PDF AS A REFERENCE

Title Experiments in associative urbanism.
Author Vereebs, Tom.
Source Architectural design, 2009 July-Aug., v.79, n.4, p.24-33

REBIRTH OF A CITY

After reading the document about urbanism and watching some videos, I came with this idea for my final assignment:

There is a big city full of orthogonal buildings; those buildings have different heights and functions, for example: office, house, apartment, industrial, museums, and parks. None of them are placed in the right place; the industrial buildings are in the centre beside the office ones, there are houses everywhere and apartment buildings also. Everything is mixed; the city has no planning at all. The streets are like a big orthogonal labyrinth, there are no main avenues or sidewalks, then that path starts to show thanks to a bright liquid light that goes by all the streets. We can see only the lighted path, then the city appears again and suddenly something funny starts to happen, a strong force enters the city and starts collapsing everything that touches, until there is nothing left, the city is gone! And only when we thought there was no hope a bright liquid stuff starts to drop out of nowhere, and we can see it spreading quickly as if it had a purpose, a mission. Nobody knew what was happening until the camera starts to zoom out then we can see that the bright liquid stuff is forming a new path, for a new city, then buildings start to grow from the below, office, industrial, museums, houses, apartments, etc. And all the buildings have a very complex shape as well as the main path there was nothing orthogonal. The most important thing of all was that everything was starting to organize and the buildings where separated by different areas, the industrial area, the commerce and retail, the museums and historic sites, and the residential area. There was no longer a chaos city on the contrary there was planning, there was urbanism and everything had a very complex shape and system like the human body, it was amazing.

STORY BOOK

Complex Urbanism

In the last few years our cities have been changing to accommodate our necessities, for these important task it is essential we consider urbanism practice so we can study every little aspect that needs to be changed or fixed.
In the early days, urbanism was applied in different cities for different purposes, for example, Paris was built in a very special way, almost all roads lead to the Arc of Triumph and the height of the buildings was the same. In some American cities they applied urbanism to design main freeways for evacuation.
People like Hausmann used to think that an orthogonal city or shape worked better and would last longer, but nowadays we are starting to learn that complex architecture can work, and cities are starting to gain a different shape.
The human body is a very complex system, conformed by a group of joined elements working with themselves and complementing each other to achieve a complete harmony, making it a perfect structure; “why not designing our cities in a more complex way so we can live in a better environment?”
As time goes by, there are more people that are concerned about these issues and they are making very interesting diagrams and essays, to makes cities more fitted for our daily life.