Session details
Organizer(s)
Simon Gunn (University of Leicester) and Elvira Kaihrullina (University of Valladolid)
Keywords
Transport, Intermodal, Planning
Abstract
After 1945 the rationalisation of urban traffic became a key objective in urban renewal and in the construction of cities in both Eastern and Western Europe. Large-scale road infrastructure related to motor transport began to be engineered with significant implications for urban morphology. However, automobility was not the only transport system which shaped post-war urban planning. Within the traffic rationalization paradigm every mode of transport, including tram, trolley-bus and rail, was involved in reconstruction and renewal. Specific areas of concern included pedestrianism, mass passenger transit, airports and infrastructural connections with regional and national transport facilities.
An important aspect of transport planning was how to interrelate all these transport infrastructures, separated spatially, within the larger urban transport system to facilitate mobility and to relieve pressure from the growing volume of motor traffic on city roads. It was a complex process to implement as every mode of transport had its spatial requirements and technical demands. The reconciliation of these systems was a new challenge for planners and politicians, resulting in various solutions based on competition as well as complementarity between different modes of transport.
This session focuses on understanding the interrelationship, interconnection and interdependence of urban transport systems in Eastern and Western Europe during the mid- and later twentieth century.
Papers
From Rome To Paris: Free Public Transport - A Transnational Urban Utopia of the 1970s?
Author(s)
Daniel Gordon (Edge Hill University)
Keywords
Transport, Intermodal, Planning
Abstract
Free public transport has in recent years been portrayed as a radical new experiment, the largest city to adopt it so far being Tallinn, with Luxembourg set to become in 2020 the first entire country to make all public transport free. But there is a hidden history of debates about, and to some extent implementation of, free transport that long pre-date the better-known examples of the twenty-first century. This paper will transport us back to 1973, the first time that the French government seriously considered the possibility of free public transport for the Paris region. It will show how these debates were transnational ones, speaking to wider concerns about inequalities in the modern city, as well as about the balance between transport modes within it. Appearing as a protest demand in West Germany in 1969 and London in 1970, and briefly implemented in Rome in 1972 and Bologna in 1973, as well as in several smaller French towns beginning with Colomiers in 1971, free transport was sometimes presented, in the aftermath of the French commuters' revolt of 1970, as an urban utopia, though often appealed to local urban policymakers for more prosaic pragmatic reasons. Yet a memory of 1970s European free transport debates is largely absent from, for example, debates sparked by the current mayor of Paris about free transport in 2018-2019. So why was the 'first wave' of free transport not more successful? What led to it being eclipsed by more incremental measures to encourage modal shift? How might the French case be viewed as example of how the 'official mind' used international precedents to decide on solutions to national or regional crises? Using material from French national and local archives, the paper will examine how central government officials rejected free transport in Paris largely on the basis of a selective reading of events in Rome. In particular, what was the impact of the thorny issue of whether free transport might counter-productively encourage modal shift away from walking?
Preston Express: Transport Interchanges and Fast City concepts in Lancashire
Author(s)
Victoria Jolley (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Keywords
Transport, Intermodal, Planning
Abstract
Central Lancashire New Town, a British Mark III new town, is a part-realised city for 500,000 people. Sub-regional in scale, it was designed to span between Longridge and Chorley following the M6 and M61 motorways. Between 1966 and 1968 consultants Robert Matthew, Johnson-Marshall and Partners determined its conceptual diagram as an arced linear string of settlements and although its clarity was later lost in the master plan produced by the Development Corporation, some of its city-scale infrastructure, neighbourhood structure and industry was constructed. Some of its architectural legacy, such as Preston Bus Station, has been threatened with demolition or, as in the case of Preston’s Market Hall, been demolished rather than being incorporated as renewal projects in Lancashire’s current growth strategy. Other parts of the original plan, for example the Preston Western Distributor, are finally being developed. In the context of the current resurgence of new towns and garden cities encouraged by the Town and Country Planning Association and polycentric regionalism, Central Lancashire New Town could provide a useful precedent that has been overlooked in recent years.
Since the Second World War British new towns’ concepts and physical forms evolved significantly in response to flourishing urban populations and car ownership. Their purpose was to relieve pressure on existing conurbations by providing jobs and homes on nearby sites. By the mid 1960s the Mark I and Mark II new town types, which were self-contained for around 60,000 people in virtually open country, had been surpassed by major town expansion schemes such as at Warrington, Northampton and Peterborough. As the next progression, Central Lancashire New Town radically departed from tradition by accelerating its sub-region’s economic revival through planned growth and change. The city's transport infrastructure, primarily constructed during the 1960s to prepare for the new town, was key to this ambition.
Transport Nodes or Horizontal Separation? Tram, Road and Pedestrian Traffic Planning in New Residential Areas of the GDR, CSR and USSR in the 1970s
Author(s)
Elvira Khairullina (University of Valladolid)
Keywords
Transport, Intermodal, Planning
Abstract
Coordinated urban transport system started to play a significant political, economic and social role in communist cities from the mid-1960s. This topic was discussed intensively by politics and professionals during rapid urbanization in the 1970s when there were serious problems with traffic congestion and people mobility. Apart from transport coordination, there was a particular issue related to the integration of transport infrastructure with urban planning. With the new mass housing construction programme on the urban periphery there also appeared an opportunity to reconsider some transport and traffic planning ideas.
One of the conspicuous concepts was based on horizontal differentiation of road and tram infrastructure with the internal location of tram line and direct access of pedestrians. This concept was compared and contrasted to the existing solution based on complex transport nodes and strict separation of transport from pedestrian traffic. As a result of these discussions different transport solutions were formed for new residential areas in the three countries of study. The objective of this paper is to understand how and why transport infrastructure planning differed among the three socialist countries. The methodology of the paper is based on the analysis of theoretical studies and proposals of transport and urban planners. Then, these ideas will be compared between Gorbitz (Dresden, GDR), Bohunice and Lisen (Brno, CSR) and Sykhiv (Lviv, USSR).
The paper concludes that the new concept of residential area was one of the first attempts to change the idea of the auto-oriented city, improving the conditions of public transport and pedestrian movement. Although all three communist countries had theoretical studies about this concept, widespread implementation only occurred in the GDR, in some experimental projects of the CSR and was not applied in the USSR. This difference between the three socialist countries was conditioned mainly by the different level of political control in town planning, by criticism of Modern Movement principles, and by diverse professional approaches in transport planning.