Ordered versus less ordered modern cities
(clean San Diego, a vision form the future)
As stated by Mike Crang:
““as robins (1999) has pointed out, too often futuristic accounts of the electronic city are driven by a resurrected modernism that, like the Saint Simonian’s of the 19th century, looks to offer transparency, efficiency, and thus social harmony. Indeed visions of the city in accelerated time-space very often assume the desirability of instantaneity and speed, in the ‘real-time city’. Robins (1997) has called for a revaluation of Byzantine complexity, and social complexity rather than transparency in thinking through the city - rather than the often unthinking celebration of ordered, purified digital space that is somehow friction-free and the assumption that the absence of dirt and disorder is a good thing.”
(In Crang, M. Urban Morphology and the Shaping of the Transmissible City. In: Graham, S. The Cybercities Reader. London: Routledge; 2004:129-132.)
(Puebla, Mexico)
Why do I blog this? the contradiction between the clean and almost aseptic vision of modern city (or what modern cities should be) is well described in this quote from Mike Crang. Especially when it comes to digital/physical interlinkages. Too often, it’s represented as on the first picture and not as on the second one.
March 21st, 2008 at 2:38 pm
And yet picture number two is very much what it will look like. Megacities and megaslums in the so-called third world are growing at a rate new, planned cities couldn’t hope to track. Infrastructure suppliers are already at their limits, so clean and hygenic cities can’t be maintained (outside of Singapore and Dubai?). Digital overlays on these less ordered cities will look a bit out of place, shiny bits sprinkled in amongst the chaos.
March 26th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
[…] quite well with Mike Crang’s Urban Morphology and the Shaping of the Transmissible City (via Nicolas) Indeed visions of the city in accelerated time-space very often assume the desirability of […]