Below is a table listing the lectures given in this course. Excluding the introductory and concluding lecture, each of the linked pages includes a lecture summary for the class, pages from the class handout, referenced texts from the lecture, as well as a list of precedents, examples, and works discussed during the class. The introductory lecture provides a brief overview of the course, the covered topics, and the course structure. The concluding lecture is a review of the entire course, with emphasis on common themes and changes in theory of city form over time.
Lecture Notes
Lecture Summary
The transformational models of these much smaller cities represent, on the one hand in the case of Vienna, a relatively unique way of changing the city’s form by using the space of its redundant walls, versus, in the case of Barcelona, a much more common way of expanding the city by appropriating and sub-dividing open land outside the city’s core.
As European cities were located toward the east, so they required larger fortification. Vienna, for long a bastion against the Ottoman threat, having lost the rationale for its walls and their surrounding glacis, found in this space the place to build for its newly empowered middle class. The old city was dominated by religion and royalty; for the new liberals, these had no role in the new city which was to be their “political bastion, economic capital and radiating center for their intellectual life.” The Ringstrasse satisfied this ambition as it encircled the old city from the Danube with continuous regions of activity: warehouses and offices close to the water, a financial center, the university, the parliament/town hall/justice/president’s palace complex, a museum district, a music zone, followed by apartments back to the river. The Ringstrasse was not intended to bridge to the outer city; it was a great avenue in itself made up of items which “carry the citizen from one building to another, as from one aspect of life to another.” As if a new architecture of the middle class was impossible, its public architecture represented itself through appropriate choices from the past, Gothic for the free commune of the Town Hall, Baroque for the aesthetic enthusiasm of the Theater, Renaissance for the enlightened culture of the University, and Greek for the democracy of the Parliament. Apartments were built as large multi-family dwellings, gruppenzinhaus, modeled on aristocratic palaces with rusticated ground floor for shops. Like elsewhere, upgrading the city’s appearance went hand-in-hand with technical improvements, such as channeling the Danube, devising an urban train system and building the first city hospital. Some have linked the massive real estate speculation with an increase in the appalling housing conditions of the poor leading to the socialist victory of “red Vienna” and the invention of a new housing type, the hof, pugnacious housing enclaves demonstrating the workers’ presence in the city. The Vienna story, beyond including one of the greatest periods of cultural achievement ever, sets up the contrasting theories of urban “goodness” between Camillo Sitte on the one hand, the champion of craft and Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, and small-scale, picturesque urban morphologies, versus the great architect and urbanist, Otto Wagner, who saw the modern city as efficient, expansive, and open-ended, served beneficially by modern technology.
Barcelona was a walled medieval city and the center of industrial development in Catalonia. But its overcrowded condition—about the same number of people died of cholera in the 1830’s as in Paris—demanded expansion which came in the form of a competition won in 1853 by the city’s architect. Invalidated by royal decree, the expansion plan fell to the engineer, Cerdà, whose plan was built soon after. The plan was seen as a rational structure of grid elements 113 meters square governed by ordenanzas and trazado in a pattern extending outwards from the old city. The corners of each block was cut at a 45-degree angle to create small squares between blocks, and each block had an open center presumably to be used as open space for the residents but taken over and used in many different ways over time. A major avenue, the Passeig de Gràcia, linked from the old Ramblas to the hills, and a wide diagonal highway was meant as a by-pass for traffic attempting to pass through the city. The Ensanche, as the Cerdà-designed area has come to be known, is highly regarded as an urban structure built on vacant ground and as well articulated as if it were architecture. It has served as host to the buildings of Gaudi, for the Casa Mila apartment block which makes full use of the diagonal corner as a façade, and for the formidable Sagrada Familia. In 1932 it was subject to a new “modernist” plan by Le Corbusier and GATCPAC, and in recent years it has been subject to various changes, those brought about by civic repair and those engendered by the demands of the 1992 Olympic Games. Cerdà’s plan is one variation on a theme of urban expansion outward from a historic center that occurs frequently in nineteenth-century European plans such as Kleanthes-Schaubert’s plan for Athens (1833), Antonelli’s plan for Turin (1852), Castro’s plan for Madrid (1860) and Trotti’s plan for Bari (1867). It is also the preferred mode for the expansion of smaller towns all over Europe.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 10 (PDF - 5.5MB)
- Page 1: Seven sectors of the Vienna Ringstrasse from the Danube
- Page 2: Aerial photo of Cerdà’s Ensanche and the old city in Barcelona
Referenced Texts
Fig. 1 and 2 from Aibar, Eduardo, and Wiebe E. Bijker. “The Cerdà Plan for the Extension of Barcelona.” Science, Technology, & Human Values 22, no. 1 (1997): 3–30.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Gruppenzinshaus, Danube Canal, Karlsplatz Stadtbahn Station, and Karl Marx-Hof (Vienna, Austria), proposed plan for Vienna (Camilo Sitte), zoning of expansion and extension for Vienna (Otto Wagner), plan of Ensanche in Barcelona, Spain (Ildefons Cerdà), Las Ramblas, and Passeig de Gràcia (Spain); Casa Batlló, Casa Milà, and La Sagrada Familia (Antonio Gaudí); proposed plans for Barcelona (Le Corbusier); proposed plans for Barcelona (Leon Krier); plan for Torino (Alessandro Antonelli); plan for Madrid (Carlos María de Castro); plan for Bari (Trotti); plan for Athens (Kleanthes-Schaubert); Altamura, Puglia (Italy)
Lecture Summary
Starting as a dozen Indian tribal huts in 1830, Chicago was built by a market economy unrestrained by walls, aristocracy or the state. From a land value of a few thousand dollars to five billion in 1930, its fortunes shifted according to a series of economic cycles documented by Homer Hoyt in 1933. These fluctuations were affected both by national economic factors but also by local activity: booms caused by the construction of a canal in 1836 and a railroad in 1854, for instance, and slumps from one of world’s largest urban fires in 1871. Speculation in land accompanied these cycles; in the first boom, the fame of Chicago real estate was so great that lots were sold in New York auctions. These real estate gambling games, it has been argued, were accelerated by the existence of a flat city grid, reducing land to a tradable commodity. Mumford recounts: “Each lot, being of uniform shape, became a unit, like a coin, capable of ready appraisal and exchange.” This does not, however, explain capitalist transactions in non-gridded cities. As a speculative engine, Chicago denied naturalness in favor of hubris. Over 50 miles of labyrinthine tunnels were built in the mud from 1899 onward by private interests “to sneak a subway system under Chicago before the city knew what was happening,” using bribes and lies to get the city’s franchise. When 18,000 buildings were destroyed in the fire of 1871, there were feelings of divine judgment and retribution but, more strongly, notions that “the day after (the fire) became the first day of the new Chicago” and “Chicago was open again for business.”
Chicago is a case study of a city first dedicating itself to assembling capital as quickly as possible, no matter at what costs to urban experience, and then socializing the wealth towards respectability and enculturation. Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium speaks to the new devotion to culture, but in Sullivan’s case culture is attached to moral propositions about modernism with which he attacked the eclectic styles of the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The Exposition was the grand response to a city of slaughterhouses, a “neoclassical wonderland” that attracted over 27 million visitors to its splendor. In London and Paris, the exhibitions were about progress through technology, while in Chicago, technology was already in the city: one-twenty-fifth of the world’s railroads crossed in Chicago in 1893 and there were already two dozen skyscrapers. The Exposition addressed culture in two ways. In the first case, the overwhelming scale and classical consistency of the White City spoke to classy ideals for an emerging city (and nation). This “great beautiful silence” was set against a transvestized, racially informed place for another version of American culture, located in a one-mile long boulevard called the Midway Plaisance, where, under the direction of a Jewish impresario, “half-naked savages and hootchy-kootchy dancers provided white Americans with … a journey into the recesses of their own repressed desires.” There were other temporary alternatives envisioned to the existing Chicago, among them the Reverend Dwight Moody’s Tent City and Pullman, the industrial model city, which visitors passed en route to the Exposition, but where its workers rejected its paternalism, leading to the town’s disappearance. The major effort to reshape Chicago came in the first plan for an American metropolis, Burnham’s plan of 1909. Burnham’s extraordinary stewardship over the Exposition could not be achieved at the scale of a modern metropolis. His attempts to enclose the city with an arc six miles from the center and the diagonalizing of the grid to connect the outskirts and the interior were “city beautiful” formalisms impossible to bring about: what could be made were improvements to the regional train system, the upgrading of the lake Michigan waterfront and an extension of the overall park and forest reserve system. Two attempts by architects since Burnham to change the pattern of Chicago have also been ignored: Hilbesheimer, some forty years after Burnham, proposing a systematic breakdown of the grid parcels, and Gandelsonas, some thirty years later, suggesting formal games to excavate the underlying structure of the grid.
Handout
- Page 1: Comparison of different city form typologies (London Square, Paris Boulevard, Vienna—Gruppenhaus, hof, Barcelona Block, Sunnyside Gardens “Superblock”) with the German Siedlung
- Page 2: Hoyt’s cycles of land value and building construction in Chicago from 1830–1930
Referenced Texts
Willis, Garry. “Chicago Underground,” The New York Review of Books, October 21, 1993.
Appelbaum, Stanley. “Rand, McNally & Co.’s New Indexed Miniature Guide Map of the World’s Columbian Exposition at Chicago, 1893.” The Chicago World’s Fair of 1893: A Photographic Record. Dover Publications, 1980. ISBN: 9780486239903.
Gandelsonas, Mario. “Drawings Investigating Chicago Grid.” The Urban Text. 1st ed. MIT Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780262570848.
Examples, Precdents, and Works
Map of Illinois (La Honton, 1703); World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago (1893); Transportation Building (Alder & Sullivan); Administration Building (Richard Morris Hunt); Women’s Building (Sophia Hayden); Manufactures Building (Robert Swain Peabody); Ferris Wheel (George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr.); Midway Plaisance, Cairo Street, Florence Hotel, and the Arcade (Chicago, Illinois, United States); proposed grid plan (Ludwig Hilberseimer)
Lecture Summary
The transformation of the nineteenth-century city involved new forms of management and information, spatial specialization, and expressions of institutional control, aspects of which are the subject of this class. Prior to the first census of 1801 there was not the urgency to enumerate populations systematically as became necessary with the extended modern city. There was also less need to measure complex space, specify legal boundaries and produce the specialized plans that the new urban management required. (Recall Turgot and Verniquet’s maps as precedent for the first urban plan of Paris.) New architectural typologies emerged as the city began to change from the random form of medievalism to the rationalization of modernism. The house, previously inclusive and promiscuous, was subject to classification and division into parts. Haussmann’s boulevard house has levels of social class from basement to attic. The journey-to-work now deals with the new separation of domestic and labor. The response to the recognition of people as individuals is special types to suit their specialness: Ledoux’ project for the House for an Intellectual is an example. The architecture of loose agglomeration and addition is replaced by buildings with clearly articulated and apparently complete and similar forms for orphanages, asylums, schools, slaughterhouses and other institutions, as evident in the plans of the hospital near Notre Dame before and after the fire.
Institutional expression changes from the display of public violence, such as torture and the guillotine, to an expression of criminal reform. Prisons no longer need dark, hidden dungeons but can now be light and exposed, as fortresses are replaced by economic geometry. Bentham’s invention of the panoptic form in 1787 follows this principle: “the prisoner is seen, but he does not see: he is the object of information, never a subject in communication.” Hard control is replaced by soft control, an image that commentators such as Virilio extend to contemporary urban surveillance. The use of idealizing geometry, symbolic control and specialized types can be seen in the salt production facility built by Ledoux for Louis XV at Chaux, where the accommodation of the factory boss, the white-collar and the blue-collar workers are identifiable around a hemi-spherical space. For further insight into the expression of power at a larger scale, two avenues are compared: the Hitler/Speer proposal for the main axis for Berlin, and the Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg. In the Berlin case, the enshrinement of permanent power (the “theory of ruined value”), the design by comparison and analogy (“We must surpass Paris and Vienna”), and the devotion to a never-ending style (Empire and Neo-Empire) are posited against the St. Petersburg example. The 2.5-mile-long Nevsky Prospekt is axially focused on the Admiralty Building, the façades represent an apparently random mixture of palaces, churches, government buildings, department and book stores, and libraries (almost the whole city is represented on the road), the architecture of the street is strong but not exceptional, and the street displays its capacity to change and incorporate the memory of change over time (the Barricada cinema now at the site of the bridge revolutionaries in 1917).
Handout
- Page 1: Peter’s Nevsky Prospekt in modern-day St. Petersburg
Referenced Texts
Friedman, David. “Palaces and the Street in Late-Medieval and Renaissance Italy.” (PDF - 5.7MB) In Urban Landscapes: International Perspectives. Edited by J. W. R. Whitehand and P. J. Larkham. Routledge, 1992, p. 93. ISBN: 9780415070744.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Panopticon (Jeremy Bentham); Fresnes prison, Hôtel-Dieu de Paris, and Arc de Triomphe (France); Ville de Chaux, Saline Royale at Arc-et-Senans and director’s house, and house for intellectual (Claude Nicolas Ledoux); Volkshalle (Albert Speer); Nevsky Prospekt in 1725 and 1850, Anichkov Palace, Beloselsky-Belozersky Palace, the Passage, Alexander Library, Kazan Cathedral, and Moika Crossing (Moscow, Russia)
Lecture Summary
For many, the gradual reform of cities could not overcome their essential malaise; yet the nineteenth century was also a time of “great expectations” and alternatives to the physical and social form of cities abounded, most often in imagined new places distant from the existing. More’s sixteenth-century Utopia / Eutopia was both a good place and no place, an island of 54 cities where no private possessions would be tolerated. Very often utopias were constructed in opposition to identified social ills: family weakness (the Kibbutz separating child-rearing); drink and alienation (Owen’s reform of character); secular failures (the abstinence of Shakers); Puritanism (Fourier’s communal passion); industrial society’s disorder (paternal factory towns of Pullman, Saltaire and Noisel-sur-Marne); and over-centralization (the distributionism of Kropotkin and Morris). Most of these options faltered around the difficulty of maintaining physical (“the middle landscape”) and psychic (“to be yourself and also a group”) boundaries, yet the power of their ideas infiltrated mainstream urbanism: Fourier’s rue interieure, for instance. Compared to their social reforms, their architecture was conservative, recalling power (Considerant’s phalansteries or Verne’s “super-Krupp” city) or suffering from not having enough resources to innovate physically. The idea of an available quotient is argued to be the case in Russia after 1917. While these utopian ideas often emanated from ordinary people, criticized as such by Marx, their influence was widespread: the effect on Gandhi and the Tolstoy farm in Johannesburg, for instance. Antagonistic opposition of ideas were stimulated, Morris’ writing of the desertion of London in News from Nowhere after reading Bellamy’s communistic version of Boston in Looking Backward.
For architects who proposed new alternatives for the modern city, the stress was on the spatial and formal organization of the city, often with naïve or borrowed notions of the society that would inhabit them. Garnier, for example, whose proposal for a new industrial city was published in 1917, argued that there would be no need for certain types of building in his city because “the new society, governed by socialist law, would have no need for churches, and that, as capitalism would be suppressed, there would be no swindlers, robbers or murderers.” Garnier’s was an all-concrete city with building corners rounded off and serviced by a technology that produced cars and airplanes. In its zoning, it was much like a paternalistic factory town. The great architect, Le Corbusier, had a fundamental conviction that the answer to most urban problems lay in the creation of the “right plan,” an instrument which would be appropriate independent of the ideology of its patrons. So his 1922 plan for a modern city located business in the center but his Voisin plan for Paris three years later was rejected by the capitalists. In 1930 his syndicalist plan for Moscow, now with housing in the center, found no favor from the communists. Frustrated by the inability of the citizens of Algiers to adopt his many plans for their city from 1933 to 1940, he appealed to the fascist French Vichy government and wrote to Mussolini for help. It waited until the middle of the twentieth century for him to realize a plan fully, this time for a capital city for a new India. Frank Lloyd Wright’s great architectural production often asserted commentaries on cities, but he never designed a large city. He wrote a great deal, expressing philosophies taken from many sources such as that of the economist Henry George. Having already built for 40 years, Wright designed Broadacre City, a tiny settlement for 7000 people, during the depression years. Its principles lay in an apparent American right to automobile ownership (in 1929 more than 5 million cars were made in the USA), a sense of quality and scale of small enterprises, both in agricultural and machine-shop production, and a connected and informed citizenry despite their physical isolation. To what extent Broadacre represents an alternative to American suburbia is unclear. Meyer Shapiro may be unfair when he says that “Wright’s social imagination should not be classed with that of the great Utopians whom he seems to resemble.”
Handout
- Page 1: Timeline of eighteenth to twentieth century urban utopianism
Referenced Texts
Excerpts from Bordosi, Ralph. Flight from the City. Harper, 1935.
Smith, Joseph. “An Explanation of the Plat of the City of Zion.” June 25, 1833.
More, Thomas. Utopia. 1516.
Owen, Robert. The Crisis. 1832.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Familistery of Guise; Phalanstery (Charles Fourier); Shakers settlement; Rappites migration; Oneida community (Humphrey Noyes); Mormon spatial program; Theosophists traditions; Fountain Grove (Thomas Lake Harris); Llano del Rio (California, United States); Kronenberg (Germany); Saltair, and Port Sunlight (England); Les Villes tentaculaires, Algiers, Ville Contemporaine, Voisin, ASCORAL (Le Corbusier)
Lecture Summary
Two national urban programs of the twentieth century are examined in the light of many of the nineteenth-century ideas and practices of the last seven classes. The British new towns policy set in motion by a newly-elected Labor party in 1946 was implemented for 25 years and then abandoned. In Russia a period of bold proposals for cities after the Revolution lasted for 15 years with relatively few realizations, to be replaced by the orthodoxy of Stalinism and subsequent Soviet practice.
It is arguable that the trajectory from the Garden cities of Howard in the first two decades of the twentieth century to the new towns policy of the forties was a continuum, disrupted only by many wars and an international economic depression. The goals of the government-sponsored new town building program were urban containment, protection of the countryside, the building of strong service centers of high environmental quality, balanced and self-contained. These towns have been allocated into three categories. The first, much like the Howard towns, were for 30,000 people (an ideal figure that goes back to the Greeks), were circular in form with a modest city center and clear zoning of parts around, and followed the architectural paradigm of the 1951 Festival of Britain (Stevenage, Harlow). The second, responding to criticisms of the dullness of the first towns, doubled the town size, increased density, accentuated the form of the center, experimented with linearity and social engineering, and followed the more outspoken imagery of British architectural “brutalism” (Hook, Cumbernauld). The third category of towns continued the trend to increased size, now 100 to 250,000 people, and, responding to a loosening up of town planning regulations and consumer affluence, produced gridded towns, the exact form of which would be achieved over time with the participation of the new residents (Milton Keynes, Washington). It has been suggested that the next generation of towns, like the proposed new town for mid-Wales would have abandoned a form generated by simple geometries. By 1971, 28 new towns had been built and one out of sixty people in England and Scotland lived in them. There have been several criticisms of the new town program, among which their failure to recruit socially balanced populations, but it still represents a unique experiment in twentieth-century city form.
Following the success of the October 1917 revolution, Russian architects and planners, and the many visitors such as Ernst May, saw great hope for a transformed urbanism in the new technological possibilities, the state control of the economy and land, and the emergence of a new class of clients, workers who were not bound by tradition and conservatism. However Russia was suffering from wars with Germany and a civil war, and with 80% of the population rural, famine accelerated rapid immigration to cities. But this did not deter the proliferation of competitions and idealized projects, often opportunities to demonstrate the polemics of the new urban institutes that claimed unique understanding of the new Soviet city. The ASNOVA group, for instance, proclaimed an aesthetic formula that would resolve the conflict between the old aesthetic symbolism and Marxism. In contrast, the OSA group of functionalists believed in a scientific socialism but was split about whether to concentrate or deconcentrate the city. And yet another institute, WOPRA, denounced both. But the boldness of the projects and theories about the modern city remain unrivalled: the many plans for Moscow, for instance, including the Mossovet disurbanist plan of 1919 and the Shirov animated greenbelt plan of 1929. Equally radical are the plans of the three finalists in the Ville Vert competition, particularly that of Melnikov whose town would have included wild animals. One of the ways to keep the visiting workers in close touch with nature, a laboratory of sleep, and a central institute for changing the form of man.
Handout
- Page 1: Mossovet and Sakulin plans for Moscow
Referenced Texts
Hamilton, Alan, and Sophie Kirkham. “Too Ugly to Live: The Award-winning Town Begging to be put out of its Misery on TV,” The Times of London, February 21, 2005.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Plan for London, England (Patrick Abercrombie); Welwyn Garden City, Stevenage, Runcorn, Milton Keynes (England); Cumbernauld (Scotland); capitalist city (Milyutin); plan for Moscow, and Centrosoyuz Building (Le Corbusier); plan for Moscow (Ernst May); La Ville Vert, and linear city (Nikolai Ladovsky); La Ville Vert, and Narkomfin (Moisei Ginzburg); La Ville Vert, and Soviet Pavilion in 1924 (Konstantin Melnikov); Magnitogorsk (Ivan Leonidov); Stalingrad, and Rusakov Workers Club (Russia); Zuyev Club (Ilya Golosov); Leningradskaia Pravada competition
Lecture Summary
A number of themes relating to the making of decisions about the form of the city are put forward and the costs and benefits of each observed. Clearly most of these do not occur singly; highway building in a city can be restricted by professional advocacy, community education and physical confrontation, to mention some, and the case of new schools for Pontiac, Michigan is framed to show how different actors use a variety of methods to achieve a final outcome.
The first theme regards decision-making as the key to achieving good city form. On the one hand, this is seen as dependent on the quality of information available and on the technological advances that can portray outcomes, illustrate probabilities and trade-offs with the use of games and simulations. Assuming that good outcomes come from better specialized knowledge, it struggles with built-in epistemological problems about completeness, time and control. Can a system ever be developed that systematizes all the pieces in an optimal relationship, or does a more disjointed incrementalism offer better learning possibilities? What are the proper time frames according to which various planned actions are determined? How much control needs to be placed in whose hands? In the latter case, the form of Milton Keynes is instructive as is its policy of using performance standards as opposed to zoning. In most contemporary democracies, a highly decentralized process is an accepted ideal, utilizing the rare knowledge of users and reinforcing their sense of competence. But all users are not competent or agree, there are indivisible goods like clean air, places such as the subway used by many transient clients, and other problems of complete participation.
Opposing the argument for inclusion is the ancient model of relying on a super-figure to determine the city’s form. Arguments favoring this model range from a belief that a good city is one of grand design, that only a single figure can superintend over complexities, recognize problems and act quickly, that citizens cannot agree on strong products, and that, as Robert Moses proclaimed: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Moses, typical of the super-figure, is seen as energetic and charismatic, enormously able to manage. His projects as America’s greatest builder and the shaper of New York are reflected upon through comments by his critics and supporters.
The invention of “advocacy,” professionals using their expertise in favor of those disadvantaged in a plural society, is examined as it was first exercised in opposition to the building of the Inner Belt highway in Cambridge, Massachusetts. This opposition, in part, changed the form of the city to one without new highway building in the center and to a re-examination of the role of public transportation in it. Another process to inform good changes to the city involves the idea of heightening people’s perceptual awareness. The education of citizens about their city takes many forms, such as political education (the steel workers housing in Terni), information-giving (Geddes’ Outlook Tower), making the city visible (Illich and Yellow Pages), and making the city into a school-room (Montreal’s metro-education and the Bedford-Stuyvesant project). Other propositions about processes to improve the city’s form include direct confrontation with authority (the 1968 Brussels experience), the development of a collective memory (Alexander), designing a utopia (subject of an earlier class), helping yourself (the anarchist tradition), and revolutionizing society (the Marxist hope).
Handout
- Page 1: Summary of commentaries about the views of Robert Moses from 1975
Referenced Texts
Johnson, Kirk. “Instead of an Autocrat, Rebuilding by Committee,” The New York Times, April 14, 2002.
Filler, Martin. “Back to Babel.” The New Republic, February 3, 2003.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Housing in Terni, and restoration in Bologna (Italy); planning of Pittsburg, and University of Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania, United States); Louvain University (Lucien Kroll); Northern State Parkway, Grand Central Parkway, and Brooklyn Bridge (Robert Moses); Genova project; Fun Palace, and InterAtion Center (Cedric Price); Bedford-Stuyvesant (New York, United States); “Manhattan” plan (Brussels)
Lecture Summary
A brief survey of some important theoretical positions about the subject is followed by a structure, developed around the concept of “bipolarity”, which is then applied to five case studies: religion (Jerusalem), apartheid (Johannesburg), bi-nationality (San Diego/Tijuana), colonialism (Delhi), and spatial integration (Havana).
The position that spatial and social structure are loosely coupled in both directions, an argument of Lynch, is tested through reference to historic examples: “It is usually more difficult to arrange a spatial change without unwarranted spatial effects than vice versa, since the spatial experiment is the more adaptable of the two, less independent and less self-willed.” Other notions follow the premise that space is an active agent, is inherently unequal, independent of political ideology, distributed as a function of who allocates resources, and is therefore subject to conflict (Pahl). Among ideas examined are those now-classic of Lefebvre (space/everyday life/social relations, “the right to the town”), Castells (“collective consumption units,” the “wild city”), Harvey (space and capital flow, territorial justice), and more recent notions of space and differentness, the coalition of multiple identities across space, and the potential of an essential diversity in the contemporary city irrespective of spatially separated categories of race, class, sexuality and ethnicity.
To serve as a lens with which to analyze the case studies of five cities, a concept of “bipolarity” is introduced. Its premises are: clear and conflicted social relations phrased as opposites (e.g., black/white), distinct spatial patterns kept apart (the green line, no-man’s land), space as mediating issues (sovereignty, security), new spatial/social items (the township, the maidan), new language, both verbal and visual (the vernacular, the bungalow), and various dynamics of change (war, revolution, reform).
The construction of religious buildings and their location in the 3,000-year history of Jerusalem is the focus of the first case study. Jerusalem is the most destroyed and rebuilt city in history, each annihilation and resurrection producing symbols of a new order. The first of the great monotheistic religions, Judaism, is reflected in the three temples built up to 70 A.D., in the end all destroyed and never rebuilt. In their Diaspora, Jews replace building by book and a religious practice unrelated to a specific architecture. For the Christians, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, despite many destructions and fraternal frictions, remains the center of its religion anchored above mythological interpretations about the passion of Christ. The most recent of religious immigrants to Jerusalem, Islam, chooses the site of the Jewish temples, destroyed over 500 years before and since kept abandoned by Christians, to build their religious complex, the Haram-al-Sharif that has never been destroyed and remains undisturbed today. Over three thousand years, Jerusalem’s form has been determined by polarized religious ideologies, often overlapping with political ambitions, making the goal of sharing the recent city formidable. How this may be achieved is reviewed together with how Jerusalem, a capital city only during the first Jewish occupation and under the Crusaders, may become the capital of two nations.
Handout
- Page 1: Notes on the outcomes of bi-polarity
- Page 2: Matrix of case studies for Johannesburg/Soweto, US/Mexico, Delhi/New Delhi and Havana/Cuba
- Page 3: Chronology of Jerusalem
- Page 4: Response to “Common ground” in The New Republic
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Solomon’s Temple, Holy of Holies, Herod’s Temple, Ezekiel’s Temple, Temple of Aphrodite, Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Dome of the Rock, Al-Aqsa Mosque, Dormition Abbey, Wilson’s Arch (Jerusalem, Israel); God as the Architect (The Frontispiece of Bible Moralisee); manuscript from De Civitate Dei (St. Augustine); Madaba Map (Jordan); plan for Jerusalem after British occupation (William McLean); plan for Jerusalem (Louis Kahn)
Lecture Summary
Racial segregation underlies all urban history in South Africa; as late as 1976, a government minister proclaimed that “blacks are present in white areas (cities) to sell their labor and for nothing else.” Five stages of Johannesburg’s growth over the century of its existence are explored according to an explicit social and spatial ideology, apartheid. The first city is a mining camp from 1885 to 1917, in which gold mining is the city’s raison d’etre and 50% of the city’s 100,000 people are black-African, Malay, colored, Indian and Chinese and at “locations” within walking distance of the center. It is a city of primitive, feudal relations and is compact until the plague epidemic of 1904 forces the city to re-house blacks some twelve miles to the southwest. Until 1948 the second city is an informal city in which social relations are determined largely by soft racialism and the city is spread south-westward for blacks and in the opposite direction for whites (recall Hoyt’s sector theory). Faced with an influenza epidemic, the city takes on for the first time the task of housing blacks, in Western Native Township which, together with the freehold housing of Sophiatown, becomes the heart of a new African urban culture of music, writing, political parties, journalism and gangs. Half of black housing is now supplied by the city (housing expenditure is equal to that spent on the zoo), but there is shared commerce on seams, a variety of journey-to-work options and a strong self-help presence. Due to the city’s industrialization during the Second World War and its overcrowding, the doctrine of strong apartheid and swart gevaar (black danger) leads to a rationalized city, supervised by a national policy in which racial groups are to be separated absolutely. Ultimately this leads to the virtual abolishment of all black space in the central city and the growth of the new city of Soweto (south-western township), now the poor partner of the white city across abandoned gold mine dumps. The state assumes unique responsibility for all black housing, building in Soweto as many houses between 1955 and 1970 as in the previous 37 years. Johannesburg’s city brochure boasts of having “perhaps the biggest housing project in the world.” Limiting black labor to only building black houses lowers building costs, thus producing hand-built housing for blacks. Soweto is also subject to internal tribal separation, and with a population of 1.5 million people it has few commercial or entertainment facilities of its own, forcing people to rely on the white CBD with a journey-to-work now costing 300% higher than in the second city. Following on the continuing economic decline of the apartheid system, the fourth city from 1970 to 1990 is a city of neglect. No more public housing is built and a futile policy of decentralization of workplaces to black homelands is envisioned. The first inclusive city follows the collapse of apartheid and leaves a new spatial and social form to be achieved after the death of racial barriers and the repair of the vast inequities of the past (the state needs about 600 new houses every day for the next twenty years).
To understand the bipolarity of Johannesburg in further detail, Western Native Township is studied in more detail. Between 1917 and 1960 in the informal city, this place of 2,000 rented houses for about 15,000 people is shown to be a community which, despite enormous obstacles, managed to organize itself as a place of pride and respectability. A large proportion of the minimal housing available to the renters is systematically enlarged by them and the street-facing facades are decorated according to an iconic imagery which operates both at a purely formal and symbolic level. The house of an ANC leader, for instance, has both a circular sun form typical in the community but it looks also like a rotor to establish the occupant’s allegiance to Russian industrial prowess. As the inhabitants stay in the city, they are influenced by urban circumstances; their first decorations are, like in the countryside, of mud and cowdung, then with throwaway tin and wood, and finally with decorated plaster. They have become urban citizens and their iconography proves their trajectory. The destruction of their homes and their multi-tribal community and their evacuation to Soweto represents the spatial and social tragedy of mindless polarization.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 17 (PDF - 1.4MB)
- Page 1: Timelines for Johannesburg and Western Native Township.
- Page 2: Black locations and public / private supply of black housing in Johannesburg, 1885-1970.
- Page 3–4: Matrix of changes to housing, services and communal organization in Western Native Township, 1918-1962.
Page 5: Excerpt from Tzonis, Alexander, and Liane Lefaivre. Classical Architecture: The Poetics of Order. MIT Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780262700313. [Preview with Google Books]
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Soweto huts, Charles Centre, Springs Station, Western Native Township, and housing typologies (Johannesburg, South Africa); Carlton Centre (SOM)
Lecture Summary
In the first of these three case studies, the focus is on the form of cities polarized as national cities co-existing across an international border. The US/Mexican border is almost 2000 miles long with paired cities all along its length, ranging from small towns of about 50,000 (Douglas/Agua Prieta) to metropolitan regions of over 2 million (San Diego/Tijuana). One view is that these couplings are part of a special border region, different and separate from each nation, and these cities should consequently also be treated as special. Despite their national allegiances, in these cities people speak two languages, share money and telephone services, have industries of one country located in the other, and people sleep in one but work in the other country. The Mexican cities are generally larger than the American and among the fastest growing in the world. Border cities share the same natural resources, yet deal with them in different ways, the lack of cooperation often affecting the other negatively. While the American cities are often poorer than other cities in the US, Mexicans migrate to the border where the cities are often wealthier than elsewhere in Mexico. There is a flourishing enterprise of cross-border activity. Interaction across the border is multiple and varied: if Americans travel south as tourists or in search of items illegal in their own country (Paz: “Americans come to Mexico in search of their own obsessions”), Mexicans move northward to buy commercial commodities not available or more expensive in their own country. The border zone is known in the US largely as the unresolved site of illegal entry, often accompanied by conservative political resentment to the Hispanization of the American Southwest. The form of the American city rests largely on automobile travel and low-density market distribution, while the denser, bus-oriented, Mexican city is subject to much higher state control. One might speculate about what kind of city a quasi-independent border region might produce, but that remains, at present, an interesting but far-fetched vision. In the meantime, these cities try to squeeze out benefits from their polarized status.
Colonial cities and efforts to rationalize the post-colonial city are the subject of the last two cases. Different traditions of colonial urbanism differ among others in their attitudes toward the creation and maintenance of “critical distance” (see Engels’ Manchester observations) between colonial and native. Delhi is a model of the British invasion of a seventeenth-century city, Shahjahanabad, the site of many previous native cities, and its subsequent transformation to a colonial city. This process involved the building of a military cantonment at a distant from the old city in 1803, followed by a civil station for colonial administration in 1850, and the subsequent partial renovation of the old city and the creation of a colonial capital, New Delhi, in 1911. For the British “critical distance” offered partial avoidance of diseases due to air and water, to diet and alcohol, and to sexual transmission. Ventilation and environmental controls consequently affected architecture in the production of the vernacular bungalow, for instance, which stood in opposition to the colonial wish to pronounce British cultural superiority through neo-classical forms. The ultimate choice of architectural and city form arose when Delhi became the national capital and had to be shaped to this purpose. The Geddesian view of incorporating the native city was an unacceptable alternative to the direction chosen and implemented by Lutyens and Baker, which, in creating a powerful colonial presence, embraced axiality and symmetry of site layout, elongated approaches such as the Raj Path, wide avenues and circular enclosures such as Connaught Place, and some inclusion of Indic imagery in the neo-classic language of the architecture. Perhaps the colonial form emanated from Lutyens’ world view that saw nothing in the native culture worth inheriting: “Indian buildings…. (are) pervaded by a ‘childish ignorance’ of the basic principles of architecture. There is no trace of any Wren.” The remnants of the colonial city now represent well the order of an independent post-colonial government. A vastly larger post-colonial Delhi, saturated by migration, now struggles to deal with the form of a new city type, the non-Western poor city of hyper and mega-urbanism.
A brief look at the case of the reforming of a previously colonial Spanish city, Havana, after the Castro-led revolution of 1959, suggests an attempt to recalibrate the polarized relations between city and country, a goal set for Soviet cities but seldom achieved. The idea of civilized city and uncouth country is challenged by major efforts to redistribute activity from Havana and to educate and enculture rural citizenry. In attempting to counter Havana’s overwhelming pre-revolutionary dominance (25% of the country’s population, 50% of industrial production, 60–70% of higher education, 70% of hospital beds and hotels) Havana is made into a “frustrated” city, so that its pre-revolutionary annual growth rate of 2.9% is reduced to less than 2% and exceeded by growth outside Havana in the years following the revolution. Some of the country’s agricultural landscape is transformed from sugar to milk production, as in the replanted Picadura valley, and farmers’ huts are collectivized into communities of about 2,000 people, housed in modern buildings and separated from one another by about 10 kilometers. Migration to Havana is controlled and its housing needs are partially supplied by panelized medium to high-rise buildings constructed by micro-brigade labor taken from industry. On the outskirts of Havana a cultural greenbelt is imagined for communal recreation and entertainment, in some ways like that imagined by Shirov for Moscow. Over the whole island a white modern architecture, often with colored supergraphics, and devoid of the mark of individual authorship, attempts to bind the form of city and country into one.
Handout
- Page 1: The 2,000-mile ribbon of paired cities on the Mexican/American border
Referenced Texts
Benham, Joseph. “Where Yanks, Mexicans Live Together and Like It.” U.S News & World Report, Sept. 14, 1981.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Tijuana settlement; San Diego, and La Jolla (California, United States); Ciudad Juárez, and El Paso (Texas, United States); Shahjahanabad, New Delhi, and Calcutta (India); Havana (Cuba); Law of Indies plan
Lecture Summary
Various themes that underlie the ideology and practice of modern urbanism are surveyed as an introduction to an analysis of the contemporary city. The presumption that cities are capable of being formed according to scientific principles derives principally from German sources. The planning handbooks of Baumeister (1876) and Stubben (1890) regard traffic engineering as the basis for the city’s organization, while others emphasize the new control of hygiene “which made the science of public health a German one,” and yet others advocate the invention of legal controls and zoning as the major components of the modern city. To articulate the confused nineteenth-century city, the modern city must be separated into distinguishable areas of life, as argued by the CIAM group of European architects. The division of the city into categories of living, working, leisure and circulation was a strange attribution to scientific thought at a time when science was primarily preoccupied with relativity and indeterminacy. Rationalities such as the optimum space between parallel buildings and the minimum space in dwellings were seen as important. There was the obligation to be modern, which had been set, according to Gideon, first by painters and engineers as an antidote to nineteeth-century eclecticism, and the need to conceive of the city as subject to its own zeitgeist, schismatically independent of any other time. Some, like Tafuri, have criticized the modernists’ naïve devotion to the idea of progress and the belief that physical arrangements have great social consequences. The modern building was to be made through the advent of universal new technologies such as prefabrication or minimal structure, and the modern city was to be shaped with an enthusiasm about the new automobile and limited-access highway. For some, the modern city would best have a universal form independent of local culture, an agnosticism of the time of the League of Nations and Esperanto. The modern environment would not have to fight conservatism but simply accede to the progressive values of the enlightened new corporate clients (Fruget et Pessac) and the new civic authorities (the LCC in London). Coupled with the idea of the dispensability of other times in the life of cities was the thought that modern city plans could be fixed (Corbusier’s “right” plan) and not be subject to adjustment over time. The architect of the modern city is at times seen as the heroic producer of original solutions and at other times as the provider of widely spread knowledge (Hilbesheimer: “The only situation that matters (is) that dictated by organization”). And finally, the forms and the spaces of the modern city follow certain patterns. Often, forms are in spatial isolation from other forms. There is an urge to achieve clarity of form and an absence of multiplicity and conflict; single meanings, as with single use zones, are most appropriate. Often open space is regarded as independent of private or public distinction and streets are seen as avenues for traffic rather than as places with many overlapping possibilities. (See Le Corbusier’s Voisin plan and the substitution of streets by general landscape.)
The reference to post-modern urbanism here is mainly as a contrast to the understanding of the city in modern theory and practice. Post-modernism seems to have more specific content in architecture and literature than it has in reference to the city. For theorists such as Harvey, the contrast between “Fordist modernity and Flexible postmodernity” allocates to post-modernity notions such as heterotopia and spectacle, eclecticism and pastiche, homelessness and diversity. Soltan refers to a history, “corporate fantasy encampments,” and frivolity. Habermas speaks of “rhetoric that still seeks to express in ciphers systematic relations which can no longer be architecturally formulated.” Jameson associates the construct of post-modernity with a particular period in capitalist logic when, amongst other, aesthetic production is integrated with general economic production. Gitlin focuses on contemporary post-modernism as having consumed and reproduced nature. The “Collage City” propositions of Rowe and Koetter are perhaps better regarded as suggested improvements on modernist city plans than post-modern urbanism, however the term is defined.
Handout
- Page 1: Aspects of modern urbanism
- Page 2: Annotated text from Oscar Newman’s Review of CIAM Activity
Referenced Texts
Table 4.1 from Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquity into the Origins of Cultural Change. Wiley-Blackwell, 1991. ISBN: 9780631162940.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Graphed distance between buildings (Walter Gropius); Barcelona plan (Ildefons Cerdà); Flachera project (Giovanni Astengo); Milano (Michelangelo Antonioni); Rome, and Genoa (Italy)
Lecture Summary
In the cosmic model, the assertion is that the form of a permanent settlement should be a magical model of the universe and its gods. Such a crystalline city has all of its parts fused into a perfectly ordered whole and change is allowed to happen only in a rhythmically controlled manner. To achieve such form, specific phenomena are included, such as returning, natural items, celestial measurement, fixing location, centeredness, boundary definition, earth images, land geometry, directionality, place consciousness, and numerology. These are acknowledged in creating the city’s form by devising methods for finding a good site, making boundaries, subdividing land, determining a center, connecting to celestial forms, fixing coordinates, controlling change, determining social structure, codifying rules, coordinating physics and metaphysics, and reinforcing form through ritual.
Debate surrounds the origin of cities. For example, the spiritual significance in city genesis is argued by Adams, Rykwert, and Mumford against materialist arguments, such as those of Childe, Sjoberg, and Jacobs.
Handout
- Page 1: Matrix of the three normative models
- Page 2: Elements and components of the cosmic model
Examples, Precedents, and Works
The Angkor Group (fourteenth-century Cambodia); ancient Athens (Greece); Çatalhöyük (southern Anatolia); Batang Benar (Malaysia); Kaaba (Mecca, Saudi Arabia); Teotihuacán and the Street of the Dead (Mexico City); Chichen Itza (Mexico); Masada and Jerusalem (Israel); Tenochtitlan (pre-Columbian Mexico); The City of the Dipper (China); Edfu (Egypt); Massa homestead (Cameroon); Mausoleum of Mao Zedong, Tiananmen Square, and the Imperial City (China); Vashu Purusa and Manduka/Chandita Mandalas, Jaipur, and Madurai (India)
Lecture Summary
The theoretical positions about the form of the modern city were formulated and publicized largely by the international, although mainly European, group of architects known as CIAM. By the time of their tenth and last congress in 1959, the thirty-year-old movement had been challenged by a younger group, known as Team X, on the basic sterility of the CIAM doctrine about the modern city. For Team X the city should not be rigidly sub-divided; what mattered were interaction, flow, movement and connection. The certainties about the future, set forth in the rigid plans of modernism, were false: what had to be embraced was an acceptance of uncertainty and theories and practices which were built on open-endedness and accommodation of change. There could be no universality of city form and the city had to be based on the dynamics of a particular place and the social relations of its people. These dynamics—the word “socioplastics” was invented to explain them—were essential to the life of good cities and involved necessary urban experiences such as simultaneity, multiplicity, and inclusion. Many of these ingredients were attempted in projects projected or built by these architects. The formal elements of these included fully-serviced multiple grids which would allow unpredicted change; connecting elements such as the rue interieure and the “web;” deliberately non-centric layouts; interchangeable modules; and places not given meaning by professionals but by users themselves. So, in the Free University of Berlin building, a micro-city in conception, the architect Woods gives the university community an open grid plan “to make the identifiable features, not the architect… I did not want to create any symbols to begin with… to let people make their own centers as they use the plan.” The trajectory of forms of the new European universities is instructive. The first new universities (Sussex 1961) are traditional campus-like layouts, followed by aggregations of disciplines in the form of building clusters (Essex 1961), linear structures which can expand (Dublin 1963), open grids (Berlin 1963), fully serviced interchangeable modules (Loughborough 1965) and the use of an existing network of places and services rather than new buildings (Potteries Thinkbelt 1966).
The idea that the city is a conjunction of items of different degrees of permanence suggests two related case studies of major ephemeral events in the history of cities. The first are the six international expositions held in Paris from 1855 to 1937, all progressively experimental and built on the same two or three sites in the center of the city, adding over time to the city’s gardens, squares, bridges and boulevards, and leaving it with memorials like the city’s most permanent tower, paradoxically approved by many in the belief that it was to be temporary. The juxtaposition of the temporary and the permanent is celebrated by Giradoux: “Delighted by reaching this cardboard-and-plaster city through the permanent stone-site of Paris… the temporary union of an ephemeral with a millenary one… the most eccentric with the most real.” The 1900 exposition hosted the second of the modern Olympic Games and as the idea of the international exposition has waned, so the temporary visit of the Games every four years has grown in significance. It now serves its host cities as a source of publicity and tourism but it allows the city to make changes which in normal circumstances it would not: new housing types (Seoul 1988), transportation improvements (Tokyo 1980), and adjustments to the Ensanche (Barcelona 1994). Underlying these cases is the idea that not only the space but the time of the city may be adjusted by design.
Referenced Texts
Zafeiriadou, Maria. “In the Quest of an Adaptable Built Form: Studying Transformations in the MIT Campus.” MIT Thesis, 2006.
Perez de Arce, Rodrigo. “Urban Transformations.” Architectural Design 78, no. 4 (1980).
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Torre Velasca (BBPR); Golden Land Competition (Smithson); Park Hill Sheffield; University of Toulouse II – Le Mirail, Champs de Mars, and Champs-Élysées, and Eiffel Tower (France); Chandigarh (Le Corbusier); National Parliament House in Dhaka (Louis Kahn); University of Bochum; University of Zurich Competition; University of Pavia (Giancarlo de Carlo); University of Loughborough; Olympic Games in Athens (1896), Paris (1900); St. Louis (1904), Los Angeles (1932), Berlin (1936), Seoul (1988), Los Angeles (1984); Nuremberg Stadium (Albert Speer); Cape Town (South Africa)
Lecture Summary
Another reaction to the CIAM orthodoxy of modern city form has focused on the city’s past rather than on its contingent path forward. In this view the city is the accumulation of its many pasts which are fossilized in different ways and at different rates in the city’s form and which should serve as the foundation for change. This is the analysis of the city articulated by the Italian architect and theorist, Aldo Rossi. For him the city’s “permanences” can be divided between primary elements and dwellings. Primary elements, like monuments, are expressions of the city’s “collective will…the result of its capacity to constitute the city, its history and art, its being and memory.” Dwellings, on the other hand, are expressions of ever-changing individual will, the vernacular that lacks the cultural autonomy of monuments. He claims that certain sites and their buildings create a “locus” that is unique in the city and should be recognized as such. The location of public housing on a major city street, such as the housing on the Karl Marx Allee in Berlin, is an example of “locus,” a significant and socially provocative location.
The concept of “locus” occurs in two cases in California, the University Cooperative in Berkeley and the Mei Lun Yuen project in San Francisco, where, against normal market conditions, these extremely valuable central sites were retained for public housing through community pressure, political influence and professional advocacy. Rossi also attacks the common argument about buildings achieving their form through obedience to context; to reverse the proposition, he would have architecture as autonomous and context as subservient. Like many of his colleagues, Rossi advocates the artifacts of the city as “types,” not determined by function, but according to a more complex formula. And finally, he contends that the physical elements of the city have a more permanent status in the city than its institutions: the functions of buildings change but the buildings often remain to accept new functions. Rossi seems to allocate instrumentality to objects rather than to people; as a critic suggests: “Memory does not reside in architectural form, but in people’s memories shaped by experience of architectural form.” As a counterpoint to Rossi’s propositions, reference is made to the work of geographers, such as Conzen, whose studies focus on secular processes of morphological change in cities over long periods of time.
Rossi’s general advocacy of the past in the form of the city is more sophisticated, if more obscure, than the proponents of a return to a particular past time in urban history. Among these, the theorist Leon Krier, has attracted attention by arguing for replacing the current, poorly formed city by “classical” forms, by “the absolute value of the pre-industrial cities, of the cities of stone.” He makes absurd claims for the virtues of these cities: “It has solved all technical and artistic problems in solidity, in beauty, in permanence and commodity.” At different times, Krier makes pleas for the reform of zoning, the city’s division into quarters the size of which is to be determined by walking distances, the separation of country and city, and the breaking up of the city’s blocks to produce more corners. His evocative diagrams of possible public places remind us of how few such we have achieved in contemporary cities. But his polemics should be a warning about the folly of using the past as a polemic against the present city, about regarding time as frozen, and of invoking a return to a vague and Arcadian “classicism.” The rebuilding of cities, especially after World War II, has raised many questions about what role the past should play in reconstruction. Recently, debates about two knowledge systems of the past, history and memory, have questioned the nature of each. The French historian, Pierre Nora, has accused history of suppressing the living memories of cultures especially in the developing world, but most other critics have assumed the necessity of both: “memory is color, history is line,” (Wieseltier). This class investigates the idea of memory and some its pertinence to city form.
Architecture and place have old associations with remembering. Classical buildings were actively used in the mnemonic learning system and in the training of debate: today the continuity and stability of form in our cities enables us to be nourished even in times of upheaval. The French sociologist, Maurice Halbwachs who was the first to write about “collective memory,” claims that every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework and that mental stability is due to the fact that objects of our daily life change so little or so regularly. “We may live without (architecture), we may pray without her, but we cannot remember without her,” Ruskin argued. In the Bible, the city of Enoch, built by Cain after his banishment, is nourishment against the “terror of space,” and the philosopher Karsten Harries says that because of man’s knowledge of his own mortality, fixed place and shelter are protection also against the “terror of time.” Ruins have been the remnants of destruction but also places of a curious fascination with the past, as in the English country ruins built in the sixteenth century, or in the case of Louis Kahn’s designs for the new Hurva synagogue in Jerusalem where he wished to retain the ruins of the previously destroyed synagogue as positive aids to memory. Monuments, memorials and museums are our artifacts in the battle against forgetting, and yet we struggle: “There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil says, as we accept the loss of content over time. Recently memorials have sought to include elements that can ensure the updating of the remembering experience: as in the Navy and proposed Air Force memorials and the Holocaust memorial museum in Washington.
There are now a number of accepted building practices that take the past into account. For one, the present can be made as if it were the past, as in the post-war rebuilding of Warsaw to appear as it was prior to the war. Or the facades of buildings can be made to appear similar to those of the past, while the interiors are completely changed, as in the rebuilding of housing in Bologna. Or, perhaps as the Team X group might have desired, open networks can be made evocative enough for memories to be achieved in them over time. Or, fragments of old buildings might be retained as tokens of memory while the overall building function and form is new, as in the cases in Boston where churches have been converted to apartments or restaurants. Or buildings can be restored according to a set date in the past while retaining the overall use theme of the past, as in Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston. Or, a new tectonics of brick and steel can be used in a new building to register the memory of Nazi war camps, as in the Washington Holocaust memorial museum. Or the city can be built in “classical” form, as Krier would prefer, or the city can be made up of the “permanences” that Rossi advocates. Or the city can be built with allegiance to a multiplicity of past and present, such as creating a rapid turnover of buildings and places through temporary events or selective short-term zoning to contrast with longer-term presence: in all, a city where time is attended to as much as space is.
Referenced Texts
Dal Co, F. “Notes on the Dialectic Nostalgia/Hope.” Annual Report. Milan: I. L. A. U. D., 1979.
“Drawing of La Villette.” Architectural Design 77, no. 2: 202–3.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Palazzo della Ragiona in Padua, and Gallarate Housing Project (Italy); project for a church (Carlo Fontana); Saunier (France); Roman Lucca; Berkeley co-op, San Francisco’s Chinatown (California, United States); Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and Church Court in Boston (Massachusetts, United States); South Street Seaport, and Seacoast fish Market (New York, United States); Pike Place Market in Seattle (Washington, United States); Ford Rouge Factory (Michigan, United States); entry for “Progetto-Bicocca” Pirelli Competition (Giancarlo de Carlo); entry for “Progetto-Bicocca” Pirelli Competition (Gabetti e Isola); Wexner Center (Ohio, United States); Chicago (Illinois, United States); London (Prince Charles); Richmond Terrace (Quinlan Terry); US Holocaust Memorial Museum, and US Air Force Memorial (James Ingo Freed); Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial (Lawrence Halprin); Washington Monument (Robert Mills); addition to Vietnam War Memorial (Ross Perot); US Navy Memorial (Conklin Rossant)
Lecture Summary
The subdivision of the city into public and private domains around issues of use, ownership, control and meaning is more complex than it seems. Often advocates of certain preferences, mostly for increased amounts and quality of public space, conveniently refer to past cities where the definition of public and private was not the same as now. For one, Hannah Arendt’s conception of Greek public life and the agora, where “everything can be seen in public” and which offers a release from individual subjectivity, speaks to a short period of democracy where women and slaves could not participate in the rhetoric of the agora. It was not the pristine place as idealized by Aristotle but a “jumble of crowded downtown streets… where public buildings stood in the midst of market stalls and taverns.” The Roman Forum, a public space not for popular rhetoric but for grand speech, was symbolically connected and referenced outward to the city and to the empire. Feudal society lacked the concept of privacy so available in the contemporary world: “any individual who attempted to remove himself from the close and omnipresent conviviality, to be alone, to construct his own private enclosure, to cultivate his garden, immediately became an object of suspicion or admiration.” Habermas considers the liberal public sphere of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to have emerged parallel to that of the bourgeoisie. Sennett tells the story of private control enabling activity which would not take place in public: in a private coffee bar close to the docks in London, the site of news and gossip about maritime trade, aristocrats, needing this kind of information, found it necessary and possible to associate with sailors, something they would not do in public. Sennett is generally critical of the public domain in the contemporary city, as obsessions with selfhood diminish the need for public space and intercourse with strangers. Jackson characterizes the public square now as simply a place of passive enjoyment but Scruton regards public places important in the city because they force people into the uncertainty and fluidity of civil society as opposed to the intimacy and security of the private family.
New York’s Rockefeller Center is arguably the most successful public open space, other than parks and gardens, of the past century. Tied into the tight spatial network of Manhattan—it even adds a road to it—it fits into and enhances the pattern around it. Where there is no powerful enough informing context, the form of public open space seems quite arbitrary, such as in the case of Boston’s City Hall Plaza, where the form is borrowed from medieval precedent. Despite competitions which have produced visions of morphological and programmatic changes to this plaza, it remains unable to satisfy either in terms of function or of meaning. Much of the failure of such attempts are laid at the feet of the suburban and electronic city where putting one’s body into public space is unnecessary; the lack of functional need where dense housing does not exist; the capacity in the capitalist city for citizens to identify psychologically with private artifacts, such as skyscrapers; the attraction of environments associated with commerce, the book store cum coffee shop, rather than those associated purely with civic purposes; the sense that the street and commerce are more attractive as public places; and the replacement of the insecurity and lack of quality of public space by private facilities, as in the case of new sports facilities. (Sorkin sees these replacements in the shopping mall as ersatz, controlled and ageographic.)
The contemporary city has public and private streets, public law courts with street facades and private law courts in the comfort of skyscrapers, public post offices in private centers, private and public schools which, despite Krier, have similar forms. Are privately owned churches public because they pay no tax, and restaurants, public in use and appearance, private because they do? Does a citizen who owns part of an army camp or a nuclear plant expect access because of public ownership? Is the image of an insurance company skyscraper in Boston more significant in the city than its city hall which the mayor has thought of selling? Who minds if a private restaurant spills over into public open space in return for the restaurant maintaining the space? Such agreements and partnerships are part of the multiplicity of palpable and hidden public private arrangements in cities, and any theory or practice which does not account for them will be inadequate.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 22 (PDF - 3.4MB)
- Page 1: List of attitudes to and practices regarding the past
- Page 2–3: Introduction on the history and memory as presented in the 1994 Jerusalem Seminar on Architecture
- Page 4–5: Extended reading list for this lecture, taken from 4.241J as taught in Fall 1997
- Page 6: Response to Leon Krier’s position on walking-distance communities
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Assisi, Piazza del Comune, Palio di Siena, Piazza del Campo, and Great Cathedral (Italy); Boston’s City Hall Plaza (Massachusetts, United States); Rockefeller Center, Manhattan, Herald Square (New York, United States); The City Tower (Louis Kahn); National Commercial Bank (Saudi Arabia); entry for Pravda (Konstantin Melnikov); Constantinople (Turkey); (New York, United States); Lever House (SOM); Ford Foundation Building (Kevin Roche); Bank of china Tower (I.M. Pei); Centraal Beheer Insurance Company Building (Herman Hertzberger); Trump Tower (Der Scutt); Citicorp (Hugh Stubbins)
Lecture Summary
Cities have always expanded horizontally unless curbed by walls, natural barriers, or the inability to communicate over distance. Policies such as greenbelts or the exclusion of immigrants—the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attempts to restrain the growth of London to exclude the poor, or the apartheid restrictions on black immigration—have not been able to maintain themselves over time. Recent urban policies have included either allowing low-density suburban expansion, building dense public housing on the periphery, establishing new towns, or allowing poor immigrants to squat in minimally controlled settlements.
American cities have chosen the first of these models. The suburbs in the early years of the twentieth century were made up of large lots and made possible by the invention of the telephone and pre-automobile street-cars. Before World War II, less than half the nation owned their homes and less than half the housing stock was in single-family homes. After the war, the percentage of families owning their homes jumped from nearly 40% in 1940 to 60% in 1960 due to higher incomes, the federal highway program, tax incentives for home ownership as a stabilizing social force, FHA and VA financing, and other factors. Levittown built 150 standard 25 ft x 30 ft cottages a week, each costing $7,900, requiring, with a government-subsidized loan, a monthly payment of $58 for 25 years. These suburbs attracted the planned shopping center, an architecturally unified development with large amounts of off-street parking. Today megamalls offer the shopping experience as a new form of entertainment and have become so large that pedestrians cannot cover them in a day. Suburban growth has broken the link between city center and its outskirts: in 1975, people who commuted from home to work in the suburbs outnumbered people who commuted to the central city by almost two to one. Outlying suburbs, now called “urban villages” or “edge cities,”, are more diverse in land use, have larger houses (in 2000 the American house averaged over 2,000 square feet, twice as large as it was in 1970), and have become different cultural enterprises than the post-World War II suburbs: “a ranch-style tract house, a Chevrolet, and meat loaf for dinner will not do anymore as the symbols of a realized dream.” The regional suburban city, in which people are able to cover very large distances, depends entirely on private automobiles. Private automobile traffic continues to increase, from 1.03 billion miles in 1970 to 1.49 in 1987, and road space over the same time decreased from 61 yards per vehicle to only 39. While the new cars are cleaner, the condition of the air is worse, in part because of the increase in car use.
Recently the large American low-density metropolis has been subject to growing criticism of its uncontrolled growth, now called “sprawl,” a relatively undefined word, as “slums” were in the late nineteenth century. The economic wastefulness and ecological damage of “sprawl” has led to recent attempts to control or balance the growth of metropolitan areas. So, exacting impact fees on growth on the outside edge, marketing higher densities on smaller lots, calling for increased light-rail systems, land-banking open space and stimulating small-scale farming, are among the more common policies. Portland, Minneapolis and Vancouver have become some of the metropolitan governments to invoke “smart” growth. But the model of creating new growth points at radial train line stops to increase public transportation and develop new nodes has not proven in practice to be as appealing as in theory; this is one of the models of good metropolitan form which will need greater study in the future. There is also little attention to achieving greater social equity, surely a major attribute of any “good” city, through these spatial policies. Among practices which set out to reform American low-density development are those of the highly publicized “new urbanism.” This practice has been unable to deal with fundamental issues such as decreasing automobile use or creating greater social equity despite some largely theoretical advocacy of higher densities and light-rail transportation, which the densities of American suburbs are incapable of supporting. This work has almost exclusively focused on methods of improving the micro-environments of developers’ suburbs. The American downtown, on the other hand, has, with few exceptions, increased in population over the past two decades. It has become more diverse with a population that is made up largely of non-family residents, who have few children (only 17% of those living in downtowns are under 20) and rent housing at twice the rate of residents in the metropolitan area. There are many reasons given for this rebirth, among which is a theory of homeostasis in which external growth in living organisms like cities is balanced by internal growth.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 23 (PDF - 1.5MB)
- Pages 1–5: Transcript from Jerusalem Seminar, “The Public Building: Form and Influence,” November 1992.
Referenced Texts
Sennett, Richard. “The Space of Democracy.” Harvard Design Magazine, Summer 1999.
Beinart, Julian. “Keeping Post Office Square as a Public Trust.” The Boston Globe, June 6, 1984.
Lecture Summary
Melvin Webber’s seminal 1963 writing in defense of the large-scale American metropolis asserted that, despite large distances, such cities could still be places of “order in diversity: community without propinquity.” Such an argument rests in part on the ease of contact made possible by individual transportation and the infrastructure of roads to support it. It has also been argued that machine-interposed communication technologies reduces the need for body movement and, if the city is essentially a communications network, changes in the scale of communication would lead to a different city form. But the decentralization of American cities precedes the advent of the new electronics, and the substitution of face-to-face contact by machines has not yet shown to automatically produce a decentralized city or region; in fact, the last significant communication technology, the telephone, made the skyscraper as possible as it did suburbia. H. G. Wells, writing over a century ago, predicted dispersal through electronic connection but at the same time he foresaw a homeostatic reaction in the form of an increase in the need for citizens to be together in the center, “a very spacious, brilliant, and entertaining agglomeration.” The increased footlooseness of industry has led to new kinds of places such as Alliance, just north of Ft.Worth, where a new non-passenger airport, is the center of an intermodal rail/highway/air node. High-technology industries have also been attracted to special historic places with high amenity, such as Cambridge in England. But in the new connected world which Castells calls “the space of flows,” there is yet little indication of what kind of urbanism will emerge. As 20 million non-farm employees in the U.S. now work at home as part of their primary job, automobile traffic has increased, partly because more road space is now available. The consequences of machine-interposed versus face-to-face contacts keep on being explored. Some, like Putnam, are concerned by the decline in collective interests in American cities as television has made American communities “wider and shallower,” yet the same cities now boast health clubs, Starbucks cafes and single’s bars. Whether the ability to communicate anywhere virtually free, the Economist’s “death of distance,” affects the perceptual form of cities any more than the form of so-called “global” cities has been affected by globalism, is yet to be seen. Certainly cell phones have not contributed much to public life: cities have much greater difficulty providing the physical infrastructure for the passage of material things than it has in dealing with costless electronic flow.
The idea of an ecological city which stresses sustainability has not been as provocative as the image of a city wired electronically. This is partly because the ecological city depends in many respects on formulae that smaller and older cities have been applying for a long time now but have since been replaced by more wasteful and environmentally destructive practices. The future of the resource conservative city rests less on technology than on changes in the behavior of its inhabitants and its institutions. For instance, the air in Los Angeles is unhealthy two of every three days. To help reduce pollution, the city has undertaken a wide variety of actions. It has the world’s toughest limits on emissions by cars. To reduce automobile use, the city of Santa Monica will buy its workers running shoes if they walk to work, and incentives to carpool have taken various forms including firms offering dry cleaning, shoe repair, grocery and other services to avoid people using their cars for errands. The city is often subject to drought: cities in the region are considering sea-water salination but also banning lawn sprinklers, offering rebates for replacement of inefficient toilets, urging using high-efficiency car washes rather than washing cars at home and even allowing new construction only if the builders pay for water conservation programs in schools. Scientists have shown that by replacing dark roofs and pavements in Los Angeles as part of normal maintenance, and the planting of new trees, the city would be cooled by 5 degrees in about 15 years. Reducing garbage and recycling material; building according to sustainable standards; implementing a water run-off policy; instituting a tree-planting program; zoning housing where transit and services exist; ensuring that pedestrian paths to transit stops are safe, sheltered, and direct; banning the use, sale and manufacturing of ozone-depleting compounds; providing special cycling lanes on roads; encouraging housing close to workplaces; pricing road use: these are some of the actions that cities are already taking and many of them involve political conflict. There is no ideal city of ecology: cities which continue to educate their citizens to conserve and introduce policies which sustain and enrich their natural resources, will over time come close to the ideal.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 24 (PDF - 6.4MB)
- Pages 1–4: Beinart, Julian. “The American Downtown: Stories for the Present.” Institute for Urban Design, 2001. (unpublished)
- Pages 4–8: Transcript from Panel Symposium, “Will Information Technology Help Improve City and Regional Form?” April 12, 2001.
Referenced Texts
Webber, Melvin. Explorations into Urban Structure. University of Pennsylvania, 1964, fig. 4. ISBN: 9780812274158.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Fort Worth Alliance Airport (Texas, United States)
Lecture Summary
London was the largest city in the world in 1850, the second largest in 1950 but only the twenty-seventh largest in 2000. Only one of the five largest cities in 2000 was in the North America: Mexico City at about 26 million followed by Sao Paolo, Tokyo, Calcutta, Bombay, New York, Seoul, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro and Delhi. Guessing at the dates of the first cities, one could estimate that it took about 10,000 years before as many people lived in cities as in the country (England in about 1850); since then it has taken just over 150 years for that to be true for the whole world. The rate of urban growth and the size of the largest cities is, with few historical exceptions, unprecedented, as is the percentage of these populations who remain in poverty. The United Nations estimates that a quarter of urban dwellers live as squatters in developing countries. Half of the world’s population lives on less than two dollars a day, one out of four do not have clean water, and 40,000 children die every day because of hunger-related diseases. In 1960 the wealthiest 20% of the world’s population earned 30 times more than the bottom fifth; now they earn 74% more. In this light it is difficult any longer to talk about cities in the classical language of urban social science or city planning. Much of the thought about these cities has been about urban survival, public health, the possibility of securing stable land and housing, and about education for children to move beyond poverty. There have been few plans for major changes to the form of the city, Bombay’s building of a large new component to the city, New Bombay, is among the few. How these cities can become sufficiently powerful economic engines, as they became in nineteenth-century Europe, and how they can distribute wealth is the task of this century. Yet the challenge seems to be recruiting only a very few of the world’s urbanists.
From many of these countries, the idea of building new capital cities after independence has meant added national pride but little help for the problems of their large cities. New capitals since 1950 include Nonakchott, Dodoma and Abuja in Africa, Chandigarh and Islamabad in the East, and Brasilia in Latin America. Of these, the forms of Brasilia and Chandigarh have attracted the most attention. With 80% of Brazilians living within 200 miles of the Atlantic, Brasilia promised to open up its Amazonian heartland. Brasilia was built as the center of a federation of existing settlements and workers’ camps; in 1973 Brasilia constituted less than a third of the federal district’s population. It has not alleviated many of the problems of Brazil’s large cities: in 1970 Brasilia’s total population was the same as the annual population increment of Sao Paolo. Chandigarh was built in 1959 as the capital of the Punjab (which it never has been) after the India / Pakistan partition. Planned by Le Corbusier, it took the form of repeated residential sectors, five types of wide roads and a capitol complex at the northern end of the city. Fifty years later, Chandigarh is much larger than the Corbusian plan imagined, largely through immigrants migrating from rural poverty to a new center of employment, Chandigarh itself has been surrounded on the south and east by unplanned towns, making Chandigarh the planned center of a random metropolitan area, much as the historic center of an Italian city is surrounded by a loosely organized periphery. The city has virtually no system of public transport, and is hierarchically organized from rich bungalows in the north to the denser housing for the poor further south. For political reasons the capitol complex, now serving two states, is guarded by military personnel. There is no drive to achieve a metropolitan plan, and Chandigarh still tries to conform to the dated policies of its origin while the rest of the metropolitan area—in whole to reach about two million in the next decade—grows freely all around.
Handout
- Page 1: Map of 35 largest cities in the world
Referenced Texts
Brooke, James. “The World; Feeding on 19th Century Conditions, Cholera Spreads in Latin America,” The New York Times, April 21, 1991.
Hackley, Randall. “A lovely madness—Argentina builds new capital in Patagonia.”
Peirce, Neal R., and Curtis W. Johnson. “Current and Projected Number of Slum Dwellers, by Region” and Chapter 1 in Century of the City: No Time to Lose. Rockefeller Foundation, 2008. ISBN: 9780891840725.
Boonyabancha, Somsook. “Trusting that People Can Do It.” In Design with the Other 90%: Cities. Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, 2011. ISBN: 9780910503839.
Lecture Summary
The concept of the city as analogous to a machine has a lengthy history. This model emerges often when there is no long-term goal in mind but the settlement must be created hurriedly, with its future growth determined by unforeseen forces. Its form requires a few simple rules in order to continue with urbanization, and the outcome is factual, functional, and without any attachment to the mystery of the universe. Among its attributes are convenience, speed, flexibility, legibility, equality, and speculation.
The set of cases of the machine model extend from the third century BC to contemporary times. The workers’ dwellings built rapidly and close to Egyptian mortuary sites are gridded in a per strigas form, “monotonously alike…, the very pattern of mechanically devised industrial dwelling.” Unlike the form of their capital city, the Greek colonial trading cities from fifth to third centuries BC are formed by equalized, rectangular blocks to allow a democracy of lots to its settlers and, according to Mumford, to provide the legibility necessary in a new climate of commercial trade. Despite Rykwert’s assertions of the role of metaphysics in Roman city building, rules of castramentation (the cardo and decumanus alignments and equal lots) and centuriation (the fusing of urban and rural land geometries) dominate the creation of the 5,267 settlements built by the Romans. The thirteenth-century colonial expansion of the 177 Bastide towns in southwest France follows an orthogonal order of a pair of double axes marking a center and surrounding equal-sized chequers. Perhaps the most complete and widely imposed practical handbook of city building instructions come from the colonization of the Americas by Spain according to the Laws of the Indies proclaimed in 1573. These laws govern site selection, street and block layout, orientation, central plaza, public buildings, walls, common lands, the distribution of lots, and even the style of buildings. The American land expansion, both religious and commercial, to the west is examined in the light of “grids of expediency,” as is the nineteenth-century expansion of the Manhattan grid as a system that “is the most cheap to build and the most convenient to live in.” The assertions of Mumford and Sennett of the capitalist/grid relationship are challenged in this discussion. Finally, many of modern machine appropriations in city form, such as linearity, are explored as are many of the metaphorical attempts to link the form of cities, Archigram, for instance, to those of machines.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 3 (PDF - 1.4MB)
- Page 1: Five sites of the machine model on a westward trajectory from the third century BC to today
- Page 2: Excerpt from “Southwest Washington in Plans”
Referenced Texts
Frontado, G. “La Leyes de Indias: Observations of its Influence on the Structure of Physical Space in the Latin American Cities.” MIT Thesis, January 1980, pp. 14–59.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Bastid towns (France); Verbonia (fictitious city in Rome); Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia); Tell el-Amarna and Kahun (ancient Egypt); New Jerusalem (Israel); Miletus and Priene (ancient Greece); Rome’s road system, Via Appia, Imola, Timgad, Verona, Meridian of Tordecillas (Italy); cities from Gromatici veteres; Caracas (Venezuela); development of Portuguese towns; Latin American colonies; plaza development in Latin American cities; land division from Ordinance of 1785; Salt Lake City (Utah, United States); Chicago (Illinois, United States); Manhattan and Central Park (New York, United States); Savannah (Georgia, United States); Madrid (Spain); The Ascoral plan; plan for Tokyo, Japan (Kenzo Tange); plan for Paris, France (Yona Friedman); Archigram drawings; dome over Manhattan (Buckminster Fuller); Soweto (Johannesburg, Africa)
Lecture Summary
The third great normative model, which claims that the city is analogous a living organism, is more recent and arose from the growth of biology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its advocates are often critical of other models. For instance, the German urbanist Hans Reichow in his 1948 book on organic city planning, architecture, and culture condemns “simple grids” or “products of the Grand Manner” as “static.” The theory of the organic city rests on a number of assumptions about the nature of organisms. Among these is the assertion that an organism is an autonomous individual, and that it has a definite boundary and is of a specific size. It does not change merely by adding parts but through reorganization as it reaches limits or thresholds. It contains differentiated parts but form and function are always linked. The whole organism is homeostatic, self-repairing and regulating toward a dynamic balance. Cycles of life and death are normal to organisms as is rhythmic passage from one state to another. From this flows the notion of the form of the organic city. It is a separate spatial and social unit made up internally of highly connected places and people. A healthy community is heterogeneous and diverse. The micro-unit is the neighborhood, a small residential area, which was defined by Clarence Perry in 1929 as the support area for an elementary school to which children, the most vulnerable of the human species, can safely walk. Like organisms, settlements are born, grow, and mature, and if further growth is necessary, a new entity has to be formed. Thus there are states of optimum size, beyond which pathological conditions ensue. Greenbelts not only ensure intimate contact with nature but also enclose healthy growth. This model has typical physical forms, such as radial patterns, anti-geometrical layouts, and a proclivity for natural materials. Often the organic idea is extended regionally to connect settlements to valleys, trails, and other extended natural systems. There is an attraction to small-scale modes of production or services as opposed to large-scale synthetic processes. Often the model aligns itself with a socio-economic philosophy that sees increases in urban value as the result of communal rather than individual endeavor.
Three cases are examined to locate these principles in practice. In the first case, the ideas and projects of Patrick Geddes are surveyed including his synoptic vision (folded paper, the Valley Section, and plan for the Hebrew University), the need for civic inclusion, and the benefits of conservative surgery and cultural retention (Indian projects). The second case covers the work of Ebenezer Howard and his attempts to balance country and city, the garden city idea in the plans of Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, and the details of density, landscape and site planning in the association of the organic with the picturesque. The third case covers the regionalism of the American plans of the early twentieth century, the ideas of heterogeneous balance and Georgian socio-economic philosophy in the urban projects of Stein and Wright.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 4 (PDF - 1.1MB)
- Page 1: Components of the cosmic model
- Page 2: The Valley Section (Patrick Geddes)
Referenced Texts
Epochs of development in New York from Report of the Commission of Housing and Regional Planning to Governor Alfred E. Smith, 1926.
Thompson, D’Arcy Wentworth. On Growth and Form. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011, fig. 517–24. ISBN: 9781463587352.
Fig. 31, 33, 35–6, and 39 from Changing Natures in Dynamic Urbanism.
“Tennessee Valley Authority v. Hill.” The Snail Darter Case. 437 U. S. 153, 1978.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
The Valley Section (Patrick Geddes); plan for London, England (Eliel Saarinen); plan for Washington D.C. (Victor Gruen); plan of the University of Jerusalem; plan for Balrampur, India (Patrick Geddes); plan for Manchester, England (Friedrich Engels); Golders Green, Adelaide, Welwyn Garden City, Sunnyside Gardens (England); Central Park (New York, United States); Chatham Village (Pennsylvania, United States); Greenbelt (Maryland, United States)
Lecture Summary
Aside from normative ideas and methods for obtaining “goodness” in the form of cities, there is a body of systematic work since the nineteenth century in urban social science that attempts to explain what cities “are” rather than what they “ought to be.” This class is a summary of the major categories of this work.
In the first instance, the city is regarded as a unique historic process. There is a rich literature of urban histories positioning cities as derivative from their own, specific culture. Emphasis is placed on observation, “reading” as Ruskin conceived of it, and the “reading” of Venice (Ruskin) is compared to that of Manchester (Engels), as well as to those of Benjamin, Norberg-Schulz and Rasmussen.
In the second, the city is regarded as an ecology of people such that each social group occupies space according to economic position and class. Derivative from general propositions of the sociology of the city (Weber, Simmel and Spengler), the work of the Chicago School, Park and Burgess in particular, suggest that the competition and accommodation of social groups produces a city of dynamic concentric rings from a center to a zone of commuters. Hoyt, however, assumed the forces of such ecological patterning would result in sectoral shapes. But both propositions regarded space as a neutral medium through which social groups interact. The third category regards the city as an economic engine in which space, unlike in the previous category, is both an additional cost imposed on the economy but also a resource for production or consumption. At a regional scale, the location of the settlement in the case of heavy industrial production would be an optimized function of raw materials, labor and product markets (Isard). In the case of agricultural distribution, systematic distributional patterns also emerge (Von Thunen), as they do in the creation of regularly spaced central places based on hexagonal market areas (Christaller). Within the city itself, the form of the city is argued around the willingness or ability of different groups to pay rent for land either close to or at a distance from the center, this expressed in curves for each class of activity (Alonso).
The fourth set of propositions regards the city as a field of forces, a communications network of particles which attract and repel each other much as they do in physics. Subsets of these ideas include population potential maps, gravity models, communications flows, and various topological models. Another category suggests that the most appropriate description of the city’s functional form lies in understanding it as a system of linked decisions. One version focuses on the decisions taken by the powerful in the community (Forrester), others on the participation of citizens in a democratic city, and yet others on the game, in which people interact together according to fixed rules and produce agreed-upon outcomes. There is a last category, more explicitly ideological, which rejects previous theories of competition and posits the city as an arena of conflict, in which the city’s form is the residue and sign of struggle, and also something that is shaped and used to wage it (Castells, Harvey, Lefebvre and Gordon).
Handout
- Page 1: Components of descriptive and functional theories
- Page 2: On “reading” the city (John Ruskin v. Friedrich Engels)
Referenced Texts
Webber, Melvin. “The Urban Place and the Non-Place Urban Realm.” In Explorations into Urban Structure. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971, fig. 4.
Meier, Richard L. A Communications Theory to Urban Growth. MIT Press, 1962, fig. 2. ISBN: 9780262130127.
Berry, Brian J. L., and Frank E. Horton. Geographic Perspectives on Urban Systems. Prentice Hall, 1970, fig. 2–11. ISBN: 9780133513127.
Lehrer, Jonah. “A Physicist Solves the City,” The New York Times, December 17, 2010.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Plans of metropolitan cores in Atlanta region and predominant metropolitan growth pattern, 1995 (Robert Charles Lesser & Co.)
Lecture Summary
Four examples of recent theoretical attempts focused on the form of cities are examined in this class. Unlike many of those discussed previously, these have a strong interest in the experience of physical place and have a more complex view of the contemporary city. They see the city as a democratic institution, and require a systematic quality and a high degree of explicitness so that citizens can participate in constructing the city’s form.
Kevin Lynch’s work follows a trajectory from his interest in the perception and cognition of city form and image (image, remember, is identity, structure and meaning) to setting out the elements of a theory in his later work. In this work he aims to connect prescriptive, normative ideas to explanatory, descriptive propositions through a series of five performance dimensions: vitality, sense, fit, access and control; and two meta-criteria, efficiency and justice. He postulates these dimensions as ranges rather than standards which can be specified more precisely over time through experiment as in the development of modern science. This requires optimism about human beings’ capacity to learn: “the city is not the manifestation of some iron law but rather part of changing human culture and aspiration.” A glimpse of these performance dimensions in practice are detailed in “A Place Utopia” within the collection of his last writings.
In Christopher Alexander’s work there is also a trajectory of ideas about city form passing through optimization, sustaining human contact, complex structures (“not a tree”), and patterns and rules of urban growth. Alexander’s normative view requires a city to be formed by the application of small-scale, commonly understood fields of spatial and social relations. Such patterns have lost their meaning in modern cities, he claims, only to be revived by an explicitly shared new language similar to the widely communicated language of science. Alexander provides the beginning documents for such a language to be built systematically by subsequent practice, experiment and learning. His latest work has focused on the practice of city design, accentuating the need for rules of piecemeal growth, coherence and wholeness, the mixing of functions and sizes, and, above all, the creation of a deeply held sense of feeling. The work of John Habraken follows many of Alexander’s tenets of process but does so more thoroughly and with less interest in specifying the particular form of the outcomes. Agreements are the basis of the city’s form and consensus on a particular site can be reached by different parties even if they disagree on other matters. Constructive participation can be organized in a city according to levels of agreement: at the level between building and city, the appropriate level is a “tissue,” the recognizable spatial patterns and repetitive features of which is a “theme.” Through such clarification the city can be properly constituted as it once was, according to Habraken, before the advent of specialized professionals.
Perhaps the most widely applied of the propositions that deal with the morphology of cities is the space syntax studies of Bill Hillier. Regarding the city as a network of related spaces, this work focuses on their geometrical interconnectedness and the consequent passage of pedestrians along routes and their presence in public places. Correlating concepts such as connectivity and integration result in measures of high or low intelligibility: high intelligibility correlates the presence of people (and associated behaviors such as the absence of crime) and the spatial pattern. Such principles have in recent times been applied to a variety of practical situations, such as the design of housing and public places.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 6 (PDF - 1.7MB)
- Page 1: List of referenced literature for this lecture
- Pages 2–3: Notes on adaptability (Kevin Lynch)
- Pages 4–5: Handwritten response to The Economist (Kevin Lynch)
- Page 6: The Grunsfeld Variations in Back Bay of Boston, Massachusetts, United States (John Habraken)
Referenced Texts
Alexander, Christopher. A New Theory of Urban Design Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 14–5. ISBN: 9780195037531. [Preview with Google Books]
Fig.7 from Habraken, N. John. “The Control of Complexity.” (PDF - 2.4MB) Places 4, no. 2 (1987): 3–15.
Martin, Leslie. Urban Space and Structures (Cambridge Urban and Architectural Studies). Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 20–1. ISBN: 9780521099349.
Fig. 1, 4, 5, and 7 from “From Research to Design: Re-engineering the Space of Trafalgar Square.”
Martin, Leslie. “The Grid As Generator.” (PDF - 1.2MB) In Urban Space and Structures. Edited by Lionel March and Leslie Martin. Cambridge University Press, 1975, pp. 6–27. ISBN: 9780521099349.
Lecture Summary
The modern city, first established in the late eighteenth century, is the significant and essential prologue for any examination of the contemporary city. “The survival of many more infants and the prolongation of the average age of adults mark off modern times from the past; and this change began in the eighteenth century.” Absolute population growth peaked in England in 1850 when London at over 2 million people became the first largest city in the world in Europe since Rome. Medieval Europe had been a rural world with towns growing at less than 1% per annum, whereas some British cities in the early nineteeth century grew at over 10% per annum. In 1850, for the first time in history, more people lived in cities in England than in the country, a statistic very soon to be achieved world-wide. The capitalism of the first industrial cities was built on agrarian capitalism; in the eighteenth century, half of the cultivated land in England was owned by 5,000 families, a quarter by only 400 families. The enclosure of commons land reduced many of the rural poor to wage-earning migrants destined for the fast-growing new single-industry towns which lacked the infrastructure to support them. The new factory system had evolved from the early household and family system, through the guild system of the Middle Ages, and through the eighteenth century putting-out system. Now production was carried out in the employer’s buildings separating house and workplace (the new journey-to-work), workers owned neither raw material nor tools, production was for a fluctuating outside market and large amounts of capital were required. As Engels saw it, “capital is the command over the unpaid labor of others.”
Cotton was the first industry to develop macro-production techniques and “it took over and monstrously specialized Manchester.” The city, then the second largest in England, became the symbol of capitalist exploitation. In 1819, eleven people were killed there by police in political protest, a number not exceeded through the actions of the police or military until some 143 years later on Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland. The British formed the modern city without bloodshed. Ann Lee worked in a cotton mill and after the death of her fourth child, she “screamed that sexual intercourse was the cause of all the world’s evil,” and in 1774 left Manchester to lead the Shaker movement in America. For the eighteen-year-old Robert Owen, Manchester provided a fortune in the cotton business with which he later developed utopian communities; he is regarded by some as the first socialist leader in Great Britain. But it was the young German, Friedrich Engels, who used Manchester as the model for the disasters of the early capitalist city when he recorded his analysis of it in 1849 at the age of 24 in The Condition of the Working Class in England. Accompanied by an illiterate Irish factory girl, his “reading” of Manchester set out many of the dimensions of the early industrial city: the appalling state of health (50% of children born in Manchester died); the deteriorated state of family life; insecurity of work as a function of the market; alienation and the quality of work; child labor, drugs and crime; the by-passing of poor areas by main roads to provide “critical distance” for the middle-class; the middle-class who avoid any acknowledgement of these circumstances and who “know no happiness but profit.” For Engels and his later compatriots, Manchester was the model which the cities of the new Marxist state would replace.
Referenced Texts
Friedman, Benjamin M. “Industrial Evolution,” The New York Times, December 9, 2007.
Huberman, Leo. Man’s Worldly Goods—The Story of The Wealth of Nations. Hesperides Press, 2006, pp. 118–9. ISBN: 9781406798203.
“Enclosure in Britain.” The Ecologist 22, no. 4 (1992): 132.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Manchester, Lancashire, and Glasgow (England); the Salus Populi; Balscott land divisions and enclosures (England)
Lecture Summary
Other than the Marxist leap to 1917 and the utopian movements, the major reforming ideas of the form of the nineteenth century city rested on continued economic expansion accompanied by social change. For the first time, the city was subject to public clients as the state involved itself in health, education, welfare and housing, the control of the built environment through by-laws and codes, and eventually in city planning. At the same time a stable middle class achieved status, government depended on the wide authority of all to vote, and worker power was recognized through the organization of labor into unions. The next classes focus on five models according to which major cities transformed themselves and set the stage for the contemporary city.
Five economic inventions are regarded as fundamental to these transformations. The invention of the constant repayment amortized loan meant a change in relations with landlords, the emergence of secure paths to home ownership and major changes in land patterns. The change from the guild-like temporary building societies to permanent institutions meant a regulated supply of capital for home owners. The third component of the change in the delivery of housing resulted from the first building firm, attributed to James Cubitt, which employed full-time labor instead of itinerant journeymen and could provide a comprehensive service at a preset fixed price. In order to satisfy the enormous new demands on land, traditional tenure relations had to be changed, which started to shift control over land and property out of the hands of the aristocracy. Finally, the invention of municipal deficit spending, another mechanism based on progress and optimism, enabled cities to undertake major reconstruction in anticipation of increased tax revenues in the belief that a more efficient and attractive city would yield great future economic benefits.
In 1850, London, the center of the world’s greatest empire, manifested this position by building the most emblematic building of the nineteenth century: the Crystal Palace, the first of the great commercial/cultural exhibitions of the century. Through land reorganization, many experiments with housing types and subsidies, upgraded infrastructure and public transportation investments, London responded to its new size and economy to become the world’s first metropolis. The form of land in the city had remained largely unchanged through the maintenance of private ownership (note the rejection by King Charles II of Wren’s plan for reshaping the city after the 1666 fire). But as the city became such a powerful economic engine, the demand for land increased and led to the vast accumulation of wealth; for example, Mary Davies inheriting from her uncle large amounts of swampy land forfeited to the crown after the plague of 1665 which, when added to the rural fortune of her later husband, Grosvenor, led to the largest fortune in private wealth in England.
Two examples of land reformation in central London are examined. The construction of Regent Street through the efforts of the Prince Regent and his architect friend, John Nash, involved an act of Parliament and financing from the Royal Exchange Insurance Company and the Bank of England. This association of royalty, government, and commercial wealth produced a cut through the city between Regent’s Park in the north and Green Park and Buckingham Palace in the south. It also happened to be a dividing line between rich and poor in Booth’s map of 1879, the first economic class map ever made. In the second case, the subdivision of the nine estates which comprised most of west central London, including the Crown’s estate (the largest), is examined as “little towns” designed to include a mixture of housing types, uses and inhabitants. The role that different types of open squares, from the earliest Covent Garden, Bloomsbury and St. James onward, played in these subdivisions, as well as in the spatial pattern of central London, is noted and compared to different textural orders in cities.
A final aspect of the restructuring of London involves the building of many layers of public transportation rendering access to the outskirts and contributing to the low densities of London as compared to, say, Paris. Among the new infrastructure are the intrusions of the major railroad lines, with the help of parliamentary acts, into the heart of the city, forming a central box of about 4 x 1.5 miles, later to become the underground’s Central line. The world’s first underground system, begun in 1863, was virtually complete by the end of the century and has only been added to marginally since. It was reticulated to cover the city and connected to a suburban railway system that enclosed London’s growing suburbs into the enlarged city.
Handout
- Page 1: Subdivision and development of Bedford Estate, London from 1761–1845
- Page 2: Matrix of textural orders comparing West London to other cities
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Thames Street, city grid of Regent Street, map of city, Grosvenor Square, Old Church, Booth’s map of pubs, the railway system, Euston Road, Charing Cross, Birmingham Railway, St. Pancras Station, Victoria Station, the Crystal Palace (London, England); Victoria Station (Mumbai, India)
Lecture Summary
The nineteenth century transformation of Paris, the world’s largest manufacturing city, took place through absolute control from the ruling center with a view to transform a largely medieval city into a modern city of efficiency and grandeur. While London, according to Rasmussen, was based on a set of villages, Paris had always been centered around royalty and court encircled by constantly expanding walls from the twelfth century to the last in the nineteenth century. The major projects of the city were made by kings from the twelfth century’s Phillipe Auguste to the sixteenth century’s Henri IV, the greatest builder of all, who built not only from his own funds but attracted others to build majestic town residences, such as Richelieu’s Palais-Royal and Marie de Medici’s Luxembourg Palace. By the time of the Revolution, their role had been replaced by local government who faced a city dense through immigration from the countryside; in the 3rd arondissement there were close to 400 persons per acre in 1851, and, starved of physical improvements, one Parisian in forty died in the 1832 cholera epidemic. Stendhal called Parisians “barbarians…having made of their streets a general sewer.”
Before you can plan, you need to measure. The first maps of the city, the city portraits of Turgot and the accurate measurements of Verniquet, made overall urban reorganization thinkable. This appeared for the first time in the 1793 plan by the Commission of Artists, which set out a plan based largely on new streets connecting a city through use and perspective. This first urban plan set forth the idea that movement would be the organizing principle for the modern Paris. But there was no financial mechanism for realizing such a plan. Under the Seine Prefectorship of Rambuteau, for instance, a road meant to be 20 meters wide ended up 13 meters wide. The later Prefect, Berger, refused to engage in deficit spending: “it is not I who will ever borrow the city into ruin,” he said as he left office.
The ascent of Louis Napoleon in 1848 changed the economic formula by which modern Paris was reshaped. He had admired the Regent Street project in London, and apparently had made grand plans for cities while in exile. But he needed the outspoken administrative and fiscal skill of his Prefect of the Seine, Haussmann, the first urban manager of modern times, to execute what had already been foreshadowed in the Artists’ plan half-a-century before, a reticulated multi-centric city. Through deals with developers and banks, Haussmann disposed of public land and received in return expensive buildings lining new boulevards that conformed to rules governing height, materials and street elevation. No deviation from Haussmann’s obsession with conformity was permitted, and these boulevards created the uniform matrix in the central city still there today. By 1870 Haussmann had engaged the city in loans of over 1.5 billion francs, which were fully retired only in 1929. Haussmann’s conception of a modern city was comprehensive; he opened up 95 kilometers of road in the center and 70 outside, and established a system of gas street lighting, a new water supply system, numerous parks and gardens, over 1,000 new trees, the alignment of 15 omnibus companies into one, and various new public buildings such as the Opera and Les Halles. This was accomplished in a period of less than a quarter of a century, bracketed by two major insurrections: the Socialist revolution of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1872. As a model for modernizing the center of a major city through public expenditure resting on a belief that the creation of greater efficiency, attractiveness and general betterment will repay these costs through, amongst others, increased tax revenue and tourist attraction, nineteenth-century Paris is without peer.
Handout
Handout for Lecture 9 (PDF - 2.6MB)
- Page 1: Development in Pairs from the seventeenth to nineteenth century
- Page 2: Network of streets implemented, thick and inherited streets, thin (Georges-Eugène Haussmann)
Referenced Texts
Fig. 4 from Debord, Guy. “The Naked City.” 1957.
“Ten Scenarios for ‘Grand Paris’ Metropolis Now Up for Public Debate.” Bustler, March 13, 2009.
Examples, Precedents, and Works
Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry—Juin, 1750 plan for Paris, The Louvre, Cours-la-Reine, Place Royale and the Carrousel, Place de la Bourse, Rue Rambuteau, Boulevard de Sébastopol, Champs-Élysées, Avenue Foch, Palais Garnier, Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, Paris underground (Paris, France); Paris Street; Rainy Day (Gustave Caillebotte); Académie royale des beaux-arts Bruxelles (Belgium)
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