Cities 07

The Le Corbusier reading was an intriguing one. After reading it and giving myself some time to think about it, I’m still not sure if I feel his ideas are revolutionary or insane. Either way, I can’t even imagine how this must have been received at the time it was published (aero-taxis? What?).
I found his basic idea, that people could try to squeeze a city into such a small area, to be a strong one. It seems as though this would really take away certain people’s fears about the sheer size of larger cities. After all, who hasn’t been awestruck by the massive size of a city they have never been to before? This idea, of course, also has an increased emphasis on the importance of parks and open spaces for people to enjoy and, really, just have a little room to breath in. This was also a strong point to his argument. Even in a city like Minneapolis, you go downtown, open spaces – and parks, especially – are not something you will really find in abundance. This increased emphasis is definitely something that is lacking from many cities today. His ideas about city streets, namely diminishing them by two-thirds, is another good idea as spreading them out more would definitely be something that would increase space for people and make driving in those cities much more tolerable. Anybody who has gone downtown in Minneapolis on a busy evening can relate to this idea.
Those are the parts that make me think his idea is revolutionary, but there were also some things that made me think he was out of his mind. First, the idea that you can use this plan, based on geometry, that would make every city essentially the same was something that didn’t make much sense. Well, it does in terms of how he laid it out, but I just don’t get why you would want every city to be the same. Wouldn’t that take out the flavor that every individual city has? There is certainly something to be said about efficiency – and the fact that city designers lacked it both then and now – but there is also something to be said about individuality. Le Corbusier himself compares the process to that of building a motor car (“a motor car which is achieved by mass production is a masterpiece of comfort, precision, balance and good taste,” he writes) which is funny, because that’s what this whole process sounded like to me before I even got to that part of the reading. Also, there are some problems regarding the very idea of “A contemporary city of three million inhabitants.” Mainly, what happens when the city grows beyond three million people? Are we just going to place all those extra people in the garden cities? What happens if those people don’t want to live in the garden cities but yet the allotted space in the other areas is filled? I just didn’t sense much flexibility in Le Corbusier’s plan as far as this is concerned. In fact, flexibility didn’t seem like the man’s strong suit.
So, I guess after I’ve typed this all out, my true opinion on Le Corbusier’s plan comes out into the open more. My opinion is that, while he makes some very good points about how to make cities better, his plan is ultimately too rigid and ignorant to be one that could truly succeed in reality. “A city made for speed is made for success” – that might be true, but it is not one that I would like to live in.