The return of aesthetics to city planning

Abstract

I n Space, Time and Architecture, Sigfried Giedion noted that town planning, as he called it, was the last department of architecture to take form in any period. Baroque planning, for example, with its emphasis on ceremonial promenades, central focal points, and axial perspectives, remained dominant during the nineteenth century, long after industrialization had radically changed not only everyday life but the structure and surface of the city as well. The same could be said today: city planning lags far behind the architectural and structural changes occurring within our cities: changes such as the gentrification of vast areas of the central city, historic preservation in control of larger and larger fragments of the city, the rise of entertainment zones, or the mallification of downtown shopping streets. There are other changes as well, such as the rise of world-class cities, the service centers of late capitalism which reflect the specifc needs and spatial politics of multinational corporations. Many of these cities have simultaneously lost or reduced their industrial base. Another transformation is apparent in the development of the polynucleated metropolitan region, an occurrence that makes obsolete the old center-periphery location theories of urban growth. What does the theory of city planning have to say about all of these changes? There are apparent rumblings in spasmodic fashion that something should happen, that city planning might return to focus on its physical form. Tokyo planners may be taking the lead. If Paris was the capital of the nineteenth century; and New York that of the twentieth century, then Tokyo, they proclaim, as the first high-tech city will be the capital of the twenty-first century. On a man-made island in Tokyo Bay a $12 billion teleport of office buildings, cultural halls, and telecommunication stations is being built. A bridge is under construction from this island to the shore where a selfcontained village. River City. is being erected, containing hotels, shopping malls, theaters, and high-rise condominiums for 7,500 people. Another 177 projects are on the drawing boards, most of them to be located in Tokyo Ba3: All of this is reminiscent of Kenzo Tange's ~'Tokyo 1960" city plan in which he foresaw that cities of the 10 million population class were becoming consumption cities, their per capita income was already far beyond that which was necessary to satisfy basic needs. These cities were organized by invisible networks of communication, information, and energy channels; and consequently it became the task of architects and planners to provide the visible structure for this information society. In New York City, the consumption capital of the twentieth century, some architects are beginning to call for at least a reevaluation of the building boom of the last decade and a return to ethics that should lie at the core o f the profession. Critical of the postmodern void that looms at the heart of the profession, they see a self-serving architecture of gigantic monumentali ty which is dramatically out of scale with the rest of the city. Representative of corporate egotism and the vapidness of luxury development, this "decotecture" is the result of the municipal government's promotion of real estate development whatever be the cost to the social and physical fabric of the city. Nobody within the government or architectural profession, much less among city planners, asks what kind of city do we want and why? Recently, The New Yorker announced the resuscitation of Lewis Mumford's old column "Sky l ine ." which he wrote for some thirty-odd years, because it is believed that New York City is currently in a much more perilous condition than it was in 1931. The city government has been giving the city away: through zoning bonuses to real estate developers that do not deserve or need them; by a passive city planning commission whose infrequent actions tend ignorantly to promote development in the wrong parts of town; by a onesided development game in which the tax base is always the winner and light, air, circulation, and the pedestrian, the continual losers. In short, neither the profession of architecture nor that of city planning has any concept or theory to deal with the city as an entity, rather than fragmented into bits and pieces: and neither hold out any vision of what the city might be as it enters the last decade of the twentieth century.