News from the Past

An urban centre is not just a location but is also defined by the users, creating an experience. The past predictions of urban centres focused on designing and developing cities with maximum human experience, environmentally friendly, and inhabitable. Ronald Barthe, for instance, noted that a city is a discourse and a language where the city speaks to people by inhabiting, traversing, and looking at it. The prediction of future urbanism relies on the experience of the inhabitants rather than just living and staying in the city. Plug-in City by Peter Cook and Arcology: The city in the Image of Man by Paolo Soleri provided an overview of how future urban centres were supposed to look like and the critical factors that to be considered like technological, social, and physical factors that could be incorporated in the urban centres. The two, in this case, provided concepts that could help to design a city that is capable of creating discourse and maximize the human experience.

The idea has been that inspiration and experience should not come from erected buildings or constructed structures but through the general perspectives like technology and the environment provided by the city. The respect for nature is one of Paolo Soleri’s views. He proposed an urban design that upholds environmental sustainability, enhancing ecological balance where the energy of man is not redirected against man or manhood. This concept possesses futuristic urbanism that incorporates both future technology and past elements. This perspective imagines an urban environment that is both new as well as anachronistic. One of the key proposals was to develop urban centres that have aesthetic values and support sustainable values. In this case, actual urban functions were not supposed to derail for the reasons for urbanization and create artificial ugliness. As a result, the predicted city had to focus on nature, urban aesthetics, and technological changes among others.

Planning urban landscape was meant to include a physical environment that adapts to human needs. For instance, China started designing urban green centres that reflected the desire of people and the sustainability of the environment. China was influenced by the Western and Soviet countries to come up with the green space framework as part of the revolution that helps in achieving the goals of urbanization rather than focusing on the construction of good looking buildings.

Technology would play an important role in ensuring that the cities were adaptable to changes in the environment. This builds on the notion of protecting the environment and including traditions and ancient technologies. The concept of the plug-in city by Peter Cook also provided a new look of cities that do not concentrate on the infrastructural perspectives

of the city. The plan was a fantasy city with a mega-machine that could adapt effectively to the needs of the people. This concept involved a megastructure that includes transportation and essential services that are movable by cranes. Similarly, it also focused on social collective living. The retro-futurism of creative structures and artistic processes that could bring good experience to the residents in the city. The retro-futurism of urban centres in this regard focused on technology, social life, and the culture to build futuristic and habitable cities with undoubted experience.

The approach of retro-futurism cities in this age to represent Cook and Soleri’s views and concepts take the approach of simulations to help figure out the technological, social, and environmental concepts of urban centres. Most urban centres have not achieved the desires and therefore simulations among other perspectives are being used to depict the sustainability, habitability, and physical look of urban centres as was predicted in the past. The futuristic ideologies of cities also appear in films such as Avatar and The Hunger Game, the endless Marvel Comics spin-offs that provide science fictions that predict the futures of urban centres. As a result, the past prediction of future urbanism has not represented the predictions but focused more on industrialization and the construction of tall buildings to face the challenges. Peter Cook and Paolo Soleri predicted future urban centres that have not been achieved to date. While Cook focused on mobile or moving cities that are able to use human needs, experience, and technology, Soleri focused on the sustainability of urban centres. However, cities have not achieved plug-in city as well as Arcology but instead focused more on the construction of structures and production that leads to physical aesthetics and actual transportation. However, it leaves out the moving aspect and environmental sustainability. Currently, movies, animations, and video games act as reminders to the retrofuturism of urbanism and continue to predict future urban designs. As a result, more designs still come up as urbanists continue to design, act, and animate while the previous remain unachieved.

Hongao Leng

Sources:

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Picture:

MOMA. Retrieved October 26-2020. https://www.moma.org/ collection/works/796

Benjamin Grandy, Nov20, 2018. Retrieved from https:// medium.com/@bpgrandy/ increasing-our-density-arcol ogy-principles-for-a-sustain able-future-ac8506ee1563