Search Results

This chapter focuses on Clarence Samuel Stein's postwar concept of the Regional City as well as the maturation of his town planning ideas. Stein and his colleagues began to regularly use the term Regional City in 1927. Their early conception envisioned an amalgam of the romanticized medieval village with connections to the land combined with all the conveniences offered through new technologies to enhance modern lifestyles in distinctive, relatively small towns. Stein, together with MacKaye and Mumford, advocated for regional, even national, planning based on the ideas the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) had already promoted, including regional river basin planning, the townless highways, and state planning. This chapter considers Stein's postwar advocacy of communitarian regionalism and the rebirth of the RPAA as the Regional Development Council of America (RDCA). It also examines how Stein applied his collaborative regionalist and town planning ideals in a concrete project at Kitimat in Canada.

This chapter consists of three sections. The first considers feelings of alienation in modern cities and contrasts this with ancient approaches to home and city. Detailed consideration is given to attitudes in ancient Rome, and the history of religious influences on town planning over the centuries is also explored. The second section then looks at the question of symbolic geography, and in particular the medieval practice of placing Jerusalem at the centre of maps (never understood literally). The final section discusses pilgrimage, noting how even those religions initially hostile nonetheless eventually succumb (e.g. Buddhism, Sikhism). Two aspects are explored in some detail: the contrasting use of the maze or labyrinth to expound the nature and meaning of the journey; and some unusual features of pilgrimage in medieval Rome.

This chapter considers Clarence Samuel Stein's legacy as a community architect, along with his postwar engagement in international initiatives in town planning. In the years after World War II, Stein found himself turning his attention toward international translations of his new town ideas. Communications with international architects, housers, and planners characterized this period, with a focus on specific projects, such as the new towns of Chandigarh in India and Stevenage in Great Britain, and broader community building concepts with housing and planning experts in places as diverse as Sweden and Israel. This chapter discusses Stein's travels in Europe to new towns as he completed documentation of his own visionary work in what would become Toward New Towns for America. It also describes Stein's involvement in town building projects in India and Israel and concludes with an assessment of his legacy in the areas of investment housing and communitarian regionalism and the influence of his community building concepts ranging from the Regional City to the Radburn Idea.

Coexisting with the laissez-faire discourse described in chapter two, British accounts of Hong Kong—including official ones—also emphasized modernization. Above all, this meant containing the disorder of the overcrowded areas, and filling in the “empty” rural areas of the New Territories. Such discourse often juxtaposed modernity with Chineseness, implying not only that the British were the effective agents of modernity, but that it was an inherently non-indigenous import. To an extent, the tropes of order and modernization contradicted the idea of a free-wheeling capitalist economy, because it cited deliberate planning. Yet because such top-down planning focused on infrastructure projects and public housing that would facilitate cheap labour, it can be seen as a complementary pro-business discourse. The British discursive imposition of order and modernization was displayed, above all, in zoning regulations, in the development of public housing (accelerating after a massive 1953 fire at Shek Kip Mei), in the creation of planned New Towns such as Tsuen Wan, Tuen Mun, and Sha Tin, and in major infrastructure projects including the Plover Cove reservoir and the Chek Lap Kok airport.

In popular perception, Dundee is far more likely to be associated with jute, jam, and journalism than with the graciousness of early nineteenth-century neo-classical town planning. It never built a new town, and the myth grew that it had never been the kind of town that aspired to civic embellishment of that kind, and could not have afforded it anyway. By examining the condition of pre-jute Dundee, this chapter demonstrates how Dundee could well have afforded to build a new town but deliberately chose not to, and why that might have occurred. The absence of a new town in Dundee can be attributed to the interaction of three factors: the fecklessness of landowners; the absence of a broader civic strategy that might have preserved the amenity of better-class suburbs; and the unwillingness of Dundee's shipmaster elite to patronise them. Thus, whereas the myth holds that Dundee did not build a new town since it was in a position of weakness during the relevant decades, its only actual weakness was civic.

This chapter focuses on Clarence Samuel Stein's contributions as a houser lending consistent support for a government role in order to more effectively engage the private sector while charting his transition to promoting investment housing as a preferable alternative to public housing. Stein and his colleagues enthusiastically welcomed the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt as an unprecedented opportunity to advance regionalism, new town planning, and worker housing. As a community architect, Stein favored a particular type of assisted housing—“investment housing”—a comprehensive design, development, and management approach to ensure the project's ongoing sustainability at affordable rates. This chapter first considers Stein's Hillside Homes project in New York before discussing the Resettlement Administration's Greenbelt Town program. It also examines Stein's role as consulting architect for the Baldwin Hills Village in Los Angeles.

This chapter discusses the decision of Friedrich I, the Duke of Württemberg, to establish a town for religious refugees at the extreme northern edge of the Black Forest, in 1598. He hoped to attract the beleaguered Protestants of Austria, where the Counter-Reformation was in full vigor. Other European princes had done the same from time to time since the beginning of the Reformation, but Friedrich was the first to make the city itself a physical emblem of a Protestant sanctuary. The result was the first formally planned city of refuge, which he named Freudenstadt, which literally means “city of joy.” As designer of Freudenstadt, Duke Friedrich appointed Heinrich Schickhardt (1558–1635), one of the most prolific and amiable architects of the German Renaissance.

This chapter explores Dundee's participation in the early town-planning movement and the ways in which, under its influence, several individuals began, from the turn of the twentieth century, to imagine a new and radically different future for Dundee. A key figure in the story which will unfold is engineer and architect James Thomson. Thomson's singular achievement was to absorb current thinking in the early twentieth century on town planning and seek to apply it to Dundee. Perhaps the best known of his work is the Logie Housing Scheme, which was the first in Scotland to be built with Treasury subsidy after the First World War. Yet it is the totality of Thomson's vision for the development of Dundee which stands out, and the extent to which it had already been worked out before the beginning of the war.

This chapter examines the suburbanization of the island of Salsette, most of which would later be annexed to form Greater Bombay. Town planning—as distinguished from urban planning—was the favored method in Salsette, and it followed a system of land-use conversion that allowed landowners to retain ownership of their lands. This form of suburbanization offers a look into the changing pattern of relationships between city authorities and suburban residents, on the one hand, and between municipal power and provincial/regional level power, on the other. While the island followed a largely different path from that of Dadar–Matunga in terms of suburbanization, the innovations introduced in the previous suburbs were also implemented in Salsette. This meant a similar focus on apartment building, as well as the social institutions that came with them.

Chapter 1 begins by narrating the history of the city from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. It then goes on to assesses the state’s vision for the city from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, to consider how ideology was made visible through bureaucratically imposed town plans. It explores how town planners attempted to mould an urban environment which was Christian, Gaelic, and market-led. However, even as these town plans were enacted, there was an absence of regulation concerning the city’s eighteenth-century central area. This was fundamental to the area becoming a site of conflicting views between the government, private finance, and civil society regarding its future

Urban population growth of the interwar triggered an expansion of the built environment of the city. Proliferation of regional rail transformed the economic geographies of urban space and the relationship between cities and their surrounding towns and villages. Depicted as the triumphant march of progress, accounts of urban expansionism echo narratives of Japanese colonialism: the juggernaut of urban modernity expanding inexorably outward, social Darwinism, and the inevitable decline of the countryside. In fact, the surrounding countryside did not disappear but was radically transformed into the hinterland of a regional urban center, a process that led to the rise of the suburb as a constitutive element in the socio-spatial form of the modern city.

This chapter examines the evidence on the actual practice of expropriation of land for the common good in western Europe and British North America between 1100 and 1800. Focusing on England, Italy, France, Germany (with Austria and the Netherlands), Spain, and the English colonies in America, it cites examples of expropriation, such as those made by the kings for land needed to build royal castles, for which landowners or laypeople were compensated. It also looks at the permanent and absolute confiscations of church property without exchange or compensation during the later Middle Ages, the expropriation of property for purposes of architecture and town planning, and seizure of land from Indians.

In southern California the authors present a case study revealing that community action is an extension of existing community processes and capacities. They are dealing with processes that have been implanted in order to generate acceptance of planning decisions and outcomes. What we see in California is a form of extended participatory democracy (which is heavily supported) rather than the communitarian planning outlined in the introductory chapter: essentially a form of community planning which is state sponsored in response to the ‘disconnect’ between the intervention and the heterogeneous needs of community groups.

This chapter focuses on Johann Georg Rapp, who persuaded nearly a thousand of his followers to leave Germany for America, where they would build three towns in the wilderness, and in the process renounce private property, personal ambition, and even sexual relations. These towns he named Harmony (1804), New Harmony (1814), and Economy (1824); all remain intact today to an unusual degree. They reveal Rapp's ever more imaginative use of architecture as an instrument of religious expression and of social cohesion. Rapp's towns are the most important and influential of all cities of refuge, which would not only shape other separatist societies but also—as later reformers looked more at the communism of the Harmonists than their architecture—a substantial portion of the world itself.

This chapter addresses recent critical accounts of urban planning in the historic space of the British empire and with a particular focus on indigenous representations of the ‘colonial city’, drawing on recent historiographical developments and approaches of Said, Foucault, and others. An overview of the development of the colonial city in history is also given. Insights into the relationship between architecture, planning, and society highlight the gross maldistribution of power and its impact on social and spatial inequalities. Empirically rich research reveals contributions of significant individuals in developing grid-iron and central square layouts of North American, Australasian, and African cities. Common to all schemes is racial segregation, rationalized on spurious grounds of public health.

This chapter discusses two approaches that have been successful in studying the mediaeval European townscape, town plan analysis and urban archaeology. These are appropriate for this study because Cusco has been occupied continually since its foundation and has been considerably altered as a result. Town plan analysis requires a sequence of urban plans and historical records over time to outline the changes to streets and plazas through encroachment and to street-blocks through property subdivision. Urban archaeology uses these results and specific methods to deal with the complex, highly disturbed stratigraphy so as to establish the occupational sequence for small areas of the town matrix. The ability to deal with assemblages of mixed deposits, as opposed to undisturbed layers in situ, is critical to resolving the nature of urban occupation, both on a small scale and across the city.