CITY SOUL 1من اصل4

Does the city have a soul? YES indeed! Thriving and livable cities DO. Its
sustainability is the mission of its highly educated and enlightened
Populaces; in addition to the vision of all of its local stakeholders and their
representatives including NGOs, associations, members of the private
sector, and government officials.
Livable, vibrant, sustainable and resilient cities are absolutely critical to our
prosperity. They are where the bulk of our economic growth can be found
… and they in themselves are economic assets.
As the great English author Samuel Johnson once said «A great city is, to
be sure, the school for studying life.» We spend our lives building in empty
spaces. Out of nothing, we make something. We fashion jobs, relationships,
structures, and meanings. Without these creations, we would live in a
wasteland.
If we are searching for the past and soul of a place we must consider how
the town or city grew. People coming together for worship, then defence,
then trade, their lives carefully balanced with the resources that could be
brought within the walls. The city allowed the exchange of ideas, of goods,
and of culture which reinforced the surrounding territory, and which, prior
to the Industrial Revolution, stood in (often enforced) balance with the
surroundings.
Even after the arrival of industry, the close cramped proximity of workers
and their industries, the revolutionary spin- offs of political and cultural
ideas, the art and design which we now favour , grew from environments
which were economic with space and energy for movement, though paid
high costs In disease and social disorder.
But what the city has become in the industrial, and post-industrial, periods
is evidence enough of how far we have moved from a sustainable, and
easily understood, urban form.