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TheEvolutionofUrbanPlanningin10DiagramsCityLab
Le Corbusiers plan may not have had such power if he hadnt 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 Corbusiers 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 inuence planners for decades to
come. Some of the other diagrams in this survey are a bit more surprising.
The exhibitions title Grand Reductions suggests the simple illustrations
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 Corbusiers plan
illustrates, they can also seductively oversimplify the problems of cities. These
10 diagrams have been tremendously inuential 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 articially
simplify something that actually needs to be complex."
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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 dont 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 its free!).
1. Ebenezer Howards Garden City
This diagram was published in Howards 1903 treatise Garden Cities of ToMorrow. 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 Corbusiers Radiant City
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Americas 1785 Land Ordinance divided most of the countrys unsettled 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 y over the
Midwest today, its effects still linger in all those perfectly perpendicular roads
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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
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 Commissioners Plan for Manhattan
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 citys irregularly shaped coastline and topography.
5. The Megaregion
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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
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As cities came to ll 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 citys skyline evolved as a result:
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This 1748 map of Rome was created by Giambattista Nolli. It doesnt look
particularly exceptional today, but Nollis 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 citys street network and its
development patterns.
9. Psychogeography
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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 bottom-up citizen experience and input. The above 1961 map from
MITs 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, Twitter trafc or bikeshare
usage stem from this same tradition.
10. The Hockey Stick
You have likely seen this diagram in many other contexts having little 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 attention 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 theres a connection between the shape of
cities and the patterns of settlement and their climate impact is so powerful. So
many other ideas can be sort of subsumed within that narrative.
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