Recent Trends in Modern Urban Concept of Landscape Design PDF
Recent Trends in Modern Urban Concept of Landscape Design PDF
Recent Trends in Modern Urban Concept of Landscape Design PDF
1.0
Introduction
The features, which have been regarded as essential items of urban
equipment have changed though time, and have made various impressions on
the present landscape. The resultant urban landscape is a product of the
thoughts and ideas of the time. The significance of Chandigarh lies in the fact that
it is a culmination of the various concepts of urban planning propagated in the
Europe and America in the early years of twentieth century and perhaps the
resultant urban landscape has some lessons to offer.
1.1
Significance
The city has an identifiable landscape structure pertaining to the open
spaces and the circulation system, which perhaps is demonstrated by a few cities
in India. It has got a gridiron pattern of roads intersected with a grid of green
spaces with the larger central natural eroded channel called the „leisure valley‟.
This green grid comprises of a series of northeast -southwest park belts, the most
prominent being the leisure valley. Today it is a place of gardens, stadiums, park s,
nurseries and groves. Parallel to this „city park‟ are narrower neighborhood belts
running through the residential sectors and providing people with largely
vehicular -free „greenway‟ for a variety of community facilities.
Urban landscape planners see u rban green space as a living component
linked and continuous throughout the urban structure. This concept embraces the
necessary functions of urban space as providing for diverse recreational needs, as
helping to shape the form and structure of our cities and providing an outdoor
educational „laboratory‟ for its citizens. Actively used „green spaces‟ and „green
corridors‟ based on such natural features as stream and river valleys, ridges and
woodland belts, will also reduce the density and monotony of large scale,
continuously built up areas. They will provide a new quality of spaciousness in
cities. An urban space system, which fully recognizes conservation principles,
ensures that urban space is not simply „space left over after planning‟. It enables all
spaces in cities to be evaluated in accordance with their existing natural qualities and
their environmental impact.
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2.0 PRECEDENTS FOR MODERN TOWN PLANNING
From some perspectives, especially it‟s results, town planning looks as though
it is an attempt to make cities function as efficiently as factories. The more
conventional view is that it began as a reaction against the industrialization, which
had created such great inequalities in living conditions. This reaction initially took
four rather different forms; municipal by -laws to govern building standards,
picturesque town layouts, Haussmann‟s reorganization of Paris, and model
industrial towns. These are the precursors of modern planning.
Regulations to govern building practices, especially with regard to fir e and safety
measures, had been in effect for several centuries, and in the second half of the
nineteenth century these were greatly extended in order to restrict the
unscrupulous practices of builders. Though these regulations were intended to
improve the design and layout of housing they had the unfortunate consequence of
encouraging the construction of monotonous rows of identical houses at 50 to the
acre, with no parks or provisions for shops and schools.
site‟.
Diagram of Haussm ann’s ‘percements’
2.2.1
CITY BEAUTIFUL AND MASTER
PLANNING
The city beautiful movement had four components that applied at all urban scales.
2.2.2
GARDEN CITIES
Turning the palliatives of philanthropic industrialists into a more general and
broad scale prescription, the English reformer Ebenezer Howard promoted a vision
of population dispersal into a series of planned communities in his influential book
Garden Cities Of Tomorrow (1902). Considered the father of the garden city
movement, Howard saw how with the proliferating network of railroads, it was
possible to leap over the city‟s no longer fixed boundaries and systematically 5
create within the larger regional framework communities that combined the
natural advantage of the country with the amenities of urban life.
Ebenezer Howard imagined a city, which aimed at
- Improvised living conditions for the workers.
- Cities without slums, blighted areas.
- City with efficient drainage system
- City limited in density of habitation
- City limited in areas organized to carry on all the essential functions of an
urban community, business, industries, administr ation, equipped with
sufficient parks and open spaces.
- City, which can be limited in size.
- City surrounded with permanent green belt.
As a result of this thought process he came up with an idea called garden
cities .
He explained the components of garden c ities in terms of three magnets.
The tree magnets were town, country, and the combination of town and the country.
The town and country had it‟s own advantages and disadvantages.
Town:
The main features were,
- High wages
- Good opportunities for employment.
- Tempting prospects of advancement.
- Good places for amusement.
- High prices and rents.
- Excessive hours of toil
- Long distances to the work place.
- Poor drainage system
- Fearful slums
- Poor health conditions of the inhabitants
Country:
The main features were,
- Sources of beauty and wealth
- Beautiful vistas, parks, fresh air.
- Low rents
- Less opportunity for employment
Le corbusier shows how courtyards - ‘the traditional way of using a site’ – can be
replaced by a sla b,in the context of Lucio Costa’s Ministry of education in Rio de
Janiro .
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LE CORBUSIER’S CONCEPT OF LANDSCAPE
Le Corbusier‟s concept of urban landsc ape were not static but evolved
during his lifetime. Its first definitive form was the city of three million of 1922,the
Rad ia nt City 1932,and the three human Establishments of 1941-42.
5.1
THE CITY OF THREE MILLION ( The Contemporary City )
5.2
RADIANT CITY
It was envisaged that the entire9
population would live in high -density
conditions, with low -density suburbs
banished altogether.
The plan had much in common with the
Contemporary City - clearance of the
histor ic cityscape and rebuilding utilizing
modern methods of production.
The building would be placed upon
pilotus, five meters off the ground, so that
more land could be given over to nature.
Setback from other unites would be
achieved by les red ents , pattern s that
Corbusier created to lessen the effect of
uniformity. The scale of the apartment
houses was fifty meters high, which would
accommodate, according to Corbusier,
2,700 inhabitants with fourteen square
meters of space per person.
Plan,Radiant c ity The business center, which had
engendered much elaboration in the
Contemporary City, was positioned to the
north of les unites and consisted of
Cartesian (glass & steel) skyscrapers every
400 meters. The skyscrapers were to provide
office space for 3,200 workers per building.
As in the Contemporary City, corridor
streets were destroyed. Automobile traffic
Detail Plan,Radiant City was to circulate on pilotus supported roadways
five meters above the earth. The entire
ground was given as a "gift" to pedestrians, with pathways running in orthogonal
and diagonal projections. Other transportation modes, like subways and trucks,
had their own roadways s eparate from automobiles.
View,Radiant City,the
buildings are on Pilotis to
maintain the continuity of
the landscape.
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5.3
THREE HUMAN ESTABLISHMENTS (1941 - 42)
The three establishments are served by a traffic system, which classifies motor
v ehicle traffic according to speed and separate the pedestrian. Different sectors
of different towns are completely reorganized in terms of function and traffic.
Finally, the linear industrial City was associated with the unite d’ Habitation, a
free standin g twenty storey slab block combining residential accommodation with
the essential source of domestic supply, in which the traditional unity of urban form
was completely abandoned
A constant feature remained throughout his commitment to achieving a green
ci ty, a landscape city offering its inhabitants „sun, space and greenery‟.
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7.0 THE CHANDIGARH LANDSCAPE – A CASE STUDY OF MODERN LANDSCAPE
7.1
LANDSCAPE RESOURCES AS A DET ERMINANT
Siting
Chandigarh is sited within three natural boundaries the shiwalik hills, Patiala KI Rao
and Sukhna Choe.
The Shiwalik Mountains in the northwest form the backdrop in the horizon. The
floodplains of the two rivulets, Patiala Ki Rao and Sukhn a Choe define the in the
northwestern and southeastern edges. These floodplains are the vast open spaces
on the edge of the city.
Thus the genus loci of Chandigarh are the vast tilting plain, Shiwalik Mountains as
the backdrop and the open spaces of the f loodplains as the edges.
Landscape structure
The central rivulet (N -choe) has provided the central spine to the open space system
of the city. The N -Choe forms the city level open space, the leisure valley (NE-SW).
These linear ope n spaces are repeated are repeated at the sector level, ultimately
forming an interpenetrating grid of open spaces.
7.2
TRANSFORMATION OF THE LANDSCAPE RESOURCES- THE MODERN CHANDIGARH
CITY
Division of the land : the village abadi was delineated by the Lal Dora , individul
farms by the Khasra and the extents of the village farmlands by the revenue
records. These boundary divisions were changed by the imposition of The Grid, into
sectors.
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Circulation : the village streets at the Abadi level, and the c art track at the inter -
village level was replaced by the hierarchy of the seven -V‟s.
Open space : the vocabulary of the rural space system, the cluster open space, the
village ch aupal, and the countryside were transformed into the neighborhood level
open space, the sector level open space, and the city level (leisure valley) open space.
Land: the land was essentially graded for the layout of roads and sectors.
Rivulets and Ponds: The village ponds were reclaimed; the sukhna choe was dammed
to create a lake, the Sukhna Lake.
Thus the gridiron network of roads was superimposed on the rural landscape. The
grid cut across the natural drainage channels and undulations, the villages leveled,
and thus this rural landscape was transformed into a modern urban complex.
V1- represents the regional highway leading into the city from outside.
V2- forms the main horizontal axis of the town,”the Madhya Marg” intersecting the
street leading to the capital complex also a V2, “The Jan Marg”. This street borders
the Civic Center, and at the lower edge of the city the V2 continuity of “Jan Marg”
intersects another V2 .The V2 boulevards, designed ultimately to employ a system
of separated lanes, will accommodate all classes of traffic, fast and slow moving
vehicles, cycles and pedestrians.
Madhya Marg,the V 2
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V 3 – Surrounding the residential
sectors and forming the grid
pattern of the city are the V3‟s,
the streets reserved for fast
moving motor traffic. Access to
the sec to rs from these streets is
limited, and there is no frontage
development permitted. The
street is treated, in fact, as
though it was a railway line,
and walls have been
constructed to restrict
pedestrian access. The sector is
thus planned to focus internally .
V 3,the sector -dividing road.
V 7 – Are the paths designed to carry pedestrians and cyclists through the park
belts of the city, which contain the schools and the playing fields. These paths
would also go underneath the V 3 roads and link sectors, thus making it
theoretically possible to traverse the entire city on foot through a park.
A sustainable landscape is designed to be both attractive and in balance with the local climate
and environment and it should require minimal resource inputs. Thus, the design must be
“functional, cost-efficient, visually pleasing, environmentally friendly and maintainable" As part of
the concept called sustainable development it pays close attention to the preservation of limited
and costly resources, reducing waste and preventing air, water and soil pollution. Landscape
Maintenance practices greatly influence the waste produced and the cost of the maintenance
itself; such as using electric or gas hedge trimmers which degrade plant material rather than
using hand shears which create plant longevity, reduce the amount of waste over time, and
prevent the misshaping of plant material and eliminates the "Balls and Boxes that unskilled
gardeners create.(James Deagan, Prof Cal Poly Pomona Lecture 1980), In addition, compost,
fertilization, grass cycling, pest control measures that avoid or minimize the use of chemicals,
integrated pest management, using the right plant in the right place, appropriate use of turf,
irrigation efficiency and xeriscaping or water-wise gardening are all components of sustainable
landscaping.
BENEFITS
The geographic location can determine what is sustainable due to differences in precipitation and
temperature. For example, the California Waste Management Board emphasizes the link
between minimizing environmental damage and maximizing one‟s bottom line of urban
commercial landscaping companies. In California, the benefits of landscapes often do not
outweigh the cost of inputs like water and labor. However, using appropriately selected and
properly sited plants may help to ensure that maintenance costs are lower than they otherwise
would be due to reduced chemical and water inputs.