By: Steve Patterson
Submitted: 2010-05-27 17:24:38 | Word Count: 511
Considering a city is li
[ advertisement ]
ke considering a dream. Anything imaginable can has his way in a dream and even unexpected dream can conceal desire and fear. Cities just like dreams are coined out of fears and desires even though there course is marred with a lot of secrecy, deceitful perspectives and concealment of almost everything. (Italo Calvino , 1972)Sometimes it is felt that the physical experience of a city is not well comprehended like the image or idea of the city. The complexity of a city makes it hard to be fully understood thus most people prefer just to try and understand the images. The society prefers a city built on association, memory and history. It is typical that most people have watched films shot in famous cities where the film director is focused on putting emphasis to the location where the action is and hence stages a car chase that illogically passes every land mark house in the city. A close watch shows that it is typically Paris, London or New York. They are presented as perfect cities where everything seems real. These cities give an opportunity to clearly differentiate between analogous and real cities. The so called false or comprehensible cities can easily be identified than the actual places. (Panayotis Mario Pagalos, 2008).Aldo Rossi in his book The Architecture of the City presents a painting done by Giovanni Canaletto most probably of Venice, in which the unfinished project of building the Basilica of Vicenza, Palazzo Chiericati and Rialto Bridge have an alignment as if they form part of an actual city. The city looks like Venice but in the real sense it is not. The city is more than Venice thus referred to us an analogous city that is a city that perfectly has an expression of a city but lacks factual presentation like an actual city. Athens, Paris ,Rome and Constantinople represent good ideas of a city that have extensions beyond their permanence and physical form thus one could boldly speak ancient cities like Babylon which have disappeared physically (The Architecture of the City, page 128). The real image of the ideal city is considered to be deeply rooted in Christendom and comes from the heavenly city of the book of revelation. Cities also features prominently in other religions as Muslims go to Mecca and Hindus make their pilgrimage to Varanasi. In religious perspectives, humanity has a placement in a state of nature with other animal but owing to the eviction as a result of gaining self-consciousness it was not the destiny of man to make a come back to the garden. The human story’s culmination is viewed as a perfect recipe for creation of a perfect city that is solely made by man for inhabitation. The city therefore represents a sign of a complete human being. It also shows a symbol of the uniqueness of human beings in what is categorized as free and autonomous beings as compared what is driven by our selfishness and animality. (Alberto Ferlenga, 1996)
