Linear Cities Research Articles

Atomville: Architects, Planners, and How to Survive the Bomb.

In the post-Hiroshima era, atomic cities-designed to survive a nuclear attack-remain in the science fiction realm. Yet Hungarian émigré Paul Laszlo, a successful architect in Southern California suburbia, had a utopian vision for a futuristic, paradoxically luxurious atomic city he called "Atomville," never built but nonetheless seriously proposed. Laszlo was one of the very few architects known to venture into atomic survival on this scale. This article focuses on why the architectural profession for the most part ignored the issues raised by the atomic bomb, and on Laszlo's role as an outlier. It also deals with the genesis of Atomville and its place among the many unrealized ideas put forward in the 1940s and 1950s for urban survival, including underground buildings, urban dispersal, linear cities, and cluster cities.

The Union State of Russia and Belarus as a Center for Reloading the New World on the Biosphere Path of Civilizational Development

The article main goal is research continuation on the development and detailed study of the socio-technological path for a civilizational solution of the critical situation our planet has faced. The key tasks here are import substitution, i.e., technological independence, reducing the energy source export importance for the economy, and the most intensive increase in political, social, technological and economic sovereignty. Moreover, the need in searching for new partners, reorientation exports and imports to new markets, strengthening integration with allied countries (Russia and Belarus), which in fact have confirmed their willingness and ability to collaborate even under strong external pressure — these needs are constantly increasing. The author concerns the creation and application of the Program for Redirecting the Economy of the Union State of Russia and Belarus on the Biosphere Path of Civilizational Development (Program) as the main solution the tasks referred above. The Program can prevent global problems in existing models of civilizational order and the destructive orientation of their technological and social development. The proposed Program is not limited by the Union State boarders and consists of the following biosphere and engineering technologies: relic solar bioenergy; biosphere agriculture; construction technology of cluster-type, pedestrian linear cities; “second level” transport and infrastructure complexes – Unitsky String Transport (uST); non-rocket near space industrialization. These biospheric technologies are complementary. Their complex implementation will make the redirection and global reset of any country economy possible, and primarily the economy of the Union State.

город как система потоков

Практика создания линейных городов насчитывает десятки столетий, но теоретическое осмысление этого феномена в основном пришлось на первые десятилетия ХХ века. Советский архитектор Н. Милютин не только создал последовательное научное обоснование линейного города, но и воплотил свои идеи в структурах нескольких городов. В те же сроки Ле Корбюзье реализовал свои градостроительные проекты в Алжире и Бразилии, а вслед за ним множество зодчих по всему миру обратились к концепции линейного города.
 Мы публикуем подборку материалов, обсуждающих понятие города с точки зрения транспортных, человеческих, информационных потоков, протекающих сквозь его ткань. Теоретический аспект концепции линейности все еще далек от завершенного вида и требует развития.
 Ярким примером соединения теории и практики линейного города является концепция Байкальского луча. Ее автор Вячеслав Воронежский – однокурсник Ильи Лежавы, одного из лидеров группы НЭР. Дерзкий полет мысли молодых архитекторов-шестидесятников не потерял актуальности и сегодня. Отголоски влияния НЭР присутствуют в идеях Зимнего города и их воплощениях в проектах Иркутских кварталов и Байкальска. Идеи линейности в масштабах города, региона, страны, целого континента продолжают жить и воплощаться в конкретных проектах.

Нелинейность развития и ее линейные проекции

В статье идет речь о «природе» развития, парадигма которого, в отличие от роста, нелинейная. Однако преобладающей проекцией идей развития (развертывания), в т. ч. и проекций на карту, до сих пор выступает линия в тех или иных ее прорисовках. Мышление линиями небезобидно: оно способно редуцировать значимое содержание идей развития; на уровне планов (которые всегда линейны) оно способно переводить интенцию развития в последовательность выхолощенных действий. Подчеркивается особый тип пространственного сознания и дискурса, порождением которого становятся идеи «линейных городов», масштабных линейных проектов (Новый шелковый путь и др.); говорится о возможностях и условиях иной концептуализации таких идей.

Байкальский луч, линейность и восточный поворот

В исторической перспективе Иркутск всегда был городом с высокой линейностью. В шестидесятых годах ХХ века группа молодых архитекторов предприняла деятельные попытки придать высокую степень линейности Иркутску. Их проекты перекликаются с работами московской группы НЭР, группы Аркигрэм, японских метаболистов. Наиболее ярким проектом повышения линейности Иркутска стал «Байкальский луч» В. Воронежского. В последние годы наблюдается рост интереса к проектам линейных городов и регионов, созданным шестидесятниками. В статье рассмотрены условия, при которых перестройка городов в сторону увеличения линейности оправдана и выгода. Показано, что в сегодняшнем контексте проект «Байкальский луч» снова становится актуальным.

The Linear City: illustrating the logic of spatial equilibrium

Linear cities where activity is spread out along a transportation line, aim to offer the highest levels of accessibility to their adjacent populations as well as to the countryside. These city forms are popular amongst architects and planners in envisioning ideal cities but they are difficult to implement as they involve strict controls on development which often ignore human behaviour associated with where we locate and how we move. We briefly explore the history of these ideas, noting the latest proposal to build a 170 km city called Neom in north west Saudi Arabia, a plan that has attracted considerable criticism for its apparent ignorance of how actual cities grow and evolve. We use a standard model of human mobility based on gravitational principles to define a set of equilibrium conditions that illustrate how a theoretical city on a line would, without any controls, successively adapt to such a new equilibrium. First, we represent the city on a line, showing how its population moves to an equilibrium along the line, and then we generalise this to a bigger two-dimensional space where the original line cutting across the grid evolves as populations maximise their accessibility over the entire space. In this two-dimensional world, we simulate different forms that reflect a balance of centralising versus decentralising forces, showing the power of such equilibria in destroying any idealised form. This approach informs our thinking about how far idealised future cities can depart from formal plans of the kind that the linear city imposes.

Role of urban planning characteristics in forming pandemic resilient cities – Case study of Covid-19 impacts on European cities within England, Germany and Italy

In recent decades, the world has witnessed a variety of emerging infectious diseases, some of which developed to pandemic world threatening outbreaks, the ongoing COVID-19 is known to be taking the lead in claiming lives around the globe and thus, urging people to trail its increasing figures. Therefore, this research aims to emphasize the role of urban planning in containing such outbreaks through running a series of analytical and statistical studies on European cities, worst inflicted region, to analyze the main urban features they share and that may be propagating the disease spread according to their population size, density, form, intracity connectivity and intercity connectivity. This study, as far as we know of, is the first practice to evaluate both the individual and combined impacts of these factors on recorded rates of infections. According to the context of this research, it is concluded that the diversity found in urban features are, to a large degree, related to cities being more vulnerable than others. Intracity connectivity through public transport is found to be the possible prime factor of this study, and is followed by population size, density, and intercity connectivity. Urban morphology seems to also contribute to such outbreak, with both radial and grid cities being associated to higher infections rates as to linear cities. Henceforth, setting priorities in post-pandemic urban planning schemes is essential for planning resilient cities that are capable to thrive and maintain functionality with lowest possible infections amid else possible diseases that are to follow in severity.

Le Corbusier y la Ciudad Lineal. A propósito de un doble centenario

<div data-canvas-width="297.494060630767">Hace cien años, en octubre de 1920 aparece en París el primer número de la revista<em> L’Esprit Nouveau</em>, donde Charles-Édouard Jeanneret toma por vez primera el nombre de Le Corbusier, que no le abandonaría nunca. Pocas semanas después, el 6 de noviembre, fallece en Madrid Arturo Soria, creador e impulsor de la Ciudad Lineal. Ambos centenarios pueden ponerse en relación intencionada. Una relación entre dos genios del urbanismo: Soria y Le Corbusier, que venía por lo menos de 1913-15, cuando éste, preparando su estudio La Construction des Villes, calca con trazo decidido una serie de dibujos de la Ciudad Lineal de Madrid y que se prolongaría durante casi cincuenta años, hasta 1958-60, cuando defiende ante André Malraux las Cités Linéaires en lo que probablemente sean sus últimas propuestas sobre Paris. A ese medio siglo de relación entre Le Corbusier y la Ciudad Lineal vamos a dedicar el presente estudio.</div>

Linear cities: controversies, challenges and prospects

The article is devoted to the study of linear planning structures; identify characteristics and problems of “linear city”. The authors presented developed systematization and classification concepts of linear planning structures. The features of the development of linear cities are disclosed on the basis of the analysis of the practice and theoretical concepts of the linear city, as well as the example of the formation of the city of Stalingrad-Volgograd. This city has a linear urban structure, unique in world practice. Volgograd stretched along the Volga River for almost 100 kilometers, reaching 10-5 kilometers in width in cross section. The authors reveal the pros and cons of the linear planning development of the city. In conclusion, the trends of complication of the planning development of Volgograd are determined.

Applications of Linear Systems in Contemporary Urban Design

One of the fundamental disputes in the contemporary urban design is principal of shaping urban systems. The main focus of disputes and research is the clash of urban interior (and its multiplication – residential quarter) systems with freestanding building urbanism. The issue is also discussed from perspective of neighbourly bonds, contact with nature and access to transport. The concept of linear systems was supposed to be an alternative solution to the dispute. The father of the idea of linear cities was Arturo Soria y Mata. The first drafts about the concept appeared in 1882. Its priorities were based on transport accessibility and green zones. In the Polish urban design, the original concepts of linear systems were created by Oskar Hansen (Linear Continuous System) and Włodzimierz Gruszczyński (Ribbon City of Conjugate Transportation) at the turn of 60’s into 70’s. The theory of Hansen predicts creation of four stripes North-South across Poland. The theory was based on demographical and geographical research. To certain extend, Hansen managed to achieve some aspects of the theory. The examples can be seen in the housing estate Przyczółek Grochowski in Warszawa and in the housing estate Lubelska Spółdzielnia Mieszkaniowa in Lublin. The article tackles upon the strengths and weaknesses of linear systems. Their main assets are: transport accessibility, contact with greenery and ability to counteract the urban sprawl. However, the basic weaknesses are schematism and dullness of buildings and the problem of residential cell divided into two parts by long transport belt. Another discussed aspect is comparison between urban interior systems and linear systems. Transforming the structure of linear systems includes three processes – reduction of the scale of systems, naturalisation of the central transport belt and individualisation of the structure of building range. One of the methods opposing the dullness is integration of various types of buildings – “hybridisation.”Besides the enumerated above transformation processes, I think that it is crucial to break the schematism of the linear systems. The parallel belts of residential areas should be replaced by networks. Such networks would leave the enormous fields to untamed and natural space.

Welfare-Deteriorating Construction of Public Infrastructure

This study examines an extension of the Hotelling model of spatial competition in which there are two separated linear cities with two roads connecting them at the edges of the cities. Initially, the cost of passing them for consumers is too high so they are impassible, but one of them is improved and passible. This simple setting gives an asymmetric set of Nash equilibria which has not been discussed in the literature before. Further, it leads to the counterintuitive result that, under reasonable assumptions, connecting the two cities decreases social welfare, even when the cost of doing so is zero. Moreover, improving two roads simultaneously may recover social welfare.

Dispersion analysis of carbon monoxide concentrations in the linear cities atmospheric air

Volgograd belongs to a number of cities in which a linear planning structure was formed, stretching along the Volga River for almost 100 km, however, the width of Volgograd in some sections ranges from 3 to 10 km. The total area outlined by the borders is 400 km2, Volgograd has a “loose” structure, as a result, the territory occupied by residential quarters is almost 3 times smaller. In the city there are gaps between the districts, which are occupied by green areas and wastelands. In Volgograd, large green space arrays prevail on the ravines and gullies slopes, which are widespread in the city, as well as in watershed areas, while having a soil-protective and water-regulating value. Moreover, in general, in Volgograd, the area of green areas is much less than the normative.

Nonlinear pricing in linear cities with elastic demands

Nonlinear road pricing charges each traveler based on his/her trip’s corresponding particular attribute level. In order to help authorities in designing road pricing systems at a strategic level, this paper attempts to address two fundamental questions: (i) what is the value of pricing’s nonlinearity for mitigating traffic congestion? (ii) if a nonlinear toll function is implemented, should it be convex, concave or other shape? Specifically, we consider distance-based pricing in linear cities. For linear monocentric cities with heterogeneous travelers, we show that the system optimal distance-based pricing indeed exhibits nonlinearity. It is proved that: (i) the cost-based system optimal toll function is monotonically increasing and concave with respect to the traveled distance; (ii) the time-based system optimal toll function always exists and is unique. If the initial proportion of each traveler group is invariant along a corridor and the demand function is of exponential type, then the time-based system optimal toll function enables the travelers, living further away from a city center, to face a lower toll level per unit distance. For a linear polycentric city, we demonstrate: (i) there always exists the system optimal differentiated (in terms of city centers) toll functions; (ii) it is highly possible that the system optimal non-differentiated toll function does not exist. Hence, we further propose an optimal toll design model, prove the Lipschitz continuity of its objective and adopt a global-optimization algorithm to solve it.

階層的な空間構造を持つ線状都市における階高を考慮した最適都市形態

This article developed a new method to obtain optimum urban forms minimizing the moving cost from each point to the central district center with consideration of floor height. By applying the method to linear cities including hierarchical spatial structure, this article aimed to clarify the effect of various factors including floor height on the optimum urban forms, and to verify the differences of the optimal urban forms with consideration of floor height from those without it in the previous studies. This article assumed hierarchical district centers and transportation system according to the stage of life needs. Based on the assumption of compact city system, this article calculated the optimal urban form. The Optimal urban form is defined as the city to minimize the total travel cost from each houses to the central district center via the nearest district center. Conventionally, the urban model to minimize the travel cost was defined without considering the floor height. In order to make the urban model more realistic, we formulated a new urban model considering the floor height and calculated the optimal urban form. When the urban model has multi-layered horizontal floors in the vertical direction, the formula of the travel cost include the integer variable expressing the number of floors. Therefore, we cannot use the integration to cost calculation of height direction and this makes the calculation of the optimal urban form difficult. In order to overcome the difficulties, this study, as the first step, calculated the optimal urban form of a linear city. This linear city can be considered as a city developed along a railway or highway, or as a section of a city. As a result, when the total floor area is given the urban form that minimizes the travel cost was uniquely determined. The result also showed that the obtained optimum urban forms are similar when only the total floor area changes but that they are not similar when the travel cost of the vertical movement or of the bus change. The comparison between the two optimal urban forms, one of which takes into account the floor height and the other of which does not take into account, showed the following three results. First, when we consider the floor height, the height of the city is generally lower than the urban model without considering the floor height. Second, the distance between the district centers of the former model is larger than that of the latter one. Third, because the area from which the central district center is the nearest grows, the population accessing the central district center directly increases. In other words, when considering the floor height, the city is expanded in the horizontal direction. The article left three issues for further study. First, the city model should be extended to the three-dimensional city model. Second, the review of suitable travel cost and other factors suppressing the highest height of actual cities is necessary. The horizontal size compared to the vertical one obtained by this study is extremely smaller than that of the actual cities. By adopting the appropriate travel cost and by considering other factors including the limitations of construction technique or building cost, more realistic urban forms may be obtained. Third, it is necessary to compare the actual city forms with this city model. The factor except the travel costs that decides real city forms may be found by comparing two. With that in mind, it is necessary to indicate the rule of compact city system.

The linear city: linearity without a city

Similar to linear cities of the early 1960s, especially that of the British town of Hook (which was not built), two linear towns were planned in Israel during the years 1960–1962: Arad (completed) and Ir HaBesor (remained on paper).The two Israeli towns highly resembled the British town, at least regarding the basic linear scheme of traffic separation, phased town growth and planning based on walking distances. However, a more thorough examination reveals an essential difference between the British linear cities and the Israeli ones, especially concerning their technological components, which were absent from the Israeli planning.This paper examines the difference between town planning models in passing from one culture to another, while focusing on the desire to impart an ‘urban character’ to the new cities. The paper claims that ideological contents negating urbanism as a concept stood behind the Israeli linear town model, and that this fact surprisingly preserved the town's vitality for many years.

Spatial Layout of Linear Cities in Eastern Region of Northwest China

Eastern region of northwest China includes Shaanxi, Ningxia Hui Nationality Autonomous Region and the area to the east of Lanzhou city, Gansu Province. Most of the region is covered by Qinling mountains and Loess Plateau that is a crisscross network of gullies, Urban land for construction shows a form of ribbon, thus creating a large number of linear cities. In this paper, based on the theories of linear city which is Matas classic theory of urban form , and based on linear cities status and trends of development in eastern region of northwest China, we put forward the concept of "organic growth" and "dynamic growth" into linear citiesstudy. Based on this, the paper combines with examples of typical cases, to explore a new form of linear cities spatial layout which combine dispersal and compaction, and not only give full play to Linear Cities advantages, but also as far as possible to avoid the disadvantages ,with the aim of changing the passive situation in the development of these cities .

The linear city: linearity without a city

Similar to linear cities of the early 1960s, especially that of the British town of Hook (which was not built), two linear towns were planned in Israel during the years 1960–1962: Arad (completed) and Ir HaBesor (remained on paper). The two Israeli towns highly resembled the British town, at least regarding the basic linear scheme of traffic separation, phased town growth and planning based on walking distances. However, a more thorough examination reveals an essential difference between the British linear cities and the Israeli ones, especially concerning their technological components, which were absent from the Israeli planning. This paper examines the difference between town planning models in passing from one culture to another, while focusing on the desire to impart an ‘urban character’ to the new cities. The paper claims that ideological contents negating urbanism as a concept stood behind the Israeli linear town model, and that this fact surprisingly preserved the town's vitality for many years.

Linear Planning and the Automobile

Hilarión González del Castillo (HGC) has made a place for himself in the history of urbanism as propagandist for the Linear City and theoretical town planner. The appearance of the first motorway projects in Spain at the end of the 1920s, inspired him to propose a colonising motorway, that would take advantage of the infrastructure for the construction of linear cities. HGC's proposal had influence in the draft of some of the first Spanish motorways but has practically disappeared until the present. While few town planners of the age considered the role of the automobile (Le Corbusier, Benton Mackaye), HGC explained the relation of the motorways with the environment, spotting conflicts that passed unnoticed by the highway engineers. From this, the proposal evolved into an attempt to resolve the conflict between the intercity traffic and the urban activities situated on the margins of the motorway.

“Let's Build in Lines” Revisited

In this paper the ideas put forward in 1967 by Lionel March are reconsidered. He argued for the development of linear cities as opposed to the traditional compact form of nuclear development, based on their superior efficiency in transport and service provision. The idea of linear development is applied to an infrastructure plan for the Central Region of Chile around Santiago. Linear development is seen as a natural extension of the traditional form rather than its opposite. Existing cities are expanded through the use of integrated corridors within which urban land use follows transport provision. The plan is seen as a rationalisation of the use of infrastructure and is implemented through an efficient system of investment, pricing, and regulation. The plan was formulated and evaluated through the use of MEPLAN land-use and transport interaction model.

Linear cities in a nonlinear world

Linear cities in a nonlinear world