Arturo Soria y Mata (1844-1920) was an internationally important
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
urban planner
An urban planner (also known as town planner) is a professional who practices in the field of town planning, urban planning or city planning.
An urban planner may focus on a specific area of practice and have a title such as city planner, town ...
whose work remains highly inspirational today. He is most well known for his concept of the
Linear City Linear city may refer to:
* Linear settlement
* Linear city (Soria design), an 1882 concept of city planning
* Linear city (Graves and Eisenman design), a 1965 proposal for a settlement in New Jersey
* The linear city model of Hotelling's law
H ...
(exemplified in Madrid's
Ciudad Lineal
Ciudad Lineal ( en, ital=no, Linear city) is a district of Madrid, Spain.
Geography
Wards
The district is administratively divided into nine wards:
* Atalaya
* Colina
* Concepción
* Costillares
* Pueblo Nuevo
* Quintana
* San Juan ...
).
He studied the
civil engineer career (Ingeniero de Caminos), but he didn't finish it.
Arturo Soria y Mata's idea of the Linear City (1882) replaced the traditional idea of the city as a centre and a periphery with the idea of constructing linear sections of infrastructure - roads, railways, gas, water, etc.- along an optimal line and then attaching the other components of the city along the length of this line. As compared to the concentric diagrams of
Ebenezer Howard
Sir Ebenezer Howard (29 January 1850 – 1 May 1928) was an English urban planner and founder of the garden city movement, known for his publication ''To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform'' (1898), the description of a utopian city in whic ...
and other in the same period, Soria's linear city creates the infrastructure for a controlled process of expansion that joins one growing city to the next in a rational way, instead of letting them both sprawl. The linear city was meant to ‘ruralize the city and urbanize the countryside’, and to be universally applicable as a ring around existing cities, as a strip connecting two cities, or as an entirely new linear town across an unurbanized region.
References
1844 births
1920 deaths
Spanish urban planners
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