Concept City vs. Lived City

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Concept City vs. Lived City

• Hausemann and le Corbusier vs.
• Baudelaire and de Certeau

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Outline

• Starting Questions
• Concept C (1) Baron Haussman
• Lived C (1) Baudelaire and Benjamin
• Concept C (2) Viennas Ringstrass
• Lived C (2) G. Simmel
• Concept C (3) Le Corbusier

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Starting Questions

• 1. Whats good and bad about the ideas of
  concept city and lived city?
• 2. What have we known so far about urban
  planning? The metaphors some theorists used?
  The differences between Hausemann and le
  Corbusier
• 3. How is urbanism a way of life? How does
  Louis Wirth defines it? Do you agree with him?
  (e.g. Urban contacts impersonal, transitory,
  segmental, and mostly utilitarian ? anomie)
• 4. Is Wirths view similar to that of George
  Simmel?
• 5. What is a flâneur? (439) Can we be flâneur
  or flâneuse?

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Concept City vs. Lived City
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Concept C (1) Baron Haussman

• P. 438
• Clean, light and airy
• To support the logistics of state power and
  economic calculation.
• Clip from We Built this City.

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Lived City (1) The Arcade in Paris
p. 440 Arcade as a temple
http//www.jellesen.dk/webcrea/places/paris/paris0
8.htm
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Baudelaire The Flâneur

• "There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into
  the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who
  demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego
  the life of the gentleman of leisure. His
  leisurely appearance as a personality is his
  protest against the division of labour which
  makes people into specialists. it was also his
  protest against their industriousness. Around
  1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles
  for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to
  have the turtles set the pace for them."

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Flnâeur Results of and Responses to Modernity

• Fast development in industrialization, capitalism
  and modernization of city spaces. ? increasing
  spectacles and human mobility.
• Arcades ? Exhibition such as Crystal Palaces ?
  fairs, gardens, statues, etc
• ? Turning indoor (department stores, shopping
  malls, Cinema city and internet).
• phantasmagoria ???? , or kaleidoscope ???
• Is flâneur an artist or a shopper?

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Responses to Modernity Baudelaire and Benjamin

• Baudelaire the modern heroes the poet, the
  flaneur, the dandy, the collector, the gambler,
  the worker, the dandy, the collector, the
  gambler, the worker,  the rag-picker and the
  prostitute give voice to the  paradoxes and
  illusions of modernity.
• Benjamin as a walking commodity is no hero he
  acts heroes ?empty commodity forms
• Flâneur can be a conceptual category or narrative
  device. One which is apparently unorganized and
  thus de-centering.
• Can we be flâneurs nowdays? And what kinds of
  flâneurs are we?

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Concept C (2) Vienna's Ringstrasse
The Ringstrasse is a wide avenue which encircles
the old city of Vienna, Austria.
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Vienna's Ringstrasse Problems

• Due to the massive nature of the Ringstrasse, the
  buildings served to draw attention to the open
  space, an inversion of these Baroque ideas.
• Roads leading inwards towards the inner city from
  the suburbs, did not continue uninteruppted to
  the city center, but were drawn into the circular
  flow of the Ringstrasse, causing a seperation of
  city and suburb, not physically, but by urban
  design.
• Similar? The roundabouts in Taipei

The Ringstrasse source.
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Vienna's Ringstrasse Problems

• Furthermore, the buildings constructed along the
  Ringstrasse were not organized towards each
  other, but towards the street itself, further
  focusing the attention on the Ringstrasse.
• Two critiques
• Sitte returns to baroque-style, seeing the city
  in organic terms,
• Otto Wagner, a modernist mechanistic terms.
• What do we learn from this example? In what ways
  are our lives and personalities shaped by urban
  design?

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London an organic city

• Sir Christopher Wren (1632 --1723 London's Great
  Fire of 1666 gave Wren a chance to present a
  scheme to rebuild the city. Utopian in concept,
  it was only partially realized. E.g. St. Paul
  Cathedral source) (clip)

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Georg Simmel (1858-1918)
Urban mentality The blasé attitude
Definition dictionary bored or not excited,
or wishing to seem so. 2. Simmels A condition
which results from the "boundless pursuit of
pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the
nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a
long time that they finally cease to react at
all."
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Blasé

• Proposition The psyche of the Metropolis
  inhabitant is over stimulated through the
  "intensification of nervous stimulation"
  resulting in an inability to react at all. It is
  felt that this is an inverse relationship. As the
  stimulation increases so does the inability to
  react. Whereas, one could presume that if the
  stimulation was intermittent, one could react
  intermittently. Furthermore, if the stimulation
  ceased, one could react always. (source) p. 468
• See our excerpt for different types of impression
  and their influences-- p. 466
• E.g. moving through traffic, a series of shocks
  and collision in a large city looking at but
  not talking to people.

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Sources of indifference Urban Environment

• Dominated by money economy intellectualism
  (466) excessive stimuli
• ?matter-of-fact attitude
• ? indifference to individuality. (also 469)
• ? calculative mind.
• P. 470 loss of individuality and personal life

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Simmel City vs. Country

• In a rural or small town context we find a
  personality born of the smoothly flowing rhythm
  of the sensory-mental phase, it rests more on
  feelings and emotional relationships
• in the city, meanwhile we find an
  intellectualistic psyche which through an
  intensification of consciousness has developed
  a protective shield with which to survive rapid
  fluctuations and discontinuities in the external
  milieu.

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the urban psychesummary

• Has mastered instrumental calculation, the
  quantification and assimilation of diverse data
• Has become indifferent towards others (blasé)
• Has gradually suppressed feelings or emotions
• Do you agree? Are all of our responses similar
  to nervous reflexivity?

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Le Corbusier

• Total modernism
• Clear the city of its cesspools (e.g. slums, etc.
  p. 447)
• Develop and separate a citys four
  functionshousing (high rises), work, recreation
  and traffic (from pedestrians)
• Re-design our lives.

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Le Corbusier

• Villa Savoye, by Le Corbusier, at Poissy, France,
  1928 to 1929.

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Le Corbusier

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References

• GreatBuildings.com http//www.greatbuildings.com/
  gbc.html
• Vienna's Ringstrasse http//www.macalester.edu/co
  urses/geog61/aaron/
• Le Corbusier 1. http//www.greatbuildings.com/bui
  ldings/Centre_Le_Corbusier.html
• 2. http//www.tu-harburg.de/b/kuehn/lecorb.html