MODULE 4: Planning 3 History Part 2

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION:

The “Owenite Communities”:
- New Harmony, Indiana, USA by Owens, Jr.
- Brook Farm, Massachusetts, by a group of
New England Planners
- Icarus, Red River, Texas, by Cabet
(eventually, Cabet joined the Mormons in laying out Salt-lake City, Utah)
- Bournville, outside Birmingham built by chocolate manufacturer George Cadbury
- Port Sunlight, in the Mersy built by William Lever

Tony Garnier, 1868-1948 (Une Cite Industrielle )
- like Howard’s garden city, was to be a self- contained new settlement with its own industries and housing close by.
- Locational features may have been a precursor to modern zoning
- Ideas and theories adopted by Dutch Architect JJP Oud in the design of
Rotterdam

THE CONSERVATIONISTS AND THE PARK MOVEMENT:

Frederick Law Olmstead - Believed that cities should be planned two generations ahead; maintain sufficient breathing space, be constantly renewed and that suburban design should embrace the whole city.
- Use of open space as element of urban system; despoilment of land through landscape system; urban park as an aid to social reform.

THE GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT:

Ebenezer Howard –
Author of “Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform”
- “Garden City of Tomorrow” – one of the most important books in the history of urban planning.

cluster with a mother town of 58,000 to 65,000 with smaller “garden cities” of 30,000 to 32,000 each with permanent green space separating the cities with the towns serving as horizontal fence of farmland; rails and roads would link the towns with industries and nearby towns supplying fresh food.

Idea of Howard:
• all of the industry was decentralized deliberately from the city or at least from its inner sectors.
• new town was built around the decentralized plant.
• Combining working and living in a healthy environment.
• the first garden cities.

Who influenced Howard?:
EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD had advocated the planned movement of population.
JAMES SICK BUCKINGHAM- developed the idea of a model city.
ALFRED MARSHALL- invented the idea of the new town as an answer to the problems of the city.

Howard advocated the concept of ‘Social City’ – polycentric settlement, growth without limit, surrounded by a greenbelt; town grows by cellular addition into a complex multi-centered agglomeration of towns set against a green background of open country.

The 3 magnets in his paradigm depicted both the city and the countryside had a indisoluble mixture of advantages and disadvantages – the city has the opportunities offered through jobs and urban services of all kinds, which resulted in poor natural environment; the countryside offered an excellent natural environment but virtually no opportunities of any kind

Garden City combined the advantages of the town by way of access and all the advantages of the country by way of the environment without any of the disadvantages of either. Achieved by planned decentralization of workers and their places of employment thus transferring the advantages of urban agglomeration en bloc to the new settlement.

The Garden City Association
• established by Howard in 1899

Letchworth:
first Garden City designed by Raymond Unwin & Barry Parker in 1902
- Consisted of 4,500 acres (3000 for agriculture, 1500 for city proper)

Welwyn, 1920 (by Louis de Soisson) - brought formality and Georgian taste

Followers of Howard:
SIR FREDERICK OSBORNE
RAYMUND UNWIN
BARRY PARKER
- Hampstead Garden Suburbs opened in 1907
meant only for housing but with a variety of housing types lined along streets with terminating axes on civic buildings in a
large common green
- Wythenshawe - called the 3rd garden city meant only for housing but with a variety of housing types lined along streets with terminating axes on civic buildings in a large common green

Modifications on Howard’s principles:
- Background of open space instead of greenbelts (adaptation of inter-urban railway)
- Dividing the town into clearly articulated neighborhood units

Ernst May
Germany city planner and architect

Ernst May (1886-1970), developed a series of satellite towns (Trabantenstadte) on open land outside the built-up limits, and separated from the city proper by a green belt.

May combined uncompromising use of the then new functional style of architecture with a free use of low-ride apartment blocks, all set in a park landscape.

May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including Magnitogorsk

successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt, "one of the most remarkable city planning experiments in the twentieth century".

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL ERA (1900 to 1945)

Daniel Burnham – Father of American City Planning
spearheaded the movement with his design for Chicago and his famous words: “make no little plans…”
- Influenced by the world fairs of the late 19th century, like the 1891Columbian Exposition in Chicago
- Emphasis was on grand formal designs, with wide boulevards, civic spaces, arts, etc.
- Also credited for the designs of San Francisco and Cleveland

Golden era of urban design in the US; according to Burnham, city was totally designed system of main circulation arteries., a network of parks and clusters or focal buildings or building blocks of civic centers incl. City hall, a country court house, a library, an opera house, a museum, and a plaza

Total concentration on the monumental and on the superficial, on architecture as symbols of power, and an almost complete lack of interest on the wider social purposes of planning. Planning was intended to impress or for display.

Daniel Burnham wrote “Chicago Plan” but was heavily criticized & referred to as centro-centrist; based on business core with no conscious provision for business expansion in the rest of the city; planned as an aristocratic city for merchant princess; not in accord with the realities of downtown real estate development which demanded overbuilding and congestion; utopian
- castigated by Lewis Mumford as cosmetic, comparing Burnham’s approach with planning practiced in totalitarian regimes; approach ignored housing, schools & sanitation. According to Abercrombie, beauty stood supreme for Burnham, commercial convenience was significant but health and sanitation concerns were almost nowhere. Burnham’s plan devoted scant attention to zoning.

Baron George Eugene Hausmann- worked on the reconstruction of Paris- linear connection between the Place de Concord, Arc de Triomph, Eiffel Tower and others

THE URBAN THEORIST:

Constantine Doxiadis - Addressed problem of urbanization on a worldwide scale and his major designs have been made for countries where the economy and productive system can be coordinated by policy and decree such as the new developing countries of Africa and the MiddleEast.

Published his “Ekistics Grid” a system for recording planning data and ordering the planning process.
Approaches town planning as a science which includes planning and design as well as contributions from the sociologist, geographer, economist, demographer, politician, social anthropologist, ecologist, etc. all these he assembles into a total rational and human approach which he calls “Ekistics” – the science of human settlements.

THE NEW COMMUNITIES MOVEMENT (EARLY 1920s):

Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Frederick Lee Ackerman –

- Piecemeal development of residential communities on endless gridiron tracts was wasteful & unnecessary; practice of laying out block pattern streets prevented clustered community design & the interspersal of open and built-up spaces.
- One of the aims of the group was the creation of neighborhood centers and the physical delineation of neighborhood groups

Christopher Alexander –
“a city is not a tree” - suggested that sociologically, different people had varied needs for local services & the privilege* of choice was paramount.

Alker Tripp –
- assistant commissioner of police at London’s Scotland Yard.
- published a book called TOWN PLANNING & TRAFFIC.
- idea that after the war, cities should be reconstructed in the basis of PRECINTS.
- hierarchy of roads in which main arterial or sub arterial roads were sharply segregated from the local streets with only occasional access and also were free of direct frontage development.
- influenced Patrick Abercrombie and Forshaw (called for application of the PRECINTUAL PRINCIPLE to London.)

Clarence Stein - The Radburn Idea or “new town idea” was to create a series of superblocks (an island of greens, bordered by homes and carefully skirted by peripheral auto roads), each around open green spaces which are themselves interconnected. The greenways were the pedestrian ways.

The basic layout of the community introduced the ff:
- "super-block" concept
- cul-de-sac (cluster) grouping
- interior parklands
- and separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic to promote safety.
Every home was planned with access to park walks.

TOWN & COUNTRY PLANNING OF BRITAIN:

The Neighborhood Unit
-book by Clarence Perry (1929)
-the embryo of NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT AREA- certain services which are provided everyday for groups of population who can’t or do not travel far, should be provided at an accessible central place for a small community w/in walking distance.
-defined as the physical environment wherein social, cultural, educational,
and commercial are within easy reach of each other
-he discussed the idea of organized towns into cohesive neighborhoods which was applicable not only to new towns but to large city areas.
- concerns self sustainability of smaller units
- Principle based on the natural catchment area of community facilities such as primary schools and local shops. the elementary school as the center of development, determines the size of the neighborhood

THE REGIONAL CITY:

Patrick Geddes - “Survey before plan”
- The answer to the sordid congestion of the giant city is a vast program of regional planning within which each sub-regional part would be harmoniously developed on the basis of its own natural resources with total respect for the principles of ecological balance and resource renewal. Cities in the scheme became subordinate to the region; old cities and new towns alike would grow just as necessary parts of the regional scheme.
- Planning must start with a survey of the resources of such a region and of human responses to it, and of the resulting complexities of the cultural landscape; emphasis on survey method.
- Wrote “Cities in Evolution” (1915); coined the term “conurbation” which meant conglomeration of town aggregates; describing the waves of population to large cities followed by overcrowding and slum formation, and the wave of backflow; the whole process resulting in amorphic sprawl, waste and unnecessary obsolescence; stressed social basis of the city – concerned with the relationship between people and cities and how they affect one another;

Stages in the creation of conurbation:
Inflow - build-up - backflow(central slums) - sprawling mass (central blight)

THE REGIONAL CITY:

Patrick Abercrombie
- most notable professional planner in Britain in the Anglo American period.
- most notable contribution to planning to a wider scale: the scale which region around it in a single planning exercise.
- did the Greater London Plan 1944

Lewis Mumford
- Geddes Follower
- wrote CULTURE OF CITIES, the Bible of regional planning movement

P.G.F. Le Play
-stressed the intimate and subtle relationship between human settlement and the land through the nature of local economy.
PLACE-WORK-FOLK
Le Play’s famous triad- was the fundamental study of men living and on their land; social-survey method of determining relationships of the family and worker to the environment.

MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING:

Charles-Eduoard Jeanneret - Popularly known as Le Corbusier.

- His most outstanding contribution as a thinker and writer was an urban planner on the grand scale.

- the most notable are his Unite’ d’ Habitation (1946-52) at Marseilles in France, a self-contained 'vertical city', with modular housing units for 1600 people, internal streets and community services.

In 1933, proposed “La Ville Radieuse (Radiant City)” anchored on objective to decongest the centers of our cities by increasing their densities by building high on small part of the total ground area. Accordingly, every great city must rebuild on centers

Le Corbusier also conceptualized Le Contemporaine, high-rise offices and residential buildings with a greenbelt for a population of 3,000,000 people

Last of the City Beautiful planners, he commented that it was hard to build a City Beautiful amidst the confusion of democracy and the market.

Chandigarh
Capital of Punjab province of India, and the only realized plan of Le Corbusier: criticized for shifting from a planning style to an architectural style, meaning a shift towards the preoccupation with visual form, symbolism, imagery, and aesthetics rather than the problems of the Indian population; plan was completely impervious to economic and human considerations.
- A regular grid of major roads for rapid transport surrounding residential superblocks or sections each based on the rectangle and measuring 800x1200 meters
- The whole plan represents a large scale application of the Radburn principle regularized by Le Corbusier’s predilection for the rectilinear and the monumental.

Two important books- The City of Tomorrow (1922) and The Radiant City;
small number of propositions:
- traditional city has become functionally obsolete, due to increasing size and increasing congestion at the centre. As the urban mass grew through concentric additions, more and more strain was placed on the communications of the innermost areas, above all the central business district, which had the greatest accessibility and where all business wanted to be.
- the paradox that the congestion could be cured by increasing the density. There was a key to this, of course: the density was to be increased at one scale of analysis, but decreased at another. Locally, there would be very high densities in the form of massive, tall structures; but around each of these a very high proportion of the available ground space- Corbusier advocated 95%- could and should be left open.
- concerned the distribution of densities within the city.
- argued that this new urban form could be accommodate a new and highly efficient urban transportation system, incorporating both rail lines and completely segregated elevated motorways, running above the ground level, though, of course, below the levels at which most people lived.

- he did teach planners in general the importance of scale in analysis.
- his insistence on the elementary truth that dense local concentrations of people helped support a viable, frequent mass-transportations system.

BRASILIA
- capital of Brazil and a completely new twentieth-century city, the biggest planning exercise of the 20th century
- designed by Lucio Costa with a lot of influence from Le Corbusier, his plans or schemes did not include a single population projection, economic analyses, land use schedule, model or mechanical drawing, yet it was awarded to him; plan did not attempt to resolve pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. Unplanned city grew up beside the planned one.
• with two huge axes in the sign of the cross, one for gov’t, commerce, and entertainment, the other for the residential component
• Oscar Niemeyer was among the architects employed to design the buildings

Frank Lloyd Wright
In the 1930s, he wrote the “The Disappearing City” and later “Broadacres” – proposing that every family live on an acre of land and where the city would be built by its inhabitants using mass-produced components; this met difficulties in land supply and logistics as the population increased.

“Broadacres”
- it was desirable to preserve the sort of codependent rural life of the homesteaders.
- that mass car would allow cities to spread widely into countryside.
- homes would be connected by super highways.
Easy and fast travel by car to any direction.
- he anticipated “out- of-town shopping center”

Problems with lack of land lead to his design of the Mile High Tower.
• Proposed to house a significant amount of Manhattan residents to free up space for Greenfields
• 10 or more of these could possibly replace all Manhattan buildings

URBAN RENEWAL:

Jane Jacobs - Wrote the “The Death and Life of the Great American Cities” – one of the most influential books in the history of city planning.
- She argued that there was nothing wrong with high urban densities of people so long as they did not entail overcrowding in buildings. She prescribed keeping the inner-city neighborhood more or less as it was before the planners had got their hands on it. It should have mixed functions and therefore land uses to ensure that people were there for different purposes, of different time schedules, but using many facilties in common. Dense concentrations of people and residents, mixed blocks of different age and conditions resulted in the “yuppification” of the city.


RADICAL IDEAS:

The Arcology Alternative - the 3D city by Paolo Soleri

Motopia - proposed by Edgar Chambless (Vehicular traffic will be along rooftops
of a continuous network of buildings, while the streets will be for pedestrian use only)

Science Cities - Proposed by the “metabolism group”; visionary urban designers that proposed underwater cities, “biological” cities, cities in pyramids, etc.

The Floating City - Kiyonori Kikutake

The Barbican City - a 63 acre area. mixed used development that was built in response to the pressures of the automobile. An early type of Planned Urban development that had all amenities in one compound with multi-level circulation patterns.