ABSTRACT
The final chapter attempts to marshal a few of the themes that have been building. It begins on a sour note, which is how urban theory proved to be catastrophic in practice, particular in its failure to come to terms with the complexity of the human organism and its codependence on the environment. The debates of Mumford, Mumford, and Jacobs have been well tilled, but they are important to raise if only to understand the rather superficial postmodern and poststructural arguments that would follow. The sketches of Aldo van Eyck, Louis Kahn, and Richard Neutra are used to present the alternative strategies of centering design centered on how people experience the environments in which they are housed. The oddity of architectural practice in the last three decades of the twentieth century, in light of the collapse of theory, is that there were so many talented architects with regionalist sentiments. The contrary idea, of course, is that of globalism, which in its reality often harkens back to the idea of an international style. The cities of Copenhagen and Singapore—one culturally unified, the other ethnically diverse; one without high-rises, the other entirely of high-rises—are imported to show that theory, in whatever utopian guise it adopts, fails to come to the terms with the most important features of a livable city. Conceptions of paradise spring from below and are enacted with regional and cultural strategies.
