Ring City : George Thrush
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Ring City as Evolving Type
The history of centralized town planning is long and we need not review all of it here, but two specific aspects are particularly relevant to the fragmentation facing America's metropolitan areas today. One is the ideal city, or the city designed to represent a specific social or religious order. The other, often a related type, is the walled city of military fortification. An ideal city, in the words of Spiro Kostoff, "engraves a pattern of faith and government."9 The city becomes a diagram that articulates social order and hierarchy. It does so by clearly defining some spaces as more important than others. The center, key nodes, gates, etc., are all participants in a spatial order that is understandable to the inhabitants because it is reconciled with religious, civil, or military arrangements existing among them. Public spaces were clearly distinguished from private spaces; major routes from minor ones; and the sacred is kept distinct from the profane. The identity of the town is the edifice of the wall, coupled perhaps with the silhouette of its major building. So monarchies and holy cities are often planned centrally, because the structure of the society that they are designed to reflect is quite clear. |
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Many European cities began on a centralized model, not only because
they were holy, but because they were responding to the functional needs
of military defense. The art and science of defensive fortifications was
critical to a city's survival in many parts of Europe. Palmanova, Italy,
just south of Venice is considered the premier example of this (figure
1). Such fortifications involved at least one layer and often many more
of circumferential outer protective masonry wall that usually separated
the city from the agricultural land surrounding it. Openings in the wall
were limited to those necessary for the major travel routes to pass out
to neighboring destinations. As a result many cities began life with circular
or polygonal walls around them. Indeed many cities (Milan, Italy,
for example) have a history of several different layers of military fortifications
embedded in their city plan (figures 2, 3, and 4). These layers read like
a history of the growth of the city—something like the rings on a tree.
As each successive layer of protective wall became obsolete, they created
unique opportunities for these cities. The remaining circumferential paths
connected the radial routes from the center of town and created new ways
to move around the city. This same phenomenon occurred throughout Europe.
As the need for these fortifications waned, many were torn down and replaced with what we now call ring roads. Moscow, Paris, and Bologna are just a few examples of cities whose former defensive military perimeters evolved into major transportation infrastructure locations (figures 5–7). "In the old fortified cities, the walls were pulled down and converted into a continuous ringroad, while former direct approaches from the countryside were rationalized into straight radial roads linking the fattened suburban belt with the center."10 Trains, carriages, trolleys, buses, automobiles, cyclists, and pedestrians all traveled along these ring roads. In many cases, though, they also served as the location for new kinds of building. Museums, concert halls, cultural attractions, and other developments of bourgeois society soon filled this zone between the old and the new city. Perhaps the best example of this is in Vienna, on the Ringstrasse. |
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The Ringstrasse performs more than just a transportation function,
and serves as more than the site for buildings of cultural importance (figure
8). The Ringstrasse offers Vienna a secular identity as an alternative
to the sacred one found in
St. Stephens Cathedral, which dominates the center of the old city. Both
the center and the Ringstrasse have civic importance, but the addition
of the ring made multiple meanings possible. It also served as the armature
for additional dense metropolitan growth (figure 9). These characteristics
make ring planning particularly interesting as a means of representing
diversity and increasing density in American cities. It seems to offer
the chance to maintain a civil center, while at the same time creating
a zone of civic importance that has room for many different voices.
The other important aspect of the history of centrally planned cities
and towns is their role in modern socialist and utopian visions: the ideal
cities of our time. Charles Fourier's phalansteries were designed
to house "2000 people of all races, classes, sexes, and ages," according
to Spiro Kostoff. His City of Garantism was composed of concentric
rings of commercial, industrial, and agricultural zones. This kind of city
in relation to diagrammatic social order reached its high point with Ebenezer
Howard in his 1898 book, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform.11
His diagram of the "Group of Slumless Smokeless Cities" and his plans for
the Garden City were strong evidence of his faith in the relationship
of geometry and order to social reform (figure 10). Kostoff describes Howard's
view of the Garden City as "an ideally balanced human environment
where town and country met," and quotes Howard |
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So, these two types of centrally planned towns–one with roots in military
fortifications yielding density, shared identity, spatial clarity, which then evolved
into a city with ring roads separating its old and new
sections; and the other being the modern prototype of the centrally planned
utopian and socialist community, with its connection of geometric order
to social harmony–give us useful background as we proceed toward solving
the problems of fragmentation in late twentieth-century American cities. |