“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 19th 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 20th
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 20th 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.
