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Figure 1.3
Kiefhoek Housing Estate, Rotterdam, J.J.P.
Oud, 1925–29. Until Le Corbusier’s doctrines were
embodied in the all-encompassing Athens Charter
of 1933, other modernists pioneers such as Oud were
reluctant to abandon the street.
Figure 1.4
Tower block in Benwell, Newcastle-upon-
Tyne, UK, 1970. All too often the modernist vision of
‘towers in the park’ was reduced to towers in the
urban wasteland by bad design and cheap
building. Housing was seen merely as a political issue
of numbers of units constructed rather than an
integral element of city building.
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demolished that deserved to remain and be refur-
bished rather than wrecked. Jane Jacob’s passionate
indictment of modernist architecture and planning
in 
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
describes how professionals were blind to the charac-
ter and potential of older, shabby but still functional
urban neighborhoods ( Jacobs, 1962). This criticism
resonates across 40 years. In the UK, the remark
attributed to Prince Charles that planners destroyed
more buildings in British cities in the years after
World War II, than Hitler’s 
Luftwaffe
managed in all
the years of bombing captures the sense of outrage at
some of the acts of our predecessors.
Yet, these were not the deeds of urban vandals,
bent on the destruction of communities. This may
have been the unintended result, but the plans and
designs were produced and implemented by well-
meaning professionals intent on serving the public
good. These architects and planners were concerned
with the problems of the vast industrial city, where
millions of people lived in great hardship with low
rates of life expectancy and high rates of infant mor-
tality. When we look at photographs of endless acres
of grim, soot-grimed British terrace housing without
a single tree in sight and blanketed by an ever-present
pall of pollution, we must remind ourselves just how
bad those conditions were. A new city of bright,
modern buildings sited amidst an infinite park-like
landscape with plenty of sun and clean, fresh air pre-
sented a compelling vision of urban improvement.
No wonder architects and planners wanted to oblit-
erate those miserable conditions and the past that
created them!
A generation of gifted, younger designers educated
in Britain during the 1950s and 1960s were imbued
with a passionate desire to serve society, and saw their
role in remaking the physical environment of cities as
a public service akin to the National Health Service.
Already by 1950 more than 50 percent of architects
were employed in public service (Gold: p. 191). Early
in the process of rebuilding war-torn Britain under
the auspices of the 1947 Town and Country Planning
Act, there were less than 1700 planners to staff 1400
planning authorities! It was young, recently graduated
architects who eagerly filled many of the vacancies,
bringing a strong three-dimensional design pers-
pective to the new planning regimes (Gold: p. 190).
Whatever else we say about them, we must give our
modernist predecessors full credit for genuine
humanitarian and social concern.
The urban renewal process that dominated Anglo-
American cities in the 1950s and 1960s was, broadly
speaking, a marriage of Le Corbusier’s 
tabula rasa
approach with single-function zoning. For several
decades following World War II, professional think-
ing about urban redevelopment was dominated by
models of widely spaced towers rising in open space
and tidy planning diagrams of colored zones that sepa-
rated the different parts of city life into distinct spatial
areas. Modernist theory was not primarily structured
around the everyday lives of people and the spaces
they inhabited; instead it sought to change these
informal patterns to others that were more orderly
and rational in physical and technical circumstances.
The planning orthodoxy derived from the urban
visions of Le Corbusier and Hilbersheimer was com-
pelling in its abstract technical clarity, and that very
strength – the abstract spatial syntax and belief in
technical systems – contained the core of its demise.
This theory had to be experienced to understand
fully the power and implications of its doctrine.
During the 1960s and even later, architectural students
in Britain were routinely taught to find little value in
old patterns of urbanism. Le Corbusier’s famous dis-
paragement of the street as an ‘oppressive trench’ and a
‘donkey path’ was an oft-quoted dictum in design stu-
dio (Le Corbusier, 1925, 1929). To the modernist
pioneers in the early decades of the twentieth century
the industrial city represented the values of old, cor-
rupt Europe, and was seen as largely responsible for 
the poor living conditions of the working classes. Its
elimination was considered a high priority. Little value
was attached to older buildings or to existing urban
configurations; they were perceived as part of the prob-
lem, not the solution. By the 1960s, the worst physical
conditions in British cities had been substantially erad-
icated, but countless acres of old terraced housing stood
as silent witness to the industrial past that was fast
disappearing. To architects and planners alike, these
neighborhoods stood in the way of progress, and their
continued demolition was a way to cleanse society of
the residual evils of the industrial city. It didn’t really
matter if the buildings and streets weren’t technically
slums. It was sufficient that they were old and decaying.
The possibility that they could be refurbished and the
neighborhood brought back to life was not one that
students were encouraged to pursue.
The overwhelming sense that these old buildings
had no value extended into a general perception that
the past itself held little merit for design profession-
als. Historical thinking and the use of precedent were
intentionally divorced from the design process; in
their place newness and originality of form were
prized above all other attributes. One of the authors
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES
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vividly remembers receiving high marks for a student
project at architecture school in the mid-1960s
proposing the complete physical destruction of an
English mining community of streets, houses and
shops and its replacement by a series of tall hexagonal
towers in open landscape.
Two examples that illustrate the process of remak-
ing the modernist city are found in Birmingham,
England, and Charlotte, North Carolina, in the USA.
As early as the mid-1950s British urban renewal, or
‘comprehensive redevelopment’ programs in the cen-
ter of cities like Birmingham demolished much of the
historic core along with whole sections of the inner
city. Though large new buildings gave the effect of
high density, these redevelopment schemes dramati-
cally reduced the population by about half, from
about 120 people per acre to 60 (300 persons per
hectare down to 150). Birmingham urban designer
Joe Holyoak witnessed this process firsthand in the
1960s as a young architect:
The dense complexes of working class houses, fac-
tories and workshops, corner shops and pubs,
unrelieved by green spaces, built on loose grids of
streets, pierced by canals and railways, were being
comprehensively swept away. They were being
replaced by a pattern which had elements both of
Le Corbusier’s geometric, high-rise