The Basics of History of Urban Planning

The pre-Classical and Classical periods saw a number of cities laid out according to
fixed plans, though many tended to develop organically. Designed cities were
characteristic of the Minoan, Mesopotamian, Harrapan, and Egyptian civilisations of the
third millennium BC (see Urban planning in ancient Egypt). The first recorded
description of urban planning appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh: "Go up on to the wall of
Uruk and walk around. Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinise the brickwork.
Testify that its bricks are baked bricks, And that the Seven Counsellors must have laid
its foundations. One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is
claypits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple.Three square miles and the open
ground comprise Uruk. Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the
door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read.
Distinct characteristics of urban planning from remains of the cities
of Harappa, Lothal, Dholavira, and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley Civilisation (in
modern-day northwestern India and Pakistan) lead archeologists to interpret them as
the earliest known examples of deliberately planned and managed cities. The streets of
many of these early cities were paved and laid out at right angles in a grid pattern, with
a hierarchy of streets from major boulevards to residential
alleys. Archaeological evidence suggests that many Harrapan houses were laid out to
protect from noise and to enhance residential privacy; many also had their own water
wells, probably both for sanitary and for ritual purposes. These ancient cities were
unique in that they often had drainage systems, seemingly tied to a well-developed ideal
of urban sanitation. Cities laid out on the grid plan could have been an outgrowth of
agriculture based on rectangular fields.
Most Mesoamerican cities in the late Postclassic period had highly organized central
portions, typically consisting of one or more public plazas bordered by public buildings.
In contrast, the surrounding residential areas typically showed little or no signs of
planning.
From 1800 onwards, urban planning developed as a technical and legal occupation and
in its complexity. Regent Street was one of the first planned developments of London.
An ordered structure of London streets, replacing the mediaeval layout, had been
planned since just after the Great Fire of London (1666) when Sir Christopher Wren and
John Evelyn drew plans for rebuilding the city on the classical formal model. The street
was designed by John Nash (who had been appointed to the Office of Woods and
Forests in 1806 and previously served as an adviser to the Prince Regent) and by
developer James Burton. The design was adopted by an Act of Parliament in 1813,
which permitted the commissioners to borrow £600,000 for building and construction.
The street was intended for commercial purposes and it was expected that most of the
income would come from private capital. Nash took responsibility for design and
valuation of all properties Construction of the road required demolishing numerous
properties, disrupting trade and polluting the air with dust. Existing tenants had first offer
to purchase leases on the new properties.
An even more ambitious reconstruction was carried out in Paris. In 1852, Georges-
Eugène Haussmann was commissioned to remodel the Medieval street plan of the city
by demolishing swathes of the old quarters and laying out wide boulevards, extending
outwards beyond the old city limits. Haussmann's project encompassed all aspects of
urban planning, both in the centre of Paris and in the surrounding districts, with
regulations imposed on building façades, public parks, sewers and water works, city
facilities, and public monuments. Beyond aesthetic and sanitary considerations, the
wide thoroughfares facilitated troop movement and policing.
A concurrent plan to extend Barcelona was based on a scientific analysis of the city and
its modern requirements. It was drawn up by the Catalan engineer Ildefons Cerdà to fill
the space beyond the city walls after they were demolished from 1854. He is credited
with inventing the term ‘urbanisation’ and his approach was codified in his Teoría
General de la Urbanización (General Theory of Urbanisation, 1867).
Cerdà's Eixample (Catalan for 'extension') consisted of 550 regular blocks with
chamfered corners to facilitate the movement of trams, crossed by three wider avenues.
His objectives were to improve the health of the inhabitants, towards which the blocks
were built around central gardens and orientated NW-SE to maximise the sunlight they
received, and assist social integration.
Proposals were also developed at the same time from 1857 for Vienna's Ringstrasse.
This grand boulevard was built to replace the city walls. In 1857, Emperor Franz Joseph
I of Austria issued the decree ordering the demolition of the city walls and moats. During
the following years, a large number of opulent public and private buildings were erected.
Similarly, Berlin finalized its "Bebauungsplan der Umgebungen Berlins" (Binding Land-
Use Plan for the Environs of Berlin) in 1862, intended for a time frame of about 50
years. The plan not only covered the area around the cities of Berlin and Charlottenburg
but also described the spatial regional planning of a large perimeter. The plan resulted
in large areas of dense urban city blocks known as 'blockrand structures', with mixed-
use buildings reaching to the street and offering a common-used courtyard, later often
overbuilt with additional court structures to house more people.
Planning and architecture continued its paradigm shift at the turn of the 20th century.
The industrialised cities of the 19th century had grown at a tremendous rate, with the
pace and style of building often dictated by private business concerns. The evils of
urban life for the working poor were becoming increasingly evident as a matter for public
concern. The laissez-faire style of government management of the economy, in fashion
for most of the Victorian era, was starting to give way to a New Liberalism that
championed intervention on the part of the poor and disadvantaged beyond urban
planning as a primarily aesthetic and technical concern as in the major urban planning
programmes in European cities. Around 1900, theorists began developing urban
planning models to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, by providing
citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments.
Urban planning became professionalised at this period, with input
from utopian visionaries as well as from the practical minded infrastructure engineers
and local councillors combining to produce new design templates for political
consideration. Reinhard Baumeister was a German engineer and urban planner, the
author of one of the earliest texts on urban planning Stadterweiterungen in technischer,
baupolizeilicher und Wirtschaftlicher Beziehung (Town extensions: their links with
technical and economic concerns and with building regulations) published in 1876. It
was used as a textbook at the first urban planning course in Germany, at the college of
technology in Aachen in 1880. Legislation enabling the laying out of urban plans by
municipalities and compulsory purchase powers were set out in the German Federal
Building Line Act of 1875,[30] but the 1794 Allgemeines Landrecht already gave the local
state authority, namely the police, the right to indicate Fluchtlinien, i.e. the boundaries of
areas which were to be reserved for streets. After the Prussian municipal reform of 1808
the Baupolizei became accountable to the municipal administration (with the important
exception of Berlin), which thus also became responsible for the planning function. [31]
Such tools were already widely used in France which from 1807 required settlements of
over 2,000 inhabitants to prepare a compulsory easement plan setting out building lines
and the width of the streets between them. In 1889, the architect and urban
theorist Camillo Sitte published City Planning According to Artistic Principles, in which
he examined and documented the traditional, incremental approach to urbanism in
Europe, with a close focus on public spaces in Italy and the Germanic countries. Sitte's
work was hugely influential on European urbanism, and with five editions published
between 1889 and 1922 was cited by planners from Raymond Unwin to Berlage.
In Britain, the Town and Country Planning Association was founded in 1899 and the first
academic course on urban planning in Britain was offered by the University of
Liverpool in 1909.The first official consideration of these new trends in Britain was
embodied in the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 that compelled local
authorities to introduce coherent systems of town planning across the country using the
new principles of the 'garden city', and to ensure that all housing construction
conformed to specific building standards,[33] while similar yet more comprehensive
legislation was enacted in the Netherlands under the Housing Act 1901, known as
the Woningwet. Following Britain's 1909 Act, surveyors, civil
engineers, architects, lawyers and others began working together within local
government in the UK to draw up schemes for the development of land and the idea of
town planning as a new and distinctive area of expertise began to be formed. In
1910, Thomas Adams was appointed as the first Town Planning Inspector at the Local
Government Board, and began meeting with practitioners. The Town Planning
Institute was established in 1914 with a mandate to advance the study of town-planning
and civic design. The first university course in America was established at Harvard
University in 1924.
The first major urban planning theorist in Britain was Sir Ebenezer Howard, who initiated
the garden city movement in 1898. This was inspired by earlier planned communities
built by industrial philanthropists in the countryside, such
as Cadburys' Bournville, Lever's Port Sunlight and George Pullman's
eponymous Pullman in Chicago. All these settlements decentralised the working
environment from the centre of the cities, and provided a healthy living space for the
factory workers. Howard generalised this achievement into a planned movement for the
country as a whole. He was also influenced by the work of economist Alfred
Marshall who argued in 1884 that industry needed a supply of labour that could in
theory be supplied anywhere, and that companies have an incentive to improve workers
living standards as the company bears much of the cost inflicted by the unhealthy urban
conditions in the big cities.
Howard's ideas, although utopian, were also highly practical and were adopted around
the world in the ensuing decades. His garden cities were intended to be planned, self-
contained communities surrounded by parks, containing proportionate and separate
areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. Inspired by the Utopian novel Looking
Backward and Henry George's work Progress and Poverty, Howard published his
book Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1898, commonly regarded as the most important
book in the history of urban planning. His idealised garden city would house 32,000
people on a site of 6,000 acres (2,428 ha), planned on a concentric pattern with open
spaces, public parks and six radial boulevards, 120 ft (37 m) wide, extending from the
centre. The garden city would be self-sufficient and when it reached full population,
another garden city would be developed nearby. Howard envisaged a cluster of several
garden cities as satellites of a central city of 50,000 people, linked by road and rail.
He founded First Garden City, Ltd. in 1899 to create the first garden city
at Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Donors to the project collected interest on their investment
if the garden city generated profits through rents or, as Fishman calls the process,
‘philanthropic land speculation’. Howard tried to include working class cooperative
organisations, which included over two million members, but could not win their financial
support. In 1904, Raymond Unwin, a noted architect and town planner, along with his
partner Richard Barry Parker, won the competition run by the First Garden City, Limited
to plan Letchworth, an area 34 miles outside London. Unwin and Parker planned the
town in the centre of the Letchworth estate with Howard's large agricultural greenbelt
surrounding the town, and they shared Howard's notion that the working class deserved
better and more affordable housing. However, the architects ignored Howard's
symmetric design, instead replacing it with a more ‘organic’ design.
Various current movements in urban design seek to create sustainable
urban environments with long-lasting structures, buildings and a great liveability for its
inhabitants. The most clearly defined form of walkable urbanism is known as
the Charter of New Urbanism. It is an approach for successfully reducing environmental
impacts by altering the built environment to create and preserve smart cities that
support sustainable transport. Residents in compact urban neighbourhoods drive fewer
miles and have significantly lower environmental impacts across a range of measures
compared with those living in sprawling suburbs. The concept of Circular flow land use
management has also been introduced in Europe to promote sustainable land use
patterns that strive for compact cities and a reduction of greenfield land taken by urban
sprawl.
In sustainable construction, the recent movement of New Classical
Architecture promotes a sustainable approach towards urban construction that
appreciates and develops smart growth, walkability, architectural tradition, and classical
design.[59][60] This is in contrast to modernist and short-lived globally uniform architecture,
as well as opposing solitary housing estates and suburban sprawl. Both trends started
in the 1980s.
Critics of New Urbanism have argued that its environmental aspect is too focused on
transport and excessive individual mobility. The real problem with the unsustainable
nature of modern cities is not just about cars and too much driving - it is about the entire
urban metabolism of the city (of which auto-mobility is less than half of the
overall ecological footprint and accounts for about half of the GHG emissions/carbon
footprint). They have also argued that land-use planning can do little to achieve
sustainability without regulating the design and associated technology of the actual
development within a zoned area. Distances and density are relatively unimportant; it is
the total metabolism of the development that determines the environmental impact.
Also, the emphasis needs to shift from sustainability to resilience, and the spatial scope
from the city to the whole urban region.[63] A further criticism is that the New Urbanist
project of compacting urban form is a difficult and slow process. In the new global
situation, with the horizontal, low-density growth irreversibly dominant, and climate
change already happening, it would be wiser to focus efforts on the resilience of whole
city-regions, retrofitting the existing sprawl for sustainability and self-sufficiency, and
investing heavily in 'green infrastructure