Since at least the
Renaissance and the
Age of Enlightenment, urban planning had generally been assumed to be the physical planning and design of human communities. Therefore, it was seen as related to architecture and civil engineering, and thereby to be carried out by such experts. Similarly, the theory of urban planning was mainly interested in visionary planning and design which would demonstrate how the ideal city should be organised spatially.
Sanitary movement Although it can be seen as an extension of the sort of civic pragmatism seen in
Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah or
William Penn's plan for Philadelphia, the roots of the rational planning movement lie in Britain's
Sanitary movement (1800–1890). During this period, advocates such as
Charles Booth argued for central organized, top-down solutions to the problems of industrializing cities. In keeping with the rising power of industry, the source of the planning authority in The Sanitary Movement arose as a direct response to the appalling living conditions in rapidly industrializing cities, focusing on improving public health through the creation of better sanitation infrastructure, including sewage systems and clean water supplies.
Garden city movement The
Garden city movement was founded by
Ebenezer Howard (1850-1928).The Garden City Movement advocated for the development of self-sufficient, planned communities that combined the best aspects of both urban and rural living. These communities would be surrounded by green belts to provide residents with access to nature while maintaining proximity to urban amenities. His ideas were expressed in the book
Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898). His influences included
Benjamin Walter Richardson, who had published a pamphlet in 1876 calling for low population density, good housing, wide roads, an underground railway and for open space;
Thomas Spence who had supported
common ownership of land and the sharing of the rents it would produce;
Edward Gibbon Wakefield who had pioneered the idea of colonizing planned communities to house the poor in
Adelaide (including starting new cities separated by green belts at a certain point);
James Silk Buckingham who had designed a model town with a central place, radial avenues and industry in the periphery; as well as
Alfred Marshall,
Peter Kropotkin and the
back-to-the-land movement, which had all called for the moving of masses to the countryside. Howard aimed to merge urban convenience with rural tranquility to promote healthier communities called Town-Country. To make this happen, a group of individuals would establish a limited-dividend company to buy cheap agricultural land, which would then be developed with investment from manufacturers and housing for the workers. After reaching the limit, a new settlement would be started, connected by an
inter-city rail, with the polycentric settlements together forming the "Social City". Actual garden cities were built by Howard in
Letchworth,
Brentham Garden Suburb, and
Welwyn Garden City. The movement would also inspire the later
New towns movement.
Linear city Arturo Soria y Mata's idea of the
Linear city (1882) replaced the traditional idea of the city as a centre and a periphery with the idea of constructing linear sections of infrastructure - roads, railways, gas, water, etc.- along an optimal line and then attaching the other components of the city along the length of this line. As compared to the concentric diagrams of
Ebenezer Howard and other in the same period, Soria's linear city creates the infrastructure for a controlled process of expansion that joins one growing city to the next in a rational way, instead of letting them both sprawl. The linear city was meant to ‘ruralize the city and urbanize the countryside’, and to be universally applicable as a ring around existing cities, as a strip connecting two cities, or as an entirely new linear town across an unurbanized region. The idea was later taken up by
Nikolay Alexandrovich Milyutin in the
planning circles of the 1920s Soviet Union. The
Ciudad Lineal was a practical application of the concept.
Regional planning movement Patrick Geddes (1864-1932) was the founder of regional planning. His main influences were the geographers
Élisée Reclus and
Paul Vidal de La Blache, as well as the sociologist
Pierre Guillaume Frédéric le Play. From these he received the idea of the
natural region. According to Geddes, planning must start by surveying such a region by crafting a "Valley Section" which shows the general slope from mountains to the sea that can be identified across scale and place in the world, with the natural environment and the cultural environments produced by it included. This was encapsulated in the motto "Survey before Plan". He saw cities as being changed by technology into more regional settlements, for which he coined the term
conurbation. Similar to the garden city movement, he also believed in adding green areas to these urban regions. This had major influence on the
County of London Plan, 1944.
City Beautiful movement The
City Beautiful movement was inspired by 19th century European capital cities such as
Georges-Eugène Haussmann's Paris or the
Vienna Ring Road. An influential figure was
Daniel Burnham (1846-1912), who was the chief of construction of the
World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. Burnham's greatest achievement was the
Chicago plan of 1909. His aim was "to restore to the city a lost visual and aesthetic harmony, thereby creating the physical prerequisite for the emergence of a harmonious social order", essentially creating social reform through new
slum clearance and creating public space, which also endeared it the support of the
Progressivist movement. This was also believed to be economically advantageous by drawing in tourists and wealthy migrants. Other major cities planned according to the movement principles included British colonial capitals in
New Delhi,
Harare,
Lusaka Nairobi and
Kampala, as well as that of
Canberra in
Australia, and
Albert Speer's plan for the Nazi capital
Germania.
Towers in the park Le Corbusier (1887–1965) pioneered a new urban form called
towers in the park. His approach was based on defining the house as 'a machine to live in'. The
Plan Voisin he devised for
Paris, which was never fulfilled, would have involved the demolition of much of historic Paris in favour of 18 uniform 700-foot tower blocks.
Ville Contemporaine and the
Ville Radieuse formulated his basic principles, including decongestion of the city by increased density and open space by building taller on a smaller footprint. His
influence on the Soviet Union helped inspire the 'urbanists' who wanted to build planned cities full of massive apartment blocks in Soviet countryside.
Brasília, planned by
Oscar Niemeyer, also was heavily influenced by his thought. Both cities suffered from the issue of unplanned settlements growing outside them.
Decentralised planning In the United States,
Frank Lloyd Wright similarly identified vehicular mobility as a principal planning metric. Car-based suburbs had already been developed in the
Country Club District in 1907-1908 (including later the world's first car-based shopping centre of
Country Club Plaza), as well as in
Beverly Hills in 1914 and
Palos Verdes Estates in 1923. Wright began to idealise this vision in his
Broadacre City starting in 1924, with similarities to the garden city and regional planning movements. The fundamental idea was for technology to liberate individuals.This was justified as a
democratic ideal, as "“Democracy is the ideal of reintegrated decentralization … many free units developing strength as they learn by function and grow together in spacious mutual freedom.” A notable example was that of
Levittown, built 1947 to 1951. The suburban design was criticized for their lack of form by
Lewis Mumford as it lacked clear boundaries, and by
Ian Nairn because "Each building is treated in isolation, nothing binds it to the next one". In the
Soviet Union too, the so-called deurbanists (such as
Moisei Ginzburg and
Mikhail Okhitovich) advocated for the use of electricity and new transportation technologies (especially the car) to disperse the population from the cities to the countryside, with the ultimate aim of a "townless, fully decentralized, and evenly populated country". Key events in the United States include the demolition of the
Pruitt-Igoe housing project in
St. Louis and the national backlash against urban renewal projects, particularly urban expressway projects. An influential critic of such planning was
Jane Jacobs, who wrote
The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961, claimed to be "one of the most influential books in the short history of city planning". She attacked the garden city movement because its "prescription for saving the city was to do the city in" and because it "conceived of planning also as essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian". She also advocated for a diversity of land uses and building types, with the aim of having a constant churn of people throughout the neighbourhood across the times of the day. The most radical opposition to blueprint planning was declared in 1969 in a manifesto on the
New Society, with the words that: The whole concept of planning (the town-and-country kind at least) has gone cockeyed … Somehow, everything must be watched; nothing must be allowed simply to “happen.” No house can be allowed to be commonplace in the way that things just are commonplace: each project must be weighed, and planned, and approved, and only then built, and only after that discovered to be commonplace after all.Another form of opposition came from the
advocacy planning movement, opposes to traditional top-down and technical planning. == Modernist planning ==