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20.02.05 History & Theory Slides PDF
20.02.05 History & Theory Slides PDF
20.02.05 History & Theory Slides PDF
From: http://www.boondocksnet.com/expos/
The Court of Honor
Looking east over the Midway Plaisance
The Electricity Building
Interior of the electricity building
“Dream no small dreams.”
Daniel Burnham
Daniel
Burnham -
The Chicago
Plan (1909)
Note: 1909 also the year of the First National Conference on City Planning
Inspiring Civic Unity and Adoration
“The central administration building…. Surmounted by a
dome of impressive height, to be seen and felt by the people,
to whom it should stand as the symbol of civic order and
unity. Rising from the plain upon which Chicago rests, its
effect may be compared to that of the dome of St. Peter’s at
Rome.”
- Charles Burnham, Plan of Chicago
Chicago Plan
• Comprehensive plan but with no legal force
• Wanted uniform order in order to save the city, “from chaos incident to
rapid growth, and especially to the influx of people of many nationalities
without common tradition or habits of life.”
• Addressed aesthetic concerns that were not looked at in the housing
surveys, or land use controls of the day.
• Not adequate housing details – but instead ‘spatial opportunity” for all
good housing and all income levels
Critiques of the City Beautiful
1. Impossibility of completing City Beautiful plans
2. Plans failed to acknowledge the centrality of politics
3. Critics asserted a functionalist or “American” Aesthetic
against the neoclassicism of typical designs.
Legacy of the City Beautiful
• It took the city for what it was and refashioned it into
something better” – something the Garden City movement
failed to do.
• It established comprehensive planning
• It gives us the vocabulary for civic architecture and urban
beautification that we inherit today.
• It created a urban political reform movement and a created
a legacy of civic activism.
UTOPIAN IDEALS
19th Century Urban Growth
• London – 900,000 to 4.5 million
• Paris – 500,000 to 2.5 million
• Berlin 190,000 to 2 million
• New York – 60,000 to 3.4 million
• Chicago – a village in 1840 was 1.7 million by the turn of the
century.
• But their beliefs were more than a belief in the power of technology – it was a belief
that technology could be used to help manifest the inherent structure of an
industrial society so that an ideal form could help bring about order, freedom,
prosperity, and beauty.
• They moved beyond earlier expressions of social ideals and rendered them in
physical form.
• {Note: Burnham paid little attention to the automobile and was criticized for it.)
Ebenezer Howard &
the Garden City
Ebenezer Howard:
1850-1928
Issues of
the Day
http://www.neuchateltourisme.ch/pictures/content/neuc
hatel/Le_Corbusier.jpg
Radiant City
(1922)
Central Station
Frank Lloyd Wright
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lloyd_Wright
Frank Lloyd
Wright –
Broadacre
City (1935)
Austin in the day
Civic Pride
Infrastructure
In 1905 Austin had few sanitary sewers virtually no public parks or
playgrounds, and only one paved street.
Historian David C. Humphrey
Littlefield Building 1910
The Great Granite Dam (Before flood - showing power house and paddle boat)
REFLECTION
CITY SOCIAL CITY BEAUTIFUL CITY PRACTICAL
Elites, reformers, Architects, visionaries, Sanitation engineers, city
Who is the Planner? intellectuals, social engineers administrators,
scientists bureaucrats
Where do they get their Social class, self (claims Sponsors, financial class, Law, elected officials, “the
authority? moral authority) professionalization institution”
Who do they say they're People, tenement Overall Greater Good, Citizens, residents
serving? residents Society at Large
• Infrastructure
• Road building
• Extension of utilities
http://www.hfmgv.org/exhibits/showroom/1908/model.t.html
Americans
• Government-
guaranteed
mortgage lending
• Decentralization – the
horizontal city
• “from anywhere to
anywhere”
http://www.texasfreeway.com/Austin/historic/photos/austin_histo
ric_photos.shtml
Zoning
• Village of Euclid vs. Ambler
Realty (1926)
“A nuisance may be merely the right thing in the wrong place, like a pig in the parlor
instead of the barnyard” – Justice George Sutherland
Government
Backed Mortgage
Lending
• Federal Housing Authority (FHA)
• Est. in National Housing Act of
1934
• Private mortgages federally
insured
• Longer-term mortgages
• Lower down payments
• Redlining
• Largest generation in
American history
http://www.fandm.edu/levittown/default.html
URBAN RENEWAL
The Trauma
Ebenezer Howard
- The Garden City
(1898)
Daniel
Burnham - The
Chicago Plan
(1909)
Le Corbusier
Plan Voisin
(1925)
The Perfect Storm
• New roads for the
automobile age
• Government-
guaranteed
mortgage lending
• Suburbanization
• Urban Blight
• An Inefficient City
“Democracy had not
solved the problem of
building large-scale public
works, so Moses solved it
by ignoring democracy”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Robert_Moses_projects
Moses’ Record
• In Stuyvesant Town Moses cleared 11,000 working class
tenants to move in 8,756 middle class families.
Rachael Carson
…….. and its People
Postmodernism
How the Planning & Design
Profession Responds
The Collapse of
Grand Narratives
1984
Two Responses to Nature
The pragmatic
The social
Ian McHarg
“Our eyes do not divide us from the
world, but unite us with it…Let us then
abandon the simplicity of separation
and give unity its due. Let us abandon
the self mutilation which has been our
way and give expression to the potential
harmony of man-nature…Man is that
uniquely conscious creature who can
perceive and express. He must become
the steward of the biosphere. To do this
he must design with nature.”
Design with Nature
• Ecological planning—systematic
way of analyzing and designing
around natural systems
• Creates overlays of features in order to eliminate areas of
high ecological value from development
• Highly rational process: ecological data inventory,
interpretation, assessment, design synthesis, guidelines,
plan
The Layer Cake
understanding a place requires understanding its ecological history in both
time and space
Land use
Wildlife
Vegetation
Soils
Surface hydrology / drainage
Climate
Geology – surface (Pleistocene)
Geology - bedrock
Lawrence Halprin
http://www.oregonlive.com/art/index.ssf/2009/10/landscape_legend_lawrence_halp.html
Ira Keller Fountain (Ira's Fountain),
with Lovejoy Fountain Park
Portland, OR 1971
SEA RANCH,
Sonoma County, CA
1964
FRAMING THEORY
In the Wake of Urban Renewal
• .On a day-to-day basis, planners found themselves on
both sides of the divide; they were part of the larger
government structures that perpetuated existing market
forces, even as they simultaneously made efforts to curb
the effects of the market.
• Through the ideas of critical theory, planners sought to
become aware of how mechanisms such as information
control, network formation, and a basic “framing” of
issues could serve to either blindly perpetuate or critically
negotiate existing power dynamics
Planning – Advocacy Planning
• The planner isn’t solely a value-neutral technician; instead, values are part of every planning
process.
• City planners shouldn’t attempt to frame a single plan that represents the “ public interest ”
but rather “represent and plead the plans of many interest groups.”
• So-called “citizen participation” programs usually react to official plans and programs instead
of encouraging people to propose their own goals, policies and future actions.
Neighborhood groups and ad hoc associations brought together to protest public actions
should rightly do their own plans.
• Davidoff said that professionals should be concerned with physical, economic and social
planning
Our Theoretic Heritage: Critical Theory
• Critical theory is an attempt to illustrate how the structures
of capitalism in mass market societies hide the dynamics of
power which the market system unwittingly keeps in place.
• Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, and later Habermas
https://hbr.org/2014/12/understanding-new-power