Life And Life: Cultural Understanding Of Urban Life

Cities are one of the most important areas of cultures, and urbanization is the most evident tendency in current human society, while the urban crisis is a vivid reflection to the crises of ecology, society and human’s psychology at the same time. The urban crises come directly from the modern people’s faulty idea of cities, which are treated as "living machines" by people. However, City’s crises have roots in modern people’s "Human oriented theory", which causes the survival crisis of people and cities.In the thesis, the city and its culture are observed by the vision of life culture, and the viewpoint of city is a kind of cultural life is also brought up based on it. From the vision of modern life science, the city is a Mega-life system, which is as complicated, self-organized and integral as a common life system. Form the vision of culture, the concept of city life reflects the life mood and aesthetic conception of human beings, while the city culture is the extension of human nature in city, as well as a kind of systematic explanation by human themselves about the relationship and value of them and the other lives. In this sense, the sustainable survival or the recession to death of the city are totally depend on people’s understanding to their relationship with other people and other lives. This is why we call city life cultural life. Seeing through the life-city theory, we are easy to find that its most important characteristic is to provide a philosophy of conviviality of the world of the ten thousand things in city, including the conviviality among human and nature, religion and science, ration and perceptuality, history and future, different cultures, humanities and technology, etc. The conviviality philosophy can almost cover all the fields of urban society and urban life by tightly connecting city and life. It is necessary for human to understand that they need to be in conviviality with others in city only in which they have chance to truly take part in process of universe and history.The belief of conviviality of the world of ten thousand things which developed from Animism and endless conversion of life style represents the faith and spirit of Chinese cultural tradition, which is based on the natural philosophy of harmony between man and nature and the culture of respecting every life. It is most important to notice that the concept of conviviality in Chinese traditional culture is not a kind of expedient measure, but an ideal realm being pursued, which is the root of the tolerant mind to diversity of Chinese culture. Because of this, we do believe that the significance of Chinese traditional cultural spirit to modern china in process of urbanization is not only to continue the urban cultural context, but also to remodel the Chinese time personality and spirit by modeling the spirit of city, or put it another way, the vitality of Chinese cites and citizens is depend on if their urban culture are capable to adapt to the conviviality with other lives.The Japanese Architect Kisho Kurokawa who is deeply influenced by eastern philosophy has been foreseen that the time of21st century to city is a time of "life city" instead of a time of "mechanic city". The prominent feature of life city is the tendency from conflict to conviviality between human and nature, people and people, science and humanities, traditional culture and modern culture. Similarly, the world wide New Urbanism Campaign arising from1990s has almost the same view with Kisho Kurokawa. Not only that, the New Urbanism keeps it foothold on the inheritance and revival of cultural tradition.Certainly, the reason why we discuss the inheritance of cultural tradition in Chinese urbanization is not for echoing some fashionable concepts, but for constructing our cities with a kind of responsible attitude to our people, to humanity as a whole and to all the lives living on earth. During such exploration, we find that we have such ability and potential in our cultural tradition. The traditional cultural spirit which has strong moral temperament of conviviality is the source and power of cultural life of city. The traditional cultural spirit, as an open system through the former, the present and the future, had done quite a lot of practice in Chinese urban history and created remarkable urban brilliance world widely. Moreover, as long as we don’t abandon it ourselves, the traditional cultural spirit will remain accompanying us on the road of urbanization now and in the future, not only guide us making better choice between the "mechanic city" and the "life city", but also remodeling our time personality and spirit during the process of pursuing urban ideal.