Badger, Emily - The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams

26/08/2018 The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams - CityLab
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The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10

Diagrams
E M I LY BA D GER N OV 9, 2012
Le Corbusier’s plan may not have had such power if he hadn’t put it on paper. The French modernist
architect wanted to reform the polluted industrial city by building “towers in a park” where workers
might live high above the streets, surrounded by green space and far from their factories. His idea
was radical for the 1930s, and it was his diagrams of it that really captured the imagination.
"It swept everyone along," says Benjamin Grant, the public realm and urban design program manager
for the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. "They were such compelling
drawings of such a compelling idea."
Le Corbusier’s iconic plan for his "Ville Radieuse" was an obvious choice when Grant and SPUR
began to curate a new exhibition, "Grand Reductions: Ten diagrams that changed urban planning." Le
Corbusier's tidy scheme for "towers in a park," drawn as if on a blank slate, would influence planners
for decades to come. Some of the other diagrams in this survey are a bit more surprising.
The exhibition’s title – Grand Reductions – suggests the simple illustration’s power to encapsulate
complex ideas. And for that reason the medium has always been suited to the city, an intricate
organism that has been re-imagined (with satellite towns! in rural grids! in megaregions!) by
generations of architects, planners and idealists. In the urban context, diagrams can be powerful
precisely because they make weighty questions of land use and design digestible in a single sweep of
the eye. But as Le Corbusier’s plan illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of
cities. These 10 diagrams have been tremendously influential – not always for the good.
"The diagram can cut both ways: It can either be a distillation in the best sense of really taking a very
complex set of issues and providing us with a very elegant communication of the solution," Grant
says. "Or it can artificially simplify something that actually needs to be complex."
Over the years, some of these drawings have perhaps been taken too literally, while others likely lie
behind some of your favorite spots in your city. "Even if you don’t know the diagram," Grant says,
"you might know the places that the diagram inspired." SPUR shared these images from the
exhibition, which opened this week. If you happen to live in San Francisco, you can also visit the
show in person at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery (654 Mission Street) through February (oh, and it’s
free!).
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1. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City
Courtesy of the Town and Country Planning Association
This diagram was published in Howard’s 1903 treatise “Garden Cities of To-Morrow.” Howard
wanted to design an alternative to the overcrowded and polluted industrial cities of the turn of the
century, and his solution centered on creating smaller “garden cities” (with 32,000 people each) in the
country linked by canals and transit and set in a permanent greenbelt. His scheme included vast open
space, with the aim of giving urban slum-dwellers the best of both city and country living. He
captioned the above diagram “A Group of smokeless, Slumless Cities.”
2. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City
From Le Corbusier's "The Radiant City" (1933)
Le Corbusier was trying to find a fix for the same problems of urban pollution and overcrowding, but
unlike Howard, he envisioned building up, not out. His plan, also known as “Towers in the Park,”
proposed exactly that: numerous high-rise buildings each surrounded by green space. Each building
was set on what planners today would derisively refer to as “superblocks,” and space was clearly
delineated between different uses (in the above diagram, this includes “housing,” the “business
center,” “factories” and “warehouses”). Le Corbusier’s ideas later reappeared in the design of
massive public housing projects in the U.S. in the era of “urban renewal.” This is an image of the
famous Prui -Igoe housing project in St. Louis that was demolished just 18 years after it was built.
United States Geological Survey
3. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City
Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives
America’s 1785 Land Ordinance divided most of the country’s unse led interior west of the Ohio
River into a neat grid of townships 6 square miles in size (each containing 36 square-mile parcels of
land for the kind of agrarian, land-owning society Thomas Jefferson envisioned). If you drive across –
or fly over – the Midwest today, its effects still linger in all those perfectly perpendicular roads and
square farms. Frank Lloyd Wright took the geometry of this rural grid even further in his vision for a
utopia with each family living on an acre of its own. That level of density would have essentially
spread suburbia over the entire country.
4. The Street Grid
Courtsey David Rumsey Map Collection
The simple, rational street grid has been a default choice of planners for centuries (one that was
widely discarded in the U.S. in the 1950s as we moved into suburbs and cul-de-sacs). The 1811
Commissioner’s Plan for Manha an tried to establish a strict street grid for the development of the
rest of the island. Several decades later, this 1852 map of San Francisco did the same, conveniently
ignoring the city’s irregularly shaped coastline and topography.
5. The Megaregion
From Jean Gottamn's "Megalopolis"
Planners increasingly talk today about issues involving transportation, the economy and the
environment not at the scale of communities or cities, but within whole regions where multiple
metros link together. The “megaregion” concept isn’t new, though. This 1961 map from Jean
Go man’s book Megalopolis illustrates one continuous Northeastern megaregion from Washington,
D.C., to Boston.
6. The Transect
Courtesy Andres Duany
Transects have been used by planners as a visual tool to divide landscapes into multiple uses. This
particular one, created by architect Andres Duany, illustrates the rural-to-urban gradation between
nature and dense urban zones and has become a popular framework among New Urbanists.
7. The Setback Principle
From New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution
As cities came to fill with skyscrapers in the early 20th century, planners turned their interest from
the layout and footprint of neighborhoods at street level to the volume of buildings as they rose
toward the sky. New zoning laws in New York City in 1916 (from which the above diagram comes)
required buildings to grow narrower the taller they got, so that daylight would still reach the streets
below. This photo illustrates how the city’s skyline evolved as a result:
The Library of Congress
8. The Nolli Map
Courtesy the University of California Berkeley Library
This 1748 map of Rome was created by Giamba ista Nolli. It doesn’t look particularly exceptional
today, but Nolli’s map established the now common practice of portraying entire cities from above
without a single focal point (every block is viewed instead as if the cartographer were directly above
it). The resulting image highlights the shape of the city’s street network and its development pa erns.
9. Psychogeography
From Kevin Lynch, "The Image of the City" (1960)
“Situationist” artists and architects from the 1950s sought to capture the city as it was experienced by
actual people, not as it was designed from the top down by architects and planners (at the time, they
were revolting against modernist urban renewal plans). Their approach helped give way to a new
emphasis in planning on bo om-up citizen experience and input. The above 1961 map from MIT’s
Kevin Lynch resulted from a project asking people to map the city of Boston from memory, revealing
essentially the most “memorable” parts of the city. Maps today built from FourSquare checkins,
Twi er traffic or bikeshare usage stem from this same tradition.
10. The Hockey Stick
Courtesy Michael Mann
You have likely seen this diagram in many other contexts having li le to do with urban planning.
This famous image from climate scientist Michael Mann illustrates the spike in temperatures in the
Northern Hemisphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. SPUR ends its exhibition with
this diagram to draw a ention to the link between “smart growth” and climate change. "That has
become really the organizing narrative of planning in the 21st Century,” Grant says. “The idea that
there’s a connection between the shape of cities and the pa erns of se lement and their climate
impact is so powerful. So many other ideas can be sort of subsumed within that narrative.”
All images courtesy San Francisco Urban Planning Research Association.
About the Author

Emily Badger
FEED
Emily Badger is a former staff writer at CityLab. Her work has previously
appeared in Pacific Standard, GOOD, The Christian Science Monitor, and The
New York Times. She lives in the Washington, D.C. area.

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26/08/2018 The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10 Diagrams - CityLab

The Evolution of Urban Planning in 10

1. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City

Courtesy of the Town and Country Planning Association

2. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City

From Le Corbusier's "The Radiant City" (1933)

United States Geological Survey

3. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City

Courtesy the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation Archives

4. The Street Grid

Courtsey David Rumsey Map Collection

From Jean Gottamn's "Megalopolis"

Courtesy Andres Duany

7. The Setback Principle

From New York's 1916 Zoning Resolution

The Library of Congress

8. The Nolli Map

Courtesy the University of California Berkeley Library

From Kevin Lynch, "The Image of the City" (1960)

10. The Hockey Stick

Courtesy Michael Mann

All images courtesy San Francisco Urban Planning Research Association.

About the Author

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