Alternative to Futility

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.Architects seem to adopt one of two attitudes toward the complexity of urban renewal and city planning, neither of which is valid. The first is the heroic: "Only the architect is capable of leading the team." The second is the futile: "It's all too much, too complex, too difficult-let's retire from the field."The result has been that the architect is called upon only to give cosmetic treatment to others' decisions. This is a tragedy, for there are earthshaking issues involved in urban renewal in American cities. We are struggling to define the architect's role in this vast enterprise and to then grasp this role. I will not argue that the architect should be at the center of the urban design process, rather that urban design should be at the center of architecture. We must immerse architects in the city. Until then no leadership can come from the profession.If architects are to become effectively involved in this mushrooming new realm of governmentaided urban development and renewal, they will need wholly new and more dynamic philosophies and principles of city form and design. These must emphasize movement, time and process in the growth of cities and character and emotional conditioning for an unfamiliar role in the administrator-created environment. In short, I propose that architecture as we have known it is dead and that in its place we should raise up a new art of "urbitecture."There are three great facts of the modem city which inspire a more dynamic concept of space and a more process-oriented approach to shaping it. The first is the fact of the City on Wheels. Roads are more than a mover of goods and peo-