Mr.Lynch states that citizens are not just observers of a city, they are also very important part of a city. From the reading “Pattern Language”, from big to small, structures, neighbors and even single creatures are very important to a city. What we need is not grids and street corners.
About my understanding of a city, a city means huge architectures and skyscrapers between grids. But few days ago I read about an article written by Shu Wang, who’s a very famous architect in China. His idea is to make a city with larger diversity, instead of just crosses, overpasses, and skyscrapers between grids. There will be more and more architecture rubbish for the city like Shenzhen in China in 5 to 6 decades. But cities like Shanghai and New York City will last longer because of its diversity of architecture and its roads and streets. I think his idea is quite similar to Mr. Lynch, because a city is made up for its citizens, not all citizens are at the same level of social economic level. For this reason, to build different architectures, and to make different people to build architectures can amplify the diversity of a city. An architecture is not a tool of residence, but a thing to react with surroundings. So in Lynch’s article, he states that citizens can ask their neighbor to cooperate with their house building.
For country towns, I think there will always a major street inside the town. I think this is a very good design as Le Corbusier said “less crosses makes a city more efficient”. Since a town needs major streets, cities also need its down town and residence places to broaden the diversity, to ask everybody to come together is more efficient than ask everybody to be a significant place all around the city.
In conclusion, as architects, we are not building a city based on “we need to build a city here”, but to build a city based on its citizens, to focus on what they need us to build, without destroying the harmonious of the society.
Jacobs, Jane. 1984. The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Lynch, Kevin A. The Image of the City , 1960.
Alexander, Christopher, Murray Silverstein, and Sara Ishikawa. A Pattern Language , 1977.