While exploring the terms in the brief I started to focus on "shrinkage" and how it could relate to this project. Urbanization started to dominate most of my research as the term shrinkage brought up connotations to the decreasing population of countryside's and the shrinking or complete eradication of villages worldwide. Through this I started to relate the other terms with this as the general theme and in turn started to use these terms in a more specific way in an attempt to raise questions and ideas that could form areas of debate on this topic in particular.
After watching a documentary called the "last train home" which is about the internal Migration of over 130million Chinese workers who each year travel by any means possible to return home for the New Year. The film documents both the enormity of this mass migration and a personal portrait of a single family who make the journey, describing the struggles of both the parents who work in the city and the children who live in the countryside with their grandmother and everything they must endure to be reunited. The film not only illustrates the economic and family pressures that the new economic prosperity has brought, but also illustrates the strong role of the government in all aspects of their citizens' lives, including the train ride back to the country that is a tremendous ordeal that would have most people amazed by the lack of civility and basic comforts. I started to realise the sheer scale of areas that were affected because of this mass urbanization/internal migration, something I discovered has been affecting and seen world over through many the years.
For Britain the industrial revolution brought about similar new economic possibilities. These new working conditions led to political changes as wealth moved away from the land and towards the new manufacturing classes and there were massive social changes brought about by internal migration, a rising population, and the growth of urban areas.
The world is steadily becoming more urban, as people move to cities and towns in search of employment, educational opportunities and higher standards of living. Some are driven away from land that, for whatever reason can no longer support them. Urbanization usually accompanies social and economic development, but rapid urban growth on today's scale strains the capacity of local and national governments to provide even the most basic of services such as water, electricity and sewerage especially to some of the more lesser developed countries of the world.
With this strain becoming more and more apparent the economy in steady decline and increasing social and cultural issues that plaque today's cities how are we to tackle this high density, corporation driven, world that we live in. Can better city planning be the key to tackling some of the issues that we face, creating a more functional way of living? Can an environment be created that works in an ecological way, an environment that's relationship between it and the organisms around it work "let air and men circulate" George Eugene Haussmann. In an economical way that distributes goods and services in a way that isn't as centralised to cities and instead more wide spread across a greater area which doesn't force the population to hoard in a single area to get to these necessities but instead brings them to the population, which also distributes wealth to the smaller business man rather than larger corporations. The idea of a linear city could achieve this need and maybe using the ideology on a much greater scale would help it come to effect.
A Linear City such as Magnitogorsk for instance with its rows of similar superblock neighbourhoods running parallel to the factory, with a greenbelt separating them. Where Planners had aligned living and production spheres so as to minimize necessary travel time; Workers would generally live in a sector of the residential band closest to the sector of the industrial band in which they worked. Basically demonstrating how better and more logically planning could create a more functional place to live in, not necessarily a way that we could live in today but as an idea the speed and efficiency of a city that is needed in modern day society doesn't have to rely so much on the varying means of travel rather a better distribution of the places rather than the people.
James Goldsby
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