Smartening up a city electronically is not only semantic nonsense, it is tantamount to a duct-tape patch job. Smartening up the citizenry is a much better option, and the singly most important purpose of urban design: educating a polity that is clear on how the built environment comes to be - what political and social forces yield dominance for decision making to a select few movers and shakers of one stripe or another. The technical issues are important, of course, but so is the relative detachment of the average citizen from the machinery behind the building of the environment within which they must carry out the obligations of a civilized life.
It is not true that the Romans, for example, simply staked out a plat for a town, then stood back as everybody pitched in and built a city in common. In the first place, citizens were in the minority. Slaves made up the greater number of urban populations, and did most of the work. There was already a sufficient division of labor that specialists were engaged to design and supervise construction of major portions of infrastructure, and to build the citadel, defensive ramparts, and other infrastructure. Many later Roman cities in frontier territories were built largely by the state as retirement communities for loyal military. After several poorly built multistory apartment buildings in ancient Rome experienced sudden collapse, killing many tenants, the Sentate passed a law to put unscrupulous contractors to death should any of their buildings fail.
Even when ancient cities grew organically, royalty and the priesthood still controlled the process, and the technologies of construction (largely mud bricks and log rafters or simple stepped vaulting) were relatively primitive. The logic of animal husbandry, protection from animal and human predation, and food storage also dictated culturally different village-based solutions, as in the South African krall, or the mud city of Djenne, in Mali, Africa. None of them matched the tecnical complexity, universality, or size of the modern city, most of which may have grown with a degree of "organic" evolution at the neighborhood level in their early history, but these "quarters" have been typically long-eclipsed by the exponential growth of urban concentration occasioned by the confluence of geometric population growth, economic change, political power, and technically advanced infrastructures.
We need to ask ourselves what function, beyond the obvious ones of economic and politcal organization, the city can best perform in modern societies. Is mankind largely to continue to serve the city and its concentrations of political power and wealth, or is the city to serve its citizens by providing a crucible for the making of an involved and knowledgeable citizenry capable of controlling the excesses of both?
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Gary Collins AIA
Principal
Gary R. Collins, AIA
Jacksonville OR
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-23-2013 12:55
From: Drew Deering
Subject: "Preserving the Metropolis" APT Conf Oct 11-15 NYC
For those of you that have an interest in saving our existing cities, I though you might find the Association of Preservation Technology International (APT) conference in New York City on Oct 11-15 interesting. The conference title is "Preserving the Metropolis". See the link below for more info.
http://www.apti.org/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=apt-nyc-2013NEW
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Drew Deering AIA
AIA National RUKC Chair
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