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ELEMENTS OF HARMONIOUS SOCIETIES & CITIES
Half of humanity now lives in cities, and within two decades, nearly 60 per cent of theworld’s people will be urban dwellers. Urban growth is most rapid in the developingworld, where cities gain an average of 5 million residents every month. As cities grow insize and population, harmony among the spatial, social and environmental aspects of acity and between their inhabitants becomes of paramount importance. This harmonyhinges on two key pillars:
equity and sustainability
.Urban, city and town planning is the integration of the disciplines of land use planningand transport planning. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a lessdetailed level. Urban planning is concerned with the ordering and design of settlements,from the smallest towns to the world's largest cities. Based upon the origins of urban planning from the Roman (pre-dark ages) era, the current discipline goes back to thesynergy of the disciplines of urban planning, architecture and landscape architecture, withminor variations.Another key role of urban planning is urban renewal and re-generation of inner cities byadapting urban planning methods to existing cities suffering from long-terminfrastructural decay. Urban planning as an organized science has existed for less than acentury. However, most settlements and cities reflect various degrees of forethought andconscious design in their layout and functioning.Discovery of agriculture and the development of technology, particularly before the beginning of recorded history facilitated larger populations than the very smallcommunities of the Paleolithic times, and may have paved the way for the developmentof stronger, more assertive and coercive governments. A number of cities were laid outaccording to fixed plans in the pre-Classical and Classical ages, though many tended todevelop organically. Designed cities were characteristic of the totalitarian Mesopotamian,Harrapan, and Egyptian civilizations of the third millennium BC.The cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilization (in modern-dayPakistan and northwest India) are perhaps the earliest examples of deliberately planned1
 
and managed cities. The streets of these early cities were often paved and laid out at rightangles in a grid pattern, with a hierarchy of streets from major boulevards to residentialalleys. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Harrapan houses were laid out to protect from noise and enhance residential privacy; also, they often had their own water wells for probably both sanitary and ritual purposes. These ancient cities were unique inthat they often had drainage systems, seemingly tied to a well-developed ideal of urbansanitation.The Greek Hippodamus (c. 407 BC) is widely considered the father of city planning inthe West, for his design of Miletus; Alexander commissioned him to lay out his new cityof Alexandria, the grandest example of idealized urban planning of the Mediterraneanworld, where regularity was aided in large part by its level site near a mouth of the Nile.The ancient Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for militarydefense and civil convenience. A river usually flowed through the city, to provide water,transport, and sewage disposal. Many European towns, such as Turin, still preserve theessence of these schemes. The Romans had a very logical way of designing their cities.They laid out the streets at right angles, in the form of a square grid. All the roads wereequal in width and length, except for two. These two roads formed the center of the gridand intersected in the middle. One went East/West, the other North/South. They wereslightly wider than the others. All roads were made of carefully fitted stones and smaller hard packed stones. Bridges were also constructed where needed. The city wassurrounded by a wall to protect the city from invaders and other enemies, and to mark thecity limits. Areas outside of the city limits were left open as farmland. At the end of eachmain road, there would be a large gateway with watchtowers. A water aqueduct was builtoutside of the city's walls.Urban development in the Middle Ages, characteristically focused on a fortress, afortified abbey, or a (sometimes abandoned) Roman nucleus, occurred "like the annular rings of a tree" whether in an extended village or the center of a larger city often on high,defensible ground. A few medieval cities were admired for their wide thoroughfares andother orderly arrangements. Florence was an early model of the new urban planning,which rearranged itself into a star-shaped layout adapted from the new star fort, designedto resist cannon fire. This model was widely imitated, reflecting the enormous cultural power of Florence in this age. All this occurred in the cities, but ordinarily not in the2
 
industrial suburbs characteristic of this era which remained disorderly and characterized by crowded conditions and organic growth. In the 1990s, the University of Kentuckyvoted the Italian town of Todi as ideal city and "most livable town in the world", the placewhere man and nature, history and tradition come together to create a site of excellence.Many cities in Central American civilizations also engineered urban planning in their cities including sewage systems and running water.In developed countries (Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia), planning and architecture can be said to have gone through various stages of generalconsensus in the last 200 years. Around 1900, there began to be a movement for  providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments. The conceptof garden cities arose and several model towns were built. However, these were principally small scale in size, typically dealing with only a few thousand residents.It wasn't until the 1920s that modernism began to surface. Based on the ideas of LeCorbusier and utilizing new skyscraper building techniques, the modernist city stood for the elimination of disorder, congestion and the small scale, replacing them instead with preplanned and widely spaced freeways and tower blocks set within gardens. No large-scale plans were implemented until after World War II however. Throughout the late1940s and 1950s, housing shortages caused by war destruction led many cities around theworld to build substantial amounts of government-subsidized housing blocks. Planners atthe time used the opportunity to implement the modernist ideal of towers surrounded bygardens.By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners were coming to realize that theimposition of modernist clean lines and a lack of human scale also tended to sap vitalityfrom the community. This was expressed in high crime and social problems within manyof these planned neighbourhoods. Modernism can be said to have ended in the 1970swhen the construction of the cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in many countries, suchas Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and in their way moreconventional housing has been built. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy.This is the post-modernist era. Minimally-planned cities still exist. Houston is an exampleof a large city (with a metropolitan population of 5.5 million) in a developed country,3
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