CITY AS A PRODUCT OF “TASTE CULTURES”
SŁAWOMIR GZELL
The search for answers to the question whether the city is now more public or more private and what this indicates, and which it ought be, has become the main axis of the current debate about the city. This debate must not proceed without the involvement of urban planners or architects, many of whom treat the city as being the object of merely technological improvement (which the inhabitants should find sufficient) or as a product of artistic creation, and once you have given it an interesting form you have no other obligations to it. Yet none of these approaches satisfies the rebelling cities. Their inhabitants, as ample evidence shows, reject the status of passive onlookers on what they are given, with the hands of architects and urban planners, by the city authorities and developers. What they want is genuine involvement, and because they function within certain cultures, they want them to play a role in the process and be reflected in the city space.
The multitude of taste cultures as understood in the colloquial sense that keep emerging in a city can lead to chaos which is impossible to control. There is, however, such a thing as chaos management, having its origin in the conceptions of temporary use of city space.