City Vision:

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City Vision

• Urban Design and Lives

Image source ???
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Outline

1. Starting Questions
2. Metropolis The City as Text (1)
3. A City is not a Tree
4. The Personals (????)

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Starting Questions

• How do we describe/represent a city? Why is city
  an imagined environment (422)? Why can a city
  be a text (written with signs, to be
  interpreted)?
• How do city planners imagine a city? With what
  metaphors and charts? What could be their
  limitations? What could be the limitations they
  place on city-dwellers? (e.g. pedestrian areas)
• How about us? What metaphors or images do we
  have in mind about a city? Can we map a city?
  How do we walk in a city such as Taipei?

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Metropolis The City as Text

• Focus representations of cities from 19th
  century till now. (human body, machine,
  labyrinth, flows p. 423)
• 1.1 Prologue excerpts from Bleak House and The
  Asphalt Jungle
• Similarities effect of the weather on the
  cities the city alien civilization
  sophisticated but fragile technologies and
  forces constituting the life of a city
• Asphalt Jungle city as a machine and a strange
  and magical place with awareness of the class
  and ethnic differences

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Metropolis The City as Text

• A. Body Two paradigms in the 19th century
• The divine order the invisible hand of the
  market in giving order to a city ? like a body
  with the instincts of brute creation.
• The medical paradigm ills attributed less to
  commercial systems than to urbanization.
• Develop social welfare system through both
  investigation and administration systems.
• Urban government . . . Includes surveillance and
  discipline. ? concrete, quantifiable and precise
  info. ? ???????.
• E.g. lt??gt its view of the citysimilar or
  different?
• The last SARS epidemic multiple systems of
  surveillance

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The police City as a statistical grid of
investigation and surveillance

• (Michel Foucault) the police a techonology of
  government which defined the domains, techniques
  and targets of state intervention. It involved
  cataloguing the resources of a state, both
  material and human, in minute detail. (429-30)
• e.g. District Offices (domicile registration)
  District Health Center

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The City as Text (2) Dynamic structure

• Engels Marxist view relations between the
  haves and have-nots as a complex, concrete
  totality, and whose parts have meanings that are
  only decipherable in relation to all its other
  parts.
• ???
• Both views are deterministic, but the poem
  emphasizes the physical rather than the economic.
  

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The City as Text 2.2 Concept vs. Experience

• Michel de Certeau p. 435
• Concept city in utopian or urbanistic
  discourse with a perspective both god-like and
  voyeuristic that can encompass all the diversity,
  randomness and dynamism of urban life in a single
  panorama (statistics). ? a proper space, a pure
  space, a space of rational organization. ? urban
  and human ills repressed

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The City as Text 2.2 Concept vs. Experience (2)

• Michel de Certeau p. 435
• 2. Lived city beneath the discourses, the grids
  and combinations of powers or a fixed pattern of
  statistical relationships.
• The people, who are unpredictable, inventive and
  devious.
• Who have illegible improvisations of the spaces
  on the streets or at home.

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The City as Text 2.2 Concept vs. Experience (3)

• Rational city vs. mythic experience
• Max Weber 18th, 19th centuries abstract,
  formal rationality as the organizing principle ?
  demythification and disenchantment of the social
  world
• The new urban-industrial world fully
  re-enchanted. --in the new shopping arcades.

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The City as Text 2.2 Concept vs. Experience (2)

• Houssmann vs. Baudelaire
• Rational organization vs. flaneur

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Christopher Alexander
Image info source

• Born in Vienna, Austria in 1936 raised in
  England, and holds a MA in Mathematics and a
  Bachelor's degree in Architecture from Cambridge
  U, and a PhD in Architecture from Harvard U.
• The father of the Pattern Language movement in
  computer science,
• He has designed and built more than two hundred
  buildings on five continents
• Recent Work, The Order of Nature, used in poetry
  criticism, too.

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Christopher Alexander (2)

• Studied beauty for 35 years in the context of
  architecture, carpet and nature.
• Studies beauty in terms of geometry, process for
  creating the wholeness and life ? poetic order

Image source
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Christopher Alexander (3) Centers

• "'Centers' are those particular identified sets,
  or systems, which appear within the larger whole
  as distinct and noticeable parts. They appear
  because they have noticeable distinctness, which
  makes them separate out from their surroundings
  and makes them cohere, and it is from the
  arrangements of these coherent parts that other
  coherent parts appear. The crux of the matter is
  this A center is a kind of entity which can be
  defined only in terms of other centers. Centers
  are - and can only be - made of other centers."

Image source
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Christopher Alexander (4) Connections between
cars and pedestrians

• Where cars are moving slowly, people and cars can
  mix up, meaning that at very low density traffic,
  there do not necessarily need to be sidewalks.
• Creating quiet places with good space for
  pedestrians and narrow slow space for cars. (?
• Wide, densely traveled pedestrian streets may
  cross densely traveled roads with cars and buses,
  best at a right angle.
• Pedestrian lanes can be designed to be internal
  to a block. . . . within 150 feet of the nearest
  road.
• Where cars dominate there should be easy access
  to beautiful and pure pedestrian space. (e.g. ??)

Info source
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Christopher Alexander (5) Connections between
cars and pedestrians e.g.

• Eishin University Campus in Japan
• A narrow pedestrian street as it might occur in
  the higher density parts of a new housing village
  --from the Eishin campus, near Tokyo, Japan

Info image source left, right
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The City is not a Tree

• Whats the difference between thinking like a
  tree or like a semi-lattice?
• What are the functions of zoning? And
  disadvantages?
• What is the good overlap?

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The City is not a Tree Introduction

• A city of little glass and concrete boxes
• ? existing remedies (120) in space, in the shape
  of the building, in density of population, in
  mixture of small villages in a city
• ? to re-configure a conception of modern cities
  
• ? start with the distinction between a natural
  city and an artificial city

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The City is not a Tree (2)

• Definition of set and unit
• Of the many, many fixed concrete subsets of the
  city which are the receptacles for its systems
  and can therefore be thought of as significant
  physical units, we usually single out a few for
  special consideration. . . .
• Now, a collection of subsets which goes to make
  up such a picture is not merely an amorphous
  collection. Automatically, merely because
  relationships are established among the subsets
  once the subsets are chosen, the collection has a
  definite structure.

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The City is not a Tree (3) tree and semi-lattice

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The City is not a Tree (3) tree and semi-lattice

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The City is not a Tree (4) tree and semi-lattice
-comparison

• P. 124
• neat and simple
• Overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity
• E.g. the overlapping functions of a post-office,
  school, youth club and adults club p.125
• Metaphor play p. 126 working in another area p.
  128

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The City is not a Tree (4) tree and semi-lattice
-example

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The City is not a Tree (4) tree and semi-lattice
-example

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Villa Savoye by LeCorbusier

• "machine a habiter," a machine for living (in).
  Located in a suburb near Paris, the house is as
  beautiful and functional as a machine. (source)

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What is the right overlap

• Pp. 129-30.
• Walking? Open-air café?
• Illegal vendors? Stores everywhere?
• Passengers walking among the cars?

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The Personals ????

• What is the film about? Why does Dr. Du want to
  put up an ad for seeking a spouse?
• What does she get instead? (What kinds of people
  does she meet? Does she learn anything?)
• What are the meanings implied in the opening and
  closing images

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Her Purposes

• Escape by playing a different role
• Looking for a way out
• But also keeps calling the guy because she cannot
  leave him.

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A Woman on the Street

• Being questioned, looked at, desired, judged and
  played with. even harrassed
• Inquisitive questions (age, number of boyfriends,
  sex experience)
• Judged by appearance
• (e.g. the voice actor and Mr. Yu)
• Desired (e.g. the pimp, the tour guide)
• Played with (e.g. the actor)

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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Selfish purposes
• For their relatives the father, the austic
  child, Yu wen (who wants to marry for his old
  parents)

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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Selfish purposes (2)
• For their business (sex, self-defense tools), for
  sex (real-estate agent), 2. Just marriage Mr.
  Wang

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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different persons
• Different personalities lesbian, old Mr. Do-All,
  sex-video-addict,

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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different personswhat does she
  learn from them? (1)

Self-indulgence in his own game
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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different personswhat does she
  learn from them? (2)

Her nervousness and disguise
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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different personswhat does she
  learn from them? (3)

Shyness in his smile, like hers
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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different personswhat does she
  learn from them? (4)

1. To grow up thru experience of pains
2. To make ones own choice
3. The difference between ? and ??

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A Woman on the Street also judging and learning
as a flâneuse

• Learning from different personswhat does she
  learn from them? (5)

1. To take a broader perspective to look at the
   moment

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A Woman on the Street also looking at the city

1. From hope (disguise) to fatigue to opening up

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A Woman on the Street also looking at the city

1. From hope (disguise) to fatigue (2)

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A Woman on the Street also looking at the city

1. From bleak vision, a broader vision to blue and
   fluid ones

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A Woman on the Street the ending

1. The blue and fluid vision
2. Chens message hoping for reconnection or chance
   encounter

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A Woman on the Street the ending (2)

1. One of many lives in the city

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References

• SOME NOTES ON CHRISTOPHER ALEXANDER
  http//www.math.utsa.edu/sphere/salingar/Chris.tex
  t.html