In the first of the Essays, we stopped at the fact that having developed an acceptable model of the urban environment over the centuries, human civilization after the XII-XIII centuries left the search for some fundamentally new models of cities for a long time, locally improving and honing the existing one. Tradition was the best guarantee of maintaining the achieved quality of life, and society was more or less satisfied with this quality, without requiring otherwise. Most cities for centuries did not have any development plans, but even if they were created, the planned buildings differed from settlements that formed spontaneously, only by the regularity of the grid of quarters. In some countries, for example in Russia, the authorities from the end of the 18th century tried to "eliminate the ugliness" of the cities, approving plans of the highest level and releasing catalogs of "exemplary projects" from St. Petersburg. Concern about the regulation of development arose, as a rule, after serious natural disasters (for example, the Commission on the St. Petersburg Building was created in 1737 after the fires in the Morskaya Sloboda, and the Commission on the Building of Moscow in 1813 to eliminate the consequences of the Napoleonic invasion).
However, in the period of the XIII-XVIII centuries, the nature of urban development was determined not so much by the approved general plans and the requirements for construction established by the authorities, but by other reasons. He was influenced by moral restrictions (say, the need to see the spire or bell tower of the church from anywhere in the city), economic features ("tax on windows" in Great Britain, Holland and France). But the main constraints regulating the parameters of the building were natural. The height of the construction was limited primarily by the bearing capacity of the materials used (wood, stone, ceramics) and the lack of reliable and safe mechanical lifts. The compactness of the city and its high density was due to the lack of any transport for most of the townspeople, which meant the need for pedestrian accessibility to all functions serving city life. The cities were also quite self-sufficient in economic terms: the variety of activities in them made it easy to find partners and contractors and create closed production and trade chains, and also contributed to the emergence of new products and the development of entrepreneurship. Urban planning and building management was not a vital necessity, but a luxury that wealthy cities or countries could afford.
And suddenly, starting from the turn of the 18th-19th centuries, cities begin to seriously change, increasing their territory and population. Kenton Frampton comes in Modern Architecture: “A city with clearly defined boundaries that existed in Europe for the previous five centuries was completely transformed in one century under the influence of unprecedented technical and socio-economic forces, many of which arose for the first time in the second half of the 18th century " [one]. It was in the 19th century that architects began to seriously search for new models of urban development, alternative to the traditional city. What happened?
We find the answer from the authors whom it was customary to quote about thirty years ago on any occasion:
“The bourgeoisie, in less than a hundred years of its class rule, has created more numerous and grander productive forces than all previous generations put together. The conquest of the forces of nature, machine production, the use of chemistry in industry and agriculture, shipping, railways, the electric telegraph, the development of entire parts of the world for agriculture, the adaptation of rivers for navigation, whole masses of the population, as if summoned from the ground, - which of the former centuries could have suspected that such productive forces are dormant in the depths of social labor!"
Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels.
Communist Manifesto, 1848 [2]
As you know, the great industrial revolution began with the rapid development of the textile industry in England. Weaving, which was the winter homework of peasant families, suddenly became a production requiring the concentration of people and energy resources. In 1733, John Kay invented the fast shuttle loom, starting a chain of inventions in the weaving industry. In 1741, a factory was opened near Birmingham, the spinning machine on which a donkey was set in motion. A few years later, its owners opened a factory with five spinning machines, and in 1771 at Arkwright's factory, the spinning machines used a water wheel as a motor. Within 15 years Manchester had 50 spinning mills [3], and by 1790 - 150. Edmont Cartwright's invention of the steam loom in 1784 led to the creation of large-scale textile industries and the construction of multi-storey factories. In 1820, there were 24,000 steam looms in England [4] and by the middle of the 19th century, hand weaving in Great Britain had practically disappeared.
Mechanical engineering and metallurgy developed. Factories were tied to energy sources, which originally used water wheels and later steam engines, and required a large number of workers. The rapid growth of industrial cities begins.
The main source of replenishment for the army of hired workers was the peasants who moved to the cities. From 1880 to 1914 alone, 60 million Europeans moved from villages to cities. The rapid growth of the urban population and internal migration in the 19th century became almost ubiquitous in Europe. In a number of countries, the urban population by the beginning of the 20th century became predominant (in Belgium, according to the 1910 census, it was 54%, in Great Britain (1911) - 51.5%). In Germany in 1907 it was 43.7%, in France in 1911 - 36.5% of the total population.
The invention of the steam engine by James Watt in 1778 and the steam locomotive by Richard Trevithick in 1804, the development of metallurgy, the 40-fold increase in iron production in 1750-1850, and the mass production of cast iron rails lead to the construction of the first public railway line in 1825. In 1860, England already had about 10 thousand miles of railroad tracks. In 1807, the first steamboat sails along the Hudson; in the middle of the 19th century, steam locomotives spread. Since 1828, carriages have been pulled along the streets of cities, first by horses (horse trams), and since 1881 by electric trams. In 1866 Pierre Lallemant patented the bicycle. In 1885, the first car leaves the gates of Benz's workshop. All this has led to an extraordinary increase in the mobility of the population, the ability to quickly travel long distances has become generally available.
Cities are no longer accommodating a growing population, but the development of transport allows them to expand. After the revolutions of 1848 in Europe, the walls were demolished everywhere. The city is losing its clear boundaries and merging with the suburbs.
Mass construction of houses with cheap housing for workers began, being erected next to factories. The approach to their design was similar to the current Russian approach to the design of "economy class", the developers saved on everything. Frampton writes that such overcrowded buildings were characterized by poor lighting, ventilation, lack of free space and the most primitive sanitary facilities, such as public toilets on the street. Waste disposal was insufficient or even absent. The same problem of overcrowding has arisen in older areas. If overpopulation is understood as living in each room, including the kitchen, more than two people, then in overcrowded apartments lived: in Poznan - 53%, in Dortmund - 41%, in Dusseldorf - 38%, in Aachen and Essen - 37%, in Breslau - 33%, in Munich - 29%, in Cologne - 27%, in Berlin - 22% of workers. Overpopulated 55% of apartments in Paris, 60% in Lyon, 75% in Saint-Etienne [5]. It was also common for families who rented an apartment to rent out beds. In London, there were advertisements for the surrender of part of the room, and a man who worked during the day and a girl who worked as a servant in a hotel at night had to use the same bed [6]. Contemporaries in the middle of the 19th century wrote that in Liverpool "from 35 to 40 thousand people live below the soil level - in cellars that do not have a drain at all …". The outdated sewerage system in the cities, where it existed at all, has ceased to cope with the increased flows.
All of the above led to a sharp exacerbation of the epidemiological situation, and in the first half of the 19th century, a series of epidemics, first of tuberculosis, then cholera, swept across Europe. This is what made the authorities pay attention to the need to regulate development, create rules and urban planning projects. Not the pursuit of beauty, but only the need to eliminate the negative consequences of the spontaneous unregulated development of ultra-fast developing cities led to the emergence of urban planning in the sense that we now put into this term, and made it an obligatory activity.
In 1844, the Royal Commission on the State of Large Cities and Populated Areas was created in England, and in 1848 the Public Health Act was adopted there, making the authorities responsible for the maintenance of sewers, waste collection, water supply, city roads and cemeteries. In 1868 and 1875 the Slum Clearing Acts were passed, and in 1890 the Working Class Housing Act. This was the first experience of urban regulation in the world - the creation of a system of laws and norms that determine the rules for building and managing cities. And it was during this period that the search for an ideal model of the city, corresponding to the changed realities, begins. Projects of factory settlements and cities are being created. Charles Fourier puts forward the utopian idea of communes-phalansters, allowing the transition to a new perfect society. The most striking examples of new urban development, which had a serious impact on urban development in the next century, were the reconstruction of Paris, initiated by Napoleon III and the prefect of the Seine department, Baron Georges Haussmann, the construction of Chicago after the great fire of 1871, and the concept of a garden city by Ebenezer Howard. But more on that in the next essay.
[1] Frampton K. Modern architecture: A critical look at the history of development. M.: 1990. S. 33.
[2] K. Marx, F. Engels Manifesto of the Communist Party // K. Marx, F. Engels Works. 2nd ed. Volume 4. M.: 1955. S. 217
[3] Chikalova I. R. At the origins of the social policy of the states of Western Europe. URL:
[4] Frampton K. Decree. Op. P.33.
[5] Kuchinsky Yu. History of working conditions in Germany (1800-1945). Moscow: 1949, p. 189.
[6] Nostitz G. The working class of England in the nineteenth century. M.: 1902. P. 577
