Civitas/What is City?

Book excerpt: What constitutes a city? How does human settlement in a specific site create a civilization? Civitas, the latest issue of the Harvard Architectural Review, presents a series of provocative responses to these questions. Architects, critics, educators, and planners investigate the conflict between contemporary constructs of human settlement and more traditional definitions of cities. Through a combination of projects and theoretical essays, Civitas aims to provide a more diverse understanding of the nature of urbanism and community. "The conception of community as an orderly or focused environment in the landscape is an expression predominantly derived from the Western medieval city and perception. This idea has been copied, transformed, and even romanticized, but today its structure is no longer the image that dominates the landscape". -- from the introduction to Civitas