10 Important factors that go into city planning.

“Space and light and order. Those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.” -Le Corbusier

City planning is a complex endeavor, with myriad considerations that shape the best form and function of the community for its residents. Even more challenging, city planners have to not only work to create a city that meets today’s needs, but also anticipates growth and fits the longterm vision of the municipality.

To do so, city planners factor in three major sectors of their urban environment:

·      Physical environment

·      Social environment

·      Economic environment

·      Cultural environment

In part one of this blog, we outlined a timeline of city planning in the United States, and how the vocation grew out of the profound needs of a rapidly growing nation, and then profound industrial, economic, and social shifts of the 20th century.

Today, we're going to cover some of the ideals, best practices, and guidelines that modern-day city planners adhere to when developing our urban centers.

1.     A big part of successful city planning involves consideration of transportation and the layout of streets, canals, railroads, and public transport services. As we see with our modern cities, increases in population and the number of drivers on the road can cripple its infrastructure, and become one of the biggest daily concerns for residents. 

Therefore, major highways, through-ways, and surface streets should be carefully planned to ease the flow of traffic, with secondary streets and aesthetics garnering less importance. The hierarchy of roadways is also so important because it’s extremely difficult – and far more costly – to expand or fix later on.

2.     City building departments need to always keep safety in mind, following all guidelines and regulations for fire codes, building construction safety, health codes, placement of public facilities (like not putting an elementary school next to a prison or an airport). This includes the placement and zoned routes of mail carriers, fire departments, police, and hospitals.

3.     City planners need to carefully consider the best use of open land and public spaces, especially parks but also recreational spaces and facilities, jogging trails, river trails, waterways like lakes, rivers, and ponds, protected lands, and other natural resources.

4.     Other community assets like public libraries, recreation centers, civic buildings, and community halls need to considered and strategically placed. While some city planners choose to concentrate many town buildings in one complex, they are often purposely spread out over the city, so all residents have equal access.

5.     Proper delineation of zoning is crucial for any well-functioning city, with clearly defined areas that serve as commercial zones, industrial zones, and residential zones, with specific regulations for each. 

6.     Most cities have a Greenbelt Zone, which is an area on the outskirts of town, or servicing as the transition from urban and suburban to rural. It usually serves as the border – officially or unofficially – to contain the urban sprawl within and prevents further building and population of this natural wildlife area.

7.     Parking is a major consideration, at least as important as the roadways and transportation infrastructure. Street widths, street parking rules, public lots, and private pay-for-parking lots and facilities are all necessary, creating adequate options that can keep up with the inflow of automobiles every day.

8.     With all of these important items on our city planning TO Do list, we almost forgot about housing all of the city’s residents! Every city needs plenty of housing alternatives that are affordable (in theory). These days, a mix of single-family homes, townhouses, multi-family units like duplexes, condominiums, apartment buildings, and other rentals fill that need. City planners hold major sway on the direction housing will take with its use of zoning, building regulations, construction permits, development deals, and other ordinances. Most cities also provide some sort of public housing, either[ through actual facilities or through support programs.

9.     A city needs citizens, but it also requires plenty of businesses to hire all of those citizens, providing vital jobs and income to support prosperity. Therefore, cities carefully balance the interests of the public good with the incentives needed to attract private employers, like tax breaks, land deals, and other special considerations.

10.  We have our city’s layout, roads, parks and green spaces, businesses, and civic buildings. But we can’t forget some very important necessary aspects of daily life. Any city’s governance is responsible for ensuring utility companies provide electricity, water, and telecommunications, as well as sewers, trash pickup, recycling, snow removal, tree cutting and landscaping of public areas, street cleaning, maintenance of public areas, and just about every other minute detail of keeping the city functioning well. What a massive endeavor!

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Look for the next installment in this blog series, when we cover the technology, environmental control, and planning that will go into our smart cities of the near future.

The Evolution of City Planning in America.

“A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness.”- Aristotle

Way back when America was still a smattering of outposts and colonies, not even a country yet, little conscious thought went into planning towns. The first settlements, such as Jamestown, Boston, and New Amsterdam, followed no systematic design.

However, as early as 1638, the first evidence of modern town planning was seen in New Haven, Connecticut. In the birthplace of the Yale University campus, New Haven featured nice large squares of common areas carefully arranged in rows of three (still to this day called the “New Haven Green”). With a church in its center and business and government buildings on its perimeter, this layout became the standard for planning many subsequent Colonial towns.

These common greens, wide streets, canals within the city, etc. served two other important purposes. Too often, densely packed and ill-planned population centers in the 19^th century were susceptible to the spread of fires and also disease, but modern planners were wise enough to create buffer zones to help contain both. 

Thereafter, cities were expected to offer solutions to social problems – not just cause them.

City planning took a step forward in 1748, when an architect named Giambattista Nolli was the first to map out an entire city, including streets, parks, common areas, and important buildings, from a bird's eye view with no central focal point – called the Nolli Map.

The task of preparing for the growth of cities soon spawned a new field: city planner, as well as organizations and groups meant to empower its members. In fact, the American City Planning Institute was formed in 1917, and The American Society of Planning Officials in 1934.

In the 1800s and the first part of the 20^th century, cities were built fairly haphazardly, with communities springing forth in a spiraling outward pattern without rhyme or reason. However, the advent of steel in construction changed all of that in the 20^th century, with industrialists taking advantage.

Soon, cities were being built upwards towards the sky, with a focus on population density – not growing outwards. In major cities like New York and Chicago, skyscrapers exploded towards the heavens, with banks, department stores, theaters, and office buildings following suit.

Suddenly, the concept of city planning was no longer a two-dimensional task envisioned at ground level, but in 3-D with the element of altitude. For instance, newly laid streets had to adhere to the Setback Principle, developed by architect Hugh Ferriss in 1916. Streets had to be 50' to 100' wide in order to accommodate wider and taller skyscrapers, following a standard ratio of 11:2 (height to street width).

To service the growing number of new workers who needed to access these centralized downtowns, mass transit evolved, too. Most people that worked and played in the city centers no longer lived there, but commuted in from “streetcar suburbs,” which were new subdivisions laid as an extension of the downtown grid and sold parcel by parcel to homeowners, developers, and businesses.

In response to the rapidly over-crowded new cities, iconic architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright was perhaps one of the fathers of the modern suburb. He took the model for the urban grid and transposed it into the countryside, planning structured and aligned communities where each family had exactly one acre of land.

Likewise, urban planner Le Corbusier wanted to solve the issue of overcrowding in cities by building mass housing up, not out, and his ideas became a major influence in designing high-rise public housing decades later.

Through the 1950s and 60s, architect Kevin Lynch looked to plan cities not from a top-down approach, but considering the actual experiences of regular people and inhabitants within the city. This bottom-up approach to city planning changed the landscape of blossoming metropolisis forever after.

In 1961, city planner Jean Gottamn also started considering a new phenomenon among cities – “megaregions.” He was one of the first to think about cities not as individual self-sustaining units, but within the context of other mega population centers in the region. Therefore, issues of transportation, the economy, and the environment were considered on a regional or multi-city perspective.

A renowned city planner named Andres Duany expressed his vision for the next era of urban planning in 2000 with his "Transect" approach. These take the traditional grid system but section it off into six zones, each progressively more green and less urban. Starting with SD (Special District, then T6 (Urban Core), the Transect continue with T5 (Urban Center), T4 (General Urban), T3 (Sub-Urban), T2 (Rural), and then T1 (Natural).

You know which city follows this general outline, although unwittingly? Sacramento has its Old Town as the Special District, downtown giving way to midtown, and then more rural and green East Sacramento and wooded campus of Sacramento State.

So what’ss the future of city planning? Smart cities that are walkable or easy to navigate via public transport, integrate urban forests and plenty of green areas, and are equipped with usable smart technology are on the horizon.

Look for part two of this blog where we cover the advances in technology, environmental control, and planning that will go into our smart cities of the near future.