Understanding the Evolution of Contemporary Urban Centers
The Contemporary City
The contemporary city rests on two basic ideas: the concentration of the market around the creation of an urban center and the meeting of the labor force and consumers. The prototype of the city is Paris, and the reform of Haussmann’s business model worldwide. Haussmann proposes an orderly city, which presents the assumptions of the enlightened hygienists: sewers, lighting, wide streets, trees, etc. However, this city is built with police standards and proposes a plan, whether radial, orthogonal, or any other, that allows the suppression of revolutionary events.
However, the important aspect of Haussmann’s model is not this, but the fact that it subjects the old city to an entire urban surgery operation, pulling out the old to build something new, all funded by the government: Haussmann was a minister of Napoleon III. The significant fact is the first internal reform. It consists of a rectification plan and widening of streets in the municipality, which puts much of the capital at stake. It is a speculative business that creates the “high road.” This space becomes a commercial area and is reserved for the bourgeoisie. It is the creation of the center. Its urban center is the principal area where business is conducted, around which other city functions revolve, from administration to residence.
The center generates social segregation in space under different land prices that are created with business and tertiary education. In the center, the tallest buildings dedicated to offices concentrate. It can be reached from anywhere in the city, but the price of land is very expensive. In the Spanish cities, the internal reform is engaged by the expansion: an expansion plan of the city reserved for the bourgeoisie and service functions, as an extension of internal reform. The great track is designed in most cases around the railroad station, the real engine of industrialization and economic development.
This expansion involves the confiscation of lots within the walls and the demolition of the walls, at least in the area of growth. The trend is the clogging of the city and the gradual disappearance of green spaces, except for some that were held by speculative motives or programmed in the Expansion and Reform Plan Interior. In all the cities in Spain, there is widening: Madrid designed by Carlos María de Castro, Barcelona by Ildefonso Cerdà, but also in León, Málaga, Mataró, etc. In addition, some cities that did not have the Expansion Plan, the growth of the city at the center of the station acted similarly, as in Oviedo and Valladolid.
Outside the old city grid, the suburbs emerge. Around the city center and urban rail, industry appears, characterizing the nineteenth-century city. However, the space needs and problems of pollution eventually expel the activity of the cities in favor of residential and tertiary education. The industry settles in the suburbs, increasingly distant from the center as the city grows. The high prices of the plots after the plans for internal reform and expansion mean that the proletariat cannot access these homes, leading to two types of marginal housing: slums on the outskirts, illegal subdivisions without a joint project, and pens or tenements in the old quarters of cities and the expansion.
These pens are usually found within blocks in buildings abandoned by the bourgeoisie, which are gradually eroding. The illegal subdivisions lack health infrastructure, and the city does not recognize them. High land prices make it expensive even for the bourgeoisie, so initial plans are almost never met. The plots are divided, creating new streets, because they are too expensive for a single promoter. The houses built are more expected and have less green space, especially for profitable land.
Over time, the bourgeoisie has widened and moved to the Old Town, which has socially degraded until recently. The interest in preserving the testimonies of the past and its new role as a leisure and tourism hub has revitalized the area, necessitating the expulsion of the underclass. Following the generalization of the private car, the city has to adapt its infrastructure for use: streets were asphalted, sidewalks created, and traffic signals, especially lights, were installed. These are all elements present in our cities today.
The traditional city is not ready for traffic and presents problems of congestion. Traffic jams are common, and necessary bypass roads, construction of roads, and pedestrian pathways in the oldest parts of the city have emerged. Urban growth has led to the silting up of the city and the creation of socially and functionally distinct neighborhoods. They specialize in certain functions: business, residence, leisure, and tourism.
The contemporary city makes fundamental reforms: new roads, wide and wooded, sewers, lighting, and various hygienic measures. In addition, cities are designed to meet police standards and political and administrative organization. In the nineteenth century, cities were not created anew, but the new city was built according to a plan. This project draws different levels with different objectives within each city. Today, we can find, in every city, different types of layouts from the time when they were reformed: from the ancient irregular city to the radial or orthogonal linear plans.
However, this does not mean that there were no proposals for ideal cities. In the 1920s, a new model of city emerged with streets open to cars and a nested road network, creating the infrastructure to supply water and electricity to homes, and garbage collection, etc. A new type of building appeared that would determine the urban landscape: skyscrapers and multi-storey buildings. The multi-storey buildings allow the use of the ground floor for the market and the rest of the building for housing.
The industrial revolution required a concentrated market and the pooling of labor-time, thus fulfilling the population’s needs in cities and leaving the countryside. The modern city needs great infrastructure to be placed outside, from hospitals and cemeteries to landfill rounds of circulation, water tanks, electrical transformers, etc. The city should also acquire asphalt pavement, modern pedestrian streets, lighting, transport and taxi stations, urban furniture, refuse collection, and a whole infrastructure without which performance would be impossible.