Where have the grand urban designs gone? A plea for comprehensive and concrete urban planning

Last December, the Spatial Concept Switzerland 2025 was presented as a consultation draft: a planning model for the entire country. It poses key questions regarding the medium-term spatial development of Switzerland's diverse cities and landscapes. However, its own ambition seems to have instilled fear in the model: The answers are at a level of abstraction that neither highlights the inevitable conflicts nor conveys ideas about possible solutions.

The document, while exemplary in its claim, is symptomatic of the state of contemporary planning. It strives to depict large and complex interrelationships, but – not only in Switzerland – remains vague in the strategies to be derived and fails to provide a spatial representation. This applies to the national, regional, and urban scale. Only for smaller and very small areas does one dare to undertake concrete projects. These, in turn, barely address the interrelationships: the self-referential fragments remain little or not at all coordinated. Our settlement landscapes, agglomerations, and urban expansions appear accordingly haphazard.

Things once looked quite different. In 1852, shortly after the coup d'état that paved the way for Louis Napoleon to imperial power, he drew a plan of Paris as a network of boulevards spanning new and old monuments. His prefect, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, implemented it over the next seventeen years. In 1855, the engineer Ildefons Cerdà presented a regular square grid plan for the expansion of Barcelona, ​​which he revised several times and on which today's Eixample is based.

In 1859, the three winners of an architectural competition established the development pattern for the site of Vienna's demolished city fortifications, which was subsequently implemented with the spectacular Ringstrasse. Over thirty years later, Otto Wagner won the competition for the general regulation plan for the entire city. In 1862, civil and water engineer James Hobrecht presented a plan for Berlin that would serve as the basis for the city's further development. The Greater Berlin competition followed in 1910, which was intended to give the dynamic metropolitan region a coherent urban form.

Five years later, the legendary Greater Zurich Initiative came into being. Its task was to create an urban development plan that would guide the rapid development of the city on the Limmat in the spirit of public benefit: the aim was to create a modern metropolis that would combine efficient transport structures, monumental urban spaces and affordable housing.

The cramped Montmartre quarter in Paris, photographed around 1910 (left); A painter in an old Parisian street, photo undated.

It's no coincidence that the late 19th century produced such large-scale urban designs. General population growth, coupled with the replacement of agrarian society by industrial society, caused European cities to expand enormously.

Paris, Europe's second-largest city after London, with just over 500,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the century, grew to 1.3 million by the middle of the century and exceeded the two-million mark by the end of the century. One-third of the people living in the urban area were industrial workers. They crowded the dilapidated old tenements in the city center or occupied shanty towns on the outskirts.

Due to the lack of adequate hygienic infrastructure, poverty and disease spread. The situation was similar in other major cities. They attempted to modernize and rationalize their unprecedented growth with corresponding expansion plans.

The ideologies underlying these plans varied. They ranged from the autocratic ambitions of the French emperor to the Marxist convictions of the Catalan engineer, from the upper-class self-promotion of the Viennese elite to the attempts at social harmonization in turbulent Berlin. However, all were characterized by expansive approaches and architectural concreteness.

For his boulevards, Haussmann defined a largely uniform residential building type with sandstone facades and continuous wrought-iron parapet elements; Cerdà designed his blocks with simple four-story double rows with truncated corners and spacious garden courtyards; Wagner and the participants in the Greater Berlin competition drew precise, wonderful architectural perspectives of their new districts.

This culture of grand urban planning collapsed in the mid-20th century—paradoxically, precisely when the challenges facing cities became even greater. After the end of World War II, reconstruction was accompanied by a second, massive wave of growth. But instead of absorbing this with urban planning, urban planning retreated. It abandoned the comprehensive perspective as well as the claim to spatial and architectural definition.

The retreat had been institutionally prepared. At the 4th Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), held in 1933 on a cruise from Marseille to Athens under the theme of the "functional city," the development concepts of 34 cities were discussed and compared. For this purpose, the plan drawings were largely standardized, simplified, and abstracted.

They intentionally depicted two-dimensional colored grids rather than spatial urban elements. The use of symbolic signs was justified by the need to conduct urban planning scientifically and based on reliable demographic data. Not only functional, but also economic, administrative, and social dimensions were to be considered. But this was nothing new. Cerdà had already presented his own work as the foundation of a new science, and in the first issue of the specialist journal "Der Städtebau," published in 1904, the young discipline was defined as a large and complex technical, economic, and artistic field.

These meager abstractions suited post-war European urban planning and its concerns. They derived their principles from systematic analyses of functions and needs, which were presented as objective and thus offered little scope for challenge in public debate. They provided social and economic information about the plots, thus making their economic potential transparent. They left ample room for a wide variety of architectural styles, which they regulated as little as possible to reinforce the primacy of the individual residential floor plan and individual formal pluralism.

They also offered considerable flexibility for future changes designed to meet new, unforeseen needs. And since these changes included questions of typology and density, they opened the door to the boldest strategies of land utilization. Almost anything could be built almost anywhere. This flexibility was exploited: 80 percent of our current European building stock was constructed after 1945, and this unprecedented building mass spilled into the seemingly endless and formless urban peripheries or into the uncontrolled urban sprawl.

There was no shortage of responses to the obvious urban planning disasters. The urban studies undertaken in the 1960s by architects such as Aldo Rossi and Carlo Aymonino, Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rob and Léon Krier, and Colin Rowe aimed to rediscover the urban space that late modernism had wiped away.

They continued to deny themselves the big picture: The only city map drawn in Rossi's office was "La città analoga" from 1976, a disturbing collage that seems to celebrate the impossibility of comprehensive urban planning. A year later, with a view to the shrinking, divided Berlin, Ungers launched the concept of the city as an archipelago, an addition of diverse neighborhoods in the green.

A comprehensive view of the territory nevertheless proved essential. The attempt to reconcile the social, economic, transportation, legal, and ecological demands placed on the territory was not undertaken by urban planning, however, but increasingly by urban planning and, even more so, by spatial planning. However, the more comprehensive their perspective became, the more abstract their statements became—to the point of insignificance.

As in the 19th century, perhaps even more so than then, our cities today are under intense development pressure. This is a threat, but it also harbors potential. Left unchecked, it will further fray the agglomeration, making cities overcrowded and overpriced. Channeled wisely, it can benefit the entire urban community. The ideal tool for this is the grand urban plan, which can create both economic and social added value.

Precise and comprehensive planning is even more urgent today than in the past. Our cities must not only accommodate population growth, but also its increased needs: for housing, open space, social infrastructure, mobility, and ecological compensation areas. These needs cannot be fully met in every area. It is essential to find locations that best meet specific requirements and create synergies between individual properties and neighborhoods.

Public spaces, squares, streets and avenues, and parks are particularly important in this regard. They can connect individual districts, both spatially and socially, but must be designed across borders. Residential areas around them can be particularly dense, especially since their supply of open space is ensured. This, in turn, relieves pressure on other districts that may be less suitable for densification.

The same applies to train stations, which provide excellent connections, especially for offices and businesses. For an efficient and livable city, residential and work areas, leisure, educational and cultural facilities, sports complexes, production facilities, transportation infrastructure, parks, and nature conservation areas must be optimally and synergistically distributed throughout the entire urban area. The broader the planning framework, the better the distribution can be achieved.

At a time when conserving our resources must be a top priority, comprehensive planning takes on an even more significant role. Climate change is hitting urban conurbations particularly hard. They must respond with natural cooling, retention areas, and infiltration capacity. However, sustainability and resilience cannot be implemented at the level of the individual house, street, or park, or even at the level of the neighborhood. There are also already built urban areas that have few ecological qualities, but therefore cannot and should not be simply replaced: The deficit must be made up elsewhere. The city must act in solidarity and manage its resources prudently as a whole.

Contemporary land-use and development plans certainly already provide guidance on a sensible distribution of uses within urban areas, but they are predominantly general and undifferentiated. Municipal structure plans are somewhat more precise. However, they all specify the what, not the how. They do not reveal the concrete spatial consequences and the possible configurations of the distribution and interconnections of uses. A street, a square, a house can take on a wide variety of forms and, accordingly, fulfill a wide variety of functions. A city plan must reflect this.

One might, however, ask whether such a detailed urban design might not go too far and ignore the complexity and unpredictability of the multifaceted and rapidly changing urban structure. Can it even reflect the tangle of building regulations, exceptions, easements, objections, and encroachments? Or does it not naively disregard existing conditions, such as property ownership or the fact that our cities are largely already built? Not to mention the many, sometimes contradictory, demands placed on a contemporary urban structure.

It was no coincidence that Haussmann's Paris remained unfinished, especially since the prefect was met with hostility and ultimately convicted of unfair financial practices. Cerdá's Barcelona was envisioned as a green garden city and was realized as a highly dense stone city. The Hobrecht Plan, conceived as an instrument of social mixing, promoted the notorious tenement city and became a symbol of segregation. Of his general development plan, Wagner implemented only the Stadtbahn in Vienna.

The modern city cannot, indeed, be fully planned, nor can it be realized as planned. Nevertheless, it requires planning. And it benefits from it even when it fails. After all, Paris, Barcelona, ​​and Vienna have become beautiful cities. Even supposed debacles like Greater Berlin or Greater Zurich, of which absolutely nothing was implemented, have provided important impetus to their respective urban developments.

Among others, they brought the most competent architects to the stage, including Konrad Hippenmeier and Hermann Herter, who, as city architect, significantly shaped Zurich's construction scene for over twenty years.

Images of the cities as they might appear as a whole allow for a tangible weighing of different viewpoints and desires, which is most likely to lead to mediation. The consequences of certain program decisions can be clearly illustrated, and the complex interrelationships can be understood and explored.

But perhaps the most important task of these grand urban designs was and is to instill in their cities a holistic sense of self. These brilliant visions inspire confidence, enterprise, and even pride. They also raise questions that may not have been considered before: about the city's overarching spatial structure, its architectural character, its atmosphere, its mythology, and its identity.

Even and especially in the thicket of complex negotiations and processes that precede and must precede the architectural form of the contemporary city, visions are necessary that evoke it comprehensively, vividly, and truly captivatingly. Only in this way can it become more than the sum of its individual demands: a place of life for a diverse community that finds itself and its own wishes, goals, and dreams reflected in the streets, squares, parks, and public buildings.

The architect Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani was full professor of the history of urban planning at ETH Zurich from 1994 to 2016.