OLGU CALISKAN
TU Delft School of Design

Measuring urban density, as a matter of fact, is not only a diagnostic tool to understand the nature of urban fabric in a descriptive view, but also a kind of litmus paper to recognize the main intention of any planning and design schema in a normative point of view. Nevertheless, measuring density level of any designed urban district may not be an adequate tool to apprehend any ideological stance behind those planning and design proposals and solutions, alone. The measure of density itself is fundamentally determined by the basic existence condition, which is spatial centrality. Therefore, in order to identify the ideological background of any urban approach –with reference to its density preferences- , it is much more essential to reveal the main positioning of the planning/design ideas towards ‘centrality versus decentrality’. Historically, this contradiction coincidences with certain antagonistic oppositions of, ‘center vs. periphery’, ‘urban vs. rural’, and ‘intensity vs. dispersion’, which are all experienced within a definite density interval in physical term.

Since each diagnostic condition quoted above, creates its own needs and demands, which are the production of a specific socio-economic, cultural and spatial context; they all have different intrinsic ideological representations. For this reason, the intended outlook, which deals with the problématique of urban density as a matter of centrality, directly has a potential to carry such a functionalistic issue into a political level of discussion.

In this way, it will be possible to (re)-formulate the history of modern urbanism based on the axis of two mainstreams: centrism and decentrism. Almost all urban visions, whether categorically belong to one or compromise two, tend to construct their own density approach to achieve the idealized socio-spatial and physical model.

Without an advocacy of one side of this ideological divergence on the density issue, the paper aims to (re)mind the ideological background of contemporary ‘urbanist’ argumentation on density –and its contraries- with reference to the pioneering modern urban paradigms and their protagonists.