Resumen de Shaping Cities: Culture as Development Work
Culture is (as Raymond Williams argued) a way of life, evidenceand expression of a set of mutable values produced in but alsoconditioning people’s encounters with the world. The question, now,is: what ways of encountering the world will produce sustainable urbandevelopment?The challenge for policy and planning, then, is that change isproduced in everyday life and often despite policies developed in political,social and cultural institutions to be delivered from a position ofauthority. This is not to say that policies have not at times been progressive;indeed, the planners and designers responsible for the concretehousing projects on the peripheries of many European cities wereprogressive, often socialists, and inspired by the modern promise thata new society can be engineered through design. The difficulty is, asMarvila demonstrates, it cannot be done through design alone, andperhaps does not begin there at all. If social change is to take place,perhaps it begins in a mutual interaction, a dialogic exchange in a spacebetween dwelling and the ways in which consciousness becomes formalisedin design or planning. Otherwise, in a separation of conceptfrom actuality, of art from life, and of design from the occupation ofspace, is a hiatus in which fear and distrust are likely to grow. Oppositionthen takes the form either of vandalism or a desperate resistancewhich fails against the greater force of the dominant society or culture.
