Recapitulation

• utopia

• dystopia

• planning for progress

• progress as relative and relational

• the garden city

• the contemporary city

• the broadacre city

The Garden City Movement• Ebenezer Howard

(1850-1928)• Tomorrow - a

Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) … Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902)

• Push-pull factors in urban development

– town magnet– country magnet– town-and-

country magnet

1000 acre centrally located citygrand central park and civic core5000 acres of permanent agriculture and parklandnew towns connected by rail

The garden city

Letchworth and Welwyn-Garden

Cities Built

The contemporary city• Roots in the works of

– Tony Garnier, French architect, 1917 treatise on cité industrielle: formal classicism and functionality of the machine age

– Futurists - Filippo Marinetti and Antonio Sant’Elia, 1914, La Citta Nuova

• Bauhaus School, Walter Gropius, Weimar, 1919, the avante garde

The contemporary

city• Charles-Edouard

Jeanneret - Le Corbusier

• (1887-1969)

• Modernist of the International Style

• The City of Tomorrow and its Planning (1929)

– 3 million inhabitants

– several hundred acres of Paris to be demolished

The contemporary

city• Le Corbusier’s basic formula: both architecture and cities should

be machines for living

• key to reduce the congestion of city centres by increasing their density by building up - high density, high-rise city cores leaving land for green space and private transport

• class segregation: elite to have spacious and best appointed tower blocks; workers to have small garden apartments in satellite units some distance from the centre (Brasilia)

The contemporary

city• Plan Voisin

– eighteen 700-foot towers to be built on the historic north side of the River Seine

– uniform cells/apartments, standardized furniture

– La Ville Radieuse (1933) - giant collective apartment blocks

• “The heroic scale of his ideas and his sheer irrepressibility drew admiration from architects and urban designers who wanted leadership and recognition, while his willingness to confront the automobile era drew admiration from technocrats. From this admiration grew a conventional wisdom that was centred on the need to modernize cities through ruthless redevelopment, tearing out their centres and replacing them with high-rise housing linked by intrusive freeways” (Knox 1995, 158).

The contemporary

city• L’Unité d’Habitation, Marseilles, 1950s

– integrated community services

– daycare facilities

– shops

– poured concrete sections and panels, textured and sculpted with recessed windows and balconies

– inexpensive and amenable to prefabrication … the grid

Demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe Project, St Louis

The broadacre city• Frank Lloyd Wright

– individualism, naturalism– response to automobility (Mumford

noted that automobiles were antithetical to the very idea of the city)

• premised on assumption of three inalienable rights:

– social right to direct medium of exchange - social credit

– social right to place on the ground to be held only by use and improvement

– social right to the ideas by which and for which we live: public ownership of invention and science

The broadacre city• planned metropolitan decentralization using the vehicle to enhance opportunities for individual lifestyles and closeness to nature

• decreased densities and more land per occupant

• differentiated and individualized homes

• based on use of high-pressure concrete, plywood and plastic for housing, surrounded by networks of landscaped parkways and freeways

• these semi-rural neighbourhoods were to be serviced by massive public service stations providing a range of low-order goods and services

• “Here now may be seen the elemental units of our social structure: the correlated farm, the factory-its smoke and gases eliminated by burning coal at places of origin, the decentralized school, the various conditions of residence, the home offices, safe traffic, simplified government. All common interests take place in a simple coordination wherein all are employed: little farms, little homes for industry, little factories, little schools, a little university going to the people mostly by way of their interest in the ground, little laboratories ... (Wright 1935, in The City Reader).

Radburn• Clarence Stein and

Henry Wright• 15 miles from Manhattan

in Fair Lawn, New Jersey, 1928

• based on Sunnyside superblock (Sunnyside, Queens, 1924-28)

• traffic channeled through road hierarchies, residential areas virtually traffic free, cycle and pedestrian paths

• housing clustered around irregular shaped open spaces

Radburn

Summary• Utopia - progress - planning

• Relative and relational project that is context dependent (viz. space, place, time and culture or society)

• Utopian pursuits in city (residential) development– Howard’s garden city– Le Corbusier’s contemporary city– Wright’s broadacre city – Radburn