Metropolitan Landscapes
When talking about landscapes in the metropolis era, the image we visualize is rather not pleasant. The reign of industry and machinery mindset over European cities, led not only to the demoralization of architecture but also to desolation of landscapes and countryside, with the immense pollution the lack of sustainable thinking in architecture and urban planning. Hence the debate on sustainability will be a starting point towards change. One idea was for cities to follow and imitate nature and another one opposed to that, was to keep following industry and rationalism. Undoubtedly, industry and extreme rational mindset dominated over the small number of nature followers, who were not architects, but biologists, ecologists, botanists, geographers, sociologists, and so on.
Going against rationalism of metropolitan era, does not mean being irrational and turn your back to symbolic way of thinking. Quite the contrary in fact, the ideology of ecologists or say “naturalists”, strongly relies on two aspects that are primarily scientific, properly rational, and what is open-mindedly new, mildly spiritual. It was rather odd to reckon such a philosophical, yet scientific ideology by the metropolis. The naturalists however, along with rational scientific approaches, also believed in nature’s power and its balance, where ecosystems are a co-living environment for diverse species spread equally, and humans should not disturb the nature’s balance. This is the so-called cycle of life and it works in perfect harmony with biotic and abiotic elements of the earth.
Such philosophy will be later adapted to the city planning and architecture where a city should work like an ecosystem, therefore we hear the term ecocity. Certainly, as always, architects were sleeping at least from 1880 to 1920! Instead, the debate on sustainability was entirely initiated by people of different fields who decided on following ecology, like geography and sociology.
Walter Christaller, a German geographer dedicated most of his works on patterns of settlements from geographical basis (human ecology). His well-known “central place theory” in 1933, seeks to explain the number, size and location of human settlements in a residential system and the spatial distribution of cities across the landscape.
On the other hand, Ernest Burgess, a Canadian sociologist working in Chicago, who by imitating nature: how ecosystems work in group species, developed urban diagrams of such ecological approaches to sociology emphasizing the interaction between human behavior, social structures, and the built environment. In this view, competition over scarce resources, particularly land, led to the spatial differentiation of urban areas into zones of similar use and similar social groups. Hence, he proposes a model for the spatial organization of cities called concentric zone theory on the city of Chicago as a prototype.
It was the work of botanists, ecologists and historians that tried to bring ecology in city planning with a lot of interesting proposals concerning new ways of growing. The unending growth metropolis had become a great problem in Europe, with an absent solution. Many thought of radially growing by adding new circles to the metropolis functional scheme, which however was a temporary comfort and not a real solution.
Howard’s Garden City concept in
“To-morrow: a peaceful path to real reform” written in 1898, aspires to go back to how life was before metropolis, with no pollution, no poverty, no chaos. His proposal can be described as a simple project of marrying town and country”
of unifying together rural space and the urban nexus, or the urban nexus into rural space.
As an environmental concept, the Garden City, is centrally composed by preoccupations about the spatial combination of different dimensions of social life such as housing, industry, agriculture, business, municipal institutions, and transport infrastructure. Hence the idea depicts of small territories with limited population where the main center squares do not comprise churches or historical monuments, but parks instead. This interpretation obliterates what is the true origin of the Howard’s scheme, specifically the ideologies of new liberalism and new industrialism.
Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, came with a new term for the metropolis, “ecological crisis” and as opposed to that, the term “urban ecology”. He firmly believed that there is
“a larger view of nature and life, a rebuilding of analyses into synthesis of knowledge and action that embeds economic, social and cultural considerations, and perceiving “life as a whole”, which is to understand life as a dynamic ecological, social, and cognitive process in what humanity participates, raises awareness of the fundamental interconnection of nature and culture”.
In his famous Valley Section Geddes tries to show how human activity comes from the landscape features and territory, therefore is bound and adapted to it. The valley section, comprising a number of valleys, is a longitudinal bird-eye section which begins high up in the mountains and then follows the course of a river down the mountains and through a plain towards the coast. Along the bottom of the diagram, Geddes notes the so-called natural, best adapted, occupations represented by tools of different trades and crafts. If these occupations, exist in harmony with their environment, human societies would materialize in the form of such human settlements as can be seen along the valley section.
When translated in city planning, we understand the very basis of why cities are formed in such territories and work upon specific social and cultural activities. This leads to a new term: “conurbation”, a regional compromise of metropolises or developed cities, which in later decades will emerge properly in forms metapolises, such as Randstad, Ruhr, Midlandton, etc.
On another note, Lewis Mumford, an American historian tried to put both ideas together, for conurbation and garden city to work together. Since technology makes it possible to travel easily from one place to another, why should people only live-in mother cities while they can satisfy all their needs in smaller ones and be connected to one another via transport systems? — is something Mumford wondered.
Frank Lloyd Wright, who was a good friend of Mumford, following his theory proposed the famous suburban concept of Broadacre City in 1935. With this proposal, he envisioned the hope of liberating the individual, and connecting citizens to nature where all elemental units of modern society were modestly included, like farms, factories, offices, schools, parks and recreational spaces, places of worship, a seat of government, and individual houses. He also envisioned that the low-density community represented in the Broadacre model would be replicated across the United States, creating a network of small communities that would be connected by highways and telecommunication systems, such as radio and telephone.
However, his plan does not cater for the type of freedom found in being able to walk, cycle, or use public transport. Furthermore, whilst Wright had a utopian vision that promised subsistence from the land, and having space to grow, he disregarded the benefits of the traditional city itself, was not sustainable at all, and somewhat influenced a new kind of urban development particularly in American cities, known later as urban sprawl.
This was a huge failure of the debate on sustainability that will have an immense effect on the future. Literally copying nature to solve the metropolis problems is nothing near the ideal sustainability they were trying to practice. Moreover, it led to a misinterpretation and misuse of the word sustainable after all, raising numerous vain confusions.
Based on Geddes ideas on large scale territories, the planning was brought to a regional scale, regional planning, especially with the establishment of Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) in 1923, an urban reform association of planners, sociologists, architects, historians. This association dealt with new innovative ideas of growing territories, mainly in the United States which was coping with the great immigration problem of that time. Some of their proposals are applied even nowadays, such as Superblock providing all needs within one big block where people share similar aspirations. Neighborhood Unit or 15-minute cities where everything is easily accessible within a period of 15minute walking, Green Belt as a concept of protected green areas within a city, Parkway as a highway lined with forests, and many other enlightening ideas.
These concepts from a hundred years ago, are now adapted to contemporary and sustainable city planning. For instance, The Emerald Necklaces project in Boston which somewhat is an interpretation of the Green Belt concept, Barcelona’s new projects to merge existing blocks of the grids into Superblocks, the initiative of Paris to be a 15minute city.
