TOWN PLANNING IN THE 20TH CENTURY

1930-2000

The 20th century marked the transition from town architecture to town planning. The transition occurred as a result of the industrial revolution which took the traditional city beyond its limits, and gave birth to a new ideal: the modern city. The attempt to realize this ideal came to grief in the 1980s, leading to nostalgia for the traditional city. But at the end of the 20th century , the changing economic context brought the question of the city and the possibility of exerting an influence through planning, onto the agenda once more.

The modernist city

Whereas the designs for garden cities and "Usonia" (see pages 40-41) took root in the country, the French architect and socialist Tony Garnier made detailed plans for a model of a modern industrial city. The project, which he presented in 1904 for a "Cite industrielle", had separate areas demarcated for different functions, such as living, working, relaxation, and transport. The traffic system had separate roads for vehicles and pedestrians, through-roads, and access-roads. Green spaces took up more than half of the city area. Set in the midst of these were loose groupings of simple free-standing apartments blocks, built of reinforced concrete using industrial techniques, and affording plenty of air and light.

Garnier did the conceptual preparatory work for the Modernist town-planners. Both his architectonic details and planning ideas became their basic principles. But it was the ambitious abstract projects of Le Corbusier which first gave these ideas ideological force and promoted their final breakthrough. In 1922 he worked out his plan for the "Ville contemporaine". Whereas Garnier's town was small, with buildings a maximum of three stories high, Le Corbusier wanted to provide homes for up to three million inhabitants massed into residential areas with buildings up to 60 stories high. His "Plan voisin" three years later placed his designs in a real location for the first time. He suggested replacing a part of the historic old city of Paris with 18 skyscrapers 650 feet (200 meters) high. The theoretical foundation of this signed manifesto was worked out by the fourth Congres Internationaux d' Architecture Moderne (CIAM) and published in 1943 by Le Corbusier and the French CIAM group.

This "Charter of Athens" was the manifesto for the new city. Whereas the traditional city drew a boundary between itself and the country, divided up its activities between public streets, squares and parks, and private buildings, and separated town planning from architecture, the modernist city would be a single, open space for living that was organized by a central state planning authority. In place of the mixed-use road system open to all means of transport that was to be found in the traditional city, the modernist city would have a traffic system separated hierarchically according to function. The housing question was inseparable from the crisis in the old cities, and should no longer be left in the hands of private speculators, but instead dealt with by erecting whole areas of mass housing, all built to the same standard, and offering light, air, and sun for all.

The Charter of Athens became the guidebook for all new town planning and building worldwide in the decades that followed. Its emphasis on the new, found particular favor with the states founded after the Second World War. East Berlin's city center was one of many dedicated to the collective idea. Over the ruins on either side on the Frankfurter Allee, Edmund Collein, Werner Dutschke, and Josef Kaiser built the first socialist residential complex between 1959 and 1965. But the West built almost as many mass housing schemes of questionable value: right up until the mid-1970s, estates with tens of thousands of separate living units were put up as the old tenement areas were torn down. Centers that had developed over centuries were programmatically rebuilt in the name of making the cities accessible for cars, and motorways were driven through the heart of the old cities.

The chance to build a completely new city occurred only rarely, however. Between the years of 1951 and 1965 Le Corbusier was commissioned by Pandit Nehru to plan the state capital of Chandigarh, which was intended to be the symbol of modern India. Over a space of around 250 acres (100 hectares) he laid out a grid of through roads. In between these there were residential areas for 150,000 people, with all the 13 different castes of Indian society living separately from each other. The only area shared by all was the line of commercial establishments along the east-west axis, in the middle of which was the civic center. The state government was separated off in its own area to the north of the city.

Similar concepts inspired Brazil to built a new capital city 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) away from Rio de Janeiro on the high plateau of Planatina. The competition to plan the city was won by Lucio Costa in 1957. Four years later Oscar Niemeyer had already erected the most important buildings, and Brasilia was inaugurated in 1960.
Costa's plan was based on a very simple grid of four- to ten-lane motorways. The east-west axis is 1.4 miles (2.2 kilometers) long and 1150 feet (350 meters) wide, and along it lie all the buildings housing local government, sports, and the armed forces, and hotels and theaters. It culminates in the "Square of the Three Powers" with the 28-story government building, the bowl of the congress chamber, the dome of the senate, the law courts, the foreign ministry, and the cathedral (illustration page 65). At right-angles to this monumental axis runs the 8.7-mile (14-kilometer) long north-south axis, flanked by residential complexes with green areas around them, in which people live in slab-shaped buildings three or six stories high. The banks and the shopping center are located at the intersection of the two highways.

Brasilia is an exemplary demonstration of the failure of modern town planning. It was successful only insofar as it solved the housing problem. In all other ways it could not even live up to its own promises. Brasilia's road system does not permit you to cover a distance of a mile simply on foot, you have to go by car, taking a six-mile detour. The international town planning ideas realized here take no consideration of the site or of the traditions of the country. The functionally divided city, intersected by motorways, left nowhere for civic life to grow. It merely represents a collection of buildings, not a city. Despite the enormous open spaces, there is none that can be used by society. Because the plan accounted for every square inch of Brasilia, today three-quarters of the inhabitants live in satellite towns which have grown up without any plan at all. The main lesson that was learnt from Brasilia was that town planning efforts that impose the new instead of giving space to what has developed historically deny themselves from the outset any chance of sustained development.

The renaissance of the city

So, theory looked again at the traditional city. In his book L'Architettura della Citta, published in 1966, the Italian Aldo Rossi stressed that the form of the city, its ground plan, was valid for every era. Only the use that is made of it must be appropriate to each era. An example he gave was the Placa del Marcato in Lucca, the oval form of which is based on the Roman amphitheatre that stood on that spot. In the 1970's the Dutchman Rem Koolhaas published several analyses of the metropolis of New York. In his book Delirious New York he celebrates the principle of mixed use. The skyscraper which accommodates offices and dwellings, as well as places of entertainment under the same roof, and which, as seen in the Rockefeller Center (illustration, page 49) also creates a free space, is Koolhaas's prototype of the city building. Koolhaas's 1972 drawing "The city of the Captive Globe" shows how the most diverse architectonic manifestations can be put together into a unified city by means of a system of blocks. The work stresses the advantages of separating architecture and town planning.

In 1977 the "Charter of Machu Pichu" was drawn up. It was the antithesis of the Charter of Athens, and it demanded, amongst other things, the preservation of historic buildings, the continuity of the city ground plan, the integration of various uses, and the priority of public transport over individual transport.

Thereafter town planning concentrated more and more on the inner city. Between 1984 and 1987, the Internationale Bauaustellung (IBA, the International Building Exhibition), turned West Burlin into a showplace for town planning ideas. Under the slogan "careful city renewal", superannuated buildings were set in order and their ability to last into the future demonstrated in the shadow of the Wall. Under the slogan "critical reconstruction", the ground plan of the city that had been destroyed by the war and by modernist town planning was reconstituted with the most varied examples of contemporary architecture. The IBA was extremely successful in its basic project of regaining the inner city as a place to live. But so long as the project "city" was the preserve of the public authority alone and only council housing was put up, only the form of the city was created; its substance - civic life - was not.

Spain was more successful: in an extraordinary act of concerted effort between 1981 and 1993, innumerable squares were brought to life again in Barcelona, and all over the country schools, tramways, and cultural centers were constructed. At the end of Franco's dictatorship the collectivity, which had been long repressed, reasserted its rights over civic space.

Today's situation

The individualization of society at the end of the 20th century has put a question mark once again over the idea of the city as a community project. The liberalization of the economy is undermining the planning monopoly of the town councils. These had already lost their active role in city development through the crisis in financing brought about by that liberalization, which had enhanced the role of private investors. When there is doubt that the city can be planned at all, aesthetic concepts step into the background.

In the mid-1990s the German Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm reflected on the question of whether it was still possible to plan under these conditions and to ensure the continuing development for the city. His Anleitung fur den Stadtumbau (Guidelines for Rebuilding in the City), takes a position against large town-planning interventions: the basic structure for the city is already there in the historically given layout of the streets. Working upon a structure of small units offers the guarantee that all town-planning goals are achieved and that no part can be developed at another's cost. After the excessive weight of private enterprise in the 19th century and the dominance of the state in the 20th, the "third city" should be based upon cooperation.

His plea for small-scale cooperative development appears completely utopian in the face of larger changes in the cities. All over the world it is not the centers themselves that are developing, but the peripheries.

The regions of southeast Asia are expanding the most explosively. For example, the triangle of the Hong Kong, Macao, and Canton is fusing into a mega-agglomeration with unimaginable speed. The number of inhabitants of Canton has doubled in only five years. Hong Kong's satellite city, Shenzen, has a population 115 times greater than 20 years ago. These quantum leaps are occurring within giant building projects. Macao is planning land reclamation which entails filling in an area of water 23 square miles (60 square kilometers) in size. Between Hong Kong and Canton half a dozen overspill cities are planned and whole bays are being filled in to gain valuable building land. Some 300,000 people will live in skyscrapers at least 40 stories high. This growth leads to an unbelievable concentration of population: there are 20 times more people on a single square yard in Hong Kong than in a big city in Europe. The resultant problems, for instance with the traffic, are reminiscent of the crisis in the European cities in the 19th century. History seems to be repeating itself.

Yet in face of the much greater speed and force of the problem it seems questionable to try to deal with it using town-planning methods that were developed over the past 100 years. The cities of southeast Asia have become the experimental terrain for a new model of the metropolis: the chaos city. This "city" is no longer constituted by the collectivity of its inhabitants which expresses itself in a unified type of building, but in the confrontation of conflicting interests, which takes advantage of an open but temporary spectrum of opportunities. In the permanent process of growth and change inherent in such a city, planning has no chance.