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Urban Form and Design: Criticisms of Modern Planning
1. PLAN 4003: Urban Form & Design
Week 5: Criticisms of Modern Planning and Design
Anuradha Mukherji
Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning
2. URBAN RENEWAL
1. City led redevelopment projects
Use of eminent domain to acquire private property
Demolition of structures
Relocation of people and businesses
2. Policy based on destruction of historic districts in cities
3. Replaced residential and business districts with super blocks and high rises
4. Objective – To remove perceived ‘slums’ by city elites
5. Driven by federal policies
Housing Act of 1949
Federal Highway Act of 1956
3. URBAN RENEWAL IN BOSTON
1. Boston Historic West End District Demolished
New highway
Low- and moderate income high rises
New government and commercial buildings
7. JANE JACOBS
1. Attacks principles that have shaped modern orthodox city planning
1. Writes about how cities work & how planning can promote or deaden socio-economic
vitality in cities.
2. Brought conversation back from big top-down plans to small plans
3. Urged planners to observe the street, not just work with abstract plans
This image is attributed to www.thesocietypages.org, Accessed February 2013
8. JANE JACOBS
ARGUMENT
a. Modern city planning guided by principles not derived from knowledge of how
cities function; no understanding of how people are connected in time through
buildings
b. Looks only at the failures of city, not its successes; valorizes the idea of new as
superior compared to the old
a. City does not work if people are in privatized space instead of sharing public
space
a. Planning belief that solving traffic problem will satisfy the needs of the city, but
cities have a complex & intricate socio-economic concerns
a. Planners creating paternalistic society
a. Planning prescription – street is a bad environment so houses should be turned
away from it and face inward toward sheltered greens. Basic unit of urban
design is not the street but the block
a. Planners consider sidewalks as purely space for pedestrian travel and access to
buildings, no recognition as a critical organ for city safety or public life
9. JANE JACOBS
This image is attributed to www.thesocietypages.org, Accessed February 2013
1. Sidewalk & Safety - Eyes on the Street
1. Sidewalk & Public Life
1. Sidewalk & Child Rearing
1. Neighborhood Park
1. City Neighborhoods
35. JANE JACOBS
CONCLUDING NOTES
a. Not to reproduce the city streets and districts in a certain way but to understand
the principles behind the behavior of cities and build on its strengths rather than
undermine them
a. City created for traffic, not people is a ghost town
a. Urban renewal in New York
- Collapse of social life in neighborhoods
- Bleak vertical towers, buildings dwarf individuals
- Individual has no control or power
- No improvement of New York economy; justification for slum clearance
- Destroyed manufacturing and small business
- Destruction of public space (Penn Station) and historic buildings
- Suburbanization and revitalization causing segregation and isolation
- Loss of the meanings and values of buildings and heritage
- Triumph of auto over mass transit
