Participation in Urban Planning of China

Well known in cities at the time were the City Beautiful movement and the city practical, however, social issues were merely pushed to the side. Wirka (1996) explains that “both are undoubtedly important movements in the history of planning” (p. 57), however, she goes on

Planners' focus was shifting from the somewhat rarified, nineteenth-century preoccupation with creating the City Beautiful (by means of monumental urban design projects) to more mundane concerns like managing land use, curbing congestion, and reforming municipal government practices. A range of reform agendas coalesced during these years, giving birth to what was soon called a "city planning" movement. Its proponents proudly devoted equal attention to questions of design, infrastructure, public health, and public administration (Freund, Colored Property,

This master plan was promoted by the central government of France between 1970-2000 it is known as the Schema Directeur. To some extent this was a success because redevelopment plans of the Schema Directeur created new futuristic high rise buildings, and better transport links were creates such as metro stations and RER. Originally 5 new towns were planned in the NW and SE corridors 30km from the city centre only 4 were ever built though. It has not quite been a total success even though the amount of people moving out of the city in this green wedge idea has increased as conterurbanisation has increased. However there are still problems in the urban areas such as racial disharmony between North Africans and Black Africans. Also in the grande couronne there is a very young populations and unemployment is still large here. Another problem with the grande couronne is that 30% of the space is still vacant, so the youth became disenchanted, and riots in 2005 occurred. Also the increase in commuting to Paris city centre has caused an increase in congestion.

/////////These ideas bring me to my final point that corporate greed may be destroying the dreams of a green and eco-friendly world. “The former Shanghai Communist Party chief and Dongtan’s primary political backer, was sentenced in 2008 to 18 years in prison on corruption charges.” The New York Times. The party chief who at the time was spear heading the operation caused a momentary standstill in the plans. Also a failure to consult the general populous made it seem as though the people had no voice in the ideas of renovating their own city. With money or political standings backing every decision, it appears as though the government had stepped and put their ideas of what is better for the masses. This of course we know not to be true, and their failed attempt at a Utilitarian view demonstrates that the backers of the project were only thinking of themselves and not putting the needs of the people first. Sze brings up a valid point, that as well as the corruption in the government, there is also a contradictory belief that building an eco-city is eco-friendly. When in fact the production of the metals and plastic that it takes to even make an attempt at a self-sustained city might

Urban development is the social, cultural, economic and physical development of cities. The development of cities is the main topic of human geography. Urban development can be used in different ways by the researchers. It can cause the price of things to increase fast. Urban development occurs in major cities like New York City, Tokyo, Japan. Urban development started back in the earlier cities like Mesopotamia, Egypt. This spreads the culture that affect people which makes them want to go to the major cities. Over fifty percent of the earth’s population lives in urban areas. Studies show by 2045 that the number of people living in a urban area will increase.

The city was becoming an inhumane place to live and today present different view. We are experiencing the emergence of a new urbanism that, unlike traditional planning does not seek the satisfaction only, of the maximum economic efficiency of a city, where the flow of capital, selling cars, real estate speculation and manufacturing productivity are above the minimum human needs. The "New Urbanism" offers a balanced city, where economic, social and environmental are in the same plane of importance, where humans and their physiological and psychological needs are the starting point of urban planning. The New Urbanism simply proposes a human city; we might well call, planning of the city for the Humans.

The developments in planning and design of urban cities inform the argument surrounding the unsuitability of grids to carfree cities, whose medieval patterns provided efficient radial routes for centrally located goods, services, and transport. The emergence of city planning as a profession borrows significantly from the long and complex history of planning, whereby all cities display variations in forethought and conscious designs that define their layout and functioning. The paper uses Rome as a case study to analyse and critique the concepts and principles in the history of urban planning and design, and their

It was in this context that theories of urban planning, which rose out of over three decades of practices in the USSR and over a century in the West, were initiated and adapted to the cause of China’s socialist construction. The spatial construction of the danwei played a vital role in the construction of a certain mode of shared subjectivity. I believe a revolution is required to produce new space, because in order for it to be truly revolutionary, one needs to create a society that reflects its revolutionary ideology. It needs to drastically transform away from the systems and encourage its citizens to think and live

“The best that can be said of the conception is that it did afford a chance to experiment with some physical and social planning theories which did not pan out. “ This quote reflects Jane Jacob’s philosophical ideas in an attempt to criticize the social housing’s design approach and its associated urban planning in modern era. “The physical and social theories” outlines the urban planning idea of social housing (Utopian idea) and according to Jane’s statement, such experiment of these theories were deem to be unsuccessful. It is inevitably certain to some extent that a provocative statement towards modern era social housing approaches would hold true due to the minimal success the plans brought to the city, such as solving the working class commendations temporarily. Nevertheless, it is a failure to deliver long-standing social improvements corresponded with the increasing suspicion of modernism, one cannot simply attribute ill fate to its “innovative physical features” (As Jane said, the Utopian and Utopia), but should rather considered a range of other elements in the larger aspect of society: factors such as difficulty of racial integration, problems of financing and management, lack of bridging between architecture and planning, as well as the increasing preference of suburban lifestyle from the rising mid class. These problems reflected evidently in some stereotypes of social housing communities built in the modern era such as Pruitt-Igoe, sunny side Gardens, Paul

New Urbanism, a burgeoning genre of architecture and city planning, is a movement that has come about only in the past decade. This movement is a response to the proliferation of conventional suburban development (CSD), the most popular form of suburban expansion that has taken place since World War II. Wrote Robert Steuteville, "Lacking a town center or pedestrian scale, CSD spreads out to consume large areas of countryside even as population grows relatively slowly. Automobile use per capita has soared, because a motor vehicle is required for nearly all human transportation"1. New Urbanism, therefore, represents the converse of this planning ideology. It stresses traditional planning, including multi-purpose zoning,

His first comprehensive city plan was La Ville Contemporaine (the Contemporary City) a project to house three million inhabitants designed in 1922. This was Le Corbusier’s first attempt to reconcile man, nature and machine (Fishman, 189). The city starts at the center with a transportation hub for busses, trains, cars and planes. Surrounding this hub there will be an organized cluster of 24 60-story skyscrapers. These glass and steel skyscrapers are cross-shaped. Each individual skyscraper is to be set within a large rectangular green space. The skyscrapers house the “brain” of the city. The city is beautifully geometric and symmetrical. Placing the skyscrapers in the city center reinforces the emphasis on capital as a means of creating a successful city. Because of the shape and mass of each skyscraper, they have more usable space than an entire neighborhood but also relieves density and congestion because of the organization (Frampton, 46).

As a result of a booming development of the nineteenth century city, “progressive” architects of the time started to deliberate and conceive opinions to create long term solutions. Known for his radical cultural manifestos, Le Corbusier is one of the architects that epitomizes the change in ideal of the Machine Age. He introduced ideas of living in completely analogous, planned, designed, and then built, cities. Le Corbusier 's proposition for the City of Tomorrow had in its roots the intention of creating a series of fundamental principles that would become the skeleton of any modern city plan. However, considerations that were not applied during that period of time, are the cause of its unsuccessful development.

The garden city movement, a method of urban planning that was initiated in 1898 by Sir Ebenezer Howard, had a significant influence on urban planning. The theory of urban planning has envolved over the past hundred years, some have attempted to emulate theories from the garden city movement, while others have been revised based on Howard’s original ideas. The Garden City concept spawned many ideas of urban planning. Among these ideas, the Garden Suburb, Satellite City, the New Towns Movement and the New Urbanism are all significant theories in the history of urban planning and had their influence to this day. The integration of town and country, the separation of conflicting land uses and modes of travel, and the ideas of growth management are all elements of the Garden City concept that have made made their ways into plans of most major Western cities.

In this book Lynch defines that performance of the city can be measured by reference to its spatial form. But the quality of a place is depends upon combined effect of place and the society which occupies that place. Here Lynch sets up new dimensions for performance in his own criteria. Author also expresses his approach on size of the city, conservation and growth, planning practices and utopian models. The dimensions which are demonstrated in this book may not be fully perfect but of course they combine all social values as well as physical values. Lynch believed that these described dimensions must cover all features of all forms of the settlements and all these dimensions should be usable where values are different.

In our twenty-first century, urban conservation has become an inescapable element of the way cities remake themselves ( Pendlebury and Strange, 2011). Since at least the 1960s, urban conservation is a concept that has been with the UK (Rodwell, 2007), but the start of conservation in different countries has different situation. Compared with the UK conservation, conservation in China begins relatively late. In this essay, the studying area is in China.