Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

This master thesis starts in a wondering about the visions and ideas we have about the
city and about the urban. In Swedish about the term stadsmässighet, which can be translated
in to city-like, urban or urbanely, something that describes or contains features of
the city. How do we use the city as a role model? Is urbane building the same as building
a city? Is it about architecture and aesthetics or is building urbanely the way to make
popular cities? The central aim of this essay is to study visions and reality around urbane
building in order to understand the concept’s meaning and how it changes. My ambition
is that the essay will function as a discussion basis for students and planners.

The work starts with literature studies where theoretical definitions and concepts about
cities and about the urbane is investigated. I have chosen to study printed literature by
well known authors, as well as diploma work and debate articles.

On the basis of my theoretical studies I have identified three dimensions of building urbanely,
three central directions in which urbanely building can be sought in various ways.
These are structure, aesthetics and function. It is on the basis of these three perspectives
and a fourth linguistic perspective I have studied existing cases. Three case study items
has been chosen in order to understand how the urbane visions take place in reality. The
cases represent so called urbane projects from different times, the oldest is from 1950.
The projects, their plans and their visions are studied and compared. A current project,
not yet implemented, is studied in a latter stage to make it possible to discuss how the
concept can change also in the future. Common for the studied cases is that they all
seek to plan for a desired city life, but the ways to achieve this varies, for instance access
balconies on the buildings or square net structures, about facade materials or about
integration of functions.

The essay is completed with a discussion where the number of questions increases, rather
than become fewer. I question whether there exists such a thing as urbanely building
at all, or if it is a concept which only exists in theory. The concepts value loaded meaning
is discussed as well as if we should avoid using this gathering concept.