It might be posited that the architect as citizen knows more about cities than as architect. Architects and planners have long had a penchant for city-as-ideal, a utopian vision that says more about the designer's ego than the city as an environment adapted to the human life cycle. From L'Enfant's Washington to Corbusier's Cite' Radieuse, or Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities to Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, notions of ideal form have served their designer's imagination and prejudices, and their assumptions about the interaction of certain sets of variables observed in the relationship of technology to society. Latter day apologies for contemporary suburban form are the same sort of rationale in reverse, starting with the current reality, and working backwards to frame the ideal.
In each case, adherence to an ideal form assumes that some sort of immaterial model for it exists somewhere in the ether, a truth to be discovered by the exercise of genius. There are of course certain threads of commonality in all of these schemes, the ususal indespensable elements of streets, other infrastructure, open space and buildings, but little consideration is given for flesh and blood human denizens as a something beyond a creature of market trends; man is expected to adapt to utopia.
Man may not be the measure of all things, but the measure of an urban environment must surely include as a primary yardstick of livability service to the human animal from birth to death. We can then at least begin with the issue of "livability" and go from there to formalization of city plans, always adapting the city to the social and personal needs of people at all stages of life.
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Gary Collins AIA
Principal
Gary R. Collins, AIA
Jacksonville OR
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