Vissers, John, "A Key to the City"

The more populist title of this thesis is 'A Key to the City", and its aim is to examine what the prospects and potential of the enclosed, multiple-level, 'City of the Future, really are.

Probably the most fantastic urban visions to emerge through modern times are those calling for the construction of vast mega-structures. Yet though such proposals have remained at the forefront in everything from science-fiction to serious design theory, their actual realization has proven elusive. There are many reasons for this - both practical and ideological. On one hand, there is really no broad social framework within which they could even begin to evolve; and on the other, even if our existing social, political and economic institutions were conducive to their development, planners would still have to identify why they would want to construct such cities in the first place. To many, they appear a dreary and oppressive substitute to the traditional city.

Yet the idea of 'enclosure' is far from dead. This thesis has been undertaken on the premise that our already taken-for-granted skywalk and tunnel systems (which were largely pursued to address such practical problems as downtown congestion and pedestrian discomfort) could in fact constitute one of the earliest phases in a process ultimately leading up to the realization of some new urban form - one containing at least some attributes of those grandiose futuristic visions.

But the emergence of skywalks and tunnels has not been trouble free. A variety of problem have come to light most of them attributable to an incongruity between these systems and the traditional structure and workings of the existing city around them. Before planners can seriously consider how they might want to bring this process of enclosing the public environment to some higher level of sophistication then, they will first have to address some very basic issues, pertaining both to its theoretical aspects (i.e., what are we trying to achieve with internal systems that was not being achieved with the traditional urban form?), and its practical implementation (i.e., assuming we even want to pursue some of these ideas, how do we go about superimposing a new urban structure over the old one?)

Where virtually all of history's cities can be categorized according to their two-dimensional patterns of streets and blocks, both the futuristic schemes thus far presented, and the actual developments which grew out of them, have given us an opportunity to alter the basic structure of the city - for the first time in history. of course, the possibilities are boundless. In the hope of inspiring a further evolution of the whole process, this thesis was intended as a broad starting point, or guide, upon which others might begin to formulate more sophisticated (and implementable) plans for internal development in the future.

Atlantic Planners Institute

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This document was last modified on February 20, 2001.