VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

This paper will focus on the reinterpretation of the critical ecological thinking of Victor Gruen (Vienna, 1903– 1980), the pioneer of the shopping centre. In the US, the “mall maker” Gruen explored and developed a crucial interaction between the design interest and the theoretical one, care for the environment and “high-culture” modernist references. After detecting the socio-morphological failures of shopping malls, in 1970, Gruen wrote his Charter of Vienna, in which he raised the legacy of CIAM’s Charter of Athens: Gruen detected a possible continuity of the Modern Movement, and he developed a manifesto for new ecological thinking relying on the commercial architectural principles experimented in the American context. The paper will focus on this seminal manifesto for a theoretical reinterpretation of contemporary livable cities nowadays. If the Charter of Vienna was an attempt to update to the functionalist Charter of Athens into the socio-urban condition of the ‘70s, this paper critically looks at and reinterpret Gruen’s manifesto questioning What makes a city livable nowadays in our cotemporary socio-spatial condition.