Intimate urbanity: spontaneous growth as an essence in the developing world

Abstract

The 20th century is such a period in which design professionals are worrying so much about urban design. This great enthusiasm has been made by the pace of urbanization rapidly increased in the last decades, and now we are faced with a massive urban explosion. Despite the subject having been discussed in several seminars and conferences, we have not built up the necessary infrastructure to come to grips with the problem or to cope with the urban realities that face us in the future. The shortcomings exists in many levels; essentially, it is the professional inadequacies in terms of town planning and urban design are the most serious. Today, of the dozen giant metropolis of 10 million plus, the majority (New York, London, Tokyo, Los Angeles) are in rich industrialized countries. The usual process of urban development treats buildings as isolated objected sited in landscape not as part of a large fabric of streets, Squares and properties of shape and scale with connections to other spaces. The attitude of architects of the modern movement towards the open space also created no-man's lands between buildings where nobody is reasonable for the common space, thus it has become the lost space.