet, 1964, pp. 105106). Inuenced by the Pythagoreans, the 5th-century BCEpoet and philosopher Empedocles introduced the concept of Kosmos, as com-posed of four primeval elements (earth, re, water and air). The doctrine of thefour elements was adopted by Aristotle (384322 BCE) a century later, was fullyembraced by scholasticism throughout the Middle Ages and further sustainedduring the Renaissance.

In the history of urban design, the adoption of the number 4 as a paradigmof balance is also exemplied by the square, a signicant element in the planningof fortied towns from the time of 2nd-century Roman colonies, such as Timgad(Figure 2), through to Baroque urban places and towns such as the 17th-centuryRichelieu (Figure 3).

The Pythagorean legacy of an orderly universe reveals itself in the reconstruc-tion plan of Miletus (c. 479 BCE, Figure 4), where rigid geometrical layout isimposed upon topography, rather than following it. The rebuilding of Miletus is

described by Aristotle with reference to a tripartite division of the city intodistinct zones:


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Figure 2. Timgad (Thimugadi) 2nd century (after Owens, 1991, p. 135).

Hippodamus [c. 500440 BCE], the son of Euryphon, of Miletus, who

invented the division of cities and laid out Piraeus wanted toinstitute a city of ten thousand men, divided into three parts, and tomake one part artisans, one farmers, and the third the military part andthat possessing arms. He also divided the territory into three parts, onesacred, one public and one private. (Politics II, 8, in Apostle & Gerson,1986, p. 55).

Based on Aristotles gures, Miletus may have had perhaps 30 000 inhabitants,whereas the typical Greek city, the polis, had population much smaller than that:

Aristotles teacher, Plato (427347 BCE), described the ideal polis as having 5040citizens. In fact, only Athens, Syracuse and Akragas had recorded populationover 20 000.

Platos own most signicant work, the Republic (Adams, 1963), completed c.380 BCE, refers to the ideal polis as composed also of three classes of citizens, afact that led to speculations as to the impact the plan of Miletus may have hadupon Plato (Von Gerkan, 1924, p. 62; Lang, 1952). The social structure of PlatosIdeal City is austere and, to the extent that Plato elaborates on the citys physicallayout, it corresponds in rigidity to his view of the citys social structure:

The conditions suppose a population with no disrelish for social


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272 A. Akkerman

Figure 3. Richelieu, c. 1638, engraving by Israel Silvestre (Chartier et al., 1981,p. 114).

regulations, who will tolerate life-long limitations of property, restric-tions such as those we have proposed on procreation, and deprivationof gold and other things which it is certain, from what has been saidalready, that the legislator will prohibit; they presuppose further thecentral position of the capital, and the distribution of the dwelling-houses over the territory, as [the legislator] has prescribed, almost asthough he were telling his dreams or fashioning a city and its inhabi-tants out of waxwork. (Laws V, 746, in Saunders, 1970, p. 217)

To Plato, orderliness in the tripartite division of the city-state arises from thedepths of the human soul (Republic II). In Platos mind, there is a fastidiousmutuality, mirrored by the human soul onto the Ideal City (Republic II), and thusthe Ideal City is a universal archetype, common to all.

The Ideal City of Stoicism and Early Christianity

The notion of the harmonious city as a universalist imprint was furtheradvanced by the Stoics, about 300 BCE, most evidently in their concept ofKosmopolis, the universe as it were, the common home of gods and man, or acity that belongs to both (Dio Chrysostom [1st-century CE], 36th logos, para. 21,translated in Schoeld, 1991, p. 62). The universe, in this view, is the only truecity, for no one knows of a good city, made up entirely of good elementsneither a mortal one that came to be in the past, nor one that is to be one dayin the future worth conceiving ofunless it be a city of the blessed gods inheaven (Dio Chrysostom, translated in Schoeld, 1991, p. 62).

Harmony, and the allied concepts of order and symmetry, as guiding princi-

ples in the arts and the sciences since ancient Greece also became pivotal in thehistory of later urban thought. The most important link between the morphology


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Figure 4. Plan of Miletus, c. 479 BCE.

of the Classical Greek city and urban perceptions of the Middle Ages and theRenaissance is the notion of the planned town, expounded in De architectura of

the Roman military architect and engineer Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (active 4630BCE). Based upon concepts Vitruvius put forward in his own ideal city plans(Figure 5), the suggestion was made that his main concern, too, was to satisfy thepremises of harmony, only using circular (rather than square) forms for compli-ance with regularity, enclosure and wind protection (Rosenau, 1983).

In the 5th century, the Stoic ideal of Kosmopolis had received a magnicentamplication in St Augustines 18 books of The City of God (Tasker, 1945). It isperhaps no coincidence that Aurelius Augustinus (354430), as the bishop ofHippo, found it signicant enough to address the base nature of the real city of

his time, when deliberating on a heavenly community in The City of God.Borrowing from the Stoics to contrast the terrestrial city of sin, the underlyingtenets of St Augustines treatise are the concepts of justice and accord astheological principles in an ideal community. Signicant in St Augustines socialideal, it has been pointed out, was, yet again, the notion of harmony and

balance, or Ordo, allied to a cosmic system of awless relations, Ordo creaturum(Barker, 1962, p. xii). St Augustines juxtaposition of the two cities, too, points toa universal parity:

Two cities were formed by two loves: the earthly by the love of self,even to the contempt of God; the heavenly by the love of God, even to


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Figure 5. Vitruviuss plan of an ideal city (after 18th-century edition of Vitruviusby Galiani (Rosenau, 1983, p. 70)).

the contempt of self. The former, in a word, glories in itself, the latterin the Lord. (City of God XIV, 28, in Tasker, 1945)

The notion of the Ideal City in St Augustine emerges thus as an ontologicalcomponent of cosmic balance, not a mere religious and social attempt at

rectifying conditions in the existing society.The `love of self, by which the terrestrial city is characterized by St Augustine,

has a factual expression in the prevailing irregular plans of most medieval cities.The orientation of houses in relation to streets as well as to adjacent dwellingsoften mirrored the desire of property owners for access to market places or mainthoroughfares rather than pointing to a prearranged, centralized scheme (Dick-inson, 1963, p. 315). On the other hand, the coveting of geometrical symmetry ina plan continued to characterize medieval new towns, outposts of dominantcity-states such as Florence or Siena in the late Middle Ages. Florences ownoriginal street plan, dating back perhaps to 9080 BCE, was possibly laid out ina chess-board fashion (Havereld, 1913, p. 92), a fact that may have reinforcedthe fancy for orthogonal, symmetric plans in the new towns as well.

Particularly striking examples are the two Florentine new towns, San Giovaniand Terranuova. In both towns the deepest lots face onto the main street in thecentre of town, perceived as the rst or the central city block. Retreating towardsthe city wall, there are several rows of blocks that succeed the rst block. As theynear the town wall, the blocks within each row, and their respective lots, become

progressively shallower. While lots in different rows retain the same width, theydiffer from one another in their depths, determined by the distance of their


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respective row from the central block. In San Giovani (founded 1299) the lotdepth is determined by the shorter and the longer side of right-angled trianglesopposite the angles of 30 and 60, respectively. In Terranuova (founded 1377)the depths are determined by the sides of right-angled triangles, opposite thecorresponding angles of 15, 30, 45, 60 and 75 (Friedman, 1988). Other

medieval examples of orderly plans, often intimating aspects of property devel-opment and speculation but also of trade and commerce, can be found as far asthe British Isles (Slater, 1990).

Equilibria in Ideal Cities of the Renaissance and Mannerism

The Pythagorean concept of harmony appears to have culminated in the aes-thetic and scientic advances of the Renaissance and Mannerism. As a method-

ological tool emerging prior to and during the Renaissance, geometricalsymmetry had continued to be an essential tenet in both the art and the naturalsciences of early modernity. Given their great emphasis on defensivefortications, Renaissance plans for ideal cities can rightfully be viewed as acreative union of art and technology within a single project. Perhaps more thanany other such union, Renaissance town planning had further recast the conceptof harmony into a more generalized and articulate notion of equilibrium, thusencompassing a transformation of the Greek heritage into early modern art andscience.

The Renaissance recognition of balance as an aesthetic feature in a physicalobject had been brought forward rst by Leone Battista Alberti (14041472) who,in his 10-book treatise, Libri de re aedicatoria decem, dened beauty as thatreasoned harmony of all the parts within a body, so that nothing can be added,taken away, or altered, but for the worse (Alberti, [1485], VI, 2, in Rykwert etal., 1988, p. 156). Almost 100 years prior to Alberti, rendition of the perspectivewas introduced in painting by Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena and Giotto diBondone in Florence. Albertis adherence to aesthetic balance through theintroduction of the perspective into urban design became evident shortly after1447, when he became the architectural advisor to Pope Nicholas V. Commis-sioned by the Pope to prepare a plan for Rome, Alberti never saw the fullimplementation of his proposal (due to the Popes death in 1455), but the planitself discloses Albertis proclivity:

From [a large] square three straight and broad avenues were to start,and terminate in another open space at the foot of the Vatican Hill; thecentral avenue was to lead to the Basilica, the one to the right to the

Vatican Palace, that on the left to the building facing it. (Pastor, 1899,pp. 171176)

Alberti articulated the notion of the perspective and the vanishing point in Dere aedicatoria, and through it wielded inuence on many of his contemporaries.Among the theoreticians, Antonio Averlino Filarete (c. 14001469) markedRenaissance urban design with lasting profundity. His treatise, Trattatodarchitettura, is an impassioned persuasion of the Milan count Francesco Sforzato commission Filarete with the construction of a new town, Sforzinda. Filarete

describes the plan of his Ideal City as a perfect octagon, created by twosuperimposed squares, with details on fortications and gates (Figure 6). There


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Figure 6. Filaretes plan of Sforzinda (after his Trattato darchitettura , c. 1464).

are 16 evenly distributed main avenues, each 24m wide, leading from the gatesto the centre of the city (Filarete, 1457, Book VI, 43v, in Spencer, 1965).

Filaretes Ideal City echoed some existing practices in the layout of streets, but

primarily it portended urban design principles that came to be adopted in theconstruction of Renaissance new towns in Italy, France and Germany: theintroduction of secondary piazze; the conguration of streets; and the placementof monumental buildings (Rosenau, 1983).

Akin to existing monasteries and to ideal physical layouts of new towns, idealharmonious communities were envisaged by social and religious thinkers of theRenaissance. Perhaps intended primarily as a satire on contemporaneous En-glish society, Sir Thomas Mores Utopia, rst published in 1516, became epitheticto all notions of ideal communities. Although the extent to which More was

aware of the works on ideal cities of his European contemporaries remainsunclear, their overall cultural context was not lost on him. On his imaginaryisland there were 54 cities designed almost identically after Amaurot, the capital.Amaurot itself

lies up against a gently sloping hill; the town is almost square in shape The streets are conveniently laid out for use by vehicles and forprotection from the wind. Their buildings are by no means paltry; theunbroken rows of houses facing one another across the streets through

each ward make a ne sight. The streets are twenty feet wide. (More,1516, in Logan & Adams, 1989, pp. 4347)


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Harmony also guided the civic programme ofUtopia, where More touched uponsuch modern concepts as optimal city size and transportation within the contextof agricultural production and labour.

The results of continuing explorations into the perspective in painting becamea guiding principle entrenched in Renaissance town planning. This is perhaps

best exemplied by some of the notes of Andrea Palladio (15081581) in his FourBooks on Architecture:

The principal streets ought to be so comparted, that they may bestraight, and lead from the gates of the city in a direct line to thegreatest and principal piazza; and sometimes also, the site permitting it,lead in the same manner directly to the opposite gate by the sameline. (Palladio, 1570, in Placzek, 1965)

Palladios contemporaries and compatriots used Filaretes work as a reference to

further develop ideal city plans as projects on circular defensive systems andfortications, e.g. Pietro Cataneo in his LArchitettura (1554) and Girolamo Maggiin Della Forticatione delle Citta (1564), or in the actual design of new towns suchas Palmanuova (1593), near Venice, attributed to Vicenzo Scamozzi.

The appeal to confer a geometrically symmetrical perimeter upon a city wasdirectly related to the delineation of a citys boundaries by its fortication walls.As people were driven from surrounding rural areas, the walled perimeter ofcities also provided safety and relative tranquillity. Cities thus lled up quickly,

and whereas within city walls one could still nd relative placidity, the suburbsoutside walls became hubs of crime and destitution (Blake, 1939).The political ideal of Mores Utopia, combined with a cosmic vision of

harmonious relations, led Tommaso Campanella in the late 16th century to writeThe City of the Sun (Donno, 1981) (rst published 1602). Campanella wrote his

book upon a brief respite from a Rome prison in 1595, just at a time whenDomenico Fontana, under Pope Sixtus V (during 15851590), signicantly re-designed the city. Whereas Fontana placed four avenues radiating from theSanta Maria Maggiore Church, Campanellas vision of The City of the Sun,

perhaps also referring to Romes seven hills, was ofa hill upon which the greater part of the city is situated The city isdivided into seven large circuits, named after the seven planets. Pass-age from one to the other is provided by four avenues and four gatesfacing the four points of the compass the entire city is two miles andmore in diameter and has a circumference of seven miles. (Donno, 1981,pp. 727)

Equilibria as Seeds of Modernity in Baroque City Planning

In many respects, Sixtuss design was ingrained in the plan launched in the1450s under Nicholas V. The papal design principle was characterized by twofeatures: rst, to have a wedge of three streets meeting at a single point andaxially aligned with a fourth street; and second, to have the street complex itselfaligned with hoisted obelisks as place makers and orientation guides. However,the overriding concern of Romes early Baroque urban renewal was, possibly forthe rst time in the history of urban design, a conscious focus on harmonizing

transportation and the movement of people, pilgrims in particular, with theconguration of monuments, streets and open spaces (Burroughs, 1994).


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Changes in the layout of Roman streets, following Nicholass initiative, hadoccurred already under the Popes Julius II (ponticate 15031513) and Leo X(ponticate 15131521), and Sixtuss redesign was the pinnacle of efforts over thecentury preceding him. Major among these early changes in the redesign ofRome was a new conguration of open spaces proposed or made by Donato

Bramante (14441514), under Julius II, and later by Michelangelo (14751564). In1505 construction began on Bramantes plan for the immense church of St Peter(replacing an ancient basilica built by Constantine in 333), with the intention of

building a large open space around the stupendous temple. Michelangelosrevised design of St Peters (c. 1536) focused on centralizing the church withinits context of open space and access. A similar attempt at visual balance wasmade by Michelangelo in the redesign of the Campidoglio, the Capitoline Hill inRome, where a measure of order was introduced into the initially irregularlandscape geometry (Roth, 1993, pp. 375376).

Sixtuss vast spatial reorganization of Rome linked the major religious sitesthrough a vast network of new roads supported by fountains to which waterwas piped, for the rst time since Roman times, through a rebuilt ancientaqueduct. The lofty attempt of Sixtus V was to physically link the great basilicasof San Lorenzo, Santa Croce, San Giovanni and the church of St Peter. Thus thegreat basilicas became nodes of a new, monumental street network in whichancient obelisks were raised and consecrated as beacons of pilgrims naldestination points. Here the notion of equilibrium evolved into a new dynamic

form heralding a modern concern for the balancing of utilitarian needs, move-ment in particular, within the context of urban development opportunities.

However, classical symmetry in urban design retained its appeal well into the18th century. In the early 17th century, the Bavarian town of Freudenstadt(Figure 7) was built by Heinrich Schickhardt (15581635), following an idealtown plan (Figure 8) by Albrecht Du rer in his treatise Etliche Underricht zuBefestigung der Stett, Schloss und Flecken (1527). Along with Campanellas The Cityof the Sun, the unfolding of Du rers plan at Freudenstadt inspired the Germantheologian Johann Valentin Andreae in his vision of the utopian community

Christianopolis (Andreae, c. 1619, in Held, 1914, p. 140):

Its shape is a square, whose side is seven hundred feet, well fortiedwith four towers and a wall. It looks, therefore, toward the fourquarters of the earth. Eight other very strong towers [are] distributedthroughout the city. (Christianopolis , Chapter VII, in Held, 1914, p. 140)

The conformity to geometric balance that appears in the imaginary blueprints ofChristianopolis (Figure 9) or The City of the Sun runs in parallel to actual physicallayouts such as those of Freudenstadt and of other Mannerist or Baroqueplanned cities or city-forms. Geometric balance is the signature of Parisian urbanplaces built by Henri IV, and of the new towns of Henrichemont, Charleville,Richelieu and others, all examples of Mannerist and early Baroque town plan-ning in the early 17th century. The social awareness of Mores Utopia or FrancisBacons New Atlantis (1627), however, is often absent in Mannerist plans, as theyseldom pay attention to detailed physical congurations within their cities.

The ideal city plans of the Frenchman Iaques Perret (Figure 10) and, later, the

plan of Versailles by Andre le No tre and Louis Le Vau, as well as the layout ofMannerist planned cities such as Naarden in Holland (late 17th century), all


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Figure 7. Schickhardts plan of Freudenstadt, c. 1599.

show afnity with axial, symmetrical design. Idealized geometric forms, whichhad ourished in Renaissance city planning, however, gradually became moreconservative, keeping a nominal balance instead of the unequivocal symmetry ofdetail (Rosenau, 1983, p. 58).

Figure 8. Albrecht Du rers plan of an ideal city (after his Etliche Underricht zuBefestigung der Stett, Schloss und Flecken, 1527).


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Figure 9. Andreaes Christianopolis , in a late 17th-century edition of his Rei publicaeChristianopolitanae descriptio.

Much as the planned city of the Renaissance and Mannerism appears to haveaddressed the notion of equilibrium through the works of Alberti and Filarete,so the early modern notions of equilibrium in the city are indebted to SirChristopher Wren (16321723). Wrens proposed plan for London following theGreat Fire of 1666 balanced pedestrian trafc with emerging modes of vehiculartransportation, adhering, at the same time, to the Vitruvian ideal plan (Figures5 and 11).

Wrens was one of numerous other plans that followed the Great Fire. It isnoteworthy that among these was a plan for London by the physicist RobertHooke, the discoverer in 1678 of the elasticity law in which the notion ofequilibrium is fundamental. It is a matter of historical record that, four yearsprior to Wrens 1666 proposal, another distinguished physicist, Robert Boyle,had already shown an equilibrium in the elasticity of solid bodies. Wren himself

presented in 1661 a theory of elastic impact, in which he equalled the force ofcollision to balance in a mechanical system (Bennett, 1972, p. 72).


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Figure 10. Perrets town plan (after his Des fortications et artices architecture etperspective, 1601; the plan led to the actual design of Henrichemont).

Harmony and Discord in Early Modern Urban Design

Although Wrens plan for London was never executed, it foreshadowed thedawn of the ideal industrial city that became the motif of much of urban designduring and after the 18th-century Enlightenment. It is fair to say that urbandesign of the Enlightenment was affected by two antithetic developments: onthe one hand, the archaeological discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in themid-18th century; and on the other hand, the emergence of Romanticism as thelonging for naturalness in reaction to the mathematically ideal paradigms ofearly modern science.

The streets of the two Roman cities destroyed in the sudden eruption ofVesuvius in 79 CE, showed impressive adherence to geometry, thus reinforcingthe universalist notion of mathematics and rationality as perpetual standards inurban design. The rationalist standard became most apparent in the 1755 plan ofClaude-Nicolas Ledoux for Chaux, an ideal industrial town that was to belocated in eastern France. The town was to be set on an oval plan in the centreof which the house of the towns administrator would be located, adjoined byindustrial buildings in which the processing of brine, dug in the nearby saltmines, was to take place. In the oval ring around the industrial centre, workers

apartments would be placed, the whole town complex being surrounded by agreen belt in which public facilities, gardens and parks would be located.


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Figure 11. Wrens plan for London, 1666.

This geometric precision found many adherents on the Continent, but it wasalso countered, in the British Isles, by rustic garden designs such as Stourheadand Blenheim, and by fake medieval ruins such as Hagley Park (Roth, 1993). Thedisillusion with the emerging industrial city was ultimately articulated by

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778). The Swiss thinker made a persuasive argu-ment for the rejection of conventions exposed as hiding corrupt practices inurban society, and for the celebration of the natural man. A suburban park,picturesque yet unkempt, was established just outside Paris by one ofRousseaus patrons, to challenge the rationalism of the Enlightenment using the

precepts of Rousseaus philosophy.The 19th- and 20th-century visionary plans, such as the Garden City (1898) of

Ebenezer Howard or La ville radieuse (1933) of Le Corbusier, as well as themodern redesign of cities such as Karlsruhe (18041824) by Friedrich Weinbren-ner or Paris (18531870) by Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann, attempted tointroduce urban equilibrium in a yet further blend of art and technology. Towhat extent these modern attempts were successful as city planning notions isstill open to debate (Roth, 1993, p. 442).

Haussmanns project, the more pragmatic among those mentioned, is a case inpoint. The narrow, dark and vermin-infested streets and alleys of Paris, much asin other European cities, were often the outcome of unwitting building schemesfrom the Middle Ages. Void of sunlight or adequate air circulation, as well as

being frequent focal points of simmering discontent, such urban settings servedas hubs of revolutionary conspiracy against the government. From here arsonattacks on government outposts and monuments were led, the clouds of smokehanging over the city once inspiring comparisons to the eruption of Vesuviusand the fall of Babylon (Evenson, 1979). The hiding places within this tortuous

urban environment, however, also constituted an ideal defensive formationagainst the police or any advancing intruder. Ostensibly addressing public


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health problems arising from overcrowding and urban blight, but primarilyconcerned with popular insurgency and urban warfare threatening the govern-ment of Napoleon III, Haussmann, the Prefect of the Seine departement, hadresponded by razing much of the medieval centre of Paris. The narrow, tortuousstreets throughout much of central Paris were thus replaced by wide boulevards,

emulating the redesign of Rome under Sixtus V (Roth, 1993). Haussmanns airy,exposed arterial thoroughfares created a new standard of an emerging metro-politan environment where access to air and sun came in response to currentdiscoveries that traced the propagation of disease to local causes such as dirt,overcrowding, lack of sunlight and decient air circulation (Sutcliffe, 1971).Calling for spatial accord between plazas, avenues and monuments, Haussmannundoubtedly reinforced an urban design standard that came to be admired bymany a planner and architect (Sutcliffe, 1971, pp. 29, 326). At the turn of thecentury, Haussmanns model came to be followed elsewhere, from Chicago(Wrigley, 1987) to Canberra (Fischer, 1989) and New Delhi (Irving, 1981,pp. 8287).

However, Haussmanns urban renewal was as much a solution to publichealth hazard and urban decay as it was a ruthless answer to riots and rifeinsurrection. To Haussmanns critics, widening of the streets to accommodatecannon re against the barricades only made sense in viewing the metropolis asa battleground, a place of conict rather than accord (Cacciari, 1993, p. 22). Itwas the old, undulating, narrow street or alley, deprived of sun and hygiene,

menacing as it was, that formed a hub of propitious surprise where daily lifetook place. The signature of Haussmanns new design, the destruction of centralParis by the introduction of wide boulevards, now epitomized the ideal of thesurprise-free city, geared towards the machine rather than the person, seekingan equilibrium rather than a prospect for challenge in the accidental, andconformity rather than occasion for adventure in the unforeseen.

Disequilibrium as an Inherent Aspect of Contemporary City-form

The mechanized, automated environment of the contemporary city continues toensure a relatively predictable and purposely surprise-free milieu. Undoubtedly,it thus provides, rst and foremost, a relatively safe environment for most urbandwellers. The unexpected outcome of this attempt has been, however, the threatto the dwellers own humanity. The city, the largest time-regulated, articialentity, provides protection to most of its residents. It does so by securingphysical survival in the city through organization and infrastructure anchoredwithin the image of equilibrium. However, as such it also transforms humanindividuals into mere components of the metropolis, mechanical parts bynecessity. The city thus bends individuals into becoming their own counterfeits.If there is an inherent paradox between human authenticity and survival, thenthe modern city seems to epitomize it.

One needs only to look at the works of Dostoyevski (Notes from Underground),Kafka (The Trial), Camus (The Outsider), Sartre (Nausea) and Beckett (Waiting forGodot) to recognize the streak common to them all: dreadful reections on thedweller of the industrial city. Alienation, the underlying motive of modernexistentialism, appears in these authors within contexts of scientic determinism,

bureaucracy, achromic behaviour, the industrial bourgeoisie or homelessness.Arguably, urban progress as well as urban decay, the equilibrium and the


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disequilibrium, can be interpreted as aspects of scientic and technologicaldevelopment. However, it is the inherent impossibility of reconciling betweenthe authenticity of the individual and the progress of the city that leads to thealienation of the city dweller (Akkerman, 1998, pp. 154170).

Nowhere does the contempt for mechanistic equilibrium in the city register

better than in Sartres Nausea. Sartre describes thus his ctitious city of Bouvilleand its residents, some 80 years after Haussmanns reconstruction of Paris:

They come out of their ofces after their day of work, they look at thehouses and squares with satisfaction, they think its their city, a good,solid bourgeois city. They arent afraid, they feel at home. All they haveever seen is trained water running from taps, light which lls

bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees heldup with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, thateverything happens mechanically, that the world obeys xed, un-changeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed,the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, leadmelts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves Ho tel de Villeat 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think aboutTomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one dayat their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same.(Sartre, 1964, p. 158)

Sartres likening of the city dwellers to objects, their happiness to a mechanicalequilibrium of the city of which they are part, is also a condemnation of fraudimbued by city life precisely due to mechanical adherence to an equilibrium.Indeed, whereas the guiding principle in the design of ideal cities had histori-cally rested on the various notions of the equilibrium, one of the aspects of latemodernity has been the cognizance of the urban disequilibrium: the authenticityin the ugliness, discordance and insanity of the city.

The conscious experience of the 20th century led to the acknowledgement of

the urban ugly, rstly as an attempt at its elimination. In the USA the CityBeautiful movement at the turn of the century sprang as a civic programmeseeking charm, order and cleanliness in the wealthy anks of US cities (Peterson,1987). Ultimately, however, the late encounter with urban ugliness led not onlyto its acceptance, but in some quarters of postmodern urban culture also to itscelebration, as an acclamation of the disequilibrium itself. Theodor Adorno(19031969) explained this as a historical reaction to the notion of classicalharmony, as the historical emergence of an antithesis to the beautiful:

the ugly subject matter, it is said, becomes in some higher sense beautiful because it helps produce a dynamic equilibrium. This is inline with one of the motifs of Hegels aesthetics, where beauty is not theresultant equilibrium per se but always the latter together with thetension that produced it. Harmony which tries to disown the tensionsthat came to rest in it becomes false, disturbing, even dissonant.(Adorno, 1984, p. 68)

Authenticity in the urban ugly, too, rises in an aesthetic meta-equilibriumagainst attempts at urban mechanistic congruity.


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City-form and the Aesthetics of Authenticity

Nowhere else could Adornos observation be more ample than in postindustrialurban environments. In conrmation, not too long ago, Newsweek magazinereported on the transformation of two houses in

a dilapidated area on Detroits east side into a kind of living art gallery.Now the painted word LOVE stretches across the street. A bathtub ina vacant lot becomes a cornucopia of tires, fenders and road signs, andold bicycles dangle from tree limbs to compose a half-articial sculp-ture. (Newsweek, 1990, p. 64).

The urban ugly thus epitomizes the disequilibrium but, quaintly, the disequi-librium of the ugly transcends into the only authentic sentiment in a world ofcoerced consonance.

Urban alienation, as a manifestation of the ugly, itself becomes the onlygenuine faculty in The Castle and The Trial of Franz Kafka. The allusion to theurban context in Kafkas literary work is somewhat less explicit than in SartresNausea. Unlike Sartres novel, The Trial and The Castle arise from an intensechildhood environment, and the display of the inane and the absurd in thesetwo towering works by Kafka does not provide unambiguous condemnation ofthe modern city. Yet, in order to comprehend Kafkas work one must delve intothe built environment of his childhood. Here, again, the tension between thespontaneous and the mechanistic, between mystery and predictability, between

the authentic and the fraudulent, emerges unequivocally. Within the context ofthis tension, ugliness and beauty lose their conventional meaning. The poverty-stricken Josefov district of Prague, near where Kafka grew up, was a hub ofphantom-like, petrifying reality:

Beneath the eaves of these strange medieval houses grouped togetherunder one roof, there were gloomy little rooms, that reminded thevisitor more of an animals lair than a room for human beings There,

below, in the smoke-blackened rooms the ears of the visitors would be

deafened by the excruciating sounds of the harmonica, or the strings ofa badly-tuned harp, plucked by the arthritic ngers of an old, blindharpist. They would awaken profound feelings of melancholy, whilston the opposite side of the road, behind brightly-lit windows, peoplewould be shouting and dancing to the strains of the piano. Here,among the dreg of the metropolis both easy and hard-earned money,health and youth were squandered away and buried for good. (Frynta,1960, pp. 5758)

A continuum of disconcerting bewilderment to many a Prague resident, Josefovmet at the turn of the century a fate similar to that of central Paris a few yearsearlier. In 1893 the Law of Resanitation was decreed, much of Pragues Josefovwas demolished and rebuilt, and the main artery now cutting through theformerly dilapidated district was named Paris Boulevard. Here is what Kafkahad to say to one of his writer friends after the redesign of Josefov:

The dark corners, the mysterious passages, the boarded-up windows,the dirty yards, the noisy beer-shops and the shuttered inns still live in

us. We walk through the broad streets of the newly-built town. Yet oursteps and our glance are unsure. Innerly we still shiver as we did in the


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old streets of misery. Our hearts still know nothing of the resanitationthat has been carried out. The sick old Jewish Town is much more realto us than the new hygienic town now surrounding us (from Kafkasconversation with Gustav Janouch as quoted in Frynta, 1960, pp. 5960)

The Prague of his youth never left Kafka, precisely for the purity of its absurdityand the authenticity of its disequilibrium. Just as elsewhere, the replanning ofPragues old town was an attempt to introduce convention and public healthinto the urban form. Yet, by bringing about sanitation it only transformedinsanity: the absurd of urban existence had merely moved from Kafkas Josefovinto Sartres Bouville.

Beyond Modernity: Concluding Remarks

The dread of human authenticity within mechanistically imbued fraud, thestrain between equilibrium and disequilibrium and the search for meaning wereat the heart of urban existence of the 20th century. Recognition of this tensionseems to be the wellhead of much of contemporary reective thought on the city.Harvey (1989) has called on urban designers and planners to recognize the forceof self-diversication among city dwellers, and to provide for its expression inwhat he has labelled `postmodernism in the city. Extreme results of thisdiversication, such as the centreless urban form of contemporary southern

California, have come to be called `postmodern urbanism (Dear & Flusty, 1998).These unappealing consequences have led Olsen (1986) to conclude that asolution is neither the starry-eyed propaganda of the town planners anddisciples of the [modern] architecture, nor the appalled rejection with which wecontemplate what those planners and disciples have done (Olsen, 1986, p. xi)

but in the recognition of historicity, of the search itself. A contemporary sourceof postmodernity in urban design, 20th-century ideal urban planning notionssuch as those of Tony Garnier or Le Corbusier, thus need not be eliminated but,rather, drawn upon as in some of the Art Nouveau of Anton Gaud.

Tony Garniers (18691948) mechanistic rationality, which came to dene20th-century urban planning, is best traced to his socialist Ideal City, Une citeindustrielle (Figure 12). Here social harmony is exemplied by the non-existenceof a police station (much as in Howards Garden City) or law courts. Theadherence to symmetry and visual harmony is substituted by balanced relation-ships in transportation access to sites, in the distribution of housing andemployment and in the cognizance of community needs within the city. As anearly spokesman of the International Style in architecture and urbanism, Garnierexerted a primal inuence upon urban planning of the early 20th century.Following a meeting with Le Corbusier in 1907, the latter reected on theprofundity of Garniers ideas as having led to Le Corbusiers own ContemporaryCity for Three Million People (or Ville contemporaine as titled originally).

The 20th centurys engrossment in the mechanistic paradigm of traditionalscience could be no better punctuated than by Le Corbusiers model dwelling,the Maison Citrohan; a humorous allusion to the popular French car, the Citroen,pointing to Le Corbusiers profound belief that a house is a `machine for living(Frampton, 1992, pp. 153154). As a shelter, the modern metropolis too, in its

undertaking for efcacy, is forced to adopt the paradigm of equilibrium in orderto streamline human beings residing with its connes. Inadvertently, however,


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Figure 12. Tony Garnier, Une cite industrielle, 1917.

it thus only sharpens their foundational dilemma. To that extent the modernmetropolis, ironically, can be credited with the rise of 20th-century existential-ism. In its aesthetic expression, existentialism not only coincides with, but also

is part and parcel of, the end of the industrial revolution. The brutal manifesta-tions of progressthe overcrowded, industrial city and its disequilibriabe-come the breeding ground of the philosophy of despair. The mechanisticequilibrium of the industrial city, overpowering in its never-ending attempt toconsolidate an omnipresent crowd, is perceived by the existentialist writer ashumanly fraudulent, only to be discerned on the backdrop of the authenticity ofthe disequilibrium. The perceived fraud within the mechanistic city thus givesrise to a new brand of dynamic correspondence with the authenticity of thedisequilibrium.

Twentieth-century architecture has not remained deaf to the existentialiststance. The architectural quintessence of deliberate disequilibrium is the SagradaFamilia cathedral in Barcelona. Created by Anton Gaud (18521926) early in the20th century, the cathedral has been left unnished, its slender towers compet-ing for attention with huge hoisting cranes that have been purposely left on site.In the true spirit of Barcelona the Sagrada Familia rises over the city as arebellious pun on the mechanized urbanism surrounding it. Gaud appears hereas an architectural oracle rebutting automatism by embracing it, satirizing the

contentment in mechanical eloquence by containing it.Gaud too could not have been more prophetic: the gratication of mechanical


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reasoning itself came to a screeching halt in 1931 when the mathematician KurtGo del (19061978) showed, on the merits of automatic reasoning in formal logic,that any axiomatic system includes true propositions that cannot be proved, i.e.that any axiomatic system is by necessity incomplete (Nagel & Newman, 1993,pp. 4597). In a gurative sense Go del echoed the two towering and perpetually

incomplete achievements of humans early in the 20th century: the SagradaFamilia and The Castle.

However, if automatism in human behaviour is the apparent analogue to themechanical reasoning of formal logic, should not the imperfection of the city beespoused and incorporated rather than expunged? The last decades of the 20thcentury witnessed architectural expression very much akin to the notion ofdesigned imperfection and incompleteness, as a celebration of the disequi-librium. In 1984 Bernard Tschumi, in collaboration with Peter Eisenman and thephilosopher Jacques Derrida, in their project Parc de La Villette, ushered decon-structivism, an aspiration for the unexpected in the way of congurations anduses of conventional objects; in the case of Parc de La Villette, follies interspersedat regular intervals leave it to the vieweruser to interpret and even interact withthem (Derrida & Eisenman, 1997, pp. 125160). Frank Gehrys buildings acrossthe USA, in Prague or Bilbao seem to conrm the deconstructivist style byreadily rejecting any convention of line, curve and proportion. With its introduc-tion of deliberate peccadillos into common architectural milieux, deconstruc-tivism is as unconventional as it is exhilarating. Could not the urban

environment itself be the subject of analogous aesthetic considerations?Late in the 19th century Camillo Sitte, observing admiringly the medieval

piazze of Italy, commented: We, on the other hand, come along afterward,scurrying about with our T-square and compass, presuming to solve withclumsy geometry those ne points that are matters of pure sensitivity (Sitte,1880, in Collins & Collins, 1965, pp. 2021). Twentieth-century urban design didnot take serious notice of Sittes critique. However, the few examples of neigh-

bourhood design for the pedestrian that emerged in the latter part of the centuryherald perhaps a promise for a new recognition of the individual, rather than of

his or her automobile. Kay (1990) suggests that deconstructivism, as a responseto postmodernism in architecture, gives hope to the budding new urbanismfocusing, precisely, on the pedestrian in streetscape. Such recognition willultimately have to grow into cognizance of the legitimacy of the imperfect andthe incomplete in city form. The prospect of imperfection, as an endearingattribute of the city, may yet provide an impetus in designing our cities,neighbourhoods and streets in a fashion that will, again, inspire the genius ofsense and intellect in their inhabitants.

Acknowledgement

Thanks are due to two anonymous referees of this journal for their valuablecomments and constructive criticism on the earlier version of this study. Allartwork was prepared by Keith Bigelow, Department of Geography, Universityof Saskatchewan.

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