URBAN PLANNING

ASSIGNMENT

NAME: MEGHA MADHU

VIII SEM B
USN: 4SN16AT036
ASSIGNMENT
1)Explain in detail:
a)Railroad tenement by Dumbbell
b)Utopian model by Robert Owen and Buckingham.
c)Industrial city by Tony Garnier.
RAILROAD TENEMENT BY DUMBBELL

TENEMENTS
• The tenement house is characteristic of most slum areas in urban centers such as new
York city. Although most were built during the second half of the 19 th century, a
substantial percentage still exists today.
• The typical plan progressed through several stages of development, generally defined as
type A) railroad plan ; type b) dumbbell plan and type c)the new law plan.

DUMBBELL PLAN
• The dumbbell tenement was similar to the railroad plan except that it was pinched in at
the center. This created courts, which permitted some light and ventilation into the center
of the building. Common toilet facilities were introduced on each floor in the public halls.
Bathing was restricted to a bathtub in the kitchen. Building coverages was between 80
and 90 percent of the lot.
RAILROAD PLAN
• The early, before 1850, railroad tenements consisted of actually two buildings on each lot.
• One was located in the front and the other at the rear. The court in between was for light
and air. All interior rooms had none.
• The later, after 1850, railroad plan had only one building on the lot but was not much
better as to converge, light, and ventilation.
• This was built full from lot line to lot line. For its entire depth the building covered
approximately 90 percent of the lot.
• On a typical floor, all interior rooms, which consisted of kitchens and bedrooms, had no
light or ventilation whatsoever. Out of a total of 12 rooms per floor, 8 rooms, or two –
thirds, were in this category.
• All the buildings were walk-ups and ranged from 5 to 7 storeys . No bathrooms were
provided, and a privy was located in the rear yard. The plan obtained its name railroad
because all the rooms were attached without corridors, and it was necessary to walk
through one to get to another.
RAILROAD TENEMENT-DUMBBELL PLAN
• In 1879, sparked by the increasing shortage of adequate housing for New York's poor
immigrants, the magazine The Plumber and Sanitary Engineer sponsored a design
competition.
• The dual objective was to create more housing and maximize landlord profits-both of
which were constrained by the Manhattan lot size of 25 by 100 feet.
• It was pointed out by a newly recruited health officials that "Man's inhumanity to man," is
nowhere more "observable than in this sacrifice of human life for the sake of gain.
• " The winner was James Ware's "dumbbell" design, so named for its narrow airshafts
running through the middle of the building on each side, yet it was essentially a front and
rear tenement connected by a long hall.
• Each dumbbell reached six stories and housed 300 people in its 84 rooms.
• Although the dumbbell did provide one window per room and airshafts admitted light and
air into the floors of tenement buildings, because of the narrowness of the shafts and the
height of the buildings, the shafts "simply [became] a stagnant well of foul air."
• More seriously, "tenants often use the air shaft as a receptacle for garbage and all sorts of
refuse and indescribable filth thrown out of the windows, and this mass of filth is often
allowed to remain, rotting at the bottom of the shaft for weeks without being cleaned
out.”
• Water-closets posed a second hazard in the new dumbbell design. Even as late as 1900, it
was not unusual for a family of four to share one water-closet. Reported one female
tenant, they "stink horribly. So, we use it as little as possible."
• Describing life on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, another tenant explained that
mothers usually began their day by cleaning house. The "garbage" problem was usually
solved by either "throwing it out the window on to the street below, or down the air-
shaft."
• One woman maintained that "in some cases it is almost a necessity to throw it out, the
premium on space is so high in their tiny kitchens, which hold wash-tubs, water-sink and
chairs and just room enough to turn about." It thus became evident by the turn of the
century that the new dumbbell tenements had only succeeded in exacerbating the very
problems it was created to solve.
• "Dumbbell" tenement construction ballooned after an 1879 housing law set new
minimum standards for lighting and ventilation. Thousands had been constructed by 1901.
UTOPIAN MODEL BY ROBERT OWEN AND BUKINGHAM.

SOCIAL REFORM UTOPIAS

• The four cities are, Andreae’s Christianopolis, Campanella’s Civitas Solis (City of the
Sun), Owen’s Villages of Co-operation and Buckingham’s Victoria. These four cities are
all described in the social reform literature, which attempted to address major social
and political problems of their time, including the disease and religious and political
conflicts that dominated the late sixteenth century and the early seventeenth century.
Robert Owen’s Villages of Co-operation
• Robert Owen was part owner and manager of New Lanark Mills, Scotland, and is
known as the Father of English Socialism. He addressed the Committee for Relief of the
Manufacturing Poor in 1817 to outline his solution to the national crisis of poverty and
homelessness that was a result of both the enclosure movement and the Industrial
Revolution.
• He later published a pamphlet entitled A Report to the Committee for Relief of the
Manufacturing and Industrial Poor that outlined a plan for Villages of Co-operation
(see Owen 1817).
• In this pamphlet, he supplied a sketch of the village. This architectural plan was later
revised in 1830 by Owen’s architect Stedman Whitwell (1972). Whitwell’s plan had
similar features to Owen’s original plan. It was Whitwell’s complete plans of the first
Village of Cooperation, New Harmony that was reconstructed for the survey.
Whitwell’s plan never came to fruition, and the inhabitants moved into the already
existing buildings and built new buildings without a consistent plan.
• This plan had one significant difference to the other cities that we considered: The
centre of the city contained a conservatory rather than a Temple or church.
• There is a similarity in this to More’s central gardens. The overall plan was a square;
the sides of the square were domestic apartments that were sufficient to house the
ideal size of these communities, which were 1,200 inhabitants in Owen’s original plan
and 2,000 inhabitants in Whitwell’s revised plan.
• In the middle of each of the rows of domestic apartments was a substantial building
that served as the main entrances and the locations for the libraries, schools, reading
rooms and lecture halls. Within the square were four public buildings that contained
the public kitchen, dining room and everything that is required for cooking and eating,
as well as the brew-houses, bake-houses, wash houses and laundries.
• Each one of the four public buildings had an immense tower that functioned as a
chimney for the fumes of the kitchens and industry but also as an observation platform
with a spiral staircase on the outside. At the corners of the complex were smaller circular
buildings that housed the gymnasiums. Outside of the square were gardens that were
surrounded with roads, and immediately beyond these were the buildings for mechanical
and manufacturing purposes.
James Silk Buckingham’s Victoria
• In 1849, Buckingham published National Evils and Practical Remedies, with the Plan of a
Model town (Buckingham 1849). This publication was presented as a solution to the
ongoing national crisis in England.
• Buckingham was a traveler and a onetime parliamentarian for Sheffield. He was a radical
reformer and was heavily influenced by Owen and the Christian Socialist movement.
• Buckingham’s town, Victoria, covered a square mile and consisted of eight concentric
rows. Four of these rows were domestic buildings, one row was for government offices
and mansions, and the other three were arcades for the shops, workshops and winter
promenades.
• The architecture of each of the domestic rows was different, and there was a
hierarchical structure to the town and its architecture. The working class lived in the
outer row, which consisted of two stories, and each side had 500 attached houses.
• The merchant class were located in the seventh row, which consisted of four floors
with 30 attached houses per side.
• In between these rows were buildings for community eating, meeting areas,
education and gymnasiums. In the centre was an octagonal tower that was 100 feet
in diameter and crowned by a spire of 300 feet in height.
• The main arteries divided the main square along lines of bilateral symmetry, and all of
roads were 100 feet broad. A main feature of Victoria’s architecture was the
walkways and colonnades.
• Each of the domestic rows were fronted with colonnades, and there were covered
walkways throughout the city that could be navigated above and below, making
communications throughout the town simpler and quicker.
INDUSTRIAL CITY BY TONY GARNIER
• Garnier ‘s proposal was an industrial city for approx. 35.000 inhabitants situated on a
area in southeast France on a plateau with high land and a lake to the north, a valley and
river to the south.
• He envisaged a town of segregated uses with a residential area, a train station quarter
and an industrial zone.
• Concept of zoning was strongly similar with Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of To-
morrow because he divided the city into three parts as well like Garnier.
• Garnier tries to take into account all aspects of the city including governmental,
residential, manufacturing and agricultural practices.
• The various function of the city were clearly related, but separated from each from by
location and patterns.
• The city of labor divided into Four main Functions: Work, housing, health and leisure.
• The public area at the heart of the city was grouped into three sections: Administrative
services and assembly halls, museum collections and sport facilities.
• Region of station is centre of the city and it includes all public trade facilities together.
• A railway passes between the factory and the city, which is on a plateau, and further up
are the medical facilities.
• The residential area is made up of rectangular blocks running east-west which gives the
city its characteristic elongated form. This is the location of the houses and the houses
was situated into the large green areas to benefit from sun and fresh air. The residential
districts are the first attempt towards passive solar architecture.
• Garnier had energy efficiently in mind as the city was to be powered by a hydroelectric
station with a dam which was located in the mountains along with the hospital.
• The industrial city resembles the ideal city in Emile Zola’s Travail. Assembly hall has
inspiration from it. Also Tony Garnier supported the variety of arts, so many artistic and
social facilities was thought.
• Another significant region was the hospital area. Medical practice of that time was
almost totally without the tools and treatments not in common use, but it had become
apparent that sunshine and pure air were helpful in overcoming many diseases.
• There was a movement toward breaking down big hospitals into units called pavilions,
thus giving patients close relationship to these amenities and making them feel more
relaxed than if they were in a huge crowded environment.
• The industrial city embraces new concepts in city planning: long,narrow lots running east–
west, buildings separated by wide open spaces, separate levels provided for pedestrians,
and houses with roof gardens.
• The renderings of Garnier’s project foreshadowed a new, sprawling urban scale defined by
the practical zoning requirements of the latest industrial and transportation technologies.
• Another title for the project was indeed“ City of Labor". So it is very clear, that modern city
planning had as source the idea of labor and production, on the basis of the industrial
revolution.
• Only three main functions have therefore been conceived by Garnier: production, housing
and health facilities.
• The dictatorship of production turned housing and health in the service of production.
• Workers had to be healthy and therefore housed well to stay stable and reliable in the
production process. Therefore we can say, the center of the conception of the modern city
is production.
• The classical conception of a city from where the urbanists started was the city as a place
of production.
• In the wake of the industrial revolution the city was conceived as a sequence of phases
conditioned by industrial labor.
• You start with an assembly line. Around the assembly line you build a factory. Around the
factory you build the homes of the workers. Around the homes you build shops,restaurants
and other services.
• Going against urban conceptions of his time,the architect developed the zoning concept,
dividing the city into four main functions:work,housing,health,leisure. The traffic system had
separate roads for vehicles and pedestrians,through‐roads,and access‐roads.
• Green spaces took up more than half of the city area. Set in the midst of these were loose
groupings of simple free‐standing apartment blocks,built of reinforced concrete using
industrial techniques, and affording plenty of air and light.
• Four main principles emerge: functionalism,space,greenery,and high sunshine exposure. In
France, Tony Garnier caught the modern currents in materials,structure,and composition
using which he evolved his masterful plan for a Citéindustrielle. In the industrial city,
reinforced concrete was to be used to create a modern city of modern buildings. The plan
called for the extensive use of reinforced concrete.