Book Review: Simon Parker - Urban Theory and the Urban Experience:
Encountering the City
‘Encountering the City’ aims to realign the activities of experiencing and theorising on the urban condition, in order to seek a way through the complex maze of the future of the city. To this end, Parker recounts the history of ‘modern’ urban theory alongside an analysis of the key aspects of today’s urbanity, and places these in the context of real-world experience.
The book traces a roughly chronological path through the last 150 years, from early theories of urbanity by Max Weber, Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel and Henri Lefebvre, through the writings of Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, to more recent thinking by Jürgen Habermas, Richard Sennett and Michel Foucault. It covers the main built forms and utopian proposals of modernist town planning, including the garden cities movement and Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine visions, and explores the ‘New Urbanist’ movement that has led to developments like Seaside and Celebration in the US, and Poundbury in the UK.
Simon Parker is Lecturer in Politics at the University of York in the UK, which is evident in the excellent chapter on ‘Politics, People and Power’, and his position outside the world of architectural debate somehow lends weight to the sections on social reform, the capitalist city, globalisation, and identity.
Beware, OMAcolytes, for Rem Koolhaas is only granted a passing mention in the conclusion, in relation to discussions on post-9/11 New York, the Pearl River Delta and Lagos; he doesn’t even get an index entry. In fact, it is only really in the conclusion that Parker pulls everything together and highlights the enormous challenge with which we are faced today in the widely varying urban conditions in Asia, South America, and Russia, let alone Europe and North America. This is less a criticism of the book – which is very good indeed – than recognition of the immense collaborative effort that is required by theoreticians and practitioners to forge successful urban centres in the 21st century.
