URBS 240 MIDTERM

Low quality of life in poor neighbourhoods inspired idea of planning
Planning is response to the irrationalities of capitalism

1st circuit: m-c-m’
Marx’s formula for accumulation of capital based on production of commodities
Money- commodities- more capital that is reinvested
M-M’
Shift to financial assets- invest in real estate
Crisis of overaccumulation
When capital can’t expand any further- shift into the 2nd circuit

Inventions sparked more inventions in the same and other fields

Industrial revolution= change in social
Now everyone needs to work to support the family- incl. Children

Revolution in productivity- what human labour can produce

City life vs country life
Country life as idyllic, moral in contrast to urban life- which they are now living in
‘worst hell’- questions of health, morality, sexuality

Technological story
Spinning jenny 1764
Middle class is tinkering

Yeomen vs tenant farmers

Land tenure
Property rights are not clear

Division of labour: spinning/weaving, men/women, country/city

Crop rotations

Transport: roads, canals, railroads, steamships

Cities and surplus
Extra food is stored= being able to afford other classes in society where not everyone is farming
Class of warriors and priests develop

Ancient greece: sacred, private, public agora, polis
Ancient rome
Roads, aqueducts, sewers, castra
Forum, pomp, hierarchy, bread and circus
Tenochtitlan 1325-1521
Grid lay-out, central plaza, systematic in spanish latin america

Large cities pre-industrialization: location of military or clerical power, pull surplus from border areas

Fall of roman empire in 400 AD
Rome: 1 million people to a couple thousand
People left cities for the countryside

Italian trade 10th century: venice, genoa, florence
Banking system, start of capitalist principles

Crusades 11ths century
Ecclesiastical towns, lay bourgs
Feudalism

Walls, faubourgs
Safe havens as countryside became full of crime- walls protected them

M-C-M’ to M-M’

Genoese, 15th to early 17th centuries
European wool for eastern silks and spices
Trade route guaranteed by Mongol empire
Ottoman empire→ seek western route to asia
Banking
Europeans want to connect east

Dutch
Grain trade
Stock exchange, dutch east india company, birth of mercantilism

British, 2nd half 18th to early 20th
Have a lot of capital, railroads, steam ships—> get more parts of the world that end up sending them materials
Invest this capital in railroads in parts of the world- incl. montreal

Hes demanding change, showing those in charge how awful the conditions are
Superficial health inspection- esp. After cholera outbreak- they clean worst parts but it never lasts

Slums are hidden

Classism that borders on racism- compare lower class to animals
How middle class lives

How manchester is structured

what could the government do:
Create and enforce building codes
Ventilation!!

How are houses built
Adulterated food, tainted meat
Cheap cotton clothing instead of wool
Weights and measures- merchants cheat on scales so they pay more for less food

Multiple families to a room, sharing beds for whole family, 1 bathroom for hundreds of people, water comes from river with waste and industrial garbage, live in marginal left over lands

No planning
Lease the land- avg. of 40 years- no incentive to build something that will last longer than that or to keep up with it
Poverty is hidden by tacit agreement
Moral economy- there is some sort of social contract, an understanding, of how the landlord/tenant is to behave
Upper class neighbourhoods are on east side and away from where the winds are blowing (bad smells)
Concentric design

“Fairly large commercial district…offices and warehouses”; little residential
Main streets with shophouses
Belt of working class dwellings
Middle class belt
Upper class belt
Villa zone further out

Upper classes move to the edges in villas- later rented out and turned into housing for the middle class/poor (Old Town)- Anglo-American model
Can't get to upper class belt without transportation

Back to back model: working class dwellings share a wall and face different streets
This has no ventilation

3 rows with an alley
Row A- face the street, have small yards and alley
Row B- faces other street, but no yard
Row C- Cheapest have front door in alley

Damp cellars
Carpenters or factory owners will build housing, but are not prepared to spend too much money on repairing and maintaining the property
Single lines of bricks, built as cheaply as possible

Lachine rapids, ‘head of navigation’
The french colony, fur trading

1760 british take over
1825 lachine canal
1853 first railroad, grand trunk (GTR, CN), Montreal- Portland Main
1859 Victoria bridge

Canadian pacific to vancouver 1887
Grain silos, brewery, sugar
Transition from workshops to factories

Golden square mile: guy, De Bleury (Parc), la gauchetière, pine
1861 horse-drawn street cars
1892 electric street cars
Westmount, outremont 1890s, telephone
The church as property developer

Would tak apprentices that they fed and cloths
This did not allow them to grow
Gendered division of labour in the craft household

British isles: english, scotts, irish
English and scotts: skills, experience, capital, tech, entrepreneurialism

Irish: cheap labour, day labour, construction of canals, victoria bridge
French canadians: cheap labour in consumer goods industries
Jewish population centred on st. Lawrence boul. Serving as a buffer for 2 linguistic groups

third city
1st: english or french???, 2nd: irish and 3rd: something else (jewish pop)
6,00 russian jews living in montreal in 1900

Very little planning or zoning in developing the suburbs
Buildings are built cheaply and wrong- sometimes 3 developers to finish it
London has a much more complex industries and layouts where aristocracy still lives in city centre
Middle class suburbs developed later in manchester than in london, but its impact was far more decisive
Manchester is great example of anglo-american city planning- wealthy in suburbs
The cotton industry “buyers, bankers, broker,s traders, machine production/ maintenance
Samuel brooks 1834, whalley range
‘Rural footpath’ vs villa development
Class relations in manchester
Economics of suburbanisation
Access to clean air and water as class privilege
The bourgeois suburban household

Cbd with almost no residents
Factory zone densely packed with industry and worker’s housing
Peripheral suburb zone with villas

Houses in a row, 2-3 storeys, live above the shop, can have warehouse in a floor too
Shop houses on mosley street
Warehouses and workers in back alley
“Patrician quarter”
This area/neighbourhood in central manchester
mixed
Factories along waterways on the ‘outskirts’

Converted moseley street townhouse in warehouse
Bought a piece of land on periphery and built villa and sold the rest
Started the suburb

Developer, builder, buyer, renter
Developer does not have much capital, they set up streets, water etc then sell land
Builder also don't have much capital, build a couple houses and then sell to bourgeoisie

2nd circuit of capital accumulation
New investments in suburbs- It was a pretty good guarantee

91: “investment in manchester’s suburbanization was therefore countercyclical”
When cotton isnt doing good they invest in real estate instead and vice versa

Avoid ‘invasions’
They are buying exclusivity, but there is danger that someone will build a factory nearby- if your far enough out then you're not as much at risk
Why zoning becomes a thing
Higher end has less of a risk as regular middle-class

89: “archaeology of speculation”
Development and building is often start and stop with them often changing- becomes a mix of different styles and ideas

Segregation by class, age and gender
Parlour for women, children kept upstairs, billiard room for men

Ideal bourgeois wife- educates children, not have hands dirty, just in charge of house and children, don't deal with politics or public spaces

Ideology of separate spheres
Politics and public= men
home= women

Ideology: Men makes money for family, income of wife and children is extra pocket money- this is often not really the case the money is needed
The separation of home and work
Women is separated from husband’s work

Precedents for modern town planning
City beautiful
Master planning
Garden cities
Neighbourhood unit. 1910s-1920s
The Radburn principle, NJ, 1920s, 1930s, +
Zoning, 1909, 1920s to present
Radiant city, le corbusier, 1920s-1930s
Broadacre, frank lloyd wright, 1921-1958

“The unfortunate consequence of encouraging the construction of monotonous rows of identical houses at 50 to the acre, with no parks or provisions for shops and schools”
Encourages to just do the minimum
Just about houses, not context of them→ not nice to live in

Paternalistic; park, stores, library, theatre, ring railway
About social control as they are built by factory owners

American hausmann - trying to be along paris with the boulv.
Inspired by Columbian world’s fair, chicago, 183, daniel burnham
Implemented in Washington Dc
Fantastical style
Tree lined avenues
Create little civic centres- small scale
Instead of bulldozing like in Paris

Letchworth near london, raymond Unwin and barry parker 1903
“It attracted unconventional people who were vegetarians, wore smocks, and home-made sandals. And grew much of their own food”
Social goals
Vernacular revivals- Build smaller versions of wealthy houses
Peasant style
Want to combine the goods of the city and countryside
Limited size- if too big they stop building and go to the next one
Self-sufficient- grow much food, have central arcades for shopping and community buildings
Next to railroads

¼ mile walk to school
Organised around schools
5000 people
30 people/ acre
Problems: urban islands, no jobs, commerce at intersections
People wanted to congregate at commerces

Separation of pedestrians from cars
Superblocks
“The contractors so little understood it that they simply ignored the blueprints and turned many of the houses to face the road and to back on to the park in the conventional way”

Hated traditional street- eliminate traditional street
Opinion: he disagrees with Relph, le corbusier was influential- seen in mtl and all over the world
Extreme zoning
Concentrate people in towers which leaves lots of green spaces
Very utopian in he thought automobiles were liberating us

Low density, low rise, decentralised
Private property
“Little farms, littler homes for industry, little factories, little school, a little university”
Car oriented
Opinion: not very commonual at all, homestead

Broad tree lined avenues through the densens parts
Intentional displacement of densest and poorest neighbourhood
Public space
Reforms solidified new city that has spaces that don't belong to anyone even if they were intended for the elite- not intended
Segregation + social mixing
New spaces created mobility and mixed the classes- Wanted to segregated
Spectacle→ paris becomes a city of spectacle
Modernist sensibilities
Largest urban renewal to date
Model for urban renewal around the world
‘Percee’ and laying out grid for future expansion
Big plans- authoritarian gov
Financing: credit foncier, credit mobilier
Leveraged 10x assets
Shareholder, shares traded on stock market

Modernists ideal. Keeping up with british, personal ambitions
Les halles vs crystal palace, international exhibitions

Economic: efficiency, accumulation of capital, 2nd circuit of capital, creative destruction
Capital flows into built environment

Create elite spaces
Fashionable shops, displays of wealth

Social control: working-class neighbourhood, barricades, barracks
Want to push working-class out, centre is elite

Liability and simplification (james scott, seeing like a state)
Maps: “no geometrical and topographically precise plan of the city of paris had ever been established”

Flaneurs

Richard sennett, fall of public man
Style of bourgeoisie becomes the style of everyone- harder to see classes
People can ‘decode’ each other- based on clothing, how they speak etc

Guy Debord, Society of Spectacle
Interactive city to one that can be observed
Conspicuous consumption
Imperial spectacle, spectacle of commodity (all the goods on sale), political spectacle

Democratic public space
Critique of current way of development- private
“Formal park-ways for pleasure-car carriages need never be obstructed…”
Old science re: the properties of air
Effect on health and morals
‘The new york park and the brooklyn park’

These green spaces in cities are exclusive to elite
He instead want pastoral landscape in city for all classes (this is the democratic part)
Expose people to his version of nature as a way of calming people down
Prospect park (brooklyn)- room for thousand of families
People are living in crowded conditions so they should have picnics in parks to get out

ppl have desire to be in a crowd but it should be peaceful, outdoors- not a riot

The country and town sare competing
The town-country magnet
Town-country is synonym for garden city
Layout:
Part of network of cities, with a central city with higher functions (universities, hospital etc)
Cooperative + market
Letchworth (1903), Welwyn (1920), Hellerau ( Dresden 1909), New Towns (post WWII)

center- garden, around- keep pubic building, next ring central park, around is crystal palace (shops) and has winter garden (green house), avenue, housing is along diagonal boulevard
Walking city, 20 min from edge to centre
Edge- railroad
6,000 acres- 5,000 for agriculture, 1,000 for central city
Total pop: 32,000 —> city is closed after, build other garden cities

Movement in the arts and architecture
Enlightenment
Ration, systematic, science, progress, improve human condition
Form follows function, less is more, break with past
Aesthetic: machine, repetition, perspective
State-led planning
Ex: hall building

In context of modernism- let go of past
What problems does he hope to address
Garden cities in outskirts
Feteshizes car, airplanes, consumption- wants city to follow logic of machinery
Wanted too much control over every aspect of people’s lives
No human scale- car focused
Need to be geometrical
Fetisiation of visual order
he aesthetic: arriving by car or plane
Authoritarian, utopian, unsentimental, modernist

Traffic- reduce intersections (1 every 400 yards)
Affordable housing- luxury apt in centre, industrial zone, garden cities (style of Howards, but not mix use) in edges- have a mix social classes
Fresh air
Green space
Noise
Crowding
Underground services
He wants to spread everything out to solve these issues- he wants order, clean lines, perspectives

Where did modernism as an architectural style come from?
International style
Art and crafts movement
Art nouveau (Jugendstil)
Cubism in art, picasso
Bauhaus, weimar, 1919
School for urbanism
Modernist public housing
Le corbusier

Influences from modern art, picasso
Tech of building has changed, things are being mass produced- response to this
New techniques for building so why put fake gothic arches on buildings?
Why put decorative flourishes on things

Focused on designing objects- chairs etc
The craftsmen- California style houses ‘low pitched gable roofs, overhanging eves, with ex[posed rafters and beams, heavy, tapered columns, patterned window panes and a covered front porch’
Reaction against industrialising

School for urbanism
Walter gropius
Buildings with no clear font
Mies van der rohe
It closed because fascist took over germany and key figures left

Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM)
Functional segregation (zoning)
Tower in a park
Separation of circulation according to speed
Buildings cover only 20% of city surface; green space and circulation use 80%

Built as new capital
Social project-
Really just a range of government officials use same housing
Satellite cities
Wealthier people refused to live in apt and built mansions not far away instead
Car oriented city
A ciam, le corbusier city
City without street corners, crowds
walking→ did not want

President Juscelino Kubitschek (JK), 1955-1960
Architect Oscar Niemeyer
Planner lucio costa

‘Clean-sweep planning’
‘Planning by numbers’
“the traffic free pedestrian precinct”
US urban renewal, 1949 housing act
Jane Jacobs
NYC, 1961 floor area bonus
Place Ville-Marie, 1962, underground city
State vs corporate new towns
Death of the street
Suburban downtown, urban villages-Pieces of city migrate to the edge- edge cities
The segregated city-Functions are segregated- retail, residential, industrial

A lot of european cities were bombed after ww2- could start from scratch
In US urban renewal
Just starting from scratch, don't replicate street grid, open plan
bauhaus, le corbusier style
Modernist planning

Have over land tunnels connecting buildings, restaurants on ground floor of buildings with offices above
Back alleys for deliveries, Close streets for cars, open early for deliveries- in older cities
New built shopping areas

If they put public plazas at base of skyscrapers
Idea was to be vibrant social scene- but in reality they weren't really used
Built just so they could build higher skyscrapers

William White, The social life of small urban areas
Hired to analyse this program

Mostly Uk, but also europe
State: have jobs, socialist, autonomous communities,
Corporate: a lot more like suburbs but away from cities, but they still end up commuting to cities

Roadway precisely designed by code
Untouchable parks
Median in middle of streets have plants but no one goes to it
Creating expressways into the city
Modernist is anti-street- car oriented