by hand

“Since he himself helped to shape and preserve his environment, he never seems to tire of it”
(Rudofsky, 1964:preface)

Only “dwellers” can build for “dwellers”
(Cacciari, 1980:2[1]).

The basic definition of successful urban process is a meaningful relationship between (hu)man and her particular shaped place (Blee, 1966: 78-80). It is from this seminal condition, through anthropomorphic social systems (and measures e.g. Tuan, 1977) that relationship grows to spiritual and collective life enhancing experience (Blee, 1966: 78-80). Cities, after all, are about the people, not the infrastructure (Geoffrey West, quoted in Lehrer, 2010) and present architectural, urban engineering and planning firms do not have the relevant experience or viewpoint at the human interface level [2] (Greenfield and Shepard, 2007:28), the level where the needs and desires of the individual confront the requirements of the community-at-large (Wilsher and Righter, 1975:139).

Missing from present conceptions and practice is the finer grained human agency that provides the completing fuzzy front end to a continuous theory that begins way before architecture and runs through to the city (ref: Tsukamoto in Kitayama, 2010c:71) – A theory that imagines a more habitable world with different assumptions and values, one without overhead control or centralized planning but based on patterns, activities, and aspirations at a much more individual, COMPONENT level (Bleecker and Nova, 2009:28; Turner and Roberts 1975:135 re: component level of action). What we need is a way of allowing a wide range of human tendencies to interact (Alexander, 1966:101).

[1] discussing Heidegger (1971)

[2] Rather than asking how the earth’s surface can be preserved for people, they tend to ask how reservations necessary for the survival of people can be established on an earth that has been reshaped for the sake of industrial outputs (Illich, 1978).