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City Planning -- Home
Current Town Planning *Celebration Critique *The New Cultural Urbanism *Criteria: The Living City Project C: Coventry Park Project D: Alysseum
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 The Modern City is zoned based on building types and function. Architectural design is not regulated and jarring juxtapositions may arise. Automobile transport is often the only option for travel between house and work. Each sector tends towards monumental showmanship. Speculative cost of land creates the need for high rise construction in city cores with few amenities given over to the public. See commentary here on planner Doxiadis' Ekistics, Modern planning program. |
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Modern technology and materials, maximized to yield greatest efficiency and lowest cost, results in a scale-less landscape. The absence of Old World crafts and masonry, metal, and wood details leaves a cold imprint on the Modern City. The green areas are left over right of way that seldom works best for the citizen who often cannot walk to these 'amenities'. The International Style was imprinted on massive city building projects throughout the developing world, usually resulting in alienation of the indigenous population. | ||
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A city with a signature building which acts as a foil to the "old" can be
a welcome addition, but when these amorphous giants are placed row after
row, the result is a Bizarro World -- completely alienating the
citizen/pedestrian. |
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The worst eyesore on the environment is commercial sprawl, which connects the subdivision expansions from one city to the next in relatively dense urban areas. This is a direct consequence of our car culture and reliance on cheap energy which allows low density planning. (See NU/sprawl commentary by David Kolb.) Futuristic vision in Sant'Elia's La Citta Nuova, right |
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Centralization, whether expressed as
the city, the factory, the school or the farm, now has the enormous power
of the machine-age setting dead against it. It is in the nature of
universal or ubiquitous mobilization that the city spreads out far away
and thin. It is in the nature of flying that the city disappears. It is in
the nature of universal electrification that the city is nowhere or it is
everywhere." Frank Lloyd Wright Broadacre City (right) was Wright's Utopia based on the idea that U.S. citizens deserved at least one acre of land for their homestead, all to be connected by auto transport and personal helicopters. The romantic notion of the endless west, bountiful land and resources supported this idea and we are now not too far from it, although the reality is that we build on less than 8% of available land mass in this country. |
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