New Directions for Planning

Ideal industries
The squalor of industrial slums motivated some enlightened British employers to create model villages and towns to provide better housing and living conditions for their workers. Soap manufacturer William Lever created Port Sunlight near Liverpool, England. And George Cadbury sponsored Bournville near his chocolate factory outside Birmingham. These employers linked decent living conditions with industrial productivity, but their communities also provided design ideas for others to follow and improve upon.

Legislating improvement
Recognition that frameworks were needed to ensure the orderly development of towns and cities led to new planning laws. A variety of new rules covered issues such as land use zoning, population density and building height limitations. Along with these ‘statutory’ regulations came detailed city studies with strategic recommendations. Scottish planner Patrick Geddes is associated with the influential mantra of ‘survey-analysis plan’.

The skyscraper
Innovative construction methods changed the scale of urban development. The new methods allowed highrise buildings supported by steel frames rather than load-bearing walls. The skyline of the central city changed dramatically. Futurists such as Swiss architect Le Corbusier envisaged entire new cities as tower blocks in parkland settings.

Cities built for cars
The motor car also had a dramatic impact on the structure of modern cities and their planning. New philosophies of road design emerged in the United States and Britain in the early 20th century.

In 1906, the first limited access motorways appeared in New York with the Long Island Motor Parkway (1906–11) and the Bronx River Parkway (1906–23).

In 1938, British policeman Alker Tripp refined the idea of the road hierarchy. The width and capacity of a street would be determined by its traffic function – whether it was catering for through-traffic, industrial or residential traffic.

Drive-in shopping
The motor car’s major impact was felt from the mid-1920s. In the United States, an economic boom led to major retailers building department stores in the new suburbs. In 1923, the Country Club Plaza, one of the first automobile-oriented shopping centres, opened in Kansas City. Another significant 20th-century development was the invention of the enclosed climate-controlled shopping mall. The first – Southdale Shopping Center near Minneapolis – opened in 1956. These developments expanded the scale of planning and highlighted the interrelationship of land use and transport development.

The megalopolis emerges
In the 1930s, the powerful New York municipal official, Robert Moses, developed the Henry Hudson Parkway down the western side of Manhattan. As leisure parkways became urban freeways they helped to define a new dispersed and multi-centred urban form. Driven by rapid population growth after the Second World War, big cities sprawled and often interconnected with each other to form what geographer Jean Gottman dubbed ‘megalopolis’. The growth pressures faced by western cities in the 20th century are now being surpassed by Asian cities in the 21st century.

Role of Town Planners

The modern profession of town planning mainly arose in reponse to the urban problems caused by rapid industrialisation from the late 19th century. The rapid growth of towns ‘shook contemporary habits and concepts’ (Benevolo, 1967). Social reformers recognised the need for corrective intervention to deal with the growth forces unleashed by modernisation.

Pioneering professionals often worked first in another built environment area like architecture, surveying, engineering or landscape architecture. Planning was a chance to exercise a distinctive overall spatial and social vision that drew on specialised inputs.

Town planners could either design entirely new urban areas (such as suburbs and garden cities), or develop ways to reform and reorder existing ones to provide plenty of space and light, clean water and adequate drainage (through urban renewal).

Early town plans concentrated on securing adequate provision for key urban needs:

housing
commercial and industrial uses
railways and roadways
water, sewerage and energy supply
open space and recreational areas.
Each element of a well-planned urban environment would work alone and as part of the whole. A town plan also had to be affordable, and to fit the designated site. The vision of what the town or city could become was critical. The drawings produced were as important as the vision itself.

Planning today retains its commitment to ideal urban environments, but has to work within challenging political contexts. The task of reconciling competing development and environmental goals in the interests of ‘sustainability’ usually falls to the planning function in government. Much attention is now directed at better managing existing cities than creating completely new ones.

Garden City Movement

White City’s beauty
An event rather than a city plan helped give rise to the City Beautiful movement – one of the most influential town planning models of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Architect Daniel Burnham led a team of leading American designers, including Frederick Law Olmsted, to create the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The temporary buildings and monuments of the ‘White City’ were constructed in neo-classical style, and flanked water features and other grand public spaces. The coordinated design of the Exposition inspired Walter Burley Griffin in his planning for Canberra.

Revamping the metropolis
Major redevelopment schemes for big cities were another factor in the rise of modern town planning. Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) was involved in two American projects. The Senate Park Commission’s 1902 plan to revitalise L’Enfant’s plan for Washington DC attracted world-wide interest. And the 1909 plan for Chicago showed how artistic vision could fuse with pragmatic ideas about efficient cities at a metropolitan scale.

Gardens in the city
Belief in a new form of community with all the advantages but none of the disadvantages of town and country evident in an industrialising England in the 19th century, led Ebenezer Howard to develop his Garden City ideas. He published his influential book, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform, in 1898. It was reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902.

Howard had many influences, and called his work a ‘unique combination of proposals’. His design ideas were influenced by both dignified Georgian towns like Bath and moden park and community plans, including Frederick Law Olmsted’s model suburb of Riverside (1869), near Chicago. Australia also inspired Howard. He included in his book a sketch of the plan of Adelaide, designed in the 1830s by Colonel William Light. Splitting the city into smaller sections surrounded by parklands was a major influence on the idea of the green belt.

Howard’s Garden City ideas inspired the development of Letchworth in 1903. Located in Hertfordshire, outside London, it was Britain’s first planned garden city. Its designers, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, also planned Hampstead Garden Suburb in London in 1907.

Renaissance and Baroque styles

During the Renaissance (broadly, the 15th century), city-states dominated by powerful rulers emerged in Italy. The papacy based in Rome in the Vatican City was one of these. Florence was another.
Rome
Rome had fallen into decay, and the Church needed to restore the faith of the people in its mission. From the 1470s, several popes began to remodel Rome. They aimed to glorify the Church and the papacy, and enable pilgrims to move more easily within the city. They adopted straight axial streets terminating in vistas marked by columns, obelisks, fountains, and views of grand buildings.
The most ambitious pope was Sixtus V (1585–90). His plan was to cover Rome with a network of straight streets and mark their intersections by obelisks. His legacy to Rome is a classic example of Baroque planning.
The architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–72) redesigned Rome’s water supply. By 1600 it was the best of any city in Europe. The Baroque remodelling of Rome culminated in the colonnade for St Peter’s Basilica by Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680).
Florence
The architect Giorgio Vasari (1511–74) remodelled Central Florence. He created a dramatic vista towards the Uffizi Palace, and placed statues at the end of axial streets.
London
Baroque Rome inspired John Evelyn and Christopher Wren in their plans for a new urban form for London after the Great Fire in 1666.
Versailles
Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles (built 1668–74), with its famous gardens by André le Notre, had bisecting land and water axes that created impressive vistas. It inspired Pierre L’Enfant when he designed Washington DC as the new capital of the United States of America in 1791.
Paris
When Baron Haussmann reordered Paris between 1853 and 1869, he also looked back to Versailles for inspiration. By 1870, Paris was the ‘wonder of the world’. Haussmann drove a network of boulevards through the city, straightened other roads, created public squares, vistas and sites for important public buildings, and also made the Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes into public parks.

Rezoning of New York

At the request of Community Board 3, local civic groups, and elected officials, the Department of City Planning (DCP) proposes a zoning map amendment and a zoning text amendment for an approximately 206 block area in the southern half of the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Community District 3, Brooklyn. The rezoning area is generally bounded by Lafayette Avenue and Quincy Street to the north, Classon Avenue to the west, Saratoga Avenue and Broadway to the east, and Atlantic Avenue to the south.

The proposed rezoning aims to preserve neighborhood scale and character, maintain opportunities for mid-rise apartment building construction along appropriate corridors, and allow for residential growth with incentives for affordable housing along the Fulton Street transit and retail corridor.

Unplanned Cities

Humans have built towns and cities for thousands of years. A cluster of huts, a camp by a river, a citadel on a commanding height – numerous places like these have grown organically into permanent settlements. With streets and housing following the contours of the land, many of these organic cities were charming. Others were overcrowded and unsanitary, failing to provide enough sunlight or fresh air. Some made poor use of their sites or outgrew them.

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