generic city and main street. critical thinking

Main street and The Generic city

In this lecture, I learned a lot of about the urban design. Like the cities in history, how the cities are planned and how to recognize the fabric of the urban. Organic, geometric or hybrid of the two.

Over through the book, The birth of urban design was after the industrial revolution and world war I, the CIAM and the idea of urban design was coming up from Europe and developed in United States. Many people who are knowledgeable and has creative thinking is make up a group called “Creative class”. It is a group believed to bring economic growth to countries that can attract its members. They are the key driver of urban design development in the industrial city in the United States.

Then the large scale urban renewal projects in the US started in the interwar period as an attempt to clear out blight inner cities and it is called urban renewal plan.

Many future concept of urban planning and design is also coming up in that time. One of the creative concept is The Generic City which come from Rem Koolhass. He mainly expressed the negation of the identity of the city, thereby to bring the theory of the Generic city as the city in the future. In general, the Generic city concept promoted by Koolhaas is a city with nonidentity, no history, no center, high efficient, can tolerate many different kinds of people from different area or country.

As time goes by, up to twenty first-century, Urbanism takes shape. Because of the rapidly changing economy, the innovation neighborhood is appeared. It is new area that combines living, working, shopping and the private sector. The private sector is the businesses in research- driven industries such as pharmaceuticals, technology, specialized manufacturing, university and educational or healthcare institution. With the innovation neighborhood came up, the traditional neighborhood street Main street is functioned as “Third places”, neither home nor workplace. People in this street can see movies, eat at restaurants, attended church, etc. In United States, after Depression and World war II, many people have their own car and very few neighborhoods could continue to support Main Street as a retail center. Most urban Main Street did not retain their traditional scale and character. The Suburban malls grew larger and came to dominate their markets. Then the urban Main Street should be focus on amenity, walkability, and authenticity, local experience that are the antithesis of the formulas and mass production that drive suburban malls.

As the city developed, urban designer should look forward. As the Generic city concept, if a city have traditional city center, it has a heavy price to continuous support, restoration the traditional city center. It is neither practical nor constraining the development of the nearby area if the traditional ancient center continues become the city center in the future. It is like human will lost themselves by worshiping the patrimony of their ancestors. The generic city is built for the need of modern human. The urban population is movable. It is only a temporary home built by the floating population and the foundation of generic city is unstable. The generic city is more like a place where do not have the past and future. People will come and live there just because of the develop of the city and the good job opportunity. Nobody really care what is the history of the generic city.

My home town Wenzhou also developed as a generic city. There are lot of people come from another city and they come there for the job or business.