ABSTRACT
Chapter 21 outlines the ideas of modern city planning – from futurism via Le Corbusier to the growing opposition to these ideas in the 1960s and the early postmodernism in the 1970s. A general feature was the lack of interest in city squares – and the transformation of existing squares into parking lots. The Modern Movement moved people into high-rises, high-rises into parks, and motor vehicles into squares, effectively neutering a public life, which anyhow was largely dismissed as chaotic and irrational, in favor of the private sphere. At the 8th congress of CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) in 1951, a renewed interest in “the heart of the city” was observable, and in the 1960s the criticism formulated by writers such as Jane Jacobs and Alexander Mitscherlich provoked a turn in the general view on architecture and planning. To a very large degree Jan Gehl’s Life Between Buildings (1971) was a call for life on the squares.
