The Atlantic Cities blog has two nicely-juxtaposed stories today: "A brief history of Suburbia" and "If Your City Were Wrecked by Totalitarian Urban Planners."
The first:
[C]ity historian Graeme Davison of Monash University, in Australia...begins with the birth of modern suburb in the early-to-mid 19th century. By the 1830s, he writes, cities like London and new industrial towns like Manchester were beginning to expand outward, stretching the boundaries of the original cores. One observer in 1843 noted that unlike Paris (which was wilderness outside the city center) and Rome (which was desert), London was made of concentric sub-communities "like onions fifty on a rope."
Davison argues that it wasn't just "sheer pressure of population" that encouraged this early form of sprawl. Many factors played a role in the change, including improved rail transit that facilitated movement inside and outside town centers. Davison also points to four major ideologies—one each in the realms of religion, science, the arts, and social life—as critical sources of the shift....
The second:
Romanian authoritarian ruler Nicolae Ceauşescu infamously left a heavy mark on the capital city of Bucharest with a massive urban planning scheme known as the Centrul Civic. In the 1980s, the project displaced 40,000 people, demolished churches and monasteries in the way, and replaced it all with 8 square kilometers of communist-era concrete buildings and government complexes in the heart of what had been a historic city.
One of the new monuments, the 3.7 million square-foot Palace of the Parliament, is thought to be the largest administrative building in the world, and it anchors the Centrul Civic along a dramatic axis in much the same way that the U.S. Capitol does in Washington, D.C. To this day, the palace and the brutally rebuilt urban fabric around it remain “perhaps the most violent scar left by a totalitarian regime,” in the words of Bogdan Ilie and Dan Achim.
I will finish reading them...someday...