The reconstruction of Paris undertaken by Napoleon III and Baron Georges Haussmann in the second half of the 19th century is considered to be the first major completed urban development project aimed at eliminating the problems that arose as a result of the industrial revolution. Appointed prefect of the Seine department in 1853, Haussmann faced a host of problems, such as contamination of drinking water taken from the Seine, into which sewage was discharged without purification; the need for reconstruction of the sewage system; the organization of parks and cemeteries and the lack of space for them; the existence of vast slum areas; and the unorganized traffic that had become extremely intense by that time. Haussmann undertook "to bring unity and transform into a successfully functioning whole the huge market and immense workshop of the Parisian agglomeration." [1] The solution to the problems was largely based on the experience of Great Britain, where Napoleon III visited in 1855, but Haussmann proposed much more radical measures. The old fortress walls were torn down, huge areas were cleared of buildings, 536 kilometers of old streets were replaced by 137 kilometers of new wide, tree-planted, well-sanctified boulevards that cut through the historical fabric and connected the main points of the city and its main districts.
Under Osman, standard types of residential buildings and unified facades were also developed, standard elements of urban design. Where possible, unbuilt public spaces were left, the "lungs of the city" - the Bois de Boulogne and Vincennes, many small parks and cemeteries were preserved. The water supply and sewerage system was reconstructed.
The experience of Paris was later used many times in the old cities of Europe. It was also used during the reconstruction of Moscow according to the General Plan of 1935, when the walls of Kitai-Gorod were demolished, and the city's fabric was cut by wide avenues. Even today they are trying to treat Moscow according to the “Osman recipe”, connecting different parts of the city with high-speed “chords”. Treatment of diseases of the city through radical surgery seems to be a simple radical method that can solve all the problems. As the practice of a century and a half already shows, if it helps, then not for long. However, many of Osman's first methods of improving the city, for example, the development of public spaces and the transformation of forests into parks, are today successfully used by city planners of various schools.
Also associated with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution is the emergence of a completely different type of city in North America at the end of the 19th century. The increase in metal production, the appearance of the metal frame, the invention in 1854 by Elisha Otis of the safe elevator made possible the construction of multi-storey buildings and, accordingly, the intensive use of the city center. At the same time, the appearance of suburban passenger rail, underground and elevated metro (in 1863 in London, in 1868 in New York and in 1896 in Chicago), the electric tram (1881) removed transport restrictions on spatial expansion and made it possible to consider the suburb as practically inexhaustible reserve of city expansion.
The combination of two opposite types of development - high-rise high-density business, concentrated in a compact center (downtown) and low-rise low-density residential around downtown (suburbia), arose in Chicago during the construction boom that followed the great fire of 1871 and subsequently spread throughout North America … After Ford made the automobile much more affordable, the American model, combining an over-urbanized center with a de-urbanized suburb, began to seem like a panacea for the problems of the modern city. Frank Lloyd Wright wrote in 1930: “The day will come, and the nation will live in one city spread over the whole country … The area will be a single, well-planned park with buildings located at great distances from each other; everyone will find comfort and comfort here. The downtown area will fill up by 10 am and empty at 4 pm for three days a week. The remaining four days are devoted to the joys of life. " [2]
A small ring in the center - downtown Rochester, densely built up with skyscrapers. Around are endless fields of low-rise suburbs with a common grid of streets, where towns smoothly flow into one another.
The disadvantages of such a model have become apparent today. Founded by the development of public transportation, the American suburbia has become increasingly focused on individual transportation as a means of transportation over time. Low building density rendered any public transport inefficient and its service area began to decline from the 1940s onwards. Proponents of the American model hypothesized that the problems of territorial growth of urban agglomerations would be leveled out by high-speed road connections. Renowned transport planner Vukan Vuchik notes that over the years this enthusiasm has fallen: automobile-oriented cities are faced with the problem of chronic congestion, and in many cases with the deterioration of the quality of the urban environment as a whole [3]. The focus on an individual car as the only means of transportation has led to the fact that centers of attraction, such as trade, cinemas, sports facilities, began to be built not in city centers, but on peripheral highways, in places convenient for access and parking. Residential suburbs were completely monofunctional, their service functions (shops, schools, public institutions) were concentrated in local sub-centers, which had to be reached again by cars.
Successful city dwellers prefer comfortable single-family houses in the suburbs with good ecology, and the poorest segments of the population, people who cannot afford to buy a car, have begun to settle in downtown and in the surrounding areas of the former served by public transport. Naturally, the marginalization of downtowns only stimulates the migration from them and the departure of those city-wide functions that have still been preserved. Even business structures began to leave the centers: many corporations prefer to buy a couple of hectares of land on the periphery to the construction and expensive operation of skyscrapers, on one of which a one- or two-story monoblock office is being built, and on the second, open parking for employees is organized. Cities cease to be a place of meeting, intersection and interpersonal communication, and therefore generators of ideas, innovations and businesses.
With the growth of motorization, it became obvious that the urban space, in principle, is not able to accommodate the number of cars that citizens interested in their own mobility want to have. Vuchik testifies that the most severe congestions are in Los Angeles, Detroit and Houston - the cities where the most powerful freeway networks are built. At the same time, Vuchik notes, Americans returning from Europe lavish praise on the cities they have visited. “Why don't we have such vibrant and beautiful cities as Brussels, Munich or Oslo?” They ask. [4] By depriving the city of an attractive environment, the North American urban model was only temporarily able to provide freedom of movement in return. This freedom ended the moment it became truly universal. Total motorization and the expansion of the boundaries of the built-up area cannot solve the problems of cities even when, as in the United States, the process of increasing the number of cars in personal use stretches over many decades and is accompanied by an adequate construction of transport infrastructure. When, as in Russia, China or India, the growth of motorization is explosive, the transport collapse occurs much faster.
We will return to the transport problem in one of the following "Essays", but for now I just want to note that the often-voiced calls for the expansion of Russian cities and the development of mass low-rise buildings in the suburbs seem to me very dangerous. Yes, we, like in America, have a lot of land, but the negative consequences of such construction will come back to haunt both social and economic problems.
The third of the models, which emerged at the very end of the 19th century and became widespread throughout the world, was the garden city model proposed by Ebenezer Howard. In 1898, in Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, he depicted a concentric garden city surrounded by a railroad that was supposed to restrict its development. Howard conceived his city, the population of which should not exceed 32-58 thousand inhabitants, as an economically independent settlement, producing a little more than is necessary for its own consumption. Howard called it "Rurisville" (from the Latin for "manor", "villa", which emphasized its semi-urban character and suggested a combination of the best qualities of urban and rural development. A network of several such towns, connected by rail lines to each other and to a common center, formed a single agglomeration with a non-settlement of about 250 thousand people. Each of the garden cities was a circle with a central park in the middle, which housed public institutions, surrounded by low-rise residential buildings. The radius of residential buildings was about 1 kilometer. It is surrounded by a green belt, schools, kindergartens and churches are being built on its inner side, administrative buildings on the outer, facing the circular avenue. On the outer ring of the city there are factories, factories and warehouses overlooking the railway tracks. The city is divided into 6 parts by boulevards connecting the center and the periphery. The land around the city does not belong to individuals, cannot be built up and used. It is used exclusively for agriculture. Its expansion is not expected, the only possible development scenario is the construction of a new satellite city outside the agricultural belt.
By the early twentieth century, the problems of "old" cities were so obvious and Howard's recipes were so compelling that his book was translated into many languages and quickly became a bestseller. In England and in other countries, including Russia, there are associations and societies of garden cities. Garden cities of Lechworth and Velvin are being built in England, Le Lodge in Belgium, and garden suburbs in Hamburg, Essen and Konigsberg are being built in Germany. However, they were not very popular, and at the end of the 1920s, only 14 thousand people lived in Lechworth, and 7 thousand in Velvin. Park Guell in Barcelona, designed by Gaudí, was originally conceived as a garden area, but there were no people willing to build there.
Howard's ideas were widespread in Russia in the first and second decades of the twentieth century. In 1918, the architect Ivan Nosovich proposes a garden city project for the restoration of Barnaul, destroyed by fire. The ideas of the concept of a garden city can be seen in the projects of the master plan of Novosibirsk by Ivan Zagrivko (1925), fully or partially implemented in the 1920s. villages in Moscow, Ivanovo, Rostov-on-Don, Novokuznetsk. In the general plan of Boris Sakulin (1918), Moscow is seen as a gigantic agglomeration that includes Tver, Rzhev, Tula, Vladimir and Rybinsk, built on the principle of a hierarchically organized network of garden cities. Ivan Zholtovsky, in the New Moscow project, also considers its development through the organization of a ring of garden suburbs.
The ideas of a garden city in a modified form were implemented in the second half of the twentieth century. After World War II, a program to build satellite cities around London was implemented in the UK. The calculated resettlement of almost a million people in order to de-compact the British capital, it failed: by 1963, only 263 thousand people had moved to satellite cities.
The ideas of a garden city are also read in the concept of academic towns, the construction of which began in the USSR in the 1960s. The first of them, Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, was designed for 40 thousand inhabitants and did not imply further expansion. Like Howard's garden cities, it was built on a combination of residential and green areas, however, unlike Howard's project, in Akademgorodok, not a radial-circular, but a newfangled principle of "free planning" was applied.
The fate of Akademgorodok is similar to the fate of many suburban garden areas in the world. Like them, it gradually turned into a dormitory area connected with the city by a powerful stream of daily migrations [5].
The problem of garden cities, as well as academic towns, as well as residential neighborhoods under construction so far, is that they are considered by architects as a project. Architects assume that the implementation, the implementation of the project in the form in which they recorded it on paper, is its completion. But even for buildings this is not the case, the house is just beginning its life at the moment of commissioning and further metamorphoses can be unpredictable. To an even greater extent, the above applies to such a complex system as the city. A city or district project cannot be implemented at a time and must provide for mechanisms that allow for a long time to implement the ideas of the authors. This approach, in which cities were seen as a kind of slow-moving, self-assembling machine, was introduced shortly after the publication of Howard's book. But about this - in the next series of our essays.
[1] F. Choay. L'Urbanisme, utopies et realites. Paris, 1965. Quoted. Quoted from: Frampton K. Modern Architecture: A Critical Look at the History of Development. M.: 1990. S. 39.
[2] Quoted. Quoted from: K. Novikov, Prairie Builder // Kommersant Money, 04.06.2007, No. 21 (628).
[3] Vuchik V. R. Transport in cities that are comfortable for life. M.: 2011. S. 32.
[4] Ibid. P. 81
[5] For more details see: A. Yu. Lozhkin. The fate of utopia // Project Russia, 2010, no. 48. URL:
