چكيده لاتين :
“For those urban designers who are looking for some formulaic typologies or processes that will make their projects better, stop reading now! For those who are prepared to accept a challenge, whereby critical self-reflection is the order of the day, read on.”
Alexander R.Cuthbert
“Understanding cities”, Cuthbert’s final research achievement, undoubtedly, is a complicated and challenging book. This book creates a vital, dynamic and dialectical association between urban design theory and praxis and deconstructs urban design in order to give it a new birth on the threshold of a new millennium. To shed more light, “understanding cities” concludes a research project begun in 2001. The task, according to Cuthbert, was to complete three books or, more accurately, three volumes of the same book, and to explain the essential features of a creative process called urban design. The first volume, “Designing cities” (2003), presented a philosophical position and a framework for urban design knowledge outside the mainstream. It constituted an edited volume of readings, but one with a difference. The intention was not merely to assemble as many readings on urban design as the publishers would allow, letting the readings speak for themselves. In “Designing cities”, this process was reversed. The articles were chosen in support of a theoretical model whose basic orientation was towards spatial political economy. In so doing, the object was to present a critique of mainstream urban design and to express the need for change. With it came a plea for a deeper and more engaging role for urban design within the social sciences generally and spatial political economy in particular. The second volume, “The Form of Cities” (2006), is a text concerned with the overarching issues of urban design within ten identified components including Theory, History, Philosophy, Politics, Culture, Gender, Environment, Aesthetics, Typologies, and Pragmatics (Cuthbert, 2011, xvii). The third volume, “understanding cities” (2011), is a book on method or, more accurately, meta-methods. “The purpose of all three volumes has been to enhance our understanding of urban design by suggesting an overall framework of knowledge that will permit the discipline a new identity” (Cuthbert, 2011, xviii). Cuthbert honestly believes that it should also finally expunge from our collective memory the inescapable idea, in the former, that a city is merely a larger building and, in the latter, that all we need to do is generate yet another set of design guidelines to move forward.
Having sketched out a theoretical framework in “Designing cities” and having worked through the detailed implications in “The Form of Cities”, volume 3, “understand cities”, is the logical extension into epistemology, from “what should we think about?” to “how should we think about it?”. Cuthbert, first and foremost, intends to outline those Meta methods that organize our thinking, rather than the inherent strategies of getting the job done, processes that Michel de Certeau refers to as heterology. According to Cuthbert, urban design methodologies remain seriously connected to rationalism as the favored methodology, one where linearity, hierarchy and modeling dominate. Hence, the suggestion that urban design should adopt a context derived from the social sciences, particularly spatial political economy, stands in contradiction to the continuing rationalist position in urban design methodologies (Cuthbert, 2011, 28).
According to Cuthbert, whether or not urban design is a recognized profession or a definable discipline or field has not prevented direct connections to in the three aspects (in particular, natural sciences, social sciences and urban sociology). While natural science offered functionality in terms of process, quantitative methods and political neutrality, social science offered legitimacy in terms of content and qualitative research methods. Urban sociology, among these, offered to bring these together into a defined region of study that had no prior existence (Cuthbert, 2011). Cuthbert’s attitude toward urban design can be explicitly traced in these five guiding propositions:
1- The first proposition is that mainstream urban design is self-referential and is neither informed by, nor committed to, any external authority in intellectual terms.
2- The second proposition is that urban design must reorient itself to social science as its wellspring, specifically urban sociology, geography and economics.
3- The third proposition is that to be scientific, a discipline must have either a real or a theoretical object of enquiry.
4- The fourth proposition is that the theoretical object of urban design is civil society, and its real object is the public realm.
5- The fifth proposition is that our understanding of the production of design outcomes must change from a modernist, Beaux Arts obsession with form, the Eureka Principle and the cult of master/disciple to one where the organic production of urban forms and spaces are inseparable from economic and social processes. (Cuthbert, 2006)
“understand cities” is not about the repetitive and stereotypical issues of urban design, and not even about formulaic typologies and processes or urban design guidelines, but about generic human concepts: hope, love, reflection, monument and myth, desire, death, space, sculpture, ideology, street names, columns and cobbles, memory, architecture and understanding. Cuthbert in this book –and of course in his other books as well- not only does deconstruct formulaic presumptions and orthodox mainstream urban design, but also projects a different image from the stereotypical figure of the thinker. That is to say, by avoiding the model of simply an academician instead of explaining and engaging with the contemporary urban design guidelines based on a neutral and unbiased approach, he in contrast plays the role of a critic and with his somewhat polemic and quite academic tone analyses and criticizes the contemporary urban movements. In brief, the ultimate product is an attractive and interesting book which despite its academic quality has the very potential to be extended and developed in the public sphere and among students and researchers from other disciplines. “understand cities” as the final volume of Cuthbert’s trilogy paves the way of the emergence of a new field in urban design. Previous theories and new concepts altogether integrate in this book or, more accurately, in this trilogy; thus a new reading of urban design will be obtained.
