AR 443A: Intro to Urban and Regional Planning Eduardo F. Bober, Jr.

Week 5: The Emergence of Urban Planning

THE EUROPIAN PLANNING TRADITIONS

Planning as a tradition in Europe goes back to the Ancient Greeks. In the 19th century it produced
such celebrated designs as the reconstruction of Paris under Georges-Eugene Haussmaan (1890-1),
which imposed a new pattern of broad boulevards and great parks on the previous labyrinthine street
patterns. Visionaries who presented new ideas transforming town-planning into city-regional planning are
the following:

1. Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920)

The Linear City (La Ciudad Lineal) – proposed by Mata in 1882 to be developed along an axis of high-
speed, high intensity transportation from an existing city. His argument was that under the influence of new
forms of mass-transportation, cities were tending to assume such a linear form. His ambitious proposal is
running this linear city across Europe from Cadiz in Spain to St. Petersburg in Russia, a total distance of
1,800 miles.
The idea enjoyed some
popularity among planners
on the grounds that it has
some good qualities. It
corresponds to the need
to exploit costly
investments in new lines
of rapid communication; it
gives easy access to
nearby open countryside;
and it can respond
automatically to the need for further growth.

2. Tony Garnier (1869-1948), an architect

working mainly in the city of Lyon, produced
in 1898 – the same year as Howard’s was
published - a design for an industrial city
(Cite Industrielle) which, like Howard’s
garden city was to be a self-contained
settlement with its own industries and
housing close by. The Cite Industrielle was
never built.

3. Ernst May (1886-1970), an architect and

city planner developed a series of satellite
towns (Trabantenstadte) an open land
outside the built-up limits, and separated
from the city proper by a green belt. They
were remarkable for their detailed design treatment, in which May combined uncompromising use of the
then new functional style of architecture with free use of low-rise apartment blocks, all set in a park
landscape.
4. Charles Edouard Jeanneret (1887-1965), Swiss-born architect popularly known as Le Corbusier.
Among his notable designs produced for
city reconstruction or for new settlements
are his Unite d’Habitation (1946-52) at
Marseilles in France, and his grand project
for the capital City of the Punjab at
Chandigarh (1950-7), which is being
finished only after his death. His central
ideas on planning are contained in his
important books, The City of Tomorrow
(1922) and The Radiant City (La Ville
radieuse, 1933). The Radiant City
developed by Le Corbusier during the
1920’s and 1930’s is an idea of a city with
very high local concentrations of
population in tall buildings, which would
allow most of the ground spaces to be left
open. The cruciform tower blocks are designed to admit maximum light to the apartments. Dense flows of
traffic on the motorway-style roads are handled by complex interchanges. The following are propositions
based on his ideas:
1. The traditional city has become functionally obsolete, due to increasing size and increasing
congestion at the center. As the urban mass grew through concentric addition, more and more
strain was placed on the communications of the innermost areas, above all the CBD, which had the
greater accessibility and where all businesses wanted to be.
2. The paradox that the congestion could be cured by increasing the density. The key is that
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 percent – could and
should be left open.
3. The distribution of densities within the city.
4. New urban forms could 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.

Sources: Hall, Peter (1992). Urban and Regional Planning, 3rd Edition, Routledge, London

Credits: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archivo:Ciudad_lineal_de_Arturo_Soria.jpg
http://iamyouasheisme.wordpress.com/2008/08/10/that-human-scale/radiant-city/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/13253658@N03/1478136448/