Le Corbusier is often referred to as the father of modern urban planning. Any account of the modern city starts with him. This title was the result of a number of schemes Le Corbusier devised for the modern city, which would later prove to be extremely influential. Following World War I, the French government was confronted with a large housing shortage and the concomitant expansion of the Parisian slums. Le Corbusier attempted to formulate plans that would house the working classes as efficiently as possible while also improving their standard of living. Taking his cue from the Fordist industrial model, Le Corbusier released his scheme for the “Ville Contemporaine” in 1922. His idea for “Towers in a Park” was the centerpiece for his scheme for the contemporary city, where sixty enormous cruciform, steel-framed towers would be set in large park-like spaces. Populations would be organized in a modular fashion, where communities would be broken up on a vertical axis. In arranging space this way, Le Corbusier sought to inhibit the urban poor’s capacity to foment rebellion. This city would be divided up into quarters for work, residence, transportation and leisure; there was also a pronounced emphasis on automobile travel, where pedestrian paths were segregated from the roads. Le Corbusier no doubt had utopian aspirations for his novel ideas concerning city planning. He saw the relationship between architecture and society as a “transitive”, where you “change the architecture and society will be forced to follow the program of social change that the architecture embodies”(Holston, 56).

Le Corbusier with a model

What these plans often resulted in, however, was the separation of the centers of production from the urban proletariat. This saw poverty displaced to the periphery of cities, and moreover, poor communities stacked atop one another in vertical, high-rise apartments. While in some cases, the tenants of these new apartments had better access to basic amenities, their new spatial configuration broke up the rooted communities from which they came, dislodging them from the support system they had previously inhabited. In many ways, the kind of urban planning promulgated by Le Corbusier indelibly fractured the communal life of the urban poor.