What is Urban Planning? Significance of Urban Planning

A Brief Introduction to Urban Planning 

When we anticipate what cities of the future will look like, or at least what we hope they will look like, we envision: Our cities feature great public transit as well as vast boulevards for strolling, bicycling, and other forms of pleasure. There are multiple dense urban centers with wild spaces flowing between them, allowing city inhabitants to live near nature. And houses and apartment complexes built of mass wood or other environmentally friendly - or even alive - materials!

Most significantly, all of this is planned in a participatory manner, which means that every resident is involved in the creation, implementation, and upkeep of their own city. There would also be trampoline sidewalks where individuals could do backflips on their way to work. These projections are only fantasies and educated guesses, but urban planning is a serious business for urban geographers. All of the economic, political, and social interactions that make up our societies produce urban environments, and how we construct cities varies depending on when and where we are – for better or worse.

Our built surroundings, or all of the human-made locations we utilize, from local parks to City Hall to our homes, reflect our cultural characteristics. They are, nevertheless, a result of our economic and political interactions. Even if we design a city from the ground up, it will tend to repeat the social interactions of our period. Why and how this occurs is a topic of urban geography. As urban geographers, we seek to comprehend the patterns that govern where people dwell and how land is used in cities, as well as why such patterns vary over time.

To do this, urban geographers employ models and economic processes to forecast the future and attempt to explain the present. As in, how will cities appear in the future? Or how a city evolved and how the work of previous urban planners and geographers either aids or hinders people's access to suitable housing or jobs. And within urban geography, we may go even more specific with urban planning, which is concerned with the creation and control of urban space. Urban planners work for governments as well as non-governmental organizations such as land conservation organizations. They weave together the region's economic, social, and environmental goals to create zones of work, play, and living that will benefit the region. As urban planners, we have a huge impact on people's lives, and there is a lot to think about!

There have been many various ways to build cities throughout history, and all cultures have their own patterns of urban development, or how cities expand and evolve. There's the Latin American Model, for example. This model covers the sorts of towns largely created by Spanish conquerors when they established cities across what is now Central America and most of the American West and Southwest, sometimes on the same soil as indigenous communities they destroyed. And the way every civilization develops its towns and cities, whether centuries ago or now, will provide information about the aspirations of that society's leaders.

Latin American City Model

Colonial priorities are embedded into Latin American towns, such as a plaza with chapels and market areas, as well as a grid of streets as in European capitals. The central plaza was a feature employed in planning and urban architecture by indigenous peoples such as the Aztecs, with significant structures, a palace, a temple, and a location for ball courts and holy spaces. And, even within comparable empires, the location of houses, both planned and unplanned, differed across Latin America in pre-colonial periods. However, this changed with the introduction of colonists.

Showing wealth and social standing through home configurations became a popular concept in Latin America. Housing for the rich sprang up around that central market. Zones of disamenity, which are corridors of squatter communities made up of thousands of individuals in the city who can't afford a house or land but yet need a place to live, radiate out from the central market to the perimeter. Squatters typically construct their homes using whatever materials are available, resulting in an extremely risky living situation. Even while this sort of neighborhood is popular in low-income sections of many cities across the world, the absence of legal rights to the property in which they reside makes it easier to relocate such populations.

So the form of a city determines how it grows and tells us about the people who live in its value. It can also inform us how we envision our city in the future, such as how many people might live there or what sorts of industries might exist. Like in the twentieth century, city planning in Latin America attempted to repair or prevent these disamenities from occurring, while simultaneously constructing economically and socially prosperous districts. Consider Brasil, the capital of what we call Brazil. By the early 1950s, the region was not even a city, but Brazilian politicians decided that by 1960, it would be the new site of the nation's capital.

Lucio Costa, an urban planner, won the design competition and recruited his friend and architect Oscar Niemeyer to help him realize his idea of a contemporary metropolis. They intended to design something creative that would both open up development to the interior of Brazil and be an urban location free of the poverty that plagued previous colonial capitals. Unlike other major Brazilian cities, Brasilia was built to seem like a bird or airplane soaring out into the future, and it is located considerably further inland than other major Brazilian cities. The original city was built around a single monumental axis, or the body of the bird, which included public buildings, museums, government offices, and other job-focused sectors.

Brasilia City Planning by Lucio Costa

The residential communities were divided into two wings. From the monumental axis, these superquadras comprised residential buildings for medium and upper-income employees, as well as community spaces, parks, schools, playgrounds, and, in principle, everything a community would want. However, while Brasilia is regarded as a contemporary design marvel, even well-planned towns may deviate from the script. The ties inside a city are exactly that tangled. Brasilia's architecture is out of step with how people want to live in 2022 since it was founded on a 1950s vision of the future. The city was planned to be car-dependent and even attempted to divide where people lived and worked. And while most people concur that not all mixing is beneficial—for example, we don't want harmful companies discharging chemicals next to homes and schools—vibrant communities do contain some degree of commercial and residential mixing, such as stores, offices, and residences. Working and living near together is vital for minimizing transportation expenses and boosting the number of services a person may quickly reach from their house. However, the relationships that emerge in a city inevitably boil up and leave their impression on the landscape.

Brazil was intended for 500,000 people, but by 2020, it had grown to 4.6 million. Because all of those people couldn't fit in the original wings, suburbs or low-density car-dependent communities outside of the main city grew. They are known as satellites in Brasilia because they arose naturally and do not fit the aesthetic of the rest of the city. They're teeming with people who live and work in the same regions, and they hold the tangle of unequal access to resources and jobs.

Today Brasilia is a UNESCO World Heritage site due to its ambitious and one-of-a-kind urban architecture. It demonstrates how we may plan anything on paper, but a city is a location that encompasses much more than grids, buildings, and employment. Cities are also all of the goals and conditions of the people who live there, as well as all of the bargains they must make with economic, political, and physical forces to live meaningful lives. However, not everyone has the opportunity to live complete lives or form communities, and urban planning may play a part in this.

For example, in the United States, urban sprawl and white flight were the increasing migration of white people farther and farther from the center as they obtained money and minority groups came into the city. That migration was also aided by urban planning. The US highway system saw a boost in investment in the 1960s. And the ability to go about fast contributed to the migration of entertainment and retail away from town centers and into stand-alone complexes and fringe cities.

There were other incentives such as inexpensive land for new home construction and low-interest home loans for WWII service veterans. All of this, together with cheap gasoline prices and other postwar consequences, enabled individuals in the middle and higher economic classes to abandon cities and relocate to the suburbs. It did, however, make it feasible for SOME individuals. Because forces were working hard to prevent minority Americans, particularly Black and Asian Americans, from owning land and houses.

Some forces prohibit individuals from owning land in the 1930s. Redlining was the practice of color-coding metropolitan maps to identify which neighborhoods were considered high risk for lending money. Credit in Black areas was rated the greatest danger level, followed by that of new immigrants, and was highlighted in red. This made housing and land ownership extremely difficult, which became much more difficult in the 1950s. After nearly two decades of planning and discussion, the car industry and highway engineers proposed proposals to develop a complicated interstate system from coast to coast, cutting directly through many communities. This cleared the way for urban renewal, a procedure in cities that allowed them to sweep out decrepit neighborhoods to make space for new buildings.

Those motorways mostly ran through traditionally Black areas. And the houses that were demolished went through the eminent domain procedure, in which a landowner must be paid for property seized for public use. However, because many of the citizens were not and could not be landowners, they got little, if any, recompense. The properties were also undervalued, so those who did receive compensation seldom received enough to relocate to another similar area.

So we must keep in mind that urban planning is a component of wider social structures that can be misused by those in power. In the United States, the motorways and ease of transportation that enabled suburbs to develop were accompanied by a history of redlining and urban renewal, which caused certain areas to wither. In other cases, they established segregated enclaves with limited financial means. Although redlining is no longer legal, many Black people and other minorities continue to endure discrimination in housing and real estate.

So, any future efforts to establish poverty-free cities, or any efforts to erase existing urban poor, must address the structural disadvantages built into the architecture of our towns and communities. Whether it's social position in Latin American colonial towns, wealth and community in Brazil, or race in North America, every decision regarding where to allow different sorts of land use reflects the connections and ideals of whoever is making those decisions. While urban planners understand the social and economic dynamics that make lively cities and know far more than they did in the 1950s when Brasilia was developed, the experience demonstrates that we cannot just demolish our cities and rebuild them.

There is no neutral city organization, and the constructed environment reflects the people and classes that are valued. Many maps and borders depict current geopolitical boundaries that have frequently been made without the consent, approval, or acknowledgment of the indigenous people of the region. Many geographical place names also do not represent the languages of indigenous or Aboriginal peoples.