URBAN ANALYSIS. A REVISION TO THE SIXTIES’ URBAN PLANNING
CRITICISM
Abstract
After the World War II, the cities grew up more than expected, compared to
any period in history. “Planning” was sixties’ main activity: it introduced the
participation in urban decisions of another kind of professionals, different from
architects, showing a new way to do the city. The planner’s tools and concepts were
subjected to a severe test by growing demand for action. Urban Planning then was
one of the most criticized activities. Nonetheless, the sixties’ urban design became a
pattern, and it is still reflected on our current urban transformations.
As well as the sixties marked our actual cities, they announced the problems
coming ahead of us. The sixties’ urban planning developed many of the actual urban
city patterns, as suburbia or the Central Business District (CBD). Both patterns have
been adopted by most cities in the world. Nowadays, these patterns have been reevaluated; not only by academics but they were also tested within the context of the
actual economic crisis. Both patterns are not economically feasible, and they do not
stimulate a sustainable economy. If we look back on the sixties’ urban planning
literature, we find highly productive discussions, suggesting new ideas and solutions.
This intervention proposes to set fort an approach to the sixties’ thought;
therefore, it will be necessarily to deal first with the introduction of the urban planning
criticism in the United States during this period. The choice of the United States was
not chosen by mistake, but because it appears as an advanced capitalist democracy
and a system desirable by many countries in the world. Secondly, we want to show
urban criticism’s and urban conflicts’ background. Since the suburbs and CBD’s
pattern was spread worldwide, we don’t need to analyze a specific city. On the
contrary, we will analyze critical common points and topics in many cities in the world.
We will introduce some discussions on sustainability, social and labor problems, and
the architect’s role as a social organizer. We want to discuss also the pattern’s
cultural problems, such as alienation and ghettorization. We will re-evaluate both
patterns, and we will highlight their problems and their qualities. Finally, we will come
up with some specific solutions that critics suggested in the sixties. Those solutions
would match today’s current situation. We will consider old ideas in a contemporary
context just to see how history participates on our urban daily life.
1
Introduction
After World War II, the city became the place of many explorations: at this time
appeared urban planning’s most attractive examples, as well as developers’ most
ambitious projects. The raise of the metropolis started with a lot of conflicts and
problems, most of them related to the city sprawl. In that sense, we can witness, from
1950 up to 1969, an activism growing in metropolitan areas. Many writers have called
“critics” to the people who participated in this activism: they were actors form different
disciplines, which took part of urban discussions.
Following criticism topics, the period should split into two decennials. During
the fifties, we can witness a criticism that began by questioning society changes and
the new suburban behaviors. During the sixties, critics switched their questions by
facing the lost of the city in a public sense: the impact of the federal urban renewal
program was beginning to be felt across the country. Critics questioned the urban
renewal as a practice against the city, as well as the way city planning works, and the
city planners’ thoughts. Urban America was seeing then as two different and
separated parts.
Suburb criticism increased since the U.S. population abruptly changed their
place to live. The country moved from a rural territory of 75 million in 1900 into an
urban country of 150 million in 1950. The Housing Act of 1949 dramatically supported
that movement.1 Over twelve million people moved to the suburbs from 1950 to 1960,
marking the greatest migration in the shortest time of the U.S. history. While the
downtown changed their characteristics – it became a central and disturbing area full
of immigrants and African Americans - the suburbs were qualified as “boring and
monotonous”. In short, suburban housing became what John Keats called a
summary of “little boxes”, an idea popularized by Malvina Reynolds’ song:
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of tricky tacky,
Little boxes on the hillside,
1
Mel Scott explains the Housing Act of 1949 in these terms: It was as a fundamental purpose to
improve the living conditions of the American people. It looked for the solution of community
development or redevelopment. It stimulated large-scale private building and re-building, adding new
tax revenues to the dwindling coffers of the cities revitalize their downtown areas, and halt exodus of
middle-class whites to the suburbs. In Scott, Mel. American City Planning since 1890. A history
commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners. University of California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1969.
2
Little boxes all the same.
Some actual lecturers suggest that the single critics’ question during the fifties
and the sixties was “were suburbs good or bad for America?”2 Perhaps this question
is too narrow, since there were too many critics trying to answer it.
Critics were -and maybe they still are- actors from different disciplines that
wrote a precise position about metropolitan changes during the fifties and the sixties.
Those actors built what I have called an “Invisible College”. This College allowed
them to start an unseen relationship. This was an invisible correspondence by the
way of books, conferences and seminars. Thanks to those “ways”, they exchanged
questions, answers, attacks, and contrapositions. What I would like to show here is
how this criticism nourished the urban discussion with the aim to prevent the fifties
and sixties urban chaos, which is our urban legacy.
Criticism different points of view, and the way it changes in the
aforementioned decennials, raise some important questions: What were critics’ main
aims? Which kind of discussions did they hold? What kind of suggestions did they
make? Did critics change professional and educational thoughts? Did they change
the way people used to think about the city or the metropolis?
The goal of this paper is to address these questions and explore their implications in
fifties and sixties urban planning. At the end of the paper, I will show how those
questions revealed some important facts in today’s urban patterns and behaviors.
To address the aforementioned questions, I begin by documenting the key
features of the fifties and the sixties urban problems, while I introduce the creation
and the development of an “urban myth”. Then, I study how critics established some
important concepts for that period, which became remedies and solutions for the
urban conditions. Consequently, I will introduce the role of the urban and the city
planner in this arena in order to explain some professional changes. Finally, I
conclude by reflecting how those ideas are so close to actual ones, and how they
tried to improve their urban areas, as well as the professional and governmental roles.
Suburbs vs. City: the decline of an ancient order
2
Nicolaides, Becky M. And Wiese, Andrew, The Suburb Reader, Routledge, New York, 2006, p. 291
3
As Herbert Gans mentioned in People and Plans, “during the 1950s the
critique centered on the ravages produced by mass culture and suburbia. In the
1960s, it is likely to focus on the destruction of traditional urbanity by new forms of city
building”. Suburbs were stigmatized strongly during the fifties while City Central area,
which became Central Business Districts, were a suitable field for a snobbish
modernity. Nonetheless, the relationship between both places were strong, they
followed each other and shared many interrogations. Both were spectators of an
ancient order’s end.
Indeed, urban America grew up almost exclusively in the suburbs, mainly
developed by housing projects. Even if this urban pattern has been developed since
the Industrial Revolution, the fifties revealed a new conception of its construction and
planning. The planners took over from their reformer ancestors an overturning of the
traditional ends, means, and techniques. As Gans suggested, “this transformation
has come about because of changes in the condition and problems of the city, in the
employers and clients of planning, and in the planners themselves.” 3 Promoters held
many of the suburban projects: big enterprises that did not need a mere description of
beautiful houses and roads provide by an architect, but a considerable professional
process of decision-making.
The architect as an urban planner becomes only one tool among many to be
employed in this process. Nonetheless, an outdated critique of suburbia continues to
feed the perception that city planners are the creators of suburbia, and what they
have created is a “barren and a monotonous environment foisted off on an uniformed
and misled public.”4 Some writers have said that Jane Jacobs, in her book Death and
Life of Great American Cities, was the first to launch an attack against city planning
profession.5 However, even before her attack, Kevin Lynch and the MIT urban
planning school, among others, remarked that the form of the urban space became a
topic without or with a relative importance for architects.6 As Peter Blake shown in his
book, God’s Own Junkyard in order to design a suburb is only necessary to follow the
3
Gans, Herbert (1), People and Plans. Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions, Chicago, Basic
books, 1968, p. 65
4
Frieden, Bernard J., “City planning since Jane Jacobs”, in Rodwin, Lloyd (ed.), The Profession of City
Planning: changes, images, and challenges 1950-2000, New Jersey, New Brunswick, Center for Urban
Policy Research, 2000, pp. 237-241.
5
Ibidem
6
See Lynch, Kevin, “The Pattern of the Metropolis”, in Daedalus, Vol. 90 No. 1, The future of the
Metropolis, (Winter, 1961), pp. 79-98
4
former rural main way. This later became suburb’s main street with a remaining land
parceled.7
Indeed, what is remarkable in Suburbia as a phenomenon is the improvement
of its way of construction. Since the Levitt Brothers introduced the standardized
construction, it was very easy to built a house, and consequently a hundred of
houses. Urban sprawl became very quickly in a new repetitive work made by few
labors, which were specialized only in one job, making the housing industry a big and
mechanized business.
Though, moving to the suburbs was a tendency, its inhabitants became the
target of the critics even before the professionals that building them. For sociologist,
the idea to live in a suburb is a part of a search for freedom not exclusive of the
middle class or the white-collar workers. That is why many of these patterns are still
in reproduction everywhere. Even in countries were land is hold by the state.
Suburbia, in opposition to the city, offers a piece of land, and an extension of the
dwelling walls.
While suburbia continued growing, pushed by the Federal Housing
Administration’s benefits for white lower middle class and the ownership opportunity,
central city swiftly became the residence of a small number of rich people, and a
rapidly rising number of poor mostly nonwhite. The city then was forced to find new
ways of self-income. Some help came from the Federal Government by incrementing
their financial aid by supporting social programs and activities. However, this help did
not represent even half of the private investment as it was in the suburban areas.
Rapidly, most of the central city areas just declined.
With the decrease of its population, the city became a space of everyday
mélange. While suburb population was apparently homogeneous, city inhabitants
were multiracial. In the suburbs, inhabitants came from the same economic level, and
their aims and goals were similar. That kind of inhabitant is what William Whyte
called “the organization man”. On the contrary, the city population was as diverse as
any central city area of the world. City centers offered a variety in zoning as well as in
population. Many critics insist that city centers’ population were mixed between them,
while others insist that they were quite defined, and they were locked into their own
7
See Pictures from Blake, Peter, God’s Own Junkyard, New York, Holt, Reinhart and Wilson, 1964.
5
zones.8 In any case, boundaries and economical frontiers were better defined in the
suburbs than in the city centers.
Indeed city centers were difficult to identify. While Suburbs remained the area
different from the downtown, the city center and some of its districts remained in
constant deterioration. These zones were qualified as blight, slum, or deprive.
Besides its social stratification, these zones provided the most important source of
diversity. Therefore, suburbs and their population were easiest to analyze and to
generalize than city center area population.
The creation of a myth
The construction of the postwar suburban housing developments was
accompanied by a similarly mass-produced phenomenon: the Myth of Suburbia.
Categorized as one of the “major social changes of the twentieth century”, suburbs
were also understood as a “New American Way of Life”. Suburbia was defined as a
glass “in which the character, the behavior, and culture of middle class America is
displayed.”9 Why did “suburbia” set off this chain reaction of images, associations,
and ideas that have combined into a single myth? Perhaps suburbia was in the
center of the eye thanks to its rapidly development.
The suburban citizen was seen primarily as an example of the middle class
American wherever it was found, even out its borders. According to writers such as
William Whyte and David Riesman, the suburb represents the purest illustration of
that new American class, offering differences in degree, but not in kind, from other
American communities. Suburbs then generated a behavior that was qualified as
pathology. While social scientist were worried about suburban middle class
behaviors, slums continued to be unpleasant and reproducing human misery and
degradation.
The Myth was raised almost exclusively referred to the middle-income
classes, who can afford to move outside the city. Indeed, The Myth of suburbia
consisted of the idea that move from the city to the suburb produces a drastic and
undesirable change in behavior and personality. Thus, previously individualistic
workers become hyperactive men, and their wives become hyperactive socializers
8
See the difference between the Boston West End analysis held by Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans.
Riesman, David, The Lonely Crowd: a Study of the Changing American Character, New Haven, Yale
University Press, 1950.
9
6
and status-seekers. Only few of the critics were against these appreciations, and
they demonstrated that working-class never change their behavior living in suburb
areas, probably neither middle income classes.10
Suburban way of life appeared as an idyllic one. Even though, many
newspapers and periodicals support criticism mostly against this ideal life.
Magazines like Fortune or The New York Times, among others, were part of this
attack. Fortune’s articles wrote by William H. Whyte, Jr. published since the middle of
the fifties, reported that suburban population had increased by 75% over 1934,
although total population was increasing by only 25%; between 1947 and 1953 the
increase was 43%. Those medias also condemned a serial of pathologic suburban
behaviors, including the explosion of extramarital relationships and the creation of
adultery clubs. Even if they systematically criticized suburban settlements by
collecting these articles of pathological behavior and publishing a bestseller book by
Whyte, people never stopped to move there.11
However, the Media never saw the Myth in terms of urban problems as critics
did. Critics move against the suburbs because of their large amount of expenses,
and they demonstrated that suburbs pattern were unsustainable in terms of
transportation due to the distances. This kind of under criticism helped to create a
different point of view, a series of discussions that remained out of the Media’s glaze.
The myth of the suburbs revealed more than social pathologist behaviors. It
questioned the urban space as a place of relationship between man, nature and city.
As well as the fifties and sixties look like the looking glass of the American way of life;
they should be look from the other side of the glass. A side that is non-reflective and
that could help us to understand the whole phenomenon.
Critics’ remedies and resolutions
Now is time to re-introduce the critics. By critic, I mean a person who
expresses its judgments, based on merits, values and faults. The most famous of the
fifties and sixties urban issues were, without doubt, Jane Jacobs, William Whyte, and
Lewis Mumford. However, as normal as it could be, they were known because not
10
Look at writers such as Berger, Bennett, Working Class Suburb: A Study of Auto Workers in
Suburbia, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1960; and Gans, Herbert (3), The
Levittowners. Ways of Life and politics in a New Suburban Community, New York, Pantheon, 1967.
11
Whyte, William Hollingsworth, Jr. The Organization Man, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1956.
7
only they create a controversy in the academic milieu, but also they were highly
supported by the media. They announce the coming of a huge amount of literature
referred into the fifties and the sixties urban issues. This large amount of publications
cannot be analyzed as independent from each other. They looked all the same, under
the eye of historians’ information, but they are different in many things. Therefore, I
have used a quantity data matrix to find their connections, and similarities
I focus primarily in a short amount of actors, like the three I have mentioned
before, plus Herbert Gans, Kevin Lynch, Robert Wood, and Scott Greer. I begin by
documenting my thesis with a small amount of books just to see how they create the
“Invisible college” that I have mentioned before. This college played an important role
in the evolution of the urban problems discussion. With a short list of ten books all of
them written between 1960 and 1963, I find out that there were more people involve
in this college of thought, over a 100 people approximately, all of them linked for one
or another reason to the urban planning criticism. Most of them are unknown to the
actual pantheon of urban planning writers, but others were, and they are well known.
To abbreviate the sense of a book into words or writers is part of a quantitative
method in order to achieve another kind of interpretation. By doing a statistical
analysis, I get a list of words constantly used by critics. I search how repetitive they
were and how they were related with the patterns. It may be unnecessarily to show
this list of words but I found helpful to mention it in order to justify the data of this part
of the paper. The list of words helps me to recognize the relevant ideas and solutions.
Proposals for an urban time
Reading the critics’ proposals is like to be in front of an active intellectual,
which was acting to stop what seems to be every potential metropolis problems:
waste of land, misuse of natural resources, negligence towards the increment of
public transportation, and an absence of government affordable solutions to the
region problems.
Nonetheless, there is an astonishing anti-metropolis attitude between these
critics, which at the end were part of a large group of American intellectuals. For the
large majority, the city appeared as utopia to preserve, while the metropolis emerged
as a reality to be change. Since suburbia look like a disease, it is relatively easy to
find many proposals to bring solutions on the metropolitan areas. If the destiny of the
8
city is to become an urban region or metropolis, it is better to speculate on the form it
should take, and the facilities it should have.
The critics were an active part of the public life. They quickly recognized that
suburbanization was not a problem but a way of life of the United States: the New
America of the twentieth Century is urban. Certain critics recognized that
suburbanization presents itself as a capitalistic pattern, where no public services
prevailed such as transportation, parks, libraries, pools, community centers, and
schools, among others.
The urban reality of the sixties, which means, whites living in suburbia and
poor minorities living in the central areas, implied a new challenge for a city and
metropolitan government. Then, the critics demand the local, state and federal
government for action. In words of Paul Davidoff, “the power of government must be
used to break the land use barriers erected by suburban communities”.12
The big challenge was indeed government participation. Differences between
classes appeared among the different urban developments, which built income
barriers. Neither of both urban patterns (suburbs and city center) received enough
governmental attention. The metropolitan government and the local jurisdiction were
not power enough to provide a sufficient volume of the traditional public services.
Suburbs represented long-established American traditions, although not necessarily
the best of these traditions, which means the indifference towards public services.
The big problem was the lack of governmental action. Even politicians and
voters did not want to persuade themselves of the need of such as services. Since
there were no voter’s demands neither popular claims, Federal government never
promoted the investment require developing systems good enough to live in suburbia.
As Mel Scott had pointed out, all the national government attention should be
place at least in developing transport systems. It was a big issue to be analyzing in
dept, and it deserved. While the government was working almost exclusively in
putting men on the moon and to develop habitable platforms that would orbit the
globe, urban workers (academics and practitioners) cannot focus in another social
12
Davidoff, Paul and Linda, Newton Gold, Neil, “Suburbian Action: Advocate Planning for an Open
Society”, in Journal of the American institute of Planners, 1970, January. Republished in Senate’s
Congressional Record, April 20, 1970.
9
problem. For Scott, government could have developed an “economical public
transportation capable of neighborhood circulation as well as high-speed, automated
trunk-line service.”13
Following the same attitude, Herbert Gans was probably the first to suggest
that government must offer a system good enough to persuade people to leave their
cars at home. 14 Some years before, Lewis Mumford suggested that the government
were giving too much subsidies to the private sector instead of incentive public
works.15
Indeed, one of the biggest controversies in terms of government negligence
was the lack of efficient public transport system for metropolitan areas. Critics in
general agreed on the necessity of a high-speed mass transit system. They believe in
technology development, as well as unnecessary displacement of the population. In
fact, almost none of them approved the development of the car industry.16 They
thought that the car industry and the suburban development were both in a confidant
relationship, only interested in benefits. Even though, critics predicted some work
habits changes: The increasing decentralization of industry will mean that many of the
next generation’s breadwinners will not have to travel to the city every day. They
insisted that the time has come for the development of high-speed mass transit
systems between city and suburb. A good public transportation system could be an
efficient mean of controlling urban density, form, and growth.
Only few of American cities can developed a mass transit system. However,
none of them could stop the raise of the metropolis. Since suburb and central areas
were very different, offering different ways of life, there were no chances for an open
discussion.
Density does matter
13
In Scott, op.cit., p.614-616. Many other critics shared this discussion against the development of
technologies out of the urban areas. As Kevin Lynch has said: “Our technology has been reasonably
successful in developing the kinds of weapons and space devices requested. Can we not count on at
least a modest success in other directions as well?”, in Lynch and Rodwin, op.cit.
14
Gans, Herbert, “The Suburban Community and its Way of Life”, in op.cit. (1), pp. 132-140
15
Mumford, Lewis, "Address," in Symposium on "The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan
Region," 1957.
16
Even since the twenties there were “subsidies indirectly supplied to the automobile by the public
highways, while the development of rapid interurban trolleys was prevented by taxation, the strict
regulation of fares, and the lack of subsidy.” Cited in Lynch, Kevin and Rodwin, Lloyd, “A World of
Cities”, in Daedalus, Vol. 90, No. 1, The Future of the Metropolis, (Winter, 1961) pp. 4-10.
10
Cars as well as highways raise questions on density as well as urban shapes
and forms, and suburb limits. Herbert Gans claimed for land restriction solutions, like
the establishment of protected zones and the reduction of land built. Thus: “the land
shortage will probably force builders to develop new housing types that provide the
advantages of single-family housing at a somewhat higher density: possibly a row
house that offers more privacy than those that have been built in the past.”
However, reduction of land is not a feasible solution. It is not in a country
where the land is a private property. Even certain critics also think that the largest
metropolis could provide the greatest variety in choice of jobs and probably the
maximum variety of cultural opportunities. Besides, for many critics the ideal density
solution is diversity at all levels. “The achievement of this ideal is not aided by
mourning past forms of diversity which cannot be brought back to life or by
deprecating the new kinds of diversity as homogeneity”. 17 Instead, what Americans
decided to do until the fifties was to move out of the cities, maintaining their social and
cultural structure. Perhaps a variety of choices could also encourage people to move
into another areas, and create another scale of metropolis, one of small communities.
In fact, if the metropolis will continue its development towards the rural areas,
critics suggested do it in a coherent way. John Keats suggested a suburban
metropolitan region carefully designed as a constellation of small towns. Each town
with its own community center, each self-contained, each controlling its local affairs at
the local level with polite regard for the larger region to which it belongs. The small
town, the small community, this is what seems good about the suburb to most
observers what needs to be preserved, and what the large organization should not be
permitted to despoil. Keats’ prescription is not to tear suburbia apart, but to build it
better: he wants homes arranged so that the illusions of privacy and aesthetics can be
cultivated in small space. He suggested suburbanites to join to build libraries and
swimming pools, in order to serve truly and common purposes. What he proposed is
a smaller scale of suburbs, as well as Robert Wood suggested as an American
natural development: “Suburbia, defined as an ideology, a faith in communities of
limited size and a belief in the conditions of intimacy, is quite real. The dominance of
the old values explains more about the people and the politics of the suburbs than
17
Gans, op.cit. (1), p.151
11
any other interpretation. Fundamentally, it explains the nature of the American
metropolis.”18
If we look at the suggestions and demands aforementioned, we can see that
professionals different from architects made them. It looks that social scientists
explained almost exclusively the nature of the American Metropolis. They were
shaping the direction of city planning, a profession that looked anachronistic and
without real remedies and solutions. Nonetheless the participation of social scientist in
urban matters trigger some changes in architectural and urban planner professionals,
a change that demanded action. Since the first suburban critics were address against
inhabitant’s behavior, social scientist questioned the interaction between physical
space and human use. Therefore, architects reacted by including their demands in
the profession. Thus appeared a new nourished vocation.
Urban Planner: a professional with new tasks
The fifties and sixties criticism revealed new tasks for urban planners; they
were activities far from architecture. Indeed, at this time, the urban and city planner
was not a profession but a specialized subject. It was a postgraduate degree that
could be acquire only in a few universities. Since this formation did not need an
architectural background, everybody could become an urban and city planner.
On the other hand, some architects that worked in urban and city planning
began to be highly engaged against poverty and racial discrimination, thanks to their
close affiliation to social scientist. Many of them fought on the lines of some civil and
political movements, and many others participated in constitutional and political
decisions. In fact, most of the professionals other than planners or architects, who
changed the architecture’s perception and interpretation, got involved in this criticism.
Indeed, this criticism changed the way architects perceived the city, the
metropolis, the region and even the country, and the idea of popular architecture.
Fifties prepared the bases in which the sixties developed the importance of an urban
landscape that could be independent of any aesthetical judgment. During the raise of
the suburban criticism many architects, sociologists as well as artists, started to take
an approach into popular social issues. As Peter Blake use to say referring to the
18
Wood, Robert, Suburbia, Its people and their politics, Boston, The Riverside Press Cambridge,
1958.p. 18-19.
12
sixties “there are certain resources or manifestations on the popular scene that have
been ignored for much too long and that should now be recognized for their
potentiality invigorating values.”19
One of the biggest acquisition for the sixties city and urban planner
professionals was a conscious of a new aesthetic, a territory big and unplanned land,
and a continuous destroyed environment. However, a big professional crisis held this
acquisition, as well as others. This marked a crisis that perhaps is still unresolved.
What was the role-played by city and urban planners? City planning appeared at this
time as an “art plid by a profession dedicated to a set of narrowly architectural goals
and to land-use and design programs for realizing them”.20 It has not paid much
attention to people’s goals, effective means, or to the cities’ urgent problems.
Criticized by the social scientist, city planner switched the way he used to
understand city problems. The City planner discovered that the social scientist had a
broad interest in urban and regional problems, and the architect, landscape architect,
and engineer had only limited interest in design. Since the City planner was not
exclusively an “aesthetical technician”, he was interesting in developed a motivating
mélange of both, and he started to learn from the existing social and formal
landscape.
Changing a profession
The professional lacunas were evident during one of its biggest periodical
meetings in the mid sixties. During the conference of the American institute of
Planners in St. Louis, in October 1965, planners faced through new challenges. It was
not the first time when professionals not related to planning attended this conference.
However, it was the first time when those external professionals arrived with demands
to help the poor, to preserve the natural environment and to reform education. The
conference received with notably enthusiasm the appeal to save the environment,
made by Rachel Carson, who had published a year before her book Spring Silent.
Nonetheless, it was not the first official approach between planners and
environmental issues.
19
Blake, op.cit. This is not my research topic, or even better, my research stops right here. It stops
where some academics start to pointed out that at the end, after years of criticism, people does not
change, or which is the same, popular feelings are as valuable as intellectuals ones. To see the
research, Gonzalez, Margarita, Urban Planning Criticism in the United States, (1950-1970), Ph.D.
Dissertation in process, EHESS-Paris, 2009.
20
Rodwin, Lloyd, “Images and Paths of Change in Economics, Political Science, Philosophy, Literature,
and City Planning: 1950-2000”, in Rodwin, Lloyd (ed.), op.cit., p. 3-23
13
During 1965 environmental questions started to be part of the planners’
questions. That year appeared the first attempt to address the solid waste problems,
the Solid Waste Disposal Act. However, it was insufficient to resolve the growing
mountain of waste disposal issues. Later, the congress of the U.S. established the
necessity of a national policy to encourage “productive and enjoyable harmony
between man and his environment”.21 In 1969 was the National Environmental Policy
Act’s proclamation (NEPA). It set up the Council on Environmental Quality.
Unfortunately, NEPA concerned only actions by federal agencies, limiting its influence
on projects in urban areas.
City planners admitted that they knew almost nothing about ecological
systems. They were not conscious of many of the environmental places where they
were acting, and perhaps they do not realized that with their projects they were
interfering in the food chain of lakes, rivers or saltwater estuaries. Indeed, city
planning as a profession was not able to understand neither biologic nor economical
issues, as many people were demanding.
City planner profession was looking for its identity. Indeed, the American
Institute of Planner membership grew by 50 per cent from 1960 and in 1965, it
numbered more than 3.800. This growth had resulted in the enrollment of men and
women of heterogeneous background and outlook, and there was no longer
agreement regarding the problems with which the profession should be concerned.
Professionals involve in the institute were colleagues but they were unable to
understand each other. Apparently, for the architectural members of the Institute, to
deal with urban problems was good enough work. Perhaps architects, as city
planners were not prepared to solve social, environmental and economical problems.
That was an extra job.
In front of the new professional challenges, the city planner was push to act.
Instead of think in city planning as a romantic civic art, the professionals grappled
with the plan making, regulatory, and development functions. The profession was still
young, as Lloyd Rodwin and William Alonso called it “is an adolescent.”22
Nonetheless, there was a time for increasing city planner’s action; otherwise, they
21
The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.
Alonso, William, “Cities and City Planners”, Daedalus, Vol. 92, No. 4, The Professions (Fall, 1963),
pp. 824-839.
22
14
could become completely useless. The primary urban mission is to provide facilities
for the satisfaction of human wants and desires. “A city, therefore, in terms of
physical structure or any other criteria, is a subordinate concept, dependent on the
needs of people for its existence. People are not dependent on cities to the extent
many planners apparently believe. A city is people in action; more so than any other
single thing city mirrors the wishes and attitudes for its citizens.”23
The lack of professional boundaries allowed planners to be involved in action.
Planners became to be engage in public life and then no longer in a closely, small
and exclusive group. Even before the 1965 conference, planners were encouraged
to pay more attention to the needs of other and less vocal interest groups in the city
as well as another problems that urban planning was created as poverty, social
exclusion, air pollution and garbage waste. “The changes in the conditions under
which planners work have been complemented, and even preceded, by changes
within the planning profession and in the recruitment of planners, especially the
entrance of social scientists into city planning.” 24
Planning for communities
United States city planning demonstrates the culture in which it has been
develop. The city planning reflected the strong social and economical inequalities of
the U.S. Then, the city planning process demands an open action, as Paul Davidoff
pointed out. This meant that it should include a number of different values. Davidoff
suggested a planning as “plural process, a process in which a number of competing
plans are presented to the public.”25 He called this process an “advocate planning”. It
implied the creation of different agencies capable of reoriented public propositions.
These agencies could were private, like New York City Architect’s Renewal
Committee in Harlem or Boston’s Urban Planning Aid. Many of these agencies
allowed the architect to be in front of the inhabitant. They allowed architects know his
or her population objective, and to improve their settlements knowing their real
conditions.
Davidoff was one of the most activist architects of that time. As a part of a
critics’ second generation, he was looking for the preservation of architect’s role in
23
Brown, Robert K., “The Dilemma of Urban Planning” in Land Economics, Vol. 37, No. 3 (Aug., 1961),
pp. 260-263, the University of Wisconsin Press.
24
Gans, Herbert, op.cit.(1), p. 65
25
Davidoff, Paul, « Democratic Planning », in Perspecta, (published by the M.I.T. Press), Vol. 11 (1967),
p. 158
15
urban and city planning, which meant to be involved within the community.26 He
advocated for an architect’s strong commitment, a commitment reflected in political
engagement. He, as many other architects of his generation, learned on social
scientists criticism that “the reconciliation of these two types of planning –advocate or
plural planning and comprehensive social planning- requires the existence of a
healthy political process, one which elicits strong leadership and one which is capable
of generating and sustaining powerful challenges to that leadership. Planners and
designers may, within such a system, act either as political men or as technicians
whose skills reflect others’ political interests, or both.”27
Advocating for community participation started to be a purpose after the sixties
urban planning failures. Since the fifties critics complained against the urban planner
and the suburb as a wrong urban shape, Herbert Gans demonstrated that social
problems are the result of social conflicts, and not of urban spaces. In fact, he
demonstrates that social conflicts came to the population even before to move to a
new place. Social conflicts are part of the culture. The fact of living in a single
detached house does not mean that people were going to live best than in an
apartment building in the city center. This difference between behavior and space
was, perhaps the reason why social scientist had some conflicts with urban and city
planners.
If the planning profession began as a “collection of diverse professionals
sharing an interest in better communities”, then concluded that it is a “distinct
profession, specialists having found a communion. Then, following Harvey Perloff, we
became generalists-with-a-specialty. Now, the demands of specialization make us
specialists within planning culture.”28
People is thinking about
At the end of the sixties, Herbert Gans published an anonymous article written
by a suburb resident. Gans interviewed the author in order to answer a single
question: why people moved to suburbia. Amazingly, the men who told his history,
preferred to live in the city center. After testing three different suburbs, he realized
that the suburban Myth was not true, and that even if his family were growing up in a
26
The explanation on critics’ different generations is part of a Social Sciences Postgraduate thesis
dissertation that will be finish in December 2011. See Gonzalez, Margarita, op.cit.
27
Davidoff, Paul, op.cit., p. 158.
28
Stollman, Israel. “Looking Back, Looking Forward”, in Rodwin, Lloyd (ed.), op.cit. pp. 100-108.
16
small and congested place, he preferred the city instead of a different life in the
suburb. This article called “The Disenchanted Suburbanite” helped me to conclude
this paper.29
Even if this is only one case among many others, the story show that the
raised of the suburban myth is due almost exclusively to the Media, and it probably
does not change people’s minds and interests. When Herbert Gans and Bennet
Berger demonstrated that suburb, the urban space indeed- did not change the way
people think or react, they do not want to discredit the critics who condemned
suburban communities. They were just looking for answers.
In today’s society, there is an envy to live in a detached house. Next October
2009, the Institut de la Ville en Mouvement will launch and exhibition in Paris called
“Dream cities, sustainable cities?” According to a SOFRES survey, more than 87% of
French people would like to live in a house. Immersing visitors in the dreams and
counter-dreams of city dwellers, the exhibition explores “the conflicting desire for
space and for centrality. Its aims are to raise awareness amongst the public- beyond
experts and specialists- of the major challenges facing urban planning today, and the
need for new compromises.”
In 2004 Gregory Greene, a Toronto-based filmmaker presented a film based
on the book The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American
Dream. Very well known in some independent film festivals, the documentary shows a
catastrophic end for the American Suburb. However, it also shows a new step in the
suburbs’ criticism. The movie was qualified as “a great introduction and a real eyeopener for people who are largely unfamiliar with the topic of energy depletion and the
impact it will have on their lives and communities.” However, there is no real statistics
people’s amount that saw the movie. Those who probably did not see the movie, think
that a housing market nowadays defines urban patterns. At the end, population has
the right to choose a place to live, and the promoter has the aim to offer different
choices. These simple actions raised many interrogations for the desirable future of
the metropolis.
In any way, sixties critics demonstrates that values that shapes new
communities are done by the population and not by the architect or the city planner.
29
Gans, Herbert, op.cit (1), p. 371-375.
17
Since the communities are poor, workless, or even middle class with a mediocre
education, urban spaces will reflect that. They doubted if the solution for better urban
places were in city planner’s hands. They also demonstrated that people move from
one part to another because they were looking for the “good comfortable life for
themselves and their families”. They were just looking for a house.
This demand is still in vogue: maybe it is a capitalist action, to be an owner of
his own house. Perhaps, instead of trying to stop more suburbs, we can think in small
cities, or even before, in large public investment to improve public transport system,
as critics suggest. It is true that opportunities in urban infrastructure have generally
received less attention than other urban systems, such as power, communication, or
roads. Even if these ideas of small community become a reality, government and
citizens should play a fundamental role. Citizens can improve their role by the means
of a strong urban education.
Then new social networks played a crucial role in public education. What
gossip did in the fifties, can be do in the present time by My space or any internet
social network. Perhaps those social networks need to be related in an independent
way to the government and the state and local authorities, in order to be possible the
accomplishment of an urban reform.
Actually, in emerging countries where the middle classes are growing faster
than the world average, the idea to be the landlord of a big house, American style,
seems to be a life goal. Live in the suburbs is an ancient dream –the American
dream- in the beginning only accomplished by a few people. Since this dream started
to be affordable for much more people, in much more countries, we could implement
old discussions and conclusions.
Of course, the States implement an urban shape intuitively since the
nineteenth century, and they base its economy in a private development, which does
not allow us to make a real comparison. Even though, global economies and
emergent countries as the block called BRIC, have metropolitan areas growing.30 To
explain the problem is to show how suburban properties have risen since the last
decennial by two times, while public transport keep the same mobilization capacity.
30
A group of the fast growing developing economies of Brazil, Russia, India and China. According to
Goldman Sachs, in India is estimate that 140 million people will move to the cities by 2020 and a
massive 700 million by 2050, leading to rapid growth in existing cities, and new towns emerging.
18
The new suburban areas could produce same criticism. We do not know if the city
planner professional is already acting. Since architects want to be stars, and social
scientist are probably engaged in another kind of explorations, we should ask our
selves who must demand for government action.
The participation of professionals different from architects in the city and urban
planner avoid further land deterioration. Urban and city planning professionals were
as Mel Scott used to say, the conscience of the age. Perhaps, they help to be
conscience of all the urban problems, like unchecked sprawl, urban blight, rapacious
developers, unenlightened public officials, failed plans and perhaps insensitive
architects. Do we need another kind of professional for our urban reality? Our actual
urban reality is demanding for urban planning action. What kinds of professionals are
in place to resolve our urban problems? Nowadays the planner has learned to take
care of his practice as a balancing act in which he tries continually to advise and
negotiate with developers while at the same time preserving his credibility with all the
parties in whom his role depends.
As well as during the sixties, right now we see people different from urban
planners or architects working on urban problems and solutions. Their presence is a
simple call to the architect. Perhaps the huge amount of architects is not an effective
response to urban problems. Designers rather than urban planners are nowadays in
the vanguard of the profession. These days, even urban sociologist are far for urban
professionals’ demand.
As a conclusion, look at the tradition of the new.
While we can talk about changes that could take place, it seems that we do
not realize that our cities are still in trouble. Indeed, the sixties problems are related
with actual troubles. The first problem is the lack of urban professionals. During the
sixties, many institutes and schools started their programs in urban education. It
should be interest to see how local universities are preparing their students in urban
issues. The miscomprehension of the real urban problems such as inequality and
inclusion is part of a narrow education.
The second problem is the raise of a myth. During the fifties is suburbia,
during the sixties, urban renewal, right now, sustainable urban development. The
raise of a myth, whatever it was, is developing as a fashionable topic, and it could not
help to resolve deep problems. In this topic, the Media participation either could help.
19
Fifties demonstrates that people do not react because to the Media information. We
should try to find new ways of education and citizen information, an effective one,
maybe by the way of citizens’ own voices.
The third problem is the scale of our urban reality. We could try to understand
the community idea, to turn back to a small urban pattern instead of the density or
another way of public transport. However, we already suffer of a huge scale in
metropolis regions, perhaps work delocalization could announce a transformation of
urban settlements as critics used to think.
As Marx said, History usually happens twice, first as a fact, second as a farce.
I would like to say also this sentence: just look into the “tradition of the new”. We have
created a new myth: the sustainable development. Since cities are the highest
producers of green house gas emissions they are condemned to change in a radically
way. Our role as urban professionals is facing continuous challenges. Since, this will
be a real and encourage challenge for all the professionals, no matter who can act on
the urban space. We should act as professionals not as stars. However, we also
should act as a society. It depends on us to demand action, and it depends on those
who can understand and who have access to education, to show where the problems
are, as well as the inequalities.
We cannot imagine an urban present without think in all the initiatives that the
sixties’ critics had. We cannot imagine an urban present without social scientist
participation, transportation solutions, governmental subsidies, private participation
and professional improvement. We cannot imagine an urban present without that
legacy. Legacy is not a problem but a reality that we can improve.
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21