No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
This paper asks some questions about man and nature from one point of view, that of an interest in the city. It puts forward a few current concepts of the city with emphasis on recent social studies. It asks to what extent the making of cities and living in them is ‘natural’ to man; to what extent they have always been a deliberate statement about man’s relationship to the world of nature (is there a conflict here ?); and it tries to show the direction in which cities are developing and the degree to which these developments may be said to enhance and enrich experience or to impoverish and destroy it. It is a personal statement and is not in any way an attempt to give a critical summary of current sociological, planning and artistic critiques of the city.
The City as Experience
After some weeks of reading in preparation for writing this paper I was preparing to make a concentrated start on it one evening. It happened that I had cause to visit a friend in a local hospital that same evening. The journey was short, through a decaying industrial/ housing part of the city. The hospital itself is entered through an arch over a narrow carriage way, unaltered since horse and carriage days as witnessed by the width of the opening and the stone cart tracks leading into a cobbled yard; the hospital building, an agglomeration of bits and pieces from the last 100 years or so. The pub next to the hospital, on a Friday night, is crowded and noisy and a refuge for both patients and staff.
page 502 note 1 Carl E. Schorske, ‘The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler’ in The Historian and the City, ed. Oscar Handlin and John Burchard (MIT Press and Harvard University Press, 1963).
page 504 note 1 Georg Simmel, Die Grosstute und das Geistesleben, Dresden 1903, also Wolff, Kurt, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, Glencoe (The Free Press, 1950).
page 504 note 2 Max Weber, The Cib, translated and edited by Don Martindale and Gertrud Neuwirth (The Free Press, New York, and Collier-McMillan Ltd, London, 1958).
page 504 note 3 Louis Wirth, Urbanism as a Way of Life (American Journal of Sociology, Vol. XLIV, 1938), pp. 1-24.
page 504 note 4 Joseph Rykwert, ‘The Idea of a Town’, from Lectura Architectonica, pub. by G. van Saane, Hilversum (distributors in the U.K., St George’s Gallery, London, 1963).
page 506 note 1 Robert Sommer, Personal Space; the Behavioural Basis of Design (Prentice-Hall Inc., New Jersey, 1969).
page 506 note 2 E. T. Hall, The Silent Language (Doubleday and Co., Inc., Garden City, New York‘ 1959).
page 506 note 3 L. Festinger, S. Schachter and K. Back, Social Pressures in Informal Groups; a Study of Human Factors in Housing (Stanford University Press, California, 1950, and Tavistock Publications, London, 1963).
page 507 note 1 B. W. P. Wells, ‘Influence of Office size on the Individual and on Supervisory and Managerial Processes’ in Office Design; a Study of Environment, ed. Peter Manning (Department of Building Science, University of Liverpool, 1965)
page 507 note 2 A. Buttimer, ‘Social Space in Interdisciplinary Perspective’, Geographical Review, 1969, Vol. LIX, p. 147. ‘Social Geography’, p. 134 of the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences, 1968.
page 507 note 3 E. A. Gutkind, ‘Urban Development in Central Europe’, Vol. 1 of International History of City Development (The Free Press of Glencoe and Collier-McMillan Ltd, London, 1964).
page 508 note 1 Paul R. Ehrlich and H. Anne, Population, Resources, Environment; Issues in Human Ecology (W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco, 1970).
You have
Access