two urban orders
on the one hand social relationships are established in the street where information can easily be exchanged. this is the driving social order behind a dense pattern of low-rise live/work form-types, where the street is heavily populated by pedestrians, bicycles, tricycle trucks, scooters, and donkeys - the old town.
on the other hand modern urban life is characterized by “increasing individualization by way of social relationships established through various networked media and dispersed work careers. so people can now lead functional urban lives without ever having to take others with whom they nominally share living and public spaces into any substantial consideration.” (abdoumaliq) this is a social order conducive to high-rise and suburban living - the new town.
evolution
the former urban order has been around as long as cities have been around. the latter has been around since the automobile and the telephone. the former is dying - perceived as impoverished, dirty, and backward, while the latter is growing, and becoming our global culture of space. finding the designer of the former is like trying to find the chef that created the hamburger, while the latter is financed by developers and designed by architects.
*Simone, Abdoumaliq. City Life from Jakarta to Dakar. New York: Routledge, 2010.
I perceive something of a chicken and the egg problem here. The way you write seems to indicate that you feel urban form follows social conditions, rather than the other way around. I don't think it's merely rhetorical, but rather is important for how you perceive your role as an architect or urban designer.
ReplyDeleteWhen I first read the quote in the second paragraph (where's that from, btw?), I thought you were talking about a more contemporary issue of the internet and social media. I feel like these tools actually allow people to become further anonymous in the city, regardless of the urban form of their environment. With the likes of Google and Yelp, there is now actually no information that your neighbors/neighborhood can provide that the internet can't, not to mention the need to make friends, etc.
Finally, I wouldn't relegate the low rise, socially vibrant city as merely "old" or "vernacular." There is a strong strain of modernism that pursued this goal through the role of the architect (Team X), and there are many contemporary architects that remain interested in creating such spaces both within buildings and the city (David Baker, as a prosaic example).