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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2016

Columbia and Reston: Two new cities, two innovative projects, two aims, a common vision of society

Résumé

Reston (begun 1964) in Northern Virginia and Columbia (begun 1967) in Maryland were the first new towns erected in the United States since World War II, and have become important models for subsequent communities. They stemmed from the utopian vision of their two idealistic, innovative and ambitious founders, James Rouse (1914 - 1996) and Robert E. Simon (1914 - 2015), who shared bold social and urban objectives. In the late 1960s, in both the United States and Europe, the concept of a new community aimed at responding to the unease and isolation of suburban housing and prescribed a new kind of urban life. Reston and Columbia broke with the traditional model of the metropolis by suggesting a less imposing, more humane and green city. They also encompassed employment opportunities and favored racial and socio-economic diversity instead of segregation, suggesting new agenda and methods for housing modernization. Reston and Columbia became laboratories seeking to retrieve previous experiences while avoiding past pitfalls. More broadly, every new community developed in the 1960s and 1970s was devised with some contributions from older European and American urban experiences. As stated by Mark Clapson (2013), "American new towns of the 1960s were in some ways the culmination in the United States of America of an Anglo-American history of town planning whose origins can be traced back not only to Ebenezer Howard's Garden City movement but also to the Anglo-American suburb tradition in town living pioneered during the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" One of the key initiatives in new town development and especially at Columbia was to set up multidisciplinary teams of leading authorities in fields as varied as psychology, sociology and architecture. Those teams provided a new way to conceive the city with the help of specialists focusing on the idea of community. This was intended to ensure the success and sustainability of the new town. This new practice in urban design, which I have identified and analyzed by consulting a variety of documents: Columbia and Reston archives, reports and periodicals, will be subsequently disseminated throughout the United States and the world.
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hal-04316927 , version 1 (30-11-2023)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04316927 , version 1

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Loup-Marie Calosci. Columbia and Reston: Two new cities, two innovative projects, two aims, a common vision of society. 17th IPHS Conference, Delft 2016 HISTORY - URBANISM - RESILIENCE, Jul 2016, Delft / Netherlands, Netherlands. ⟨hal-04316927⟩

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