Radial-circular paradigm of the city: old-fashioned or modern? : Reflections on Moscow-Wrocław street patterns comparison

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Date
2010
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AESOP
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The focus of the EUSS workshop on plans to lay out a new avenue across quarters of mass produced housing in the southern part of Wrocław and to redevelop the Kazimierza Wielkiego street in the inner city happens to be the starting point of this article. The discussion on the reorganisation of the street network appeared surprisingly familiar to the Moscow planning agenda. Very different by their size, population, history and culture the two cities share the same radialcircular typology of their street network. However the degree of its development is not the same – Wrocław has a much more intricate geometry of streets and its plan is not so straightforward as Moscow’s system of rings and radiuses. Such similarity between so many different cities has attracted my attention and led to a small study on parallels of their evolution. I had no ambition to make a deep and comprehensive analysis of the history, urban development problems and future plans of Wrocław and Moscow. The study is only an attempt to indicate common features and tendencies inherent in the radial-circular plan system and to identify successful approaches to cope with common challenges relevant to that urban form. Therefore the comparison focuses mainly on historic and present day city maps, supplemented by some general data on Wrocław’s history which I managed to collect from the Internet.
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Book of proceedings: Urban change : The prospect of transformation
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