The city as an egg – Cedric Price
Cedric Price (1934-2003), an English architect, developed the ‘city as an egg’ image. It starts with the walled city and the nominal 1-mile radius under its legal control (boiled egg). With the development of public transport, bicycles and cars, people found it easier to travel longer distances and the city centre became larger, as did the area outside the centre (fried egg). As people gained even greater freedom of movement with more frequent public transport, increased numbers of car parks, safer biking infrastructure and the ability for pedestrians to safely cross a road, living areas become both more local and regional (scrambled egg), forcing cities to compete with each other and making it futile to have city centre, protectionist policies, or to use local zoning rules to suppress competition.
The image above was used in reference to the area between The Hague and Rotterdam, where the edges of the cities and the surrounding countryside are blurred. This is shown below on page 2 of The City as an Egg by Cedric Price.
Cedric Price expected places to change. An extended poster below on his ‘city as an egg’ concept has two-thirds of it focusing on the area he called the ‘tidal zone’: an area of ‘peripheral movement and random links’ which has ‘short life growth points on constantly [changing] undulating zone ’. On one side is an area shown as ocean: a non-urban** area, such as an industrial zone or rural area, while the other side is shown as land he describes as sub-urban. In between is an area that wants to be everything: think of Tamahere, Norton Rd, Avalon Drive, plan change 13 Te Rapa Racecourse, or Te Awa Lakes.
**Non-urban – a place that can generate nuisances, including heavy motor vehicle use, smoke, noise, dust, vibration, glare, and other noxious or dangerous effects ... [it may]also involve deliveries or the arrival or departure of persons from the site at random hours.
Global planner and placemaker Geambazu Serin used ‘the city as an egg’ concept to describe how Berlin has changed over the centuries. She writes ‘We know the city is not a cohesive structure, but instead an unstable series of systems, in continual transformation, reorganizing and rearranging itself through processes of both expansion and retraction’
The Canadian Centre for Architecture has an online archive of Cedric Price’s sketches and notes (link) and many of his talks can be found on YouTube.
My notes on city planning: Germany 1648 to 1806 , Prelude to Industrial revolution 1800 to 1840s , Waikato the golden age 1840s to 1850s , Waikato 1860s , Gentry & Speculators , The beginning of modern planning: Water, Sewage, Housing, Transport, City Centre, Markets and Zoning, 1890s: Introduction, Dwellings & Lots, Reason for Zoning, Horses, Cyclists & road deaths, York, City beautiful & genesis of motorways, Garden City, Dresden 1903, Chicago 1909, 1910s: Hamilton, Columbus, Rochester and Seattle, Newark, Berkeley, Bridgeport, Walpole, Genesis of housing crisis, Hamilton’s 5 leg intersections, 1919 NZ Planning: Urban country, what planning adds & racism, Garden suburbs, rules & Kurralta Park, Root Cause, Cost of renting & Home ownership, Bristol, 1920s: Zoning propaganda