Planning History and Ideas: From the Origins of the City to the Smart and Global City
2. The Garden City: Howard’s three magnets and the plan
Ebenezer Howard published “To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform” in 1898; it was reissued in 1902 as “Garden Cities of To-morrow”. He asked why people move to towns and answered with the three magnets: Town, Country and Town-Country. The point of the diagram is that the third magnet keeps the advantages of both and drops their disadvantages.
| Magnet | Attracts by | Repels by |
|---|---|---|
| Town | Jobs, high wages, social opportunity, amusement | High rents and prices, crowding, smoke, isolation of the crowd, slums |
| Country | Beauty of nature, fresh air, low rent | Low wages, few jobs, little society or amusement |
| Town-Country | Social opportunity with nature, high wages with low rent, no smoke, no slums | Nothing; this is the proposed new form |
The plan. A compact, roughly circular town of about 1,000 acres sits at the centre of an estate of about 6,000 acres, planned for about 32,000 people, of whom about 30,000 live in the town and the rest in the agricultural estate. A park lies at the centre, wide radial boulevards and a ring road structure the town, factories stand at the edge beside the railway, and the town is ringed by a permanent agricultural greenbelt. The town is not allowed to grow beyond its planned size; when it fills, another garden city is founded.
Two further features matter as much as the shape. Land is held in trust for the community, so the rise in land value created by the town (the unearned increment) returns to the community and pays for it. And the town is self-contained: it carries its own industry and jobs, so residents do not commute to a big city. Several garden cities linked by rapid transport round a larger central city form Howard’s Social City: a central city of about 58,000 and six garden cities of about 32,000 each, about 250,000 people in all.
Built examples. Letchworth (begun 1903, Hertfordshire; planned by Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin) was the first garden city, and Welwyn Garden City (begun 1920; Louis de Soissons) the second. The idea fed the greenbelt and the British New Towns programme after the Second World War, and the neighbourhood and satellite-town thinking of many countries.
3. City Beautiful, Broadacre, Radial City and Linear City
City Beautiful. The movement took off after the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where Daniel Burnham and others built a monumental “White City”. Its belief was that beauty and civic order lift public morale and conduct: grand axes, boulevards, civic centres, classical façades, squares and parks. Burnham’s Plan of Chicago (1909) is the best-known plan, and Lutyens’s New Delhi is the Indian example usually cited for monumental axes. The criticism is that it was cosmetic and costly, and left housing and slums untouched.
Broadacre City. Frank Lloyd Wright set out the idea in “The Disappearing City” (1932) and showed a model in 1935. With the car, telephone and electricity, he argued, the dense city had become unnecessary: every family should have land of about an acre, homes and small farms and workplaces spread over the countryside, linked by motorways. It is decentralisation taken to its limit, with no distinction between town and country. Criticism: it consumes land, makes the car compulsory and makes every service expensive to provide.
Radial City (Le Corbusier’s Radiant City). Le Corbusier’s Contemporary City (1922) and Radiant City (“Ville Radieuse”, 1930s) answer congestion by going up, not out: tall towers set in continuous parkland give high density together with most of the ground left open; the four functions (dwelling, work, recreation, circulation) are separated, as the Athens Charter later stated; a hierarchy of roads, with a transport interchange at the heart, feeds everything. Chandigarh, with its sector grid and hierarchy of roads, is the Indian application. The criticism, made most sharply by Jane Jacobs, is that the streets become empty and the mixed life of the city is zoned away.
Linear City. Arturo Soria y Mata proposed the “Ciudad Lineal” in Madrid in the 1880s and began building it in the 1890s. The city is a continuous strip, a few hundred metres wide, along a central transport spine (tram or rail with a main road), with houses and gardens on both sides, and it can extend indefinitely, even joining existing cities. Every household is near the transit line and near open country, and services are cheap to lay along a line. Soviet planners such as Milyutin took up the idea as the “Sotsgorod” (1930). Its weakness is that a line has no centre: services concentrate poorly, and the strip is easily cut at any point.
| Model | Proponent | Core idea | Form |
|---|---|---|---|
| Garden City | Howard (1898) | Self-contained town in a greenbelt, community land | Compact, circular, limited size |
| City Beautiful | Burnham and Chicago 1893 | Civic beauty and order | Monumental axes, civic centre |
| Broadacre City | Wright (1932) | Dissolve the city into the countryside | Very low density, car-linked homesteads |
| Radial City | Le Corbusier (1922, 1930s) | High density by height, open ground, separated functions | Towers in a park |
| Linear City | Soria y Mata (1880s–90s) | Development strung along a transport spine | Continuous narrow strip |
4. Ekistics and urban sociology
Ekistics, the science of human settlements, was developed by the Greek planner Constantinos Doxiadis. It treats a settlement as a whole, made of five elements: Nature (the setting), Anthropos (the individual person), Society, Shells (buildings of every kind) and Networks (roads, water, power, communications). Crossing these five elements with fifteen ekistic units, from the single person through room, house, neighbourhood, town (polis), metropolis and megalopolis up to the continuous world city, ecumenopolis, gives the “ekistic grid”, which lets a problem be placed at its proper scale. Doxiadis also proposed Dynapolis, a city that grows along one direction with its centre moving with it, and he prepared the plan for Islamabad.
Urban sociology asks how city life shapes people and society, and gives planning its vocabulary of community, segregation and neighbourhood.
| Thinker | Idea |
|---|---|
| Tönnies (1887) | Gemeinschaft (community: close, personal ties) giving way to Gesellschaft (society: impersonal, contractual ties) |
| Durkheim | Mechanical solidarity of similar people (rural) against organic solidarity of specialised, interdependent people (urban); anomie when norms weaken |
| Simmel (1903) | Metropolitan overstimulation leads to a reserved, “blasé” attitude and greater individual freedom |
| Wirth (1938) | Urbanism as a way of life follows from three variables: size, density and heterogeneity |
| Park, Burgess, McKenzie (Chicago School) | Human ecology: competition for land, invasion and succession, natural areas, concentric zones |
| Jacobs (1961) | Safe, lively streets need mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings and “eyes on the street” |
| Gans; Castells, Lefebvre, Harvey | Gans found close-knit “urban villages” inside cities, against Wirth; the political-economy school sees the city as shaped by capital, class and power (Lefebvre: the “right to the city”) |
These ideas reached practice through the neighbourhood unit (Clarence Perry, 1929: a primary school at the centre, a walkable radius, through traffic kept on the boundary) and through debates on segregation, gentrification (a term from Ruth Glass, 1964) and social mix.
5. Concepts and theories of urban planning
Planning theory splits into two. Theory of planning (procedural theory, a distinction drawn by Faludi) asks “how” planning should be done: who decides, with what method. Theory in planning (substantive theory) is what planning is about: land use, housing, transport, the economy. The syllabus’s “concepts and theories of urban planning” is mostly the procedural family below, which shows a historical drift from the expert with a blueprint to the planner as a facilitator of many voices.
| Model | Source | Core idea | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blueprint / master plan | Early twentieth century physical planning | A fixed end-state land-use plan drawn by the expert | Rigid; ignores change, economy and people |
| Rational comprehensive | Meyerson and Banfield; the systems and process planning of the 1960s | Set goals, generate all alternatives, predict, evaluate, choose, implement, monitor | Needs complete information, agreed goals and unlimited time |
| Disjointed incrementalism | Lindblom, “Muddling Through” (1959) | Compare a few options close to the present, by small steps; agree on means without agreeing on goals | No long-term direction; favours the status quo |
| Mixed scanning | Etzioni (1967) | Scan broadly for fundamental decisions, examine in depth only where needed, increment elsewhere | Hard to say what is “fundamental” |
| Advocacy planning | Davidoff (1965) | Planner acts as the advocate of under-represented groups and plural plans compete | Resource-poor groups still lose; advocacy is not empowerment |
| Equity and radical / transactive planning | Krumholz; Friedmann | Favour the disadvantaged; the planner and the citizen exchange knowledge face to face | Slow; limited by political power |
| Communicative / collaborative | Healey, Forester, Innes; from Habermas | Planning is argument and consensus-building among all stakeholders; the planner is a mediator | Power inequalities can distort “open” dialogue |
The rational comprehensive sequence is: identify the problem and goals, generate alternatives, forecast their consequences, evaluate them against the goals, choose, implement, and monitor with feedback. Its critics make three points: planners never have all the information, goals are rarely agreed because values differ, and the planner is not value-neutral. Rittel and Webber (1973) added that planning problems are wicked problems: they have no definitive formulation and no stopping rule, solutions are good or bad rather than true or false, and every problem is a one-off.
Participation has its own scale, Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation (1969), with eight rungs in three bands: non-participation (manipulation, therapy), tokenism (informing, consultation, placation) and citizen power (partnership, delegated power, citizen control). A public hearing where citizens speak but nothing changes is consultation: tokenism, not power.
6. Contemporary ideas and trends; Global North and South
The Eco-city (the term is credited to Richard Register, 1980s) aims at a settlement that lives within ecological limits: compact and mixed-use, walkable, served by public transport, powered by renewable energy, with closed loops for water and waste and generous green space. Curitiba’s integration of bus rapid transit with land use, Freiburg’s Vauban district and Masdar are the examples usually quoted. The Smart City uses sensors, data and ICT to run services better and to involve citizens. A common frame lists six dimensions (Giffinger): smart economy, people, governance, mobility, environment and living. India’s Smart Cities Mission (2015) selected 100 cities, combined area-based development (retrofitting, redevelopment, greenfield) with pan-city solutions, and worked through a city-level special purpose vehicle (SPV). The criticisms are techno-centrism, privacy and data ownership, the digital divide, and an enclave of smart area amid an unserved city.
Network Cities replace the central-place pyramid, in which each town depends on the one above it, with a network of complementary cities that specialise, exchange and cooperate across borders; Batten’s network-city idea and polycentric urban regions such as the Randstad are the usual illustrations, and Castells’s “space of flows” explains why flows, not rank, now bind them. Global Cities (Saskia Sassen: New York, London and Tokyo) are command points of the world economy, where advanced producer services (finance, law, accounting, design) concentrate; Friedmann’s world-city hypothesis and the GaWC rankings place cities in tiers. A global city is defined by its function, not its size: a megacity, by contrast, is a size class, ten million people or more.
Other current ideas the paper may name: the compact city and transit-oriented development, New Urbanism (traditional neighbourhood design, 1990s), the resilient city (absorbing floods, heat and shocks), the sponge city (water-sensitive design) and the 15-minute city (daily needs within a short walk or ride).
| Dimension | Typical Global North | Typical Global South |
|---|---|---|
| Urbanisation | High share already urban; slow growth; some cities shrinking and ageing | Rapid growth, much of the world’s future urban growth; often without matching industrial jobs |
| Economy and land | Mostly formal jobs and secure tenure | Large informal economy and settlements; insecure tenure |
| Main planning concerns | Regeneration, sprawl, retrofit of old infrastructure, climate and equity | Infrastructure backlog, informality, affordable housing, weak data and enforcement |
| Typical tools | Statutory plans with strong enforcement | Colonial-inherited master plans often mismatched to reality; in-situ upgrading, sites-and-services, incremental approaches |
Growth arithmetic. City populations grow roughly geometrically, so the time to double is t = ln 2 / ln(1 + r). A city growing steadily at 3.5 percent a year takes ln 2 / ln 1.035 = 0.6931 / 0.03440 = 20.1 years to double. This is why a Southern city of five million at that rate reaches the ten-million megacity mark in about twenty years.
Key takeaways
- Cities need agricultural surplus; the pre-industrial city is walled, small and has its elite at the centre; the industrial city produced slums and the planning response; the post-industrial city rests on services, with brownfield, gentrification and polycentric form.
- Garden City (Howard, 1898/1902): three magnets, about 1,000 acres of town in a 6,000-acre estate, about 32,000 people, greenbelt, community land, self-contained; Letchworth 1903, Welwyn 1920; a garden suburb is not a garden city.
- City Beautiful: civic beauty and monumental axes (Chicago 1893, Burnham). Broadacre: Wright’s decentralised acre-per-family, car-linked. Radial City: Le Corbusier’s towers in a park, separated functions. Linear City: Soria y Mata’s strip along a transport spine.
- Ekistics (Doxiadis): five elements (Nature, Anthropos, Society, Shells, Networks) and fifteen units up to ecumenopolis. Urban sociology: Tönnies, Durkheim, Simmel, Wirth (size, density, heterogeneity), Chicago School, Jacobs.
- Planning theory runs from blueprint to rational comprehensive (Meyerson, Banfield), incremental (Lindblom), mixed scanning (Etzioni), advocacy (Davidoff), transactive (Friedmann) and communicative (Healey, Forester, Innes); Rittel and Webber’s wicked problems and Arnstein’s ladder complete the set.
- Eco-city, Smart City (India 2015, 100 cities, area-based plus pan-city, SPV), Network Cities (complementarity, flows) and Global Cities (command functions, not size; a megacity is 10 million or more); Global North and South is a development divide, not latitude. Doubling time = ln 2 / ln(1 + r).
Practice questions (19)
Attempt each one before opening the answer. Every explanation names the tempting wrong option as well as the right one, because that is where marks are lost.
In Howard’s diagram of the three magnets, the Town-Country magnet is meant to combine
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Answer: C — the social opportunity and wages of the town with the beauty and low rent of the country
Howard’s third magnet keeps the town’s jobs, wages and social life and the country’s nature, fresh air and low rent, and drops the disadvantages of each. The civic-centre option is City Beautiful thinking; Howard in fact wanted land held by the community, not privately.Howard’s Garden City is planned for 32,000 people on an estate of 6,000 acres, of which 1,000 acres are the town. The gross population density of the whole estate, in persons per acre, correct to two decimal places, is ____.
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 5.33
Gross density divides the population by the whole estate: 32,000 / 6,000 = 5.33 persons per acre. Dividing by only the town’s 1,000 acres would give a different figure (30,000 / 1,000 = 30 per acre for the town alone), which is the trap.A new residential area on the edge of a large city has low density, gardens and tree-lined roads, but no industry or other employment of its own and no permanent agricultural belt. Residents commute to the city. It is best described as
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Answer: B — a garden suburb
Green layout and low density are not enough. A garden city is self-contained, with its own jobs, a permanent greenbelt and community land. An area that is green but depends on the big city for work is a garden suburb. The garden-city label is the tempting wrong answer because of the gardens.The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, with its monumental “White City”, is generally regarded as the launching point of
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Answer: B — the City Beautiful movement
Burnham and his colleagues showed at Chicago how classical façades, axes and civic spaces could create civic pride, which launched the City Beautiful movement. The Garden City movement comes from Howard’s 1898 book, and Ekistics from Doxiadis in the twentieth century.A proposal dissolves the city into the countryside: each family gets about an acre, homes, small farms and workplaces are spread widely and linked by motorways, and the car, telephone and electricity make density unnecessary. The model is
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Answer: C — Wright’s Broadacre City
Broadacre City is decentralisation at its extreme, enabled by the car and communications. The Radial City is the opposite, high density by building tall; the Social City is a cluster of compact garden cities; the Linear City is concentrated along a spine.Which statement about Le Corbusier’s Radial (Radiant) City is correct?
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Answer: D — It builds tall towers in open parkland for high density and zones the four functions apart
The Radial City raises density by going up, leaving the ground as parkland, and zones the four functions apart. Community-trust land with a fixed population and a greenbelt describes Howard’s Garden City, low-rise development along a single transport spine is the Linear City, and mixed-use short blocks with old buildings are Jane Jacobs’s counter-argument against exactly this kind of planning.The distinguishing feature of Soria y Mata’s Linear City is
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Answer: D — a continuous narrow strip of development organised along a central transport spine
The Linear City concentrates development in a narrow, potentially endless band around a tram or rail spine and a main road. The circular town with a belt is Howard’s garden city, the civic centre is City Beautiful, and the fifteen units are Doxiadis’s Ekistics.Which of the following pairings of idea and origin are correct?
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Answer: A — City Beautiful is associated with Burnham and the Plan of Chicago (1909); B — Linear City was proposed by Soria y Mata in Madrid; D — Letchworth, begun 1903, was the first garden city, planned by Parker and Unwin
Letchworth, Burnham’s Plan of Chicago and the Madrid Ciudad Lineal are correctly attributed. Broadacre City is Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposal; Le Corbusier proposed the Contemporary and Radiant Cities, the near opposite of decentralised Broadacre.Doxiadis’s five elements of human settlements in Ekistics are
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Answer: C — Nature, Anthropos, Society, Shells, Networks
The five are Nature, Anthropos (the individual), Society, Shells (buildings) and Networks (infrastructure and communications). The distractors each swap one element, for example Economy for Society, which is the near-miss to watch for.Compared with the industrial city of the Chicago School, the pre-industrial city of Sjoberg’s model typically has
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Answer: A — the elite concentrated near the centre and the poor towards the edge
In the pre-industrial city status was inherited, the elite lived close to the palace, temple and market at the core, and the poor and noxious trades lay at the margins. The poorest housing in a ring outside the business centre is the Burgess pattern of the industrial city, which is the reversal; factory districts along the railway and high mobility with achieved status also describe industrial or modern cities.Which of the following pairings of urban sociologist and idea are correct?
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Answer: A — Jacobs: lively, safe streets need mixed uses, short blocks and eyes on the street; C — Wirth: urbanism as a way of life arises from size, density and heterogeneity; D — Tönnies: the shift from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (society)
Wirth, Tönnies and Jacobs are correctly paired. Invasion and succession and the concentric zones belong to the Chicago School (Park, Burgess, McKenzie); Simmel wrote on the metropolis and mental life, the reserved blasé attitude of the city dweller.A planner compares only a few options that differ marginally from current policy, accepts agreement on the means without first agreeing on goals, and adjusts by small steps. This is
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Answer: B — disjointed incrementalism
This is Lindblom’s “muddling through” or successive limited comparisons. Rational comprehensive planning does the opposite, specifying goals first and examining all alternatives. Mixed scanning is the tempting near answer, but it combines a broad scan for fundamental decisions with incremental detail rather than abandoning the long view.Residents of an informal settlement, helped by a planner who prepares a plan on their behalf, present it at a public hearing as an alternative to the planning authority’s plan, and the two plans are then argued before the decision-makers. The approach followed is
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Answer: B — advocacy planning, with a planner speaking for an under-represented group and rival plans competing
A planner representing a particular group and a contest of rival plans is Davidoff’s advocacy planning. Communicative planning is the tempting alternative, but it seeks a single consensus through inclusive dialogue among all parties rather than competing partisan plans.Which of the following are assumptions of the rational comprehensive model of planning?
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Answer: B — Goals can be agreed and specified clearly in advance; C — Information on all alternatives and their consequences can be obtained; D — The planner is a value-neutral technical expert
The rational comprehensive model assumes agreed goals, complete information and a neutral expert, and these are exactly what its critics deny. Proceeding by small adjustments to existing policy is Lindblom’s incrementalism, which was proposed as the alternative.A city is described as a “global city” in Sassen’s sense mainly because
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Answer: C — it is a command point of the world economy, with advanced finance and law services
Sassen defines global cities by function: they are command points of the world economy with concentrated advanced producer services. Size does not define them; ten million or more is the definition of a megacity, which is the usual confusion.A city of 5 million people grows steadily at 3.5 percent per year, compounded annually. Using ln 2 = 0.6931 and ln 1.035 = 0.0344, the number of years it takes to reach the 10-million megacity mark, to the nearest whole year, is ____.
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 20
Reaching 10 million from 5 million is a doubling: 5 (1.035)^t = 10, so t = ln 2 / ln 1.035 = 0.6931 / 0.0344 = 20.15, which is 20 years to the nearest year. A check with the rule of 70 gives 70 / 3.5 = 20 years.Which statement about Global North and Global South perspectives in urban planning is the most defensible?
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Answer: D — Informality shapes much urban growth in the Global South, so incremental upgrading often suits better than a rigid master plan
Informality, insecure tenure and an infrastructure backlog make staged, in-situ and incremental approaches more workable than rigid blueprints. The terms mark a development divide rather than latitude (Australia is Global North); the fastest urban growth is in the South; and inherited colonial-style plans are widely mismatched to Southern conditions.In Howard’s Social City, a central city of 58,000 people is surrounded by six garden cities of 32,000 people each. The total population of the whole cluster, in thousands, is ____.
Numerical answer — type the value.
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Answer: 250
Total = 58 + 6 × 32 = 58 + 192 = 250 thousand, that is 250,000 people. Check: 192 + 58 = 250.India’s Smart Cities Mission, as launched in 2015, is built around
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Answer: A — area-based development plus pan-city smart solutions, delivered through a city-level SPV
The Mission selected 100 cities, combined area-based development (retrofit, redevelopment or greenfield) with pan-city solutions using ICT, and delivers through a city-level SPV. It is not limited to sensors, and each city prepares its own proposal rather than receiving a uniform plan.