Urbanized Page #3

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It's almost always

an economic question.

By the mid-1800's industrialization

had been a reality

for a couple of decades already in the

major cities of Western Europe,

and the congestion,

the insalubrity,

the un-livability of those cities

made it such that there needed to be

some sort of a solution.

In Paris, Baron Haussmann comes in

and radically demolishes the city

eliminating all

of its medieval streets,

its slums, and rebuilds the city

with the roundabouts and the other

iconic elements of Paris.

Unlike Europe,

America's cities didn't have

a really strong architectural legacy.

City Beautiful was a movement

to bring the grand boulevards

and large civic arenas

of classical architecture

into American cities.

To encourage a kind of civic pride.

The next major shift would be

the Garden City movement,

which is happening right

at the end of the 19th century.

The idea would be to separate out the

different functions of the city

with concentric roadways

and greenbelts.

The Garden City proved

to be incredibly influential

on the Modernist movement.

Modern city/urban planning

is very similar

to modern graphic design

or modern industrial design.

It's minimalist,

very ordered, very rational,

separate everything out.

Modernistic city,

built on all the ideas of

the Modernistic manifests.

It looks fantastic from the airplane,

but if you are down at eye level

on your feet and going

from one place to another,

Every distance is too wide,

things are not connected.

You have to trample

for endless miles and miles

along completely straight paths.

Nobody ever started to think about

in between all these monuments.

Of course it makes a certain logic

to separate things out.

You don't want cars and pedestrians in

the same place, it's not safe.

But as we've certainly

come to experience,

if you design the city

so that every single trip

has to made by car,

suddenly you aren't zipping

around anymore,

you're stuck

in enormous traffic jams.

The 1950's is when the automobile

starts to have a real impact

on cities, especially American cities,

and a largely a detrimental effect.

Not only do you have increased means

of access to the city,

bringing more cars, and creating

congestion, and noise,

but also radically changing the way

cities are designed.

And this is becoming increasingly

a global issue,

especially in developing countries.

Many things about cities are very

counterintuitive, for example

it seems to us that making bigger

roads, or flyovers,

or elevated highways

will solve traffic jams.

And clearly it has never been the case.

Because what creates traffic is

not the number of cars,

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