Te Urba

Páginas: 8 (1827 palabras) Publicado: 22 de febrero de 2013
nTHE URBAN PROBLEM
At the turn of the 20th century, the city became the focal point of public discourse in much of U.S life. Municipal authorities, politicians business people, land speculators, architects, engineers, social reformers, social scientists, novelist, and visual artists all seemed to converge on one point that the rapidly growing U.S cities were in trouble (Benevolo, 1967; Callow,1969; Handlin & Burchard, 1963, Reps, 1965). Industrialization, immigration, and congestion were taxing the resources of the manufacturing cities to the limit. Chaos reigned, and there appeared to be a crying need for order harmony, and rationality ( Benney, 1910). At the same time, the Progressive Era was bringing about a general consensus on the need for rationalizing the contradictions andmonopolist tendencies of the market. However, the novelty and complexity of the newly emerging urban problems could nor generate much more agreement beyond that general consensus. The public discourse of the U.S city was thus with rich with diversity and controversy. The fate of American cities in the 20th century was largely shaped by the urban movements and discourses of this period leading toan embryonic formation of the profession of urban planning. Planning as a method of public intervention in the free play of market forces, dates back to the rise of cities and the need for public intervention to rationalize land use particularly with respect to the design and construction of public buildings and spaces. In the United States, due to its relatively decentralized political system,modern urban planning had a relatively chaotic appearance. By the turn of the 20th century, due to the rapid growth of major cities during the preceding decades, the gravity of urban problems assumed such severe proportions that the city became the focus of national attention. The realization of the need for some kind of pubic intervention on behalf of urban reform and planning became a strongsentimental. By the second decade of the century, out of a number of contending urban reform movements and discourses, a new profession also came into existence – the profession of urban planning. Although the new profession primarily focused on physical planning, the urban discourses that preceded it were rich in content and emphasized greater social concerns. These ranged from social reformist toaesthetic, egalitarian, and engineering schemes. The eventual triumph of the practical over the aesthetic, reformist, or egalitarian, may be largely attributed to the fact that American urban civilization was, and continues to be, an essentially capitalist enterprise. American cities grew mainly out of the need for corporate and manufacturing centers. Their design and development grew out of theperceived needs of the business community. These needs called for corporate headquarters, urban utilities, and urban spaces to house the factories. This physical pattern of American cities was primarily conceived and shaped at the turn of the century by the struggle for hegemony among a number of urban movements and discourses. Although planning was generally considered an anathema to the capitalistclass, who viewed it as state intervention in their own affairs, the discourse of planning and the profession that became its custodian gained gradual acceptance. It did so as a result of the desire of private capital o bring its own sense of order, rationality, and harmony to the urban spaces (Wiebe, 1967). Although urban planning was historically initiated in response to the shortcomings of themarket system, it has never been anticapitalist. The early city planning movements such as the Park movement, and the City Beautiful movement were rooted in the business community’s advocacy of, government intervention in regulating urban development. Paradoxically, capitalism promotes and, at the same time, restricts demands for state intervention in the sphere of the built environment. On the...
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