Part 2 of the Seminar - New Towns and Regionalism
I have just included the text as the slides seem to be a bit heavy for the website. There is a fair bit more here than in the LeGates & Stout piece, although you will find significant sections of their work reprinted here. This is the transcript from my speech and has not been properly referenced using the Harvard convention, however I have included a list of references at the bottom if you are interested in further reading. If you were going to follow up on any of this, I highly recommend reading about the Utopians - Le Corbusier and Wright. The book by R. Fishman is really interesting and available in the UC Library.
Slide 1 – New Towns and
regionalism
Early on, most city planning thinking
was generally about the single city, but some of the new urban theorists and city
planners were concerned with entire regions.
Slide 2 – The contribution of Patrick Geddes
The construction of Letchworth
and Welwyn helped establish Garden City planning in the mainstream of British
urban planning practice. But other
important planning theories were soon to join with the Garden City
movement. Much of this new thought came
from a brilliant, eccentric Scot named Patrick Geddes (1854 -1932).
Before 1904, Patrick Geddes had
not been directly engaged in town-planning activities. He was, first and foremost, a natural
scientist and an evolutionist who felt that he had a biological message that society
could only ignore at its own peril. His
message was clear and simple. The twin
process of industrialisation and urbanisation had created a vast new potential
in the evolutionary pattern for mankind, which if not realised and acted on,
could lead to the decline and fall of modern civilisation.
Geddes had a “social
evolutionary” approach to planning philosophy, quite unlike any involved in the
planning movement at the time.
During the 1890s Geddes immersed
himself in studying the evolutionary potential of Edinburgh City. This work included the ground-breaking
Edinburgh Survey. It was from this work
that Geddes was able to develop a generalised technique called the “Regional
Survey”, which was to be arguably his most important practical contribution to
the town-planning movement. The Regional
Survey was based on the Le Play formula of “Place, Work and Folk”. The geographical concept of the region, the
importance of the community and its relationship with its environment, and the
need to involve people in their own development towards higher evolution began
to strike a chord of response from the small but growing number of people
interested in town and country planning.
Geddes fully developed the
regional vision that was implicit in Ebenezer Howard’s system of “social
cities” and brought the abstraction down to earth. Before any changes could be made to a city or
its neighbourhoods, a survey would place the city within the environmental
context of its region’s surrounding ecosystems.
Slide 3 – New Towns for America
Of the many disciples that Geddes
attracted, perhaps none were more brilliant and influential that Lewis Mumford (1895 -1990). Mumford carried the ideas of both Howard and
Geddes into his own philosophy of urban development and helped to popularize
those ideas in America. He saw that the
power of transportation and communication technology could actually permit
decentralisation of the population and industry throughout regions.
Mumford was at the centre of a
small but extremely influential group of intellectuals called the Regional Plan
Association of America (RPAA) – a group that included Clarence Stein, Henry
Wright and Benton MacKaye. Mumford
developed a powerful vision of regional planning that would turn existing urban
development away from cluttered toward a clearer pattern of smaller cities that
would fit harmoniously within the greater New York region.
Slide 4
The RPAA’s first important
project was Sunnyside Gardens in Queens — New York, where Mumford and his
family lived for six years, which begun in 1924. Sunnyside Gardens was patterned after the
ideas of the Garden City movement, Covering 77 acres between Queens Boulevard
and the Sunnyside Railroad Yards.
Slide 5
Sunnyside Gardens includes one-,
two-, and three-family homes, and a few apartment buildings. Each private residence has a small front
garden facing the street and a private garden in the rear. The rental units in the two- and three-family
houses enjoy private terraces overlooking the gardens. There are two configurations: the courtyard condition
and the mews condition. At the edges of
the community some homes simply line the street, with a common walkway running
the length of the row. Homes in the
courtyard blocks enclose an inner courtyard that was designated a common,
landscaped but not used for recreation. Each
homeowner paid taxes on the part of the common in the block and lot, even if it
was not used. The mews houses face a
common front court and back on alleys; each mews house also has a private rear
yard. This model allowed for denser residential
development, while also providing ample open/green-space amenities. As an amenity for the residents, lots were
reserved on the northern edge of the development abutting the railroad yards
for a private park. This is one of only
two private parks in Queens.
Slide 6
This was followed by the even
more ambitious Radburn New Jersey project which
begun in 1928.
In the Radburn
plan, Stein and Wright proposed a city using “superblocks” (the high
density clustering of single, double, and multifamily housing around large
areas of commonly held parkland) in place of the characteristic narrow
rectangular blocks, roads for different uses (service lanes, secondary
collector roads, main roads, and parkways), a complete separation of pedestrian
and automobile traffic, and houses turned away from the street to face a series
of parks forming the backbone of the community.
Slide 7
Radburn’s demographic dimensions
were based on the neighbourhood principle articulated by Clarence Perry in the Plan for New York and its environs. However, the full execution of the plan which
was for a complete town with housing, employment and commercial facilities for
a projected 30,000 population was thwarted by the 1929 stock market crash which
saw the projects major sponsor, the City Housing Corporation, bankrupt by
1933. Although only a small fraction had
been executed (housing for about 3000 and the commercial centre), the plan and
demonstration would be influential in the coming years as one of the first
tangible products of a new urban science.
Slide 8
Architect Clarence Perry (1872 –
1944) influenced Radburn, but also took the idea of human scale development
further and considered how to design neighbourhoods that would function well in
the automobile age. His thoughts are
summarised in “The neighbourhood Unit”
(1931).
Perry envisioned the school as
the centrepiece of the neighbourhood, performing a role in the community well
beyond educating primary school children, and argued that the neighbourhood
should have sufficient population to support one elementary school. Perry gave a good deal of attention to the
relationship between the neighbourhood and the streets. He suggested that neighbourhoods should be
bounded on all sides by arterial roads, but internal street systems should be
almost exclusively for use by the residents.
The use of the cul-de-sac and careful separation of streets from
pedestrian ways would harmonise transportation with living space.
Slide 9 – The plan for New York and environs
In 1922, the Russell Sage
Foundation, which was concerned with the nature of development in the New York
Region, funded a monumental nine-year study of the New York region. As chair of the Russell Sage Foundation’s
committee on the Regional Plan of New York and Environs (RPNY), Charles Dyer
Norton advocated a monumental planning effort and convinced other members of
the foundation board to fund this effort on a massive scale. The person he chose to head this regional
planning effort is one of the most influential of twentieth-century planners:
Thomas Adams (1871 – 1941).
As a young man, Adams had worked
on Letchworth and other Garden City projects.
Adams had been the town planning advisor to the governor of Canada and
in this capacity developed the first real regional plan in North America for
the area around Niagara Falls. Adams
assumed the position of general director of plans and surveys for the New York
regional planning effort in 1923. Top
professionals in planning, architecture, engineering, sociology, housing,
economics, and other specialties joined the staff.
The RPNY was partly a scheme to
save New York City by preserving its economic and cultural viability. According to Adams the RPNY had three major
purposes:
·
To promote
lower densities through diffused recentralisation of industry and planning for
new industrial centres;
·
To reunify
home and work by planning for new residential areas near industry; and
·
Sub-centralisation
of businesses for greater consumer convenience.
Some of the plans derived from
these principles were practical and sensible, such as the residential
superblocks equivalent in size to four or six standard city blocks with their
intervening streets. The word
“superblock” later became associated with dehumanised skyscraper housing, but
in the 1920’s it included even single family residences. The land not given over to streets in the
superblocks could be used for parking, for playgrounds, for houselots with
garden spaces, and for wider, safer through streets on the perimeter. The irrationality of the village street
pattern in an urban setting—giving some 40% of the land over to streets and
jamming the people onto the remainder—was recognised in the 19th century.
When all was said and done,
however, the RPNY’s three purposes boiled down to 1: to decentralise and
decongest New York enough for it to continue functioning in traditional
ways. The planers of the RPNY did not
oppose all congestion and overcrowding, they opposed only the extreme clotting
and compaction that carried the threat of death to the cities commercial
financial and cultural institutions.
Some traffic diversion and some retail decentralisation was necessary to
keep Manhattan from strangling to death, but the revived Manhattan was not to be
fundamentally altered.
In one of the most celebrated
conflicts in American planning history, Lewis Mumford and other members of the
RPAA attacked the completed regional plan.
The RPNY’s limitations were hopeless defects in the eyes of Mumford. Mumford dismissed the plan as an essentially
conservative document which dodged hard choices, accepted continuation of the
status quo as inevitable, and failed in its goal of providing a real vision of
regional development.
While Mumford’s criticisms were
probably unfair and overcritical on some particulars, it can be argued that the
RPNY was really a plan for New York and its environs, and not a true regional
plan. The plan assumed the overriding
importance of New York and its continued domination of its hinterland. Indeed, Charles Norton believed that planners
would have to confine themselves to a radius of 40 miles from the centre, a
convenient commuting distance. The
committee thrust out as far as 130 miles, but Norton’s principal remained
intact. The RPNY planned for the area
palpably dominated by New York City. Regardless,
the plan was a success in realistic terms, because many of its proposed
highways, rail routes, parkways, and air terminals were built.
Slide 10 – Prophets of High Modernism
As urban planning became
professionalised and regularised, both in Europe and America, a new urban
utopianism emerged to reinvigorate the movement at the level of theory. While the professionals planned for today,
new dreamers planned for the city of tomorrow.
Le Corbusier, was the prophet of
a higher, later stage of modernism: the city as the administrative centre of
the bureaucratic, technocratic state. In
1922 he proposed “A Contemporary City for Three Million People.” This was a modern vision of undecorated
skyscrapers evenly spaced in a park, that astonished the people of Paris and
that still seems futuristic today.
Slide 11
His ideal was a city in which
people, nature and the machine would be reconciled. For Le Corbusier, order is
expressed by pure forms. The
contemporary City is a perfectly symmetrical grid of streets. The right angle reigns supreme. Two great superhighways (one running east
west and the other running north south) form the central axes; they intersect
at the exact centre of the city. Le
Corbusier considered the health of the city to be reliant on its capacity for
speed. Speed is freedom, the freedom to
exchange, to meet, to trade, to coordinate.
Le Corbusier wrote that the city that achieves speed, achieves success.
Slide 12
He designed an elaborately
coordinated system of transportation: superhighways, subways, access roads,
even bicycle paths and pedestrian walks.
Fittingly, the very centre of the city is a multi-level interchange for
the whole system.
By announcing that his city would
house 3 million people – about 100 times the population of Letchworth – he flew
directly in the face of the Garden City advocates while still advocating many
of their own ideals: simultaneously decongesting cities while maintaining their
density.
In 1925, he boldly announced a
new version of the Contemporary City plan, the Plan Voisin, that was to be
built on a site cleared by bulldozers in the middle of Paris! The popular
response was outrage, but Le Corbusier became instantly famous as a spokesman
for a new, uncompromising modernism.
After World War II Corbusian
principles were adopted by governments worldwide as a quick and easy response
to the demands of reconstruction. Today,
the skyscraper in the park (as often as not reinterpreted as the skyscraper in
the parking lot) is one of the standard realities of modern cities everywhere.
SLIDES 13 and 14
Slide 15 – Frank Lloyd Wright’s alternative vision
While Le Corusier promoted a city
of tomorrow that embraced skyscraper development, Frank Lloyd Wright advocated
automobile-based urban sprawl. Wright
advocated a naturalistic style and vision of urbanism that were totally at odds
with Le Corbusier’s hard-edge cubist conceptions.
Slide 16
Announced as early as 1932,
Wright’s Broadacre City allocated a minimum of one acre per person, with no
large urban concentrations whatsoever.
Broadacre City would be family-based, and Wright designed a small house
with an attached carport that became the model for millions of suburban houses
in the decades following World War II.
Wright was convinced of the car’s
potential to revolutionise modern life. He
firmly believed that the disappearance of big cities was inevitable. The expensive concentration of people was
wasteful when modern means of communication could overcome large distances,
with large centralised organisations more economically efficient when spread
out over the countryside.
Wright’s essential insight was
that decentralisation, if taken to its logical extreme, could create the
material conditions for a nation of independent farmers and proprietors. If properly planned, cities could spread over
the countryside and still not lose their cohesion or efficiency. The diffusion of population would create
conditions for the universal ownership of land.
The world of concentrated wealth and power would be replaced by one in
which the means of production would be widely held. Wright proposed wholesale reforms of land
ownership laws as well as to the financial system, not just designing a new
city model but redefining society.
The Broadacre model, with its
emphasis on the automobile and the telephone as annihilators of space and time,
was prophetic of a new urban/suburban reality that would dominate the planning
of the future.
While neither Wright’s nor Le
Corbusier’s ideals were never achieved in their pure forms, the regionalism and
decentralisation proposed by the Garden City and New Town advocates now faced
two rival approaches that would strongly influence modern urban planning.
Slide 17 – Planning and
the Great Depression
The Great depression of the 1930s
called for a fundamental re-evaluation of the relationship between government
and the existing social order. Faced with
near total economic collapse, democratic governments in Europe and America
sought new ways to stabilise themselves, to protect the lower strata of their
populations from utter destitution, and to invest in massive new programs of
social reform and infrastructure development.
When President Franklin Roosevelt
took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to try and stabilise the economy and
provide jobs and relief to those suffering through the Great Depression. Over the next eight years, the government
instituted a series of experimental projects and programs, known collectively
as the New Deal, that aimed to restore some measure of dignity and prosperity
to many Americans. In the United States,
Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal included a Public Works Administration that
constructed thousands of post offices, courthouses, hydroelectric dams, bridges,
schools, highways and parks throughout the nation in an impressive and uniform
federal style. This was the climate in
which urban planning made great strides.
Slide 18 – Modern housing
for the depression poor
One of the key figures in New
Deal urban planning was Catherine Bauer (1905 -1964), who profoundly affected
U.S. housing and urban development policy throughout the 1930s and 1940s. She was one of a small group of idealists who
called themselves "Housers" because of their commitment to raising
the quality of urban life through improving shelter for low-income families.
Bauer was a modernist with a
faith in larger-scale, rationalised housing using the most advanced building
methods and materials – cement slabs, glass and iron. She saw housing units as intimately related
to schools, shops, laundries, public open space for recreation, and
gardens. Bauer played a leading role in
formulating and securing passage of the critical U.S. housing Acts of 1937 and
1949 which created the U.S. Public Housing and Urban Renewal programs.
Slide 19
The Housing Act of 1937 provided
for subsidies to be paid from the U.S. government to local public housing
agencies to improve living conditions for low-income families. As well as other agencies, the Act created
the United States Housing Authority to control the payment of subsidies. Bauer
served as a Director for the United States Housing Authority two years.
The Housing Act of 1949 was part
of Harry Truman’s Fair Deal program. In
his state of the union address at the time, Truman observed that "Five million
families are still living in slums and firetraps and three million families share their homes with
others.
Slide 20 – Patrick Abercrombie and the Barlow report
In Britain, Prime
Minister Neville Chamberlain had long supported regional planning and Garden
Cities. In 1937, he appointed a Royal
Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, popularly called
the Barlow Commission, which undertook a monumental review of the location of
industry and housing throughout Britain, as well as examining the causes and
consequences of the recent spectacular growth of the capital.
In the
report we can see the idea of decentralisation to garden cities gathering new
strength from a mix of ideas peculiar to the 1930s: the impact of architectural
modernism, with its image of cool, white cubist buildings set in green
landscape; the idea of ‘planning’ as an alternative to the blind muddle of the
market economies; labour party concerns over London’s disproportionate share of
new employment; and a grim foreboding of aerial bombardment.
It was the
danger of industrial concentration at the outbreak of the war and the perceived
need for strong, centralised planning for post-war reconstruction that made
national-level city and regional planning possible in Britain.
Patrick
Abercrombie had sat on the Barlow Commission, and the concepts of the Barlow
Report were reiterated in Patrick Abercrombie’s historic plan for Greater
London.
The
Abercrombie Plan called for the creation of New Towns outside of a decongested,
greenbelted London. Arguably,
Abercrombie achieved for London what Lewis Mumford and his circle had dreamed
for New York, an official plan with an holistic philosophy and a regional scope
which treated neighbourhoods, districts, metropolis and region as an organic
whole. The key to the design was the use
of landscape to define urban form.
These New Towns were planned
under the powers of the New Towns Act 1946 and later Acts to disperse
population following the Second World War. They were not completely new, but
developed around historic cores.
In Britain
and Europe, planners saw regionalism and New Towns policies that helped in the
rebuilding process that was the inevitable work of the post-war
reconstruction. In the United States,
the 1949 housing Act, strongly influenced by Catherine Bauer, called for an
expansion of public housing and institutionalised urban renewal. Massive new efforts at slum clearance and
inner-city redevelopment were undertaken under this important legislation.
Large-scale
inner-city reconstruction projects borrowed heavily from Le Corbusier’s
ideas. Post-war prosperity also brought
an extraordinary expansion of suburban tract-home communities, borrowing the
energy and focus of wartime mobilisation and applying them to domestic
needs.
The great
accomplishments of early city planning must not be overlooked or
undervalued. The great urban parks still
enhance the lives of millions and constitute an incalculable asset for the
residents of great cities. Both the
elegant civic centres created by the City beautiful planners and the comfortable,
sensitively designed garden suburbs built by the New Town developers of the
1920s remain models for emulation today.
And the many dedicated architects, landscape designers, legal experts,
social reformers, environmental activists and others who contributed to the
professionalization of modern urban planning deserve both the interest and
respect of subsequent generations of urban specialists.
References
LeGates & Stout 1998, Modernism and Early Planning
Krueckeberg, D. A. (ed), (1983) Introduction to Planning History in the United States, Rutgers University, New Jersey.
Birch, E. L. (1980) “Radburn and the American Planning Movement: the persistence of an idea” Journal
of the American
Planning Association Vol 46, No 4 pp 424 – 439.
Fishman, R. (1977) Urban Utopias
in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer
Howard, Frank Llyod Wright, and Le Corbusier, Basic Books Inc., New York.
Hebbert, M. (1998) London: More by fortune than design, Wiley, West Sussex, England.
Sutcliffe, A. (ed.), (1980) The Rise of Modern Urban Planning
1800- 1914, Mansell, London.
Wheaton W., Milgram, G., Meyerson, M. (eds.), (1966) Urban Housing, The Free Press, New York.
After it's establishment, the Commonwealth government had no interest in planning other than that of Canberra, and so in the first half of the twentieth century it was actors drawn largely from the architecture, engineering and surveying fields, as well as state and local government who campaigned for better urban management processes and outcomes. Driven by problems associated by the accelerating unplanned urbanisation brought on by the growth of mercantile and resource sectors of the economy, the coastal capital cities with their burgeoning populations and administrative importance became the natural focus of these campaigners, who through lectures, conferences, exhibitions, publications and general lobbying tried to raise the issue of slums, transport infrastructure, civic design and land use zoning. However, these efforts had little effects on policies and protocols covering building and subdivision, although some tangible outcomes were evident in the creation of a number of planned states, housing developments, urban renewal projects, civic improvements, open space and improved transport infrastructure.
