24.4.08

urban sprawl

We look into history, and we realise more often than not the face of cities are placed into our minds as mental maps, a graphic representation vide iconic structures, at the simplest level, or at the level of reading visible physical aspects of our urban fabric. On the ground plane however, we quietly engage in the parks, the hotel lobbies offered to us, as pedestrians, and then ofcourse we reach and enter our homes, the fruits of labour of our interior designers, or not, and sometimes, our hotel lobbies, and our shopping malls. These spaces begin to prime itself [responding and being shaped] to become specific to our needs. They attain global smilarities in design and at once become both regional or indigenous, yet they self-adjust, and are re-examined by their inhabitants, person by person, community upon community, until one fine day they meet all the same criteria, as they become more and more accepted as global standards and solutions, all over the world, non specific as it were to region or culture, even geographical features. The city could in fact become extremely uniform, homogeneous, and is only differentiated at the level of artistic preference, chanced upon by designs, of its more visible structures, namely larger buildings, or more easily, its taller iconic architectural exploits. At the ground plane, surprisingly they cannot be so well defined as being unique to any one region or place.

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