Thanks for the great post. I had no idea Le Corbusier was involved in the design of some Indian cities. I lived in New Delhi for a while and traveled around a bit. This makes total sense now. There is some really abstract architecture and grand spaces to be seen. Now I understand the influence. Thank you!
Chandigarh is pretty unique in this regard. Someone else can correct me if I'm wrong but I think it's the only city where a single modernist architect was allowed mostly unfettered control.
Brasilia was the work of multiple architects, Lucio Costa was the main urban planner, while Oscar Niemeyer designed the most important government buildings.
I used to go to Brasilia 3-4 times a month for work. If you got on a Tuesday morning flight you could rub shoulders with congressmen, top-level cabinet ministers, supreme court justices and so on. Many would easily engage you in conversation, too; maybe because I didn't open with political subjects and mainly complained about having to go to Brasilia.
The first problem with Brasilia is that it's horribly located. We did avoid the Stockholm fate of having our historical cities razed, but moved the seat of power to the middle of nowhere. I know that overpaid lower-ranking bureaucrats have houses in the outer rings, near the lakes; but no one who has an actual choice lives in Brasilia. I don't know if it fully qualifies as a city. If the capital ever moves, it will be a ghost town in three weeks and start crumbling (bad architecture and bad construction) within the year.
If you ever find yourself in or near Albany, New York it’s worth looking at the state government complex and university to compare and contrast.
The capitol complex really settles the arguments. You have the NYS Capitol, which is an amazing expression of the excess of 19th century monumental building. Across one street is a circa 1910 replica of a Greek temple turned office building, with a gross 1950s addition in the rear. Across the park is an Art Deco mid rise, and then you have the Empire State Plaza, which is an interpretation of Brasilia in the US.
It’s designed as an over proportioned Roman forum built on a parking garage and mall-like concourse, but the buildings themselves are bizarre. Full of little warrens, and dependent on chaulk and constant maintenance to endure.
The architects sold the place based on the modernist form, but the building interiors are really not designed for their intended use. Function always follows form in these sorts of buildings.
I took my bar admission oath in Albany. The NYS Capitol is so beautiful. Then I came across Empire State Plaza and thought I had entered some Star War set.
There are a lot of planned cities in India, and Pakistan.
Few know, but Islamabad is also began its existence as a 100% planned city. Pakistan invited C. A. Doxiadis to do the planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinos_Apostolou_Doxiadi... . He was considered to be of Corbusier's calibre if not more, at the time.
Faisalabad was planned back in British time. And the now infamous Model Town, as the name suggests, too.
Dhaka, and Karachi were also supposed to get plans at around late sixties, but we all know how it went...
Diodiaxis left Karachi plan half finished when 1971 happened, and Dhaka had an initial burst of orderly development for a few years, but it was cut short after Mujib was murdered, and 20 years of instability followed.
Karachi, and Dhaka now are prime examples of "urban hells" in the world.
I think Chandigarh is the only one he was involved in. "New Delhi", as in the British Imperial capital built next to old Delhi, was largely Edwin Lutyens' creation and predates modernism.
This type of destruction happened in parts of Stockholm, with the historic Klara neighbourhood being destroyed and replaced by roads and modernist/brutalist architecture.
It was apparently very difficult for people to speak up during the forced reloactions and demolishing, but in hindsight it's viewed a destructive act. Too late.
It's not like there wasn't any room for architectural experiments. Many suburbs were built at that time on empty land (with both good and bad results).
Le Corbusier actually made plans for Stockholm as well. They were even worse. The whole Old Town of Stockholm as well as great parts of Norrmalm and Södermalm would have been lost. The raisinf of the old Klara and the related "modernization" was bad, but it could have been much, much worse if Le Corbusier had had his way.
Not just Paris, cities are built on the corpses of their past selves. Go back enough in the life of any major building in an historical city and you're likely to find someone who thought it was an abomination that should never have replaced a lovely piece of architecture
This is not to say that new is always better, to be clear, but cities are living things, sometimes I'm worried we're trying too hard to preserve everything for the future
It’s fashionable to say that. Yet I think NYC would be worse off had he not been around.
Moses was a complex man and he did stuff good and bad. The unique thing about Moses is that he was an incredibly talented individual, both genius and villain. His acquisition, wielding, and addiction to power is fascinating.
The other thing is that he attracted the attention of the greatest biographer of the modern era. His legacy is documented in depth while the people who destroyed Baltimore, Cincinnati, Syracuse, etc get the benefit of anonymity.
Caro boiled it down to one idea: “Moses loved the public but hated people.”
Fair about anonymity, and fair about his talent. But I can't forgive him for what he did to the Rockaways, as much as I can't forgive whoever designed the Inner Loop highway in Rochester. The fact that I know one's name and not the other doesn't change my dislike of what they did.
If you haven’t, it sounds like this is a topic you’re into and i would recommend that you read “The Power Broker”. It’s a summer read (as in June-September), but is a uniquely awesome book.
First a cookie popup with only an "Accept" button (that isn't auto-clicked by Super Agent); then a demand for payment that can't be dismissed, and blocks the article.
At-least Chandigarh was "planned" with a vision or an idea. Ask anyone in India who has lived in or visited Chandigarh and they will speak of it highly. Most other big cities / state capitals in India are not that pleasant to live in and are just built or expanded as per "demand".
Le Corbusier is a mystery to me. I would very much like to understand the intellectual bending of his esthetic instincts that lead him going from this [0, 1, 2] to this [3, 4, 5] and his ideas of "machines for living" [6]. With good intentions, he invented the modern ghetto.
The first few are single family villas, the last four are multi family housing complexes.
For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transport, integrate commercial and residential zones and are fairly nice to live in. Most, however, are simply unhealthy for both the planet and the residents.
It's great to live in dense places; but its benefits are countered by huge, empty plazas that take 15 minutes to cross if I just want to walk to the next corner store.
You're missing how some of those places were built with, or without, the necessary secondary support architecture that was specified in the original ideas.
For example, Communist-era housing blocks in Poland had standardised requirements for availability of grocery shops, healthcare, transportation, sport and recreation areas, etc. for each community built this way, and generally you never had to walk far to get to a grocery store in my experience. What was problematic is that due to worse processes at the time, it took years for green areas to get, well, green.
Corbusier and many places inspired by him seemed to have put the requirements, but often for various reasons those were stripped out - either due to subpar followers, or costs, or even outright malfeasance (one place I lived in had the design changed by builders while architects were on vacation, resulting in much maligned building)
> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
To be fair, there were pressing issues with large slums all across Europe at that time, and they needed to build lots of homes very quickly. I am not sure there were many alternative to blocks of flats back in the day. The problem is also not really high densities, because it also means that there is a local market for shops, restaurants, etc, which can make the neighbourhoods very walkable and nice. Most large projects had plans for things like cinemas, swimming pools, gyms, shops, and stuff. Often these were not built and instead there were these rows after rows of blocks of concrete.
Transport is a real problem, because these places became less and less attractive as they aged and became more and more isolated.
But smaller population densities would not have helped one bit with that. It would just have encouraged urban sprawl which is even worse in terms of public transport and walkability.
What you said is underappreciated in options on architecture. I'm as much of a critic of some themes as anyone, but it's fundamentally about designing within constraints.
One can dislike the result, but proposing alternatives that ignore the design constraints is disingenuous.
If countries need massive amount of housing but don't have time or money to build it... you're going to get a certain type of solution.
And it can be the best solution given those constraints and still an objectively bad solution.
> For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
I saw a documentary about one of these projects. It was contemporary footage with interviews of regular people, asking what they thought about them. A woman gave an answer which I felt was very profound: "Who wants to live where you can't see your kids when they're playing outside?"
It just seems so jarringly obvious, how disconnected it is to sit up in a tower block, coming from someone who is probably used to be able to open the front door and be outside. Also it struck me how these areas are always associated in my mind with delinquency (having grown up around them). Perhaps it's just because the parents can't see their kids, duh.
I grew up in a courtyard style (but much larger, super-block style) area for much of my childhood. The outer box is one section of the compound. The inner boxes are tall apartment blocks. If you look out your front balcony you'll see your kids play with other kids and the older kids will watch out for the younger ones. The box with the 'x's in it is a massive courtyard (think a couple of your football fields) with trees and playgrounds and space for sports. It is encircled by a road that leaves at that top right area.
I consider my neighbourhood in Western Europe a great modernist success:
Blocks are mostly around 7 floors high, with access organized vertically - each floor landing has typically 3 apartments around the lift/stairwell, so no 'streets in the sky'.
Plenty of shops (and entrances!) at ground level of each block.
Lots of parks, schools, trams, etc interspersed amongst the blocks.
I can't find any online searchable text of his great polemic, "Towards a New Architecture" -- but basically if you read that it's pretty clear: he hated people. Individual humans are fine and should have their needs efficiently catered to, but humans, en masse, are a repugnant horror that need to be cleaned up.
From memory, he described the cafes and bars of Paris as "fungus which consumes the pavement". He wanted to raze Paris to the ground in order to sort that out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin). There was one line in particular -- I wish I could find the exact text, but it went something like this: "the modern phonograph or victrola can perfectly reproduce the sounds of the orchestra, so there is no more need for the modern man to expose himself to the germs of the audience of the virtuoso of the soloist."
(I threw that book across the room SO many times during architecture school.)
In short: at one scale Corbusier may have had a fine sense of aesthetics and a generally keen mind, but at social scales he was a sociopathic germophobe who absolutely abhorred the complexity of organic living systems.
It's borderline ignorant to call Unite buildings ghettos, especially if you're judging them only by looks. I've been in several of them in the article and loved it, in some places they're coveted places to live - if they've been maintained and supported with surrounding infrastructure.
Relevant quote:
"
High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.”
"
I stayed in one of Le Corbusier's buildings in Marseilles (now a hotel) and loved it, but his treatment of neighbourhoods seems to ignore human nature/scale to our detriment.
I've watched many architecture TV programs presenting works of Le Corbusier, the Bauhaus school, and other examples of modernism. And often I've walked away with a "Wow" feeling, there is in some sense a kind of majestic beauty in it.
But OTOH I'm thinking that actually living in an environment like that would get, well, quite boring after a while. Lacking all the small ornaments and other minor details that you notice when you're there day in an out. It might look cluttered and disorganized in a glossy architecture magazine, but, well, I guess people actually living there might well prefer it that way.
Wonderful article - I had no idea that Le Corbusier was involved in "modernizing" an Indian city.
But I feel like some maps and aerial views and wider shots would've illustrated some of the higher-level discussions for a Westerner like me.
I kept craving more visuals to correspond to what the author was talking about. Often the phots they did provide contrasted quite strongly with the descriptions - like when discussing the upper-class Sector 23 and the more cosmopolitan Sector 17 (these names are almost cartoonishly dystopian) the photos seem to be almost reversed, since the Sector 23 photo looks much more run-down contrasted against the open and polished plaza shown of Sector 17.
I looked at the city on Google maps; the street grid is prominent but I didn't feel like I good a good idea of how the city is laid out into sectors as the article mentioned. One thing I did notice were some blocks of the city that did not conform to the overall grid (there's a prominent one in the southwest of the central city). Does anyone know if these were instances of post-Corbusier demolition and rebuilding, or were these part of the original plan? It would be interesting to know how much the city has changed sense it was designed and built (in the 60s I guess?).
I have visited this city. These photos and this story do not do it justice. There are multiple beautiful parks in every sector, a massive jogging park, a man made lake, for example.
Yes, Corbusier's vision of cities was tied to speed, and by consequence, to cars.
But Chandigarh today has fantastic segregated bike infrastructure! No other Indian city comes close. The city itself is pan-flat and relatively small (shaped as a rectangle where the longer side is 10 kilometers).
Cycle the routes and you see the vast array of tradesman, workers, maids, and vegetable vendors travel by cycle. Big apartment complexes will have bike stands full of pink bicycles that the maids would use.
Granted the city has far too many cars, but the article doesn't adequately reflect the town and all its people.
Man, I recall in good old 2008, arriving into Chandigarh after almost month of backpacking in rest of India. What a shock it was! Straight roads in mesh, traffic lights everywhere. It looked and felt so surreal, detached from rest of Indian subcontinent which felt to me to be in some very distant parallel universe.
I was there in 2006, but I started my journey recovering from jet lag there, and I kept thinking "this seems very different from what I expected India to be like". My traveling companion explained it is in fact completely different from most of India (and so I found in the rest of my visit).
I'm currently reading Suburban Nation by Duany et al, and they talk about this exact thing - how the most desirable neighborhoods in old US cities like Boston or Washington are the old, dense, mixed-use parts of town. The book is twenty years old but it is still a good introduction to some of the problems of American-style suburbia.
The 19th-century warehouses that are so trendy these days were abominations back in the day. I think it’s very difficult to predict with any king of accuracy what people will like 100 years from now.
This does not really change the fact that we are applying current ideas about how a building should look like in a future we don’t know. For all we know refurbished brutalist buildings will be all the rage in 2070.
Well, I lived in a converted warehouse. Then I lived in a new-build next door. The converted warehouse had an aesthetic, but the new build? Fucking gorgeous, man. Look out over the Thames, massive panes of glass. The thing those warehouses have that you can't beat is location. They're all right on the river for obvious reasons.
Great read. I wonder the author will think of bay area suburbia and in general american suburbs. It's depressingly same story - vast for no reason, designed for cars, just vast emptiness for no real reason, climate unfriendly
I immediately find myself asking whether the mistake is to allow one person to govern so much of a design of something so large and multi-purpose as a city.
Many places where people complain of a failed designed city are complaining about its uniformity, whereas most places that people rate highly will have an enormous range of styles, sizes, ages and even geometry.
It seems like a more useful design would need to be organic. You could have an open competition for people to simulate how a real town would have grown over time taking into account what happened in that part of the world (famines, wars etc.) to end up with something that could look much more varied and interesting but which could be built to modern standards of efficiency and also can design things like roads and services more sustainably, instead of creating something that cannot be maintained for reasonable money (digging up roads all the time, tarmac etc.)
This article misses the mark in so so many ways.
Chandigarh is pretty much the only livable city in the country!
- "unnecessarily large scale" is the reason that it is the only city in India that doesn't suffocate it's own residents
- wide avenues, open spaces and numerous public parks encourage families to step out of their residential sectors often. Walk into any park after 4pm during the week, and you will see children and adults of all ages exercising/ playing sports
- It is also one of the few places where the bureaucracy has enforced strict building codes to prevent the kind of construction creep you see in large tier 1 metropolitan centers
I remember Chandigarh as refreshingly quiet compared to many other Indian cities. And easy to get around. It's a nice weekend getaway from Delhi. The rock garden is a fascinating place to explore there.
62 comments
[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadps. see comment below, it was the work of multiple architects
The first problem with Brasilia is that it's horribly located. We did avoid the Stockholm fate of having our historical cities razed, but moved the seat of power to the middle of nowhere. I know that overpaid lower-ranking bureaucrats have houses in the outer rings, near the lakes; but no one who has an actual choice lives in Brasilia. I don't know if it fully qualifies as a city. If the capital ever moves, it will be a ghost town in three weeks and start crumbling (bad architecture and bad construction) within the year.
The capitol complex really settles the arguments. You have the NYS Capitol, which is an amazing expression of the excess of 19th century monumental building. Across one street is a circa 1910 replica of a Greek temple turned office building, with a gross 1950s addition in the rear. Across the park is an Art Deco mid rise, and then you have the Empire State Plaza, which is an interpretation of Brasilia in the US.
It’s designed as an over proportioned Roman forum built on a parking garage and mall-like concourse, but the buildings themselves are bizarre. Full of little warrens, and dependent on chaulk and constant maintenance to endure.
The architects sold the place based on the modernist form, but the building interiors are really not designed for their intended use. Function always follows form in these sorts of buildings.
Few know, but Islamabad is also began its existence as a 100% planned city. Pakistan invited C. A. Doxiadis to do the planning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constantinos_Apostolou_Doxiadi... . He was considered to be of Corbusier's calibre if not more, at the time.
Faisalabad was planned back in British time. And the now infamous Model Town, as the name suggests, too.
Dhaka, and Karachi were also supposed to get plans at around late sixties, but we all know how it went...
Diodiaxis left Karachi plan half finished when 1971 happened, and Dhaka had an initial burst of orderly development for a few years, but it was cut short after Mujib was murdered, and 20 years of instability followed.
Karachi, and Dhaka now are prime examples of "urban hells" in the world.
It was apparently very difficult for people to speak up during the forced reloactions and demolishing, but in hindsight it's viewed a destructive act. Too late.
It's not like there wasn't any room for architectural experiments. Many suburbs were built at that time on empty land (with both good and bad results).
This is not to say that new is always better, to be clear, but cities are living things, sometimes I'm worried we're trying too hard to preserve everything for the future
Moses was a complex man and he did stuff good and bad. The unique thing about Moses is that he was an incredibly talented individual, both genius and villain. His acquisition, wielding, and addiction to power is fascinating.
The other thing is that he attracted the attention of the greatest biographer of the modern era. His legacy is documented in depth while the people who destroyed Baltimore, Cincinnati, Syracuse, etc get the benefit of anonymity.
Caro boiled it down to one idea: “Moses loved the public but hated people.”
If you haven’t, it sounds like this is a topic you’re into and i would recommend that you read “The Power Broker”. It’s a summer read (as in June-September), but is a uniquely awesome book.
Please don't post paywalled articles.
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Maison_b...
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a6/CF05.jpg
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3c/VillaSavoye.j...
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sainte-Marie_de_la_Tourette#/m...
[4] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a1/Corbusie...
[5] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d6/Ch...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation
[1]https://lecorbusier-worldheritage.org/wp-content/webpc-passt...
For some reason, people in Europe back in the 60s believed that creating dense housing only units with no sense of scale, long commutes and walks and 100% car dependence was the way forward.
That experiment backfired almost everywhere. Some of these homes, both in Eastern and Western Europe are well connected via public transport, integrate commercial and residential zones and are fairly nice to live in. Most, however, are simply unhealthy for both the planet and the residents.
It's great to live in dense places; but its benefits are countered by huge, empty plazas that take 15 minutes to cross if I just want to walk to the next corner store.
For example, Communist-era housing blocks in Poland had standardised requirements for availability of grocery shops, healthcare, transportation, sport and recreation areas, etc. for each community built this way, and generally you never had to walk far to get to a grocery store in my experience. What was problematic is that due to worse processes at the time, it took years for green areas to get, well, green.
Corbusier and many places inspired by him seemed to have put the requirements, but often for various reasons those were stripped out - either due to subpar followers, or costs, or even outright malfeasance (one place I lived in had the design changed by builders while architects were on vacation, resulting in much maligned building)
To be fair, there were pressing issues with large slums all across Europe at that time, and they needed to build lots of homes very quickly. I am not sure there were many alternative to blocks of flats back in the day. The problem is also not really high densities, because it also means that there is a local market for shops, restaurants, etc, which can make the neighbourhoods very walkable and nice. Most large projects had plans for things like cinemas, swimming pools, gyms, shops, and stuff. Often these were not built and instead there were these rows after rows of blocks of concrete.
Transport is a real problem, because these places became less and less attractive as they aged and became more and more isolated.
But smaller population densities would not have helped one bit with that. It would just have encouraged urban sprawl which is even worse in terms of public transport and walkability.
One can dislike the result, but proposing alternatives that ignore the design constraints is disingenuous.
If countries need massive amount of housing but don't have time or money to build it... you're going to get a certain type of solution.
And it can be the best solution given those constraints and still an objectively bad solution.
I saw a documentary about one of these projects. It was contemporary footage with interviews of regular people, asking what they thought about them. A woman gave an answer which I felt was very profound: "Who wants to live where you can't see your kids when they're playing outside?"
It just seems so jarringly obvious, how disconnected it is to sit up in a tower block, coming from someone who is probably used to be able to open the front door and be outside. Also it struck me how these areas are always associated in my mind with delinquency (having grown up around them). Perhaps it's just because the parents can't see their kids, duh.
I consider my neighbourhood in Western Europe a great modernist success:
Blocks are mostly around 7 floors high, with access organized vertically - each floor landing has typically 3 apartments around the lift/stairwell, so no 'streets in the sky'.
Plenty of shops (and entrances!) at ground level of each block.
Lots of parks, schools, trams, etc interspersed amongst the blocks.
Private balconies for all.
From memory, he described the cafes and bars of Paris as "fungus which consumes the pavement". He wanted to raze Paris to the ground in order to sort that out. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Voisin). There was one line in particular -- I wish I could find the exact text, but it went something like this: "the modern phonograph or victrola can perfectly reproduce the sounds of the orchestra, so there is no more need for the modern man to expose himself to the germs of the audience of the virtuoso of the soloist."
(I threw that book across the room SO many times during architecture school.)
In short: at one scale Corbusier may have had a fine sense of aesthetics and a generally keen mind, but at social scales he was a sociopathic germophobe who absolutely abhorred the complexity of organic living systems.
Relevant quote: " High-modernist (think Bauhaus and Le Corbusier) aesthetics necessarily lead to simplification, since a reality that serves many purposes presents itself as illegible to a vision informed by a singular purpose. Any elements that are non-functional with respect to the singular purpose tend to confuse, and are therefore eliminated during the attempt to “rationalize.” "
I stayed in one of Le Corbusier's buildings in Marseilles (now a hotel) and loved it, but his treatment of neighbourhoods seems to ignore human nature/scale to our detriment.
But OTOH I'm thinking that actually living in an environment like that would get, well, quite boring after a while. Lacking all the small ornaments and other minor details that you notice when you're there day in an out. It might look cluttered and disorganized in a glossy architecture magazine, but, well, I guess people actually living there might well prefer it that way.
But I feel like some maps and aerial views and wider shots would've illustrated some of the higher-level discussions for a Westerner like me.
I kept craving more visuals to correspond to what the author was talking about. Often the phots they did provide contrasted quite strongly with the descriptions - like when discussing the upper-class Sector 23 and the more cosmopolitan Sector 17 (these names are almost cartoonishly dystopian) the photos seem to be almost reversed, since the Sector 23 photo looks much more run-down contrasted against the open and polished plaza shown of Sector 17.
But Chandigarh today has fantastic segregated bike infrastructure! No other Indian city comes close. The city itself is pan-flat and relatively small (shaped as a rectangle where the longer side is 10 kilometers).
Cycle the routes and you see the vast array of tradesman, workers, maids, and vegetable vendors travel by cycle. Big apartment complexes will have bike stands full of pink bicycles that the maids would use.
Granted the city has far too many cars, but the article doesn't adequately reflect the town and all its people.
Tourists still flock to old parts of towns and 19th-century factories are refurbished into elite apartments.
Many places where people complain of a failed designed city are complaining about its uniformity, whereas most places that people rate highly will have an enormous range of styles, sizes, ages and even geometry.
It seems like a more useful design would need to be organic. You could have an open competition for people to simulate how a real town would have grown over time taking into account what happened in that part of the world (famines, wars etc.) to end up with something that could look much more varied and interesting but which could be built to modern standards of efficiency and also can design things like roads and services more sustainably, instead of creating something that cannot be maintained for reasonable money (digging up roads all the time, tarmac etc.)
- "unnecessarily large scale" is the reason that it is the only city in India that doesn't suffocate it's own residents
- wide avenues, open spaces and numerous public parks encourage families to step out of their residential sectors often. Walk into any park after 4pm during the week, and you will see children and adults of all ages exercising/ playing sports
- It is also one of the few places where the bureaucracy has enforced strict building codes to prevent the kind of construction creep you see in large tier 1 metropolitan centers