By Dana Cuff
The provisional urban is one in every of consistent erasure and eruption. via what Dana Cuff calls a ''convulsive city act,'' builders either private and non-private demolish an city web site and disband its population, changing it with a few imaginative and prescient of a higher lifestyles that leaves no hint of the previous constitution. Architects deliver their very own utopian desires to the method. during this ebook Cuff examines these convulsions via underestimated dimensions of architectural and concrete shape: scale and the politics of estate. Scale is in detail tied to measure of disruption: the bigger a project's scale, the larger the upheaval. As either tradition and geography, genuine property performs an both major function in city formation. concentrating on l. a., Cuff seems to be at city transformation in the course of the structure and land improvement of large-scale residential tasks. She demonstrates the inherent instability of very huge websites. Having created perverse renditions of the very difficulties they sought to resolve, for instance, public housing initiatives that underwent upheaval within the Forties and Fifties are doing so back. Cuff explores 5 instances that span the interval from the Thirties, whilst federal aid for slum clearance and public housing brought on convulsions close to downtown, to an incredible Nineteen Nineties' mixed-use improvement on one in all Los Angeles's final ultimate wetlands. the tale takes us from the subtle modernist structure of Richard Neutra to the self-conscious populism of the recent Urbanism. The circumstances light up the connection of housing structure to problems with race, type, city layout, geography, and political ideology.
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Extra info for The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism
Example text
Is balanced by, indeed often overwhelmed by, racial discrimination, real estate speculation, and local urban politics. Urban development hinges on the political economy of real property. ), it cannot adequately explain the selection of any particular property as a site. Time lapse, aerial photography would capture a John Cage-like performance in which individual properties undergo sporadic metamorphosis across the city. Most of these transformations remain isolated in the midst of the original surroundings, upon which they have little impact.
Instead of reading Levittown with Scully (1969, pp. 161–165), as the offspring of Radburn, Ebenezer Howard, and Broadacre City, we could view it as a 4,700-acre intrusion into the potato fields of a rural community that had never before seen the like, with a nearly autonomous infrastructure of streets and a repetitive architectural visage that peppered flat modern lines with economically efficient symbols of home. This might be the start of a more phenomenological perspective, of the Levittown perceived by its neighbors as it was being constructed, describing urban process and urban form as social production.
7). Later, when this practice was discouraged by city ordinance, self-built shacks hid behind only slightly more substantial bungalows. The further back from the street, the more insubstantial the dwellings became. This pattern was common in the poorer areas of the city, and provided livable if not comfortable accommodations to people of very low income. The overall geography of the city has permitted great horizontal expansion, which, coupled with the dominance of the automobile and the demise of public transportation, has led to very low population densities compared to most large cities.
