bbbbbb
Municipalism and urbanism started out together at the turn of the last century and have come back as partners in the radically different context of post-millenial globalisation and climate change. The physical model of a dense walkable public realm has proved its flexibility over many centuries. The traditional European city developed this setting a high degree of cultural perfection, and it has been revalorised. When mayors first gathered at international meetings they showed magic lantern slides of their urban blocks, boulevards, city parks, railway station plazas and expo sites. When mayors gather today they show powerpoints of their urban blocks, boulevards, city parks, raillway station plazas and expo sites. In the cyclical history of munipalism and urbanism we catch a glimpse of human progress.
Urbanism, like municipalism, went through a radical transformation after 1918. Design history tells how the agenda for city design was abruptly transformed by the shock of the cultural avante-garde breaking through from art, music and literature into architure and urbanism. Le Corbusier almost single-handedly redefined the field with his book Urbanisme of 1925. He rejected all the traditions of urban enclosure - the street and the square - and the underlying concept of the city as a container of shared space and functional diversity. Regional and stylistic variations of design were replaced by an idealised international style, based on 8 D R A F T segregation of monofunctional sectors, according to principles formulated and codified under Corbusier’s tutleage through the International Congress of Modern Architecture. Reconceptualising the city a network of flows between zones, modernist urbanism opened the way for human settlements to be penetrated after the Second World War by high-speed motorways. The physical transformation expressed the regularisation and standardisation of everyday life under the Fordist phase of capitalism. In the context of postwar growth, planning was reduced to technocratic rationality, concerned primarily with methodology of sectoral balances and servicing of land use zones with highway connections (Lefebvre 1991). An urbanism of abstract processes seemed logical in a world where cities in the conventional sense no longer existed, their functions having been scattered into what was famously described as the Non Place Urban Realm ( Webber 1964).
bbbbbb
Municipalism and urbanism started out together at the turn of the last century and have come back as partners in the radically different context of post-millenial globalisation and climate change. The physical model of a dense walkable public realm has proved its flexibility over many centuries. The traditional European city developed this setting a high degree of cultural perfection, and it has been revalorised. When mayors first gathered at international meetings they showed magic lantern slides of their urban blocks, boulevards, city parks, railway station plazas and expo sites. When mayors gather today they show powerpoints of their urban blocks, boulevards, city parks, raillway station plazas and expo sites. In the cyclical history of munipalism and urbanism we catch a glimpse of human progress.
Urbanism, like municipalism, went through a radical transformation after 1918. Design history tells how the agenda for city design was abruptly transformed by the shock of the cultural avante-garde breaking through from art, music and literature into architure and urbanism. Le Corbusier almost single-handedly redefined the field with his book Urbanisme of 1925. He rejected all the traditions of urban enclosure - the street and the square - and the underlying concept of the city as a container of shared space and functional diversity. Regional and stylistic variations of design were replaced by an idealised international style, based on 8 D R A F T segregation of monofunctional sectors, according to principles formulated and codified under Corbusier’s tutleage through the International Congress of Modern Architecture. Reconceptualising the city a network of flows between zones, modernist urbanism opened the way for human settlements to be penetrated after the Second World War by high-speed motorways. The physical transformation expressed the regularisation and standardisation of everyday life under the Fordist phase of capitalism. In the context of postwar growth, planning was reduced to technocratic rationality, concerned primarily with methodology of sectoral balances and servicing of land use zones with highway connections (Lefebvre 1991). An urbanism of abstract processes seemed logical in a world where cities in the conventional sense no longer existed, their functions having been scattered into what was famously described as the Non Place Urban Realm ( Webber 1964).