This entire series is worth a read. The following excerpts are from the March 2013 essay entitled The Big Rethink: Urban Design.
The fundamental purpose of urban design is to provide a framework to guide the development of the citizen. [p.83]
But other assumptions about the future seem pretty safe bets, including those underlying this series of essays, not only because they are founded on discernible trends, but even more so because they are urgently necessary to resolving a wide range of dangerously pressing issues. The most threatening of these, as earlier essays have argued, are endemic to modernity. And resolving them would require, among other things, counterbalancing modernity’s too exclusive focus on the quantitative and objective with attention also to the qualitative and subjective, including the desire to live in accord with personal values and aspirations. [p.84]
Rural people arriving in the cities might willingly sacrifice themselves for dependents and future generations; but their children and following generations will inevitably have, and want to realise, very different aspirations. Nor will being able to afford consumer goodies and distracting entertainment persuade them to compromise their ideals. They will want lives and work of dignity, offering meaning and personal fulfilment − what the city always promised, but delivered to only a minority, and will soon be deemed essential by most. So the challenges facing these mushrooming cities are much more than the overwhelming current concerns of number and quantity, such as housing and employment for their burgeoning populations, feeding them and disposing of wastes and emissions. Difficult as these are to achieve, they are conceptually easier to entertain than dealing with such psycho-cultural challenges as conceiving of cities that offer lifestyles and work of dignity, meaning and fulfilment in line with very varied individual notions of purpose, identity and personal destiny. [p.84-85]
The epidemic of obesity and associated diabetes are due partly to the processed foods with which corporations swamp supermarkets and fast food outlets, but also because in the contemporary city, hours are wasted commuting long distances rather than walking or cycling in pleasant conditions. Another contributory factor to many diseases is increasingly understood to be inflammation, often compounded by the solitary lifestyles, loneliness and lack of community characterised by modern city life and exacerbated by its design. These are issues we will return to in next month’s essay. [p.86]
Behind all these essays, as already explicitly stated and argued in them, are key assumptions. Central to these is that in this pivotal moment in history several epochs of differing duration are drawing to a more or less simultaneous close, in particular 4-500 years of modernity along with its terminal, meltdown phase of postmodernity. The emergence of the Conceptual Age and TIR [Third Industrial Revolution] are part of this larger transition. Thus the times demand that much be radically rethought, right down to such basics as the fundamental purposes of things. This is especially true of architecture and urbanism because the Modernist conceptions of their purposes, along with the associated vision of what constitutes the good life they are to frame, are so desperately impoverished. In contrast to their too-exclusive emphasis on the objective, the Right-Hand Quadrants of the AQAL diagram, it is time to re-emphasise the many dimensions of human subjectivity, the Left-Hand Quadrants, and to reground architecture and urbanism in these too. Their fundamental purposes need redefining in terms of their deepest, originating human impulses to be as inspiring, ennobling and encompassing as possible so as to inspire urgently needed change. [p.86-87]
Terrifyingly, this is an exact and fair summary of the Functional City of modern town planning as promulgated by the Athens Charter: urban settlements of dispersed zones for work, housing and recreation connected by circulation-only transport routes. This is human life reduced to a mere productive economic unit, its pointlessness to be compensated for by the addictive distractions of consumerism and entertainment. Indeed, the underlying ethos of such planning was a weird mixture of socialism and consumerism, seeking a balanced allocation of requisite facilities: one playground per so many houses; one primary school per multiple of that many houses; and so on. Town-planning manuals of the mid-20th century exemplify this dismal approach exactly and in many parts of the world towns and cities were laid out like this. The insidious legacy of this thinking continues, if often more subtly. [p.87]
Certainly the city is a place of trade and manufacture, residence and recreation, education and healthcare, and so on − the things the city of modern planning provided for. But the quintessential and most elevated purpose of the city is as the crucible in which culture, creativity and consciousness continually evolve. [p.87]
It is in helping to understand these diverse world views and their underpinning values, as well as in how best to accommodate and communicate with these groups, that disciplines like Spiral Dynamics are proving invaluable to architects and urbanists − no matter how much their schema of developmental levels is offensive to the postmodern mindset. [p.87]
Another significant development was the publication of A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander et al. A book packed with ideas and wisdom, it certainly has its weaknesses, particularly the constructional patterns. Architects are also put off by the implied return to craft construction of a rather crude sort, and the retro formal language. But it is very much a book about the City of Being and Becoming, of richly articulated and varied places that will nourish and develop the psyche and a richly vibrant community life, and in which even buildings and urban spaces convey a sense of life, almost as beings in themselves. It is a book whose time has yet to come, particularly as it plays an important role for times of profound cultural change by sifting and condensing into a usable formula the wisdom of the past so that it can be carried forward to influence the next era. [p.88]
[Another excerpt from the March 2013 issue:]
Unless we radically reduce the number of Buicks on the road, stop the inexorable rise of coal power, halt the global assault on our forests, and get the temperature down, we're fucked. [p.25, Michael Sorkin]