Town planning, Utopias and reality
Francoise Choay: The Town planning in question in “Town planning, Utopias and realities”, Editions of the threshold - Paris 1965, and Collection Points tests, Editions of the Threshold 1979
Through the study of significant examples, F.Choay compares the urban theories since the XIXe century until the Second world war, which form the bases of a new science, town planning.
These theories rest initially on a critical reading of the traditional city, lit by the new emergent economic order which is the capitalism and its procession of social and territorial changes: the mono-functional small island, the district of businesses, the station, the car,…
The traditional city appears unsuited.
This news gives inspires technicians as artists of a fantasmatic vision of a better future in an ideal territory; the city, support and product of the human activity, are a cultural fact. This conscience reveals the possible one of all the dreams, all the Utopias, but also revealed the narrow overlap between urban project and sociétal project.
Is town planning the science of the human settlements? Is an exact science? Francoise Choay shows the theoretical nature of the first visions of town planning: inaccuracy of the widespread analysis of the disordered traditional city which evacuates the question of the change of order, the divergences and controversies which appear as of the primitive theorists and which relate to the social project as much as its space working. This work, anchored in the abstraction of the political reasoning generates only utopian models, without real existence, and of the society projects, evacuating the question of the form. That only could not found a science. As of these primitive thinkers, the author determines two large currents of thought, persistent in the second phase of “town planning”, that the specialists in the dépolitisant adapt themselves:
- the Town planning progressist (Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, then Le Corbusier): universalist, it ambitionne to improve the man; science must promote the individual wellbeing. Functional analysis structure the model in unit self-sufficing juxtaposable, made up on a symbolic system mode; housing is the center. But he suffers from a lack of legibility; by imposing a new space framework underlain idea of the output, it flirte with authoritarianism; finally, it explores little the technical possibilities which founded it: the town planning of Science-fiction remained imaginary;
- town planning culturalist (William Morris, Camillo Sitte, Ebenezer Howard) the city is a cultural totality with the service of the human grouping; it must create an existential climate suitable to develop the needs for spirituality of the group, organized around the Community buildings Its tools are the history, archeology, poetry; it militates for the conservation of a polar city, identifiable and distinct from the countryside. Alas, this town planning is based on nostalgia and evacuates progress like founder of the urban one; “the movement historicist closes with the history” . The idea of the city replaces the presence of the city.
The scientific base of town planning is a persistent illusion: “town planning” is a philosophical field where values for or against the mechanized company clash.
The doubts and the difficulties of the developer remain, but it has exploitable theoretical contributions because contradictory, of operational tools (the statistics, sociology, the history, morphology…) parapets of imaginary and demiurgic temptations and a judicious reading of the operations actually carried out.
The city is an object socialized which dialogs with a company, not with the specialists; it is the gasoline of democratic progress. It is not reducible with vital functions, the blind reproduction of an existing state, or with an unspecified utopian model. The city is a living language, which must be understandable because another way is possible: the city “naturalist” of Frank Lloyd Wright is based on its rejection and develops today in an autonomous way around individualism of the pleasure and the refusal of the constraints; it is the current problems of “perish-urban anti-urban” against the old centers reduced to poverty.
“Will town planning” be able to give again at the “city”, the human community, the confidence of which it is disinvested?
Francoise Choay is professor of town planning, art and architecture at the Universities of Paris I and VIII
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