IV. MODERN CITY PLANNING
The hectic social transformations and the rapid in-
crease in urban population in modern times led to a
heightened
awareness of the social and economic
problems of the city. There also emerged moral atti-
tudes towards the urban settlement; it was criticized
as
a place of vice or hailed as the promise of a radiant
future. Such
thoughts and attitudes were expressed, and
modified, in actual town
planning.
The Enlightenment conceived of the city as a place
of virtue. Voltaire
considered London, the typical
modern city of his time, as the fostering
mother of
social freedom and mobility as against the fixed hierar-
chy in rural society. He noticed that
even the aristoc-
racy, traditionally
connected with land, moved into the
cities, bringing culture to the
hitherto uncouth towns-
men. Adam Smith, whose
attitude to the city was more
ambivalent than Voltaire's, also defended the
city in
relationship to the country. But he did see some of
the moral
deficiencies of town life, particularly its
“unnaturalness and
dependence.” The nostalgia for
rural life that was to
characterize significant parts of
English social thought of the nineteenth
century is
already expressed by Adam Smith. In Germany, where
no large
cities existed, the radical humanists exalted
the communitarian ideal of
the Greek city-state; but
also the medieval town appeared to the early
romantics
as a culture-forming agent, and as the seat of virtues
like
loyalty, honor, and simplicity. German thinkers
of the early nineteenth
century (Schiller, Fichte,
Hölderlin) fused the characteristics of
the Greek polis
and the medieval town into the image of a burgher-city
as a model of an ethical community.
In the town planning of the period the ideal of the
“planned” city clearly prevailed, although in actual
fact most cities were not built, or expanded, according
to an overall plan.
The emerging science of city plan-
ning was
challenged to provide rationally for the
necessities of a progressively
more industrialized and
mechanized society. This led to the conception
that
the city as a whole is “architecture.” Its
spatial rela-
tionships, its organization,
and the forms and levels of
activity in it require that a city be
“built.”
At a very early stage of the modern period the
visionary architect
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806)
drew an elaborate plan for a
“built” city. A project,
begun in 1773 when he was
asked to propose some
improvements in the residential quarters of a
small,
salt-producing town, continued all his life and resulted
in the
publication of L'Architecture considérée
sous le
rapport de l'art, des moeurs, et de la
législation (1804).
Ledoux planned five volumes, but
completed only one.
Filled with enthusiasm for J. J. Rousseau and the
hope
for an improved social order, Ledoux envisioned his
ideal city
and drew plans for it, thereby boldly com-
bining traditional patterns with original motifs. The
shape of his
ideal town is a semicircle, with the factory
at its center and the
important buildings on the rings.
He thus anticipated both Ebenezer Howard's “garden
city” and Le Corbusier's cité
radieuse. Ledoux's poetic
gifts become particularly evident in
his plans for indi-
vidual buildings which,
although designed in the form
of simple geometric shapes, are permeated by
a per-
sonal, subjective symbolism.
Ledoux's starting point was comparatively modern
(the salt-producing plant
of Chaux) but the solutions
he proposed place him within the tradition of
utopian
town planning. Like Campanella and other authors of
utopias he
emphasized the principle of the “planned
city” and
like them he preferred the round form.
The vision of an ideal city continued to exercise its
fascination in the
later nineteenth century, but more
attention had now to be paid to problems
arising from
economic and technical conditions. One specific type
of
“built” city was proposed by Ebenezer Howard
(1850-1928), a London architect who was deeply in-
fluenced by an extended visit to the United States. In
order to
counteract the industrial congestion of modern
cities (mainly in England),
Howard evolved the con-
cept of the garden city.
He published his proposals
in his work Tomorrow: A
Peaceful Path to Reform
(1892), reprinted as Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902).
Howard envisaged a self-contained town of strictly
predetermined size
(approximately 35,000 inhabitants)
and plan. A well-balanced proportion
between the
urban area and agricultural land is essential. Any in-
crease in population would be met by the
creation of
satellites, none nearer than four miles to the original
city. The town plan of the garden city owes much to
Ledoux, and through him
to the utopian tradition.
Howard's imagined city is round; factories and
houses
are placed on belts of open land to combine town and
country
advantages. (In this particular feature Howard
is perhaps preceded by some
English and American
industrialists who moved their factories into the
coun-
try and established villages around
them.) Of particular
interest in Howard's plan is the fact that he paid
atten-
tion to, and made provisions for,
the specific joys of
urban life. Thus, in a wide glass arcade
(significantly
called “Crystal Palace”) near a large
park, that kind
of shopping is done “which requires the joy of
deliber-
ation and
selection.” Howard's garden city allows large
space for nature
(not more than one sixth of the general
area should be covered by
buildings), but it is a “built”
town, with rigidly
prescribed boulevards, distribution
of buildings, etc. Even nature is
planned, being funda-
mentally recreation
ground. Howard's close relation
to what is known as the “English
garden” is obvious.
Town planning in the twentieth century, although
it largely remains on
paper, shows the profound
changes in urbanistic thought. Most of the
problems
of contemporary town planning were anticipated by
Tony Garnier (1869-1914) in his first project for an
industrial
town, designed in 1901-04. In his further
projects and commissions, and in
his book
Une cité
industrielle
(1917) he discusses his plans in great detail.
Clearly distinguishing
between the different functions
of the city (living, work, leisure,
education, traffic),
Garnier undertakes to design a town which will
fully
serve the needs of man in an industrial age. A bold
innovator in
the use of materials and in the shape of
individual buildings (preferring
an ascetic geometry),
he is also highly original in the disposition of the
town
as a whole: he separates vehicular and pedestrian
traffic,
designs a residential district without enclosed
courtyards but featuring
continuous green areas, and
plans a community center that anticipates contem-
porary social centers.
Another architect and town planner who anticipated
the problems and shapes
of the modern city, Antonio
Sant' Elia (1880-1916), was sometimes
associated with
the Futurists. Sant' Elia was greatly attracted by
some
features of North American civilization, particularly
by the
romantic aspects of its technical development
and by the progressive
expansion of an industrial me-
tropolis. His
grandiose project for a Città Nuova
was
shown in Milan in 1914. In the catalogue to the exhibi-
tion Sant' Elia published a manifesto on the need
of
breaking with the past. The “New City” should
corre-
spond to the mentality of men
freed from the bonds
of tradition and conventions. In his many drawings
a
major theme is the architecture of a metropolis which
is the result
of a technological and industrialized soci-
ety.
In designing towering buildings with exterior ele-
vators, multi-level road bridges, and imaginary fac-
tories (“monuments of the city of the
future”), Sant'
Elia raised these modern forms to the level of
symbols.
Garnier and Sant' Elia influenced Le Corbusier. Le
Corbusier's work in
urbanism consists of a large
number of articles and books, and an
impressive num-
ber of projects for town
planning. Only a small part
of these projects has materialized (of
particular
importance is the so-called Marseille Block of 1952).
Le
Corbusier took a decisive step beyond Garnier and
Sant' Elia. While Garnier
still thought of small towns,
limited to 35,000 inhabitants who are all
engaged in
industry, and Sant' Elia's visions remained in bare
outline, Le Corbusier planned in detail for a city of
3,000,000
inhabitants. From the outset he steered to-
wards the problems of the “change-over town” (as
he
later called it), a metropolis with diverse functions
which must be
disentangled.
A significant part of Le Corbusier's theoretical
inquiry into the urban
problem is a critical apprecia-
tion of
cities of the past, particularly of the recent past,
and of the solutions
that have been proposed to this
problem. Without ever allowing himself to be moved
by
“local color” or aestheticism, he denounced the
blemishes of modern cities, that is, those aspects of the
city not well
enough adapted to their various functions.
He also rejected the utopian
ideas of limiting the size
of cities, and contrary to Frank Lloyd Wright,
who
advocated the diffusion of urban communities, was
opposed to
horizontal spreading of the urban complex.
Le Corbusier's work in urbanism bears the mark of
both rationalism and a
philosophical image of man.
His rationalism leads to an analysis of the
city's differ-
ent functions, and to an
allocation of distinct spaces
to each function. The establishing of an
orderly rela-
tionship between traffic
lanes, on the one hand, and
living and working zones, on the other, is of
primary
importance in this context. A famous result of this
approach
is Le Corbusier's famous hierarchy of roads
(the 7 V system), starting with
1 V, an artery carrying
international and inter-urban traffic, and ending
with
7 V, a fine capillary system in the zone reserved for
children
and schools. The analytical character is
expressed even in small details.
“So great is Le Cor-
busier's
need for logical organization that, having to
lay out the vast capital of
Candigarh, he divides the
vegetation to be used into six categories, each
of which
receives a precise function” (F. Choay, p. 16).
Le Corbusier combines the analysis of the city's
functions with a
philosophical image of man, for whom
the city is built. Although he
emphasizes the specific-
ally modern
conditions of urban life (millions of inhab-
itants in one metropolis, the decisive role of traffic)
and proposes
specifically modern solutions (the
“Cartesian
skyscraper,” the zoning of traffic), he is
deeply indebted to
the humanistic tradition. The
thought of the utopians (especially of
Charles Fourier)
was of particularly great importance for his work.
This is reflected even in his language: terms such as
“radiant
city,” “architecture of happiness” are
both
frequent in his writings and characteristic of his ideas
and
attitudes.
In his work, both in individual buildings and in town
planning, he tries to
achieve an “adaptation to the
human scale”: in
individual buildings by applying the
“Modulor” (his
own invention of a scale of architec-
tural proportions related to the proportions of the
human body), in
the designing of the city as a whole
by assuming an hour of walking as the
basic unit of
town planning. In his town planning he emphasizes
the
city's center: on a small scale it is a community
center (as in St.
Dié, 1945-46), on a monumental scale
it is a capitol (as in
Candigarh, the metropolis of
Punjab, begun in 1950). Under Le Corbusier's
influence
the “Athens Charter” was published by the
interna-
tional architectural
organization (CIAM) in 1933, set-
ting out data and requirements connected with the
planning of
modern cities under five headings (Dwell-
ings, Recreation, Work, Transportation, Historic
Buildings).
Le Corbusier's work makes it evident that in the
twentieth century, as in
former periods, town planning
is not only a highly complex technical task
but involves
philosophical ideas and the creation, or application,
of
traditional, symbolic forms.
