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Figure 2.8
Hampstead Garden Suburb, Parker and
Unwin, 1907. Mixed-use buildings on Finchley Road.
Unwin’s admiration for German medieval
architecture is evident in the design of these
buildings at the main entrance into the suburb.
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Suburb, they were relatively few in number, being
exceptions for specific circumstances rather than the
general rule. At Radburn, the opposite was true:
cul-de-sacs dominated the street layout. Instead of
normal sized urban blocks with a connected street
network, Stein and Wright’s basic unit of planning
was the ‘superblock,’ a large area defined by a system
of arterial roads, which were designed for the
automobile rather than pedestrians. The extensive
circumference of these arterial loops contained a
multitude of cul-de-sacs, and this system of vehicle
circulation was kept quite separate from pedestrian
paths. No longer did cars and pedestrians share the
same public space. Homes accepted the service of the
car to one side of the dwelling, but opened on
another face to green footpaths that led to large and
attractively landscaped open spaces. These communal
green areas were segregated from vehicles and crossed
by pedestrian paths leading to community facilities
and other neighborhoods via underpasses. In the
completed scheme, pedestrians would have rarely
needed to cross a busy street (see Figure 2.9).
As an interesting side note to the continued transat-
lantic trading of ideas and precedents, it is worth
recording that Barry Parker visited America in the
1920s, where he met with Stein and Wright. He was so
impressed with Radburn that he incorporated several
of its features into his 1930 designs for Wythenshawe,
a huge satellite community in Manchester, England,
that has some legitimate claim to be called England’s
third Garden City (Hall: p. 111).
In the burgeoning world of private car ownership,
safety was an increasing concern, and Stein and
Wright were intent on creating a secure environment
for pedestrians and cyclists. This logic of separating
vehicles from pedestrians, so radical in the 1930s,
became a planning principle in many types of devel-
opment during the 1950s and 1960s when efficient
movement of cars became preeminent in the minds
of planners and engineers. Multi-leveled circulation
systems had been a staple of many futuristic urban
visions from Leonardo da Vinci onwards, including
in the twentieth century, Antonio Sant’Elia’s 
La Citta
Nuova
(1912), Le Corbusier’s 
Plan Voisin
(1925),
Hugh Ferris’ 
Metropolis of Tomorrow
(1929), and the
New York City Regional Plan, also from 1929.
In Britain, an over-simplistic reading of Sir Colin
Buchanan’s 1963 report for the government entitled
Traffic in Towns
raised this concept of vertical segre-
gation of people and cars to an almost universal pre-
cept for city design, evident in massive projects like
London’s Barbican (see Figure 2.10). Stein and
Wright’s limited instances of vertical separation how-
ever, have a more modest precedent, that of Olmsted
and Vaux’s plan for Central Park in New York where
pedestrian paths dip below roads that cross the park
on rustic bridges.
At the suburban scale, vertical separation did not
mature into a defining principle, but the use of lots of
cul-de-sacs branching from a few collector and arterial
streets did. The collective assumption by highway
engineers and developers was that travel demand
would not increase beyond the expected population
growth, and that this new hierarchical system, that
saved developers money when compared with gridded
layouts, would be able to meet the future demand.
This belief held sway for several decades, to the extent
that it became the governing suburban layout type
since the 1950s in America, and to a lesser extent in
Britain. What the engineers, planners and developers
didn’t foresee was the demographic shift of the
DESIGN FIRST: DESIGN-BASED PLANNING FOR COMMUNITIES