1.8 The City 2
The Modern City
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Colonial Boston: organic development on peninsula
Philadelphia: planned grid (like Newcourt’s London Plan)
o William Penn and Thomas Holme, plan of Philly, 1684
o Sets up clear organization and plans, Market and Broad Street
America and the Grid
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Jefferson: suggests dividing new U.S. territory into a GRID
Surveyed into 6-mile squares (“townships”) with 36 “sections”
Structures political boundaries, railroads, towns, farms
Consistency and order
Establishes clear, practical pattern for infinite expansion
Ex: map of counties in Kansas, bird’s eye view of Chicago (1898)
Geometry and democracy: each square = equally important.
o Disadvantage when you actually wanna show that something is more important
Tame wilderness, turn it into democracy
Designing a Symbolic City
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L’Enfant’s plan for Washington, D.C.
o Pierre L’Enfant was the planner, Jefferson was the design consultant
New capital city: site chosen in 1790 (North-South compromise)
o On the Potomak River
Layout: combined system:
o Grid overlaid with diagonal avenues
Symbolic monuments (capital, White House) placed at the nodes
o White House at one end, Capital at the other, mall in the middle, then Washington Monument in the middle
 5 main avenues intersect in the path of these
o How we feel about what the city means has a lot to do about these monuments, their size, location, etc.
Paris: One Straight Street
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Rue de Rivolil, 1802-1825
Like Popes in Rome, Napoleon wanted to “regularize” Paris
20 years to build one new, straight street (Rue de Rivoli)
o Image: “orderly” façade, protected arcades for pedestrians
o Harmony and control
Streets of Revolution
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Why was it so important for him to do this? Image and reality were connected
Paris was a rebellious city… French Revolution, Les Mis…
Difficult to police the city and quell political unrest
Dense neighborhoods with labyrinth-like streets
Barricade narrow points = overturn gov
Haussmann’s Project
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Napoleon III (1848-70): secure, stable Paris = a NEW Paris
George Haussmann: modernized Paris from 1852-1870
Provide access and security for vehicles, goods, people
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New roads to link railway stations on city perimeter
He basically demolished the whole and city and made a new one
Emphasis: cutting through the rebellious neighborhoods
The New Paris
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Lots of very wide streets
Sewers, paved streets, sidewalks, tree, gas streetlights
Better place for people to live and walk
Building codes: taller, uniform = orderly, prosperous appearance
o Windows had to be aligned, made everything the same “Haussmanized area”
City improvements benefit the bourgeoisie (“gentrification”)
Also politically effective: no uprisings after 1870; orderly Paris = peaceful Paris
Gentrification flip side? Where do the poor go
o 350,000 poor Parisians displaced in 18 years…
o One-class city now?
Barcelona, Spain
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1850: Barcelona = Europe’s most crowded city; uprisings in 1854
Architect/engineering Idelfonso Cerda sent to Paris 1856-58 to study how Paris was doing so well… he was impressed by
some of Haussman, some stuff he was disturbed
Cerda’s Plan
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Plan: tear down city walls, grow to 10x original size of the city
Imposes axial avenues and nodes over a grid of streets
Theorizing the City
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Cerda’s city blocks, Barcelona
Cerda on Haussmann: orderly image, ignores the social reality!!!!
Exporting the working class (poor) didn’t’ solve anything
His book “General Theory of Urbanization” 1867: Cerda’s philoshophy
o Saw the city as “organism”: should serve all people’s social needs
He did set up city grid, but the grid was a flexible framework, could accomobdate anything rather than it being dictated
ahead of time
Block corners chamfered: every intersection would be a piazza
His urban structure set up the plan for the whole city
Most innovative thinking: make the city as a whole, broad, basic terms
Vienna
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Founded by Romans, along river
Hapsburg empire
Like Barcelona, defensive walls defined Vienna’s form
Suburbs grew around Old city; old ramparts as “dead zone”
City wall torn down in 1856: they were outdated
o How to modernize this split city?
o Decided to leave medieval core…
Vienna’s Beltway
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New Parliament, Ringstrasse, Vienna
Used open ring for Parliament, town hall, university, museums
Capitalized on its own unique urban structure and thinking about Haussman
Organized around a beltway circling old city: the Ringstrasse
Links between old and new city while preserving separate character
Crooked and Crowded
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Alstadt (Old City)
Camillo Sitte: prefers old Vienna to the Ringstrasse
o He loved the narrow, crooked streets, the intimacy, environments that evolved over time
o “City Planning According to Its Artstic Principles) 1889
 He said right angles, straight lines, too much openness made things organized, easy to run, etc… but he
said they were BORING!!!
 His priorities are how the city looks, its feeling
o Sitte: praises “traditional” organic urbanism as superior
o He said don’t “copy” old organic cities, but rather learn from their vitality
The City as Diagram
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Ebenezer Howard, “Garden City” plan, 1902
o Don’t fix old cities, create new urban models
U.S.- inspired “Garden City” of 7 small towns in countryside
City should be a mix of buildings and the natural environment
Cluster of small towns around a larger town
Designs ideal city in a circular pattern
Low-density living for 250,000
o Linked by trains, canals, roads (basically what makes it a city)
o Integrate human life in an open landscape
Separate industry, agriculture, residential in green belt... so the various parts of separated
Each function has own specific space in the diagram
Urban design as rational arrangement of needs and functions
The Scientific City
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CIAM: International Congresses of Modern Architecture
o Le Corbusier, model of Ideal City
o Ludwig Hilberseimer, Illustration of City Plan
“Athens Charter” (1933): CIAM urban planning principles
Cities have 4 functions
o Dwelling
o Working
o Recreation
o Transportation
Most cities biggest problem: lack of organization
Zoning: keep functions separate
Low density = light, air, mobility
Urban fabric: solids in a void, not voids in a solid city
o Modern transportation was a crucial part for this new design
Scientific basis for different, more modern urbanism
Freeways and Cities
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1955 Map of planned U.S. Interstate Highway System
Grand Central Parkway, NY
U.S. Gov. shaped suburbs: mortgages and road building
o Shaped by the automobile
o Left trains cause they were congested, so now freeways were the way of the future
Decentralized cities, autos were safer cause they spread things out
o Safer from attacks, like nuclear ones
o Federal Interstate and Defense Highways Act, 1956
 Fed money pulled from trains, straight to this
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Access ramps: where new suburbs would be built
Freeways: created low-density living, U.S. car culture
Suburban Solutions?
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Rational, well-organized suburbs: safe or just bland?
Lewis Mumford: what about the “fifth function” on that list? What about civic life?
Civic life in the modern city: space for community?? City structure keeps people apart, not bring them together as a
community
Civic centers: built to work as suburban “piazza”
o You’d have to drive to these places, wasn’t just spontaneous, like a piazza, didn’t draw people naturally
The Non-Civic Center
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Victor Gruen Assocaites: integrate community and commercial life… MALL
Mall as social solution for auto age: urbanizes suburbia
Conjoins year-round shopping, leisure, and community life
Reality: private and commercial vs. truly “public” space
Physically isolated urban simulacrum in a parking lot
A New New York
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Postward U.S. cities: changed by demographics and the Car
Robert Moses: reshaped New York from 1930s-60s
Most powerful force in changing the cities face
Lincoln Cetner, New York, (urban campus for performing arts; rare, open piazza) lots of parks, bridges, community centers,
etc.
o Also to show NYC culture awesomeness, sophistication, etc. to the world
o Wouldn’t it be better if they scattered these cultural things around the city?
o Lincoln Center design faces inward, can even be seen as an expression of insolatirty
o Built in low income neighborhood
o Housing demolisehed to make room for culture
o What Moses was really interested in? Urban hygiene: making it comfy for the middle class
“Urban Renewal” Project: displaced 7000 poor residents, erasing appearance of poverty
Restricted suburbs, subsidized demolition… where to go now (esp. minorities?
The Projects
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Many “slums” were functioning neighbhroods, communities
Ex. Robert Taylor Homes, Chicago, Cabrini-Green, Chicago
Demo, new freeways = isolate minorities within the city
Residential towers used as “modern solution” for the poor
Racially segregated, inadequate design, enforced move
Only accepeted the poorest residents
Made term inner-city like a ghetto… new ghettos just as hard to escape
Pruitt-Igoe: design awards in 1951, demolished in 1972
o Completely unlivable, terrible urban solutions
Defending the City
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Jane Jacobs, arch journalist
Disturbed how urban renewal was changing NYC
“Unurban Urbanization” uses a failed formula
Healthy city neighborhoods: dense mix of people, functions was the thought
Published “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” 1961
When they almost demolished her fav part, Greenwich Village, NY, she launched a campaign
Encouraged public activism against City Hall and the “experts”
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Urban planning “science” – as bogus as “medical bloodletting”
The Limits of Logic
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Christopher Alexander: math, physics, architecture
All functions needed for a community need to list in a “tree diagram”
o Use set theory model to generate city plan
o Functional and objective urban plan to meet all the city needs
Problem: real cities are far more complicated (semilattice)
o Possible groupings are anything but clear and straightforward
Best cities: flexible, adaptable spaces for enjoyable life
Use urban “grammar” of historic cities that still work
A New Urbanism?
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Live/work units and single family homes
Can we build multi-function, dense, walkable cities today?
Andrews Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk: “new Urbanism”
“Neo-traditional”: model new developments on older towns
Kentlands, MD: varied housing types, density, and retail
Includes town center with businesses, etc…
Meant for mixed-income residents; quickly became upscale `