Concept City vs. Lived City

1. Concept City vs. Lived City Hausemann and le Corbusier vs. Baudelaire and de Certeau Image:

2. Outline • Starting Questions • Concept C (1): Baron Haussman • Lived C (1): Baudelaire and Benjamin • Concept C (2): Vienna’s Ringstrass • Lived C (2): G. Simmel • Concept C (3): Le Corbusier Image:

3. Starting Questions • 1. What’s good and bad about the ideas of ‘concept city’ and ‘lived city’? • 2. What have we known so far about urban planning? The metaphors some theorists used? The differences between Hausemann and le Corbusier • 3. How is ‘urbanism’ a way of life? How does Louis Wirth defines it? Do you agree with him? (e.g. Urban ‘contacts’– impersonal, transitory, segmental, and mostly utilitarian anomie) • 4. Is Wirth’s view similar to that of George Simmel? • 5. What is a flâneur? (439) Can we be flâneur or flâneuse?

4. Concept City vs. Lived City

5. Concept C (1): Baron Haussman • P. 438 • Clean, light and airy; • To support the logistics of state power and economic calculation. • Clip from “We Built this City.”

6. Lived City (1):The Arcade in Paris p. 440 Arcade as a temple http://www.jellesen.dk/webcrea/places/paris/paris08.htm

7. Baudelaire: The Flâneur • "There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."

8. Flnâeur: Results of and Responses to Modernity • Fast development in industrialization, capitalism and modernization of city spaces.  increasing spectacles and human mobility. • Arcades  Exhibition such as Crystal Palaces  fairs, gardens, statues, etc  Turning indoor (department stores, shopping malls, Cinema city and internet). • ‘phantasmagoria’–浮光幻影 , or kaleidoscope 萬花筒 • Is flâneur an artist or a shopper?

9. Responses to Modernity: Baudelaire and Benjamin • Baudelaire: the modern heroes: the poet, the flaneur, the dandy, the collector, the gambler, the worker, the dandy, the collector, the gambler, the worker,  the rag-picker and the prostitute; give voice to the  paradoxes and illusions of modernity. • Benjamin: as a walking commodity; is no hero; he acts heroesempty commodity forms; • Flâneur can be a conceptual category or narrative device. One which is apparently unorganized and thus de-centering. • Can we be flâneurs nowdays? And what kinds of flâneurs are we?

10. Concept C (2): Vienna's Ringstrasse The Ringstrasse is a wide avenue which encircles the old city of Vienna, Austria.

11. Vienna's Ringstrasse: Problems Due to the massive nature of the Ringstrasse, the buildings served to draw attention to the open space, an inversion of these Baroque ideas. Roads leading inwards towards the inner city from the suburbs, did not continue uninteruppted to the city center, but were drawn into the circular flow of the Ringstrasse, causing a seperation of city and suburb, not physically, but by urban design. Similar? The roundabouts in Taipei The Ringstrasse source.

12. Vienna's Ringstrasse: Problems • Furthermore, the buildings constructed along the Ringstrasse were not organized towards each other, but towards the street itself, further focusing the attention on the Ringstrasse. • Two critiques: • Sitte: returns to baroque-style, seeing the city in organic terms, • Otto Wagner, a modernist mechanistic terms. • What do we learn from this example? In what ways are our lives and personalities shaped by urban design?

13. London: an organic city • Sir Christopher Wren (1632 --1723 London's Great Fire of 1666 gave Wren a chance to present a scheme to rebuild the city. Utopian in concept, it was only partially realized. E.g. St. Paul Cathedral source) (clip)

14. Georg Simmel (1858-1918) Urban mentality: The blasé attitude – Definition: dictionary: bored or not excited, or wishing to seem so. 2. Simmel’s: A condition which results from the "boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all."

15. Blasé Proposition: The psyche of the Metropolis inhabitant is over stimulated through the "intensification of nervous stimulation" resulting in an inability to react at all. It is felt that this is an inverse relationship. As the stimulation increases so does the inability to react. Whereas, one could presume that if the stimulation was intermittent, one could react intermittently. Furthermore, if the stimulation ceased, one could react always. (source) p. 468 • See our excerpt for different types of impression and their influences-- p. 466 • E.g. moving through traffic, “a series of shocks and collision”; in a large city – looking at but not talking to people.

16. Sources of indifference: Urban Environment • Dominated by money economy + intellectualism (466) + excessive stimuli • matter-of-fact attitude •  indifference to individuality. (also 469) •  calculative mind. • P. 470 loss of individuality and personal life

17. Simmel: City vs. Country • In a rural or small town context we find a personality born of the “smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase”, it “rests more on feelings and emotional relationships”; • in the city, meanwhile we find an “intellectualistic” psyche which through an “intensification of consciousness” has developed a “protective shield” with which to survive rapid “fluctuations and discontinuities in the external milieu.”

18. the urban psyche:summary • Has mastered instrumental calculation, the quantification and assimilation of diverse data • Has become indifferent towards others (blasé) • Has gradually suppressed feelings or emotions • Do you agree? Are all of our responses similar to nervous reflexivity?

19. Le Corbusier • Total modernism • Clear the city of its cesspools (e.g. slums, etc. p. 447) • Develop and separate a city’s four functions:housing (high rises), work, recreation and traffic (from pedestrians) • Re-design our lives.

20. Le Corbusier Villa Savoye, by Le Corbusier, at Poissy, France, 1928 to 1929.

21. Le Corbusier

22. References • GreatBuildings.comhttp://www.greatbuildings.com/gbc.html • Vienna's Ringstrasse http://www.macalester.edu/courses/geog61/aaron/ • Le Corbusier 1. http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Centre_Le_Corbusier.html 2. http://www.tu-harburg.de/b/kuehn/lecorb.html