ISSUE NO.2: HOUSING & CITY ARCHITECTURE
Part 2 : City Architecture
Dossier
This dossier provides an overview of the discussions on city architecture in the light of the development of the PerfectCity Charter in context of general developments in the discussed areas. The poll aimed to identify the most crucial facets and aspects of city architecture shaping the city of the future. After we have listed eight factors, we asked our readers to vote on them.
As shown in the figure, “Infrastructure” is considered to be the leading factor in that poll.
It is most important for a city to have general structural elements providing a proper framework to support its functionality. Infrastructure is everything that sustains our quality of life including but not limited to transportation, built environment, water supply, waste management, building and development constraints.
A Canadian study on „Infrastructure and Productivity“ gives an explanation why infrastructure is such an important factor: Results from this study show that public infrastructure reduces private costs and increases productivity. Infrastructure not only plays a role in reducing costs, but there is also recognition that modern public infrastructure has an important role to play in improving quality of life and in making economies more competitive by enabling activities that provide public benefits. Read the entire study here.
We supported this factor with an interesting article on public transportation. There we can find a personal review by a PerfectCity author concerning the public transportation systems of Los Angeles and Berlin. The conclusion of this article is that the Berlin system works almost perfect in contrast to the system of Los Angeles which totally failed. This experience is confirmed by a PerfectCity reader in the comments.
The result: A bad public transportation system has a negative influence on the quality of life of a city. This is an important issue for the most of us and should be a more important issue for urban planners.
"Infrastructure" is followed by the factor “Visual excitement” in second place. It is the feeling people get when they see beautiful or interesting buildings. This maybe because of the scale of the building (as in it is just huge) or it may be because it is very intricate design that leaves a person in awe as to how it was built. We tried to deal with this factor by looking for a ranking of the most beautiful cities of the world. This article shows that there are no objective worldwide rankings of beautiful cities and once again that beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder.
When we put “Visual excitement” on a level with beauty and attractiveness we can find several explanations for this factor voted second place. In a German study on beauty and facial attractiveness and its consequences, we find that people are affected by a distinctive stereotype of attractiveness. There are high correlations between an attractiveness judgement and the attributive characteristics “successful”, “satisfied”, “likeable”, “intelligent”, “sociable”, “exciting”, “creative” and “hard-working”. The analysis showed that beauty and attractiveness result in extensive social consequences. These findings could be transferred to city architecture. Beautiful and interesting buildings have a high impact on people because they connect this to other positive features of a city. They could also have huge influence on productivity of people working in them and the success such a building might reflect could also be transferred to the people working in it.
As a third winner we have “Housebuilding”. “Housebuilding” is ranked that high, because all people living in the cities of industrialized western countries are affected by this factor. In addition, according to a current study into the UK house building industry, buying an apartment or a house is, for many people, the largest purchase they will ever make. John Fingleton, Chief Executive to the Office of Fair Trading, said about this study: "This is the first in-depth examination of competition and consumer issues in new house building. This is a hugely important market for the economy because of its substantial economic impact and because unresponsive housing supply hinders labour mobility, constrains economic growth, and harms consumers. Furthermore, for individual house buyers, even low levels of dissatisfaction can translate into very high detriment. The study will examine how regulation and competition in the market might work better for both the economy and individual house buyers." The study is expected to report back by summer 2008.
“State of buildings” as well as “City history” are also quite important factors although they didn’t make it to the podium. When it comes to the architecture of a city it is important to consider the city’s history and the state of the existing buildings before designing new buildings. Maybe it is possible to renovate old buildings or to design new buildings that reflect the history of a city. An American study on historic preservation confirmed that restoring old buildings is a boost for cities. This study showed costs for preserving a historic building were about equal to constructing a new building; towns with historic structures attract higher income and longer-staying tourists; and historical designations improve property values. Preserving old buildings for that matter has a high economic impact.
Furthermore it is interesting that our readers rated “heterogeneous architectural styles” to be more important than “homogeneous architectural styles”. That means that different styles are more interesting for the face of a city because as they say, variety is the spice of life.
You will find an interesting article on blobitecture, a modern architectural style, here.
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