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ОглавлениеOn death and dying
urbanism
Back in black
Why do architects wear black? Is it because they are trying to disguise sedentary life-styles, where black is used for its slimming properties just as they would use black to ‘paint out’ elements of buildings they wish were slimmer or weren’t there? Probably not. Though most architects may have ‘AutoCAD arms’, they do seem to come in all shapes and sizes, including those who are as slender as Sejima columns.
Is it because of the architect’s inner bogan*? Are architects secretly fans of heavy metal, the musical movement synonymous with wearing black, but due to a desire to maintain a professional appearance, are unable to proudly sport their favourite black band t-shirts? This may be true for some, (including the authors of this book) but the abysmal sales of our ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series would suggest otherwise [Figure 2 and Figure 3].
Is it because architects are all-powerful ‘urban puppeteers’ looming behind the scenes controlling the built environment and dictating people’s lives? Hardly. Quantity surveyors and traffic engineers now have far more control over shaping the built environment than any architect. If anything, the black clothing is more likely to represent mourning over a complete loss of control over the urban environment and the decline of cities. In Rem Koolhaas’s book with Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, he pronounced that “urbanism is dead” (1995) and that the uncontrollable generic city has taken over.
[…] The role of the architect in thisphenomenon (manipulation of the urbanlandscape) is almost negligible. The onlything architects can do from time to time isto create within those circumstances, moreor less masterful buildings (Koolhaas & Mau,1995).
Koolhaas describes the unfettered development within cities throughout the world with low-quality buildings designed in generic, non-descript architectural styles, built with little thought given to overall urban cohesion, connections, place, composition or much of anything other than to respond to market forces.
Cities are becoming or already have become manifestations of globalisation and ‘genericness’ like shopping malls or airports. In almost every international airport, one can either stare out onto the desolate expanse of tarmac covered in fossil fuel-guzzling vehicles, just like the endlessly sprawling car-dominated landscapes of the suburbs, or wade through the anonymous no-placeness of the airport shopping mall with its H&M, Zara, and Gap, Duty-free perfume, cigarettes and liquor stores, Starbucks and Gloria Jean’s coffee shops, Subway and McDonalds fast-food restaurants. If not paying attention to subtle differences, it is difficult to discern where you are in the world. If not for the receipt from the over-priced burger you just ordered saying AUD and that the Burger King logo subtly swapped out for Hungry Jacks†, it would be very easy to believe yourself to be anywhere, Mexico, Brazil, Hong Kong, Germany or North America.
Figure 2: ‘ArchitectyA : None More Black’ from the ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series shows what architects are wearing on the inside, a modified Metallica t-shirt from the ‘Black Album’ (1991) replacing Hetfield, Ulrich, Hammett and Newsted with Hadid, Gehry, Koolhaas and Nouvel. www.zazzle.com.au/architectya
Figure 3: ‘ArchitectyA : Plaster of Muppets’ from the ‘Architecture – not just for wankers’ T-Shirt series, a modified Metallica from the ‘Master of Puppets’ album (1986) replacing field of military cross headstones with Le Corbusier’s 1964 Ville Radieuse cruciform towers (note master of puppets pulling strings replaced with collaged hands from the famous photo of Le Corbusier pointing to the physical model of said scheme).
Even older cities, once beyond the tightly controlled ‘historic quarter’ or old ‘down-town’ inner area, begin to blur into one another, with a scaled-up version of the airport’s retail, topped with monotonous curtain walled commercial office towers or tightly packed housing towers with façade articulated by balconies sized to fit split system air conditioner condenser units.
As you travel beyond the central business district, the denser urban form fades towards lower density, single-use zoned suburbia. Again, the repetitive urban fabric is almost indistinguishable to the non-discerning eye – are you in Altadena on the outskirts of Los Angeles? Are you in Rueil-Malmaison on the edge of Paris? Or Tarneit in Melbourne’s outer west? If you have ever travelled to Tarneit, it can be hard to not at least question the health of urbanism. For those readers who are not familiar with the term urbanism, it is both an abstract and concrete noun used to describe the conceptual and physical characteristics of a town or city. It is derived from urban which in turn comes from the Latin origin urbanus, from urbs ‘city’. Ildefons Cerdà coined the term urbanism in his 1867 manifesto Teoría General de la Urbanización [General Theory of Urbanization] (Rippon, 2005) referring to the focus of the work done by an urban designer, who in terms of scale, works somewhere between that of a regional planner and that of an architect.
In 1859 Ildefons Cerdà produced plans for the extension ‘Eixample’ to Barcelona. Cerdà proscribed building heights, a carefully considered spatial structure and urban character with a direct relationship between streets and buildings, delicately balanced pedestrian and vehicular movement systems with in-ground and above ground services, and rigorous rules to ensure the protection of urban amenities such as light and air.
We will come back to Cerdà later, but for now, it is worth contemplating the level of careful consideration employed by Cerdà in the 1800s in contrast to the kind of globalised urban chaos described by Koolhaas or the monotonous, treeless, sidewalkless urban wasteland of Tarneit in Melbourne.
Urban decomposition
The death of urbanism is manifested in the slow death of many cities that are occurring around the world. We can find apparent evidence of the death of cities if we take an anthropomorphic approach and compare the human body to the city – a popular analogy with architects from Vitruvius, da Vinci, through to Le Corbusier. The death of urbanism might be confirmed if we think about the posthumous human body decomposition. The decomposition of the human body occurs in three phases. Firstly, autolysis (self-digestion), which begins immediately after death and involves circulatory systems consisting of cardiovascular (heart), pulmonary (lungs), systemic (arteries, veins, and vessels). The human body begins to eat itself – membranes in cells rupture and release enzymes that begin eating the cells from the inside out. If urbanism is indeed dead, we might think about the way many cities’ transport systems have ground to a halt. Despite having undergone numerous ‘urban surgery’ attempts to prolong the life of most major cities via procedures such as freeway bypasses (coronary bypass) and road widenings (stents), commute times in many cities have increased well beyond the ‘inflection point’ of a 45 minute commute time limit.
The next phase of decay is bloat. Leaked enzymes from the first phase produce gasses that de-densifies the corpse leading to the body to double in size. Clear examples of cities that are very much in the bloat phase of decomposition can be found in North America including Atlanta, Boston, St Louis, Orlando and Houston, and in Australia Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne spring to mind.
Finally, active decay and skeletonisation, where the liquefied internal organs are released from the body as it begins skeletal decomposition. For examples of how this plays out in urban form, see post-industrial European cities such as Turin and Frankfurt, more extreme cases in the rust belt cities in North America such as Detroit or, even more extreme, Katamatite in Australia which has about as much life-blood flowing through it as Guillermo del Toro’s portrayal of Karl Ruprecht Kroenen in the movie Hell Boy.
Good grief
Urban design and urbanism have struggled to come to terms with the aforementioned losses, while also struggling with a myriad of other perceived or impending losses including the loss of environmental stability, loss of affordable housing options, loss of design control or influence, and a loss of urban amenity.
In this book, we will explore various key urban design paradigms transitioning through a (mis)appropriation of Swiss-born psychiatrist, Kübler-Ross’ ‘five stages of grief’ from her seminal book, On Death and Dying – What the dying have to teach doctors, nurses, clergy & their own families (1973). The book is based on her research with terminal patients, dealing with loss in the post-modern world. In her book, Kübler-Ross explores multiple different types of emotional state, complex and dynamic types of grief, and coping mechanisms of people with incurable conditions. She touches on patients grieving past losses of health, mobility and independence, past losses of family members who had died, whilst also looking at losses and worries for their families, as well as the future loss and fear of death. She also traverses various emotional responses from patient’s families as they try to make sense of and cope with their imminent loss. Kübler-Ross’ book tackles these complex and mixed elements of past, present and future losses and a multitude of players by formulating the well-known concept of ‘five stages of grief’. In our book, we will use these five stages as a loosely fitting construct to traverse recent urban design paradigms and responses to the aforementioned urban losses.
Our analogy of applying the ‘stages of grief’ to urban design paradigms, is used in part as a narrative device, structuring our review of paradigms and design approaches, and partially as an attempt to give a new insight into the complex, pessimistic world of post-optimistic urban design.
The topic of urbanism cannot be tackled in a traditional ‘pure research’ manner, is not necessarily singular or elegant and needs to take on board many facets and juxtapose many seemingly ill-fitting ideas. Just as Kübler-Ross’ stages were not supposed to represent a formulaic linear progression, as Ira Byock M.D points out in the 2013 anniversary edition preface, our five stages are not strictly chronological nor mutually exclusive. And we will not strictly adhere to the death metaphor and will at
times foray into pseudoscience and philosophy, design technology analysis, and popular culture.
Of course, this is not the first book that uses the themes surrounding death and grief to explore cities. In the early 1960s Jane Jacobs, (or ‘gentrification Jane’ as she is known in many unaffordable inner-urban suburbs where historic neighbourhood preservation quickly translated into pricing out low-income populations), wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), in which she critiques the planning and architecture of the 1950s leading to the ‘death’ of traditional North American cities. This book was highly influential throughout the 60s and 70s being treated with bible-like reverence and in some places, still haunts university syllabus presented as a contemporary theory even today. There are quite a few critical themes, including densification and land-use diversity in Jacob’s book related to urban grief that we will be returning to throughout the latter chapters of this book.
The five stages of grief are: ‘denial’; ‘anger’; ‘bargaining’; ‘depression’ and ‘acceptance’. These five stages are used as chapter headings, under which we symptomatically categorise design paradigms into the particular stages of grief. We will discuss key concepts of urban ‘loss’ that inform each of these paradigms and the design approaches and procedures used by each.
On urbanism (that is not dead or dying)
Before we launch into the five stages of grief, we feel it is useful to give a little bit of historical context discussing key themes of ‘healthy’ urbanism – connectivity, aesthetics and urban liveability to help frame the different urban design paradigms. We will talk a little about the birth of urbanism and the relationship between a population’s needs and human aspirations or ‘desires’, the urban design paradigms, and the methods and procedures used by architects, urban designers and policymakers.
The city is not the manifestation of someiron law [but rather] the result of changinghuman aspirations (Lynch, 1981).
The connected city: pack-donkey versus the 2D grid
Pre-Renaissance cities are generally described as either having grown organically – ‘the pack donkey’s way’ or having derived from a two-dimensional grid plan.
The pack-donkey meanders along, mediatesa little in his scatter-brained and distractedfashion, he zigzags in order to avoid largerstones, or ease the climb, or gain a littleshade; he takes the line of least resistance(Le Corbusier, 1929).
Le Corbusier’s concept of civilised humans planning cities with a 2D orthogonal grid in contrast to the unplanned, pack-donkey-organic layout echoed the thoughts of the British historian, Francis Haverfield, whose paper ‘Ancient Town Planning’ (1913) suggested the orthogonally planned grid distinguished the civilised from the ‘moral inconsistency’ of the barbarian. He argued that Rome’s greatest gift to Europe was the definitive form of the town’s rectangular grid. According to Haverfield ‘The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally inconsistent, equally unable to “keep straight”, in his house-building and his road-making’.
The Roman design approach of ordered, gridded street layouts (aspects of the design paradigm), expressed the Empire’s urban desire to reflect their accomplishments as a civilisation, with the physical form of cities appearing ordered and therefore ‘civilised’. Another urban desire that influenced the orthogonal grid approach relates to efficient movement and city defence. The grid was believed to be useful for military access for defence from attacks and protect the city from uprisings from within, to keep under watch a restless population for surveillance, control and even repression (Kostof, 1991).
The layout of the Roman grid was possible because of technological advancements in design procedures, the understanding of scaled drawings and implementation (set out tools) such as the ‘road measurer’ or hodometer conceived of by Vitruvius, and the groma‡ which allowed the setting out of straight lines and right angles for gridded streets found in military camps and Roman settlements.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe reverted to the irregular, unplanned growth around the spiritual and physical focus of the Church reflecting the social milieu. Gridded cities appeared again in the new towns in France and England (around 1100 AD) due to another change in society’s prominent urban desires - the rekindled need for protection, fortified communities designed to counter each other’s ceaseless raids. The revived interest in the grid plan was continued into the Renaissance, particularly after the rediscovery of the work of Vitruvius. Designers adopted the grid to create a new paradigm in the treatment of public spaces and amenity while maintaining political and military prerequisites.
The 2D grid would continue to be used for colonial settlements throughout the world. With the rise of the commerce agenda, 2D grid plans became speculative, used in part due to the ease in which real estate could be divided up and sold.
Each lot, being of uniform shape, became aunit, like a coin, capable of ready appraisaland exchange (Mumford, 1940).
The 2D grid method of planning was adopted all over the world. It was sometimes applied over sites regardless of topography resulting in areas of street grid too steep for a car to drive up. Notable examples are San Francisco California (the home of the movie car chase)§ and Wellington, New Zealand which was designed in England using 2D site plans without topographical information by a designer who had never visited the site.
‘A city made for speed is made for success’(Le Corbusier, 1929).
The rational nature of the grid and illustration of universal reason and human equality was appreciated by the Modernists who adopted the grid but began to give some streets prominence over others (Taylor, 2001). The idea of street hierarchy was elaborated on by German Modernist architect and urban designer, Ludwig Hilberseimer (1927) who argued that the hierarchy of major (wide) roads and narrow (minor) roads would satisfy the urban desire for safer streets for children, whilst increasing the overall speed of circulation of vehicles. This system was adopted by the Modern masters – Lucio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer in their built city, the capital of Brazil, Brasilia, as well as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India. The grid also reflected the classical tendencies of Le Corbusier’s town planning (Laurence, 1993). A mutated version of Hilberseimer’s street hierarchy occurred through the 1960s almost putting an end to the grid with serpentine street layouts for residential subdivisions. This proliferation of the highway, feeder and cul-de-sac system will be discussed later in the book.
The pretty city: a new perspective on the city
Though the gridded city resurfaced in some areas in Europe during the medieval period, organic town growth continued in other areas. Towards the end of this period, advancements in the artistic representation technique by Giotto (Giotto Di Bondone), and Masaccio (Tommaso Cassai) began to have an effect on the representation of cities. ‘Bird’s eye view’ drawings of cities in a pseudo perspective (somewhere between 2D and 3D) allowed for an overview of cities (Rowland, 1966). Though there was some idea of depth, the buildings shown in these drawings were not proportional, complying with the gothic tradition of using scale to set up a hierarchy of importance of figures and themes, not depth [Figure 4 and Figure 5].
Figure 4: ‘Eunuchus’, an early 2D / 3D drawn representation of urban setting, (Ulm, 1486).
Figure 5: Lithograph reproduction of Marco Polo’s departure from Venice on his journey to China (CEA+, 1344).
In the early 1400s, prominent architect of the Italian Renaissance, Filippo Brunelleschi demonstrated the geometrical method of perspective by using a painting of the baptistry with a hole in it, standing in front of the building facing away from it holding a mirror [Figure 6]. The understanding of perspective was later formalised by the author, artist, architect, poet, linguist, and philosopher, Leon Battista Alberti in Della Pittura, a document that explained the procedure. This is noteworthy for two reasons. Firstly this is a clear example of the advantage of an architect being directly involved in developing their own design and representation procedures, a concept that we pursue in later chapters, and secondly, the new technique would lead to a new understanding of cities as potentially an urban composition, in turn, influencing society’s urban desires.
Figure 6: Sketch of Brunelleschi’s verification of geometric perspective technique, by White, M. based on illustration by Jim Anderson in II Duomo: Brunelleschi, a Man of Many Talents (Atkins, 2008).
The new understanding of the perspective procedure led to the city being represented with more accuracy as a whole, which helped to affect the public’s understanding and informed urban aspirations for the city. These new desires, in turn, affected the urban design paradigm.
In the second half of the 16th century, theurban setting became a collective concern…a large number of perspective city viewsin which a great deal of information wascombined in a realistic rendering. For thefirst time the entire heritage of the Europeancities was precisely represented accordingto the tenets of Renaissance visual cultureand given general circulation. The populationbecame accustomed to the syntheticperception of parts of the urban organismand the relationship between the city andthe geographical setting. Perspective,the tool used to create these images wassubsequently and continuously employed forthe rectification of urban settings. The newrectilinear avenues became more frequentand longer, and better emphasised the viewof the vanishing point (Benevolo & Ipsen,1993).
This application of perspective as an urban design technique impacted city design through the Renaissance and into the Baroque periods. During the 1400s the urban aspirations of the inhabitants of Rome varied from their predecessors. A new desire for an emphasis on the Church and the path of pilgrims was reflected with urban interventions – straight axial streets terminating in vistas marked by ‘wayfinding’ obelisks and religious buildings (Bacon, 1974). This urban design paradigm reflected the melding of the current urban aspirations and the new design technique – perspective.
Figure 7: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of the Michelangelo plan for the Capitoline Hill (Piazza del Campidoglio), map data: Google, LandsatICopernicus.
A prime example of urban design paradigms taking into account a city’s urban desires as well as expressing technological achievements (design procedures), is Michelangelo’s Campidoglio (1546) which remodelled the Capitoline Hill to reflect Pope Paul III’s vision for the new Rome, turning away from the Roman Forum towards the civic centre – St Peter’s Basilica. The design involved ‘tidying up’ the space giving ‘clarity and formal order’ by adding a veneer of Renaissance façade creating a trapezoidal plaza space to achieve the desired perspectival effect [Figure 7 and Figure 8] (Mumford, 1940).
The potential of perspectival composition of urban form illustrated in the Campidoglio was explored further by French landscape architect to King Louis XIV of France, André Le Nôtre (1613 – 1700) who’s design for the Palace of Versailles [Figure 9], emphasises axial composition and terminating vistas on a large scale. This bisecting axis created inspiring vistas that would influence many other designers internationally including Pierre L’Enfant in his design of Washington DC in 1791.
Figure 8: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of the Capitoline Hill (Piazza del Campidoglio), map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus.
Figure 9: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of Louis XIV’s Palace of Versailles (built 1668–74) gardens by André le Notre, map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus.
With the understanding of perspectival composition technique and the urban design paradigm came an understanding of the importance of the individual spectator’s point of view, raising questions of whether urban composition was for the glory of God or the individual. The French philosopher and mathematician, René Descartes, a prime contributor to developing analytic geometry referred to as the Cartesian coordinate system (1637) suggested that space was the projection of thought where every viewpoint can be deduced, abstracted, from the universal position of a god for whom all viewpoints are instantaneously accessible. As noted by NYU academic Allen S. Weiss, depth is the function of ratiocination; depth exists because man is not God (1995). None the less, the importance of the individual human experience continued to be of interest. Weiss refers to the French philosopher, Merleau-Ponty:
…every perspectival projection… returns tothe spectator’s point of view, to that zero-degree visibility which is the pure latency ofdepth…. There is a fundamental “narcissismof vision” inherent in all systems ofrepresentation (1995).
This ‘narcissistic position’ in perspectival representation seemed particularly evident in the picturesque movement of the 1700s. One of the aspirations (urban desires), of the wealthy English ‘leisured class’ was to show off their beautiful estates to colleagues during ‘pleasure rides’ (on horseback) [Figure 10]. English Landscape designers such as Capability Brown and Uvedale Price used the projected perspective views as a compositional tool, which in turn informed their landscape plans (Broglio, 2008). Key moments along a path were chosen as viewing points where one would dismount from the horse and view the perspective composition of the estate.
In most literal aesthetic observations, wemight note that it is only in the “major”art of architecture and the “minor” art ofgardening that the artist – and the spectator– may literally enter and explore theperspectival projection, taking his body intothe very work of art (Weiss, 1995).
The picturesque design paradigm was possible because of the discovery and understanding of perspective, but it was also due to advancements in cartography and surveying. The concept of triangulation used for surveying being fully understood at a similar period. This triangulation would have allowed landscapers to sculpt the ground surface to gently roll under the sublime follies and artificial ruins.
Another example of urban scaled composition would occur over 50 years later in Paris, France between 1853 and 1869 with Baron von Haussmann’s interventions into the Parisian urban fabric, which involved carving great boulevards through the medieval city, creating public squares and grand vistas to civic buildings. This major ‘urban surgery’ work recalled the perspectival interest of the Renaissance and the grandiose Baroque of Versailles.
The Austrian architect and city planning theoretician Camillo Sitte criticised the boulevards of Haussmann advocating curving or irregular streets for ever-changing vistas in lieu of ‘a monotony of vistas, and an architectural ineffectiveness’ (1986). Sitte argued that the city should be considered art, with a spatial and formal composition that preceded the considerable population explosion of his century. He suggested that the pre-industrial medieval cities had an inherent beauty forged by the intuitive creativity that shaped the irregular streets and public spaces. It would seem that the ‘pack donkey’ was better at urban composition than Haussmann or the modern planners thereafter.
Figure 10: Drawing of Warkworth Castle by Thomas Allom, Source: (Rose, Allom, & Pickering, 1835).
Despite these critiques, the Baroque style boulevards of Haussmann would also be revisited on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1890s and 1900s a reform movement known as City Beautiful recalled the planning of the Baroque mixed with Beaux-Arts elements. The movement came to prominence in US cities such as Chicago and Washington D.C. which believed that the beautification of cities could counteract the moral decay of the poor, encouraging ‘civic virtue’ (Bluestone, 1988).
The concept of grand terminating vistas did not stop with the rise of Modernism. The capital of Brazil, Brasília, inaugurated in 1960, applied the CIAM¶ principles established in the Athens Charter of 1933. Designed by Brazilian urban designer Lúcio Costa with Oscar Niemeyer as the chief architect, Brasilia is essentially a gridded city bent in the centre, the Eixo Monumental. The focal point of this axis is the Congresso Nacional. Niemeyer and Costa worked closely to set up a strong relationship between the buildings and the city plan with the view down the centre of the axis used as the focus for perspectival composition. Similar to picturesque designers, the perspective image was used to drive the composition informing the plan. The composition of the towers, bowl and dome of the Congresso are enhanced by the planning of the avenue, and the editing of other less important buildings by either keeping them away from the Congresso buildings or by sinking them into the ground [Figure 11 and Figure 12].
Suffice it to say, urban composition has been a critical element of urbanism over the past few centuries, in many cases literally shaping our cities. We will continue to return to this concept throughout the book, but will delve more deeply in the latter chapters.
The liveable, healthy city: urban amenity for humans
During the 19th Century, the industrial revolution brought the promise of better wages to cities, an alternative to the dire poverty of the countryside(Daunton, 2004). This new urban desire for workers to be located in close proximity to industry led to a great population increase and densification of cities. The cities were not well suited to these numbers and epidemics of diseases such as cholera and typhoid from polluted water, typhus spread by lice, ‘summer diarrhoea’ from flies feeding on horse manure and human waste contaminating food [Figure 13].
In 1851, a boy born in inner Liverpool had alife expectancy of only 26 years, comparedwith a boy born in the small market town ofOkehampton, who could expect to live to 57(Daunton, 2004).
This dramatic difference in life expectancy was believed to be due to disease related to the foul odour coming from the human waste that covered the streets, as well as the tanneries which fill the neighbourhoods with the ‘stench of animal putrefaction’ (Sandlin, 2006). Surprisingly the common belief was that the problems were to do with ‘bad air’ due to a ‘lack of through ventilation’ of the cities as opposed to say, having people continually wading through excrement. The wish to improve airflow in cities became one of society’s new prevailing urban desires.
…putrefaction and stench was also athreat to public health. Until the generalacceptance of the germ theory of disease inthe later 19th century, fevers and epidemicswere explained by “miasmas”, exhalationsfrom decaying matter which poisoned the air(Daunton, 2004).
John Snow**, the English physician-turned-anaesthetist, turned big data and geospatial analytics expert, is now considered to be one of the fathers of modern epidemiology. In 1850, Snow was a founding member of the Epidemiological Society of London formed in response to the cholera outbreaks of the time.
Figure 11: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view down the Monumental Axis, map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus.
Figure 12: Photogrammetry point-cloud aerial view of the less important administrative buildings ‘edited’ out of view of the Ministry of Justice building, map data: Google, Landsat/Copernicus, Image copyright 2019 Maxar Technologies.
Though these events were before the understanding of ‘germ theory’ and there was not an acceptance of the faecal-oral route of disease transmission, Snow was sceptical of the popular miasma theory. During a cholera outbreak in the mid-1850s, Snow rigorously sought out health records of recent deaths geo-referencing instances of cholera as well as in-ground service drinking water sources (point data) and produced a geospatial representation showing deaths from cholera in Soho London on Broad Street, Golden Square, and the surrounding neighbourhood, from 19th August, to the 30th of September 1854. A black mark was placed on the location of the houses where deaths occurred, as well as marking water pumps in the area. Snow estimated service areas for each pump – analysing walking distances and calculated areas that includes all properties within walking distance of each pump. By using catchment accessibility modelling (we are unsure if he used PedestrianCatch.com or ESRI’s Network Analyst), he produced a kind of ‘closest pump’ Voronoi map to identify which pump citizens were most likely to use depending on their dwelling’s location. These datasets were combined, and his map, along with statistical analyses, was used to identify patterns of clustering occurring around the Broad Street pump. It was later revealed that the well had been dug less than a meter away from an old cesspit which had begun to leak contaminated faecal bacteria from an earlier outbreak. It turns out that faecal matters††. Though met with considerable resistance from government officials – ‘you know nothing John Snow’ (Extra Credits, 2015), his compelling drawings, statistical graphs and argument for the connection between the water pump and cholera cases was sufficient to warrant the handle to be remove from the Broad Street pump, resulting in the happy ending of the rapid subsidence of the cholera epidemic in the area. In true progressive bureaucrat fashion, shortly after the outbreak had subsided, government officials replaced the pump handle. Fortunately, despite these efforts by the officials, the area was not subject to another outbreak.
Figure 13: Engravings for ‘Over London–by Rail from London: A Pilgrimage’ by Stephane Pannemaker of a drawing by Paul Gustave Doré (1872), showing the overcrowded unsanitary conditions of London in the late 1800s.
Snow’s combining of geospatial health and service data would go onto inform epidemiology, health planning research, urban analytics and informatics research, with influence spanning to this day. Incidentally, according to Michael Ramsay (2006), John Snow also administered chloroform to Queen Victoria on multiple occasions.
Let us now return to Baron von Haussmann’s boulevards and their impact upon the concept of health and airflow in cities and the use of his ‘subtractive’ urban approach. Planning historians customarily attribute the origins of modern planning to Haussmann’s plan for Paris commissioned by Napoleon III, between 1852 and 1870 (Neuman, 1998). In what Le Corbusier later described as ‘urban surgery’, Baron von Haussmann’s renovation of Paris involved radical reshaping with the cutting of wide boulevards through the medieval city (Le Corbusier, 1929). The surgery was in direct response to the prevailing urban desire for improving the health crisis in a ‘sick’ Paris. The wide boulevards provided better airflow, created compositional terminating vistas, and at the same time accommodated a new modern sewerage system. It was Haussmann who objected to a proposal to channel human waste mixed with stormwater to flow into the Seine. Le Corbusier suggested that the boulevards ‘were not based on strict deductions of the science of town planning. The measures he took were of a financial and military character’, though Le Corbusier does go on to praise the urban surgery for having ‘admirable foresight’ opening the city up to the motorists or ‘rabbits’ as he describes them.
The Haussmannisation also involved strict rules for new buildings along the boulevards, with height limits and a set angle (45 degrees) applied to mansards for visual unity, but equally importantly, to ensure good daylight penetration (A. Jacobs, 1993). Haussmann’s changes to Paris demonstrate a powerful cross over between the urban desires for health and military control.
At a similar time in Spain the Catalan urban planner Ildefons Cerdà, who we mentioned earlier, published his comprehensive theory of urbanisation, Teoría General de la Urbanización, with its five interconnected steps, covering theory, economics, law, administration and politics. As we touched on earlier, Cerdà was the first use the terms urbanisation and urbanism, both of which have become popular in the field of urban design.
Today everything is movement, everything isexpansion, everything is communicativeness(Cerdà, 1867).
Prior to Cerdà publishing this study, Barcelona, much like Paris, had become extremely overcrowded and stricken with similar health problems and thus similar urban desires. In addition, the city had been closed to development beyond the medieval walls with real-estate prices unaffordable for the working class, so in addition to society’s prevailing urban desire for the amenity of daylight and clean air, there was also a desire for affordability.
In 1859 Ildefons Cerdà produced plans for the extension ‘Eixample’ to Barcelona that embraced the grid layout with 45-degree chamfered corners and large diagonal avenues [Figure 14]. Unlike the urban desires for expressing civilisation or controlling a population, Cerdà believed the arrangement was to be an egalitarian, spatially just extension to the city. Cerdà’s proposal was grounded in reality, seeking to adapt cities to the new needs for transport and expansion, by new, rail-based mobility, as well as the needs defined by the ‘Hygienists’. Though Cerdà was aware of city remodelling that was happening elsewhere in Europe (such as Paxton’s London, Haussmann’s Paris and the Vienna Ring) his proposal to extend the city with a networked rail system was more holistic, than the interventions of Paxton and Haussmann. This was ‘a new ‘science of urbanization’ for a complete city’, one where ‘buildings and the street were indivisible’ where drainage, light sunshine and spatial quality was ensured (Rippon, 2005). Cerdà produced street sections that show a multitude of uses such as walking pedestrians, pedestrians dragging carts, horse-drawn carriages and light rail. ‘He also designed the locations of services gas, telecommunications, and sewers’ (Magrinyà & de Balanzó, 2015) [Figure 15].
Figure 14: Noli map by Tianyi Yang showing the plan of Cerdà’s Barcelona extension, map data: Mapbox and OSM.
Cerdà designed housing types around a perimeter block model, balancing bourgeoisie and working-class expectations with hygiene requirements and housing affordability. As one of the founders of modern urbanism, Cerdà is noteworthy not only because of his systematic analysis but because of his holistic multi-disciplinary approach to design.
Figure 15: Street cross-section showing central rail network, horse and person-drawn cart lanes, pedestrian paths, stormwater drainage and sewerage, gas and water lines, light pole locations, with tree locations and sizes. Source: Museu d’Historia de la Ciutat, Barcelona (Cerdà, 1859).
Another influential urban designer concerned with urban health that came after Cerdà was Ebenezer Howard in the UK, who published To-morrow: a Peaceful Path to Real Reform in 1898 (reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow) in response to the ‘great stink’ and health problems of UK cities. What was needed was through-ventilation, the provision of parks to act as lungs for the cities, and ‘a general process of cleansing’ (Daunton, 2004).
Howard’s Garden City zoned a mix of country and city life, proposed a radial boulevard layout, central parks bounded by public buildings, encircled by the ‘crystal palace’, a kind of elongated glazed arcade shopping mall opening onto the park for shopping in ‘most doubtful of weathers’. All this ‘near to every dweller in the town’, within ‘600 yards’ [550 metres] from the furthest home. Moving out from the crystal palace was more discrete zoning, with a ring of schools and churches, with the industrial zone making up the outer ring surrounded by agriculture.
Unlike Cerdà’s manifesto which was extraordinarily detailed and tested on the specific site of Barcelona as a ‘case study’, Howard’s proposition was less resolved and included a disclaimer stating that the proposal was a ‘diagram only’ dependent on the eventually chosen site. This site unspecific aspect of Howard’s proposal ‘gave a new dimension to the town plan; a versatile freedom during its creation’ (Lucey 1993).
Howard used the city of Adelaide, Australia as an example of how to deal with garden cities that grew beyond their capacity, by adding a satellite separated by parkland as is suggested by Colonel William Light’s 1837 Adelaide plan (Howard was however mistaken, as both communities were laid out simultaneously) [Figure 16]. In 1903, English urban planner, Raymond Unwin put Howard’s plans into practice with the town of Letchworth, the United Kingdom’s first Garden City. Howard’s plans were subsequently adopted around the world, seen as a new alternative to high-density cities, however much of the intent of the Garden City plan was over-looked or misinterpreted, resulting in new suburbs that did not have walkable access to civic buildings, parks, shopping or workplaces. His Crystal Palace mutated into what is now known as the shopping mall. Ironically, the idea of building on a green-field site was used to expand the cities of Britain devouring the countryside with the emphasis on low-density settlement being at least in part one of the major causes of ‘suburban sprawl’ (Laurence, 1993). We will come back to the concept of ‘sprawl’ in the next chapter.
Modern city planners also adopted the use of detailed city studies to make strategic recommendations to improve urban health and population movement. Scottish planner Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) is associated with the influential mantra of ‘survey-analysis design’ (SAD), an analogue precursor to Geodesign. The approach drew from the scientific method and involved conducting a detailed survey of a site, and through analysis of the data, the design would appear as a kind of scientifically determined outcome.
Geddes advocated ‘diagnosis before treatment’, considering the urban survey as indispensable to urban planning. Though there is still great support for engaging with site contexts, the approach has been criticised as too deterministic. University of Greenwich academic, Tom Turner, suggests that the Geddes SAD method produced sad results. It should be ‘put out to grass like a poor old tired horse’ (Turner, 1991).
Figure 16: Noli plan by Tianyi Yang of The City of Adelaide, map data: Mapbox and OSM.
…the result of a pseudo-scientific, clean-hands, drawing-board-rooted designmethod. […] One conducted a semi-scientific survey; one analysed the results(usually on drawings with jagged lines andarrows); then one performed a creative leapand produced a design. More often thannot the design had little relationship to thesurvey and analysis. The method was not asuccess (Turner & Watson, 2000).
Geddes’ approach was more sensitive than Haussmann’s or Le Corbusier’s. Geddes preferred to engage in minor ‘constructive and conservative surgery’ making minor incisions in cities to improve the living conditions within poor quality housing, for example, widening narrow closes into the courtyard to enhance sunlight and airflow (Tyrwhitt, 1947). We will return to the wholistic diagnosis and treatment approach of Geddes towards the end of the book.
In contrast, to the more aggressive major amputations, bypass, or full organ transplants suggested by the ‘urban surgeons’ of the modern movement (see Haussmann’s Paris or Le Corbusier’s unrealised plans for Paris). They encouraged major renewal emphasising sterile repetition for efficiency and ‘cleanliness’, particularly in response to the postwar housing crisis. This architecture had a social conscience; it aimed to provide for all the inhabitants a social, an economic and above all, a democratic city, planned for all the people (Laurence1993). Their version of the scientific determinist urban design approach involved many testing speculative studies on the maximisation of housing capacity against minimisation of amenity loss. Gropius, Le Corbusier and Hilberseimer each used the design technique of physical models as well as drawn plans and sections with solar tables to work out their buildings effects on solar amenity – overshadowing [Figure 17].
The modernist urban design and architecture movement reflected a hopeful attitude in the face of adversity which was, as Kübler-Ross suggested, pervasive in other fields such as science and medicine:
And there were good reasons to beoptimistic. Startling breakthroughs inphysics, chemistry, engineering, and—tomost people most important—medicinewere occurring almost daily. Curesfor hitherto lethal conditions such aspneumonia, sepsis, kidney failure, and severetrauma had become commonplace. Diseasewas increasingly seen as a problem to besolved. The sense was that medical sciencemight soon be able to arrest aging and(subconsciously at least) possibly conquerdeath itself (Kübler-Ross, 1973).
This was the point at which many failures of modern planning were placed squarely upon modernist architects. Until this moment architects had been seen as infallible, able to solve all urban problems using modern architecture and urbanism, just as the best physicians, during this same period, had been seen as those who could forestall death using modern medical treatments.
Figure 17: Walter Gropius solar analysis for a variety of urban form arrangements redrawn by Tianyi Yang.
In this culture, the best doctors werethe ones who could always find anothertreatment to forestall death. In the 1950sand 1960s, doctors rarely admitted whentreatments weren’t working and commonlyfailed to tell patients when furthertreatments would do more harm than good.Physician culture epitomized the never-say-die stance (Kübler-Ross, 1973).
But in 1973, the critical social eye that was turned on these extremely confident physicians and their procedural ‘mistakes’, was also turned on Modernist architects. The absolute trust of those pushing the modernist agenda had eroded. Individualistic genius architects like those epitomised by the Howard Roark character in Ayn Rand’s 1943 classic novel The Fountainhead were no longer to be trusted in quite the same way as they once were, as all-knowing visionaries at the top of the decision-making tree.
Almost at the same time that cities were investigating consolidated urban growth, the concept of high-density living was also being questioned. Modernist housing tower blocks that responded to mass housing shortages were being blamed for several social problems (Gallagher, 2001). The end of the long post-war boom heralded the start of two decades of intermittent recession and rising unemployment. New social problems would fester in Modernist housing schemes. In Britain, since the 1956 Housing Act, councils had been paying a premium for construction of blocks of flats. The apartments became filled with the current underclass and were beset with social problems and crime.
Le Corbusier’s dream of concrete towers floating over lush landscapes was misread and reproduced ad nauseam without any of the pizzazz of his own built versions such as the Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, France. Instead of the green landscape rolling under the towers, the pilotis (columns) were filled in or became a landscape of car parking. A pivotal moment for these high-rise buildings occurred prior to 1973 in East London, when a structure known as Ronan Point partially collapsed due to a domestic natural gas explosion killing several occupants (Delatte Jr, 2009).
Contemporary atmosphere of loss
In the previous sections, we outlined three critical ‘healthy urbanism’ themes that occurred during historic moments within an atmosphere of optimism for an urban design future that was more connected, more beautiful, and healthier than what had come before.
The visionary example of Haussmann’s Paris, and the holistic approach of Ildefons Cerdà in Barcelona demonstrate urbanism coming of age. These urban designers were grappling with balancing issues of movement by considering transportation and network connectivity. They were studying aesthetic unity and visual composition by designing for the human experience and composing from the human perspective. They were also responding to a desire for improving public health through their development of urban design procedures responding to desires for access to daylight, airflow, and sewerage in growing cities.
When we think about the atmosphere of contemporary society’s urban concerns and wants, they appear somewhat more pessimistic than prior urban desires. The use of the grid expressed the ‘civilised’ nature of Roman society, perspectival urban compositions reflected cultural advancement, and the boulevards of Haussmann and chamfered grids of Cerdà were an expression of enlightened design defeating the disease and pestilence of the past. The focus of contemporary urban design is far less aspirational. We no longer talk about the future being better than it is now, we use terms like ‘sustainability’, that the best we can hope for is to sustain the lifestyle we currently have, and ‘resilience’, that we expect things are going to get horribly worse with a myriad of crises, and we hope that we can return to pre-crisis status quickly.
The driving force behind urban aspirations and desires now is based on perceived losses. The loss of cheap fuel due to peak oil; the loss of environmental stability due to climate change; the loss of time due to long commutes; the loss of social diversity due to planning regulation induced social segregation; the loss of health due to a worldwide obesity epidemic; as well as the continuing fear for a loss of amenity due to urbanisation and densification are all realities for which society needs to adjust and prepare.
In the following chapters, we will explore these loss-focused objectives and desires, as well as various responses to the suggested death of urbanism. We use the analogy of ‘coping with loss’, as the structure for our review of prevailing current and emerging urban design paradigms and their associated design techniques or ‘procedures’. We use Kübler-Ross’ concept of ‘five stages of grief’ from her book On Death and Dying, published in the pivotal year of 1973, with each chapter exploring a ‘stage of grief’ with its corresponding urban design paradigm.
In the First Stage: Denial chapter, we explore the coping mechanism of refusal to accept that the ‘diagnosis’ is correct, comparing terminal patient denial to advocates for business-as-usual urban ‘sprawl’ development, and some of the significant problems with this denial.
In the Second Stage: Anger chapter, we examine the placing of blame that can occur during difficult times of transition by examining anti-development community groups and attempt to tease out some of the underlying reasoning behind their anger.
In the Third Stage: Bargaining chapter, we move on to discuss the strong desire of terminal patients to want to go back to the way things were before they had been presented the bad news. We compare this yearning for the past with the revisionist New Urbanist design movement attempting to understand the embedded use of nostalgia and promises of ‘clean’ urban order.
In the Fourth Stage: Depression chapter, we study concepts of depression, starchitects, digital-procedural fetishism, and community co-design.
In the Fifth Stage: Acceptance chapter, we explore the idea of accepting our fate and making the most of the time left, presenting an optimistic manifesto that includes strategic densification, making speculative plans, proposing smarter community participation, and putting forward an integrated performance-based approach to urbanism.
* ‘Bogan’ is Australian and New Zealand slang term for describing a person whose speech, behaviour and appearance are considered uncouth or unsophisticated, often dedicated fans of 1980s heavy metal bands such as Mötley Crüe or AC/DC who epitomise the ‘boganesque’.
† The Burger King business name was already trademarked by a takeaway food shop in Adelaide when the franchise was first being established in Australia and was consequently renamed Hungry Jacks.
‡ A ‘groma’ or ‘surveyor’s cross’ was a primitive surveying device that used vertical staffs with cross members hanging plumb bobs. The surveyor’s assistant would walk ahead and move around until their staff lined up with the surveyor’s plum bobs.
§ For a prime example of a grid laid out indiscriminately over undulating topography, see Bullitt, the 1968 police thriller film starring Steve Mc-Queen, directed by Peter Yates, distributed by Warner Bros, where a 390 CID V8 Ford Mustang and two 1968 V8 Dodge Chargers chase each other around the steep streets of San Francisco becoming airborne at intersections. This example exposes the mismatch of 19th C gridded street layout, steep terrain and the speed of the 20th Century car.
¶ CIAM: Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne, (International Congress of Modern Architecture) founded in 1928, in Switzerland, group of Modernist architects led by Le Corbusier, Hélène de Mandrot, Sigfried Giedion with Hugo Häring, Pierre Jeanneret, Hannes Meyer and others.
** Not to be confused with Jon Snow ‘The Pouting Bastard of Winter-fell’, short-lived ‘King of the North’ and the second most disappointing resolution of a character arc in GOT Season 8.
†† Sorry, that pun was irresistible.
