The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design

A History of Shifting Manifestoes, Paradigms, Generic Solutions, and Specific Designs

Jon Lang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000206258
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Century Urban Design is a fully illustrated descriptive and explanatory history of the development of urban design ideas and paradigms of the past 150 years. The ideas and projects, hypothetical and built, range in scale from the city to the urban block level. The focus is on where the generic ideas originated, the projects that were designed following their precepts, the functions they address and/or afford, and what we can learn from them.

The morphology of a city—its built environment—evolves unselfconsciously as private and governmental investors self-consciously erect buildings and infrastructure in a pragmatic, piecemeal manner to meet their own ends. Philosophers, novelists, architects, and social scientists have produced myriad ideas about the nature of the built environment that they consider to be superior to those forms resulting from a laissez-faire attitude to urban development.

Rationalist theorists dream of ideal futures based on assumptions about what is good; empiricists draw inspirations from what they perceive to be working well in existing situations. Both groups have presented their advocacies in manifestoes and often in the form of generic solutions or illustrative designs. This book traces the history of these ideas and will become a standard reference for scholars and students interested in the history of urban spaces, including architects, planners, urban historians, urban geographers, and urban morphologists.

Part I

Haussmann’s Paris: Avenue de la Grande Armée

Credit line: Photograph by Balkorstat/Shutterstock.com

Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Urban Design

Self-conscious urban designs date back to the earliest civilizations on Earth. The settlement of Çatalhöyük (ca 7500 BCE) in Anatolia may have evolved piece by piece unselfconsciously, but the Bronze Age towns of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro in the Indus Valley were clearly preplanned. Vedic and Chinese texts prescribing settlement patterns were written as early as 4000 BCE. The story in this book may begin there, but its focus is on the modern era of Western European thought and its impact on the world. The restructuring of our concept of the universe by the Polish mathematician-astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) initiated the era: The earth was no longer considered to be the center of the solar system. Curiosity in the search for knowledge and its explorations of the globe led to Europe’s displacing Asia as the world’s economic powerhouse. The development of notions of group and individual rights helped.

Our concepts of individual rights began with the Magna Carta Libertatum (1215) and its defining them under the monarchy in England and later the Protestant Reformation with the posting of The Ninety-Five Theses by Martin Luther (1483–1546) in Wittenberg in 1517. The posting heralded the Protestant belief that rewards after death come from hard work and not simply by doing good deeds. In Britain, the overthrow of King James II (1633–1701) during the Glorious Revolution of 1688 led to the formulation of a Bill of Rights in 1689 and the establishment of parliamentary democracy. The American Revolution (1765–83), in which patriots won independence from Great Britain, led to the 1791 US Bill of Rights, establishing an individual’s right to the freedom of religion, speech, and ownership of private property. It also placed limitations on the power of the government. Soon afterward, the French Revolution (1789–99) and the future development and propagation of rational thought and Cartesian philosophical ideas promoted concepts of liberty, constitutional government, and the separation of the powers of church and state. Contemporary southeastern Europe was under the control of the Islamic Ottoman Empire (1453–1922). Asia remained conservative; Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and Islam prevailed as intellectual traditions.

The Nineteenth Century

The nineteenth century was “the best of times” and “the worst of times,” as Charles Dickens noted in the opening words of The Tale of Two Cities (Dickens 1859, 1). It was an age of enlightenment and of suppression (Osterhammal 2014). In Britain, Adam Smith produced An Inquiry into the Nature of the Wealth of Nations in 1776. He argued that competition among the users of resources was the path for success of firms and industries. In France, the ideas embedded in Code Civil des Français (1804) became an intellectual force delivered across Europe by Napoleonic conquests and globally in the French Empire. In Britain, North America, and the British colonies, the concepts of English common law held sway. The view of God (or gods) as the creator of the universe was challenged by the texts of Charles Darwin (1809–82). Although Alfred Russell Wallace (1823–1913) had already published works on evolutionary theory, Darwin’s On the Origins of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and the Descent of Man (1871) changed the way people began to think about the world as much as Copernicus had earlier.

The century was also an era of colonization by the European powers, furthering the globalization of the international economy and the spread of Eurocentric design ideas across the world. The East India companies of the Dutch and British became major multinational corporations. Slaves from Africa worked in large numbers on the cotton fields of the United States and the cane fields of the Caribbean (Carey, Ellis, and Salih 2004). The slave rebellion in Haiti (1791–1804) eventually led to the end of the slave trade. Britain abolished slavery in 1834, and the United States in 1865. Brazil followed in 1888. Racist stereotypes that justified slavery nevertheless persisted. Tsar Alexander II’s emancipation reform ended serfdom in Russia in 1861. Strivings against colonial rule began to appear in India with the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885. In China, the Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, known as ‘The Boxers,’ rebelled against colonial forces (1899–1901).

Important as all these events were in stirring up intellectual endeavors, the technological advances created by the Industrial Revolution in Europe led to comprehensive changes in the ways of life and livelihoods of people throughout the world and the habitat of many other species, animate and inanimate.

The Industrial Revolution and the Victorian Era

The middle of the eighteenth century saw the introduction of machinery to replace human hands in labor. The year of the American declaration of independence and the publication of The Wealth of Nations—1776—was also year that the first prefabricated iron bridge was built in England’s Severn Valley. The Industrial Revolution soon spread across the country to Scotland, continental Europe, and the United States (Allen 2017). Japan’s industrialization began after the Meiji Restoration of imperial rule in 1868.

A second phase of the revolution began around 1850 with the development of steam-powered trains and ships. They provided the first major advances in transportation modes in centuries. The electric relay was developed in 1835; the telegraph that used Morse code followed in 1837. The first telephone call was made in 1876. Thomas Edison (1847–1931) created an efficient electric light bulb in 1878. Toward the century’s end, the gasoline-powered automobile was developed in Germany. Of all the nineteenth-century inventions, it, along with the telephone and refrigeration, had the greatest impact on the morphology of cities in the twentieth century.

The new technologies, military and civil, aided the expansion of the British, French, German, and Russian Empires and led to the demise of the Spanish and the Napoleonic in Europe and the Mughal in South Asia. Colonial cities saw major projects’ being implemented in the image of good cities of the colonizers. The colonized countries were dramatically changed by their conquerors, but the colonizers were, in turn, affected by their colonial experiences. Several urban design ideas were first implemented abroad before being applied ‘at home.’

In Great Britain and Ireland, Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 until her death in 1901, giving her name to an era. It was a time of strict moral codes and norms of behavior, manners, and modesty, on the surface at least, for the upper and middle classes. Workers, including young children, labored in the industries and mines of Europe. Their wretched state in capitalist England was described by Friedrich Engels (1820–95) in 1845 and by Karl Marx (1813–83) with Engels in their influential 1848 pamphlet The Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Urban Development and Design

The population of the world doubled during the nineteenth century; people flocked to cities in search of better lives. The change in the mode of transportation from foot and horse to trains facilitated rapid urban expansion. London grew from a compact town into the world’s largest metropolis, sprawling into its hinterland. Living conditions for the poor were abysmal but better than in the countryside (L. Mumford 1961). Slums were overcrowded; sanitation conditions were deplorable. In London, the River Thames became an open sewer. In 1858, the ‘great stink’ of the river was accompanied by a renewed outbreak of cholera, leading to many deaths. Paris, held in high esteem for its cultural advances, was even worse (Olsen 1986). The desire for more-salubrious living conditions led to the building of major sewer systems, significant social reforms, and new ideas about what the city should be like.

Urban areas around the world were reshaped by urban renewal projects. The aristocracy built palaces for themselves; property developers built large houses for the wealthy and slums for the poor. The demolishing of city walls in places such as Vienna and Barcelona provided new development opportunities. Regency London (1795–1820), with the designs of John Nash (1752–1835), who was much influenced by contemporary picturesque landscapes, gave the heart of that metropolis much of its present-day character. Paris was reshaped for Napoléon III under the direction of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann (1809–1891). The Belgian, French, and British colonial powers used the wealth obtained from the exploitation of their colonies to build grand civic complexes in the hearts of Brussels, Paris, and London. The power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918) in central Europe led to similar grand schemes in Vienna and Budapest.

The disparity in the quality of living conditions of the wealthy, the middle classes, and the poor was vast and obvious. The wealthy lived in highly desirable urban locales or in the countryside, and middle-class people emulated them to the best of their ability. In London, the wealthy might be living adjacent to one of the city’s garden squares developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries or near one of the city’s parks. Lowly workers lived in crowded hovels. Cholera, measles, scarlet fever, and diphtheria were regular scourges. Rickets, especially in children, led to fractures and skeletal deformities.

The etchings of Gustave Doré (1832–83) present a powerful image of the poverty-stricken areas of London that he saw in his wanderings around the city with Blanchard Jerrold (1826–84), a journalist (Doré and Jerrold 1868). The photographs of Jacob Riis (1849–1914) published in How the Other Half Lives (1890) do the same for New York. The development of photography enabled many observers to capture penetrating images of both elegant and deplorable urban scenes. A concern for the improvement of working and housing conditions as well as the desire to beautify cities led to questioning what urban design projects were needed and what they should be like.

Figure 1 Wealth and poverty in nineteenth-century New York: The interior of a middle-class home (left) and slum accommodation as photographed by Jacob Riis (right)

Credit line (left): Collection of the author

Credit line (right): Photograph by Jacob Riis

Source (right): Riis (1890)

Project Types

A wide range of project types built during the nineteenth century set precedents for twentieth-century urban design. Many were initiated to accommodate the swelling population of cities. The most comprehensive were the new towns. They varied from company towns associated with industries or mines to private developer–initiated schemes driven by the desire to create profits, but they also included the efforts of reformers to establish ideal settlements.

The Eixample, an extension to Barcelona (1855–), designed by Ildefons Cerdà i Sunyer (1815–76), was one of many developed for the expansion of cities. Urban renewal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Prologue
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Part IV
• Epilogue
• Bibliography and References
• Credits
• Index