lecture 8 postmodern cities: cities in the third millennium from metropolis to megalopolis prof. dr....

LECTURE 8

POSTMODERN CİTİES: CİTİES İN THE THİRD MİLLENNİUM

FROM METROPOLİS TO MEGALOPOLİS

PR OF. DR . N ACI YE DOR ATL I

ARCH 354CULTURE OF CITIES

SOME DEFINITIONS

SuburbSuburbanizationMetropolisConurbationMegalopolis

Suburb

The word suburb mostly refers to a residential area, either existing as part of a city (as in Australia and New Zealand, and generally in the United Kingdom) or as a separate residential community within commuting distance of a city (as in the United States and Canada).

Some suburbs have a degree of administrative autonomy, and most have lower population density than inner city neighborhoods.

Suburbs first emerged on a large scale in the 19th and 20th century as a result of improved rail and road transport, leading to an increase in commuting.

Suburbs tend to proliferate around cities that have an abundance of adjacent flat land.

Any particular suburban area is referred to as a suburb, while suburban areas on the whole are referred to as the suburbs or suburbia.

A person who lives in a suburb is named as a suburbanite.

Suburb

Suburbs in America

Suburbanization

Suburbanization is a term used to describe the process of population movement within towns and cities to the rural-urban areas.

It is one of the many causes of the increase in urban sprawl. Many residents of metropolitan regions work within the

central urban area, choosing instead to live in satellite communities called suburbs and commute to work via automobile or mass transit.

Others have taken advantage of technological advances to work from their homes, and chose to do so in an environment they consider more pleasant than the city.

These processes often occur in more economically developed countries, especially in the United States, which is believed to be the first country in which the majority of the population lives in the suburbs, rather than in the cities or in rural areas.

Metropolis (METROPOLITAN AREA)

The term metropolitan area refers to a region consisting of a densely populated urban core and its less-populated surrounding territories, sharing industry, infrastructure, and housing.

A metropolitan area usually comprises multiple jurisdictions and municipalities: neighborhoods, townships, cities, exurbs, counties, and even states.

As social, economic and political institutions have changed, metropolitan areas have become key economic and political regions.

A metropolitan area combines an urban agglomeration (the contiguous, built-up area) with zones not necessarily urban in character, but closely bound to the center by employment or other commerce.

These outlying zones are sometimes known as a commuter belt, and may extend well beyond the urban zone, to other political entities.

For example, El Monte, California is considered part of the Los Angeles' metro area.

In defining a metropolitan area, it is sufficient that a city or cities constitute a nucleus with which other areas have a high degree of integration.

Metropolis (METROPOLITAN AREA)

TurkeyThe word metropolitan, describes a major city in Turkey like

Istanbul, a city which is dominant to others both in financially and socially.

There are 16 officially defined "state metropolitan areas" in Turkey, for governing purposes. More than ten of these metropolitan areas are populated with more than one million people: Istanbul (10+ Million), Ankara (4+ Million), Izmir (3+ Million), Bursa (2+ Million), Adana, Gaziantep, Konya, Antalya, Samsun, Kayseri and Mersin.

Istanbul-Kocaeli-Sakarya-Yalova-Bursa metropolitan areas, almost continuously inhabited, form one single megalopolitan area around the eastern part of Marmara Sea, with total population of almost 20 Million.

Megalopolis

This concept of a "megalopolis" was first proposed by the French geographer Jean Gottmann in his book Megalopolis, a study of the northeastern United States.

It is an extensive metropolitan area or a long chain of continuous metropolitan areas.

In California and Baja California, Ventura County, Los Angeles County, Orange County, San Diego County, part of Riverside County, part of San Bernardino County, Tijuana Municipality, Rosarito Beach Municipality, Mexicali Municipality, and Tecate Municipality.

There are hundreds of cities and towns in this megalopolis, with the largest ones being Los Angeles, Long Beach, Irvine, Anaheim, San Diego, and Tijuana.

Conurbation

A conurbation is a region comprising a number of cities, large towns, and other urban areas that, through population growth and physical expansion, have merged to form one continuous urban and industrially developed area.

In most cases, a conurbation is a polycentric urban agglomeration, in which transportation has developed to link areas to create a single urban labor market or travel to work area.

A conurbation can be confused with a metropolitan area. As the term is used in North America, a metropolitan area can be defined by the Census Bureau or it may consist of a central city and its suburbs, while a conurbation consists of adjacent metropolitan areas that are connected with one another by urbanization.

Internationally, the term "urban agglomeration" is often used to convey a similar meaning to "conurbation".

A conurbation should also be contrasted with a megalopolis, where the urban areas are close but not physically contiguous and where the merging of labor markets has not yet developed.

Towards the City of the 3rd Millennium

Expansion of cities (Suburbs):As long as the city remained relatively

compact and self-contained, it was possible to keep a balance between rural and urban occupations.

Suburb is not a new phenomenon. It is as old as the earliest cities.

The rise of suburb brought about significant changes in both social content and the spatial order of the city.

Seeds of Suburban Development

In earlier periods we have seen that new groups and institutions, with larger demands for space than the closely filled in city could offer, necessarily settled on the outskirts, in little suburban enclaves.

The Asclepius at Cos; Gymnasium and the Academy were often located in the suburbs of

the Hellenic city. In medieval times, the monastery was often located outside the walls

after the 12th century, before the city expanded toward outside.

The suburban pattern was typically an open one: garden and orchards and shaded walks accompanied by buildings.

Great universities like Oxford and Cambridge, which grew up in country towns, sought and wrought for themselves the same kind of park like environment.

In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new community has emerged, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge:

Uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up at uniform distances, on uniform roads;

People of the same class, the same income, the same age group, with similar hobbies, similar habits, tastes.

Actual development of SUBURBAN CONTAINER:

A great change in the urban structure. Grid iron street network Development of a new type of open plan and a

new distribution of urban functions.

HISTORY & PHASES OF SUBURBAN GROWTH

From the 13th century on, epidemic diseases such as plague, there were periodic escapes from the city.

As the crowding of the greater metropolises and the spreading industrial towns became chronic in the 18th century, the demand to get away from the city became more necessary and undeniable.

Suburbs emerged around towns with more mixed population, at the beginning more restricted to rich people.

Later, the railroad and the metropolitan mass transit widened the economic basis of a movement that had begun among the upper classes long before this invention.

At the beginning the street pattern of these new villa districts remained regular and hardly distinguishable from that of the central city.

The houses were the usual spacious urban houses, with regular, often square, ground plans and high-ceilinged rooms.


But by the middle of the 19th century the romantic impulse in landscape planning began to affect architecture and urbanism, favoring the ‘natural’, the informal, the accidental and the wild.

Following the romantic principles, the suburban house and plot and garden were deliberately de-formalized.

The street avoided straight lines, even when no curves were given by nature.


The suburban house was often consciously oriented for sunlight, for summer breezes, for a view.

Out of respect for a whole complex of biological and domestic interests, the suburban dwelling house achieved a new form, more suitable in all stages of development.

From the suburb, a new domestic architecture came out.

Organically: both in function and image; Houses and gardens brought to conscious perception the

traditional spirit of the farmhouse.


By setting the houses in many- acred blocks from two to five times as big as the standard city blocks, the new suburban residential density was low.

In these new suburbs the problem of creating an urban environment favorable to the health of children was solved by the middle classes.

Once suburban growth became unrestricted, the open plan made rapid locomotion and an excessive road system a necessity, at the expense of most of the other qualities that had made the suburb originally attractive.


To sum up:

The early romantic suburb was a MIDDLE CLASS EFFORT to find out solution for the DEPRESSION and DISORDER of the Metropolis.

For the happy few, the suburb met the need of child-bearing and child rearing:

Throughout the day woman was dominant (a sort of archaic matriarchy, in a more playful and relaxed mode).

Taking suburb at its best, it provided a park like setting for the

family dwelling house. This was a colorful reproduction of the older Country House culture

(with daily rather than seasonal excursions to town).

Beginning as a mechanism of escape, the suburb has turned afterwards into its very opposite.

THE SUBURBAN WAY OF LIFE

At the beginning, the suburb was the expression of a new way of life, less effortful, less formalized in every way than that of the production minded urban centers; emphasis has shifted to consumption.

The suburb could be identified by a number of related social characteristics.

A segregated community, set apart from the city, not merely by space but by class stratification.

But the metropolis was a mixture of people who came from different places, practiced different occupations etc.


The great freedom of the suburbanite is that of locomotion (movement).

For aesthetic and intellectual motivation, the suburb remains dependent upon the big city: the theater, the opera, the art gallery, the university, the museum are no longer parts of the daily life (environment).

The suburb kept the busier, dirtier and more productive enterprises at a distance.

When the suburbs first emerged, it was considered as an adequate environment for bringing up the children.


In the early days of the railroad suburb, each settlement was surrounded by a broad greenbelt of woods and fields.

Here children could play safely, without supervision; Around the suburban schools there were big play-spaces.

As leisure generally increased, play became the serious business of life:

The golf course; The country club; The swimming pool; The cocktail party;

All became part of the varied and significant life.


In reacting against the disadvantages of the crowded city, the suburb itself became an over-specialized community (more and more committed to relaxation and play).

Even children suffered from this transformation of the whole community into a mere recreation area.

For such a segregated community, composed of segregated economic strata (katman), with little visible daily contact with the realities of the workaday world, placed an undue burden of education on the school and the family.

Both the childhood and the suburb are transitional stages:

A well planned urban community must have a place for other phases of life and other modes of living.


A survey of the suburbanite’s movement to city’s outskirts (Cleveland):

61%: To live in a cleaner, healthier neighborhood;

48%: Better schools/ to have their own homes;

28%: To have a garden/yard.

HISTORIC CITY versus SUBURB

In its free use of space, the suburb was the opposite of most historic cities in the West.

In the historic cities: Scattered open spaces behind and between buildings; (Sometimes) considerable cultivated areas within the walls.

In the suburb: Scattered buildings in the middle of open spaces; the garden,

the park, the arcade of trees, the approaching road.

Rows of buildings no longer served as continuous walls, bounding streets that formed a closed corridor: the building is separated from its close relationship with the street.

The suburb was the opening up the close texture of the traditional city.

Suburban Pattern

As a result it was necessary to change in the size of the residential block.

By the middle of the 19th century, the suburban superblock emerged (many times the size of the ordinary city block.)

Access to its interior was provided by cul-de-sac or narrow U and L shaped roadways (for limited local use).

This innovation: Provided for large gardens; Freedom from disturbing through traffic; Reduced the cost of road building.

THE SUBURB AS NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT

Suburbs were originally small and self-contained communities.

This has affected their development.

The sense of neighborhood has been re-created (lost in the rapid growth of the city).


In many suburban communities there were no LOCAL GOVERNMENTS.

PROMOTED NEIGHBORLY ORGANIZATIONS

(DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION and LOCAL INITIATIVE).


Some of the activities of the middle class suburbs were due to: the superior education of its members; large amount of leisure (women of the community

enjoyed).In the suburb:

Small face- to- face community of identifiable people.

Participation in the community life as equals.Gardening;Politics;Both, “Do-it-yourself” activities in the

suburb.


This development has inspired Clarence Perry, who framed the ‘Concept of Neighborhood Unit’.

After experiencing the benefits of a well-planned suburban environment as a resident of a model suburban development on Long island, Forest Hills gardens, he made his proposal (more explicit, a better defined structure).

The principle of neighborhood organization was to bring within walking distance all the facilities needed daily by the home and the school, and to keep the heavy traffic arteries outside the area.


THE WALKING DISTANCE:

The very first criterion of a face-to-face community;

No playground for school children should be more than a quarter of a mile (approx. 400 m) from the houses it served.

Same distance to primary school and the local marketing area.

Population: 5.000 Large enough for a full variety of local services; Large enough for a primary school.


Clarence Perry (with his proposal) had restored, with modern ideas and modern facilities, one of the oldest components of the city, the QUARTER, which we found in early Mesopotamia.

He transposes the temple or the church, as the attractive nucleus, into the school and the community center.

Playground and the community center, an essential part of the whole design (bringing back some rural elements into the city).

Restore the pedestrian scale and lessen the amount of unnecessary transportation.


His ideas have been applied to some communities.

Out of these applications two new planning features developed:

Separation of through transportation avenues from local roads and streets.

Pedestrian paths and vehicular roads formed two independent systems.

Neighborhood park: Either as a Greenbelt around the neighborhood; Or as a ribbon of internal green uniting the

superblocks.

Physical and Social innovations made in the original planning of the romantic suburbs

Most striking innovations in the modern city planning.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

However today, the suburb has lost the conditions that preserved the landscape around it and provided for spontaneous associations and common enterprises.

What the suburb retains today:

Segregation; Status seeking; Political irresponsibility.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

A recent study in Boston:

Only one male resident out of three (1/3) spends: Any time on community/civic activity in his dormitory

suburb; He does not participate actively in his professional or

business association.

The suburbanite gives up the obligations at both ends.The farther he goes from the center, the more

disconnected he becomes.

Neither neighborhood nor city give cohesion to the suburb of the ‘motor age’.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

The suburb shopping centersThe suburban factoriesBusiness officesResearch Institutions

Provide a minimum of facilities for association.

They impose through their random distribution a maximum consumption of effort- whether counted in time, distance, or cost.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

These fast moving elements are the outcome of the metropolitan development.

They are no longer held together: Either by the URBAN MAGNET or the URBAN

CONTAINER.

They are rather emblems of the ‘disappearing city’.

This movement from the center carries no hope or promise of life at a higher level.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

Expanding urban areas Carries its separate fragments ever farther

from the city

Leaving The individual more isolated, alone and

helpless.

PROBLEMS OF SUBURBS

At the beginning:

Movement to suburbs was a flight of the families from the center.

Later it became a more general escape.

No more individual suburbs.

A spreading suburban belt.

From METROPOLIS TO MEGALOPOLIS

Megalopolis is fast becoming a universal form, and the dominant economy is a metropolitan economy, in which no effective enterprise is possible without a close tie to the big city.

Looking at the Negative Aspects of Metropolitan civilization, would serve as a prelude to a fresh analysis of the role of the city as magnet, container, and transformer, in modern culture.


The basis for metropolitan agglomeration lay in the significant increase of population that took place during the 19th century.

During the Napoleonic wars the European population was 200 million.

This population has increased to 600 million at the outbreak of the First World War.

In 1800 not a city in the Western World had even a million people: London (the biggest): 959,310. Paris: Around 500,000.

In 1850, population of London has increased to 2 million. Population of other cities has also increased.


By 1900 eleven metropolises with more than 1 million inhabitants came to existence (Berlin, Chicago, New York, Moscow, Tokyo etc.).

30 years later: 27 cities with more than 1 million population.

The rise of cities with a population of over a 100.000 had their suburban rings:

In America cities of this size (separate entities) tended to come together into undifferentiated, formless urban mass, which termed as ‘conurbation’.

This alteration in numbers, scale, and area under urbanization, resulted in qualitative changes in all centers.

In addition, extended the sphere of urban influence, bringing the goods, habits, and the ideological values of the city to hitherto almost self-contained villages.


The building and multiplication of cities altered the whole balance between the urban and the agricultural population.

Remember the ‘Mechanical Civilization’ during the last three centuries.

Mechanical processes had replaced the organic processes.

Everything has been attached to profit and a shift in many respects has taken place. A shift to more distant places for raw materials A shift from the producing towns to the financial

centers.


FREE COMPETITION broke the old feudal and municipal monopolies.

OLIGOPOLY: A minority of organizations took control of the market and fixed prices.

The great METROPOLIS: An agent of this process; A symbol of its great success.


This general movement brought the various sectors of the modern society within the same large urban container.

It broke down the separation between the various ruling groups and classes.

Land, industry, finance, the armed forces and administrative system formed a coalition in the leading Western countries for: Maximum amount of economic advantage; Maximum exercise of effective political control.

Governmental agents of power began to direct ‘national interests’ towards the service of the industrialist and the financier.


After 17th century: A productive economy (industrial) A consumption economy (commercial)

Then after, both economies have expanded under the pressure of continued invention:Power, speed, quantity, and innovation became ends in themselves.

As a result of all these developments, the great metropolises brought into one vast complex the industrial town, the commercial town, and the royal and the aristocratic town, each stimulating and extending its influence over the other.


The standards of the factory and the market quickly spread to every other institution in the metropolis.

To have: The biggest museum; The biggest university; The biggest department store; The biggest bank etc.

became a mark of the metropolitan success.


These (positive) developments were not without any problems.

These developments have been accompanied by urban disorder and decay.

Many scholars have made studies to establish better norms for growth and development.


THE REMOVAL OF LIMITS

Urban explosion

The removal of quantitative limits

This marks the change: from an organic system to a mechanical system; from purposeful growth to purposeless

expansion.


THE REMOVAL OF LIMITSUntil the 19th century the limitations of both local and

regional transportation placed a natural restriction upon the growth of cities.

Even the biggest cities (Rome, Alexandria etc.) respected this limitation.

19th century: the railroad! (coal & iron)

In terms of purely physical requirements the area of settlements coincided with coal beds, the ore (cevher) beds and the railroad network.


Entire provinces and counties were becoming urbanized, very different than the historic city, named as ‘conurbation’.

Conurbation ---- Megalopolis???

Megalopolis still holds in itself the city. It can be considered as an entity.

Whereas the conurbation is a NONENTITY, and it becomes more obviously so as it spreads.


SPRAWLING GIANTISMIf we try to understand the shape of some cities

like London, Buenos Aires, Chicago etc. through examining the aerial map, it can easily be seen that the original container has completely disappeared.

NO SHARP DIVISION BETWEEN CITY AND COUNTRY SIDE.

In each case, the city has absorbed villages and little towns, reducing them to place names.

(Manhattan and Harlem in New York).


As one moves away from the center, the urban growth becomes ever more aimless and discontinuous.

Loss of formLoss of autonomy

Become normal attributes of the metropolitan regime.


CONGESTION AND DE-CONGESTION With the increase of private cars, the streets and

avenues become parking lots. To move the traffic, vast expressways are cut into the

city. Congestion is an indispensable part of the daily life in

the metropolitan areas:

-Traffic congestion;- Congestion in the crowded office elevators;- Congestion in metros (subway train.

In the act of making the core of metropolis accessible, the planners of congestion have already made it uninhabitable.


THE BURSTING CONTAINERThe dominant world metropolises represents huge

concentration of political, financial and technological power.

Though the congestion of the metropolis has tended to destroy the organic tissue of neighborhoods and smaller communities, it has helped to create new organs of a more specialized and more selective in nature, made possible by their accessibility to a very large population.

This can be an important opportunity for reconstruction of the cities and regions in the future.


Metropolitan container has exploded. But the institutional magnets still

maintain their original attractive power. In every metropolitan area, the population

is spilling over new suburban, exurban and rural areas much faster than it is being accumulated in the reservoir at the center.

The reservoir itself, the metropolitan core is not becoming empty.

WHY????


In developed countries there has been a general shift in employment from agricultural and industrial occupations to the services and profession.

i.e LONDON:Increased employment offered by administrative activities

The CENTER became fashionable again.

The industry moved out from the centers of industrial towns.

As a result of this change, there has been no substantial change in the metropolitan population.


But the fastest rate of growth has been in the outlying areas.

Provincial towns and regional centers became the focus of this further metropolitan growth.

As time passed, they started to face similar problems (unbalanced budget, environmental problems etc.) of the big cities.

Although rapid transportation and instant communication have altered the SCALE OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT, they have not altered much the pattern.


Every society today in some way is faced with the continued expansion of the metropolis into the formless megalopolitan conurbation.

It seems very difficult that this problem could be solved by local authorities, which do not have a full control over this complicated process.

One cannot bring about the renewal of the city by replacing old structures with new buildings that only confirm the obsolete pattern of city growth and that rest on the equally obsolete ideological foundations of ‘ mechanical process’.

As long as the present forces remain in operation, the area of urban disorganization will widen.


Due to the indefinitely expansion and the desire for immediate profit, one metropolis will merge physically with its neighbor.

In this merging each metropolis will lose the neighboring landscape and its own urban individuality.

It is almost impossible to get rid of this process.


CULTURAL FUNCTION OF THE WORLD CITYPositive function of the historic metropolis

Metropolitan massiveness and congestion have some positive justifications:

It is a focus of those activities that bring people, nations together through co-operation and interplay.

It brings the diversity and variety of special cultures:their languagestheir customstheir typical cuisine


CULTURAL FUNCTION OF THE WORLD CITYMuseum

Most typical institution of the metropolis(As gymnasium was for the Hellenic city or the hospital

for medieval town)

In its rational form, the museum is not equivalent of the library.

It is a mean to get access to a variety of selected items, which would not be otherwise reached by people.

In this rational form, the museum is an indispensable contribution to the culture of cities.


INVISIBLE CITYMany of the original functions of the city,

which required physical presence of participants, have been transformed into other forms through IT.

In addition to the old functions of the urban container, we have some new functions, exercised through the ‘functional grid’: the framework of the INVISIBLE CITY.


The final mission of the city is to promote man’s conscious participation in the cosmic and historic process.

Through its complex and enduring structure, the city greatly enhances the man’s ability to interpret these processes and take an active, formative part in them.

Manifestation of all the dimensions of life, through emotional communion, rational communication, technological mastery, and above all, dramatic representation, has been the supreme organization of the city in history.

And. It remains the chief reason for the city’s continued existence.

lecture 8 postmodern cities: cities in the third millennium from metropolis to megalopolis prof. dr....

Documents

term metropolitan area

metropolitan areas

residential area

suburb suburbs

central urban area

builtup area

word metropolitan

particular suburban