Bottom Up or Top Down

The London Fire in 1666 created the best opportunity for Wren’s master plan. London was in a state which was closest to a clear site construction. However, even with the King’s (Charles II) formal approval on September the 10th to restrict anyone from rebuilding on their own, it didn’t take long for the King to have given way to this order due to the dominate disapproval to Wren’s plan by the public. Even with Wren’s plan that required minimal changes to the city compared to other proposals by John Evelyn, Captain Valentine Knight, Robert Hooke, and Richard Newcourt, it was still jeopardizing the trades and business of the factions. The fail alignment of the King’s and Queen’s Street is the proof of the little control that Wren had over individual building plot. With so many things in Wren’s favor, he did not succeed in bringing his plans to reality. Similarly, in the fight between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses in the Greenwich Village incident of the slum clearance, the grassroots effort in protecting existing neighborhoods succeeded in stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway proposed by Robert Moses.

When the way of life of the daily people is at stake, resistance will be the prevailing attitude, rejecting the foreign individual’s idea of how things should be. This way of thinking is natural since we all dislike change in some ways. The comfortable environment that we wrap ourselves in is most sacred and precious to us. It is then the architect’s duty to find a way start from the bottom, interacting with the residents, asking what they actually want and how things work in their network. Starting from there and develop the original urban structure to create an environment that is truly user-friendly and advance in technology.