The Big Rethink Part 11: Urban Design | Thinkpiece | Architectural Review
▻https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/campaigns/the-big-rethink/the-big-rethink-part-11-urban-design/8643367.article
The fundamental purpose of urban design is to provide a framework to guide the development of the citizen. As this AR campaign reaches its conclusion, the penultimate essay attacks the City of Doing found in modernity
In the largest-ever wave of human migration, vast numbers all over the developing world are flooding from countryside to city. Most of humanity is now urbanised as new settlements, some expanding into vast megacities, mushroom rapidly − and around them sprawling slums provide the initial foothold in the transition from peasant to urbanite. Many of these new cities, like the newer parts of old ones, are dismal aggregations of sweatshop factories and crowded residential buildings of stacked hutch-like homes. But, like the even less salubrious slums, these offer escape from the grinding poverty of the countryside, with its lack of education and healthcare. The first generations entering these cities and slums willingly sacrifice their lives to give their children the education and opportunities they never had and to support dependents in the countryside. And despite the slums’ decrepit and unhealthy conditions, they do in a sense ‘work’: people progressively upgrade their homes, or move on, as they can afford to; and the slums are hotbeds of small-scale entrepreneurship and creativity. Indeed it is well-intended interventions, such as construction of state-funded new housing, that tend to fail. Slum dwellers cannot afford the rents and implicit lifestyle of the new housing, whose leases secretly fall to the better off to be sublet for profit.