URBAN DESIGN

LATER URBAN THEORIES AND PRACTICES

 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). More significantly, the middle class realized
that the old regimes were obstacles to the new capitalist economic
system. This led to revolution in America and in France.
 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
 French architect Tony Garnier‟s industrial city plan was
based on rigorous zoning. By sitting housing area away
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. There was also a big gap between
Capital and Labor and new social problems. Overcrowding
in urban housing led to disease and death. Urgent action
had to be taken to prevent revolt and the loss of the
workforce. In order to improve the living conditions for the
poor urban masses, PUBLIC HEALTH ACTS were
culminated in 1875 in England.
 Public Health Acts mainly aimed at improving sanitation
and living conditions in general, for the poor urban masses
and they prescribed minimum standards for urban housing
with respect to the,
- level, width and construction of new streets and provision
for the sewerage thereof;
- structure of walls, foundations, roofs and chimneys for
securing stability and the prevention of fires and for the
purpose of health;
- sufficiency of space about buildings, to secure a free
circulation of air, with respect of ventilation of buildings;
- drainage of buildings.

These regulations affected the form and the design of urban

housing and so urban planning in England. Similar cases
and process of industrialization and urbanization can be
seen in many parts of the world.
 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; 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
corners 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.
 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.
 Therefore he attempted to 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 general, he disliked intensely the
boulevard approach which had been so
fundamental to Haussmann-like planning.
 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. Yet the
exposition was supported by some business men
who, having demonstrated their commercial
skills, now wanted to buy cultural respectability.
 They 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.
 Designed thus as it was in the Classical
manner, the Exposition, and so the city of
Chicago, naturally encouraged all those who
had been looking for a revival of that grand
approach to city planning.
Looking South across the Grand Plaza towards the Machinery Hall at the
World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
 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.
 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 urban density and the
urban design of Modernism.
 Although his ideas seem to be opposing to
Howard’s notion of the small-town Garden City,
Le Corbusier’s vision, in fact, had grown out of
Howard’s: he points out in his study that, nature
melts under the invasion of roads and houses and
the promised seclusion becomes a crowded
settlement, and the solution will be found in the
vertical garden city.
 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 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

 New Empiricism – Neo-Empiricism
 Neo-Rationalism

 TEAM 10 (a young group of second-generation of

European Modernists who moved towrad a more
contextual approach at least in concept and
attempt to re-define the underlying principles
and formal expression of urban space) ---------
REDEFINITION OF PRINCPLES AND FORMAL
EXPRESSION OF URBAN SPACE in 1950s

NEO-RATIONALISTS:
 ALDO ROSSI (ITALY)
 LEON & ROB KRIER (LUXEMBOURG)
 RICARDO BOFILL (SPAIN)
 Rationalism – promotes a concern for public open
space over a preoccupation with individual buildings
and incorporates strongly defined geometric spaces
as ordering devices. It looks at historic models and
classical spatial structures to derive principles for
linking old and new, high and low, and diverse
materials, colors, and textures for inspiration.
 Leon Kries‟s mission was to reconstruct the tradional
urban blocks as definers of streets and squares.
 Formal, multidimensional, horizontal pattern of spaces by
highlighting the qualities of public space.
 Neo-Empiricism

 HIGHLIGHTING PERCEPTUAL AND SPATIAL

QUALITIES OF THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT
 REPRESENTATIVES:
KEVIN LYNCH
ROBERT VENTURI
GORDON CULLEN
COLIN ROWE
 KEVIN LYNCH

 URBAN ANALYSER IN EMiPRICAL TERMS

 PRESENTED HIS PRINCIPLE RULES FOR
DESIGNING CITY SPACES AS:
 LEGIBILITY: THE MENTAL PICTURE OF THE CITY
HELD BY THE USERS ON THE STREET
 STRUCTURE AND IDENTITY: RECOGNIZABLE
COHERENT PATTERN OF URBAN BLOCKS,
BUILDINGS AND SPACES
 IMAGEABILITY: USER PERCEPTION IN MOTION AND
HOW PEOPLE EXPERIENCE THE SPACES OF THE
CITY
 ACCORDING TO LYNCH:
 SUCCESSFUL URBAN SPACE MEET THESE
REQUIREMENTS
 PARTS OF THE CITIES - “ELEMENTS OF URBAN
FORM” SHOULD BE DESIGNED ACCORDING TO
THESE REQUIREMENTS
 ROBERT VENTURI

 MOST OF THE OUTDOOR SPACES CREATED BY

MODERN MOVEMENT ARE LOST SPACES –
ISOLATED FROM ITS TOTAL SURROUNDINGS.
 GORDON CULLEN

 A TOWNSCAPE ARTIST
 EXPLORED THE EXPERIENCE OF SEQUENCE
THROUGH URBAN SPACE
 UNIQUE SENSE OF PLACE FROM STREET
LEVEL
 RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE OBJECT &
MOVEMENT
 THE EVENT OF ARRIVING AT / LEAVING
CITY SPACES
 COLIN ROWE

 A LEADING URBAN DESIGN EDUCATOR

 DILEMMA OF TEXTURE – COMPOSITE URBAN
PATTERN OF STREETS, BUILDINGS, AND OPEN
SPACES – THE FABRIC OF THE CITY
 The problem: Building as a free-standing object and
its disruptive effects on the continuity of these
urban patterns.
 He put forward a pluralist view of urban form, a collage
city that accomodates a range of ideas and visions.
 His urban design work is based on cubist geometries and
historic models of Rome and Florence etc. where
buildings as articulated solids are designed to
create positive voids.