Why cities fail
When designing cities, there is a set of strong values that are frequently and explicitly cited, and whose achievement is clearly dependent to a significant degree on city form, such as: meeting demand for housing and infrastructure, providing space for wanted uses, reducing pollution, exploiting resources or new areas, maintaining property value, improving safety, …
On the other hand, there are another set of values, which can be classified as weak or sometimes wishful values, which are also frequently cited but are marginally related to city form such as: improving mental health, improving social stability, increasing diversity, reducing crime, improving equity, reducing migration, …
By making these 2 distinctions of values I’m inviting the reader to consider how often does urban planning focus on weak values rather than strong ones. Personally, this made me wonder to what extent is urban planning used to manage city form issues or social form issues? I wanted to find a way of exposing, in the clearest way possible, which are the core intentions that lie in the depths of an urban planning project. Have they to do with city or social form? For more evident answers, I turned to the most dramatic material I could find; some of the best known utopian urban designs from our classical tradition. Asking a planner to design his/her dream city usually unearths profound feelings. Because of the freedom to unleash personal utopian thinking, the planner’s deepest intentions are exposed. For example, ask someone to design their perfect urban plan for Barcelona, I’m sure you’ll be able to read plenty into it and discover things like what this person most misses in the city, opinions on how hierarchy should be organized, desired lifestyle, and even political ideology.
I’ll briefly expose below some of the most famous utopian urban planning projects so that the reader can evaluate if the heart of city design seeks to act upon city form (meaning only physical shape and setting of a city) or social form. As a small preview, I’ll say that it’s curious to find how utopian thinking has a tendency to slightly disregard spatial environment and city development, while the main concern lies in acting upon social structure and relationships. I guess big dreams bring up deep feelings.
Radiant City
Radiant City was Le Corbusier’s utopian urban project for a contemporary city of 3 million inhabitants. 24 skyscrapers 200m tall, meant for offices and hotels occupy the center. The most affluent would live in the tallest, most central apartments. Farther out are six-story linear residential blocks, or four-story duplexes, while “garden cities” for industrial workers lie out of sight beyond the green belt. Public institutions and a park are located at one edge of the core city, and factories at the other. An airport is also sketched into the plan, under which is a railway station. The city is an expression of a clear, static, centralized order.
Observing the uniformity of the buildings and how people (not public or religious institutions) are set at the center of the plan, we can see a clear reflection of Le Corbusier’s socialist-communist ideology. One of his architectural premises was to achieve maximum functionality at minimum cost regardless of the origin and social class of users. Radiant City was a people-centric design meant to promote social equality and social interactions along the vast pedestrian streets and the vast shared skyscrapers. The reality is that, this cold military-like design isn’t the ideal space to promote rich social relations as it does not enable spontaneity to flourish, skyscrapers with such an amount of neighbors have been proved to eventually become warrens where insecurity ends up being rife, 200m tall buildings would most certainly block sunlight entry, the city reflects no culture thus provoking a heavy sense of placelessness, the design is so rigid it does not leave any space for the city to evolve, and a long etcetera.
Broadcare City
Broadcare City was Frank Lloyd Wright’s theorical project on what would be the perfect urban setting. It was first presented in 1932, although Wright published a revised version in 1945 named When Democracy Builds, and a second revised version in 1958 named The Living City. The project is the antithesis of the big cities of the time, and a celebration of suburban neighborhoods. Again, it was more of a socio-political project than an urbanistic one.
The design is based on the search for environmental quality by recovering the idea of the frontier myth (a romantic myth about the availability of “land for all” in the old Western America). Thus, Broadacre City would be a city with a very low density index, extended in all directions, and which would be found -according to Wright- everywhere and nowhere. Each American family would inhabit a one-acre (4046.85 m²) quadrangular plot of federal reserves and with the intention of making each unit almost self-sufficient. Transportation would be primarily by car around the edges of each acre, and on foot within it. There is a large number of natural spaces, where the different uses are integrated in an arbitrary way, forming an urban landscape where nature predominates, even in the buildings. The flying cars are a delightful fantasy, based on the illustrations of science fiction propagandists and Wright’s own passion for convertible cars. The intention of these vehicles was to separate traffic from daily life.
Overall, Wirght’s design was plausible (except for the flying cars), in fact it is very similar to what can be found in some residential areas and suburbs, but it would be absolutely unfeasable in big cities. That didn’t matter though because Wright’s utopic city was above all a socio-politic manifesto, a critique of the contemporary city and the influence exerted on it by the economy or industry.
Phalanstery
The phalanstery is the community of production, consumption and residence theorized by the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier as the basis of his egalitarian social system. It was agriculture-based and formed by groups of 1,620 people. In these communities economic competition was abolished, as there were no salaries nor private property. Phalansteries were founded upon the idea that each individual would work according to his passions and there would be no abstract and artificial concept of property, private or common. All individuals would share in the ownership of land and the means of production.
The phalanstery was a single, large, multistoried building housing all the activities of the colony, set in a rich farming region. With its symmetrical wings and arcades, it resembled a great place of the nobility. The emphasis was on comfort, easy access, and prideful group identity. Nevertheless, the form had rather little to do with Fourier’s intricate social proposals, except that the inhabitants were to take joy in improving and admiring their environment, and its maintenance was to be the main care of groups of children, organized in little hordes.
As in most utopian proposals previous to his time, the environment was still primarily a setting. This example might not be as spatially extense as Le Corbusier’s and Wright’s proposals, but it insists on the idea of modifying the physical environment to achieve a social goal, to create a major socio-politic shift by modifying people’s direct environment.
To wrap it up…
Cities are not managed according to utopian designs, of course, but this analysis allows to highlight what’s usually at the heart of a planner’s intentions. Knowing this gives us the power to keep an eye on how much of social intent (and careful, I’m saying intent, not social reality) is influencing urban projects that shape our city, and correct them if the core intentions aren’t right. As much as we want to see otherwise, it is our social relations which play a significant role in the satisfaction of our core human values, not physical form. We could argue that our direct physical space -like our home, office, or even neighborhood- can have some influence in our wellbeing, but when it comes to a larger scale such as city form, the shape of a city becomes irrelevant, and economic and social considerations will always take over. Regardless of any influence it may (or may not?) have, physical form will never be the trigger for social change, but rather the other way around. Physical setting is a reflection of the kind of society that lives in it. As I once read: change society first and the environment changes as well, but change environment first and you’ll change nothing.
The general conclusion I’m drawing from all this is that it looks pretty obvious that there is no urban planning without community management, and viceversa. Both should probably be as intertwined in political structure as they are in real life in order to ensure one another’s effectiveness. Urban planning is often thought as designing for the “public interest”, but is there such a thing? What I believe does exist in cities is a plurality of interests, all of which are (more often than not) in conflict with each other. Maybe the real job of an urban planner isn’t to induce social change through city form, but rather clarify the course that all of those conflicts will follow by displaying the necessary information on the map, predicting potential future changes and clearly explaining to the public the impacts of the plan’s upcoming actions.
