CITY PLANNING ARTICLES

by Gabriele Tagliaventi

The evening of the 10th of December 1989. Television networks from the whole world have transmitted everywhere the images of the demolition of the wall of Berlin and, after decades of tragic separation, the embrace between east and west. It will be difficult to forget that evening in Germany: after the division of the two Germanies following defeat in the second World War, the re-unification of the country is peaceful, bloodless, in an extraordinarily exultant atmosphere, full of promises for the future.

That evening, millions and millions of German people rejoiced at watching what, until a few years before, seemed to be only a dream, an historical task for future generations.

Instead, it had happened. The crowd exultantly swarmed under

the Brandenburg Gate and all the people in the country were exultant and proud of their Chancellor, the stubborn author of the re-unification.

The whole country was proud, but the 168.000 inhabitants of Ludwigshafen-on-Rhine were, no doubt, a little prouder.

The Chancellor, the great director of re-unification, is actually their fellow-citizen, as usual when a fellow-citizen realizes something extraordinary, all the people are rightly proud of him and in him recognize themselves.

But, there could have been no celebration among the inhabitants of Ludwigshafen, and, that evening, the inhabitants of an industrial suburb in Mannheim would have rejoiced, if one hundred and fifty years earlier(1), instead of founding a town on the western banks of the Neckar, they had decided to expand Mannheim with a peripheral enlargement.

And so, that famous evening of December 1989, the Chancellor's proud fellow-citizens might go out in the streets and celebrate the event in front of the Rathaus, instead of crossing the river and doing so in the Court of Honor of the Residenz of Mannheim.

This symbolic event shows how, frequently, the environmental situations in which we live are not the casual result of a blind progress of History, but the immediate effect of decisions, acts, operations knowingly performed by men, are the immediate consequence of choices. Nothing more than the foundation of a town better expresses the human need to produce, to create something permanent.

The capacity to build towns, to found them new, to enrich them through the construction of new urban quarters, is one of the most relevant characteristics of the western world.

In the 20th century, this capacity seems to be lost, and for the first time, we have to face a spoiled environment, in which the traditional relationship town-country has been exchanged with shapeless environs of urban areas characterized by being suburbs, though they may be inhabited by either rich or poor classes, SUB-URBS which are different,

negatively different from the city, from the -URBS.

At the end of the 20th century, the problem of the crisis of the European territorial system corresponds to the crisis of the urban system.

However, at the urban level the European cities which we admire so much, those cities which today are often circumscribed to 'historic town centres', demonstrate that they are organised in accordance with the fundamental principles of planning per urban quarters, the self-governing unit, the real minimal unit of association to the city.

From Greek colonies to Roman cities, from French bastides to German neue stŠdte in the eastern territories, from the terre murate in Florence to Spanish villas nuevas, passing through fortified towns in Vauban, the Danish or Swedish foundation cities, the cities of the Italian Renaissance and the residence-towns of the Baroque Age, arriving at the Town Plan for Helsinki in 1918, a continuous thread thus links the European

town planning experience. Everyday reality is explained by the outstanding examples of new towns, the wonderful reality of thousands of towns which slowly grow, generation after generation, faithfully to the ground rules of the -urbs, those cities that today we admire in Bruges or in Salamanca, in Siena or in Regensburg, in Bath or in Montpellier.

The European city organically grows in urban quarters, Leon Krier has clearly pointed out(2).

The problem of the changes in towns which are due to transformations in the productive network, social structure or political power, is not a problem set in this century. In its millenary history, the European city must always face this problem and try to solve it.

The ville neuve of Nancy was founded in the second half of the 16th century in order to enlarge the city according to the generating mother-son principle which can be found in Hanau and other German cities where the Huguenots escaped from France arrived. A ville neuve, a new town, with new squares, new churches, new markets, was the basis for the 1700's urban organization through an extraordinary coherent and elegant system of squares(3).

Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, provides yet another example. In the second half of the 18th century, it was decided that its boundaries should be enlarged by building a new town on the north side of the old one: they had to be apart and formally independent. The new town had to be organized according to the theme dear to the British tradition of the square. Then, after the first new town by James Craig, the second was also built towards north by Reid and Sibbald. And, if we analyze the data of the surface in relation to the population of the old and the new towns, we would discover that the duplication process is precisely and physically characterized, as follows: the old town, the one situated on both sides of Royal Mile between the castle at west and the Holyrood Palace at east, lies on about 60 ha and, in 1750, was inhabited, including the southern suburbs, for about 40,000 inhabitants. The first new town developed upon about 52 ha and, in 1801 reached more than 15,000 inhabitants, whereas the second new town, which covered equally about 60 ha, contributed to the increase of the population of Edinburgh to 136,301 units, in 1831(5).

Accordingly, between 1829 and 1851, Silvestre Perez, Augustin Goicoechea, Antonio Echevarria started the foundation of a new quarter around the Plaza Nueva, in Bilbao, and this almost allows the doubling of the population in the town, which from 11,407 inhabitants in 1800, still inside the ciudad vieja - reconstructed after a fire in 1571 - raised to 20,000 units in 1860.

In San Sebastian, after the destruction of the town in 1813, Pedro Manuel de Ugartamendia started the project of reconstruction of the town around the Plaza de la Constitucion even on the layout of the 1700's town, on about 15 ha, populated by 15,000 inhabitants in 1835. In 1864, the economic progress enforced an enlargement of the town which was obtained by building two grid-like quarters, each developed, like the ciudad vieja, around a porticoed square: Plaza de Guipuzcoa in the first, Plaza del Buen Pastor in the second. It is interesting to note that the first quarter of enlargement developed upon a surface equaled to that of the mother town(6).

The list could include Hildesheim, Ansbach, Turin, Copenhagen, Lion, until the plan by Eliel Saarinen for the new town of Munkkiniemi-Haaga, designed between 1910 and 1915, and afterwards inserted into the General Plan Pro-Helsingfors, in order to solve the problem of the expansion of Helsinki through the construction of a 170,000 inhabitant town, which was just as large as the mother town.

In the 20th century, therefore, we were already fully prepared to perpetuate the European urban tradition of 'the city within the city'. On the other hand, however, when examining the instance of Cracow, we realize that, beside the quarter built around the great Rynek, the central market square, the autonomous cores of the town included the University suburb at the bottom of the Wawel, the castle, the suburb of Stradom to south, and similarly the town of Kazimierz, completely surrounded by walls, is in the same ways represented by Merian in the 17th century, with its own main church and central square.

But, then, how could we loose this immense cultural wealth? What have we exchanged it for? and, yet, what should we do to change this situation?

The crisis of the urban monocentric systems.

When Le Corbusier traced the co-ordinates for the construction of his theoretical system(7), the historical town was considered a medley of ills which was bound to disappeared. In his town planning conception, as it has been clearly demonstrated by Castex, Depaule and Panerai(8), there is a complete reversal of the relationships which structure the traditional urban space, starting from its most important element: the street.

Progressing through the millennia, changing economies and architectural styles, but always preserving its characteristic of space for human relations, the disgraceful rue corridor, along which the western urban civilization had developed since ancient times, has been substituted by a complex system of high speed motorways: "a) the lorry-traffic underground, b) the manifold and quick network of ordinary streets which widely spreads the circulation - at the ground level of buildings, c) the high-speed one-way through-motorways, which constitute the two axes of the town, - along the north-south and east-west directrises"(9).

This imposing infrastructural network, of course, has been coherently and functionally thought so as "the city-center must grow taller"(10) finally conceding "2,400x1,500 m (3,640,000 m2) of space for a square at the bases of skyscrapers, and all around them,(11) with gardens, parks and plantations"(12).

Never in history, has a prophet been paid more attention to or has a theoretician of architecture seen his own spatial conceptions so faithfully put into practice.

In Europe, from east to west, from north to south, it is easy to acknowledge the success of such town planning schemes.

Even in those places where a strong urban tradition has prevented the savage ravage of the historic town center, such as in the town centers of Bologna, Florence, Bordeaux, Edinburgh, and many other towns, the tower and bar-like concretes and anodized aluminum, particularly during the 70's, have spread all over and have surrounded the old town core like an invading army which is besieging it.

The suburbs of Bologna have not change much, they are for example, not so different from the French grand ensembles and, even if there are a few more sports grounds or football fields, the fate of the old people, taken away from the life of the quarter, from the card games, from the pubs, not to mention the lifestyle of young people, deprived of the experience of living together in a court or a courtyard.

Somewhere else, in Frankfurt or Dusseldorf, the destruction of the town immediately after the second World War has reached such a level that the little number of historical buildings preserved or reconstructed, such as the Romemberg or the Alte Stadt, are like modern descendants of those mythological heroes bound to a tragic and unequal struggle against an adverse fortune.

Today, when one arrives, by car or by train, in the capital of German finance, one can experience the same kind of feeling which one has entering a north American metropolis: skyscrapers here and there in the city-center, a sea of motorways and railways in which buildings seem to be sailing which reflect the prevailing trends of contemporary architecture.

A wonderful shop-window of the consumer society, of the accelerated degradation of ideas and of things, of the society based on substitution and de-construction.

Almost nothing remains to testify to our presence in the core of Europe, nothing of its highest urban tradition, not ways, but motorways, not blocks, but bars.

Elsewhere, in Hannover, for example, the Le Corbusier's model can be studied in one of its practical and concrete applications.

Has all this been good for the Man? has all this improved the conditions of life? has the sacrifice of such wealth, and of such architecture been useful, at least, to make the city more comfortable? to make it, ultimately, more functional?

It is difficult to avoid noticing that the ills and defects of the present urban areas: congestion, resource waste, traffic increase, pollution, are such and so many that serious and thought-out answers cannot avoid being negative.

Unfortunately, and this is even worse, one can verify how the great part of 'metropolitan' dis-economies and dysfunctions are truly derived from macroscopic planning errors. In short, they come from the adoption of the model of the Swiss theoretician, the model issued by the principles of the notorious 'Charter of Athens'(13) which, like Tables of the Law are to be applied to any latitude, any situation, regaining above any particular historical, geographical, climatic, or cultural condition.

The standardization, the serial reproduction of a prefabricated panel, of a housing unit, of a city of three million inhabitants, has generated, on one side, the phenomenon of a city-centre occupied only by commercial and trade units, while on the other by the thousand dormitory suburbs for a population forced to commute and migrate on a daily basis. In so doing, people have perhaps forgotten, in the wake of post-war euphoria - the period of the reconstruction - of the peculiar historical moment in which such town planning theories were formulated, a period marked by an extraordinary diffusion of totalitarian political systems: Fascism, Nazism, Bolshevism.

Maurice Culot has reminded us that: "...it will be passed over in silence that the new Man described by the infamous Drieu La Rochelle is the twin brother of the one by Le Corbusier and great care will be taken not to underline that it has been the latter which has provided the unit of measure to modern architecture"(14).

To understand thoroughly the dimensions of the problem and underline the variables which determine the values, it is useful to examine some of the most significant European urban areas.

First of all, we will compare the German and the French metropolitan systems and, for each of them, evaluate the differences between mono and polycentric urban areas and the rapport among density of settlement, urban morphology, volume of traffic.

The Federal Republic of Germany has a structure of settlement based on a town of average dimensions.

Fundamentally different from the French situation and in some way similar to the Italian and Spanish ones, in the German reality, there is not only one metropolis which towers above the other cities, like London or Paris.

Today, the four million inhabitants in Berlin are only 5% of the total, whereas the French situation reaches statistics close to 16%.

Taking into consideration the urban framework, it can be discovered that Munich, the largest city and capital of Bavaria, houses, as such, 13% of the population of the Land, whereas, Koln, the only 'one-million city' in Northrhine-Westphalia, hardly represents 6%. Therefore, we are facing two structures of settlement completely diversified, two exemplary models with which the whole of Germany can be interpreted: the polycentric system and the monocentric metropolis.

While in the case of the monocentric metropolis, Munich, for example, the density of population statistics are very low, 177 pop/km2, the conurbation of the Rhine-Ruhr region has 885 pop/km2, that of Rhine-Main 655, and that of Rhine-Neckar 555.

Such conurbations represent the continuity of the polycentric tradition of European urban culture.

Comparative analysis of urban systems.

Within the given metropolitan regions, we will now carefully analyze some significant urban areas which can be found in the conurbations along the river Rhine:

in the conurbation of the Rhine-Ruhr region, the urban systems of Dusseldorf-Neuss-Ratingen and of Wuppertal-Solingen; in the conurbation of the Rhine-Main region, the urban systems of Mainz-Wiesbaden;in the conurbation of the Rhine-Neckar region, the urban systems of Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-on-Rhine.

The results of this analysis can be synthesized as follows: the polycentric structure displayed on the scale of conurbation visibly remains at the level of urban system; this leads, as in the instance of Dusseldorf-Neuss- Ratingen, to a multiplication of cores that permits the settlement of an amount of people, equal to the population in Munich, in three most important centres, administratively and historically independent, whereas in the Bavarian capital, instead, the gravitation is only towards a single center; 

the multiplication of centres within urban systems of conurbation can also be seen in the cases of Wuppertal-Solingen-Remscheid, of Mainz-Wiesbaden and of Mannheim-Ludwigshafen-on-Rhine;

in the urban system of the valley of Wupper, it can be seen in the presence of a 400,000 inhabitant town, Wuppertal, one of 170,000, Solingen, and another of 130,000, Remscheid, beside a number of towns with a population varying from 20,000 to 50,000 units;

the 'town' of Wuppertal, in turn, is the result of an administrative union, which occurred in 1929, between a number of pre-existing towns, the most important of which were Barmen and Elberfeld;

in the urban system between the Rhine and the Neckar, there are two towns which are part of two different LŠnder: Mannheim in Baden-Wurttemberg and Ludwigshafen-on-Rhine in Rhineland-Pfalz; they respectively count 300,000 and 168,000 inhabitants;

in the case of Mainz-Wiesbaden, the two capitals of State are actually situated the one in front of the other, separated by a river, at the distance equal to two opposite points in the Mitteler Ring in Munich.

Villes nouvelles or towns.

The French reality is strongly characterized by a great imbalance of settlements at the national level.

In the Ile-de-France region, there are 10,300,000 inhabitants and 4,800,000 jobs, that is 18.5% of the national population on only 2.2% of the territory, 21.5% of the working population, 27.1% of the national additional value(15).

In order to organize the growth in population, determined by such an economic pole of attraction and to re-balance the distribution and use of resources, the French government has, since the mid 60's(16), started a decentralization policy based on the foundation of new settling entities, conceived as real self-sufficient cities: the villes nouvelles.

After more than twenty years, some conclusions can be drawn about the kind of planning system and its consequences on traffic, at a metropolitan level, in reference to the reality of the Parisian region.

Historical Paris, the old town within the ring of the boulevards, counts (1989) 2,300,000 inhabitants on about 8,000 ha(17): the ville nouvelle of Cergy Pontoise only 140,000 on the same amount of surface, and, once the making of the town is accomplished, is bound to reach the 200,000 threshold.

Accordingly, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines has 117,600 inhabitants on 6,300 ha and Evry 65,000 on 3,023 ha.

The most exemplary records are those of Marne-la-VallŽe, 200,000 inhabitants on 15,000 ha, and finally, Melun-Senart: 72,000 inhabitants on 12,000 ha.

Comparing the data of the two realities, the city of Paris and the new towns in the region, it can be easily seen that:

on an equal land surface, Paris houses 16 times the number of inhabitants of Cergy-Pontoise (11 times by the end of the foundation plan);

on a land surface two times as great, Marne-la-VallŽe houses a population 11 times lower than that of Paris;

upon a land surface, one and one half times as great, Melun Senart houses a population 30 times inferior to that of Paris.

These data provide a clear picture of the phenomenon of territorial pollution, of waste of natural and energy resources (motorway and railway networks are necessary to link the different parts of ville nouvelle with Paris).

The most dramatic case provided by Melun-Senart, where 50% of the population live in single-family dwellings with a consequent increase of the distances and a total dependence on automobile transport, rendering impossible the institution of an effective public transport system.

In the end, taking into consideration the data related to the working population and the employees of each ville nouvelle, we can see that: if Cergy Pontoise and Evry present values in balance and employees/working people rates equal to 1 and 1.09, even if only 56%, in the first case, and 54%, in the second, work within the town where they live, Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines presents a value of 0.82 and 37% of resident employees, while Marne-la-VallŽe and Melun-Senart have taken up positions at 0.68 and 0.60, with, respectively, 48% and 26% of resident employees.

The destiny of the European town.

The town has a limited extension. This extension is based on a physically unchangeable parameter: the distance that a man of a normal constitution can cover on foot without getting tired. This distance never exceeds the 800-1000 metres(18).

When the space requirements increase because the town grows economically and demographically, the latter enlarges according to a process of duplication similar to the reproductive methods of others living beings: it reproduce itself.

An exception to this kind of phenomenon is represented by the model of the radial expansion. But, the outstanding feature of such a model of growth is the creation of a new spatial relationship, between the town-center and the suburbs which comes to undermine the essence of the town itself.

Like a living being which steadily increase its weight until it assumes a pathological state close to obesity, and thereby limits all its natural functions, likewise the city which expands radially undergoes an impoverishment of its fabric in the suburban areas, accompanied most times by a drastic reduction of public space: the example given by Bologna's expansion in the 14th century is, on this matter, emblematic.

The rule for a correct functioning and development of the urban body is to create other urban bodies similar in all to the mother body: the district(19).

Just as the city has a network of streets and squares, which represents the public space, and a network of blocks, which represents the private space, with alterning functions: dwelling, productive, shopping functions, etc., so does also the district.

There is always a square within the district, there is a church, a market and so on.

The large cities, the capitals of national states or of nodal points of international commerce have grown according to a series of city-districts; London, its several Cities and its districts developed around the squares; Paris, its three original matrices: the CitŽ, the Ville, the UniversitŽ, and the districts were built by the different sovereigns around the Places Royales: Place des Vosges, Place des Victoires, Place Vendome, Place de l'OdŽon, etc...

In the light of all this, the problem of planning in the historic town centere lies in the acknowledgment of its being a quarter most of all, and not a center.

Therefore, planning which considers the center as a specialized area must be avoided, and instead a careful study of those morphological features which can be considered exemplary must be carried out, so that one may get to the practical means permitting interventions in different parts of the city and, to similarly use the center as a workshop.

In these terms, the concept of pedestrian precinct becomes completely obsolete. It is not a matter of closing the whole center to the traffic and changing it in a protected zone, one more specialized district within a territory functionally arranged in zones, but it must be the right balance between public and private spaces within the WHOLE urban area studied, by means of new squares and new public buildings where the structure is solely residential; and inputting residential houses, the most different and socially diversified, in the districts mostly characterized by businesses or industries.

Only by starting from these bases, can the recovery of the public spaces of the city be entirely realized: keeping in mind that is the basic framework in which to work, which the global strategies to use, what ultimate aims are. And then, ultimately by means of a careful and painstaking analysis what the characteristics of the town are, its streets, its squares, its buildings, its houses, its churches, main doors, windows, moldings, the lot distribution inside the blocks, materials, colors.

Only through the knowledge of the city can a project of recovery and development be undertaken .

What architecture should be finally built?

The simplest and clearest answer can only be: an architecture which takes Man as reference, as the core of the world, and of the project, not the machine, nor the car of the 60's, neither the computer of the 80's. Therefore, not the machine ˆ habiter.

A human architecture which will enable social integration and a variety of activities on the inside of a code of relationships, of symbols, of common meanings and whose roots are the roots of that same town in which it is working: a classical architecture, therefore.

An architecture that will vary from Edinburgh to Siena, from Vitoria to Prague, from Paris to Bologna, from Sevila to Budapest. An architecture which will be able to express the differences among peoples and among towns, preserving a common basis: our culture.

An architecture which is able to become part of the existing city without violence and to create a city by itself.

Not a parade of hard gestures, of exaggerated and extravagant individual expressions. Not masterpieces, better, not necessarily masterpieces, but an urban continuity made up of many little contributions, each one planned and built with a dignity by architects aware of their responsibilities towards people, environment, and aware of their capability to strengthen or root out the habits, customs, and traditions of the people.

An architecture which understands the rules of the city.

A street is a street, not a motorway. A square is a square, not a wide space, some residual open ground.

The width of the street, its morphology, the presence of a wider or less wider pavement, of plants and trees has a precise meaning and corresponds to well-established functions in the traditional European town. A boulevard is a by-pass street lined with trees which historically developed along the way of the walls, demolished once the need of a military defense had ceased an alley is a narrow street in a district, a high street is one of the main streets of the town.

Every country has a well-established name for all these types. But beyond the differences of language, both boulevard and avenue, both street and calle, both alley and gasse, the meaning is still the same.

Just as it is absurd and against all any logic to make of an alley a high speed motor-thoroughfare, so it is to transform an avenue into a pedestrian street.

Likewise with the square. The square has peculiar features in the history of European town planning: it is always an open space bound by three, four or more built up sides, which serve to 'close it', when at the same time it is a meeting and stopping point, a real room inside the town(20). The 'closure' of a square is due to the rapport between the width of the streets which end in it and the built up boundary. When its borders coincide with the town-limits, with a river, with a park, with a lake or a sea, only then can a square be considered 'open', that is with a side without buildings where there is the natural landscape.

The square is the most important place of social life in the town. In the square, there are the public buildings which, from time to time, mark this or that leading political or economic system: the church, the market, the town hall, the government hall, the law court, etc.(21).

The town has limited dimensions, so as the square has fixed dimensions which vary according to the role and importance, but which never go beyond prefixed values. The largest squares in Europe do not exceed 150 metres by side. An open space of 500x300 meters is not a square, it is an empty space, absurd it merely displays the inability to truly face the problem of the public space.

We have seen how the problems of contemporary urban areas are strictly linked to planning choices.

The town center/suburb dialectic is the first cause of the movements and the congestion which comes from them, when place of origin and place of destination have completely diversified characteristics as far as the physical structure and the kind of activity performed is concerned.

The knowledge of the town and of its rules of development is, therefore, a necessary condition for the most appropriate planning of a human space.

It is clear, though, that there are town planning models which being completely different from and antithetical to one another, must never be mixed up. The approach to planning issued by CIAM (Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne) and the Charter of Athens, as it has been underlined by Bernard Huet(22), favours the alteration of the town-country relationship. By altering the millenary town-country rapport and creating a tendenzially isotropic space, the suburbs, where high speed roads mark a land covered with detached buildings, movement becomes the fundamental element for the functioning of the system and the phenomenon of the commuters is an everyday reality.

It is also clear that a society greatly changes in accordance with the changes of the economic system, but the relationship between social changes and the configuration of space is also inverse.

RenŽ Schoonbrodt(23) has underlined that if a certain social and productive fabric remains on the inside of the urban area, it depends on a receptive and available environmental situation.

Handicraft and retail trade can only exist given the continuity of the traditional and spatial conditions exist within which they have always been developed. Beyond this context, there is only the modernist model of development: a highly consumer society, immense residential districts, shopping centers, shopping malls, all of them haphazardly spread over a territory.

On the eve of the third millennium the European town planner now find himself faced with the making of two choices. He must either choose in favor of the final transformation of towns into desolated suburbs or of their development in accordance with traditional models, accepting the challenges arising from modern society's needs and on these bases, undertake the building of a still more effective and beautiful town.

Likewise we must also understand which destiny we desire for the towns and environment our children will have to live in. Whether on the one hand, it will be that of a new Las Vegas(24) or whether it might still be able to aspire to the eternal values of western urban civilization. Whether in other words, our squares are to become Caesar's Palace or Holiday Inn parking lots, or whether, like eighteen century Edinburgh, after a long and bloody civil war, the city might arise again, our European city might arise again, placing itself on a higher plane and still continue to enjoy the same harmonious and organic growth that it has had for millennia.

Notes

1. Ludwigshafen-on-Rhine was founded in 1843 by King Ludwig I of Bavaria; it became a municipality in 1859 and a town in 1865. It must also be noted that the city of Mannheim was founded around the beginning of the 17th century and was then reconstructed after its destruction during the Thirty Years' War.

2. see: LEON KRIER, Town and country, in DEMETRI PORPHYRIOS (ed.), Leon Krier. Houses, Palaces, Cities, Academy editions, London 1984;

3. the town planning development of Nancy since 1752, made by Emmanuel HŽrŽ under the government of Stanislas Leszczynski, has been studied, among the others, by Rasmussen (see: Town and buildings, described in drawings and words, The MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts 1969; first Danish edition 1849; first English edition 1951), Zucker (see: Town and square. From the agorˆ to the village green, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,

and London, England 1973; original edition, Columbia University Press, New York 1959); Norberg Schultz (see: Architettura tardobarocca, Electa, Milano 1972); Brinckmann (see: Die Baukunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Berlin-Neubabelsberg, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion M.B.H., 1915); Lavedan (see: Histoire de l'urbanisme. Renaissance et temps modernes, Henry Laurens, Paris 1959);

4. see: A. J. Yungson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1966;

5. see: ibid.;

6. see: JOSE LUIS GARCIA FERNANDEZ, LENA SALADINA IGLESIAS RUOCO, La plaza en la ciudad, Hermann Blume, Madrid 1986;

7. it was in the 20's, when Le Corbusier wrote Vers une architecture (1925) and Urbanisme (1925). In the same period in Amsterdam the School of Berlage was gradually substituted in its main public administrative and professional posts by a tendentially rationalist generation of architects and town planners, whose leader was J.P. Oud. A few years later, after the publication of the book by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson on the International Style the functionalist modernism became style and, leaving the avant-garde, became the leading style.

8. see: PHILIPPE PANERAI, JEAN CASTEX, JEAN CHARLES DEPAULE, Formes urbaines: de l'ilot ˆ la barre, Bordas, Paris 1980;

9. see: LE CORBUSIER, Urbanisme, Cres, Paris 1925;

10. see: ibid.

11. italics of the editor: almost all the squares built until the beginning of the 20th century do not exceed the 100x150 m, Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, Plaza Mayor in Madrid, Place des Vosges in Paris, Kšnigsplatz in Kassel, etc.. Among the largest squares, we find Piazza San Pietro in Rome, 240x340 metres, Place de l'Etoile in Paris, a round with 275 m diameter, but the rule is confirmed in the most beautiful European squares: Piazza San Marco in Venice, trapeze of 58 and 90x175 m, Place Stanislas in Nancy, 100x120 m, Place Verd™me in Paris, 100x140 m, Plaza Mayor in Salamanca, square of 75 m by side.

A surface of 2400x1500 m (364 ha) that is three times larger than the Altstadt in Munich, about 100 ha, and than Toledo intra-muros (inside the walls), about 125 ha, can be compare with that of the 1800's Bologna, 390 ha;

12. see: LE CORBUSIER, op. cit.

13. see: BERNARD HUET, The city as dwelling space. Alternatives of the Charter of Athens, in "Lotus international" n. 41, 1984;

14. see: MAURICE CULOT, Un peu de ce que nous abons appris, in ANNICK BRAUMAN, MAURICE CULOT, MICHEL LOUIS (eds.), La reconstuction de Bruxelles, Ed. AAM, Brussels 1982; it is also interesting to know the history of the attempts made by Le Corbusier in order to obtain a commission from the Italian fascists, within the E42 operation in Rome, see: VITTORIO SAVI, Illusioni 1938-1940, in "Archi & Colonne" n. 1, 1985;

15. see: COLLECTION DYNAMIQUES DU TERRITOIRE ILE-DE-FRANCE, Un nouveau territoire, Reclus-La Documentation Franaise, Paris 1989; D.R.E.I.F., A.P.U.R., I.A.U.R.I.F. Le livre blanc de l'Ile-de-France, Paris 1989; PIERRE MERLIN, Les Villes Nouvelles, Presse universitaires de France, Paris 1989; SECRETARIAT GENERAL DU GROUPE CENTRAL DES VILLES NOUVELLES, Villes Nouvelles de France. Les Villes Nouvelles des outils d'amŽnagement, Paris 1989; LES CHAIERS DE L'I.A.U.R.I.F., Villes Nouvelles d'Ile-de-France, n. 87/88, 1989;

16. about the history of the planning process of the Villes Nouvelles in France, see: PIERRE MERLIN, Les Villes Nouvelles Franaises, La Documentation Franaise, Paris 1976; SECRETARIAT GENERAL DES VILLES NOUVELLES, Institutions et financements des villes nouvelles, La Documentation Franaise, Paris 1981;Villes Nouvelle rŽgion parisienne, in "Technique & Architecture" n. 301, 1974; Villes nouvelles province, in "T & A" n.302, 1974; Villes nouvelle en France, in "Urbanisme" n. 186, 1981; Villes nouvelles, in "Urbanisme", n. 214, 1986;

17. furthermore, it must be considered that, in the 50's, the population of the 20 arrondissements was 3,500,000 inhabitants;

18. see: LEON KRIER, The Cities within the City. Les Quartiers, in DEMETRI PORPHYRIOS op. cit.;

19. see: ALDO ROSSI, L'architettura della cittˆ, Clup, Milano, 1983 (orig. ed., Marsilio, Padova 1966); LEON KRIER, Luxenbourg, capital of Europe. Project for the new complex for European Common Market, in "Lotus international" n. 24, 1979;

20. see: CAMILLO SITTE, Der StŠdtebau nach seinen kŸnstlerischen grundsŠtzen, Karl GrŠser Verlag, Wien 1889;

21. see: PAUL ZUCKER, op. cit.;

22. see: BERNARD HUET, op. cit.;

23. see: RENE SCHOONBRODT, Sociologie de l'habitat social, Ed. AAM, Brussels 1979;

24. as Robert Venturi has provocatively proposed in a very successful book of the 70's, in which the praise of the American popular culture was set against the modernist functionalism, thereby celebrating a new design trend, which soon was followed in Europe, too.

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