"Grand Urban Rules", 2009

This interesting little book talks of an imaginary city called Averuni that lies in the Atlantic Ocean about 5 1/2 hours flying from New York City. This city represents the contemporary metropolis with American, European and Asian influences, and resembles Paris in population density. 

At some point this imaginary mega-city began to suffer from detereorating urban qualities quite similar to those affecting real cities around the globe. The mayor of Averuni ordered the forming of an urban design group to investigate the world's great cities resembling Averuni's charachter or whose problems were in some way exemplary. 

Overview of the urban "rules"

19 cities were selected including New York, Berlin, Paris, London and Hong Kong. After an intensive research the design team came up with a set of rules that serve as a steering instrument to overcome problems that rise in most contemporary cities.

The various "metropolisses" that were analysed

Though Averuni is a fictional city, the 115 rules extrapolated from the analysis of 19 great cities give the urban designer methodological tools to counterforce definite urban issues. They represent "creative acts", attempts at guiding urban destinies.

Sources:
Alex Lehnerer, Grand Urban Rules, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 2009
http://books.google.com/books?id=w_60W3cJqhoC&hl=nl&source=gbs_ViewAPI
http://www.010.nl/catalogue/book.php?id=666
http://urbantick.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-grand-urban-rules.html
All images courtesy of 010 Publishers

"To be, to dwell, to build"

"Heidegger places great weight on language, which he regards as not only a tool for communication between human beings, but principally as a means of bringing beings to appearance and of revealing their essences. In doing so, he carefully weaves the tissue that connects dwelling with building and the Being of humans... bauen, buan, bin."


"Building is not simply the process of constructing buildings. They belong to dwelling in the sense (as proposed by Heidegger) that it is the prime means for human beings to integrate themselves in the fourfold (the four components of man's world: earth, sky, mortals, divinities)"

"To build is in itself already to dwell."




Sources:
Dwelling & Architecture - From Heidegger to Koolhaas, Pavlos Lefas, 2009, Berlin

"Building, Dwelling, Thinking", 1951

"Heidegger trusted human beings more than the proponents of Modernism did. To him we human types are manifest, warts and all; we revel in untidiness. Dwelling is not about living in a house; for us dwelling is a verb and the centre of everything we do. To dwell is not static - it is on the move and even when it stops its journey it is rarely still. It is there before we journey and there when we arrive, it is not place-specific. A good home is where we make it, it is where we lie."

dwelling |ˈdweliNG|(also dwelling place )noun (formal)a house, apartment, or other place of residence
DERIVATIVESdweller noun [ in combination ] : city-dwellers
ORIGINOld English dwellan ‘lead astray, hinder, delay’ (in Middle English‘tarry, remain in a place’)of Germanic origin; related to Middle Dutch dwellen‘stun, perplex’ and Old Norse dvelja ‘delay, tarry, stay.’

Sources:

Dwelling & Architecture - From Heidegger to Koolhaas, Pavlos Lefas, 2009, Berlin