Planning a Pluralist City: Conflicting Realities in Ciudad Guayana

When city planners and designers are given the ideal assignment -- to build a new city in the wilderness, unencumbered by an existing urban matrix -- and,
at the same time, the site is located in the midst of a resource-rich region that attracts a rapid influx of people who proceed to build for themselves a burgeoning boomtown of indigenous settlements, planned without planners, conflicts are almost inevitable.This book, based on the experience of Ciudad Guayana in Venezuela,
demonstrates that the deeper conflicts between planners and people are not only the result of clashes of value or intent but are as much reflections of basic differences in perception. The planner sees his model of the projected city as a totality, from above; the inhabitant sees the present reality, from street level.
The planner's map is a multicolored physical reality; the inhabitant constructs and constantly revises his mental map as experience interacts with memory.The MIT-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies has been involved with the planning of Ciudad Guayana from the time it was a gleam in the planners' eyes (The MIT Press has published several reports by participants in the project), and Donald Appleyard spent a number of summers at the site. The Joint Center has also sponsored pathfinding studies of urban perception and environmental cognition, notably Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City and Appleyard's The View from the Road (written with Lynch and John R. Myer). The book at hand is the product of the fruitful union of these two interests, a convergence of a subject and a methodology that illuminates both.The author writes that "Ciudad Guayana was many cities in one. Different people knew it in different ways. Their perceptions of its parts, their predictions of how it might grow varied from group to group and from person to person. Citizens viewed the city in different ways depending on their backgrounds, familiarity with the city, patterns of use, educational level, and methods of transportation..."The book pays particular attention "to certain aspects of environmental meaning by exploring how well the city's functional and social pattern, economic base, and natural environment are communicated to and accurately interpreted by its inhabitants," and describes "the inhabitants' perceptions of environmental change, remembered past,
perceived present, expected future, and knowledge of the city's future plans..."Policies, strategies, and techniques for planning cities which grow out of the pluralist character of their populations are proposed.

Acknowledgments p.viii
Introduction p.1
The Guayana Project p.9
The Planners and Designers p.10
The Interviews and Field Surveys p.14
Time of Interviews p.15
New Cities p.16
The City and Its Landscape p.22
The Planners' City p.18
The Inhabitants' City p.21
The Inhabitants' Landscape p.22
Rating Ciudad Guayana on a Self-Anchored Scale p.26
Comparing Ciudad Guayana with Other Cities p.27
Local versus City Identity p.28
Awareness of Nature p.28
Maintaining Satisfaction p.29
The Spatial Distribution of Urban Knowledge p.30
Complexity, Density, and Urbanity p.30
Complexity Differences p.31
Reducing Ignorance p.42
The Settlements and Residential Areas p.44
The Four Settlements p.44
Inhabitants' Views of Settlements p.44
Descriptions of Settlements p.51
Perceived Functions p.53
Insiders and Outsiders p.54
Perception of Social Characteristics p.54
Residential Areas p.55
Environmental Cues to Social Perception p.60
The Planned and the Indigenous Areas p.61
Achieving Settlement Identity p.65
Why Places Were Known p.68
The Planners' Media p.68
The Inhabitants' Language p.69
The Attributes of Buildings p.69
Intercollerations between Attributes p.73
Correlations with Recall p.74
Map, Trip, and Verbal Recall as Indicators of Operational and General Knowledge p.80
Levels of Ignorance p.80
Differences in Building Perception p.81
The Prominance of Buildings: Design or Control? p.86
Descriptions of Buildings p.91
Sixteen Buildings p.91
Building Evaluation p.96
Descriptions versus Free Recall p.97
Building Perceptionp.98
Buildings and the City Image p.99
The Information Structure p.104
Planners, Designers, and Symbolism p.104
Determiming Significant Information p.105
Perceptions of Valued Functions p.108
Differences in Functional Perception p.109
Exposure of Functions in Ciudad Guayana p.111
Meaningful or Trivial Cities p.133
Criteria for Selecting Information p.133
A City Information Chart p.137
Strategies for Environmental Communication p.137
Some Communication Proposals p.141
Identification of Functional Types p.145
The Spatial Structure p.155
Planners' Methods of Structuring the City p.155
Structural Perceptions p.156
Sequentially Dominant Maps p.160
Spatially Dominant Maps p.160
Structuring Differences p.161
Three Methods of Structuring a City p.167
Summarizing Structural Perception p.182
Structuring the Future City p.183
change p.190
Planners and the Future p.190
Perceptions of Change p.191
Observed Change p.191
Observed Change p.191
Desired and Predicted Change p.193
Differences in Change Perception p.194
Perceived Structural Change p.195
Predicted Structural Change p.196
Managing Change p.199
Many Cities in One p.204
The Personal City p.204
Different Personal Cities p.208
The Differentiating Variables p.218
The Tenuous Connections between Personal Cities p.224
The Planners' City p.224
Group Environments for Ciudad Guayana p.226
Six Strategies for Structuring the Plural City p.229
The Public Environment p.233
A Paradigm p.233
The Public Environment p.238
The Public Environment and the Educational City p.242
Conclusion p.244
Appendixes
A Tables p.246
B The Interviews and Field Surveys p.274
The Purposive Area Sample Design p.274
Original and Substitute Samples p.274
General Characteristics of the Sample p.275
Intercollerations between Personal Dimensions p.277
Interviewing p.278
Expert Field Surveys p.278
Coding the Interviews p.279
C The Interview Schedule p.281
D Research Methods p.288
Assessing the Public Environment p.288
Future Research p.291
Notes p.293
Glossary and Venezuelan Terms p.299
Bibliography p.300
Index p.306