LINEÁRIS VÁROS: EGY VISSZATÉRŐ SZÉLSŐSÉGES KONCEPCIÓ AZ URBANISZTIKAI GONDOLKOZÁS RACIONALIZÁLÁSÁRA

Abstract

In January 2021, Saudi Arabia first published the vision of a 170-kilometer-long city on a single axis stretching from the Red Sea across the mountains of Tabuk Province to the Arabian Desert. Earthwork began in October 2022 and this urban utopia keeps fascinating the world. Nevertheless, the concept of a city organised along a single axis is not unexemplary in urbanism. Spanish architect Arturo Soría y Mata was the first to formulate the idea of a linear city in a programmatic way in 1882, which he would have applied for Madrid. 150 years have passed from the original idea to present day and the concept of the linear city appears at various points in time and space. This research focuses on linear city ideas that can be considered antitypes of the Saudi vision. Namely, Soría’s Ciudad Lineal, the Soviet plan for Magnitogorsk and The Continuous City of Alan Boutwell and Michael Mitchell concentrate space and limit the main movement of users to one direction – along a longitudinal axis. As such, this determining decision has a crucial effect on planning, operation and the lives of inhabitants. The core of this paper is the comparative analysis of similarities and differencies, advantages and disadvantages of four linear city concepts from different eras. Contemporary publications and the small number of existing comparative studies provide the basis for drawing the storyline of the linear city and for interpreting them in the history of urbanism. Such a paper is all the more necessary since the Saudi vision seems to be the first opportunity to fully realise ’The Linear City’ existing largely in the form of theories, sketches and blueprints only. After the failure of similar attempts, this urban utopia cannot avoid neither previous lessons nor hinders if it wishes to revive the recurring idea of urban revolution and rationalisation.