Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
sought to make it “beautiful” and whimsical, as good a neighbor as possi-
ble.) These two figures, the Italian-American Paolo Soleri and the Austrian
Friedensreich Hundertwasser, seem opposed, yet they respectfully and
mutually coexist if we do not insist that true progress move in lockstep
toward some dogmatic future.
Cities only came into being gradually, realized with planning and prob-
ing that was no more a straight-line progression than any other technology
exhibits. Undoubtedly blind evolutionary alleys and failed attempts litter
urbanism's pre-history, along with discarded notions and occasionally an
idea so good it was adapted and repeated. Sometimes urban successes were
forgotten (the great Indus valley cities), or were merely predecessors, not
genuine cities (Çatal Hyuk in Asia minor) or enduring pre-urban forms
(the Amerindian Southwestern pueblo)—all anticipated the truly achieved
city. The earlier forms too were driven by a striving toward efficiency, a
need to gather together trades and the specialized information represented
by so many occupations, and to defend a way of life.
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Urban culture
resulted. This mass of human-borne knowledge quickened the evolution-
ary step of each successive cultural advance; indeed, as a colonial animal the
city expressed the cultural externalization of biological functions that exist
only in the aggregate. If technology is the amelioration of the environment
by means of human intervention, then, that mediation between nature and
the culture-magnified faculties (tools) finds its greatest and most complete
expression in the city.The city does not intercede with nature on behalf of
any one faculty or sense—as tool-making substitutes or extends one sense,
faculty, limb, or organ at a time—but on behalf of perception itself. The
caloric price for this achievement has always been steep: dependence upon
the surrounding countryside, and lost privacy.Yet there are gains too. New
Yorkers, who travel by the millions through tubes in the ground eschewing
a personal car and who live in boxes surrounded on six sides by neighbors
(not often of their choosing or preference) use something like 40 percent
less energy than their rural fellow citizens
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; the mythically liberal, sus-
piciously effete, gourmandizing, and fashion-conscious New Yorkers are
subsidizing their conservative, rural, and independent-minded political
adversaries, who enjoy nothing better than to pillory city dwellers as
immoral. (The equalizer is a cash, not a caloric, economy.) Cities draw
heavily on the countryside for resources, but use those resources more effi-
ciently than the rural population that supplies them and therefore the
countryside prospers at the city's expense.
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Not the other way round.
