Urban planning, how a German preoccupation became common practice

It is often said that what sets the Germans apart as a people is that they like everything nicely planned and neatly organised. This is certainly true, but the same can be said of Scandinavian and Dutch people. It is no surprise to most that modern urban planning originated in Germany. Camillo Sitte starts his treatise on town planning with an historic overview beginning with Ancient Greece. This is hardly relevant; the oldest cities in the Germanic lands go back to Celtic and Roman military fortress and city foundations. In most cases the lines of the regular Roman fortress are difficult to recognise in the present city (e.g. Mainz, Cologne, Trier and Utrecht); in rare cases the crossing main streets can still be understood from the plan (e.g. Vienna, Maastricht and Regensburg). Apart from some relics little remains. In that sense the history of present cities starts after the Roman Era.

Yet the cities we see today don't look anything like those medieval cities as these were constructed mostly of wood as some charming relics in German cities still show. Most of what we can see today wandering around our cities dates from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, often with a ring of developments from after 1900 around. Especially in bombed-out cities few historic buildings remain. Amongst the historic cities there are cities that were planned as an entire entity (e.g. Freudenstadt, Mannheim, Ludwigslust, Ludwigsburg, Karlsruhe, Elburg and Willemstad). Some of the so-called new cities were expansions of an existing town (e.g. Hanau, Harlem, Krefeld and Dusseldorf). These typically had a regular street plan as a variation on a grid; the northward expansion of Antwerp is also a good example. Sometimes the choice for a regular street plan was based on classicist theory (Elburg and Karlsruhe), but mostly it was seen as a practical way of parcelling land. Especially in the 18th and 19th centuries urban expansion in the German realm took the shape of a regular pattern forced on the situation. The expansion of Vienna, Pest, Munich (Maxvorstadt) and Berlin (Friedrichstadt and Dorotheenstadt) are good examples of this.

These planned urban extensions often had strict rules concerning the building line, building height, type of roof, material and style of facade, as architecture was seen as the vehicle for quality. The ideal was after all to create a beautiful district to enhance the city as a whole and bring fame to the ruler who had initiated it. In the Dutch Republic there was no absolute ruler, so cities were run by an elite of bankers, guilds and merchants. These advocated private enterprise, but still laid down some rules for planned new urban districts -the famed Canal Belt of Amsterdam is a good example. Medieval cities already had several directives in place concerned with type of use, access and sanitation (to prevent the spread of disease and fire), so there is a long history of setting building rules and designating use.

The big change came with industrialisation. In England cities grew unchecked into large conurbations without much structure. The resulting transport problems are felt to this day in places like Greater Manchester and Greater London. Industrialisation in mainland Europe started first in Wallonia (Belgium) and spread from there to the Ruhr Area, the Campine and beyond. At first industrial expansion and private house building for the new workers went hand in hand. Speculative house building quickly lead to bad living conditions that were recognised as detrimental to the productivity of workers. This lead to company-lead housing projects that took the shape of workers colonies near the factory or works. These colonies were often rather haphazard in layout and made most of the land available. Most consist of little more than one or more streets -often cul-de-sacs- with housing on either side.

The first big improvement took place in Mulhouse with the creation of large housing quarters on a regular plan with the pioneering Mulhouse Quadrangle. This house type was rapidly taken up by industrialists building workers colonies for their collieries and factories in Belgium (Beringen-Mijn, Genk-Zwartberg, Genk-Waterschei, Overpelt-Lommel and Olen), Germany (Neukirchen-Vleun, Repelen, Essen, Mulhouse and Gelsenkirchen) and the Netherlands (Budel, Heerlen and Landgraaf). Especially in Germany colonies were planned as regular entities combining housing and certain amenities and facilities (Seraing, Alfredshof, Nordbahndorfl, Kolonie Eickel), but industrialist in neighbouring countries quickly followed suit.

Improvements in agriculture lead to more land being cultivated with higher yield and less people needed to do the work. This also lead to a growth in urban populations. Better sanitation meant lower rates of child deaths and greater longevity for workers in general. Also the middle class expanded. All these people needed to be housed. This was mainly seen as a technical issue in the 19th century. Sometimes public health was also taken into account. An early example of this is the 1854 Singelplan (Perimeter Moat Plan) for Rotterdam, combining the need to adjust the drainage situation for development (by creating more surface water), ensuring water flow in otherwise stagnant canals and making sure polluted water would be diverted around the city. The plea Sitte makes in his book for a return to town planning on artistic principles was basically an attempt by architects to take back control from the engineers that were now mostly involved with urban expansion. The result was the birth of a new profession: the urban planner.

On the left the sketch (1913) and the final plan (1914) for Rotterdam - Blijdorp by Burgdorffer shows artistic urban design. The building plan for Hellerau (on the right) with 5 functional categories is a good examples of the German approach.

German historian Gerhard Fehl distinguishes three movements: Stadtplanung (town planning), Siedlungsbau (housing estate development) and Stadtbaukunst (urban design). Reinhard Baumeister (1833-1917) and Josefh Stübben (1845-1936) saw urban planning as a kind of social and hygienic politics that was termed Stadtplanung. Both advocated a flexible General Plan with prescribed building lines to better cope with changing future demands. Problems should be resolved via technical means. The urban expansion plan was at the heart of this type of urban planning.

Others advocated the integration of social and psychological sciences with spatial planning. The result of this Siedlungsbau would be a living environment that worked as an educational machine. A merely technical approach wouldn't suffice for people like von Mangoldt, Eberstadt, Goecke and Messel as they saw urban planning as a way of creating better people through a better living environment and better housing. Some company housing falls in this category as it integrated housing, schools, shops, communal facilities, community spaces, social clubs and recreational facilities.

The last strain of urban planning in Germany around 1900 was town planning as an aesthetic and educational strategy. This variant was very influential in both Germany and the surrounding countries. It is this type of town planning that Unwin refers to in his book (although he shows many examples of flexible expansion planning in his book taken from Der Städtebau by Stübben). Camillo Sitte, Karl Henrici and Cornelius Gurlitt are saw urban planning as an art form -hence  Stadtbaukunst- that could solve the problems of cultural decay and alienation. Their main focus lay with designing public space (an relied on engineers to make the city as a whole work). This rather singular focus that disregarded the city as a whole lead to fierce criticism from for instance Albert Erich Brinckmann, an art historian.

All these planners had one thing in common: a clear focus on shaping change, managing renewal and realising improvements to better the lives of residents. In idealistic idea like that of Ebenezer Howard and his Garden Cities of To-morrow were quickly absorbed in the existing practice and became integrated in Siedlungsbau, with the aesthetic aspects of Stadtbaukunst added. This aesthetic wasn't merely focussed on the romantic and informal but also would lend itself to design exercises in New Objectivity (Siedlung Törten, Siedlung Dammerstock and Tuindorp De Burgh) and Early Modernism (Gartenstadt Falkenberg, Onkel Toms Hüttte, Batadorp, Betondorp, La Cité Moderne and Tuinwijk Kapelleveld). The strong undercurrent of civil engineering always remained. It was this practical mix that conquered mainland Europe as it provided very realistic way of managing urban expansion for (local) governments, professional specialists and residents alike.

The General Plan for the town of Heerlen from 1936 showing the existing built-up area, the existing and planned infrastructure and the designated use of other areas set aside for industrial use, housing or nature (the valleys of the Geleen and Caumer brooks).

After 1933 functionalist modernists break away from rationalists and traditionalists. This functionalism would later become international modernism. This in turn resulted in a counter movement: postmodernism. All these "isms" use a general plan, zoning and a restrictive or relaxed type of use planning. The main differences are to be found in the organisation of infrastructure, the (absent) relation between placement of buildings and infrastructure, the scale of the (design) intervention, relationship to existing context and the preferred mode of transport as central to the layout and the experience of the urban landscape.