IDEAL CITIES

Arch Symbolon
Ideal cities, or ideally planned, imagine the urban structure and its physical
shape as an identity that reflects the aspirations of a particular civilization.
Therefore, the analysis of these forms requires additional methods compared
to those applicable to human habitat in general, theoretical reflections in the
humanistic tradition.
Even when they turn into a living city they retain a particular message, highlight
a particular episteme, in the meaning in which Foucault uses the term: the
examples speak to us about the Renaissance, Classical Age (since the 17th
century), and Modernity; with their episteme: the similarity, the representation,
and, after Kant, the analytic of finitude, namely the man as subject and object of
its own knowledge.
Thus we pass from a model that compares the city with the perfect order
(Palmanova, in the likeness of God and of man, as in the Vitruvian model), a
model that speaks of power and representation (and of the contradictions
between the Enlightenment and absolute power, Karlsruhe), to the attempts of
interpretation of the city as a human habitat in the first industrial age
(Letchworth), as field application of political economy (Eixample) to Brasilia, a
city founded in the empty heart of a country in search of identity, "a form of
nation-building in a heroic scale" (Deyan Sudjic, The edifice complex, Spanish
edition, Larquitectura del poder, Editorial Ariel S.A., Barcelona 2007, p. 176):
here we see an attempt to monumentalise reflection on man and his institutions,
"frozen" in a giant simulacrum.
All planned cities have one thing in common: idealism. Idealism is at the root of
their existence and at the core of their structure. Together with this idealism
comes a vision that is beyond the day-to-day requirements of our lives. A vision
for a better life, maybe a vision for a better world. Furthermore planning an
entire city is naturally an expression of power, as without power no such feat
could ever be attained.
On the other hand, what is the experience with these artificially structured living
spaces after decades or centuries of use?
We show a series of comparisons of these characteristics, in the form of
symbolic contrasting images, trying to interpret the nature of planned cities as
mirrors of the universe.
We chose our classification categories identifying the fundamental element or
quality (which we also consider in relation to the choice of a significant detail) in
the relationship between the presence or absence of reference to the
radiocentric diagram, and therefore the possibility of expansion as the main
property of the chosen scheme.
Looking closely to the Eixample, the Plan Cerd of 1860 generates a
"checkerboard" that is potentially extensible, a city with a different logic than the
other models presented. We chose Eixample for this reason, for it highlights
some purely functional strategy, and apparently there is no formal symbolism;
this is just apparently so, for it is planned and formed to an ideological scope. Its
regular pattern can also be a symbol in our intent to highlight the potential end
of the citys extensive growth, without opening a complex discussion on the
relation between iconic architecture and new city planning. A real estate

strategy that can better be related to the other examples, but that in our vision
makes a childish use of symbolism.
But this extension, along the Diagonal avenue, was long impeded by legal
disputes in the field of civil law, an emerging factor in a bourgeois class that on
the other hand is one of the epistemes which is attributable to the scheme itself.
We chose the northern end of the Diagonal and generally the border of the
Eixample as "detail" (see the marks on the picture).
We compared the edge and the growth of Rome between 1959 and 1980 with
the extension of Barcelona in 1980-2005 to highlight the potentially easy (but
limited) extension of the Plan Cerd.
We think that Eixamples pattern of growth in the XXI Century will not need to
tend so dangerously toward the Ciudad Lineal, or a simply accumulative or
linear growth, because its extension is possible, well beyond its physical limits,
by other means.
But access to relationship, communication and full citizenship is right now still a
matter of income, i.e. of the progress of the multitude.
On the other hand, Barcelonas expansion needed the event "Forum" to sell and
secure its new land use, an aggressive capitalist action dressed as a cultural,
communicative issue, or a higly spectacular move.
Actually late capitalism society lives of these strategies and violence, and needs
to enter into a communicative reality, either in a vertical or horizontal
system.This detail is particularly important: it is the door to an impossible move.
The city of the future cannot grow indefinitely on a portion of land and cannot be
limited to a single location. The cities as we know them, including their names,
they will tend to disappear. These names will be taken by new entities, and
there will be the definition of intangible places that brings together various
physical realities and the multitude.
The question of the "building plot" and the rent will not disappear, but will be
replaced by reality strictly responding to the phenomenon now stuck in a
contradictory system generated by the union between communication and
value, the current advertising and marketing nature of urban space (with its
function as a generator of a quality scale convertible into money).
The social struggles of the future will move in this new field: apparently it is still
an open field... It is however evident that this phenomenon can be inscribed
within the expression of a general intellect.
In its positive interpretation (Negri, Hardt and Negri, Virno) when in the
production of the General Intellect the main fixed capital becomes man himself
then, with this concept one must term a logic of social cooperation situated
beyond the law of value.
But evading the law of value open fields that can not be described according to
the current parameters (and values ...), making the concept of the individual
used by Negri and Virno a metaphor, a metahumanity more than a living being.
So going back to the roots of the problem of the confrontation between the man
and the city.