The Linear City, By Arturo Soria Y Mata

One of the most important pioneers for this concept was Arturo Soria y Mata; he was an urban planner from Spain. His concept first appearance was in an article in Madrid famous journal of the time, where Soria tackles the municipal policies of planning, advising a radical measure for the future planning of Madrid. The Linear City concept had as principal idea one strip of 500 meters wide, the long of the strip would be the necessary, by necessary we mean it could be as long as the city would require. In the center of this strip, the main actor would be the train line and tranvia. Main pipes for water, gas, sewage, electricity etc. Every certain distance would be building exclusively for municipal services, like fire prevention, cleaning, sanitation, security, etc. In this concept, …show more content…
Soria talks about the ideal form that the cities should adopt, supporting his theory in naturalistic and geometric reasoning that points out the spontaneous grouping of building in linear series along the road of the suburban cities. He recalls “ ruralized the urban life, urbanized the rural life, this is the problem and the solution is the Linear City” . In his argument, he compares the garden city and the linear city, implying the lack of attention that the garden city has for the transport lines, curve streets that are more expensive and inefficient and that this perpetuate the concentric arrangement of land values. Meanwhile the linear city make the transportation the main objective into its consideration and the advantages of metropolitan life are couple with the contact with the rural zone. “ A system of urbanization is not due to chance, but the product of an invention and results of a study” . It discusses the justification of his idea from the simplification and rationalization of the traffic situation, which, in turn, determines the pipes of urban services reinforcing the aspect that the linear form is the most favourable to the needs of