A Game of Levels

Habraken talks about the growth and development of built environment as a interplay between agents at diffrent levels of dominance and dependence. When we analyze how most modern cities have been planned, there’s a framework of streets that are planned and imposed by a dominant agent which in most cases is a city planner who has power through a political system. Although planned cities have been around since Greek times, not until recently has this framework been imposed so rigidly as in the past two centuries. Before that, cities were built following an interplay between dominant and dependent agents that was more flexible.

My family had a tradition of going to my dad’s hometown in Spain for the summer when I was younger. His hometown is a small city in a valley in western Spain where industrialization has not changed much of people’s lifestyles.  The city follows an “organic” medieval plan where streets around buildings and all lead to a central public square. In this city, the framework is inverted from the modern city layout; instead of the buildings being placed withing city blocks and streets, the streets curve around of axis buildings that grew progessively form the center of the city. Buildings where built following topographic lines and along ancient routes into the city. Some of these streets are named after the orthographical directions they face such as eastern facing streets are called Puerta del Sol (Sun’s Gate) after the medieval gate which it ends at. This is typical in many Spanish cities as other cities in Europe.

I think the key is that this ancient arrangment is reacting to a complex framework of different agents and conditions that were imposed naturally. This is in complete contrast of the modern way of things were architecture and planning are simplfied to only react to a limited set of conditions.