Page "Urban planning" Paragraph 26

In the 1920s, the ideas of modernism began to surface in urban planning.

Based on the ideas of Le Corbusier and using new skyscraper-building techniques, the modernist city stood for the elimination of disorder, congestion, and the small scale, replacing them with preplanned and widely spaced freeways and tower blocks set within gardens.

There were plans for large-scale rebuilding of cities in this era, such as the Plan Voisin ( based on Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine ), which proposed clearing and rebuilding most of central Paris.

No large-scale plans were implemented until after World War II, however.

Throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, housing shortages caused by wartime destruction led many cities to subsidize housing blocks.

Planners used the opportunity to implement the modernist ideal of towers surrounded by gardens.

The most prominent example of an entire modernist city is Brasilia in Brazil, constructed between 1956 and 1960.