PLAN 2

2:30-4:00 PM TTH

(1844-1920)

JEMVI BECARO
BS-ARCH4D

AR. RIALINO ALISBO

INSTRUCTOR
Biography of Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920)

Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920) was an internationally

important Spanish urban planner whose work remains
highly inspirational today. Engineer and Spanish
mathematician born in Madrid in 1844 and died in this
city in 1920.

Soria was a remarkable engineer, the first in Spain that

was faced with several technological innovations of
great complexity.

In order to prepare couple entry to the school of

engineers of roads, Soria studied mathematics with
Manuel Becerra. He entered the school at the beginning
of the Decade of the sixties, where regular Augusti-Louis Cauchy reading about the existence
of five classes of Polyhedra, aroused his interest in geometry.

His theories on urban planning showed a simple mechanistic, common to the theories of the
time planning. His idea of town linear as a function of a spinal transport system was based on
the notion of Herbert Spencer's the line straight as the line of least resistance. The set link of
urban local belts continuous for geometrically regular regional networking is an anticipation
of the modern theory of the "central square". According to the evolutionary analogy, Soria
was considered the linear city as more highly developed than traditional amorphous cities, a
vertebrate among invertebrates. There are numerous articles on urban planning in its
magazine, the linear City (1897-1932) and in Madrid of urbanization company publications.

CONTRIBUTION:
He is most well-known for his concept of the Linear City (Ciudad Lineal) for application
to Madrid and elsewhere. The main street in the district has his name, Arturo Soria street.

Arturo Soria y Mata's idea of the Linear City (1882) replaced the traditional idea of the city as
a centre and a periphery with the idea of constructing linear sections of infrastructure - roads,
railways, gas, water, etc.- along an optimal line and then attaching the other components of
the city along the length of this line. As compared to the concentric diagrams of Ebenezer
Howard and other in the same period, Soria's linear city creates the infrastructure for a
controlled process of expansion that joins one growing city to the next in a rational way,
instead of letting them both sprawl.

Ciudad Lineal, Madrid

The linear city design was first developed by Arturo Soria y Mata in Madrid, Spain during the 19th
century, but was promoted by the Soviet planner Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin in the late 1920s.
(Milyutin justified placing production enterprises and schools in the same band with Engels' statement
that "education and labour will be united".)

The linear city was an urban plan for an elongated urban formation. The city would consist of
a series of functionally specialized parallel sectors. Generally, the city would run parallel to a
river and be built so that the dominant wind would blow from the residential areas to the
industrial strip. The sectors of a linear city would be:
1. a purely segregated zone for railway lines,
2. a zone of production and communal enterprises, with related scientific, technical and
educational institutions,
3. a green belt or buffer zone with major highway,
4. a residential zone, including a band of social institutions, a band of residential buildings and a
"children's band",
5. a park zone, and
6. an agricultural zone with gardens and state-run farms (sovkhozy in the Soviet Union).

As the city expanded, additional sectors would be added to the end of each band, so that the city
would become ever longer, without growing wider.

Objectives of the linear city:

 To create less populated suburbs

 To preserve individualism
 To make the nature part of the city
 To solve the problems of transport: Its main objective was to make the trips between the country
and the city quicker.

Streets had to be 200m long and 20m wide, and the centre line of the street had to connect with the
different blocks of houses, all of regular shapes; squares, rectangles or trapeziums. The city should grow
parallel to the main street.
OTHER WORKS:

He first introduced the first tram (trolley

car/cable car) in Madrid and also a
suburban train. In 1875 he founded in
Madrid the first tram ("stations and
markets"), in accordance with his idea
that urban transport systems function was
to provide effective liaison between
consumers and the market. He also
invented the tram's ring-road and
designed an underground railway line. In
1877, the year following the invention of
Graham Bell, he designed a system of
urban telephone adapted in Madrid. He
designed an automatic printer which
composed his readings, as well as a
system of indicators electrically linked to the floods of the rivers.

References:

http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Arturo_Soria_y_Mata

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_city

https://www.slideshare.net/rosacomenius/the-garden-city