The traditional system of .......... influences town planning and architecture even today
Answers
Answer:
City Journal
City Journal
is a publication of Manhattan Institute
THE MAGAZINE
TOPICS
CONTRIBUTORS
MULTIMEDIA
ALL PUBLICATIONS
ABOUT
SUPPORT
SUBSCRIBE
FROM THE MAGAZINE
Tradition and the Modern City
Robert Adam
Autumn 1995
There is so much about the modern city that is wrong. Insecurity and isolation have marred the quality of life; beauty and community are in retreat. When we look at how our cities have changed in the last 50 years, we cannot escape the conclusion that our physical surroundings must have had a part to play in this decline. Post-war buildings and planning are the product of the failed modernist ideal that transformed most aspects of twentieth-century life, from politics to painting, and that gave rise to our urban social ills and to urban ugliness. In architecture, modernism—the cult of abstract rationality and change for its own sake—has given us sterility and inhumanity instead of its promised progress and liberation. Utopian ambitions and professional arrogance have left our cities with decay and dereliction, the perfect breeding ground for the alienation and brutality that have undermined community life.
Some of us look to the cities we admire from the past for a solution. In traditional cities like Siena in Italy or Bath in England we can see something that is not only beautiful but alive and humane—the very qualities that modernism seems to have destroyed. One can't help feeling we could make our cities more life-enhancing if we were to build them like these traditional cities. Out of this impulse, a revival of traditional architecture and city planning has grown up; it is flourishing from Portland, Oregon, to Paternoster Square in London, from Brussels in Belgium to Seaside, Florida.
We call the places that have inspired this movement traditional, but, other than the simple fact of being old, how do we define a traditional city? I confess I do not know.
Do any of us know? We talk about tradition and cities as if we all knew what these things were, and we make comparisons with the past on the assumption that we really can do something similar today. But what hope do we have if we are not even talking the same language?
The word "city" is derived from the Latin for citizen and originally meant a community of citizens. It does not mean that now. Any comparison we make with classical antiquity must also acknowledge huge differences in size. The average population of a pre-Hellenic Greek city would be a little over 5,000. A large provincial Roman city would have a population of 10,000 to 20,000. Not much changed in terms of size until the Industrial Revolution. Most medieval cities had fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. Even major Italian Renaissance cities rarely exceeded 50.000. Today, London counts 8 million inhabitants, Chicago contains nearly 3 million people, Paris 2.5 million, and even a small Italian city such as Perugia has a population of 120,000.
These differences in size make for very different dynamics of city life. So, too, do differences in social and political organization. Democracy in Greek city-states or Italian communes was unlike modern democracy and was a fragile flower easily and often crushed. Throughout the history of the city, it was much more common to be subject to oligarchic or tyrannical rule.
Equally crucial to an understanding of the city is its economic base. Very early cities were fortified villages where people engaged in agriculture outside the walls. This did not last for long. Since antiquity, the city has been a consumer of goods produced in the countryside. It supported itself on trade or conquest. A city was a place where wealth free from the pressures of sufficiency could be enjoyed. Outside the city there was brute existence, the wilderness, the struggle for survival and danger; inside the city there was order, safety, wealth, and the leisure to pursue the finer things of life. This urban ideal may have been the lot only of some citizens, but it embodies the essential ideas that made the city a civilized place.
This ideal of civilization, however, is at odds with the modern concept of the city. The modern city is the wilderness, the urban jungle. The inner city is a dangerous place where brute existence is dominated by the struggle for survival. Anyone with sufficient wealth leaves the public city for a private place where there is safety, order, and the enjoyment of leisure.