You have been reading about how Ebeenzer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier and Paolo Soleri, who are also known as “Utopians” because they wanted to design an ideal city. But these four thinkers had very different visions of how the city should look. Howard and Wright envision a low density garden with lots of room between buildings and land uses (such as residential, shopping or industry). These thinkers are often referred to as “decentrists” since did not believe that in a large central city (also known as low density cities). While Howard’s vision combined some elements of the city with the country (what we now call the suburbs), Wright had an even more radical idea of having almost no urban areas at all. Howard also wanted to put unwanted land uses and people (orphanages, mental institutions in the suburbs.
The centrists believed in very high density living with tall buildings which conserved land use. Le Corbusier sometimes called “Le Corbu” (his real name was Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and Paolo Solieri considered the benefits of building higher density cities although for different reasons. Le Corbu saw his “Radiant City” as a machine and thought high-density cities offered the best way to deliver cities services in the most efficient manner. If you look at the illustrations in the powerpoint, you can see that he designed different uses of the city in various layers and as floors in buildings. For instance, there would be a separate road for cars, separate road for trucks, separate floors for living, shopping and whatever other uses that a city would need. Paolo Solieri while agreeing that high density was an efficiency, he believed that his cities or an “Arcology” (a combination of architecture and ecology) should employ architectural design principles for very densely populated, ecologically low-impact and energy efficient human habitats. In Solieri’s cities, cars and other motor vehicles would be less important since most people would be able to walk, bike or use mass transit to get to their destinations since they would be living so compactly.
Our current built environment of cities, suburbs and even exurbs (lower density areas outside the suburbs) has incorporated many of these ideas in one form or the other over the last 100 years. Current thinking in urban planning is guiding growth more towards Solieri’s vision of archology where growth is encouraged to be compact, public transportation such as light rail will support this type of development as well as other forms of alternate transportation. We are also moving towards building design principles that are environmentally friendly (such as solar panels, passive solar design and wind power) that are LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified by the US Green Building Council (see https://new.usgbc.org). However, it has been difficult to shake our current ways of living, we still have builders developing low density subdivisions and we are still reliant primarily on motor vehicles and roads for our transportation needs.
For this discussion, I want you to consider all four of these thinkers’ ideas and debate who had the best vision of what cities should become. When writing your answer consider the densities at which the author thought the ideal city should contain. From these ideas, I want you to develop what your ideal city would look like based on these thinkers’ ideas. You are to write from 350 words in a discussion post to answer this discussion and respond to two other student’s responses.
