Architecture and the city: Conceptual shifts in a time of change

Abstract

The majority of the South African population presently lives in mushrooming, unstructured cities. Such cities recognise neither their inhabitants' cultural and social needs nor the realities of their everyday lives. It is essential to create credible conceptual frameworks capable of integrating the complexity and diversity of the modern metropolis.
This article therefore discusses two aspects of the problem:
• The identification of criteria which urban contexts should meet in order to be experienced as meaningful and life-sustaining.
• An analysis of the approaches of current structuring systems in the light of these criteria. Comparison of these approaches leads to the proposal of a possible "key model" for the structuring of the contem­porary multi-cultural city.