TravelGuide-Alamar-2016-web

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47 | the Alamar travel guide
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Fig 4.3: The Reverse Map
Modernist town planning
Modernist town planning was an excessive analytical
approach to space production. Top-down planning, as a
solution for urban development, influenced huge parts of
the world including Western Europe and the eastern Soviet
Bloc after the Second World War and during the Cold War.
Clearly, the development of Cuban urbanism was also
influenced by its economic relations with the Soviet Union.
The neglected public
space
Alamar is the child of a
masterplan that wasn’t fully
realised. Add a layer of
geographical segregation
from the center of Havana
and the economic crisis of
the 90s, and the results
filter down to the poor state
of public spaces in Alamar.
Within modernism existed a “belief in linear progress,
positivist, technocratic, rational planning of social and
geographic space; ‘standardized conditions of knowledge and production and a firm
faith in the rational ordering of urban space’ to achieve individual liberty and human
welfare”. 3 Modernist planners aimed to correct the ‘chaos’ of the city and create an
ideal order.
The modernist town planning principles were accepted by the socialist state of Cuba
and visualized in the standardization and the strong zoning of Alamar as the solution
for the housing shortage. Fulfilling the demand of houses was perceived as the new
essence of socialism and as a positive act towards the Cubans. The ideologies and
plans found their application in the masterplans for Alamar of the 1970s, bringing
into the Carribean the modernist concept of public space mainly shaped by massive
building arrangements around a central spine. The overdimensioned building blocks
3. Allan Irving, ‘The Modern/Postmodern Divide and Urban Planning’, University of Toronto Quarterly, Volume 62,
Number 4, Summer 1993, p. 476