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URBAN DESIGN

LECTURE 2 History of cities and the emergence of urban design – Part II


LATER URBAN PLANNING THEORIES AND PRACTICES

Naciye Doratlı
Şebnem Hoşkara
 The theoretical literature of western
architecture and search for a theoretical
understanding of urban design starts with
Vitruvious, the Augustan architect, and his
treatise De Architectura.

 More important for urban design however,


are the works of the Renaissance scholars,
Leone Battista Alberti, Antonio Averlino
Filarete, Serlio and Andrea Palladio.
 Alberti presented a great work called De Re
Aedificatoria to Pope Nicholas V in 1452 in
which he established architecture as a
learned discipline based upon principles
articulated and structured by reason. In his
text Alberti dealt also with elements of city
design, streets, roads, and piazza.
 Filarete’s book Libro Architettonico, in
which he wrote a treatise on architecture in a
modern language for the first time, a capital
city, Sforzinda and a port city Plousiapolis is
described in terms of planning, design and
construction of the city as well as its
institutional organisation.
 It was, however with Palladio, who wrote the
most influential architectural treatise of the
16th century. His book covers the general
principles of architectural design, the
Classical orders, the design of palaves, villas,
etc. Like Alberti, he also dealt with the
design of streets and piazzas.
 These names are of urban designer’s interest
for the development urban form and the
origins of urban design until the 19th
century.
 In the development of the urban form from
early times to the 19th century, the urban
structure had in common the fact that the
shape of towns and cities was very much
determined by people who had the social,
political and economic power to put their
theories into practice.
 Also, topography, climate, construction
materials and need for defense were the
other urban form and planning determinants.
 However, modern urban structures - and so
modern urban design - are different than
the previous examples because the
organization of the society is fundamentally
different.
 In rest of the lecture, the most popular urban
design theories (together with the basic
principles and ideas behind) of the 19th and
20th centuries will be studied in a
chronological order.
Age of Reason - Public Health Acts

In the 18th century Europe, there were two significant developments in


the society:

(i) expansion of trade leading to growth of a new middle-class,


(ii) development of science.

The new working middle class could not afford to live in the grand
houses and palaces of the old aristocracy and this led to the
development of ‘town houses’ and grand terraces (e.g. Regents Park,
by John Nash, London).
 The development of science and rationalism influenced the
‘taste’ in architecture.
 The architectural forms became more simple, refined and
rational. This was so called neo-classic planning.

 This also provided basis for industrial revolution beginning in


England and changed from handcrafts to mass production in
factories - a new building type located in rapidly growing cities.
 New urban settlements started to develop around these factories
and this led to overcrowding in cities.
 So the important terms specializing the
period are INDUSTRIALISATION,
OVERCROWDING and URBANISATION.
 Garnier – La Cite Industrille 1901
 Frenc architect Tony Garnier’s industrial city plan was based
on rigorous zoning. By sitting housing area way from the
industrial area and city center, it removed much of the
richness of traditional city life along with some of its squalor.
Personal transport is still a necessity.
 Existing towns were transformed very
quickly. Industry required ‘new building
types - factories, offices, railways and
transportation systems, housing,
government administrative buildings,
prisons, museums, theatres, etc.’ to serve
the new society.
Boulevard Planning
 Industrial revolution had a similar process in
France but led to different results.
 In England the concern was with health and
good living conditions (Public Health Acts); in
France and especially in Paris the concern
was with preventing another revolution.
Thus, after the Revolution in 1848 in France,
Napoleon wanted Paris to be redeveloped in
such a way that no barricades would be able
to be built in the streets.
 Baron Haussmann brought a straight,
pragmatic solution to a highly practical
problem by destroying many existing
buildings and building up wide boulevards
with the intention of focusing visually and
functionally on the great monuments of Paris
which were connected to one another by
these boulevards.
 The new railway stations of Paris were also
connected to assure more efficient transport
between them and the city centers. These
boulevards were by no means designed for any
kind of intrinsic beauty.
 They gave long perspective views towards the
major monuments, and also afforded the longest
feasible sight lines for Napoleon’s troops.
 Besides, with their round-points in front of or
around they also speeded up the flow of traffic.
 The trees, which seemed to humanize the
boulevards, together with the great width of the
boulevards themselves, made barricade-building
difficult too.
 Haussmann’s Boulevard planning became very influential in
many cities in the world like Vienna, Barcelona, Ankara, etc.; it
become the norm towards which most great European cities
were developed or redeveloped in 1870s.
Sitte’s Artistic Planning

 Camillo Sitte, a Viennese architect and the originator


of modern city planning, reacted against
Haussmann’s formal and monumental planning, just
as some others.
 Abstract principles for the design of plazas, streets
and public squares from the analysis of historic
examples, with particular reference to the medieval
Italian city.
 In his book Der Stadbau
published in 1889 and
translated into English in 1965
under the name of City
Planning According to
Artistic Principles, he
examines the public and
aesthetic nature of old
European cities that have lived
from the pre-industrial age
without being damaged.
 He was concerned with city
planning which he considered
‘an art’ rather than ‘a scientific
object’. He restricted his
attention and concern to public
squares wherein, he believed,
lies the character of a city.
He appreciated the informal
irregularity of the old
squares, their being natural
and having picturesque
quality.
The City Beautiful

 The next distinguishable movement in city


planning - the American City Beautiful was
opposite in principle to Sitte’s artistic
planning.
 It was rather based on Haussmann’s
Boulevard Planning and first seen at Chicago
World Fair (World’s Colombian Exposition) in
1893.
 Chicago had been developing through the 19th century as a
great commercial center; and after the disastrous fire of 1871,
the architects were concerned with the development of fire-
resisting structures for the office and warehouses, such as steel-
framed high buildings, skyscrapers with elevators, etc. (1883 by
Le Baron Jenney).
 However, steel-frame and elevators solved the technical
problems but not the architectural ones: the whole city was
designed for the Exposition by a group of architects yet the
design looked like reproduction of Baroque.
 They also wanted Chicago to be known, not only as the
commercial center of America, but also as its cultural capital.
 To achieve this aim, they wanted to create a uniform and
ceremonious style - a style evolved from the highest civilization
in history - i.e. the Classical examples, rather than the current
medieval or any other form of romantic or picturesque art.
 The influences of the City Beautiful
Movement can be observed in England,
especially in the City Hall and Law Courts at
Cardiff, the Civic Center in Southampton, and
the Civic Offices in Portsmouth.
The Garden City
 The next great set of planning conventions, those of the Garden
City movement were intended to free the pressures on such
cities by decanting population to new and much smaller towns,
built well outside the city in virgin countryside.
 The chief exponent of this approach was Ebenezer Howard
whose main concern was to stem the drift of population-limited to
32.000 people-from rural to urban areas presenting the
alternatives as town and country magnets, each of which has its
attractions and corresponding disadvantages – inegration of town
and country.
 He characterizes the town as closing out nature and
catalogues many disadvantages such as the
isolation of crowds, distances from work, high
rents and prices, excessive hours of work, etc.
 He then balances these with some advantages,
such as social opportunity, places of
amusement, high wages, fresh air, low rents, etc.
 Howard’s notional plans, which were first
published in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to
Real Reform (1898), and were republished
as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, are based
very firmly on the idea of a central
park/garden of some five acres about
which all of the city’s main functions are
grouped concentrically. Indeed, major
components would all be segregated.
 The first ring around the central garden consisted of public buildings:
the town hall, concert and lecture halls, library, museum, art gallery and
hospital.
 These were surrounded by a ring of parkland, cut through radically by
the six principal boulevards and surrounded by the Crystal Palace - a
wide glass arcade which, in wet weather, is one of the favorite resorts
of the people.
 The next ring was a broad ring of houses each standing in its own
garden. The houses were greatly varied in character, some having
common gardens.
 The main ring of housing was surrounded by a Grand Avenue forming
a belt of green, an annual park dividing the main part of the town into
two concentric belts.
 The Avenue itself is divided into six radial boulevards occupied by
public schools, their surrounding play-grounds and gardens.
 The outer regions of the town would be occupied by factories,
warehouses, markets, coal yards, etc. all with access to circular
railway lines which surrounding the town enabling goods to be loaded
at various points.
 Beyond this there would be a full range of uses for agricultural
purposes.
 Howard’s Garden City can be seen as the
beginning of regional planning and
decentralization.
Neighborhood Planning
 Clarence Perry developed the idea of the neighborhood unit by
analyzing the things he found good - including gardening and
community participation - about living in a Long Island suburb named
Forest Hills Gardens.
 The neighborhood unit was focused on a community centre, a place for
debate and discussion.
 Crucial to Perry’s concept was the idea of day-to-day facilities: shops,
schools, playgrounds, etc. should be within walking distance of every
house. This in itself the overall size of a neighborhood, while heavy
traffic was kept out, confined to arterial roads which skirted around the
neighborhood.
 Perry estimated the optimum size for a neighborhood to be around
5000 people; large enough to provide for most people’s day-to-day
needs, yet small enough for a sense of community to develop.
 The general characteristics of the neighborhood unit were based
on the idea of:
- the super block - instead of the narrow, rectangular block
- the specialized roads planned and built - each for one use instead
of for all uses
- complete separation of pedestrians and vehicles
- houses turned around; living and sleeping rooms facing towards
gardens and parks, service rooms towards access road
- park as backbone of the neighborhood.
 In addition to the points above, cul-de-sacs/dead-end streets
were used for vehicular access to the fronts of the houses
The Modern Movement

 The modern movement in architecture during


the early part of this century has had a strong
influence on contemporary architects,
planners and urban designers.
 The urban design proposals of Le Corbusier
and Frank Lloyd Wright represent the polar
attitudes toward urbanization and urban
design.
Le Corbusier: Ville Radieuse
 Le Corbusier, being very critical of
traditional cities, attempted to convert the
city into park within which the actual
buildings would occupy only some %5 of
the land. He developed a contemporary
city – Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) –
for 3 million inhabitants; this city was to
be a city in a garden instead of being a
city with gardens. The fundamental
principles he put forward were:
- freeing the city from traffic congestion,
- enhancing the overall densities,
- enhancing the means of circulation,
- augmenting the area of planting.
 The second work, Plan Voisin for rebuilding Paris designed in
the 1920s but never constructed, illustrates the contrast
between traditional urbna density and the urban design of
Modernism.
 His design for a city is linear and nodal on a large scale grid,
proposing two kinds of housing immediately around the city
centre: terraces and apartment blocks.
 He also considered the traffic in the design of a city. According
to him, new forms of street must be designed so that the traffic
can flow freely at optimum speed.
 There were 3 important principles behind
Corbusier’s influence on modern urban space:
1. The linear and nodal building as a large scale
urban element – a principle applied physically to
define districts or social units
2. The vertical seperation of movement systems – an
outcome of Le Corbusier’s fascination with
highways and the city of the future
3. The opening up of urban space to allow for freeing
landscape, sun and light.
 Le Corbusier’s plans and perspectives
captured the imagination of architects, urban
designers and planners worldwide.
 In the 1960s particularly, a remarkable
number of them were enabled to make their
own cities look remarkably like Le Corbusier’s
perspectives with their motorways slashing
between their skyscrapers.
Frank Lloyd Wright:
Broadacre City
 As its name emphasizes the proposal of Wright was for a low-
density development of detached buildings. He envisioned a city
of small farms or garden home-steads. His scheme eliminated roads
as much as possible and attempted to bring the country into the city
rather than create parks.
 Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City plan gave an acre of land to
every household, but the inhabitants still depended for
communications on a motorway grid and a helicopter for every
family.
 Both of these architects have had a great
influence on the architectural profession and
the general public. In a sense, the both
expected and influenced two major kinds of
urban form existing today –especially in
American cities: the high-density urban
core and the low density suburb.
 Then the principles by which architects and
planners were to deal with the problems of
the 20th century were codified by CIAM
(Congres Internationaux d’Architecture
Moderne).
 Accordingly the city was divided into four
main functions: housing, work, recreation,
transport. Radical solutions were proposed
for each area.
RECENT URBAN PLANNING
THEORIES AND PRACTICES

RECENT APPROACHES TO
URBAN DESIGN
Two major themes were found in the Post-
modern reaction to the hegemony associated with
modern architecture:
 New Rationalism - Neo-Rationalism concern for
public open space over a preoccupation with individual buildings and incorporates
strongly defined geometric spaces as ordering devices
 ALDO ROSSI (ITALY)
 LEON & ROB KRIER (LUXEMBOURG)
 RICARDO BOFILL (SPAIN)
 New Empiricism – Neo-Empiricism PERCEPTUAL
AND SPATIAL QUALITIES OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
 KEVIN LYNCH
 ROBERT VENTURI
 GORDON CULLEN
 COLIN ROWE

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