a notebook by DiellëzaTahiri

a notebook by diellĂŤza tahiri history of architecture and landscape in the contemporary age

This notebook is based on contents of “The Debate on Sustainability: History, Theories, and Contemporary Approaches”, a course by: Carlos Gabriel García Vázquez

written and interpreted by Diellëza Tahiri | 951007

December, 2020 Politecnico di Milano

1

Introduction

A B C

3

10

1882-1939

Metropolis

Metropolitan Landscapes

21

26

Megalopolis 1939-1979

Megalopolitan Landscapes

32

36

Metapolis

1979-2007

39

References

Metapolitan Landscapes

16

Berlin

28

Los Angeles

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Introduction The course of the debate on sustainability which I had the privilege to follow over the past three months has filled me with a lot of new and diverse perspectives, some of which I already had in my mind in a quite foggy and clumsy way and of some I actually had never thought about in particular. What is interesting is the content that the course follows, starting from the very paradoxical concepts of the same problems on simply different periods of time, the huge failure of the first part of debates on sustainability, the chronological timeline of cause and effect in a wide variety of fields and not only architecture alone. In fact, what is rather surprising for most of us architects, is when we learn that from all the fields influencing one another in the history of humankind, architecture is almost the last one to evolve. Instead, it merely follows and adjusts to major historical events, being highly influenced by other fields like economy, technology, sociology, politics, and relatively losing its own true essence.

The topics inducted in this brief notebook consist of three crucial ages of the modern/contemporary times. From monopolist capitalism to rationalism of the glorious Metropolis era; from war to severe existentialism on top of social freedom of Megalopolis era; and from world crisis through relativism to telecommunication onto the peak of today’s late capitalism or globalization of Metapolis era. Wandering through some of the most influential theories and approaches on sustainability and urban systems of the last century towards today’s prominent dilemmas on growth, degrowth and environmental justice as realistic yet bizarre realities.

My reflections might be synonymous to one another and yet contradictory, leaving me in such strange ambiguity of paradoxical ideologies that truly convinced me that the issues of today are not as superficial as simple as one would think, but rather bewildering and concerning, particularly when our responsibility as architects and city planners is higher than we think, whether the future is catastrophic or victorious.

A | Metropolis (1882-1939) The period of metropolis represents one of the most significant multidisciplinary transformations in human history. An ambitious cause with extraordinary effect that will constantly be shaping the future life and city of today.

The first and second technological revolution in the beginning of the 19century in the United Kingdom and then the rest of Europe, opened doors to new ways of life, where things are never going to be the same again. Although the cause behind is solely decent and kind, the effect on the other hand was huge and disastrous that eventually brought Europe on a horrible situation.

The laissez-faire times: invention of steam machine and new transport systems, rapid replacement of agriculture into industry; will lead to a continuous and massive movement of people from countryside to cities. Hence European cities are going to grow immensely, especially mother cities generating jobs and hosting major industries, like Paris, London, Berlin. These cities are known with the term Metropolis.

Population in Europe in 1800 and 1890

Alexander Leydenfrost: “Science on the march” (1952)

Life in metropolis was miserable for most people, especially the working class who mainly worked in factories with very little salaries and lived in housing units of terrible conditions, whereas for the bourgeoisie or the rich whose life was extraordinarily luxurious, everything was surely in favor. Eventually this social segregation will lead to a brutal monopolist capitalism and to abandoning the traditional beliefs of spiritualism into a new construct, into a rational mindset.

Rationalism will reflect on every aspect, developing strategies and models like Fordist strategic production model and Taylor Principles: 1-research 2-efficient design 3-mass production, which will not only be applied in work ethics but also adapted in everyday life, stimulating segregation, in terms of gender, social status, function and general lifestyle.

Otto Wagner: Vienna as “unending growth metropolis” (1912)

Berlin Mietskasernen (Verlag Dr. Hans Epstein/Wien & Leipzig 1929)

The huge contrast of social classes, the rational way of thinking and the machinery-vision, will influence also the later city planning and architects who so far had carelessly been decorating plazas and buildings under different directives.

Therefore, urban planning was born after most of metropolitan cities had already been built and working. However, rationalism awakened architects and urban planners to act on the big housing problem due to overpopulation, chaotic urban growth in European cities and the need to accommodate this huge amount of people. The use of only two tools made it quite easy for architects to solve these problems in Metropolis. Ordinances built for working class and entirely based on rational mindset, originally were the first important tool to improve the quality of life. However, architects seem to somewhat lack empathy while designing ordinances that actually were accommodating people in devastating conditions whereas hundreds of small rooms were found in one block and thousands of people living there.

The other tool was regulation plan which will decide on built areas, road networks and most importantly, zoning. Regulation plans will establish zones for everything, especially industry and housing, and were highly influenced by rationalistic way of living, the Taylorist principles and social segregation. This means that the working class and industry cannot be mixed with the bourgeois.

Usually, the urban model adapted in Europe and North America during this period, will follow the same approach where public facilities and commerce are in the center, but housing and industry are in peripheries.

Due to pollution of industry and wind direction of west-to-east, surely the rich will peculiarly live in the west while the working class will miserably live in the east, where the industry is.

European cities, known with their medieval centers, will have to be partially demolished, in order to build the tertiary commercial activities and the mass transport systems connecting center, peripheries and other small towns together, which is what makes a metropolis work.

drawing

Reinhard Baumeister: Heilbronn Regulation Plan (1879)

On these notes, many architects started working closely on the urban model for such cities, frankly speaking, with quite inconsistent and yet absurd ideas, reflecting the rational mindset to its bits, even from the intellectual class of welleducated people like architects for that matter.

A brilliant proposal of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse in 1935, ideally follows the human body elements (head, spine, arms and legs) and composing an abstract shape of linear city planning where functions were spread horizontally according to given hierarchies. This proposal anyhow, lacks efficiency in terms of commuting for long periods (travelling home-to-work and vice versa) and as known, efficiency is in essence of rationalism.

As opposed to Le Corbusier’s idea, German architects thought of more efficient ways, like the proposal of Ludwig Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt, where there is no zoning, one typology, and a ruthless efficiency in the superposition of circulation, production, consumption and reproduction.

These two approaches are rather too rational and ideal, theoretically speaking, but if we look closely, does it really feel like architecture?

Le Corbusier: Ville Radieuse (1935)

Ludwig Hilberseimer: Hochhausstadt (1927)

The debate between LC and Hilberseimer was somewhat pursuing what is the logic of the metropolis to its most extreme conclusion, which eventually might have ascended towards disappearance of architecture into a technical functional scheme. Even after the Chart of Athens in the early 30s when architects agreed upon modern urban planning approaches in European cities and added recreation in the list of four main functions of city planning, architecture in the beginning of 20 century was nothing more than a reflection of rationalism and “machine-era�.

Le Corbusier: Ville Contemporaine (1933)

Taylorist principles applied in architecture:

1-Research

2-Efficient Design

3-Mass Production

A lot of great architects of this period were coping with difficulties of Metropolis and more particularly, late modernization of architecture. Le Corbusier’s many attempts to solve the issue of rapid urban growth with Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse, Hillberseimer’s controversy with the Hochhausstadt, and the many efforts on housing problems from other architects like Gropius, Breuer, Martin Wagner, Alexander Klein, Bruno Taut, were all depicting towards a soulless, empty, and desperate architecture.

On a positive perspective, this rationalism of metropolis era, is undoubtedly a very important aspect of history in numerous disciplines, then of course in architecture and urban planning. No matter how deluded and absurd the architects might look with their proposals of that time, their approaches serve a great importance to what is today contemporary development. Considering how swift the revolutions metamorphose our realities, even unnoticedly, we get caught in problematic situations where we are responsible to co-design the future and respect the past, because our footprints are the latest to be set and the longest to last.

A | Metropolitan Landscapes When talking about landscapes in the metropolis era, the image we visualize is rather not pleasant. The reign of industry and machinery mindset over European cities, led not only to the demoralization of architecture but also to desolation of landscapes and countryside, with the immense pollution the lack of sustainable thinking in architecture and urban planning. Hence the debate on sustainability will be a starting point towards change. One idea was for cities to follow and imitate nature and another one opposed to that, was to keep following industry and rationalism. Undoubtedly, industry and extreme rational mindset dominated over the small number of nature followers, who were not architects, but biologists, ecologists, botanists, geographers, sociologists, and so on.

Going against rationalism of metropolitan era, does not mean being irrational and turn your back to symbolic way of thinking. Quite the contrary in fact, the ideology of ecologists or say “naturalists”, strongly relies on two aspects that are primarily scientific, properly rational, and what is open-mindedly new, mildly spiritual. It was rather odd to reckon such a philosophical, yet scientific ideology by the metropolis. The naturalists however, along with rational scientific approaches, also believed in nature’s power and its balance, where ecosystems are a coliving environment for diverse species spread equally, and humans should not disturb the nature’s balance. This is the so-called cycle of life and it works in perfect harmony with biotic and abiotic elements of the earth.

Such philosophy will be later adapted to the city planning and architecture where a city should work like an ecosystem, therefore we hear the term ecocity. Certainly, as always, architects were sleeping at least from 1880 to 1920! Instead, the debate on sustainability was entirely initiated by people of different fields who decided on following ecology, like geography and sociology.

Walter Christaller: Central Place Theory (1933)

Walter Christaller, a German geographer dedicated most of his works on patterns of settlements from geographical basis (human ecology). His well-known “central place theory� in 1933, seeks to explain the number, size and location of human settlements in a residential system and the spatial distribution of cities across the landscape.

Ernest Burgess: Chicago School Diagram (1925)

On the other hand, Ernest Burgess, a Canadian sociologist working in Chicago, who by imitating nature: how ecosystems work in group species, developed urban diagrams of such ecological approaches to sociology emphasizing the interaction between human behavior, social structures, and the built environment.

In this view, competition over scarce resources, particularly land, led to the spatial differentiation of urban areas into zones of similar use and similar social groups. Hence, he proposes a model for the spatial organization of cities called concentric zone theory on the city of Chicago as a prototype.

It was the work of botanists, ecologists and historians that tried to bring ecology in city planning with a lot of interesting proposals concerning new ways of growing.

The unending growth metropolis had become a great problem in Europe, with an absent solution. Many thought of radially growing by adding new circles to the metropolis functional scheme, which however was a temporary comfort and not a real solution.

Howard’s Garden City concept in “To-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform” written in 1898, aspires to go back to how life was before metropolis, with no pollution, no poverty, no chaos. His proposal can be described as a simple project of “marrying town and country”, of unifying together rural space and the urban nexus, or the urban nexus into rural space.

As an environmental concept, the Garden City, is centrally composed by preoccupations about the spatial combination of different dimensions of social life such as housing, industry, agriculture, business, municipal institutions, and transport infrastructure. Hence the idea depicts of small territories with limited population where the main center squares do not comprise churches or historical monuments, but parks instead. This interpretation obliterates what is the true origin of the Howard’s scheme, specifically the ideologies of new liberalism and new industrialism.

Ebenezer Howard: To-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform (1898)

Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, came with a new term for the metropolis, “ecological crisis” and as opposed to that, the term “urban ecology”. He firmly believed that there is “a larger view of nature and life, a rebuilding of analyses into synthesis of knowledge and action that embeds economic, social and cultural considerations, and perceiving “life as a whole”, which is to understand life as a dynamic ecological, social, and cognitive process in what humanity participates, raises awareness of the fundamental interconnection of nature and culture”. In his famous Valley Section Geddes tries to show how human activity comes from the landscape features and territory, therefore is bound and adapted to it.

The valley section, comprising a number of valleys, is a longitudinal bird-eye section which begins high up in the mountains and then follows the course of a river down the mountains and through a plain towards the coast. Along the bottom of the diagram, Geddes notes the so-called natural, best adapted, occupations represented by tools of different trades and crafts. If these occupations, exist in harmony with their environment, human societies would materialize in the form of such human settlements as can be seen along the valley section.

Patrick Geddes: The Valley Section (1909)

When translated in city planning, we understand the very basis of why cities are formed in such territories and work upon specific social and cultural activities.

This leads to a new term: “conurbation�, a regional compromise of metropolises or developed cities, which in later decades will emerge properly in forms metapolises, such as Randstad, Ruhr, Midlandton, etc.

On another note, Lewis Mumford, an American historian tried to put both ideas together, for conurbation and garden city to work together. Since technology makes it possible to travel easily from one place to another, why should people only live-in mother cities while they can satisfy all their needs in smaller ones and be connected to one another via transport systems? - is something Mumford wondered.

Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a good friend of Mumford, following his theory proposed the famous suburban concept of Broadacre City in 1935. With this proposal, he envisioned the hope of liberating the individual, and connecting citizens to nature where all elemental units of modern society were modestly included, like farms, factories, offices, schools, parks and recreational spaces, places of worship, a seat of government, and individual houses. He also envisioned that the low-density community represented in the Broadacre model would be replicated across the United States, creating a network of small communities that would be connected by highways and telecommunication systems, such as radio and telephone.

Frank Lloyd Wright: Broadacre City Model (1935)

However, his plan does not cater for the type of freedom found in being able to walk, cycle, or use public transport.

Furthermore, whilst Wright had a utopian vision that promised subsistence from the land, and having space to grow, he disregarded the benefits of the traditional city itself, was not sustainable at all, and somewhat influenced a new kind of urban development particularly in American cities, known later as urban sprawl.

This was a huge failure of the debate on sustainability that will have an immense effect on the future.

Literally copying nature to solve the metropolis problems is nothing near the ideal sustainability they were trying to practice. Moreover, it led to a misinterpretation and misuse of the word sustainable after all, raising numerous vain confusions.

Based on Geddes ideas on large scale territories, the planning was brought to a regional scale, regional planning, especially with the establishment of Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in 1923, an urban reform association of planners, sociologists, architects, historians.

This association dealt with new innovative ideas of growing territories, mainly in the United States which was coping with the great immigration problem of that time. Some of their proposals are applied even nowadays, such as Superblock providing all needs within one big block where people share similar aspirations,

Neighborhood Unit or 15-minute cities where everything is easily accessible within a period of 15minute walking, Green Belt as a concept of protected green areas within a city, Parkway as a highway lined with forests, and many other enlightening ideas.

These concepts from a hundred years ago, are now adapted to contemporary and sustainable city planning. For instance, The Emerald Necklaces project in Boston which somewhat is an interpretation of the Green Belt concept, Barcelona’s new projects to merge existing blocks of the grids into Superblocks, the initiative of Paris to be a 15minute city.

Frederick Olmsted: Emerald Necklaces Carlos Moreno: Paris as a “15-minute city” (Image: Ubique)

A | Berlin Berlin is one of the most characteristic cities of the metropolis period in Europe.

It describes best the beginning of industrial revolution and the transition from laissez-faire to capitalist rationalism to extreme edges. The industrial revolution in laissez-faire times happened in other cities first and not Berlin, which being a military capital of Kingdom of Prussia, was not an industrial city at that time.

However, the establishment of Germany as a compromise of many States, brough Berlin as its capital and therefore huge transitions with it. The industrialization of Germany started late compared to other countries in Europe. That is why it had the advantage to not make the same mistakes as UK or France, but instead, to apply properly the fordist/taylorist principles, technologies and to swiftly become the greatest industrial country in the world. Hence most important companies of industry are German, like Siemens, Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, ThyssenKrupp, etc. The rapid change of Berlin, from a provincial military city into the most powerful industrial metropolis in the world, caused an incredible amount of people migrating to the city, seeking jobs and housing.

The two tools for city planning, can be seen quite clearly in Berlin: the regulation plans that actually were dated even before establishment of Germany, like the one of Hobrecht which more or less followed the idea of Paris. But Berlin is not Paris, and surely it tends to apply cheaper ways of city planning; as a result, they built big blocks with less streets where thousands of people would live in very small military tenements or also known in german as Mietskaserne.

James Hobrecht: Bebauungsplan der Umgebungen Berlins (1862)

While the discourse on the housing question in Germany helped produce the notion of an ethical urbanism aimed at humanizing the city, it did so by naturalizing the same system of urban development that initially led to the spread of the Mietskaserne, that in fact were the most horrible housing typologies in Europe.

They often had elaborate historicist facades facing the street, increasing their apparent value and shielding from public view the horrid conditions within them (which for bourgeois reformers included poor hygiene, overcrowding, criminal activity, and the spread of socialist ideas). These tenements were not only for working class, but for the majority of people living in Berlin. These horrifying living conditions which were caused by using both tools combined, Hobrecht plan and Mietskaserne, led the country to revolution of communist parties and ideas.

Model of Mietskaserne in 1880 (credit:Rainer Bartzsch)

After the first world war outcome, Germany began to cope with not only incredible economic crisis, but also moral crisis of existentialism. People were desperate to change the doomed reality as much as they were willing to do anything that is new, a year zero with open minded people. This explains why Germany will lead the modern revolution of innovation in art, architecture, engineering, science, and other fields, while places like France, were still flourishing in their comfort and not seeking anything new. It will be very obvious this kind of transition that could happen only in Germany, especially in urban planning.

Mietsakaserne Conditions in Berlin (image credits: Bundesarchiv et al.)

Awakening of architecture and urbanism certainly started in Berlin, where urban art got converted into functional schemes and rationalism took over everything.

Martin Mächler Plan just after the first world war in 1919, is proof of this radical change of mentality in Germany and it’s the start of a new way of architecture, literally following rationalism to a point where it became relatively absurd. Many known architects contributed to solving the housing problem in Berlin during this time like Walter Groupius, Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner and others.

Martin Mächler: Berlin Plan (1919) Berlin lost its attachment to history, to heritage, to the old times due to its incredible transformation, and only focused on industrializing and rationalizing the city.

After the first decades of its industrial bloom, economic crisis, mental crisis, and poverty pushed the society on the edge of despair. That is why Hitler came to power and won the support of the people, by huge promises of a better life for Germany, he gave the people what they wanted to hear and thus the Weimer Republic was finished. Unfortunately, what was called democratic idealism, unexpectedly turned into a horrifying dictatorship that brought the next years of terror with the Nazi Regime in Europe. In terms of architecture, Hitler hated modernism and metropolis rationalism. He wanted to go back to classical architecture and bring monumentalism to Germany to what he demanded from Albert Speer to create, a pure style of German Architecture.

Albert Speer: Kuppelhalle (1940)

Albert Speer: Chancellery (1938)

The second world war surely had fatal outcomes, and specifically caused the destruction of Berlin. Bombings from the west, left huge voids in the city, which can partly be seen even nowadays throughout the city center.

Berlin in 1939

Berlin in 1945

B | Megalopolis (1939-1979) This period is a continuity of Metropolis, it did not have an industrial revolution to influence economy, mentality, and architecture as it happened for the previous era. It will still use the same tools, the same industry but what is different, is the mentality of people. Megalopolis is the period of huge social changes that will trigger new philosophies, new beliefs; will enhance creativity, art, culture, and most importantly, freedom! The second world was the deadliest conflict in human history, resulting in 70 to 85 million catastrophes, with more civilians than military people killed. Millions of people died due to genocides, like Holocaust, deliberate death from starvation, massacres, and disease. The air warfare played a big role in the conflict, including strategic bombing and nuclear weapons that left a lot of cities destroyed (Berlin, Tokyo) and nearly on the edge of complete vanishing (Hiroshima, Nagasaki). The humankind had never experienced such a terror, whose consequences in people’s mentality will be studied by philosophers, sociologists, psychologists, theists. They began to connect the war with rationalism and industry of monopolist metropolis and asking themselves how is it possible for something that was meant to make life easier (machines), to be used for killing people? Rationalization, technology, and science can really be dehumanizing and self-destructive.

Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland (image: Hulton Archive,1945)

The moral crisis caused by this terrific tragedy of the Nazi Regime, brought a completely new mentality which philosophers call existentialism. A simple explanation is: nothing matters except your physical matter of existence, thereof there is no god, no spiritual force to guide you except for yourself. As Sartre says: “Life has no meaning a priori... It is up to you to give it a meaning, and value is nothing but the meaning that you choose.” or as Heidegger raises a pragmatic question: “Why are there beings at all, instead of Nothing?”

With this radical change of mentality, comes a change of politics and therefore, a change in economy. Now government will become powerful and will try to balance the social classes, circulating the money from the bourgeois to the poor by making them pay taxes according to the wealth and providing better life conditions for working class. The Welfare State, which is based upon the principles of equal opportunity, equitable distribution of wealth, and public responsibility for citizens unable to avail themselves of the minimal provisions for a good life, is a successful outcome of the new governance, and can be seen as one of the most humanist decision in the history of humankind. Welfare as a matter of fact, someway influenced by existentialism, was not centering around efficiency and rationalism but mostly around social justice and sensibility. People have changed, and so has the purpose of life.

Cedric Price: The city as an egg

A similar philosophy at the end will reflect in architecture, and urban planning. In comparison to metropolis, the city centers will begin to shrink while the peripheries will grow to a point where different cities of diverse sizes, will merge with one another, and thus create one huge region that will be called a Megalopolis.

A creative illustration by Cedric Price, shows the evolution of the city,“from its origins in the mists of time up until fairly recently, the urban form resembled a hard-boiled egg.”

With this reverse growth and extremely huge cities, the importance will shift to peripheries and will fade from the historic centers that sometimes were completely demolished and replaced by new functions. On the other hand, peripheries will be densely inhabited by two type of people: the working class that will move from ordinances to social housing state and the middle class which will move to the garden city. The previous decades of war, political and economic issues, had left many cities in terrible conditions, especially the centers where you could find shanty towns and still people living in buildings like mietskasernes. In megalopolis, humanism will take over monopolism and the working class will be provided housing in newly built peripheries, where huge immigration happened.

Oddly enough yet necessary, behind this social housing architecture the idea was existentialism while the tools were still fordist/taylorist and efficiency.

Pruitt-Igoe, St.Louis (1954)

Levittown, Long Island (1946)

As for the middle class, which was constantly blooming and growing, they would like to live in suburbs, depicting the garden city concept. The United States would surely be the host of this new urban development, with prefabricated and affordable single-family houses for the middle class.

Levittown located in Long Island, New York is one of the first truly mass-produced suburb and is widely regarded as the archetype for postwar suburbs in the US. Initially, it was proposed for veterans of World War II after they returned home in 1947 – 1951. As well as a symbol of the famous “American Dream�, Levittown would also become a symbol of racial segregation in the States. Before the sales began, the agents were aware that no applications from black families would be accepted. As a result, American veterans who wished to purchase a home in Levittown were unable to do so if they were Black or Jewish.

Nantucket model, Levittown, Long Island (1946)

As architecture, the houses were cheap and designed typically using the same tools, of fordist/taylorist principles: research on typical spatial organization, prefabricated construction, two or three home typologies, and mass production.

On another note, the shrinking centers, in particular those areas where working class used to live, were the main focus of the so-called Urban Renewal Programs. Ironically, these “ideally positive” programs sometimes operated under corrupted directives: first, they demolished buildings of important heritage to reaccommodate working class and second, they did not build social housing for them as promised but cultural, commercial centers instead. This phenomena were present primarily in the United States, and then in Europe as well.

The 1960s are the astonishing peak of megalopolis, representing an absolutely rigid culture, highly demanding of greater individual freedom, wanting to break free of the social constraints of the previous age through extreme revolutions.

The World War II had brought a huge leveling of social classes in which the surplus of the old feudalism disappeared. And now the educated society, with open-minded aspiration and visions inflamed a new beginning of counterculture and revolution in social norms about music, sexuality, drugs, clothing, education, gender, race, and civil rights.

Notable events, protests and revolts will make the change what we live today, such as The Paris Riots of 1968, Woodstock Festival of 1969, Gay Liberation Front march of 1969, Bra Burning -protest against Miss The Night of the Barricades, Paris (1968) America in 1968, etc. (image:Gökşin Sipahioğlu)

Architects from now on will not decide alone on how and where people live.

Advocacy planning and participatory process will begin to apply in urban and architectural project in scope of multidisciplinary approaches and multicriteria analysis.

Along with this, the gender question as well will evolve as now women will be heard in scientific studies, sociology, journalism, and thereof in architecture and urbanism.

One very influential character is the brilliant Jane Jacobs, a journalist from New York, who understood cities as functioning organisms that relied on diversity and complexity.

She opposed large-scale urban renewal programs that affected entire neighborhoods areas and built freeways through inner cities. She was an absolute heroic figure that still inspires our today open-minded society: “Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas need old buildings. Cities need old buildings so badly that it is probably impossible that vigorous streets and districts could grow without them.�

Woodstock, New York (1969) (image:Henry Diltz)

Gay Liberation Front march, New York (1969) (image: Diana Davies)

Jane Jacobs (1961) (image: Phil Stanziola)

Parallel to social revolts of the 60s, the world of architecture experienced theoretical protests as well. Many Italian and English avant-garde architectural groups strongly opposed the early modernist architecture of famous figures including Le Corbusier.

They created the “Radical Design Movement” consisting of Archizoom, Superstudio, Studio Alchimia in Italy and Archigram in the United Kingdom. Their aim was to “prevent modernism from becoming a sterile and safe orthodoxy by its adherents”, through seductive vision of a glamorous future machine age; however, social and environmental issues were ignored by the architects.

“No-Stop City” by Archizoom, is a radical analysis of architecture and design projects, offering a model for “an immaterial city without quality, a city dedicated only to the continuous flow of information, technical networks, markets and services; where architecture disappears in a pure “urban semiosphere”, free of all symbolic value”.

“Plug-in City” by Archigram, is another utopic project against metropolis, of a hypothetical fantasy city, containing modular residential units that “plug in” to a central infrastructural mega machine. The works of Archigram suggested a nomadic way of life and, more particularly, a liberation from the modernist “suburbia”.

These attempts to change architecture of this period were not in vain. They inspiried many contemporary projects later, like the famous Pompidou Centre by Rogers and Piano, early Norman Foster works and Future Systems.

Archigram (Peter Cook): Plug-in City (1963)

B | Megalopolitan Landscapes The second part of the Debate on Sustainability will continue in the megalopolis period and they will realize mistakes in their previous approaches towards sustainability. Starting with Mumford who will boldly criticize what he once defended, the Garden City. Before the War, the concept of garden city was used by bourgeois only, meaning it was not common. On the contrary, after the war and growth of middle class, peripheries will be home to hundreds of garden cities or also known as suburban residences or suburbia. This failure on sustainability, explains the essence of megalopolis concept. Certainly, adapting nature’s logic to city planning is the opposite of sustainability: First, in terms of urban planning, such suburbia model occupies a great surface of land with an actual low density of people living there in comparison to the smaller but denser historic cities; it also does not contemplate any kind of spatial hierarchy considering streets, squares, public spaces, walking paths and recreation areas, the very essential elements that make a city alive.

Second, the architectural design of houses in suburbs in such monotonous semblance, lacks the sense of identity, soul and free-will, encouraging even a humorous human homogeneity and yes, a dehumanizing social segregation on racist and religious basis (case of Levittown). Cities in order to be sustainable, should be mixed, dense and compact; provide public transport instead of highways for cars, thereof the debate mixed, dense and compact; provide public transport instead of highways for cars, thereof the debate on sustainability will focus on shifting to historic city model instead of garden city.

This comparison between these two models shows pretty clearly the huge mistake of the approaches on sustainability during metropolis age that sadly speaking, continued to spread during megalopolis as well.

Bertraud and Richardson (2004)

Another approach beside the historic city concept, is “urban entropy”, which originates from thermodynamics studies and information theories. It relies on the idea that certain processes are irreversible or impossible and describes the structure or behavior of different systems as measures of the molecular disorder and randomness of these systems. When applied in urban systems, entropy processes can be found in the failures of garden city concept to suburban developments of megalopolis, with effusive, low-density, and broad urban growth that we call, urban sprawl.

Unfortunately, urban sprawl will be present even in the contemporary age of today. This phenomenon must be detected and prevented in order to achieve urban sustainability. Considering systemic paradigms, in the light of the previous assumptions, the city can be approached as a dynamic and complex system which changes and develops in space and time, constantly it moves and evolves “within itself”. However, today new procedures are being developed to plan sustainable cities which, in a circular process, regulate this spontaneous evolution and ensure that entropy is kept within a range defined by the minimum value, below which the system becomes vulnerable and unstable, and the maximum value, above which the system becomes unsustainable.

Vernacular architecture is one different idea that came to the minds of architects and urban planners during the 60s. No matter how efforts they had spent to govern the development of cities, society has always been there shaping the cities without architects, which actually proves to have very sustainable features and values. Disregarding “the controlled city growth” of western countries, most countries of Middle East and Latin America were growing in very informal ways: shanty towns in Pakistan or Favelas in Brazil and what is interesting is how selfsufficient, creative, humble, and yet of common-sense they are.

Many architects like Bernard Rudofsky, John Turner and Christopher Alexander considered visiting and analyzing such places where they would get inspired to

write and initiate a humbler approach to architecture and planning reflected by diverse patterns occurred.

Occasionally, such new methodologies will be seen in projects as PREVI, Lima in 1968 and later in metabolism architecture.

Christopher Alexander: A pattern language (1977)

Kurokawa-Kikutake-Maki: PREVI, Lima (1968)

Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles (1950)

B | Los Angeles A typical city that explains megalopolitan age is for sure Los Angeles in California, USA. Its environmental, geographical, and social characteristics make it a city of many possibilities and namely of major transitions after the first two technological revolutions. Hence, Los Angeles represents one of the first and biggest Megalopolis cities in the world.

Originally, as a Spanish colony of agricultural culture this region consisted of Los Angeles, a simple town near the coast, that was connected to many small towns nearby, like San Bernandino, Orange, Ventura, Long Beach, Santa Monica, Northbridge, etc. Initial urban planning was slightly different to the one we are used to: it follows mainly the geographical features starting with the bourgeois who would settle on the hills and along the coast while the others on the flat land of previous agricultural activity.

The rapid development of technology brought trams and urged large railway networks, such as Red Cars of Pacific Electric Railway, that was vastly spread between the small towns around Los Angeles for economic and social purposes.

Such a dense network will soon be transformed into a new transportation system of wide freeways and highways with a new element of focus, the automobile.

Eventually Americans will grow an interesting obsession about cars which will

be used massively throughout the country. Perhaps the economic and political strategies of USA, on gasoline and car prices in comparison to the rest of the world, somewhat encouraged this new obsession and thereof a mildly different mentality. Consequently, it will be the Americans who adapt cars in all sorts of daily activities, and thus in architecture: starting with the fact that everyone will come to own a car, downtowns will be occupied with large parking areas, all houses will own individual garages for one or two cars, and the newly fashionable concepts of drive-in markets, drive-in theater, drive-in restaurants, drive-in motels, drive-in church, car washes, and car dealerships, all originating from the 1930s that spotlighted a new youth culture.

On the contrary, the importance of architecture would relatively fade. As there are no real attachment to it, no constrains to follow, no common identity Drive-in restaurant, San Bernardino (1948) to it, no past and no future.

Downtown of Los Angeles for instance, is a very humble and simple space, but it does not have a specific value as historic cities usually do.

Instead, there are a lot of neighborhoods with marvelous and unique authenticity, such as Beverly Hills, Bel-Air, Hollywood, Malibu, etc.

Drive-in theater, Los Angeles (1949)

“Woman’s place is in the home”

An intriguing debate was introduced after the second world war on the gender discrimination. The routine of women working during the war while men were in the army, changed after they came back home.

Going back to the patriarchy of 19century is rather disturbing for the new generations which will raise against such idiocy and prosper adequate equality of civic rights in the present day.

A megalopolis like this, or as Reyner Banham calls it “polycentric urbanism”, owns tens of “centers” and yet paradoxically speaking, none. Urban sprawl of such extent resembles a chaotic environment forming a feeling of “no place”. The greatest impact on sprawl came through colonization of suburbia, notably from the development and expression of mass production for single-family homes, seen before the war, and expanded after the war in the large master planned communities of Panorama City in 1948 and Lakewood in 1950. The reason of this massive expansion was the government bank loans, given to people (after they returned home from war) to buy or order affordable houses in the suburbs.

Efficient and cheap, these houses required minimum labor to be built and a modular plan for massive production of very few typologies: “Ranch House”, “Dingbat Apartments”, “The Pacific Ready-Cut Homes”, etc.

Ranch House Model, Los Angeles (1930s)

Lakewood, Los Angeles (1949)

There is a lot of criticism about Los Angeles, particularly in the sense of urban sprawl, architectural controversy, suffocated sustainability, identity, and perhaps “beauty”? But what is bizarre is the fact that, Los Angeles in essence works and has been working for a long time, because despite endless facts on its urban structure, it is socially inspiring, creative, innovative and it is becoming more and more livable.

Hence is rather hard to seek a proper answer to what makes LA so uniquely paradoxical. On a simple observation, we might say that the secret of Los Angeles, is the people! They give meaning, identity and love to bits of the city, embracing a freedom with no constrains and being inspired to be educated, creative, humble and happy.

Banham, an architectural critic, is one of the few to be fond about Los Angeles.

He thinks that freeways are “one of the greater works of man”, and freeway land is the peak of the futuristic no-place that citizens of LA are, according to him, perfectly happy with. -“It is only visiting ‘snobs’ who see an apocalyptic dystopia.”

Interpretation of “Reyner Banham loves Los Angeles” (image: Lucie Gilormini et al.)

C | Metapolis (1979-2007) The last period disputed in this notebook consists of the contemporary age between 1979 - 2007 and continues in the present day. The two previous ‘-polises’ led to radical changes triggered by either industrial revolution or world wars aftermath. As though this period is another sequel of modernity, it will in fact be indirectly provoked by another war, The Yom Kippur War between Israel vs. Arab States in 1973. A global economic crisis occurred after Arab States lost and “avenged” through huge increment of petrol prices, which had been very cheap and supporting industrial countries. Coping with such crisis, the Western countries could no longer maintain properly the welfare state, thus were bound to slowly reduce its distribution to the people. Many public services and facilities passed to private sectors disturbing social balance and mildly re-initiating social economic classes. Another significant point is the new technological revolution, of computers and telecommunication networks, which led towards globalization.

Ironic Statement - Rationalism

Embracing relativism that comes from incredible and open-minded events of the previous ages, metapolis will sharpen even further ideas of social justice, equality, diversity, civil rights, sexuality, gender, race and education by which society is free of judgments and social construct because the truth is, relative!

Diverse yet homogeneous, today’s society highly influences the spread of common places, with no strings

Consequently, globalization stirs up the competition between developed countries on which city is more global than the other. Take London, New York, Tokyo, Paris, Los Angeles or lately Dubai. They way they are competing is undoubtedly through city planning, architecture and innovation. An interesting case is Dubai which is leading the world in huge architectural projects. On the other hand, global companies that generate immense incomes such as Apple, Sears, Microsoft, require dense developed cities with global impact in order to settle, like the case of LA versus NYC. This competition that has economical and commercial basis, as a matter of fact is helping against the shrinking of city centers and influencing gentrification of many central neighborhoods with very expensive housing prices. Sadly speaking, it is making middle class move out and attracting new classes of bourgeois to settle in expensive centers of global cities. Other phenomena happening in metapolis is a second re-development of suburbia, originally in USA, where new “commercial” or business dictricts are formed outside the city.

The term used is “edge city” and implies as Joel Garreau says in his book “Edge City: Life on the New Frontier” in 1991: “the standard form of urban growth worldwide, representing a 20th-century urban form unlike that of the 19th-century central downtown.”

The extent of Edge Cities is something that mirrored also in Europe. The Randstad in Netherlands for instance, demonstrate resemblance to Edge City development in several respects. However, perhaps because of some cultural differences, the European Edge Cities are not mere copies of their American counterparts, but rather a ‘typically European’ variation of the original Edge City model.

On that note, when talking about Randstad, we see a very advanced conurbation system adapted specifically to its main roles and activities represented in each or nine urban regions composing the Randstad. They co-live in dense, compact and developed cities, embracing a perfect harmony within their metapolitan agglomerate, often called “Ring City”.

The Randstad, Netherlands

The four largest cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht along with other cities are bond with one another in a multidimensional system, selfsufficing its basic needs of a strong economy, government, education, innovative technology, social and cultural development. Randstad is viewed as an example of the expansion of urban interaction to a polycentric city network, in Europe and worldwide. The idea of cities cooperating and not competing is a new way of not only sustainable urban growth, but also in terms of economic creative development.

Quite recently, many new metapolises are forming, following the example of Randstad, like in Italy there is Milan together with cities encompassing river Po to Venice and Bologna; in the UK, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds; in Germany, the case of Ruhr that already is considered a metapolis; in China, the Pearl River Delta Metapolis; and an international metapolis between Copenhagen, Malmo, Helsingborg and Helsingør.

Randstad in comparison to other global regions

Milan PGT: Urban de-growth

Others imply the “generic city” model to be followed, notably Europeans, which due to deindustrialization, struggles with degrowth of big cities due to vast abandoned areas of, for instance, military barracks and industrial zones.

Abandoned areas are a real issue in today’s contemporary cities and not just in European compact ones. Regenerating and colonizing such areas with new development projects is what Bernardo Secchi foresees of postmodernity’s urban growth, or as he calls it “inner growth”. In one of his urban journal essays, he speaks about two levels of reality and what lies in between them as a contemporary vision. Also describing two positions on which European city survived until today, he refers to ‘renovatio urbis’ as one possible vision from which “any plan or project for the city, any urbanism that would build a tie between the two levels of reality through a policy of renovatio urbis, of limited and precise projects, of architecture that could colonize its context giving it new meaning.”

American planners are thinking of another model called “new urbanism” as opposed to the sprawl of suburbia. It mainly aims to achieve environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighborhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. Although, it is an innovative and sustainable approach, its architectural appeal is controversy and certainly not modern for such a modern urban model, something possible for the US, but not for European mindset (one might call it “kitsch”).

“Nine Parks” Project in Milan

C | Metapolitan Landscapes This last chapter will briefly go through the third and last part of the debate on sustainability, starting with the very establishment of “Sustainable Development” concept in 1987, which states sustainability as a “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, and in urban context as an: “Agreement between city and natural environment, so that the pressure of the former over the latter Bruntland Report (1987) doesn’t exceed some limits”. Soon this concept will be widely used in a lot of fields despite architecture and urbanism, which philosophy relies on growing to a limit in compact and diverse cities, with renewable environmentally friendly resources and finally belonging to the original term of “ecocity”.

Serge Latouche, a French economist, preserves the term of “de-growth” hence “degrowth movement”, as a way of political (leftist) commitment against globalization and capitalism, notably in terms of economics, politics, and then architecture.

Latouche thinks that our growth-orientated civilization suffers from the delusion that there are no environmental limits to growth. Thus, degrowth opposes to mainstream ideas that aim to increase capitalist growth and consumption where higher economy and lower well-being dominate. There is need to reduce global consumption and production; to protect a sustainable society, replacing economic GDP as the indicator of prosperity. Degrowth, is however suggested for rich capitalist countries and not the developing ones which in contrast, still need to grow.

Accordingly, contemporary cities are losing people and architectural matter.

Detroit from 1950 to 1994, undergone a huge transformation of shrinking after deindustrialization, losing its physical matter with abandoned areas. Another urban degrowth, is expected to happen in Milan, as also Secchi writes about, decreasing in 20 years, 8% of population and urban matter, and spreading numerous circumstantial physical “voids” throughout the city.

The regeneration of such spaces, as Secchi in his essays refers as “renovatio urbis” and “inner growth”, is a valid answer to degrowth of cities, with urban agriculture or public spaces for social integration and creative clusters.

Degrowth of Detroit, Michigan

Allotment Garden: Prinzessinengärten, Berlin

A rather hypothetic approach of recent decades is the alternative selfsustainability, which does not firmly believe in ecotechnology and mainstream sustainability. It disregards the hierarchical human way of thinking to an equal ecosystem harmony: ego versus eco.

The brilliant French botanist, Gilles Clément, strongly defends the interaction with nature by highly respecting it and not dominating upon it. His projects consist of small provocations in ecosystems, that occasionally enact newly formed ecosystems with richer biodiversity. The ecosophy of his simply implies: “To do as much as possible with, as little as possible against”.

Soft transformations is the last point inducted briefly in this notebook. Many contemporary architects adapt to the idea of small interventions in landscape, that would trigger new biodiverse ecosystems.

Reluctantly or not, nature always works itself, constantly changing and evolving into its course without the need of us to mess with its cycle. Hence, as my old childhood friend once said: “doing nothing often leads to the very best of something” -Winnie the pooh.

Conversion Airfield Bonames, Frankfurt (2005)

Gilles Clément: Île de Deborence (Parc Matisse - Euralille, 1995)

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Available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259333096_Entropy_ in_Urban_Systems Stead, Dominic & Meijers, Evert. 2015. “Urban planning and transport infrastructure provision in the Randstad, Netherlands - a global city cluster” Prepared for the Roundtable on Integrated Transport Development Experiences Of Global City Clusters, Beijing, 2015.

Secchi, Bernardo. 2003. “The form of the city.” In Planum. The Journal of Urbanism, n.7, vol.2. Available at http://www.planum.net/the-form-of-the-city Secchi, Bernardo. 2003. “Projects, visions, scenarios.” In Planum. The Journal of Urbanism, n.7, vol.2. vol.2. Available at http://www.planum.net/diary-10projects-visions-scenarios-bernardo-secchi Viganò, Paola. 2009. “The Metropolis of the Twenty-First Century” The Project of a Porous City. On Territories, OASE, (80), 91–107. Available at https://www. oasejournal.nl/en/Issues/80/TheMetropolisOfTheTwenty-FirstCentury

DiellĂŤza Tahiri, 2020