Polemics

One thing we have to address before this chapter starts is that, no matter how many problems there are in the current environment, cities themselves are not problems. Instead, cities are the solutions to far bigger problems. Humans in different cultures and locations all forms settlements and cities through out the history, and claim them to be very much necessary in human development. Humans are not getting rid of cities for sure, and also we are not running away from these problems. The goal here is to acknowledge the city problems, to understand them, and then try to solve them.

One can never argue about the problems of cities without trying to understand cities first. To begin with this topic, the first step would have to be examining what a city is, and what makes a city.

For most of the history of modern Homo sapiens, we have been constantly relocating homes for hunting and gathering food. Only about 10,000 years ago, agricultural technique and home breeding was discovered by humans, and then came the first settlements. However, limited nutrition and water content in the soil requires relocating the farmlands, which made these settlements semi-permanent. It is very important that, due to these early semi-permanent settlements, people started to understand the concept of architecture. Around 3000 BC, our ancestors from both Middle East and Eastern Asia developed efficient irrigation systems that made sure there is sufficient water and nutrition for large amount of crops. Thus, as the productivity of food nearly stabilized, these settlements became more permanent; and food as a resource defined these earliest towns and cities.

Even though the main reason permanent settlements exist is food as a resource, the most important factor of locating these settlements is natural resources. Natural resources like water is necessary for cooking and drinking, flat land and rich soil are important for farming, wood and stone are required for constructing shelters, and appropriate climate is essential for living hood. For example, the city of Jericho was built around Elisha’s spring as its most important water resource, and thousands of cities were built this way later on; only until Roman times that people invented aqueduct system to overcome the limitation of fresh water. Again, natural resource defined the location of early settlements.

Associated with the technology advance, food productivity dramatically increased soon after irrigation systems were invented, and much less labor was required for agriculture and food production. As a result, other professions other than farmer started to grow rapidly. These early cities with large population became places with the concentration of crafts, arts, decoration, clothes, accessories, gastronomy, and so on; and integrated into their unique regional culture. These cultural products as resources became the drive for trading between cities, and defined the identity of each of them.

Since enormous amount of trading routes were connected from city to city, the development of small towns and trading stops along these routes was heavily stimulated. These settlements were different than cities, they only provide necessary re-

sources such as water and food for travelers. The typology of these places is more like early human settlements that most people are working as food providers that raise and collect food from around the town. Although some of these settlements grew out of its original typology due to growing population and unique geography locations, most of them remained very similar to other settlements. Again, these towns were places of necessary resources.

The relationship between towns and trading routes introduced in the previous paragraph is surprisingly similar to the fabric we have right now. Highways connecting big cities stimulated the economy of smaller towns by providing traveling consumers and recognition, which allows them to grow. These places often has many gas stations, hotels, and convenient shops, and they are necessary resources for travelers. In larger scale, any town or city is a place of resources. There are many more small towns because they provide necessary resources for daily needs such as, in today’s standard, grocery store, pharmacy, gas station, fire department, and police station. However, because necessary resources such as hospital and car dealership are less visited, they often only appear in larger towns, as well as other resource needed in daily bases. The same rule applies to cities, which is why resources like airport and large amusement parks only exist in cities. More international cities like New York City and Tokyo not only has to sustain the population around their own radiant area, but they also have to export services for the global population, which makes them much more unique places to hold resources like large investment banks and international convention centers. The same rule of resource distribution applies to all different scales of urban models.

Even though these cities were connected with global trading system, because of the slow transportation and geographic differences, each of them developed their own culture. Most of these cities or regions have their unique cultural resources to contribute to the global trading system, making the trading goods more diverse, and providing more recognition of unfamiliar regional cultures.

Since the long distance transportation opened up the new global trading network, the cultures of different places started to fuse and blend. Ancient Egyptian obelisks started to appear in the skyline at city of Rome, paper-making and printing technology originated in Chinese Empire were widely used on the publication of Catholic Bibles in western world, and German modern industrial design was heavily influenced by imported African folk art. With the advancement of technology, the synthesis of different cultures sure created enormous amount of new possibilities. However, the

harmonious balance between regional culture and newly created modern culture soon began to fall apart since the application of mass production in the mid 19 century. After industrial revolution, the modern culture dominantly took over the traditional cultures in Europe and America. Starting with Ford Motor Company’s concept of assembly line, global capitalists began to excessively mass produce their products to maximize their profit. Of course, it created convenience and more affordable products for the public and emerging middle-class, and heavily stimulated the growth of global population. But at this time, the importance of economic profit was put in front of that of culture.

With more and more products being mass produced, less people were needed in crafting and manufacturing industries even though the population was increasing at the time. As large corporations produce the daily and life sustaining products of people’s lives, it was obvious that large amount of unrelated people were using the same products and living the same lifestyle. This phenomenon was reflected in George Orwell’s 1984 that everyone in the world is wearing the same outfits in the near future from then. It is not difficult to find out that red peppers in supermarket mass produced from Brazil are less expensive than ones grew locally in farmers’ market. The same rule applies to building materials: standardized building materials shipped from China are much cheaper than locally customized materials. This is one of the main reasons that the movement of mass production heavily influenced the building industry and even global city scape. Gradually, traditional architecture started disappearing in modern cities due to the overshadowing force of capitalism.

This phenomenon is more obvious in developing countries desperately pursuing economic advantage. With the policy of “economic development comes first”, China’s capital city Beijing has almost changed completely in last 30 years. Economic growth created millions of job opportunities in newly emerging cities, the largest population migration and urbanization started to happen in China. In order to accommodate such large amount of population influx, tens of thousands of new buildings were built within few years. Housing was such a necessity that people would pay high price for any architectural quality and housing condition as long as they are in the city. Because the geographic location in the city is the main factor determines the housing price rather than the apartment itself, a large number of apartment buildings built had the identical floor plans and same façades in repetitive patterns for efficiency and economic profit. During its fastest developing era, even until now, buildings were built faster than any normal architectural designed period: the construction period for a mega size building complex project only takes a few

Beijing 1908 Sao Paulo 1915

months. Responding to the fast constructing speed, many design of new buildings were done by large state-owned corporations. They apply almost same designs for tens buildings, sometimes even hundreds, to keep up with the city developing pace. Tens of thousands of construction workflow was done this way that created gigantic amount of poorly designed buildings, and this is the reason why the skyline of Beijing is boringly repetitive.

Another city had undergone almost the same boring cityscape as Beijing. From far away, it is hard to tell which city is which. However, this city is located on the other side of earth. Sao Paulo in Brazil, a city with drastically different cultures and geographical features. How do two cities that are thousand miles apart share almost the same cityskyline?

Beijing 2010 Sao Paulo 2010

It turned out that these two cities had experience rapid development in the same period. These buildings in the cities were built to accommodate the fast developing real-estate market and to house the massive amount of population increase.

In this period, both cities sacrificed there identities and cultures for economic growth. It is understandable on a macro perspective. However, people would not be happy about this as just average citizens in these cities. Kevin Lynch describe cities as places to host memories, but these citiescape with no character can hardly host any special memory about the cities.

These are just two typical cities. There are thousands of cities like this all over the world. When every real-estate developer put the profit in front of the city experi-

ence, or when all the architects are competing to build the iconic buildings, the city becomes chaotic. One Chinese architect Yung ho Chang describe modern cities as the “Frankenstein”, that the creator wants to create the perfect city by putting all the best parts together instead of setting some sort of hierarchy or order, and the city later turns out to be a disaster in design.

What Chang said was that the cities area not the image of what planners originally intended. However, when we are complaining about current cities looking repetitive and similar, we should look into the earlier imagination of future cities to find out.

In Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the city is fill with high rises and expressways. Looking at the city of Metropolis’ cityscape, it reminded me of the cityscape of both Beijing and Sao Paulo. Meaning the early ideologies of what cities should look like has great impact on later designers.

Since the age of automobile, average citizens are experiencing a worse urban environment. The cities became a place of danger, and even inequality. One painter illustrated the city streets as cliffs, where people will be killed if stepped in.

Speaking of inequality. Current city façade is all about the inequality, enclosure, and privacy. These are mostly private corporations with large amount of financial support that no one has saying about what they do. The problems of the cities lies beyond just city itself, it is intertwined with the political and economic system.

Poster for the Film: Metropolis (1927)

Fritz Lang

New Building Type

In the mid twenty century, a new building type emerges: shopping malls. These malls are the social and economic centers for American suburbia. These malls usually have large parking lots because people usually drive to these malls to shop, and they leave with their car as well. For the suburbia residents, these malls are more of their shopping destinations than something they would enjoys staying for long.

However in recent years, these mall are taking places in the cities, and transforming into even more ambitious developments. They contain cinemas, shopping centers, recreation spaces and many restaurants. These large developments started to pop up in the cities, and they have large parking garages as well.

Gradually, these developments became people’s destination that people would travel by car and spend more time there, then leave by cars. These developments are usually really large that the facade of these building are just very large surfaces of glass glazing. More and more people are “trapped” in these developments instead of spending quality time on the streets.

These developments are extremely similar to what Robert Moses was trying to do to do to the city of New York. He was proposing new building types such as massive public housing units and large infrastructures that would benefit the upper class.

These large developments are destroying the city streets, and the worst thing is that it is not realized.

Jane Jacobs once said :“A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented

Robert Moses with a model of his proposed Battery Bridge in late 1930s

to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”

When the streets are dead, the entire city is doomed as well. Luckily, the online shopping is replacing these large developments. However, it is not helping in terms of the city experience. Maybe some thing need to be done, but no one has any idea yet.

Modernist Cities

After the industrialization of Europe, many cities turned into fully inustrial cities, and more and more issues raised, especially the health and life quality problems. For example, the city of Manchester became a city of air and water pollution, where the industrial workers can barely sustain their live in very small and non regulated sheds.

Luckily, the technological advancement enabled the birth of modern architecture. Also, many remote colonies of European countries became the testing ground for the modernism, which accelerated the development of the modernist movement.

The modernism embraces the technology, and believes that technology advancement can solve all the urban problems including inequality, sanitation, infrastructure, and growing population. In the modernists’ mind, everything can be explained rationality, and the deigns are supposed to be extremely rational, and functional. In one short wording: Form follows function.

Paris undergone the haussmannization, and transformed itself from an medieval city to a city of modernity. Vienna built the ringstrasse on the site of old city wall, and established its modern city order. Casa Blanca became the place to develop the very first model for dual city for social separation.

After the CIAM’s 1941 meeting, Le Corbusier established the ground rule for modernist cities in the Athens Charter. It explains that: Housing is supposed to be well lit by natural light, and it has to be ventilated. Working space needs to be separated from the living district of the cities. Recreational spaces have to be created in the cities for public as a necessary program. Then the traffic needs to be completely separated from the pedestrians to maximize the safety for citizens. The new city would contain prefabricated and identical high-density skyscrapers, spread across a vast green area and arranged in a Cartesian grid, allowing the city to function as a “living machine.” His later design for the Radiant City strictly followed the rules he established in Athens Charter.

However, with projects like Pruitt Igoe and Robin Hood Gardens, the modernism architecture and modernist cities seem not to be the solution for current urban development issues.

Urban Morphology

Morphology is a study of the form and structure of organisms and their specific structural features.

Since the 19th century, more and more planners started to focus on the overall look of the cities. It is a good thing in terms of the overall circulation. Also, the scientific master plans had directly stimulated the idea of zoning. However, this enables architects and urban planners of being obsessed with the geometric and topographic features of the city instead of think about urban spaces in a human perspective. Massive drawings were made for city master plans through out the years. As Le Corbusier explains: “The city of today is a dying thing because its planning is not in the proportion of geometrical one fourth. The result of a true geometrical lay-out is repetition, The result of repetition is a standard. The perfect form.”

However, none of them have considered human scale. Brasilia as one the most relevant example, designed entirely based on an urban morphology idea, that can not even fully function as a society.

Old and New

Old and new, the most permanent topic in architectural design both academically and practically. Vitruvius once said in ten books of architecture that architecture is the highest expression of culture, which defines architecture’s tie to the culture and history. However, international famous architect Norman Forster also said: architecture is the highest expression of value. I agree with him and think that historical preservation is certainly overrated, and architect as a social profession should bring new values to the society. But since modernism, the ideology is buildings something that is completely irrelevant to the traditions, and it turned out to be

Urban development has been skyrocketing in recent years especially in developing countries, and there are vast amount of historical buildings that are less important to the culture, but taking over a more economical important real-estate. For most buildings that are decades old, they tend to carry some memories and history. However, every other new buildings would be a part of the history as well. Selectively, they need to be transformed or demolished for economic growth.

Old buildings that are still serving as they original functions are not only inefficient, but also extremely non environmental friendly. In many city’s central business district, there still are a few old buildings existing due to the zoning, and they are usually a lot shorter than the surrounding buildings, which means they are less efficient in terms of land use. Also, the floor plan and space inside the building are less efficient to fulfill modern needs. Moreover, old buildings with older building systems usually leaves much larger carbon footprint and consumes more energy.

Admittedly, there are drawbacks from demolishing old buildings for economic growth, and it is important to protect what is important for our history. No one could imagine Pisa without the lining tower, or Rome without the pantheon. As I said, the process of substituting the old buildings needs to be selective. In architectural design aspect, the designers could bring out the history of the site, or try different ways to give back some memories to the community when they are dealing with historical sites.

It is important to remember, but for the urban development and economic growth, planners and architects need to look ahead into the future.

The American Dream and Emerging Suburbs

Following the modernist era, the United Sates became the superpower, and the pioneer for new models of urbanism and urban design. Also, the new development is highly based on the pride of Americans, as well as the ideology of the American Dream.

The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity, and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, and an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers. In the definition of the American Dream by James Truslow Adams in 1931, “life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement”

With the wide spread of home loan and the better rural living environment due to the regulations set by Regional Planning Association in America, American suburban housing became the new American Dream.

The new idea of the American Dream is based on the personal mobility, urban sprawl, individualization, and homogeneity. The ideology was all about creating new typology called suburbia.

The forms for American suburban area takes ideas from the broad acre city by Frank Lloyd Wright, where every family is given one acre of land in the city suburbs. Within the communities, all the houses are inward facing, and highly rely on ground transportation and telephone. The cities are places where people work, and they usually have greater density with many high rises.

Large hopping malls and shopping centers across America gave people who live in suburbia chances to experience urban shopping and services. After the Highway Act of 1956 for the rapid transportation of military equipment such as nuclear bombs and tanks, American suburbs were truly made viable.

Until now, the suburbia is still the major typology of the entire country.

Bigger Houses, Bigger Blocks, and Bigger Cities

The is an interesting phenomenon, that the personal vehicles are getting bigger and bigger through out the history. Of course one reason is that people tend to have more needs of moving bigger objects. Also, for superficial reasons that people used to think bigger cars represents wealthier family background. But there is another important reason, that is, people nowadays have to drive to the destinations where they are intend to go. So car actually became much more important than before.

For most urban citizens, personal ride should be an option instead of necessity. If people living in an urban area have to drive to their destination, there is something wrong with the city. For example, the city of Los Angeles is defined by the major highways going through the city, and majority of its population drive to work on these highways.

A city that encourages automobile will have really low efficiency of land use. People usually need three places to park their one car: homes, workplaces, and shopping malls. Thus, the houses need to be built bigger to accommodate larger cars. Building blocks are getting bigger to accommodate parking. Also, since the cities are no longer walkable anymore, larger buildings are built as people’s destinations.

In conclusion, the cars are getting bigger because of the urban typology, and the urban typology is changing because of larger cars.

Density

Although the lifestyle illustrated by American suburbia is comfortable, the urban model for it is extremely inefficient. Massive amount of traffic are pored into interstate highways during the rush hours causing inefficient traffic. In the cities, the office buildings are empty for more than half of time. In the suburbs, the vast amount of land taken by suburbia houses and neighborhoods are endangering the natural habitat for various species. Personal vehicles for reaching to each house release large amount of green house gas collectively.

Metropolitan Area Density Diagram

Levittown, NY 1957

Modern China, the New Testing Ground

The recent booming of China’s economy created a brand new crowd of middle class and rich, leading to the largest urban migration on the planet earth. Millions of people moved from rural areas into urban centers, causing the dramatic growth of large metropolitan centers and hundreds of emerging cities.

Following the migration, unimaginable amount of apartment buildings, office tower, infrastructure, and recreational spaces were built within a very short amount of time in order to host the massive amount of population moving into the cities. In terms of urban growth, the cities were growing in both horizontal and vertical directions.

Unlike developing countries with rich regional cultures, China had experience the Cultural Revolution, which is a sociopolitical movement happening all through China from 1966 to 1976 that almost completely wipe out the traditional cultures and replaced them with the Communist ideology. In this ten-year long movement, anything that was related to the imperialism had to be destroyed, including books, weapons, architecture, and even human lives. Thus, most of China’s traditions have been abandoned. By the end of 1976, most families were under educated and they were left with no private properties.

After the Cultural revolution, China completely reversed its policy, and opened up the country’s ports to global trading. Within the country, China started its thirty-year long reconstruction just like what Europe did after the war. Soon after, due to the revival of China’s economy, the reconstruction turned into the modernization of the entire country, and then the Chinese urbanization now.

In the process of modernization, the fact that China lost a large part of its culture became very valuable because this made Chinese people more open to the unknown world. A large amount of people in China even became accept and adapt to western values. This is also one of the reasons China is very much dominant in the globalization. The Cultural Revolution turned modern China into a blank paper forty years ago, but on this blank paper, there is unlimited freedom of what creative people can draw. As a result, the lack of complete social structure and loose regulations made this country the new testing ground for different theories and ideas in both architecture and urbanism.

New Fushun:

Construction Site of Residential Towers that Will Soon House Millions

The Absolute Quantification of Regulation

Most people think that designers and architects influence the cityscape by designing different buildings and parks. However, the designs are highly influenced by the regulations set by city planners. Simply speaking, every single piece of land in the cities can be quantified in different index and norms. The most important factor influencing these quantifications is the economic drive.

In New York City, early regulations of Skyscrapers shaped some tall buildings’ distinct

look. For example, the Barclay-Vesey Building in lower Manhattan has the step back design responding to the zoning regulation, which was limiting skyscrapers’ shadow over the street side and on the lower buildings. The goal of the 1916 zoning law was to prevent the city’s streets from “devolving into gloomy, darkened canyons in the early days of skyscrapers. This zoning law had great influence on some early, and most important, skyscrapers designs such as the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the Rockefeller Center.

In 1961, a new zoning law sought to address those plans by creating incentives allowing developers to add extra floor space so long as plazas were incorporated into their plans. By the year 2000, over 3.5 million square feet of public space was created in New York City under the influence of this zoning law.

Due to the vast amount of land and the massive amount of urban development happening in China, as well as the lack of experience in urban planning, local government seemed to have very loose and out of date regulations about new urban developments. These regulation are often appear as different index that can be quantified in an very abstract way. With the largest real-estate market and extremely profitable business interests, developers usually propose the most efficient design for buildings that fulfill all the regulation requirements.

New Funshun City, a newly constructed city dedicated to high technology and urban lifestyle, is a perfect example of boring cityscape caused by maximized economic profit and overly quantified regulation. First of all, the most important part of the regulation on skyscrapers at Fushun are the floor to area ratio, as well as the daylight time for each building. Under these two very essential regulations, all the buildings were built in the same orientation, spacing, and height for the maximum efficiency.

It is understandable that developers want to maximized their profit by having as many apartments in a set piece of land as possible, but the simply quantified regulation can only result in very excessive amount of repetition and order, creating mind numbing sameness of buildings.

Not only in New Fushun these monstrous urban development exists, but also in many other newly developed or fast expanding cities. In theory, these regulations are reasonable for urban development. However, the quantified nature of these regulations turned out to be disaster for urbanization.

Office for Property Management Apartment Buildings Underground Car Parking Bicycle Parking Convenience Shops Public Playground Outdoor Gymnasium Vegetated Garden Kindergarten Internet Cafe Clubhouse Sentry Box

Typology Case Study: Modern Chinese Real-estate Development

Cultural Impact of Globalization

The globalization has always seen as a positive thing on global economy, and cultures although received many critics though out many years. Yes, without the globalization, people would not even know that there are other cultures on this planet.

However, from a local citizen’s perspective, the globalization might be that glorious as all. There are a number of negative impacts globalization has had on cultural diversity, including the influence multinational corporations have on promoting a consumer culture, exploitation of workers and markets and influencing societal values. This increased availability of commercial media and products can “drown out” local cultural influences.

Loss of individualism and group identity occur when globalization encourages a ‘Western ideal of individualism’. This promotes a homogeneous set of values and beliefs. The adoption of Western Culture and ideologies is seen as many computermediated technologies are developed, marketed and processed via western markets. The dominant population and culture of the day determine the next greatest technology along with the next commercialized gadget that will be offered up to the masses and longed for by those who are at arm’s reach of financially obtaining these devices. Heather Kanuka from University of Alberta also cites that electronic learning technologies perpetuates colonization by designing curriculum that mimics the cognitive styles of the dominant culture. Not having access to technologies that are present in the classroom, combined with an education system geared toward the dominant society can be a lethal combination for non-dominant cultures. The present education, legal and power structures reflect western ideas and philosophies. These western ideas are easily assimilated into other cultures and paradigms with far reaching effects. There is an assumption that the values and ideologies of the Global North will provide a suitable framework for the new knowledge economies of the developing Global South.

In last few decades, there are many exciting projects came out as the internationalism. These projects do not share any regionalism or culture reference from where the architects are from. The question is that: is there a right or wrong on the impact of globalization on the architecture and urban design?

Skyscrapers and Enclaves

In both Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture and Rem Koolhaas’ Delirious New York, they share the same idea that the new typologies of skyscrapers have endless capabilities.

In traditional sense, tall buildings are the result of stacking floors, and they are simply the more dense version of offices or houses. The difference between traditional low rises and newly emerged high rises are volumetric difference, however, as well as the floor to area ratio.

As an architect and a socialist, Le Corbusier contradicted the traditional view of skyscrapers. In his book Towards a New Architecture, he pointed out that because the dramatic volumetric differences in these super tall buildings, they are capable of being more than just stacked floors. Corbusier used the cruise ship as an example: in these massive cruise ships, there are swimming pools, hotel rooms, restaurants, and shops. In this case, the difference between a cruise ship and a fishing boat is not only the volume, but also the programs. Compared to the fishing boat, the cruise ship is closer to a miniature floating city. The large high rises could have function the same way as the cruise ships. In these large volumes, people could live, work, and entertain in different floors and sections. The design of Unite d’Habitation strictly followed the ideology of his, and contained not only housing units, but also restaurants, schools, and work recreational spaces.

By the time Rem Koolhaas was writing Delirious New York, skyscrapers became much more complex. He defined “programs” as the essential elements of tall buildings, and they pretty much would determine how people interact with the buildings and with each others. Some of large scale mixed-use or complex development in downtown area are called HOPSCA, which refers to hotels, offices, parks, shops, clubs, and apartments. In these more modern high rises, interior programs are sometimes more complex than just these programs. For example, the Global Center in Chengdu, China, a massive mixed-use building with the volume of 18,000,000 square feet, hosts hundreds of restaurants and shops, multiple shopping malls, a five-star hotel including rooms with a beach view, several class A office towers, a water park, an ice rink, an aquarium, a theatre, and even an entire Mediterranean town for high-end shopping. Further more, this building has its own fire department and hospital. The amount of activities people could do is far more than a town or a small city.

Unité d’habitation, Marseille

Even though these skyscrapers have access to the street, they are somehow isolated from the city fabric. The original idea was separate people from weathering, so people were able to be comfortable inside at any time of the year or day. However, this isolation cut off the connections these buildings with the streets as well. Gradually, these buildings have become more of a enclave rather than a part of the city, completely distinct from the surroundings.

Although isolated from the city fabric, these enclaves largely effects the urban design and city experience in an indirect way. These large buildings became destinations of thousands of people during the day, and then turned into an empty volume at night. This sudden change within short amount of time dramatically increases the load of city traffic, leading decision makers and planners to widen the streets in order to accommodate the rush hour traffic. Also, the energy consumption at night is still very high for these buildings since all the systems keep running in the after hours, which leaves a gigantic unnecessary carbon footprint.

Despite the energy efficiency and increasing urban density, the isolation created by these tall buildings in the cities is a negative forces of making ideal urban spaces.

Concrete Texture Detail of West Village by Jiakun Archtiects

Endlessly Boring City Facade

Urban Development under the Globalization

The globalization directly influenced the urban development in current cities in terms of architectural design and even the entire city skyline.

First of all, the global standards of materials has completely changed the architecture industry. . For better trading environment and convenience, most of manufactures in different fields have came up with many universal standards and units. These standards did make general productivity more efficient and more precise, especially for those products on the automated assembly lines. Under the framework revolving these standards, mass produced goods shipped around the world are much cheaper than individual produced ones in local market. Because the architecture construction market is highly adapt to the benefits of global standards, although many architects are considering local material and craftsmanship, they have to surrender to the extremely high prices their client might not be willing to pay. For example, the West Village in Chengdu, despite its eight years of construction, exceeded the budge more than five times overall due to its adoption of local materials and craftsmanship. The same as other works of Jiakun Liu, the Chinese pioneer and practitioner of critical regionalism, the West Village turned out to be a masterpiece. But the amount of money and time invested is absolutely enormous comparing to other commercial projects.

Secondly, the globalization and clash of cultures eliminated local traditions. Nowadays, due to the information technology and the internet, more and more people are interested in western pop culture instead of regional cultures. Thus, many local traditions are dying out. Plus, the global terrorism is splitting the general population and human thoughts in two extreme directions. The cultures that western world considers foreign are less tolerated, especially for Islamic cultures. With less people being interested in their local cultures, architecture and design became less resistant to the globalization. In China, numerous Eiffel Towers and Big Ben were built in different cities which have no direct relationship from the local cultures.

Thirdly, the biased media heavily influenced people’s perception of architectural aesthetic. In digital age, building facades can be easily copied and pasted, and for a while, the advanced technologies and high rises in western movies seems very tempting for developing countries. As a result, many Asian cities ended up having mind numbing cityscape of skyscrapers and glass glazing facades.

The New Individualism

When Internet was born, we were expecting to have a whole new dimension of world where infinite amount of activities could be done, and everyone was going to be brought much closer by the global social network: The idea of website made sure that information was shared freely over the internet; the invention of email opened up a new way of communication between two people apart from anywhere in the world; internet video calls amazingly connects two people face to face with no time difference; social media enables people sharing their ideas, thoughts , and culture on a much more massive dimension that can be heard or seen by millions of people. The dream of the Global Village finally was becoming true under the framework of internet. In this dream, the world was finally flat: everyone was no longer separated by their geographic locations, and eventually linked to the global information system that advances the communication, database of knowledge, and so much more. Over 50 years has passed by since the dream of global village, the world has developed into a radically different reality away from what people expected. In that dream, the internet was supposed to bring everyone closer together. As a result, the world should have been unprecedentedly united. However, as we see, the world is as broken as it was before the internet.

With the development of information technology, one person is able to learn about the world on just one digital device. Instead of the real window in this person’s room, the digital device is the new window, with better accessibility, to the outside world. Evidently, the world one person sees could be largely different from other people’s world in their device. For example, if one person watches decent amount of cat videos on YouTube, the website will continue to forward cat videos to the home screen of this user. The same rule applies to everyone, that every user has its own unique feed that differs from any others’. In this case, YouTube is a web company that provides free online video sharing and watching services, but realistically, it is a data processing company. Because the way these corporations make money is to collect users’ personal information and advertise towards them with selective information. The real money in this business is time: the more time people spend on these websites, the more advertisement they can absorb. To have people spend more time on their sites, these web companies came up with algorithms to make websites and apps an infinite loop system that keeps feeding information that interests these people. As a result, people’s windows to the world gets distorted by the information generated by algorithms and themselves, and eventually turns into

The Social Network (2010) David Fincher

mirrors that reflect themselves infinitely. As people get more detached from the rest of the world through this window, they becomes more independent as themselves, and the new individualism arises.

The social network did bring people closer together as originally designed, however, these people come together and formed their own groups and communities that further detached from rest of the world. People that share the same interests and similarities would form their own groups, and exclude anyone that undermine their beliefs. This phenomenon completely reversed the traditional value system mankind has being trying to keep: we have practiced and worked hard to behave the way society wants us to be, and tolerate people that are different, so we can live under the same roof. This new internet world allows us to interact with other people virtually, and selectively. Traditional social skills can be completely abandoned, and traditional bonding is greatly weaken. Silent diner table has become a common phenomenon: people sitting in the same dining table, possibly sharing somewhat a social bonding, stare at their own smart phone screens silently. The internet has given them freedom to break away from their physical bonding, then virtually spend time with their own online circle. Eventually, all we see and hear is ourselves, and no one would be able to understand, to agree with, and even to know each other anymore. All we care is ourselves. In the age of internet, human being as a species becomes

never before so isolated.

The human history is based on discoveries and findings that makes us understand the world better. We were told by teachers and parents that the more we learn, the more knowledgeable we are. However, the network engineers and algorithmic mathematicians told us a different story: that sometimes the more we know, the more detached we are from the truth. Large internet corporations like Facebook and Amazon have figured out how to make more money by feeding people enormous amount of selected information matching their interests and needs to trick customers into purchasing products. The same with news media, they only show people what they want to see in order to have viewers spending time on it, and to promote advertisement. If one person likes searching cat pics online, and gradually, there would be more and more cat pic suggestions showing up on his feed. Eventually, this person is going to be buried under millions of cat pics he like. Cat pic is just a metaphor for things people are interested in; but this example tells us the way how people spending hours on YouTube without planning in advance, and then end up being regretful. In this age of information explosion, there is no way anyone could learn everything that is happening in the world. It seems like it’s our own choice of what we see, but what we see is all filtered information calculated from big data. The algorithms of the internet select information we like and brings it to us limitlessly. The elite culture has made people so full of themselves that everyone thinks what they see heard is true. The more they think so, the more internet feeds them what they think is reality. The computer screen has become a giant mirror, and all we see is our selves, nothing beyond. Deep down, no one cares about the reality anymore, and all we care is what we think is the truth.

In 2016, Brexit happened, unpredictably. Then, Donald Trump was elected as the president of United States of America, contradicting predictions from all the major media and think tanks. More and more unpredictable results is happening challenging our beliefs. Does it mean democracy is falling apart like everyone was afraid of? Or, just as terrifying, does it mean no one really knows each other anymore? Where is individualism going?

Architecture used to be the means of shaping people’s lifestyles. But now, the computer algorithms are re-shaping people’s identities and the way people live in the society. The question is: Why is this happening?