Intentional, centralized urban planning resumed piecemeal in the 18th century, then became a major obsession in the 19th century. England’s 18th-century planning was done by private developers who controlled large tracts on the edge of boroughs. They used wealth from the Industrial Revolution to construct urban areas that reflected the values of the newly moneyed classes — places that were serene, beautiful, functional and pleasant. Terraces of white classical townhouses would face country views in sweeping circles, or lead into rebuilt markets on wide new streets cut into the old Alfredian boroughs. Typically a major developer would plan out the project and install the infrastructure, then continue as the “ground landlord,” the actual landowner. He would then lease subtracts to smaller developers, regulating what they built. The result was a controlled free market in land within the project, with architectural harmony imposed in such a way as to allow a great deal of variation. This is the method, and much of the philosophy, behind Poundbury’s construction.

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By the early 19th century, the Industrial Revolution had shifted into high gear, and major cities acquired factories built on a scale unseen since the great cathedrals of five centuries earlier. With massive population growth and nearly no municipal government, these cities were a mess. The turnaround began in 1835, when a reform act created powerful, elected governments for nearly every city and town, and the new municipal governments started a mad scramble to fix the problems. One by one they obtained acts of Parliament allowing them to seize privately owned sewer, water and gas systems. They imposed careful planning on their new assets, unifying the hodgepodge of private systems, extending them to the poorest areas, separating the sewage and drainage systems from the water systems, and imposing health and sanitation codes on both new buildings and old. By 1920 cities were basically safe and healthier places (except for coal fumes from household fires, a major health hazard not addressed until the 1950s). This great cleansing in the ’50s made up the third phase of urban planning — a planning effort that was comprehensive and successful, even though it did not include zoning or other land use regulation. Zoning had to wait until the 20th century, and the philosophy of Ebenezer Howard.

Ebenezer Howard was no one in particular — a mousy little clerk in late 19th-century London — until he published his concept of the “Garden City” in 1898. Like nearly everyone else in his era, Howard had little historic perspective on the rapid improvement of cities; he just assumed that cities were irredeemably bad and getting worse. He “invented” (his term) a new type of settlement that he thought could replace cities altogether, producing the same amount of goods and services while allowing everyone to live in a bright, clean environment surrounded by nature — a community he called the “Garden City.” Although Howard addressed all aspects of urban life and economy, only his ideas on physical layout made it into 20th-century planning practice. Howard proposed segregating land uses into zones that would separate the incompatible areas and better organize the economy; he also mandated low densities and plenty of greenery. In fact, the modern density-regulating zoning code derives from Howard.

Howard gave us the technical tools of modern urban planning; Le Corbusier contributed the theory. A Swiss watch engraver turned Parisian intellectual, Le Corbusier obsessed over giant skyscrapers surrounded by parkland. The exact nature of these emparked towers would evolve with his politics (which ranged from industrial elitist in the 1920s to Vichy Fascist in the 1940s) but the basic format remained the same. Each huge skyscraper would house an entire city, from residences to shops to places of work. The social elites would occupy luxury flats on the top floors, while workers would be housed in modestly adequate apartments farther down. Wide parklands would separate the towers; a group of such towers would make up a great city. Le Corbusier presented these towers as symbolizing the triumph of the Machine over Humanity, of the Collective over the Individual. You can see his emparked towers all over America and Europe, often miserably dysfunctional places — but his symbolism had the deeper influence, and informs every modernist construction project.

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