Touching the City: Thoughts on Urban Scale - AD Primer

2On Scale and Movement

‘The relation of the city to its parts is similar to that of the human body to its parts; the streets are the veins.’

Francesco di Giorgio Martini, Trattato di Architettura, Ingegneria e Arte Militare, 1485¹

The word ‘dimension’ has a double meaning; both the simple quantitative measure of a line or a pixel and the more complex aspects of time and space, built up in layers of perception and memory, purpose and understanding. This chapter is about distance and the perception of distance. It is also about choice and freedom; how we choose to move and how this affects our experience of scale in cities. Cities are shaped by, and grow through, their transport systems which, however large a metropolis becomes, if well designed and properly linked together, can help to make an individual feel at home in the city; to feel that the city belongs to them and them to it. The hugeness of a city, when broken down into journeys of twenty minutes here, half an hour there, sometimes by car, by train, by bike or by foot, becomes manageable. As cities grow, they can also shrink in terms of the perception of those who inhabit and use them.

Paris 1925

As we have already seen in connection with Detroit, the car changed the nature of the city for ever. It is an important part of our lives and an essential piece of the urban equation. It is just as much a source of trouble, however, as it is an asset. As quoted in Willy Boesiger and Hans Girsberger’s compendium Le Corbusier ...