Page 116 - Vertical City

116 The vertical city

of population that it leads to, from the ancient core of
the cities to far-flung suburbs. The morphology of cities
becomes discontinuous, empty spaces grow geometri-
cally for the same reasons of the dynamics of growth.
The question posed is thus that of the mechanisms of
regulation to be invented in order to limit the anarchic
development of lines (and the cost) of transportation,
to diminish the environmental impact of the totality of
technical networks – and to discourage the social iso-
lation caused by unequal access to the resources of
the city, and even the exaggerated virtues of material
and “immaterial” connectivity. Has the reality of urban
contact, that which in the past Richard Sennet called
“civility,” become indifferent to spatial distance? Social
ties are influenced by a system of “human establish-
ment” where the tendency of isolation in the one-family
dwelling is only compensated by the dynamic of univer-
sal connection in all times and in all places, which engen-
der the effects of chaotic and unpredictable behavior
across all the inhabited space.

How then to think and to act as an architect? Being
inspired by a very ancient intellectual tradition, and
according to a perspective that doubtlessly appears sur-
prising: by thinking through the act of drawing on the
plan, by assuming both the abstraction of this discipline
and its mediating function that enables it to organize a
space by projecting directly onto it, the traces, the grid,
a reticular figure, and all that in a drawing. Such is the
utopic side of urban planning. It is thus to this utopic
vision that the geometric speculations of Philippe Samyn