Optimal city planning

Summary: Mathematics is used to model optimal city designs and reduce problems of traffic congestion, sanitation, and water distribution.

Also called “urban planning” and “town planning,” city planning is a discipline that focuses on the various economic, environmental, historical, physical, political, and social characteristics of the urban environment and their harmonious organization. It encompasses a variety of projects, processes, and goals that involve multiple disciplines and fields of expertise, such as physical design, and quantitative and qualitative research, as well as analysis, forecasting, strategic planning, negotiation, and public mediation. Since the late nineteenth century—and especially during the second half of the twentieth century—the profession has increased its reliance on statistics and mathematics.

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Early History

The early origins of urban planning can be traced in the physical design and purposeful spatial organization of some ancient cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Mediterranean Basin, South and Central America, the Yellow River Basin, and along the Indus Valley. Many of these settlements present a hierarchical system of paved streets, often following a rectilinear grid, with water supply and drainage systems. The Middle Ages was not a propitious era for urban planning. It became popular again during the Italian Renaissance with the design of ideal cities. Influenced by the belief that a perfect form was the image of a perfect society, designers opted for radial or centrally planned cities frequently uniting the perfect geometric figures of the square and circle into a star-shape layout. In the seventeenth century, the rise of nation states and absolutism was conducive to the development of the monumental baroque city with its straight and endless avenues, unbroken horizontal rooflines, and repetition of uniform elements, which glorified the ruling power. Simultaneously, the advances of warfare techniques led to the disappearance of the old city walls and the adoption of new complicated systems of fortification with considerable outworks and bastions in spearhead forms.

The Industrial Era

The modern origins of city planning have their roots in the industrial city of the mid- and late nineteenth century. In both Europe and the United States, rapid technical progress, tremendous industrial development, and massive displacements of rural population to urban areas created considerable problems that threatened to disrupt the existing social order. The dreadful conditions experienced by masses of people living in abject poverty and misery in overcrowded slums sprawling around wealthier districts became a source of concern for the general public health. In 1854, Dr. John Snow—the father of modern epidemiology—identified the source of a cholera outbreak in London by studying the patterns of the disease and using statistics and a spot map illustrating the clustered death cases of cholera around the Broad Street pump. The fears of major epidemics resulted in the rise of a social movement for urban reform and planning, which first focused on water supply and sanitation improvement, and later on housing provision.

In the 1880s, the basic lack of information regarding the extent and distribution of poverty in London led English philanthropist Charles Booth to develop a comprehensive and scientific social survey investigating the incidence of pauperism first in East London, and later in the entire city. His quantitative statistical analyses and qualitative research presented in 17 volumes with accompanying colored maps indicating the levels of poverty and wealth by street received considerable attention. They were also influential in demonstrating the importance of social surveys for public policy, demographics, and sociology as well as in improving census data collection.

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Similar problems affected Paris and, after visiting London, Napoléon III placed considerable emphasis on urban planning to modernize the medieval capital into the capital of light. The large-scale restructuring program under the direction of Baron Haussmann affected not only the center of Paris but also its surrounding suburbs. At the time, it was the largest urban renewal project ever implemented. The plan created a network of large, easily accessible avenues and boulevards with radiating vistas terminated by prestigious public edifices and monuments. In addition to the building of 71 miles of new roads, the layout of 400 miles of pavement, and the doubling of the number of trees lining the streets, the city’s infrastructure was entirely renovated. The construction of more than 340 miles of sewers and hundreds of miles of aqueducts increased the water supply by 400%. Haussmann also created two major urban parks and two large natural preserves on the periphery. This urban metamorphosis influenced the design of numerous cities worldwide and in particular the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, which was the first large-scale project of the City Beautiful movement in the United States. The aim of expanding civic consciousness and raising the standards of civic design culminated in the publication of the famous Plan of Chicago in 1909, which coincided with the first university course in city planning at Harvard and the first National Conference on City Planning. In 1917, the American City Planning Institute was founded.

The Twentieth Century

Nevertheless, with the growth of the automobile as a favorite mode of transportation, it was the “Garden City” concept invented by Ebenezer Howard that became the leading model for the development of U.S. suburban residential communities. As the old city centers became increasingly congested, transportation planning became increasingly important to ensure an efficient balance between land-use activities and the potential communications between them. Transportation planners regularly collect data, which they analyze and process, to forecast future traffic using various techniques such as land-use ratio methods, multiple regression models, category analysis, growth-factor methods, synthetic models, modal split analysis, diversion curves, and geographic information systems (GIS).

After the U.S. Department of Commerce published “A Standard State Zoning Enabling Act” and “A Standard City Planning Enabling Act” in the 1920s and the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of zoning in 1926, most U.S. cities established planning departments to adopt master plans and zoning regulations that allowed them to control land-use development, protect property values, and segregate uses. Cities also started implementing subdivision controls and regulations. These new tools contributed to the belief in part of the planning community of the possible rational and scientific management of cities. On the other hand, idealists such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Lewis Mumford criticized the new pragmatic and technological approach, preferring a philosophy of city development for humanistic and social ends as epitomized in the design of Radburn, New Jersey. Over time, zoning regulations revealed some drawbacks. They often increased traffic congestion, and sometimes prevented the construction of affordable homes. Some courts struck them down as exclusionary.

City planning in the post–World War II era was dramatically affected by four significant federally funded programs: public housing, urban renewal, home mortgage insurance, and highway building. The miserable failure of urban renewal—and the urban crisis of the 1960s that ensued—required new approaches to urban planning. During the second half of the twentieth century, city planning became increasingly defined as a cyclical process attempting to balance conflicting social, economic, environmental, and aesthetic demands while implementing selected objectives and goals. Therefore, regular monitoring became necessary to test, evaluate, and review the strategies and policies adopted on a continuous basis. City planners regularly use a wide range of models ranging from basic descriptive statistics to more complex mathematical models that allow them to understand the nature of various urban components and forecast the consequence of change.

Because of the tremendous complexity of urban systems, models can provide only a simplified representation of the studied phenomena. Consequently, there is considerable attention and controversy regarding the choice of variables, and their level of aggregation and categorization, as well as the handling of time, specification, and calibration. Although deterministic models are the dominant type of predictive models used by urban planners, there has been some attempt at developing stochastic models. Urban planners are also concerned with the accuracy, validity, and constancy of the models they use. Most models tend to be topic specific, focusing, for example, on population, housing, employment, shopping, transport, or recreation, but integrated forecasting systems have become more common as there has been an increasing recognition of the interdependence of the various subfields of a city.

Bibliography

Field, Brian, and Bryan MacGregor. Forecasting Techniques for Urban and Regional Planning. Cheltenham, England: Nelson Thornes, 2000.

Freestone, Robert. Urban Planning in a Changing World. New York: Routledge, 2000.

Hall, Peter G. Cities of Tomorrow: Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century. 3rd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

Kostof, Spiro. The City Shaped: Urban Patterns and Meanings, Through History. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1993.

Krueckeberg, Donald A. Introduction to Planning History in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1983.

Lynch, Kevin. Good City Form. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984.

Moughtin, Cliff, et al. Urban Design: Method and Techniques. 2nd ed. Burlington, MA: Architectural Press, 2003.