15th INTERNATIONAL PLANNING HISTORY SOCIETY CONFERENCE

The City Center in Early Modern Planning

Carlos Feferman
Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo, UFRJ
cfeferman@gmail.com

ABSTRACT
The nineteenth-century urban debate is often characterized around the
attempt to reconcile rural and urban life. The search for an equilibrium
involving density, size, morals and culture culminates in the Garden City,
widely recognized as the most systematic and comprehensive expression of that
debate. Modernism builds many of its principles upon its underlying concepts a
synthetic, autonomous proposition, having a subdued density, which allowed
for distinct territorial separation and the creation of a controlled social
environment. A concurrent and not so evident debate remained open,
nonetheless. It concerns the development of large cities, mainly capitals, and
constitutes a divergent line, equally important for early modern planning. This
debate, which begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, will surface
in early twentieth century through a wide-ranging discussion on the
characteristics of modern life and the peculiar space which breeds it. The city
center is its main structuring element and symbolic expression.
Understanding the role of the city center within the growing metropolis
becomes a main issue in early twentieth century planning. In Cause and Effect
in the Modern City, presented at the Town Planning Conference (1910), H. V.
Lanchester investigates the centers gradual displacement and reaccommodation as a result of city growth. The new center represents
burgeoning life in large cities and the increasing administrative and financial
importance of the metropolis. In the mid 1910s, Auguste Perret envisions a
monumental center containing high-rises and large open spaces. This image will
inspire Le Corbusier to review his outlook on urbanism and to accommodate the
new center within a large-scale plan. He addresses the issue specifically in Le
Centre des Grandes Villes, presented in Strasbourg (1923). A similar effort can
be seen in H. G. del Castillos adapted version of the Spanish linear city (1919),
where the addition of a larger center aims to align the original model,
proposed by Arturo Soria y Mata in the 1880s, with the contemporary debate.
For these authors, the city center plays a key-role in urban differentiation and
should coordinate the spatial equation.
The metropolis thus presents a singular problem, setting itself apart from the
smaller scale planning modeled upon the Garden City. The new character of
urban life, so sharply portrayed by Georg Simmel, needed a new planning
response. Our work proposes to investigate how the modern planners above

Cities, nations and regions in planning history

responded to the new urban phenomena, mainly through their understanding of

the role of the city center.

The nineteenth-century urban debate is often characterized around the

attempt to reconcile rural and urban life. The search for an equilibrium
involving density, size, morals and culture culminates in the Garden City,
widely recognized as the most systematic and comprehensive expression of that
debate. Modernism builds many of its principles upon its underlying concepts: a
synthetic, autonomous proposition, having a subdued density, which allowed for
distinct territorial separation and the creation of a controlled social
environment. A concurrent and not so evident debate remained open,
nonetheless. It concerns the development of large cities, mainly capitals, and
constitutes a divergent line, equally important for early modern planning. This
debate, which begins in the second half of the nineteenth century, will surface
in early twentieth century through a wide-ranging discussion on the
characteristics of modern life and the peculiar space which breeds it. The city
center is its main structuring element and symbolic expression.
In many ways, the Garden City represents the climax of a long series of
empirical investigations which dominated the second half of the nineteenth
century and aimed at identifying and rearranging the fundamental elements of
the existing city. As is well-known, the model presents a clear reordering of
those elements, providing a vision of unity while keeping each territory distinct
within the plan. As a planning strategy, it presents itself in opposition to the
existing cities and proposes a shift towards autonomous settlements. Since its
arrangement was so tightly conceived, a transition from old cities to Garden
City would involve gradually abandoning the former.
There is a growing perception, in the first two decades of the twentieth
century, that differences in urban scale generate different urban problems. In
terms of scale, the Garden City lies halfway between rural settlements and the
Metropolis. Howards choice of a median scale is determinant of its structure.
The Garden Citys population limit (32,000) is well established and plays a
fundamental role in the overall control of spatial and social development.
Though the model tries to mediate between the urban phenomena of large
cities and the more controlled, low-density rural life, it gradually became
evident that it could not respond to some of the more dynamic aspects of the
metropolis.
Howards intention of bringing together the positive qualities of rural and urban
life missed out on the emerging character of life in large cities. The common
reinterpretation of the garden city as garden suburb, in the 1910s, reflects the
perception that its scale was very similar to that of the residential suburbs.
Such adaptation of the original principles to the growing metropolis will prompt
Howards criticism of the suburbanization of his ideas, as portrayed in his

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articles in the Garden City Review during the 1910s. Though Howard was
correct in seeing this as a fragmentation of his original model from a structural
standpoint, its median spirit was integrally present in the garden suburb.
An investigation of scale and its relationship to the different forms of
socialization can be found in Georg Simmels Soziologie (1908). In the chapter
the quantitative determination of the group, Simmel observes that the historic
socialist experience pertains to smaller, more controlled environments, while
the large city is associated with individuality and new social relations: Thus,
we can observe that socialist and near-socialist orders were only viable in very
small circles and that they have invariably failed in larger ones. [SIMMEL,
Soziologie, p. 47] This correlation between scale and social ideal places the
utopian plans in new perspective and reflects the growing awareness of the
metropolis as a place which breeds peculiarity. Simmel goes on to describe the
different measures, forms and organs [Massregeln, Formen und Organe] which
must be developed when the social group attains a certain size. He sees growth
as generating unavoidable differentiation (Differenzierung) of the individual
functions and demands. [SIMMEL, Soziologie, p. 48] These observations
correlate with the spatial differentiation observed in the large European cities.
Five years earlier, in Metropolis and Mental Life (1903), Simmel had already
observed the peculiar qualities of the large city, its effect on the individual and
its consequences on social form. The metropolis thus presents a singular
problem, setting itself apart from the smaller scale plans modeled upon the
Garden City. The new character of urban life, so sharply portrayed by Simmel,
needed a new planning response.
Though the rural-urban equation no longer responded to the new complexity of
the early twentieth century debate, a renewed interest in the peculiar qualities
of the Metropolis and its relationship to the city center evokes the nineteenth
century empirical analysis of urban phenomenon. In Cause and Effect in the
Modern City, presented at the Town Planning Conference (London, 1910) Henry
Vaughan Lanchester suggests a critical investigation into the causes that have
resulted in the various types of cities. [LANCHESTER, p. 232] He describes the
dynamic phenomena which shape large cities:
We have the original city gradually taken up by commerce and exchange, the
residential districts filling up by degrees the spaces between the star points
composed of mills or factories, and the retail traders following along the main
radial arteries. The most attractive district will naturally be selected by the
wealthy, and the others will secure occupants on a basis of necessity or
convenience. The governing or official centre, unless firmly fixed by tradition,
will slip into a position between the commercial centre and the wealthy
quarters, while the leading places of entertainment will gravitate in the same
direction. (LANCHESTER, 1910, p. 233)

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The analysis suggests that the existing city is not a static entity: the expressions
filling up by degrees; gradual taking up; slipping into position and gravitation
describe a dynamic territorial transformation. These phenomena, which
determine spatial structure, might be harnessed towards planning.
Lanchesters analysis is synthesized in a diagram much similar to Howards
Garden City representations. [IMAGE 01] The overall vision which characterized
Howards diagrams is transferred to the representation of the existing city. The
center plays a key role in the dynamic transformation.
IMAGE 01
LANCHESTER:
diagram
representing forces
that shape the city:
growth, gradual
displacement of
the center and
transformation of
the suburbs. (1910)
SOURCE:
LANCHESTER, in.
Transactions of the
Town Planning
Conference.

Like Simmel, Lanchester emphasizes the relationship between the new

dynamics and a communal ideal: for the distribution of its component parts
and the subdivision of purpose that distinguishes the modern city one must
admit an economic basis, but the subsequent way in which these parts are
handled depends, as previously stated, on the quality of the ideal, or rather on
the resultant of the many ideals appertaining to the community.
[LANCHESTER, p. 233]. His analysis of the gradual displacement of urban
territories is both wide-ranging and specific. It presents a sophisticated
example of early urban modeling: one which unites distinct parameters, such as
scale (the metropolis), relative territorial position (the center; industrial zone;
residential zone), and social profile (the liberal strata emerging in the larger
European cities).
The transformations presented by Lanchester do not belong to just any city.
They are typical of large cities, mainly capitals, and are related to
administrative, cultural and financial functions. The growth of a liberal class is
the main distinction between the Metropolis and the medium and small sized
agglomerations. In Simmel, the subject is portrayed mainly through the

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discussion of individualism, while in Lanchester, through the theme of mobility

in its different forms: not only transport (from the residential suburb to the
financial center) but also mobility as territorial displacement, such as the
gradual reaccommodation of the residential areas, mainly within the suburbs.
Mobility is represented in its relationship to social profile and has the center as
referential element.
The city center is thus brought back into the equation with new structural
significance. Though Howards model has a center a well-defined one,
geometrically its importance is mainly administrative and unchanging. And,
despite its overall order based on social unity and functional separation, the
Garden City would have seemed static when compared to the burgeoning life of
the metropolis described by Simmel, or to the phenomenal transformations
modeled by Lanchester. Within this new and changing context, the Garden City
will remain an important reference precisely because of its stable qualities and
its median scale, allowing planners to gauge the transformative forces of
different urban phenomena.
The city center is thus identified by some planners as a key element which
distinguishes the small and medium-sized ideal city types (such as proposed by
Howard) from the large-scale city. During the 1910s and early 1920s important
efforts will be made to capture the essence of the new center and to
understand its role in planning. In the mid-1910, a remarkable vision is
presented by Auguste Perret: a monumental center with high-rises and large
open spaces rationally disposed. [IMAGE 02] It tries to capture the new spirit
identified by the authors examined above.
The symbolic significance of Perrets monumental center will have great impact
on Le Corbusier. He will attempt to transpose it to an autonomous plan, the
Ville Tours of ca. 1915. [IMAGE 03] The result is unrefined: a center with highrises grafted into a lower density medium, which historians identify with the
Garden City. The operation reinforces the idea that the monumental center is
an element which had been overlooked, and is brought into an equation still
largely dependent on Howards model.

Cities, nations and regions in planning history

IMAGE 02
Auguste Perret: city center with high-rises
(cits-tours).
SOURCE:
http://eras3.free.fr/html_fr/perret.html

IMAGE 03
Le Corbusier, Ville Tours. (ca. 1914-1915)
SOURCE: TURNER. La Formation de Le
Corbusier, p. 149.

A more refined attempt is made in the Ville Contemporaine (1922), a plan for 3
million inhabitants. There, Le Corbusier distinguishes between the liberal strata
of the population and the working class, mainly according to their daily
displacement.
A.) The urban, those living in the center (cit) that have business and reside
in the city.
B.) The suburban, those who work in the periphery, in the industrial zone and
that do not go to the city (ville); they live in the garden-city (cit-jardin).
C.) The mixed, those who offer their work in the city center (cit des
affaires) but who raise their family in the garden city.
To class a, b, c (and by classing, we mean the virtual transmutation of known
species) is to attack the problem of urbanism at its root, for it entails the
placing of the three units and their extensions, consequently posing and solving
the problem of the:
1.

Cit, business center and urban residences.

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2.

The industrial city, and the garden-cities (transports).

3.

The garden-cities and the daily transport.

(Le Corbusier, 1924, p. 159)

Interestingly, Le Corbusier reserves the term urban precisely for those who
have a freer spatial fruition and work in the city center, justifying its character.
The industrial workers, by contrast, are termed suburban, and have more rigid
mobility needs, associated mainly with the industries in the outskirts. The
financial center (cit des affaires), a typical feature of the Metropolis, has a
clear structuring role and is directly linked to the movement of a liberal class.
The subdivision into urban, suburban and mixed denounces the difficult task of
combining two distinct city types: the industrial city, with its more rigid
routines, and the metropolis, with its cosmopolitan character.
A similar arrangement had been proposed three years earlier by the Hilarin
Gonzalez del Castillo, a Spanish diplomat/planner, who worked closely with
Arturo Soria y Mata in the development of the Linear City theory. Soria y Matas
model had been criticized for having an essentially anti-urban character and the
linear development was said to be dispersive, mostly due to the absence of a
recognizable center. During the 1910s Castillo will try to respond to this
problem through an investigation of the city center and its economic and
cultural role. In 1919, he presents his own version of a linear city: the Cit
Linaire Belge, having as main characteristic the addition of a fully functional
center. [IMAGE 04]

IMAGE 04
H. G. del Castillo: Cit Lineaire Belge (1919).
SOURCE: George Collins. Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Lineal, pp. 32-33.

Castillos description of the Cit Linaire Belges city center shows its
importance in structuring the entire plan. Its social and economic profile
conforms to the contemporary metropolis:

Cities, nations and regions in planning history

All urban agglomeration is a living organism. As the human organism has a

heart that pumps blood and carries activity, life and movement to the whole
body, so the city needs a center of activity that irradiates urban life and
business life. The planned heart of the Cit Linaire Belge, which I have named
Forum, will have, like the ancient roman forum, a triple aspect of place of
amusement, center of public life and business center. (H. G. del Castillo, 1919,
p. 14)

Castillo also refers to his city center as the urban zone, as would Le
Corbusier, in 1923, and distinguishes it from the industrial zone. He divides
the population into urban, suburban and rural and presents a similar synthesis
between industrial city and the contemporary metropolis.
The problem of city growth and extension under discussion throughout Europe
revolved mainly around the suburban territory, often restricted by the still
remaining fortified walls as was the case in Paris, until early in the twentieth
century. Spanish urbanism brings to the debate its experience in city
extensions: the ensanches. This nineteenth century idea has an important
characteristic: it is both autonomous in structure and interdependent of the
existing city. Though Cerdas Barcelona and Madrid plans are often seen as
quasi-autonomous objects, a closer look reveals intricate relationship to the
existing city and its center. The Barcelona plan, for example, absorbs the old
city and port areas as symbolically and economically-specific parts of the
integral plan, and preserves their centrality. The same can be observed in Soria
y Matas Ciudad Lineal around Madrid, with its development anchored on the
Spanish capital, despite claims of independence.
By the early twentieth century the linear development around Madrid had
consolidated its own peculiar characteristics. It borrowed the character and
importance of the existing center (the capital, Madrid) integrated within the
development of the plan. The Ciudad Lineal development is, therefore, very
distinct from the image of an autonomous plan, which the linear city came to
be associated with during modernism. Though Soria y Mata insisted that this was
only a provisional and partial manifestation of his idea its true conception
would be a fully autonomous development it is precisely this hybrid solution
which approximates the Spanish linear city to the early twentieth century
debates concerning the large city phenomena.
The linear city allowed for new strategies of extension based on its peculiar
geometric structure seemingly, ones which could deal with the restrictive
character of the suburban ring.
A system for uniting existing urban
agglomerations is one of the theoretical forms of the Spanish linear city
proposed by Soria y Mata and refined by Castillo. The strategy can be observed
both in the Cit Linaire Belge and in Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin (1925). [IMAGE
05] Though the result seems maladroit, it is part of the investigative process of

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alternative positioning of the center in relationship to the larger plan, while

allowing for future growth.

IMAGE 05
Comparison between new plan and existing city in the Cit Linaire Belge (1919) [LEFT]
and Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin (1925) [RIGHT]. Similar strategies can be observed, such as
the type of transition between old tissue and extension plan, as well as internal patterns.
SOURCE: CASTILLO. Cit Linaire Belge; LE CORBUSIER ; Pierre Jeanneret. Oeuvre
Complte de 1910-1929, p. 110.

The Plan Voisin and the Cit Linaire Belge point, furthermore, to the still
important role of the existing city. These radical interventions, which take into
account the tissue of the existing city, reinforce the debate which gained
momentum in the two preceding decades, with Simmel and Lanchester among
others. To take into account the forces within the growing Metropolis went one
step beyond the idealized, somewhat frozen plan proposed by Howard. We thus
see that the development from the rural-urban debate toward the modernism
of the 1930s is not a constant progression towards autonomy, or a constant
distancing from the existing city. A continued review of the large city
phenomenon revealed new forces and social manifestations still to be fully
understood.
Despite its limitations, the linear extension is an alternative to the concentric
development, largely based on the suburb, and partly responds to the new
growth dynamics sought by planners. Castillos new center builds upon the
logic of extension developed by Soria y Mata. The city center appears as a
fundamental element from which the structural lines extend. A similar
structure can be observed in Le Corbusiers Ville Contemporaine. The two
examples seem to have attained a structural precision comparable to Howards
Garden City, without the restrictiveness of the concentric rings. [IMAGE 06]

Cities, nations and regions in planning history

IMAGE 06
Comparison between diagrams showing the fundamental structure of the Cit Linaire
Belge (Castillo, 1919) [LEFT] and the Ville Contemporaine (Le Cobusier, 1922) [RIGHT].
Despite differences in size, strategies are similar: accommodation of a liberal center;
positioning of the residential areas; transport structure; and an open and linear extension
pattern. SOURCE: CASTILLO. Cit Linaire Belge; LE CORBUSIER: Urbanisme (plan).

The linear city theory had been brought to France by George Benoit-Levy, who
presented the publications containing Soria y Matas and Castillos Linear City
developments to Le Corbusier, during the late 1910s. [FEFERMAN, ch. 4] The
importance of the Spanish strategies for Le Corbusier go beyond physical
similarities. They present well-structured alternatives even if in theory to
the vegetative growth on the suburban borders, which took place in many
European cities. They also presented an alternative relationship to the existing
city and to the role of the city center.
Between the Ville Contemporaine and the Plan Voisin, Le Corbusier presents
the study Le Centre des grandes Villes in the Strasbourg congress O en est
lUrbanisme en France et lEtrange (1923). The study, which would become a
chapter in his Urbanisme, examines the role of the center in countering urban
dispersion:
The municipalities and the mayors of large cities worry over the problem of the
suburbs and seek to attract the population that invades our capitals outward.
These efforts are praiseworthy, but incomplete. They do not breach the main
subject: the city Center. One takes care of the athletes muscles, but does not
realize that his heart is sick (). It is good to attract the population to the
periphery, but one must remember that each day, at the same time, the
hordes that would be better lodged in the cits-jardins, will have to enter the
city center. (Le Corbusier, 1923)

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For Le Corbusier, during the 1920s, the fundamental problem in articulating

the overall structure of the plan remains that of the role of the center and its
position relative to the population movement. This fundamental problem will
lose some importance with the Ville Radieuse, a plan of the early 1930s, where
the administrative center is displaced from its central position, and acquires a
subdued role similar to the Garden City center. Interestingly, this change aligns
itself with the socialist criticism of the center as representing the capitalist
city, as appears in the 1929-30 debates collected by Anatole Kopp. As we have
seen, this is well justified by the association of city center and business
district/liberal strata which characterized the portrayal of the metropolis in the
early twentieth century.
The socialist urbanist Nikolai Ladovsky referring directly to the Strasbourg
presentation, criticizes Le Corbusier, classifying his plans as essentially static.
The fortress cities of the Middle Ages, Howards Garden City, Unwins
satellite-city system, Le Corbusiers Plan Voisin for Paris, all these planning
schemes can be grouped, despite the apparent differences in form and
function, within a single type: the static form. [LADOVSKY, 1930, p. 211] He
calls for a dynamic urban structure associated by some with the linear city. The
problem, though, is not necessarily that of a linear plan, but of the removal of
the center from the linear structure.
Not surprisingly, many of the socialists will attack the notion of a city center in
the late 1920s and early 1930s. The disurbanist propositions are a literal
translation of an entirely non-hierarchic plan. They propose not only
decentralization, but the complete abolishment of the city center. Their
position acquires metaphoric contours: the center would be described as the
epitome of capitalist culture and a breeding ground for undesired individualism.
The removal of the city center, proposed by some socialist urbanists as a way
toward a more dynamic development will be accompanied by a regression in
density and scale, often beyond that which had been established in Howards
Garden City.

Thus, urbanists sought to investigate the character of the large scale center
while trying to attach social significance to it, in the first decades of the
twentieth century. These pre-CIAM debates portray the city center as a
phenomenon which had to be investigated empirically. They represent a gradual
awareness of the relationship between city scale and social vision, and are part
of an attempt at large scale planning which would encompass the cosmopolitan
life emerging in some of the European cities of the early twentieth century.
The historic role of the city center is key to the gradual construction of a
discourse against the existing city which came to be associated with

Cities, nations and regions in planning history

modernism. As the modern idea of an autonomous plan became more and more
consolidated, so would the original relationship with the existing city be
repressed. The debate remains latent and the original role of the center will
reemerge in different ways within modernism, ultimately including attempts to
recreate the diversity characteristic of the existing city.

REFERENCES:
CASTILLO, Hilarion G. del. Projet de Cit Linaire Belge. Madrid, Imprenta de la
Ciudad Lineal, 1919.
FEFERMAN, Carlos. A Cidade Linear: representaes de um modelo no incio do
sculo XX. Rio de Janeiro, PROURB-FAU, UFRJ, 2007. [Thesis]
LADOVSKY, Nikolaj Aleksandrovitch. La Structure Urbaine Dynamique. (1930)
In : KOPP, Anatole. Architecture et Mode de Vie, textes des annes vingt en
U.R.S.S. Grenoble, PUG, 1979
LANCHESTER, H. V. Cause and Effect in the Modern City. In: Transactions of
the Town Planning Conference, 1910.
LE CORBUSIER. Le Centre des grandes Villes. In : O en est lUrbanisme en
France et lEtranger. [247-257] Strasbourg, 1923.
LE CORBUSIER. Urbanisme. ditions Crs, Collection de "L'Esprit Nouveau",
Paris, 1924.
SIMMEL, Georg. Sociologie : tudes sur les formes de la socialisation. Paris, PUF,
1999.