What ever happened to Urbanism?

What ever happened to Urbanism?

Rem Koolhaas

“How to explain the paradox that urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared at the moment when urbanisation is everywhere – after decades of constant acceleration – is on its way to establishing a definitive global “triumph” of the urban condition”

The ideal model of urbanism is the functional city, described to control and develop the new city. The modernist ideology has failed as they have tried to take control over such a complicated and extensive topic that it has merely scratched the surface and been unsuccessful. When designing a new city or to alter an existing, there are many things that you can not simply control or predict, and it is these that become the challenges of the urbanist.

In our past we have formed cities and failed so many times that we can no longer be sure or confident of the cities we live in today. These former cities have been a representation of our past; they have been formed and developed around our churches, monastery’s and remembrance of our history. This text of Rem Koolhaas discusses how our future needs to move forward to create a city that improves the quality of life as its main objective; we cannot keep looking to our past for guidance. We need to grasp a new regime of values to create a new paradigm, and it is this that will subconsciously alter our perception of how our future cities should form.

“Now we are left with a world without urbanism, only architecture, ever more architecture. The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the “rest” – but it also consumes. It exploits and exhausts the potentials that can be generated finally only by urbanism and that only the specific imagination or urbanism can invent and renew.”

From the City to Urban Space

From the City to Urban Space

Urban society is a result of industrialization, where a process of domination that absorbs agricultural production.

Agricultural production is no longer a principle sector of our economy in the major industrial nations.

Although agriculture has not disappeared, it has become a subordinate to the urban society and its demands that it entails. This has resulted in how the village life has been transformed through the economic growth and industrialisation expanding to entire territories, regions and continents.

“Urban fabric grew and extended its borders to corrode the residue of agricultural land”.

The text goes on to describe the urban fabric, and how this has adapted our countryside’s. A temporary vacation home for a city dweller, a super market and highways are typical examples of how the countryside has become apart of the urban fabric in today’s society. Areas that are untouched by this urban fabric are now seen as either “stagnant or dying”.

Politics have played a massive controlling part in how our urban cities have been formed and adapted. Through the political city developing with the on-going struggle of payment for the lower classes to pay their overlords, the market place began. Setting up in the middle of the towns a new central space of assembly formed, thus creating the new conception of the city; the urban space. By the 14^th Century markets where so efficient that the architectural development of the cities where formed around these spaces replacing the past agora or the forum.

“The merchant city succeeded the political city…At this time commercial change became an urban function, embodied in a form both architectural and urban.”

With the post industrialisation came the decline of the urban cities. There purpose is no longer to feed the urban society and in turn become a stagnant town without a purpose. These cities hold a new architectural and social challenge to form a new paradigm; they now need a new use to become a town with a function once again.

Space

When I started reading the David Harvey text on 'Space as a key word', I started to examine my initial interpretation of how I understood space.
I looked around my office and asked myself to define the space that surrounded me. The space could only be defined by the elements in the room that the spaces related too. The walls creating the container I occupy, the desk and cupboards, defining the small, dark cramped space of my office. Space has an existence but it is not until we relate objects to one another that we can grasp the concept of this existence. This seems to be explored within the text as material space, “…simply the world of tactile and sensual interaction with matter, it is the space of experience” (D.Harvey)

“Architecture is the thoughtful making of space” Louis Kahn

I then read on to explore Harvey’s deeper interpretation of space. How he sees space become a concept better connected too Social, Literary and cultural metatheaories.
He examines how space and space-time in different key words allowed him to define certain conditions of possibilities for critical engagement.

Architecture‘s relationship to space come hand in hand. Yet how architecture responds to space can be somewhat different, some buildings are seen as objects within a space, others become the shapers of space, like suburban buildings in relation to the urban.

“Our Experience of an architectural space is strongly influenced by how we arrive in it.”(Mathew Frederick)

The key point of Harvey’s text on space that inspired me was his general matrix of spatialities. How space becomes more than just material but also conceptual and lived, and how these different terminologies relate to absolute space and space in time, may it be relative or relational. I guess before now I had never really explored the idea of how space exists in time, and yet now that is all my mind wants to explore. How I never pondered over the concept that space-time is a constant feature in my vivid imaginations, my emotions and fears, and especially in my intricate dreams is now something my mind is constantly exploring.