THE SEED OF THE MODERN CITY

For many people it is easy to track and find the roots of modern cities and urban planning in the recent centuries. There are many civilizations that contributed with their knowledge in setting up the seed of the cities we are dwelling in today.

City of Bam - Iran

FIRST ANCIENT CITIES

The first recorded evidence of urban planning activities appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh with this description: "Go up on to the wall of Uruk and walk around. Inspect the foundation platform and scrutinise the brickwork. Testify that its bricks are baked bricks, And that the Seven Counsellors must have laid its foundations. One square mile is city, one square mile is orchards, one square mile is clay pits, as well as the open ground of Ishtar's temple. Three square miles and the open ground comprise Uruk. Look for the copper tablet-box, Undo its bronze lock, Open the door to its secret, Lift out the lapis lazuli tablet and read."

Aancient city of Dholavira Plan - Source Pinterest

Although these terms are the first descriptions of urban terms, organization and measuring, the earliest examples of planned cities are found in the Indus Valley Civilization that emerged more in around the year 2600 BC. In this group we find the ancient cities of Harappa, Dholavira, Lothal and Mohenjo Daro. The streets of many of these early cities were planned out with a grid structure, with a hierarchy of streets from major boulevards to residential alleys, an idea probably inspired from the agriculture rectangular fields. It is also believed that these cities were provided with drainage systems and a well developed urban sanitation. The city of Dholavira planned also a sophisticated network of channels connected with three reservoirs made with stone that were supplied by two main streams. Administration was in charge to harness the fresh water use and create an effective water management system.

Many Central American civilisations also planned their cities with a modern concept that included sewage and running water system. In Tenochtitlan, ancient capital of the Aztec Empire that flourished between A.D. 1325 and 152, Aztecs built their capital on an island in the Lake Texcoco in the present-day Mexico City in central Mexico. At its civilization summit, Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world, with over 200,000 inhabitants. The lake that surrounded the city was also partly covered with chinampa villages that along with the capital, created the first urban settlement based on capital and suburbs.

It is well documented that King Motecuhzoma (or Montezuma) I, who reigned from 1440 to 1469, created an education system where every neighborhood had independent school and temples to serve their inhabitants.

Aztec city of Tenochtitlan - Source Mexicolore

GREEK CITIES

Although Greek civilization did not give any special feature or visual characteristic to the modern cities, the political organization brought the seed of modern city from the social aspect.

It came with the social organization of the city in Demes, (Dēmos, in Greek, δ?μο?). Demes were an organization of the Greek cities (Polis) in districts or villages, giving the common people a registration and a status in their own Demes. This new organization was settled in Cleisthenes’ democratic reform at Athens (508/507 BC), and it pursued the end of the social organization of clans and a more democratic social division. It supposed by many experts, the origin of the identification of the citizens with their districts and their cities, as well as the origin of the urban administration . Being part of a Deme meant to be a citizen and became the requirement for citizenship that had been previously been based on a phratry, or family group.

The term Deme continued to designate local subdivisions in Hellenistic and Roman times and was applied to circus factions at Constantinople in the 5th and 6th centuries AD.

In the town planning, Hippodamus (5th century BC) is traditionally regarded as the first town planner and ‘inventor’ of the orthogonal urban layout. His orthogonal layout, called the Hippodamian plan after him, was an orthogonal urban layout with square blocks. The first orthogonal urban planning or not, these layout grids became quite popular from the late 8th century on, when Greek city-states started to found colonies along the coasts of the Mediterranean. Following in the tradition of Hippodamus about a century later, Alexander commissioned the architect Dinocrates to design the new city of Alexandria, the grandest example of first political commission of a big capital in the world. 

The pride of ancient Alexandria was the great lighthouse, the Pharos of Alexandria, which was built on the eastern tip of the island of Pharos and named one of the Seven Wonders of the World. This lighthouse is reputed to have been more than 110 m high and was still standing in the 12th century. In 1477, however, Sultan Qā?it Bey used stones from the dilapidated structure to build a fort that was named after him.

Alexandria Urban Planning, Deinokratis - Source ResearchGate

The Canopic Way (now ?arīq al-?urriyyah) was the main avenue running east and west through its centre, accumulating most of the monuments nearby. Close to the intersection with the street of Soma was the Mouseion (museum), the academy of arts and sciences and the great Library of Alexandria. At the seaward end of the Street of the Soma were the two obelisks known as Cleopatra’s Needles, today in the banks of the River Thames in London, and in Central Park in New York City.

Alexandria was the origin of urban design as a response to political desires and aspirations. This new dimension of urban design became more common with the Renaissance and the modern times, with many cases like Brasilia or New Cairo.

ROMAN CITIES

The ancient Romans also employed regular orthogonal structures that were probably inspired by the Greek and Hellenic cities and by regularly planned Etruscan cities.

One of the great values of the Architecture and Urban design was given by the Roman engineer Vitruvius, who established the principles of good design in his text De Architectura whose influence is still felt today. Since its rediscovering in the Renaissance, these texts have become a touchstone for students of classical planning and architecture.

The first topic on this book touches the most basic questions of urban planning: the selection of a site for a new town. In general this book and Roman organization gave the Roman city a level of definition and planning never seen before and that can be seen in present cities such as Turin.

Ruins of the Roman City of Timgrad - Source Amusing Planet

In general, the Romans used a consolidated scheme for city planning, developed for civil convenience. It was organized by two main roads, the Decumanus, running east–west, and the Cardo, running north–south, intersected in the middle to form the centre of the grid, where the central forum was located. This central forum, where most city services were located, was surrounded by an orthogonal and regular grid of streets. A river sometimes flowed near or through the city, providing water, transport, and sewage disposal canalization. This water supply was often supplemented by the construction of an aqueduct that canalized water from rivers and reservoirs far from the city.

All roads were equal in width and length and were made of carefully fitted flag stones and filled in with smaller, hard-packed rocks and pebbles. Bridges were constructed where needed. Each square marked by four roads was called an insula, the Roman equivalent of a modern city block.

Each insula was 73 m square and as the city grew, it could be eventually filled with buildings of various shapes and sizes and criss-crossed with back roads and alleys. The city may have been surrounded by a wall that would protect from the outer areas, normally open farmlands. At the end of the two main roads was a large gateway with watch towers.

MEDIEVAL CITIES & RENAISSANCE

After the gradual disintegration and fall of the West-Roman Empire in the 5th century and the devastation by the invasions of Huns, Germanic peoples, Byzantines, Moors, Magyars, and Normans in the next five centuries, little remained of urban culture in western and central Europe, where it had been more developed at that time. In the 10th and 11th centuries, with a more political and economical stability, urban culture flourished again. Initially, these new cities set up in existing settlements inherited from Roman towns, but later on, cities started to be created anew.

As the population of Western Europe increased rapidly and agriculture areas extended from the 9th to 14th century, hundreds of new towns were enlarged with planned extensions. These cities normally grew up as centres of church or feudal authority, of marketing or trade and focused on a fortress, a fortified abbey, or a Roman nucleus. Since population growth made these cities reach their expansion limits, many villages emerged outside the city walls, mainly focused on agriculture activities. 

Dubrovnik Footage - Source Stock Clips

Most of this new generation of medieval towns was settled from the 12th to 14th centuries, with a peak-period at the end of the 13th. The settlers of the new towns generally were attracted by fiscal, economic, and juridical advantages granted by the founding lord or king. There was not an orthogonal planning such as the Roman or Greek one, and these new cities The physical form of medieval and Renaissance towns and cities used to follow the pattern of the previous village, spreading along a main street or a crossroads in irregular shapes, though rectangular patterns tended to characterize some of the newer towns. As the population of the city grew, walls were often expanded, reaching high population like 40,000 people in London in the late 14th century, Paris or Venice were exceptions, reaching 100,000 inhabitants.

The Renaissance supposed a new attempt to plan cities in a more conscious way, improving circulation and sanitary conditions, as well as revising the role of protection structures and military defenses. From the 16th century to the end of the 18th, many cities were laid out and built with monumental splendour.

Palmanova Italy - Source XciteFun

Only in ideal cities did a centrally planned structure stand at the heart, as it happened n the city of Sposalizio , planned by Raphael in1504. Today we can only see the unique example of the town of Vigevano (1493–95), rationally planned as a Quattrocento new city centre surrounded by arcading.

THE BIRTH OF MODERN CITIES

Medieval times left a whole collection of cities that reflected the rulers Absolutist power. The new Modern World absorbed the planning concepts of European absolutism in some cases, such as the urban plan for Washington, D.C. (1791, by Pierre L’Enfant’s. More influential on the layout of the coming centuries U.S. cities was the rigid grid plan of Philadelphia, designed by William Penn (1682).

After the Medieval times, rulers attempted many ambitious reconstruction and renovation plans as the ne carried in Paris in 1852 by Georges-Eugène Haussmann. He received the commission to remodel the Medieval street plan of the city by demolishing the old quarters and set up wide boulevards beyond the old city limits. This was one of the most ambitious projects of this kind and encompassed all aspects of urban planning, from pure graphical work to building regulations that affected to facades, public spaces, parks or urban installations.

Paris Renovaton Urban Planning - Georges Eugene Haussmann

Planning and architecture went through a new paradigm at the turn of the 20th century due to the growth of cities in the Industrial revolution. Around 1900, theorists began developing urban planning models to mitigate the consequences of the industrial age, by providing citizens, especially factory workers, with healthier environments for their daily life.

The first major urban planning theorist was Sir Ebenezer Howard, who initiated the garden city movement in 1898 exposing his ideas in his book Garden Cities of To-Morrow (1902),. All these settlements decentralized the working environment from the centre of the cities, and provided a healthy living space for the factory workers. Howard generalised this achievement into a planned movement for the country as a whole. Howard's ideas, although utopian, were also very practical and were followed around the world in the coming decades. Ebenezer Howard's urban planning concepts were mostly adopted after World War II. Post-war rebuilding initiatives saw new plans drafted for London, which, for the first time, contemplated the idea of de-centralization. The Greater London Plan of 1944 went further by suggesting that over one million people would need to be displaced into a mixture of satellite suburbs, existing rural towns, and new towns.

The principle of the Garden City, Ebenezer Howard - Source Research Gate

In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to influence in urban planning, starting by one of the pioneers of this movement, the architect Le Corbusier presented his urban project for a "Contemporary City" for three million inhabitants (Ville Contemporaine) in 1922. This urban plan consisted in a group of sixty-story cruciform skyscrapers, steel-framed office buildings set within a large rectangular park. At the centre of this planned area there was a huge transportation hub with buses and trains, as well as highway intersections, and an airport at the top. He segregated pedestrian circulation paths from the roadways and set the basis of the automobile as the main way of transportation. In 1925, he tried to implement his concept in with his Plan Voisin, in which he proposed to demolish most of central Paris north and replace it with his sixty-story cruciform towers concept from Contemporary City. In the 1930s, Le Corbusier expanded and reformulated his ideas on urbanism, eventually publishing them in La Ville Radieuse (The Radiant City) in 1935.

Plan Voisin Model - Le Corbusier

The ideas of Le Corbusier were the catalyst of a new generation of urban planners and theorists that set the basis of Today’s cities. It was the case of Oscar Niemeyer and Lúcio Costa's city plan of Brasília. Sir Patrick Geddes plan of Tel Aviv or the Le Corbusier’s plan for Chandigarh in India.

Many city governments established planning departments during the first third of the 20th century. Urban planning emerged as a scholarly discipline in the 1900s, starting with a planning program at the University of Liverpool in 1909, and the first North American program at Harvard University in 1924.

The year 1909 was a turning point for urban planning with the passage of Britain’s first town-planning act and the first national conference of city planning in the United States, the first national conference on city planning,

THE EXPANSION OF BARCELONA (1856)

The intervention of Ildefonso Cerda in Barcelona is one of the most remarkable urban planning interventions in history due to the impact in the coming century cities.

Barcelona Urban Planning - Ildefonso Cerda

Cerdà’s plan focused on planning a new city grid structure looking for hygiene and ease of mobility and transportation. Cerda street layout and grid plan were optimized to accommodate pedestrians, carriages, horse-drawn trams, urban railway lines gas supply and large-capacity sewers to prevent frequent floods, without depriving the city with public and private gardens and other amenities. Cerdà focused on increasing the green spaces and gardens in every block of the city, almost like compact garden-city model so every block could have their own portion of green space.

To increase hygiene, Cerdà and planned the city blocks of the extension to be 113.3 by 113.3 sqm, meaning an average of 6sqm per person. To increase mobility and transportation, Cerdà planned for each corner of the city blocks to be a chamfer and planned a very large general street of 35 m width. The plan also set bigger avenues from 50 to 80 m that will cross the whole city. This new efficient communication grid would allow goods and raw materials to be easily transported around the new industrial and developing city.

Cerda Plan transport Grid - Source Slideshare

In addition to the planning for the layout of the extension, Cerdà also included an economic plan and the bylaws necessary for his plan to be implemented. The construction of Cerdà’s wide streets involved the use of many expropriations and compensation to be paid for the expropriations. Cerdà suggested the urbanization and building process of the Extension should be handed over to a large private enterprise to manage this expropriation. Cerdà also included very strict bylaws in order to ensure his living standards were being met. Buildings had to use less than 50% of the block’s surface, and could only use two of the block to allow space for gardens. There was a 20 m height limit as well as a 15 to 20 m depth limit

Cerda Plan - Source Slideshare

His plan for Barcelona had two major revisions, being the second one, the one still recognizable in the city layout of today's Eixample, In addition, only one of the two planned diagonal streets was realized.

Culturally, the Eixample was (and still is) inhabited by the well-to-do, instead of integrating social classes. Many of the Catalan architects of his time opposed Cerdà's ideas, even accusing him of promoting socialism; in the end, however, they designed the Modernista fa?ades that brought fame to the district.

Barcelona Blocks - Source Twitter

FUTURE CITIES: SUPER-BLOCKS

Urban planning has come to a new era of struggle in the cities. Cities grow at the same time they are losing their urban scale and pedestrian adaptation. In order to save the city and give it back to the people, a new urban tendency has come in the XXI Century.

Supermanzana Barcelona - Source ArchDaily

The SuperBlock (or Supermanzana as it is known in the first Spanish cities the system has been implemented) is a new urban cell or unit that that provides solution to the city mobility dysfunctions linked to mobility and improves the availability and quality of the public space for pedestrians.

This is achieved with a new road network and the establishment of a differentiated network for each mode of transport.

Salvador Rueda could be considered the main supporter of this new urban system, considered the Plan Cerda of XXI century. Mr. Rueda has been the Director of the Barcelona Urban Ecology Agency since its foundation in June 2000.

Supermanzana Barcelona - Source Domestika

These Superblocks are urban squares of 400 by 400 meters with the peculiarity that motorized traffic and parking of vehicles is reduced to a minimum inside the 400x400 sqm block. Almost all the circulation grid inside the block is given to pedestrians and residents vehicles while general vehicle traffic runs on the perimeter roads. Each one of these blocks is intended to be the basis of the functional model of any city and the basis of a new urban model.

Supermanzana Circulation Grid - Source CEVISMAP Magazine

This primacy of the citizen -currently turned into a simple pedestrian- is the basis that gives meaning to the whole set of interventions with which the Supermanzana will be outlined: single-section streets for universal accessibility, safety due to the speed limitation to 10 km/h and development of the potential to increase habitability and comfort in public space.

Superblocks manage to reach a real improvement in urban quality reducing environmental impact and increasing the quality of life of residents and visitors. For this purpose it is not necessary to implement major changes in urban planning, since biggest change is implemented in traffic hierarchy.

The average population of a "Supermanzana" in a city like Barcelona is around 6,000 inhabitants what makes it suitable for larger cities.

Therefore, the Supermanzanas have been implemented in several Spanish cities with different typologies, such as Vitoria-Gasteiz (winner of the European Green Capital Award 2012) , A Coru?a, Ferrol, Viladecans, El Prat and some different districts of Barcelona