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Counterpoint: Transect Transgressions [The Transect]

Jaime Rodríguez Correa · eScholarship (California Digital Library) · 2006

Counterpoint: Transect Transgressions Jaime Correa The rural-to-urban transect may be a good ordering device and may serve as a good explanation for the morphology of some cities, but it falls short describing the formal symbol- ism and development of the true traditional city—the one built by human volition and affected by climate, culture and topography. Despite efforts to reduce every culture of the world to a single ethnocentric episode, the proponents of the “transect” have yet to realize that the complexity of the city is resilient. It cannot be demoted to a deceptive intellectual exercise with universal or pragmatic pretenses. To think in such reductive terms can only lead to the replacement of the inefﬁciencies of one system with the promises of another, with ultimately similar consequences. In traditional urbanism, there is no such a thing as a natural law; incremental development, with its eccentrici- ties, appropriateness, and morphological disobediences is “The Law.” The paradox is that, the model from which the transect-based theory receives its mimetic inspiration and critical power is also becoming its ultimate transgression. Against Universal Types At a point when the neo-morphological project of the modernist period is in clear defeat, the rural-to-urban tran- sect is emerging as a pretentious design standard carrying similar yet devastating cultural consequences. Unchecked and unchallenged, its multinational application may eradi- cate the beauty of places shaped by local cultures, white- wash the formal expression of the various world regions, and downgrade the accumulated urban design richness of the last few thousand years. The idea of one single model based on an ecological transect—which proponents may consider a mischaracter- ization—is very seductive, but it is also the kind of Ameri- can pragmatism where predetermined cultural proprieties, ethnocentricity, self-control, transportation engineering, zoning, and land use economics are the controlling agents of a design empire. How many of our most beloved tradi- tional cities would pass, with academic rigor, this pseudo- scientiﬁc test? At the Graduate Program in Suburb and Town Design of the University of Miami, the documentation of tradi- tional cities is a fundamental introductory assignment. The systematic investigation of the incremental city (the tra- ditional/living city) allows domestic and foreign students to increase their awareness of design commonalities and eccentricities. Most importantly, it also helps them develop an acute professional lexicon. Over the years what this effort has shown is that the study of traditional cities and towns reveals corollaries, but also contradictions, to transect theory and its explanation of the city. For students from Shanghai, New Delhi, Al- Madinah, Cartagena, Ibiza, Qatar, Lima, Kuwait, etc.—or, even for students from small American cities like Wood- stock, Santa Fe, or Williamsburg—the transect is an exotic idea which is valued more for its methodological manner- isms than for its accepted principles. With a great degree of certainty, design studios at our program have allowed us to see how the incremental city cannot be reduced to the simplicity of the rural-to-urban transect. Furthermore, the living city does everything pos- sible to enrich its own culture, annihilate homogeneity, defy economic descriptions of its geographic territories, and resist the production of undifferentiated public spaces. The traditional city breaks its formal structure into a vast mosaic of small and different subcultures, each with its own spatial territory, and each with its own distinct lifestyle. To complicate matters even more, these cities present little recognizable structure. The living city offers a com- bination of land uses and densities which are more or less rambling and incoherent. The high-density areas, poten- tially capable of supporting high intensity, are too widely spread; the low-density areas, capable of supporting quiet and silence, are also diffusely speckled. The formal result contains neither an intensive center nor a place of absolute peace, but a harmonious collage of both—a collage that might just as easily be achieved through historic evolution and/or traditional experience (e.g., Muslim cities), founda- tional design rules (e.g., Law of the Indies), or marketing and contractual hierarchies (e.g., medieval cities). Correa / Counterpoint: Transect Transgressions

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