Urban Planning History and Contemporary Movements
The exam tests whether you can place a proposal in its intellectual lineage and name the critique that broke it. Questions typically describe a plan's device - towers in a park, greenbelt, transit corridor - and ask which movement produced it.
Landmarks you must recognise
- Ebenezer Howard (1898/1902) - Garden City: 1,000 acres for the town, 5,000 acres of agricultural belt, about 30,000 residents, a cap on growth, municipal land ownership. Letchworth (1903) and Welwyn (1920) were the tests.
- Arturo Soria y Mata (1882) - linear city along a tram spine.
- Tony Garnier (1901) - Cité Industrielle: zoning by function, sunlight, separation of work and dwelling.
- CIAM (1928) and the Athens Charter (1933) - functional zoning, high-rise, open space, traffic separation; Le Corbusier's Radiant City.
- Team X (1953) - street, cluster and identity against CIAM abstraction.
- Jane Jacobs (1961) and the human-scale reaction.
- New Urbanism (CNU Charter, 1993), smart growth, transit-oriented development (Calthorpe, 1993), landscape urbanism, tactical urbanism, the 15-minute city (Moreno, 2016).
Worked example
A scheme relocates housing into 20-storey slabs on open lawns, separates shops into a shopping centre and routes traffic on ring roads. Diagnosis: this is the Athens Charter/CIAM model, not Garden City (no greenbelt, no growth cap, no land ownership claim). Expect the exam to attach Jacobs' critique of lost street life and Newman's critique of undefended open space.
Traps
- Dating the Athens Charter to 1943 rather than 1933.
- Calling Garden City anti-urban; it is a decentralisation argument, not a rejection of cities.
- Equating New Urbanism with sprawl; its charter is explicitly about walkable, mixed-use neighbourhoods.