The Routledge Companion to Urban Media and Communication by Zlatan Krajina;Deborah Stevenson;

Author:Zlatan Krajina;Deborah Stevenson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2019-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 22.1 Ebenezer Howard (1902) Diagram of Garden City. Plate 2 from Garden Cities of Tomorrow

Public domain image.

Resonant with its utopian promise, the city served at this time as a visual leitmotif of the utopian impulse (Leach 2002: 2). But the reality of urban life was far from ideal. Aghast at the seemingly unstoppable rise of cities racked by huge social tensions, disease and political ferment, late 19th-century reformers set about constructing unitary spatial designs that might reconstitute the space of the city as an “ideal worth fighting for” (Hall 1988: 7). Described by Harvey (2000: 175) as “utopias of spatial form”, the plans devised by early town planners were not only original and wide-sweeping in an urban design sense, but were also concerned to bring about fundamental social change as well. As the architectural historian M. Christine Boyer has argued, “by following the path of scientific methodology and assuming their role to be that of social engineering, [early planners] sought an absolute correspondence between the exterior city reality and its truthful and purified representation” (1996a: 19–21).

Scientific methods of classification were integral to the work of these reformers, assisting them to introduce greater “legibility” to urban space. The influential Scottish planner Patrick Geddes was originally trained under biologist Thomas Huxley, a prominent defender of Darwin’s radical evolutionary theories, and used the emerging principles and classificatory schemas of evolutionary thought as a means to control the disorders of industrialization (Batty and Marshall 2009). He saw the industrial city as “a sorry aggregate of ill-constructed houses, mean or showy without, unhealthy within, and containing little of permanent value” (Geddes 1885, quoted in Welter 2002: 17). By coming to view the city as a biological system subject to states of equilibrium and decay, Geddes established new principles for a more contained and controllable urban spatial form (Geddes 1915).

Resistant to the seemingly unstoppable forces of growth and expansion, Geddes’ vision of the city was one that more efficiently captured resources from its wider region, a position that came to be known as “regionalism” (Welter 2002; Batty and Marshall 2009). Underpinning this vision were theoretical expositions about different urban social structures, which were graphically rendered as “thinking machines” and represented through various matrices and diagonal components abstracted as “Place”, “Folk” and “Work” (Geddes 1915). By visually abstracting the core elements of otherwise chaotic urban spaces, Geddes asserted the need for cities to be organized as unified, classifiable and contained entities, whose unruly and unhealthy natures could be effectively tamed through improved spatial organization (Hall 1988; Welter 2003: 30).

Geddes’ radical ideas about urban space informed the urban planning strategies he produced for some 50 cities across India during the first decades of the 20th century, and were to prove influential to the work of numerous urban reformers during the following decades and beyond. In particular, the idea that a city could and should be comprehensively ordered according to objective classificatory schemas would help propel the use of city-wide mapping techniques adopting the most advanced scientific methods of the time.

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