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An attempt to manage the city, often in order to avoid, or alleviate, common urban problems such as inner city decay, overcrowding, traffic and other forms of congestion. See urban development corporation, traffic calming.
For more information on urban planning, visit Britannica.com.
Communities in the United States have planned their development since the early European settlements. City planning has been a profession since the early twentieth century. Its development has been marked by an ongoing contrast or tension between "open-ended" plans intended to encourage and accommodate growth and the less common "closed" plans for towns serving specific limited populations, such as religious utopias, company towns, and exclusive suburbs.
Colonial Squares
The first towns on the Atlantic coast, such as Jamestown, Boston, and New Amsterdam, grew by accretion, rather than systematic design. Yet conscious town planning appeared as early as 1638 with New Haven, Connecticut. Nine large squares were arranged in rows of three, with the central square serving as the town common or green. This tree-shaded community park, preserved as part of the Yale University campus, became a distinctive feature of many colonial New England town plans.
In contrast to the open green of New England towns, the architectural square characterized the courthouse towns of Virginia, which had a smaller green square closely surrounded by private residences, shops, courthouse, and often churches. Versions of these Chesapeake and New England plans reappeared in the nineteenth century as the courthouse square or town square in new communities west of the Appalachians.
William Penn's and Thomas Holme's plan for Philadelphia, laid out in 1682, was a systematic application of the gridiron pattern, with regular blocks and straight streets crossing at right angles. Four public greens, in addition to a central square to serve as a civic center, sought to make Philadelphia a "green country town." Extended from the Delaware to the Schuylkill River, the plan also gave the new settlement room for future growth.
Spanish settlements on the northern frontier of Mexico were guided by the Laws of the Indies (1573), a royal proclamation that prescribed the layout of new towns. The essential elements were a central square within a grid and public institutions situated around the square. The influence of Spanish rectilinear planning could be seen in frontier towns such as Santa Fe, San Antonio, and Los Angeles. Similar planning principles were apparent in the layout of the eighteenth-century French colonial city of New Orleans.
Baroque Influences
New capital cities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to show the influence of European baroque plans, such as Christopher Wren's plan for rebuilding London after the fire of 1666. Such plans incorporated axes, radials, diagonals, and squares. The plan for Annapolis, Maryland, prepared by Francis Nicholson in 1694, was the first to incorporate diagonal avenues and circles. Williamsburg, Virginia's, major axis, cross axis, and squares reflected many renaissance European plans for cities and parks, designed for displaying palaces and public buildings. Savannah's plan, prepared by James Oglethorpe in 1733, was similar to Philadelphia's gridiron pattern, but with a more liberal introduction of residential squares.
The climax of such plans was Pierre L'Enfant's design for the new federal city of Washington in 1791. Working on a grand scale, L'Enfant identified high points for the presidential residence and houses of Congress, and inter-laced the landscape with broad diagonal boulevards and circles. Derided as "city of magnificent distances," Washington took a century to grow into its framework.
Gridded for Growth: the Nineteenth Century
Philadelphia and New York set the standard for nineteenth-century planning. New York's maze of early streets was first extended by several gridded subdivisions and then, in 1811, by the decision to plat the entire island of Manhattan with a rectilinear set of north-south avenues and east-west streets. The plan converted every piece of ground into an instantly identifiable piece of real estate. Philadelphia's grid, also capable of repeated expansion, set the tone for many Middle Western cities, which even copied its custom of naming streets after trees.
Rectilinear town plans west of the Appalachians had the same function as the national land survey system. Grids gave every lot and parcel a set of coordinates and made it possible to trade real estate at a distance. Town promoters staked out grids at promising locations in the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri river valleys, in the Gulf States, and along the Great Lakes; they then waited for residents to pour in. Rival promoters often laid out competing grids that abutted but did not coincide, leaving sets of odd-angled corners in downtown Milwaukee, Denver, Seattle, and other cities.
Midcontinent railways with federal land grants made town planning into an integral part of railroad building. The Illinois Central Railroad in the 1850s developed a standard plan and laid out dozens of towns along its route. Later railroads did the same across the broad prairies of Minnesota, the Dakotas, and points west.
Closed Communities
The standard gridded town was designed to be open to all potential residents and investors. Other communities, however, were planned for specified populations. Over the course of the nineteenth century, dozens of secular and religious utopias dotted the American landscape. They were usually located in rural and frontier districts and sometimes were self-consciously designed to promote equality or isolation. By far the most successful were the Mormon settlements of Utah. Building and then abandoning the city of Nauvoo, Illinois, because of fierce local opposition, the Mormons moved to Utah in 1847. Salt Lake City and smaller Mormon towns built throughout the territory in the 1850s and 1860s adapted the rectilinear plan to the scale of the Wasatch mountains to the west and laid out large blocks with large lots for in-town agriculture, reflecting Mormon beliefs in self-sufficiency.
The nineteenth century also brought new factory towns. The best tried to offer a good physical environment for their workers, while still reproducing the social hierarchy of industrial capitalism. Lowell, Massachusetts, was a notable early example, a town developed in the 1820s and 1830s to utilize waterpower for a new textile industry. Factory buildings were flanked by dormitories for unmarried female workers and then by single family housing for other workers and managers.
The entire town of Pullman, Illinois, was planned and constructed for Pullman Company employees in the 1880s. It attracted favorable attention for its carefully planned layout of public buildings, parks, and substantial homes whose different sizes reflected the status of managers and workers. A bitter strike in 1894 demonstrated the difficulties of combining the roles of employer and landlord, while trying to preserve a sense of community. The collapse of the Pullman experiment discouraged further efforts to build fully owned company towns. Instead, corporations that needed to house large numbers of workers in the early twentieth century laid out new communities and then sold the land to private owners and builders, as in Gary, Indiana; Kingsport, Tennessee; and Longview, Washington.
Suburban Planning
Cities grew both upward and outward in the second half of the nineteenth century. Tall buildings, products of steel construction and the elevator, turned the old low-rise downtown into central business districts with concentrations of office buildings, department stores, theaters, and banks. Improvements in urban mass transit fed workers and customers to the new downtowns and allowed rapid fringe expansion along the main transportation routes. The new neighborhoods ranged from tracts of small "workingmen's cottages" and cheap row housing to elegantly landscaped "dormitory" suburbs for the upper crust.
The most common form of development was the "streetcar suburbs." These were usually subdivisions laid out as extensions of the city grid. The developer sold lots to individual owners or small builders. These neighborhoods were often protected by restrictive covenants in deeds that set minimum house values, prohibited commercial activities, and excluded African Americans or Asians. The U.S. Supreme Court declared such covenants unenforceable in Shelley v. Kramer (1948).
Romantic suburbs drew on the developing tradition of park planning associated with Frederick Law Olmsted, designer of Central Park (Manhattan), Prospect Park (Brooklyn, New York), Mount Royal Park (Montreal), and many others. Olmsted saw parks as a way to incorporate access to nature within the large city and therefore preferred large landscaped preserves to small playgrounds. Parks functioned as "the lungs of the city" and gave the urban population access to nature.
The development that established the model for the suburbs was Riverside, outside Chicago. Designed by Olmsted in 1869, it offered large lots, curving streets, park space, and a commercial core around a commuter rail station. The exclusive residential development or suburb, with tasteful provision of retail facilities, schools, and churches, flourished in the late nineteenth century (for example, Chestnut Hill and the "Main Line" suburbs of Philadelphia) and the early twentieth century (for example, Shaker Heights near Cleveland, Mariemont near Cincinnati, and the Country Club District of Kansas City).
In the early twentieth century, Britain's Ebenezer Howard had a substantial influence on suburban planning. Howard's ideas for a self-contained "garden city" as an alternative to overcrowded London inspired Forest Hills Gardens, built in New York City in 1913 by the Russell Sage Foundation as a demonstration community, and several federally sponsored communities for defense workers during World War I in cities such as Camden, New Jersey, and Newport News, Virginia.
In 1927, Henry Wright and Clarence Stein planned America's first garden city, Radburn, New Jersey, the "Town for the Motor Age." The plan utilized superblocks, a large residential planning unit free from vehicular encroachment, providing uninterrupted pedestrian access from every building to a large recreation area within the center and pedestrian underpasses at major arteries. During the depression of the 1930s the Resettlement Administration applied the planning principles of Radburn to the design of three new "greenbelt" towns—Greenhills near Cincinnati, Greendale near Milwaukee, and Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.
City Beautiful Movement and Professional Planning
In 1893 the magnificent spectacle of the classic Court of Honor, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Daniel Burnham for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, catalyzed the City Beautiful movement, an enthusiastic revival of civic design and grand planning. Cities throughout the nation inspired by this movement appointed special civic art commissions—forerunners of today's planning commissions—to carry out vast self-improvement projects that yielded scores of civic and cultural centers, tree-lined avenues, and waterfront improvements. L'Enfant's partially effectuated plan for Washington, dormant since the Civil War, was reactivated in 1902. The planning of the City Beautiful movement was concerned with promoting civic beauty, efficient transportation, and regional systems such as parks.
In the midst of the wave of civic improvement generated by the Columbian Exposition, Hartford, Connecticut, established the first city planning commission in 1907. City and village planning laws were passed in Wisconsin in 1909 and in New York and Massachusetts in 1913. These laws officially recognized planning as a proper function of municipal government. Most of the other states enacted similar enabling legislation in the 1920s and 1930s.
The legal framework for modern city planning practice began with the zoning ordinance, based on the police power to control land use in order to balance the interests of the individual and the community. New York City in 1916 adopted the first comprehensive zoning ordinance. The classic decision by the U.S. Supreme Court upholding the constitutionality of municipal zoning was handed down in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company in 1926. Efforts to use zoning to enforce racial segregation failed in the courts. The growing number of abuses in zoning and the lack of direction in its application caused the courts to insist on an accompanying comprehensive master plan for future land use to provide guidelines for zoning. This gradually resulted in the general acceptance during the 1920s and 1930s of the master plan as the official document showing the pattern of development for the community. Along with this came state legislation authorizing planning commissions to prepare and help administer master plans and to control land subdivision. The drafting and adoption of such state laws was greatly facilitated by the Standard City Planning Enabling Act, promulgated by the U.S. Department of Commerce.
With the development of zoning, city planning diverged as a profession from related fields of activity with an interest in urban social and physical problems. It developed an identity distinct from that of civil engineers, social workers, and housing reformers and was led by a number of consultants with national practices such as John Nolen and Harland Bartholomew. Planning practitioners organized as the American City Planning Institute (forerunner to the American Institute of Planners) in 1917. The American Society of Planning Officials (1934) served the needs of lay members of planning commissions and their staffs.
Federal Involvement
During the Great Depression, the federal government took a central role in the production of new housing. The National Housing Act of 1934 created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to act as a housing mortgage insurance agency to bring adequate funds into housing construction and there by to create new employment opportunities as a boost to the domestic economy. The National Housing Act of 1937 authorized loans and annual operating subsidies to local housing authorities for slum clearance and for construction and operation of public housing for low-income families, bypassing constitutional restrictions on direct federal construction of housing. The Veterans Administration mortgage guarantee program after World War II augmented the FHA.
The National Housing Act of 1949 authorized new and substantial federal assistance to cities for slum clearance and Urban Redevelopment, a program broadened greatly through the Housing Act of 1954, to become known as urban renewal. The 1954 act gave direct assistance to smaller municipalities to undertake comprehensive planning and authorized loans and grants for metropolitan and regional planning. The Workable Program for Community Improvement, another feature of the 1954 act, required annual recertification of comprehensive master plans in order for cities to continue to be eligible for the various federal funds authorized by the act. The achievement of racial, social, and economic mix constituted a requirement for city eligibility to receive federal funds, but one often ignored in actual implementation.
The establishment in 1965 of the cabinet-level Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was the culmination of federal government concern about the growing importance of housing, inner-city deterioration, and urban sprawl. The Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act of 1966 provided for grants to 147 selected "model cities," to concentrate funds from various government agencies for all forms of urban improvement on specified target neighborhoods. This crash program designed to create model neighborhoods never really had an opportunity to prove its worth because of changes in program objectives and funding priorities during the administration of President Richard Nixon.
The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 effected an important change in the federal funding of community development programs. Existing "categorical" grants for various types of community improvements, such as water and sewer facilities, open space, urban renewal, and model cities, were consolidated into a single program of community-development "block" grants giving localities greater control over how the money was spent, within broad guidelines. These funds have since been distributed to various cities according to a formula based on population, poverty, and degree of overcrowding.
New Towns
Private developments of planned residential communities, notably for retired persons on fixed incomes, proliferated during the 1960s, mostly in the southeastern and southwestern United States. Communities with such names as Leisure World, Leisure Village, and Sun City came to dot the countryside, particularly in Arizona and California. Notable among the more ambitious planned communities of the 1960s were the new towns of Reston, Virginia; Columbia, Maryland; and Irvine, California—three pioneering communities financed with private capital and having target populations of 75,000, 125,000, and 450,000.
The New Communities Act of 1968 and the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1970 authorized for the first time the development of new towns in America through a federal program of guaranteed obligations to private developers to help finance the building of new communities in their entirety. Although more than a dozen new towns were begun under these programs, only a few, including The Woodlands, Texas, were successfully completed.
In the 1990s, many planners adopted the goals of the "new urbanism" or "neotraditional" planning as advocated by architects Peter Calthorpe and Andres Duany. New urbanists attempt to build new communities that are compact, walkable, and focused on community centers, reducing automobile dependence and reproducing many of the best features of early-twentieth-century neighborhoods and suburbs.
The Planning Profession
In the last three decades of the twentieth century, the American urban planning profession assumed new roles in the fields of environmental planning and protection; community-based housing and economic development; and the implementation of regional and statewide programs for the management of metropolitan growth. City planners in America were engaged in five major areas of activity: (1) preparation, revision, and implementation of comprehensive master plans, zoning ordinances, subdivision regulations, and capital-improvement programs; (2) review of environmental impacts of contemplated development and initiation of policies and courses of action to protect and preserve the natural environment; (3) urban redevelopment planning in older communities for rehabilitation of salvageable sections and conservation of neighborhoods of good quality; (4) quantitative modeling of transportation demand and land use patterns, often with the technology of Geographic Information Systems; (5) implementation of state and regional growth management programs.
This latter activity has seen substantial institutional innovation since the 1970s. In 1973, Oregon adopted a law requiring all cities and counties to plan according to statewide goals, including the adoption of urban growth boundaries around each city. Several other states followed with a variety of state growth management programs, notably Florida, Georgia, Washington, and Maryland.
American city planning is a well-developed profession, sustained by graduate and undergraduate programs. The American Planning Association formed in 1978 from the merger of the American Institute of Planners and the American Society of Planning Officials. Its membership in 2001 was roughly 30,000. Two-thirds of the members worked in state and local government, with the remainder in nonprofit organizations, federal agencies, universities, and consulting firms. The American Institute of Certified Planners provides additional professional credentials by examination.
Bibliography
Abbott, Carl. Portland: Planning, Politics, and Urban Growth in a Twentieth-Century City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Buder, Stanley. Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and Modern Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Fishman, Robert. Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebeneezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier. New York: Basic Books, 1977.
Fishman, Robert, ed. The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.
Gilbert, James. Perfect Cities: Chicago's Utopias of 1893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.
Hise, Greg. Magnetic Los Angeles: Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Reps, John W. Cities of the American West: A History of Frontier Urban Planning. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Rodwin, Lloyd, and Bishwapriya Sanyal, eds. The City Planning Profession: Changes, Images and Challenges: 1950–2000. New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 2000.
Schultz, Stanley. Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
Schuyler, David. The New Urban Landscape: Redefinition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Scott, Mel. American City Planning since 1890. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Silver, Christopher. Twentieth Century Richmond: Planning, Politics and Race. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.
Silver, Christopher, and Mary Corbin Sies, eds. Planning the Twentieth Century American City. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Wilson, William H. The City Beautiful Movement. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.
—Carl Abbott
Early City Planning
Many ancient cities were built from definite plans. The fundamental feature of the plans of Babylon, Nineveh, and the cities of ancient Greece and of China was a geographical pattern of main streets running north and south and east and west, with a public square or forum in the center. Such a gridiron plan was used in the ancient Peruvian city of Chan Chan. It was also followed by the Romans, as in Lincoln and Chester in England; in all their towns the Romans emphasized drainage and water supply and practiced zoning. In medieval cities, built with military security in mind, the only relief from the extremely narrow streets was the space formed by municipal and church squares. The living conditions of the poorer citizens were given little attention.
With the Renaissance came the truly monumental views—wide avenues and long approaches creating vistas of handsome buildings. The new aim is seen first in special sections of a city, such as Michelangelo's grouping on the Capitoline at Rome and Bernini's piazza of St. Peter's. In most European cities through the 17th and 18th cent. there was fragmentary replanning of medieval streets. After the fire of 1666 in London, Sir Christopher Wren devised a superb plan for a complete rebuilding of the city, but the plan unfortunately was not carried out. In the 18th cent., Mannheim and Karlsruhe, Germany, were laid out geometrically; Emmanuel Héré planned Nancy, France; John Wood produced grand architectural streets and squares at Bath; and the new part of Edinburgh was laid out. In the early 19th cent. John Nash planned certain sections of London; central Vienna was improved; and Baron Haussmann remodeled Paris to produce the celebrated boulevard system with its spokes-and-hub design.
Legislation that enabled cities to make and carry out planning designs was enacted earlier in Europe than in the United States. Such laws were passed in Italy in 1865, in Sweden in 1874, and in Prussia and Great Britain in 1875. Planning in Great Britain was especially concerned with slum elimination; its greatest exponent was Sir Patrick Geddes. At the turn of the century Sir Ebenezer Howard was the founder of the modern garden city movement. The first English garden city, Letchworth, was begun in 1903.
City Planning in the United States
In the United States, early New England towns, formally disposed along wide elm-lined central roadways or commons, exhibit a conscious planning. Annapolis, Md., Philadelphia, and Paterson, N.J., were built after plans; but the most celebrated example is the city of Washington D.C., laid out according to the plan devised (1791) by Pierre Charles L'Enfant, under the supervision of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—a rectangular plan with diagonal main thoroughfares superimposed and the Capitol as the central feature.
In the 19th cent. Frederick Law Olmsted was a pioneer in city planning, especially in developing parks. State legislation enabling cities to appoint planning commissions and in some cases giving them authority to carry out the plans began in Pennsylvania in 1891. The work of Daniel Hudson Burnham for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, was a stimulus to city planning, and Burnham, with Edward Bennett, drew up a plan for Chicago, much of which was put into execution. In 1901 a commission composed of Burnham, Charles Follen McKim, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., devised a scheme for the modern development and beautification of Washington, D.C., adhering to L'Enfant's original plan as a basis for all new operations.
A wide influence on planning in U.S. cities was exerted by the zoning laws adopted in New York City in 1916, which controlled the uses of each district in the city and regulated the areas and heights of buildings in relation to street width. The important Regional Survey of New York and Environs, completed in 1929, took into consideration legal and social factors as well as internal transit problems and various modes of approach to the metropolitan area.
Governmental efforts to provide employment during the depression of the 1930s led to the building (under the Federal Resettlement Administration) of three experimental model communities—Greenbelt, Md., Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio. Among the many subsequent planned communities built by private developers are Columbia, Md., and Reston, Va. The increase of traffic and crowding together of tall buildings have crippled the street plans of many cities—especially U.S. cities that have been handicapped by their rectangular or checkerboard layouts.
Contemporary Planning
In the larger U.S. cities, physical deterioration, crowding, and complex socioeconomic factors have produced vast slums. Most urban renewal programs of the mid-20th cent. were aimed at clearing these slums through the demolition of decayed buildings and the construction of low-income and middle-income housing projects. It was found, however, that the mere replacement of old buildings with new structures did not eliminate slum conditions.
In contrast to traditional planning, which concentrated on improving the physical aspects of buildings and streets, modern city planning is increasingly concerned with the social and economic aspects of city living. The process of city planning is a highly complex, step-by-step procedure, usually involving a series of surveys and studies, development of a land-use plan and transportation plan, preparation of a budget, and approval of a unified master plan by various agencies or legislative bodies. City planners are usually part of an urban planning board or governmental agency that must take into account the characteristics and long-range welfare of the people of a particular urban community—their employment opportunities, income levels, need for transportation, schools, shopping areas, hospitals, parks and recreational facilities. They must face the problems of traffic, congestion, and pollution; they must also consider the availability of police, fire, and sanitation services, the limitations posed by zoning and other regulations, and the problems of funding. In recent years, residents of many communities have demanded greater participation in the planning of their own neighborhoods, and some planners have worked closely with community groups during various stages of the planning process.
Contemporary examples of planned cities include Brasília, the federal capital of Brazil, Rotterdam, main seaport of the Netherlands, Chandigarh, the joint capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, and Abuja, the capital of Nigeria.
Bibliography
See J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, repr. 1969); L. Mumford, The City in History (1961, repr. 1966); F. Gibberd, Town Design (5th ed. 1967); W. H. Whyte, The Last Landscape (1968); H. Colman, City Planning (1971); G. E. Cherry, ed., Shaping an Urban World (1980); A. Sutcliffe, Toward the Planned City (1981); V. M. Lampugnani, Architecture and City Planning (1985).
Effect on city organization of colonialism and petroleum wealth.
In the modern period two major influences have shaped contemporary urban planning in the Middle East: colonialism and petroleum. These two influences, and a host of other minor factors, have had different roles during three phases of constructing urban landscapes: the colonial period (c. 1800 - 1945), a transitional period (c. 1945 - 1972), and the oil-boom era (post-1972). Within these three stages, urban planning has shifted from being primarily involved in physical planning and urban design to integrating socioeconomic and physical planning.
The Colonial Period (1800 - 1945)
Although not all countries in the Middle East were colonized at the same time or in the same pattern, a common thread connects the urban-planning process. Europeans used urban planning successfully to establish and maintain the colonial extractive system. Physical segregation was the main tool used in implementing this policy. Urban planning in this period was dominated by physical land-use planning and urban design, which chiefly concerned the arrangement of urban infrastructure and land use. The colonial use of physical planning established and maintained a trading network and facilitated a suitable living environment for European colonial administrators, workers, and their households.
European colonialists built port cities to collect and ship goods (for example, Aden, Casablanca, Tunis, Suez, Hormuz, and Port Saʿid). They also built interior towns to serve as military centers, local administrative capitals, or collection points for regional resources, and they built infrastructure, such as roads and railways, to connect interior cities to ports. This trade-related settlement system became the new colonial urban hierarchy that is still common all over the Middle East.
Urban planning then played its second major role in this period by maintaining and servicing the influx of European military personnel, administrators, businesspeople, settlers, and fortune seekers. Planning was utilized to build the segregated city, in which a European, upper-class quarter was separated from the rest of the city. French Morocco offers the most vivid example of this kind of city planning: European quarters were built separate from the old medinas; important urban cultural sites were preserved; and the European part of the city utilized the most up-to-date urban-planning techniques. Similar practices were followed in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt. These urban plans segregated Europeans, along with some local resident minority groups (such as Coptic Christians and Jews) and a small community of the native rich, from the indigenous population, resulting in a dual city. A parallel but noninstitutionalized development in Palestine was the building of Tel Aviv as a Jewish city adjacent to Arab Jaffa.
In the dual city, a disproportionate share of the urban revenue was spent on the European quarters, even though taxes were raised mostly from the native quarters. As a result, the European neighborhoods had large residential plots, low densities of population, and broad tree-lined roads and streets. They were also better connected to urban amenities like water, electricity, and sewage facilities. These low-density residential quarters with their superior facilities and other urban benefits provided healthier environments for their residents. In addition, they provided the Europeans with a culturally familiar environment, making them more interested in working in colonies and thus maintaining the colonial system.
In countries where local rulers had more autonomy or colonialism was not officially present, rulers tried to copy European styles of design and urban planning. In Egypt before British control began in 1882, Khedive Ismaʿil (r. 1863 - 1879), influenced by his visit to Paris, tried to follow for Cairo the urban plans of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Later, in Iran, Reza Pahlavi Shah (r. 1925 - 1941) promoted a grid design for Tehran and constructed wide avenues through the old quarters of the city, and a "modern" city along the lines of the European model was built in north Tehran, where the rich began to reside. It was thought that copying Western urban form would lead to modernization, but the end result was the growth of dual cities similar to those that developed in colonized countries. Indeed, the internal structure of most Middle Eastern cities still can be traced back to this period.
The Transitional Period (1945 - 1972)
Urban planing assumed a lesser role in the Middle East during this politically active period. Since most of the countries in this region either had just become politically independent or were in the process of becoming so, urban planning was less important than ongoing political struggles and social movements. In the immediate postcolonial period, a spontaneous population movement occurred within some major Middle Eastern cities. In particular, the space formerly occupied by Europeans was taken over by the indigenous elites. In countries such as Morocco and Tunisia, this transition occurred in a peaceful and orderly fashion, but in a few countries, most notably Algeria, the rapid exodus of foreign settlers resulted in more diverse economic classes taking over the quarters formerly occupied by colonialists. Nevertheless, most Middle Eastern cities maintained their dual character.
Major concerns for urban planners were to provide housing for new migrants from rural areas and to bridge the gap between the former European and traditional quarters. To consolidate power, new rulers provided various social groups with land, housing, and urban amenities in return for their political support. In Israel, for example, the Labor Party provided temporary housing in the 1950s for Jews immigrating from postwar Europe and from other areas of the Middle East. Later, these immigrants were resettled in new urban neighborhoods and in newly established development towns in less populous areas.
Urban planning also began to develop in a new direction, emphasizing company-town building, master-plan technique, and economic development. This aspect was particularly evident in the Persian Gulf states of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia. The steady growth of oil revenues beginning in the late 1950s encouraged governments to devise long-term economic development plans or to invest in industrial projects. These policies had a major impact on developing urban planning into an integrated physical-economic approach.
U.S. and British oil companies also established company towns for their workers. The Arabian-American Oil Company (ARAMCO), for example, used Western planners and engineers to lay out company towns such as Dhahran and Abqaiq using a system of blocks with a grid pattern. Similarly in Iran, British planners modeled the city of Abadan on the landscape of suburban England. Middle Eastern countries depended on the West for qualified planners and consultants to carry out urban planning. Consequently, a planning technique then common in the West, the master plan, was imported to the Middle East and soon became ubiquitous throughout the region. Most plans were end-state master plans, in that the ultimate look of the city in the future was already predetermined. Most plans were also unclear about the process of city planning or procedures for implementation. Additionally, the plans were usually static and design-oriented, with little consideration for the social and economic needs of the majority. Although very few master plans actually were implemented, the process of designing master plans proved to be a positive development for urban planning.
The Oil-Boom Era (1973 to the Present)
In the 1970s the role of urban planning underwent a rapid transformation, particularly in the oil-producing countries, where the rise in oil revenues enabled governments to embark on a variety of grandiose urban projects. A major focus was on comprehensive planning, which involved the private sector and considered spatial development concerns. The construction of new towns absorbed considerable investment. Three major goals prompted the building of new towns: to relieve the population pressures on the major cities by drawing migrants away from already overcrowded cities; to accommodate the growing population of industrial workers and to facilitate industrialization; and to accommodate military bases throughout the region. Primarily, Western firms have undertaken the planning of these new towns, especially those in oil-rich countries. Although efforts to incorporate aspects of indigenous culture into the design of these towns have been made, such efforts have not been fully successful. Most of these towns have used zoning to isolate economic activities, in contrast with the mixed-use tradition in the region, and their layouts are designed for the use of the automobile.
With the oil wealth - fueled economic growth of the Persian Gulf countries serving as a catalyst, the rejection of end-state master plans soon became common all over the Middle East in favor of new city plans that give more consideration to social and economic factors. In addition, the new plans were integrated into broader regional and national planning strategies based on large urban centers in such countries as Egypt, Iran, Morocco, and Saudi Arabia. The new dynamic style of planning is also evident in the use of Integrated Urban Development Projects (IUDPs) among local planners and planning consultants. The emphasis of IUDPs is on the sectoral and spatial integration of projects, operating alongside, although often effectively replacing, comprehensive master planning. For example, the IUDP for Baghdad consisted of three integrated plans for central Iraq, greater Baghdad, and Baghdad the city. Three models - urban corridors, growth poles, and dispersed settlements - were used to develop comprehensive alternative strategies based on future scenarios. After evaluating the scenarios, a hybrid of all three models applicable to Iraq's needs was adopted.
Although the focus of making plans had changed, the tools for implementing them remained inadequate in most Middle Eastern countries. The reasons include a lack of cooperation among decision makers, a lack of enforcement legislation, and the conflict between the beautification and modernization of the city and the meeting of basic needs of the inhabitants. Thus, urban planning in the Middle East still is grappling with numerous problems. One major issue in large cities of oil-rich countries is how to allocate resources between immigrants and the native population. These immigrants, often from other Middle Eastern countries, are not granted citizenship or the right to own property, placing a heavy burden on the rental markets. In addition, a new form of segregation is taking place: Housing estates are planned so as to minimize contact between immigrants and the indigenous population. For example, in the new towns of Jubail (Saudi Arabia) and Umm Said (Qatar), dormitory-style housing for single expatriate workers secludes them from the native population.
Perhaps the most important issue for city planning is rapid population growth and urbanization. At approximately 3 percent per annum, the region's population growth rate is higher than the figure for any other world region with the exception of subSaharan Africa. The urbanization rate, at more than 4.5 percent for most countries in the Middle East, is also among the fastest in the developing world. Most large cities of the region suffer from overcrowding; squatter settlements; housing shortages; poverty; unemployment; lack of adequate urban infrastructure, services, and amenities; and escalating environmental degradation, including unbearable pollution. These and other urban problems are placing increasing stress on the budgets, resources, and planning capacities of municipal governments, forcing planners and policy makers to seek new ways of managing urban growth. In fact, this need to cope with many intertwined urban problems often has led to planning being used as a tool to anticipate future problems and merely manage current ones, rather than solve them. A more preventive approach to urban planning must take the place of the existing curative approach.
Bibliography
Abu-Lughod, Janet L. "Moroccan Urbanization: Some New Questions." In Development of Urban Systems in Africa, edited by R. A. Obudho and Salah El-Shakhs. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1979.
Amirahmadi, Hooshang. "Regional Planning in Iran: A Survey of Problems and Policies." Journal of Developing Areas 20, no. 4 (1987): 501 - 530.
Amirahmadi, Hooshang, and El-Shakhs, Salah S., eds. Urban Development in the Muslim World. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1993.
Brown, Kenneth, et al., eds. Middle Eastern Cities in Comparative Perspective: Points de vue sur les villes du Maghreb et du Machrek: Franco-British Symposium, London 10 - 14 May 1984. Atlantic Highlands, NJ; London: Ithaca Press, 1986.
Denither, Jean. "Evolution of Concepts of Housing, Urbanism, and Country Planning in a Developing Country: Morocco, 1900 - 1972." In From Madina to Metropolis: Heritage and Change in the Near Eastern City, edited by L. Carl Brown. Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press, 1973.
Zaim, Sabahaddin. "Urbanization Trends in Turkey." In The Middle East City: Ancient Traditions Confront a Modern World, edited by Abdulaziz Y. Saqqaf. New York: Paragon, 1987.
— HOOSHANG AMIRAHMADI
UPDATED BY ERIC HOOGLUND
In early modern Europe city planning was not a profession, as it is today, but a function of public administration and the emerging profession of architecture. Plans for new cities, extensions, and redevelopment were made by monarchs, bureaucrats, municipal authorities, architects, military engineers, and amateurs. From the mid-fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, the broad trend in the theory of city planning was increased understanding of cities as complex systems of interrelated elements having to do with public utility and beautification.
Planning was informed by practices established in the Middle Ages and memories of ancient Rome. The medieval legacy included municipal building regulations and a repertoire of urban design techniques and features, among which were plans based on grids, such as the bastides of France and Spain, and symbolically charged public spaces, such as the Piazza del Campo in Siena. Popes, such as Alexander VII (reigned 1655–1667); kings, such as Louis XIV (ruled 1643–1715); and even the governments of the French Revolution regarded imperial Rome as the supreme model for public administration and urban grandeur and vied to meet the standard of magnificence suggested by ancient ruins and descriptions in Roman literature.
Medieval rulers and artisans involved in planning cities drew on a variety of texts, including the treatise on architecture by the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius (first century B.C.E.), but they did not write systematically on the subject. This task was taken up in the fifteenth century by Italian authors, who, reinterpreting Vitruvius, addressed urban design within comprehensive treatises on architecture. Influential in this respect were Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino, c. 1400–c.1469), and Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1502). They posited ideal cities shaped by theories of fortification, social order, and geometry. In their view, urban design was to follow the same compositional principles of hierarchy, symmetry, and regularity that governed architecture. Diagrammatically, the ideal city was contained within walls forming a regular polygon. The street pattern was regular and could be a grid or a radial system. A public square with buildings housing secular and religious authority occupied the center. For over two hundred years, this model served for the planning of military garrison towns such as Palmanova, Italy (1593), and Neuf-Brisach, France (1698). In a few instances, such as Charleville (1608) in France and Zamość (c. 1579) in Poland, local princes adopted the model as an expression of prestige and cultural attainment.
The theoretical treatment of city planning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries generally followed themes established earlier, but thinking about planning was hardly stagnant. Developments can be seen best in building regulations. Among the more notable legislative achievements were the Spanish Laws of the Indies, promulgated in 1573, which included many provisions addressing city planning in the New World; the Rebuilding Acts of 1667 and 1670 for the reconstruction of London after the Great Fire (1666); and the regulations governing the construction of St. Petersburg, issued from 1714 to 1737. The London ordinances, for example, addressed building materials and construction techniques, street widths, and standardized house types.
Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century, several new attitudes transformed city planning theory. Military engineering was increasingly regarded as a discrete profession, and the links between fortifications and urban design loosened. Authors such as the French architect Pierre Patte (1723–1814) promoted the creation of master plans that addressed traffic circulation, sewage, and street lighting among other functional and aesthetic concerns. In some settings, questions regarding city planning became matters of public debate. In Paris in 1748, the decision to create a square honoring Louis XV (now the Place de la Concorde) prompted an informal competition attracting amateurs as well as professionals. Other indications of increased public interest are books and pamphlets advocating the adoption of specific plans, such as John Gwynn's (1713–1786) proposal for London, published in 1766.
Urban populations increased significantly in early modern Europe, but most of the growth was in existing cities. New cities were founded as instruments of specific state policies. In addition to garrison cities, specialized types included seaports (Livorno, Italy, 1576), cities supporting princely palaces (Versailles, France, 1660s–1680s), and manufacturing centers (Perm, Russia, 1723). In the second half of the eighteenth century, some designers, among them the French architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), regarded such foundations as opportunities for social as well as physical planning. New cities typically were modest in scope. An exception was St. Petersburg (fortress begun 1703), which Peter the Great (ruled 1682–1725) envisioned as a full-fledged capital rivaling Amsterdam, London, and Paris.
City planning throughout early modern Europe primarily addressed the extension, redevelopment, and reconstruction of existing cities. The primary compositional elements of urban design were gridiron and radial street patterns, public squares, and broad, straight streets aligned with architectural monuments and framed, ideally, by buildings with uniform facades. These elements were refined in Italy during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, noted by travelers, and depicted in engravings and paintings. In Rome, influential examples included the improved streets linking major Christian monuments and the public squares designed by Michelangelo on the Capitoline Hill (begun 1538) and Gian Lorenzo Bernini at St. Peter's (1656). Among other celebrated works were Piazza San Marco in Venice (improvements begun 1537) and the extensions of Turin realized throughout the seventeenth century.
The crowded centers of medieval cities were enticing targets for redevelopment, but the high cost of land acquisition limited the scale of most projects. Disasters offered extraordinary opportunities for transformation, as was the case in Lisbon following the earthquake of 1755. In many instances, however, major changes to the street plan could not be implemented. Ambitious new plans by Christopher Wren (1632–1723) and others for London after the Great Fire were put aside in order to simplify reconstruction. Extensions offered the most frequent opportunity for planning. Their scope varied from piecemeal additions (eighteenth-century Berlin) to single plans more than doubling a city's land area (Nancy, France, 1588), and various combinations of speculative and governmental interests drove them. Among the most spectacular examples are the extensions to London and Bath, England, realized by developers throughout the eighteenth century. A distinctive feature of their work was the use of squares, often containing a private park, framed by row houses embellished to a greater or lesser extent by classical details in accordance with the wealth of the intended occupants.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building in Ten Books. Translated by Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor. Cambridge, Mass., 1988. Translation of De Re Aedificatoria, c. 1450.
Filarete (Antonio di Pietro Averlino). Treatise on Architecture. Translated by John R. Spencer. 2 vols. New Haven, 1965. Original, untitled manuscript dates from c. 1461.
Gwynn, John. London and Westminster Improved. Farnborough, U.K., 1969. Originally published in 1766.
Martini, Francesco di Giorgio. Trattato di architettura, ingegneria ed arte militare. Edited by Corrado Maltese. 2 vols. Milan, 1967. Original manuscripts date from 1475–1476 and c. 1482–1492.
Patte, Pierre. Mémoires sur les objets les plus importants de l'architecture. Paris, 1769.
——. Monuments érigés en France à la gloire de Louis XV. Paris, 1765.
Vitruvius Pollio. Vitruvius: Ten Books on Architecture. Translated and edited by Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1999. Translation of De architectura.
Secondary Sources
Girouard, Mark. Cities and People: A Social and Architectural History. New Haven, 1985.
Harouel, Jean-Louis. L'embellissement des villes: L'urbanisme français au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, 1993.
Hohenberg, Paul M., and Lynn Hollen Lees. The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950. Cambridge, Mass., 1985.
Kostof, Spiro. The City Assembled: The Elements of Urban Form through History. London, 1992.
——. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings through History. London, 1991.
Morris, A. E. J. History of Urban Form: Before the Industrial Revolutions. 2nd ed. New York, 1994.
—RICHARD CLEARY
Urban, city, or town planning is the discipline of land use planning which explores several aspects of the built and social environments of municipalities and communities. Other professions deal in more detail with a smaller scale of development, namely architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. Regional planning deals with a still larger environment, at a less detailed level.
Another key role of urban planning is urban renewal, and re-generation of inner cities by adapting urban planning methods to existing cities suffering from long-term infrastructural decay.[1]
Urban planning as an organized profession has existed for less than a century, however most settlements and cities have displayed various degrees of forethought and conscious design in their layout and functioning.
As agriculture replaced a nomadic existence, permanent human settlements, and larger settlements began to appear. These early cities became centres for trade, defense, and politics and as centers for distributing the agricultural surplus a settled farming society produces.
Cities laid out with forethought and design permeate antiquity. Perhaps the earliest of
these were those of the ancient Mesopotamian and Harrapan
Ur located near the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in modern day Iraq and some ancient cities of the Indus Valley in modern day India are perhaps the earliest examples of deliberately planned and managed cities in history. The streets of these early cities were often paved and laid out at right angles in a grid pattern. There was also with a hierarchy of streets (commercial boulevards to small residential alleyways). In Harrapan settlements, archaeological evidence suggests the houses were laid out to protect from noise, odors, and thieves, and had their own wells, and sanitation. Ancient cities often had drainage, large granaries, and well-developed urban sanitation[2]
The Greek Hippodamus (c. 407 BC) is widely considered the father of city planning in the West, for his design of Miletus; Alexander commissioned him to lay out Alexandria, the grandest example of idealized urban planning of the Mediterranean world, where regularity was aided in large part by its level site near a mouth of the Nile.
The ancient Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for military defense and civil convenience. The basic plan is a central plaza with city services, surrounded by a compact rectilinear grid of streets and wrapped in a wall for defense. To reduce travel times, two diagonal streets cross the square grid corner-to-corner, passing through the central square. A river usually flows through the city, to provide water and transport, and carry away sewage, even in sieges.[citation needed] Effectively, many European towns still preserve the essence of these schemes, as in Turin.
The idea of rational planning collapsed with the idea of the res publica in the European Early Middle Ages. Round a fortress or fortified abbey or next to a Roman nucleus — sometimes itself abandoned— urban growth occurred "like the annular rings of a tree"[3] whether in an extended village or the center of a larger city. Since the new center was often on high, defensible ground, the city plan took on an organic character, following the irregularities of elevation contours like the shapes that result from agricultural terracing.
The ideal city resurfaced in the Early Renaissance in Florence, where the star-shaped city plan was adapted from the new cannon-resistant star fort. The star-shaped fortification had a formative influence on the patterning of Renaissance urban planning: "The Renaissance was hypnotized by one city type which for a century and a half— from Filarete to Scamozzi— was impressed upon utopian schemes: this is the star-shaped city"[4] Radial streets extend outward from a defined center of military, communal or spiritual power. Only in ideal cities did a centrally-planned structure stand at the heart, as in Raphael's Sposalizio of 1504 (illustration); as built, the unique example of a rationally-planned quattrocento new city center, that of Vigevano, 1493-95, resembles a closed space instead, surrounded by arcading. Filarete's ideal city, building on hints in Leone Battista Alberti's De re aedificatoria, was named "Sforzinda" in compliment to his patron; its twelve-pointed shape, circumscribable by a "perfect" Pythagorean figure, the circle, takes no heed of its undulating terrain in Filarete's manuscript.[5]
The true heirs of Greek rational planning were the Muslims, who are thought to have originated the idea of formal zoning (see haram and hima and the more general notion of khalifa, or "stewardship" from which they arise),[citation needed] although modern usage in the West largely dates from the ideas of the Congrès Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.
Many cities in Central American civilizations also engineered urban planning in their cities including sewage systems and running water. Mexico-Tenochtitlan, was the capital of the Aztec empire, built on an island in Lake Texcoco in what is now the Federal District in central Mexico. At its height, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world, with close to 250,000 inhabitants.[citation needed]
In developed countries (Western Europe, North America, Japan and Australasia) during the last two centuries, planning and architecture can be said to have gone through various stages of general consensus. Firstly there was the industrialised city of the 19th century, where control of building was largely held by businesses and the wealthy elite. Around the turn of the 20th century there began to be a movement for providing people, and factory workers in particular, with healthier environments. The concept of garden cities arose and some model towns were built, such as Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City the world's first garden cities, in Hertfordshire, UK. However, these were principally small scale in size, typically dealing with only a few thousand residents.[6]
It wasn't until the 1920s when modernism began to surface. Based on the ideas of Le Corbusier and utilising new skyscraper building techniques, the modernist city stood for the elimination of disorder, congestion and the small scale, replacing them instead with preplanned and widely spaced freeways and tower blocks set within gardens. There were plans for large scale rebuilding of cities, such as the Plan Voisin (based on Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine), which proposed clearing and rebuilding most of central Paris. No large scale plans were implemented until after World War II however. Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, housing shortages caused by war destructions led many cities around the world to build substantial amounts of government housing. Planners at the time used the opportunity to implement the modernist ideal of towers surrounded by gardens. The most prominent example of an entire modernist city is Brasilia, constructed between 1956 and 1960 in Brazil.
By the late 1960s and early 1970s, many planners were coming to realise that the imposition of modernist clean lines and a lack of human scale also tended to sap vitality from the community. This was expressed in high crime and social problems within these planned neighbourhoods. [7] Modernism can be said to have ended in the 1970s when the construction of the cheap, uniform tower blocks ended in many countries, such as Britain and France. Since then many have been demolished and in their way more conventional housing has been built. Rather than attempting to eliminate all disorder, planning now concentrates on individualism and diversity in society and the economy. This is the post-modernist era.[8]
Minimally-planned cities still exist. Houston is an example of a large city (with a metropolitan population of 5.5 million) in a developed country, without a comprehensive zoning ordinance. Houston does, however, have many of the land use restrictions covered by traditional zoning regulations, such as restrictions on development density and parking requirements, even though specific land uses are not regulated. Moreover, private-sector developers have used subdivision covenants and deed restrictions effectively to create the same kinds of land use restrictions found in most municipal zoning laws. Houston voters have rejected proposals for a comprehensive zoning ordinance three times since 1948. Even without zoning in its traditional sense, metropolitan Houston displays similar land use patterns at the macro scale to regions comparable in age and population that do have zoning, such as Dallas. This suggests that factors outside the regulatory environment, such as the provision of urban infrastructure and methods of financing development, may play a greater role in the way American cities are developed than does zoning.
Sustainable development has become some sort of a 'buzz-word' in the planning industry, with the recognition that present ways of consumption and living have led to problems like the overuse of natural resources, ecosystem destruction, pollution, growing inequality in cities, the degradation of human living conditions and human-induced climate change. Planners have, as a result, taken to advocating for the development of sustainable cities.[9]
However, the notion of sustainable development can be considered as rather recent and evolving, with many questions surrounding this concept.[10] That said, it is often not difficult to recognise what are 'unsustainable' forms of lifestyles, and urban planning is recognised to play a crucial position in the development of sustainable cities.
Stephen Wheeler, in his 1998 article, suggests a definition for sustainable urban development to be as "development that improves the long-term social and ecological health of cities and towns."[11]He goes on to suggest a framework that might help all to better understand what a 'sustainable' city might look like. These include compact, efficient land use; less automobile use yet with better access; efficient resource use, less pollution and waste; the restoration of natural systems; good housing and living environments; a healthy social ecology; sustainable economics; community participation and involvement; and preservation of local culture and wisdom.[12]
The difficult challenge facing planners comes with the implementation of sustainability visions, policy and programmes, and in the midst of doing so, the need to modify institutions to achieve these goals. This is still being worked out by urban planners.
In developed countries there has been a backlash against excessive man-made clutter in the environment, such as signposts, signs, and hoardings.[13] Other issues that generate strong debate amongst urban designers are tensions between peripheral growth, increased housing density and planned new settlements. There are also unending debates about the benefits of mixing tenures and land uses, versus the benefits of distinguishing geographic zones where different uses predominate.[14]
Successful urban planning considers character, of "home" and "sense of place", local identity, respect for natural, artistic and historic heritage, an understanding of the "urban grain" or "townscape," pedestrians and other modes of traffic, utilities and natural hazards, such as flood zones.
Some argue that the medieval piazza and arcade are the most widely appreciated elements of successful urban design, as demonstrated by the Italian cities of Siena and Bologna[citation needed].
While it is rare that cities are planned from scratch, planners are important in managing the growth of cities, applying tools like zoning to manage the uses of land, and growth management to manage the pace of development. When examined historically, many of the cities now thought to be most beautiful are the result of dense, long lasting systems of prohibitions and guidance about building sizes, uses and features. These allowed substantial freedoms, yet enforce styles, safety, and often materials in practical ways. Many conventional planning techniques are being repackaged using the contemporary term, smart growth.
There are some cities that have been planned from conception, and while the results often don't turn out quite as planned, evidence of the initial plan often remains. (See List of planned cities)
Historically within the Middle East, Europe and the rest of the Old World settlements were located on higher ground (for defense) and close to fresh water sources[citation needed]. Cities have often grown onto coastal and flood plains at risk of floods and storm surges. Urban planners must consider these threats. If the dangers can be localised then the affected regions can be made into parkland or Greenbelt, often with the added benefit of open space provision.
Extreme weather, flood, or other emergencies can often be greatly mitigated with secure emergency evacuation routes and emergency operations centres. These are relatively inexpensive and unintrusive, and many consider them a reasonable precaution for any urban space. Many cities will also have planned, built safety features, such as levees, retaining walls, and shelters.
In recent years, practitioners have also been expected to maximize the accessibility of an area to people with different abilities, practicing the notion of "inclusive design," to anticipate criminal behaviour and consequently to "design-out crime" and to consider "traffic calming" or "pedestrianisation" as ways of making urban life more pleasant.
City planning tries to control criminality with structures designed from theories such as socio-architecture or environmental determinism. These theories say that an urban environment can influence individuals' obedience to social rules. The theories often say that psychological pressure develops in more densely developed, unadorned areas. This stress causes some crimes and some use of illegal drugs. The antidote is usually more individual space and better, more beautiful design in place of functionalism.
Oscar Newman’s defensible space theory cites the modernist housing projects of the 1960s as an example of environmental determinism, where large blocks of flats are surrounded by shared and disassociated public areas, which are hard for residents to identify with. As those on lower incomes cannot hire others to maintain public space such as security guards or grounds keepers, and because no individual feels personally responsible, there was a general deterioration of public space leading to a sense of alienation and social disorder Source
Jane Jacobs is another notable environmental determinist and is associated with the "eyes on the street" concept. By improving ‘natural surveillance’ of shared land and facilities of nearby residents by literally increasing the number of people who can see it, and increasing the familiarity of residents, as a collective, residents can more easily detect undesirable or criminal behaviour.
The "broken-windows" theory argues that small indicators of neglect, such as broken windows and unkempt lawns, promote a feeling that an area is in a state of decay. Anticipating decay, people likewise fail to maintain their own properties. The theory suggests that abandonment causes crime, rather than crime causing abandonment[citation needed].
Some planning methods might help an elite group to control ordinary citizens. Haussmann's renovation of Paris created a system of wide boulevards which prevented the construction of barricades in the streets and eased the movement of military troops. In Rome, the Fascists in the 1930s created ex novo many new suburbs in order to concentrate criminals and poorer classes away from the elegant town.
Other social theories point out that in Britain and most countries since the 18th century, the transformation of societies from rural agriculture to industry caused a difficult adaptation to urban living. These theories emphasize that many planning policies ignore personal tensions, forcing individuals to live in a condition of perpetual extraneity to their cities. Many people therefore lack the comfort of feeling "at home" when at home. Often these theorists seek a reconsideration of commonly used "standards" that rationalize the outcomes of a free (relatively unregulated) market.
The rapid urbanization of the last century has resulted in a significant amount of slum habitation in the major cities of the world, particularly in the Third World. There is significant demand for planning resources and strategies to address the issues that arise from slum development, and many planning theorists and practitioners are calling for increased attention and resources in this area, particularly the Commonwealth Association of Planners.[15] When urban planners give their attention to slums, one also have to pay attention to the racial make - up of that area to ensure that racial steering does not occur.
The issue of slum habitation has often been resolved via a simple policy of clearance, however more creative solutions are
beginning to emerge such as Nairobi's "Camp of Fire"
program, where established slum-dwellers have promised to build proper houses, schools, and community centers without any
government money, in return for land they have been illegally squatting on for 30 years. The "Camp of Fire" program is one of
many similar projects initiated by Slum Dwellers International, which has
programs in Africa, Asia, and South
America.[16]
Areas devastated by war or invasion represent a unique challenge to urban planners: the area of development is not one for simple modification, nor is it a "blank slate". Buildings, roads, services and basic infrastructure like power, water and sewerage are often severely compromised and need to be evaluated to determine what, if anything, can be salvaged for re-incorporation. There is also the problem of population; more often than not, people are also still living in these areas, displaced but not removed, and their issues need to be addressed. Historic areas and religious or social centers also need to be preserved and re-integrated into the new city plan. A prime example of this is the capital city of Kabul, Afghanistan, which after decades of civil war and occupation has regions that have literally been reduced to rubble. Despite this, the indigenous population continues to live in the area, constructing makeshift homes and shops out of whatever can be salvaged. Any reconstruction plan proposed, such as Hisham Ashkouri's City of Light Development, needs to be sensitive to the needs of this community and its existing culture, businesses and needs.
Urban Reconstruction Development plans must also work with government agencies as well as private interests to develop workable designs.
There is a direct, well-researched connection between the density of an urban environment, and the need to travel within it [citation needed]. Good quality transport is often followed by development. Development beyond a certain density can quickly overcrowd transport[citation needed].
Good planning attempts to place higher densities of jobs or residents near high-volume transportation. For example, some cities permit commerce and multi-story apartment buildings only within one block of train stations and four-lane boulevards, and accept single-family dwellings and parks further away[citation needed].
Densities can be measured in several ways[citation needed]. A common method, used is the Floor area ratio, using the floor area of buildings divided by the land area. Ratios below 1.5 could be considered low density, and plot ratios above five very high density. Most exurbs are below two, while most city centres are well above five. Walk-up apartments with basement garages can easily achieve a density of three. Skyscrapers easily achieve densities of thirty or more.
City authorities may try to encourage lower densities to reduce infrastructure costs, though some observers note that low densities may not accommodate enough population to provide adequate demand or funding for that infrastructure. In the UK, recent years have seen a concerted effort to increase the density of residential development in order to better achieve sustainable
