City as Home and City as Network: Contrasting Paradigms in History

Guido Francescato Presented at the 32nd annual conference of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) Edinburgh, Scotland, July 3, 2001.

Introduction It has taken more than thirty years, but historical approaches to environment/behavior studies and environmental research are finally emerging as an important component of EDRA's work. For this development, we must be especially thankful to Amos Rapoport who, with the publication in 1990 of History and Precedent in Environmental Design, illustrated the potential of historical research for furnishing lessons that can inform intelligent and realistic design and planning decisions 1. It is critical to note that the evidence provided by historical precedents can only yield applicable lessons if mediated by a theoretical process, that is if subjected to conceptual organization. This organization requires a theory. In turn, a theory is based on an underlying conceptual perspective or paradigm. It is such a paradigm that guides us in structuring explanations that account for the historical evidence. In other words, the value of history's lessons hinges on the validity of the underlying paradigm on which theory is founded. A number of such paradigms have guided interpretations of the history of the city. But two -- in the form of contrasting metaphors -- seem particularly pervasive among designers and planners: that of the city as home and that of the city as network. In this paper, I submit that approaches as disparate as those of the garden city movement, the modern movement, and the new urbanism have relied uncritically, often even unknowingly, on the first of these two paradigms. In these urban design approaches, the city is essentially conceived as an artifact different only in scale, not in kind, from the singular building. Consequently, the city is viewed as amenable to the application of processes which are properly dependent on a high degree of designer's control and finite execution time. I believe that this view is flawed and is indeed a fundamental reason, though not the only one, for the inadequacies of the solutions that stem from it. Understanding the city as a network is more likely, in my view, to lead to successful approaches. Consider this: In buildings, the outcome of the design process is a set of specifications that control definitive and stable configurations. In networks, the outcome is a set of rules, that is a syntax - itself amenable to change over time - that sets the parameters within which configurations are assembled to support specific processes. The City as Home A glance to our mental images of pre-industrial cities is sufficient to understand the power of a metaphor in which the city is seen as an object that houses the community, just as the home is thought of as an object that houses the family. Pre-industrial cities even tend to look like large buildings. Bound by walls or other defensive features, they exhibit a recognizable shape [Figure 1]. Whether their internal layout is rigidly geometric [Figure 2] or more organically irregular [Figure 3], these cities give the impression of compact, finished artifacts - even when considerable rearrangement of buildings and spaces may in fact have taken place over time [Figure 4]. It is therefore not surprising that Leon Battista Alberti, the maximum theoretician of the renaissance, would make this metaphor explicit and give it intellectual currency in his treatise on architecture 2. We must view Alberti's dictum in the context of his time. The renaissance abhorred the confused, haphazard, seemingly accidental aspects that had characterized the medieval city. It sought the controlled clarity that geometry and perspective made possible. It is not by chance that it produced so many designs of ideal cities conceived as one-time, complete artifacts in the guise of large buildings, that is of objects in which every aspect could be controlled through geometric organization and the building process. It is a vision of serene, immutable balance, also shown in many renaissance paintings [Figure 5]. Few