SAINT LOUIS COLLEGE

College of Engineering and Architecture

Department of Architecture
SchoolYear2021-2022

ARA 218

PLANNING 3
INTRODUCTION TO URBAN & REGIONAL PLANNING

PRELIM SEATWORK 1.0:

Submitted by:

RIMANDO, JEANNE CARLA M.

BS Architecture 4-A

Submitted to:

ARCH VIC A. QUIJANO, UAP

Professor
A SHORT HISTORY OF URBAN
PLANNING:
Paul Knox argues that the
profession of planning emerges out of
series of crises and people’s responses to
them
• health crises (epidemics)
• social crises (riots, strikes)
• other crises (fire, flood, etc.)
Planning tries to mitigate the
adverse elements of capitalism, but also
makes capitalism viable over the long term.
Marxist inspiration
Friedrich Engels observed the
misery of mid-19th c. Manchester &
wrote: The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1844)
• worker oppression
• pollution
• overcrowding
• disease
• alienation
• display of status symbols in the landscape
The Roots of Urban Planning:
Romanticism & Progressivism
• these were philosophical, intellectual, and
moral stances opposed to the trend in
social relations, values, and environmental
conditions of the 18th & 19th c., with loose
ties to Marxism
-Romantics were utopian visionaries
• generally attempted to balance
city/country opposition
• seldom saw their plans actualized
• had a major influence on planning
profession
-Progressives were activists
• motivated by desire to reduce poverty or
the harmful effects of poverty
Urban Public Health as a Focus of
Concern
-Physician Benjamin Ward Richardson
wrote Hygeia, City of Health (1876)
envisioning:
• air pollution control
• water purification
• sewage handling
• public laundries
• public health inspectors
• elimination of alcohol & tobacco
• replacement of the gutter with the park as
the site of children’s play
Sch concerns motivated the Parks
Movement
The Parks Movement
 grew out of landscape archit. &
garden design
 shifted from private to public
settings
 naturalistic parks were created in
the U.S. by Frederick Law
Olmstead, whose career started
with Central Park, New York, 1857
Goals:
• separate transportation modes
• support active and passive uses
• collect water
• promote moral pass-times
Frederick Law Olmsted
1822-1903
advanced quite impressively for a
park superintendent without a
college degree
with Calvert Vaux (1847) won the
competition & went on to design:
• Prospect Park (1865-1873),
• Chicago's Riverside
subdivision
• Buffalo's park system (1868-
1876), • the park at Niagara
Falls (1887)
In later years worked on Boston’s
park system, “the Emerald Necklace”
and the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago
-Olmsted’s parks were not natural but they
were “naturalistic” or “organic” in form.
-This form was seen as uplifting urban
dwellers and addressing the social and
psychological impacts of crowding
environmental determinism
Olmsted’s Park Design Principles
1. SCENERY: design spaces in which
movement creates constant opening
up of new views and “obscurity of
detail further away”
2. SUITABILITY: respect the natural
scenery and topography of the site
3. STYLE:
• “Pastoral” = open greensward with
small bodies of water and scattered
trees and groves creates a soothing,
restorative atmosphere
• “Picturesque = profuse planting,
especially with shrubs, creepers and
ground cover, on steep and broken
terrain create a sense of the
richness and bounteousness of
nature, produce a sense of mystery
with light and shade
1. SUBORDINATION: subordinate all
elements to the overall design and
the effect it is intended to achieve:
“Art to conceal Art”
2. SEPARATION:
• of areas designed in different
styles
• of ways, in order to insure safety of
use and reduce distractions
• of conflicting or incompatible uses
3. SANITATION: promote both the
physical and mental health of users
4. SERVICE: meet fundamental social
and psychological needs
Riverside, Illinois
 designed by Olmsted, 1869
 a prototype suburb
 9 mi. from Chicago
 fashionable location for the wealthy
to live
 often copied
Settlement House Movement
 Jane Addams founded Hull House
(Chicago) 1889
 soon over 100 others are founded in
American cities
 goals: educating, elevating and
saving the poor (condescending
attitude) gradually evolved into
something more responsive and
scientific
 residents surveyed slum
populations, organized housing
studies
 the gathering of information from
such surveys and studies became
central to urban planning
 famous tenement studies around
1901: Lawrence Veiller (NY) and
Robert Hunter (Chicago)
Garden Cities (a British innovation)
 Ebenezer Howard: Garden Cities of
To-morrow (1902)
 “three magnets”
• town (high wages, opportunity, and
amusement)
• country (natural beauty, low rents,
fresh air)
• town-country (combination of
both)
 separated from central city by
greenbelt
 two actually built in England
• Letchworth
• Welwyn
Ebenezer Howard
 no training in urban planning or
design 1850-1928
 opposed urban crowding/density
  hoped to create a “magnet” people
would want to come to
Garden Cities
 would combine the best elements of
city and country
 would avoid the worst elements of
city and country
 formed the basis of the earliest
suburbs,
 separation from the city has been
lost virtually every time due to infill
A Utopian Model
 an ideal, self-contained community
of predetermined area and
population surrounded by a
greenbelt
 was intended to bring together the
economic and cultural advantages of
both city and country life while at
the same time discouraging
metropolitan sprawl and industrial
centralization
 land ownership would be vested in
the community (socialist element)
 The garden city was foreshadowed
in the writings of Robert Owen,
Charles Fourier, and James Silk
Buckingham, and in the planned
industrial communities of Saltaire
(1851), Bournville (1879), and Port
Sunlight (1887) in England
 Howard organized the Garden-City
Association (1899) in England and
secured backing for the
establishment of Letchworth and
Welwyn
 Neither community was an entirely
self-contained garden city
Actual Garden Cities
 Letchworth, England
•Founded 1903
• Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin,
planners
 Welwyn, England
• Founded 1920 by E. Howard
• designed by Louis de Soissons
• most of the population now
commutes to London
Garden City Legacy in the U.S
 Garden City idea spread rapidly to
Europe and the United States
 Under the auspices of the Regional
Planning Association of America, the
garden-city idea inspired a “New
Town,” Radburn, N.J. (1928–32)
outside New York City
 The congestion and destruction
accompanying World War II greatly
stimulated the garden-city
movement, especially in Great
Britain
• Britain’s New Towns Act (1946) led
to the development of over a dozen
new communities based on
Howard's idea
 The open layout of garden cities also
had a great influence on the
development of modern city
planning
 Most satellite towns fail to attain
Howard's ideal
• residential suburbs of individually
owned homes
• local industries are unable to
provide enough employment for the
inhabitants, many of whom
commute to work in larger centers
A New Town in the U.S. Radburn, VA
Origins of the Planning Profession in
the U.S.
 emerges during the first third of the
20th c.
 adopts less critical stance relative to
modernity
 first national conference on city
 planning in Washington D.C., 1909
 shifts slowly from concern with
aesthetics (city beautiful) to concern
with efficiency and scientific
management
 patriarchal attitude
 naïve faith in social engineering
 left-leaning political bias almost
disappears, esp. with role of zoning
The City Beautiful Movement
 main emphasis: showy urban
landscapes
 drew on “beaux arts” tradition
(France)
 aped classical architecture
 iconography of and for the urban
elites
 moral diagnosis: people need to be
civilized
 Daniel Burnham: 1893 Chicago
World’s Fair
• orderly and clean
• aesthetic rather than social
sensibility
• grandiose and ambitious
The Birth of Land use Zoning
 1886 statute: San Fran. Chinese
laundries shut down
• Fed. court case: Yick Wo v. Hopkins,
Sheriff struck down statute, so city
imposed no-laundry zone
• other CA cities zoned against
laundries, brothels, pool halls, dance
halls, livery stables, slaughterhouses
• How? municipality’s trad.
responsibility for protecting “health,
safety, morals and general welfare”
of citizens
 1st NY zoning law (1916) protected
Fifth Ave. luxury store owners from
expansion of Jewish garment
factories
• protected property values and
expressed chauvinism
• idea spread to 100s of cities in
decade after the NY law was passed,
promoting property values and
special interests of the upper class,
white majority
Giants of Planning in the U.S.
 concept of the “master plan”:
Edward Bassett, 1935, included:
• infrastructure layout
• zoning
 Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915) called
for urban planning to take into
account the ecosystem and history
of a region, called for social surveys
 a protégé of Geddes, Lewis
Mumford (1895-1990) was the first
notable critic of sprawl and the main
figure in the Regional Plan
Association of America, which built
new towns in NJ & NY
A New Generation of Dreamers
 Le Corbusier (1920s): skyscrapers in
parks
• apartment tower idea caught on,
but not the park setting
• bland concrete apartment building
is everywhere, and is hated
everywhere
 Frank Lloyd Wright (1930s):
“Broadacre City”
• his small house with carport
became more or less the American
standard in the 1950s
• his dream of a decentralized,
automobile-dependent society
materialized
• Wright’s vision, with 1-acre lots,
would have created even worse
traffic nightmares
Le Corbusier
originally Charles-Edouard
 Jeanneret 1887-1965
a founding father of the modernist
movement “social engineering”
Elements of Le Corbusier’s Plan
-very high density
• 1,200 people per acre in skyscrapers
• overcrowded sectors of Paris & London
ranged from 169-213 pers./acre at the time
-Manhattan has only 81 pers./acre
• 120 people per acre in luxury houses
• 6 to 10 times denser than current luxury
housing in the U.S.
• multi-level traffic system to manage the
intensity of traffic
-access to greenspace
• between 48% and 95% of the surface area
is reserved for greenspace
• gardens
• squares
• sports fields
• restaurants
• theaters
-with no sprawl, access to the “protected
zone” (greenbelt/open space) is quick
and easy
The logic of increasing urban density
 “The more dense the population of a
city is the less are the distances that
have to be covered.”
 traffic is increased by:
• the number of people in a city
• the degree to which private
transportation is more appealing
(clean, fast, convenient, cheap) than
public transportation
• the average distance people travel
per trip
• the number of trips people must
make each week
 “The moral, therefore, is that we
must increase the density of the
centres of our cities, where business
affairs are carried on.”
Frank Lloyd Wright
1867-1959
532 architectural designs built
(twice as many drawn)
designed houses, office buildings
and a kind of suburban layout he
called “Broadacre City”
Broadacre City
 low-density car-oriented
 freeways +feeder roads
 multinucleated
Planning Today
 main tool: zoning
 19,000 different systems
 tends to actually do little in the way
of planning
• imposes a rigidity to existing land
uses
• encourages separation by class
• encourages retail strip
development
• discourages mixed use, pedestrian
areas
• in practice, it promotes satellite
bedroom communities and suburbs
superficially like Garden cities or
Broadacre City
Relationship between Planning and the
Crises that Created It?
 Water quality and sanitation is
controlled
 Most people have adequate light
and air
 Fire danger is controlled
 Disease is controlled
 Current planning practice has even
more to do with protecting property
values
 Urban growth continues to create
unhealthy and dehumanizing
environments (air pollution, stress,
isolation, lack of community, etc.)
  genuine planning is desperately
needed

Is there Hope?
 Precedents:
• Cluster zoning & PUDs (dates back
to Radburn, NJ, designed by Regional
Planning Association of America in
1923)
• New Urbanism & Neo-Traditional
Planning
-Peter Calthorpe
-Leon Krier
-Congress for the New
Urbanism
 Participatory Planning
3. PROJECT YOUR URBAN PLANNING THOUGHTS BY SUGGESTING OR
RECOMMENDING SOLUTIONS TO THE URBAN PLANNING PROBLEMS IN THE
PHILIPPINES. CITE AN EXAMPLE OR MAY CREATE DIAGRAMS IF NECESSARY FOR
THE INTERPRETATION

What struck me immediately upon seeing and observing our National Capital-Manila,
and other cities around the Philippines, it was a cultural diversity and it is the warmth of
its citizens. As a future urban planner, I could not help but think of the large
opportunities but also unused potential the city offers in terms of jobs, education, access
to welfare services, among others.

Our urban cities is a gateway for many people to improve their family’s quality of life.
As vibrant and dynamic as it is, there is much the city could improve through better
urban planning to address visible issues of congestion, lack of affordable housing, and
more broadly, providing a livable and healthy urban environment so that citizens can
thrive. Now more than ever, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the urgency of
integrating various considerations in urban planning,   including infrastructure,
environment, economic activities, and spaces to bring communities together in our
cities. COVID-19 is a pandemic and threatens all of us. Hotspots in one barangay
increases the threat to the whole metropolitan area. This pandemic has highlighted the
need for a more equitable management of our cities. Urban management is
fundamental for efficient and effective service delivery, especially for ensuring that all
citizens have equal access to quick and coordinated response efforts in times of crises
and disasters.  

This pandemic and our experiences with the shutdown of megacities all over the
globe compels us to revisit the basic tenets of urban planning and urban
management. As a future urban planner and to the community, we must work
collectively to make our cities more livable and designed around the health, safety, and
well-being of all residents.

In the plan, I suggested these important things to be considered:

1. Equal service delivery for all 

There is a glaring disparity in level and quality of service delivery between
informal mostly poor neighborhoods and wealthier areas. For example, according to
the 2017 World Bank report on Urbanization in the Philippines, close to 11% of Metro
Manila’s population live in informal settlements. Not all informal settlers are income
poor, but many are vulnerable to external shocks that can easily push them below the
poverty line. Many families that live in informal settlements rely on minimum wage
earnings and contractual work. These incomes are seasonal with no job security, no
social protection measures such as paid sick leave or family leave benefits. Those
engaged in small businesses suffer from unsteady levels of income. Many of them have
limited savings that are exhausted in the event of any external shocks. Their situation is
exacerbated by poor living conditions including a lack in reliable water supply and
sanitation, overcrowding in living tenements, and weak healthcare systems. Under
these circumstances, how can social distancing be practiced? How can households
afford basic services like water supply and sanitation to follow protective hygiene
practices like handwashing? Or even afford a doctor visit? Local governments are best
placed to step-up through increased coordination across jurisdictions and meet the
promise of inclusive high-quality services for all but this requires proactive approach to
urban management that spans beyond election cycles.
2. Urban transportation matters
When Metro Manila was placed under Enhanced Community Quarantine and
after which the other cities around the Philippines with high risk of COVOD-19, public
transportation grounded to a halt. Jeepneys, tricycles, buses and trains were prohibited
from operating. Commuters and even essential medical personnel walked long
distances or borrowed bikes to get to the hospital. Public transport could not restart
because social distancing measures present a serious challenge, especially for small
public operators like jeepneys. The lack of mobility options impacts vulnerable sections
of society like the poor, elderly and disabled. 
Weak urban transport is hampering the economic productivity of the cities as
people’s choice of mobility is very limited in Philippines. For example, the development
of urban transport directly competes with the increase of private cars in Manila’s
congested road network. With COVID-19, it is time to rethink urban mobility solutions. In
the short-term, the focus would be on demand management including social distancing
measures, fleet sanitation, enforcement of safety protocols in informal modes of
transport and management of public’s travel expectations. In the medium-term, there
needs to be a focus on public transport reform including interjurisdictional coordination
of public transit and better management of informal transport providers. This can be
achieved by bringing in multi-modal solutions such as mass transit systems like Metro
and, Bus Rapid Transit and start thinking of non-motorized solutions like bicycles, e-
vehicles alongside main corridors to offer diverse mobility solutions for people.
      
3. Redesigning our cities
Cities across the world are rethinking urban design, from hardscapes of concrete
and glass to more green solutions such as vertical gardens. Public parks are being
designed to serve as multipurpose infrastructure, for example using a watershed
approach to capture storm water during the rainy season and simultaneously use if for
recreational purpose.
Similarly, iconic design in open spaces allow for people of all ages to enjoy
amenities like we see in Medellin, Colombia, where libraries are being designed as safe
spaces for people without the fear of drugs or crime. Future planning will also need to
take into account access to health services during epidemics and integrate it with
mobility solutions. We are advancing rapidly with digital solutions like internet of things
or artificial intelligence for evidence-based planning. As part of its COVID economic
recovery efforts, greater emphasis could be given to use of geospatial tools for planning
and implementation of infrastructure. This a fantastic opportunity for cities in the
Philippines to interconnect with the rest of its peers and also use these solutions in
proactive urban planning. 

Cities attract talent, innovation and creativity. As people are pulled into increasingly
dense and dynamic urban centers around the world, a secure high-quality life and
sustainable environment is becoming imperative in the planning discourse. 
With mayors and local governments who are at the frontline of response and recovery,
it is a stark reality that our cities will no longer remain the same.   
For me, it is a good way to neatly organized into sub-districts (residential, commercial,
green open spaces) with easy access to existing MRT Stations and other cities,
minimizing the need for cars. Most of the time we are only concerned of our homes
without care for the outside. We Filipinos need to care more for the public realm, and
recognize we do have a role in placemaking. It could be as simple as keeping the
sidewalk clean and clear, not having too-high concrete walls, and planting trees to
shade passersby from the sun. It could be keeping our homes well maintained so that
we could contribute to the visual order of a neighborhood or streetscape.

EXAMPLE DIAGRAM