SELECTED URBAN ISSUES OF LARGE CITIES AND RESIDENTIAL ESTATES IN WESTERN EUROPE FROM THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY UNTIL WORLD WAR II

WANDA KONONOWICZ

Reactions to the state of the 19th century city, both in theoretical and practical areas, took various forms. On one hand, regulations were introduced around the mid 19th century, on the other hand, suburban residential estates were created tendency to escape from large industrial cities.
The last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century was a breakthrough period in European town-planning. At that time, the process of forming modern town-planning, based on the integration of technical, social, hygienic and aesthetic aspects, matured. This phase, named “urbanism”, by F. Choay and “Gesamtplanung” by J. Posener, referred to an a-priori new town-planning order, questioning the current order. A vital event was the competition for the extension of Greater Berlin (1910), whose results set the direction of development of this large city for many years.
The sources of modern changes to town-planning date back to the 19th century, related to theories of social and political thinkers with aspirations to completely reconstruct societies. The new town-planning concept was formed following two contrary trends: progressive and cultural.
The progressive model, with its rationality, standardisation, hygiene and zoning, manifested at the beginning of the 20th century by T. Garnier, and continued in designs and executions of the inter-war period, in particular by Bauhaus, Le Corbusier and CIAM rational architects. Garnier was the first to tackle the issue of the smallest flat, rational development methods and the functional city, which in 1929-1933 became topics of the subsequent CIAM congresses.
On the other hand, the cultural trend referred to the image of small and dense pre-industrial city. Its main representatives were C. Sitte and R. Unwin, whilst the forms of forming space included picturesqueness and asymmetry. This trend reflected the model of the garden-city, published in England by E. Howard at the end of the 19th century, which initiated a great garden-city movement developed over many decades. This movement, with its roots in suburban patronal colonies and residential estates from the mid 19th century, was continued in city extension concepts via the satellite method of the inter-war period, and also in the execution of New Towns in England after World War II. Depending on the political, social and economical conditions, this movement took various flavours. For example, during the economic crises of the Weimar Republic, when the tendency to escape from large cities to the suburbs increased almost on the scale of the garden-cities movement. This escape was a return to a subsistence plough-land as a struggle for survival. On the other hand, during the Third Reich, the garden-city principles were applied as an effective foundation of nationalistic ideology.