Town planning

The expansion of the Chinese city Shenzhen, one of the fastest growing in the world, was designed by urban planning.

Urban planning is the study of how the inhabitants of urban areas, such as towns and cities, interact with the built environment. It is a direct component of disciplines such as urban planning, which is the profession that focuses on the physical design and management of urban structures.

Many architects, economists, geographers, engineers, sociologists, and exclusively urban planners, investigate the way people live in densely populated urban spaces. There is a wide variety of theories and approaches to the study of urbanism. As a whole, it studies the socio-economic-environmental relationships that take place within the urban phenomenon.

The term urbanism originated at the end of the 19th century with the Catalan civil engineer Ildefonso Cerdá, whose intention was to create an autonomous activity focused on the spatial organization of the city.

Urban planning and urban planning

Urban planning is the set of techniques that derived from urban planning are used for urban intervention, in which urban processes are systematized in order to achieve an efficiency of urban intervention. There are various currents of urban thought to say strategic planning, urban planning, urban renewal, among others.

In a concrete way, it is the urbanization action that intervenes in search of the organization of the city and the territory.

The denomination of those who dedicate themselves to this profession are urban planners, however, according to the regulations of the countries and regions, these can be called urban planners, urban planning experts, urban planning technicians, cadastral engineers. In many countries, urbanism is a specialization or extension of the professions of planning, geography, architecture or civil engineering.

Urban planning is the planning of the various places and environments in which material, sentimental and spiritual life takes place in all its manifestations, individual and collective, and includes both urban and rural settlements. exclusively to the norms of a gratuitous aestheticism but its nature is essentially functional.

It is generally understood that urbanism is nothing more than the practice of urbanism, which is the scientific discipline corresponding to the science and art of urban planning. Urbanism has traditionally been associated with planning and architecture in in that these disciplines are applied to the set of practical knowledge that provides the fundamental bases to solve the problems of cities. This duality allows us to glimpse the descriptive and explanatory nature of urban planning as a science as opposed to the prescriptive nature of urban planning as a practice or technique, even as an art, although both approaches are partially correct and mutually feed back.

• The theories of urbanism are in close relationship and converge with other disciplines interested in the study of the city and the territory and in the intervention on both of them: planning architecture, civil engineering, political sciences, ecology, geography, economy, law, sociology, etc., as well as other human sciences such as: history, anthropology, linguistics, semiotic, etc.
• As a professional field, urban planning practices and techniques are involved in the implementation of urban policies on equipment, housing, infrastructure and transport, environment and nature protection, resource management, etc.

The well-being of the population (resident or foreign) that inhabits or is occasionally in the city or territory is the ultimate goal of urbanization, a term that was coined by Ildefonso Cerdá who described thus the referred activity:

«Behold, the philosophical reasons that prompted me and decided to give the floor urbanization, not only to indicate any act that tends to group the building and to regularize its functioning in the already formed group, but also the set of principles, doctrines and rules that must be applied, so that the building and its grouping, far from compressing, devouring and corrupting the physical, moral and intellectual faculties of social man, will serve both to promote its development and vigor and to increase the individual well-being, whose sum form the happiness.

History

Built from the mid-1990s, Putrajaya, the administrative capital of Malaysia, is one of the newest capitals in the world.

Hippodamus of Miletus (considered by many to be history's first urban planner) drew up the urban plan for Piraeus, the port of Athens, on a grid now known as Hippodamus, which is has repeated many times. Nero also behaved like an urban planner when, after the burning of Rome, he had the city rebuilt on a different plan from the original layout.

Philip II includes several urban planning ideas in the laws of the Indies when dealing with the construction of new cities in the New World (a process in which Spain carried out one of the largest creations of new cities in history). Since the fifteenth century, cities have also been founded throughout Europe, although probably in most of them the guiding idea was more to demonstrate the power of the monarch than to make useful cities, which does not mean that there are a few of great beauty.

Baron Haussmann designed the renewal of Paris. Camilo Sitte was the most prominent member of the Urban School of Vienna. Other prominent urbanists are Otto Wagner. In 1928 the first International Congress of Modern Architecture took place and in 1947 the British law of urban planning (the Town and Country Planning Act 1947) was approved, as a result of the New towns movement.

At the initiative of the Higher Institute of Urbanism of the University of Buenos Aires, in 1949 the United Nations (UN) declared November 8 World Urbanism Day as a date to remember necessary actions for the common good such as increasing of parks and recreational areas, the remodeling of some citizen areas, the completion of urban development works, the decongestion of overcrowded areas and those measures that reduce air and water pollution. This date is the beginning of various initiatives for sustainable urban development and a milestone for the celebrations of urban planners around the world.

In 1970, the postmodern city emerged and beyond the framework in which urbanism was constrained by etymology and definition —the city—, today it is a discipline with a much broader objective and is used for the integral planning of the territory. Urbanism, synonymous with planning and management, deals with providing sectorialized territorial models in which each of these areas is assigned a development according to their aptitudes. Thus, there will be some land that is clearly urban, others that can be developed, that is, susceptible to becoming urban when the needs for growth and expansion determine it, and, finally, land that is not developable without any expectation of evolution towards civic spaces.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, symbolically represented by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the bipolar confrontation that characterized the post-war history of the 20th century gradually faded. Concerns of a global nature were then accentuated, such as climate change or global warming, which led, for example, to the inclusion of the Madrid Protocol of 1991 as part of the Antarctic Treaty System. This multiplication of environmental concerns encouraged the creation of related university degrees and the incorporation of urban planning in an environmental perspective. Although the premise that expresses the organicity of cities is traditional, the concept did not go beyond a simple enunciation until the development of the theory that, within the framework of Great History, explains them as organisms and their ontological justification as part of a generation process. of entities of increasing complexity within the field of environmental planning and which aims to explain why towards the first decade of the 21st century the world population has become mostly urban, as stated by Marcelo Pazos, professor of Environmental Planning at the University of Salvador, in Buenos Aires.

Origin and meaning of the term «urbanism»

Frankfurt, destroyed during World War II, rebuilt some centennial buildings that were integrated into the "new city".

The term «urbanism» comes from the Latin word urbs (‘city’), which developed in antiquity and referred par excellence to the capital of the Roman world, Rome. It appears for the first time in the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1956, where it is defined as "a set of knowledge that refers to the study of the creation, development, reform and progress of towns in order to meet the needs of urban life". It is clear that the idea of town does not adjust to the current dimension of urban planning, being the idea of city, in the modern sense of the term, the one that is most appropriate to the field of this discipline.

The urban has a condition that more deeply distinguishes modern life from that traditional-rural one, it is not a spatial condition nor a demographic or productive delimitation, but a behavior, a way of life, which is determined by the singular characteristics of the city as a material entity: specifically its size, density and heterogeneity. The urban is the effect that the size, density and heterogeneity of the city have on the social character of collective life.

Although the term urbanism was initially used to designate all urban planning phenomena, as the constructive and building phenomenon has gone beyond the urban space itself, said term has been displaced in practice by Territorial Planning when you want to refer to interventions on extra-urban land, where supra-local interests protected from higher public authorities come into play: national defense, roads, environment, etc. In Spain, the term Territorial Planning is also used for planning in supra-municipal areas, in which there are generally important functional relationships between municipalities and the need to coordinate municipal urban plans is appreciated.

Currently the term urbanism is applied to urban planning; to all knowledge related to the construction of cities or urban centers, and is distinguished from the term "urbanization", which is, today, directly related to construction processes, but not with urban planning. The term land use planning is used, on the other hand, to designate the urban activity oriented towards interlocal land planning, from a broader perspective of spatial planning, covering areas of a rural nature.

The profession of Urbanism

In the world for several decades, urban planning has been taught in universities as a liberal discipline and independent from other professions. We can find more than 100 universities from different countries, which offer this university degree using denominations such as: Urbanism, Bachelor's Degree in Urbanism, Land Planning and Environment, Urban Engineering, Urban Planning, City Planning, Urbanism and Environment, Urban Topography, among others.

In Latin America, the first study program leading to a Master's Degree in Planning in the areas of Urban and Territorial Planning, Society and Environment and in Economic Development and Comunidad was the Graduate School of Planning of the University of Puerto Rico - Río Piedras Campus, created on April 30, 1965. This program is accredited by the Planning Accreditation Board (PAB), the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP), among others. It is a requirement to practice in Puerto Rico to pass a revalidation exam to obtain a license granted by the Board of Examiners of Professional Planners of Puerto Rico. Subsequently, at the undergraduate level, the urban planning degree was implemented at the Simón Bolívar University of Venezuela;^{[citation required]}later the degree was implemented in Mexico; in the highest house of studies, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM)‚ the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM)‚ in the University Center of Art, Architecture and Design of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. In Argentina, the Degree in Urbanism is dictated at the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS). Brazil and Colombia implemented the Urban Management and Development Program at the Universidad del Rosario and the Urbanism Program at the Universidad de La Salle (Bogotá) and at the Universidad Mayor de San Simón. The European case is led by the Netherlands and France and in North America by Canada.

However, the training of urban planners still endures as a specialization at the postgraduate level in related disciplines, such as Planning, Architecture, Civil Engineering, Ecology, Geography, Economics and Sociology, among others.

Tactical Urbanism

Tactical Urbanism includes the way in which cities grow, intervening underused existing spaces, assigning them a use that is not necessarily architectural or permanent occupation, rescuing possibilities for spaces to be used by people and valorizing the town. This type of action is intended to make the city a more human place (Mike, 2012^{[citation required]}, p. 54)

Tactical Urbanism tries to transform public spaces, neighborhoods, roads, into interventions with privileges for pedestrians, leaving the vehicle in the background. Also propose strategies to promote alternative and sustainable means of transport. The interventions are carried out by action groups, rescuing public spaces made for the vehicle, each proposal is low cost and recyclable materials. Each intervention revalues the city, proposes caring for the environment by giving a visual change to public spaces, also presenting possible solutions to planning problems, giving a local identity of great impact.

Mike Lydon (2012) refers to this discipline as “a deliberate approach to city-making, offering local ideas for local planning challenges with short-term commitments and realistic expectations, proposing low-risk interventions with the possibility of high rewards."

Tactical Urbanism in Latin America

In Latin America, Tactical Urbanism includes short-term actions to generate long-term changes, tries to solve citizen problems, inequality, and more.

On the other hand, it seeks to highlight the value of public places by providing light, fast and cheap solutions made by creative people. Whether in the field of housing, the local economy of a neighborhood or transportation. These are born as a response to a historical scenario of scarcity that today is at a crossroads: between an inherited informality and a necessary formalization of urban processes. This is reflected in multiple case studies such as street vendors, free fairs, land occupations by neighborhood associations, or informal practices that, due to a lack of institutional channels or political will, operate reactively seeking to reduce the inequality and representativeness gap in the community. city (Steffens^{[citation needed]}, 2013).

In Latin America, places like Chile, Peru, Ecuador and more rethink public places, transforming them into opportunities for the city itself. It tries to encourage citizen participation to provide possible solutions to social, economic and urban problems. Propose strategies that encourage the promotion of alternative means with recyclable and cheap materials. The bike paths offer to rehabilitate streets occupied by private vehicles and public transport to improve the sustainable development of neighborhoods, cities and more. It is very important that pedestrians can move around in public spaces without any difficulty, such as architectural barriers and automobiles.

One of the objectives of tactical urbanism in Latin America is to humanize urban public spaces by rehabilitating each sector, giving possible solutions to planning problems in cities. This strategy can not only be carried out by urban planners and architects, but also by people willing to give a new visual to public spaces, promoting the use of bicycles or alternative transportation, rehabilitating green areas, painting colored zebra crossings, favoring pedestrians.

Features

• It is an intentional and progressive approach to promoting change.
• It offers local ideas for challenges in local planning.
• It includes short-term commitments and realistic expectations.
• It supposes a low risk, with a possible great reward.
• It develops social capital among citizens and builds organizational capacity between public/private institutions, NGOs and civil society.
• It helps to generate citizenship, as it stimulates the sense of collaboration between neighbors, becomes an exercise of opinion and community work.

Types of Interventions in Tactical Urbanism

• “Pumping chairs” is an easy-to-use urban tactic, with the aim of activating public space in agile and experimental way.
• “Live cinema" It is a film group that deals with a van prepared to project an outdoor film.
• “A47 Mobile Library” it deals with a mobile library that transports more than 3 thousand books for your free consultation, as well as having incorporated a space for conferences and projections.
• “Park Books Paradero” is a program of the Secretariat of Culture, Recreation and Sport and the District Institute of the Arts, in agreement with reading.
• “Field Plant” group of flowers, shrubs and trees march among the buildings, traffic transport by cars, wheelbarrows, bicycles, backpacks, hands or heads, in search of their place in the city.
• “Urban Evil” the objective is to invite the neighbors to take their tables out to the street.
• “Jardinería de guerrilla” place gardening elements in spaces where it does not exist and where there is no legal permission to do so.
• “Calles Open” temporary spaces for walking, cycling or attending social activities.
• “Color snake” where whole streets become public space.
• “Des-paved” remove unnecessary pavement to place green area.
• “ Parks or Pop-up Shops” residual spaces that temporarily become public or commercial areas.
• “Initiatives of block improvements” With cheap materials or donated in commercial streets transforming them into EP, cycle tracks and removing vehicle space.

Ecological Urbanism

Ecological urbanism is a form of urbanism that has four basic objectives as its central axis: compactness, complexity, efficiency and stability. As Salvador Rueda defines, ecological urbanism projects three planes on the same scale to formally solve the variables that are intertwined in cities. Such as biodiversity and the preservation of geographic and natural values of a territory, urban metabolism and urban services and logistics. This form of urbanism wants to address the problems of current society related to sustainability, rethinking the models of urban occupation.