New Urban Decorum? City Aesthetics To And Fro

Abstract

From the municipal and civic perspective, improving the environment responds to the idea “to make a more beautiful city”, answering to the jump from the industrial city to the metropolitan one, and then to the different attempts for ordering cities during the twentieth century. To and fro refers to the journey into the past and arriving in the present. Urban decorum raises the question of What? Who? Where? but especially the How? The issues raised by the “urban decorum” are not new. They emerge, firstly, from boredom inherent in urban life with the consequent need for self-expression and, secondly, from the grass-root processes based on mutual support that intend to take part in improving the quality of the built environment, of the urbanscape, in the city, empowering citizens in the process of “city making” and decision-making.