Cities Born from Mud

Abstract

This paper represents above all recognition of the city planning as a complex issue that nurtures itself from collective history, its myths and aspirations. Present city planning has turned into an aseptic technic that is only concerned with property rights and insertion of infrastructures. Nevertheless the city is a sophisticated artifice. We cannot only understand it only with numbers, standards and indicators. The city, as the rower in a regatta, moves forward, but looking back. Cities forge their identity through history, myths. Each city tends to look like its name. We will approach Venice and Saint Petersburg because, in their radical artificiality, they are obvious examples of how cities are above objectively reasonable conditions. We will examine their historic avatars, their inclusion in the art and the literature, which provide heroes and settings. Yet this is not a historic study, we will reach conclusions that can apply to the treatment of our cities to refund our city planning as an art able to fertilize technique. Following the Bible, cities must be built on stones. For those cities that were built with mud, stones have been social cohesion created thanks to the distinctiveness of a myth, something that can be useful and fertile for many other cities.