History - Urbanity
High modernity after WWII in terms of urban planning
after 1971 it is mainly characterised with disillusionment.
What is a city?
Tokyo has 40 million inhabitants, whilst the brussels-Leuven area only has around 2 million, of which most live in Brussels.
A city in Japan is vastly different to that of Aarschot. As such the experience of urbanism too follows.
Different studies on metropolitan areas gets different numbers as according to the amount of people living there, due to differing definitions as to what count as part of a city.
Belgium and the netherlands have quite different populations per city. In the netherlands most cities are around the same, whilst Belgium has high population centers.
Working definition:
A location characterised by a higher concentration compared to its surroundings in terms of population, services, excitement (Rodger), crime, pollution.
City and surroundings are the object of urban planning.
Föllmer & Smith:
Plea for the city as a focus for understanding post-war European history; Plea for historicising the urban events that have taken place since 1945.
There has been very few textbooks on the matter by historians in regards to urban development, but rather they have always been by specific authors who already have very partisan views on the matter. As such there has been a clear lack in academic discipline on the matter.
The Article covers the ”European” city.
What is this?
In the article it is assumed that they are different from cities elsewhere.
As such we can also talk about a northamerican way of building cities, which are usually heavily car-centric. The US high-rise buildings are offices whilst in Canada they seem to often be livable.
In the article they talk about a south and east urbanisation; and a north and west suburbanisation, though not as intense as in the US.
In the US more like: Geographical isolation of the suburbs; racial segregation, with the white population moving to suburbs; car-centered; gender component (with the man as the sole breadwinner with a housewife).
In Europe, women could usually still participate in Urban life, and as such housewives were not as much of an important element. In the US housewives were bored and depressed.
The US: Levittown PA
”Little boxes all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same”
The downtowns of US cities, like Detroit’s michigan central station were often neo-classical. Though like this station, it became derelict after public transport was abandoned.
In Europe there was a remarkable recovery and swift reconstruction of postcatastrophic cities.
West: Berlin, nurnberg, munchen, coventry, rotterdam, Royan.
East: Berlin, Dresden, Warsaw, Minsk [Königsberg → Kaliningrad; was more or less uninhabitated and remain a closed city during the entirety of the Soviet Union, as such never recovered].
Various reconstruction strategies were used: cities combined emerging modern suburbs with vaied approaches to their cores (radical modenrisation: very little concern for the past, reconstruction or preservation: damaged buildings are reconstructed or built alike from the ground up – and combinations thereof).
Local urban elites reaffirmed their belief in the city as a pleasant habitat, whilst in the US the local elites fleed the city, itdid not have to be protected. (Paradoxical outcome: suburbanisation was combined with a stable city center.)
Negative impact on multi-ethnic character (eg. Lwow → Lviv; Breslau → Wroclaw)
On the long run it seems that a multi-ethnic character would then grow further in the West.
80-90% of Warsaw was destroyed after the Warsaw uprising: a kind of urbicide. A willful act of destroying a city for its own sake.
The core of Warsaw was sought after to be rebuilt, whilst the rest was rebuilt in a modernised fashion.
Rotterdam suffered the same fate as Warsaw, only 10% remaining of the city center; all of medieval rotterdam is gone. Instead however, they chose to commit entirely to modernisation as a specific aim of the dutch planners. The idea was to make rotterdam as a model colony of modernisation and urbanisation. Ossip Zadkine’s ’Destroyed City’ Statue stands at its center.
They built the Lijnbaan, the first pedestrian-only shopping street in Europe. A full seperation of car and pedestrian trafic. De Lijnbaan is as such avant-garde. As well as the opening of the ’De Rotterdam’ in 2013, a direct continuation of the conscious decision to have an urban identity in Rotterdam.
As a mix between the two there is the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche in Berlin (ugly af) and the Coventry cathedral.
In some cases even, ruins were preserved in as a marker of the new era.
In Dresden there was a full committment to pure modernisation given its highly damaged urban center. However, sometimes there is a kind of backlash. After the German unification there was a demand to repair some of the choices made under the east, and as such the Frauenkirche was rebuilt in Dresden, with lots of building on the same market square.
There is also the Palast der Republik, the East-german parliment building. It was multi-functional, had lots of recpetions and public events and as such was quite an open and accessible building. The building was clearly made in a modernist idiom, and built instead of the Berliner Schloss, which had been torn down during the war and there was little money and care for reconstructing a royal palace, as it would have been ideologically dubious.
Around 2007 the Palast was torn down, and instead to reconstruct the Berliner Schloss – finished in 2020. One side is historicist and one side is modern. Insanity.
Urban spaces became a testing ground for local/national governments, planners, and (in the West) commerical investors who believed in progress, innovation and technocratic governance: building a better society through housing and urban planning (social engineering) → top down push for modernisation.
Heavy participation from ’experts’ on how society should be.
The attempt to create a new society through urban planning: to create populations desirable for those with power.
However, there was also a bottom-up push:
They wanted better housing, mobility and consumption, as such the engine of the welfare state was fueled, which allowed for huge opportunities for experts. Föllmer and Smith want to point out that high-modernity was not entirely un-democratic, and that it actually had support from the people.
There was a demand for knowledge in expertise: how to engineer things.
The theoretical foundation of these ideas were those postulated by CIAM: congres internationaux d’architecture moderne; established at the charter of Athens in 1933.
Wanted to improve the lives of the masses with habitation, work, leisure and transport. Wanted to create buildings which would be useful for people.
The Charter of Athens was a kind of pamphlet that wasn’t really influential at the time of its appearance with the economic crisis going on at the time. Architects were barely employed at the time. However, it proposed a strategy to reconstruct the modern city by seperating its functions clearly. By analysing the space in it, and seperate the essential 4 functions, ie. Habitation, work, leisure with transport uniting the other 4 functions. You should not have multiple functions in the same area. People should live in one place, work in another, and have fun in another. Everything should be conceptually seperated. After WWII when there was economic growth, this became an implicit pamphlet to follow at the time; in many instances it was applied uncritically and as an internalised dogma.
→ it solved some problems but created obvious new ones.
There was very much an honest and positive intention with this way of doing architecture, but it was not thought through all the way.
Ideological preference for the city as the space/place to construct a new type of mankind (marxist tradition: aversion to rurality). There was an ideological preference for the city to create the city as a new kind of place for humanity.
Stalinist modernisation: construction of new cities near factories eg. Nowa Hutta, Eisenhuttenstadt GDR, Stalinstadt.
The state should provide free welfare amenities such as (schools, kindergartens, libraries and housing) despite them being dictatorships.
Weak development of civil society and urban counter culture.
Clear eastern-european typology: architecturally homogenous residential architecture (mainly pre-fab plattenbau from mid 1950s onward: industrialisation of construction as a central tenet of modernism). It was considered backward to build houses of bricks. Pre-fab constructions are way faster and rationalised. You just assemble structures like lego-toys. It is a kind of social act, which makes housing available for literally everyone, despite it not looking good at all. This happened both in east and west but went in extreme in the east.
In new Belgrade in Yugoslavia there were direct planning of the entire city. On the other side of the river they were specifically building a new district from scratch, with many women participating, as the expertise of archtecture became wide-spread among women who were finally allowed into education.
Nowa Huta is actually really beautiful wtf. It is planned from scratch.
Modernisation in the West:
Creation of new cities such as the UK New towns act, the Villes Nouvells and Zones a urbaniser en priorite, many parts of France that were already existing were urbanised, and citified. From 1960s onwards there was the Flevoland land reclamation programme. In Belgium Lovuain-la-neuve was built to house professors kicked out of Leuven.
Increased government interventionism regarding social housing and high-rise, mid-rise, and single family houses.
Strong development of traffic infrastructure and the rise in car ownership from the 60s onward, aided by low fuel cost until 1973.
Development of industrial estates near cities, close to office blocks and light industry.
The countryside was modernised: strong emphasis to bring the living standards of the countryside to those in the city: so-called isotropy. Which worked well with land consolidation which is about the rational parcellisation of plots of land.
The movie ”New Town” is a search for legitimacy to the experts on building the cities.
All the parties in Belgium had similar views in terms of what kind of architectural path to follow after the war. All the parties wanted to claim themselves as MODERN.
Belgium 1948 established De Taeye law: a subsidy for private ownership + social housing (single family houses. ”A house on the countryside is a happy house”. You should not only live in the city, you may have the same comfort even if you do not live in a city. As such there was no urban planning law.
Only in 1962 was there a national urban planning law – and still very liberal at that.
With no real state interventions, the development of the nevelstad (nebular city) in Flanders until today, despite ”betonstip” rhetorics, creating an odd kind of geographical pattern all over Flanders. Also led to development of purely industrial estates in smaller locations, far away from the city. So jobs could easily be near to where you lived.
Belgium wanted to really fulfill the ideal of the isotropic world, with people not living so close together.
”In belgium the absence of planning led to a dispersal of newly built single-family homes that corresponded to their owner’s preferences – even if it caused a renowned modernist architect to speak of the ’ugliest country in the world’. Renaat Braem hated Belgian infrastructure and urban planning. It is neither city nor village. Went entirely against the CIAM principles.
What the Belgians built was exactly what the modernists were trying to avoid.
The Flevoland planning was very thorough. The mindset of the dutch planners was that they could more or less predict the future up to the year. Now a days no projects are ever on time. 4 new polders were constructed in less than 30 years.
The polders were based on Walter Christaller’s ”central place theory”, that there should be a main city in the middle with smaller cities around it which could all bike to the main central place.
In Brussels came the discovery of a new urban proletariat in the 50s. Simon Gunn: ”In france and Britain, the rediscovery of poverty was led not by state officials but by voluntary associations, often an improbable coalition of church groups, charities and left-wing activists.”
In Brussels there were a majority living in slum houses despite the quick increase in the city wealth.
Many complained about Brussels that it reminded them of concentration camps.
In Brussels then, most slums were attempted to be removed and replaced by modernist housing, and done by experts, such as the Groupe Alpha (1954).
”The great world exihibition of 58 was a good reason for Brussels to tackle the entire traffic problem, which it, like every other world city, has to deal with, in a truly grand manner. By making extennsive use of tunnels and viaducts, the number of intersections at level was reduced to a minimum and the gigantic car traffic is handled smoothly on wide roads. The high building houses a socialst insurance fund”.
Karl Schlögel: Planning became an ambivalent combination of confidence and despair/confusion over being modern.
Arriving quarters: non-attractive quarters but which are used by eternal new influxes of migrants.
Postmodern era:
Cause celebre: Modern architecture died in St Louis Missouri on July 15 1972 at 3.32pm. Charles Jencks.
A specific complex was demolished there, a specific social housing complex which was segregated from the start between white and black people. It ended up becoming completely used by black people, and then fell into disarray.
It seems to have had to do with the bad planning in the complex, they couldn’t engage economically as there was no work.
The maintenance was done badly, elevators and cleaning never functioned, and vandalism was never repaired leading to the entire place being in ruin less than 20 years after its build-up.
It became an immense blow to the idea of modernism: with architecture as the sollution to social problems.
As such, with postmodernism there is a disillusionment with the idealism joined together with social engineering. Erosion and legitimacy of authority and technocracy.
Instead we should build according to the needs of the people, not the perceived needs of them. They should be built with a bottom-up logic against the market.
Dissatisfaction with architectural sollutions both technologically and aestethically.
Rising living standards increases averstion to collective housing typologies and with the oil crisis came the death of the general car ownership.
Re-appraisal of historical city centres as foundational for urban identity:
intellectural precedent: CIAM 8 debated the heart of the city as a probable fifth function that cannot be reduced.
Sociological interest in the inherent value of unplanned communities.
Le Corbusier: Main author of the charter of Athens, uge actor in the CIAM and architectural culture in general. Often depicted as both an evil genius as well as a normal genius. He is at the core of the many problems of the city that emerged out of the modern period.
Corbusier loved cars and helicopters. He hated trains. Fuck trains.
Segregating of classes, races and probably men and women I guess. I get why people said he was a bit evil.
Wanted to provide a personal garden to everyone even in the apartments. He never spoke of social housing however, he thought every class should have the same kind of confort, no matter the class (one would think that that required abolision of classes). So he wasn’t all that totally evil I guess.
Architectural determinism: the way you build will effect how people act and feel.
Clichy-sous-Bois: most isolated suburb of Paris: it is impossible to get jobs whilst living there, and you have to drive into central paris. As such many of the urban riots emerged from here and surrounding areas.
Corbusier thought we should have the highest quality standards, and as such did not exactly enfore this sort of area. He thought there should be immediate access to greenery, of which there is nothing of in an area like Clichy-sous-Bois. The area is as such partially corbusian but not all the way.
In siciliy there is the zone esspansione Nord (ZEN) in Palermo which is entirely revelatory of the modernist mindset. The area is famously bad to live in. It was built by a milanese architect called Vittorio Gregotti. The question posed to these architects is why would they build an area like this? The answer is usually that they planned it with a lot of amenities which the government often cut.
As such, you can almost imagine that it is not architects who are usually evil… I wonder who was really behind these disasters like Ronan Point and Grenfell tower in London, which where built cheaply.
Both in east and west there developed counter-cultures, though with strong repression in the east.
Like the hungarian protest and revolution in the east, the algerian protest and massacre in Paris of 1961. The 68 revolutions and the ”sous la paves, la plage”. Ice Block action in antwerp in 68. An artist delivered blocks of ice and poured water over them and the blocks stuck together, blocking a square for cars, to condemn them.
Antiwar protests in Amsterdam against US missiles. And then 2005 French riots after some young people were chased by police. Then there were the 2024 UK southport riots.
In all these cases the city was a focal point of the riots and protests.
Dirk van Laak: Urban planning is a pbulic anticipation of the future, which aims at securing the spatioal and infrastructural configurations of society → combines the architectrual, spatial, economic and social dimensions, and an attempt at achieving a utopian harmony in the city-town.
The city for whom? → demands for a ’right to the city’ as a never-ending process. The city is always a contested arena, in terms of who can and should live there.
Societal challenges are always first absorbed in the city and are also first visible there → as such there is a need for pragmatic problem solvers.
The countryside is almost never confronted with the problems of the city to the scale of the city planners.
Benjamin Barber makes a plea for urban governments to be able to make sure that the life on the local level must be ensured, this is what urban governments are about. The nation is never able to deal with practical problems. Kill the nation-state.