KRYSTYNA SOLAREK

The modern concepts of urban design grew out of the cities crisis and critical opinions of urbanization’s trends, which were observed since the middle of XXth century, like urban sprawl at city peripheries and decay it aging central areas. Most of the negative tendencies came on as consequences of these conceptions, which had to improve industrial cities. That’s why to start description of contemporary urbanism’s basis, some effects of two most important ideas and their implementations – Garden City idea and Athena’s Chard were described. Then some tendencies which grew out of the Modernism and Functionalism critique were characterized. Among them New Urbanism – initially linked to Post – Modernism and Contextualism. The idea of the “Coherent City” was mentioned, as well, as new, different or even opposing previous ideas, that appeared later, like Post-Urbanism, Neo-Modernism and Deconstuctivism. Actually there are no any coherent and unambiguous recipes for the city’s structure, neither any new urban doctrine after the Modernism. In general, two basic but opposed to each other ways of city’s development are consider- one is the idea of “Compact City”, the other – idea of “Green City”. Both of them grew out of the vision of “Ekopolis”, but each proposes the other way of land management. There are also few trends equivalent or supplement to these ideas, which concern both buildings, environment and their relations with man in the city, as well as style of life, like: “Slow- Cities, “Smart Growth”, “Ditch Urbanism”, “Everyday Urbanism”, “Green Architecture”, or the idea of “Third Way” of urbanism.

Keywords: contemporary urbanism, compact city, green city, green architecture, new urbanism, garden-city, modernism