Ebenezer Howard

Author of Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform

- Garden City of Tomorrow one of the most important books in the history of urban planning.

cluster with a mother town of 58,000 to 65,000 with smaller garden cities of 30,000 to 32,000 each with
permanent green space separating the cities with the towns serving as horizontal fence of farmland; rails and
roads would link the towns with industries and nearby towns supplying fresh food.

Idea of Howard:
all of the industry was decentralized deliberately from the city or at least from its inner sectors.
new town was built around the decentralized plant.
Combining working and living in a healthy environment.
the first garden cities.

Who influenced Howard?:
EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD had advocated the planned movement of population.
JAMES SICK BUCKINGHAM- developed the idea of a model city.
ALFRED MARSHALL- invented the idea of the new town as an answer to the problems of the city.

Howard advocated the concept of Social City polycentric settlement, growth without limit, surrounded by a
greenbelt; town grows by cellular addition into a complex multi-centered agglomeration of towns set against a
green background of open country.

The 3 magnets in his paradigm depicted both the city and the countryside had a indisoluble mixture of advantages
and disadvantages the city has the opportunities offered through jobs and urban services of all kinds, which
resulted in poor natural environment; the countryside offered an excellent natural environment but virtually no
opportunities of any kind

Garden City combined the advantages of the town by way of access and all the advantages of the country by way
of the environment without any of the disadvantages of either. Achieved by planned decentralization of workers
and their places of employment thus transferring the advantages of urban agglomeration en bloc to the new
settlement.

The Garden City Association
established by Howard in 1899

Letchworth:
first Garden City designed by Raymond Unwin & Barry Parker in 1902
- Consisted of 4,500 acres (3000 for agriculture, 1500 for city proper)

Welwyn, 1920 (by Louis de Soisson) - brought formality and Georgian taste

Followers of Howard:
SIR FREDERICK OSBORNE
RAYMUND UNWIN
BARRY PARKER
- Hampstead Garden Suburbs opened in 1907
meant only for housing but with a variety of housing types lined along streets with terminating axes on civic
buildings in a
large common green
- Wythenshawe - called the 3rd garden city meant only for housing but with a variety of housing types lined along
streets with terminating axes on civic buildings in a large common green

Modifications on Howards principles:
- Background of open space instead of greenbelts (adaptation of inter-urban railway)
- Dividing the town into clearly articulated neighborhood units

Ernst May
Germany city planner and architect

Ernst May (1886-1970), developed a series of satellite towns (Trabantenstadte) on open land outside the built-up
limits, and separated from the city proper by a green belt.

May combined uncompromising use of the then new functional style of architecture with a free use of low-ride
apartment blocks, all set in a park landscape.

May's "brigade" of German architects and planners established twenty cities in three years, including
Magnitogorsk

successfully applied urban design techniques to the city of Frankfurt, "one of the most remarkable city planning
experiments in the twentieth century".



1844:

Arturo Soria Y Mata Spanish Engineer
Suggested the idea of Linear City from Cadiz, Spain across Europe through St. Petersburg, Russia in which he
proposed that the logic of linear utility line should be the basis of all city lay-out. Houses and buildings could be set
alongside linear utility systems supplying water, communications and electricity. Proposed high-speed, high-
intensity transport from an existing


Tony Garnier, 1868-1948 (Une Cite Industrielle )
- like Howards garden city, was to be a self- contained new settlement with its own industries and housing close
by.
- Locational features may have been a precursor to modern zoning
- Ideas and theories adopted by Dutch Architect JJP Oud in the design of Rotterdam

THE CITY BEAUTIFUL ERA (1900 to 1945)

Daniel Burnham Father of American City Planning
spearheaded the movement with his design for Chicago and his famous words: make no little plans
- Influenced by the world fairs of the late 19th century, like the 1891Columbian Exposition in Chicago
- Emphasis was on grand formal designs, with wide boulevards, civic spaces, arts, etc.
- Also credited for the designs of San Francisco and Cleveland

Golden era of urban design in the US; according to Burnham, city was totally designed system of main circulation
arteries., a network of parks and clusters or focal buildings or building blocks of civic centers incl. City hall, a
country court house, a library, an opera house, a museum, and a plaza

Total concentration on the monumental and on the superficial, on architecture as symbols of power, and an
almost complete lack of interest on the wider social purposes of planning. Planning was intended to impress or for
display.

Daniel Burnham wrote Chicago Plan but was heavily criticized & referred to as centro-centrist; based on business
core with no conscious provision for business expansion in the rest of the city; planned as an aristocratic city for
merchant princess; not in accord with the realities of downtown real estate development which demanded
overbuilding and congestion; utopian
- castigated by Lewis Mumford as cosmetic, comparing Burnhams approach with planning practiced in totalitarian
regimes; approach ignored housing, schools & sanitation. According to Abercrombie, beauty stood supreme for
Burnham, commercial convenience was significant but health and sanitation concerns were almost nowhere.
Burnhams plan devoted scant attention to zoning.

Baron George Eugene Hausmann- worked on the reconstruction of Paris- linear connection between the Place de
Concord, Arc de Triomph, Eiffel Tower and others




MODERN ARCHITECTURE AND PLANNING:

Charles-Eduoard Jeanneret - Popularly known as Le Corbusier.

- His most outstanding contribution as a thinker and writer was an urban planner on the grand scale.

- the most notable are his Unite d Habitation (1946-52) at Marseilles in France, a self-contained 'vertical city', with
modular housing units for 1600 people, internal streets and community services.

In 1933, proposed La Ville Radieuse (Radiant City) anchored on objective to decongest the centers of our cities
by increasing their densities by building high on small part of the total ground area. Accordingly, every great city
must rebuild on centers

Le Corbusier also conceptualized Le Contemporaine, high-rise offices and residential buildings with a greenbelt for
a population of 3,000,000 people

Last of the City Beautiful planners, he commented that it was hard to build a City Beautiful amidst the confusion of
democracy and the market.

Chandigarh
Capital of Punjab province of India, and the only realized plan of Le Corbusier: criticized for shifting from a planning
style to an architectural style, meaning a shift towards the preoccupation with visual form, symbolism, imagery,
and aesthetics rather than the problems of the Indian population; plan was completely impervious to economic
and human considerations.
- A regular grid of major roads for rapid transport surrounding residential superblocks or sections each based on
the rectangle and measuring 800x1200 meters
- The whole plan represents a large scale application of the Radburn principle regularized by Le Corbusiers
predilection for the rectilinear and the monumental.

Two important books- The City of Tomorrow (1922) and The Radiant City;
small number of propositions:
- traditional city has become functionally obsolete, due to increasing size and increasing congestion at the centre.
As the urban mass grew through concentric additions, more and more strain was placed on the communications of
the innermost areas, above all the central business district, which had the greatest accessibility and where all
business wanted to be.
- the paradox that the congestion could be cured by increasing the density. There was a key to this, of course: the
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%- could and should be left open.
- concerned the distribution of densities within the city.
- argued that this new urban form could be 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.

- he did teach planners in general the importance of scale in analysis.
- his insistence on the elementary truth that dense local concentrations of people helped support a viable,
frequent mass-transportations system.

BRASILIA
- capital of Brazil and a completely new twentieth-century city, the biggest planning exercise of the 20th century
- designed by Lucio Costa with a lot of influence from Le Corbusier, his plans or schemes did not include a single
population projection, economic analyses, land use schedule, model or mechanical drawing, yet it was awarded to
him; plan did not attempt to resolve pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. Unplanned city grew up beside the planned one.
with two huge axes in the sign of the cross, one for govt, commerce, and entertainment, the other for the
residential component
Oscar Niemeyer was among the architects employed to design the buildings

THE CONSERVATIONISTS AND THE PARK MOVEMENT:

Frederick Law Olmstead - Believed that cities should be planned two generations ahead; maintain
sufficient breathing space, be constantly renewed and that suburban design should embrace the whole city.
- Use of open space as element of urban system; despoilment of land through landscape system; urban park as an
aid to social reform.


Frank Lloyd Wright
In the 1930s, he wrote the The Disappearing City and later Broadacres proposing that every family live on an
acre of land and where the city would be built by its inhabitants using mass-produced components; this met
difficulties in land supply and logistics as the population increased.

Broadacres
- it was desirable to preserve the sort of codependent rural life of the homesteaders.
- that mass car would allow cities to spread widely into countryside.
- homes would be connected by super highways.
Easy and fast travel by car to any direction.
- he anticipated out- of-town shopping center

Problems with lack of land lead to his design of the Mile High Tower.
Proposed to house a significant amount of Manhattan residents to free up space for Greenfields
10 or more of these could possibly replace all Manhattan buildings


ROME (1500s)

Leonardo da Vinci
In his Codex Atlanticus he described a new concept of urban planning that was suited for Milan sketched a city
straddling a river where upstream, the river was directed into 6 or 7 branches, all parallel to the main stream and
rejoining it below the city.