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Needham Street
by Seth Harry and Associates Inc., Architects and Planners
The Traditional City
The City of Luxembourg
(Photo by Lucien Steil)
The traditional city is the excellent, complex
and popular materialization of civility and conviviality in the most genial invention of mankind: Civitas....It is the perfect
synthesis between territory, culture and human communities. It is a stable and stimulating 'Patria' for individuals and families,
for locals and visitors, residents and hosts, for industry, business, crafts, arts, etc., and the most supportive setting
for men's most profound and enlighted investigations and productions in science, technology, performing arts, education and
artistical and intellectual creations. It remains the best possible human environment for communication, interaction and for
social, cultural, intellectual and commercial creativity and invention!
Old Postcard View of Luxembourg
(Photo from Joel Crawford's Archives)
"civitas nihil aliud est quam hominum
multitudo societatis vinculo adunata."
Augustinus
Innsbruck, Maria Theresienstrasse
(Photo from Joel Crawford's Archives)
"The town is a community of men joined
together by social bonds."
Augustinus, "Civitas Dei", quoted by Erwin
Gutkind:
"Urban Development in Southern Europe: Italy and Greece"
Nurnberg before the Second World War
(Photo from Joel Crawford's Archives)
The traditional city has always remained a
compelling artifact for imagination, for reflection, for poetical inspiration and for veneration.....How many vedutas, paintings
and engravings, photographies, descriptions, poems and popular songs have been left to us which do but enthousiastically celebrate
the virtues, the beauty, the excellence, the uniqueness, the authenticity and the liveliness of the popular traditional city!
Even smaller cities and towns, --and now even
New Urban Towns and Neighbourhoods--, have impressive collections of visual and written records of their epic memory, their
origins in some mythological past or in an almost as mythological 'Charrette'.
How much all of them cherish their urban layout,
their monuments and squares, their streets, their skylines and panoramic views, and also of course their citizens and
outstanding and heroic figures through a history of permanence and change, continuity and transformation within
a living, vital and complex urban identity...
Assisi, Piazza Vittorio Emanuele
(Photo from Joel Crawford's Archives)
A Work of Centuries
Neighbourhood in Siena
(Photo by Lucien Steil)
"For in whatever way a town has developed
de facto as a work of the centuries, it was viewed at every moment as a towering edifice conceived and built in a spirit of
harmony whose systematic composition expressed a high and ideal vision. Such a vision --it was never the same-- determined
successively the building activities of the bishops, the free communes, the later tyrants and the princes....We know this
ideal picture of the civitas from literature. The Latin Middle Ages have given much thought to the essential nature of a town.
One was convinced that it should provide the framework and the stage for a life pleasing to God and ordered significantly."
Wolfgang Braunfels
"Mittelalterliche Stadtbaukunst in der Toskana"
Old View of Siena
(Photo from Joel Crawford's Archives)
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