#newtownssmartcities

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Week 6 : What dictates a City’s success?

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

The Howard County lands before Columbia was laid (Source : Columbia: A New Town for Howard County)

In the 1960’s, Jim Rouse envisioned the planned community of Columbia, Maryland as a new kind of American city, that was rationally planned to avoid the problems associated with larger cities and sprawling suburbs. To carry out this vision, Columbia was designed as a series of interconnected neighborhood units with supporting employment, civic, and services placed around a larger town center. Rouse wanted the town center in Columbia to provide the most comprehensive range of recreational activities and services that had ever been contemplated in a new town. People would have opportunities, especially attractively and conveniently presented, for “discovering new ways to enjoy their free time—new foods, new visual and tactile aesthetic experiences, even new social relations.”

Master Planner of Columbia - James Rouse who believed that physical form takes its roots from social behaviour of people

To facilitate this, a series of community-based planning efforts preceded the plans to engage citizens in an extensive dialogue to shape a community vision. Rouse’s plan envisioned a real town; live, work and play as one says today, an integrated community with open-plan schools, a central mall and interfaith worship centers where one service can play off another to achieve synergy between people and activities.

Multi disciplinary team for Columbia’s new town planning brainstorming sessions (Source : Columbia: A New Town for Howard County)

"It's not an attempt at a perfect city or a utopia, but rather an effort to simply develop a better city, an alternative to the mindlessness, the irrationality, the unnecessity of sprawl and clutter as a way of accommodating the growth of the American city," Mr. Rouse said on Columbia's 15th birthday in 1982.

“The People Tree” by Pierre Du Fayet is Columbia’s most visible and symbolic sculpture. This civic monument is the artistic interpretation of Columbia’s goal to create an environment that contributes to the growth of people and foster community spirit. 

Planners Rouse (Columbia), Fry and Drew (Tema Manhean) firmly believed in social patterns shaping the physical form of a city. Fry and Drew, as the in Chandigarh planning went directly to the original inhabitants of the fishing village in Tema Manhean to seek out methods and design spaces and homes to make their real-estate projects encourage rather than discourage social interaction. Does this approach make a city successful? It can be felt that they were double sided to be involved in a process that caused resistance by the local population and meanwhile were studying the way of living and “habitat”. This double sidedness is routed in the conception of a regional modernist approach that took a local context into account by studying vernacular building practices meanwhile destroying them with forced displacement and surrounding new modernist housing projects.

Newspaper publications during Kwame Nkrumah’s new presidency

Present day impoverished condition prevailing in Tema’s planned village by Fry and Drew

Constantinos Doxiadis (planner responsible for the redesign the Tema harbor), on the other end didn’t believe that every design decision need to be dictated by its people. His efforts lay in uniting two different cultures of planning, that is, the sociological perspective with the calculative spirit of mathematics and statistics. Doxiadis, sought to plan the city of the future as part of a global urban system. Michelle Provoost, while discussing about the diverse planning strategies applied to Tema is of the opinion that a combination of collaboration, calculation, culture and socio-economic patterns together could probably pave the way for the city’s bright future.

The New towns’ movement was most definitely a global phenomenon but exporting planning and planners from the western world to developing countries to implement building cities of the future doesn’t guarantee a successful city as exemplified even in Amsterdam and Tehran. Social outcomes cannot be predetermined but allowing for fluidity in the plans and sensitivity to feedback as a continuous process can ensure cities to be ‘not a disastrous failure’.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 5 - Indian Modernity, Power Struggle, and Authorship

Paul Xiaopu Wang - xw2441

Nihal Perea, “Contesting Visions: Hybridity, Liminality and Authorship of the Chandigarh Plan” - Planning Perspectives, 19 (April, 2004) 175-199.

Lain Jackson, “Maxwell Fry and Jane drew’s Early Housing and Neighbourhood Planning in Sector-22, Chandigarh” - Planning Perspectives, 28:1 (2013) 1-26.

The authorship of the master plan for Chandigarh is not singular. As the majority would suggest, Le Corbusier is understood as Chandigarh’s grand creator. Though, Perea and critcs have argued that the city’s grand vision and implementation were the result of many authorities, political figures, architects and planners. There are traces of influence from US garden cities, UK New Towns, Green Belt, British colonial cities, climate oriented designs, Neighborhood Unit and etc. The clash and similarity across different ideologies and planning theories enhanced Chandigarh’s identity in its seeking of “Indian Modernity” as people defined the term in quite divergent ways. 

The government of India decided to create a new city that would showcase the “independent India” and the sense of unity the nation desperately desired. Before Le Corbusier was approached, Albert Mayer and Matthew Nowicki’s vision was set to address the quality of domestic life within the city - a humane ideal influenced by the garden city movement. Nowicki, in perticular, endorsed the idea of creating city around home and workplace of small entrepreneurs. Jawaharlal Nehru, Prime Minister of India at that time, strongly opposed to post-colonial cities like New Delhi, who also promoted selective learning - a non-aligned movement as an alternative to US-Soviet duality. While Garden City alike concept was favored by Punjabi state officials, The Prime minister was seeking for an architect/planner who understood “Indian Modernity” which as he describes, “...between India-traditional and the Western-modern”. Mayer and Nowicki both had practiced in India for years unlike Le Corbusier whom to Nehru was a European “outsider”.

In Perea’s words, “To Le Corbusier, Chandigarh should be radically different from the industrial present and European past, creating an environment that would constrain traditional practices and engender new ones.”  Le Corbusier and his team was awarded the planning contract after Nowicki died in a plane accident. The critical moment also caused Nehru to lose his voice over Punjabi state officials. The state was convinced by Le Corbusier’s design language that highlight symbolism, imagery, aesthetics, visual identity to exhibit political power. In return, Le Corbusier had the support he never had in Europe.

Based on Mayer and Nowicki’s work, Le Corbusier’s framework for Chandigarh imposed that city should determine the roles of its inhabitants rather than the other way around as the previous plan advocated. In practice, when different sectors were designed by architects with their own agendas, the neighborhoods that proven to be successful and timeless are the ones designed with human scale and resident comfort in mind. 

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Mixed Smart City prototype (Retrofitted + Built from ground up) - The case of Hudson Yards

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

City administrations have long generated data about people and places and used them to manage and control urban populations, steer operations and services, and guide and evaluate public policy. For instance, 60% of the world’s population is expected to live in mega-cities by 2030. Recently, there has been a step change in the production of urban data through the development of urban informatics and smart city technologies.

Smart cities are born out of the realization that technology has the power to help people live in communities that are more responsive to their needs and that can actually improve their lives. Take the case of smartphones. These devices are becoming the ‘remote controls’ of our lives, acting as hubs for sensor-based health monitoring products and fitness apps. Smartphones have the potential to transform city life, easing service and administration accessibility but on the other end, this increases demand for ICT infrastructure.Using data and electronic sensors in this way is often referred to as building “smart cities,” which are the subject of a major global push to improve how cities function. In part a response to incoherent infrastructure design and urban planning of the past, smart cities promise real-time monitoring, analysis and improvement of city decision-making. The results are expected to improve efficiency, environmental sustainability and citizen engagement. Smart city projects are big investments that are supposed to drive social transformation. Decisions made early in the process determine what exactly will change. But most research and planning regarding smart cities is driven by the technology, rather than the needs of the citizens.                            

Smart city innovation starts with the imagination and drive to envision radical new possibilities, which must take shape in a complex social context – overcoming countless technical, social and political hurdles. This isn’t a vision of life like on “The Jetsons". It’s real urban communities responding in real-time to changing weather, times of day and citizen needs. These efforts can span entire communities. They can vary from monitoring traffic to keep cars moving efficiently or measuring air quality to warn residents when pollution levels climb.                                                      

Systems overlay on cities

A city’s identity is more than a result of the planning and design of physical spaces. It includes how cultural and social interactions define a place. The aim is to create public spaces that improve liveability, as well as people’s health, happiness, and wellbeing and this is precisely New York City’s very own smart city’s aim as well. The 28-acre “city within a city” on Manhattan’s west side, is the largest and most ambitious private real estate development in the US in the history of the US. Hudson Yards, targeted for completion in 2025 aims to be the first fully instrumented and quantified neighborhood lab.   A project of similar scope has not been seen in New York City since Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s. Hudson Yards is touted as a 21st century neighborhood designed to digitally assist better living. This is a smart neighborhood that 'lives' so long as it's persistently connected to the Internet.

In Instrumental City, Shannon Mattern talks of the ingredients that go into making this kind of Hudson Yards urban development : sustainable design, infrastructure upgrades, and a mixture of retail, commercial, and residential space. No description of the new development’s impact on the urban economy is complete without detailing the amenities offered back to the city’s residents: open space, affordable housing, and a self-aware carbon footprint.

Mattern takes a broad look at contemporary urban discourses, and compellingly advocates for a “materialist, multisensory approach to exploring the deep material history” of our cities. She articulates the stakes, and argues for the importance of peoples’ opinion in building their cities amidst the complex mesh of infrastructure, geology, history, and architecture that constitutes the contemporary city. Hudson Yards is a maze of interconnected technologies, a system rather than a set of buildings. Shannon Mattern offers a thoughtful account of the data-driven infrastructure that the Hudson Yards development promotes as sustainable design. “While such systems are environmentally ‘smart’—they eliminate noisy, polluting garbage trucks; minimize landfill waste, and reduce offensive smells—they also cultivate an out-of-sight, out-of-mind public consciousness,” Mattern explains. The aesthetics of sustainability emerge from the urgency to suppress, cover up, and ultimately control our environment. While all this is good, she advocates for transparency , "Perhaps the designers could provide a peek into the trash-collection system so that visitors can both marvel at its efficiency and reflect on their own contributions to the challenges of waste management." The designers  behind the smart systems are accountable to the citizens who have a right to know the behind-the- scenes scenario as their lives (in the form of data) are interwoven into these systems.

Construction and timeline of Hudson Yards Project

Reusing existing and unused infrastructure is seen as highly beneficial for urban areas, both economically and socially. Existing transport and underground infrastructure are prime examples for adaptive reuse, where cities create valuable public space without compromising further land areas. New York’s Highline project, for example, has successfully transformed a piece of the city’s unused infrastructure into a public park, creating vital green space for its citizens which is essentially an extension of the Hudson Yards platform.

A ‘city within a city’ on the Island of Manhattan

Infrastructure investment is critical to the future success of cities. Much of this infrastructure will be needed in cities, requiring new financing mechanisms that take the burden from city authorities and increasingly include private sector investments. As businesses strive to differentiate themselves and customer expectations increase, the need to innovate around the consumer experience is becoming a critical factor and the biggest challenge for good design, including in the design of the built environment. As cities strive to become more liveable and direct increasing attention to citizens as their main stakeholders, user centricity considerations (designing systems that are responsive to citizens’ needs and desires) are fundamental. This is championed by Sidewalk Labs, the tech firm in charge of the Hudson Yards' systems focused on urban quality-of - life issues whose parent company is Alphabet. Social media and crowdsourcing are opening up new possibilities for public engagement and participation, changing how cities undertake projects, collect data and gauge public opinion. Social media opens up the planning process to a larger, more representative audience, while crowdsourcing can be used to leverage intellectual capacity and local knowledge to help solve city problems which is exemplified from Sidewalk's LinkNYC experiment around the city.  

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 8: The desirability of lending total control to the ‘systems’

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

Smart cities are now arguably the new urban utopias of the 21st century. Integrating urban and digital planning, smart cities are being marketed across the world as solutions to the challenges of urbanization and sustainable development. Governments and developers are increasingly adopting “smart” solutions in areas from traffic control to waste management. However, it is important for governments (and residents) to understand that the adoption of new technology does not necessarily make a city “smart.” The concept of what exactly makes a city “smart” is undefined and still evolving. 

Smart city ideals are based on the key role of digital networks, data, and technical experts in recasting the urban environment in the key of enhanced efficiency, information, and knowledge about how, why and when the city functions. In this light, there has been the emergence of a set of critiques focused on critically interrogating the smart city and its myriad iterations. Rob Kitchin (a geographer with the National University of Ireland, Maynooth) states these as technocratic governance, brittle and hackable urban systems, surveillance, corporatisation of governance and the politics of urban data. He is not advocating that cities shun technology but that they foster a more open debate about how best to adopt it. He underscores the importance of reimagining the smart city vision and its evaluating/reporting mechanisms on what makes the city work.

Visualizing the city

Source : Left - http://www.dublindashboard.ie/; top-right: http://citydashboard.org/london/; bottom-right: bigdata.architecture.org

The ultimate vision is a city that is hyper efficient, easy to navigate, and free of waste—and which is constantly collecting data to help it handle emergencies, disasters, and crime. The orderly, manageable city is a vision with enduring appeal, from the PlanIT valley to Masdar City in the UAE to Songdo, an entirely new smart city constructed near Seoul, Korea. But there’s an equally compelling vision of the city as a chaotic and dynamic whirl of activity, an emergent system, an urban jungle full of possibility—a place to lose oneself. Efficiency isn’t the reason we like to live in cities, and it’s not the reason we visit them. Tourists come to India for experiencing the bustling charm of the streets, the colorful landscape, the diverse culture and not for the sterile tall buildings of GIFT (smart city in Gujarat,India). 

Malik ghat Flower Market in Kolkatta, India

Rendering of GIFT Smart city, India

Source : http://giftgujarat.in/documents/GIFT.pdf

In a city where everything can be sensed, measured, analyzed, and controlled, we risk losing the overlooked benefits of inconvenience. We could compare the networks being built today to the way cities were redesigned for car travel in the first half of the 20th century: As dirt roads were paved, then widened, then run through neighborhoods, and raised into overpasses, they remapped cities completely, for better and worse - new towns were born then. Smart-city infrastructure like software, sensors, and networked systems may seem more ephemeral than a highway , but its legacy will similarly shape how cities work for the next generation.

The idea of new towns seen as “smart cities” is reinforced in the Volume 4 reading through four case studies namely PlanIT Valley in Portugal; Lavasa in India; Strand East in London; New Songdo in South Korea. They are seen as contemporary variants on the new town idea with a ‘city in a box’ approach having a coded framework as its foundation. 

Amidst all the glossy renders and marketing, governments should realise making a city smart is not an end in itself but a means to an end. The end is to make cities liveable and inclusive for all its citizens. Smart cities can't just be about showing innovation and conveying administrations; in a far-reaching way, they must be comprehensive and equitable spots to live in. For eg - In the Indian context, there has been a bold move towards building 100 new smart cities in the future in order to spur economic growth and urbanization. “The smart city concept implies an oversimplified vision of technology. It is based on the belief that technology can solve any problem without fundamentally changing lifestyles. However, can India’s problems actually be simplified to the point that they can be controlled by a large set of data points? Does this mean that the current problems are not social, but technological? Given a country as diverse as India, can the heterogeneity of its cities be accommodated in a linear vision backed by technology?” (Kajaria, 2014)

Whether technology comes from citizens or the city, there’s a philosophy built into the smart-city vision, one in which there’s always a technological answer to a city’s ills. “It’s almost as if things can be boiled down to a simple equation: technology plus innovation equals urban sustainability,” says Kitchin.

But what about issues like persistent poverty, social injustice, or public education which aren’t primarily technological problems with single “best” answers that can be optimized by a system? Do we simply not ‘code’ it?

Does the city of the 21st century necessarily need to be ‘smart’ to claim that it is ‘developed’ and ‘modern’? Is that why cities of today are ardently lauding a smart label. “After all, which city wouldn’t want to be called smart, creative and cultural?” (Hollands, 2008)

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Week 7 : Where is the ‘who’?

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

The New town had become synonymous as a planning concept for progressive urban development from the 1960s globally. In today’s age that ‘technology is culture; it is not something separate; we cannot choose to have it or not. It just is, like air’, Smart cities and towns, a second generation of new towns has started to emerge in accordance with economic and demographic growth. Both these types of new town developments have basic planning characteristics in common and the difference lies in one being embedded on the geographical landscape and the other on a microchip. When equipped with state of the art, ‘smart’ technology, this new breed of new towns is positioned as smart cities, representing contemporary notions of what a modern city should look like and how it should function like its forebears. In terms of urban identity, they seem to replicate and repeat existing cityscapes elsewhere rather than incorporate local culture developed using generic designs. Planned cities would have trouble then adapting to changing circumstances (sudden influxes of people, aftermath of unforeseen natural disasters). Because of their calculated thorough design, they wouldn’t have the resilience or flexibility that historic cities can exploit when necessary. Although undoubtedly state-of-the-art at the time of its construction, how will these cities age with digital infrastructures (touted as its urban core) that are constantly updating?

The earlier new towns were primarily oriented with regards to infrastructure ranging from irrigation, language, transportation, streets, open spaces which sprang up from the core urban dynamics of their age, culture and commerce. Now that technology and culture have fused; how do we orient ourselves, with regards to today’s technological cultures? How does our cities orient with regards to this Networked infrastructure?  

It takes time to build a unique urban character, despite the similar planning principles and methodology involved in making new towns like Chandigarh (India) or Milton Keynes (UK). 

What is it that renders this ‘uniqueness’ to any city?

The city is its people. We don’t make cities in order to make buildings and infrastructure. We make cities in order to come together, to create wealth, culture, more people. As social animals, we create the city to be with other people, to work, live, play. Buildings, vehicles and infrastructure are mere enablers, not drivers. They are a side-effect, a by-product, of people and culture. The smart city vision, however, is focused on these second order outcomes, coupled with efficiency. To see the city as a complex system to be optimized, made efficient, is to read the city along only one axis, and hardly a primary one at that. Aren’t people part of the equation of development today?  Unlike its ancestors (Images 3 & 4 below), the smart city advertisements don’t seem to celebrate this (Images 1 & 2 below). 

India’s 100 Smart Cities Initiative (check out the lone bicycle!)

Source : http://newznew.com/central-government-announces-the-list-of-98-smart-cities-out-of-100-across-india/

Render of Milton Keynes (First generation new town)

Early render of Cumbernauld (UK’s new town)

Smart cities as Adam Greenfield puts it in ‘Against the Smart City’ is that its “generic, inflexible, elitist and have controlling environments”. These serious limitations are never acknowledged in smart city marketing materials or high-level presentations. The three targets of Greenfield’s fierce critique are the Korean New Songdo, Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, and a planned small city in Portugal called PlanIT Valley. The reality of city life is that it is a place that depends on countless interactions that go unmeasured. None of these normal activities that go on all day between people in cities is accounted for in the techno-utopian ideals of the Smart City as Greenfield presents in his critique.

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Week 5 : At the nexus of Democracy, Planning and Experimentation

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

Following India’s Independence from the British rule in 1947 and the subsequent partition of the sub-continent into India and Pakistan, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of postcolonial India wanted to see an Indian city that was “free from the fetters of the past”. The city of Chandigarh was built from scratch near the foothills of the Himalayas, to replace the former capital of Lahore, lost to Pakistan thereby addressing the administrative vacuum that was felt in Punjab then. Chandigarh was the intended ‘solution’ to several daunting problems which confronted the newly-independent Indian government, some of which were relocating the refugees, reviving India’s forgotten identity with a modern twist.                                                        

Nehru initially aspired for a blend of Indianisation and westernization to come through in the city’s planning when he commissioned Albert Mayer, the American city planner who had some working experience in India. But, he was replaced by Le Corbusier’s team in 1951, after his colleague Nowicki’s sudden death and for reasons of steep fees charged for services rendered. Compelled by the in-house political parties for appointing a ‘modern’ European architect, Nehru was urged to commission Le Corbusier, the visionary modernist architect to take over the planning. “I have welcomed greatly one experiment,” Nehru once said, “and that is Chandigarh…. It hits you on the head and makes you think.”                                                                        

Le Corbusier was determined and most involved in revising Mayer’s plan to suit his vision. Ultimately, Le Corbusier presented a plan to Nehru which he called the “CIAM Town-Planning Grid” (CIAM being the Congrès Internationeaux d’Architecture Moderne). The basic layout relied on the original Mayer plan while only being able to refine certain details. It attempted to create a hierarchical system to order the citizens’ living, working, recreation, and communication. The city plan contained four main work areas: the Capitol, the University zone, the City Center, and an industrial area. 

The two architects’ ideologies clashed, and this difference in opinion is visible in Chandigarh’s eventual design. Mayer’s thinking took roots from the Garden City Movement, whereas Le Corbusier believed in the gridiron plan as the only correct way of approaching the modern problems of city planning. Le Corbusier felt that a thorough understanding of Indian history, society and culture was extraneous and irrelevant to the planning of Chandigarh, while Mayer understood the relative paucity of his own knowledge. Mayer had been very concerned with the socioeconomic factors and social customs, whereas Corbusier was more concerned with the physical look of the city – trying to avoid the appearance of an industrial town, with the monumentality of the building designs (images below), and with the separation of automobiles and pedestrians in daily life. Unfortunately, the monumentalism and hierarchic organization he so admired were among the principles from which Nehru’s government was attempting to move away, reminiscent as they were of the recent British Imperialist philosophy – but this was not apparent until well after the construction had begun.

Open Hand Monument - designed by Le Corbusier located in Sector 1

One of the many manhole covers in Chandigarh - designed by Corbusier

The hierarchic organization mimicked India’s traditional social structure of division by assigning homes according to administrative rank as opposed to the earlier practice of division by caste, community or language group. This was precisely the time the city’s design had to advocate for  the democratic, secular and equality ideals of free India. As per the design, the highest-paid officials and the largest houses were nearest the Capitol, and the greater the distance of a sector from it, the higher was its population density.

The main architects on the project were Pierre Jeanneret, and the English husband-and wife architects Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew. Fry and his wife were especially qualified for the project due to their considerable experience developing designs and technologies for tropical conditions in West Africa. Even under tight financial funding for the project, Drew, with her efforts of engaging the Indian community did design houses within the sectors in her responsibility that tapped into the sensibilities of ‘Indian’ homes factoring in the affordable housing component. What if this thread was pulled into the design of the city itself? What if Corbusier’s team worked in collaboration with one another, borrowing methods where and when it was deemed to be ideal? What if Chandigarh wasn’t just about being a modern urban showpiece to reinforce the images of certain individuals? What if there was more indian-ness injected into the city’s design?

The city’s plan was trying to solve Western urban problems, not Indian ones, and this is the root of many of Chandigarh’s issues. It was based on the consumption patterns, lifestyle and eccentricities of the industrialized West’s middle classes. The physical aspects of the city reflected the over-scaled streets for high-volume traffic (Indian culture favors small or animal-powered vehicles, and the climate demands small, shaded streets); single-family homes with gardens (Indians used to live in large multi-generation family units because of the prevalent joint family system, and preferred courtyards to gardens for climatic and maintenance reasons); and vast concrete-based open spaces (which in India’s climate are murderously hot, unpleasant, and therefore deserted). (Images below)            

Corbusier’s plan of a complex network of roads for the automobiles but even today, most ride by bike and autorickshaw

Huge landscaped gardens, reflective pools, concrete buildings - Corbusier’s plans devoid of sentimentality towards the Indian region.

I agree with Jackson and Perera’s argument that the city is not the sole creation of any one individual. Nevertheless, Chandigarh stands as a strong testimony of a period during which India made a bold attempt to make a break with her past within the confines of a socio‐urban experiment that included, along with an innovative master plan, modernist buildings, new land‐use patterns, provisions for education, recreation, medical and social services, the careful and deliberate inclusion of ideas that had their origin in a culture far removed from her own. Between the contested ideas of the western planners and the ambitious hopes of the Indian government officials, there is the account of a planned city and the overall influence of modernism on India.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 4 : Manifestations of Politics

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

The New Towns of Paris were conceived during a period of strong economic growth and at a time when the capital’s rapid rate of population increase seemed certain to continue (which wasn’t the case eventually), posing a delicate problem of accommodation in the centralized agglomeration because of its previous lack of effective urban planning.

The need for decentralization was recognized when a reappraisal of the existing planning strategies and the spread of suburban sprawl was undertaken in 1964-65. Coupled with the strong political backing of President DeGaulle and carefully crafted media campaigns (Images 1-3) , Paris’ villes nouvelles idea of creating something ‘different and new’ quickly became an appealing alternative to the tangled mess of the Paris suburbs, large areas of which had been overrun by towering blocks of low-income housing projects, more appropriately termed as grands ensembles. Up until then, the grands ensembles were widely regarded as the quintessential products of postwar French government policy in the areas of regional and urban planning.

Illustrations taken from ‘Une ville se lève à l'est’ , 1970.

These villes nouvelles sought to anchor their planning strategy around the fundamental issues of demographic and economic expansion, administrative organization and the quality of the urban environment (Image 4). The plan declared that the urban center should create the sense of a "real town" as opposed to the succession of ‘characterless dormitory suburbs' or the desert of the Grands Ensembles.

Under the expert supervision of Paul Delouvrier, appointed by President DeGaulle as the first head of the new regional planning and governmental unit of the Paris metropolitan area - Schema Directeur d’management et d’urbanisme (S.D.A.U), the regional planners used the new town concept to reorganize the city’s suburbs unlike its European counterparts. They intended to provide the residents with more of the necessities and advantages of daily life and program undifferentiated open spaces that weren’t designed to gather people together previously. Each of these new cities was to have an inter and intra city transportation system, an array of commercial, cultural and recreational activities, large public parks, comprehensive health and welfare services and educational institutions. They were also expected to experiment with ways to solve nagging urban problems as separation of pedestrian and auto traffic, waste disposal, water supply and soil conservation. Each new city would house as many as 500,000 people on about as much land as there is inside Paris. In a way, the team pulled threads from the American concept of New towns but dared to deviate by attempting to be innovative in their urban ideology of Parisian cities.   

A major social goal of these towns was to avoid the social catastrophe of the Grands-Ensembles. The multi-disciplinary team of professionals, on realizing the past deficient conditions and the related increase of youth violence gave utmost importance to spatial programming and animating posters. Delouvrier insisted that the new cities have a lively, diverse and pleasing urban atmosphere. “Of course we cannot give them all a Comedie Francaise,” he said, “but we will try to give them everything else.” (Image 4).

The S.D.A.U. was not a cut and clear political program in the sense that it did not propose a clear solution for future social life like Howard with its new towns. I would argue, that the S.D.A.U. is inscribed in traditions of political 'programs' though. It had a very precise idea of its objectives and implications for social life but due to its scale of study it didn’t show it too clearly, defining only general directions. The plan hoped that an identity will develop in the new communities but designed them in relation to a development strategy designed for the agglomeration where Paris has the central role. The plan dealt on agendas, not to serve but ‘how to’ persuade the public to relocate.                                          

It is important to realize, at the outset, that the new towns were constructed after 1968; so they could essentially be a reflection of the second period and not of the ideology that prevailed at the moment of their inception. The 1965 approach to the question of the urban centers is essentially pragmatic, quantitative, qualitative and mechanistic. The events of May 1968 seriously shook up the prevalent conceptions in France and with it the state, the policy of centralization, and the urban policy in France. A very immediate impact is the reduction, in 1969, of the number of villes nouvelles from 8 to 5 in the province. Many of the shortcomings could be blamed on the inability of the 1968 French government to match ambitious plans with sufficient public money to carry them out. When public resources became strained by the many renovation projects planned for Paris, Georges Pompidou, who inherited the program from DeGaulle, urged private investors to share more of the burden. To make it as profitable as possible for them, they were given larger shares of the public-private corporations, as well as such concessions as permission to build more lucrative high-rise buildings and to defer development of public facilities. Once again, the plan of persuasion comes to light.

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 3, Units: from single-class housing estate to neighborhood units to staged programming

Paul Xiaopu Wang / xw2441

Hook was considered by the London County Council as a possible site for one of its New Towns. Thought the vision was never realized at Hook, the lengthly detailed report decoded the master planning of Hook from aspects of the people, the local geography, the central area study, the industry and services planning, the open space design, the communication and transportation projection, the feasibility analysis, and the engineered programming. The report took in critiques in regards to early British New Towns’ Neighborhood Unit models and developed agendas that attempted to retain some of the assets of urban life lost in the garden cities and Neighborhood Units era/movement. 

Neighborhood Unit is widely considered a failure with limited success because it had not met its social objectives - to create Social Balance and breakdown class differences. It was a politically charged move from the Ministry of Town and Country Planning following the end of WWII. 

Based on Britain’s garden city movements founding father  - Ebenezer Howard’s idea and American planner Clarence Perry’s vision, between 1946 and 1951, 11 of 14 constructed New Towns in Britain adopted the Neighborhood Unit concept. The concept divided residential areas into distinct neighborhood units suggesting towns should be established and developed as self-contained and balanced communities for working and living. The Ministry of Town and Country Planning views Neighborhood Unit as a way to promote community spirit and enforce the power of civil defense. As various types of dwellings should be located together, variety should also be implemented in types of persons, in social, and economic position as well.  “..So that each person may be able to make a contribution to the life of the community. “ echoed by Lewis Silkin, the Minister of Town and Country Planning. The concept promotes the idea “if the community is to be truly balanced, so long as social classes exist, all must be represented in it”

Without throughout investigation and research, the construction of the first New Town of Stevenage began before The New Town Committee headed by Lord Reith had its first meeting.  There was no discussion on alternatives since the concept enjoyed significant political support within the Ministry of Town and Country Planning. Which, in many critics view, the lost of key personalities committed to Neighborhood Unit directly correspond with the decline of its influence in 1955. 

It also failed to attract middle-class who’d rather spend more to live outside the town. Private ownership was not offered initially, different neighborhoods contained within New Town have taken on distinctive class characteristics yet without any identities, working-class’s voice and representatives dissolved after the self-formed Neighborhood Council was legitimized and integrated in to social services, all which failed fundamentally to take an account of class prejudice and culture.  

The core concept of New Town Hook was to project growth and fluctuation of both the physical change of the city and its demographic change base on census data and case study on previous British New Towns. 

Its linear planning maintains Neighborhood Unit’s original position in pedestrian experience, open greens, primary school oriented residential blocks, and accessible local shops and services yet maximizes neighborhood/group identity and allows people to have choice. It sets itself away from the isolated sub-centers strategy, instead provides framework to support shifts in population aging, next generation social pattern, employment types, regional communication needs, and etc. It plans to use the projected sweet spot where city reach its population balance and becomes self-sustained to set up priority and hierarchy in city development in comparison to empty claims such as “Once the differences social classes had intermingled any tensions between them would disappear” made by The New Town Committee in late 1940s.

Hook’s Master Plan, in London County Council’s perspective, creates more realistic socially balanced city that could withstand impact and recessions.  

[newtowntosmartcity]

Week 3, Units: Segregation or cohesion?

Jesfae John (jmj2196)

Planning is a slow and continuous process, particularly in old and well established urban centers. However, in the case of the new towns of the London area, it is probably seen in its clearest and simplest form. Firstly, a government decision was made to undertake the building of new towns to relieve population pressure in London. Through the process of survey, and in consultation with local government bodies, sites were selected which were considered suitable for development. Next, development corporations were set up and charged with surveying the chosen site thoroughly, and then preparing firstly an outline plan, and secondly detailed plans for residential neighborhoods, industrial estates, commercial areas, parks, schools and so on. The implementation of these plans was effected through the machinery set up in the New Towns Act 1946, which also embodied the financial provisions necessary to undertake such schemes.                                                                                                             

The contemporary idea of building new towns was welcomed as one of the most exciting features of urban development in Britain, and indeed it has been one of the most fertile grounds of imagination for thinkers, designers and reformers throughout the social history of man. The limiting factor for the size of towns before the development of the transportation networks of the second half of the nineteenth century was the need to supply food to their inhabitants. Post war period from 1945, the siting of new towns held the road, rail and river networks of utmost importance as realized in the new towns like Harlow. (First Image)                                              

In the 1920′s, Clarence Perry introduced a concept that he referred to as “The Neighborhood Unit“. The second image above is the sketch published by Perry in 1929 illustrating the relationships between the residential components of a neighborhood and the uses that could easily be traversed to and from by foot.  The “Neighborhood Unit” had since gained a global momentum and was considered integral to many post war planning movements and discussions. In Britain particularly, it was implemented quickly in 11 out of the 14 planned new towns without much of an afterthought or sufficient research. Keeping aside the noble intentions of inculcating community spirit among the different classes in society in order to bring about social balance, the idea that physical planning parameters of neighborhoods can determine the way residents are going to behave as neighbors and that everyone, irrespective of the class of society they belong to are going to behave in exactly the same manner was probably the main misconception of the New Towns Committee, who were established to oversee the development and proceedings of the new towns in post war Britain.                                        

In 1969, Cedric Price with Paul Barker (writer), Reyner Banham (architecture historian) and Peter Hall (geographer and planner) published ‘Non-Plan: an experiment in freedom’ an article in a social affairs magazine titled New Society. The idea emerged after a conversation about the appalling results of the then-current urban planning strategies and that it would get better if there was no planning at all. At the time, Non-Plan infuriated many architects and planners because not only was it extremely provocative and contentious but it also went against the established order and controlled uniformity of the built environment.                                               

Unlike the British New Towns Committee, they saw the city not as a cohesive structure but instead as an unstable series of systems, in continual transformation, constantly reorganizing and rearranging itself through processes of both expansion and retraction. They supported the idea that the general public could determine, control and shape their own surroundings. The major premise behind Non-Plan was when ‘professionals’ were designing communities, should think before telling other people how they should live because everyone had their own preferences and ideas. Non-Plan explored ways of involving people in the design of their environments by circumventing planning bureaucracy and letting the people shape the environment they want to live and work in.                                           

The fact that residents or rather communities were not part of the planning equation was what led to the spiraling decline of the neighborhood planning concept in Britain according to Andrew Homer’s analysis. Committee board members called the shots on how neighborhood units, without considering any alternatives, were going to be the solution to having a socially balanced and close knitted community.    

Doesn’t the idea of stemming urban sprawl by building self-contained new towns, strategically restricting geometry, placing limits on population and that every town entity has its own place which essentially grounded the New towns in Britain like Harlow or Hook in turn segregate people by vast swaths of agricultural or rural land? Were the new towns looking to limit even community spirit to its perimeter? Don’t the individual new towns take the shape of a caged arena with all its control points for its inhabitants even for everyday social interaction?