16 ms·

Man I'm really glad he didn't get his way for Paris There seems to be a similar sort of thinking between grand designs in urban planning and waterfall style de

by rtpg 11y ago

Man I'm really glad he didn't get his way for Paris There seems to be a similar sort of thinking between grand designs in urban planning and waterfall style development (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough). A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!). And the results seem just as mediocre Its kind of funny, despite having a lot of the same zoning vocabulary as this grand plan, playig Sim City for an hour will make you realise how foolish giant zoning areas are. And it's all because of the simple fact that people need to live close to various parts of the city. +1 for first principles. A city is a bunch of people first, a zoning map second( or ideally, almost dead last)

rzzzt 11y ago
> (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough) I think it's the other way round: software development borrowed ideas, process and vocabulary heavily from "rubber meets the road" engineering and architecture at its beginnings, just to have something to work with. :)
draven 11y ago
"A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!)." I'm not familiar with architecture nor city planning, but did these guys ever stop and look at how city centers work (in Europe at least.) Living spaces, parks and commerce places are all mixed, an arrangement that's the result organic growth and restructuration over time, converging towards a (at least local) optimum for people living there.
- vidarh 11y ago
  Many did, and many clearly thought it was too chaotic for their tastes and/or didn't actually stop to think where all the people were coming from or going to. It also gets easier to understand the temptation when you look at the kind of stamps other planners have been able to put on cities. Central Park? Arch de Triomphe with it's radiating avenues? The successful examples puts you in the history books. And even the not-quite-so-successful examples can look amazing and still be fantastic landmarks (e.g. la Défense, with the position of La Grande Arche as one end of the "historical axis" ending at the Louvre). It's not that surprising that a lot of city planners gets seduced by broad strokes and grand structures when the "prize" is to have your work quite literally stand out even on maps.
- dreamfactory2 11y ago
  It's very formalized in Barcelona's Eixample - the streets are on a square grid and each block is mix-zoned in order that each is a mini community e.g. you probably have a cafe and restaurant on your block, don't need to go far for a laundry etc
- _delirium 11y ago
  Part of their motivation was scale: how do you house 10x as many people? Or 50x? As countries were rapidly urbanizing, it looked clear that the traditional European city center design couldn't handle the population influx, leading to a proliferation of ramshackle slums, lengthy commutes from the suburbs, etc. The modernist housing-block was one proposed solution, to provide housing at large scale while still letting light in, having high standards of cleanliness, etc. What actually happened in most places was the long-commute option, though. A European city center like Stockholm looks nice and quaint as a historical piece, but as a livable city it doesn't work very well, because it doesn't have sufficient living space for most of Stockholm's population. Instead, most Stockholmers live in modernist housing blocks out in the suburbs, and commute in. So you still have the modernist housing blocks, they're just placed in a more out of the way location. Is that better or worse? Better for the scenic Stockholm city center, but probably worse for livability.
  - gozo 11y ago
    Uhm. I'm not sure that is entirely correct. The city proper of Stockholm is very dense, often comparable to Paris. While not as uniformly dense there is higher building often six to eight floors, compared to the usual five in Paris [0, 1]. The modernist housing blocks in Stockholm were to some degree supposed to be self-supported in what was called an ABC-area. ABC (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum) is an acronym in Swedish for work, housing and service (or center). That's why they are as disconnected from the city as they are. The problem with Stockholm is that the city stops very abruptly once you go outside the main islands. You essentially have suburbs just a couple of kilometers from the city center. While Paris just goes on and on. This becomes quite clear if you look west on a satellite maps of Stockholm [2] or compare panoramas [3, 4]. [0] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e53279637d3640c58edd542d50d99e89&extent=17.545,59.1193,18.5592,59.4706 http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e532796... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/@59.3275603,17.9835409,9633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x465f9e1e43cac981:0x79938dc7521d624b!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/... [3] http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG [4] http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg
ianbicking 11y ago
In these plans it feels like the highest priority is to make the design comprehensible for the planners. An expression of incredible laziness. And still such a common planning behaviour. On a smaller scale you might look at one skyscraper and consider the raw quantity of human activity contained within, all utterly erased by the architecture so that every floor and window looks the same - what a loss! On the level of roads and navigation we can start to consider ignoring comprehensibility entirely. With navigation systems and even more with automated vehicles we can traverse a city without understanding it. Who needs the strict hierarchy of transportation from the Radiant City? Or even the hierarchies we have now. Transportation is the beginning, but commerce will follow - will we need the hierarchy of warehouses, big box stores, local shops, categories of retail...? New Urbanism principles may survive, but only as an aesthetic, urban planning as decoration. The organic city structures we'll see (organic because what use has nature ever had for comprehensibility?) could go more than one way. Like an algae bloom of suburbia, structure without character or meaning. Maybe suburbia is already an expression of this trend. But if we don't fetishize old patterns like New Urbanism, and we don't create spiritually beige non-patterns like suburbia, what other structures do we have to meaningfully organize our cities? I'm somewhat at a loss. But then no one is asking me anyway ;)
api 11y ago
La Corbusier is still alive in parts of Southern California, resulting in places where it feels like you have to get on the highway for 20 minutes to go to the toilet. This kind of design philosophy results in places that look good from a distance and tick off all the desirability checkboxes but are not actually good places to live. The comparison with waterfall development is apt: vision first, reality second, users last.

by rtpg 11y ago

rzzzt 11y ago

> (because of course everything is like software development if you try hard enough) I think it's the other way round: software development borrowed ideas, process and vocabulary heavily from "rubber meets the road" engineering and architecture at its beginnings, just to have something to work with. :)

draven 11y ago

"A lot of compartmentalizing into giant subsystems (let's put all the commerce here , all the houses there! In giant buildings!)." I'm not familiar with architecture nor city planning, but did these guys ever stop and look at how city centers work (in Europe at least.) Living spaces, parks and commerce places are all mixed, an arrangement that's the result organic growth and restructuration over time, converging towards a (at least local) optimum for people living there.

vidarh 11y ago
Many did, and many clearly thought it was too chaotic for their tastes and/or didn't actually stop to think where all the people were coming from or going to. It also gets easier to understand the temptation when you look at the kind of stamps other planners have been able to put on cities. Central Park? Arch de Triomphe with it's radiating avenues? The successful examples puts you in the history books. And even the not-quite-so-successful examples can look amazing and still be fantastic landmarks (e.g. la Défense, with the position of La Grande Arche as one end of the "historical axis" ending at the Louvre). It's not that surprising that a lot of city planners gets seduced by broad strokes and grand structures when the "prize" is to have your work quite literally stand out even on maps.
dreamfactory2 11y ago
It's very formalized in Barcelona's Eixample - the streets are on a square grid and each block is mix-zoned in order that each is a mini community e.g. you probably have a cafe and restaurant on your block, don't need to go far for a laundry etc
_delirium 11y ago
Part of their motivation was scale: how do you house 10x as many people? Or 50x? As countries were rapidly urbanizing, it looked clear that the traditional European city center design couldn't handle the population influx, leading to a proliferation of ramshackle slums, lengthy commutes from the suburbs, etc. The modernist housing-block was one proposed solution, to provide housing at large scale while still letting light in, having high standards of cleanliness, etc. What actually happened in most places was the long-commute option, though. A European city center like Stockholm looks nice and quaint as a historical piece, but as a livable city it doesn't work very well, because it doesn't have sufficient living space for most of Stockholm's population. Instead, most Stockholmers live in modernist housing blocks out in the suburbs, and commute in. So you still have the modernist housing blocks, they're just placed in a more out of the way location. Is that better or worse? Better for the scenic Stockholm city center, but probably worse for livability.
- gozo 11y ago
  Uhm. I'm not sure that is entirely correct. The city proper of Stockholm is very dense, often comparable to Paris. While not as uniformly dense there is higher building often six to eight floors, compared to the usual five in Paris [0, 1]. The modernist housing blocks in Stockholm were to some degree supposed to be self-supported in what was called an ABC-area. ABC (Arbete, Bostad, Centrum) is an acronym in Swedish for work, housing and service (or center). That's why they are as disconnected from the city as they are. The problem with Stockholm is that the city stops very abruptly once you go outside the main islands. You essentially have suburbs just a couple of kilometers from the city center. While Paris just goes on and on. This becomes quite clear if you look west on a satellite maps of Stockholm [2] or compare panoramas [3, 4]. [0] http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e53279637d3640c58edd542d50d99e89&extent=17.545,59.1193,18.5592,59.4706 http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=e532796... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissements_of_Paris [2] https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/@59.3275603,17.9835409,9633m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m2!3m1!1s0x465f9e1e43cac981:0x79938dc7521d624b!6m1!1e1 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Bromma,+Stockholm,+Sweden/... [3] http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG http://www.tyreso.com/ovrigt/flygfoto/city/DSC01246Large.JPG [4] http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg http://caliban.lbl.gov/panoramas/paris/paris_panorama5.jpg

ianbicking 11y ago

In these plans it feels like the highest priority is to make the design comprehensible for the planners. An expression of incredible laziness. And still such a common planning behaviour. On a smaller scale you might look at one skyscraper and consider the raw quantity of human activity contained within, all utterly erased by the architecture so that every floor and window looks the same - what a loss! On the level of roads and navigation we can start to consider ignoring comprehensibility entirely. With navigation systems and even more with automated vehicles we can traverse a city without understanding it. Who needs the strict hierarchy of transportation from the Radiant City? Or even the hierarchies we have now. Transportation is the beginning, but commerce will follow - will we need the hierarchy of warehouses, big box stores, local shops, categories of retail...? New Urbanism principles may survive, but only as an aesthetic, urban planning as decoration. The organic city structures we'll see (organic because what use has nature ever had for comprehensibility?) could go more than one way. Like an algae bloom of suburbia, structure without character or meaning. Maybe suburbia is already an expression of this trend. But if we don't fetishize old patterns like New Urbanism, and we don't create spiritually beige non-patterns like suburbia, what other structures do we have to meaningfully organize our cities? I'm somewhat at a loss. But then no one is asking me anyway ;)

api 11y ago

La Corbusier is still alive in parts of Southern California, resulting in places where it feels like you have to get on the highway for 20 minutes to go to the toilet. This kind of design philosophy results in places that look good from a distance and tick off all the desirability checkboxes but are not actually good places to live. The comparison with waterfall development is apt: vision first, reality second, users last.