Harmonies of Urban Design and Discords of City-form: Urban Aesthetics in the Rise of Western Civilization

The cerebral theme in the layout of planned towns since antiquity has often reflected the image of cosmic harmony and perfection, unfolding in various notions of the Ideal City. The underlying adage of much of urban design and planning during modernity has continued to be the paradigms of accord in science and perfection in technology. Kindred to the notion of equilibrium in physical science, much of 20th century urban design too has seen to it that planned city-form addresses urban growth within the ideal of a balanced environmental, economic or social development. The notion of the Ideal City thus has remained implicit in urban design through to the present day. The motif of the 20th-century city, however, has not been composure and equilibrium proclaimed by the ideal. Rather, the factual contemporary city has been increasingly characterized by disparity, neurosis and disequilibrium. The gap between a blueprint, and its factual aftermath in the city, has led the fervent observer to the discernment of human fraud implanted in the mechanistic paradigm of modern city-form. The scientific remoteness of a city plan seems to have yielded a contradiction between urban existence and human essence: the city can reasonably guarantee individuals' survival, but in the process it appears to strip them of their own authenticity. The individual, through observation of self and other humans within the contemporary city, discerns that the only genuine sentiment emerging from the city's mechanistic ambience is that of meaninglessness, absurd, even insanity. The one humanly authentic virtue that contemporary city-form can still offer is not equilibrium but disequilibrium; not perfection but imperfection. Architecture of the 20th century seems to have acknowledged this distress on occasion by introducing deliberate imperfection as a design scheme. Commensurate consideration in urban design today, however, is still missing.