Topography and urban form

Abstract

Man is more drastically changing the face of the earth: also his structures are beginning to challenge those which nature provides. The city is, and will continue to be, the largest of these structures. The relationship of the city to the landforms is changing because some of the basic reasons for their importance to the city have changed. And functionally a much greater freedom exists for both the location and the form of the urban agglomeration. Thus a new responsibility exists as well. This responsibility involves a new appraisal as to what landforms meant to man and his urban form in the past and an analysis of what qualities they have which can be beneficial to the city today. In short, how they can be employed as design elements. This problem of the changing scale of man’s activities has been voiced by many writers from many different fields and has been of special concern since the turn of the century. Their views have been both of man’s influence on the earth itself and, of greater concern, the significance of natural land features which man has or has not recognized in giving a character and discipline to this urban form. In order to understand the present and propose for the future in man’s use of the earth form as it relates to his urban form, one must know what factors have changed. Man’s close identification with the earth began in the earth itself, the cave, as his first permanent shelter. Until the relatively recent times, topography remained unthreatened as the major three-dimensional element both of his everyday nomadic life and later his urban environment. He depended on land features for guiding his trails, orienting him to his hunting grounds, observation and protection from his enemy, and even serving as the basis of his religious beliefs. If the urban planner can inject some of this simplicity in approach into the complexity of the city, those surviving elements of this simplicity may suggest a framework for present and future town-building. Topography has since slowly become a passive agent; it permits, but it no longer compels. Industrialization has overcome the functional limitations. Now it is man's structures which attempt to give form to the urban environment. The only means he has to retain a semblance of the natural world in the ever increasing scale and artificiality of the urban form unrelated to it is to visualize a new urban form as a recognition, appraisal, expression, and reinforcement of the characteristic topographical features in his particular urban environment, an approach to city building as an art of the place rather than as a technique. The demonstration illustrates the existing and the possible role of topography in the urban environment of Dubuque, Iowa. It consists of two phases: first, a historical and critical topographic survey examining the influence of the topographical features in its present composition; a proposal in view of changing technology employing the topographic features as a new framework.