LIFE IN URBAN SPACE: A LIFE LESSON

The history of recent city planning reveals that the management of urban space we today hold responsable for the destruction of social interactions in european urban areas - reduction and separation of human activities in four different functions (work, housing, transport, entertainment) - originated from the best theoretical intentions, summarized in a document presented during the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1933 : the Charte d'Athènes.

Sincere in their quest to give the best of their knowledge to modern life and man, architects had strong and convincing arguments to justify, for exemple, the disappearance of streets between buildings, as were only meant to remain huge empty spaces separating high buildings, letting the light coming in (fair enough).

Check out this interesting sequence where the architect André Wogenscky is explaining this general idea with confidence and enthusiasm, between 00: 05 : 30 and 00 : 06 : 36 of the following video (if you understand french you can watch it all of course, but if you don't understand french just look at the diagram drawn during this short sequence) :
Architect ANDRÉ WOGENSCKY presenting le corbusier's project for paris (1960)

I find the sparkle of excitement and faith you can feel in his tone very sinking when you know how much this great plan failed.

Today's mortifying lack of city life in the suburbs can not be blamed on a lack of thought concerning this matter. There was a plan. And the thing is you can't really blame the architects who theorized this plan either, as they were truly convinced it was a good idea.

Of course the situation wouldn't be as bad if we wouldn't have had to reconstruct very fast after the second world war and apply this concept everywhere we could. Now its all over the place.

Nowadays people strongly suspect that the rationality governing architects's minds at the time was molded by the rationality of the mass-production model ruling the industrial world, based on division of labor and efficiency. Which basicaly means that its not just the architects who were "wrong", its the entire society model and beliefs that are responsable, which leaves us petrified with horror, witnessing the uglyness of what our civilization managed to produce the last decades.

In spite of the recognition and the awareness of this process by historians, the risk of seeing again economic values managing unconsciously our choices in urban forms is not negligible. Today the economic environment has evolved compare to the Fordist paradigm, so the mechanisms framing our ways to conceive society must have transformed too.

Still we haven't formulated clearly the nature of this new mutation, as we might even be unable to do so, trapped in our time.

It seems nevertheless necessary to deconstruct the official speech carried by contemporary urban projects to try to spot in which new insidious ways our choices in terms of urban developpement are being corrupted.

Which will be done in a future post, along with some hypothesis to qualify the syndromes.

Also there will be a big QUIZZ to imagine in what kind of city shapes could be incarnated the new industrial revolution that is ours (dematerialization and speculation).

Below a reward for reading this long post :
Here's the plan for Paris drawn around 1925 by le Corbusier (the guy who lead The Charte d'Athènes at the CIAM in 1933). NB : This plan didn't happen.