Читать книгу Resilience - Sandrine Robert - Страница 23

At its heart, 19th and 20th century urbanism carried the idea that the choice of a type of plan or building scheme could promote the development of a societal model. The urban plan was seen to have the potential to establish a spatial order that would also imply a social order. Notions of architectural disorder are often closely linked to ideas of social disorder in discussions of urban design (Poïesis 1998). Up until the 1970s, urban design projects were still being presented as “harbingers of spatial order, opposing urban chaos and fragmentation” (Choay and Merlin 1988, p. 625). For the culturalists, the idea of reviving a former, “ordered” state was closely linked to a desire to normalize “chaotic” industrial cities (the same type of logic is still applied in the context of discussions surrounding suburban development, city outskirts, etc.). The esthetic qualities inherent in certain older configurations had been confirmed over the course of history, an opinion supported by the recurrence of these arrangements, confirming the intrinsic value of the plan. Thus, the mother form was also considered as a social project. According to this perspective, space is seen as a relatively neutral substrate, a canvas for the models applied to them by urban designers – models that could be adapted to any location and time, with no need to account for the specific characteristics of geographical sites or for the unique trajectory of a place. On the contrary, dissociation from the natural milieu was seen as a potential criterion for ensuring the durability of an urban form.