GEOG 346

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GEOG 346

• Week 4 The Origins of Modernist Planning and
  Growth Management

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Housekeeping Items

• As you started getting organized around the City
  of Nanaimo OCP/ RDN growth strategy project,
  please look at the additional presentation on the
  web on sustainability indicators for ideas. If
  you want me to put any of the reports alluded to
  on reserve, I will. We have someone coming on
  Wednesday to give us the rationale and outlines
  for the new OCP.
• On Wednesday, from noon to 1 there will also be a
  pizza and pop social next door to allow students
  and faculty members in Geography to get
  acquainted.

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Housekeeping Items

• Is there anybody who didn't get a sheet of tool
  instructions? Think about what and when you want
  to present.
• Before we get into the lecture material for
  today, we will review the group sketches of how
  Nanaimo could have been planned. Who wants to go
  first?

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City Beautiful and City Efficient

• The City Beautiful movement got its start when
  architects, Daniel Burnham and John Root, were
  involved in designing the 1893 World Exhibition
  in Chicago.
• Like Vancouvers Expo 86 or DisneyWorld, it was
  full of temporary buildings that simulated the
  temples, lagoons, and palaces of ancient Greece,
  Rome, and 17th century France. It was full of
  parks and boulevards. It was, in a word, grand.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient

• Many European cities already exhibited the same
  features sweeping tree-lined boulevards,
  monumental buildings, dignified and beautiful
  parks and gardens.
• Many Americans, after visiting the Expo, began to
  ask Why cant we have cities like that? Why do
  our cities have to be so ugly and drab?

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Burnham, and other like-minded architects, went
  on to design City Beautiful plans for Chicago,
  Calgary, Kitchener, Vancouver, and many other
  places, with a number of the plans being funded
  by business groups.
• The key values they were operating with in trying
  to manage the citys growth were symmetry,
  coherence, and monumentality.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Their influences went back to the way the ancient
  Greeks and Romans laid out their cities, to the
  Renaissance Italians, and to the kings of the
  Baroque era and beyond.
• This way of planning emphasized the public realm.
  The public realm consists of streets, parks (or
  other forms of open space, such as plazas), and
  public buildings. As with what are called urban
  designers today, the practitioners of City
  Beautiful were concerned with how these elements
  fit together with private buildings into a
  harmonious whole.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• In later years, architects would tend to focus on
  individual buildings, landscape architects on
  landscaping for individual sites, and planners on
  zoning. But, back then, the differences among
  architects, planners, and landscape architects
  had not yet become fixed. There was a lot of
  overlap.
• The City Beautiful folks saw buildings and
  components of the public realm (streets and open
  spaces) as defining each other. Each required the
  other. But too often today, we treat public space
  as space left over after planning or building.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• What are some major examples of the public
  realm in Nanaimo?
• In the past, a beautiful public realm had been
  used to promote the prestige of the king or
  emperor. However, people like Burnham saw it as a
  way of celebrating democracy, much as Frederick
  Law Olmsted had done in his work on parks. The
  public realm is where the public of all classes
  and backgrounds gathered to rub shoulders and to
  remind themselves that they were a part of a
  common civic community.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• This is a very geographical idea to have a
  public, you need to have public spaces and public
  events in those public spaces.
• They also emphasized that people need public
  buildings to help anchor their community spirit
  and to help foster civic pride. Are there such
  buildings in Nanaimo?

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• The most prominent City Beautiful plan was the
  one for the improvement of Washington, DC (1903)
  which reflected the influence of French design,
  with a prominent role being played by Frederick
  Law Olmsted Jr. and Sr.
• At the first city planning conference in the U.S.
  (1909), the City Beautiful movement was
  criticized for being overly concerned with
  aesthetics and grandeur, while paying
  insufficient attention to bread and butter
  issues like housing and health issues. It was
  also felt that planning needed to extend beyond
  the public realm to private land.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• While the City Beautiful idea continued to have
  some influence up through the end of the 1920s,
  gradually, the idea of City Efficient took its
  place, though the idea had been stirring for
  quite a while.
• The impetus for this came, in part, from a
  growing body of case law which upheld the right
  of municipalities to protect the public interest
  against nuisance and to exercise police
  powers to protect the public interest.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• This was partly motivated by NIMBY and a desire
  to protect property values, and partly because of
  the health and nuisance implications of
  incompatible land uses and the increasing height
  of buildings, with their effects on air, light,
  and safety.
• The elevator had been invented in 1853, and the
  first steel framed building was introduced in
  1885. By 1913, there were 50 buildings in
  Manhattan above 20 storeys. At the dawn of the
  20th century, health was a major issue vis-à-vis
  the built environment and it is becoming so again.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• The new innovations in construction also
  stimulated the growth of modernist architecture,
  as typified by Le Corbusier and the Bauhaus
  School.
• For the most part, these architects despised the
  traditional city and the ornamentation of
  traditional buildings. They wanted to create a
  new aesthetic suited to the Machine Age.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Rather than seeing buildings as needing to fit
  into their environment, they put a lot of stress
  on signature buildings that made a statement
  and stood out.
• Many of the buildings they created proved to be
  not pleasant to live in or work in and, at their
  worst, the unadorned slabs (such as bank
  buildings) that their work subsequently inspired
  are now considered by many to be blots on the
  urban landscape.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Attention began to shift away from the public
  realm in the prosperity years of the 20s, as
  consumerism started becoming a way of life.
  People became more concerned about privacy and
  domesticity.
• Also, there was the incredible rise to prominence
  of the automobile. While streetcar ridership
  peaked in 1923, by around that time there was
  also one car for every person in the U.S. (85 of
  all cars in the world were in the United States).

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• The trolley companies, if not publicly owned,
  were soon bought out by the automobile, oil, and
  tire companies who replaced them with buses
  and/or ran them into the ground. By the 1950s,
  most had ceased operation.
• Where streets had previously been seen as
  multi-functional, now planners like Le Corbusier
  and Robert Moses began to view streets solely as
  arteries for traffic. As Corbu declared,
  Crossroads are an enemy to traffic.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• The Automobile Revolution prompted designers to
  come up with new community designs for the
  automobile age. One such designer was Clarence
  Perry, who designed the new town of Radburn, New
  Jersey, which began construction in 1927.
• Radburn was organized around the neighbourhood
  unit, which in turn was centred on an elementary
  school and its catchment area.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• The houses were turned in on a greenway, so that
  children could walk to school in safety away from
  cars.
• Perry also pioneered the use of cul-de-sacs,
  feeder streets, and arterials, so as to minimize
  through traffic in residential areas. Though his
  intentions were good, his design ideas ultimately
  fed the suburban monster of subsequent decades.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Before we move off City Beautiful, how important
  are beauty/ aesthetics/ sense of place as a
  consideration in planning and urban growth
  management? Are these frills or core issues?
• What is beauty? what is ugliness? Do they matter
  and, if so, why?

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• As we begin to get into the emergence of modern
  urban planning, its important to remember that
  planning emerged because of market failure.
  The market had failed to develop healthy,
  orderly, efficient cities. One manifestation of
  that was the incredible speculation frenzy in the
  teens and twenties that led to the subdivision of
  many building lots before they were actually
  needed or in the wrong places. Planning was
  based on placing checks and balances on
  unrestrained property rights.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• For instance, at a time when there were only
  50,000 people living in Calgary, some 770,000
  lots had already been subdivided. This negatively
  affected municipalities in at least two ways.
• First, it created a pattern for future settlement
  which was not necessarily the most optimal or
  efficient for instance, in terms of road
  networks.
• And, second where new subdivisions were built
  on and occupied it meant having to extend
  municipal services to areas that were inefficient
  and costly to service. This is a problem that
  remains to this day.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Planning arose, in part, to reign in the chaos of
  the industrial and speculative city. It was
  premised on the belief that public institutions
  had a constructive role to play in safeguarding
  the public interest.
• While planners started out with, and maintained,
  many high ideals, they became increasingly
  pragmatic with the 1913 economic slump and the
  excessive subdivision and speculation of the
  1920s.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Planners began to sell themselves on the basis
  that they could provide for the more efficient
  and orderly development of communities, thus
  saving both municipalities and the business
  sector money.
• Disorderly urban growth could lead to a rise in
  taxes and a decline in property values, they
  argued. It could decrease the attractiveness of
  communities for investment.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• Poised between British and American influences,
  Canadian planning has been a bit of a hybrid,
  reflecting some of the idealism of the British
  planners and some of what evolved into the
  functionalism of the American.
• In the U.S., in the 20s and subsequent decades,
  the dominant ideology was that the role of
  planners was to facilitate urban development and
  growth and the efficient functioning of the urban
  system, and to encourage a booming business
  climate.

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City Beautiful and City Efficient(contd)

• This was the City Efficient movement.
• The ethos of this movement was well-expressed by
  a Canadian commentator in 1923, who wrote that
  good city planning is not primarily a matter
  of aesthetics, but of economics. Its basic
  principle is to increase the working efficiency
  of the city.

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Zoning

• Originating in Germany, the first zoning by-law
  in the U.S. was enacted in New York in 1916.
  There is some debate about the first regulations
  in Canada, but Toronto and Kitchener are cited as
  early examples.
• Zoning regulates the 1)uses of private land in
  zones, 2)the density of buildings per land unit
  (as measured in FSR floor space ratio), and
  3)the dimensions or massing of buildings. The
  main zoning classifications are residential,
  commercial, and industrial.

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Zoning

• Zoning can be cumulative or non-cumulative. In
  cumulative zoning, different land uses are
  allowed cumulatively in different zones except
  for single-family, whereas in non-cumulative, all
  land uses are mutually exclusive.
• Zoning is formalized in a zoning map and a zoning
  text. Non-conforming uses, variances, and by-law
  changes allow for flexibility.

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Modernist Planning

• Two key articles of faith of modernist planning
  were and are
• that the planner is a neutral, scientific
  ("objective") analyst of cities and land uses,
  and is in the best position to determine the
  public interest and the ways of meeting its
  objectives, and
• that we need to approach urban and regional
  development with a clean slate, that there's
  little we can learn from the past.

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Modernist Planning (contd)

• Four key principles of modernist thinking (in my
  view) are
• mechanism (thinking of cities as machines, and as
  principally existing to serve machines, i.e.
  cars)
• functionalism (belief in eliminating
  ornamentation from buildings and belief in the
  value of single-purpose districts)
• formalism (emphasis on the superficial 'order'
  and geometry to the detriment of diversity and
  vitality)
• economism (tendency to put economic objectives
  first, rather than balancing them against other
  social considerations, and favouring private
  solutions).

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Modernist Planning (contd)

• These beliefs were supplemented by elitism (the
  idea that people weren't knowledgeable enough to
  participate in the shaping of their own
  communities), as demonstrated in the words and
  deeds of people like Robert Moses and Le
  Corbusier.
• Le Corbusier was of the opinion that city
  planning was altogether too important to be left
  to the citizens. Robert Moses famously said
  that more houses in the waymore people in the
  way when you operate in an overbuilt metropolis,
  you have to hack your way with a meat axe.

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Correlation Between Modernist Thinking
andContemporary Planning Practice

• Characteristics of Modernist Thinking and
  Relation to 20th Century Planning Principles
• mechanism- reliance on automobiles to get around
  (Regarding mechanism, as Peter Newman and Jeff
  Kenworthy note, planning became a science of
  codes, plot ratios, setbacks, percentages of open
  space, standardized road patterns. In essence,
  the city became a machine best understood by
  specialized and credentialed experts.)

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Correlation Between Modernist Thinking
andContemporary Planning Practice (contd)

• functionalism- separation of the city and region
  into different functional zones that only perform
  one function (e.g. industrial districts,
  residential districts, commercial districts,
  etc.)
• formalism- tendency to ignore the public realm
  (emplacement of shining commercial or corporate
  office buildings, while ignoring the public
  spaces between and around them also a
  de-emphasis on civic symbolism and pagaentry)
• economism- low density sprawl (people wanting to
  retreat into private fortresses, and seeking
  fulfillment of their needs through the market)
  and high density CBDs, lacking in human scale,
  which reflect faith in the wisdom of the market.