C i TY

16 Nov, 2010. Tuesday.

“THE MATERIAL OF CITY PLANNING ARE SKY, SPACE, TREES, STEEL AND CEMENT IN THAT ORDER AND IN THAT HIERARCHY."
- LE CORBUSIER.

Q: Are all imaginations of the city independent of the citizen that inhabits it ?

The city functions as an organism, it lives by itself, because that is the way it is imagined and that is the way it is planned. Nowhere in the conceptualisation does the individual appear. There is no, "i," in city. Citizens of the greatest cities have been reduced to numbers. They are looked upon as statistical quantities, as charts, graphs and projections based on formulae.
The city survives. The city is alive.
The city fails to acknowledge the material that gives it life, the Citizens.
The citizens behave as blood cells within the body. They are each assigned a function, a job that must be carried out and a destination. Like blood flow, the citizens flow through the arteries of the city, the transport corridor. They lose their importance and identity. They are a part of a larger volume.
The city is not conscious.
Unlike the human body, the organs that regulate the citizens and allows for growth and expansion, lie outside the realm of the city's control. What drives these organs is something external, something that does not understand the body that is the city.

Q: What drives these organs?

Thus, the city is alive and growing. It is independent, but, under the control of a force which operates under a larger framework.

Q: What is the nature of this larger framework?

Let us save the city,
restore its consciousness,
prevent bodily decay.

Let us put, "i" back in C i TY
Let us put, "i" back in ARCH i TECTURE
Let us make a City for its Citizens.

Work in progress - http://apurvaparikh.blogspot.com/2010/11/work-in-progress.html