NINO STAFFA To achieve the kind of cities we would wish to live in we must seek ways of, first of all, dismatling the allocation system (either through rendering that type of occupation dangerous or archaic or precarious or all three) and, secondly, developing alternative life styles and Jiving spaces. Constant Nieuwenhuys describes the incompatibility between cities as they function at present and what they must become. « A growing discrepancy can be observed between the standards applied in allocating urban space and the real needs of the community. Town planners and architects still tend to think in terms of the four functions of the city as defined by Le Corbusier in 1933: living, working, traffic ancl recreation. This over-simplification reflects opportunism rather than insight into and appreciation of what people actually want today, with the result that the city is rapidly becoming obsolete» (67). In Colin Ward's open letter to the Secretary of State for the Environment he also points the incapacity of the institutions to deal with the problems of cities that, if anything, the 'experts' have made things worse. « •.. Firstly, this is not a short-term crisis but a permanent characteristic of our kind of society, and secondly ... the 'experts' are the last people from whom to seek solutions: look at what have given us in the past. Wasn't it the experts who gave us high-rise housing and the intolerable problems it has bequeathed us? Wasn't it the experts who bulldozed the humble homes of every inner-city district in a blitzkreig policy of raze-and-rise, where the urge to raze has outstripped the financial capacity to rise? ... You and he (Lord Goodman) see the homeless, the illhoused and overcrowded and the newly-weds just coming up for membership of the Housing Shortage Club, as the inert objetcs, the raw material of policy waiting to be processed by the Housing Problems Industry. But suppose we turn the whole subject upside down and assume that ordinary people are the makers, rather than the victims of policy. We can then see a totally new spectrum of opportunities and possibilities, some of which the experts dismiss as irrelevant, some of which they regard as (67) CONSTANT NIEUWENHUYS: New Urbanism, Published by Friends of Malatesta, New York, p. 2. 46
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