Urban planning  

From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia

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The Appian Way as it appeared in Piranesi's imagination (1756), from Antichita Romanae

The Acropolis of Athens (1846) is a painting by Leo von Klenze of the Acropolis of Athens. It is an idealized reconstruction of the Acropolis and Areopagus in Athens

Cityscape from the Villa Boscoreale

Capriccio With the Colosseum by Bernardo Bellotto

A Paris street - set design for Act II of Puccini's La bohème by Adolfo Hohenstein

Rue de la Colonie (1900) - Eugène Atget

"Machines for living:" for various critics, including Tom Wolfe, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project illustrated both the essential unlivability of Bauhaus-inspired box architecture, and the hubris of central planning.

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Urban planning, also known as town planning, city planning, regional planning, or rural planning, is a technical and political process that is focused on the development and design of land use and the built environment, including air, water, and the infrastructure passing into and out of urban areas, such as transportation, communications and their accessibility. Traditionally, urban planning followed a top-down approach in master planning the physical layout of human settlements. The primary concern was the public welfare, which included considerations of efficiency, sanitation, protection and use of the environment, as well as effects of the master plans on the social and economic activities. Over time, urban planning has adopted a focus on the social and environmental bottom-lines that focus on planning as a tool to improve the health and well-being of people while maintaining sustainability standards. Sustainable development was added as one of the main goals of all planning endeavors in the late 20th century when the detrimental economic and the environmental impacts of the previous models of planning had become apparent. Similarly, in the early 21st century, Jane Jacob's writings on legal and political perspectives to emphasize the interests of residents, businesses and communities effectively influenced urban planners to take into broader consideration of resident experiences and needs while planning.

Urban planning answers questions about how people will live, work and play in a given area and thus, guides orderly development in urban, suburban and rural areas. Although predominantly concerned with the planning of settlements and communities, urban planners are also responsible for planning the efficient transportation of goods, resources, people and waste; the distribution of basic necessities such as water and electricity; a sense of inclusion and opportunity for people of all kinds, culture and needs; economic growth or business development; improving health and conserving areas of natural environmental significance that actively contributes to reduction in CO2 emissions as well as protecting heritage structures and built environments. Since most urban planning teams consist of highly educated individuals that work for city governments, recent debates focus on how to involve more community members in city planning processes.

Urban planning is an interdisciplinary field that includes civil engineering, architecture, human geography, politics, social science and design sciences. Practitioners of urban planning are concerned with research and analysis, strategic thinking, Engineering architecture, urban design, public consultation, policy recommendations, implementation and management. It is closely related to the field of urban design and some urban planners provide designs for streets, parks, buildings and other urban areas. Urban planners work with the cognate fields of civil engineering, landscape architecture, architecture, and public administration to achieve strategic, policy and sustainability goals. Early urban planners were often members of these cognate fields though today, urban planning is a separate, independent professional discipline. The discipline of urban planning is the broader category that includes different sub-fields such as land-use planning, zoning, economic development, environmental planning, and transportation planning. Creating the plans requires a thorough understanding of penal codes and zonal codes of planning.

Another important aspect of urban planning is that the range of urban planning projects include the large-scale master planning of empty sites or Greenfield projects as well as small-scale interventions and refurbishments of existing structures, buildings and public spaces. Pierre Charles L'Enfant in Washington DC, Daniel Burnham in Chicago, Lucio Costa in Brasilia and Georges-Eugene Haussmann in Paris planned cities from scratch, and Robert Moses and Le Corbusier refurbished and transformed cities and neighbourhoods to meet their ideas of urban planning.

Examples

• 1853 Baron Haussmann - responsible for the broad avenues of Paris
• 1950 Le Corbusier - Chandigarh, India
• 1966 Walt Disney - Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (concept) (Note: While never built in the form Disney intended, Walt Disney World, where EPCOT was planned, houses an amusement park by the same name and is also near the Disney Company-founded town of Celebration, Florida.)

Urban design

While the two fields are closely related, urban design differs from urban planning in its focus on physical improvement of the public environment, whereas the latter tends, in practice, to focus on the management of private development through planning schemes and other statutory development controls.

Although contemporary professional use of the term 'urban design' dates from the mid-20th century, urban design as such has been practiced throughout history. Ancient examples of carefully planned and designed cities exist in Asia, India, Africa, Europe and the Americas, and are particularly well-known within Classical Chinese, Roman and Greek cultures (see Hippodamus of Miletus). European Medieval cities are often regarded as exemplars of undesigned or 'organic' city development, but there are clear examples of considered urban design in the Middle Ages (see, e.g., David Friedman, Florentine New Towns: Urban Design in the Late Middle Ages, MIT 1988).

Throughout history, design of streets and deliberate configuration of public spaces with buildings have reflected contemporaneous social norms or philosophical and religious beliefs (see, e.g., Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, Meridian Books, 1957). Yet the link between designed urban space and human mind appears to be bidirectional. Indeed, the reverse impact of urban structure upon human behaviour and upon thought is evidenced by both observational study and historical record. There are clear indications of impact through Renaissance urban design on the thought of Johannes Kepler and Galileo Galilei (see, e.g., Abraham Akkerman, "Urban planning in the founding of Cartesian thought," Philosophy and Geography 4(1), 2001). Already René Descartes in his Discourse on the Method had attested to the impact Renaissance planned new towns had upon his own thought, and much evidence exists that the Renaissance streetscape was also the perceptual stimulus that had led to the development of coordinate geometry (see, e.g., Claudia Lacour Brodsky, Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origins of Modern Philosophy, Duke 1996).

The beginnings of modern urban design in Europe are indeed associated with the Renaissance but, especially, with the Age of Enlightenment. Spanish colonial cities were often planned, as were some towns settled by other imperial cultures. These sometimes embodied utopian ambitions as well as aims for functionality and good governance, as with James Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah, Georgia. In the Baroque period the design approaches developed in French formal gardens such as Versailles were extended into urban development and redevelopment. In this period, when modern professional specialisations did not exist, urban design was undertaken by people with skills in areas as diverse as sculpture, architecture, garden design, surveying, astronomy, and military engineering. In the 18th and 19th centuries, urban design was perhaps most closely linked with surveyors and architects. Much of Frederick Law Olmsted's work was concerned with urban design, and so the (then-new) profession of landscape architecture also began to play a significant role in the late 19th century.

Modern urban design can be considered as part of the wider discipline of Urban planning. Indeed, Urban planning began as a movement primarily occupied with matters of urban design. Works such as Ildefons Cerda's General Theory of Urbanization (1867), Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889), and Robinson’s The Improvement of Cities and Towns (1901) and Modern Civic Art (1903), all were primarily concerned with urban design, as did the later City Beautiful movement in North America.

'Urban design' was first used as a distinctive term when Harvard University hosted a series of Urban Design Conferences from 1956 . These conferences provided a platform for the launching of Harvard's Urban Design program in 1959-60. The writings of Jane Jacobs, Kevin Lynch, Gordon Cullen and Christopher Alexander became authoritative works for the school of Urban Design.

Gordon Cullen's The Concise Townscape, first published in 1961, also had a great influence on many urban designers. Cullen examined the traditional artistic approach to city design of theorists such as Camillo Sitte, Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. He created the concept of 'serial vision', defining the urban landscape as a series of related spaces.

Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, was also a catalyst for interest in ideas of urban design. She critiqued the Modernism of CIAM, and asserted that the publicly unowned spaces created by the 'city in the park' notion of Modernists was one of the main reasons for the rising crime rate. She argued instead for an 'eyes on the street' approach to town planning, and the resurrection of main public space precedents, such as streets and squares, in the design of cities.

Kevin Lynch's The Image of the City of 1961 was also seminal to the movement, particularly with regards to the concept of legibility, and the reduction of urban design theory to five basic elements - paths, districts, edges, nodes, landmarks. He also made popular the use of mental maps to understanding the city, rather than the two-dimensional physical master plans of the previous 50 years.

Other notable works include Rossi's Architecture of the City (1966), Venturi’s Learning from Las Vegas (1972), Colin Rowe's Collage City (1978), and Peter Calthorpe's The Next American Metropolis (1993). Rossi introduced the concepts of 'historicism' and 'collective memory' to urban design, and proposed a 'collage metaphor' to understand the collage of new and older forms within the same urban space. Calthorpe, on the other hand, developed a manifesto for sustainable urban living via medium density living, as well as a design manual for building new settlements in accordance with his concept of Transit Oriented Development (TOD). Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson in The Social Logic of Space (1984) introduced the concept of space syntax to predict how movement patterns in cities would contribute to urban vitality, anti-social behaviour and economic success. The popularity of these works resulted in terms such as 'historicism', 'sustainability', 'livability', 'high quality of urban components', etc. become everyday language in the field of urban planning.

List of urban planners

List of urban planners chronological by initial year of plan.

• c. 332 BC Dinocrates - Alexandria, Egypt
• c. 408 BC Hippodamus of Miletus - Piraeus, Thurii, Rhodes
• c. 1450 AD Nezahualcoyotl - Texcoco (altepetl), Aztec Mexico
• c. 1590 Tokugawa Ieyasu, Tokugawa Hidetada, Tokugawa Iemitsu, Takatora Todo- Edo, later Tokyo, Japan [1]
• 1666 Christopher Wren - London
• 1682 William Penn and Thomas Holme - Philadelphia
• 1727 Maharaja Jai Singh II, astronomer, city planner - Jaipur, Rajasthan, India
• 1791 Peter Charles L'Enfant and Andrew Ellicott - Washington, D.C.
• 1805 Augustus B. Woodward - Detroit
• 1811 Gouverneur Morris, John Rutherfurd, and Simeon De Witt - Commissioners' Plan of New York City
• c. 1838 Joseph Smith and later Brigham Young - several Mormon settlements including Nauvoo, Illinois and Salt Lake City.
• 1853 Georges-Eugène Haussmann - responsible for the broad avenues of Paris
• 1859 Ildefons Cerdà - planner of the Eixample district of Barcelona
• c. 1880 Solon Spencer Beman and George Pullman - Pullman, Chicago
• 1880 Pedro Benoit - La Plata, Argentina
• 1882 Arturo Soria y Mata - the Ciudad Lineal, Madrid
• 1898 Ebenezer Howard - Garden city movement
• 1901 Charles Follen McKim - Washington, D.C. revised plan
• 1909 Daniel Burnham - Chicago
• 1912 Walter Burley Griffin - Canberra
• 1915 Alfred Bettman
• 1924 Andrew R. Cobb and Thomas Adams - Corner Brook, Newfoundland
• 1924 Clarence Stein - Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, New York; Chatham Village, Pittsburgh; Baldwin Hills Village, Los Angeles
• 1925 Ernst May - city plan and housing units in Frankfurt, Germany, including Siedlung Römerstadt
• 1927 Bruno Taut - Hufeisensiedlung (Horseshoe Projects), Berlin
• 1928 Henry Wright - Radburn, New Jersey
• c. 1930 Robert Moses, responsible for the urban renewal of New York City
• 1930 Ernst May - Magnitogorsk and some 20 other urban projects in the Soviet Union
• 1935 Frank Lloyd Wright - Broadacre City (concept)
• 1935-1981 Eldridge Lovelace - many US cities.
• 1938 Donald Gibson - Coventry, England
• 1942 Arthur Korn and Felix Samuely - MARS plan for London
• 1950 Le Corbusier - Chandigarh, India
• 1952 Macklin Hancock - Don Mills, Ontario
• 1955 Stanley Wardley - Bradford, Yorkshire, England
• 1957 Lucio Costa - Brasília, Brazil
• 1958 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Alfred Caldwell - Lafayette Park, Detroit
• 1960 Edmund Bacon - engaged in the redevelopment of parts of Philadelphia
• 1960 William Pereira - Irvine, California
• 1960 Konstantinos Doxiadis - Islamabad, Pakistan
• 1963 Mort Hoppenfeld, James Rouse - Columbia, Maryland
• 1964 Jaime Lerner - Curitiba, Brazil (transportation and land use combination)
• 1964 Robert E. Simon - Reston, Virginia
• 1966 Walt Disney - Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (concept) (Note: While never built in the form Disney intended, Walt Disney World, where EPCOT was planned, houses an amusement park by the same name and is also near the Disney Company-founded town of Celebration, Florida.)
• 1968 Agustín Landa Verdugo - Cancún, Mexico
• 1970 Paolo Soleri - Arcosanti, Arizona, as well as his concept of arcologies
• 1970 William Pereira, Ian McHarg - The Woodlands, Texas
• 1971 H. K. Mewada, Prakash M. Apte - Gandhinagar, Gujarat, India
• 1973 Moshe Safdie - Coldspring New Town, Baltimore
• 1978 J. Michael Cobb - Jubail New Industrial City, Jubail, Saudi Arabia
• 1980 Stanton Eckstut - Battery Park City, New York City
• 1984 Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk - Seaside, Florida
• 1990 Peter Calthorpe - Laguna West, California
• 1992 Vladimir Arana - Chorrillos District, Lima, Peru
• 1999 Michael E. Arth, New pedestrianism, Downtown DeLand, Florida's Garden District (2001)
• 2002 Rick Abelson - Sylvia Park, Auckland, New Zealand
• 2003 Christopher Charles Benninger, Thimphu, Bhutan
• 2006 Steven Bingler - New Orleans (Unified New Orleans Plan)
• 2009 İlke Planlama - Samsun-Çorum-Tokat Regional Plan, Blacksea / Turkey
• 2012 Kyle R. Kingma - Tyler, Texas

See also

• Architectural theory
• Urban planning in Nazi Germany
• Urban planning in communist countries