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Reading this evening about The shape of cities from their geometry, morphology, complexity and form; I cannot help but think about the discourses that emerge around homelessness and poverty because our understanding of cities is still dominated by a search for visual order.
Our immediate experience and knowledge of our community is usually visual. Therefore urban problems which manifest themselves are first associated with their impacts on visual order and perceived harmony.
The consequence of this has become some kind of quest to solve these problems by reimposing this visual order. The problem is that the methods which have traditionally been used do not actually solve the problem they only push it around.
The ideology of visual order seems so deeply engrained, and yet the very issues it fixates on are best solved through a more humanitarian understanding of our cities and communities.
Many of you know this intuitively already, myself included, but I hadn’t quite though about it with this sort of specific language. Thoughts?
