The models described in the previous essay, looking for an acceptable form of organizing urban life in the conditions of industrialization and hyper-urbanization, proceeded from the understanding of the city that had developed by that time as a frozen, self-contained system. If they envisaged development, then only a relatively small one, in a space limited by some framework, and only quantitative, due to territorial expansion (as in the American model) or due to the growth of agglomeration elements (in the garden city model). In fact, such views did not go far from the pre-industrial understanding of city planning as a project that ends at the moment of its completion, while the city continues to develop after that. In a situation where cities have not changed significantly for centuries, such a project was sufficient, but under the new conditions, a successful model could only be one that would offer not a finalized project, but a development program.
The French architect Tony Garnier played a key role in the formation of the well-known modernist urban planning model containing such a program, who proposed the concept of an "Industrial City" in 1904 [1]. While studying at the School of Fine Arts, Garnier studied, among other things, programmatic analysis, which apparently influenced his views. For the first time, Garnier envisages the possibility of independent development of each of the parts of the city, depending on the changing urban needs. In his project, the territory of the settlement is clearly divided into an urban center, residential, industrial, hospital zones. “Each of these main elements (factories, city, hospitals) is conceived and remote from other parts so that it can be expanded” [2].
Garnier is not as famous as another Frenchman, Le Corbusier. But it was Tony Garnier who, almost thirty years before the adoption of the Athens Charter, proposed the principle of functional zoning, which became the dogma of modernist urban planning for many decades. Corbusier was undoubtedly familiar with Garnier's ideas and even published a fragment from his book in 1922 in his journal L'Esprit Nouveau. And it is Corbusier that we owe the widespread dissemination of this idea.
Inspired by the ideas of Garnier, Bruno Taut [3] and American cities with their rectangular planning grid and skyscrapers, Le Corbusier, in his book The Modern City, published in 1922, proposed the concept of a settlement consisting of twenty-four 60-storey office buildings surrounded by a park and 12 -storey residential buildings. This model was widely promoted by Corbusier, proposing it for the reconstruction of Paris, Moscow and other cities. Subsequently, he modified it, proposing a linear development of the city [4] and abandoning the original perimeter residential block in favor of a more free location of the building. His "Radiant City" (1930) was zoned by parallel ribbons that formed zones of heavy industry, warehouses, light industry, recreational, residential, hotels and embassies, transport, business and satellite cities with educational facilities.
Considering the house as a car for housing, functioning according to the program laid down in it, Corbusier also considered the city as a mechanism that should only clearly carry out the programmed functions. At the same time, he treated the processes taking place in the city in a utilitarian manner, not taking into account the emerging complex interactions between them and the generation of new urban processes as a result of such interactions. Like any mechanistic model, this one tended to simplify. Only over time did the negative consequences of this simplification become apparent.
The "radiant city" was never built, but the ideas promoted by Corbusier were widespread and formed the basis of many projects, including those implemented in the Soviet Union. It is enough to compare the plan of the "Modern City" and the general plan of the social city on the left bank of Novosibirsk, or compare the figurative series of the same "Modern City" with the appearance of the new Soviet cities and micro-districts of the 1970s.
The ideas of the functional division of urban areas were dogmatized in the Athenian Charter approved in 1933 by the IV International Congress of Contemporary Architecture CIAM. The document, adopted on board the ship Patrice, contains 111 points, of which, taking into account the events that followed, two seem to be the most important:
- An apartment building freely located in space is the only expedient type of dwelling;
- The urban area should be clearly divided into functional zones:
- residential areas;
- industrial (working) territory;
- rest zone;
- transport infrastructure.
These principles began to be widely applied in western urban planning practice during the post-war reconstruction of European cities. In the Soviet Union, they were adopted only in the first half of the 1960s, during the Khrushchev era, to replace the dominant concept of socialist settlement, which presupposed mainly the construction of workers' settlements in production. Developed by European architects with socialist views, the modernist urban planning paradigm seemed almost perfectly compatible with the Soviet quasi-planning system.
The ideology of total rationing of life processes and the functional division of urban areas in the USSR was scientifically substantiated in the first half of the 60s and subsequently recorded in SNiPs. However, the consequences of the implementation of the modernist urban planning model in the end turned out to be negative and did not lead to the achievement of the goals for which it was developed: the emergence of a convenient city for life with a humane environment, which favorably differs from historical cities in terms of transport accessibility, comfort and sanitary and hygienic indicators. The creation of "sleeping", "business", "industrial", "recreational" areas has led to the fact that each of them is used only part of the day, and the rest of the day is abandoned by the inhabitants. The consequence of monofunctionality was the "seizure" of suburban neighborhoods by criminals in the daytime, and business centers in the evening and at night, when they are empty. The division of the place of residence and places of work and rest has led to an increase in transport movements of the townspeople. The city turns into an archipelago divided by highways, whose inhabitants move from one "island" to another by car.
Finally, one of the invisible, but important consequences of monofunctionality was the restriction of the opportunity for the intersection of different types of activity and, as a result, the cessation of the generation of new types of business and social activity, which is the most important raison d'être of the city. But we'll talk about this a little later.
Also, the transition from the traditional type of perimeter block development to the principle of free placement of apartment buildings in space led not to an increase, but to a decrease in the quality of the urban environment. The quarter was a way of dividing public and private spaces in feudal and early capitalist society, and the wall of the house was the border between the public and the private. The streets were public and the courtyards were private areas. With the growth of motorization, the architects considered it necessary to carry the building line away from the noisy and gas-polluted roadway. The streets became wide, the houses were separated from the roads by lawns and trees. But at the same time, the distinction between public and private spaces disappeared, it became unclear which territories belong to houses and which to the city. "No man's" lands were abandoned or occupied by garages, sheds, cellars. Courtyards have become generally accessible and unsafe, and are often “turned out” to the outside by playgrounds for children and households. The houses that were moved away from the red line of the streets were no longer attractive for placement in their first floors of shops and service enterprises; streets have ceased to be public spaces, gradually turning into highways. Deprived of pedestrians, they became criminally unsafe.
With the “return” of capitalism, huge “no-man's” spaces in Russian cities were occupied by kiosks, parking lots, trade pavilions and markets. Houses began to be fenced off from outsiders with barriers and fences, with the help of which residents tried to designate "their" territory. An extremely unpleasant environment, hostile to "outsiders", emerges, provoking a sense of inequality among people.
In the west, these areas have gradually become marginalized ghettos. Initially, they were settled by young, quite successful yuppies, for whom a new building on the outskirts was their first own home. But, if they were successful, then very soon they changed such housing to more prestigious ones, giving way to less successful citizens. That is why the suburbs of Paris and London have become a haven for immigrants from Arab and African countries and a place of high social tension.
Architects planned cities and new districts based on their compositional preferences, like artists. But these new districts, which look like a perfect utopia on mock-ups, turned out to be unfavorable living conditions for their inhabitants, not comparable in quality to the historical districts they were supposed to replace. In the 1970s, the demolition of neighborhoods and residential complexes built not long before began in different countries of the world.
(To be continued)
[1] The concept was finally formulated by T. Garnier in the book "Industrial City" (Une cité industrielle), published in 1917.
[2] Garnier, Tony. Une cité industrielle. Etude pour la construction des villes. Paris, 1917; 2nd edn, 1932. Quoted. Quoted from: Frampton K. Modern Architecture: A Critical Look at the History of Development. M., 1990. S. 148.
[3] Bruno Taut proposed in 1919-1920 a utopian model of an agrarian settlement, in which residential areas intended for certain groups of the population (initiates, artists and children) were grouped around the urban core - the "city crown".
[4] The idea of the "Linear City" was first proposed back in 1859 by the Spanish engineer Ildefonso Cerda in the plan for the reconstruction of Barcelona and was creatively developed by Ivan Leonidov and Nikolai Milyutin in 1930.
