Softening cities

Abstract

In the U.S. we stand somewhere about the halfway point in a major shift in the way we view city building, both the process and the product that results. We have been used to seeing urbanization as a production process. (This, in itself, replaced an earlier view of the city as a necessary condition of industrial production.) More and more we see metropolitan areas as distributions of people and their social relations, formal and informal. As this change occurs we lose interest in urban hardware as such. From single houses to new towns, from garden paths to freeways, the things we focused on when we saw cities as production questions dissolve. Things take on importance. only as we take them to be important, as settings for social interaction, not for any intrinsic qualities. We see enormous evidence of this change in the everyday world around us as needed facilities are vetoed in favor of social imperatives, freeways give way to expressions of neighborhood solidarity, and all the rest. The two views conflict and mutually exclude each other to a large extent. Within a decade the new view should be dominant throughout our country.