Linear Planning and the Automobile

Fernando Terán , La Ciudad Lineal. Antecedente de un urbanismo actual (Madrid: Ciencia Nueva, 1968), 27-34.

George R. Collins and Carlos Flores, Arturo Soria y la Ciudad Lineal (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1968); Terán, La Ciudad Lineal; Miguel A. Maure, La Ciudad Lineal de Arturo Soria (Madrid: Colegio Oficial de Arquitectos, 1991); José R. Alonso, La Ciudad Lineal de Madrid (Barcelona: Fundación Caja de Arquitectos, 1998). Arturo Soria left a written decalogue containing the fundamental principles of the linear city: (1) derive all problems of town planning from the problem of locomotion; (2) city plan should precede its construction; (3) for the geometric forms of the streets and blocks, preference should be given to regular ones as these are the most beautiful, more comfortable, more beautiful, and cheaper than irregular ones; (4) the division of surface area should be one-fifth for land for housing, four-fifths for land for cultivation; (5) independence and separation of the houses from each other; (6) double alignment with a distance from the building to the street; (7) triangulation (linear cities uniting point cities); (8) the city can reduce its width to cross difficult points (rivers, mountains, etc.). (9) return to nature and exodus from the cities to the abandoned planes (colonization); and (10) justice in the sharing of the land. Soria, Terán, La Ciudad Lineal, 27-34.

Carlos Sambricio, "De la Ciudad Lineal a la Ciudad Jardín. Sobre la difusión en España de los supuestos urbanísticos a comienzos de siglo," Ciudad y Territorio 94 (1992): 147-59; José R. Alonso, "González del Castillo, teórico y propagandista de la ciudad lineal," Ciudad y Territorio. Estudios Territoriales 111 (1997): 49-63.

Terán, La Ciudad Lineal, 21.

This approach in which the form of the cities depends on the methods of transport was enunciated before by Cerdà in 1860 in his Teoría de la Vialidad Urbana. Ildefonso Cerdà, Teoría de la Vialidad Urbana ( Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Administración Pública , 1991).

Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria, 318.

Hilarión González del Castillo (HGC) was not the only person who tried to adapt the linear city to the automobile. In 1930, the Revista de la Ciudad Lineal echoed the conclusions of the General Assembly of the International Association of Linear Cities (in which HGC was accustomed to represent the linear city of Madrid), in which the convenience of bringing about the linear city in a way that the principle route "was sometimes presented as park avenues, similar to that of Westchester, others as motorways in the in the generating axis of longitudinal cities, according to one of the variants introduced by Comey and other specialists; finally as others, as the maritime boulevards advocated by Henry Prost" was discussed. Maure, La Ciudad Lineal, 378. The proposal of Westchester is without doubt the Bronx River Parkway, completed in 1925, that ran through the county of New York and served as a model for Robert Moses to create a network of parkways that ended up converting themselves into commuter roads in the metropolitan area. Arthur Coleman Comey, disciple of Olmsted, proposed in 1923 the distribution of industry, commerce, and residence along the cardinal arterial routes of the regional reticle of transport. Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria, 70. Henry Prost, a French architect, created a semiradioconcentric plan in Casablanca (Morocco), where he constructed a maritime boulevard and another bordering the city that bring together the residential and industrial districts.

"It is the same, I understand, a proposal for a city between Pozuelo, Aravaca and Las Rozas (Municipalities surrounding Madrid), or a proposal for a group of small colonies like part the hydraulic work that Lorenzo Pardo has carried to completion in these years or these proposals that wanted to define a Madrid-Guadarrama garden city or to build another along the length of the railway that would unite Madrid with Valencia: any of these projects, that of Madrid for example, reflects the abstraction of the idea and, above all, that beyond a certain point HGC is incapable of escaping his own dynamic." Sambricio, "De la Ciudad Lineal," 142.

Ibid, 147.

HGC, "La pista Madrid-Valencia y la Ciudad Jardín" Ingeniería y Construcción (1927): 192-94. This civil engineering magazine started its publication in 1923 being ideologically more liberal than the official magazine Revista de Obras Públicas. It ended its life in 1936 with the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. HGC, "Las autovías y la Ciudad Jardín," Revista de Obras Públicas 2541 and 2544 (January 15 and March 1, 1930): 39-40, 114-15. Revista de Obras Públicas was the official publication of the Cuerpo de Ingenieros de Caminos (Corps of Civil Engineers). Published uninteruptedly from 1853, it is an inexhaustible source for the study of the history of civil engineering.

Le Corbusier , Como concebir el urbanismo (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Infinito, 1984), 18.

F. Javier Rodríguez Lázaro , Las primeras autopistas españolas, 1925/1936 ( Madrid: Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos, Canales y Puertos, 2004 ).

Benton Mackaye, "The Townless Highway," New Republic 787 (1930): 93-95. Also see Benton Mackaye and Lewis Mumford, "Townless Highways for the Motorist. A Proposal for the Automobile Age," Harper's Monthly Magazine (1931): 347.

Lewis Mumford , The Highway and the City (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963).

In Alonso, "González del Castillo," one can find an extensive biography of HGC, including details about his training, his diplomatic experiences in the Orient, where he came into contact with the current town planners, his contact with Arturo Soria and the Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización responsible for the construction of the linear city, his years as theorist and propagandist for the said linear city, and the years of decline of the linear city and of HGC himself.

See note 1.

Sambricio , "De la Ciudad Lineal," 154.

Ibid., 150.

Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria, 56.

HGC , Ciudades Jardines y Ciudades Lineales, conferencia en el Ateneo de Madrid (Madrid: Imprenta de la Ciudad Lineal, 1913).

Sambricio , "De la Ciudad Lineal," 155.

Maure, La Ciudad Lineal, 376.

HGC, Ciudades Jardines y Ciudades Lineales.

Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria, 307.

Ibid., 308.

HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 10-24 (1930): 145-47, 161-63, 182-84, 193-95, 209-12, 225-28, 243-45, 257-60, 273-75, 289-91, 305-8, 322-24, 337-40, 354-56, 375-78. HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 1, no. 2 (1931): 6-9, 18-19.

Maure, La Ciudad Lineal, 21.

Sambricio , "De la Ciudad Lineal," 151.

Maure, La Ciudad Lineal, 269.

Lando Bortolotti and Giuseppe Da Luca , Fascismo e autostrade. Un caso di sintesi: la Firenze-Mare ( Milan: FrancoAngeli, 1994), 19-22.

George Charlesworth , A History of British Motorways (London Thomas Telford, 1984 ), 1.

1ER Congrès International de la Route , Compte rendu des travaux du Congrès (Paris: Imprimerie Générale Lahure, 1909), 16.

E. Naud , "Soixante ans de l'AIPCR," in AIPCR-PIARC, 1909/1969 ( Paris: Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route, 1970), 15-28.

Alfio Mangarano and Giuseppe Pellizzi, "Les premières Autoroutes réalisées en Italie," in AIPCR-PIARC, 1909/1969 (Paris: Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route, 1970), 129-40; Autostrada Serravalle-Milano-Ponte Chiasso, 1924-1935. Le autostrade della prima generazione. Autostrada Serravalle-Milano-Ponte Chiasso (Milan, 1984); and Bortolotti and Da Luca, Fascismo e autostrade.

Bortolotti and Da Luca, Fascismo e autostrade, 32-33.

Permanent International Association of Road Congresses, IV Congreso Internacional de Carreteras. Sevilla, 1923. Resumen de los trabajos del Congreso (Rennes, France: Imprimeries Oberthur, 1924), 204-6. 37. Guido Lori, "Pel V Congreso Internazionales della Strada," Le Strade (1924): 353-54.

E. Cauterman and P. De Gaer , "Les Routes spéciales reservées aux automobiles, rapport belge," in Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route, V Congress (Milan, 1926), 3-4.

Thomas H. MacDonald , "Les Routes spéciales reservées aux automobiles, rapport américain," in Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route, V Congress (Milan, 1926), 13-16.

Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route, V Congress, (Milan, 1926), 45.

It is interesting that the American engineers proposed widening highways, financed by the state, so that vehicles could go in four rows, "assigning the outer lanes to vehicles of slow travel and the interior for faster travel." And in spite of the presentation of plans for superhighways, with widths of 61 meters, with space for the railway, intersections at different levels, lateral closures, variants, and so on (Detroit, California), no explicit references to parkways were made, perhaps because they were considered more as parks than roads.

Manuel Aguilar López , "Carreteras modernas," Revista de Obras Públicas 2467 ( 1926): 524-27.

José Marqués , Anteproyecto de la autopista Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia (1927), Archivo General de la Administración, Guadalajara, Sección Obras Públicas, boxes 2874, 2875, and 2876 (hereafter referred to as AGA).

Amalio Hidalgo and Francisco Terán , Anteproyecto de calzada directa a la Sierra (1927), AGA, box 2495.

Enrique Colás , Anteproyecto de la autopista Madrid-Irún (1928), AGA, box 2495.

Ildefonso Sánchez del Río , Anteproyecto de la autopista Oviedo-Gijón (1928), AGA, boxes 2608 and 2609.

Delegación de Prensa , Publicidad y Propaganda de la Sociedad Anónima Autopista Madrid-Cuenca- Valencia, Autopista Madrid-Cuenca-Valencia (Valencia, Spain: Imprenta A. Marzo, 1928), 46.

Hildalgo and Terán, Anteproyecto de calzada directa.

Ildefonso Sánchez del Río , Anteproyecto de la autopista Oviedo-Gijón, 4.

In the economic study of the draft of the motorway, it was said, "Apart from the twenty metres of width of the motorway, there remain as building land one hundred metres in the whole length of the twenty-five kilometres, that make two million five hundred thousand square metres . . . with the amount from the sale of the lands the costs of the service shall be met by the capital interest paid out and form the gradual recovery of the capital." Ibid., 7.

Ibid., 4.

HGC, "Las autovías," 39-40, 114-15. HGC, "La autovía Oviedo-Gijón," La Construcción Moderna 18 (1933): 8-9.

HGC, "La pista Madrid-Valencia," 192-94.

Diana Velez , "Late Nineteenth-century Spanish Progressivism. Arturo Soria's Linear City," Journal of Urban History 9, no. 2 (1983): 131-64.

HGC, "La pista Madrid-Valencia," 192.

Ibid., 192.

In 1888, William Hesketh Lever created Port Sunlight Village near Liverpool. Lever provided a healthy and pleasant environment for the workers of his soap factory, building cottages of varied architectural styles including Flemish and Dutch as well as two cottages that were actual reproductions of Shakespeare's cottage at Stratford-On-Avon, shops, and common buildings. The streets were laid out in continental boulevard style, wide and lined with elm and chestnut trees. In 1878, George and Richard Cadbury built a new chocolate factory in a site in the countryside, 4 miles out of Birmingham but with excellent canal and railway access. Bournville provided decent quality homes in a healthy environment that could be afforded by industrial workers in a green environment.

Fermín Caballero (1800-1876), Spanish geographer and politician, wrote Memoria sobre el fomento de la población rural (1863-1864). In it he confronted the problem of rural depopulation, proposing an alternative model to that which had been developed in the eighteenth century with the repopulation of the Sierra Morena by means of establishing of rural nuclei as the base of the repopulation of the extensive territories. The proposal of Fermín Caballero was based on a dispersed population distributed in houses occupied by a family unit (the coto acasarado), in the styles of the hamlets in the north of the country or of the Catalan country houses. Before HGC did so, the proposal of Caballero had inspired Arturo Soria, with whom he agreed about the single-family dwellings endowed with an orchard or garden: "The dignity of the citizen, who is steadied and strengthened when most insulated, independent and free in his home. With the price of the lands regulated along the hundreds of kilometres, instead of being at a central point, many problems, the enumeration of which are beyond the narrow limits of any conference, are resolved. Nevertheless, I will not resist the temptation to site one: that of the possibility of establishing in parallel, and at a short distance from the linear city, the coto acasarado of which D. Fermín Caballero dreamed, for the development of rural population." Arturo Soria, Conferencia dada en el ateneo científico y literario de Madrid por D. Arturo Soria el día 14 de mayo de 1894, acerca de la nueva arquitectura de las ciudades (Madrid: Compañía Madrileña de Urbanización, 1894), 11. HGC, "La pista Madrid-Valencia," 192.

Ibid., 193.

Ibid., 193.

"Begin as soon as possible the first garden city in combination with the great, beautiful Madrid-Valencia road and thus at the same time a great work shall be produced, Spain shall show the way to other countries that, like United States, like Cuba, like Germany, or like Italy, had planned or started to construct wide roads destined for automobile traffic and which could serve as the basis for great plans for the colonisation of the bordering terrains in the form of highly original garden cities." HGC, "La pista Madrid-Valencia," 194.

La Construcción Moderna (the Modern Construction) was a journal founded by the architect Luis Sainz de los Terreros and the engineer Eduardo Gallego in 1903. It was published until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and during those years it was a relevant forum for the discussion of architectural and urban planning tendencies.

HGC, "Madrid y la Sierra de Guadarrama," La Construcción Moderna 3-12 (1929): 33-34, 49-55, 65-67, 145-50, 307-12, 325-28.

Collins and Flores, Arturo Soria, 347-54. In this work over the future Madrid, the convening of a competition of ideas for the extension of Madrid was already asked for, and the study of "a regional plan in which would be determined the great roads that would put Madrid in communication with the rest of the province and principally with the neighbour Sierra de Guadarrama, studying if the said great roads should or should not be laid out as avenues that serve as access to colonised linear cities, in the form proposed years ago by Soria and Mata" was proposed. Ibid., 353.

"The American garden city system of Whitten, consists in making around a large capital a series of garden cities satellites, each one specialised in a group of similar industries, the intermediate spaces that separate some cities from each other and from the great metropolises of which they are satellites, would be destined principally for agriculture in one of its many forms: orchards, gardens, arable farms and livestock farms, exploitation of forestry, vines, crop fields in which will be produced the prime materials for adjacent factories, agricultural colonies, etc." HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 1 (1931): 7.

HGC, "Madrid y la Sierra de Guadarrama," La Construcción Moderna 3 (1929): 34.

HGC, "Madrid y la Sierra de Guadarrama," La Construcción Moderna 4 (1929): 53.

Mackaye , "Townless Highway," 93-95.

HGC , "Madrid y la Sierra de Guadarrama," La Construcción Moderna 5 (1929): 65.

This type of comment shows how HGC did not feel sure at the point when his proposals passed into practice, and this is one of the reasons through which his proposals have been considered futile and too abstract. It was common in his articles for him to call on the collaboration of different professions to design the linear city: "Would it not be convenient that our engineers, in intimate collaboration with architects, economists, industrialists and men of government studied carefully the motorways in combination with colonising plans that apply to the garden city?" HGC, "Las autovías," 114.

Miguel Otamendi , "El porvenir de las autovías," Revista de Obras Públicas 2528 ( 1929): 241-45.

Ibid., 244.

HGC , "Las autovías," 39.

Ibid., 40.

Ibid., 40.

Elisabeth Macdonald, "Structuring a Landscape, Structuring a Sense of Place: The Enduring Complexity of Olmsted and Vaux's Brooklyn Parkways," Journal of Urban Design 7, no. 2 (2002): 117-43. HGC mixes terms such as parkway, fastroad, speedway, and parkdrive such that they are not always clear and at times uses an antiquated bibliography-mostly of American origin-because he did not always have access to the best sources of information. In this way, after analyzing greater London, he makes his proposals for Madrid, following Charles Mulford Robinson in his book Modern Civic Art (or the City Made Beautiful), fourth edition of 1907, and he distinguishes between park-ways and park-drives. The first, according to HGC, "have a great analogy with the boulevards and urban avenues, being distinguished from these in that they must find themselves essentially intimate related to the park," citing, among others, the Paramount Parkway in Philadelphia and the Avenue of the Commonwealth in Boston. HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 10-24 (1930): 289. On the other hand, the park-drives are "roads that form splendid avenues and nothing more; neither boulevards at whose sides buildings are constructed, nor means of communication between two points," distinguishing speed ways and beauty roads. Ibid., 305. HGC is conscious of the antiquity of his sources, because of which he said in a note, "The work of Ch. M. Robinson (fourth edition) being written 1907 suggests that, given the American activity, the predilection of its town planners and landscape architects for systems of parks, and the great increase in motoring, there will be more speedways than those mentioned, that strictly speaking are true motorways." Ibid., 305. In this same text, he cites Bronx River Parkway, but he assimilates it in the model of the park road before the automobile and not that of the speedway; that is what it would correspond to in his terminology.

The special tracks are specific road surfaces for automobiles such as those covered in bitumen or tar or those covered in paving, differing from dry tarmac, which was the usual road surface before the automobile.

HGC, "Las autovías," 40.

Ibid., 114.

HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 10-24 (1930): 145-47, 161-63, 182-84, 193-95, 209-12, 225-28, 243-45, 257-60, 273-75, 289-91, 305-8, 322-24, 337-40, 354-56, 375-78. HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 1-2 (1931): 6-9, 18-19.

HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 10-24 (1930): 182.

Ibid., 183.

HGC, "El doble circuito de carreteras en Madrid," La Construcción Moderna 3, 16 (1933): 16-17.

Some pages later he proposes another similar hybrid, although less clearly defined: "A double road-park, that travels to and from different places . . . forming a circuit; a road-park that could have an central lane in the form of a fast-drive (that would be a motorway), for high-speed automobiles and a line for electric trams; on both sides of the said track, others with the character of beauty roads (which would be a motorparkway for recreational traffic); adjoining these, two strips of isolating vegetation, and beyond this, the service roads or urban streets that give themselves to plans for colonisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and the repopulation of great extensions of terrains." HGC, "El Greater London," La Construcción Moderna 10-24 (1930): 307-8.

Ibid., 355.

HGC, "La autovía Oviedo-Gijón," 8.

HGC , "El Congreso de Sanidad y la Ciudad Jardín," La Construcción Moderna 12 (1934): 197.

Larry Anderson, Benton MacKaye. Conservationist, Planner and Creator of the Appalachian Trail (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

HGC , "Radburn, nuevo tipo de Ciudad Jardín," La Construcción Moderna 13 (1933): 9.

Points 51 to 64, dealing with the lanes of traffic, clarify the separation between motorways and urban development set out in the Charter of Athens. For example, point 60 is that the traffic lanes should be classified according to their nature and constructed according to the vehicles and their velocities, establishing that "for heavy traffic, [there should be] lanes that are independent of the current ones, [that should be] destined purely for minor traffic." Point 64 emphasizes this separation between motorway and building: "The green zones should, from the start, isolate the lanes of heavy traffic. The lanes of heavy traffic well differentiated from the lanes for light traffic, will have no reason to be near public or private constructions. It is desirable that these be bordered by broad curtains of vegetation." International Congress for Modern Architecture (CIAM), Athens Charte (Athens, 1933).