Silent Urbanism

Abstract

The built environment is becoming the product of a highly specialized system where the users find themselves at the mercy of a dictatorship of a remote group designers. In today’s advanced world, the majority of people possess low levels of autonomy in the organization of their communities, neighborhoods, and cities. Instead, the highly specialized condition of modern civilization puts the majority of people in a situation where the decisions of others that they have little or no influence on have a great affect on their everyday lives. This produces an inability for self-organization which has translated into problems in the built environment. Low levels of autonomy can create a lack of responsibility possessed by the individual for making personal choices and actions that will affect change, it has generated restrictions for choosing alternative ways of living, and has also produced obstacles that distract innovative development. These forces have hindered the built environments ability to grow into its surroundings and consequentially, have created ineffective households, workplaces, and the overall organization of communities. Therefore, when seeking to improve the effectiveness of the built environment, there is value in re-establishing autonomy into the lives of people to grant more responsibility in the architectural and urban design process. Vernacular communities are genuinely emergent systems. They develop from the bottom-up by the self-organization of the masses and free of a pace-making agent. This results in a more authentic community, that is specific to its unique place in the world. In more advanced cultures on the other hand, communities are typically more planned from the top-down and highly influenced by a small group of architects, engineers, planners, and politicians, who provide more generalized solutions for community organization. Although this reliant way of life allows for new conveniences, it also provides more opportunity for inaccuracy in the built environment. Low levels of autonomy can be connected with ecological problems like high degrees of energy and fossil fuel consumption, high demands for nonrenewable resources, irresponsible waste generation, and the production of toxic materials, along with problems in community development such as producing stability and opportunity in the economy. With these inefficiencies existing in the built environment complex cultures cannot be sustained. This raises the question: in an effort to produce a more effective built environment, could it be organized in a way that more autonomy is possessed by the individual, and it is able to emerge similarly to vernacular communities? Can the effectiveness of more authentic communities be achieved by devising an architectonic solution that grants the ability for communities to grow into its surroundings? Autonomy exists in silence. Silent Urbanism is a concept where the designer’s role in the fabrication of the built environment intentionally becomes more transparent. With this philosophy, more autonomy is transferred to the user and allows for an urban form that is self-organized. The thesis will focus on autonomy and its relationship to the phenomena of emergence to answer these questions and how it can pertain to the development of communities.