between the requirements of a structured environment on the one hand, and the
imperatives shared by money and power on the other.
RESTORATION OF URBANITY?
No doubt development met with a linguistic misunderstanding. Those means, that are
suitable for a certain purpose, are called ‘functional’. In this sense one can understand
‘functionalism’ as seeking to construct buildings according to the measure of the users’
purposes. The term ‘functional’, however, also characterizes decisions which stabilize an
anonymous relation of activities, without the system’s existence having necessarily been
called for or even noticed by any of the participants. In this sense, what is considered as
‘system functional’ for the economy and administration, for example an increase in the
density of inner city areas with rising prices in real estate and increasing tax revenues, by
no means has to prove to be functional in the background of the lives of both inhabitants
and neighbouring residents. The problems of town planning are not primarily problems of
design but problems of controlling and dealing with the anonymous system imperatives
that influence the spheres of city life and threaten to devastate the urban fabric.
Today, everyone is talking about recalling the traditional European city. However, as
early as 1889, Camillo Sitte, who was one of the first to compare the medieval town with
the modern city, had warned against such forced lack of constraints. After a century’s
criticism of the large city, after innumerable, repeated and disillusioned attempts to keep
a balance in the cities, to save the inner cities, to divide urban space into residential areas
and commercial quarters, industrial facilities and garden suburbs; private and public
zones; to build habitable satellite towns; to rehabilitate slum areas; to regulate traffic
most sensibly, etc., the question that is brought to mind is whether the actual notion of the
city has not itself been superseded As a comprehensible habitat, the city could at one time
be architecturally designed and mentally represented. The social functions of urban life,
political and economic, private and public, the assignments of cultural and religious
representation, of work habitation, recreation and celebration could be translated into
use-purposes, into functions of temporally regulated use of designed spaces. However, by
the nineteenth century at the latest the city became the intersection point of a different
kind of functional relationship. It was embedded in abstract systems which could no
longer be captured aesthetically in an intelligible presence. The fact that from the middle
of the nineteenth century until the late 1880s the great industrial exhibitions were planned
as big architectural events reveals an impulse which seems touching today. Whilst for the
purpose of international competition arranging a festive and vivid display of their
industrial products in magnificent halls for the general public, the governments literally
wanted to set the stage for the world market and bring it back within the limits of the
human habitat. However, not even the railway stations, which had brought their
passengers into contact with the transport network, could represent the network’s
functions in the same way as the city gates had once represented the actual connections to
the nearby villages and neighbouring towns. Besides, airports today are situated way
outside cities, for good reasons. In the characterless office buildings which dominate the
town centres, in the banks and ministeries, the law courts and corporate administrations,
the publishing and printing houses, the private and public bureaucracies, one cannot
recognize the functional relations whose point of intersection they form. The graphics of
Jorgen Habermas 221