The earliest cities trace back to around 4500 years ago in Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), and grew in an organic manner. Later civilisations such as the Greeks and Romans centred their towns around focal points of government, worship, culture and commerce and residences sprawled organically from these points. Other ancient cities, such as Priene (pictured below) in Asia Minor (modern day Turkey), were planned in order to make best use of a specific site such as a hillltop.
Unlike Rome itself, many cities and towns of the Roman Empire were planned, but mainly as military camps. They featured a grid with a forum at the centre, and baths, basilicas, amphitheatres and markets.
Ancient Athens and Rome have inspired waves of ‘classical revival’:
- the Renaissance (15th century)
- the Baroque style (17th century)
- the Georgian style (18th century)
- the City Beautiful movement (19th and 20th centuries)
Much civic architecture in the Western world is in the classical style. The National Library of Australia (pictured below) is a modern interpretation of the Parthenon in Athens.
An event rather than a city plan helped give rise to the City Beautiful movement. Architect Daniel Burnham led a team of leading American designers, including Frederick Law Olmsted, to create the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The temporary buildings and monuments of the ‘White City’ were constructed in neo-classical style, and flanked water features and other grand public spaces. Daniel Burnham was involved in designing major redevelopment schemes for the revision of L'Enfants plan of Washington DC in 1902, as well as Chicago in 1909. Both of which were exercises portrayed the principles of the City Beautiful while providing efficiency at a metropolitan scale.
The Garden City movement was largely brought about through Ebenezer Howard's proposal for a new form of community with all the advantages but none of the disadvantages of town and country which were becoming evident in industrialised England. This is famously illustrated by the 3 magnet diagram in his only publication, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform, in 1898, which was reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow in 1902. He also developed plans for 'slumless, smokeless cities' and the provision of 'green belts'.
These latter principles were of particular influence on Burley Griffin's planning of Canberra as Australia's 'ideal' capital city.
Meanwhile, well established Western cities such as New York were experiencing significant population growth in population density largely in part to technological advancements like the introduction of steel frame construction and the elevator. This afforded the construction of high rises as we know them today and the subsequent densification of the metropolis's in which they were built. This coincided with the domination of the automobile on city planning, which led many architects to devise radical solutions to the fast changing shape and infrastructural demands of urban environments.
The image below depicts the "Cosmopolis of the Future" as envisioned in 1908 in response to the trend towards densification and connectivity already being felt . Published by Moses King, rendered by Harry M. Petit.
In 1923, prominent thinker on New York architecture Harvey Wiley Corbett proposes a scheme for elevated and arcaded walkways which free up the ground plane for services and vehicular transport between high rises. Pictured below are visions of such a metamorphosis: (Koolhaas, Rem. Delirious New York. 1994. The Monacelli Press: New York.)
In 1935, Le Corbusier combined the efficiency of the high rise typology with the philosophy of the garden city movement in La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City). Despite receiving criticism by contemporary critics for their inherent segregation and sterility, the plans are a significant contribution of the Modernist movement and went on to influence planned cities such as Brasilia, Brazil, in the 1960's.
As Brasilia was being constructed in the 1960's, a new generation of architects were tackling the issues of city planning and developing radical new solutions to how cities might function, and thus, the way people would live their lives in a rapidly advancing society. These include the Metabolists, Archigram and Superstudio, who questioned the possibility of cities which occupied the sky, the sea, virtual space, as well as the limits of mobility and flexibility.
The Metabolist movement consisted of a number of extremely creative Japanese architects who took inspiration from the leading biological research of the time, often referencing genealogy, cellular and skeletal structures. Pictured below is a model view of a 'City in the Air' by Arata Isozaki (1961), and a plan and perspective view of Noriaki Kurokawa's Kasumiguara project (1965). Both projects exhibit the movement's iconic use of construction scales which provide flexibility by attaching pre-fabricated modules to infrastructural cores.
Kawazoe wrote that:
The dwelling of the future will be reduced to "parts" and attached on to the "city structural unit", but these factory-produced parts will be capable of endless combinations and change by means of standardized systems and joints." (Lin, Zhongjie. 2010. Kenzo Tange and the Metabolist Movement. Routledge: New york.)
Meanwhile, in 1960s England, an avant-garde architectural group known as Archigram were formulating futuristic, technologically inspired, hypothetical designs for modern cities. Famous schemes produced in this era include Peter Cook's 'Walking City' and Ron Herron's 'Plug In City', which are pictured below respectively.
Superstudio, an Italian design group formed in 1966, proposed the concept of 'virtual spaces and cities' and 'continuous monuments' as a solution to globalisation:
Interestingly, the proposals of all three of these movements are typified by large scale infrastructure which facilitates flexibility as smaller scale modular structures can be rearranged to suit the fast changing needs of modern society and the cities they inhabit.
In recent years, several phenomena have contributed to new approaches towards city design:
- humans have officially reached the point where over 50% of people live in cities, making us a predominately urban species. This trend is particularly apparent in Australia
- access to finite food and energy resources (particularly fossil fuels) has become a matter of critical concern
- it is well documented that the pollution and destruction of the environment caused by our industrial and agricultural processes is having an undeniably detrimental effect on eco systems and is directly responsible for climate change
The effects that these factors have on the future of city design include:
- growth determined by carrying capacity (ability of a region to supply food and energy to its citizens in a sustainable fashion)
- utilisation of renewable energy sources
- urban / vertical farming and minimisation of travel distances for both people and services
- regulation of migration and population growth
These factors have led to a recent influx of schemes for 'sustainable cities', such as Masdar in the UAE, pictured below, which features all of the most cutting edge solar and wind energy harvesting technology.
The claim of the 'sustainability' of these cities is based on the premise of 'zero energy', or that the city will produce as much energy as it consumes over an annual period of operation.
This may be an improvement over cities which have preceded it, however, the capacity for these cities to adapt to the changing needs of their citizens and the uses of the regions where they are located makes their long term sustainability questionable. Are these rigid, technology based plans doomed to the same fate as the Le Corbusier's Modernist vision of a city as a machine?
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