About
Urban planning — the discipline of organizing and designing cities to function effectively, equitably, and aesthetically — has produced some of history's most transformative and most destructive interventions. Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris (1853-1870 under Napoleon III) demolished medieval neighborhoods and created the iconic Haussmanian boulevards, parks, sewers, and apartment blocks — simultaneously creating the most beautiful large city in the world and displacing 350,000 poor residents from the city center.
Key moments and thinkers: Robert Moses (NYC Parks Commissioner and 'master builder,' 1934-1968 — built 13 bridges, 416 miles of highways, thousands of apartments, but deliberately routed highways through Black neighborhoods and designed overpasses too low for public buses); Jane Jacobs ('The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' 1961 — argued that diversity of use, short blocks, old buildings, and dense population were necessary for urban vitality, opposing the clearance of 'slums'; successfully fought Moses' Lower Manhattan Expressway); Léon Krier (New Urbanism, traditional town planning); and the '15-minute city' concept (Carlos Moreno — all daily needs within 15 minutes' walk or bicycle ride, implemented in Paris under Mayor Hidalgo). Car-centric planning (the post-WWII US suburban model) has been recognized as a public health, environmental, and social disaster.
# Top 10 urban planning facts
- 1Haussmann Paris (most beautiful, most exclusionary)
- 2Robert Moses (NYC, highways through Black neighborhoods)
- 3Jane Jacobs ('Eyes on the Street')
- 4Le Corbusier (Plan Voisin, proposed demolishing central Paris, rejected)
- 5Pruitt-Igoe failure
- 615-minute city (Paris)
- 7Singapore planning (densest, most liveable)
- 8Chandigarh (Le Corbusier designed city, India)
- 9Brasília (Oscar Niemeyer, car-dependent failure)
- 10co-housing and community design
Fascinating Facts
- ◆Robert Moses deliberately designed the Southern State Parkway overpasses in Long Island with clearances of 9 feet — too low for buses — to prevent Black and poor New Yorkers (who depended on public transit) from reaching Jones Beach; he called them 'deliberate social engineering' according to his biographer Robert Caro
- ◆Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses from building an expressway through Greenwich Village by organizing community resistance in 1961 — two years after publishing 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' which argued that what planners called 'slums' (mixed-use, walkable, dense neighborhoods) were actually the most vibrant and safest urban environments
- ◆Le Corbusier's 'Plan Voisin' (1925) proposed demolishing all of central Paris north of the Seine (except major monuments) and replacing it with 60-story cruciform towers set in parkland — Paris rejected it, but similar ideas were implemented in American housing projects with catastrophic results, demonstrating how dangerous utopian urban planning can be when actually built
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