Appunti Planning theory - Seconda parte

13.11.24 (è qua o è del 19.11.2025) New urbanism

What is a good city like?

Should we propose models or are we just abiding by a set of rules about how development should be. This lesson will explore the New Urbanism movement.

How is it possible for planners to propose specific models of cities and what are the outcomes?

The New Urbanism origins, principles and criticism

The movement known as 'New Urbanism' is attempting to reconcile competing ideas about urbanism that have been evolving in America for over a century.

New Urbanism, an urban reform movement that gained prominence in the 1990s, seeks to promote qualities that urban reformers have always sought: vital, beautiful, just, environmentally benign human settlements.

Urban planning must reduce inequality through special means.

New Urbanism attempts to combine multiple traditions that, though inter-related, often comprise opposing ideals:

• The quest for urban diversity within a system of order,
• Control that does not impinge freedom,
• An appreciation of smallness and fine-grained complexity that can coexist with civic prominence,
• A comprehensive perspective that does not ignore detail (Talen, 2005)

New urbanism refers to a design-oriented approach to planned urban development.

Developed primarily by architects and journalists, it is perhaps more ideology than theory: and its message is carried not just by academics but by planning practitioners and a popular movement.

New urbanists have received considerable attention in the United States and, to a lesser extent in Great Britain.

Their orientation resembles that of the early planning theorists Ebenezer Howard, Frederic Law Olmsted, Patrick Geddes in their aim of using spatial relations to create a close-knit social community that allows diverse elements to interact.

The precursors of new urbanism appeared in the 1980s, with the development of Seaside, Florida.

Its proponents drew substantially on Jane Jacobs (1961) in their call for mixed use, connected street patterns, and walkable communities.

Neo-traditional town planning or traditional neighbourhood design, pioneered by Duany and Plater-Zyberk, advocated:

• Complete communities
• Mixed-use town centres,
• Traditional building types

Transit Oriented Development, promoted by Calthorpe and Kelbaugh, suggested that designers and planners use access to public transportation as an organizing mechanism for determining land uses and densities.

By 1993 these forces merged to form the Congress for the New Urbanism (Katz, 1994) and fused their principles.

However, several scholars who have evaluated new urbanism suggest that its theoretical claims will be difficult to implement under current market and political conditions and evaluations of its practice have come to mixed conclusions (Grant, 2009) 1

Charter of the New Urbanism

The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society's built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.

We stand for the restoration of existing urban centers and towns within coherent metropolitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of real neighborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments, and the preservation of our built legacy.

The new urbanism stresses the substance of plans rather than the method of achieving them.

In practice, it has stimulated the creation of a number of new towns and neighborhoods.

Fundamental to its development has been a critique of American suburbia.

The new urbanism is vulnerable to the accusation that its proponents over-sell their product, promoting an unrealistic environmental determinism that has threaded its way throughout the history of physical planning (Hillier and Healey, 2008).

But my real worry is that the movement repeats at a fundamental level the same fallacy of the architectural and planning styles it criticizes. Put simply, does it not perpetuate the idea that the shaping of spatial order is or can be the foundation for a new moral and aesthetic order?

The movement does not recognize that the fundamental difficulty with modernism was its persistent habit of privileging spatial forms over social processes (Harvey 1997).

One frequently made criticism is that it merely calls for a different form of suburbia rather than overcoming metropolitan social segregation.

Duany responded to this accusation by arguing that because most Americans are going to live in suburbs, planners need to build better suburbs.

1. The classic and more important dilemma results from the two-edged quality of community, which in providing emotional sustenance to its members, necessarily excludes others.

2. A second problem arises within theories of planning and urban design that urge the creation of exciting locales: is planned diversity an oxymoron?

Although Jacobs's (1961) critique of modernist planning undergirds much of the New Urbanism, she would probably repudiate its effort to prescribe what in her view must be spontaneous. 2

12.11.2025 Ecological perspectives in urban planning

• Ecology vs Urban Ecology
• Urban Political Ecology
• Territorialist School
• A case study: Vajont 1963

What makes the difference between the two scenarios is the technology.

Nature vs Humans

“The idea of the production of nature is indeed paradoxical to the point of sounding absurd, if judged by the superficial appearance of nature even in capitalist society. Nature is generally seen as precisely that which cannot be produced; it is an antithesis of human productive activity, in its most immediate appearance, the natural landscape presents itself to us as the material substratum of daily life, the realm of use values (usefulness of something) rather than exchange-values (the value derived from the market sale of something). As such it is highly differentiated along any number of axes. But with the progress of capital accumulation and the expansion of economic development, this material substratum is more and more the product of social production, and the dominant axes of differentiation are increasingly societal in origin.

In short, when this immediate appearance of nature is placed in historical context, the development of the material landscape presents itself as a process of the production of nature (Smith, 1990).

What is ecology?

“The study of organisms and their environment” (Melntosh, 1985).

It depends on what we intend for organism and environment.

Developing the science of ecology

The balance of nature

The world (nature) maintained a state of stability (balance) unless disturbed by the actions of humans.

Equilibrium paradigm → Implications:

• Humans have traditionally not been viewed as biological or as part of ecosystem
• Exclusion of humans in the study of ecology
• The ideal sites for studying ecology are those with little to no human impact

Exclusion of humans from conservation strategies.

Non-equilibrium paradigm

“This new paradigm views ecological systems as driven by process rather than end-point and as open systems potentially regulated by external forces”.

“This new ‘non-equilibrium paradigm’ explicitly allows for the inclusion of humans as components of ecosystems studied by ecologists”.

“Humans are components of ecosystems and human-dominated ecosystems provide a new and challenging arena for inter and transdisciplinary studies involving the physical ecological and social sciences” (McDonnel, 2011).

Rising atmosphere CO² data in the early 1960s revealed that no ecosystem on Earth was untouched by human actions.

The Man and Biosphere (MAB program) was established to conserve and study both natural and cultural ecosystems. 3

Three dimensions:

• Natural sciences
• Engineering and planning
• Humanities (including social sciences)

Recognition of Urban Ecology and its integration into mainstream knowledge.

Urban ecology has been practiced for a very long time, well before its official recognition by governmental and political bodies and, more generally, by academia.

Many disciplines analyze the interactions between the physical characteristics of cities and the structural models that influence social processes.

Two examples:

• (In the field of Sociology) Chicago School of Urban Sociology: interaction between individuals and the urban environment, moving beyond biophysical determinism.
• (In the field of Political Economy) Marxism: cities as the material expression of capitalist relations of production.

What is urban ecology?

“Urban ecology integrates both basic and applied natural and social science research to explore and elucidate the multiple dimensions of urban ecosystems” (McDonnell, 2011).

A possible definition:

“Urban ecology is the study of the ways that human and ecological systems evolve together in urbanizing regions” (Alberti, 2008).

That is the “integration of several disciplines as a result of mutual interest in understanding the ecological structure and function of cities and towns” (McDonnell, 2011).

Urban ecology focuses on ecological interactions in urban contexts and, moving beyond the goal of conservation (as in traditional ecology), aims at sustainable planning and urban management. In other words, it intersects with the domain of urban planning.

• How should the adjective “urban” in urban ecology be defined?
• Is urban ecology the ecology of the cities? Is it the ecological within the city? Or is it the ecology of urbanization?
• What are the implications of these three different perspectives in our analysis?

“Cities are dense networks of interwoven socio-spatial processes that are simultaneously local and global, human and physical, cultural and organic. The myriads of transformations and metabolism that support and maintain urban life, such as, for example, water, food, computers or hamburgers always combine infinitely connected physical and spatial processes”.

Urban ecology and political ecology

“From a progressive or emancipatory position, then, urban political ecology asks questions about who produces what kind of socio-ecological configuration for whom. In other words, urban political ecology is about formulating political projects that are radically democratic in terms of the organization of the processes through which the environments that we (human and non-humans) inhabit become produced”.

Political ecology of urbanization

Two major challenges: 4

• Re-naturing urban theory: “First, there is a need to revisit the overtly ‘sociological’ nature of much of twentieth-century urban theory. (…) this impels interrogating the failure of twentieth-century urban social theory to account of physical or ecological processes” (Heynen, 2006).
• Recognizing Urbanization as a Key Environmental Force: “Second, most of environmental theory has unjustifiably largely ignored the urbanization process as both one of the driving forces behind many environmental issues and as the place where socio-environmental problems are experienced most acutely” (Heynen, 2006).

City as socio ecological process

“Contemporary scholars increasingly recognize that natural or ecological conditions and processes do not operate separately from social process and that the actually existing socio-natural conditions are always the result of intricate transformations of pre-existing configurations that are themselves inherently natural and social” (Heynen, 2006).

Second Nature

“Lefebvre’s explanation of second nature defines urban environments as necessarily socially produced and thus paves the way to understand the complex mix of political, economic and social processes that shape and reshape urban landscapes. In addition, for Lefebvre, the urban constitutes the pivotal embodiment of capitalist or “modern” social relations, and, by implication, of the wider (and often global) socio-ecological relations through which modern life is produced, materially and culturally”.

Socio-natural metabolism

“In capitalist cities, ‘nature’ takes primarily the social form of commodities. Whether we consider a glass of water, an orange, or the steel and concrete embedded in buildings, they are constituted through the social mobilization of metabolic processes under capitalist and market-driven social relations. This commodity relation veils and hides the multiple socio-ecological processes of domination/subordination and exploitation/repression that feed the capitalist stretches from the immediate environment to the remotest corners of the globe. Indeed, the apparently self-evident commodification of nature that fundamentally underpins a market-based society not only obscures the social relations of power inscribed therein, but also permits imagining a disconnection of the perpetual flows of metabolized, transformed and commodified nature from its inevitable foundation, i.e. the transformation of nature”.

Urban political ecology and environmental justice

Urban Political Ecology studies how economic and political processes shape the way natural resources are exploited.

(It) “combines the concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy. Together this encompasses the constantly shifting dialectic between society and land-based resources, and also within classes and groups within society itself”.

Rawlsian vs Marxist

According to UPE scholars:

• The environmental justice literature has evolved through political praxis and focuses on the uneven distribution of both environmental benefits and harms to economically/politically marginalized people
• It fails to grasp how these relationships are integral to the functioning of a capitalist political-economic system
• It speaks from a liberal and distributive perspective in which justice aligns with a view akin to Rawls’ and is associated with the dynamics of externalities allocation. 5

Marxist political ecology, on the other hand, argues that unequal socio-economic conditions are produced through the specific capitalist forms of social organization of the natural metabolism.

Manifesto of urban political ecology

• Environmental and social changes are co-determined. Socio-environmental metabolic processes transform the physical and social environment, producing physical and social milieus (such as cities)
• There is nothing unnatural about the produced environment (such as cities). Produced environments are the historical result of socio-environmental processes
• The characteristics of physical and environmental changes, and the resulting environmental conditions, are not independent of specific historical, social, political, and economic factors or the institutions accompanying them
• Non-human