Urban Planning Legislations Course

1. Urban Planning Legislation
MUPD 610
Dr. Yasser Mahgoub
ymahgoub@qu.edu.qa
Qatar University
College of Engineering
Department of Architecture and Urban Planning-DAUP

2. Urban Planning
• Evidence of urban planning can be found in the ruins of
ancient cities, including orderly street systems and
conduits for water and sewage.

4. Plan of Miletus around 470 BC

5. Plan of Miletus around 470 BC

6. Alexander laying out the city of Alexandria

7. Map of Piraeus, the port of Athens, showing the grid plan of the city.

8. Urban Planning History
• During the Renaissance,
European city areas were
consciously planned to achieve
circulation of the populace and
provide fortification against invasion.
• Such concepts were exported to the
New World, where William Penn, in
founding the city of Philadelphia,
developed the standard gridiron plan
— the laying out of streets and plots
of land adaptable to rapid change in
land use.
The fortified city of Palmanova, Italy

9. Urban Planning History
1900-1930s:
• Industrial hyper-development presented new
challenges eliciting a diversity of complex
responses.
• Economic depression (1929-39) stimulated
“New Deal” action ranging from
environmental planning, to urban and
industrial/labor as well as social reform.

11. The Automobile Shapes The city (from article by M. V. Melosi)
Ford Model T-automobile 1920s

12. The Planning Responses
Reflected differing perspectives/philosophies
and differing outcomes.
Pragmatists Utopians

13. The solutions
• Realistic
• City Efficient – Regulate and Redevelop
• Utopian
• New Communities – Reject, Recreate, and
Relocate

14. City Efficient: Pragmatic professionals
Who were they:
-Architects: Daniel Burnham (master
planner and “father of American
architecture”)
- Lawyers (Alfred Bettman and Edward
Bassett
- Engineers (Robert Moses)
- Social Critics (Jane Jacobs)
- Publicists/strategists (Walter Moody)

15. The
Pragmatic
Planners
Walter Moody Jane Jacobs

16. Pragmatic ideology
Their perspective:
• Improve city form for better functioning
• Engage in new construction to improve
infrastructure
• Adopt policies (control approach) to achieve
desired goals
Their vision
• Maintenance of capitalist order
• Support for democracy and individualism

17. Idealists (utopian) planners
Their Perspective:
The city needed to be revamped and people relocated.
Their vision:
• Anti-urban
• Embraced semi-rural landscapes with green belt
areas
• Implementation of mixed use landscape for self
sufficiency
• Urban design - blend of country and city
• Ideal size of city - 30-40,000 population
Social order
• Prescriptive (at the cost of some laissez faire
individualism)

18. Who were labeled the idealists?
Best known:
Ebenezer Howard
(1850-1929)Robert Owen
(1771-1858)
Patrick Geddes
(1854-1932)

19. Frank Lloyd Wright
(1867-1959)
Edouard de
Jeanneret aka
LeCorbusier (1887-
1990)
Lewis Mumford
(1895-1979)
Best known
idealists…

20. Modern Urban Planning
• Modern urban planning and redevelopment arose in
response to the disorder and squalor of the slums
created by the Industrial Revolution. The urban planner
best known for his transformation of Paris was Georges-
Eugène Haussmann.

21. Urban Planning Background
• 1800’s
• Paul Knox argues that the profession of planning
emerges out of series of crises and people’s
responses to them
– health crises (epidemics)
– social crises (riots, strikes)
– other crises (fire, flood, etc.)

22. Urban Planning Background
– Friedrich Engels observed the misery of mid-19th c.
Manchester & wrote: The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1844)
• worker oppression
• pollution
• overcrowding
• disease
• alienation
• display of status symbols in
the landscape

23. Urban Planning Background
– Romantics were utopian visionaries
• generally attempted to balance city/country
opposition
• seldom saw their plans actualized
• had a major influence on planning profession
– Progressives were activists
• motivated by desire to reduce poverty or the
harmful effects of poverty

24. Urban Planning Background
1900-1930s
• Persistent and expanded urban problems and a
diversity of (inadequate?) responses.
• Industrial hyper-development presented new
challenges eliciting a diversity of complex
responses.
• Economic depression (1929-39) stimulated
“New Deal” action ranging from environmental
planning, to urban and industrial/labor as well as
social reform.

25. The Parks Movement
– grew out of landscape architecture
& garden design
– shifted from private to public
settings
– naturalistic parks were created in
the U.S. by Frederick Law
Olmstead, whose career started
with Central Park, New York, 1857
– goals:
• separate transportation modes
• support active and passive uses
• collect water
• promote moral pass-times Frederick Law Olmstead
1822-1903

26. Riverside, Illinois
• designed by
Olmsted, 1869
• a prototype
suburb
• 9 mi. from
Chicago
• fashionable
location for the
wealthy to live
• often copied

27. Garden Cities (a British
innovation)
– Ebenezer Howard:
– Garden Cities of To-morrow (1902)
– “three magnets”
• town (high wages, opportunity, and
amusement)
• country (natural beauty, low rents, fresh air)
• town-country (combination of both)
– separated from central city by greenbelt
– two actually built in England
• Letchworth
• Welwyn
Ebenezer Howard
1850-1928

28. Giants of Planning in the U.S.
– Concept of the “master plan”:
– Edward Bassett, 1935, included:
• infrastructure layout
• zoning
– Patrick Geddes (1904, 1915) called for urban
planning to take into account the ecosystem and
history of a region, called for social surveys
– Lewis Mumford (1895-1990) was the first notable
critic of sprawl and the main figure in the Regional
Plan Association of America, which built new towns in
NJ & NY.

29. A New Generation of Dreamers
– Le Corbusier (1920s): skyscrapers in parks
• apartment tower idea caught on, but not the park setting
• bland concrete apartment building is everywhere, and is
hated everywhere
– Frank Lloyd Wright (1930s): “Broadacre City”
• his small house with carport became more or less the
American standard in the 1950s
• his dream of a decentralized, automobile-dependent society
materialized
• Wright’s vision, with 1-acre lots, would have created even
worse traffic nightmares

30. Le Corbusier
originally Charles-Edouard
Jeanneret
1887-1965
a founding father of the
modernist movement
“social engineering”

31. Elements of Le Corbusier’s Plan
• very high density
– 1,200 people per acre in skyscrapers
• overcrowded sectors of Paris & London ranged from 169-213
pers./acre at the time
• Manhattan has only 81 pers./acre
– 120 people per acre in luxury houses
• 6 to 10 times denser than current luxury housing in the U.S.
– multi-level traffic system to manage the intensity of
traffic

32. Elements of Le Corbusier’s Plan
• access to greenspace
– between 48% and 95% of
the surface area is
reserved for greenspace
• gardens
• squares
• sports fields
• restaurants
• theaters
– with no sprawl, access to
the “protected zone”
(greenbelt/open space) is
quick and easy

33. The logic of increasing urban density
• “The more dense the population of a city is the less
are the distances that have to be covered.”
• traffic is increased by:
– the number of people in a city
– the degree to which private transportation is more
appealing (clean, fast, convenient, cheap) than public
transportation
– the average distance people travel per trip
– the number of trips people must make each week
• “The moral, therefore, is that we must increase the
density of the centres of our cities, where business
affairs are carried on.”

34. Frank Lloyd Wright
• 1867-1959
• 532 architectural designs built
• (twice as many drawn)
• designed houses, office
buildings and a kind of
suburban layout he called
“Broadacre City”
low-density
car-oriented
freeways +feeder
roads
multinucleated

35. Ancient Cities
• Evidence of urban planning can be found in the ruins of
ancient cities, including orderly street systems and
conduits for water and sewage.

36. Renaissance
• During the Renaissance, European city areas were
consciously planned to achieve circulation of the
populace and provide fortification against invasion.

37. Renaissance
• Such concepts were
exported to the New
World, where William
Penn, in founding the city
of Philadelphia, developed
the standard gridiron plan
— the laying out of streets
and plots of land
adaptable to rapid change
in land use.

38. The Roots of Urban Planning:
Crisis…Response…Crisis…
– Paul Knox argues that the profession of planning
emerges out of series of crises and people’s
responses to them
• health crises (epidemics)
• social crises (riots, strikes)
• other crises (fire, flood, etc.)
– Planning tries to mitigate the adverse elements of
capitalism, but also makes capitalism viable over the
long term.

39. The Roots of Urban Planning:
Marxist inspiration
– Friedrich Engels observed the misery of mid-19th c.
Manchester & wrote: The Condition of the Working
Class in England (1844)
• worker oppression
• pollution
• overcrowding
• disease
• alienation
• display of status symbols in the landscape

40. The Roots of Urban Planning:
Romanticism & Progressivism
– These were philosophical, intellectual, and moral
stances opposed to the trend in social relations,
values, and environmental conditions of the 18th & 19th
c., with loose ties to Marxism
– Romantics were utopian visionaries
• generally attempted to balance city/country opposition
• seldom saw their plans actualized
• had a major influence on planning profession
– Progressives were activists
• motivated by desire to reduce poverty or the harmful effects of
poverty

41. Urban Public Health as a Focus
of Concern
– Physician Benjamin Ward Richardson wrote Hygeia,
City of Health (1876) envisioning:
• air pollution control
• water purification
• sewage handling
• public laundries
• public health inspectors
• elimination of alcohol & tobacco
• replacement of the gutter with the park as the site of children’s
play. Such concerns motivated the Parks Movement

42. Relationship between Planning
and the Crises that Created It?
– Water quality and sanitation is controlled
– Most people have adequate light and air
– Fire danger is controlled
– Disease is controlled
– Current planning practice has even more to do with
protecting property values
– Urban growth continues to create unhealthy and
dehumanizing environments (air pollution, stress,
isolation, lack of community, etc.)
– genuine planning is desperately needed

43. The Use and value of Urban Planning
• 1. Why do we need urban planners?
• 2. Performances in planning cities: success and
failures
• 3. An urban planning methodology which:
– Uses a cross sectoral approach
– Takes impact on markets into account when
developing strategies
– Increases the chances of successful implementation

44. Is there Hope?
– Precedents:
• Cluster zoning & PUDs (dates back to Radburn, NJ,
designed by Regional Planning Association of
America in 1923)
• New Urbanism & Neo-Traditional Planning
– Peter Calthorpe
– Leon Krier
– Congress for the New Urbanism
• Participatory Planning
– What else could planning involve?

45. To which of these camps do you
belong?
• Idealist?
• Pragmatist?

46. End