Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
HOW DO INNOVATIONS IN CITY PLANNING SHAPE THE
ENVIRONMENT?
In 1926, Fritz Lang's film Metropolis offered a bleak vision of cities of the
future. People lived in class-defined strata where opportunity and a fulfill-
ing life were restricted to the rich and powerful.Workers and the machines
they operated became indistinguishable from one another.Technology was
elevated to the role of co-star.
Lang, trained as an architect, held a strikingly different view of the
“techno-city” than others in the 1930s, as the historians Arthur Molella and
Robert Kargon point out. Defining techno-cities as planned communities
developed in conjunction with an industrial enterprise, the two historians
compare Norris, Tennessee (a product of the Tennessee Valley Authority)
and Salzgitter, Germany (established in connection with the Hermann-
Göring-Werke armaments factory). The two towns are examples of “high
modernism,” evoking a faith in technology, science, rational design, and
control over nature.These “techno-cities,” Molella and Kargon assert,“were
created by visionaries in each country as exemplars for the environmental,
economic, and moral regeneration of the nation.” In the end, though, both
Norris and Salzgitter failed as viable communities—for reasons beyond
their founding philosophies.
The architectural visionary Paolo Soleri also addresses the idea of
planned communities. Labeling the single-family house “the classical tip of
the iceberg of wrongness,” Soleri advocates combining living, working, and
service establishments into unified megastructures. As the art historian
Harry Rand explains,“Soleri wished to conserve the city's space rather than
allowing it to spread horizontally.” Rand places Soleri's call for the death of
cities into context by contrasting it with the work of the artist and archi-
tect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. “If Soleri has tried to unify the city to
save it from sprawl,” he notes,“Hundertwasser has tried to bring the village,
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