Discuss how urban planning policies after WWII shaped city migration patterns and development. What was the impulse for these policies, and what were some of the consequences and/ or long-term effects?
Overview
Cities’ spatial structures are made up of shapes that change over a considerably longer period of time than the architectural content [1]. Most of the time, they are created in a harmonic manner, increasing or changing pre-existing spatial systems.
There are examples of diverse types of spatial structure growth in the history of town planning when continuity was broken and old structures were abruptly demolished [2]. These were the effects of war devastation, but they were also large-scale reconstructions done for other purposes. Among the towns devastated in antiquity are Carthage and Jerusalem, which were both razed to the ground by the Romans. In contemporary times, the devastation of Magdeburg in 1631 was noteworthy, as were the towns destroyed during World War II.
Many of the latter were in modern-day Poland (Warsaw, Gdansk, Wroclaw, and Szczecin, to mention a few), but others included Rotterdam, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, a huge portion of London, Coventry, Le Havre, and Manila. W. Kil mentions various cities in Germany, including Neubrandenburg, Nuremberg, Wurzburg, Freiburg, Munich, and Münster [3]. Of course, there are plenty such instances from Europe’s terrible past. Another group is the change of cities such as Paris by G. Haussmann or Bucharest by N. Ceaușescu in the twentieth century.
The aforementioned measures resulted in significant changes in the spatial architecture of these cities, either via rebuilding or alteration. Some think that it was motivated by a symbolic closure of the past and the beginning of a new era. The change of the urban fabric was a recurring theme in these cases.