Monday, August 24, 2015

What is urbanism?

What is urbanism? 

Throughout the centuries urbanism has been about human beings living in sustaining, and stimulating environment. It is the urbanism of cities, which attracts people from nearby villages, neighborhoods and towns, as places of interaction, opportunity, and creativity. What is New Urbanism? It is urbanism for our era. It is the revitalization of vital public space—streets, squares, and neighborhood centers—where people can see each other and meet. This essential feature of urbanism is in danger of disappearing from cities like Delhi.

Urbanism is the key to community life, efficient public infrastructure, and preserving nature. Urbanism is Interaction. Living things interact. The main reason of growth and development of cities is human commerce, commerce broadly defined—economic, social, civic, and cultural. Why do humans engage in commerce? For the rewards and satisfactions: employment, business, learning, creativity, stimulation, culture, politics, and companionship.

The right knowledge and education of Urbanism equips the urban planners and designers of the future with the right tools to come up with new solutions for effective, efficient and aesthetically organised and operated public spaces.

Urbanism is Organization 
We are organisms. Organic life is about ordered re
lationships, habits, and rules. When property owners, government agencies, businesses, and citizens agree on standards for development that sustain community life, the built landscape attracts people and people prosper.

Urbanism is Movement
We are animals and we are attracted to animated things; not the predictable movements of clock faces and freeway traffic, but the unpredictable movements of our fellow creatures. To be alive, a built landscape has to have intriguing, playful, spontaneous human movement, and places where that can be observed.

Urbanism is Color and Self-renewal
Living things are colorful. When things die, they lose their color. When places are replenished—buildings painted, surfaces washed, and landscaping tended—the spirit of hope and investment thrives.

Urbanism is life
City is a place where life comes together, but as we see the urban cities today they have turned unnatural and unhealthy. Urbanism is toxic and has to be regulated any ways. The earlier intimate neighborhoods have been replaced with big blocks, big buildings, and concrete jungles. Towns and cities went from cramped and intense to dispersed and lifeless. The human purposes of urbanism have been forgotten. Massive migrations put diverse racial and ethnic groups in uneasy and un-mixing proximity. Diverse peoples are trying to mix with each other. Urban spaces as gathering places are getting more popular and numerous. Crime rates are increasing. At marketplaces, multi-racial scenes like we see today would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

There is a lot of work to be done, today we have the knowledge, technology, and sophistication to turn our built landscapes into hospitable, sustaining and beautiful places, as smart cities for future. These cities are places of contact and learning, they need to be healthy and welcoming. Turning our cities around- Turning them smarter is the way forward. Facing and celebrating the public spaces of our communities is key. Care is also the key. We have to care enough to design attractive architecture, maintain existing properties, prune trees, and keep streets/ roads in good condition. But no amount of caring by itself will ever make an interactive, living, walk able community out of sprawling, formless tract and strip development.

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