City As Home And City As Network

City as Home and City as Network: Contrasting Paradigms in History
Guido Francescato
Presented at the 32nd annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA)
Edinburgh, Scotland, July 3, 2001.
|Introduction |
|It has taken more than thirty years, but historicalapproaches to environment/behavior studies and environmental |
|research are finally emerging as an important component of EDRA's work. For this development, we must be especially |
|thankful to Amos Rapoport who, with the publication in 1990 of History and Precedent in Environmental Design, |
|illustrated the potential of historical research for furnishing lessons that can informintelligent and realistic |
|design and planning decisions 1. |
|It is critical to note that the evidence provided by historical precedents can only yield applicable lessons if |
|mediated by a theoretical process, that is if subjected to conceptual organization. This organization requires a |
|theory. Inturn, a theory is based on an underlying conceptual perspective or paradigm. It is such a paradigm that |
|guides us in structuring explanations that account for the historical evidence. In other words, the value of |
|history's lessons hinges on the validity of the underlying paradigm on which theory is founded. |
|A number of such paradigms have guidedinterpretations of the history of the city. But two -- in the form of |
|contrasting metaphors -- seem particularly pervasive among designers and planners: that of the city as home and that |
|of the city as network. In this paper, I submit that approaches as disparate as those of the garden city movement, |
|the modern movement, and the new urbanism have relied uncritically, often evenunknowingly, on the first of these two|
|paradigms. In these urban design approaches, the city is essentially conceived as an artifact different only in |
|scale, not in kind, from the singular building. Consequently, the city is viewed as amenable to the application of |
|processes which are properly dependent on a high degree of designer's control and finite execution time. ||I believe that this view is flawed and is indeed a fundamental reason, though not the only one, for the inadequacies |
|of the solutions that stem from it. Understanding the city as a network is more likely, in my view, to lead to |
|successful approaches. Consider this: In buildings, the outcome of the design process is a set of specifications that|
|control definitive and stableconfigurations. In networks, the outcome is a set of rules, that is a syntax �- itself |
|amenable to change over time -� that sets the parameters within which configurations are assembled to support |
|specific processes. |
|The City as Home|
|A glance to our mental images of pre-industrial cities is sufficient to understand the power of a metaphor in which |
|the city is seen as an object that houses the community, just as the home is thought of as an object that houses the |
|family. Pre-industrial cities even tend to look like large buildings. Bound by walls or other defensivefeatures, |
|they exhibit a recognizable shape [Figure 1]. Whether their internal layout is rigidly geometric [Figure 2] or more |
|organically irregular [Figure 3], these cities give the impression of compact, finished artifacts -� even when |
|considerable rearrangement of buildings and spaces may in fact have taken place over time [Figure 4]. It is therefore|
|not surprising that Leon...