Could urban engineers learn from dance?
A
AWhether a city can sustain itself is bound up with how its inhabitants get from place to place. Roughly 30% of the energy burned in the richer nations of the world goes, by most estimates, on transport, and so any real reduction in mobility's environmental toll depends on our leaning less heavily on energy-guzzling vehicles. Movement of other sustainable kinds matters too, all the more as ever-greater numbers crowd into urban centres. Our health of body and mind, the friendships we keep, the work and culture we can reach, even the air we breathe, all of it is coloured by how we make our journeys. Reshaping that journey through urban design falls to engineers, yet their profession keeps building on the same premises behind the energy-thirsty networks already around us, worshipping speed, efficiency and the hard number above all else. Nothing short of a thorough overhaul will do, one that leaves city travel kinder to health, to pleasure and to the environment alike.
B
BSome of those answers may lie in dance. The point is not that we should all pirouette our way to the office, cheering though that might be, but that the methods choreographers use to explore and shape movement could hand engineers fresh ways of thinking about how cities are made. Aldo Verekker, a prominent urbanist and sociologist whose work has reshaped how we understand the making of cities, contends that ever since the architectural blueprint arrived, urban design has been split between the mind and the body.
C
CWhere the builders of medieval times worked by improvising and adjusting as they went, drawing on a close feel for their materials and first-hand knowledge of a site's conditions, the plans for a building are today conceived and kept inside media technologies that hold the designer apart from the physical and social realities being brought into being. Indispensable as these newer practices are for handling the sheer technical intricacy of the modern city, they carry a cost: reality gets flattened along the way.
D
DVerekker illustrates the point with Kessler Court, a scheme in the city of Rendholm and a textbook case of the modernist planning so much in vogue in the 1970s. Laid out as a grid of streets and towers, it was meant to furnish the city with a fresh centre in which people might move about on foot. Its undoing, as Verekker tells it, was the excessive trust its makers reposed in computer-aided design to predict how the whole would function. What escaped them was that the cafes built along the streets could not endure the fierce sun without the awnings that keep older buildings shaded, relying therefore on air conditioning that devoured energy; nor that the vast car park would prove so cheerless as to leave people unwilling to step from their cars. Whatever appears wholly foreseeable, wholly governable, on a screen turns out otherwise the moment it becomes brick and pavement.
E
ETransport engineering stumbles over the very same difficulty, for it too leans on models to anticipate and channel the movement of people through a city. No one doubts that such models earn their keep, yet each is founded on a particular outlook, one that admits some version of efficiency and safety while quietly discarding other ways of experiencing the streets. A design that reads as logical on the model can strike its everyday user as downright contrary. Take the metal railings that greet anyone attempting to cross a busy urban road: conceived as an engineer's remedy for pedestrian safety, they sprang from models in which the unbroken flow of traffic came first. Where roads run wide, the railings herd walkers toward chosen crossing spots and drag out their journey across by splitting it into two staggered stages, a carriageway apiece. A crossing thus made to feel longer raises psychological obstacles that press hardest on the least mobile, while goading others into hazardous dashes around the rails. More than nuisances at the kerb, these barriers slice through communities and shrink the room for healthier travel, which is why so many are now being ripped out, at no little upheaval, expense and waste.
F
FGive the designers of those rails the means to reason through the body, as a dancer does, and to feel in advance how the barriers would sit with a pedestrian, and a wiser answer might have surfaced. If we are to overhaul how our cities are lived in, engineering must cultivate a deeper grasp of what draws people to move in the ways they do and of what such movement does to them. An unlikely ally, choreography, turns out to chase the very thing engineering chases: the shaping of movement within the bounds that space imposes. Almost its whole method is to rehearse an idea in the flesh and register at once how the result feels. A dancemaker knows, from the inside, the mental, aesthetic and bodily consequences of favouring one way of moving over the next.
G
GWhen the cognitive scientist Tomas Reell watched the choreographer Lena Sørby, he spoke of someone who thinks with the body. Pressing her own body into the work of trying outcomes out, he maintains, lets Sørby light on answers that abstract thought, however rigorous, would never yield. Expertise of many stripes holds such bodily knowing in high regard, and yet the formal machinery of engineering design leaves no room for it. Reell suggests that transport engineers, too, might rough out answers on the spot and judge them by the felt experience of trying them, or stage a design at full scale as a choreographer puts a company of dancers through its paces. Beyond everything else, they may learn to design as much for what is felt as for what merely functions.
Kéo chỉnh
Question 1 - 6
Choose the correct paragraph, A-G.
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
1.
a claim that the design assumptions engineers still rely on produced today's energy-hungry transport
2.
a description of how rehearsing an outcome with the body produces insights unreachable by reasoning alone
3.
a remark on the way present-day design methods keep their user removed from real-world conditions
4.
an account of barriers that lengthen the felt distance of crossing a road
5.
a reference to an expert who blames unsuccessful city-making on the divorce of thought from bodily experience
6.
a statement that dance and engineering pursue one common aim: organising bodily motion within the confines of available space