The document discusses the evolution and future of cities. It notes that while technologies originally favored centralized urbanization, deconcentration is now increasing in Western Europe and America. The future of cities is expected to be more complex. Issues around urban funding, changing populations, and suburban development are raised. The document also examines visions for planned utopias, transportation alternatives, and governance structures. While some argue cities have reached their peak, most urban sociologists doubt predictions that the city will pass, as urbanism remains the dominant way of life.

1. TOWARD THE URBAN FUTURE
J. Palen

2. A RECAPITULATION
Through its examination of the concept of the interaction of
population, organization, environment and technology - has
illustrated the evolution of the first cities…
- A classic example is Chicago. The city that had only 4,100 people when
incorporated in 1833 had some 2million residents only three-quarters of a
century later.

3. DECONCENTRATION
Now, however, communication and - to a lesser extent -
transportation technologies nolonger automatically favor
centratlization
- Urban deconcentration and dispersion has increasingly become the western
European as well as the American Pattern
- What is clear is that American urban places and patterns are undergoing
profound changes. It appears that the future will be more complex and more
interesting than previously projected.

4. MAJOR ISSUES AND QUESTIONS
URBAN FUNDING
- There was urban consensus among democrats and republicans that programs and funding
were needed
PEOPLE vs. PLACES
- Beyond the question of amount of funds is disagreement about how limited urban funds
should be spent.
CHANGING POPULATION DISTRIBUTION
- Without substantial numbers of new arrivals, central-city populations generally can be
expected to remain fairly stable for the next decade
SUBURBAN DEVELOPMENTS
- Suburbanism is destined to remain the American way of life for the balance of this century

5. PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE CITY
To many people, urban planning almost automatically means physical
planning: but physical planning is never free from social
implications–the two are always intertwined.
As Scott Greer has expressed it:
It is my assumption that images of the future determine present actions. THay may or may not
determine the nature of the future – that depends on a much more complex set of
circumstances. But willy-nilly much of our behavior is postulated upon images of a possible
and/or desirable future.

6. PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE CITY
PLANNED UTOPIAS
As Machiavelli accurately points out, “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more
dangerous to handle than a new order of things.”
- An interesting architectural innovation in housing design, for example, was Moshe Safdie's "Habitat." crected for Expo *67 in
Montreal. Safdie's design of modular boxes piled irregularly upon one another was originally hailed by some observers as the
answer to the urban housing problem. The modular units were prefabricated and shipped to the construction site; the irregular
placement of the units provided not only for variety but also for balconies and private space.
- Frank Lloyd Wright’s model of a decentralized garden city called “Broadacres” was more explicitly anti urban than
Howard’s
- Le Corbusier’s “radiant city” was to be composed of a center of towering skyscrapers surrounded by parks and open
spaces
- Mis van der Rohe’s functional, Spartan, glass-box design now dominates the downtown of major American cities
- Buckminster Fuller’s vision: it cuts our ties to the physical earth and to mundane things such as water mains and sewers by
means of recycling packs that we could wear on our backs like the astronauts’ life-support systems
- The prescription of visionary and planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis for the planning an organized community likewise is
radically removed from the situation in contemporary cities
- Paolo Soleri’s “arcology,” compact three-dimensional city. He and volunteers attempted to build in Arizona a 3,000sqm, 25
storey prototype of the future named Acrosanti
- Dantzig and Saatz take this idea of vertical compactness a step further and propose a compact vertical city that makes
round-the-clock use of all facilities. Such a city that would require constant services

7. PLANNING FOR THE FUTURE CITY
PLANNING FOR CITY DWELLER
- One transportation alternative proposed by the author--and having virtually no chance of adoption- -is his
"borrow a bike" plan. This plan was actually implemented experimentally in Amsterdam in the late 1960s. The
idea is quite simple: The city would put up numerous clearly marked municipal bicycle racks and fill them with
city-owned bicycles. Anyone could use any bike from any rack, the only requirement being that he or she
eventually return it to one of the racks.

8. PLANNING METROPOLITAN POLITICAL SYSTEMS
The political system itself becomes a major obstacles to effective planning.
- One alternative would be to abandon most local jurisdictions and move in the direction of one
metropolitan area government such as those found in Dade County, Florida, or Nashville, Tennessee
- Another approach is a two-level system which would move certain decision making powers and
organization to the level of a country while other functions would be handled by dividing the entire
area–including the central city–into political size of suburbs, which would deal with local problems.
- Under the larger metropolitan unit would be placed functions common to the urban system as a whole,
such as water supply, waste disposal, expressways and streets, control of air and water pollution,
muscums, public hospitals, and major recreational facilities.
- Police departments could also be organized on a local basis--with a common radio network and other
specialized facilities while fire protection could move to a metropolitan basis.
- Emergency management of disasters such as hurricanes, tornados, or earthquakes also has to be
carried out on a metropolitan rather than a local basis." However, areawide plans and approaches need
to be accepted by local areas.

9. SOCIAL PLANNING
Assumptions regarding problem
solving
General approach to planning Resulting action taken
Most, if not all, problems can be solved
by existing mechanisms
Conventional approaches (System
needs minor modifications, fine tuning
or both)
New leadership, better administration
SOme problems cannot be solved by
existing mechanisms
Reformist approaches (System needs
some major modification)
Mobilization of power bases outside
existing party structures quasi-legal
protests, civil disobedience
Most, if not all, problems cannot be
solved by existing mechanism
Radical approaches ( System needs
major revision or replacement)
Rejection of societal goals, extreme
countercultural movement, revolution,
planned violence
Strategies for Planning and Problem Solving

10. SUPERTERRITORIALITY
- Doxiadis, for example, viewed population increases resulting in a world where urban
settlements covered an area not just seven to ten times as large than they now do, but
as much as thirty, forty, or even fifty times large.
- Ecumenopolis is when there is no possibility of halting or changing the growth of this
ultimate megalopolis
Doxiadis felt that stopping the trend toward Ecumenopolis is impossible for two reasons:
1. These are trends of population growth determined by many biological factors and social
forces which we do not even understand properly, let alone dared countermand
2. The great forces shaping the Ecumenopolis–economic, commercial, social, political,
technological, and cultural–are already being deployed, and it is too late to reverse them
THE POSTCITY AGE

11. NON-TERRITORIALITY
- This new unit, commonly called the "metropolitan community," has evolved rapidly in the United States during the past half
century. Now some scholars believe that we are moving from metropolitan communities to a new "postcity" age.
"We are passing through a revolution that is unhitching the social processes of urbanization from the locationally fixed city and
region.* Webber maintains:
A new kind of large-scale urban society is emerging that is increasingly independent of the city. In turn, the problems of the city
place generated by early industrialization are being supplanted by a new array different in kind,
- Like much of the "Chicago school" of sociology of half a century earlier, Webber assumes that movement from localized
primary-group relationships to territorially unbounded secondary-group. relationships is inevitable and irreversible.
He states:
At one extreme are the intellectual and business elites, whose habitat is the planet; at the other are the lower-class residents of
city and farm who live in spatially and cognitively constrained worlds.
THE POSTCITY AGE

12. INTO THE FUTURE
- Some such as John Seeley even argue that the western city has reached its highest point of development and that **there
is something tragicomic about sitting around planning to secure, extend, and improve what is about to be swept away.
However, telecommunication advances, while exposing us to international economic and social changes, have yet to eliminate
the need for a spatial city. The "electronic city" has not eliminated the need for the physical city and the specialized managerial,
residential, and leisure areas it nurtures.
Most urban sociologists are dubious about whether prophecies of the passage of the city will come to be. To paraphrase Mark
Twain's famous remark on being told that he had been reported dead, the reports of the death of the city have been greatly
exaggerated. Today urbanism is the way of life in North America and around the globe.
THE POSTCITY AGE

13. THANK YOU!
PREPARED BY: ALYSSA REGINE DE CASTRO