Urban Planning and Design

Dr. Majd Musa

Jan. 29, 2024

This class contributes to the following Course
Learning Outcomes (CLOs):
CLO 1 – Identify major urban planning and design
theories and theorists, as well as matters relating to
the structure, tools, and practice of urban planning
and design.
CLO 2 – Outline the history of the city, its urban
planning approaches, its shape, and its image.
CLO 3 – Relate political, social, economic, and
cultural forces to the processes of city making.
Lecture Content
• Planned and Unplanned Cities:
o The planned city

o The unplanned city

o Debating the dichotomy of the planned and

unplanned cities
• Evolution of the Organic Pattern:
o What is an organic pattern?

o What determines the forms of organic cities?

Topography
Synoecism
Law and social structure
Planned and Unplanned Cities
 The Planned City

• At first, urban form analysis reveals two kinds of

cities.
• The first is the planned city: a designed city laid at
one moment with patterns determined by an
overseeing authority.
Until the 19th c., the planned city had a well-
ordered geometric pattern: a grid, a circle or
polygon with streets radiating from the center, or
a complex geometry combining both patterns.
 A 1683 plan of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
The city was the first in America to be configured as
a grid.
Palmanova, Italy, as designed in 1593.
 The Unplanned City

• The second kind of cities is the unplanned spontaneous

city, which is also called “grown,” “chance-grown,” or
“generated” (vs. “imposed”).
The presumption is that this city was not developed
with the help of designers or planners; it had no
master plan. Rather, it developed over a long time
influenced by how people lived their everyday lives.
The spontaneous city has irregular, non-geometric
organic form with curved streets and open spaces that
are randomly defined. It develops through processes
of “unplanned evolution” or “instinctive growth.”
Left: Irregular urban pattern of a spontaneous city.
Right: Regular pattern of a planned city.
 Debating the Dichotomy of the Planned
and Unplanned Cities
• The dichotomy of the planned and organic cities
is based on the issue of order and control.
Thus, depending on one’s perspective, one may
view the planned city as better than the
unplanned because of its formal discipline or may
denounce it for its rigidity.
One may disapprove of the random forms of the
unplanned city or celebrate these forms as
flexible, evolutionary, and responsive to
topography and the community’s ways of living.
• This dichotomy of city forms obstructs our
understanding of the city.
The planned city’s regularity is conditional.
Streets that appear on the plan as straight and
uniform may turn out not so in reality.
How we perceive the city’s geometric order
strongly depends on the way buildings relate to
the street line and their location on the lots.
Even when buildings are aligned along grid lines,
their masses and, particularly, heights can reduce
the effect of formal planning.
The geometric regularity of straight streets can be
enhanced by laws prescribing uniform setbacks; it
can be reduced by allowing flexible setbacks.
• How irregular an unplanned city is can be seen as
a matter of degree. What is perceived as an
arrangement with no order is often segments of
straight streets crossing at random angles, and
linear elements broken with angular bends. In
some cases, these elements become regular
enough to be considered a distorted grid.
Hence the blurring of the duality of urban forms
(the planned and unplanned).
• The planned and organic urban forms usually
coexist.
In Europe, the new additions to medieval historic
towns took regular forms.
The colonial power in North Africa interfered in
many old medinas, sometimes creating diagonal
boulevards and formal squares and other times
introducing new additions of regular geometric
forms.
Thus, we need to understand historic towns as an
intricate mesh: as a puzzle of interlocked
designed and spontaneous parts.
• The planned and spontaneous segments of
the city do not always juxtapose. Sometimes,
they transmute or metamorphose.
As time passes, a regular grid may change and
become almost hidden leaving a mere
palimpsest as new narrow winding streets
replace the older arrangement.
• This was the case of the transformation of the
formally planned Roman towns following the fall
of the Roman Empire.
The grid that the Romans adopted in planning
their cities was inflexible for human movement.
With no significant municipal control in the post-
Roman city, people created shortcuts through the
Roman blocks, freeing their movement from the
rigid geometric order.
 Transformation of a Roman colony into an Islamic city.
Left: Roman grid interrupted only by the amphitheater and
market. Center: Parts of the public space were appropriated
for houses, blocks were divided, and pathways were
introduced with no concern for the old orthogonal street
pattern. Right: The original layout became hardly
recognizable as public space was significantly reduced and
labyrinthine network of streets overwhelmed the old grid.
The Evolution of Organic Pattern
 What Is an Organic Pattern?

• The term “organic” that we use here to

describe the spontaneous city is not to be
taken in its biological sense, although we can
identify some similarities between cities and
living things.
• There are many visual parallels between plans
of cities and some organisms. Some urban
patterns resemble the arrangement of veins
on leaves.
Some urban patterns look like leaf veins
shown in this picture.
• There are also functional similarities between
elements of urban form and human organs. We
refer to open spaces in the city as “lungs”; the
city center as “the heart pumping blood (traffic)
through the arteries (the streets).”
• Another resemblance city theorists theorized
between the organic city and organisms is their
growth. Like plants and animals, it was argued,
organic cities should have a self-regulating
growth; they undergo processes of change and
adjustment; they can get sick and decay.
Titles using similarities between elements of urban
form and human organs.
• Here we agree with Kevin Lynch who points
out the difference between the city and living
things, “cities are not organisms … They do
not grow or change of themselves, or
reproduce or repair themselves” (cited in
Kostof, 1991, p. 53). It is humans who make
cities.
 What Determines the Forms of Organic
Cities?
• Regardless of how random a city’s form appears,
the city cannot be said to be unplanned.
• If not biology, then what determines the forms of
organic cities?
• Underlying the irregular spaces and labyrinthine
alleys is an order related to things such as land
features, the process through which the city was
generated, and social conventions.
Topography

Topography or natural landscape is one of the

most significant causes behind the shapes of
organic cities.
Natural harbors with long curvy background may result
in suitable street arrangements, creating a theater-like
shape.
Defensive cities on uneven sites used to have features
such as stepped streets and walls that followed
prominent contour lines.
Throughout history, there have been as much
cities in which the natural landscape was
amended as there have been cities working
with their natural landscape. River diversion,
hilltop leveling, and land reclamation are all
practices associated with city making.
For example, Machu Picchu, Peru, designed
the land on which it sits.
Man-made terraces in Machu Picchu (founded
around 15th c.), Peru.
In the West, the Netherlands is the most famous
place that redesigned its natural landscape. Only
a small number of Dutch cities are built on
naturally high ground. For most cities, the
ground was drained, consolidated, and raised
before building these cities.
 Dikes or levees (banks or embankments built to
confine water) are a significant element of Dutch
cities.
Synoecism
Another thing that may affect the form of an organic
city is synoecism: the administrative integration of
several close villages to form a town.
The form of cities generated through the process of
synoecism takes in the shape of the original
settlements and their road systems. The open spaces
between settlements are gradually replaced with
buildings, leaving some open spaces for markets and
communal centers.
Since the units being merged are traditional villages,
frequently the resultant town form will be “organic.”
Venice is a famous case of synoecism from the
early Middle Ages. A group of lagoon
communities seeking refuge from the turbulent
post-Roman period came together and united
their irregularly shaped islands creating Venice.
This process gave the city its irregular shape and
water streets.
A 1500 depiction of Venice, Italy.
Non-Western examples of synoecism include the
city of Calcutta, India, which was generated
through the merging of a group of neighboring
villages on the Hugli riverbanks.
Cities in Iran such as Kazvin and Qum also grew
out of the coming together of several villages.
Law and Social Structure
Topography and synoecism are physical factors,
which may determine the irregular form of the
organic city. Law and social structure are other
determinants of the shape of this city.
Here the traditional Islamic city provides a good
example. The irregular forms of urban pattern in
the Islamic city served and demonstrated a social
intention, which was valid in different periods
and geographic areas.
In the traditional Islamic city:
- City form needed to respect custom, ownership, and
visual privacy.
- There was no detailed prescription as to how to design
the city. But city residents were prohibited to do things
threatening social norms.
- The arrangement of doors and windows as well as
buildings’ height were determined based on the
concern for privacy.
- Visual corridors and urban vistas were avoided.
- Residential fabric consisted of introverted courtyard
houses grouped together. This arrangement made the
neighboring structures interdependent; matters such as
shared walls and maintenance of cul-de-sacs were
subject to legal arbitration.
 The cul-de-sac is conceptualized as a semiprivate space
used by residents of surrounding houses for ceremonial,
social, and recreational purposes. In the past in Medina,
Saudi Arabia, such semiprivate spaces used to have gates
with doors at their entrances.
- The residential fabric was more important
than the public space and street. The public
space was continuously negotiated and
rearranged as buildings jutted out over the
narrow streets.
- Older structures had priority over new ones.
In addition to implicit conventions regulating the
city, there existed written local building codes
and universal religious law derived from Qur’an
and Sunna.
Projections over the streets in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
Left: mashrabiyya projecting onto the street; right: a
second-floor chamber built over the street.
Few general rules applied to the Islamic city:
- The street’s minimum width must be 7 cubits
(around 3.5 m) to allow the passing of two
heavily loaded camels.
- Projections over the street must be at least 7
cubits above the street to allow the passage of
a person riding a camel.
Thus, despite its irregular form, the Islamic city
had a rational organization.