City Vision:

Urban Design and Lives

Image source: 迪化街

Outline

1. Starting Questions

2. “Metropolis: The City as Text” (1) –

3. “A City is not a Tree”

4. The Personals ( 徵婚啟事 )

Starting Questions

How do we describe/represent a city? Why is city an “imagined” environment (422)? Why can a city be a text (written with signs, to be interpreted)?

How do city planners ‘imagine’ a city? With what metaphors and charts? What could be their limitations? What could be the limitations they place on city-dwellers? (e.g. pedestrian areas)

How about us? What metaphors or images do we have in mind about a city? Can we ‘map’ a city? How do we walk in a city such as Taipei?

Metropolis: The City as Text”

Focus: representations of cities from 19th century till now. (human body, machine, labyrinth, flows; p. 423)

1.1 Prologue: excerpts from Bleak House and The Asphalt Jungle – Similarities: effect of the weather on the cities; the city –

alien; civilization – sophisticated but fragile; technologies and forces constituting the life of a city

Asphalt Jungle – city as a machine and a strange and magical place; with awareness of the class and ethnic differences

Metropolis: The City as Text” A. Body Two paradigms in the 19th century: The divine order “the invisible hand” of the market i

n giving order to a city like a body with ‘the instincts of brute creation.”

The medical paradigm: ills attributed less to commercial systems than to urbanization.

Develop social welfare system through both investigation and administration systems.

Urban government . . . Includes surveillance and discipline. concrete, quantifiable and precise info. 系統的多重關係．

E.g. 〈馬桶〉 its view of the city—similar or different?

The last SARS epidemic –multiple systems of surveillance

The police: City as a statistical grid of investigation and surveillance (Michel Foucault) the police: a techonology of

government which defined the domains, techniques and targets of state intervention. It involved cataloguing the resources of a state, both material and human, in minute detail. (429-30)

e.g. District Offices (domicile registration) + District Health Center

“The City as Text (2)”: Dynamic structure

Engel’s Marxist view: relations between the have’s and have-not’s as a complex, concrete totality, and whose parts have meanings that are only decipherable in relation to all its other parts.

馬桶？ Both views are deterministic, but the poem em

phasizes the physical rather than the economic.

“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs. Experience

Michel de Certeau: p. 435

1. Concept city – in utopian or urbanistic discourse; with a perspective both ‘god-like’ and voyeuristic that can encompass all the diversity, randomness and dynamism of urban life in a single panorama (statistics). a proper space, a pure space, a space of rational organization. urban and human ills repressed

“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs. Experience (2)

Michel de Certeau: p. 4352. Lived city –beneath the discourses, the grids an

d combinations of powers or a fixed pattern of statistical relationships.

The people, who are ‘unpredictable, inventive and devious.’

Who have ‘illegible improvisations’ of the spaces on the streets or at home.

“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs. Experience (3)

Rational city vs. mythic experience Max Weber – 18th, 19th centuries –abstract, fo

rmal rationality as the organizing principle demythification and disenchantment of the social world

The new urban-industrial world –fully re-enchanted. --in the new shopping arcades.

“The City as Text” 2.2: Concept vs. Experience (2) Houssmann vs. Baudelaire Rational organization vs. flaneur

Christopher Alexander

Born in Vienna, Austria in 1936; raised in England, and holds a MA in Mathematics and a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Cambridge U, and a PhD in Architecture from Harvard U.

The father of the Pattern Language movement in computer science,

He has designed and built more than two hundred buildings on five continents;

Recent Work, The Order of Nature, used in poetry criticism, too.

Image & info source

Christopher Alexander (2)

Studied ‘beauty’ for 35 years in the context of architecture, carpet and nature.

Studies beauty in terms of geometry, process for creating the ‘wholeness’ and life; poetic order

Image source

Christopher Alexander (3): Centers

"'Centers' are those particular identified sets, or systems, which appear within the larger whole as distinct and noticeable parts. They appear because they have noticeable distinctness, which makes them separate out from their surroundings and makes them cohere, and it is from the arrangements of these coherent parts that other coherent parts appear. The crux of the matter is this: A center is a kind of entity which can be defined only in terms of other centers. Centers are - and can only be - made of other centers." Image source

Christopher Alexander (4): Connections between cars and pedestrians

Where cars are moving slowly, people and cars can mix up, meaning that at very low density traffic, there do not necessarily need to be sidewalks.

Creating quiet places with good space for pedestrians and narrow slow space for cars. (?

Wide, densely traveled pedestrian streets may cross densely traveled roads with cars and buses, best at a right angle.

Pedestrian lanes can be designed to be internal to a block. . . . within 150 feet of the nearest road.

Where cars dominate there should be easy access to beautiful and pure pedestrian space. (e.g. 敦化 ) Info source

Christopher Alexander (5): Connections between cars and pedestrians e.g.

Eishin University Campus in Japan A narrow pedestrian street as it might

occur in the higher density parts of a new housing village --from the Eishin campus, near Tokyo, Japan

Info & image source left, right

The City is not a Tree

What’s the difference between thinking like a tree or like a semi-lattice?

What are the functions of zoning? And disadvantages?

What is the good ‘overlap’?

The City is not a Tree: Introduction A city of little glass and concrete boxes existing remedies (120): in space, in the

shape of the building, in density of population, in mixture of small villages in a city;

to re-configure a conception of modern cities

start with the distinction between a natural city and an artificial city

The City is not a Tree (2):

Definition of set and unit: “Of the many, many fixed concrete subsets of the

city which are the receptacles for its systems and can therefore be thought of as significant physical units, we usually single out a few for special consideration. . . .

” Now, a collection of subsets which goes to make up such a picture is not merely an amorphous collection. Automatically, merely because relationships are established among the subsets once the subsets are chosen, the collection has a definite structure.

The City is not a Tree (3): tree and semi-lattice

A collection of sets forms a tree if and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection either one is wholly contained in the other, or else they are wholly disjoint.

The City is not a Tree (3): tree and semi-lattice

A collection of sets forms a semilattice if and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection.

The City is not a Tree (4): tree and semi-lattice -comparison

P. 124 neat and simple Overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity E.g. the overlapping functions of a post-office,

school, youth club and adult’s club p.125 Metaphor: play p. 126; working in another area p.

128

The City is not a Tree (4): tree and semi-lattice -example

Columbia, Maryland, Community Research and Development, Inc.: Neighbourhoods,in clusters of five, form 'villages'. Transportation joins the villages into a new town. The organization is a tree.

The City is not a Tree (4): tree and semi-lattice -example

                  

         

Figure 4. Mesa City, Paolo Soleri: The organic shapes of Mesa City lead us, at a careless glance, to believe that it is a richer structure than our more obviously rigid examples. But when we look at it in detail we find precisely the same principle of organization. Take, particularly, the university centre. Here we find the centre of the city divided into a university and a residential quarter, which is itself divided into a number of villages (actually apartment towers) for 4000 inhabitants, each again subdivided further and surrounded by groups of still smaller dwelling units.

Villa Savoye by LeCorbusier

"machine a habiter," a machine for living (in). Located in a suburb near Paris, the house is as beautiful and functional as a machine. (source)

What is the right overlap

Pp. 129-30. Walking? Open-air café? Illegal vendors? Stores everywhere? Passengers walking among the cars?

The Personals 徵婚啟事

What is the film about? Why does Dr. Du want to put up an ad for seeking a spouse?

What does she get instead? (What kinds of people does she meet? Does she learn anything?)

What are the meanings implied in the opening and closing images

Her Purposes

Escape – by playing a different role;

Looking for a way out But also keeps calling

the guy because she cannot leave him.

A Woman on the Street

Being questioned, looked at, desired, judged and played with. –even harrassed

1. Inquisitive questions (age, number of boyfriends, sex experience)

2. Judged by appearance

(e.g. the voice actor and Mr. Yu)

3. Desired (e.g. the pimp, the tour guide)

4. Played with (e.g. the actor)

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Selfish purposes

1. For their relatives – the father, the austic child, Yu wen (who wants to marry for his old parents)

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Selfish purposes (2)

1. For their business (sex, self-defense tools), for sex (real-estate agent), 2. Just marriage –Mr. Wang

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons

1. Different personalities: lesbian, old Mr. Do-All, sex-video-addict,

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons—what does

she learn from them? (1) Self-indulgence in

his own game

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons—what does

she learn from them? (2) Her nervousness

and disguise

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons—what does

she learn from them? (3) Shyness in his smile, like hers

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons—what does

she learn from them? (4) 1. To grow up thru’ experi

ence of pains; 2. To make one’s own ch

oice; 3. The difference betwee

n 情 and 愛。

A Woman on the Street: also judging

and learning as a flâneuse Learning from different persons—what does

she learn from them? (5) 1. To take a broader

perspective to look at the moment

A Woman on the Street: also looking

at the city 1. From hope (disguise) to fatigue to opening

up

A Woman on the Street: also looking

at the city 1. From hope (disguise) to fatigue (2)

A Woman on the Street: also looking

at the city 1. From bleak vision, a broader vision to blue

and fluid ones

A Woman on the Street: the ending

1. The blue and fluid vision;

2. Chen’s message –hoping for reconnection or chance encounter

A Woman on the Street: the ending

(2) 1. One of many lives in the city

References

SOME NOTES ON CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER http://www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.text.html