The Horizontal Metropolis as an Environmental Toolbox

Abstract

In a rapidly and thoroughly urbanizing World, there is no meaning in seeking a definite urban form as an a posteriori proof of good (planning) intentions. As Konstantinos Doxiadis’s Œcumenopolis (see, Doxiadis in BRITANNICA book of the year 1968. Encyclopaedia Britannica. 1974 ) turns out to become a dystopian reality (just compare his world map with the Earth’s nocturnal satellite photograph…), the question the design disciplines have to address increasingly pertains to the means by which the urban continuum will effectively partake in a new type of environmental equilibrium. Forget about the city (form) against the countryside (formlessness). The city is everywhere and nowhere as Frank Lloyd Wright had foreseen (“The future city will be everywhere and nowhere, and it will be a city so greatly different from the ancient city or any city of today that we will probably fail to recognize its coming as the city at all” (Wright in The disappearing city. William Farquhar Payson, New York, 1932) “(…) these Broadacre studies of freedom: this vision of a free city that is a nation the city that is nowhere unless everywhere”, Wright (When democracy builds. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, p. 63, 1937). The city is not anymore a modern project, it is a rather merciless commonplace.