a city is a human-made creation, constructed of many parts that individually represent the needs of our civilization. shelter, food, interraction, movement, art, maintenance, and all the services that support these are found, in many scales, throughout cities across the globe. we understand them as an amalgamation of all the pieces of our culture grouped together. this, like all things, is subject to time, and the pieces of which it is made up of change accordingly. the functions that we valued more in the 10th century are less likely to be as prevalent in the city today -- indeed there are a vast number more functions. the city itself can be seen as an entity, changing in correspondance with our needs.
in the 4th century, most of the byzantine cities were walled, reflecting the needs for protection and unification, and they all had a central axis, sometimes two, because procession and hierarchy of building function were important. many centuries later, you can still see the same city structure, however the buildings have escaped outside the wall. this common theme reveals our need for order and structure in our cities (and also our departed need for security from without). on the other hand, in these same cities, buildings have grown vertically, and all types of connections to each other are made both at street-side and below in mass-transit systems painstakingly built.
in the 20th century, an explosion of growth occurred, both in population as well as industrialization. this brought with it many ramifications, including dramatic increase in construction, development, crowding, and pollution -- and automobiles. the introduction of higher buildings and easier transportation marked a detachment of the highly held values of hierarchy and scale, which was so important to the city. the idea of destroying the limitations of the city, and the escape of the mills and industry within it gave way to many different ideas of what a city could be.
one of the most influential was Ebenezer Howard's "Garden City" proposed in 1898, showing low density, dispersed settlements with agriculture and parks throughout; a clear idealization of the flight to the suburbs that was to come. many similar proposals were to come, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, which shared the same idealistic view. the difficulties of these visions were only realized much later, with the constant and exponential need for more and more automobile and residential accomodation.
after this growth had been witnessed during the following two decades, more visions of the future of the urban environment came out which focused more heavily on concentration. most of them european, the designers and architects imagined the way that technology could harness the rampent growth that was becomming apparent. Antonio Sant'Elia's "Citta Nuova" in 1914, Harvey Wiley Corbett's illustrations of series of stacked streets in 1913, or Le Corbusier's "Cite de Trois Milles" in 1925 and later "Ville Radieuse" in 1930. Many if not all of the schemes that had come from this time were radical, however much of Le Corbusier's view of large highways and parking garages have become commonplace today.
the failing of these proposals in the reality of the aftermath of the second world war essentially ended the pursuit of these "utopian" visions, and the responsibility was transferred to the world of academia. Moshe Safdie, an influential and accomplished architect and planner clarified that during this time "...a climate developed in which the expression and comment of an individual architect became more important in the design of buildings than perceiving the city as a whole and architecture as collective, connective, or shared."
the result of this period of exploring city forms has resulted in smaller communities being formed such as Seaside, Florida, which is the realized ideal of the movement of New Urbanism, which sought to define our living in terms of the individual, yet fails from its conscious ignorance of the need for more housing and automobile access. other projects similar to Paolo Soleri's Arcosanti, a large-scale commune structure attempt to realize similar goals in an inclusive system. with the exception of these experiments, most of the resulting cityscape is a product of social and economic forces.
the chaotic composition of the modern-day city could be seen as the result of numerous small economic decisions placed in the framework of the city. as a need grows large enough to warrent expenditure, it gets built, and consequently informs growth around it. it is becoming very clear that the form that this city-type has evolved into is not the one we would like. the question then becomes: what is?
more to come
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