Sir Patrick Geddes and Barra Bazaar: competing visions, ambivalence and contradiction

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries successive British governments in Calcutta (Kolkata) became increasingly concerned with the links between the health of its inhabitants and the cleanliness of the city, particularly in the indigenous parts of town. European urban solutions, typically involving slum clearance and road building schemes, were imposed to address such problems. These colonial attitudes contrast with more 'hybrid' visions of health and hygiene that Sir Patrick Geddes adopted for proposals for a market area in Calcutta called Barra Bazaar, in 1919. Geddes' ideas combined an approach that commended 'traditional' Indian courtyard houses, street patterns and external space, with more 'modern' ideas for business accommodation. In conclusion, I argue that Geddes' often ambivalent and contradictory outlook on such competing visions of city space echoes notions of 'hybridity,' recently developed by Homi K. Bhabha.     

Refashioning urban space in postwar Toronto: the Wood-Wellesley redevelopment area, 1952–1957

This paper considers the creation and the subsequent meaning of ‘redevelopment areas’ in Toronto in the 1950s. The city passed a bylaw in 1952 that defined blighted areas as suitable for redevelopment. One of these areas was the downtown district that runs between Wood and Wellesley streets. The history of the Wood-Wellesley redevelopment area between 1952 and 1957 was important in several ways: it built on but differed from similar activity in the USA; it discursively reflected the needs of the city to refashion itself as a modern landscape; it provided the city with the tools to turn planning ideas into action; and it gave developers the forum by which they could push for specific areas of the city to be opened up for investment. Politically calculated and heavily contested visions of urban space, redevelopment areas such as Wood-Wellesley were used by the state and developers to physically reconstruct Toronto’s downtown area for private capital, to create a new modernist landscape, and to reproduce new and to reinforce existing social inequalities.     

British colonial civic improvement in the early twentieth century: E. P. Richards in Madras,Calcutta, and Singapore

E. P. Richards’ Calcutta report of 1914 has been reprinted as a key text in planning history, but little is known of the man himself, compared with other planners active in the British colonies during the early twentieth century such as Geddes and Reade. This article seeks to rescue Richards from obscurity, and position him in the context of the new town planning movement in the first quarter of the twentieth century. A basic narrative of Richards’ career, taken mainly from his membership records and obituary at the Institute of Civil Engineers’ headquarters in London, covers his key periods with the Derwent Valley Water Board (working on the Birchinlee model village) and the Calcutta and Singapore Improvement Trusts between 1901 and 1924.     

Patrick Geddes's (e)utopian Belvedere in Southern France

The Collège des Ecossais in Montpellier, France, Patrick Geddes' last major project and place of death in 1932, may have been a mere reproduction of his Edinburgh Outlook Tower under fairer skies. The site Geddes fell in love with in the South was, characteristically of his ideals, mostly a place with a view, in fact over much of Languedoc. As we shall show, this view was one of a whole region made ‘legible’ at a glance, with city, mountains and sea, a prospect at the same time wide and limited, an area with ready access to the rest of the world yet self-contained. Besides, what the ageing Geddes wanted to achieve near Montpellier was no less than to gather a representative assemblage of up-and-coming scholars from three continents. Yet again, the Collège may have been an excuse for Geddes to postpone the writing of long-awaited books. However, we will see that it also served as a stone-and-mortar receptacle for his ideas and systems, which would hardly be surprising from a thinker who was ever looking for ways of escaping traditional teaching methods.     

突发公共卫生事件引发的城市发展思考与规划应对

建设人民城市、健康城市,提升城市应对突发公共卫生事件的能力和水平,是落实以"人民为中心"发展理念的必然要求。针对新型冠状病毒肺炎疫情暴露出的城市发展问题和短板,文章提出"厘清两对关系、构建两个体系、提质四类空间"的规划思考,具体为厘清平时与疫时、城市与区域的关系,构建适应性强的公共卫生体系、现代化的城市治理体系,通过规划这一公共政策补齐"医护空间"短板、重视"社区空间"建设、发挥"蓝绿空间"功能及再现"乡村空间"活力。     

Democratic design experiments in urban planning – navigational practices and compositionist design

In the field of urban planning, public participation and inclusion of citizens have been practised and researched for many years. However, a focus on co-creative urban planning practices seems to have gained more focus over the last decade and calls for new urban planning practices, which allow experimentation and imagination, and at the same time take its outset in the existing networks in the city (such as visions, strategies, regulations and practices) when planning for the future. In this article, we investigate how a compositionist design programme can be translated into the practices of urban planners. We find that the notion of ‘democratic design experiments’ in many ways meet the demands of the increasingly complex field of urban planning and set out to explore how such a design programme can be applied in practice. We suggest ‘navigational practice’ as a way of describing how urban planners deal with ‘drawing things together’ in urban space and introduce ‘sensitivity’, ‘staging’ and ‘mobilization’ as interconnected elements of this practice. We exemplify the significance of these navigational practices by analysing two democratic design experiments in the area of urban waste management in Copenhagen. The article concludes that compositionist design is a powerful contribution to the framing of urban planning projects and that navigational practice can be a productive way of operationalising democratic design experiments in the urban context.     

Displacements in the name of (re)development: the contested rise and contested demise of colonial ‘African’ housing estates in Kampala and Jinja

This paper examines historical and contemporary processes of urban (re-)development and displacement in Uganda. Particular focus concerns the often conflicting strategies employed by urban managers and residents to plan, govern and live in both the late-colonial and early twenty-first century city. Both eras can be considered significant, even momentous, for the prominence of strategic projects of socio-spatial urban reconfiguration that incorporate(d) powerful discourses fusing land and housing development with societal progress and national development. The former project putatively centred on orchestrating African development and welfare, the latter on the more ambiguous project of re-development. The ‘Good City’ and the ‘Good Citizen’ are used as heuristic devices to examine the planning ideals and rationalities that inform(ed) these projects and the conflict of rationalities they provoke(d), particularly in terms of competing visions of the good city and good citizen. The paper emphasizes that current projects of redevelopmentalism do not take place in politically inert or historically benign space. Rather, it is shown how historical and place-based specificities articulate with and mediate the process of redevelopmentalism in Kampala and Jinja.     

From encampments to hotspots: the changing policing of homelessness in New York City

Abstract

This article examines a shift in language and enforcement around homeless dwellings in New York City that occurred in 2015. Amidst a rising tide of anti-homeless sentiment, city officials and police department administrators switched from calling such dwellings ‘encampments’ to ‘homeless hotspots’, which were defined as anywhere with two or more homeless people in public space. Using data from city policy memos, interviews with homeless people, ethnographic fieldwork with a homeless-led organization, and data from the city’s 311 user-driven complaint system, this article argues that in practice, the shift to hotspots demonstrates the relational geography of homelessness. Selective enforcement of the visible ‘homeless hotspot’ took place in recently-gentrified neighbourhoods, suggesting that the idea of a homeless hotspot itself and the financialized home are co-produced and co-dependent, created through one another. This relational geography, in turn, sheds light on the pervasiveness of anti-homelessness, force that changes with political winds but retains its power in producing borders and boundaries of urban space.     

Planning southern Iraq: placing the progressive theories of Max Lock in Um Qasr,Margil, and Basra in the context of Iraqi national development, 1954–1956

ABSTRACT

Between 1954 and 1956, the architect, educator, and planner, Max Lock (1909–1988) produced a trilogy of plans to modernize the historical city of Basra and create new areas at Margil and Um Qasr in the south of Iraq. The New Basrah Plan was heavily inspired by the works of Patrick Geddes and aligned with contemporaries such as Lewis Mumford, Lock’s planning was progressive in scope and looked to differ from the planning of post-war principles in Britain through his notions of ‘civic surgery’. Contrary to this, his plans for Um Qasr and Margil focussed on infrastructure and the creation of more industrial areas not prioritizing people and place as highly as he did in the New Basrah Plan. Lock’s ‘Civic Surgery’ offered an alternative to mainstream thought by attempting to create usable, humanistic spaces, which hampered by politics and legislation, resulted in the plan’s shelving and were contradicted by his other works’ philosophies. New retrospective analysis of his underappreciated career reveals the complexities of his planning which this article demonstrates through the ‘failure’ of the New Basrah Plan and his plans at Um Qasr and Margil.     

Critical nostalgia: Kuwait urban modernity and Alison and Peter Smithson's Kuwait Urban Study and Mat-Building

In September, 1970, Peter Smithson presented the ‘Kuwait Urban Study and Mat-Building' proposal to the Crown Prince of Kuwait. The meeting took place two decades after Kuwait's 1952 Master Plan that had transformed the historical mixed-use centre into a central business district. The new urban landscape, as some suggested, lacked the character and coherence that the old city had once possessed. At the same time, the Smithsons’ dissatisfaction with post-war British reality inspired a shift in their understanding of the city and the development of ideas of ‘re-identification’ and ‘association’. This paper explores the cultural traces of this encounter and ties these narratives together through the more recent concept of ‘critical nostalgia’. It draws conclusions from the parallel narratives of loss that were expressed about the ‘modern’ environment in mid-1960s Kuwait and those that were recorded in the ‘Englishness’ of the Smithsons’ writings. These debates about the role that ‘tradition’ would play in the contemporary city set the context of this cultural intersection that, in turn, informed the making of the Kuwait Urban Study.     

Whose City is it? On Urban Planning and Local Knowledge in Globalizing Tel Aviv-Jaffa

This article focuses on the variety of images, perceptions and social constructions about a city articulated by the different ‘actors’ which use and shape globalizing urban settings. The actors in focus are mainly the planners (representing the authoritative aspects of planning and city management) and the residents of the city (those who enjoy or are adversely affected by different planning visions and projects). Planners mainly use their professional knowledge, which they obtained from formal education. Residents built up their perceptions and images of the city in a more intuitive way, from their daily routine practices in the city. Following this, the article explores the intricate and sometimes complicated relations between the various types of knowledge involved in the planning process with the aim to find out whose perceptions of the city are incorporated in the planning processes. Focusing on knowledge as a base for formulating cityscapes stems from a personal position and experience as planners, as members of a planning team, nominated by the Tel Aviv Municipality to devise a ‘new strategic plan’ for the Central Bus Station (CBS) area in the city. The article begins with a short introductory background, describing the social and economic situation of Jewish residences and non-Jewish labour migrants of the CBS area in Tel Aviv. It then outlines some theoretical frameworks regarding the different perceptions of this area by the different ‘actors’ involved in its production. The article concludes with some insights regarding the ways that globalizing cities are planned and managed.     

The Mothers of Invention

Japan-based architect and academic Tom Daniell puts out a call to architects, beseeching them not to lose sight of their role as creative inventors. Rather than being diverted into despair by the present confluence of ecological, economic and political crises, architects should be providing much needed optimism, thinking beyond the current situation with utopian visions. He challenges the view that future innovation is to be located in collective collaborations, regarding ‘true innovators’ to be individuals, such as Rem Koolhaas, Hernan Diaz Alonso or Philippe Rahm, who provide the essential entrepreneurial catalyst for the interaction of other people and ideas.     

The machine in the garden city: Patrick Geddes’ plan for Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a pedestrian‐scaled city of neighbourhoods supportive of an active civic life. This despite a building fabric clad exclusively in International Style garb, an architecture said to be antithetical to humane urban life. The city's success lay in the tightly controlled and binding plan provided by Patrick Geddes in 1925. Applying both a variation of the ‘super‐block’ — in a manner that actually fosters the growth of communities — as well as a platting strategy responsible for the development of a distinct building typology, Tel Aviv has managed to resist anti‐urban propositions. These characteristics, coupled with Tel Aviv's narrow streets, its interstitial spaces and its extensive planting produce a city that even proponents of traditional urbanism could applaud.     

Digital neighborhoods

With the advent of ‘big data’ there is an increased interest in using social media to describe city dynamics. This paper employs geo-located social media data to identify ‘digital neighborhoods’ – those areas in the city where social media is used more often. Starting with geo-located Twitter and Foursquare data for the New York City region in 2014, we applied spatial clustering techniques to detect significant groupings or ‘neighborhoods’ where social media use is high or low. The results show that beyond the business districts, digital neighborhoods occur in communities undergoing shifting socio-demographics. Neighborhoods that are not digitally oriented tend to have higher proportion of minorities and lower incomes, highlighting a social–economic divide in how social media is used in the city. Understanding the differences in these neighborhoods can help city planners interested in generating economic development proposals, civic engagement strategies, and urban design ideas that target these areas.     

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt: a founding mother of modern urban design

Jaqueline Tyrwhitt (1905–83) was a town planner, editor and educator who was at the centre of a group of people who shaped the post‐war Modern Movement. Tyrwhitt’s great contribution, especially to the planning arm of the Modern Movement, the new field of urban design and the new science of ekistics, is under‐recognized, largely because she worked willingly as the ‘woman behind the man’ – notably as a disciple of Patrick Geddes, translator and editor of Sigfried Giedion, and collaborator of Constantinos Doxiadis. In doing so she extended their influence greatly and shaped the work of many people. Histories of planning lose much by omitting the contribution of collaborative, catalytic actors such as Tyrwhitt, whose career serves as a touchstone for this era, considered to be a watershed in the history of planning as an intellectual and professional movement. This paper sheds light on Tyrwhitt’s contribution through a chronological narrative, interweaving the biographical facts of her career with the larger themes her work engages in the broadest sense: the globalization of planning and urban design as an intellectual and professional movement as part of the larger civilizational transformation – the emergence of countervailing, ‘postmodern’ globalism, a humane, ecological world view very much like Geddes’ Neo‐Technic Era.     

The role of international actors in low-carbon transitions of Shenzhen's International Low Carbon City in China

This study looks into one of the most promising low carbon city planning initiatives in China, namely Shenzhen's International Low Carbon City (ILCC). First as a collaborative project between the Dutch and Chinese partners, the ILCC's international partners have expanded to include other countries, such as Germany, Italy, France, Australia and the US. This paper investigates the influence of these international actors in the development process of the ILCC and their benefits in the long run, through knowledge transfer and accumulation of resource.The paper first highlights a broad understanding of ‘low carbon city’ followed by detailed discussions on discourses of ‘low carbon city’, ‘eco-city’, and ‘low carbon eco-city’ in China. Then it provides insights on knowledge transfer in low carbon city development, and particularly the Sino-Foreign cases of China. The authors then introduce the case of study (ILCC) and highlight its visions, project planning, and partnerships. Using primary and secondary data, it then maps the ILCC's international actors and their roles, and then analyses their behaviours and impacts in the project's planning and development process. Next, the paper summarises the research findings with further updates on the case of ILCC. The authors conclude that the engagement between Chinese and international partners differ in three forms and they are (1) the type of involvement; (2) the level and timeframe of involvement; (3) the level of Influence in the project's multiple stages. The paper concludes that the role played by an international partner evolves as the project proceeds.     

Pathways and artifacts: neighborhood design for physical activity

Both informal observation and systematic studies reveal that, especially among car-owning households, pedestrian travel occurs less for utilitarian purposes such as shopping, and more as therapeutic physical activity, meant for health and recreation. In response, this study proposes a new model for residential neighborhood design. Wide ‘pathways’, many resembling medians in residential thoroughfares, link streets, neighborhoods and open space in networks rich with recreational opportunities, while maintaining the advantages of accessibility and orientation that grid patterns provide. ‘Artifacts’ in the landscape lend sensory and experiential interest to a walker’s or jogger’s encounter with the environment. Taken together, pathways and artifacts provide pedestrians with more opportunities for engaging with the built and natural environments and thereby generate the comings and goings that make for vital neighborhoods.     

Developing and financing the ‘garden metropolis’: Urban planning and housing policy in twentieth‐century America

This article examines the evolution of garden city ideas in the United States during the twentieth century. It distinguishes between four sets of goals: environmental reform; social reform; town planning, and regional planning. Much of the literature on American garden city movements focuses on the general political failure of its advocates to achieve key social reforms and regional planning objectives. By contrast, the accomplishments in environmental reform and town planning have been far more successful. Though Ebenezer Howard's proposals did not lead to widespread adoption in their purest form, urban decentralization and sub‐urbanization have produced significant improvements in the building of higher‐quality and lower‐density housing and in providing more open space and greenery for a large segment of the population. This pattern of planning and development may be viewed as ‘the garden metropolis.’ Its relationship to garden city ideas is best symbolized by the central role of Thomas Adams, the British planner who served as a leading proponent of the garden metropolis in the United States. Many of Adams’ policy recommendations, including his strong support for mass home owership initiatives, were later implemented by the Federal Housing Administration beginning in 1934. The FHA, through its mortgage insurance programs, its property and neighborhood standards, and its Land Planning Division, was extremely influential in shaping the growth of the garden metropolis, especially during the 1940s and 50s.     

Lewis Mumford and Norman Bel Geddes: the highway,the city and the future

Lewis Mumford’s life spanned the era in which American cities were rebuilt for the automobile and his writings addressed that theme from the 1920s to the 1970s. Norman Bel Geddes achieved fame during the 1930s for his imaginative evocations of future urban and regional landscapes designed for high‐speed auto travel, culminating in the Futurama exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. Both of these men were influential figures during the period (1935–45) when the basic contours of American urban highway policy were codified. Mumford advocated a careful integration of street, highway and landscape in order to tame the destructive impacts of the automobile. By the 1950s he had become a fervent opponent of both central city freeway building and auto‐dependent suburban sprawl. Norman Bel Geddes embraced the emerging world of automobiles and freeways, and poured his energies into the creation of exhibits, models, plans and books showing how high‐speed motorways could shape a new metropolis. This paper compares these two men along multiple dimensions and argues that the contrasting styles of Mumford and Bel Geddes embody a recurring split in the American attitude toward cities and urban planning.