discussion

PUP 420: Theory of Urban Design

Historical Perspectives:

Siena, Italy

Part of understanding the basics of urban design is to understand the history of designing our cities.

Two basic city forms – organic and geometric – emerged very early in Western civilizations.

Organic cities are likely to have been the more ancient of the two, having arisen through chance and accretion. Accretion means that these settlements grew where paths became streets, and villages merged into towns and then cities.

Organic cities developed around geographic features that were crucial to trade or defense, such as regional crossroads, safe harbors, river crossings, access to mountain passes, and so forth.

Miletus, origin of Miletian plan

Palace Quarter, Babylon

The geometric form, on the other hand, was planned – purposely and self-consciously designed.

This is where we get our grid system, where streets are at right angles and form blocks.

Most early geometric cities had specific places for religion and commerce. And most early societies were concerned about controlling access to their city for the purpose of defense.

Historical Perspectives:

Historical Perspectives:

Piazza del Campo, Siena

Villingen, Germany

The Middle Ages were shaped by warfare and military considerations, leading to things like building city walls.

Public spaces became associated with religious structures and, later, commerce, as the church plaza became the marketplace.

During the Middle Ages, we also started building secular public plazas – these are plazas that are not associated with a church or religion. Piazza del Campo in Sienna was one of the first of these secular plazas.

Historical Perspectives:

Pienza, Italy

Palmanova, Italy

Next, we move ahead to the Renaissance, which was roughly the 15th – 17th Centuries. (There’s no consensus about the exact years.)

During this time, classical architecture and planning served as precedents, as neo-classical architecture began to be built. This was stemming from a renewed interest in art, architecture, literature, and so forth. This coincides with the emerging “humanist” view – meaning that people were looking at Ancient Rome and Ancient Greece for inspiration and seeing the value in classical learning.

Historical Perspectives:

Pope Sixtus V’s Plan of Rome

The Baroque period was roughly the 16th – 17th Centuries, sometimes grouped into the Renaissance time period.

During the Baroque period, we built straight avenues with clear lines of sight. Our cities also had radial and diagonal patterns defined by focal points. This is largely because the planners were military engineers, interested in efficiency.

During this time, cities were also starting to be confronted with the challenges of swelling populations – and the consequences of this on health, light, and air.

Historical Perspectives:

Paris, France

Baroque principles dominated urban design through the 19th Century, with several concepts that have been particularly important through modern times.

First, we have purposely shaped public spaces, where we still remain interested today in actively shaping our cities through design. Next, we use focal points and vistas as organizing devices for our cities – they help us orient ourselves.

And third, the idea of having uniform facades (streetfronts that look similar) is something that has its origins in the Baroque period.

Historical Perspectives:

New Amsterdam

Savannah, Georgia

Here in the early days of building cities in the U.S., we became more concerned about what was logical, pragmatic, and efficient.

We made extensive use of the grid, partially because the grid exemplified democratic ideals – dividing up a city into equal blocks.

There was also an agrarian ideal, where we saw farming as a noble way of life and we had a seemingly unlimited supply of land. For a while, we had a symbiotic relationship between city and countryside.

Historical Perspectives:

Then came… the Industrial

Revolution, where factories, which were located mostly in cities, needed people to work in them.

Simultaneously, improvements in machinery meant that fewer people were needed to work on farms.

This resulted in a mass rural-to- urban migration (urbanization), leading to some very unhealthy places.

Tenements, New York

During the period after the Industrial Revolution (the first

couple decades of the 1900s), we saw that people were reacting to the widely held perceptions of the “unhealthy” city and its overcrowding.

Mariemont, Ohio

Historical Perspectives:

During this time, we started to build lower density developments in the form of garden cities and suburbs. These were built on a small scale, with cottage-type homes, both detached and semi- detached. The streets were curvilinear with dead-end streets and lots of trees.

Historical Perspectives: We place Modernism in the time period of

1923 – 1948. (Some Modernist buildings were designed after this time.)

With Modernism, the idea was to have high

density at the periphery of the city, where people would be connected through good public transport. The design aesthetic was to have starkly functional, clean lines. People were to live in long, straight living units surrounded by collective open space. Streets were to be straight or only modestly curved.

All of this was a reaction against Garden

Cities.

Seagram Building, New York

Historical Perspectives:

Anywhere, U.S.A.

After World War II and through the 1970s, many things were going on… We had a great demand for housing, created by the Baby Boom and soldiers returning from war. Much of this housing was in the form of newly built suburbs. We were building for good vehicular access, with pedestrians as an afterthought. We also started extensively using zoning, creating environments of only one use (such as residential-only areas).

Urban Design Paradigms: Out of all of this has emerged two design

paradigms (or schools of thought): The first is Empiricism – regressive

utopianism. This means looking to the present and the past for design inspiration.

The second is Rationalism – progressive utopianism. This is an attempt at inventing futures based on assumptions and proposals for new technologies and social orders.

Welwyn Ad

Empiricism: The primary precedents of

Empiricism were concepts that were perceived to be working well at the time or to have worked well in the past. This included models such as:

The Medieval City (from which we developed the so-called New Towns)

The Baroque City (which inspired the City Beautiful movement)

The small country town (which inspired Garden Cities)

Medieval Town

City Beautiful: The City Beautiful design

movement had a heavy reliance on precedents with rational thought. This movement was the major paradigm for civic design of municipal or governmental sectors of cities during the first three decades of the 20th Century.

World’s Columbian Exposition

Its basic elements included: •  Axial avenues terminating at focal points;

•  Grand plazas; •  Wide streets; and •  Monumental buildings (ideally, these were classical in design).

Garden City: The Garden City concept was originated

by Ebenezer Howard. This was a highly utopian concept with considerable rational thought behind it. As it was actually carried out, it was more down to Earth than the initial concept.

Briefly, a Garden City has a city center surrounded by neighborhoods with industry and farmland on the periphery. These were meant to be well treed and connected by a greenbelt, and were to have a small population. Howard wanted to blend city life with country living.

Conceptual Diagram

Neo Empiricism: This means “new” Empiricism.

It’s a response to the perceived limitations of Garden Cities and other models. It still reflects the past, but is less hindered by some of the early romantic notions.

New Urbanism is the example that has gained the most attention. This movement looks back to towns of the early 20th Century for design principles.

Rationalism: •  Modernists perceived empirical models to be highly

romantic and irrelevant to the modern world. •  Rationalist urban design principles combine

progressive (if sometimes poorly reasoned) social organization with geometric shapes for physical form.

Brasilia

•  Modernists embraced large cities, modern technology, tall buildings, and cars.

•  They embraced change, which they saw as necessary and positive.

Rationalism: Two major analogies emerged in

Rationalism:

•  City as machine •  City as organic, living form

When we think about Rationalism, images that come to mind are slab or tower buildings, which are often situated in an area surrounded by open space. These places are linked by highways.

Radiant City

Brasilia

Rationalism: An example of Rationalism is Corbusier’s Radiant City,

which was applied in Brasilia.

Overall, the greatest application of Rationalism has been in mass housing, especially public/social housing.

Brasilia Radiant City

Utility and Limitations of Paradigms:

•  Each paradigm has successes and failures, but they’re criticized for being too simplistic and not considering the cultural and physical contexts of their communities.

•  We’re still not clear about when and where they work. But we know we need a greater range of models – and richer, better ones. Science City, Hugh Ferris

Garden City

How Paradigms can be more useful: The next generation of paradigms should recognize that problems have changed. These new paradigms should be clear about what problems they do, and do not, address in various social, cultural, and terrestrial contexts. They need to have more layers, each layer dealing with a specific issue, such as transportation, distribution of parks, etc. Merging these layers will lead to trade-offs between solving one problem well and another problem well.

Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans

Security barrier, Washington, DC

Government and Planning

For the purposes of urban design, we’re concerned with two kinds of societies: autocratic ones and democratic ones.

In autocratic societies we have centralized planning. The leader’s opinion matters more than anything else and planning/design decisions are not subject to control from citizens. This means that these kinds of societies can build large-scale projects because there are no public meetings, no design review, etc. Examples: Haussmann’s Paris Via della Conciliazione (Rome) under Mussolini

Government and Planning Democratic societies, on the other hand, have legislated planning – meaning that we enact laws to govern how we engage in planning, rather than yielding to an autocratic leader’s whims. In democratic societies, decisions are usually made by a team of professionals and stakeholders, and these decisions are subject to control from citizens and the market. The design scale varies in democratic societies. Examples: Most, but not all, developments in the U.S.

Example: Via della Conciliazione The Via della Conciliazione is one of the most hated streets in Rome. Between 1936 and 1950, twenty-two Medieval and Renaissance buildings and dozens of housing units were torn down. In their place, Mussolini’s grand vision was constructed – the Via della Conciliazione. It was completed in 1950.

This is before its construction. You can see buildings here in the center of the photograph that will later be demolished to make way for this grand road.

Via della Conciliazione Today, the view as you walk along the street is awe- inspiring. St. Peter’s dome is framed by sculpted angels on the roof of the Basilica. The piazza (plaza) can be seen from far away. Walking towards the Basilica, your mind and eyes have a chance to get used to the scale and to adjust slowly to the magnificence of it all.

Via della Conciliazione So what’s the problem? This stunning view – the ability to adjust to the scale of it all – is not what was originally intended with St. Peter’s Basilica. Instead, imagine how it must have been if you were walking through the narrow, dark streets of Rome and then stumbled out to see the Basilica, as if appearing out of nowhere.

That experience – that moment of revelation – was exactly what was intended. Being prepared was never the point. The point was to be overwhelmed. Yet the Via della Conciliazione no longer allows this.

Other Autocratic Examples Here we have the beautiful Medieval core of the Eastern European city of Tallinn, Estonia. This part of the city developed organically over a long period of time.

Other Autocratic Examples This is an image from the same city. Outside of the Medieval core, there are slabs of bland, concrete buildings that were erected while Tallinn was under the control of the Soviets. This is the autocratic influence of design on this particular city.

Autocratic Developments in Democratic Societies?

There are also some examples of autocratic developments within democratic societies, such as large-scale housing developments and company towns. (This is a mural of Pullman, Illinois, after the Pullman rail company.)

End of Unit 2.