ABC city
ABC-Stadt is a (mostly historical) term from Swedish urban planning that describes a built-up area that combines workplaces ( Arbete ), housing ( Bostad ) and a small city center ( Centrum ). Such a city should allow the residents a short commute to work, simplify official channels and at the same time create shopping opportunities in the vicinity.
Background and implementation
Sven Markelius , who was city planning director in Stockholm between 1944 and 1954 , can be described as the spiritual father of the ABC cities. He was influenced by his numerous study trips to England and his ideas were reflected in the 1952 general plan for Stockholm. The general plan was later converted into a building program for expanding the city to the northwest, south and southeast. The construction was inevitably driven forward due to the immigration to Stockholm after the Second World War and the enormous housing shortage that followed. The often divided political forces in the Stockholm city administration were forced to cooperate due to the acute housing shortage, so that the most important parts of the ABC cities such as workplaces, housing options, city center, schools, local public transport and the rest of the infrastructure worked well from the start.
In the general plan of 1952 it was stipulated, among other things, that apartment buildings should not be more than 450 meters from the city center. The distance to the single-family houses should be 900 meters and to industrial development 600 meters. It was planned that districts of this type would hold a little more than 16,000 inhabitants. Vällingby , part of Stockholm Municipality, became the most faithful and comprehensive implementation of Markelius' ideas. He described the planning of, among others, Vällingby in the specialist journal Byggmästaren in 1956 in detail, but without mentioning the term ABC city. It is therefore unclear by whom the term ABC city was first used.
In the post-war period, the ABC townspeople concept enjoyed great popularity in residential construction and urban planning in Sweden . The central parts of the cities were already built up and expansion could only take place in undeveloped areas that were outside the city centers. The 1952 general plan for Stockholm differed in one important respect from many other general plans in Sweden: In contrast to many other cities in which this never got out of the planning stage, it was actually implemented in Stockholm. The most credible Swedish implementations of the ABC city concept were Vällingby (opened 1954) in the west and Farsta (opened 1960) in the south of Stockholm. Both places are connected to the Stockholm subway network via the Green Line .
The concept for Vällingby and other similar suburbs around Stockholm was mistakenly called a kind of satellite town . In this regard, Sven Markelius said as early as the 1950s that
... it cannot be expected that these districts or district groups function like satellite towns in the original sense of the word. The distance to the most important workplaces in the city [Stockholm] and the center of attraction Stockholm City is far too small for that.
See also
- New Urbanism
- Spatial planning
- Satellite city
- Urban development , sub-area of urban planning for structural, traffic engineering and economic tasks
- Urban geography
- Urban morphology (geography) - principles of shaping cities
- Satellite town
supporting documents
- ↑ Rudberg (1989), p. 156
- ↑ Byggmästaren 1956 A3, Stockholm structural synpunkter på ett storstadsproblem av Sven Markelius, 49-70.
- ↑ Rudberg (1989), p. 157
- ↑ Friman (2008), pp. 198-199
- ↑ Byggmästaren 1956, A3, Stockholm's structure synpunkter på ett storstadsproblem av Sven Markelius, 54.
Literature and Sources
- Helena Friman: Stockholm: en historia i kartor och bilder Wahlström & Widstrand, Stockholm 2008, ISBN 9789146218432 .
- Eva Rudberg: Sven Markelius, arkitekt Arkitektur Förlag, Stockholm 1989, ISBN 9789186050221 .