Rethinking the Planned City

If one were to visit almost any of the world’s “planned cities,” one would almost immediately notice some problems and differences as compared to the conventional cities of the world that evolved into their current forms over many years. Beyond the fact that sometimes, planned cities appear to follow rigid structure, with many similar buildings and an impersonal lack of human scale, most of the time these cities just don’t work. The basic explanation for these differences is the fact that it is very difficult, and actually impossible in some cases, for things to come out exactly as planned. When the plan is as big as an entire new city, the results can be disastrous.

When conceiving, planning, and executing a project of such enormous financial, geographical and intellectual scale as the creation of a new city, it is near impossible to make the “perfect” plan. Beyond that, it is also near impossible to carry out the project to reflect the planners’ ideals and original blueprints and concepts. An example of this is the cul-de-sac and open space idea proposed by the designers of Ciudad Guyana. The original plan included building community at the neighborhood level with settlements organized in cul-de-sac patterns with open space and community buildings in the center. In reality, however, the scheme was abandoned because it was too complex, and cost too much.

A major difference between most of these planned cities and the conventional cities of the world is a lack of human scale. When planning an entire city, I can see how it can be difficult for architects and planners to come down from the “view from above,” stop looking at the city as a whole, and look at the buildings from an individual person’s perspective. In Ciudad Guyana, the landscape is marked by large apartment buildings separated by concrete with no pedestrian access and no community areas. In Brasilia, convenient shopping virtually doesn’t exist. While it is possible to plan and build an entire city that actually serves its inhabitants properly, we know that nothing can substitute the hundreds of years of slow evolution and irregular growth patterns that create the world’s truly great cities.