Movement 4 - The Metabolist City/Plug-in City
According to Dennis Crompton, an architect, the word
metabolism is a medical term for something but then it gets borrowed and used
in architecture and urban design. The devastation of World War 2 offered young
Japanese and European architects opportunities to redesign cities around new
principles as the post-war Japan needed residential and urban housing thus they
came together to form the Metabolist group. The term Metabolist came about due
to the idea of the metabolic system/life
system as an ongoing process, thus leads to the thinking process for our urban
environment and natural landscapes as part of a continuum. The architectural
renderings, drawings and models from the
1950s and 60s revealed radical new directions in urban design. The Japanese
metabolists developed the metaphor of the city as organisms from the ashes of
Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It depicts a twisted mega structure in a burnt
out landscape to show that the concept of a living/growing urban system can
still survive even in the midst
of widespread destruction. The Japanese architect, Kiyonori Kikutake saw the
solution for Japan's need for more space by envisioning the city as the
creature of the sea floating on the surface of the ocean, capable of submerging
beneath the waves during storms. The
Metabolists concerned themselves with housing large populations while
preserving the autonomy of the individual in a modern world. The work of
these visionary designers suggest approaches worth considering today in our own
nature of economic crisis, environmental challenges and restrain resources,
encouraging us to think as cities as living things that are constantly growing,
changing and adapting, much like the people who inhabit them.
Reference Links -
Movement 5 - Participatory Urbanism/Urban Planning
A type of
cultural practice that falls under a broad conceptual formulation that is
called participatory urbanism. It presents the important new shift in mobile
devise usage ranging from communication tools to network mobile personal
measurement instrument. It is the exploratory of the new instruments that
enable the new participatory urban lifestyle. In contrast to the traditional
processes of official bureaucratic urbanization, there is an approach to urban
processes that is characterized by temporary and flexible solutions that can
adapt and evolve change to meet a variety of dynamic urban conditions. Participatory
Urbanism builds upon a large body of related projects where citizens act as
agents of change. Participatory urbanists work within a range of urban public
spaces from streets and plazas to freeway underpasses, vacant lots, parking
spaces and underused streets. It often establish operations at the fringe of
cultural production and it teaches us a fair amount about how to generate a
more effective and user-friendly built environment. There is a long history of
such movements from grassroot neighbourhood watch campaigns to political
revolutions. It promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to
become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighbourhood and urban
self reflexivity. Examples of them are to provide mobile device centred
hardware toolkits for non-experts to become authors of new everyday urban
objects and collective needs based dialogue tools around the desired usage of
urban green spaces.
Reference Links -
Movement 6 - The Compact City
Compact City has main characteristics such as central area
revitalisation, high-density development, mixed-use development as well as
services and facilities. Developers have increasingly looked towards designing
a more compact city in order to achieve a more sustainable urban form. The
benefits of the compact city include less car dependency thus will lead to
lower emissions, reduced energy consumption, better public transport services ,
increased overall accessibility, the re-use of infrastructure, a regeneration
of existing urban areas and urban vitality, a higher quality of life, the
preservation of green space as well as social and environmental elements. Sustainable Compact Cities could reinstate the city as the
ideal habitat for a community-based society. It is an established type
of urban structure that can be interpreted in all manner of ways. Cities should
be about the people they shelter, about the condensation of the ferment of
human activity and about generating local culture. The long-term aim of
sustainable development is to create a flexible structure for a vigorous community
within a healthy and non-polluting environment despite the condition of the
climate. The provision of good public space, the presence of natural landscape
and exploitation of new urban technologies can radically enhance the quality of
air and of life in the dense city. The overall effect of rich urban landscaping
is to reduce the heat 'bloom' of cities. Urban landscape absorbs rain thus
reducing the discharge of urban rainfall and storm water. Landscape plays a
vital psychological role in the city and can sustain a wide diversity of urban
wildlife. A Compact City reduces the waste of energy.
Reference Links -
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