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Utopia, pragmatism and the search for good city formseminar reader Autumn 2016

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UTOPIA, PRAGMATISM AND THE SEARCH

FOR GOOD CITY FORMEdited by Eirini Kasioumi and Daniel Kiss

Professorship Kees Christiaanse

TEXTS FOR URBAN DESIGN

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Utopia, Pragmatism, and the Search for Good City Form

Seminar Reader Autumn 2016

Editors: Eirini Kasioumi and Daniel KissPublisher: Professorship Kees Christiaanse, Department of Architecture, Network City Landscape, ETH ZurichAutumn Semester 2016www.christiaanse.arch.ethz.ch

Illustration on front cover: Après l‘amour, Madelon Vriesendorp, 1978.

This publication is meant solely for purposes of education. Its commercial distribution is, accordingly, strictly forbidden. The copyrights of the included texts are with their original copyright holders. „Utopia, Pragmatism, and the Search for Good City Form“ is copyrighted by the editors of this reader.

„We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.“Winston Churchill

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Table of Contents

Utopia, Pragmatism, and the Search for Good City Form: An Introduction 6

2 Ideal Cities 66Ebenezer Howard: Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902) 67Frank L. Wright: Broadacre City (1935) 70Le Corbusier: A Contemporary City (1929) 73Robert Fishman: Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977) 79

5 Techno-Utopias and the Megastructure 182Howard P. Segal: The Technological Utopians (1986) 183David Gosling and Barry Maitland: Concepts of Urban Design (1984) 185Yona Friedman: Paris Spatial: A Suggestion (1959) 188Reyner Banham: Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (1976) 196

7 Urban Ideologies and the Manhattan Project 246Manfredo Tafuri: Architecture and Utopia – Design and Capitalist Development (1976) 247David Kishik: The Manhattan Project– A Theory of a City (2015) 250Rem Koolhaas: Delirious New York– A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978) 260

1 Urban Utopias 36Amir Ganjavie: Role of Utopia for Design of Future Cities: Utopia in Planning Literature (2012) 37John Friedmann: The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking (2000) 44Robert Fishman: Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer HoWward, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (1977) 53

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4 The Psychological Dimension of Space 152Gordon Cullen: The Concise Townscape (1961) 153

3 Everyday Urbanism 118Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) 119Michael Larice and Elizabeth Macdonald: Editor's Introduction to “The Significance of A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas“ (2013) 137Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour: Learning from Las Vegas (1977) 140

6 Collective Form 222Fumihiko Maki: Investigations in Collective Form (1964) 223

8 The Urban Archipelago 298Oswald M. Ungers: Die Thematisierung der Architektur (1981) 299Jasper Cepl: Oswald Mathias Ungers, Eine intellektuelle Biographie (2007) 306Oswald M. Ungers: Die Thematisierung der Architektur (1981) 326

9 Theories of Urban Form 346Roger Trancik: Finding Lost Space (1986) 347

10 Good City Form 378Kevin Lynch: A Theory of Good City Form (1981) 379

Literature 408

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Eirini Kasioumi and Daniel KissUtopia, Pragmatism, and the Search for Good City Form:An Introduction

7

Kevin Lynch asserts that the purpose of urban design is ‘good city form’, and provides a powerful theory for ensuring it. Indeed, the question of how to achieve good city form, and in extension, the good city, lies at the core of the urban design discipline. This reader uses this question as a starting point to take a journey through theories and visions of the last century motivated by the search for good city form. Applying the lens of utopian thinking, it considers visions of the ideal city in the architectural and urbanistic discourse of the twentieth century, examines the forms associated with them, and juxta-poses them to pragmatic claims for city-shaping practice. Ultimately, the aim of the reader is to offer a grid associating utopian theories of the city with theories of urban form, while providing orientation for their discussion, comparison and synthesis.

Texts for Urban Design - A Grid of TheoriesIn a world of rapid transformations in urban areas, it is ever more important

to consider the question of urban form. What is the form of a ‘good city’? Kevin Lynch’s Theory of Good City Form (1981)1 is one of the rare theoretical texts that offer a comprehensive model for city design and embody an integrative approach grounded in the reality of practice. Therefore, we turn to his fundamental endeavor as the basis of this exploration. If the purpose of urban design is, as Lynch asserts, ‘good city form’, how can it be defined, and how can it be reached? What is the role of vision, and that of theory? How can the search for the ‘good city form’ contribute to the higher end of the ‘good city’?

In fact, the most radical and ambitious urban forms of the 20th century were born of visions of the good city. These were, in turn, often products of utopian

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thinking, whose pioneers were committed to looking beyond the inevitable limitations of specific timeframes and places to consider the urban problem as a whole, and envision cities based on positive human values: efficiency, quality of life, social justice, equality.

In his opus, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (1977)2, Robert Fishman introduces three categories of urban utopias: ideal cities, utopian romances, and urban ideologies. His focus lies with the first category, in which he places the plans of Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, as the most comprehensive attempts to imagine cities of the future. This reader examines these classic visionaries of urban form, and goes on to consider critical voices. It then pursues the exploration of urban utopias via texts that pertain to the other two of Fishman’s categories, while in parallel, links the discussed city visions with respective urban forms. A categorization of urban form theories is then in order, for which the reader turns to Roger Trancik, who in his book Finding Lost Space (1986)3 provides a way to it, by identifying three major approaches to theories of urban form: figure-ground, linkage, and place theories. Each of the discussed forms are classified into these three categories, thus supplementing the grid on utopian visions with a grid on urban form theories. (Fig.1)

Finally, the narrative turns to Kevin Lynch’s question again, pondering how discussed visions and theories can help reach ‘good city form’. Lynch gives us his own version, based on a set of ‘performance dimensions’ that, if fulfilled, augment the interrelation of human purpose and city form.

In Search of the Good City Form

“Urban design has reached a dead end. Estranged both from substantial theoretical debate and from the living reality of the exponential and transformative growth of the world’s cities, it finds itself pinioned between nostalgia and [inevitability], increasingly unable to inventively confront the morphological, functional, and human needs of cities and citizens…”

In this pessimistic note begins the article entitled “The End(s) of Urban Design” by urbanist Michael Sorkin in a recent volume on urban design of the last half-century.4 Sorkin is not alone in evoking a crisis; recent years have seen the revival of a debate on the ends and means of urban design. There exists a concern about the ability of practice to respond to contemporary urban challenges such as

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Introduction

Fig. 1Theories of Urban Utopias and Form

utopian romances urban ideologiesideal cities

linkage theory figure-ground theoryplace theory

Robert Fishman‘s basic grid (1977)

Roger Trancik‘s basic grid (1986)

theories of urban utopias

theories of urban form

sustainability, population growth, equity, and diversity.5 Additionally, scholars and practitioners lament the scarcity of substantial theory that would provide a solid basis to urban design. For example, Denise Scott Brown maintains that urban design follows trends and fashions, while being systematically constrained by available resources. Recounting her turbulent 50-year experience in the field, she concludes that:

“urban designers tend to borrow percepts, methods and concepts from architecture – but late in the game. They borrow theoretical hand-me-downs – architecture’s old clothes – the most recent from Post Modernism, before that from the Athens Charter. [American urban designers] also borrow models from the [traditional] European city…”6

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The theorist Alexander Cuthbert is particularly critical; he argues that even after 50 years of disciplinary existence of the field, we can mostly see “a generalized anarchy of creative ideas that bear little coherence, either internally or collectively”.7 According to Cuthbert, the consideration of urban design as “half way” between architecture and planning has handicapped its autonomy and relevance. When seen as extension of architecture, the connection of urban form to fundamental social processes and goals tends to be downplayed. Planning, on the other hand, having for many decades been the agent of the state in implementing a prevailing ideology in space, is today mostly characterized by modesty. Susan Fainstein explains how city planning was born, in the late 19th century, of visions of the ‘good city’, whose common purpose was to achieve efficiency, order, and beauty through the imposition of reason. In contrast, the last few decades have been dominated by skepticism over imposing any views, however visionary, on the public, and more importantly, over the very possibility of identifying a model of a good city.8 This focus on process rather than substance has further marked a disengagement of city planning from questions of urban form, that has raised some critical voices. For example, Emily Talen and Cliff Ellis argue that this cautious attitude toward normative theory should be eradicated through the introduction of a “well-articulated theory of good city form”.9 Fortunately, there already exist many theories that engage with the search for good city form, of which this reader presents only a sample. This search lies at the heart of the urbanistic discourse. However, many urban design theories are criticized as being self-referential10, superficial11, or obsessed with three-dimensional form.12

Two needs seem therefore to emerge in the search for good city form: the need for substantive theory, and the need for visions of the good city. Aseem Inam strongly calls for a theory-based practice, suggesting that the most robust theoretical endeavors of urban form are those that are simultaneously normative and explanatory; that is, they are not only concerned with how the city should be, but also with understanding how it works.13 Inam praises Kevin Lynch as the most successful in developing a comprehensive theory of urban form, based on human values and what is fundamental and shared in society. Lynch directly engaged with the question of the good city, even providing an image of it in his “Place Utopia” chapter in Good City Form. Although Lynch ultimately avoided prescribing his own “utopia” as a theory for universal application, visions of an ideal urban society underlie the work of many other thinkers, albeit only a few of them contemporary. In a recent article, Tali Hatuka and Alexander d’Hooghe suggest that urban design today is caught in a post-critical era dominated by pragmatic approaches

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Introduction

that emphasize materiality and technology.14 Consequently, they posit a revival of utopian thinking as necessary motivation for the design practice and as method for creating awareness of change. Taking up this suggestion, we use the lens of utopia to examine the potential of formal urban visions towards the good city.

Fig. 2Thomas More: Island of Utopia

Urban Utopias: Visions of the Good City

Utopia and the production of spaceA utopia is an imagined community or society that possesses highly desirable or “perfect” characteristics. Utopian ideals often (though not exclusively) place emphasis on egalitarian principles in economics, government and justice, with the method and structure of proposed implementation varying based on ideology.

The term utopia was coined by Thomas More in 1516. His seminal book15 was a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island (Fig.2), its ideal society and its religious, social and political customs. The island’s name, Utopia, derived from the Greek topos (“place”), qualified by the prefix “U”. More understood this as a contraction of the negating ou- (“non-place”) and of the adjective eu- (“good-

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place”).16 Accordingly, suggests the historian Françoise Choay, space is designated as the subject of the book, if in an antinomic way. Priority is given to the strict urban configuration and its standardization that contrasts the diversity of the island’s natural space. Based on a radical critique of the existing society, the function of the rationalized and standardized geometry is to ensure equality to all. The cities of Utopia all looked the same. All in all, an existing society under criticism (16th century England), a model society (the island of Utopia), and a model space (Utopia’s cities) constitute the utopian genre – summarizes Choay.17 She also notes that in More’s Utopia, the role of built space counterpoises that of time: the perfection of the model space eliminates temporality in favor of a quasi-eternity.18

As opposed to More’s model island, Lewis Mumford’s utopia is “actual life, here or anywhere, pushed to the limits of its ideal possibilities”.19 To him, the past is, as much as the future, a source of utopias, as every community possesses a “reservoir of potentialities”, partly rooted in their pasts and opening the way to further development. Mumford points out two important ideals that derive from utopias. Firstly, the pragmatic function of ideals is calling awareness to the fact that each society has many alternatives to the path it is actually following and many possible goals besides those immediately visible. Secondly, through their holistic approach, utopias point to the idea of wholeness and balance, which are essential attributes of all organisms.20

Whilst discussing the production of space, Henri Lefebvre also refers to utopia, understood in the sense of Karl Mannheim as a system of ideas that transcends a given historic or social situation, not by denying it but by surpassing it.21 The historian Grégory Busquet adds that Lefebvre prefers to describe himself as a “utopian”, a term etymologically referring to the inhabitant of utopia, because according to him, similarly to Mumford’s potentiality-theory, the ‘possible’ is an integral part of the real.22 Accordingly, the utopia he proposes does not deny reality but deals with it, precisely in order to explore its possibilities. The urban space itself is strewn with the marks and potentialities of change: it is particularly subject to the signs of this utopia and, therefore, suitable to becoming its preferred object, just as there can be no ideology without reference.

This takes us to the question of the difference between ideology and utopia. In his opus Ideology and Utopia, Karl Mannheim argued that the application of the term ideology ought to be broadened and saw ideology as the deliberate obscuring of facts. He pointed to the importance of utopias and contended that ultimately utopia is more decisive for progress than ideology, because:

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Introduction

“whereas the decline of ideology represents a crisis only for certain strata, and the objectivity which comes from the unmasking of ideologies always takes the form of self-clarification for society as a whole, the complete disappearance of the utopian element from human thought and action would mean (…) a static state of affairs in which man himself becomes no more than a thing. (…) [W]ith the relinquishment of utopias, man would lose his will to shape history and therewith his ability to understand it.”23

Utopia’s Ups and Downs, and Visions of the Built EnvironmentWith the major exception of William Morris’ News from Nowhere (1891), the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth witnessed the decline of utopias in the strict sense. According to Françoise Choay, their remains were appropriated by two new literary genres, both focusing on the built environment and its technological aspects: theoretical urbanism (Fig.. 3) and science fiction narrative.24 (Fig. 4) Choay names Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City as virtually the only project preserving the societal concept of Utopia, namely a combination of critique and a developed spatial model. She argues that progressive urban theory in the twentieth century went on to focus on the development of spatial models that proceed in authoritarian fashion to impose a technical order on things.

Fig. 4 Aldous Huxley: Brave New World (1932)

Fig. 3 Ebenezer Howard: Garden City (1902)

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Rooted in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and experiencing revival in the 1960s, technological utopianism derived from the belief in technology as the means of achieving a ‚perfect‘ society in the near future. (Fig.5) Such a society, moreover, would not only be the culmination of the introduction of new tools and machines; it would also be modeled on those tools and machines in its institutions, values and culture. Despite its basis in modern technology, technological utopia was not to be a mass of sooting smokestacks, clanging machines, and teeming streets. The dirt, noise, and chaos that invariably accompanied industrialization in the real world were to give way in the future to perfect cleanliness, efficiency, quiet and harmony.25 In the post-war period, urban techno-utopias were responses to population growth and the unsatisfactory living condition of cities. Many of them were, however, rather detached from realities, making realization hardly imaginable. Choay goes as far as to call them false utopias and claim they have never had an impact on the process of urbanization.26

Fig. 5 Yona Friedman: La ville spatiale (1960)

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Introduction

Their disappearance is explained by the fact that since then, technology has reigned supreme, and its progress has been so accelerated that it outdistanced specialists and users alike, to the extent that no measure of anticipation can hope to compete.

Choay further points out that futuristic comprehensive plans were often understood as utopian, due to their subversive style, their uncompromising critique of the advanced industrial society, and their virulent opposition to urbanism. Their critique was accordingly formulated. For example, in 1969, Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price co-authored an article entitled “Non plan, an experiment in freedom”27, where they claimed that totalitarian (utopian) planning had become obsolete as all it could offer would be environments rendered anachronistic by the pace of socio-cultural change. Nonetheless, according to Choay, such plans were in fact anti-utopias that gave constructed space and urban dynamics no currency. Theses spaces, being far from serving a lasting transformation of society-as-subject, become instruments serving to promote the freedom of the individual-as-subject. To the end of utopia’s disappearance around the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Choay adds:

“From More to Morris, the dualism consubstantial with Utopia is inevitably seen specifically in terms of opposition of two types of built environment. In the case of Utopia, the model space happened to correct a traditional local space so self-evident at the time that More scarcely bothered to describe it. In Morris on the other hand, the newly appreciated traditional space was called on to play the role of pharmakon in the face of technological space advanced by industrial society. But whatever their polemical position and historical situation, all the authors of real utopias attributed an anthropogenic function to a spatial organizational mode, and this mode was an integral part of a dual relationship. The disappearance of Utopia at the end of the twentieth century can be explained by the underlying obliteration of this dualism in favor of mono-space.”28

In her closing remarks, however, she claims that Utopia still remains a living entity that beckons us to the subversion of radical social critique and to the revitalization of an anthropogenic space. John Friedman defines utopian thinking as “the capacity to imagine a future that departs significantly from what we know to be a general condition in the present”.29 Thus, it remains an ever-important instrument for visions of new social orders and for the search of their accompanying good city forms.

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A grid of urban utopiasHow can one start to examine the different expressions of utopian thought in urban visions? In his book Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century (1977), Robert Fishman claims that three visionaries stand out from other utopian thinkers: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. Their prominence, according to Fishman, lies in a combination of “(1) radically original urban design, (2) a revolutionary program for social change, and (3) a sustained personal commitment to make the plan a reality.”30 Contrary to Choay who singles out Howard, Fishman suggests that Wright and Le Corbusier also share his comprehensive approach expressed in specific urban form, even though the starting points for their visions are different, even antithetical.

In addition to the three planners’ ‘ideal cities’, Fishman defines two other categories of urban utopias. The first category, ‘utopian romances’, refers to delightful portrayals of cities that exhibit a vivid imagination, especially in relation to the role of technological development, but remain mute or vague in relation to their social vision. They can be thought to include the visions of Antonio Sant‘Elia, Arturo Soria y Mata (Fig. 8), and Buckminster Fuller, but also post-war techno-utopian designs, such as Yona Friedman’s or Archigram’s visions. The definition of ‘utopian romances’ echoes Choay’s critique of 20th century urban theories that constitute technical exercises without explicit social content – often expressed in authoritarian manner.

Fig. 6Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City (1935)

Fig. 7Le Corbusier: Ville Radieuse (1935)

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Introduction

Fig. 8 Arturo Soria y Mata: Linear City (1882)

Fig. 9 Avenue of the Palace of the Soviets (1936)

The second category that Fishman proposes is ‘urban ideologies’, for the explanation of which he draws on Mannheim’s definition of “ideology” as a thought that seeks to advance the interests of a class or group within the context of an established social order. Accordingly, ‘urban ideologies’ include plans whose content either advances the interests of specific regimes or groups, or at best does not require revolutionary social change. Fishman suggests that monumental designs produced by totalitarian regimes, such as Fascism, Nazism, or Stalinism (Fig. 9), often fall in this category; as well as, more generally, plans produced by a narrow, ideologically driven, vision of the city.

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Ideal Urban Forms vs. Theories Theories of Place

Utopia and the production of spaceThe ideal cities of Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le CorbusierMotivated by deep discontent about the cities of their time, the three visionaries that Fishman brings together had very different perspectives about the ideal form of society. But they shared two important beliefs: that this form can be defined and attained, and that reform of the physical environment can catalyze societal change.32 Accordingly, they welcomed the prospect of radical reconstruction, even if it meant extensively rebuilding, or even abandoning, existing cities.

Ebenezer Howard’s utopia was conceived as a remedy to the urban ills caused by overcrowding. Praising the environmental qualities of the countryside, but recognizing that cities offer benefits such as access to employment, higher wages, and social and cultural opportunities, Howard sought to combine the best of both worlds. His vision, described in Garden Cities of to-morrow (1902)33, consists of compact towns of 30’000 inhabitants surrounded by an agricultural green belt and connected by railway. Each “Garden City” is made up by concentric rings, featuring, from center to periphery, gardens and public buildings, houses of varied architecture, and the factories and workshops where its residents are employed. Howard stresses that his plans are diagrammatic, yet his model came to be associated with the urban form of inflexibly planned, low-density suburbia. According to Peter Hall, Howard’s perceived “anti-urban” sentiment is misunderstood, as is his intention, which, more than a physical plan, consists in a progressive reconstruction of capitalist society into independent commonwealths.

While Howard dreamed of moderate decentralization and cooperative socialism, Frank Lloyd Wright’s driving ideas were radical decentralization and individualism. He too, wanted to combine the advantages of city and country – minus the actual city. Wright maintained that high-speed transportation and communication had rendered the reasons for urban settlement obsolete, and argued for a redistribution of land and a family-centered egalitarian economy.35 His ideas took shape in Broadacre City, exhibited in 1935 as a large detailed model. In it, houses, roadside businesses, factories, and transport infrastructure are distributed over the open agricultural countryside, appearing as organic parts of the landscape.36

Le Corbusier shared Wright’s belief that industrialization and technology could bring about a new era of justice, harmony, and beauty, but his vision takes on

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Introduction

a contrasting, centralized form.37 Appalled by the squalor of the Parisian slums, Le Corbusier advocated for a spatial organization based on modern architectural forms that would elevate the quality of life of the working masses. First presented in 1922, his plan for “A contemporary City of Three Million People”38, consisting of a group of cruciform skyscrapers on a grid set amidst green spaces, expressed his passion for order and symmetry, which he believed symbolized the victory of planning over anarchic individualism. Le Corbusier’s ideas on urbanism culminated in his plan for the “Ville Radieuse” (“Radiant City”) in 1935, which juxtaposes the collective realm of order and administration with the individualistic realm of family life and participation.39

Everyday urbanism: in critique of modernity The plans of Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier may have been exemplary urban utopians, but the urban forms to which they gave rise became the subject of harsh critique in the 1960s and 1970s. Le Corbusier’s modernist “towers in the park” model and his ideas about the prioritization of the automobile had been massively applied in public housing estates, central city highway projects, and new towns in the postwar period, particularly in North America. Initially admired for their functional purity and efficiency, they were now criticized for isolating people in monolithic high-rises and destroying the social ties necessary to community. One of his most influential critics was Jane Jacobs, who in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) rejects the inflexible forms that ideal master-planned cities are associated with, as well as the undemocratic apparatus that their implementation requires.40 She defends established neighborhoods that exhibit intensity and diversity – values that, according to her, keep cities prosperous and healthy. She suggests four necessary physical conditions for city vitality: multifunctional neighborhoods, short blocks and connected street patterns, residential areas of varied age, and high density of people.41

Similar in spirit to Jacobs‘ attack on the planning establishment, Robert Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972)42 is an anti-utopian manifesto, proclaiming the de facto urbanism of the Vegas Strip as worth learning from, for its richness of communication, its representation of everyday consumer values, and its representative American form. (Fig. 10) As the authors affirm, “architects are out of the habit of looking non-judgmentally at the environment because orthodox Modern architecture is progressive, if not revolutionary, utopian and puristic; it is dissatisfied with existing conditions.”43 Their disdain of ideal

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forms risks to be understood as support for shallowness and disconnect from context – and indeed provided a justification for such early postmodernist designs – but Venturi and Scott Brown concede that their text should not be understood as prescriptive. One important thesis that permeates their views, as well as Jacobs’, is the urge to look at the everyday qualities of place; subsequent theories were inspired by this call, such as Margaret Crawford’s „Everyday Urbanism“, which challenges architectural formalism, positing everyday urban space as a rich and complex public realm created by diverse daily experiences.44

Fig. 10Illustration from „Learning from Las Vegas“

Townscape and the psychological dimension of urban formProponents for place-based approaches to urban form are also found in the “Townscape movement” that flourished in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Gordon Cullen being its most important representative. Townscape theorists introduced a new radical tradition in architecture that broke with the modern movement by emphasizing “character” and differentiation. Its basis was the assumption that understanding the emotional effects created by the physical elements of the environment can lead to improve it.45

In The Concise Townscape (1961)46 Cullen discusses the visual impact the city has on its users and their activities, and how this becomes a force of spatial organization. He claims that, in an urban conglomeration, buildings can collectively provide visual pleasure which none could give separately. This is made possible through what he calls the „art of relationship“ that takes all elements

21

Introduction

of the environment – buildings, plants, water, traffic, billboards and so on – and weaves them together in such a way that drama is released.47

Unlike Alison and Peter Smithson who argue in their Italian Thoughts (1993)48 that it is the combination of our different senses that allow our orientation in unknown territories, Cullen says that it is almost entirely through vision that the environment is apprehended. He coins the term „serial vision“ to describe the notion of the pedestrian strolling through town at a uniform speed, yet perceiving the scenery as a series of impulses and revelations. Cullen addresses the relationship between object and movement or, implicitly, the city’s psychic content. By means of a sense of identity with the environment, on a street or a square one feels being in it, entering or leaving it. Cullen argues that the introduction of here automatically means that there has to be a there and that some of the greatest townscape effects are provided by a charged relationship of these two. These are exemplified in his Casebook49 (Fig. 11) with a set of spatial patterns, each comprised by a variety of different architectural aspects – similarly to Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language (1977).50 The aim here is to assist in charting the structure of the subjective world, which can also be understood as the city‘s form. (Fig. 12)

Fig. 11Arriving at and leavingdifferent city roomsExtract from Cullen‘s Casebook

Fig. 12The pattern of the shopping streetin Alexander‘s Pattern Language

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Techno-Utopias and the Megastructure Form

Utopian Romances Based on the Belief in Technological AdvancementIn his explorative grid of urban utopias, Robert Fishman labels utopian visions prompted by a technological optimism as utopian romances, and regretfully discards these – such as Sant Elia’s futuristic infrastructure-driven cities, Soria y Mata’s linear city or Buckminster Fuller’s early work - as mere technical exercises.

The period between the 1950s and 1970s has seen a major revival of such responses to acute problems of urbanization. Yona Friedman’s Paris Spatial (1960), Archigram’s Living (1963) and Instant Cities (1969), or Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969) were all urban models based on technological advancements and proposing new, holistic ‘megaforms’ that would be superimposed on the existing urban landscape. Friedman’s net hovers over Hausmann’s Paris, Superstudio’s geometrical forms follow a rigid geometrical grid, deliberately cutting through

Fig. 13Superstudio: Continuous Monument

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Introduction

terrain and waters – based on a universal logic, notwithstanding location and genius loci (Fig. 13), and the Instant City’s linear structures are simply collaged into the British landscape, following major infrastructure lines between existing cities. This ignorance of the status quo, the powerful imagery illustrating radical difference between project and its context and, thus, the denial of an organic, gradual transformation were shared and central characteristics of these utopian projects. This required a comprehensive approach with coherent narratives. As Peter Cook from Archigram puts it: “it was […] inevitable that we should investigate what happens if the whole urban environment can be programmed and structured for change.”51 Consequently, the projects materialized in forms of expandable megastructures, mostly consisting of a prime infrastructure framework and smaller elements, functional units, that can be plugged in and easily modified. In his Megastructure Bibliography (1968)52 Ralph Wilcoxon provided a definition for megastructures, introducing the concept of a permanent and dominating frame containing subordinate and transient accommodations. He also pointed out that the structural framework is expected to have a useful life much longer than that of the smaller units that it supports.

The Mega-Structure and Fumihiko Maki’s Linkage TheoryMass-human scale forms were also favored by the Japanese metabolists of the 1960s. Making reference to his former master, Kenzo Tange, Fumihiko Maki defines a ‘Mega-Structure’ as “a large frame in which all the functions of a city or part of a city are housed. It has been made possible by present day technology. In a sense it is a man-made feature of the landscape. It is like the great hill on which Italian towns were built.”53 Maki incorporated the discussion of megastructures in his renowned theory on the role of linkage in urban design. In his influential book, Investigations in Collective Form (1964), Maki addressed linkage as the most relevant quality of urban space when stating that „linkage is simply the glue of the city. It is the act by which we unite all the layers of activity and resulting physical form in the city.“54 From this starting point he defines three different approaches to collective form. (Fig. 14) The first he calls compositional form, which is two dimensional and static, as for example Oscar Niemeyer’s design for Brasilia. The second is the megaform, a structural approach that provides large, hierarchical, open-ended and interconnected systems – encompassing different functions and elements, as do the above discussed utopian megaprojects of the 1960s. The third, the group form is a result of incremental accumulation of spatially interconnected elements along an armature, for example a central road or topography lines.

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Roger Trancik points out that in the group form approach the notion of linkage is neither implied nor imposed but evolves together with the settlement in its organic development.55 Maki also points out that the „sequential [or group] form in historical examples developed over a period of time much longer than that in which contemporary cities are being built and rebuilt.“ He adds that, consequently, efforts of contemporary urban designers are quite different from those of their historical counterparts, and the forms they consciously evolve in a short time span must also differ. He quotes the historical example of traditional Japanese agrarian villages where the single street is the armature that unifies the community. Linkage is the controlling idea for ordering buildings and spaces in this case. The two-story street-front forms a tight, continuous facade that links the individual house to a larger fabric of houses on the one hand, and connects the families’ private life to the village’s community life on the other. Based on such examples, Maki argues for strong relations between all the layers of activity and the physical form of the city, claiming that their linkage is the act by which one unites the two in a collective form.

Compositional Form Megaform Group Form

Fig. 14

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Introduction

Fig. 15The Commissioners PlanManhattan (1811)

Fig. 16Madelon Vriesendorp: Après l‘amour (1978)

Urban Ideologies and the Question of Totalitarian Urban Forms

Capitalist Economy and the Production of Urban SpaceComplementary to Robert Fishman’s definition of urban ideologies as totalitarian plans, one could also understand urbanization driven by a dominant force, such as the capitalist free market as one determined by powerful urban ideologies. To this end, we will investigate the discourse on Manhattan, as a pure example of the capitalist economy’s urbanization.

Manfredo Tafuri claims that conflicts caused by the victory of technological progress turned cities of the nineteenth and twentieth century into open urban structures.56 On the other hand, architecture was traditionally conceived as a stable structure, giving form to permanent values and consolidating urban morphology. Tafuri argues that in the metropolises organized in the nineteenth century, this traditional conception was given up in favor of binding architecture to the destiny of the city. Consequently, Piranesi’s prophecy of the bourgeois city as an absurd machine materialized in the nineteenth century cities as primary structures of the capitalist economy.57 As David Kishik puts it, the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan (Fig. 15), which established Manhattan’s urban grid, is for Tafuri a product of capitalist speculation.58

As opposed to Tafuri, Rem Koolhaas sees the raster of streets and avenues, and the blocks defined by these, rather as a conceptual speculation. His Delirious New York (1978)59 documents the symbiotic relationship between Manhattan’s mutant metropolitan culture, what Koolhaas calls the culture of congestion, and the unique architecture, the skyscraper, to which it gave rise (Fig. 16). While Tafuri sees the chessboard superimposed on the island as a totalitarian gesture that unifies urban form in the whole city, Koolhaas argues that it is an instrument that

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actually puts restraint to totalitarian development, as it limits the area of one’s self-expression to the size of the block.

In his project for the Welfare Island in New York (Fig. 17), Oswald Mathias Ungers introduced a miniature version of Manhattan – of a well-known antetype, and image of congestion and condensed urbanity. He underlined the proposal with the thesis that people aim for realities where the objects’ meaning is perceived through the image they convey. He called this the “Theme of Imagination”, one in a line of five themes (complemented by “Transformation”, “Assemblage”, “Incorporation”, and “Assimilation”). Ungers expressed himself against architecture’s treatment as applied art, a trend he accredited to functionalism and the Bauhaus movement more specifically.60 He argued that architecture that only addresses purpose and practicality is bound to be impoverished and to end up in the dead end of everyday banality. In his architectural manifest, Die Thematisierung der Architektur (1983), Ungers established parallels between architecture that does not operate with themes from its own domain and images that are restricted to being photographic copies of reality. He advocated autonomous architecture and argued that the Thematisierung of architecture contributes to transforming the environment from the pragmatic and trivial reality of the everyday into the metaphysical world of ideas and, thus, to the sensitization of everyday life.61 He claimed that themes inherent in the architectural and urban design thinking lead to architectural and urban form.

Fig. 18Berlin: A Green Archipelago

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Introduction

The Urban Archipelago and the City’s Figure-GroundUngers’ search for fundamental forms of spatial organization also lead him to the idea of the city as “archipelago”. Analogical to Aldo Rossi’s monumentalist approach based on urban artifacts62, in their concept for Berlin as green archipelago (Fig. 18), Ungers and his colleagues proposed a sequence of landmarks that were supposed to establish a new order, invisible on the ground – just like individual stops of a metro line. Koolhaas remembers that they devised a strategy to design the city’s decay based on raw judgments of aesthetic, political and social values.63 Based on their realization that European cities were shrinking, they tried anticipating which complexes to maintain, where the essence of urbanity could be condensed. The rest they abandoned for erosion, turning the city as a whole into an Arcadian landscape, analogous to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Capricci for Spree-Athen64 and as a colossal enlargement of his Schloss Glienicke. They did so by reading and

Fig. 17O. M. Ungers:Mini-Manhattanproject for the Welfare Island

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selecting distinct urban figures of the metropolis and metamorphosing them into an archipelago where each island was designated for more or less utopian projects. The surroundings they envisaged as a territory that offers multiple iterations of all possible exteriors of the metropolis – ranging from highway infrastructure, through suburban housing developments, to farmland, forests and natural reserves.65 Ungers developed this form of spatial organization and labeled it the „theme of the archipelago“. The antetype in this case is the conglomeration of islands surrounded by the sea.

Ungers’ Archipelago can be understood as an investigation of the relationship between the figures, namely the thematized islands, and the voids, that is, the open territories surrounding these islands and comprised of infrastructure, landscape, single-family house neighborhoods, shopping malls, and the alike generic urban structures. This relates the project to figure-ground theory, which discusses the relationship between the built solid mass („figure”) and the open voids („ground”), and the patterns formed by these.

Theories of Urban Form

Introduction to Urban FormAt its most basic, a form is a three-dimensional geometrical figure, as opposed to a shape, which is two-dimensional or flat. With regard to the coherent image or the formal structure of any „thing” – be that a simple object, a room, a building, a city or a metropolis – form can be defined as the organization, arrangement or relationship of its basic elements. Urban form, more specifically, is usually taken to be the spatial pattern formed by the objects of a city, such as its buildings, public spaces, topography and waters. In a broader sense, form means the totality of an artifact’s perceivable elements and the way those elements are united. This definition also implies that form allows us to mentally capture a structure of reality, to understand it and attempt to analyze it. Proceeding from this aim of mentally capturing an artifact, George Spencer Brown suggests in his magnum opus, Laws of Form (1969), that every observation is based on the notion of difference and defines form as the unity of this distinction. This means that form is not a nice shape, a special thing, but the difference – and therefore also the relation – of an object to its surroundings. Combining the above statements leaves us with a definition of urban form as the distinct pattern of a city. Kevin Lynch, however, calls attention to the fact that the objects constituting this pattern are bestowed with a handful of

29

Introduction

modifying terms that have to do with their use, quality or ownership.66 This leads to an understanding of urban form as the totality of relationships between material space and social activities in the city. There are multiple ways of approaching these social-material relations, and these different approaches are omnipresent in the discourse.

Theoretical GridIn his book Finding Lost Space (1986) Roger Trancik identifies three major approaches to theories of urban form: the figure-ground, linkage, and place theories.67 By introducing these three categories and associating the previously discussed, utopia-related urban forms with them, we aim at wrapping up the reader with a theoretical grid on urban form theories, after having started it with one concerning urban utopias.

Figure-ground theory is rooted in studies of relative land coverage. Analyses of the figure-ground approach are powerful in identifying textures and the spatial order of the urban fabric but are mostly limited to static and Cartesian conceptions of space. A good illustration is Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome (Fig. 19) that reveals the city as a clearly defined system of solids and voids. In this reading, the open spaces are carved out of the building mass as a continuous flow linking interior and exterior spaces. In his renowned project the Collage City (1978), Colin Rowe investigated the question of how the geometry of the city could mediate the adjacency of the modern and traditional city’s various conflicting demands. He praised the traditional city for its texture of solids giving energy to the voids, thus creating what he called specific spaces (Fig. 20).

Fig. 19Nolli‘s map of Rome (detail)

Fig. 20Rowe‘s specific space:

Vittoria, Spain, Plaza Mayor

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He argued, accordingly, that buildings should act both as space occupiers –maintaining an individual presence– and as space definers –providing continuity to the urban texture.68 In our exploration of urban forms, Ungers’ approach can be thought to belong to figure-ground theories, though extending beyond the relationship between solid and void to a reading of the urban space as field of condensation and erosion.

Linkage theory is based on connections between different elements. These connecting lines materialize in the form of streets, pedestrian paths, riverbanks or other linear spaces that connect different parts of a city. According to Trancik, in this approach circulation dynamics becomes the generator of urban form. Movement systems and the efficiency of the infrastructure dominate over patterns of defined space. Trancik explains that when designing based on the linkage approach, the lines of force on a site provide a kind of datum that determines the design.69 These range from site boundaries, through flows of movement and organizational axes to building edges. Together they constitute a constant system of linkages that should be taken into account when the spatial environment is being manipulated. Maki’s theory on Collective Form is the most representative work on spatial linkage.

Finally, place theory is based on the cultural and human characteristics of physical space, that is, on its psychological dimension. It is grounded in the thesis that physical space gains additional richness through unique details that are rooted in its setting (genius loci) and its use. Place theory embraces the urban realm’s complexity by stating that place is created through the synthesis of different elements rather than by simple manipulation of spatial form. According to this approach, whereas space is a purposeful void with the potential of physically linking things, place is a space with distinct character and with contextual meaning that derives from cultural content. Significant in this respect is Aldo van Eyk’s formulation of the shift from ‘space and time’ to ‘place and occasion’. He said in 1962: „Whatever space and time mean, place and occasion mean more. For space in the image of man is place, and time in the image of man is occasion“.70 Pertaining to this description is also Cullent’s townscape approach; in fact, Trancik exemplifies the sequential complexity of contextual space by referring to Cullen’s drawings that explore the relationship between object and movement in events of arriving at or leaving different „city rooms” by illuminating contrasts and transitions.71

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Introduction

Good City Form

Complementary to utopian visions depicting how ‘good cities’ could be, we ultimately discuss Kevin Lynch’s A Theory of Good City Form (1981), a theory grounded in the relationship between material space and human action. It is a product of the search for patterns that effectively augment the interrelation of human purpose and city form. Accordingly, it defines the form of a city as the spatial arrangement of people doing different things.72 This definition comprises both the social activities and the physical features that encompass and modify them. Lynch argues that urban design relies on a well-developed stock of models, which integrate process and form. These models need to be sufficiently independent and abstract to allow for the continuous recasting of aims, analyses, and possibilities. He, however, criticizes the majority of existing models for referring only to a completed form and, thus, taking no account of the process by which that form is achieved. Furthermore, this emphasis on completed form ignores the reality of continuous change, in which no form is a permanent feature. This leads Lynch to think that „the preoccupation with form is the mark of a mind which focuses on things rather than on their consequences for people“73 and that process shall be the key instead. After all, the city does not change or take form on its own as in a “biological organism”. The form of the city is much rather a product of multiple, interacting decisions and actions of agencies and persons, and this process could be labelled with the term management.74 Thus, he continues by discussing the possibility of a model that deals with form, process, and management in one whole and proposes the alternating net (Fig. 21) as an example.

Lynch also sets out to answer the question of what makes a good city and suggests that the answer to his question lies in the development of a general normative theory, which relates the value of a city to its spatial characteristics. The key to developing this theory is identifying a set of performance dimensions and, to this end, Lynch provides five criteria: vitality, sense, fit, access and control, complemented by two meta-criteria: efficiency and justice. Lynch‘s notion of a ‘good city’ may appear to be simple and naïve at first glance, but does suggest a clear direction to contend with:

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“The good city is one in which the continuity of [a] complex ecology is maintained while progressive change is permitted. The fundamental good is the continuous development of the individual or the small group and their culture: a process of becoming more complex, more richly connected, more competent, acquiring and realizing new powers— intellectual, emotional, social, and physical (...) So that settlement is good which enhances the continuity of a culture and the survival of its people, increases a sense of connection in time and space, and permits or spurs individual growth: development, within continuity, via openness and connection.”75

Roger Trancik says that following place theory the goal of urban design should be „to discover the best fit between the physical and cultural context and the needs and aspirations of contemporary users.“76 Kevin Lynch’s performance dimensions offer an apparatus for this very purpose. He suggests that a developed theory of cities ought to be simultaneously normative and explanatory because it is impossible to explain how a city should be, without understanding how it is.77 Furthermore, according to him, an understanding of how a city is depends on a valuing of what it should be. This thesis of values and explanations being inextricable turns Lynch’s theory into an interesting pragmatic alternative to purely normative utopias.

Fig. 21Kevin Lynch: Alternating Net

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Introduction

Notes

1 Kevin Lynch, A Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1981).

2 Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books, 1977).

3 Roger Trancik, Finding Lost Space. Theories of Urban Design (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1986).

4 Michael Sorkin, „The End(s) of Urban Design“, in Urban Design, eds. Alex Krieger and Willian S. Saunders (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), p.155.

5 Ibid, p.181-190.6 Denise Scott Brown, “Urban Design at

Fifty: A Personal View (2006)”, in Urban Design, p.82-83.

7 Alexander Cuthbert, “Urban Design: requiem for an era – review and critique of the last 50 years”, Urban Design International 12 (2007), 177-223 (177).

8 Susan Fainstein, “Planning and the Just City”, Conference in Searching for the Just City, GSAPP, Columbia University (2006).

9 Emily Talen and Cliff Ellis, “Beyond Relativism. Reclaiming the Search for Good City Form”, Journal of Planning Education and Research 22 (2002), 36-49.

10 Cuthbert, Urban Design: requiem for an era, p.178.

11 Sorkin, The End(s) of Urban Design.12 Aseem Inam, Designing Urban

Transformation (New York: Routledge, 2014).13 Ibid.14 Tali Hatuka and Alexander d’Hooghe,

“After Postmodernism: Readressing the Role of Utopia in Urban Design and Planning”, Places 19(2) (2007), 20-27.

14 Thomas More, Libellus vere aureus, nec minus salutaris quam festivus, de optimo rei publicae statu deque nova insula Utopia (Leuven, 1516).

16 Françoise Choay, „Utopia and the Anthropological Status of Built Space”, in Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76, eds. Martin Van Schauik, Otakar Mácel (Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Verlag and

Delft: Delft University of Technology, Institute of History of Art, Architecture and Urbanism, 2005), 96-103.

17 Ibid, p.96.18 Ibid, p.97.19 Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (New

York: The Viking Press, 1962) (1922), p.7.20 Mumford, ibid, p.8.21 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space

(New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1991), p.112.22 Grégory Busquet, “Henri Lefebvre,

l’Internationale situationniste et la revue Utopie”, Urbanisme n° 336 (2004), 54-57.

23 Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (London: Routledge, 1936), p.236.

24 Choay, Utopia and the Anthropological Status of Built Space, p. 99.

25 Howard P. Segal, "The Technological Utopians", in Imagining Tomorrow: History, Technology and The American Future, ed. Joseph J. Corn (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986), 119-136.

26 Choay, Utopia and the Anthropological Status of Built Space, p. 97, p.100.

27 Reyner Banham, Paul Barker, Peter Hall, and Cedric Price, “Non plan, an experiment in freedom", New Society, March 20, 1969.

28 Choay, Utopia and the Anthropological Status of Built Space, p.100.

29 John Friedman, “The Good City: In Defense of Utopian Thinking”, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24.2 (2000), p.462.

30 Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century, p.xii.

31 Ibid, p.xiii.32 Ibid, p.4, p.7.33 Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of to-

morrow (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1946, original 1902).

The 1902 publication of Howard’s book was a re-issue, with slight revisions, of its first publication in 1898 as To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform.

34 Pater Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Malden MA, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), p.88.

35 Frank Lloyd Wright, “Broadacre City: A New Community Plan”, in Frank Lloyd Wright: Essential Texts, ed. Robert Twombly (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009), p.257-

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Eirini Kasioumi and Daniel Kiss

266.36 Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth

Century.37 Ibid, p.163.38 Le Corbusier, “A contemporary City”, in

The City of To-morrow and Its Planning (New York: Dover publications, Inc., 1987, original 1929).

39 Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century.

40 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (London: Jonathan Cape, 1962).

41 Ibid, p.150-151.42 Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown,

and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1977, first edition 1972).

43 Ibid, p.3.44 Margaret Crawford, John Chase and John

Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism (Monacelli Press, 1999).

45 William M. Whistler and David Reed, Townscape as a philosophy of urban design (Monticello, Ill., Council of Planning Librarians Exchange Bibliography, 1977).

46 Gordon Cullen, The Concise Townscape (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis, 1961).

47 Ibid, p.8.48 Peter Smithson and Alison M. Smithson,

Italian thoughts (Sweden: s.n., 1993).49 Cullen, The Concise Townscape, p.17-192.50 Christopher Alexander, A Pattern

Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (USA: Oxford University Press, 1977).

51 Peter Cook, „Plug-in City”, in Exit Utopia, Architectural Provocations 1956-76, p.77-87.

52 Ralph Wilcoxon, Megastructure Bibliography (Monticello, III., Council of Planning Librarians Exchange Bibliography, 1968), p.2.

53 Maki, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis: Washington University, 1964), p. 8.

54 Ibid, p. 35.55 Trancik, Finding Lost Space.56 Manfredo Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia.

Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1976), p.42.

57 Ibid.58 David Kishik, The Manhattan Project. A

Theory of a City (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2015), p.67.59 Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A

retroactive manifesto for Manhattan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).

60 Oswald Mathias Ungers, Die Thematisierung der Architektur (Zürich: Verlag Niggli AG, 2011, original 1981), p.15.

61 Ibid, p.16.62 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City

(Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1982).63 Rem Koolhaas, „But Most of All, Ungers:

Berlin Stories”, in Post-Occupancy, eds. Rem Koolhaas and Kayoto Ota (Milan: Domus d’Autore, 2006).

64 Schinkel completed his painting Blick im Griechenlands Blüte in 1825. This was one in a series of paintings that were all visual manifestos for a new urbanism whose program was to transform Berlin into a new „Athens-on-the-Spree”.

65 Sébastien Marot, “The Genesis of a Hopeful Monster”, in The City in the City: Berlin: A Green Archipelago, eds. Florian Hertweck and Sébastien Marot (Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2013), p.41.

66 Lynch, Good City Form, p.47.67 Trancik, Finding Lost Space, p.97-124.68 Colin Rowe and Fred Coetter, Collage City,

Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1979, p.60.69 Trancik, Finding Lost Space, p.106.70 Herman Hertzberger, Lessons for Students

in Architecture, Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2009, p.193.

71 Trancik, Finding Lost Space, p.122.72 Lynch, Good City Form, p.4873 Ibid, p.280.74 Ibid, p.336, 343.75 Ibid. p.116-117.76 Trancik, Finding Lost Space, p.114.77 Lynch, Good City Form, p.38-39.