Abstract
This article studies Sir Patrick Geddes’ housing-based urban planning, pointing to a less-explored aspect of his groundbreaking work, while proposing ways to rethink the history and theory of modern urban planning towards a “housing builds cities” planning agenda. Focusing on Geddes’ modern urban planning for Tel Aviv in 1925 as housing-based urbanism, this article conceives urban structure and urban housing as one single problem rather than disconnected realms of planning. Based on new findings and revised study of available sources, we look into three planning processes by which policy makers, planners, and dwellers in Tel Aviv engaged in this housing-based urban vision: (1) The city as a housing problem; (2) the city as social utility for reform and reconstruction; and (3) housing-based urbanization as self-help. We show how Geddes’ modern urban plan for Tel Aviv employed the city’s pressing housing needs for urban workers to provoke planning by way of cooperative neighborhoods based on self-help dwellings. This approach was grounded on Geddes’ survey of Tel Aviv’s early premise on housing and extends beyond Geddes’ period to the brutalist housing estates of the 1950s and 1960s. The result is a new historiographic perspective on Tel Aviv’s UNESCO-declared modern urbanism vis-à-vis housing as the cell unit for urban living. Further, insights regarding Tel Aviv’s housing-based planning are relevant beyond this city to other examples of the town planning movement. It proposes rethinking modern urban planning before the consolidation of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) principles, namely when planned settlements were explicitly experimental and involved diverse processes, scales, methods, practices and agents. Housing—a key arena for the modernization of the discipline of architecture, as well as for the consolidation of the discipline of urban planning—is studied here as the intersection of sociopolitical, formal, aesthetic, and structural elements of the city.
Highlights
This article discusses Geddes’ urbanism beyond regional planning
This article focuses on three planning processes by which policy makers, planners, and dwellers in Tel Aviv engaged in this housing-based urban vision: (1) The city as a housing problem; (2) the city as social utility for reform and reconstruction; and (3) urbanization as act of self-help
Comparing Geddes’ ideas for city planning with Howard’s Garden City, we see they are strikingly different in the role assigned to the people’s own actions in construction of their homes and the city, the latter model based on purchase of cheap farm land by industrialists as investment in a city of good worker housing to be paid back as rent and property values go up
Summary
This article discusses Geddes’ urbanism beyond regional planning. It examines Geddes’ less-discussed idea of a housing-based city, built by its own dwellers based on semi-autonomous urban blocks. Geddes’ ideas were influenced by French geographers Reclus and de la Blanch, and by sociologist Le Play—whom he met with at the Paris Exhibition of 1878—and spread as far as Hong Kong and America to influence the formation of regional cities like Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn (Allweil, 2016; Law, 2005; Meller, 1995). Geddes’ plan was based on a detailed survey of the town as housing estate and accepted Tel Aviv’s use of housing as building block to produce a “Housing Before Street” urban planning. This plan for Tel Aviv as a city of 100,000 people was the cornerstone of three planning processes that characterize Tel Aviv’s urban history as a ‘housing before street’ urban development process. This article focuses on three planning processes by which policy makers, planners, and dwellers in Tel Aviv engaged in this housing-based urban vision: (1) The city as a housing problem; (2) the city as social utility for reform and reconstruction; and (3) urbanization as act of self-help
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