Designing the Modern City

3 units

This course, which is based on the textbook Designing the Modern City: Urbanism Since 1850, is a lecture course that examines designers' efforts to shape modern cities. Topics covered include the technical and social changes in mid-19th century industrial cities, notably London, Paris, and Barcelona, as well as varied efforts to shape urban extensions and central new interventions elsewhere. These include reform housing efforts for the working class in 19th-century London and New York, Städtebau (city building) in German-speaking environments, the Garden City Movement, the American City Beautiful movement, town planning in Britain, and urbanisme in France (the source of the contemporary term urbanism). Less well-known topics that will also be addressed are urban modernization in East Asia before 1940 and suburban planning in the United States, including Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City. The book also addresses social change and modern urbanism in Europe in the 1920s, including the emergence of CIAM (International Congresses for Modern Architecture), which met from 1928 to 1956; the political, technological and urban transformations of World War II; the expansion of racially segregated decentralization in the United States; and some European and Latin American postwar urbanism. It also addresses urbanistic aspects of postwar architectural culture, including critiques of modernist planning by Jane Jacobs and others and more recent responses to the ongoing challenges posed by efforts to create organized self-build settlements and to make more ecologically sustainable cities.