MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

20TH CENTURY CITY

PLANNING
A new city has emerged in the 1990s,
designed
to
achieve
urban
sustainability.
The
notion
of
sustainable urban form has its roots in
the Garden City movement at the turn
of the century. The garden cities of
the 1900s and the ecological cities
of the 1970s were proposed as
alternatives to the pathology of
modern urban form. Just as cities
provide a place for humans to live, so
they destroy ecosystems and become
unfit habitats for the human spirit.

The city must be made more vital, humane, efficient, beautiful, selfsufficient, and natural through a return to a more compact form, its
impact on the environment must be decreased. These themes have
re-emerged in the sustainable cities of the 1990s, advanced on behalf
of future generations and planetary ecology.

The sustainable city is a compact city. Calthorpe's Transit-Oriented

Developments (1989) are hailed as sustainable because their
walkable streets free residents from reliance on automobiles and their
high density preserves surrounding wildlife habitat

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

The European Commission (EC) rests a sustainable future for Europe

(1990) on the twin pillars of urban compactness and urban

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regeneration.

Nash (1991) believes that sustainable global urbanization would

consist of 1.5 billion humans living in 500 compact cities. He calls his
vision Island Civilisation. The sustainable city is also a city of

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

regenerative

processes.

Girardet (1990; 1992) thinks it has a , as distinguished from the

linear metabolism of contemporary cities.

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McDonough (adviser to
President Clinton on sustainable
development)
theorizes inThe Hannover
Principles (1992)
that
in
order to make
civilization sustainable, urban form
will have
to be based on the principles of nature, which makes no waste,
maximizes biodiversity and is sustained by the sun.

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

The urban form designed by McDonald (1993), conceptualized with

ideas from chaos theory, contemplates a sustainable city within a
sustainable watershed and a form holistic, diverse, fractal and
evolutionary.

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

Lyle (1994) believes that the sustainable cities of the next century will
be based on the green infrastructure of regenerative systems.

The commonality linking these landmarks of sustainable urbanization

is the ideal of bringing the city into a vital symbiosis with nature. The
sustainable city is a green or living city. The search for the
sustainable city in the 20th century has not been Utopian buttopian, a
quest to create a form of city suited to optimal development of the
Earth island.

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3

MARIA DEL PILAR CASTRO CHOEZ S4TH G3