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Recombinant
Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in Architecture, Urban Design,
and City Theory by David Grahame Shane.
This history and manifesto of urban-modeling techniques
is all about threes. It starts with the three stage sets
of Sebastian Serlio (the Noble, the Comic, and the Satyric)
from his Mannerist treatise The Five Books of Architecture.
It continues with Kevin Lynch's three "normative"
models (the City of Faith, the City as a Machine, and the
Organic City), in many ways the basis for Shane's book.
Variations on Lynch's three are also found in Cedric Price's
"The City as an Egg" (boiled, fried, scrambled)
and the Young Planners' three urban patterns (Archi Città,
Cine Città, and Tele Città). Each of these
groupings of three basically tell the same story, the evolutionary
stages of urban form: the compact pre-industrial city with
a highly defined center, the sprawling industrial city with
its logic of production and consumption, and contemporary
cities characterized by multiple centers acting as attractors
(of people and goods).
Shane further breaks down cities into three constituent
elements: enclaves, armatures, and heterotopias (the last
was originally postulated by Michel Foucault but not entirely
worked out as its development was interrupted by his death).
Enclaves are simply buildings or groups of buildings that
contain individuals and functions. Armatures are the circulation
networks that connect enclaves and move people and goods.
Heterotopias are "the other", those things that
cannot be contained within the normative enclaves of societies.
Shane further explains that each stage of urban form is
characterized by one element being stronger than the rest,
so the City of Faith stresses enclaves, the Machine City
stresses armatures, and the Organic City stresses heterotopias.
That is not to say that the other elements are not present.
Rather they exist in a subsidiary state to the dominant
urban element, due to many factors, such as power structures
and technology.
More threes are injected when Shane even further breaks
down the urban elements into three different types, relating
to the normative urban models. Without going into detail
on these, the three heterotopias that close the book are
the most complex concepts but also the most important to
Shane in terms of looking at the city. Ultimately he breaks
free from the bounds of three in his proposal of an emerging
city form and the future evolution of the city. Shane arrives
at this via a lucid analysis of city theory, urban design,
and architecture that instills the reader with a fresh vocabulary,
a new way of thinking about the city, and henceforth its
future.
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