Resumen: This chapter analyzes the existing tension between the experience of the city and the image of it, arguing that the designer is a creative agent that acts as a mediator between both poles. Although the growing primacy of the visual has marked the notion of cities throughout the twentieth century, this investigation presents two paradigmatic cases to illustrate the opposite: The idea that the conception of the city can-and probably should-start from experience, not so much from its image. These cases are the vision of Las Vegas that, as a manifesto, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott-Brown, and Steven Izenour provide in 1972; and New Babylon that Constant Nieuwenhuys devised between the 1950s and 1960s. In the light of these cases, the text concludes by prompting-or rather by asking-what is the role of the contemporary designer in the city now that we are fully immersed in the twenty-first century.
