Mat Buildings-Gated Cities. Critical, change and paradoxical phenomenon in last 20th Century New Towns

Abstract

The paper aims to revalue and to compare two urban phenomena of growth and change during the second half of the 20th century: the Mat Building and the Gated City. On the one hand, Mat Building is analysed as a modern strategy of spatial and formal organization in architecture, which is related to the concept of Mat Urbanism. This idea is rooted in the interest of TEAM X in the traditional cities of North Africa, Japan and China, among others, during the late 1950s and 1960s. In 1974 Alison Smithson defined this urban structure using the model of Arab fortresses called Kasbah: “where the functions come to enrich the fabric, and the individual gains new freedoms of action through a new shuffled order, based on interconnection, close knit patterns of association and possibilities for growth, diminution and change.” Alison Smithson formulated an alternative to the functional city described in the CIAM´s Athens Charter. But she also proposed a new urban form, closed and opened at the same time, a kind of urban structure based on the necessity of identity and mobility. On the other hand, the phenomenon of the Gated City is also closely related to the idea of urban identity. The CIDs (Common-Interest-Developments) began to emerge at the end of the 1970s, but actually, that idea was put into practice during the 19th century, as a reaction of utopian socialism to environmental and social consequences of the Industrial Revolution. In the context of the sprawling city, during second half of the 20th century, the New Urbanism also established its criticism to the urban ideology of the Modern Movement, as the TEAM X had done before them. However, unlike the previous one, this current used the paradigm of the walled medieval city, or Gated City, which was indebted to the anti-industrial manifesto of Rob and Leon Krier. They wrote: “function follows form”, and not the opposite, as Louis Sullivan had said. Therefore, a purely picturesque approach to urban form was adopted, against the rationalism of the modern post-war planning. The paper compares both strategies through European and North American urban developments. It analyses their spatial and social structures pointing their own relevance in contemporary urban discourse, and it provides a critical relationship between them, which is full of paradoxes and contradictions for the sustainable urbanism and the landuse planning challenges.