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The City After the Automobile; An Architect's Vision
-- Moshe Safdie with Wendy Kohn
Below are my comments on sections I found particularly interesting.
The origin of early cities and their later evolution was, in fact, based on the need for places of interactive exchange: the marketplace, the government, and the spiritual and intellectual centers. When people walked through the city, by necessity they interacted with others outside their own social and professional spheres. Urban life broke down social barriers, as a wide range of business, commercial, cultural, and educational exchagnes occured within a single zone -- the downtown center, which included formal public meeting places, as well as informal venues like cafes and arcades, crowded streets and parks.
Now as our roles in society become ever more specialized (and thus more isolating), our basic need for interaction increases. Major contemporary hospitals are concentrations into a single complex of the hundreds of specialists who have become essential in providing the full array of medical services. The great research labs -- NASA, the Superconducting Super Colider Laboratory, cancer, AIDS, and genetic research centers -- are each examples of the new mode of "super-mind" made possible by the collective interaction of many individual minds, each highly skilled in an increasingly narrow spectrum of knowledge. The disciplinary generalists -- the designers, writers, artists, and philosophers -- then remain as catalysts for these mega-projects, synthesizing long-term objectives with their own sense of perspective, yet totally dependent on the specialists for their expertise.
As digital modes of communication expand, the need for physical proximity appears to increase as well. Today most professions seem to be continuously inventing new modes for personal interaction: annual, semi-annual, and even more frequent conferences, conventions, exhibits. Hotel complexes mushroom around major national airports, sustaining their business not on the transfer passenger who has missed a connection, but primarily on the teams of people coming together for working sessions in the same physical space, and dispering again to communicate electronically until the next meeting.
-- pp 30 - 31
Points of interest:
- Side effect of traditional city centres is interaction outside our social and economic circle
- Research institutions offer an environment for specialists to be exposed to each other via the actions of generalists (i.e. Project Managers)
- Specialists desire interaction with other specialists in their area (conventions, workshops, etc)
Applications:
- Organising an office to locate area specialists within a reasonable proximity of each other, and also provide an environment to intermingle with other specialists and generalists
- Inter-departmental meetings and projects
- Common venues like lunch rooms
Personal Experience (as a "Unix Specialist" in the IT field)
- Project Managers, and Documentation Writers are distant from area experts.
- Many specialists are strewn about the company, duplication of job expertise?
- Little interaction with other area experts other than those directly related to job functions
