City planning in history

First Planning Paradigm

Utopian planning and urban zoning

• 1890s - 1910s

• A response to the industrial city, it’s replacement.

• Saw design and community as having a causal relationship, where the city is a moral instrument for character. Connection to nature.

Second Planning Paradigm

High Modernist Planning

• 1920s - 1970s

• Strict use separation, elevated pedestrian walkways, high speed roads, and low density

• Rebuilding after WW2

Third Planning Paradigm

Pushback Against Big Planning

• 1973 - 2001

• Pushback against high modernist planning. Based in a distrust to holistic planning approach. Wanted to humanize people effected by planning.

• Jane Jacobs and Davidoff.

Fourth Planning Paradigm

Reflective and Reparative Planning

• 2000s to today

• Be conscious of the past planning harms. Look at planning issues through the lens of race, reparations, wealth distribution, and environmental impacts— not just efficiency.

• Away from planners as experts

Haussman

• 1850s - 1860s

• Paris

• Executed Plan for Paris. It was the first major redevelopment of an existing city that met its goal.

• Boulevards lined with trees that lead to historic monuments. Denser apartment buildings and street walls.

Garden City / Ebenezer Howard

• 1898

• Utopian city planning in response to industrial city and industrial conditions

• Wanted a city combining pull factors (economy, jobs, and industry) plus public health benefits of rural ideas. Green belts, superblocks.

• Green spaces in cities are still a popular trend in planning today:

The Industrial City

• 19th century

• Factory jobs drawing massive populations into cities faster than housing or infrastructure could be built

• Urbanization brought massive overcrowding, pollution, and public health crisis

Industrial conditions that produced conditions of squalor

• 19th century

• Dense tenements a breeding ground for disease

• Factory towns with heavy smoke, lack of clean water

• Lack of infrastructure: open sewers and unpaved streets, missing garbage collection

City Beautiful / Daniel Burnham / Frederick Law Olmstead

• 1890s - 1910s

• Took ideas from Haussman and using neo classical architecture. Clear site lines and monumental architecture.

• EX. Palace of Fine Arts, and Central Park

Broadacre City / Frank Lloyd Wright

• 1930s - 1950s

• In response to and against City Beautiful.

• Rooted in individualism; bringing into the automobile and the gridded landscape. Every family to a piece of land.

Rational-Comprehensive Planning / Robert Moses

• 1950s - 1960s

• Decision making and planning process adopted in High Modernist Mvmt.

• Top down approach; Planning to be in the hands of “experts” and left communities out of the decision-making process.