Abstract
IN this essay on the general principles of town-JL planning, Dr. Fooks, emphasizing that population density should form the starting point for urban planning, reviews the methods already suggested for measuring the density of population in urban areas and then suggests a new method which would enable a comparable analysis of different cities to be made, free from the confusion of arbitrary administrative boundaries which constitute the major defect in density figures in relation to a whole urban or metropolitan area when considered as a basis for urban development or rehabilitation. To overcome this defect, Dr. Fooks proposes to introduce clearly defined notions for expressing the environmental factor of urban living conditions and for measuring population distribution, and to illustrate the distribution of the population within urban areas by means of the diagram of population density in its various forms, based on the distance grid. He would then replace the vague overall density figures by distance-density figures and distance-density factors; and superimposing on a city plan a circular distance grid, and calculating the densities for individual segments of each concentric ring, he obtains a rational area density diagram which can be used effectively, if not universally, to implement the sociological approach to planning of which Lewis Mumford, F. J. Osborn, T. Sharp and Ebenezer Howard have been such eloquent exponents.
X-Ray the City!
The Density Diagram: Basis for Urban Planning. By Dr. Ernest Fooks. Pp. 108. (Melbourne: Ruskin Press, 1946.) 12s.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
BRIGHTMAN, R. X-Ray the City!. Nature 161, 297 (1948). https://doi.org/10.1038/161297a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/161297a0