GEOG 346

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GEOG 346

• Finishing Up Platt (The Utopian Roots of Planning)

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ANNOUNCEMENTS

• If anyone wants information on the PIBC job fair
  next Thursday night in Vancouver, let me know.
• SOLUTIONS is having its inaugural meeting of the
  semester at the totem pole on Wednesday at noon
  just up the slope from the Java Hut.
• I'm trying to get someone in from the City to
  talk about the new OCP. It's official it was
  adopted last week.

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Final Section of Platt Chapter

• Dont worry if you didnt get all of this its
  a lot of historical detail.
• As mentioned, the roots of current planning
  strategies lie in the strategies that were
  developed to deal with the crisis of the
  industrial city. These were regulation (now
  reflected in zoning), municipal rebuilding
  redevelopment, and relocation of workers and
  other residents to new planned communities.
• This section of the chapter focuses on the latter.

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Final Section of Platt Chapter

• It focuses on three key figures two British,
  and one American Robert Owen, George Pullman,
  and Ebenezer Howard. All three were environmental
  determinists, i.e. they believed that the
  physical environment was the key to transforming
  human character. They were influenced by attempts
  at creating spiritual utopias, primarily in the
  U.S.

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Final Section of Platt Chapter

• Both religious communities and the model
  communities sought by the individuals profiled in
  the chapter were characterized by centralized
  control over land use and development proximity
  of work and residence caps on population size a
  largely rural setting surrounded by open space
  and facilities and programs for social and moral
  betterment.

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Robert Owen

• Owen was an industrialist by marriage (1830s),
  who first managed and then came to own a textile
  business in New Lanark, Scotland employing over
  1100 workers, most of them children. He took
  immediate action to improve conditions for his
  workers. These included
• improving the housing, sanitation and streets

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Robert Owen

• improving the distribution of food and coal, and
• putting children in school until at least the age
  of 10, with a diverse and balanced curriculum.
• He also wanted to create a network of
  co-operative rural villages, and lost his fortune
  on a vast utopian experiment in the U.S. (New
  Harmony).

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New Lanark Today...
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George Pullman

• Pullman invented the railway sleeping car in
  1864, and his firm was the main manufacturer of
  such cars. In 1880 he bought a site outside
  Chicago for a new car plant. Because of its
  distance from Chicago, it made sense to build
  workers housing nearby.
• He felt that a better housed workforce would be
  more productive, so he undertook with the help
  of an architect to design a model community
  under the auspices of a holding company.

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George Pullman

• This community had low-density brick rowhouses of
  varying sizes with a diversity of rents, a proper
  sewage system, schools, a library, a theatre, and
  other amenities.
• As with the paternalistic Owen, alcohol was
  prohibited in the community.

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Pullman, Illinois Arcade Park
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Pullman, Illinois Pullman Factory
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George Pullman (contd)

• The community of 8000 attracted a lot of positive
  attention including at the Chicago Worlds Fair
  which also launched the City Beautiful
  movement. Unfortunately, Pullman was dead set
  against his workers unionizing, and tried to put
  through wage cuts and layoffs in 1894.

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George Pullman (contd)

• This led to a 3-month strike, and to the first
  use of U.S. federal troops in a labour dispute.
• The community began to decline shortly
  thereafter, and was eventually severed from his
  financial empire in 1904. Today, it is a
  desirable location for Chicago yuppies.

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Ebenezer Howard

• The last person profiled, and the man con-sidered
  one of the main founders of modern planning is
  Ebenezer Howard, founder of the garden city
  movement. Howard built on the ideas of these
  predecessors and others.
• In addition to the perceived unworkability of the
  old industrial city, new technologies were coming
  on the scene, such as gas lighting, electricity,
  motor cars, telephones, and eventually elevators
  and steel framing for skyscrapers that offered
  new possibilities.

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Ebenezer Howard

• This, combined with the optimism of the age and
  the new technical opportunities produced a group
  of planners, architects, and visionaries who
  wanted to start with a clean slate and build a
  new city.
• As with the earlier utopians, these people not
  only wanted to redesign the physical environment,
  they wanted to redesign the social environment
  each change would reflect the other. However,
  their visions would be quite different from one
  another.

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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• Howard, who had travelled to the U.S., was also
  influenced by Riverside (below), designed by
  Frederick Law Olmsted. When his book, To-Morrow
  A Peaceful Path to Reform (later republished as
  Garden Cities of To-morrow), was published in
  1898, he soon attracted a large number of
  followers.

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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• Two garden cities were built, though neither of
  them fully approached Howards vision. These were
  Letchworth (1904) and Welwyn (1919 see below).

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Letchworth Garden City today
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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• The garden city concept was influential in the
  U.S., where it was reflected in numerous attempts
  to create new towns (such as Radburn see
  below), especially during the Great Depression. A
  number of new towns were also built in Great
  Britain, Sweden, and elsewhere after World War
  II.

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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• In addition to being a main founder of modern
  urban and regional planning, Howard (1850-1928)
  can also be considered the father of urban growth
  management, with the garden city being the
  first systematic model offered for dealing with
  the chaotic growth of the industrial city and its
  impact on the region.
• Another founder was Scottish polymath, Patrick
  Geddes, who pioneered the use of the regional
  survey and who advocated constructive surgery
  in the case of run-down communities.

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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• In addition to being a main founder of modern
  urban and regional planning, Howard (1850-1928)
  can also be considered the father of urban growth
  management, with the garden city being the
  first systematic model offered for dealing with
  the chaotic growth of the industrial city and its
  impact on the region.
• Another founder was Scottish polymath, Patrick
  Geddes, who pioneered the use of the regional
  survey and who advocated constructive surgery
  in the case of run-down communities.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• Patrick Geddes, was a practicing planner in
  Scotland, Palestine, and India. He also wrote on
  and made contributions to biology, sociology and
  geography, and created exhibitions and museums of
  urban and regional planning, such as Edinburgh's
  Outlook Tower. He practiced a brand of planning
  that was far more holistic than is being done
  today 100 years later.
• Geddes believed planners should have a strong
  grounding in, and work with, the unique
  attributes of the places they were planning for,
  which came to be expressed in his motto, Survey
  Before Plan.
• He also was guided by the three S's Sympathy,
  Synthesis, and Synergy. Sympathy for the people
  and environment affected by any social remedy
  synthesis of all the factors relevant to the
  case and synergy the combined, co-operative
  action of everyone involved in order to achieve
  the best result.

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Folk-Work-Place and the Valley Section
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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• In addition to encouraging planners to walk the
  entirety of their regions, he advocated setting a
  context for planning through the use of regional
  surveys.
• As he wrote, As our surveys advance we become at
  home in our region, through-out its time and its
  space up to the present day. From thence, the
  past and the present cannot but open out into the
  possible. For our survey of things as they are
  that is, as they have become must ever suggest
  ideas as to their further becoming their
  further possibilities.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• 'Local character' is no mere accidental
  old-world quaintness, as its mimics think and
  say. It is attained only in the course of
  adequate grasp and treatment of the whole
  environment, and in active sympathy with the
  essential and characteristic life of the place
  encountered (p. 157).
• Each place has a true personality and with this
  shows some unique elements a personality too
  much asleep it may be, but which it is the task
  of the planner, as master-artist, to awaken. And
  he can only do this who is in love and at home
  with his subject the love in which high
  intuition supplements knowledge, and arouses his
  own fullest intensity of expression, to call
  forth the latent but not less vital possibilities
  before him (ibid.).

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• Geddes turned the Outlook Tower in Edinburgh into
  a museum of urban and regional planning, with
  exhibits that went from the neighbourhood to the
  whole globe.

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• This incremental and respectful treatment of
  place contrasts sharply with the placeless
  planning that has characterized much of modernist
  practice over the past half century and more. It
  contrasts even more starkly with the clinical
  detachment of the planners responsible for urban
  renewal projects in the mid-20th century.
• As Eugene Walter observes, in the idiom of our
  urban renewal programs, urban therapy is a
  surgical metaphor. Healing, in this frame of
  mind, prescribes the excision of 'blighted'
  neighborhoods. This kind of 'therapy' requires
  objectivity. Objectivity means that the
  'surgeon' may view a place marked for amputation
  and think 'there is nothing of me in there.'

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Who Was Patrick Geddes?

• The quotations given from Geddes show the
  opposite frame of mind an attitude of active
  sympathy with a place, even when it is
  experiencing challenges. When Geddes lived in
  Edinburgh, he promoted and was personally
  involved in what he called conservative surgery
  remediation of slums through mobilizing
  residents to take matters in their own hands in
  rebuilding and improving their immediate living
  environments.

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Ebenezer Howardand the Garden City concept
(contd)

• There were a number of key features of the garden
  city model
• relatively small size
• protective greenbelts
• linkage to other cities via rail
• municipal ownership of the land
• abundant greenery and amenities for all,
• and separation of land uses.

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Features of the Garden City

• The garden city was envisioned as a community of
  approximately 30,000 on 5000 acres, with 1000
  acres taken up by the actual settlement itself
  and the rest filled with farms, sanitoria, and
  allotment gardens functioning as a green belt and
  open space reservoir. It was linked by rail
  transit to the central city and other garden
  cities.

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Features of the Garden City (contd)

• At the centre were gardens to be surrounded by
  key municipal buildings, a park, and a retail
  area in a glass arcade (crystal palace). A
  diversity of housing types would be arrayed along
  a number of radial and axial boulevards. At the
  outer edge would be factories and warehouses that
  would provide jobs. They would be run on
  electricity and would be kept separate from other
  uses.

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Features of the Garden City (contd)

• The land would be owned and leased out by the
  municipality based on money advanced by
  investors. The revenues thus generated would pay
  interest and principal on the loan, be used to
  build public works, and provide funding for
  pensions and disability payments. Apart from the
  modest interest paid, all revenue from the ground
  rents would benefit the public interest.

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The Three Magnets

• Howard believed that the garden city would
  provide a new and more healthful alternative to
  the city and country magnets. Howard
  insightfully perceived that unless planners could
  come up with a better alternative, people would
  stick with the options they had, despite their
  limitations. In other words, one needed to
  understand their existing attractive features.
  Does this point have any relevance today?

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Reflections on Howard

• 100 years ago and more, people werent afraid to
  envision whole new different ways of arranging
  human settlements.
• At the same time, these schemes were often rather
  paternalistic in that they involved communities
  being developed according to one persons vision
  and genius, with very little input from their
  inhabitants.

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Reflections on Howard

• Other quite different, but still visionary,
  thinkers include Frank Lloyd Wright and Le
  Corbusier see next page. Their views werent
  based on viewing cities and regions as organic
  entities evolving from a multiplicity of forces.
• The already-mentioned Patrick Geddes was an
  exception. He was quite idealistic, but he
  believed in working with what the city and region
  already presented and taking it to higher levels.
  This he called eutopia (some place), instead of
  utopia (no place).

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Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusiers Visions...