Contemporary urban aesthetics:
The city of tomorrow as a wise gardener's job

"It is not an easy task to design the plan of a city so the overall beauty would be divided in an infinity of local beauties, all different; for it to be ordered, yet with a sort of confusion; that a number of regular parts would yield together a certain idea of irregularity and chaos, which is so suited to big cities. No city better than Paris offers to the imagination of a clever artist such a beautiful field of action. It is like an immense forest, with topographical variations which alternate plains and mountains, crossed in the middle by a large river which, dividing itself in several branches, forms islands of different sizes."
Marc-Antoine Laugier, Essay on Architecture, 1753

"The vertigo felt in large cities is analogous to the one we feel in the midst of nature: pleasures of chaos and immensity."
Charles Baudelaire, Writings on art, 1846 c.

"Landscape: this becomes the city for the flaneur. More precisely, the city divides for him in two dialectical poles: it opens to him as a landscape and encloses him as a room." Walter Benjamin, Arcades, 1935 c.

Regardless of local differences, we perceive the environment, the scale and form of traditional small cities or villages as a sort of "second nature." We feel protected by their public spaces, by the pattern that seems to embody and shape the relationship between our private realm and our collective dimension.

On the other hand, the large metropolis - ever since its origins - has generated in us an ambivalent feeling: it attracts us with its glamour, freedom and social chances, but frightens us as a generator of loneliness, crime, poverty, noise and pollution. As we continue to build and expand the metropolis, we often see it as something escaping our control, like the cloned dinosaurs in Jurassic Park: an entertainment resort turned into a nightmare, a pursued environment becoming an ecological or social catastrophe.

Last century's urban theories, confronted with and confused by the uncontrolled rate of this growth, tried to generate models of coping with its endemic disorder. Be they generously totalitarian like Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse or pluralist as per the more recent slogans about "archipelagos of urban islands", all these theories try to reintroduce, without stylistic nostalgia, the canons of "urban beauty": formal order, hierarchy of parts, scale, clear models of collective space and controlled variety.

Nevertheless, the instruments of "traditional" urban design, which were used to build the expansions of European capitals - boulevards, promenades, porticoes and long perspectives pointed on monumental accents - often seem useless in the present conditions of world metropolises. The classical beauty ideal is already split in 18th century aesthetical theory, with two opposite romantic poles - the "sublime" and the "graceful", which in our minds are somehow connected to the two scalar extremes of the contemporary city.

Meanwhile, on a larger scale, the aesthetics of high-rise buildings have shifted from the expression of their constructive framework and functional features, as praised by early Modernism, to a scale-less "landmark" status that directly confronts nature. This distant vision cancels human scale and its attributes from the building, enhancing instead its abstract sculptural and textural qualities.

At ground level, large public or semi-public interiors, often connected over and under the street grid for climatic reasons, strongly compete with the traditional urban "streetscape", creating an inner phantasmagoria and pushing back outdoor spaces to the role of mere circulation devices. In the modern metropolis, public life is increasingly identified with the excitement of shopping and strolling in spectacular commercial spaces or else in reassuring stage-like replicas of "historical" environments. High-density urban housing piles up customized, idiosyncratic individual interior spaces packed in anonymous boxes, interfacing the private realm with the public one in a "jump-cut" fashion, without the buffer of a neighborhood dimension.

This patchwork of often surreal juxtapositions (a cruise through them is the physical equivalent of TV "zapping", quickly shifting from one narrative to another) is held together by a network of transportation infrastructures which connect the "figural" downtown to large, opaque, often poor and blighted suburban areas. Outside the established cities, new artificial environments and housing enclaves punctuate the pockets of leftover terrain-vagues.

Faced with this lively but overwhelming spectacle, many contemporary designers have rather lightheartedly abandoned any attempt to create a balanced and meaningful environment, and have simply adopted a cynical praise of metropolitan chaos, congestion and gigantism as a new set of formal values. The irreversible split between "structure" and "image" that we see in many contemporary buildings is an established side effect of post-modernist society, where the communicative dimension of an object is often separated from its productive one. The often-praised "holistic" approaches (and their hi-tech architectural equivalents, which try to convince us of the scientific basis of form and its link with ecological issues) appear often as marketing devices rather than real concerns.

Statistics tell us that the world tendency toward megalopolis is unstoppable, and it is quite obvious that all its social and ecological problems should be dealt with well before the matter of "urban aesthetics." In this scenario, I think we should give up last century's noble ideals of "total design" without falling into an irresponsible laissez-faire, where a few star-architects give image and glamour to the landmarks of globalization while a cheap, shabby and monstrous urban infill constitutes the daily backdrop for the majority of the population.

For this difficult but exciting task, instead of trying to control the development of the entire metropolis with deterministic planning, I would rather envisage a strategy of "urban acupuncture" or "city gardening". By maximizing the positive effects of limited intervention via careful choices of placement and intensity, "city gardening" would accept and encourage the juxtaposition of different environments as a stimulus for social interaction.

Designing a new building in tomorrow's metropolis should be conceived as an act of "grafting" rather than a mere addition of an object to its already congested state. We must also consider the positive effects of controlled "pruning" techniques to enhance environmental balance and diversity. To this goal the resources of many disciplines and formal strategies can and should be used according to their effectiveness. Economical aids, ad-hoc legislation, urban planning, environmental engineering, landscape design, architecture, lighting design, urban furniture, public art, interior design, graphics, animation and events can all join hands to give us a more balanced, rich and stimulating extended territory in which we will live today and tomorrow. This task can only be achieved by the combined cooperation of public and private forces, and by the interaction of many levels of decision, where simple shared values and objectives work as "attractors" for the thousands of micro and macro independent transformations shaping the city of tomorrow. Our desire for the metropolis and its artifacts to reach the status of "nature" - which seems to recur in history as a sort of Freudian guilt complex for the destruction of the latter - should not make us forget the origin of the city as a defense against the caprices of mother earth. Nor should we forget the constant possibility of human failure, and the consequent great responsibility in shaping our man-made environment.

The only way to forecast the future is to design it.