THE IDEAL CITY
the way to safety, food, health and education Since olden times, people have been longing to live together in peace and happiness. When we think about the societies and cities of the past, we see that people believed that monumental buildings, erected for the gods (and for the rulers) would bring guaranteed happiness for the people. Daily life developed in areas where cities had been founded around these monuments, and where they hoped that ideally, the divine, the gods, would manifest themselves.
W
e can imagine that throughout history, a great deal has been thought about the concept of ‘the ideal city’ and that many projections have been made. Sometimes this was done through abstract concepts, sometimes by active attempts, taking all aspects of life into account. Sometimes philosophers and thinkers worked only architectonically. Many people have diligently occupied themselves with ‘the organisation of happiness’, which we may, after all, call the principle of the ideal city. The mere words ‘ideal city’ demonstrate a longing for perfection, for wholeness, for which people have always been striving. We see around us how they have tried to consolidate this wholeness, sometimes real, sometimes imaginary, in a social organisation with justice, peace, freedom and love as its point of departure. THE MODERN PROTOTYPES: COMMUNISM AND CAPITALISM From Akhenaten to Le Corbusier
and from Plato to Wijdeveld (the architect of Renova), thinkers have suggested that the ‘ideal city’ could become reality on the basis of simple concepts. Our modern society is the final expression of a number of these projects. Lofty human values underlie them, which sometimes return in the motto of certain
countries like that of France: ‘Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood’. Two main streams of the twentieth century, communism and capitalism, which largely determined the organisation of our modern society, were born from the idea of finding ultimate happiness. We have to draw the conclusion that neither has been successful. The communist model says: ‘The happiness of the group will be reflected by each individual, while each individual is wholly subservient to the goal’, but we have seen that this philosophy of collectivity and sharing of all possessions resulted in the death of hundreds of millions of people. And the capitalist counterpart states: ‘Acquiring power, possessions and means of production contributes to individual happiness. If the individual is happy, society will consequently also be so.’ We cannot yet wholly take stock, but there are enough signs (colonisation, the arms race, pollution of the environment, lack of respect for the laws of life on earth, excessive exploitation of natural resources, breaking up of the family, inner-city violence, credit crisis…) to be able to speak of a disastrous result. Yet, both systems stem from the same longing: the striving for happiness and freedom although, ultimately, both resulted in the opposite of their primary goal, namely in the use the way to safety, food, health and education 9
