Purposes

__Reply to Teresa Almeida d’Eça__

After listening to this podcast, I have now a better view of what Urban Planning is and what is its purpose. I agree with many of the things you said and, also, I think that some places are badly designed because they’re made in different periods of time, therefore, as well as in architecture, the dynamics of the places changes and the tastes also change. While you’re designing a city, a new place is born and when you’re finished with the first city, its design is old comparing to the new one. It seems to me that most of the places can’t satisfy all the needs and all the tastes of the people who live in them and that is why I think they’re poorly designed.

__Reply to Leanne Mackenzy__

 In my opinion, architects create and build environments of such elaborateness to provide a better shelter for the people who would live there. If a house is built to protect ourselves, our activities and our possessions, the safer the house, the better it accomplish its function.  I think that the principal purpose of architecture is to create a safe, functional and beautiful place to live according to the needs of each person or group of persons.

 __Comparing: Architecture and Urban Planning__ Today I’m going to write about Architecture and Urban Planning, their differences and their similarities. But before I compare them, I’m going to define shortly each career. Let’s go first with Architecture. This career has its principal interest in the design of places where people can live, work, recreate or all this together. On the other hand, Urban Planning studies the geographic, social and economical environments of a city, or even a whole town. Architecture and Urban Planning are similar in some things. They’re both about design, they work with groups of people and their needs and they also have similar purposes. One of them is making spaces where people can develop their regular activities feeling comfortable. Another purpose is to relate the structure to the surrounding landscape and make the building a part of its environment. But these careers have some remarkable differences. One of the main purposes of urban planning is to analyze the physical, political, economical, spatial and psychological context of the place and architecture doesn’t get too involved in these fields. The principal target in architecture is to provide a shelter for the people, their activities and their possessions through houses or buildings. After comparing these two careers, I would like to finish giving my opinion about my city, Caracas, in terms of Architecture and Urban Planning. Caracas has some awesome constructions. Some of them were made by the greatest architects in the history of this country and some of them are just beautiful to me. But Caracas is a city that grew too fast, and because of that, it has become a nightmare for the people who walk on its streets every day. The amount of cars, the improvised homes and the extinction of places for outdoor recreation have become Caracas in a difficult city to repair for Urban Planners.

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