Ideal City
Intellectual and physical incarnation of Utopia , the Ideal City design is urban to the architectural perfection and human. It aspires to build and to live in harmony peculiar social organization based on certain moral and political precepts.
If very many "ideal cities" are remained at the stage of dreams in the minds of their creators, some, however, were in fact completed. However, these achievements "ideal" in the sense that, unlike the spontaneous city , which develops gradually as needed according to multiple decisions, and thus organically and sometimes anarchic, the ideal city is conceptually developed before being physically constructed, and its foundation will result in a unified and intellectualized.
"So these old cities that have been the beginning of the villages that have become in course of time large cities, are usually so badly stilted, the regular price of these places that an engineer has its traces in a plain fantasy "
- Rene Descartes , Discourse on Method , Part II.
Summary |
Antiquity and Middle Age
Since antiquity, man has dreamed of building an ideal city as evidenced by the myth of the Tower of Babel . It is found later in both ancient cities , and contemporary. This rationalization of urban space, whose paternity has long been attributed to Hippodamus of Miletus ( fifth century BC. ), shows careful planning and optimizing the management of urban form that reaches concerns of philosophers. According to Aristotle, Hippodamus is looking for the ideal city in the sense that the organization of urban space applied to translate the organization of the ideal republic , and is credited with the grid plan of Piraeus , and in -479 BC. AD rebuild Miletus , burned by the Persians.
The social organization and urban development of the ideal city is also central to the thoughts of Aristotle , who in his Politics, looks after criticizing, in Plato's Republic and the existing cities. Spatial organization, social organization and political organization are the rational lines along which the philosophers think the ideal city in which architects and urban planners have first been attacked on the ground.
The foundation of cities by Roman settlers, as described by Pierre Grimal , is performed according to a perfect obedience to several requirements: rationalization of space by a checkerboard grid of streets from a major included by the intersection at right angles to decumanus and cardo , the ends will be the four main entrances to the city, cutting the space in which islets are distributed by rank and function of future occupants in mind justice and equality and finally on a plane orientation east-west ( decumanus ) and north-south ( cardo ), determined by the sun, which indicates the sacred dimension of the city and perhaps its report to world . The Roman ideal city is a kind of matrix, the essence of the mother city, the Urbs, Rome . Translated on the ground, the Roman city should allow citizens to travel, live, work and be under the protection of the gods. Pierre Grimal cites the example of Timgad , today part of the World Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.
In the Middle Ages, hippodamian plan is still used in the creation of new towns, such as country houses . This grid hippodamian is also that of chess that is used in the Dominican Jacques de Cessole to describe the ideal organization of the city encircled within its walls, symbolized by the four corner towers . According to Jacques Heers , dividing urban space into private spaces, the absence of a strong central government to oppose the design and implementation of major public projects during the Middle Ages.
Anyway, Christianity, based on the text of the Apocalypse of Saint John , the faithful offer the promise of an ideal city which is not of this world, the New Jerusalem . The ideal city in which men must work, it's City of God of St. Augustine.
From the Renaissance to the Classical
Utopias
The Italian Renaissance humanism is strongly influenced by the return of the city-state. The urban organization and the issue of the "ideal society" became a major topic of discussion. Medieval towns with winding streets and inconvenient appear as a degenerate form of the ancient city with wide avenues and majestic prospects. They no longer meet the strategic and economic requirements of their time. There is also the question of the political organization of the city. The theme of good governance comes from philosophers, lawyers, artists, architects such as The Filarete , who in his treatise on architecture in 25 volumes Sforzinda present plans, an ideal city.
In Poliphilia Dream ( 1467 ), Francesco Colonna describes an ideal city on the island Cytherea. It is also on an island that Thomas More is his Utopia (1516). Francois Rabelais (The Abbey of Thelema, 1534) , Johann von Gnzburg Eberlin (Wolfaria, Protestant utopia) , Tommaso Campanella ( Sun City , written in 1602) and Francis Bacon ( New Atlantis , 1627) imagine themselves as ideal societies. Campanella is particularly concerned by the very organization of urban space that fits perfectly on the economic organization, social and political life of the city.
The problem of the ideal city also wins the artistic sphere as a result of the rediscovery of the Treaty of Vitruvius , which occurs at the extreme end of the Middle Ages (De architectura, 1414) and the work of Leone Battista Alberti .
Meanwhile, lawyers like Jean Bodin (1529-1596) , philosophers as James Harrington (1611-1677) questioned the legal structure most favorable to preserve the ideal state.
Experiments
The social and political aspirations of utopian thought are struggling to put into practice in Europe. The concrete experiences are isolated, often at the initiative of some wealthy or powerful enough character to carry out these projects. These achievements expressed an ideal of rationalization of urban space shaped as a function of the city, but also respect for the "divine proportion", in the words of Luca Pacioli . Cortigiano village, birthplace of Pope Pius II becomes the town of Pienza in 1459. The work, which would make an ideal city, remained unfinished at the death of the Florentine architect Bernardo Rossellino and their main instigator. The layout of the city of Ferrara by the architect Biagio Rossetti from 1492 reflects this search for an ideal blending aesthetics and rationality, but the Addizione Erculea, intersection of two avenues flanked by four palaces, represents a fraction of the project also remains unfinished.
In 1593 , the superintendent of the city of Venice built Palmanova , characterized by its original star to nine branches. The fortress covers both the strategic and formal perfection: the monumental gates are designed by Vincenzo Scamozzi in the Vitruvian tradition, but the plan allows beaming troops on parade in the center to go quickly to their different positions on walls through the wide avenues and free. Sabbioneta , reorganized the sixteenth century by the Duke of Mantua , is also an ideal fortress city on a reduced scale. We should also mention the new towns of Charleville , built on the orders of Charles I of Mantua a map hippodamian and wholly dedicated to trading, or Richelieu (Indre-et-Loire) , also built on a plan instigated hippodamian Cardinal de Richelieu.
The only social utopia Anabaptists of Munster , who tried to establish a theocracy in their town, will do little imitators. In contrast, infection will offer some European communities the opportunity to experience a paradoxical way of new projects ideal cities. The Jesuit missions of Paraguay Guarani entrap them in the experience of "reductions" which lasted from the early seventeenth century to 1767. The Puritans of the Mayflower fleeing Anglican England to found a new society in New England are less concerned with planning as religious freedom, but the founding of Philadelphia in 1681 by the Quaker William Penn revives the tradition of utopian city whose very architecture reflects the ideal society that claims to base.
XVIII century
Montesquieu (1689-1755) continues the discussion initiated by lawyers and philosophers in search of a constitution suitable for corporate reform. In 1755 , the Code of Nature, or the true spirit of its laws, Etienne-Gabriel Morelly develops the revolutionary base of a state where equal rights and duties of citizens is ensured by a mathematical and rational organization of the city and the disappearance of private property . The view that the city could be the basis for a better society is progressing in intellectual circles. She meets a particular echo among French revolutionaries including Saint-Just - nicknamed "the Archangel of the Terror" because of his intransigence on political ideals - will be one of the most illustrious representatives. But they can not achieve their dreams of a virtuous republic and ideal.
The eighteenth century saw many beautification projects and ordering of urban space. It is also the century visionary architects like Jean-Jacques Lequeu , Etienne-Louis Boullee and Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806) . The latter is the source of one of the achievements of the most perfect ideal city in the world: Saline Royale d'Arc-et-Senanssitue on the town of Arc-et-Senans ( Doubs ). Visionary architect, Ledoux however, can not carry out his project of an ideal city, the town of Lime , . Free from prison, built around the needs of its inhabitants and integrated nature, the town is steeped in good intentions Rousseau. It offered, by Alberto Prez-Gmez, "a physical environment in which man should be able to find true happiness . "
In the late eighteenth century , in 1794, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey develop the project of an ideal community, the Pantisocracy (government by all) . Their plan was to settle on the banks of the Susquehanna in the U.S. but the practical difficulties discourage them from trying the experiment.
XIX century
Revolutionary ideas that inspired the failed project of English poets continue to make their way. In the nineteenth century utopian socialism will inspire the realization of communities designed to prevent the oppression of the working majority by a small number of idlers. These are the phalanxes of Fourier , which gives the British socialist Robert Owen 's idea of reform Plant New Lanark , then that of cooperative utopian it is trying to achieve but without success . Also include Cabet Stephen and his project of Ikaria whose implementation in practice (Icaria, Iowa in the 1850s) is a failure, but that innovates into the very way the city is designed, not only by specialists, but also by a form of what we would today call "participatory democracy":
Imagine first, either in Paris or London, the most beautiful reward promised to plan a model city, a large open competition, and a large committee of painters, sculptors, scholars, travelers, plans that meet or descriptions of all known cities, which collect the opinions and ideas of the entire population and even strangers, discussing all the pros and cons of existing cities and projects presented, and who choose between thousands of plans, models the plan the most perfect model. You will conceive a city more beautiful than any that preceded it, you can now get a first idea of flying, especially if you do not forget that citizens are equal, it is the republic that does everything, and that the rule invariably and consistently followed in all, it is: first the necessary and useful, then the pleasant . "
Jean-Baptiste Andr Godin try to translate some of these social aspirations in familistre while the communities of Saint-Simon attempt to put into practice their ideas of social reform.
Reflection on the city is also fueled by the problems of sanitation, exacerbated by population growth and the beginning of the rural exodus. Epidemics, measles , dysentery , typhus , wreaking havoc in urban areas. The cholera epidemic that affects Paris in 1832, for example, focuses on the inadequacies of water supply. Large cities, especially London , are accused of being the breeding ground of crime, vice and misery .
An interesting example of realization of the nineteenth century Napoleonic town of La Roche-sur-Yon (Vende), indeed, the latter is largely inspired by the ideas of architects Pierre Patte and Jean-Jacques Huv with straight streets, a large square civic, or many public spaces .
Development and democratization of the railway during the years l850-1870 favor a relative "return to nature" whose city-garden is a British icon. The idea was later also adopted in France, including Stains (93) and in Suresnes (92).
The rise of concerns hygienists of the time reflected in these projects. Whereas the reduction of mortality and longer life are an essential aspect of social progress, Benjamin Ward Richardson in 1876 published a book called Hygeia, a City of Health in which he describes an ideal city for health its inhabitants . The renovation of Paris by Haussmann , Belgrand and Alphand was inspired by these theories hygienists as evidenced by the construction of parks or sewers of Paris. We find these aspirations at Jules Verne, who imagined an ideal community in the Five Hundred Millions of the Begum , which he named patriotically France-Ville , while HG Wells published in 1905 also inspired a Modern Utopia Planning hygienist.
XX century
While influenced by socialist ideas, grow in Palestine, the first kibbutz , with their plan and strictly egalitarian community, the reflections of the architects of the late nineteenth century leads to the notion of planning , a term that appears in France in the early twentieth century.
Concerns involving hygienists and aesthetic sensibility, Tony Garnier , author of The Industrial City (1917), incorporates the ancient principles of a functional division of urban space and advocates including the closure of the island of "park city" in using contemporary materials. If his theoretical work will appeal to Soviet architects, it will find a limited field of application in the work entrusted to it by the City of Lyon. Indeed, the industrial areas there will finally realize not like his manifesto articulated business parks and residential areas with low density and low height gauge.
These social concerns are found in Adriano Olivetti , who develops his ideas on architecture and urbanism in Citt dell'uomo (The City of Man), published posthumously. It implements some of these ideas in the development of the Aosta Valley and in the reconstruction of Italy after the war.
The proposed Baldwin Hills Village , which emerged in the early forties in the United States, is in the tradition of garden cities.
The figurehead of the utopian tradition in planning post-war may be the architect Le Corbusier , whose ideas, the purist in particular, will spread throughout the world, inspiring architecture of the new towns of Eastern Europe and the instigators of Brutalism Anglo-Saxon. His name is intimately connected with the rise of modern cities such as Chandigarh , which he is the architect with Albert Mayer, but Brasilia , including the planning program is directed by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer. The " Athens Charter of 1933 is an attempt to synthesize the concepts that must, according to Le Corbusier and his friends, to preside over the development of the "functional city".
Louvain-la-Neuve is a new city whose construction began in the 1970s. Its designers have tried to respond to criticism of the modern city by asking three principles: diversity, architecture without gigantic human scale, no traffic.
However the construction of ideal cities remains an open project initiated utopian private. The peace movement of the sixties, for example, results in the founding of Auroville , or by multiplying communities hippies informal in industrialized countries.
In the seventies, American artists make up the project of "Illichville" , after the name of the thinker of the political ecology Ivan Illich. "Illichville" is an urban utopia centered on the notion of decay and conviviality. It was at that time emerges to concepts such as Arcology the architect Paolo Soleri , who advocates a vertical development of the city, concepts that are widely popularized by writers of science fiction. More modest in its design, the Ecovillage is born of the rejection of consumer society and its gigantism in the late twentieth century.
XXI century
The types vary from contemporary ideal city: on one side of gigantic projects of new-rich, branded by their opponents on the other utopias claims of equality and social justice. An example might be the early development of Dubai , which feeds back the oil wealth in an urban form that is both a challenge to the harsh climatic conditions of the desert and architecture of the industrial era. Dubai, praised by Rem Koolhaas , is presented by Mike Davis as the "fruit of the unlikely encounter of Albert Speer and Walt Disney on the shores of Arabia . "The new utopias, of great boldness technology, are often inspired by the desire to anticipate climate change while practicing architecture virtuous, anxious men and the environment, rational and aesthetic at once. The Urban Water ("aquaURBanism" in English), such as Water Lilies presented by Vincent Callebaut, a project of a "floating ecopole multicultural whose metabolism would be in perfect symbiosis with the cycles of nature , "anticipates global warming and the rising waters. Atlantis and Utopia have not finished reinventing itself.
Currently, the debate rages even within the camp between supporters of sustainable urbanism (as Jacques Ferrier and his tricks Hypergreen) and opponents of urban vertical. The documentary Last Call for Planet Earth - Architects for a better world (2007-2008), director Jacques Allard , attempts to summarize the challenges of the ideal city of the future .
Criticism
The ideal city is criticized in antiquity by Aristophanes. In The Birds, he imagined the construction of an ideal city in the air, Nphloccocygia. Various charlatans arise, including a surveyor, Meton, gazing at the air come and share the streets: I apply a straight edge, so that you have a circle tetragon; the center is the Agora, the streets lead to them are straight and converging at the center, and a star, which is round by nature, go straight rays of which shine in all directions . Jonathan Swift will do the same in his novel, Gulliver's Travels (Laputa), which shows the architects to start building houses through the roof. In Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens shows how the operation of the utopian dream by charlatans can lead to loss of naive dreamers. The city supposedly ideal of Eden, located in a swampy area infested with malaria, quickly turns into a living hell, and is in contact with the inferno that the hero will develop admirable qualities of caring and dedication a truly ideal city would perhaps not generated.
In Les Cinq Cents Millions of the Begum (1879), Jules Verne contrasts two ideal city projects, City and Stahlstadt France. The latter is the prototype of the industrial city built around a mineral deposit, responding to a logic of profit, which takes little account of people's lives. It's actually a dystopia, like the Coketown described by Dickens in 1849 in his novel Hard Times Industrial, a novel in which he attacked so vociferously in the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham.
See also
Internal Links
General
- Utopian socialism
- New Town
- Linear City
- Mythical city
- Private City
- Gated Communities
- Intentional community
Analysis
- Reunion (phalanx)
- Ebenezer Howard , Garden Cities promoter, including Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City
- Joseph Paxton
- Tony Garnier
- History of the garden city of Vesinet
- International Congress of Modern Architecture
- Arcosanti
External Links
- Oliver Jonas for the Documentation Centre of Urban Planning, " Dream City. Urban utopias: the ideal city in the digital city (2002) "
- Of the Ideal City in the utopian city, Philippe Cardinali
- File
- To another utopian city urban Architecture Institute, Bremen, Germany
Bibliography
- Bibliographic Online CDU (Documentation Centre of Urban Planning) "featuring recent works on or about renewing the utopias" http://www.cdu.urbanisme.developpement-durable.gouv.fr/IMG/pdf / autrebiblio_cle68c1f6.pdf. This 20-page document presents a wide range of work on the theme of the ideal city or on related topics.
- The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects, Lewis Mumford (1961) ISBN 156731211X (Lewis Mumford, The City in History, Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1978, 784 p.)
- Travel to countries of nowhere, Raymond Trousson, Brussels, 1979
- Johan Eberlin von Gunzburg's "Wolfaria": The First Protestant Utopia Susan Groag Bell, Church History, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun. 1967), pp. 122-139
- Aristophanes , a href = "Les_Oiseaux_ (Aristophanes)" title = "The Birds (Aristophanes)"> The Birds References
- Old Testament, Genesis 11: ideal city because it satisfies the social aspirations of the builders: Come on! build us a city and a tower whose top may reach unto heaven, and make us a name, that we are not scattered over the face of the earth
- Hippodamus of Miletus, Evolution or revolution in urban spatial structures? Gabriela Cursaru , p.8
- [1]
- Hippodamus is also the first who, without ever having handled public affairs, ventured to publish something on the best form of government. (Aristotle, Politics, Book II, Chapter V
- a , b , c , d and e Roman Towns, Chapter I
- [2]. According to this site, there would be a vision of the egalitarian ideal city is reflected in the design of these new towns. The site refers (but with a spelling that are not found elsewhere), Francesc Eiximenis , author of Regime [n] t la cosa publica, including facsimile is available here. See also The city's ideal theorist Catalan Eiximenis and genesis of the Ibero-American city, Genevive Barbe Cocquelin Delisle, in The Unicorn, No. 34, "The city in the world Iberian and Ibero-American"
- [3] The Game of Chess moralized
- The City in the Middle Ages, Fayard, 1990, ISBN: 2213025576
- Apocalypse of St. John (or Revelation), XXI, 18
- See fresco Effects of good and bad government of the Palazzo Publico of Siena
- The Abbey of Thelema, Gargantua, Chapter LVII (1534)
- Ein Newe Ordnung Weltliche standts of Psitacus anzeigt hat in Wolfaria beschriben. (New order of the state of the world) Bundtgnosz Der XI. Basel: Pamphilus Gengenbach.
- tables called Perspective of the ideal city located in Urbino, Berlin, Baltimore, time allocated to Piero della Francesca, seems to be today Alberti (Cardinali, p. 6)
- The Six Books of the Republic (Paris, 1576 )
- James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, London, 1656 , Available here
- De divina proportione (written in Milan between 1496 and 1498 and published in Venice in 1509).
- Dobre Museum, Sabbioneta, ideal city
- The Spirit of Laws , 1748
- Code of Nature, Chapter V, "Laws city fathers" (I - XIII) , 1755. Accessed November 22, 2008
- Saint-Just, Fragments on republican institutions, 1793.
- The architecture considered in respect to art, morals and legislation. Volume I, Introduction p. 3, [4]
- The ideal city of Chaux . Accessed November 22, 2008
- a and b Alberto Prez-Gmez (trans. Jean-Pierre Chupin), Architecture and the crisis of modern science, Mardaga Editions, 1987, 352 p. ( ISBN 2870093101 , 9782870093108) , P. 161
- Tim Fulford , Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780-1830, Cambridge University Press, 1998 107 p. ( ISBN 0521591430 ) [ read online ]
- Lucy Newlyn , The Cambridge Companion to Coleridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002 129 p. ( ISBN 0521659094 ) [ read online ]
- Orbiton, near Glasgow, and New Harmony, in the Indiana (USA)
- Stephen Cabet, travel and adventures of Lord William Carisdall in Ikaria
- See especially their dream of a Paris rehabilitated new town, or the Paris of the saints-Simon, Charles Duveyrier, 1832, [5] , and Article Transformations in Paris under the Second Empire
- It should be read including Bleak House, Charles Dickens. See also (in) Jerry White, London in the 19th Century: A Human Awful Wonder of God, Jonathan Cape, London
- Journal 303 No. 84
- Project Gutenberg Text
- The 500 Millions of the Begum, Chapter X, on wikisource
- Project Description
- Website of the historic city and the proposed new town
- Illichville the city without cars
- (en) Rem Koolhaas, Al Manakh, Archis, 9077966129, 2007, 496 p.
- Mike Davis Stadium Dubai capitalism, ordinary Prairies, 2007
- Vincent Callebaut, " Lilypad, a prototype of self-sufficient amphibious city "
- Last Call for Planet Earth, press release , November 2007. Accessed November 21, 2008
- The Birds, 993-1020)
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