OBE #6
I can see where Wheeler would take much liking to Corbusier. Corbusier leaned his mind towards developing cities with the intent of having garden cities where 95% of the ground around skyscrapers 85% of the ground around residential blocks with set-backs to be open, to which Wheeler would be at most content with. Wheeler would though disagree on the Corbusiers favor towards the heavy use of automobiles and the double-decked streetways where the below-the-ground street would be used for heavy traffic and the “ground floor level of the buildings there would be the complicated and delicate network of the ordinary streets taking traffic in every desired direction” (Corbusier, 320). When cars were starting to get hot during Corbusier’s time, he put a lot of emphasis in sprawl and the heavy use of the automobile. He saw that the solution to the issues of density and congestion in the original city would be to spread the city throughout the rural landscape with outer cities having similar amenities to that of the city. Corbusier probably think that there would be implications to his ideas on sprawl, and Wheeler was able to see what Corbusier wasn’t able to see during his time as to how the suburbanization and the automobile has greatly effected not just the urban landscape alone, but throughout the world.
“Restoring urban ecosystems can lead to healthier and more livable cities, while providing important amenities that can help entice residents back from suburbia” (492B). It seems to me that Wheeler is asking for people to head back into the city away from the suburbs. I’m not too sure this would be the best solution. It’s a bit discouraging to see how the planners that we’ve read about have so many great ideas to city planning, but always lack the ability to foresee the implications that planning has on people, the economy, the earth, etc. Of course, I’m not asking that they all should be able to read into the future, but that they should mention some possible implications after giving out a grand scheme to save the world, or the urban landscape for the sake of our course.
It was interesting when Wheeler pointed out that any one economic model holds the answers to everything when “it is likely to be what Paul Hawken terms a “restoration economy” – one which helps restore the environmental and social damage done in the past, and that prevents problems from occurring” (493A). Wheeler and I could relate on this, but I would go on further to say that I think this ideology behind city planning is encompassed not just in economic models, but in other models of change. This may sound pessimistic, but I think it has been inevitable to see that with whatever city planners have proposed and may have seen their ideas executed, there has always been some sort of problem. It’s an endless cycle. To want to make change, to make the change, and to see it’s negative (and positive) implications in result of the changes that were made. And even if some social ills were to be cured, something else always seems to come up.