I'm sure this is a thread that comes up from time to time, but I'm new here and was just wondering what the response would be. Any thoughts on what some of the best examples of successful planning are? Any size city.
I'm sure this is a thread that comes up from time to time, but I'm new here and was just wondering what the response would be. Any thoughts on what some of the best examples of successful planning are? Any size city.
San Francisco.
'Best' Planned? In my humble opinion, the cities which represent a synergy of high architectural quality, functional and liveable layout, efficient and well planned transport infrastructure, provision of greenspace and good 'attention to detail' in terms of street furnishings and street level urban design would be:
Amsterdam
Copenhagan
Berlin
Madrid
Barcelona
Paris... just
I considered the suburbs as well as the inner cities.
To be honest, most German, Danish and Dutch cities seem shockingly well planned if you come from the more anarchic UK...
The France and the Latin countries don't do planning to the same level, Milan for eg. Sprawls for miles and miles, cities in the UK tend to be let down by their transport infrastructure. I don't really know about anywhere else :P
Time for me to be a crumudgeon...
I think the concept of the best planned city is an oxymoron. Cities that have been "best planned" by todays standards were not planned at all. They were allowed to organically grow over hundreds (sometimes thousands in Europe) of years to be what they are today. This concept of best planned is flawed. I think we would need to relstate the question as "Most Livable" cities.
...steps off of his soapbox.
Satellite City Enabler
From a functional perspective (i.e. social issues aside), Philadelphia is extremely well-planned.
If you include social issues, I'm not sure any city is planned well - just some are planned better than others.
I agree with Plan It.
Actually i don't really agree. Sure, of course most European cities have a medieval core, but even this was roughly 'planned' to the extent that the limits of city wall, bye-laws and so on were set, and even for the largest ancient cities the vast majority of their growth and expansion was during eras where there was some type of 'planning' or other. The examples above have their organic cores but around that is a well planned infrastructure, some sort of layout and provision of greenspaces. A lot of the planning might not have been by 'government', here, the largest green space is still ran by an association which was established by the 'Society of Merchant Venturers' in the 19th century, the Georgian areas, by merchants and commercial developers and the old docks continuously improved and enlarged by merchants societies and civic guilds.Originally posted by Plan-it
I guess what i'm trying to say is that as 80-90% of the developed land in most major western cities was built under some sort of planning regime or another, therefore how well 'planned' they are is an important factor even if it they are the age of London or Paris or Rome.
Edit: Take a look at an old thread of mine, where i outlined the development of Bristol which is by most counts about 1,000 years old, but most of its development is since the 1800's: http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=32059
To some degree I see your point, but for example, I consider the "best planned" part of Barcelona to be the "most planned" part:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eixample
Two wrongs don't necessarily make a right, but three lefts do.
I think this is a very important point. The suggestion that things/ideas emerge organically from the collective subconscious is a common mis-perception of a great many things "cultural" (folk traditions, musical forms, etc.). There were and continue to be (though their details differ) rules for adding to settlements all over the world. Even in my experience in small rural African villages (a setting often thought of as "unorganized"), each cultural group has a different philosophy for organizing the space (round versus linear, organization of household compounds, proximity and relationship with natural resources like mountains or rivers, etc.) and they build accordingly.
It is true, though, that many ancient cities take on a more organic FORM and this is largely due to the limited abilities of people in times past to engineer the environment. So, as a settlement grows, it subscribes to the rules, but also has to contend with topography, drainage issues, solar and wind exposure, etc. Thus, no two places look exaclty the same, even if built under the same rules.
I think maybe a more useful question is what are examples of well MANAGED cities. That is, places that have responded dynamically to changes (in transportation, economy, size, infrastructure, services, etc.) to remain well-functioning.
Still, I see a trend here that some of our favorite places have, at least at their core, a scale and density that is very gratifying to experience first hand (which is to say, they are compact). This is certainly due to the times in which they were built and the necessity for most residents to be within a certain distance from goods, services and employment.
Even Pittsburgh, a more recent city in the context of Europe, saw a large degree of its early growth prior to the turn of the century and as a result, its core is very compact, despite the intense topography (two rivers converge into a third, they boast over 100 bridges, and its a very hilly place). During my visit a few years ago, there were a couple of stories and examples that reinforced this sentiment. One was the funiculars, the vertical streetcars that took workers down and back up the hills from the steel factories clustered along the rivers. The second was a story about how wives/families of steelworkers would communicate from the hillsides with their spouses using different colored sheets hung out over the balconies - births, deaths, emergencies, etc. each were associated with a different color and the houses were close enough to see and for folks to know which household was sending the message.
In this, I am also reminded of a comment by Jaime Lerner (many time Mayor of Curitiba Brazil) that "the turtle is the perfect animal because he lives where he works." This internal continuity of place is, I think, very important to our sense of a city as serving our essential needs. Work, home, school, shopping should, ideally, have some level of interconnection (ie. be in the same neighborhood). This continuity means you see the same people at these locations, that they are all part of your larger local community, and this helps make people feel that they belong to a "place" and don't just own a box on some land somewhere.
My two cents...
The purpose of life is a life of purpose
Clearly Boston (insert laugh track).
Actually, I think planning is an important part of a city's development but only as part of an overall organic development pattern. Philadelphia does seem to be a good combination but has other troubles that keep it from seeming well planned. New York would be high on my list. The problem is that most cities have as many bad planning ideas (slum clearance and interstates downtown) as good ones (adequate parks and affordable housing, good urban design, good transit.)
I think the best planned city was probably Savannah, GA.
It was planned with a unique specific concept of squares for livestock and produce in town adjacent to through streets and terminous streets with vistas for government, churches, retail, and fine housing.
Of course the city outgrew the plan, and the plan did not expand with the growth, so much was lost and became functionally obsolete.
[QUOTE=Plan-it;441928]I think the concept of the best planned city is an oxymoron. Cities that have been "best planned" by todays standards were not planned at all. They were allowed to organically grow over hundreds (sometimes thousands in Europe) of years to be what they are today. This concept of best planned is flawed. I think we would need to relstate the question as "Most Livable" cities.
QUOTE]
This is a myth to soem extent inculcated by the popularity of Jane Jacobs' "Life and Death of Great American Cities".
Jacobs registered, astutely and decades in advance of the "professsionals" that post-war 'planned' communities and 'clearances' comapred extremely poorly with older neighborhoods, the plannign for which was somewhat obscured/smudged by the passage of time (but which were planned, at lwast to some extent, noentheless).
Rather than contrasting planned vs. roganic growth, it makes more sense to compare:
'basic urban framework' vs. comrpehensive, detaield planning
accretive, gradual plan implementtion vs. all-at-once implementation
people-centered plannign vs. car centered planning.
So, my best-planned 'cities':
- Amsterdam. So much to say... I'll jsut tnatlize you with one sentence. It's a city where 20th-century neighborhoods that accomdoate a reasoanble flow of cars and display the festerign sores of 'modernist' architecture still amange to be very walkable, huamne and livable.
- The Crown Estate. Ok, not a city but a good example of crafty and long-term stewardship of whole neighborhoods.
- Paris.
- The New Town, Endinburgh.
I would like to experience Portland/Seattle/Austin but ahven't bene there so I can't say.
Life and death of great pattern languages
I concur with this statement. Savannah (at least the historic core) is an impeccably planned city. The newer stuff on the outskirts of the core is less than desirable but the fabric of the community is contained in that "old city" section.
I am not going to get into a pissing match with those who disagree with me, but I will say that there is a natural evolution of convenience, classism, and commerce that had a large role in the determining the layout an function of older cities.
Convenience and Commerce - people selling goods want to be in areas where people congregate and where people are moving about between destinations and people buying goods do not want to run all over the city to buy them.
Classism - People with means built their housing away from the more obnoxious and less desirable uses because they could.
I know this is really simplistic, but I personally think these aspects of human nature had a larger impact on city growth and development (back in the day) compared to some bureaucrat working for the governor/mayor/lord/etc.
Satellite City Enabler
It seems like a better title to this thread should be cities that practice best planning...as cities evolve over time and an organic process. I can't think of a "best planned city"...what are we talking like Dubai???
American cities suffer from an inferiority complex about "best planned". To a large extent our cities are relatively young.
The great cities of Europe didn't get that way overnight. The great cities of Europe and Asia were old before Columbus got in his boats and took a trip. These European cities have been built, rebuilt, shook, shaped and molded over many centuries. They have been ravaged by disaster, war and famine. They have risen like the fabled Phoenix, time and time again from their ashes. Literally the new city was built upon the old one. They evolved by trial and error. Mistakes were torn down and replaced. The good stuff remained.
In comparison, most American cities are teenagers. Gawky and unformed. We haven't had much time for transformation and renewal.
I live in a city that is 144 years old. The oldest building in town is about the same age and it is a log cabin. Most subtantial buildings are 20th century structures. The city started as a mining camp, with tents and shacks along a narrow gulch of placer gold. It burned down twice at least, and was rebuilt better and more substantially. Soon it was a center of regional finance and territorial and state government. At one time Helena had more millionaires per capita than any place in the USA. Then the mining boom burst and it declined, but remained vital as a center of state, federal and local governments. It is only fairly recently (last 30 years) it has begun to grow again.
The Queen City of the Rockies is not the best planned city, by any means. But she is well-planned for its purpose. No doubt there are changes in the future and a century from now Helena will be a different city.
I have never been to these great cities. I would love to see Frisco, Rome, London, Paris and Amsterdam. Maybe one day.
As far as cities, I like them small. If you cannot see the natural world (mountains, forests, prairie, rivers, lakes, etc.) from your window, no settlement is appealling to me.
"I am very good at reading women, but I get into trouble for using the Braille method."
~ Otterpop ~
That's more what I meant. And as far as Otterpop's comment, I'm reminded of Witold Rybczynski's quote that North American cities are like Monopoly boards in midgame.
Northern/Northwestern European cities have really good planning, like b3nr said. The amount of work going into planning new developments like Ijburg (NL), Hammarby Sjostad , and the revitalization of urban centres in Germany is quite incredible. Copenhagen is said to be a good example as well. Vancouver and Portland are supposed to be good examples of modern planning in North America.
Since most older cities evolved beyond original "plans," what about the "new planned cities," ie Reston, The Woodlands, SeaSide?, Columbia, Peachtree City, etc. - towns that were planned from the begining without constraints of existing roads and railroads, etc.
And what are your thoughts about how they continue to be examples of good planning (or disappointments)?
Chicago - Burnham Plan. Easy question.
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