The urban freshman.

http://www.ralphmag.org/IZ/washington.html

When asked what they think of when they think of cities recently, at least a dozen University students replied that they thought of art.  Cities were where art was, where it happens.  When a lecturer challenged one of the respondants to expand on his comment, the student said "you know, making art.  Art is made there."

At first I was dismayed by the quality of the student's response.  Thinking back a few decades to when I was in the same seat as the student in question, I knew I would have been able to cite the transition from bucolic to industrial urban themes in the late 19th century under the influence of mass production and industrialization.

But would I have actually been any smarter?  Or had I simply worked harder to sound smarter, in an essential vacuum shared by most undergraduates? (1)

 Very little reflection is required to see the influence of photography on the arts, indirectly at first, as the generation of the 80s started their first experiments.  By the turn of the century, with the Fauve and Cubist movements coming to the front lines, painters were taking giant steps in separating themselves from the fussy realism of photography.

What similar trends could be seen in Urban Planning, and at least Western attitudes toward the city in general?

Painting is considered one of the plastic arts, as is sculpture, printmaking, drawing, etc.  Not because they use plastic in their paint or plaster!  No, the concept of plasticity is that of malleable media, which can be shaped, formed, reformed, painted over or recut to achieve the final desired effect.  Architecture not so much - it requires planning, for the most part, and pretty diligent following of the plan.  Which leads us to Urban Planning, godchild of the famous "Baron" Haussmann who redrew the street plan of Paris in the mid 19th century.

His patron was Napolean III.  And Napolean III, unlike his predecessors, didn't see the city as set in stone.  He saw the city as a plastic art form, which could be manipulated, drawn, redrawn, to achieve certain goals.

Now, lets talk about the difference between plasticity, and organization.

Washington D.C. (See graphic above) was famously layed out by L'Enfant, under Washington's direction, to provide an order that has been parsed by a thousand conspiracy theorists in the last 5 years alone. (Washington insisted on calling him Lang Fang)  Planned in the 18th century, what inspired Washington to think he could design something ( a capitol city) better than nature herself?

Boom!  First question.  That's what I am talking about.

What makes some people think they can design a city better than the emergent mix of chaos and organization that results when cities just grow on their own?(2)
***********************
Notes
1. Full disclosure: for all my sophistication, I had never earned my undergraduate degree.  In fact, I witnessed this exchange as a Junior, at the age of 69, enrolled in the College of Liberal Arts, pursuing the same Urban Studies major that I had abandoned on several occaisions since 1972, when my advisor at the time defined Urban Studies as all the courses with the word Urban or City in them.

On a more serious note, I do think of art undergoing a significant change when the early Impressionist painters deconstructed the realism of the Academy, in France, around 1860, when Bourgoureau and Ingres were at their prime.  Seurat was a young man impressed with the impudence of Manet, who had painted a dead matador with no busy background, just the suit of lights, the white shirt and red scrap of a cape floating in a very unnatural visual space.


2. Side note on the history of Washington D.C. at the end: (From the blog http://www.ralphmag.org/IZ/washington.html)

Alexander Robey "Boss" Shepherd, a post-Civil War millionaire who in 1870 got himself elected to the local board of public works, and, by the simple expedient of spending every cent allocated to it and using a few more million dollars on top of that (he knew that even though Congress had not approved these funds, that when the shit hit the fan they would pay the bills), he had the major eyesores demolished (including the pestiferous Northern Liberty Market), got the B&O railway to reroute their main line out of the heart of the city, paved "more than 150 miles of roads and sidewalks and installed nearly 125 miles of sewers plus gas mains, water mains, and street lights." Thus, in the decade after the Civil War, he gave the city the infrastructure it deserved, so those who were demanding that Washington be moved en toto to Ohio, Illinois, or Missouri could be sent packing.