The Early Years of Planning

 The Reading: Modernism and Early Urban Planning – Richard LeGates and Frederic Stout

 Just a heads up, I got a bit carried away so it's kind of long this week. I will try and be good next week haha.

So this week’s reading gave an introduction of the early movements of organised urban planning. Unsurprisingly, the need for planning grew out of the rapid urbanisation resulting from the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, more people lived in urban places than in rural areas and cities were soon overcrowded, leading to widespread poverty, crime and poor health. In this sense, urban planning can be seen to have spawned from a social policy to address the poor living standards or urban populations.

The Parks Movement was a response to the crisis of industrial urbanism. The establishments of places like Victoria Park in London and Central Park in New York City provided much needed relief from the dense urbanisation. I think Canberrans can often take open space for granted due to our low density city. But for other people parks provide a refuge, and this was the intention of the Park Movement. Having lived overseas, I understand and appreciate the ability to go to a large green-space in the middle of a city. I think this is why large city parks in Europe and America especially are so highly valued, but also why Canberra green-space seems under-developed and at some times wasteful. When a resource such as a park is limited, people will work hard to preserve it.

This ties in well with the Garden City and City Beautiful movements. In extreme cases, they can be viewed as utopian ideals that rejected the modernisation the built environment. I think this is why the Garden City movement didn’t really take off, especially when you look at Ebenezer Howard’s original vision of publicly owned land and housing co-operatives. A middle class was starting to emerge and people were beginning to find it more affordable to own their own homes. They didn’t want to give this up for the sake of a planning experiment.

The Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne (left) and Thomas Moran's painting of the World's Columbia Exposition (right)

  

The City Beautiful movement, however, attempted a more holistic approach to urban planning. It represented a marriage of artistic principles and spatial analysis to achieve a synthesised approach to planning that both functional and beautiful. The crowning glory of this movement was the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World Fair) of 1893. Despite the massive construction works, only two of the two hundred buildings remain, albeit the most grandiose structures from the Fair. It is interesting to note that Chicago is also the birth of the skyscraper, with the ten storeys high Home Insurance Building constructed in 1885. Planners followed with the Chicago Plan in 1909 which was the first metropolitan plan of the 20^th Century. It is important to note that Walter Burley Griffin was from Chicago, and his original plans for Canberra are far more representative of the Columbian Exposition than the Canberra we have today. The influence was seen in the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880, with similarities between the Royal Exhibition Building and the Palace of Fine Arts in Chicago, built thirteen years later.

Contrasting designs for Paris: Le Corbusier's proposal (left) and Haussmann's celebrated renovation (right)

The influence of modernism and minimalism were brought together through Progressivism and the City Efficient movement. The influence of science and rationalism was clear, which links to last week’s reading and the notion of science above art in the early 20^th Century. This links with La Corbusier and the International Style which reflected sleek, dominating structures. Thank god Paris didn’t adopt Le Corbusier’s plans to demolish the centre of Paris north of the Seine and replace is with bleak offices and apartments that went against all the organic principles of Haussmann’s mid 19^th Century renovation. It seems physical determinism represents the ego far more than is represents society. I think planners have now realised that the city can be a well functioning machine without a rigid structure and lack of aesthetics.