Urban Design Studio

Module 2 – Urban Design Concepts

URBAN DESIGN CONCEPT

LEARNING Fundamental definition of Concept and Theory

OBJECTIVES CONCEPT.
- Is an abstract idea, a general idea or
After studying this module, you as a future Architect
understanding of something.
should be able to: - Is a mental image
- Term is used in different fields such as
1. Differentiate Urban Design Concept from linguistics, sciences, philosophy etc.
Urban Design Theory THEORY.
2. Identify each and every concept discussed - Is a scientifically credible principle that
explains a phenomenon
- Can be presented as a model
TOPIC - This term is more used in the field of science
OUTLINE Some known Urban Design Theories and their underlying
1. Urban Design Concepts Concepts

BROADACRE CITY:
Philosophical Foundations
OVERVIEW Through Broadacre City, Wright expressed his
principles of urban decentralization, economic self-sufficiency,
and individualism. The traditional city, with its masses of
buildings, was replaced by small houses dotting the rural
Module 1 serves as a brief discussion about the basic landscape. In Broadacre City, the built environment would be
concepts of Urban Design. It gives us an overview on distributed over open countryside and would be organically
the known concepts presented from theories of constructed to harmonize with natural surroundings. Each lot
various Planners. This module is good for 3 hour would be inwardly oriented, thereby promoting a domestic,
family- oriented lifestyle where every person would be at least a
lecture.
part-time farmer. Indeed, the notion of individualism was a
crucial element of Wright’s vision of Broadacre City. He owed
ACTIVATING much of this vision to the Jeffersonian ideal of rural self-reliance.
Broadacre City would provide for the universal ownership of land
PRIOR KNOWLEDGE and a society of individual proprietors. There would be no rent,
landlords, or tenants, and no private ownership of land.
Looking back at the vocabulary learned from previous Everyone would have the skills and knowledge to be a part-time
Module, identify whether the following is a CONCEPT or a farmer, mechanic, and intellectual—much as Jefferson was.
THEORY. Goods would flow directly from the producer to the consumer
1. GARDEN CITY with no intermediary. Industry in Broadacre City would be
2. NEIGHBORHOOD FAMILY UNIT privately or cooperatively owned. Local government would be
3. PIECEMEAL DEVELOPMENT the only local public administrative group within the city. Like
4. SATELLITE TOWNS modern conservative economists, the sole purpose of national
5. SUBURBS government would be the regulation of natural resources, the
6. UTOPIA / UTOPIAN PLANNING provision of national defense, and the compilation of
7. DYNAPOLIS or DYNAMIC CITY information. Despite Wright’s penchant for communal
8. TRANSIT ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT ownership, however, his “democratic decentralization” would
9. GRID PLANNING allow every person to own at least one acre of land in Broadacre
10. BLIGHTED AREA City. The resulting urban pattern would greatly decentralize
population and replace the city’s concentration of wealth and
power with a society where the means of production would be
widely held.
Design Features
Broadacre City was publicly displayed in print media
and in a showing of a model from 1934 to 1935. The version of

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his plan published in Architectural Record in 1935 is
conceptualized in Figure 1. Broadacre City would cover an area
of 4 square miles or 2,560 acres and would support a population
of approximately 5,000 people living in 1,400 homes. Each
person regardless of age would be provided at least 1 acre of
land. The typical residential lot configuration would be 165 feet
by 264 feet, or precisely 1 acre. The lot would allow for a garden
or small farm next to the house. Families would also live in small
apartments, single-family cottages, worker quarters above
shops, or larger hillside houses. Scattered throughout would be
a dozen or so 15-floor towers, each with 33 apartments.
Everyone would be within walking distance of work, and
vehicular transportation would be used primarily to travel
between cities. Among the small farms would be factories,
schools, stores, professional buildings, hospital, cultural centers,
and other institutions. The local government buildings would be
in a single high-rise building by a lake, but it would not be the
focus of the community. A single freeway and railroad system
would provide access to other Broadacre Cities. Using the
modern rule of thumb for a familyoriented household size of
three, the population base of Broadacre City would be about
4,200 people. The density is slightly more than 1,000 people per
square mile, which is comparable to that of the nation’s most
densely populated state, New Jersey, or roughly equivalent to
the population density of Kansas City, Missouri. Broadacre City
would clearly qualify as an urban place according to the U.S.
Census. In effect, Broadacre City would be an oasis of settlement
set in a rural landscape.
GARDEN CITY
The Garden City is a planning concept and model
developed by Ebenezer Howard, who founded the Garden City
Association in 1899. Howard’s writing strongly influenced an
early generation of urban planners, as well as the City Beautiful
movement in the United States. Two garden cities were built in
England in the early 1900s, and urban planners and architects in
Europe and South America followed with garden cities in their
countries. In the United States, garden cities were promoted by
the Regional Planning Association, resulting in the construction
of three communities in the 1930s. The Garden City has served
as a model for urban development and an inspiration for other
planning models to the present day.
Howard’s plan for the Garden City was first published
in 1899 as Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, but the
book did not generate much attention; a revised version titled
Garden Cities of Tomorrow, published in 1904, became a
cornerstone in urban planning. The Garden City was designed to
house some 32,000 people on a site of 6,000 acres. Six radial
boulevards 120 feet wide extended from the center, creating a
radial pattern, with open spaces and parks separating areas for
residential, industrial, institutional, and other uses. The Garden
City was intended to be self-sufficient, to include a mix of
employment as well as sufficient agricultural land to feed the
local population. The Garden City was bordered by a greenbelt
to separate it from other cities. In one mapping included in the
original publication but not in Garden Cities, a ring of planned
communities surrounds a larger, central city; the communities
are connected to the central city and to the other suburban
centers by rail transport. The Garden City was a blend of the city
and nature, but without the problems of pollution and
overcrowding found in the large industrial city.
With financial support from William Hesketh Lever, the
first Garden City, Letchworth, was built in Hertfordshire, north of
London (Lever was in the midst of construction of Port Sunlight,
a planned industrial community outside of Liverpool, during this
period). Letchworth was viewed as a successful implementation
of the Garden City, with new homes and ample open space, a
wide range of industries to provide employment for town
residents, and an agricultural greenbelt to control further
expansion. After World War I, the British government provided
support for the second Garden City, in Welwyn, also in
Hertfordshire. The Garden City would also serve as a more
general model for smaller developments, including the
Hampstead garden suburb and Gidea Park in London, and for
garden cities in other countries as well, including Hellerau (a
suburb of Dresden) in 1909 and Bromma (in Stockholm)
beginning in 1910. In 1909 the Garden City Association changed
its name to the Garden Cities and Town Planning Association (in
1941 the name would be changed once again, to the Town and
Country Planning Association). By this time, there was a
worldwide Garden Cities movement, as Howard’s ideas served
as a model for urban development in other countries. In 1908,
the Australian government selected the site for a new national
capital (present-day Canberra) and commissioned an
international competition to design the new city. The winning
design, by two Chicago architects, is derived in part from the
comprehensive regional mapping for central city and
surrounding garden cities published in Tomorrow: A Peaceful
Path to Real Reform. New Delhi, in northern India, was similarly
designed (in the 1910s) as the new capital city for the British
colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent, and the broad axial
boulevards and clustering of functional areas within the city
(built in the 1920s) are derived from Howard’s Garden City
model.
CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT
The Origin
The City Beautiful movement rose in late nineteenth-
century America as a reformist attempt by the ruling elites to
solve the urban crisis that was plaguing big cities across the
country during the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth
century and particularly during the economic depression of 1893
to 1897. With its emphasis on comprehensive, large-scale
planning, the City Beautiful movement would set the standards
for modern city planning. The vanishing of the agrarian society,
coupled with the increasing processes of immigration and
urbanization, had led to a drastic rise of the population in urban
areas across the country. From 1860 to 1910 the American
population as a whole had increased from 31.4 million to 91.9
million, and 46 percent of Americans lived in urban areas, as
manufacturing jobs in the city industry replaced agriculture jobs
in the countryside. In the same time period, the number of
American cities with over 100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50,
while in 1910 several cities had a population exceeding the 1
million mark. The striking concentration of poverty in core urban
areas created dangerous sanitary conditions, phenomena of
congestion and overcrowding in tenements, while at the same
time the improvement of transportation systems spurred the
unrelenting outmigration of the upper classes to the suburbs and
the countryside. The massive migration of families to the city in
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search of opportunity in the rising industry led to a climate of
social unrest, labor struggles, and ethnic conflicts.
Overcrowding, blight, and crime became major concerns for the
elite classes, who lived in fear for their own safety. In 1890 Jacob
Riis reported about the living conditions in the tenements of
New York City:
[T]hree-fourths of its [New York’s] people live in the tenements, and the
nineteenth-century drift of the population to the cities is sending ever-increasing
multitudes to crowd them. We know now that there is no way out; that the system
that was the evil offspring of public neglect and private greed has come to stay, a
storm-center forever of our civilization.
Riis’s writings, a dramatic documentation of poverty and
disenfranchisement in dense urban settlements, were
interpreted as a strong call for social reform.
The City Beautiful movement rose as a response by the
ruling elites to these concerns. The reformist and paternalistic
goal of the movement (which mobilized architects, planners, and
social reformers) was to bring social order and control to the city
through an improved, orderly, and beautified urban
environment: A new city would lead to a new harmonious sense
of community and belonging for all citizens, thus removing the
causes of social conflicts. According to Julie K. Rose, the
underlying assumption of the movement was “the idea that
beauty could act as an effective social control device.”
In major industrial cities, the growing phenomenon of
labor upheaval had resulted in legislatures damping down labor
movements, systematic state repression, and violent
confrontations between police and labor protesters. The
Haymarket Affair in Chicago (May 1886), which had begun as a
peaceful rally in support of striking workers, resulted in the
death of several protesters, police officers, and civilians. The
highly controversial trial that followed brought the capital
executions of four, presumably innocent, anarchists. Following
the example of the 1851 Universal Exhibition in London’s Crystal
Palace—which was strongly encouraged by the British
government to counter the spread of political radicalism and to
celebrate the global expansion of the British Empire— Chicago’s
Columbian Exposition of 1893 was championed by the city’s
political and economic elites with the aim of cementing a badly
divided society and of rescuing the city’s reputation after the
worldwide publicity and outcry over the Haymarket trial.
The World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago (also
known as the Chicago World’s Fair) was the first large-scale
display of the principles of the City Beautiful movement. The
“White City,” under head planner Daniel Burnham, was a model
for an idealized, utopian, harmonious urban environment
unknown to most American city dwellers of the time: It featured
monumental buildings (all of uniform cornice height, all painted
white, all generously decorated) orderly articulated among
green spaces, wide canals, and reflective pools, and a
picturesque lagoon designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr. Its
stylistic vocabulary was the neoclassicism of the Parisian École
de Beaux-Arts, the leading international school of architecture
that, from the 1870s to the 1930s, instructed artists and
architects from all over the world in the teachings of harmony
through the use of a historicist repertoire, and in the art of large-
scale planning—as in Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s
redesign of Paris during the reign of Napoleon III. Several
American architects who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts,
such as Richard Morris Hunt, George Post, and Daniel Burnham,
imported these aesthetic ideals to America for the occasion of
the Chicago World’s Fair.
INDUSTRIAL CITY
Une Cité Industrielle portrays a utopian, modernist
vision that incorporates functionalist principles a decade before
they were advocated by any other architect (Miriani, 1990).
Garnier envisioned an entire city in plan and in detail, including
schools, hospitals, factories, residential quarters and
recreational facilities. His generating concepts included a
decentralized layout, traffic-free pedestrian zones, and
residential districts with gardens to emphasize continuous
pedestrian circulation and orientation and placement to follow
local climatic design variables. In the Preface to Une Cité
Industrielle, presented below, Garnier includes “regulations” to
institute his design and plannng principles. The proposed
materials and building techniques of reinforced concrete—up to
then used only experimentally—would permit open plans and
roof terraces, and glass windows disposed generously for
sunlight and natural ventilation.
The town is assumed to be of average size, to have a
population of 35,000 inhabitants. A generalized approach to
research is adopted for this scale that would not have been
applicable to the study of a smaller village or to a larger city. It is
also assumed that the site includes an equal amount of hillside
and level plain that is transected by a river. Although the town
under study is fictitious, the existing towns of Rive-de-Gier,
Saint-Étienne, Saint-Chamond, Chasse, and Givors that represent
similar basic needs as the scheme we have imaged here. The
setting is assumed to be southeastern France and the building
materials proposed are indigenous to the region.
The reasons motivating the establishment of such a
town could be assumed to be the availability of raw materials for
manufacturing, the existence of a natural energy source
available for industrial use, or the site’s accessibility to
transportation. In this case, the determining factor is taken to be
a rushing stream that is advantageous for a dam and location of
a hydroelectric power station to provide electricity for heating,
lighting and power for factories and town. There are also mines
nearby, although these could be assumed to be located farther
away.
The main factory is situated in the plain, where the
stream meets the river. A major railway line runs between the
factory and the town, located above on a higher plain. Higher still
are the well-spaced hospital buildings. Like the town itself, these
are shielded from cold winds, oriented to the southern sun on
terraces sloping facing the river. Each of these principal
elements—factory, town, and hospital—is sited to allow for
expansion, so that our study represents a more general longer
term planning proposal.
To arrive at a design that completely fulfills the moral
and material needs of the individual, a set of standards are
established concerning traffic circulation, hygiene, and so on.
The assumption is that a certain progress of social order would
have already established such standards, thus insuring the
adoption of such regulations although these are completely
unrecognized by current law. As such, it is assumed that there is
the enabling public power of eminent domain, governance of
uses of the land, distribution of water, food essentials and
medicines, and the reutilization of refuse.
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RADIANT CITY (Ville Radiuse)
Backgrounder
Ville radieuse (French pronunciation: [vil ʁaˈdjøːz],
Radiant City) was an unrealised project designed by the French-
Swiss architect Le Corbusier in 1930. It constitutes one of the
most influential and controversial urban doctrines of European
modernism. Although Le Corbusier had exhibited his ideas for
the ideal city, the Ville contemporaine in the 1920s, during
contact with international planners he began work on the Ville
Radieuse. In 1930 he had become an active member of the
syndicalist movement and proposed the Ville radieuse as a
blueprint of social reform.
The principles of the Ville radieuse were incorporated
into his later publication, the Athens Charter published in 1933.
His utopian ideal formed the basis of a number of
urban plans during the 1930s and 1940s culminating in the
design and construction of the first Unité d'habitation in
Marseille in 1952.
Developing the idea
In the late 1920s Le Corbusier lost confidence in big
business to realise his dreams of utopia represented in the Ville
Contemporaine and Plan Voisin (1925). Influenced by the linear
city ideas of Arturo Soria y Mata (which Milyutin also employed)
and the theories of the syndicalist movement (that he had
recently joined) he formulated a new vision of the ideal city, the
Ville Radieuse. It represented a utopian dream to reunite man
within a well-ordered environment. Unlike the radial design of
the Ville Contemporaine, the Ville Radieuse was a linear city
based upon the abstract shape of the human body with head,
spine, arms and legs. The design maintained the idea of high-rise
housing blocks, free circulation and abundant green spaces
proposed in his earlier work. The blocks of housing were laid out
in long lines stepping in and out. Like the Swiss Pavilion they
were glazed on their south side and were raised up on pilotis.
They had roof terraces and running tracks on their roofs.
The Ville Radieuse also made reference to Corbusier's
work in Russia. In 1930, he wrote a 59-page Reply to Moscow
when commenting upon a competition in Moscow. The report
contained drawings defining an alternative urban model for the
planning of the city. He exhibited the first representations of his
ideas at the third CIAM meeting in Brussels in 1930 (although he
withdrew the Moscow proposals). In addition he developed
proposals for the Ferme Radieuse (Radiant Farm) and Village
Radieuse (Radiant Village).
Throughout the thirties Le Corbusier spread the
message of his new, ideal city. Discussions at the fourth CIAM
meeting on board the SS Patris bound for Athens were
incorporated into Corbusier's book, The Radiant City (published
in 1933).[7] This in turn influenced the Athens Charter.
Between 1931 and 1940 Corbusier undertook a series of town
planning proposals for Algiers. During that period Algiers was the
administrative capital of French North Africa. Although he was
not officially invited to submit proposals for the city, he knew the
mayor was interested so he tried his luck. The plan had to
incorporate the existing casbah whilst allowing for the linear
growth of the increasing population. The resulting Obus Plan was
a variation on the Ville Radieuse, adapted for a very specific
culture and landscape. It comprised four main elements: an
administration area by the water in two slab blocks, convex and
concave apartment blocks for the middle classes up on the
slopes above the city, an elevated roadway on a north-south axis
above the casbah and a meandering viaduct with a road on top
meandering down the coast.
In 1933 in Nemours, North Africa he proposed eighteen Unité
apartment blocks orientated north-south against a backdrop of
mountains.
On his 1935 trip to the United States, Corbusier
criticised the skyscrapers of Manhattan for being too small and
too close together. He proposed replacing all the existing
buildings with one huge Cartesian Skyscraper equipped with
living and working units. This would have cleared the way for
more parkland, thus conforming to the ideals of the Ville
Radieuse.
Even as late as the 1940s he was trying to court both
Mussolini and the Vichy government to adopt his ideal city
plans.[10] Corbusier's best opportunity for the realisation of his
plans were the designs for Chandigarh, India, which he
developed in 1949.
From 1945 to 1952 he undertook the design and
construction of the Unité d'Habitation in Marseilles. The Unité
embodied the ideas of the Ville Radieuse that he had developed
in Nemours and Algiers.
When designing the layout for Brasilia, architects Lúcio
Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were influenced by the plans for the
Ville Radieuse.
SUMMARY
Let us see if you can remember the main points
raised in this lesson. Below is a summary of these
points:
- Urban concepts are terminological means
by which researchers analyze urban reality
and define and interpret urban conditions. All
urban theories contain a set of concepts to
classify and categorize knowledge.
- Concepts are the building blocks of urban
theories and frame urban reality, setting
boundaries for analysis, and are fundamental
to the historical and material constitution of
cities and urban life.
- Concepts take on meaning only in relation
to one another. Class and capitalism, for
example, represent a unity of complex ideas
and urban conditions that have utility in the
world, according to Marxism urban theorists.
Urban politics, political power, and urban
economic growth are major concepts in
urban growth machine theory and urban
regime theory.
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- Depending on the theory, concepts can be
descriptive, analytical, explanatory, or
evaluative. Different concepts provide a
framework or orientation for identifying and
explaining social processes including, for
example, exploitation, alienation, and
discrimination. Thus, scholars may use the
concept of race to develop theories of the
causes, consequences, and persistence of
racial residential segregation and uneven
metropolitan development. In turn, scholars
have employed different theories of
segregation to clarify how meanings of race
and manifestations of racial discrimination
have changed historically.
- urban theories are interpretive tools that
address questions such as what is “urban”
about urban life, how are cities organized,
and how do they change over time? Another
more analytical approach defines urban
theory as a set of interrelated propositions
that allow for the systematization of
knowledge, explanation, and prediction of
urban reality
- In this definition, urban theories specify
both causal relations between variables
(including models that indicate how causal
factors are interrelated) and causal
mechanisms responsible for producing these
relations.
- A third meaning of urban theory starts from
a critical-normative foundation and views
theory as a set of concepts and explanatory
tools to examine the operation of urban
power structures, identify the causes and
consequences of urban inequalities, and
clarify the bases of social conflict and
struggle in cities.
- There are no timeless, static, or immutable
urban theories. Just as urban theories are
products of particular times and historical
conditions, urban theories change as social
movements, social processes, and
individuals transform cities and metropolitan
areas.
- urban theories are diverse, complex, and
multidimensional. This entry addresses the
five major building blocks of urban theory:
ontology, epistemology, concepts, levels of
analysis, and agency–structure relationships.
BROADCRE CITY’S Concept:
- decentralization
- in commune with nature
GARDEN CITY’S Concept:
- a contract between city and nature
- self-sufficiency and self-sustaining
CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT’S Concept:
- beauty (aesthetics) as social control device
INDUSTRIAL CITY’S Concept:
- proximity to source of raw material as
generator of industry
RADIANT CITY’S Concept:
- use of the grid as generator of urban growth
LEARNING ACTIVITY 2
Home Reading Assignment on Urban Design
Processes
Home Reading Assignment for further study of other
Urban Design concepts
- Urban sprawl
- Urban ecology
- Urban catalyst
- Urban renewal
- Transit Oriented Development
- Traditional Neighbourhood Development
REFERENCES
Watson, Donald et.al (2003). Time Saver Standards
for Urban Design. The McGraw-Hill
Companies, Inc.
Arnold Whittick, Editor-in-Chief 1974, Encyclopedia
of Urban Planning. McGraw-Hill, Inc.
Encyclopedia of Urban Studies. Ray Hutchison,
Editor 2010. SAGE Reference Publication
www. Wikipedia.com
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Prepared by:

ARCH. ALBERT T. PASCUA, LRA

Faculty, College of Engineering and Architecture

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