Chapter Review:

The City of Monuments

Submitted by: Devyani Totla

Subject:Elective
CHAPTER 6: CITY OF MONUMENTS
Chicago During the ugly riots of 1880s, Chicago saw an atmosphere of uprising tension due to the
continuation of the urban social fabric for middle class people, facing increasing cultural diversity and
escalating threat of disorder. The primary aim was to eliminate the breeding places of disease, moral
depravity, discontent, and socialism.

The Chicago Plan, 1909, was Daniel Hudson Burnham’s greatest achievement. First, the Mall in
Washington, DC was nearly doubled in width and length, and intersected by two major cross-park
strips. Second, Cleveland, a place of uncontrolled industrialism, received proposal for a new civic
center grouping major civic buildings with linked public parks alongside the lakefront, which together
would form an impressive open space. Third, San Francisco, where a new civic center complex –
strategically located at the junction of Market Street and Van Ness Avenue – was to be the focus of a
set of radiating boulevards, from which subsidiary radials would take off at intervals; bringing the
city’s regular grid into “miraculous formal equilibrium”. Earlier, San Francisco and Cleveland, were
based on a civic and business core with no provision for business expansion in the rest of the city.

The basic concept of Chicago was to restore a lost visual and aesthetic harmony, thereby creating the
physical prerequisite for the emergence of a harmonious social order. The chaotic city, that had
arisen through rapid growth and a rich mixture of nationalities, would be given order by cutting new
thoroughfares, removing slums, and extending parks.

All this had a huge price tag attached. The Lake Front was to be reclaimed and turned into a park.
Congress Street, running at right angles from this park, was to become the principal axis of new
Chicago. A mile inland, where this axis intersects Hubbard Street, wide diagonal avenues would
radiate from a huge domed civic center: the focus of the whole plan, and ironically one of the few
features that was never built. The banks of the Chicago River were to be straightened, reclaimed, and
lined with new streets and buildings. Large public buildings were to be placed at prominent positions
in the park strip.

The picture described by Burnham, one of the very few in the history of planning, is like no other
urban vision that has ever been. The City Beautiful rapidly gave way to the City Functional, to be
achieved by zoning – a topic to which the Burnham Plan had devoted scant attention.

The City Beautiful in the British Raj

During 1910 -1935 the British wanted to create visible symbols of authority and domination. The
British India Office and Colonial Office employed consultants to create instant capital cities in far
corners of the globe. Delhi, as a capital, provided the taste for monumentality.

Lutyens, a country-house architect, along with Herbert Baker, an imperialistic architect, put forth
nationalist and imperialist ideas, both symbolic and ceremonial. The present New Delhi was chosen
as the site in 1911 on the western part of old Indian City i.e. Raisina. From Raisina, the main axis ran
east to the ancient capital of Indrapat, symbolizing the keystone of the rule over the Empire of India.
The resulting final plan reflected formal geometry: the Secretariat and the War Memorial Arch both
had seven radiating routes, the great railway station circle, virtually all main roads made 300 or 600
angles with the routes connecting these three foci, and all major buildings were at centers or angles
or midsides of hexagons.

Within the hexagonal grids, houses were allocated according to a complex formula of race,
occupational rank, and socio-economic status, which had nothing to do with the traditional structure
of “civil lines” in India.

In South and East Africa, the British produced a number of instant mini-capitals: Harare, Lusaka,
Nairobi, and Kampala. Cities were considered completely white with a separate Indian bazaar at a
respectful distance; Africans were officially supposed to be farmers, or were herded into squatter
reservations with the aid of mass deportations and pass systems. Military had a virtual stranglehold
over the planning system. The British segregated themselves as best they could, and lived in
bungalow-style at exceedingly low densities. In South Africa, the mining compounds produced very
high death rates from tuberculosis and pneumonia.

It originated the “Durban system,” using revenues from a municipal monopoly of beer sales, to fund
African-worker housing and social facilities, and thus allowing white ratepayers to avoid financial
obligations.

Common to all these plans was the land-use and settlement structure. There was a central
government office node and a commercial office area; and a central shopping area that was adjacent
to both. All these were designed around a formal geometrical road layout, with broad avenues
meeting at traffic circle surrounded by very low-density European residential areas, a style known in
Lusaka. The African compound was relatively very small and was clearly segregated on one side of
the city as far as possible from the European areas by a physical barrier such as a railway track.
Difference as against New Delhi, was just not a matter of money. The consultants’ plans for the
African capitals never aimed at Lutyens’ geometrical complexities. Though the government house
was always given a prominent and dignified position.

Canberra
The new Commonwealth of Australia government chose Canberra for Australian Capital Territory in
1908. It organized an international competition to plan the city which was boycotted by British and
American institute of architects due to low prize money. Only young architects and students
competed and it was won by Walter Burley Griffin, an American student who had worked in Frank
Lloyd Wright’s office. But the design was termed impracticable by the board which was appointed by
government and it made some modifications which were not received well by the public. And the
plan was not implemented for several years and the suburbs began to grow without any plan. In
1957 William Holford from England recommend plan modifications and the next year John Overall
was appointed National Capital Development Region Director and started implementing the plan.
Unbelievably, after 45 years Griffin’s Plan began to take shape and it was effectively complete by the
millennium.

Griffin’s described the plan as an irregular amphitheater. From the lowest point of the basin towards
south west, the land rose in steps, which formed like a stage on which symbolically important
buildings of the Commonwealth: the Court of Justice, the Parliament House, finally – on the highest
internal hill within the basin – the Capitol building were planned but latter Parliament was given
bigger role and placed on Capitol hill.. The military establishments and market center were placed on
front left, the national university and municipal center on front right when facing towards Capitol
Hill. These two were joined by broad highways crossing the lake. Later an elegantly monumental art
gallery and national library have joined the Courts of Justice at front of stage.

Griffin made some of his most innovative leaps in designing the residential suburbs. He was
influenced by garden city movement he had designed linear parks leading to vast central space of
playing fields. These neighborhoods, and the new towns that are supplementing them farther out,
are strung like beads on the strings of the traffic roads which pass between and around them. So
Canberra became one of the last Cities Beautiful, and also the world’s biggest Garden City.

The City Beautiful and the Great Dictators

The return of the City Beautiful to Europe came in the age of the Great Dictators. In Rome Mussolini
was the chief architect of fascism who believed that great public works would not only recall the
triumphs of imperial and medieval Italy, but also would surpass them. The fascist ideology
concerning the city was in many ways close to Nazi that only rural family life was truly healthy; the
metropolis was the origin of most things bad, including labor unrest, revolution, and socialism. The
fascist town plans followed Roman models, with modified orthogonal grids, normally with four
quadrants and a rectangular piazza as the civic center. The role of planning was to be monumental:
to rediscover the glories of Rome by removing most of the traces of the subsequent two millennia.
The new plan in 1931 suggested the street widenings, and the focus on the Piazza Venezia as
Ceremonial Square but was not translated into reality which saved Rome from depredations of the
master builder.
Hitler wanted to reconstruct Berlin to perform as gathering-points for vast public ceremonies, by
moving population to Lebensraum in the countryside. Hitler was obsessionally determined that
Berlin should have an east–west axis two and a half times as long; the disposition of the buildings –
huge and monumental, with wide spaces between them.

In Moscow, The Urbanists who followed Corbusier wanted to house everyone in towers and the
deurbanists who followed Frank Lloyd Wright wanted to disperse everyone in mobile homes across
the countryside. But Full Assembly denounced foreign theories of planning and called for five year
development plans for Moscow. The physical structure and equipment of the plan were old
fashioned and were criticized. In 1935 a plan was called to limit cities future growth with forced
modernization. The city was developed as a single integral unit and the City Beautiful came to
Moscow. Stalin felt that very building however modest its function, had to be a monument and
personally approved plans for major buildings. In 1930 Moscow was a kind of Potemkin village the
new facades alongside the giant highways concealed a mass of ancient slums behind them.

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s was another great dictator whose mission was to rebuild Romanian society. He
personally took charge of designing the Victoria Socialismului civic center and dedicated great part of
his precious time to personally direct the activity of construction, architecture and systematization in
Bucharest. the axis of the new center, 3.5 kilometers long and 92 meters wide, is big enough to
assemble half a million people, and is lined with ten-story buildings. its purpose was to provide a
monumental approach to Casa Republicii one of the largest political administrative buildings in the
world, 86 meters high with facades 276 meters long, on 6.3 hectares of land, and housing 700
offices, meeting rooms, restaurants, libraries, and assembly halls for 1,200 people.

The City Beautiful. It manifested itself, over an 80-year period, in a great variety of different
economic, social, political, and cultural circumstances. What all these had in common, with some
qualifications and exceptions, was a total concentration on the monumental and on the superficial,
on architecture as symbol of power and also complete lack of interest in the wider social purposes of
planning.

CRITIQUE OF THE SUMMARY OF CHAPTER ‘CITY OF MONUMENTS’ FROM ‘CITIES OF

TOMORROW’

The critique provided here is of the summary of Chapter 6 ‘City of Monuments’ written by Sir Peter
Hall in his seminal book ‘Cities of Tomorrow’. The summary has been divided into two parts, one
discussing on the rise of City Beautiful Movement in Chicago and then it’s continuation in far flung
parts of the world under British Raj. The other part discusses on one of the brighter example of the
same movement, the planning of Canberra and it concludes with reviewing ambitious urban
architectural and planning projects initiated by totalitarian dictators (Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and
Ceausescu) in their respective capital cities, i.e. Rome, Italy, Moscow and Bucharest.

From the first look, the summary seems to be compacted version of the article itself. Dividing the
summary in two parts without any introductory context and concluding remarks makes it difficult for
readers to capture the scope of the article. The work summarised here is a definitive book on
(Urban) Planning Theory and Practice, written by former president of Town and Country Planning
Association (UK) – Sir Peter Hall. Chapter 1 of the book sets out clear objectives and the primary
objective of the book is to document the city planning visionaries of the twentieth century and how
their vision affected city building process in the world. The central argument set by the author is,
“most of them were visionaries, but for many of them their visions long lay fallow, because the time
was not ripe”. In the chapter of ‘City of Monuments’, the argument cannot be applied; as for the
visionaries, ‘City Beautiful Movement’ was exactly what was needed at that time and more or less
the visions came into existence on ground also.

The essence of the chapter lies on documenting the city planning in twentieth century affected by
aestheticism, sanitization by bourgeois class, business aspirations, imperial dominance, and
totalitarian visions. As the summary is mere compaction rather comprehension, it has failed to
capture this essence. The plan of Chicago, designed by Daniel Burnham – architect turned city
planner, was set on beauty and commercial boost rather than equitable improvement of the whole
society. And the summary focuses more on the Haussmanization (i.e. creation of large boulevards,
removing of slums etc.) aspects of the plan rather than on the creeping issue of least amount of
focus on housing, health and education. The city plan of Chicago, developed at the same time when
Thorstein Weblen developed his theory of conspicuous consumption, represents ‘Municipal
Cosmetic’ (coined by Lewis Mumford) rather than an inclusive and socially befitting plan. Also, in the
midst of Burnham’s poetic vision of the city the real estate market wanted overbuilding and
densification and therefore the original plan was modified by addition of zoning. The summary gives
least importance to these facts, misleading the readers on glorification of Chicago city plan.

A parallel City Beautiful movement was taking place under British Rule also. But not in their
mainland but at their outposts. A subsection in the chapter talks about the British Raj and their city
planning initiatives in India and African countries. The story of planning of Delhi, new capital of
British India, is well known. Edward Lutyens and Herbert Baker, with the help of decisive inputs from
Viceroy Hardinge, designed what today known as Lutyens Delhi. Obsessed by geometrical form,
Lutyens designed the city in the form of hexagonal grids made by intersecting diagonal roads with
two axes crossing across the heart of it. The summary rightly observes that allocation of houses in
the newly developed area was based on rank, occupation pattern and socio-economic status. The
plan was envisioned as symbol of British dominance but irony is that the newly formed city could
serve only for sixteen years after completion. The planning of cities in African countries was not as
grand as in India in terms of geometrical forms, but it included the obnoxious element of racial
exclusiveness. The summary again rightly points out a fact from the chapter that Africans were
allotted new houses – known as ‘compounds’ – as far as possible from the European centre of the
city, where government houses again were given superior and dignified position.

The author briefly takes a positive turn in the chapter when it shifts to the planning of Canberra. As
described in the summary, the plan envisaged in 1911 through a low profile competition, started to
take shape after 45 years; only to be fully realized near the end of the millennium. Noted for its
ambitious vision as irregular amphitheatre, the summary failed to explore the argument that the
plan also had religious undertones influenced by Madame Blatavsky’s Theosophical movement,
which aims at social desegregation and equality.

The chapter’s epilogue focuses on the visions set not by planners or architects but dictators of
totalitarian regimes. Each dictator chose his favoured ideas to develop his city, but the central theme
was same as city beautiful movement, where monumental architecture and grandeur represented
the regime’s superiority. Though, most of the visionary projects imagined by these dictators could
never be established. In these cities, wide thorough fares with towering buildings were used only to
hide settlements squatting between them. The summary again fails to emphasize on the same issue
and rather delves into the technical aspects written in the chapter.

Overall, the chapter concludes with the fact that the City Beautiful movement spawned for over 80
years. It was followed by wide ranges of world ideologies and political alignments. The summary
rightly extracts out the insight of the author that with few exceptions, entire focus was on superficial
and monumental building of the cities. But it (summary) again fails to add to the fact that the lack of
social consciousness then led to the emergence of the concept of liveability and urban design.