Class notes/September 10

Chinese cities
walls, palaces, market (though they don't care where it is located), rigid


CSO: combined sewer outlets (sewer and industrial waste runoff goes to rivers).


PIECEMEAL EFFORTS TO ADDRESS URBAN ILLS

• Housing Reform
• Regulatory programs
  
• result of disease (TB)
• light, air and ventilation
  
• Reconstruction of neighborhoods
• Population decentralization
• Social surveys
• Infrastructure Construction
• Open Space: parks and park systems
• Water systems
• Large Scale redevelopment projects
• Paris and Vienna
• Barcelona

The nature of reform--how does change get accepted? You have to imagine yourself in the 19th century when there was very little regulation of anything. There were laws that protected people's health and safety.

Some proposed changes:
In the 1880s there was a design competition for a replacement for current housing with bathrooms and light. The result was the Dumbell Tenement (for light).

Declare the slums blighted, bulldoze them and turn them into parks (Mulberry Corner).

1901 Tenement Housing Law

Housing will be taller, outside hallways, non-profit/limited dividend corporation Peabody Estates--clear the existing housing and put up contiguous blocks and join them and create a courtyard. This is the beginning of large scale development. Consolidate blocks, higher density around the perimeter and a open space in the middle. Late 19th Century. This is all about affordable low income housing.

Limited dividend housing groups only allow a certain amount of profits and put the rest of the money into improvements on the housing project.

England (Late 19th/early 20th Century)
Reform Ideas

• Change street patters
• Streets are wasteful, if you reorganize you can have more open space
• Slums are so huge and so extensive that it won't work just to do one or two buildings, the hole slum must change. It will be a bastion against other slums.
• Lets build whole new neighborhoods at the fringe of the city.
• Begin to think of the best use of the leveled slum land (early land use thinking)
• Industrialist's Company Towns
• George Pullman
• Invented Parlor Cars for trains
• Pullman Company Town
• Very organized layout
• housing (hierarchical)
  
• public space
• factory
• hotel
• library
• lots of rules and no saloons
  
• church
• Strike
• Cadberry
  
• Chocolate man likes gymnastics
• SOCIAL SURVEYS
  
• Pittsburgh Survey (scientific method)
  
• Oldest and first attempt to really know a city in the US.
• The first time we make policy decisions based on scientific approaches (data and photos particularly in housing surveys).
• began to look at density
• health and crime statistics show that density is the link
• Pittsburgh changed its triangle from an industrial park to a park in 1970s
• Penn's Landing has had at least four plans

Infrastructure and Parks

• Cemeteries, typically downtown, move the bodies out to planned places
  
• people liked going there
• Olmsted
  
• Central Park
  
• British Park design (curvilinear streets, natural looking)
• Different paths for different modes of travel
• little French section that is orderl
• Public Art (comes with parks)
• Ideas for Park purpose
  
• Nature in the city and the city in nature
• This is a place in the city where all the classes can mix and mingle in peace
• Park Systems
• Open space framework
• Alexander Garvin
• Vision for parks across the city

Water

• Philadelphia
• The water system was right where city hall is
• moved to waterworks on the Deleware
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairmount_Reservoir
• marvel of the western world
• various watersheds, pumping stations
• CSO is built
• incredibly important piecemeal approach to an infrastructure need.