City: A Narrative About Urban Dreams

Author: Shu Kewen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-12-01
Features: The ideal of a city utopia always requires abandoning the social masses and memory, looking ahead to reorganized spaces and design environments based on a vague future vision. However, the true value of life comes from relationships among people, including deceased relatives and neighbors, as they are an integral part of life. Thus, the value of life not only stems from imagination about the future but also from the delicate connections accumulated day by day with the environment through the daily routines of life, death, and illness. All of these form the essential foundation for emotional fulfillment and a sense of harmony and security. A good city should respond to these aspects. A new city provides its inhabitants with a completely new set of life principles and understanding of humanity. Judgments from past experiences are compressed and distorted in the face of prevailing urban ideals. How do people in the city reorganize their emotional content and reconstruct their life experiences outside their own logic of life? This book describes the evolving urban form through specific local changes during the process of reconstruction.