The Urban Masterplanning Handbook (eBook)

Eric Firley, Katharina Groen (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2014
John Wiley & Sons (Verlag)
978-1-118-94200-0 (ISBN)

Infos

A highly illustrated reference tool, this handbook provides comparative visual analysis of major urban extensions and masterplans around the world. It places an important new emphasis on the processes and structures that influence urban form, highlighting the significant impact that public or private landownership, management and funding might have on shaping a particular project. Each of the book’s 20 subjects is rigorously analysed through original diagrams, scale drawings and descriptive texts, which are complemented by key statistics and colour photography. The case studies are presented in order of size rather than date or geographical location. This offers design professionals, developers and city planners, as well as students of architecture and urban design informed organisational and formal comparisons, leading to intriguing insights.

A wide geographical range of contemporary and historic masterplans are featured. These encompass European projects from the 19th century to the present day: Belgravia in London, Sarphatipark in Amsterdam, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, La Défense Seine Arche in Paris and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm. In North America, the postwar development of Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan is also the subject of a case study. More recent and ongoing international urban schemes are included, such as Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, Downtown Dubai and the New Central Business District in Beijing.

Eric Firley is the author of this book’s companion volumes The Urban Housing Handbook (2009) and The Urban Towers Handbook (2011). Assistant Professor at the University of Miami School of Architecture since January 2011, he is a trained architect and urban designer with work experience in property development and several design practices in Paris and London. Regularly invited to speak at architectural institutions around the world, he has a specific interest in interdisciplinary research and in the relationship between architecture and the urban fabric.

Katharina Grön is a German planner who graduated in 2008 from the Hamburg University of Technology. Already involved in the production of The Urban Housing Handbook, she has developed the graphic concept of the book, including diagrams and custom-made urban plans. She lives and works as a planner and urban designer in Hamburg.

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A highly illustrated reference tool, this handbook provides comparative visual analysis of major urban extensions and masterplans around the world. It places an important new emphasis on the processes and structures that influence urban form, highlighting the significant impact that public or private landownership, management and funding might have on shaping a particular project. Each of the book s 20 subjects is rigorously analysed through original diagrams, scale drawings and descriptive texts, which are complemented by key statistics and colour photography. The case studies are presented in order of size rather than date or geographical location. This offers design professionals, developers and city planners, as well as students of architecture and urban design informed organisational and formal comparisons, leading to intriguing insights. A wide geographical range of contemporary and historic masterplans are featured. These encompass European projects from the 19th century to the present day: Belgravia in London, Sarphatipark in Amsterdam, Potsdamer Platz in Berlin, La D fense Seine Arche in Paris and Hammarby Sj stad in Stockholm. In North America, the postwar development of Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan is also the subject of a case study. More recent and ongoing international urban schemes are included, such as Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, Downtown Dubai and the New Central Business District in Beijing.

Inhalt

Acknowledgements

Introduction

CASE STUDIES

Broadgate, London 24

Masséna Nord, Paris 36

stuyvesant Town, New York 50

Battery Park City, New York 62

Avenue de l'Opéra, Paris 76

Vauban, Freiburg 88

Antigone, Montpellier 100

Potsdamer Platz, Berlin 114

Kirchsteigfeld, Potsdam 126

Spangen, Rotterdam 138

Belgravia, London 150

False Creek North, Vancouver 164

Sarphatipark, Amsterdam 178

Marunouchi, Tokyo 190

Euralille, Lille 200

Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires 212

Hammarby Sjöstad, Stockholm 224

Downtown Dubai 236

Beijing Central Business District 248

La Défense Seine Arche, Greater Paris 260

APPENDICES

Timeline 274

Density Table 275

Figure-ground Diagrams 276

Scale Comparison of all Projects 280

Bibliography 282

Index 284

Image Credits 288

Textauszug

Introduction

Blueprints for Urban Life

From a philosophical early history traceable back to utopian visions and ideas, masterplanning today is internationally recognised as a planning method that is embedded in political, social and economic frameworks. It responds to the needs of architects, urban designers, planners, developers and other construction professionals to participate in major urban expansion and regeneration projects that cross the boundaries of their own roles and promise to transform the quality of city life. Vast in scope, such initiatives demand extensive preparatory research in order to identify an effective approach for the site in question. Following on from the first two books in Wiley’s ‘Urban Handbook’ series – The Urban Housing Handbook (2009) and The Urban Towers Handbook (2011) – this manual sets out to equip professionals for the task.

Rather than to test or discuss a particular hypothesis in the field of planning, our aim is to enable an organisational and visual comparative approach. We have selected 20 masterplans from around the world, historic and recent, each of which is analysed in turn. Project descriptions and key data are complemented by specially custom-made diagrams that outline each masterplan’s physical nature and development. Each study includes four analysis drawings of the current site – highlighting separately green spaces, the street network, public transport connections and building uses – a further four graphics illustrate the development process, putting special emphasis on the notions of cadastral subdivisions and of public or private ownership.

Images and figure-ground diagrams of Avenue de l’Opéra in Paris and Stuyvesant Town in New York City.
One of the main aims of this book is to examine the ways in which the diversity of these urban artefacts has been influenced by non-formal parameters.

Images and figure-ground diagrams of False Creek North in Vancouver and Hammarby Sjöstad in Stockholm.

With public buildings and plots shown in pink and private ones in blue, they explain the change of landownership that occurred in most of the cases during the development process, as well as suggesting a conceptual reading of the masterplan’s prescriptions for the creation of blocks and building masses. Potsdamer Platz in Berlin is hence an example of a plan that focused, from the city’s point of view, on the clear delimitation of urban blocks and the street space; while New York’s Stuyvesant Town represents a contrasting type of urbanism, the tower-in-park configuration, in which there is no intermediate scale between the buildings themselves, their footprints and the rest of the plot. At the end of the book, the appendices provide not only comparative tables, but also a scale comparison of all project perimeters in their entirety, and a timeline that facilitates the understanding of each project’s development frame. Finally, to highlight the impressive diversity of built results, we have assembled all 20 of the figure-ground diagrams featured in the case studies. By focusing on the relationship between built and unbuilt spaces, these reveal a broad range of urban patterns employed in masterplanning.

Before moving on to the case studies themselves, some background information on the evolution of masterplanning as a concept, and on our own approach to it, will be useful. This introductory essay prepares the ground for our hands-off project presentations and clarifies our point of view in relation to several fundamental issues of planning.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF MASTERPLANNING

Historically, in its more figurative sense, the notion of the masterplan was primarily linked less to the built environment than to political, philosophical or religious affairs. In signifying a blueprint, long-term strategy or divine plan, it has been interpreted as the equivalent of the Greek logos, schema or kosmos which can be found in the epistemological writings of the philosopher Plato around the early 4th century BC. These evoke the concept of a divine plan as something the average human – due to the physical world’s and his own imperfection – is not able to decipher. In contrast to the expression’s most common current use, it hence alluded to something fundamentally out of reach, rather than something under human control.

Portrait of the Greek philosopher Plato.

Woodcut by Ambrosius Holbein for a 1518 edition of Thomas More’s Utopia.

It was through the theoretical description of ideal societies that these philosophical ideas indirectly found an application in the world of architecture. The earliest and most influential such source is Plato’s The Republic, which was meant as an allegory of the human soul’s inner workings. This was adopted and elaborated in 1516 by the English Renaissance humanist Thomas More in his vision of the hypothetical island country Utopia. Over the following centuries, the notion of an ideal community and its masterplan in the sense of a blueprint became a recurring theme in the history of architecture and urbanism. Sometimes explicitly, but mostly not, it led to built and unbuilt projects such as French philosopher Charles Fourier’s early-19th-century Phalanstère concept, Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana (founded 1814) and Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities in the UK (late 19th and early 20th centuries). Modernist versions of Utopia include Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer’s Hochhausstadt (High-Rise City, 1924), Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin (1925) and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City (1932). In this context, the masterplan can be understood as the key to happiness, sometimes in the form of a specific intervention, and sometimes as an abstract model.

If these insights deal with the notion of ‘masterplanning’ in the widest possible sense, a more technical and literal application of the word can be traced back to the beginnings of modern comprehensive planning in the early 20th century. The Netherlands played a pioneering role: the Dutch Housing Act of 1902 not only provided new building regulations and guidelines for the creation of housing associations, but also prescribed the establishment of comprehensive plans for all municipalities above 10,000 inhabitants (see Spangen case study) which – importantly – had to be reviewed and adjusted every 10 years. Similar laws were adopted in Britain with the two consecutive Town Planning Acts of 1909 and 1919, and in France in 1919 and 1924. In the USA, the City Beautiful Movement – an aesthetically driven vision of social cohesiveness achieved through the reform of architecture and urbanism, which began to flourish in the 1890s – paved the way for the development of broader planning frameworks. Edward M Bassett, whose 1938 book The Master Plan links the origin of masterplans to the creation of planning commissions in the USA of the 1920s, proved a key figure. Often referred to as ‘the father of zoning’, he believed that control had to be exerted through the establishment of seven planning elements: streets; parks; sites for public buildings; public reservations; zoning districts; routes for public utilities; and pierhead and bulkhead lines.

Charles Fourier’s unbuilt Phalanstère, conceived in the early 19th century. Its revolutionary claim is expressed through the architectural similarity with the Chateau of Versailles, symbol of a very different type of society. Autarkic and utopian, the Phalanstère figures as a precedent for Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles (1947–52).

Illustration by the architect Thomas Stedman Whitwell for Robert Owen’s New Harmony in Indiana (1825). As a vision of a new type of community, it explicitly referred back to Plato’s and More’s utopian writings.

Ludwig Hilberseimer’s influential vision of a Hochhausstadt (high-rise city) for one million inhabitants (1924). The diagrammatic and hypothetical proposal is almost contemporaneous with Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine (1922) and Plan Voisin for Paris (1925).

The essential element of this rather administrative definition of masterplanning is the development of national or state legislations as an institutional practice. Such a view allows us to draw a (still blurred) separation line between the modern conception of masterplanning and scattered cases of 19th-century urbanism, notably the Ringstrasse in Vienna, the Castro Plan for Madrid or Baron Haussmann’s works in Paris. These plans and many others can certainly also be understood as masterplans – one of Haussmann’s breakthroughs even figuring in this book (see Avenue de l’Opéra case study). However, they were essentially one-off interventions and not yet the result of a binding and recurring planning culture. Similar statements could be made about Frederick Law Olmsted’s visionary work in the USA, using vast networks of green infrastructure – New York’s Central Park (1850s) and Boston’s Emerald Necklace (1860s) being the most prominent examples – in order to sustain the long-term growth of a conurbation. It should not be forgotten that the initiative for most of these late 19th- and early 20th-century plans was forced on by the swift spread of diseases and the subsequent danger of political unrest. The...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.5.2014
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften ► Geowissenschaften ► Geografie / Kartografie
• Themenwelt: Technik ► Architektur
• Schlagworte: Architecture • Architektur • Masterplans for urban settings, influences on urban plans, planning an urban masterplan, case study of urban masterplan, privately funded urban plans, publically funded urban plans • Planning • Planung
• ISBN-10: 1-118-94200-0 / 1118942000
• ISBN-13: 978-1-118-94200-0 / 9781118942000