CAP. 2 - THE CITY IN THE SCALES

Another objections that to oppose the structure cheap to run social of the cities, that they counterweigh the economic benefits that he offers exist .
The city forces us, for the grouper made from residing in her, to see us displayed to landscapes, gentes and systems of organization that would not elect . We can see ourselves once very noisy neighbors were exposed, drug dealers or depraved men that they bother our children. These need the contact with the nature, learning that reality is not only her urban, and that the alimony do not come out of a factory at the suburbs, but of that charitable factory that the field is .
A conditioning that bears the life in town is the publicity landslide, that he can push to our family's part to consume products that he does not need, and enclosure changing our consumption pattern. Nothing else is not sad that to flee from a green space a Sunday and to unveil that all townsmen have decided to do the same thing themselves.
The nutrition of plastic that characterizes the inhabitants of urban centers is criticized: Lewis Mumford was becoming astonished, when visiting the ruins of Pompeii, for the similitudes of this one with San Francisco and his outskirts. The vineyards, wheats and olive groves grow on one and another place. However, the mosaics and Trojan cool airs are famous, and the Forum of Pompeii does not bear relation to San Francisco's Center Cívico.
Mumford verified that the local bakeries of Pompeii were doing bread upon the catastrophe with flour elaborated right there,, lamenting our foam bread of gum, devitalized, replete of additives and substitutes, cut in slices mechanically and priding oneself of no to have been touched never by human hands.
In the urban economy, we did not pay only for what we used . Water supply, anthology of leavings and cloacal liquids, schools, theaters, museums, the incluídos are in the parcel, independently of our individual need.
The public demonstration in front of the legislative palace transform a hell the urban traffic for wholes, independently of our political posture. Like to us or no, he will greet nobody to us for the street like at a small town. For ones, the city has the advantage to turn us, for others the pain into anonymous beings had it not been nobody. The longing to be a member of a community to human scale is so old like the city.
In the decade of the ' 40, thinkers like Ebenezer Howard in England, creator of the garden city, and Frank Lloyd Wright in Estados Unidos, they tried from the theory or the practice, proposing urban alternative models.
Howard was able to Letchworth, the first garden city, with private funds and credits come to point to lofty rates that did problematical the financial handling. The difficult beginning and his bad emplacement knocked down the project.
Disregarding the failure, Howard accomplishes a new attempt: The garden city Welwyn. The picture was similar to the previous, but Howard perished before gravest inconveniences turn up .
Frank Lloyd Wright, a American of messianic ideas, he made his project out of Broadacre with all resolved, at least in his mind. At the acre to grant you marry to each inhabitant, diagramó, buildings, farms, automobiles, and he presented rigid guidelines on education, religion, music. In Lewis Mumford's perception, in spite of proclaiming social liberation and espacial, and trying that the urban settlements get close to the agricultural and recreational areas of the field, this idea only introduces, under news forms, the vices of the overpopulated metropolises and archirregimentadas.
At the beginning of the years 70, while they were throwing to each other great part of the cities of Europe in ambitious real-estate programs, at Metz's, France's city they make a decision to plan the city in part in accordance with the human criteria, and not only economic, and on the other hand, being based on his story, several times millenarian, which is shown at for the physical presence the breast of urban space of testimonies of different architectonic styles.
Metz preserves numerous footprints of Roman epoch, that turned her into one of centers of Empire. We can admire the vestiges at Metz's Museums, or in some places of the city like Saint, Pierre aux Nonnains, the more antique Church of France that the IV dates from century.
Inhaled for native Metz's Jean Marie Pelt, Ecología's Institute Europeo's Presidente, and emeritus Profesor of the University of Metz, this concept of urban ecology will constitute the foundation of all the action accomplished by Metz's City, that he is based on the setting in value of patrimony and the links that they join the man with his historic surroundings, native and cultural..
Nowadays, after almost thirty years of setting in practice of urban ecology, Metz's townspeople have lifted the 180 ha. of green spaces in 1970, to 450. Metz has known how to endow with, in the heart the city himself, of places consecrated to the walk and to the leisure, such like the pond and his marina, the docks, and the 34 km of walks conditioned to the bank of the pond, the numerous parks and gardens, without forgetting, evidently, of the pedestrian precinct, that it is crowed over being an one belonging to more important ones belonging to France.
Metz carries the name that qualifies her like garden city, and his Great Premio Europeo's title of Blossoming 1994.