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INTEGRAL URBANISM
As our connections to the environment and other people grow increasingly tenuous — a condition commonly described as the breakdown in community and the family as well as the ecological crisis — efforts to rethink urban design have been seeking to reconnect or provide places allowing connections to occur. Rather than respond to specific problems with piecemeal solutions that only exacerbate the problems or push them elsewhere (reactive solutions), the emphasis on holism and seeing or forging connections at a higher and more complex level is leading to a wide range of proactive interventions. ACROSS THE FISSURES The Modern era divided the world and our thinking about it into fragments and our landscape followed. We are suffering the results. To bring it back together, we need to overcome the divisions in our thinking, so we can envision the integration and implement it. Not the way it used to be, but a new integration. A decade ago, Herbert Muschamp described the “Urban Revisions” exhibition at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art as “a sprawling mess of undigested ideas.” He also remarked, “so is the field of urbanism that it sets out to survey.” Muschamp concluded that “If nothing else, the show exposes the need for a new vocabulary of urbanism — a language capable of bridging the differences among those who shape the public realm.” He maintained, “if designers want to reinforce the connective tissue of cities, they will have to speak across the fissures that have opened up among themselves.”27 Integral Urbanism aspires to speak across these fissures. It offers an alternative to the tired and unproductive opposition between radical high designers and traditionalists, whom Robert Campbell calls the “rads” and the “trads”: The rads and the trads are the same. They’re much more like each other than they are different. That’s because they both seek to substitute a utopia of another time for the time we actually live in. The trads find utopia in the past; the rads find it in the future … What both the rads and the trads ignore, in their love of utopias of the past and the future, is the present. They both try to elbow aside the real world we live in and substitute a world of another era. It’s a lot easier to design a utopia than to deal with the complex reality of a present time and place. You don’t have to deal with the tension between memory and invention. You just take one or the other. If you do that, you inevitably create architecture that is thin, bloodless, weak, and boring.28