1 Imagine you are getting ready to share the rest of your life with someone who will be your lifetime other half.You have been offered the freedom to choose any one you like in the whole world (including all the celebrities, political figures, and the like), except you have to follow just one simple rule: you can only pick your partner based on his or her silhouette, the only information you will be able to see.What would be your reaction? To a) simply disregard the whole idea as a ridiculous way to choose a partner or b) take the challenge and make your choice through this formal judgment?
… A city can be experienced all of a piece.That is why city views, whether of Paris spread out below the heights of Sacre-Coeur or of lower Manhattan from the Staten Island ferry or of the crowded island of Hong Kong from Kowloon, are so moving. Such views are also a potent reminder that cities represent great human achievements. —Witold Rybczynski. City Life Population for a long time was used as a factor in evaluating the tempo of a city – for example Aristotle believed that the ideal city contained not more than 5000 citizens. Later factors such as size, culture, ritual and tradition, religion, politics, wealth, industrial power and the degree of citizens’ accomplishments have all been used as tools to measure urbanity. Therefore it sounds very naive to study a city, such a complicated creature, only by its skyline, its linear profile, but I am going to propose this as a way to compare cities with each other and to shape some ideas about them. The sharp contour or silhouette, clearly visible at dawn and dusk, defines a boundary between the city and the sky. This silhouette can be either a simple horizontal edge, as we find in many suburbs, or a jagged edge, found in most urban downtowns. This skyline has a capacity to reveal, if not all, part of the urban characteristic of any city. Morphologically cities have been usually studied and categorised by their plans’ archetype: the cosmic city, the practical city and the organic city were three classic patterns proposed by Kevin Lynch. However, the city’s section, revealed by its urban cardiogram may open new possibilities to catalogue or examine urban structures. A cardiogram is a tool that records the electrical activities of the heart and which represents graphically some physical or functional features of heart action. It also may be considered as an index which represents the struggle of life against death. With an urban cardiogram, I can imagine each city’s skyline as a manifestation of its struggle with gravity. If a medical cardiogram depicts the liveliness of a human heart, the urban cardiogram portrays the very existence of a city. If one’s health, fears, pressures, tensions, excitement or any other factors affect a person’s heartbeat, then density, diversity, zoning or social class can also affect an urban cardiogram.
urban cardiogram
urbanism | measurement by reza aliabadi taking the pulse
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