Civitas by Design: Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism 9780812205282

Citation preview

Civitas by Design

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Civitas by Design Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism

Howard Gillette, Jr.

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

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Copyright 䉷 2010 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gillette, Howard. Civitas by design : building better communities, from the garden city to the new urbanism / Howard Gillette, Jr. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4247-8 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. City planning—United States—History. 2. Community development—United States—History. 3. Urbanization—United States—History. I. Title. HT167.G55 2010 307.1⬘2160973—dc22 2009044901

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For Margaret

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Contents

Introduction

1

1.

Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention

5

2.

The Garden City in America

23

3.

The City: Film as Artifact

4.

The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning

5.

The Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City

6.

James Rouse and American City Planning

7.

The New Urbanism: ‘‘Organizing Things That Matter’’

8.

Civitas in the Design of Low-Income Housing Conclusion Notes

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Index

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45 60 77

95 115

134

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction

Americans have perpetually harbored complex and often uncomfortable feelings about urban life. Recognizing early in their national history that cities performed critical economic functions, they nonetheless worried about the effects of concentrated settlement, not just on individual behavior but on citizenship itself. Thomas Jefferson was not alone in the belief, which he stated in Notes on Virginia, that ‘‘the mobs of great cities add just as much to the support of government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.’’1 Stating his strong preference for agrarian republicanism over social conditions generated in European cities, Jefferson, like others after him, nonetheless ultimately embraced the forces of modernization. For critics who followed, the challenge lay not in avoiding urban development but making it work according to republican principles. Over time, solutions differed, but one strain remained remarkably consistent: the belief that in improving the physical environment lay the key to civic as well as social regeneration. Countless reforms, of course, were incremental. Among the most lasting and influential efforts, however, were those intended to uplift whole communities. Distressed by the ways urban density fostered anonymity and social differences at the cost of solidarity, reformers sought new means to bring together the ‘‘people’’ in whom the nation’s founders had endowed so many powers. Through interventions in public spaces as well as private living conditions, they sought to enhance both sociability and knowledge among strangers. Their goal was not simply better people. Ultimately, they sought to shape civitas—the community of citizens— through design.2 These efforts first emerged in concentrated form in the early twentieth century, as critics of unbridled capitalism on both sides of the Atlantic sought alternative ways of assuring more responsive and humane uses of investment. In England, Ebenezer Howard’s vision for a whole network of

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garden cities organized on the principle of returning to residents the increased value of the land as it was improved provided a powerful alternative to the status quo. Progressive reformers in the United States embraced a number of methods for countering the ill effects of the prevailing laissezfaire ideology. They shared with Howard, however, faith in the ameliorative effect of a good environment and sought in their best efforts to implement change for the betterment of civic life, not just of individuals. Reform withered with the disillusionment that followed World War I, but other efforts emerged, not least through a small band of architects and critics who formed the Regional Planning Association of America in the mid-1920s. From their extraordinary members, among them Lewis Mumford, Clarence Arthur Perry, Catherine Bauer, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright, came innovations to building practice that envisioned broad social benefits through good physical design. Through their writing as well as their building experiments they left a vital record of what I have chosen to call here ‘‘civitas by design.’’ This legacy remained in evidence as I undertook graduate training at Yale in the mid-1960s. Christopher Tunnard, of the School of Architecture, was an enthusiast of Lewis Mumford’s sweeping formulations for a revitalized urban civilization based on purposeful regional planning and respect for the natural environment. It was through him that I was exposed to Mumford’s assertion, which has been repeated more than once in my subsequent writing, that ‘‘The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. . . . here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused.’’3 Times were changing, however. Mumford’s emphasis on the central agency of cities remained pertinent, but the focus for reform was shifting. Even as New Haven received accolades from journalists as well as academics for its extraordinary ability to tap federal funds in the cause of ‘‘urban renewal,’’ Mayor Richard C. Lee came under intense fire from local activists for putting physical revitalization ahead of human welfare. When civil disturbances wracked the city in August 1967, a protest document directed at the mayor carried with it the ring of authority: ‘‘What are looted stores compared to looted lives?’’4 Within a few years, prescriptions for city revitalization had changed irrevocably. Rejecting ambitious efforts to reconstruct whole cities typified by the ambitious ideas of Paris-based architect Le Corbusier and the Modernist movement he promoted,5 critics embraced instead more incremental and

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community-based approaches that stressed social justice first and physical design only secondarily. Social history and its allies in related disciplines dominated the historical field, and the broad approach employed by Mumford, though not forgotten, was marginalized in academic discourse. In the meantime, the public, far from supporting the new research agenda in the academy, distanced itself both from difficult urban problems and the people associated with them. A postmodern turn in scholarship in the last part of the century only deepened the distance between the public and the academy. Not surprisingly, widely held perceptions of cities remained largely uninformed by academic criticism. My interest in cities derived from the critical views conveyed both before and after the upheaval of the 1960s. In my early years as a college professor, I became closely associated with Frederick Gutheim, a younger associate of Lewis Mumford and a leader in the movement spurred in the mid-1970s to recover and celebrate the career of the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, an early practitioner of environmental reform. Through Gutheim, I became interested in the work of Roy Lubove, another enthusiast for Mumford, and a tradition he labeled ‘‘environmental intervention.’’6 That interest is reflected in the four chapters included in this volume. Although I found that each effort to promote better civic life through physical design ultimately proved problematic, I considered these experiences not just influential in their own time but the basis for reflecting upon contemporary urban policy. The two chapters that open this volume provide the context for those approaches to urban reconstruction. Even as I maintained an interest in the intellectual traditions associated with Mumford and his later admirers, I could not help but be drawn into discussions central to my own generation’s concern for social welfare, concerns that were heightened beyond earlier work to include avid attention to issues of class, gender, and race. The last two chapters here revisit earlier traditions of environmental intervention in light of these changed perceptions and changed circumstances in the nation’s metropolitan areas. The New Urbanist movement, a clear descendent of earlier environmental reform efforts—most notably the Garden City tradition—has opened the door to a reconsideration of how best to design and redesign communities for the betterment of civic life. As much as they have focused on physical design, New Urbanists have not ignored issues of social welfare, even in the inner city. Their efforts have had mixed results, but the record of their building practices, as well as the social criticism they have produced, offers

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the opportunity to take stock once again as to what is both desirable and possible. This exercise is not merely academic in light of contemporary events. The failure to respond effectively to the disastrous effects of Hurricane Katrina and the deep recession that rages as this volume goes to press provide compelling reasons for revisiting traditions of environmental intervention. For much of a generation, public policy followed the lead of neoliberalism, an unwavering faith in the benevolent effect of the marketplace. As regulations receded and housing markets boomed, criticism by urban activists and environmentalists had marginal effects at best on the fate of our metropolitan areas.7 Despite warnings of deepening residential disparities and unequal resources, outer suburbs boomed, highways clogged, and wasteful energy consumption continued. Barack Obama’s election as president set the stage for a policy reversal. Both his experience as a community organizer and his promotion of energy independence provided supporters hope that new investments by his administration would address the structural inequalities of resources even as they met the immediate needs for recovery. It was not too much to hope, they asserted, that the United States could achieve not just a stronger but a more just economy, not merely a safe environment but one that could better sustain communities of citizens.8 The goal in this volume, then, is both to report evolving traditions of environmental design and to do so in light of the best available scholarship, including that which has complicated my previous view of such activity. While this volume contains older material, it is framed from a contemporary perspective, one that has been informed by other work connecting social justice and the built urban environment. Most recently, in Camden After the Fall, I concluded that the best way to overcome an American apartheid as it is currently entrenched in our metropolitan areas is to join the forces of the civil rights and environmental movements, broadly conceived.9 This book is an effort to bring together the sensibilities associated with these movements in the review and assessment of traditions that can be built upon in a new century.

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Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention

In its attempt to grapple with the harsh conditions brought about by urban industrialism, the Progressive Era set the stage for many of the twentieth-century reforms that followed. Seen in historical perspective, this movement appears sharply limited by a middle-class bias that sought less to eliminate injustice than it did to restore an idealized vision of established republican principles. If it failed to challenge racial or gender bias and left unchallenged the basic tenets of modern capitalism, it nonetheless sought through active government intervention to assure that the democratic system offered its citizens the chance of a decent life. In seeking to mediate the ill effects of unbridled development, Progressives became the first generation to embrace environmental intervention as a means of improving both the social and the physical attributes of cities. Whether the object of their attention was in the home, in public spaces, or in the means though which urban development might be directed through planning, they sought to assure acceptable conditions for living, work, and recreation.1 That reform groups counted on an active and engaged citizenry to achieve their goals made them the first generation to actively pursue civitas through design. Because activists committed to social and physical aspects of urban reform diverged in the second decade of the twentieth century, it is often been assumed that their goals were incompatible. The chief publicist of the City Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson, suggested as much in 1904: ‘‘We may reasonably assert . . . that civic art need concern itself only with the outward aspects of the houses, and therefore that for such details— sociologically pressing though they are—as sunless bedrooms, dark halls and stairs, foul cellars, dangerous employments, and an absence of bathrooms, civic art has no responsibility, however earnestly it deplores them.’’2

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Robinson may have intuited the ultimate divisions that specialization ultimately advanced, but at the outset reformers of all persuasions looked to environmental improvements as a primary means for social uplift. Whether it was a City Beautiful plan to reshape downtowns as monumental civic cores capable of inspiring resident loyalty and respect or the actions of housing activists and settlement workers to improve the lives of immigrants, reformers agreed: a strong democracy required a decent environment. Progressivism had many antecedents, but without doubt the crusading journalist Jacob Riis played a major role in sparking public interest in environmental reform. For more than a quarter century, as far back as the aftermath of the 1863 draft riots, critics had sought to curb building practices in New York City that crowded residents into densely overcrowded and highly unsanitary tenements. Efforts to eliminate the most atrocious conditions secured modest results without, however, attracting the lasting concern or interest of the general public.3 Riis’s provocative expose´ How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, reflected earlier criticisms but had the advantage in its graphic imagery of bringing home to a middle-class audience conditions that were not just alien but threatening. Here, he demonstrated, were conditions infecting not just individuals but civic health as a whole, for such poor home conditions, it seemed beyond argument, produced bad citizens. Alienated from nature, removed from any trace of healthy village life, and thus lacking natural ties of friendship and moral support, poor urban dwellers appeared susceptible to every variety of social, physical, and spatial disorder: crime, saloons, and a steady deterioration of mind and body. Crammed by necessity into living quarters in which they remained defenseless, these victims threatened to spread the ill effects of their own disorderly lives, thus contaminating whole cities. Riis made just this point in a 1903 visit to Washington, D.C., where a quick survey of that city’s notorious living conditions in back alleys had stirred reform efforts at the turn of the century. Describing the inside of these dwellings to the Senate District Committee as worse than those in New York and ‘‘too dreadful to conceive,’’ he subsequently warned a meeting of the city’s Associated Charities, ‘‘You cannot suffer these places to continue in existence and do your duty to your city or to yourselves. The influences they exert threaten you, for the handsome block in whose center lies the festering mass of corruption is rotten to the core. The corruption spreads, my friends, and you will pay the bill.’’4 Riis’s friend Theodore Roosevelt shared his view of the dire civic consequences that followed slum conditions. Speaking at an exhibit on New

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York tenements about the same time, Roosevelt advised his audience to ‘‘go look through the charts downstairs, which show the centers of disease and poverty, and remember that it is there that the greatest number of votes are cast.’’5 Such efforts to tie the social welfare of those living in slum conditions to the self-interest of the middle class helped Progressives generate support for their cause.6 In what would prove an understatement in a period when graphic depiction was becoming the rule, political scientist Elgin Gould concluded in his influential 1895 volume, The Housing of the Working People, ‘‘bad housing is a terribly expensive thing to any community.’’ According to Christine Boyer, the obvious response was to impose an orderly environment to ‘‘discipline and turn to social advantage the base instincts of the individual.’’7 This intervention necessarily started in the home according to early housing critics. Alice Lincoln, for instance, declared in 1899 that ‘‘a good, clean, wholesome home ought to be within the reach of every honest, temperate, and respectable man and woman; only from such homes can the best children and the best citizens come forth to help forward the progress of the nation.’’8 Riis shared this outlook, complaining about the ‘‘murder of the home’’ and describing the tenement as ‘‘the enemy of the commonwealth.’’9 Roy Lubove reports, ‘‘He observed that tenement neighborhoods, populated often by foreigners and their children, seemed to abound in vice, crime, and pauperism. He assumed, therefore, that the physical environment was at fault. The tenement must cause a deterioration of character, making the individual more susceptible to vice than he would have been in a different environment. Improve his housing, it followed, and you would influence his character for the better.’’ Riis was not entirely captive to such determinism, however. ‘‘More than previous housing reformers, he sensed that the tenement, the slum, was a way of life and not simply a problem of sub-standard housing. Thus socially effective housing reform would involve a reconstruction of the whole environment and the customary life-organization of the inhabitants,’’10 Lubove concludes. Reconstructing a broader environment necessarily led Riis and other Progressives to campaigns to curb, if not eliminate, the influence of institutions considered morally suspect, such as saloons and dance halls, even if such places may have satisfied deep needs for recreation and release from the vicissitudes of daily living, at work as well as at home. Again, such efforts may have been more intense in the Progressive Era, but they were not new. What Riis pointed to as well were changes in the urban environment that could be relied on to counter the bad effects of conditions that could

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Figure 1. Work invades the home: a New York City tenement apartment. Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1913. Library of Congress.

not be eliminated entirely. Here he looked especially to youth, seeing the school and its associated recreational activities as necessary means for creating the next generation of what he called ‘‘useful citizens.’’ Anticipating the community school movement described in Chapter 4 in conjunction with Clarence Arthur Perry’s neighborhood planning concept, Riis argued, ‘‘When the fathers and mothers meet under the school roof as in their neighborhood house, and the children have their games, their clubs, and their dances there, there will no longer be a saloon question in politics; and that day the slum is beaten.’’11 Closely associated was Riis’s interest in planting small parks in tenement districts as wholesome diversions and, ultimately, as places of socialization as well as recreation. Each element in Riis’s range of reform efforts would grow in importance as the Progressive movement matured. In the years when Riis first become widely known, housing reform remained largely a philanthropic endeavor, a position he promoted himself.12 Among the most visible efforts in New York City was Alfred T. White’s construction of tenements between

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1877 and 1890 for ‘‘thrifty and socially ambitious’’ artisans in Brooklyn. White described his effort as driven by ‘‘fair return for fair rents, simple justice, and not that which is falsely called charity.’’ To his first efforts in the late 1870s he introduced the innovation of locating a central courtyard within several blocks of tenements, a clear effort to insulate residents from the temptations of the street even as it assured residents greater access to light and air.13 Suburban Homes, which he formed in 1896, became the most prolific ‘‘limited dividend’’ company in America, so named because with returns limited at between 3 and 7 percent, they were well below expected market returns which could reach 20 percent. Costs were kept down as investors combined modest profits with a sense of charitable giving.14 The critic Elgin Gould formed a limited-dividend company himself, building properties both in Manhattan and Brooklyn to provide amenities lacking in the city’s worst tenements—broad central courts, apartments two rooms deep to guarantee light and ventilation, private water closets, and gas appliances—but at a cost that made such structures unaffordable to the mass of workers whose housing conditions remained intolerable.15 The alternative approach embraced more widely by mainstream reformers at the turn of the century was regulation, a movement that assumed prominence first in New York City under the leadership of Lawrence Veiller. As head of the New York Charity Organization Society, Veiller used information gathered from a survey of sanitary and physical conditions in tenement houses to mount an exhibit whose shocking details helped build support for new legislation. As approved in 1901, the new state tenement law marked a shift from regulating building materials to regulating building conditions by mandating minimum standards for light and air and requiring running water and water closets in every apartment. That success sparked other regulatory efforts, in Chicago, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, among other cities. Veiller’s massive two-volume report, issued in 1903 with fellow housing reformer Robert DeForest, charted those efforts even as it further documented unsuitable housing conditions around the country.16 Throughout the volume, the authors expressed confidence, now common among Progressives, in the power of the environment to make new citizens: ‘‘It is only by providing homes for the working people, that is, by providing for them not only shelter, but shelter of such a kind as to protect life and health and to make family life possible, free from surroundings which tend to immorality, that the evils of crowded city life can be mitigated and overcome. . . . Homes are quite as much needed to make good citizens as to make good men. According as the working people are

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provided with better or poorer homes will the government, morals, and health of a city be better or worse.’’17 The 1903 report marked a shift that became characteristic in the Progressive Era, from the sensationalist reporting typified by Riis to the systematic gathering of information and more concerted organization to act upon findings. Its success prompted other efforts to effect environmental change, the most important of which was the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907–8, generously funded by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation. Published initially in the journal Charities and the Commons beginning in January 1909, the survey appeared in six volumes between 1909 and 1914. Describing ‘‘entire families living in one room, . . . courts and alleys fouled by bad drainage and piles of rubbish,’’ and ‘‘playgrounds for rickety, pale-faced grimy children,’’ the Survey coupled emotion with fact-finding to secure new regulatory reforms. In attempting to remake man-made environments by identifying problems in the community machinery and recommending specific solutions, the Survey sustained as an article of faith the belief that civic action and a revitalized democracy would inevitably follow such investigations.18 Pointing especially to environmental reforms—to reduce smoke, improve sanitation, and increase access to natural resources—Joel Tarr characterizes the investigators’ motivation as rooted in a ‘‘new science and art of social up building’’ with the goal of producing ‘‘a self-reliant, selfdirecting community.’’19 Closely associated with housing reform was a settlement movement that built on Riis’s emphasis on the neighborhood context for social reform. Dominated by the first generation of college-educated women seeking an outlet for their idealism as well as their advanced training, settlements sought through a range of programs and activities to draw workers and their families into their sphere of influence and, in the process, to educate them to the habits of good citizenship. Linked to earlier uplift efforts confined to home improvement, settlement work nonetheless embraced a wider environmental sphere. Settlement workers fought for better schools and sanitation, supported union organizing, and agitated for accessible recreational opportunities. New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch unveiled a typically ambitious agenda by seeking to reduce neighborhood congestion, establish social centers at schools, and create ‘‘a community spirit.’’20 As the premier representative of the settlement movement, Jane Addams made explicit the domesticating thrust of her work. She considered Hull House a model home for the immigrants who attended the programs

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there. High standards in art and furnishings were but part of the larger message of proper comportment that visitors were to take away. If they could never afford the particular emblems of civilization they were exposed to, they nonetheless were expected to absorb and appreciate standards of beauty that could be applied in their own homes. Further efforts extended directly into working-class homes, where the new helping professions provided advice on how to apply rules of cleanliness and order considered essential to the sustenance of the family in crowded apartments that often doubled as work as well as domestic spaces. Gwendolyn Wright asserts that ‘‘Housing reformers saw themselves as a moral police force, using environmental change to enforce propriety.’’21 Some tensions existed between settlement and professional social workers. While the former grew increasingly convinced that poverty was the product of environmental conditions that could be overcome through humane intervention, the latter field clung still to the nineteenth-century belief that impoverishment was a product of poor character.22 As settlement workers made inroads into the programming for the national meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, however, the division narrowed in favor of an environmental view. With the election in 1906 of Edward T. Devine, a strong believer in shifting intervention from individual uplift to a broader program of environmental change, the agency began to swing to that view. By 1910, when Jane Addams delivered her presidential address by right of her election a year before, she could claim the two wings had been united, each with its own role, but marching together under the banner of environmental change.23 By this point, Daniel Burnstein asserts, while Progressives agreed on the need to alter social behavior, unlike conservatives who demanded behavioral change in the poor, they ‘‘recognized a reciprocal obligation to help upgrade the urban environment and living standards of city residents. With adequate external resources, individuals could more readily change their attitudes and behaviors.’’24 As the network of settlement workers fanned out in the early years of the century, new alliances and new organizations formed, each operating on a similar conviction, that urban industrialism had badly degraded the human as well as the physical landscape and that organized responses were both necessary and possible. Among the organizations spurring new efforts beyond the neighborhood focus of the settlements themselves was the National Consumers League (ably directed by Addams’s former colleague at Hull House, Florence Kelley), with its intent of rallying women to selective

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buying from employers as a means of pressuring them to improve working conditions of women and children,25 and the National Child Labor Committee. Among the most committed environmentalist organizations which Addams, Riis, and other nationally recognized Progressives helped initiate, was the Playground Association of America. The organized play effort dated back to 1885 with the establishment in Boston of a small sand garden under the influence of an organization of influential women, the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association. Within two years, the city had added ten more sand gardens and authorized the use of school property during summer months for children’s recreation.26 Riis’s campaign to eliminate a notorious example of slum life, Mulberry Bend, near the infamous Five Points area on the Lower East Side of New York, followed shortly thereafter. As part of a larger movement devoted to getting children off the street and directing them into safe play spaces, Riis’s graphic criticism in How the Other Half Lives prompted the city, after a tragic accident killed several children in the district, to tear down tenements in order to convert the area into a park. Even as Riis pursued his criticism, Jane Addams succeeded in getting the city of Chicago to open the first space devoted specifically to neighborhood play through the conversion of an empty lot in 1893.27 Soon they were joined by other settlement house leaders who saw in the effort the opportunity to direct their faith in environmental uplift toward civic revitalization. City playgrounds, they asserted, would be the womb from which a new urban citizenry— moral, industrious, and socially responsible—would emerge. According to settlement house leader Graham Taylor in Chicago, ‘‘The city which has made its reputation by killing hogs has awakened to the fact that manufacturing good and sturdy citizenship is even more important.’’ In Pittsburgh, leaders of the movement claimed that money spent on playgrounds would pay high dividends in cultivating ‘‘the moral nature of children, promoting civic unity, and supplying the social training and discipline’’ urgently needed among the immigrant masses.28 By the early years of the new century, critics had become convinced of the need for a national association to promote and sustain their work. In 1906, Addams and Riis, with the financial backing of the Russell Sage Foundation, helped form the Playground Association of America. The movement accelerated thereafter, as municipal governments invested $100 million in the construction and staffing of organized playgrounds across the country between 1880 and 1920.29 By entrusting the supervision of play to experts, one city authority claimed, ‘‘More ethics and good citizenship can be instilled into our embryo rulers by a play

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Figure 2. An unsafe environment seen as a danger to raising future citizens. Library of Congress.

master in a single week than can be inculcated by Sunday school teachers and Fourth of July orators in a decade.’’30 Other youth programs, dedicated to the proposition that juvenile prospects as good citizens depended on a commitment to, as well as immersion in, a healthy environment, sought ways to introduce young people to sanitary reforms. Among the leading examples of such activities were the juvenile street-cleaning leagues, organized most effectively in New York City under the influence of civil engineer and sanitarian George Waring. Devoted both to removing children’s play from the streets—‘‘the foul mud of the gutter is his toy’’—and to embracing standards of cleanliness and beauty, such organizations sought to instill habits of social cooperation that could flower eventually into civic loyalty. In league efforts to build character, Waring perceived the citizen in the embryo, with reform organizations acting as what a colleague dubbed ‘‘citizen factories.’’ Such efforts were part of a larger perception, as Delos Wilcox put it, that ‘‘the health and morals’’ of children were well cared for ‘‘where the physical surroundings make health and morality possible.’’ Such perceptions, he thought, required government intervention to provide not just improved housing in tenement areas but also inexpensive transit, water, and lighting services.31

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Figure 3. The reformer’s goal: organized play, the teacher of future citizens. Library of Congress.

Even as social progressives tackled the difficult problems associated with growing concentrations of poor, who were most often immigrant residents in older urban districts, a separate yet ultimately complementary movement emerged in towns and cities across the country. Diverse in the object of their attention and their methods, contributors to this movement had in common a commitment to improving their communities and confidence that their efforts could make a difference. From civic improvement organizations to municipal arts organizations to enthusiasts for outdoor recreation, these activists shared a belief in the beneficial effects of beautifying their communities. By the last years of the nineteenth century, their efforts had coalesced in what came to be called the City Beautiful movement. Often dismissed by social progressives as well as later scholars for embracing causes quite separate from the most pressing failures of urban industrialism, these contributors have found a powerful defender in historian Jon Peterson, who has made the most complete assessment of the

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movement. These ‘‘improvers,’’ no less than others active in urban reform, Peterson argues, were committed to creating better citizens through environmental intervention. They were not simply seeking to impose their elitist standards of taste on the urban masses: ‘‘By seeing beauty as an attribute of the collective environment,’’ Peterson asserts, ‘‘they redefined what had been matters of private concern and proprietary right as issues of public moment, worthy of expression within a new and sought-for social order: the City Beautiful.’’32 That collective concern ultimately coalesced support for comprehensive city planning, and with it, confidence that such efforts would uplift the full body of urban citizens. The World’s Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, no doubt had a strong influence in launching the City Beautiful movement and, through it, city planning, as Peterson confirms. The grouping of buildings, artfully arranged and draped in the architectural garb of classicism with all its positive associations with the civilizing effect of art, helped convince skeptics that city cores could be both planned and beautiful. But the White City, so named for the striking consistency of the core exhibits grouped around the Court of Honor, was merely temporary, its plaster-of-paris construction quickly dissipating as the marble it evoked would not have done. So the 1902 Senate Park Commission plan for Washington, D.C., which had been inspired by the Chicago fair but proposed a permanent reordering of the nation’s capital at its core, proved most decisive in creating a vision that extended beyond the individual project to that of a whole city.33 It was this commitment to uplifting cities as a whole with the ultimate goal of reshaping civic life that made the movement so ambitious. In the early years of the century, a number of interrelated efforts conveyed a similar message. The positive effects of sculpture displayed at the world’s fair in Chicago, for instance, spawned a number of beautification organizations, not least in New York City. There, as Michele Bogart points out, ‘‘artists contended that civic sculpture could help improve the beauty and arrangement of city thoroughfares as well as socialize the working classes and new immigrants. The content of the images and their technical excellence would establish high ideals and standards of workmanship for the public to emulate.’’34 Properly stated, they offered a practical lesson in democracy too, as an early proponent of the City Beautiful approach contended. Immigrants might not be able to read English, but they could not miss the message of grand civic structures.35 More generally, Charles Mulford Robinson argued, it was the aesthetically rich element of a city that formed civic attachments: ‘‘Upon just such little things as this is fixed the

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citizen’s love for his city; its towers and domes pin his affections, and the more because in every case the composition has inevitably a meaning, a cleanness and accuracy of significance, that makes it more than merely a pretty picture. It is a work of art which speaks not to the eye alone, nor to the head alone but unitedly, to sense, brain and sentiment.’’ Such efforts would assure ‘‘a happier people, a better citizen, democratically instructed and more artistic in mind and soul, would arise from this beautiful and ceremonial American city.’’36 A contributor to the journal American City added, ‘‘A city which does nothing except to police and clean the streets means little. But when it adds schools, libraries, galleries, parks, baths, lights, heat, homes, and transportation, it awakens interest in itself. The citizen shows some care for him. He looks upon it as his city, and not as a thing apart from him; he becomes a good citizen because it is his city.’’37 An early form of the historic preservation movement took a similar position, according to Randall Mason’s examination of turn-of-the-century New York. Members of the American Scenic Preservation Society, organized ‘‘to minister to both the physical and spiritual well-being of the people,’’ believed that the cherishing of historical landmarks would ‘‘make better citizens of our people’’ and ‘‘stabilize our cherished political institutions.’’ By assuring a ‘‘landscape of memory,’’ as Mason describes it, such organizations intended to instill in citizens ‘‘a proper dignified, celebratory civic memory in the form of stone, bronze, authentic buildings, and historical park landscapes.’’ By thus teaching civic patriotism, one preservationist claimed, the city ‘‘becomes more than a mere collection of buildings. . . . Instead, it becomes a living organism with an interesting and honored past and a future to which every citizen ought to contribute, and for which every citizen should cherish great concern.’’ ‘‘By giving historical memory lasting form in the built environment, it was thought, the particular memory was endowed with power to reform the public at large,’’ Mason concludes.38 Perhaps the most ambitious, if not ultimately influential, embellishment came in the form of grand civic centers inspired by the Court of Honor at the 1893 World’s Fair. The vision, formed in Chicago and extended in Washington, was that of a grouping of public structures classical in style and monumental enough in construction to match the nation’s highest ideals. Created in the unplanned, congested, and increasingly ugly city, such bodies of work would prove uplifting, even as they conveyed a necessary civic lesson to an increasingly diverse population. Although it took virtually a generation to achieve the vision of a monumental core at

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the heart of the United States capital, architect Daniel Burnham proceeded to extend the concept even to the least promising sites, including industrial Cleveland and his home city of Chicago. Where rail yards and smokestacks had once symbolized the emergent industrial metropolis, Burnham envisioned public groupings of civic structures not unlike those that he proposed for Washington’s National Mall. In Cleveland, such buildings, headed by a monumental railroad station—the gateway to the city—framed a mall-like park, the 500-foot-wide Court of Honor named in the spirit of the Chicago fair.39 In his 1909 plan for Chicago, Burnham’s ambitions extended to reshaping the whole city and region. At the core, grand avenues converged on a grand civic structure—‘‘the St. Peter’s of the new Chicago,’’ as Daniel Rodgers has described it—appearing very much like the U.S. Capitol in an open plaza. Such a center, Burnham believed, would promote good citizenship by helping cement together the city’s ‘‘heterogeneous elements,’’ teaching them, as symbol of civic order and unity, ‘‘the lesson that obedience to law is liberty.’’40 Although the civic center was never built, Burnham was more successful in achieving his vision of forming a grand complex of civic and educational institutions along a new park at the Lake Michigan waterfront. Here, clearly, civic presence was enhanced and grand public spaces offered the opportunity for social mixing. The ‘‘lakefront by right belongs to the people,’’ Burnham proclaimed. Creating recreational opportunities here would enable workers to ‘‘take up the burden of life in our crowded streets and endless stretches of buildings with renewed vigor and hopefulness.’’ New parks and parkways would accommodate parades and pageants, giving ‘‘charm and brightness to the life of people who might of necessity pass long summers in the city.’’41 In his analysis of the plan, Carl Smith marks the connection with social reform efforts, noting, ‘‘Just as a bad environment brought out the worst in people forced to inhabit it, a grand one that expressed the values of civilization and order would inculcate these ideas and thus elicit the best.’’ The plan, he asserts, repeatedly stressed ‘‘that terrible living conditions diminish the individual and, by extension, the entire city, and so should be of concern to the prosperous as well as the less fortunate.’’42 Burnham also repeatedly emphasized elements of ‘‘order’’ and ‘‘unity’’ and the need to see the city as an ‘‘organic whole,’’ in what one scholar later described as ‘‘an awesome visual idealization of civic harmony.’’ As such, the Plan of Chicago, Paul Boyer concludes, represented ‘‘the supreme expression of some Progressives’ dream of transforming the

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behavior and moral outlook of America’s urban masses by transforming the cities in which they lived.’’43 Despite obvious differences between the beautifiers and those who highlighted untenable social conditions, the entire range of Progressives—writers, architects, engineers, and settlement workers—descended on Washington for the first national planning convention in 1909. The driving force behind the convention was a group of social progressives who had formed the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York in 1907. Headed by Florence Kelley, the group included Lillian Wald of the Henry Street Settlement, Edward Devine of the New York Charity Organization, Paul Kellogg of the Survey, and Mary Simkhovitch of the Greenwich House settlement. Convinced that crowding compromised the quality of life of tenement dwellers, Kelley, stepping away from earlier efforts to disperse workers to the countryside, argued instead for lower densities throughout the city as a result of comprehensive planning. Housing reform, child labor reform, and a few playgrounds were insufficient to change existing conditions, she thought, unless the density of population were reduced. ‘‘Instead of assenting to the belief that people who are poor must be crowded,’’ she asserted, ‘‘why did we not see years ago that people who are crowded must remain poor?’’44 As their executive director, the committee hired Benjamin Marsh, an enthusiast for Henry George’s proposal to tax for public reinvestment the ‘‘unearned’’ increments of private land value due to public investment and urban growth. As a result of several study tours undertaken at the committee’s request, Marsh returned from Europe deeply convinced that planning measures pioneered in Germany, particularly zoning for separate land uses, promised to ease forces crowding wage earners and their families into tenements at ever higher rents. By creating separate districts for industry and low-density workers’ housing at the urban periphery, Marsh and his allies hoped to improve home conditions while at the same time rationalizing land use. Marsh made sure those issues would be central to a national planning conference.45 For those associated with the City Beautiful movement who joined the social progressives at the convention, most notably Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., zoning offered considerable appeal as well, though more as a means of managing land use than effecting social justice. Although he maintained a low profile by necessity, given Marsh’s influence on the convention, Olmsted nonetheless was effectively countering Marsh’s influence even before the sessions were over. Within a year, he had succeeded in establishing a leadership structure for future planning meetings without Marsh’s involvement.

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In 1911, despite Simkhovitch’s objection, the National Plan Association dropped any further reference to problems of congestion in the title of its annual meeting, prompting Marsh to quit national planning efforts, never to return. As Jon Peterson reports, Olmsted ‘‘aimed for a better-ordered, more livable city, but not a socially reconfigured one.’’46 Even as Olmsted worked to move planning away from social reforms toward greater technical mastery of the built environment, the movement splintered still further as Lawrence Veiller managed to form his own organization, the National Housing Association in 1910. Launched with the assistance of the Russell Sage Foundation, the NHA embraced the cause of tenement reform without Marsh’s attendant enthusiasm for social justice. The chief problem of cities, Veiller insisted, lay in the regulation of space, not the reform of land use. The former could be managed within the existing system through proper use of police power. More fundamental changes in land use still remained too radical for adoption, he believed, and thus remained outside the purview of reform. Although Veiller and Olmsted held nominal positions in each other’s respective organizations, they effectively pursued their own agendas.47 In the process, not just collaborative opportunities were lost, but also the goal of citizenship was subsumed by other, more narrowly conceived objectives, at least among men working at the national level.48 There were exceptions, however, especially among women, whose own contributions beyond the settlement movement are less well known. The broad role of women in Progressive reform was identified at the time ‘‘as municipal housekeeping,’’ a means of identifying women’s appropriate role in civic affairs by drawing parallels between the home and the city, especially the need for cleanliness and order. As Rheta Childe Dorr, of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, put it in her 1910 book, What Eight Million Women Want, ‘‘Woman’s place is Home. Her task is homemaking. But Home is not contained within the four walls of an individual home. Home is the community. The city full of people is the Family.’’49 Seeing beyond such efforts as simply supplemental to men’s work, recent scholarship has emphasized the way women embraced a more comprehensive and fully inclusive and civic approach to reform than their male counterparts.50 Seeing the integrity of their homes and those of their neighbors at risk from the forces of the marketplace, they sought government action to protect values they held dear. As Nancy Dye writes, ‘‘Increasingly, middle-class women came to the realization that in modern industrial society, the doctrine of separate spheres no longer held: the home and the community were inextricably bound together, and those concerns once defined as

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the private responsibility of individual housewives and mothers were in actuality public and political. Women argued that their domestic duties compelled their interest in municipal politics.’’51 Women’s networks, Ardis Cameron argues, converted neighborhoods into ‘‘landscapes of subterfuge’’ and ‘‘autonomous social spaces [that] allowed women to develop and sustain a world of vision and value relatively independent of husbands, bosses, priests, and teachers.’’ In the spirit of communitas, as used by anthropologist Victor Turner, such spaces created a ‘‘bond uniting people over and above any formal social bonds.’’52 Maureen Flanagan suggests that such powers both put women at odds with their male counterparts and ultimately helped them sustain their critique of existing approaches to civic revitalization long after the great majority of men had abandoned a structural critique of modern city development in favor of making the existing system more efficient. In matters of housing as well as sanitation reform, women were less likely to accede to the constraints of private property and its prerogatives. Rejecting the male definition of the city as a corporation with defined but limited objectives, women activists sought government action to assure the public welfare. ‘‘We are building now a new city—a spiritual city, where the watchword is ‘personal welfare,’ ’’ declared Anna Nicholes, superintendent of the Women’s Club of Chicago, in 1913. ‘‘This new city will care because babies die from preventable diseases . . . will work to decrease the procession of little children going through the Juvenile Court; will open to all greater industrial and social opportunities within its borders.’’53 Whereas male voluntary organizations consistently curbed the power of housing programs when they conflicted with private enterprise, women demanded pledges from municipal officials ‘‘not only that the laws were enforced, but that even the humblest citizen had a clean, comfortable, sanitary dwelling.’’ By 1920, these same women were calling on the national government for a federal bureau of housing, which would incorporate the expertise of women, as well as men. Looking similarly to government to ensure adequate removal of municipal waste, Chicago women activists secured a goal in 1914, sought after from the early years in the century by Jane Addams, of municipal ownership and collection.54 Clearly, such efforts afforded a bridge to the reform efforts, especially in housing, that had to wait until the New Deal era. In the meantime, women found in federal funding a means both for sustaining their reform activity and for carving out a sphere of public influence for themselves through the creation of the Children’s Bureau in 1912. Spurred especially by the leadership of Florence Kelley, whom histo-

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rian Robin Muncy identifies as the person most responsible in the 1890s for transforming Hull House from a philanthropic to a reform organization, the Children’s Bureau provided both a national forum for women’s advocacy and a sphere for exerting influence. Boosted by President Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to host the White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children in January 1909, the idea of a children’s bureau divided supporters by gender. Whereas most of the majority men in attendance sought to divorce fact-finding from advocacy, in line with the maledominated ethos of social scientific research, the women in attendance rejected that restriction based on actions they had already pioneered at the state level that combined both spheres. The bureau, as formed under the leadership of Julia Lathrop, acted on the female perspective voiced at the conference, creating what Muncy describes as an effective vehicle for linking a small federal agency with women’s volunteer actions to effect change in states across the country. When funding lapsed for the bureau, women’s organizations effectively lobbied legislators for restoration, giving the organization power and influence that endured well beyond what historians normally consider the height of the Progressive Era.55 In 1906, Frederic C. Howe, the single-tax enthusiast and ally of Progressive Cleveland mayor Tom L. Johnson, turned the concept of municipal housekeeping to socialist ends. He claimed that with the socialization of transit, light, heat, and water, along with urban ground rents, ‘‘the city would become in effect an enlarged home, offering to its members many of the comforts and conveniences that are now denied to any save a few. With these opportunities enlarged, the love and affection of the citizen for the city would increase, which, in turn would bring about a purification of our politics that cannot be obtained so long as the influence of the rich and privileged classes is united against the community. With such a programme achieved, democracy would cease to be a class struggle. There would be created a union of all the people, seeking in conscious ways the betterment of human conditions.’’56 Progressive reform stopped well short of Howe’s ideal, the result in part of the movement’s own biases and shortcomings. Even acknowledging women’s success in advancing a socially progressive and highly participatory agenda that went well beyond restrictions imposed by the exclusion of women and most racial minorities from the franchise, the tilt of reform was never fully inclusive. Immigrants, African Americans, and to a considerable degree, women themselves were not treated equitably, and the interests of capital over workers and consumers surfaced in numerous ways. That being

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said, the early years of the twentieth century opened a serious and enduring conversation about the proper balance between people and profit. In multiple instances, land use became central to that conversation, most notably who was to derive not just its profits but also its social benefits and to what degree would that value be shared equitably. In this conversation lay the roots of a difficult and yet critical dialogue about how best to realize the promise of the civitas.

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Chapter 2

The Garden City in America

Even as the elements of Progressivism were first stirring in America, an obscure English stenographer named Ebenezer Howard published with his own funds a modest looking tract with the pretentious title To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. The product of years of discussion in moderately radical English circles, Howard’s extended essay proposed nothing less than the elimination of the capitalist exploitation that had characterized English cities as the scourge of the Western world. Influenced by a range of utopian thinkers, not least two nineteenth-century American reformers who themselves had fundamentally challenged the ill effects of urban industrial development, Henry George and Edward Bellamy, Howard incorporated elements of each critique. His proposed solution was unique, however, in that he sought to solve the problem of urban industrialism by the formation of a new kind of community, what he called the ‘‘garden city.’’ Located apart from existing cities, but with comparable economic opportunities shorn of the associated exploitation that followed from low pay and high rents, Howard believed his new creation could so undermine existing economic and social arrangements as to make them wither away. As cooperative in spirit as Bellamy’s utopian future but without its authoritarian control, as economically just as George’s ‘‘single tax’’ economy but without the expropriation of any single class, this was to be a peaceful revolution effected through design. In the words of Robert Fishman, ‘‘Howard was, in his quiet way, a revolutionary who originally conceived the Garden City as a means of superseding capitalism and creating a civilization based on cooperation.’’1 Howard’s vision would be modified in England as it was first put into effect in the form of model versions of his plan and subsequently adopted as the basis for a national policy of town planning. It would be further modified in the United States, initially under the direction of the Russell Sage

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Foundation’s construction of Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, and subsequently in experimental projects pressed alternatively by the War Industries Board, the small but influential Regional Planning Association of America, and finally the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration’s new towns program. The scope and intent of the efforts differed in detail, but propelling every one was an unrelenting confidence in the power of a proper physical environment to enhance and sustain a vital civic life. Howard’s garden city vision percolated a long time before he fully articulated it. Influenced in part by his own experience with poverty during a brief experience as a homesteader in Nebraska, his introduction to critical political theory followed his return to London in 1876, when he joined a number of earnest discussion groups. Appalled by the concentration of wealth in England, these critics were too substantial themselves to seek a Marxist overthrow of the system. Instead, they sought the means to greater cooperation, favoring such innovations as profit sharing in production and cooperative stores.2 Howard was himself greatly influenced by a number of contemporary critics, including James Silk Buckingham’s vision to create the planned community of Victoria (set within an agricultural belt and owned cooperatively), and the social critiques of Alfred Marshall and Thomas Spence.3 His concern with the concentration of land in the hands of the few gained visibility and a specifically urban focus under the influence of Henry George. His series of lectures in London in 1882 ignited interest in George’s 1879 book Progress and Poverty and generated proposals for solving the problems associated with industrial crowding by forming new communities devoted to combining the conveniences of town life and with the salubrious environment of the country.4 Such proposals undoubtedly influenced Howard, but it was in reading Bellamy’s utopian novel, Looking Backward, that Howard’s still inchoate ideas about poverty solidified. Reporting that he had been carried away by reading the book shortly after its publication in 1888, Howard described his actions the next morning: I went into some of the crowded parts of London, and as I passed through the narrow dark streets, saw the wretched dwellings in which the majority of the people lived, observed on every hand the manifestations of a self-seeking order of society and reflected on the absolute unsoundness of our economic system, there came to me an overpowering sense of the temporary nature of all I saw, and of its entire unsuitability for the working life of the new order—the order of justice, unity and friendliness.5

Looking Backward, he wrote, ‘‘permanently convinced me that our present industrial order stands absolutely condemned and is tottering to its fall, and

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that a new and brighter, because a juster, order must ere long take its place.’’6 Howard began promoting Bellamy’s ideas in the circles that had already influenced his own critical thinking. In 1890 he participated in forming the English Nationalisation of Labour Society, the counterpart of Bellamy’s Nationalization Party in the United States.7 It was this group on which he relied to promote the idea that had been forming since George’s visit, to create garden city alternatives to existing industrial cities. Wary, however, of the authoritarian powers that Howard became convinced would follow from Bellamy’s centralized national state, he concluded that the best hope for founding a cooperative civilization lay in small communities embedded in a decentralized society. To visualize the challenge, he conceived the image of three magnets. The town magnet historically had drawn residents through the promise of employment but had burdened workers with high prices and terrible living conditions. The country’s obvious amenities of health and beauty were countered by backwardness. The task for the planner, then, was to create the new town-country magnet as a community that would offer high wages, low rents, the beauty of nature, bright homes and gardens, and freedom and cooperation. In Howard’s words, ‘‘Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.’’8 In order to move his vision from simply a utopian concept to an immediate reality, Howard envisioned the creation of a philanthropic investment company that would buy up land and raise money by issuing bonds at a modest fixed rate. With these funds, the necessary infrastructure for a city and its productive industries would be created. As population grew in response to the new opportunities for work, rents would rise. The profits accrued would be used to pay back investors, allowing any surplus for reinvestment in additional community services. Eventually the garden city company would buy out the original investors, and the entire income from rents could be used to benefit citizens. Taxes would be unnecessary because rents would support schools, cultural, and other necessary institutions. As collective ownership replaced individual ownership and a new commonwealth formed, the land problem finally would be solved.9 Central to Howard’s goal of obtaining desirable social ends was the creation of a completely planned environment. He called his approach to community organization ‘‘social individualism,’’ suggesting a good deal of flexibility for the evolution of personal relations. Overall, however, every element of his ideal spelled cooperation, and in its physical details the gar-

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Figure 4. Ebenezer Howard’s ‘‘Plan for the Garden City,’’ envisioning a compact urban core, surrounded by open space with easy access to work set apart from residential living. From Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, 1902.

den city revealed an unwavering commitment to substituting communitarian for previously competitive values. No household would be privileged under this arrangement. Each was assured access to adequate space for living, enhanced both by abundant light and a small garden as well as easy access to the open space represented by parks within the town and a continuous greenbelt surrounding it. Such housing arrangements, buttressed by centrally located common facilities grouped around a small park—a museum, library, theater, concert hall, and hospital—seemed to assure easy mixing among residents and thus provide the civic underpinnings for a larger commitment to the common good. Behind them a central park hosted shopping facilities grouped in a ‘‘Crystal Palace’’ to further assure social congregation. In line with his commitment to small communities, Howard set a fixed limit of 32,000 people on 6,000 acres of land. As the first

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demonstration town filled up, he theorized, a new one would spontaneously sprout up nearby. Over time, a planned amalgamation would form, with each garden city offering a range of jobs and services even as it was connected to others, and to the metropolis, by rail. This larger ‘‘social city,’’ as he called it, constituted the true third magnet as he originally envisioned it.10 Howard was disappointed not to secure the financial backing he expected from his fellow critics of exploitive capitalism, including trade unions and the cooperative movement. With Fabians arguing that money was better spent in existing cities, he had to rely on businessmen for the investment necessary to bring his ideas to fruition. In the process, some of the more radical social thinking behind his effort was modified, including proposals for communal living and intentions to eliminate class differences.11 In the hands of architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, however, the first garden city, Letchworth, built some thirty-four miles outside London, remained true to the spirit of Howard’s ideas. As secretary of the Manchester branch of John Ruskin’s Socialist League, Unwin in particular had attempted to translate Ruskin’s aesthetic theories into a ‘‘civic art’’ devoted to advancing a ‘‘spirit of cooperation’’ through design that he immediately associated with the garden city. Unwin described such art as intended to transform ‘‘mere aggregations of people’’ into ‘‘consciously organized communities’’ allowing residents to enjoy ‘‘that fuller life which comes from more intimate intercourse.’’12 His proposal to organize the new city cooperatively, around ‘‘quadrangles’’ of homes in which three sides would be devoted to private apartments and the fourth to a common dining room, recreation room, and nursery, was realized only on a limited basis in Letchworth, which became the victim of financial restraints.13 Other elements spelling cooperation remained, however, not just in the common access to open space but also in strategically situated community facilities, most notably the town’s civic center, located along a mile-long axis leading to the railroad station. Influenced more by the Arts and Crafts aesthetic associated with John Ruskin than by Howard’s own ideas of social and economic change, Unwin and Parker’s vision drew from the relationships associated with the traditional English village, which gave the feeling, Susan Klaus reports, ‘‘of being an organic whole, the home of a community, to what would otherwise be a mere conglomeration of buildings.’’14 Although the town grew more slowly from its origin in 1904 than anticipated, by 1910 the practicality of Howard’s vision had been realized. As Robert Fishman reports, ‘‘The new town of Letchworth was a clean, healthy, and well-

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planned environment; it had shown its capacity to attract industry and residents; and the First Garden City Ltd., though still financially pressed, was beginning to reap the rewards of its investment and declare its first dividend.’’15 Equally important to the history of urban design was the intentionality of focusing civic life in limited neighborhood units, a concept fully developed a quarter century later in the United States by Clarence Arthur Perry. Dividing the garden city into wards defined by radial boulevards, Howard created virtually self-sufficient residential quarters, where schools would also provide sites for worship, concerts, libraries, and other civic gatherings. Such subelements of the new city would act as villages once had, in Raymond Unwin’s words, ‘‘as an expression of a small corporate life in which all the different units were personally in touch with each other, conscious of and frankly accepting their relations . . . it is this crystallisation of the elements in a village in accordance with a definitely organized life of mutual relations . . . which gives the appearance of being an organic whole, the home of a community.’’16 Mervyn Miller contends that Unwin readily translated that concept of design on a village scale to Letchworth and extended it farther in a second city demonstration, Hampstead Garden Suburb, starting in 1905. There the layout of the worker’s quarter especially was ‘‘arranged to encourage neighborliness,’’ through the siting of two small children’s play areas, a primary school, and a clubhouse located where working- and middle-class areas converged, in a conscious effort to break down class barriers.17 The Garden City movement had its own counterpart in the United States, as a Garden City Association of America formed in 1906 to propose that garden cities be built in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, but it disbanded within a year. The effort, which stressed relocating workers to the country, depended on large corporate sponsors to assure that workers who followed factories had sufficient reason to stay. The economic downturn of 1907 dampened business interest in the concept, and it collapsed as a movement.18 A delegation organized by the National Housing Association and charged to investigate British garden cities visited Letchworth and interviewed Ebenezer Howard. Subsequently its representatives met with botanist and town planner Patrick Geddes, whose tour of Dublin was intended to demonstrate the positive attributes of the organic medieval city. The association’s field secretary, John Ihlder, was not impressed, concluding that whatever the attributes of garden cities, they remained philanthropic projects that did not pay.19

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The one community built specifically along garden city principles during the early years of the century, Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, was the product of the Russell Sage Foundation. An exemplary part of the fact-finding generation that constituted the core of Progressive reform in America, Russell Sage’s pioneering the social survey of Pittsburgh, described in Chapter 1, demonstrated in six thick volumes of statistics, photographs, and chilling narrative the ill effects of unbridled industrialism on working people. Such efforts added weight to demands from masscirculation magazines for increased government regulation of the workplace. But Russell Sage went one step further by determining to underwrite a model community for working people that would demonstrate a viable alternative to environmental degradation. Described as an institutional bulwark for the developing professionalism of the reform community, Russell Sage poured nearly half its endowment into Forest Hills Gardens.20 Among the driving forces behind the new community were housing reformer Robert DeForest and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., who had assisted his father at the Chicago’s World’s Fair before serving with Daniel Burnham on the commission that brought forth Washington’s landmark 1902 plan. DeForest recruited Olmsted for the task of building the new community because, he thought, Olmsted was ‘‘interested in the social as well as the aesthetic side of landscape gardening.’’21 Tastefully designed in 1911 by architect Grosvenor Atterbury on a farm eight miles from Manhattan on the Long Island Railroad, Forest Hills Gardens reflected the spirit of Parker and Unwin’s effort at Letchworth. In this new community, housing was to be sufficiently concentrated to save enough in costs to ensure plenty of open space, land that would be devoted not to individual but to collective use. Workers targeted as buyers thus would be not just be buoyed by contact with nature; they would be given every opportunity to socialize together, thus heightening civic ties. Centrally located shopping facilities would further enhance social interchange. This approach was what Grosvenor Atterbury, influenced by Austrian architect Camillo Sitte, and transmitted through Parker and Unwin’s design for Hampstead Garden, called ‘‘collective design.’’22 Determined like Howard before him to avoid the ill effects of socialism without succumbing to the evils of land speculation, Atterbury called for ‘‘collective town planning,’’ fully convinced that as ‘‘the school of environment’’ the model town was capable of breeding the ‘‘blooded’’ citizens necessary to sustain the enterprise.23 But this was America. In place of collective ownership of land, as Howard had envisioned his ideal city, lots were to be individually pur-

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Figure 5. Hampstead Garden Suburb, Ebenezer Howard’s effort to group essential services, including a neighborhood school, within walking distance of residences. From Clarence Arthur Perry, The Neighborhood Unit, 1929.

chased, and investors were to be guaranteed a return, modest as it might have been in an otherwise speculative housing market. As a result, the experiment never reached the working poor as intended. Moreover, the experiment proved the exception in an era which, as much as it accepted the necessity of making cities more livable, lacked the commitment to fundamental social change that lay behind Howard’s and, to a lesser degree, Russell Sage’s plans for whole new communities. While the Garden City concept did not achieve wide application after Forest Hills Gardens, it was employed to an extent by a number of industrial housing projects, including Kohler, Wisconsin; Goodyear Heights, Ohio; Kincaid, Illinois; Beloit, Wisconsin; and Fairfield, Alabama.24 As in earlier experiments such as Pullman, Illinois, companies were anxious to blunt worker militancy through the control they held as landlords and employers. In the Indian Hill development in Worcester, Massachusetts, sponsored by the Norton Grinding Company, Forest Hills Gardens architect

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Atterbury was charged with designing a ‘‘charming New England village’’ for skilled machine-tool industrial workers so that the ‘‘cozy colonial cottages, tree-lined streets, and a town square’’ would help the company obliterate the public memory of recent labor turmoil.25 Less directly influenced by the Garden City concept but embracing a similar commitment to uplift through proper environmental influences, the Massachusetts legislature launched a ‘‘homesteading’’ program in 1911 intended to relocate workers from congested cities to the country. Intended to combat a ‘‘lowered standard of citizenship’’ following from ‘‘generations habituated only to contact with stone pavements, wooden floors, and brick walls,’’ the solution was to place families in small homes with garden plots and exposure to air and sunshine. Hardly a harbinger of extended public commitment to fashioning new communities for workers, the effort resulted in construction of only a dozen homes in Lowell.26 It took World War I and an acute need to house war workers to prompt the federal government to assume a direct role in town planning. In all, the United States Housing Corporation and the U.S. Shipping Board’s Emergency Fleet Corporation constructed fifty-five housing developments to shelter workers in shipbuilding and munitions industries.27 Among a number of projects incorporating Garden City principles was Camden, New Jersey’s Yorkship Village. Each built commercial and civic spaces around village squares that were intended to be community gathering points. In Camden, these facilities included churches, a library, and the public school, each designed for easy pedestrian access. A public meeting hall was intended, according to architect Electus Litchfield, to afford workers ‘‘the physical plant where the worker might quietly and in comfort discuss among his fellows the problems which affect him, thus developing a cooperation, a unity, and a community of spirit between himself and his fellow workers.’’28 Appropriately designed as a ‘‘Colonial tower and cupola,’’ its role among Colonial Revival architecture and planning features was to convey a sense of order and patriotism, an approach further assisted through the adoption of patriotic street names. Offering workers what Litchfield termed every ‘‘physical opportunity for happiness’’ and everything ‘‘essential for the development of true American citizenship,’’ the Yorkship neighborhood was intended, as Kristin Szylvian suggests, to dissipate any sense of alienation workers felt on the job when they reached their snug, colonial-inspired town. Similarly, a Bridgeport, Connecticut, site, according to a report in Architectural Record, was expected to ‘‘exert a commensurate influence upon the people who live there—counteracting the slovenly and

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Figure 6. Fairview Extension (Yorkship Village), in construction, 1916, a model community constructed for ship workers, World War I. Courtesy Camden County Historical Society.

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vicious tendencies of the usual tenement environment and leading them along the first steps of the way to the higher grades of American working life.’’29 Influenced by the British Guild Socialism promoted by John Ruskin as well as by Howard’s Garden City ideal, Frederick Ackerman, as director of design for the Emergency Fleet Corporation, sought continued public ownership of the land when the war ended. Although the federal government rejected that argument and sold the properties, physical layouts favoring a spirit of common responsibility for community welfare and of neighborhood good fellowship nonetheless remained to inspire future efforts. Ackerman and Emergency Fleet director Robert Kohn managed to extend their mission by helping form, in 1923, the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA), a small group of critics and practitioners that became especially active proponents for extending the Garden City ideal in America. Their interests were buttressed by fellow architect Clarence Stein, recently returned from a meeting with Howard in England and a review of his accomplishments. As Stein described the experience, ‘‘After the First World War there was a strong surge of enthusiasm for a better world. . . . I went abroad in search of more constructive action. In England . . . the second Garden City, Welwyn, was being built. I returned to America a disciple of Ebenezer Howard and Raymond Unwin.’’30 Joining interests with these architects was Lewis Mumford, then a young journalist. An early enthusiast for the work of Patrick Geddes and Ebenezer Howard, Mumford drew from their somewhat divergent approaches the belief that successful architecture and planning required a carefully considered social underpinning.31 Described by his biographer, Donald Miller, as more responsible than anyone else in his time for making the case that good buildings need to be complemented by intelligent community design,32 he became the chief publicist for the group. In an effort to put theory into practice, Stein joined with fellow RPAA member and a former town planner for the federal Emergency Fleet Corporation Henry Wright, a particular enthusiast for Unwin’s design philosophy,33 to form the City Housing Corporation, a limited dividend corporation, as a vehicle for developing an American version of the garden city. When plans to build for 25,000 people on a square-mile plot on the edge of New York City faltered for lack of investment, Stein and Wright settled for a more modest site on a former Pennsylvania Railroad property in Queens. Limited finances reduced the scope of the project considerably, but by reducing costs through unified production techniques, the Sunnyside Gardens development managed to reserve space on the interior of extended

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Figure 7. A Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, superblock, intended to enhance sociability through the creation of common open space, protected from intrusions external to each housing complex. Reprinted from Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), copyright 䉷 MIT Press, used by permission.

‘‘superblocks’’ for common use, creating in the process a commons intended to enhance community sociability. Stein and Wright thus realized, even within the constraints of an existing city grid, the goal of communal space that had escaped Unwin in Letchworth.34 Mumford moved there with wife Sophia in 1925 and stayed for eleven years, commenting that ‘‘though our own means were modest, we contrived to live in an environment where space, sunlight, order, color—these essential ingredients for either life or art—were constantly present, silently molding all of us.’’35 Even as work on Sunnyside Gardens proceeded, the RPAA hosted in 1925 the International Town, City, and Planning Conference in New York City. The conference theme was the garden city and regional development, and all the key figures in the movement attended, among them Howard, Parker, and Unwin. As the meeting drew near, members of the RPAA convinced the editor of Survey Graphic, Paul Kellogg, to produce a special issue on regionalism. Pulled together by Mumford and featuring essays by Ackerman, Stein, and Wright, among others, for publication in May, the issue spelled out the RPAA critique of modern development. Housing was more expensive than it needed to be. Using large-scale, modernized production techniques pioneered in the United States and Europe during the war, builders could overcome the shortage of housing at affordable costs. Incorporating garden design principles of open space and adopting the neighbor-

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hood plan that Clarence Arthur Perry had proposed as a recreation specialist for the Russell Sage Foundation, strategically located schools and associated recreational spaces would foster a sense of community. Utilizing these techniques, Mumford asserted, regional planning would ‘‘promote a fuller kind of life.’’ In terms that harked back to Howard as well as to fellow RPAA member Benton McKaye, he labeled such efforts ‘‘the New Conservation—the conservation of human values hand in hand with natural resources,’’ which could promote development ‘‘that will eliminate our enormous economic wastes, give life to stable agriculture, set down fresh communities planned on a human scale, and above all, restore a little happiness and freedom in places where these things have been pretty well wrung out.’’36 What still remained theoretical as Sunnyside reached completion in 1928 promised fuller realization on open land, as the City Housing Corporation laid out a 640-acre site in the Borough of Fair Lawn, New Jersey, sixteen miles from New York City, to be known as Radburn. Seeking ‘‘an adequate theater in which to produce an American Garden City,’’37 Wright and Stein nonetheless had to sacrifice two elements central to Howard’s concept: the greenbelt, because of the high cost of land in metropolitan New York, and nearby industry. The experiment became important, however, for its novel approach to controlling the effects of the automobile on town building. Finding some precedent in Olmsted, Sr.’s specialized pathways for carriages and pedestrians in Central Park, the Radburn approach of fully separating automobile from pedestrian traffic broke new ground by planning the development as the ‘‘Town for the Motor Age,’’ a ‘‘town in which children need never dodge motor-trucks on their way to school.’’ Stein called Radburn ‘‘A new town—newer than the garden cities and the first major innovation in town-planning since they were built.’’ As such, Radburn was ‘‘a setting in which a democratic community might grow.’’38 Believing Radburn went beyond what Howard had accomplished in England, Mumford credited the garden city for putting forward ‘‘a new method of urban growth—by whole cities, rather than by block-by-block accretions or by suburban dribbles; and this principle of growth led us in turn to conceive of a wholly new kind of urban unit, whose outlines Howard had first roughly sketched out in his chapter on Social Cities, a regional constellation of cities that would have all the advantages of a metropolitan massing of population without destroying valuable soils and landscape that should be put to non-urban purposes.’’39 Constituted around contiguous ‘‘superblocks,’’ each containing some

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thirty to fifty acres, much of Radburn could be traveled by foot by way of interior parks without crossing a single street. Here, a 1930 brochure asserted, planners had addressed ‘‘the civic and social need for a scientific attack on the problem of providing better communities and better houses for the average family.’’ Noting that the town ‘‘should not be confused with the average little suburban development,’’ the brochure promised ‘‘all the facilities and conveniences which ordinarily are associated only with living in a large city.’’ Promoters promised a rich community life and permanent upkeep of public spaces and associated facilities through creation of the nonprofit Radburn Association.40 Mumford was never impressed with the architecture, which he considered mediocre, but he embraced Radburn’s vision of civic nuclei—strategically located shopping areas, schools, and parks to draw the population together—and outer boundaries to give residents a sense of belonging together.41 Stein and Wright’s designs were not so directly devoted to the uplift of working people as even Forest Hills Gardens had been. As the Depression deepened, more ambitious plans for Radburn faltered. The City Housing Corporation declared bankruptcy, Wright and Stein went their separate ways, and the community never became self-sufficient as its supporters had hoped. Ultimately the town became only a pristine part of a larger suburban landscape.42 It did, however, provide a model for the ambitious new towns effort instituted under the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration. Headed by Columbia economist Rexford Tugwell, the new towns program was informed by the more collectivist philosophies of George and Howard rather than those that had been modified or muted in American translation. As Tugwell explained in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, ‘‘I am eager that from the beginning this housing should be thought of not only in terms of its physical aspects, but as a contribution to a better way of living.’’43 Although Tugwell denied any Garden City influence, direct or indirect, his stated intent ‘‘to go outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community, and entice people back into it,’’ clearly derived from that tradition. So too did his intention to ‘‘go back into the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them.’’44 Intended initially to encompass as many as 100 communities as an effort to relieve overgrown cities of congestion even as they gave homesteaders a new chance at a healthy living environment, the program quickly attracted criticism from conservatives for its collectivist goals as well as its high costs. Ultimately, only three such communities were built, each surrounded by a belt of forest or farmland. Only Greenbelt, Maryland, appropriately the focus of Stein’s advocacy film The

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Figure 8. Underpass, Greenbelt, Maryland, keeping kids safe by separating pedestrian from automobile traffic. Library of Congress.

City (see Chapter 3), incorporated the prime elements of the Radburn design intact.45 Although the new towns built under the Resettlement Administration conspicuously lacked industry, Stein harbored no doubts that the Garden City concept was the preeminent influence on their physical design. Town planners carefully sited Greenbelt within a green crescent of open space. At the town’s heart was a community center Stein described as ‘‘the focus for the common life of the town’’ and the ‘‘logical and beautiful arrangement’’ for various elements for community activities, including religious, educational, leisure, and market facilities.46 Early residents recalled the importance of these facilities to their sense of civic engagement, while more personal interchanges followed from the division of blocks into courts, where families easily formed social groups. Such interchanges on a daily basis formed the foundation for the cooperative spirit as well as organizational structure planners envisioned for the community.47 Design elements differed among the three towns built, but the greenbelt program consistently embraced the belief that good citizenship followed good design. Keeping the size of planned neighborhoods manageable was important not primar-

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Figure 9. Plan of shopping center at Greenbelt showing the new food store and youth center. Reprinted from Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), copyright 䉷 MIT Press, used by permission.

ily to advance economic goals but to assure neighborliness and high levels of social knowledge among residents. ‘‘A community must be small enough to permit friendly association,’’ Stein told an audience at Greendale, Wisconsin. ‘‘It is only in small places that everyone can know everybody and associate with as many as he wants.’’48 Such planning had its effect, according to Cathy Knepper: ‘‘As hoped the physical design contributed to the ability of residents to carry out their goal of cooperation by providing ways for residents to easily come together.’’ New Deal planners, she concludes, ‘‘created a symbiosis in which the physical design and cooperation mutually sustain each other, a symbiosis that has proven to be long lasting.’’49 Even though the Resettlement Administration’s new towns program had been shut down by the time his sweeping analysis of the urban condition, The Culture of Cities, appeared in 1938, Mumford remained an enthusiast for the effort and its Garden City antecedent, what he labeled ‘‘the biotechnic conception of a balanced urban environment.’’ It was not Howard’s physical design, Mumford argued, that was so groundbreaking, but the principles behind it, principles that were above all civic in intent. Stating

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the goal not just to bridle unchecked individualism but to transform ‘‘the military-capitalistic regime’’ into ‘‘a social commonwealth,’’ he called for ‘‘a new order of design and a different kind of designer,’’ following the Garden City precedents in England and the United States. Charging that ‘‘a community that does not plan and build the necessary structures for a common life will remain under a perpetual weight and handicap,’’ he called for the dramatization of communal life: ‘‘the widening of the domain of human significance so that, ultimately, no act, no routine, no gesture will be devoid of human value, or will fail to contribute to the reciprocal support of citizen and community.’’50 Mumford attributed the Garden City’s limited success to the lack of supportive social and political institutions grounded in a cooperative and socially planned society. The collapse of capitalism in the 1930s appeared, however, to open the door for critics such as Mumford, who sought, like Howard, a middle way between individualism and socialism. The New York World’s Fair of 1939 offered a possibility to make the case. Marking the 150th anniversary of George Washington’s inauguration as president in New York City, the fair drew the interest both of businessmen hoping to boost the city’s economy out of Depression doldrums and social critics seeking to communicate a reform message to a broad audience. At a dinner meeting at the New York Civic Club in December 1935, one hundred artists, designers, architects, and educators heard a series of speakers call for a new kind of fair that would take up the means for solving America’s central social problems. Determined not simply to celebrate past achievements as earlier fairs had done, Mumford used his opening address to lay out his case: The story we have to tell . . . and which will bring people from all over the world to New York, not merely from the United States, is the story of this planned environment, this planned industry, this planned civilization. If we can inject that notion as a basic notion of the Fair, if we can point it toward the future, toward something that is progressing and growing in every department of life and throughout civilization, not merely in the United States, not merely in New York City, but if we allow ourselves in a central position, as members of a great metropolis, to think for the world at large, we may lay the foundation for a pattern of life which would have an enormous impact in times to come.51

To achieve their goal, these critics formed the Committee on Social Planning and managed to carry much of their agenda with the fair’s business leadership. In adopting the theme ‘‘Building the World of Tomorrow,’’ members of the committee together conjured an optimistic preview of a

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future America where the advances of science, the capability of technology, and the wisdom of good design would shape an orderly, healthy, and contented society. In a magazine section devoted entirely to the fair, the New York Times adopted the motif of progress, adding to its own essay, ‘‘World of Undying Hope,’’ sociologist William Odgen’s contribution, ‘‘Building a Better Society,’’ as well as grand claims for the products of industrial giants RCA and the Ford Motor Company.52 The Committee on Design, cochaired by the RPAA’s Robert Kohn, took responsibility for translating the theme ‘‘Fair of the Future’’ into reality. Although committee members agreed that building displays could differ, they imposed strict guidelines for exhibitors in which companies would have to contribute to the overall plan to stress ‘‘the vastly increased opportunity and the developed mechanical means which this twentieth century has brought to the masses for better living and accompanying human happiness.’’ A central exhibit was intended to provide visitors their initial introduction to the seven other sectors of the fair, each designed to coincide with major functional divisions of modern living: production and distribution; transportation; communications and business systems; food; medicine and public health; science and education; and community interests. All elements were contained in the fair’s central exhibits on urban and regional development. At Democracity, the creation of industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss, visitors viewed a massive exhibit of the metropolis of 2039, extending over 11,000 square miles and accommodating 1.5 million inhabitants in what a guidebook described as the ‘‘symbol of a perfectly integrated, futuristic metropolis, pulsing with life and rhythm and music.’’ Reflecting the idealized regional planning promoted first by Ebenezer Howard and subsequently by Mumford and his RPAA colleagues, the region was divided between Centerton, a metropolis without residents into which a working population of 250,000 commuted daily, and seventy surrounding satellite towns, some exclusively residential (Pleasantvilles) while others (Millvilles) contained a mixture of light industry and suburban dwellings. Visitors, viewing the model as it would appear from a height of 7,000 feet, were encouraged to see it as a realistic blueprint for forming ‘‘a brave new world built by united hands and hearts.’’ Not incidentally, Robert Kohn sized the opportunity to describe Democracity as no ‘‘planless jumble of slum and chimney, built only for gain, but an effective instrument for human activities, to be used for the building of a better world of tomorrow. . . . The relation between these units of stone and steel, highway and green is symbol of the new life

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Figure 10. Traveling sound chairs at Futurama exhibit in the General Motors ‘‘Highways and Horizons’’ pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Courtesy GM Media Archive.

of tomorrow; that life will be based on an understanding of the contribution of all elements to a new and living democracy.’’53 Later critics would see Democracity as closer in inception to the modernist Le Corbusier’s vision than to Mumford’s own utopian one.54 Indeed, Kohn’s statement to the contrary, the fair’s emphasis had shifted dramatically from its early focus on social reconstruction to the active embrace of consumerism and its corporate sponsors. Nowhere was that fact better illustrated than in the fair’s other exhibit to encompass a regional vision, ‘‘Futurama,’’ which proved to be not just the fair’s most popular attraction but also its most revealing insight into a future in which the automobile would triumph rather than come under appropriate controls. Sponsored by General Motors, an even more expansive exposition, this one geared to the year 1960, carried visitors above 36,000 square feet of display, including half a million buildings and 50,000 automobiles, 10,000 of them in motion. Al-

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though the vast highway system, with seven lanes of traffic moving at three prescribed speeds, served as the exhibit’s greatest promise of future happiness, cities were nonetheless conceived in utopian terms. Here highways did not end in congestion but coursed through on elevated causeways or linked up with feeder roads at the periphery. As skyscrapers dominated the core, pedestrians strolled above through traffic on raised walkways, enjoying unfettered access to shops and businesses. Outside the central city lay housing developments, zoned to prevent business encroachment. In sharp contrast to the Radburn ideal that preceded the fair, no effort was made to link residential with other amenities. The whole effect rested on functional efficiency, defined as moving between places by automobile, not by foot, creating in the process what one observer calls ‘‘the thrills of Coney Island with the glories of Le Corbusier.’’55 No wonder Mumford reflected bitterly on the hopes he held for the fair.56 That Clarence Stein produced the film The City for release at the New York fair, that it attracted large and enthusiastic audiences, and that it incorporated through its structural imagery as well as its narration ideas most closely associated with Mumford, thus contained a sad irony. As competent as the film was in translating ideas into imagery, as consistent as its message was from the progressive experiments in bringing the Garden City ideal to America, its role was an anomaly. What underlay the fair, despite its socially progressive intentions, was a consumer ethos that pointed fully to the suburban diaspora that undercut any pretensions RPAA had for advancing communitarian solidarity. What had been whittled back in Howard’s generation would be devastated in Mumford’s. While most scholars have chosen to celebrate the garden city legacy as a socially, as well as environmentally, sound alternative to unfettered development, the movement has had its critics. Standish Meacham argues that Howard’s more utopian goals were undercut from the start by Unwin and Parker in their effort to reproduce not just the sociability of the old English village but also its class hierarchy. Although common meeting spaces for workers were described as areas where ‘‘a common life for a noble end could be discovered,’’ the intent was not so much to vivify civic practice as to impart endangered middle-class values. Parker and Unwin, he asserts, ‘‘designed for people not as they were but as they wanted them to be, and as they hoped their buildings would make them: individual best selves come together into a community of the high-minded and plain-living.’’57 Others have blamed Howard and his disciples for fostering the problems they most deplored. Many elements of the garden suburb model, William Fulton

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charges, ‘‘were easily bastardized for mass consumption by the productionoriented American real estate development industry.’’ As Paul Adamson puts it, modernist planners tailored their conception of the humanist garden city model to suit the demands of the free market: ‘‘Accommodating the free-flow of capital and unrestricted access to speculative development, post-war American planning consistently rejected the centralization and hierarchy of the Garden City model, retaining only its innovation of the polynuclear field.’’58 The most pointed critique comes from Tristram Hunt, who has been described as a public intellectual on the left and whose 2005 defense of the Victorian city, Building Jerusalem, blamed the Garden City ideal for undercutting the civic vitality associated with dense urban environments. Rather than seeing the 1909 British Town Planning Act as a triumph for planned community building, Hunt charges that the legislation undermined the nineteenth-century tradition of civic architecture, public spaces, and grand urban projects in favor of private homes and ‘‘the anonymity of the suburb.’’ In their enthusiasm for a new urban form, Hunt asserts, the hopes of conservationists and urban planners were overpowered ‘‘as policy makers and architects unleashed a tide of concrete, utterly oblivious as to what the long-term effects of their policy would be when placed in the hands of private developers and in the context of a fast-expanding car culture.’’59 Hunt’s criticism follows to some degree Jacobs’s earlier attack on Mumford’s enthusiasm for planned decentralization. No doubt both critics have been right that the confidence that the automobile in particular and development more generally could be directed to positive social and physical ends was misplaced. By the 1960s, Mumford himself was appalled by the extent of urban sprawl as well as its consequences. He could still praise Howard’s ‘‘transformative idea,’’ responsible for half a million people ‘‘now living under physical and biological conditions immensely superior to those enjoyed by the majority of Londoners,’’ but prevailing metropolitan conditions belied his earlier optimism. He concluded in 1968, ‘‘The result is not a new kind of city on a supermetropolitan scale, but an anti-city; not merely destitute or urban attributes, but also inimical to the most important of them—the unification of specialized vocations and interest in order to produce a more stimulating and creative common life.’’60 Still, the design principles, if not their original collective intent, remain a part of a usable past, as Chapter 7 on the New Urbanism movement in America reveals. The early planned-community advocates, Emily Talen notes in her assessment of New Urbanism, ‘‘should be appreciated for even

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getting the social implications of human settlement on the table. The broad-minded thinking of Geddes, Mumford and Henry Wright in which the sociological implications of planned communities was taken into account, is now standard.’’61 Shorn of adequate public financial support and directed to other, often profit-oriented ends, those efforts typically failed to achieve the broad social goals they were intended to attain, but the record of their goals and philosophy remains for a new generation of critics and designers to adapt.

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The City: Film as Artifact

Pare Lorentz’s landmark documentary The City, prepared at the request of Clarence Stein on behalf of the American Institute of Planners for presentation at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, is a wonderfully rich statement of the faith that the proper environment could shape better communities. As this chapter demonstrates, however, conveying complex ideas through a visual medium was not a simple matter. As I circulated drafts of the chapter between the filmmakers and Lewis Mumford, the chief intellectual influence on the film, tensions that had surrounded the original production surfaced again, despite the considerable passage of time. The filmmakers objected to the preachiness of the narrative. Mumford retorted that the filmmakers, left to their own devices, would have obscured the intent of promoting a planned environment. What remains impressive is how well audiences received the production, whether for its visual dexterity or its deeper social criticism. However uneven the film appears to contemporary viewers, it manages still to convey concepts central to the thinking of the Regional Planning Association of America. Although the new towns program that The City featured already had been terminated and its principal sponsoring agency absorbed into another government division by the time the film appeared, the film’s survival as a prime artifact of twentiethcentury criticism has deeply informed generations of viewers ever since. Moreover, as Robert Leighninger contends, the high hopes embedded in the new towns effort that ‘‘the mass migration to the suburbs could be carried out in an orderly fashion that would achieve a harmonious integration of work, commerce, recreation, and residence,’’ ultimately found supporters not just in the contemporary New Urbanist movement described in Chapter 7, but also in the private new town experiments at Reston, Virginia, and Columbia, Maryland, as well as in the ambitious effort to protect open space in the area surrounding Portland, Oregon.1

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The advent of the Depression, with its visible signs of economic and social collapse in cities, encouraged the Roosevelt administration to launch the country’s first national study of urban life. With this mandate, in 1937 the Committee on Urbanism issued its first report, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy. A year later, Louis Wirth drew on his contribution to the report to publish his highly influential essay, ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life.’’ In the same year, Lewis Mumford published his seminal urban study, The Culture of Cities. Contributors to these works agreed that the precarious urban condition demanded unprecedented efforts to rouse public opinion for widespread civic and social reform. Yet despite achieving ultimate historical recognition, these appeals had limited immediate impact. Beyond generating a modest amount of editorial opinion, the report of the Committee on Urbanism, as Mark Gelfand points out, failed to gain the attention of either President Roosevelt or Congress.2 Although Wirth took an active role in advocating urban reforms at planning conferences, his growing reputation was nonetheless largely confined to academic circles. Even though The Culture of Cities helped propel Mumford to the cover of Time, he later related his disappointment that ‘‘despite a certain measure of popular success, the book exerted little influence in the United States.’’3 It was scarcely surprising, then, that a group of urban critics would seize on the emerging documentary form as a vehicle for generating public support for their programs. The English already had demonstrated the ability to influence public opinion through film under the leadership of John Grierson. Pare Lorentz’s films The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1937) had proved the receptiveness of an American audience. Richard Griffith wrote in 1938, The nation-wide success of Lorentz’s two government films has put documentary on the map with a flourish. Never before have pictures dealing with social problems captured the attention of an audience which includes all levels of American opinion. And this popularity, as widespread as it is unprecedented, has raised high hopes among those who have for years wanted to enlist the film as an instrument for social education. Educators and publicists everywhere are hailing documentary as a vivid, urgent method for developing the social attitudes of masses of people, for reconditioning their civic thinking.4

It remained only for architect and community planner Clarence Stein to forge the link between film-makers and urbanologists. In 1938, Stein established a nonprofit corporation, Civic Films, within

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the American Institute of Planners, to produce a film on the urban condition for maximum exposure at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He went through his brother-in-law, Arthur Mayer, to enlist as producer Ralph Steiner, who, along with Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz, had photographed Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains. They secured an eleven-page working outline for the film from Lorentz, which was built on by Henwar Rodakiewicz, who had come to their attention as the writer for Strand’s The Wave (1935). Rodakiewicz enlisted Lewis Mumford to write the commentary. Not surprisingly, once again the film sponsors chose to promote the founding of planned ‘‘garden cities’’ as their cause. Stein had built his reputation on the private development of these new towns at Sunnyside Gardens, Long Island, and Radburn, New Jersey. Although he served only as a consultant to the Resettlement Administration’s program to finance such towns publicly during the New Deal, his timely intervention in the planning process with its director, Rexford G. Tugwell, helped set the program on course.5 The extensive public criticism of this aspect of Tugwell’s program may possibly have influenced Stein to turn to film to publicize the new town ideal. At any rate, his intentions to promote the idea were clear as he gathered together veterans of town planning to promote the film. Three of the six board members of Civic Films—Robert Kohn, Tracy Augur, and Frederick Ackerman—had joined Stein and Mumford as members of the small but influential RPAA to promote the development of garden cities in the 1920s. At one time Stein’s architectural associate, Kohn took a leadership role in planned government housing, first as director of the U.S. Shipping Board’s housing program during World War I and then as director of the housing division of the Public Works Administration in 1933 and 1934. Ackerman worked under Kohn at the Shipping Board, subsequently serving as a town planner for both Sunnyside Gardens and Radburn. Best known in the 1930s as chief town planner for the Tennessee Valley Authority, Augur shared an enthusiasm for Radburn as a possible model for the nation.6 The film, then, can be viewed in large part as a propaganda piece for the Garden City idea. As the scene shifts from the idyllic setting of a New England village through a grimy industrial town to the huge metropolis and back to the ideal of the garden city, a solution emerges through the juxtaposition of visual images. The planning ideals of restoring to modern urban life the healthy environment, sociability, and sense of community once associated with the New England village are realized in the new towns. For every disharmony of the fragmented, chaotic city, the new town offers

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Figure 11. Workers diminished by machines, craftsmen in harmony with tools and nature. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art/ Film Still Archive.

order, peace, and happiness, factors underscored by numerous cinematic techniques. As the scene shifts from the New England village to the industrial town, the music shifts from harmony to dissonance, the film texture darkens, and the measured pace of the opening sequence adopts the frenzy of its urban subject matter. After sequences on the metropolis and an endless weekend traffic tie-up in the country, the mood and imagery shift back to the opening scenes. The restoration of a healthy living environment is signaled by dispensing with shadows, reviving musical harmony, and a return to the even pacing of the opening sequence. The camera hammers home the contrasts in the closing minutes through alternating dissolves from two children’s paintings—one of the squalid city, the other of the planned community. The narrator underscores the point, saying: ‘‘You take your choice. Each one is real. Each one is possible. Shall we sink deeper, deeper in old grooves . . . or have we vision and courage? Shall we build and rebuild our cities?’’ On the level of communicating a reform message, the collaboration between planners and filmmakers appears to have been felicitous, providing historians interested in the sequence of events with a powerful illustration of an important movement in city planning. The film is important at another level, however, in offering a creative treatment of the urban environment, one which was achieved only through considerable conflict between the filmmakers and their sponsors. Mumford originally intended to do an outline for the film, but when he was called to the West Coast and Hawaii, the responsibility passed to

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Lorentz. The planners submitted what Ralph Steiner described as ‘‘two hundred pounds’’ of material for Lorentz to review, much of which undoubtedly stressed the garden city programs in which the planners were involved. Lorentz was slow to do the work, however, and when he ultimately turned out the outline—under Steiner’s prodding after a few days of intensive work—it seems unlikely he would have had time to pore over those materials.7 More likely, he was influenced in adopting the new-town solution through his association with Rexford Tugwell, whose own debt to the planners was also indirect.8 Whatever the immediate source of inspiration, Lorentz’s scenario closely paralleled the pattern of his earlier films, combining a creative, even poetic treatment of a social problem with a considerably more perfunctory treatment of a government solution.9 Both elements survived to set the framework for the film without, however, resolving the built-in conflict between social theory and artistic integrity. There is no doubt that the film-makers, like the planners, viewed themselves as reformers. In a 1975 interview with me, Willard Van Dyke described The City as ‘‘the kind of film that could only be made by young hopeful artists who still felt that their art could make a difference.’’10 Still, he rejected using the artistic medium for narrowly reformist purposes, as he noted when explaining his differences with John Grierson in a 1973 interview at the Center for Media Study at SUNY, Buffalo: He had a kind of contempt for art. He was a propagandist, and I thought that the two worked together. I thought there was no reason in the world not to have art in propaganda. Certainly I was interested in social change, but I was also interested in the aesthetics of my medium, and the two of them were good together, but he didn’t agree.11

Most clearly at issue during the production of The City was the pressure from Clarence Stein and his colleagues to dominate the film with the Garden City solution. The final reform sequence dragged out in a disproportionate seventeen of the forty-four minutes of the film, which later prompted Van Dyke, who shot most of the footage in Greenbelt, Maryland, to say: ‘‘It was never conceived of that way at all. We had planned it to be very short. When the city planners said, ‘Oh, come on, you’ve had your fun, it is our time to say what we really want. You have to spell it out.’ ’’12 According to Ralph Steiner, who never shared the planners’ faith in garden cities, the subject matter proved a cinematic nightmare:

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The architects’ and city planners’ solution was of an impossible dullness—no grace—more jails without locks. They had not learned what the New Englander (first sequence) had in his bones when he built his towns—harmony, grace, loveliness. . . . I’m more emotional than Willard, and I’d have rebelled at shooting those modern slums. What the city planners built resulted from all head and no heart and no eye. Stingy minds creating stingy houses.13

Closely associated with the problems of spelling out the reform solution was Mumford’s commentary, which Steiner claims was ‘‘forced’’ on the producers by Stein’s committee with unhappy results: ‘‘when we first read Mumford’s written commentary, we all thought it was terrible. Perhaps correct from a city-planning point of view and philosophically, but mushy and sententious in the extreme. I still shudder, after all these years, at some of the unnecessary ‘on-the-nose-ness’ and goo-iness.’’14 Henwar Rodakiewicz probably shared some of Steiner’s uneasiness with the Mumford commentary. In a set of notes compiled in preparation for the film, published in 1970 in Lewis Jacobs, The Movies as Medium, Rodakiewicz expressed his intention, in line with the original Lorentz outline, to minimize commentary, letting the sights and sounds of the city supported by Aaron Copland’s musical orchestration speak for themselves. The narrator, he believed, should be reserved for the first and final sequences, so that his voice will, in his words, ‘‘always represent the ‘good’ whether the past, present or future.’’ He was particularly anxious to exercise this restraint in the industrial sequence: Narrative is unnecessary, for the images are vivid. Any words that could be said . . . would surely distort the purpose of this sequence, for, because of the juxtaposition and contrast of words and picture, they would inevitably resolve themselves into a cynical and one-sided commentary, which is neither a completely true representation of the scene nor our aim in this sequence. So music is all that is needed on the sound track. The pictures will speak for themselves and tell their story far more vividly and honestly.15

In the final film version, the shift in scenes from New England village to industrial city takes place through a dissolve from the fire of the blacksmith’s anvil to the molten fires of red-hot Bessemer steel. In line with Rodakiewicz’s goal, much of the burden of transition is carried by sight and sound. As he described it, ‘‘music is born of the anvil beats—and as the camera moves closer and closer to the red-hot iron, the music becomes more intense and ringing.’’16 To this is added, however, what would have

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to be considered, in Marshall McLuhan’s terms, Mumford’s overheated commentary: Forget the quiet cities. Open the throttle. All aboard, the promised land. Pillars of smoke by day, pillars of fire by night, pillars of progress, machines to make machines, production to expand production. . . . There are prisons where a guy sent up for crime can get a better place to live than we can give our children.17

Even though the speeded-up pace of the narration fits the theme of the sequence—much in line with Dos Passos’s technique of running words together in U.S.A. to establish a tone of mechanization—we have the feeling that such comments were gratuitous by Rodakiewicz’s standards. The same problem arises at the conclusion, where, according to William Alexander, Rodakiewicz’s hope to incorporate a number of conflicting points of view in the form of different indigenous voices was overruled by Stein’s committee in favor of the ‘‘on-the-nose-ness’’ approach ultimately retained.18 At the heart of the conflict between planners and film-makers lay the question of tone. The film-makers sought to bring their subject alive, not least through the use of humor. From the outset, Lorentz envisioned the scenes of weekend traffic as a kind of ‘‘Laurel and Hardy’’ sequence which could provide comic relief from the grim facts of urban living. The preceding metropolitan scenes were full of humor, too, as the camera focused on hapless pedestrians trying to cross in the middle of the street, frustrated passengers helplessly witnessing the grind of a taxi meter, and the painful anonymity of lunch counter dining. Perhaps because the scenes of the pulsating city had more verve than the camera could ever give the new town, some of the planners objected to such scenes, charging that the film-makers had ‘‘taken a serious subject and made fun of it.’’ Their insistence on projecting their own message ultimately drove the film-makers to subterfuge, as Ralph Steiner revealed in 1973: ‘‘The clients wanted to know, ‘what are you doing, what are you doing,’ and we didn’t want to show them, so we would just take anything and put it together all mixed up and just show them shots, so they couldn’t see sequences or anything. Sometimes we’d take apart the work print and mix it all up and then put it back again.’’19 One conclusion might be that theorists do not make good films. Steiner reiterated this belief time and again in that interview, as he emphasized that the only way to make films was to learn by making mistakes, not by overintellectualizing. He made this point again in denying the capacity of film to present complex ideas:

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Maybe the historian (like Mumford) can, but the film maker simply rubs his nose in hard visual facts. Most of the visuals come out of nose and eyes to reality and the lens to reality. If we had been the thinkers and sociologists we’d made a film that would have gone straight into the ash can—a dreary, dry thing. If I were selecting a film maker for a film on a like subject, I’d pick a man with an eye and heart and the breath of life in him any day over a film maker with a brilliant theoretical mind.20

Given the many reviews which praised above all else the human dimensions of urban life in the first four sequences,21 Steiner’s position would seem to have been vindicated. Yet the contribution Mumford made to the film should not be underestimated, for he must be credited with making such scenes appear as something more than random incidents. His role was to move the film from the level of mere entertainment to incisive public commentary, a point he suggested in describing his differences with Steiner and Rodakiewicz: They conceived of the film entirely in terms of pictorial shots with a minimum of explanation: the best parts of the film were those that were self-explanatory, because they dealt with the frustration and difficulties of living in the big city, or even attempting to leave it in search of recreation. All these scenes were well grasped by R. and handled with great gusto and skill. But the producer had no notion of what we sought to demonstrate; and as a result, every attempt to show better alternatives in planning and living were commonplace, insipid, conventionally conceived, and entirely unconvincing. This is an old story in the drama; conflict and evil are much more exciting than an uneventful, happy life.22

Despite complaining that his role had been reduced to a minimum, Mumford was nonetheless able to use the commentary to draw together thematic connections that otherwise would have been lost. The many shots of children, for instance, provide important linkages from one sequence to the next. From the original scenario, it appears that Lorentz confined these images purely to a cinematic technique to achieve continuity: From this point on, I feel the entire Green City should be a children’s or a youngster’s sequence. It may be theatrical hokum to show a happy child as a sign of happiness, but in this case I think we should do more than show one happy child. We started this picture with a boy on the green—we showed our children, finally, on city streets, we showed our children on the highway. Now, I think we are fully justified in saying that the city of the future is here. . . . All the other details of housing, of planning, of parks, of underpasses should be done with a series of children’s activities; and they should be active as hell, and not just posed . . . Playing games— swimming, chasing one another—all these devices will give a visual lift to the

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picture. . . . I feel it should end with baby smiling, and rolling in sun, with longer shot of sun going down behind group of buildings with trees and green around them, having some basic design that will remind you of our prologue and New England village.23

Beyond the device of parallelism, the contrast between children in dangerous or forlorn urban circumstances and their luckier counterparts in the planned communities drew on a long tradition of reform journalism associated most prominently with Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. What made those images more than just muckraking, however, was the commentary, which built on an ascendant neighborhood planning theory, endorsed by members of the RPAA, stressing the importance of a planned environment in the process of socialization. Most closely associated with Clarence Arthur Perry, an informal RPAA member, neighborhood planning theory attempted to counter the fragmentation of urban life by emphasizing primary group relations along lines suggested by the sociologist Charles Horton Cooley, especially the child’s play group and the neighborhood community of elders.24 Such theory, as Lewis Mumford later described it, stressed ‘‘the needs of families; particularly . . . the needs of mothers and children from the latters’ infancy up to adolescence; as well as upon the needs of all age groups for having access to certain common cultural facilities; the school, the library, the meeting hall, the cinema, the church.’’25 The greenbelt towns offered a particularly appropriate subject for the film, for it was there, as Clarence Stein explained, that Perry’s neighborhood unit ideas were first self-consciously applied to the earlier models of Radburn and the English garden cities.26 The juxtaposition of families served, then, not merely as a dramatic device, but as a theoretical foundation. Most critical, in light of the unimaginative portrayal of domesticity in the greenbelt towns, was the commentator’s assertion that This is no suburb where the lucky people play at living in the country. This kind of city spells cooperation. Whenever doing things together means cheapness or efficiency or better living. Each house is grouped with other houses close to schools, the public meeting hall, the movies and the markets. Around these green communities a belt of public land preserves their shape forever.27

Closely associated with the desire to enhance neighborhood cooperation was the planners’ attack on the antisocial consequences of the automobile. Lorentz’s outline revealed his sympathy with the planners by depicting ‘‘the cultural life of the endless highway’’ with its ‘‘pitiful recreation camps

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Figure 12. Children in slum conditions contrasted to those fortunate enough to enjoy a planned environment. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art/Film Still Archive.

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Figure 13. Even in the country the auto intrudes, if the environment is not planned. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art/Film Still Archive.

. . . junked cars; stupid garage facilities.’’ Like Mumford, he saw the automobile as a symbol of modern urban culture, which could be contrasted to other transportation forms representative of different urban stages, notably the cart opening the New England sequence, the railroad which ushers in the industrial city, and the airplane which heralds the greenbelt towns in the final sequence.28 But beyond this linking device, Lorentz did not spell out the means to tie the automobile to theory. In the film-makers’ hands, most traffic scenes are used for dramatic effect, particularly the final shot in the highway sequence of a car gratuitously plunging over a cliff. What saved such incidents from mere drama and put them in the form of social philosophy was the commentary in the final sequence which depicted both the internal network of roads and external parkways as the means to harness the automobile for social purposes. In the end, much of The City’s power derives from the fundamental goal behind the new planning ideas: not merely to provide the good life in new towns, but to reorder existing urban forms out of the congested central

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cities into a regional framework of small urban nodes, each tied together by new forms of transportation and communication. This goal, which had achieved wide circulation in the previous decade through the writings of Stein, Mumford, and their colleagues in the RPAA, especially Benton MacKaye,29 achieved its most forceful expression in The Culture of Cities. Drawing from Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, Mumford argued that the life of cities followed the fate of living organisms, passing through a series of developmental stages marking the rise and fall of civilization. Rejecting, however, Spengler’s conclusion that cultural organisms ultimately lead to extinction, Mumford claimed that ‘‘cities can take on new life by a transplantation of tissues from healthy communities in other regions and civilizations . . . while there is life, there is a possibility of countermovement, fresh growth.’’30 The parallel between The City and The Culture of Cities was so striking that one reputable film commentator, the Englishman Paul Rotha, claimed that the film was based on the book.31 Despite Mumford’s limited direct influence—he provided only the commentary, after The City had been cut and edited—the film clearly parallels Mumford’s description of the decline and rebirth of cities. The final section, in particular, abounds with the symbols of what he called the new ‘‘biotechnic’’ civilization. It appears to be no coincidence, for instance, that the crucial transition from the old to the new urban forms is made with the cut from the automobile’s destruction to images of Boulder Dam, power stations, an airplane, and a modern highway. These are the signs of the new order where, as the narrator reports, ‘‘New cities are not allowed to grow and overcrowd beyond the size fit for living in. The new city is organized to make cooperation possible between machines and men. . . . The motor parkways weave together city and countryside. . . . Science takes new currents. We grapple with brute force and chaos. Who shall be master, things or men? At last men take command.’’32 Both film-makers and planners thus made their own special contribution to The City. Their differences in perception produced a number of compromises which proved unsatisfactory to both groups of participants. Yet despite these differences they found an underlying point of unity which brought them close together on fundamentals. What gave the film a consistent purpose was not the promotion of the greenbelt towns, which had practically run its course in the New Deal by 1939, but the redemption of cultural processes gone amuck. What the film-makers seemed to sense was exactly what the theorists were writing about with a passion, that the city

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was the chief agent shaping the culture and thus its trials could be seen as the source of malaise for the entire civilization. Lorentz suggested this when he wrote of the steeltown sequence, ‘‘the horrible condition of the industrial town, is really a prelude to the city. This is what built the city. This is what gave it its wealth. This is really the culture that is the basis—the fundamental basis—of the mores of the city.’’33 Although the city’s role in cultural transmission had been dealt with before, it was not until the late 1930s that major American writers put that theme at the center of their work. As its title suggested, Mumford’s Culture of Cities built on this theme, opening with the assertion that The city, as one finds it in history is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains on both social effectiveness and significance . . . here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused.34

Significantly, Louis Wirth, who has been identified with a separate school of urban theorists,35 took a parallel position at the 1937 planning meeting in Detroit when he said, ‘‘the city has become the dominant influence upon national life. It is both symbolic of modern civilization and the principal medium through which the mode of existence of mankind is being remoulded.’’36 He then built on that premise, writing in the opening pages of ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life,’’ that ‘‘the city is not only in ever larger degrees the dwelling place and the workshop of modern man, but it is the initiating and controlling center of economic, political, and cultural life that has drawn the most remote parts of the world into its orbit and woven diverse areas, people, and activities into a cosmos.’’37 The strength of the film, then, was that it could select and present in dramatic form the seminal aspects of urban life which characterized the civilization. Richard Griffith recognized this capacity when he wrote, ‘‘this is a film full of details of behavior and aspects of the human countenance captured by specialists who know what behavior and countenances can mean emotionally.’’38 As such, it could fulfill the function of sociology, as well as of art, as a few brief parallels with Wirth’s article illustrate. Wirth’s chief contribution to the field of sociology in ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life’’ lay in his visualization of the shift Cooley had identified from primary to secondary group relations in the transition from rural to urban life. Characteristically, Wirth said, urbanites meet one another in highly

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segmental roles. Typically, physical contacts are close, but social contacts are distant, a perception which is presented in The City through a host of images, most particularly through frequent shots of crowds, a frantic fastfood counter with its absurd automatic pancake maker, and an office full of secretaries, each typing away as part of their role as cogs in the new bureaucratic machine. ‘‘The close living together and working together of individuals who have no sentimental and emotional ties foster a spirit of competition, aggrandizement, and mutual exploitation,’’ Wirth continued. ‘‘To counteract irresponsibility and potential disorder, formal controls tend to be resorted to.’’39 The City makes the same point by indicating that the policeman and the rule of law have supplanted the order of custom and habit, a theme reiterated through countless shots of prohibitory signs and, in the height of expression, a shot of a mechanized policeman waving his arms wildly out of control. Another parallel interpretation emerges in the film’s treatment of work and leisure. According to Wirth, ‘‘the segmental character and utilitarian accent of interpersonal relationships in city life finds their institutional expression in the proliferation of specialized tasks,’’40 especially in the division of labor. In the New England village portrayed by the film, work is organically related: ‘‘We work from sun to dark if you can call just work a job that makes a body full at peace. . . . Working and living we found a balance.’’ While tools and machines (particularly the water mill) are utilized, they are relatively simple extensions of man: the sickle to cut the hay, the loom to weave the carpet. The shift to the steeltown emphasizes the diminution of man and his subjection to the rule of the clock, which has supplanted natural working habits. The new town attempts to restore that balance, with the commentator claiming: ‘‘You can’t tell where the playing ends and where the work begins. We mix them here.’’ In the new decentralized industrial plant, employees ‘‘reach a factory where the work and all that’s part of it adds up to something that makes a worker glad to be alive.’’ By all accounts, Wirth’s article was unknown to the filmmakers and had no direct effect on The City. Yet both his writing and the film managed to depict urban life not only in vivid but also in analytic terms, indicating how different stages of urban growth had affected the quality of American life. The very absence of Wirth’s influence serves, then, as eloquent testimony to the film’s own contribution to the study of urbanization. This discussion should have demonstrated that to the historian the message of any film is a complex and often inconsistent one, not the least because of the many different points of view it may accommodate. Just

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where ideas for a documentary like The City came from and how and when they were translated into cinematic language is a difficult process to trace. When such disparate groups as Stein’s planning committee and the documentary filmmakers got together, the points of conflict were bound to affect the final product adversely. To have studied the filmmakers and their medium or the planners and their theories in isolation, however, would have detracted from a full appreciation of this film, for it is the shared perception of the urban condition as the basis of the crisis in modern American civilization that gives the film both its power and historical significance. In the sense that The City conveys that perception to a later audience, it stands the historical test, not just as an illustration of important planning ideas or of the capabilities of the budding documentary movement, but also as a seminal statement in its own right on the state of modern American civilization.

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The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning

In the controversy surrounding efforts to revitalize older urban areas in the 1950s and 1960s, no terms became more polarized than those of ‘‘neighborhood’’ and ‘‘redevelopment.’’ Reacting against ambitious plans for the wholesale rebuilding of blighted areas and the consequent disruption of indigenous social patterns, neighborhood protests proliferated, helping secure, finally, greater citizen participation in the planning process. Yet such antagonism was not anticipated with authorization of redevelopment provisions under Title I of the 1949 Housing Act. Although contention over public housing delayed passage of the bill, the participants in the debate agreed that the goal of providing a decent home for every American, which became the cornerstone of the act, meant, as the act specified, a decent home in a planned neighborhood. Nevertheless, behind that apparent harmony of interest in neighborhood planning lay profound differences of philosophy and intent, which represented a decisive split between the once unified approach to the social and physical rehabilitation of cities. In recent years some critics of redevelopment have blamed the neighborhood unit idea as formulated by Clarence Arthur Perry in the 1920s and adopted by planners over the next quarter century for the antisocial effects of urban renewal. Writing in 1979, Roger Ahlbrandt and James Cunningham link Perry’s concept to the garden city planning approach of Ebenezer Howard, charging that ‘‘the Howard-Perry ideas have become irrelevant for old cities.’’ At the heart of the problem, they believed, was an emphasis on the physical city that gave ‘‘lip service to social fabric as a goal of planning,’’ but has done little ‘‘to put the idea to work.’’ In this criticism they echoed arguments first popularized by Jane Jacobs in 1962 in her scathing critique of the planning profession, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Indeed, they claimed, ‘‘non-planner Jane Jacobs may have done more for social fabric than the planners.’’1

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Like Jacobs before them, Ahlbrandt and Cunningham affirmed a tradition of sensitivity to the conservation of existing social relations and manmade structures too often lacking in modern planning. A review of the historical record reveals Perry’s contribution to some of the problems later associated with redevelopment. But even more significant was the way the application of neighborhood planning altered over time, quite apart from Perry’s involvement with the idea. It is in this evolution that neighborhood planning provides a link between contrasting urban reform efforts in the early and middle years of the twentieth century and helps explain the controversy surrounding the 1949 Housing Act. Despite Ahlbrandt and Cunningham’s accusation, for the major part of Perry’s career it was the improvement of social life that chiefly concerned him. If, as Mel Scott suggests, it was Perry’s association with the model suburban community of Forest Hills Gardens that most influenced his conception of neighborhood planning,2 this interest derived from collaborative efforts central to the Progressive Era. Developed by the Russell Sage Foundation in 1909 under the inspiration of the Garden City ideal, Forest Hills Gardens represented the culmination of reform efforts by housing reformers and planners.3 Perry himself acknowledged the influence of Forest Hills Gardens, where he and his family moved in 1912, writing that ‘‘when the writer analyzed the Garden’s development into its essential elements, he found that they constituted the main principles of an ideal neighborhood.’’4 Just as important to Perry was his association with the community center movement, which he helped promote from the time he joined the Russell Sage Foundation’s recreation department, in 1909, through World War I. Emanating first from efforts to encourage public schools to offer the use of their playgrounds for neighborhood residents, the community center movement crystallized with the formation of neighborhood-based facilities to serve a variety of civic purposes, including town forums, adult education, and a variety of recreational activities. The movement formed its own national association in 1916, reaching a height of activity during World War I, when according to a popular slogan, ‘‘every school house [was to be] a community capital and every community a little democracy.’’5 The impetus of the movement owed much to Perry’s widely cited 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plant, and to his contribution of two additional monographs and some twenty pamphlets on the subject. He unveiled his neighborhood planning concept, appropriately enough, in 1923 at a joint meeting of the National Community Center Association and the American Sociological Asso-

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ciation. Perry described the community center movement as ‘‘but an extension of the settlement movement,’’6 an affirmation of the importance he attributed to social reformers in promoting the planned location of neighborhood-based facilities for civic and recreational purposes. In the more fluid period of their history, before planners attempted to establish a separate discipline, social and recreational workers were active participants in planning circles, thereby interjecting many of their special concerns into planning proposals. The neighborhood approach to those civic concerns can be traced back to a 1907 St. Louis plan. While other cities, following the inspiration of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, were proposing centralized civic centers as part of their efforts to promote the City Beautiful, the Civic League of St. Louis suggested formation of half a dozen civic centers in various parts of the city that could combine semipublic and private facilities around a common center, possibly a small park or playground.7 The plan was favorably reviewed by the leading commentator on the City Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson,8 and by World War I the features of the neighborhood civic center concept had made their way into a number of planning journals.9 Perry may well have been exposed to that literature even before he became associated in the 1920s with Henry Wright, a formulator of the St. Louis civic center concept.10 However Perry arrived at his notion of neighborhood planning, the constellation of values that informed the concept derived from a belief, widely shared during the Progressive Era, in the positive effect of environmental intervention. Physical changes in the urban fabric, it was believed, could improve social life and enhance citizenship. Activists in the playground and community-center movements described their causes as essential elements in the socialization process and preparation for citizenship.11 The 1907 St. Louis plan claimed that the clustering of public facilities around a common center would ‘‘foster civic pride in the neighborhood and would form a model for improvement work, the influence of which would extend to every home in the district.’’12 Both Robert Woods, the prominent Boston settlement worker, and Mary Follett, who began her career in nearby Roxbury promoting community centers, developed elaborate arguments for building democratic institutions from the neighborhood up to the city, the state, and finally the nation.13 Activists stressing the importance of neighborhood institutions drew inspiration from the emerging field of urban sociology, especially the work of Charles Horton Cooley. In his 1909 book Social Organization, Cooley argued that the family, the play group, and the neighborhood or community

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group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process. He recognized that ‘‘in our own life the intimacy of the neighborhood has been broken up in the growth of an intricate mesh of wider contacts which leaves us strangers to people who live in the same house.’’ However, he suggested, ‘‘the fact that the family and neighborhood groups are ascendant in the open and plastic time of childhood makes them even now incomparably more influential than all the rest.’’14 He saw the neighborhood as the nursery for what he called the primary ideals, such as loyalty, truth, service, and kindness. Together these neighborhood activists sought to restore the primacy of face-to-face relations once characteristic of small town and village life through revitalized community activity in defined neighborhoods. For Mary Follett, as for others, the ‘‘lost’’ features of shared social knowledge and identity could not be restored in the more anonymous city without purposeful efforts to bring residents together in local community centers or settlement houses. To critics who claimed that such efforts only confirmed the social isolation of increasingly differentiated neighborhoods, Follett countered, in a spirit reminiscent of Cooley, that more variety could be found among neighbors than in professional associations: ‘‘I go to the medical association to meet doctors, I go to my neighborhood club to meet men.’’15 In describing the origins of the neighborhood unit concept, Perry acknowledged the influence of Woods, Follett, Cooley, and Chicago sociologists Robert Park and Ernest W. Burgess, who emphasized the importance of neighborhood institutions to social welfare.16 Indeed, Perry’s introduction of the neighborhood unit concept in the 1920s extended the case for the primacy of the neighborhood as he and other contributors to the Progressive reform movement had conceived it before World War I. Like Follett, Perry worried about the urban trend toward specialization, which was ‘‘making skilled workers into horizontal layers’’ and immigration, which ‘‘by cleaving neighbors vertically has dropped us into isolated chunks.’’ The solution, he suggested in 1910, was wider use of schools for social and civic purposes, which once adopted would proliferate civic centers and make ‘‘our community life . . . into a social whole.’’17 It was but a simple step, then, in the 1920s to make the transition from using the school as a civic center to making it the focal point of all planning. In large and increasingly differentiated cities, urban residents needed a comprehensible focal point for their daily activities, Perry said. Policy makers could help by making the neighborhood the unit for planning, and

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Figure 14. The neighborhood plan as envisioned by Clarence Arthur Perry, The Neighborhood Unit, 1929.

the logical definition for a neighborhood derived from the distance a child could walk to school. In order to enhance the sense of community, Perry urged the use of a number of physical features, since criticized by Cunningham and others, such as the superblock and planned use of roadways to separate pedestrian from automotive traffic.18 However, as Lewis Mumford later pointed out, Perry extended his concept beyond the superblock or the avenue ‘‘to the more complex unit of the neighborhood.’’ What Perry did was to take the fact of the neighborhood ‘‘and show how, through deliberate design, it could be transformed into what he called a neighborhood unit . . . a unit that would now exist, not merely on a spontaneous or instinctual basis, but through the deliberate decentralization of institutions that had, in their over-centralization, ceased to serve efficiently the city as a whole.’’19 The physical features of Perry’s concept would be developed more fully by

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new-town builders Clarence Stein and Henry Wright in the 1920s. What is most significant in this first stage of his writing was Perry’s close intellectual association with social workers, sociologists, and community activists whose concern was primarily social, not physical or aesthetic. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s Perry maintained a constant interest in investing physical planning with expansive social purposes. In presenting his concept to the National Conference of Social Work in 1924, for instance, Perry claimed that a planned neighborhood district with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and its convenient circulatory system—all integrated and harmonized by artistic designing—would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish.20

He reiterated his primary concern for promoting family life in his most extensive elaboration of the neighborhood concept, his 1929 volume for the Regional Plan of New York, sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Families seeking a home in the city require more than just a house and a lot, Perry said, but also convenient schools, shopping, and recreational facilities. While most city districts lacked well-planned facilities, they should be provided, Perry reasoned, both in new developments and in older, blighted districts where sufficient capital was available to rebuild.21 By the early 1930s Perry’s concept had made its way well into the planning profession, achieving special prominence at President Hoover’s 1931 national Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership. Each of four different committees—city planning and zoning, subdivision layout, large-scale building and development, and housing and the community— cited Perry’s work and urged the neighborhood approach to urban problems. Like Perry and his predecessors, the committees stressed the value of neighborhood planning to family life, citizenship, and the solution of social problems, such as delinquency.22 In comments foreshadowing the preamble to the 1949 Housing Act, the Committee on Housing and the Community, on which Perry served, stressed the importance of ‘‘the goal that every citizen of these United States should have as a background a home in a neighborhood where there is beauty, convenience, and social opportunity.’’23 All the conference housing committees, Architectural Record reported, finding that the relationship of the family to the city was less intimate than to the neighborhood,

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came to the conclusion that planned neighborhoods are essential to good housing—planned neighborhoods within the framework of the city plan and the regional plan . . . The very idea of home ownership means permanence, stability, security. The best security for home ownership is a high standard dwelling located in a desirable neighborhood, protected against deteriorating influences.24

Support for neighborhood unit planning expanded in the 1930s. In 1933 the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA), with whom Perry met in the mid-1920s, made the concept the centerpiece of its proposal for a national housing policy. As published in the journal of the American Institute of Architects, the Octagon, the RPAA report argued that ‘‘in order to make the most effective use of site planning and large-scale building to reduce costs, as well as insure stable occupancy, the complete neighborhood community should be taken as the basic unit of housing.’’25 RPAA members Lewis Mumford and Catherine Bauer published their own defenses of neighborhood planning in 1933 and 1934 respectively.26 A further endorsement came from Gordon Whitnall of Los Angeles, who, along with local colleagues, believed that his city could escape the problems of eastern industrial areas through careful planning for decentralized subcenters throughout the metropolitan region.27 On a national level, the first full report on American cities, issued by the U.S. National Resources Committee in 1937, suggested that the conditions most desirable for urban living might be advanced by the organization of the urban area as a whole into neighborhoods and satellite communities each of which provides for a maximum of opportunity for the daily activities and needs of its inhabitants, each of which possesses a social and political coherence which can arouse and hold community loyalty and participation, inspire reasonable civic leadership, and can perform effectively its specialized function in the metropolitan region.28

Planners and social activists worked together in the 1930s to extend the need for neighborhood coherence into legislation authorizing public assistance for low-income housing. Mary Simkhovitch, an organizer of the first national conference on city planning and one who readily acknowledged Mary Follett’s influence on her career at New York’s Greenwich House settlement,29 helped convince Senator Robert Wagner to include slum clearance and low-cost housing projects as part of the administration’s public works program in the National Recovery Act, introduced by Wagner in May 1933.30 While the act did not specify a neighborhood approach, housing activists led by Catherine Bauer succeeded in establishing the kind of compre-

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Figure 15. Neighborhood planning finds support in American cities. American City (January 1938).

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hensive neighborhood planning described by Perry in such early projects sponsored by the Housing Division of the Public Works Administration as the Carl Mackley Houses in Philadelphia.31 Bauer’s work to organize labor support for public housing, when joined to the ongoing leadership of Mary Simkhovitch in her role as chairman of the National Housing Conference, contributed greatly to passage of the 1937 Housing Act. The Federal Housing Administration incorporated Perry’s concept into its guidelines for new development, and by the 1940s, the acceptance of neighborhood planning throughout the planning profession was recognized by friends and critics alike.32 The apparent continuity in the neighborhood unit idea has led critics like Ahlbrandt and Cunningham to blame Perry and his associates for the bad aftereffects of the redevelopment provisions of the 1949 Housing Act. In assuming a direct progression from Perry’s original neighborhood concept through the public housing efforts of the 1930s and 1940s, however, they fail to recognize the way changing attitudes about urban needs altered the concept of neighborhood planning to give it a different purpose than Perry had originally conceived. Indeed, by 1937 neighborhood planning was already taking on new connotations in light of changed perceptions among social scientists about the role of the neighborhood and a shift in priorities among planners and businessmen from the social to the physical rehabilitation of older residential areas. Among social scientists, Jesse Steiner marked the most dramatic shift of opinion, when, as president of the National Community Center Association in 1929, he openly challenged the primacy of the neighborhood. Believing that modern changes in communication and association had made the back-to-the-neighborhood movement obsolescent, he asserted that ‘‘our eyes are now turned toward the outer world of larger contacts instead of seeking satisfaction within a narrow circle.’’ While he said he believed that neighborhood centers could still be of value, he urged community leaders to abandon the tradition of trying to pull together all residents of the area for common purposes. In stressing the wider range of citizen interests, he even suggested that the name of the organization be changed to the National Association of Community and Regional Organizations.33 Steiner’s position was embraced and extended in the ‘‘neighborhood’’ entry written by sociologist Niles Carpenter for the prestigious Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences published in 1933. In contrast to earlier social theory that stressed the variety found in neighborhoods, Carpenter claimed that homogeneity was a necessary condition for neighborhood activity and

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that the heterogeneity of the urban population and the development of an intricate network of secondary group associations tended to break down neighborhood spirit. Significantly, he called the cohesion that followed both concentrated ethnic groups and settlement activity ‘‘pseudo-neighborhoods,’’ arguing that settlements were necessarily specialized in approach whereas ethnic areas ‘‘are far too numerously populated to present anything remotely resembling the close-knit primary group community life characteristic of the generic neighborhood.’’34 Such criticism was taken up again on the eve of the 1949 Housing Act in a series of articles by Reginald Isaacs, who was serving as chief planner for Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital. Drawing on his association with Louis Wirth, Isaacs claimed that the density of modern cities prevented the mutual acquaintanceship between inhabitants that ordinarily characterized neighborhood or small town life. Noting the growing perception in the social sciences of the declining social significance of the family, the disappearance of the neighborhood, and the undermining of the traditional basis of social solidarity, he said it was hardly surprising that so many people were joining groups that had nothing to do with their place of residence.35 While Isaacs’s remarks drew some spirited defense for the neighborhood, his belief that more cosmopolitan forces had subordinated the importance of the neighborhood remained the dominant position among sociologists into the 1960s.36 This decline in the perception of the importance of the neighborhood among scholars left its fate increasingly to the forces of politics and the marketplace. Concurrent with this anti-neighborhood trend among sociologists was a growing role for businessmen in reaction against advances in public housing, particularly those associated with the 1937 Housing Act. Mark Gelfand has noted the efforts business interests made to shift urban public assistance from slum housing toward more broadly defined blighted and deteriorated areas where commercial, as well as residential, properties had declined in value.37 This pattern dated back to the 1920s, even before public works surveys had publicized the extent of urban blight. To this was added in the 1930s a new argument for public efforts to stimulate private investment in cities as the means to counteract the outward flow of population and capital to the suburbs. Instead of promoting planned decentralization, as advocates of the Garden City concept had done, a new generation of urbanists urged the rebuilding of older neighborhoods. As both these themes emerged, the emphasis in neighborhood planning shifted from the kind of social and

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civic concerns associated with its origins in the Progressive Era to the protection of business investment and the growth of city revenues. Perry picked up the redevelopment theme himself as early as 1933 with the publication of a monograph on the use of neighborhood unit planning to rebuild blighted areas. Arguing that zoning was an inadequate solution to the problem, he suggested a pooling arrangement for land assembly whereby the state would intervene to overcome minority holdouts in a blighted area by exercising the power of eminent domain. Such cooperation was necessary on a large scale, Perry said, if redeveloped areas were to escape the bad effects of urban conditions. The goal of the neighborhood unit remained what it had been, to promote ‘‘common prosperity,’’ public health (through better light, air, and play space), public safety (less risk from street accidents), public morals (through enhanced community environment), and public convenience (better located shopping districts). However, in calling for a ‘‘resounding psychical attack’’ to attract new families to redeveloped areas, Perry joined the competition with the suburbs for tax-paying residents. In the process, he took the unaccustomed step of proposing to set the redeveloped neighborhood apart from the city as ‘‘an internal environment of such unusual charm and all-around desirability, that the unpleasantness of the sights and sounds outside the neighborhood could be completely counteracted.’’38 For Perry, an isolated physical development increasingly meant an isolated social development as well. While he made only passing reference to the Forest Hills Garden policy of exercising discrimination in selecting tenants in the early 1920s,39 by 1929 he had turned that policy into a positive virtue. Unlike Follett, who welcomed implementation of community center programs in diversified neighborhoods, Perry favored homogeneity in planned development. In his chapter for the Regional Plan of New York entitled ‘‘Replanning Central Deteriorated Areas,’’ Perry said that the requisite needs for substantial capital investment would encourage formation of a kind of club, which would be desirable because ‘‘in this way the whole body would acquire a homogeneity that would facilitate living together and make possible the enjoyment of many benefits not otherwise obtainable.’’40 In describing the success of Forest Hills Gardens, Perry praised the ‘‘peculiar qualities of the development’’ that ‘‘attracted people with similar tastes and living standards.’’41 He openly suggested that fully planned neighborhoods were for those who could afford them and, at best, examples of such developments would have a trickle-down effect by giving ‘‘needed object

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lessons in improved housing environment and community organization which will of themselves ultimately aid the reform of slum areas.42 Such ideas would have their effect on the evolving relationship between neighborhood planning and redevelopment, but Perry’s direct influence was already waning by 1937, when he retired from the Russell Sage Foundation. Although he issued another call that year for public assistance to business for redevelopment,43 he provided no other significant publications on the subject. His death, five years before passage of the 1949 Housing Act, was scarcely noted in the press, and it was left to others to carry his ideas to their own conclusions. One person who might have extended Perry’s ideas in a different direction, were it not for his untimely death in 1936, was Henry Wright. Despite a common interest in neighborhood planning, Wright’s approach differed from Perry’s in his emphasis on the gradual rehabilitation of housing by blocks. He thus hoped to develop a method that might be pursued ‘‘without a great disturbance of the neighborhood at any time, but that, because of its reasonableness and logic would set up a more or less automatic and progressive rehabilitation.’’44 This approach, proposed for the deteriorated southwest quarter of Washington, D.C., by Arthur Goodwillie in 1942 and by Elbert Peets in 1951, was rejected as ‘‘too timid.’’45 The bolder approach that would dominate planning before and after the 1949 act was wholesale rebuilding by private enterprise. More influential among planners than Perry or Wright during this stage was Harland Bartholomew. As chairman of the committee on subdivisions for the Conference on Home Ownership, which also included Henry Wright, Bartholomew was an early enthusiast of the neighborhood unit idea. He had linked neighborhood planning to slum clearance at the 1933 National Conference on City Planning and incorporated the concept in a number of the comprehensive plans he had prepared for cities across the United States in the 1930s.46 As an early proponent of redevelopment to counter suburbanization, Bartholomew shared Perry’s belief that rehabilitated areas had to be sufficiently large and self-contained to assure potential residents of their isolation from the problems associated with blighted areas. In an article entitled ‘‘The Neighborhood—Key to Urban Redemption,’’ he argued that slum areas had to be reconstructed as single undertakings. Because he thought that low-cost housing was too big a job for the federal government, he sought ways to encourage private investment in redevelopment projects.47 To do that, Bartholomew built on Perry’s pooling idea to develop a

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‘‘Neighborhood Improvement Act’’ in 1937. According to this legislation, neighborhood-based corporations could be formed and granted powers of eminent domain to redevelop blighted areas if they secured the approval of 60 percent of a designated area’s property owners and if the plan for redevelopment met the approval of the city’s planning agency. In justifying his approach before a 1937 housing symposium, Bartholomew reiterated this emphasis on competing with the suburbs, stating that ‘‘our cities are faced with economic collapse unless large numbers of people become persuaded that areas within the city can be made fully as attractive as the suburbs.’’48 Originally prepared for the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), Bartholomew’s plans failed to meet the approval of the association’s executive director, Herbert U. Nelson, who developed a revised version of the plan the following year. A bitter critic of public housing in any form, Nelson nonetheless hid this antagonism to the goals of housing activists by adopting language fully reminiscent of earlier social reforms. Affirming that ‘‘the important elements of family life and security of home ownership rest, in no small degree, upon the character of a neighborhood,’’ he argued that ‘‘the neighborhood must, therefore, be the new unit upon which effective city planning is built.’’49 Nelson soon followed by proposing an even more ambitious establishment of semipublic rebuilding corporations, which would gain equity capital from the federal government and the right of eminent domain to facilitate land assembly, subject to approval of the local city planning agency.50 Other refinements emerged from the business community, including the formation of urban land commissions that would receive long-term loans at low interest rates from a national Urban Land Commission for land acquisition. The local land commission would have the power to establish a master plan for the entire metropolitan area and do practically everything necessary to complete the plan except actually erect buildings.51 In 1941 three states adopted variations on this approach by authorizing assistance to private redevelopment: Illinois, through its Neighborhood Redevelopment Corporation Act; Michigan, through its Redevelopment Corporation Act; and New York, through the Urban Redevelopment Corporation Act. Although the measures differed in the degree of incentives offered to business, each encouraged companies to undertake large neighborhood revitalization projects by offering rights of eminent domain and reduced taxes. The New York bill received the enthusiastic support of the Regional Plan Association for promising to put into effect the neighborhood unit

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plan as promoted by the association since its 1929 publication of Perry’s study. The New York Times endorsed the concept of ‘‘private slum clearance’’ as a means of making up for unmet needs in public housing.52 Two years later the Urban Land Institute, an offshoot of NAREB, induced Senator Wagner to bring before Congress the Neighborhood Development Bill with similar objectives. Declaring it public policy ‘‘to encourage and assist the development of wholesome neighborhood conditions that are necessary to family life by private enterprise with the collaboration of public enterprise,’’ the bill envisioned federal loans or subsidies to assist land assembly and reconstruction as part of the postwar recovery.53 The bill did not advance in Congress, but by 1949 twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia had adopted redevelopment legislation.54 While some states, such as New Jersey and Maryland, turned redevelopment powers over to existing housing authorities established under the 1937 Housing Act, a number created separate authorities that would act along lines originally conceived for land commissions, an approach naturally favored by realtors and builders, with their established antagonism to public housing. In one critical instance, where Congress had to pass a redevelopment law for the District of Columbia, businessmen, headed by the NAREB, in association with the National Association of Home Builders, fought to keep control away from the local housing authority. As approved in 1945, Washington’s redevelopment law established the independent Redevelopment Land Agency with power to assemble land parcels, which were to be offered first to private bidders and then only as a last resort to the city’s housing authority.55 In the meantime, another important change in direction emerged with revisions made in New York’s Urban Redevelopment Corporation Bill. With the prodding of Robert Moses, New York authorized the participation of existing corporations, notably life insurance companies and savings banks, in redevelopment, and it liberalized incentives by allowing increased dividends and extending the exemption of any new taxes on new projects from ten to twenty years. The bill as amended and approved March 30, 1943, also removed corporate responsibility, established under the 1941 law, for securing ‘‘the availability of other suitable dwelling accommodations for [those] living in the area.’’56 Moses believed such inducements were necessary to encourage truly comprehensive projects, such as the Stuyvesant Town development that the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company was proposing for the old gashouse district on the Lower East Side. Although Metropolitan Life had previously carried out huge housing projects, notably

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Parkchester in the Bronx, these had been on relatively open land and did not include the costs of land assembly involved in such built-up areas as the East Side. By extending the power of eminent domain to an existing corporation located wholly outside the neighborhood, the 1943 law encouraged outside intervention and offered the prospect in extreme of isolating any neighborhood project from the surrounding area. Covering eighteen city blocks and built to house between 11,000 and 25,000 people, Stuyvesant Town represented, as Fortune reported, ‘‘a self-contained new community, a virtual suburb within the city.’’57 Although Perry’s enthusiasm for selfcontained development may have anticipated the scale of Stuyvesant, the project’s distance from the original neighborhood unit approach could be measured by its lack of community facilities, most notably a school. Unlike the poor reception offered more gradualist approaches, Stuyvesant Town generated enthusiastic editorial response. A 1943 article in the New York Times Magazine, for instance, reflected developers’ arguments that partial rehabilitation of older neighborhoods was insufficient to attract middle-income residents. Describing the replacement of slums with superblocks, Joseph McGoldrick claimed that blighted areas required major surgery if they were to be returned to health: ‘‘We must cut out the whole cancer and not leave any diseased tissue.’’ Unless urban neighborhoods were rebuilt, he said, highways planned for postwar completion would ‘‘lead people right out of cities and greatly aggravate financial difficulties already chronic.’’58 Further praise for the comprehensiveness of the Stuyvesant plan came from Tracy Augur, a planner who had maintained some association with the RPAA in the 1920s: ‘‘Little islands of redevelopment in a big sea of blight have little chance of survival.’’59 However, criticism of such wholesale redevelopment did emerge. As chairman of the National Capital Housing Authority, John Ihlder favored a more gradual approach that allowed for neighborhood conservation, and he bemoaned the growing influence of large-scale projects, which he associated with New York housers.60 In New York itself, Simkhovitch, who in her position as vice-chairman of the city’s public housing authority found herself more frequently in an adversarial position with Stuyvesant enthusiast Moses, added her reservations. ‘‘Many of my city planner friends think it foolish to engage in housing unless it is on an impressive scale,’’ she wrote in her autobiography. ‘‘I suppose a woman looks at it differently. . . . My life at Greenwich House has taught me not to despise small things. . . . Neighborhood planning should be developed in accord with a city plan, but the reverse is true also.’’61

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The size of the redevelopment projects alone was not the issue, since Bauer, Mumford, and Wright, among others, had argued that amenities of recreational and civic facilities were best secured through the economies of large-scale building. What bothered critics of Stuyvesant Town, such as Bauer, was the way those projects contributed to social differentiation. Pleased as she was to see the neighborhood concept bringing planners and housers together, Bauer worried that ‘‘in our native preoccupation with material means’’ neighborhood builders were losing sight of that ‘‘broad and progressive civic philosophy as to what really constitutes a ‘good neighborhood.’ ’’ Over the past generation, she continued, ‘‘practically every effort in the field of city planning and housing, whether profit-minded or welfare-minded, has been pushing us toward enormous one-class dormitory developments as completely separated from one another and from work places as possible.’’62 Bauer thought the NAREB neighborhood improvement schemes were designed to promote racial and economic segregation, a claim that seemed to be substantiated by Stuyvesant Town’s widely publicized refusal to accept black tenants.63 The question of race arose in other considerations of redevelopment, notably in the District of Columbia, where blacks voiced their fears in congressional hearings that giving private companies redevelopment powers would accelerate their displacement from their traditional place of residence in older city neighborhoods.64 Publicity concerning the antagonism of builders and realtors to integrated projects led Reginald Isaacs, on the eve of the 1949 act, to brand neighborhood planning an instrument of segregation.65 The massive displacement of blacks and other ethnic groups from older neighborhoods in favor of suburban-oriented building projects undoubtedly influenced critics like Jacobs, Cunningham, and Ahlbrandt to blame neighborhood unit planning. Perry’s evolving conception of the needs of inner-city neighborhoods certainly contributed to the problems these critics have described. But it was the new connotation given neighborhood planning in the 1930s and 1940s that stripped the concept of its original progressive purposes and divided old and new proponents of the idea. Although she did not play the central role in the 1949 act she had in the 1937 act, Simkhovitch maintained her faith in neighborhood-based planning for social rehabilitation.66 Her confidence in the central role settlement workers might play in an expanded redevelopment program was echoed in 1949 by Daniel Carpenter, director of the Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York, who felt that settlement houses provided the proper balance to centralized efforts in Washington to establish housing, education, welfare,

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and recreation programs.67 Meanwhile, businessmen and realtors, led especially by Herbert Nelson, attacked the 1949 Housing Act as socialistic, arguing that existing state legislation and strict code enforcement were sufficient to deal with housing problems.68 Nelson and his colleagues may have lost the battle in 1949, but they won the war, for with passage of the new act, redevelopment was to be directed by the interests of private enterprise, not by those of public housers or social workers. In the race to make cities compete with suburbs,69 the original connotations of Perry’s concept of purposeful neighborhood planning were subordinated or lost, and an instrument once conceived for social and civic rehabilitation was turned to social disruption.70

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The Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City

Among the culprits most often singled out for the decline of America’s central cities, the suburban shopping center stands out. These ‘‘engines of commerce’’ not only undercut traditional economic patterns, they had, according to critics, detrimental effects on social relationships forged over generations.1 Such criticism would have surprised the pioneers of such efforts, who cast their goals in terms of a philosophy rooted in the earlier era of greatest suburban growth, when theorists had conceived planned shopping centers as the means not just to sell merchandise but to improve social and civic life. This chapter traces the evolution of the planned shopping center, placing that movement within a tradition of environmental reform in which physical designs are used to advance social goals.2 In revealing the origins of the movement, this essay links the contemporary urban mall closely to its suburban predecessor. In the process, however, it raises new questions about the appropriateness of transplanting into historic downtowns techniques that were pioneered in the outer city. The history of planned shopping facilities goes back as far as 1908 to Baltimore’s Roland Park.3 Their growth, however, was modest in the 1920s and 1930s, when only a few centers were opened—notably Upper Darby Center in Philadelphia (1927), Highland Park in Dallas (1931), and River Oaks Center in Houston (1937).4 These centers were created to serve existing communities. More ambitious, and ultimately more influential, was J. C. Nichols’s Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, which aimed to build a whole town around the Plaza shopping center. Believing that increased trade would help build up a town center, Nichols borrowed from the English Garden City ideal in designing the Plaza. In particular, he borrowed its effort to integrate residential development with environmental amenities by lavishing his center with features previously reserved for the

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biggest and most dominant of the downtown department stores. These included art objects, small parks, benches and fountains, and a variety of community activities, from an annual Spanish fiesta to free bridge lessons, dog shows, and an outdoor art fair. As his residential development grew from the original ten-acre tract to an area encompassing 5,000 acres, Nichols incorporated ten neighborhood shopping areas, more limited in scope than the central plaza, with the goal of providing easy access to everyday necessities such as grocery and drug stores.5 Following Nichols’s example, developers built a few other planned developments around central shopping facilities in the 1940s, including Park Forest, Illinois,6 and Levittown, New York. The latter took advantage of the postwar demand for housing by transforming 4,500 acres of farmland into the largest town on Long Island. Described by one source as a modern version of the town green, the central store group in Levittown included a playground and a nursery.7 Even as businessmen were using shopping facilities as strategic elements in their development strategies, urban theorists began to conceive of the shopping center as a vehicle for social and civic reform. Distressed by the formless outward spread of the city, they viewed the planned development of shopping centers as an antidote. Early experiments to concentrate shopping facilities were tried in Forest Hills Gardens in New York (see Chapter 4), and as part of government housing ventures during World War I. Shopping centers received growing attention in the building of new towns, starting with Radburn, New Jersey, in 1928 and continuing in the 1930s with the three greenbelt communities developed by the New Deal Resettlement Administration.8 The development of the neighborhood planning concept in the 1920s and 1930s as an attempt to instill civic pride through physical design encouraged planners to place the shopping center alongside the school and the playground. Clarence Arthur Perry, the chief figure behind the movement, claimed that a planned neighborhood district ‘‘with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and its convenient circulatory system—all integrated and harmonized by artistic designing—would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish.’’9 As pivotal as theorists considered shopping centers to be to community design, such centers typically were limited in practice to their immediate vicinity, usually an area containing no more than several thousand peo-

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ple. It was not until the boom that followed World War II that larger, more diverse centers were conceived to serve a regional clientele. That movement began a shift in retailing, according to geographer Peter O. Muller, from passively following a dispersing population to shaping the outer metropolitan region around retailing centers.10 The number of shopping centers grew from a few hundred at the war’s end to 2,900 in 1958, 7,100 in 1963, and 22,000 in 1980; 230 of the latter were classified as regional malls serving wide geographic regions. By 1954 total retail sales in suburban shopping centers surpassed total retail sales of all metropolitan centers exceeding one million population.11 That statistic prompted the influential editor of Chain Store Age, S. O. Kaylin, to declare that ‘‘there is no logical place to locate stores but in the suburbs.’’12 New regional centers emerged at the convergence of major new highways built with funds from the 1956 Federal Highway Act, many where no concentrated residential development had existed before. Among areas that generated phenomenal growth were Paramus, New Jersey, described as the ‘‘suburb Macy’s built,’’ with two adjacent shopping centers and parking to accommodate up to 16,000 cars,13 and the Cross Country Shopping Center in Yonkers, New York, described as ‘‘enmeshed in a network of parkways and expressways.’’14 To services provided in the 1940s, such as play lots for children, the regional shopping centers of the 1950s added a range of special features, including soft music, nurseries, fireworks, band concerts and square dances, fashion shows, and even (in Columbus, Ohio) strolling singers, trapeze artists, and high divers for entertainment.15 In reaction to highly publicized conditions of traffic congestion downtown, these centers stressed availability of parking and the separation of pedestrian from automotive traffic— advantages widely cited as the keys to their success. Although shopping centers varied greatly in the number and types of amenities and conveniences they offered, they quickly attracted attention for their potential contributions to the civic and commercial vitality of the suburbs. Even before World War II ended, a writer for Architectural Forum urged great care in building the shopping center, for, he said, it ‘‘symbolizes the life of the town’’ and ‘‘lends color and character to community living.’’16 In 1948 an article in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners cited the shopping center’s potential, through recentralization, to create ‘‘a pedestrian pulling power of sufficient density to permit a rate of sales volume to store space comparable to downtown areas.’’17 A 1955 Journal of Retailing review of the sudden rise of shopping centers pronounced the innovation

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‘‘a thoroughly practical concept . . . which embraces the idea that such a development can also act as a civic, cultural, and social center.’’18 A report in Architectural Record praised these centers for creating ‘‘a pleasant, landscaped business street free of traffic hazard,’’ and an article in Department Store Economist claimed that ‘‘no construction is more dynamic than the shopping center or as likely to influence a reform of the usual urban and suburban hodgepodge. . . . A new generation of department store men and women . . . are showing the same high responsibility to the communities that their grandfathers showed when they helped to create the great downtowns which we know today in hundreds of cities.’’19 When residents of one Pennsylvania community attempted to block construction of a shopping center, charging that it violated local zoning restrictions, the state supreme court ruled in favor of the developers, stating that the shopping center in America had become ‘‘an almost integral part of any suburban community.’’20 During the late 1940s and early 1950s, developers kept close track of each other’s work, following the growing literature on shopping centers in architectural and trade journals, visiting each other’s sites, and meeting to share ideas. The Urban Land Institute took the lead in this effort, sponsoring a symposium on residential development and suburban shopping centers in November 1946. The institute’s monthly publication, Urban Land, reported the proceedings the next month. Suggestions for shopping center development appeared in greater detail in the 1947 edition of Community Builders Handbook, published by a ULI subsidiary, the Community Builders’ Council, established by J. C. Nichols in 1944.21 By the 1960s, as Peter Muller points out, the suburban shopping center reached a new level of achievement, both diversifying the range of its services and attracting clients on such a regular basis as to approach the level of community ritual.22 By 1972 a report in Architectural Record declared that ‘‘the growing commitment to concentration and mixed activities in these malls are a very strong sign that people do not want to abandon their urban life—even in the suburbs.’’ Suburban malls, the report continued, ‘‘are taking on all the best characteristics of central cities . . . even achieving some of the idealized techniques of urban life that central cities have seldom achieved.’’23 In a survey for Fortune the same year, Gurney Breckenfeld described the shopping center as ‘‘a whole new urban form’’ that was ‘‘seizing the role once held by the central business district, not only in retailing but as the social, cultural, and recreational focal point of the entire community.’’ In the Eastern Hills regional center, Breckenfeld pointed out, retail

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sales were projected to exceed those generated by all downtown Buffalo only a few miles away.24 Delaware Township, New Jersey, changed its name to Cherry Hill, adopting the name of a shopping center so successful that Muller reported that it ‘‘helped revolutionize the geography of the outer city.’’25 Wide as the interest in regional shopping centers was, it was Victor Gruen, more than anyone else, who helped crystallize a philosophy for the development of such centers, urging their use in enhancing social and civic life through the incorporation of environmental design. Born in Vienna in 1903, Gruen fled Nazi domination and came to the United States in 1938. His first job was to design exhibits for the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Together with his partner (later his wife), Elsie Krummeck, whom he had met through work at the fair, Gruen attracted national attention for innovative urban storefront designs. In the mid-1940s he became associated with Morris Ketchum. Ketchum was an early proponent of pedestrian malls as the means of eliminating automotive traffic that blocked display windows, and also the creator of an influential master plan to convert the main street of Rye, New York, into a landscaped mall, diverting automobile traffic to the city’s periphery.26 In 1947 Gruen incorporated these principles in the design for his first shopping center, for Milliron’s Department Store near the new Los Angeles Municipal Airport in suburban Westchester, an area described as the fastest-growing community in southern California.27 In an article for Chain Store Age, Gruen suggested that comprehensively planned centers like Milliron’s could become ‘‘market places that are also centers of community and cultural activity.’’ Stressing the importance of separating pedestrian from automotive traffic, Gruen, like Nichols before him, also emphasized the importance of physical amenities—such as the small kiosks with outdoor seating he introduced to Milliron’s—as a means of impressing ‘‘the center’s facilities deeply into the minds of the people living in a wide surrounding area.’’ The center, he claimed, would thus become to its customers ‘‘more than just a place where one may shop—it shall be related in their minds with all activities of cultural enrichment and relaxation.’’28 Although Milliron’s attracted its share of national attention, two regional centers completed in the mid-1950s established Gruen as the nation’s leading shopping-center developer and marked the maturation of his philosophy of making such commercial enterprises vital centers of community. Gruen’s Northland Center in suburban Detroit, the largest shopping complex built up to that time, attracted up to 100,000 people to its opening

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in 1954 and prompted Architectural Forum to compare it with New York’s Rockefeller Center.29 Commissioned by the venerable downtown J. L. Hudson department store, Northland represented (according to Gruen) the first modern architecturally defined space that could resemble the market squares of European cities or the commons of colonial towns.30 Shortly afterward Gruen brought together competing department stores, Hudson’s and Allied, to build the huge Southdale Center complex outside Minneapolis, this time around a closed court that was designed at the outset to provide an urban space for citywide activities, such as the annual ball of the Minneapolis Symphony. Both as the country’s first enclosed, ‘‘weather conditioned’’ shopping center and as a complex incorporating dramatic public art, including forty-five-foot sculptured trees, Southdale quickly attracted public attention and inspired many imitators. In promoting these planned regional shopping centers and in subsequent publications, Gruen identified shopping as part of a larger web of social activities, arguing that merchandisers would be most successful where they integrated their activities with ‘‘the widest possible palette of human experiences and urban expressions.’’ It thus made business sense, he said, to include ‘‘as many nonretail urban functions within the complex of the center as feasible, in creating opportunities for cultural, artistic, and social events and in striving for an environmental climate and atmosphere which in itself becomes an attraction for the inhabitants of a region.’’31 Such activities were particularly in demand in sprawling suburban regions, where the automobile had deprived merchants of preordained locations. Shopping centers could provide ‘‘crystallization points for suburbia’s community life.’’ ‘‘By affording opportunities for social life and recreation in a protected pedestrian environment, by incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping centers can fill an existing void,’’ Gruen wrote with his financial partner, Larry Smith, in 1960.32 Although he credited the influence of Nichols’s Country Club Plaza, Gruen looked farther back in time for models, arguing that shopping centers could ‘‘provide the needed place and opportunity for participation in modern community life that the ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place, and our own Town Squares provided in the past.’’ He called the integration of commerce with community life ‘‘environmental architecture,’’ which involved planning not just for buildings but also for the range of activities that might go on in and around them.33 To that idea Gruen brought a distinctly urban set of values, stating that ‘‘when the need has been fully understood, shopping centers have taken on the character of

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Figure 16. Southdale Center complex outside Minneapolis, with its ring roads and retail and recreational facilities, helped establish Gruen as the nation’s leading developer of shopping centers. Courtesy Gruen Associates.

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urban organisms serving a multitude of human needs and activities, thus justifying the designation ‘shopping towns.’ ’’34 As he later described his goal, ‘‘By interweaving all experience of human life within the urban tissue, we can restore the lost sense of commitment and belonging; we can counteract the phenomenon of alienation, isolation, and loneliness and achieve a sense of identification and participation.’’35 But if shopping centers were to become ‘‘town centers,’’ Gruen expected them to draw only selectively on the urban experience. While he sought the stimulation of a crowded streetscape—which, he suggested, satisfied a ‘‘primary human instinct to mingle with other human beings’’— he sought as well to banish all that was ugly in the city. Following the nineteenth-century example of covered arcades designed to shut out the surrounding urban turmoil, such as London’s Burlington Mall and the Victor Emanuel Galleria in Milan, the suburban shopping center turned inward to create its own peaceful version of the urban street. He excused such introverted projects with the explanation that in cities ‘‘we have permitted anarchy and ugliness to take over to such a degree that good architecture has no place to express itself.’’ With little chance to be effective within cities, ‘‘we architects,’’ he wrote, ‘‘have followed the merchants and commuters’’ to become ‘‘suburbanites and exurbanites.’’36 In the suburbs, he hoped, architects could achieve a balanced architectural approach that offered ‘‘variety without confusion, colorful appearance without garishness, gaiety without vulgarity.’’37 The shopping center was to offer, in short, that ideal middle ground between city and country, public and private life, which was so often promised for the suburbs but so seldom realized, as Leo Marx suggests in The Machine in the Garden.38 Recognizing the revolution in leisure time brought on by postwar affluence, Gruen throughout the 1950s stressed the need to provide physical facilities that could make shopping recreational. As he declared at the dedication of the Northland Center in 1954, shopping centers should be designed for relaxation and amusement, providing an atmosphere that becomes ‘‘restful and fun.’’39 To enhance that experience, Gruen added to the kinds of amenities pioneered by J. C. Nichols a group of integrated visual elements intended to attract the passerby, such as flags, kiosks, special landscaping, and sculpture. As a contributor to a 1959 issue of Progressive Architecture put it, ‘‘These are the factors which pull the crowds. . . . And the people make the show.’’40 In the effort to shape that ideal middle landscape for their suburban shopping centers, Gruen and later architects attempted to domesticate the

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setting, creating an environment that could be considered an extension of the home. The creation of clusters of benches, often shielded from pedestrian walkways by plants and foliage, provided private refuges within the larger public setting. Strict controls over signs and store frontage ensured the cohesion of an ideal neighborhood while they allowed individual shopkeepers to put personal touches on their places of business. Recognizing the growing role of shopping centers for family recreation, a reporter for Architectural Record described the courtyard of the Town East Center in Arlington, Texas, as an area larger than a baseball diamond but with the character of a ‘‘covered public living room.’’41 Another issue of Architectural Record described efforts at Northpark, five miles from Dallas, to humanize the huge parking lot by ‘‘breaking it into room-like enclaves with trees and planting, by the elimination of signs and by simplification of lighting.’’42 In describing Gruen’s Southdale as ‘‘more like downtown than downtown itself,’’ Architectural Forum suggested it was successful because its distillation of downtown elements included ‘‘all kinds of changes that might be there if downtown weren’t so noisy and dirty and chaotic.’’43 Although early in his career he had stressed the special design needs of suburban as distinct from urban stores,44 and despite his repeated insistence that suburban malls chose only selectively from urban experiences, Gruen nonetheless turned quickly to an effort to translate to the downtown area the successes of Northland and Southdale. Beginning in 1955 he gave a series of speeches depicting the plight of an urban area he would describe only as ‘‘City X,’’ where, he said, the planning principles pioneered in suburban shopping centers could be applied as a solution. ‘‘For the planning of regional shopping centers, we learned many a lesson from carefully watching and analyzing downtown activities,’’ he told a Boston conference on distribution. ‘‘Now that large regional shopping centers have been planned, constructed, and successfully operated, they are ready to pay back part of the debt owed to the old downtown district by serving as testing and proving grounds of ideas and for the renewal of our city cores.’’45 Although on other occasions Gruen noted some differences between suburban and downtown retailing, he insisted now that the primary lessons of the suburban center could be applied downtown: improving the flow of traffic and the productivity of the land, separating pedestrian from automobile traffic, and integrating commercial and noncommercial activities.46 In March 1956 ‘‘City X’’ was revealed—with considerable attention in the press—as Fort Worth, Texas, where Gruen unveiled a dramatic plan to turn the ‘‘heart’’ of the city into a virtual shopping center. Although he later

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Figure 17. Shopping city: Gruen’s rendering of his plan to turn downtown Fort Worth into a virtual shopping center. Courtesy Gruen Associates.

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Figure 18. City street as shopping center. From the plan for Fort Worth, Texas, as envisioned by Victor Gruen. Courtesy Gruen Associates.

described the inspiration for his idea as the medieval defense system of roads in Vienna, the most immediate influence clearly came from his own shopping centers. There, as had been done in Vienna, Gruen had conceived of concentric highways around the shopping center; he now applied that concept to the city to ‘‘repel the invasion of mechanical hordes into those areas where they create havoc.’’ By providing up to 60,000 parking spaces at the perimeter and by shutting off all traffic at the inner of three concentric highways, Gruen could hope to achieve the central goals of providing convenient access downtown and separating pedestrian from automobile traffic. The newly created shopping area would encompass large plazas and squares where garages once had been necessary. Some streets would be roofed over and air-conditioned, while colonnades and arcades would be

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added to others. Thus, ‘‘a pattern of great variety and interest was created, providing a continuous change of pace and atmosphere to those who would work in the core or visit there. Some public spaces would be large, even monumental; others would be narrow and intimate. Some would be open to the sky; others would be covered and skylighted, similar in character to the regional shopping center.’’47 Gruen’s Fort Worth plan was not entirely original and followed substantially the format of an approach to downtown rehabilitation put forth by the Urban Land Institute in 1954 and discussed the previous year by the Chicago Planning Commission. In both of those cases the goal was to eliminate ‘‘chaotic’’ and ‘‘incompatible’’ activities by applying more harmonious planning designs tested outside the city.48 Gruen’s special contribution was to give that approach unprecedented national publicity and to articulate more fully the connection between city and suburban experiences. In unveiling the Fort Worth plan, he emphasized his hopes to draw what he called ‘‘forced suburbanites’’ back to the city, providing an urban vision (like that pioneered in suburban malls), as Women’s Wear Daily reported, of eliminating obsolete buildings; creating homogeneous, connected entities whose plans would be grouped in logical order to minimize walking distances; providing ample immediate and potential parking; conceiving underground road systems; and creating landscaped courts.49 The special impetus to Gruen’s work came from the 1954 Housing Act and the 1956 Federal Highway Act. In the housing act Gruen saw a chance to heighten retail trade by redefining redevelopment to include commercial facilities.50 The 1956 Highway Act, he argued at an important conference in Hartford in 1957, could aid cities by providing planners with the tools to shape the urban environment. ‘‘Highway bulldozers,’’ he claimed, ‘‘instead of being the grave diggers of our urban civilization, will clear the path for lifegiving, cellforming, bloodfeeding activities.’’51 The Fort Worth plan, which anticipated drawing together resources made possible by both the highway act and the housing act, represented one of the most hopeful visions of coordinated planning among those discussed in the postwar period.52 Although a local initiative rejected the Fort Worth plan after parking lot companies opposed it, Gruen found support for his approach from urban critics, including Jane Jacobs, who praised it for its efforts to enliven street life with the same visual elements pioneered in suburban shopping centers.53 Writing for American City, Arthur McVoy of Baltimore gave the pedestrian-oriented recreational activities advocated by Gruen the name

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Figure 19. Shopping center as community center: a dance at Midtown Plaza, Rochester, New York. Courtesy Gruen Associates.

‘‘community leisure centers,’’ anticipating such a development along his city’s decaying inner harbor and suggesting that every city should establish just such a center.54 Gruen himself was able to implement a number of the concepts originally envisioned for Fort Worth in Fresno, California, and in Rochester, New York, which he described as a ‘‘shopper’s paradise,’’ with its 1,900 built-in parking spaces. There, a mall, including new office space and a hotel covering seven and one-half acres, was used to connect two existing downtown department stores.55 Reiterating the connection between city and suburb, Gruen said in Architectural Forum, ‘‘We wanted to create a town square with urban qualities. At the same time, the plaza is important as a setting for cultural and social events—concerts, fashion shows, balls, and those activities one connects with urban life.’’56

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As his approach found growing public support, Gruen could write confidently by 1960 that ‘‘the same principles apply to both urban and suburban centers, modified only by the fact that suburban land is cheaper and more easily available, and that mass transit must play a larger part in the urban center, regardless of size or type.’’57 In an extension of this belief, Gruen became a consultant to a number of urban development projects, many inspired by efforts to make downtown retail centers—now popularly referred to as the ‘‘heart’’ of any city—competitive with suburban shopping centers. Gruen’s downtown revitalization plan for Paterson, New Jersey, for instance, was designed to make the city’s retail core competitive with shopping centers in nearby Paramus. In contrast to the modest booster effort to locate 800 parking places downtown, Gruen insisted that space be made available for up to 6,000 cars.58 Gruen also contributed to a report for New Haven, Connecticut, where expansive new parking facilities were built as part of an effort to lure suburban shoppers back downtown to new department stores via a ring road connected to new interstate highway routes.59 Gruen repeated the pattern as a consultant in other cities, including Providence and Boston. By the late 1960s Gruen’s vision for using the planned shopping center to revitalize downtown areas was receiving a respectful hearing, as increased competition and legal and environmental challenges to suburban centers encouraged builders to look for alternative locations in urban areas. Toward the end of his career, however, Gruen soured on American shopping centers, charging that many of the best philosophical principles behind them had been compromised by greed.60 But even as he turned his efforts to Europe, the philosophy of environmental design was picked up and extended in the United States, most notably by James Rouse, who drew an increasing share of publicity for his efforts to revitalize downtown retailing. The two actually worked together directly only once, in the completion of the Cherry Hill Shopping Center, for which Rouse was the developer and Gruen the architect. But a review of Rouse’s career reveals a close parallel to Gruen’s work. Both men argued for and implemented designs that animated the tradition of environmental reform. Like Gruen, Rouse took up the development of suburban shopping centers as an urbanist. In a contribution to Gruen and Smith’s 1960 book, he described his hopes to bring to the first of his three dozen shopping center efforts—Mondawmin, three miles from downtown Baltimore—the atmosphere of that city’s historic shopping area, Lexington Street, ‘‘in a more pleasant, flexible, and convenient manner.’’61 There, as in Gruen’s South-

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dale and Northland centers, Rouse cited the advantages to social community that the architect could provide by saving space for public events. He described such space as being ‘‘designed to establish and continually strengthen the shopping center’s position as a real community center.’’ One of the center’s greatest opportunities, he noted, ‘‘derives from the fact that it fits into the way of life of its shoppers in a manner that downtown and old suburban centers can seldom, if ever, accomplish.’’ Noting that suburbanites probably spent more time in shopping centers than in any other institution except home or school, Rouse argued that the center should relax and replenish the families who use it and promote friendly contact among the people of the community. And in its management, the center should fulfill its unparalleled opportunity to enrich community life.62 Like Gruen, Rouse conducted elaborate traffic surveys for his centers and stressed the inclusion of social amenities—sidewalk cafes, kiosks selling high-impulse items, movie theaters, and community halls—creating what Gurney Breckenfeld called ‘‘a carnival-like atmosphere.’’63 Although Rouse’s achievement in building the new town of Columbia, Maryland, owed much to the precedents of Nichols’s Country Club Plaza, neighborhood planning, and the greenbelt towns of the Resettlement Administration, Columbia’s special role for him was as a transition between suburban and urban malls. Columbia was conceived, Rouse noted, as a city that could grow from the impetus provided by a shopping center. Although it was divided into carefully planned neighborhoods, each with its own limited shopping facilities, primary schools, and playgrounds, the heart of the city was the Columbia Mall, which Rouse described as a combination of Milan’s Galleria and New Jersey’s Cherry Hill.64 Here were the same facilities for special events and the same visual elements tested in earlier suburban centers. Such amenities attracted the crowds necessary to provide urban levels of density and interest, but here, too, were the private spaces for refuge. If any element symbolized the melding of city and suburb, it was Rouse’s use of the push cart in place of the traditional kiosk, harking back to the peddlers who once crowded the immigrant quarters of big cities, but designed with the ambiance of the suburban garden. From Columbia, the transition back downtown was not difficult for Rouse. As one of the architects of the 1954 Housing Act,65 he recognized that the features of his early shopping centers—the creation of spaces ‘‘in which people can drift, relax, smile, contemplate, and enjoy the living, working, shopping for which they are there’’—could be applied to cities.66 The shopping center, he believed, was more attuned to new social values

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that stressed informality, against which ‘‘the old city stands grim and ugly, formal and unwelcome.’’67 For Rouse, then, the urban shopping center represented more than ‘‘simply a new plan for retail expansion. It represents a massive reorganization of the urban community.’’68 Some pioneer shopping centers, including Detroit’s Northland and Baltimore’s Mondawmin, have entered a period of decline, as changing fashion and demography have passed them by. In many other instances, shopping center practice failed to live up to high expectations, as Gruen himself admitted toward the end of his career. But if time and practice have provided variations in experience, the design ideals behind the regional shopping center, both suburban and urban, have remained remarkably consistent. In recent years a number of cities have undertaken the kind of massive reorganization Rouse called for in 1956, introducing improved traffic and pedestrian patterns, along with a variety of noncommercial activities designed to make the city more pleasant and entertaining. At the heart of these efforts have been the planned urban malls, which, like their suburban predecessors, are distinguished by environments tightly controlled through restrictions on design and leasing arrangements. This selective use of environmental intervention, though presented in general terms as the means of revitalizing the ‘‘heart’’ of the city, as Gruen would have described it, has been directed toward replicating the success of the early suburban shopping centers. As the Rouse Company’s chairman and president, Mathias J. DeVito, described the goal, ‘‘The suburban mall is perceived as attractive, safe, comfortable, and dependable with lots of greenery, lots of light and entertainment. These things work . . . because a mall has one management that controls the environment. . . . Our mission is to do downtown what has been done in the suburbs.’’69 In economic terms there is no doubting the success of these efforts. In Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace, Baltimore’s Harborplace, and New York’s South Street Seaport, among others, the Rouse Company has linked large malls with other elements of urban redevelopment to establish its own forms of modern agora, lively places for social and recreational activity as well as retail sales. Time’s headline for its 1981 feature on Rouse, ‘‘Cities Are Fun,’’ thus captured the way the Rouse Company has confirmed and extended one of the central premises of Gruen’s early work: that to be successful, retailers must link merchandising to recreational activity. Restoration efforts by other developers of turn-of-the-century gallerias or arcades have pumped new life into decaying urban centers in Cleveland, Dayton, and Providence.70 Such efforts typically have generated high revenues, and a few

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malls—notably the Rouse Company’s projects in Boston and Baltimore— have attracted more people annually than even Disneyland.71 Today the urban mall is widely credited with reviving decaying centers. A typically effusive writer for Builder claimed recently, for instance, that ‘‘Single-handedly, these downtown development projects, with their distinctive architecture, unusual settings, special mix of shops, restaurants and entertainment and unique urban style, rekindled sparks of life in their cities and, in turn, became celebrations of the vibrancy and diversity of city life.’’72 Because of the attention generated by the economic success of urban malls, planners only recently have begun to identify some of the problems associated with efforts to adapt techniques originally conceived for socially homogeneous and spatially dispersed suburbs to the more diverse social needs and compact spaces of urban areas. Ann Satterthwaite is among those planners who have expressed concern for the social costs that follow from the selective retailing practices of urban malls. In seeking to generate highvolume sales from well-to-do shoppers these malls have encouraged the proliferation of specialty shops. The result often has been that essential services, such as hardware and variety stores, have been displaced from the retail core. This process is becoming widely known as ‘‘commercial gentrification.’’ Public funds that have boosted these private developments have not included, as they did in earlier redevelopment programs, revenue to help accommodate displaced businesses.73 Although James Rouse’s Enterprise Foundation may point a new direction for investment in previously neglected portions of inner cities,74 some black community leaders claim that investment in downtown malls continues to drain funds from needy areas.75 Jack Meltzer makes the same point in his book on contemporary planning. He notes that while the downtown has itself ‘‘taken the characteristics of a regional shopping center with its own captive shed of service,’’ this has happened ‘‘often at the expense of the older community centers, particularly within the inner city.’’76 Closely related to the mall’s selective social function is its design. Treated sensitively, even an urban mall with a suburban look can relate well to the surrounding city, contributing to its renewal as a central place of concentrated activity, as Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace has done. But there has been a tendency, in the effort to provide secure havens for wellto-do shoppers, to set malls entirely apart from the city, with damaging consequences to the surrounding area. This problem was recognized as early as 1974, when Architectural Record noted that the new Broadway Plaza in Los Angeles, while succeeding in attracting shoppers back downtown,

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nonetheless stood out as ‘‘an island of inward-turned amenities placing no relationship except proximity by motor car to other developments in the area.’’77 More recently, developer Kenneth Triester, noting the continuing decline of areas around such shopping centers, warned against the establishment of self-contained fortresses downtown.78 As an early critic of the bad effect of the automobile downtown, Gruen was not one to praise the street. But he conceived his role, as Jane Jacobs emphasized, not to abandon the street but rather to manage its traffic and give it additional life by improving pedestrian amenities. Unlike Rockefeller Center, which Jacobs praised for working to help invigorate the surrounding streets,79 new malls, like New York’s Trump Tower or Chicago’s Water Tower Plaza, turn actively away from the street, thus isolating what pedestrian activity they attract from the surrounding area. Such projects have prompted William Whyte to complain that ‘‘the street is being put almost everywhere except at street level. It is being buried in subterranean corridors; it is being elevated on platforms or put in glass tubes. Finally it is being obliterated altogether as it is enveloped by mega-structures hermetically sealed against the city.’’80 Like projects in the suburbs, urban malls have varied in details of layout, design, and overall intention. Some, like the Commons in Trenton, New Jersey, were praised for avoiding the homogeneity of the suburban shopping center by weaving together a ‘‘melange of shops and surfaces in which its history can be traced.’’81 Others, like the Rouse Company’s South Street Seaport, tread a difficult line between retaining the distinctly urban grist of a wholesale business and introducing a modern shopping facility.82 In all these cases shopping centers have been conceived as vehicles for achieving social and economic goals. To the degree that techniques pioneered in the suburbs have recommended themselves for the success they promise downtown, the challenge for contemporary planners is to adapt those principles in a way that can enhance rather than sacrifice the social and aesthetic diversity that has been the hallmark of our urban areas.

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James Rouse and American City Planning

During his life and since his death in 1996 at the age of eightyone, James Rouse has attracted attention and, for the most part, praise for his multiple roles as entrepreneur, developer, civic activist, and philanthropist.1 Propelled to the cover of Time in 1981 following the opening of Baltimore’s tremendously successful Harborplace retail complex, his image has been indelibly linked with the magazine’s headline, ‘‘Cities Are Fun!’’2 In an era when urban areas have struggled with debilitating decentralization and rising social costs associated with heightened racial and class conflict, Rouse’s affirmative vision for revitalized cities boosted spirits and generated a host of imitators. Hardly one to be denied a place in the story of modern urbanism, can the creator of the festival marketplace also be rightfully described, in Time’s terms, as a ‘‘master planner’’? Credited variously, if not always accurately, with coining the term ‘‘urban renewal’’ and contributing to its translation into law, and with building one of the first enclosed regional malls and pursuing their adaptation downtown, he can scarcely be excluded from the history of urban and regional planning. Although his role as a businessman placed him outside the ranks of professional planners, his distinctive leadership in urban development repeatedly put him in the sphere of planning. Both as participant and as relative outsider to the profession, Rouse’s life work is instructive. The activities that took Rouse from a suburban shopping center developer, to the builder of the new town of Columbia, Maryland, to the creator of a foundation dedicated to rehabilitating the nation’s most troubled urban neighborhoods are not as eclectic as they might seem. True, Rouse’s religious beliefs affected his concept of turning profits into dividends for the economically disadvantaged. But he was no Benjamin Franklin, who, having made his fortune, decided to retire so that he might better give his

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talents back to his community. Rather, throughout his career, Rouse exhibited a consistent belief, closely associated with a faith that could be traced back to the Progressive Era, that intervention directed into the physical environment holds the key to social regeneration. Rouse’s belief in the power of changing the physical environment came to him in his early years in Baltimore. Orphaned in 1930 at the age of sixteen, Rouse survived hard times during the Depression to make his way through night law school at the University of Maryland while working in the Baltimore office of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). In 1939 he took up selling the new and controversial FHA mortgages by forming his own mortgage company with Hunter Moss.3 He later recalled that if you’re in real estate finance or development, you’re automatically drawn into a much deeper, wider spectrum of urban life than a manufacturer or a banker or a merchant, unless he reaches out. That’s because what you’re doing is financing, or developing, the pieces of a city, and, therefore, the city is your playing field.4

Like so many other Baltimore civic leaders, including William Donald Schaefer, the former mayor and Maryland governor, and Robert Embry, the former assistant secretary for community planning and development of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Rouse received his initiation in urban problem solving as an active member of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA). This organization traced its origin to the Housing Council of Baltimore, founded in 1940 following publication by the Health and Welfare Council of a dramatic study of Baltimore’s slum conditions. Written by Frances Morton, a native of the city and a recent graduate of the New York School of Social Work, the study stressed the close relationship between bad housing and bad health. It attracted the attention of the Baltimore Evening Sun and, building on the drive to secure the National Housing Act of 1937, projected social reform to the forefront of civic consciousness.5 Imbued with a strong religious as well as social conscience, Morton broke new ground by getting blacks and whites working together to promote neighborhood revitalization. Seeking greater public use of police powers to clear up blighted areas, she helped secure a new ‘‘Hygiene of Housing’’ ordinance in 1941. It provided the commissioner of health with broad powers to outlaw unsanitary and unhealthful slum conditions through a new housing office in his department.6 In the same year, Morton’s Housing Council merged with a group of architects, planners, and university professors—the Planning and Redevelopment Council— who were interested in securing private funding for Baltimore’s urban rede-

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velopment, to form the CPHA. The new organization’s stated mission was ‘‘To foster good city planning, to provide better land use, to improve housing and living conditions, and to correct urban decay in the Baltimore metropolitan area by means of research, education, public discussion, legislation, law enforcement and other methods.’’7 The term ‘‘blight’’ captured many of the concerns raised by the CPHA and attracted considerable attention during the war. A number of states responded by passing legislation granting limited powers of eminent domain and tax breaks to spur redevelopment in selected areas. In New York, where legislation was amended at the insistence of Robert Moses to attract large insurance companies as investors, huge complexes such as Stuyvesant Town rose on land cleared of dilapidated structures.8 Baltimore instituted an alternative approach. With G. Yates Cook, a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, heading the new housing office of the Health Department, the city undertook an aggressive neighborhood-oriented campaign to rehabilitate existing housing through strict enforcement of housing codes. The CPHA assumed a role for itself by using volunteers to survey poor housing conditions and identifying a single block in south Baltimore as a pilot for improvement. Even after a year of working with five city housing inspectors, some of the 98 identified code violations still existed. But publicity for the effort attracted the interest of realtors, including Guy T. O. Hollyday, chairman of the Baltimore Real Estate Board, and, not incidentally, Morton’s former Sunday school teacher. Through his extensive network of contacts, Hollyday further publicized the effort, prompting a colleague in Texas to write Morton to learn more about the ‘‘Baltimore Plan.’’ It was then that the term ‘‘blight’’ emerged. Coincidentally, Hollyday introduced his associate James Rouse to the effort.9 In 1947, under pressure from Morton and the CPHA, Baltimore established a separate housing court to deal with housing law violations and assigned police to a ‘‘sanitation squad’’ to canvass the slums for outdoor sanitary violations. By 1950 the city was allocating $200,000 to assure blockby-block coverage, as enforcement spread to cover one hundred blocks.10 In 1951 the city upgraded the Health Department’s division of housing to a Bureau of Housing, giving power to director Yates Cook, not just for housing matters under the Health Department’s jurisdiction, but also for coordinating work by other city agencies in enforcing sanitary, building, zoning, and related ordinances.11 Cook, however, was not satisfied with the city’s progress and devised a plan to form a citizens’ advisory committee to the

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Figure 20. Citizen activist Rouse addresses Baltimore Citizens Planning and Housing Association in the early 1950s. Courtesy Citizens Planning and Housing Association Collection, Archives, University of Baltimore Langsdale Library.

mayor on housing-law enforcement that might be used to pressure the health department to allocate more resources to his office. Rouse already wanted to expand Morton’s early single-block pilot project to a whole neighborhood. When he and Hollyday met with Cook in May 1950 to discuss the advisory committee, they devised a plan focusing on the enforcement program, but one that would be couched in broad terms, stressing the need to combine social with physical renewal in order to uplift the spirits as well as the physical conditions of an entire neighborhood. As he wrote Mayor Thomas D’Alesandro accepting the invitation to chair the advisory committee, Rouse indicated that it was essential to combine the two elements: The efforts which comprise the Baltimore Plan have, until now, been based largely on law enforcement and have been directed primarily at improving the physical condition of slum dwellings. But it is not only board fences, outside hoppers, physi-

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Figure 21. Baltimore Plan, as Rouse promoted it in 1953. Courtesy Archives, University of Baltimore Langsdale Library.

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cal decay and rats which make an area a slum. It is also the spirit and attitude of the people who live and own property there. The City not only has at its command facilities for requiring people to clean up their dwellings to acceptable minimum standards but also facilities for enlarging their opportunity and aspirations for decent living. It has tools to work with their spirit as well as their houses. Education and recreation are perhaps the two most obvious but there are others both in and out of city government.12

The advisory council, Rouse suggested, wanted to launch a pilot program which would bring to bear on an entire neighborhood the full combination of forces available to the City-law enforcement, education, [and] recreation- with the fullest possible participation by the people in the neighborhood and by interested educational, religious and civic groups throughout the community.13

Rouse subsequently discussed his ideas in depth with CPHA president Hans Froelicher, during which time the phrase ‘‘urban renewal’’ emerged to connote the rehabilitation of both people and structures.14 The ideas stressed in Rouse’s memo made their way into the new 27-block pilot project in East Baltimore. There, as Morton later wrote, ‘‘the homes were in better condition and community spirit could be aroused and motivated.’’15 Rouse continued to monitor the effort as chair of the Housing Bureau Advisory Council, while Morton served as chair of a steering committee to oversee additional subcommittee work on law enforcement, social services, education, medical care, and recreation. With Guy Hollyday’s help, Rouse and Cook secured assistance from the Real Estate Board of Baltimore in 1951 to form a revolving fund—Fight Blight—to assist owners in paying for the repairs demanded by housing inspectors. The fund’s annual report for the following year claimed success, not just in consolidating and extending mortgages, but also in marshaling neighborhood cooperation to keep areas well maintained. A fund brochure circulated in 1954 claimed, in fact, that improved housing would more than improve Baltimore’s appearance; it would help create better citizens: In the blocks that have been rehabilitated, and in the Pilot Program area, residents have assumed a new interest in their community, their city, and their responsibility to others. Each of the blighted areas that has been rehabilitated under the Baltimore Plan has brought forth a new spirit of citizen responsibility.16

While admitting that the aggressive intervention of housing officials generated some fear and resentment, especially among African Americans

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who felt they were being singled out by the city’s white establishment, Fight Blight supporters claimed success. ‘‘For the first time in decades the neighborhood was cleaned up,’’ a 1958 report of a study Rouse had commissioned stated. ‘‘Rotting old board fences were ripped out of the alleys; streets were scraped and cleaned; back yards were cleared of tons of trash, garbage and raw sewage. The residents began to clean because they were ashamed, as one inspector put it, ‘to be caught as dirty as they can be.’ ’’ ‘‘Shame,’’ the report continued, ‘‘for the bad conditions was gradually replaced by pride in the improvements brought about.’’17 Martin Millspaugh and Gurney Breckenfeld—two former Baltimore Sun reporters—reiterated Rouse’s belief in social as well as physical reconstruction. Miles Colean, a respected housing economist, wrote in the introduction that their findings show ‘‘that the prevention and eradication of slums are not to be accomplished by physical measures alone or by measures limited to the condition of housing, but that profound changes in the hearts and minds of people, both in and out of the affected areas, are called for.’’18 Fight Blight exemplified Rouse’s involvement in social issues as a businessman as well as a philanthropist. The fund’s promotional literature made clear that loans would be made available only to property owners ‘‘unable to secure legitimate loans from established financial organizations at reasonable rates,’’ thus making up for some of the restrictive practices of Rouse’s own industry while not constituting direct competition to it. At the same time, fund supporters solicited donations both as charitable contributions and as a measure to protect property values, declaring that ‘‘Unless blight is conquered, it can spread like a cancer into every community.’’19 Yet even with the availability of such funding, considerable obstacles remained, as a 1953 assessment suggested: As the work in the Pilot Areas progressed, it became evident that law enforcement alone could not recreate the neighborhood; could not effect needed changes in the existing street and alley design and layout or provide playgrounds, eliminate objectionable non-conforming uses or require other necessary changes in the neighborhood pattern to provide a healthier, more liveable and attractive neighborhood environment. While leaders of the ‘‘Baltimore Plan’’ pointed to a well planned community as one of their objectives, they lacked the necessary legal tools to provide such a community.20

In order to achieve such a comprehensive approach, Rouse sought reorganization of public agencies, which he considered too fragmented to deal effectively with the city’s problems. Securing the support of a new or-

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ganization made up of the chief executive officers of Baltimore firms which he organized with Morton—the Greater Baltimore Committee—Rouse sought the additional backing of the CPHA. Morton, however, resisted the proposal. Having worked for seven years to replace pro-development control of the city’s housing office, she argued that existing agencies should be given a chance to work. CPHA president Hans Froelicher, moreover, had a good working relationship with Mayor D’Alesandro, who opposed a separate housing agency and indicated that if it were created, he would appoint the worst possible person to head it. When Rouse lost a vote of support within CPHA, he charged that it was ‘‘trying to deal as a political tactician instead of with its heart.’’21 In protest, he and Hollyday resigned from the mayor’s advisory council. Finding the Maryland Assembly also unsympathetic to his campaign,22 Rouse pursued nationally goals he was not immediately successful in achieving in Baltimore. He found his opportunity in 1953 when President Eisenhower appointed him chair of the urban redevelopment subcommittee of the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs. Rouse accepted his appointment at a time when Republicans were actively attempting to gut the public housing provisions of the National Housing Acts of 1937 and 1949. Eisenhower’s choice to head the Housing and Home Finance Agency, former Representative Albert Cole, had been an active critic of public housing in Congress, and his position as chair of the President’s Advisory Committee signaled the possible demise of federal support for the elimination of slums.23 In that context, planning historian Mel Scott has characterized the committee’s report as an ‘‘astonishingly bold document,’’24 which not only accepted a role for public housing, but also recommended providing compensation to those dislocated by redevelopment. It also raised, though it did not ultimately endorse, the idea of providing rent subsidies to needy families. In fact, Rouse revealed his hope to reduce the role of public housing to one of simply accommodating those displaced by redevelopment.25 He did so based on his belief that the concept of redevelopment should be redefined as ‘‘urban renewal’’ and include rehabilitation and conservation as well as slum clearance. Mark Gelfand has been among those historians who credited Miles Colean’s 1953 book Renewing Our Cities for providing both the new terminology and the emphasis of the report.26 A member of the president’s committee, Colean undoubtedly contributed greatly to its deliberations, but the influential urban redevelopment section was written by Rouse himself, and in it could be seen the last-

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ing influence of the Baltimore Plan, which Colean cited generously in his book.27 Rouse’s subcommittee laid out the philosophy, which flowed directly from his Baltimore experience: To receive federal assistance, cities had to be prepared ‘‘to face up to the whole process of urban decay.’’ They should be granted ‘‘the widest possible ingenuity, initiative, and discretion at the local level,’’ but only after proving that they were ‘‘not simply engaging in superficial, piecemeal approaches.’’ Cities, in short, would be required under new legislation to gain federal approval for a ‘‘workable plan,’’ which, following the Baltimore model, would stress rehabilitation and conservation over slum clearance by requiring localities to design programs to ‘‘prevent the spread of slums and rehabilitate existing structures and neighborhoods’’ as well as to clean out ‘‘nonsalvageable dwellings and obsolete land uses’’ with the goal of establishing a locality of ‘‘sound, healthy neighborhoods.’’28 Acknowledging Fight Blight’s program to make mortgages available in rundown areas, the committee recommended that ‘‘FHA financing be made available in renewal areas on terms at least as favorable as are available elsewhere in the city,’’29 a position Guy Hollyday, whom Eisenhower had asked to head the FHA, readily endorsed.30 Such funding would be tied directly to conservation by requiring a new redevelopment administrator to ‘‘ ‘give consideration’ to the extent to which the city is developing more modern building codes and preventing the spread of blight through enforcement of health, sanitation, and safety codes.’’31 Testifying on behalf of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America to support legislation he had done so much to influence, Rouse hailed a Senate bill for shifting ‘‘the emphasis from demolition projects done to the regeneration of neighborhoods and the renewal of our cities.’’32 Charging that salvageable structures ‘‘should not be destroyed simply because they are in a demolition area,’’ he urged coordinating the various redevelopment elements in a single plan where all unfit and nonsalvagable structures should be demolished; adverse nonconforming uses condemned; congestion relieved; parks and playgrounds provided; public utilities installed, street and traffic patterns planned to protect the neighborhood and, under a vigorous program of law enforcement, all structures should be rehabilitated to an acceptable minimum standard of health, safety and sanitation.33

Calling for a city made up of ‘‘a community of healthy neighborhoods,’’ he said the challenge was to create out of that huge area of a city, which is cold and unsolaced and spiritless and unneighborly as it exists now, a new neighborhood in which people are happy

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to live and want to live and where forces of deterioration are reversed by forces of care and concern and a buildup of the property.34

Rouse’s prominence in the 1954 Housing Act recommended him to government officials in Washington, who commissioned him to prepare for the District of Columbia, with Nathaniel Keith, the workable plan required by the 1954 act. Titled ‘‘No Slums in Ten Years,’’ the report, released in January 1955, reiterated Rouse’s testimony in 1954 defining urban renewal as making the city into a community of healthy neighborhoods where people want to live and raise families. . . . Urban renewal in order to be effective must go deep enough to reach the attitudes of the people, and to rehabilitate those attitudes along with the dwellings in which they live.35

In the kind of criticism the 1954 act had directed at wholesale redevelopment as practiced in the influential rebuilding of the entire southwest sector of the city, the report urged emphasis ‘‘on integrating future public housing within neighborhoods by developing small properties on scattered sites rather than large institutionalized projects.’’36 As chairman of the Greater Baltimore Committee’s urban renewal subcommittee, Rouse helped spur the belated formation, in 1957, of a powerful city urban renewal and housing agency, which in turn launched the plan, approved in 1959, to clear and redevelop as Charles Center 22 acres in the heart of the city.37 Among the recommendations of the President’s Advisory Committee was the formation of a broadly representative private organization backed by the government to heighten public interest in the broadened concept of urban redevelopment. To this end, Rouse worked with Life publisher Andrew Heiskell to form the American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods—ACTION, for short. Launched with a major address by President Eisenhower in November 1954, ACTION announced its goal to raise $100 billion—mainly from private sources—to eliminate slums.38 Boosted by widespread editorial support, ACTION named Rouse as its president in 1958.39 A year later he described ACTION’s goal in typically upbeat fashion as creating healthier residential neighborhoods and improving the new central business and cultural ‘‘neighborhood’’ for the city as ‘‘an environment where people can not only do business, but can rest and smile and breathe fresh air as well,’’40 a place, in effect, which could be fun. Even as Rouse gained national prominence as a spokesman for urban renewal, he was shifting his focus from banking to development, and in the mid-1950s he launched the first of some three dozen shopping centers.

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Although apparently marking a departure from his concern for poorer neighborhoods, Rouse still managed to conceive his work within the same community-building framework he had applied to redevelopment. Closely following a philosophy pioneered by Victor Gruen, which dovetailed closely with his own interest in using physical construction for constructive social ends, he sought through retail development to restore some of the same sociability he had called for in the process of urban renewal. At Mondawmin—three miles from downtown Baltimore—he described his hopes to introduce the atmosphere of Baltimore’s historic shopping area, Lexington Street, ‘‘in a more pleasant, flexible, and convenient manner.’’41 There, as in Gruen’s pioneer Southdale and Northland malls, Rouse cited the advantages to social community that the architect could provide by saving space for public events. Writing shortly after the opening of the Cherry Hill, New Jersey, mall, he stressed his faith that the regional shopping center could serve to ‘‘relax and refresh the families who use it, and promote friendly contact among the people of the community.’’ There was, he said, ‘‘no natural conflict between profits and people’’ as long as a center fulfilled ‘‘its enormous opportunity to enrich the community life.’’42 Described, accurately enough, as a city built around a shopping mall, Rouse’s new town of Columbia, Maryland, evolved not just from his own shopping center experience, but extended a Garden City tradition that stressed placement of commercial activities at strategically located points as enhancements to sociability. It was more than that, too. Stemming from concerns, stated in the President’s Advisory Report and Washington’s workable plan, that minorities desperately required better housing opportunities and that markets should be expanded on a metropolitan-wide basis in order to relieve congested conditions in the worst areas of center cities, Rouse conceived Columbia as another element in what he continued to call urban renewal.43 There he attempted to build for diversity by stressing open housing and encouraging a range of housing types to assure affordable choices, while at the same time extending his interest in community building to every facet of the town. Acknowledging the extra burden diversity would place on building practice, he stated, some years later, ‘‘We believed it was important to produce a sense of place at each level of community to which a person felt a sense of belonging and in which it might be easy to meet and know his neighbors.’’44 Rouse laid out much of his thinking in an internal company memo dated July 23, 1963, suggesting ways that experience gained from the development of the Village of Cross Keys on a former Baltimore golf course

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could be extended to the larger scale of Columbia. The purpose of any community, he stated, must be ‘‘the improvement of mankind.’’ The target of an ‘‘inspired, concerned and loving society’’ would give positive purpose to community planning.45 He used much the same language in a keynote address to a conference on metropolitan growth delivered at the University of California at Berkeley in September. Speaking of community building, he declared that there could be no other right purpose except to provide an environment and an opportunity to develop better people. The most successful community would be that which contributed the most by its physical form, its institutions, and its operation to the growth of people. . . . Our talented designers need to be hauled away from their myopic view of buildings as man-made works of art and lifted up to the bigger view of communities as gardens in which we are growing people and a civilization.46

Rouse’s goal was immediately taken up by Morton Hoppenfeld, whom he recruited from Washington to help direct Columbia’s plan. Together with a working group of social scientists, he sought the synthesis of social and physical planning as the central objective. Columbia’s intricate design from neighborhood to village to city was developed on the premise, as Hoppenfeld put it, that the ‘‘built environment must be conceived as a way of making possible the activities and well-being of people.’’ A city, he declared, is made of overlapping, interlocking layers and sets of communities: communities of place and of interest. If the varied interests which compose American society are to come together and live in cities, the traditional concept of consensus or majority rule will have to shift to that of alternative cultures and varied life styles, brought together by social and physical environment and enabled to co-exist, overlap, and thrive.47

As Rouse told officials of Howard County, ‘‘All of the opportunities that were once possible only in very small towns will be part of the rich fabric of life in Columbia.’’48 The opening of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston in 1978 and Baltimore’s Harborplace in 1980 appeared to mark a new stage in Rouse’s career. In fact, they represented extensions of his belief, stated as early as 1956, that the enclosed regional mall offered the potential for ‘‘a massive reorganization of the urban community’’ as a place of sociability as well as profit making.49 Certainly, in Baltimore the location of Harborplace in the once decaying Inner Harbor represented a logical, if not inevitable, extension of the renewal of downtown, which Rouse had helped launch a quarter century

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earlier, as well as the application of the successful marketing of Columbia. Such ventures also greatly boosted the Rouse Company’s profits, as the company found in public-private partnerships new ways to promote redevelopment that could benefit investors as well as the strained treasuries of decaying cities.50 Harborplace generated immense positive publicity, including the Time cover story. In its coverage, however, the Washington Post highlighted the discrepancy many critics had noted in the aftermath of the high hopes associated with urban renewal—that such retail successes in the business sector proceeded even as older residential neighborhoods continued to decline. In an ironic twist, the paper coupled its coverage of Harborplace with an article detailing the deterioration of the nearby Sandtown neighborhood in historically black West Baltimore. Although the area had received several million dollars in block grants for redevelopment, work had not yet begun four years later. Noting that it took a long time to transform the grimy old port area, Jay Brodie, Commissioner of Housing and Community Development, promised action shortly.51 The area continued to suffer, however, and it was more than a decade later when Rouse, whom Brodie had met through his own involvement in the CPHA, designated the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood the pilot area for a ‘‘transformation process’’ and a keystone in his highly publicized effort to direct private investment to inner-city neighborhoods through creation of the Enterprise Foundation. As announced in December 1981, Rouse’s new foundation intended to raise about $15 million a year to support the purchase and renovation of slum buildings. The chief innovation in the idea, one that tied together Rouse’s careers as philanthropist and retail developer, was the decision to form a for-profit real estate development corporation whose investments in inner-city commercial ventures such as shopping centers would help revive depressed urban areas. Profits from these investments were to be reinvested in neighborhood housing. Stressing that such efforts were intended to use volunteer labor to help the poor improve their own environment, Rouse said his programs would help inner-city families with incomes of less than $8,000 a year.52 For Rouse, the Enterprise Foundation appeared once again to mark a departure, a belated response to the criticism by one of the participants in the planning process in Columbia, the sociologist Herbert Gans, who charged that social transformation had to go beyond physical changes in order to achieve any measure of social uplift.53 There was a consistency in Rouse’s decision, however, though it was undergirded with a newly deep-

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ened religious conviction. There was the same social philosophy, as he would later stress in 1992, that the Enterprise Foundation sought to blend public and private efforts ‘‘in a united effort to lift the physical conditions of the neighborhood from dilapidation and oppressive rents to decency and affordability, and, at the same time, to lift the human condition from hopelessness and fear to self-respect, growth, and a sense of well being.’’54 There was also the same concern—the Enterprise Foundation’s Patrick Costigan used the word ‘‘obsession’’—with building community. In a 1993 interview, Costigan said, I think one of the reasons Jim Rouse is focused on Sandtown is because he failed in the first [Baltimore] neighborhood pilot project forty years ago. He’s built community in the suburbs and in Columbia. He’s shown what a revitalized downtown could look like. But to date the process of building community in the inner city has escaped him.55

Reports about the Enterprise Foundation’s creation briefly mention Rouse’s contact as far back as 1973 with an organization known as Jubilee Housing in the Adams-Morgan section of Washington, D.C. The foundation, in fact, grew out of the networking system that had evolved as Jubilee’s success in using volunteer labor led to the renovation of older apartment buildings in Washington and their management by tenants. Such reports also mention, though usually in passing, Rouse’s involvement with Washington’s Church of the Saviour. That involvement was deeper and of greater consequence than the public reports have indicated. The Church of the Saviour was founded in 1947 by Gordon Cosby, chaplain of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II. Deeply moved by the devastation his men faced, Cosby, like Rouse, turned to the challenges of the postwar era with a sense of urgency. After serving briefly at a Baptist church in Arlington, Virginia, he founded the Church of the Saviour on an ecumenical basis around the concept of mission. Each church member was to combine an inner sense of mission with external applications to ‘‘social uplift,’’ a process reinforced by participation in small mission groups that would be part of larger faith assembly groups, which in turn would form the larger Church of the Saviour. Rouse learned about the church through an article in Reader’s Digest in the early 1960s, took the required training for membership, and became an active participant in the life of the organization. When members of the church first approached him in 1973 about helping to secure funding for the renovation of several apartments for low-income residents, Rouse actively discouraged them, saying

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they did not have the experience to put together the deal. His long association with the church made him sympathetic, however, and when residents got commitments to turn the property over to them anyway, Rouse secured the funding himself.56 Jubilee Housing was formally launched and the predominantly white and middle-class members of the congregation poured 50,000 hours of volunteer labor into Jubilee’s first two projects, the renovation of the badly deteriorated Ritz and Mozart apartment houses in Adams-Morgan. Jubilee’s literature stressed the centrality of housing to the transformation of people’s lives, saying of itself, ‘‘The common persuasion of the group was that affordable, decent housing was an essential necessity in creating change in the lives of those caught in the desperate pressures of inner-city existence.’’57 Rouse joined the board. His second wife, Patricia, joined him on the board, and according to Robert Boulter (who worked for Jubilee on the Rouse Company payroll for most of a decade), strongly reinforced his interest in the organization and in working directly with the people affected by the programs.58 Boulter met Rouse at a real estate conference in 1978, joined the Jubilee staff shortly thereafter, and entered into an intensive dialogue with Rouse carried on every two weeks to plan a strategy for expanding Jubilee’s influence. A series of support organizations followed, including Columbia Road Health Services, a nonprofit medical center founded in 1978, and Jubilee Jobs in 1981, formed to act as an employment agency for unemployed residents of Jubilee Housing and the surrounding neighborhood.59 Rouse was nearing mandatory retirement at the Rouse Company, and Boulter believed he was already thinking ahead about how to redirect his energies. The Enterprise Foundation evolved out of those meetings and out of the networking that followed as the Jubilee concept spread to other cities. In the first several years, the networking conference represented Enterprise’s core activity. The organization itself was announced in Washington, and many of Enterprise’s early staff received training through Jubilee. In the early years, Gordon Cosby, who has served continuously on Enterprise’s board of directors, would appropriately open national meetings with a prayer. Enterprise described its mission as seeing that ‘‘all low-income people in the United States have the opportunity for fit and affordable housing within a generation, and to move up and out of poverty into the mainstream of American life.’’60 Originally conceived as a largely regional organization, it grew quickly to encompass literally hundreds of projects in some sixty cities across the country. The concept of using the for-profit arm

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Figure 22. Rouse with Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Jack Kemp (center) and Jubilee Enterprise’s Robert Boulter (right), touring Jubilee housing renovations in the Adams-Morgan section of Washington, D.C., 1989. Photo by David Welsh, courtesy of Jubilee Ministries.

of Enterprise to raise funds through smaller shopping areas placed in decaying midsize cities did not work well, and the company sold its interest in the first group of centers in Norfolk, Toledo, and Flint. Subsequent development has been largely abroad and on a grander scale. The Enterprise Foundation, however, grew through corporate and foundation giving, distributing a total of $36.9 million in grants and loans in 1996.61 By the mid1980s, however, Rouse was convinced he had to do more than merely support single-service projects, returning to the belief he had emphasized as early as 1953 and reiterated in hearings before President Johnson’s National Commission on Urban Problems in 1967—that if one city could turn around, others would follow.62 To pursue this vision, he turned his focus back to his native Baltimore, working with the city’s first black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, to develop a concerted project that would tie together public and

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private efforts to revitalize one of Baltimore’s most distressed areas, Sandtown.63 In many ways, the Sandtown initiative looked very much like Rouse’s earlier efforts, going back even so far as the Fight Blight campaign of the mid-1950s, which insisted on the cooperation of different city departments in the eradication of blight. As in the first Baltimore pilot project, a religious organization played a central role. And Rouse’s assessment of the effects of urban renewal on the human spirit reported in Parade in 1991 could have been issued forty years earlier: ‘‘In their hearts poor people don’t believe there’s going to be any real change. They can’t imagine it. . . . But think what happens when they do. Once the transformation begins, there will be a change in the spirit of the neighborhood.’’64 Rouse himself saw the Sandtown effort as building on the Columbia experience through the solicitation and coordination of expert opinion in the name of community building.65 Although the circumstances were different, the goals for Sandtown followed Rouse’s earlier assessment of what was needed in Columbia: The fundamental ingredients of community looked at in human terms simply do not exist in urban society today, and they do not exist any more in the suburbs, than in the ghetto—if as much. In the massiveness of the city there is little or no physical definition of community-no arrangement of community institutions such as schools, churches, or health centers that bring people together in relationship with one another. There is an irrational scattering of the institutions and natural meeting places and an absence of any physically defined community, with the result that people live in a kind of negative, impersonal, depersonalized massiveness.66

Not surprisingly, Rouse initially wanted to approach Sandtown as a developer would—preparing a professional plan on a quick time line that would persuade neighborhood residents and the city by its vision and professionalism. Costigan convinced him, however, to support a complex neighborhood-based planning process.67 The end result of two years of dynamic and sometimes disorganized efforts was a plan, endorsed in March 1993 at a meeting of 200 neighborhood residents, that reflected their multiple needs beyond suitable housing: employment and health services, treatment for substance abuse, education, reduced crime, and increased safety.68 Neither the particular ideas nor the framework offered was original to the Enterprise Foundation, in that they had evolved from the efforts of the neighborhood-based coalition of churches—Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, formed in 1987 and known as BUILD—which worked closely with Foundation staff.69 At least one critic has dismissed Enterprise’s

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role as more therapeutic than empowering, as marginalizing community organization in favor of expert opinion.70 Yet out of the process emerged an independent organization with a very Rouse-like name and agenda: Community Building in Partnership, chartered by the mayor in 1994 to oversee implementation of a wide range of transformation activities and programs. Fifty years after the CPHA targeted its first pilot project for rehabilitation, the area continues to decline. Included along with much of SandtownWinchester as part of a federally designated empowerment zone in the city, this southeast Baltimore neighborhood shows persistent physical and social decay, prompting commentary that the empowerment approach will be no more effective than the efforts at social uplift that preceded it. Nicholas Lemann and others charge that advocates of such place-based programs delude themselves into believing that through neighborhood economic development the poor will be able to build independent communities that control their own resources and destiny.71 At the end of his life, Rouse took a more optimistic view, that slums could turn a profit and be brought back to life, beliefs that accorded with those of some recent theorists, most notably Harvard business professor Michael Porter.72 It is still too early to judge whether Rouse’s faith will be realized in Sandtown. A trip through the neighborhood today reveals all the signs of physical work in progress: new housing developments, including more than 200 new units built under the federal Nehemiah Program and another 300 expected under a home ownership zone award from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well as community gardens cropping up across from boarded buildings and littered alleyways. Some social services are better integrated, as can be seen, for instance, in the introduction of health clinics in each of the area’s three elementary schools. Community building continues, with impressive increases in voter registration and an estimated 40 percent participation rate in community patrol efforts to reduce crime. Still, drugs, crime, and the loss of the area’s middle-income residents make the problems facing the neighborhood much more deeply rooted and intractable than they had been a generation earlier. In fact, Rouse’s many pioneering initiatives over time did not always have the positive results he intended. The policy of urban renewal he helped forge subsequently resulted in the displacement of many of the poor people he intended to aid. The success of shopping centers like those he helped pioneer clearly contributed to the erosion of the cities he cared so much about. His effort to achieve in Columbia a mix of races as well as classes,

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though more successful than in other new developments in Maryland, fell short of his high expectations. Like many reformists before him, he had more faith than was warranted that the models he constructed would prove the rule rather than the exception among his business peers. Yet when trends took a contrary turn, he did not publicly reveal disappointment. Rather, he pressed on to the next logical corrective action, continuing to preach the message that private enterprise could be marshaled to help solve the most persistent urban problems. In the forward to a book commemorating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Columbia’s planning published shortly after his death, Rouse reiterated the admonition he had made in his 1963 address in Berkeley, that planning should proceed on the axiom: Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. ‘‘If that were the target and the test of community planning; if we were really trying to create inspired, concerned, and loving people, might not this begin to influence the kind of plans we would unfold and might it not point the way to answers we are not now perceiving?’’73 Those words, he recounted, had sufficiently disturbed his chief planners, William Finley and Morton Hoppenfeld, that they urged him not to refer to ‘‘love’’ when discussing Columbia with the working group of social scientists formed to advise the planning effort. Rouse solemnly agreed at the time, only to be appalled when the consultants ‘‘raised directly and negatively all the tough issues to be faced as if to say there were no answers.’’ So the meetings continued until sociologist Chester Rapkin finally intervened to say, ‘‘You know we are all missing the point of these discussions. We are being asked how in a new community to nourish love.’’ According to Rouse’s account, ‘‘The morale and performance of the group was transformed’’ and the plan gained ‘‘deep authenticity’’ by ‘‘focusing on producing a better life for the people of the community’’74 This story, recounted near the end of his life, spoke centrally to James Rouse’s career. Such deep religiosity often set him apart from the professional planners he sought to work with and influence. At the same time, he clearly respected and built upon important traditions, not just of philanthropy in housing but also of garden city and neighborhood planning. While his record of achieving these lofty goals may be mixed, his many achievements nonetheless extended a long tradition in planning of building community by design and gave this tradition a sense of social immediacy too often missing in the field.

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Chapter 7

The New Urbanism: ‘‘Organizing Things That Matter’’

As concerned as James Rouse had been about the state of metropolitan America, he never went so far as to develop new principles of design that would overcome the social as well as the physical problems induced by sprawl, crass commercialism, and divided authority over land use decisions. At best, he hoped to promote community by providing magnets for sociability. His vision, even in building the new town of Columbia, did not extend to reforming contemporary culture. That challenge has been taken up more recently by a new generation of architects and critics who, like Rouse, have sought to make more livable places. In addition to being more comprehensive in their intent, they have moved beyond individual enterprises to form a national organization, the Congress for the New Urbanism.1 Asserting in the introduction to their charter the symptoms of a deteriorating quality of life—‘‘more congestion and air pollution resulting from our increased dependence on automobiles, the loss of precious open space, the need for costly improvements to roads and public services, the inequitable distribution of economic resources, and the loss of a sense of community’’—they state their confidence in the social power of design: ‘‘We recognize that physical solutions by themselves will not solve social and economic problems, but neither can economic vitality, community stability, and environmental health be sustained without a coherent and supportive physical framework.’’2 These New Urbanists, one reporter noted, ‘‘want to induce neighborliness with architecture . . . they believe social change can be brought about through architecture and planning.’’3 With acknowledged debts to Ebenezer Howard, to the neighborhood planning ideas of Clarence Arthur Perry, and to the regional approach advocated by Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes,4 New Urbanism, as one adherent puts it, stresses ‘‘the conviction that the built environment can create a ‘sense of

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community’ . . . and that a reformulated philosophy about how we build communities will overcome our current civic deficits, build social capital and revive a community spirit which is currently lost.’’5 Echoing the critique that emerged in the 1920s from members of the Regional Planning Association of America, New Urbanists have been critical of the design professions—especially planners—for subordinating the larger goal of vital and attractive communities to technical and formulaic practice. Zoning remains a point of contention, but the critique is broader in being directed at the triumph of commercial capitalism consumed with selling products to niche audiences without much concern about the civic consequences.6 David Brain blames ‘‘the logic of practice embedded in the professional disciplines and organizational fields of those responsible for the process of building particular places.’’ Identifying as the culprit what he calls procedural liberalism, he credits a mature New Urbanism for challenging the professional practices not just of architects and planners, but also ‘‘the standards and routines of traffic engineers, developers, banks and lending institutions, real estate marketing, and even ideas about retail.’’ To create a new ‘‘urbanism,’’ he asserts, ‘‘one is engaged in reconfiguring the social process of place-making and the way physical and visual attributes of places operate as components of a social reality.’’7 What is at issue is not just gated communities, McMansions, and unregulated growth. New Urbanists insist on revising established practices to provide greater visual order, conservation of open space, and reduced reliance on the automobile by increased emphasis on mass transit and pedestrian uses. In these efforts, they are part of a ‘‘smart growth’’ movement associated most closely with environmental stewardship and advocates of sustainable communities. But their goal is still broader. Seeing ‘‘the center of any vital democracy . . . seeping away in suburbs designed more for cars than people,’’ and special interest groups replacing citizens, they seek to spur a ‘‘cultural shift’’ to revitalize civic life. As Bruce Stephenson reports, New Urbanists wish to design towns ‘‘that venerate the civitas.’’8 While the principles associated with the New Urbanism owe much to the work of Leon Krier, especially his promotion of the urban village concept in England, 9 the acknowledged leaders in the United States have been the husband and wife team of Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk. Through their own design efforts, through their writing (starting with the 1994 book edited by Peter Katz, The New Urbanism), and through their organizational efforts, they have articulated principles that have no competitor in the effort to alter the built environment. Their interest in what they

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originally called neotraditional architecture emerged from their studies at Yale, where, their teacher Vincent Scully recalled, they toured New Haven’s neighborhoods to review vernacular structures. There they examined types that over time had, in Scully’s words, ‘‘shown themselves capable of shaping civilized places and fitting together in groups to make towns.’’10 Embracing the vernacular, they broke from modernist tradition and especially the tendency under the urban renewal program to replace whole portions of cities with modernist structures. Asserting their belief in ‘‘a direct causal relationship between the character of the physical environment and the social health of families and communities at large,’’ they expressed confidence in the power of good design to enhance community and strengthen citizenship. Asserting that ‘‘we shape our cities and then our cities shape us,’’ they have called for neighborhoods ‘‘that nurture sociability and bring out the best in our nature.’’11 Duany and Plater-Zyberk first experimented with a new design vocabulary in 1989 in the Florida resort community of Windsor, some eight miles north of Vero Beach. Placing luxury homes on small lots intended to encourage intimacy and linking them to a village commons intended to serve ‘‘both as a gateway to the community and as a focus for its social and commercial activity’’12 set the stage for a more mainstream development. That opportunity came at a seemingly unpromising site on the Florida panhandle. Conceived in the early 1980s by the developer Robert Davis, the small resort of Seaside allowed their new firm, DPZ, to establish the principles that were intended to embody the success they associated with the small, pre-World War II towns characterized by human scale, strong centers, and clear boundaries, what a New York Times report later described as an effort to ‘‘encourage a civic intimacy they believe has been lost in America.’’13 Such goals required a design emphasis on public over private land use that was pursued though the strategic location of public buildings and civic spaces (defined not just as parks and squares, but also as streets, boulevards, walks, and natural features such as beaches and dunes); convenient pedestrian paths; and restrictions on the automobile through a ban on streetfronting lots and relegation of garages to back alleys. Here, as Duany and Plater Zyberk later described the overt civic function of design, ‘‘Sharing the same public realm, these people have the opportunity to interact, and thus come to realize that they have little reason to fear each other.’’ Like Clarence Arthur Perry’s neighborhood planning concept, which they admired, Seaside’s common facilities were located within an easy quarter-mile walk from any residence, thus encouraging pedestrian over automobile traf-

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fic.14 Streets gained their own importance in shaping public usage, they asserted: ‘‘From alleys to boulevards, each street is cast as a special kind of space according to its function and position within the town. The street hierarchy furthers the dialogue between public and private space by extending public territory from major streets into minor streets. . . . The flexible hierarchical network allows a variety of routes that filter traffic through the town better than a single large arterial.’’15 That Seaside covered only 80 acres, about the size of an average-sized shopping mall and only a bit more than half the size of the original plats for Radburn (140 acres) and Forest Hills Gardens (142 acres)16 and that it accommodated only 2,000 people was not lost on critics who questioned its applicability for larger communities. But it was both the comprehensiveness and explicit nature of the design guidelines at Seaside that would prove to be widely influential. Arguing that traditional zoning has the effect of segregating land uses and fragmenting public spaces, DPZ relied instead on building codes to achieve a sense of order.17 Under these design guidelines, for instance, the firm laid out a matrix that ‘‘regulates those aspects of the private building types which pertain to and help form the public realm,’’ as well as ‘‘building elements which influence social behavior, such as stoops, porches, and garden walls.’’ Architectural codes sought to produce harmony among buildings by regulating configurations, materials, and techniques of construction. According to an early review of the experiment, ‘‘Seaside stands as the first stage of a thorough critique of our current methods of making communities . . . its plan for incremental growth also begins to encourage the notion of a ‘partnership’—a partnership of citizens rather than consumers.’’18 Other experiments followed, notably at Kentlands in Gaithersburg, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C. Kentlands was DPZ’s first application of what the firm labeled traditional neighborhood development principles—defined as a capacity to build ‘‘in the manner of our admired historic places’’—to a year-round, working community. Constructed on the 356acre Kent Farm tract, the development consisted of six neighborhoods laid out around a town commons, a cultural center, and associated shops and offices. Following Perry’s strictures once again, the same complex included an elementary school within easy walking distance from each neighborhood sector. The interiors of detached homes were similar in layout to more conventional suburban counterparts, but minimum setbacks from the street and smaller lots were intended to assure greater sociability among neighbors through the effect of residential compactness. A mixture of housing

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2 0 0 2 D U A N Y P L A T E R - Z Y B E R K & C O M P A N Y ( V E R S I O N 3 . 2)

1927

Pedestrian shed one-quarter mile radius

Regional institutions at the edge

Workshops and offices along edges

Parking lot designed as plaza

Regional institutions at the edge

Mixed use streets anchored by retail at 100% corners

Bus stops at center

Neighborhood shops & institutions at center

Roads connect across edges wherever possible

Playground in each quadrant

Club

Short face of residential blocks

School to be shared by adjacent neighborhood

1997

SCALE

C 1

The traffic along the boulevards at the edges is more unpleasant than originally envisioned. Three mitigating strategies are proposed: the provision of an end-grain of blocks at all edges, a green buffer shown along the bottom edge, and the location of resilient building types, such as office buildings, shown along the bottom edge.

The thoroughfare types support a transect from rectilinear streets at the urban center to curvilinear roads toward the rural edge.

The minor thoroughfares are connected with those outside the neighborhood in order to increase permeability and disperse traffic. This modification, however, increases the possibility of shortcuts.

More service alleys and lanes have been added to accom modate the increased parking requirements.

NEIGHBORHOOD

The shops at the busiest intersections have been modified to accommodate larger parking plazas for convenience retail and extended by an attached main street for destination and live-work retail.

There are few sites reserved for local institutions at the center and more for regional institutions at the edge. Ease of transportation has made membership in institutions a matter of proclivity rather than proximity.

The school is not at the center but at an edge, as the playing fields would hinder pedestrian access to the center. The school at the edge can be shared by several neighborhoods, mitigat ing the problem created by the tendency of neighborhoods to age in cohorts generating large student age populations that then drop off sharply.

• Traditional Neighborhood Development: A diagram that updates the Neighborhood Unit and reconciles the current models.

TRADITIONAL NEIGHBORHOOD DEVELOPMENT

STRUCTURE

Retail is confined to the junction having the most traffic, accepting the realities of the automobile.

Larger thoroughfares channel traffic at the edges.

A network of small thoroughfares within the neighborhood disperses local traffic.

There is a civic open space at the center of the neighborhood, and several smaller playgrounds, one in close proximity to every household.

institutions are placed at the edges so that their traffic does not enter the neighborhood.

Shopping at traffic junctions at the edge

Many playgrounds

High capacity thoroughfares at the edge

Neighborhood institutions and schools within Civic space at center

NEIGHBORHOOD

Local institutions are located within the neighborhood. Regional

An elementary school is at the center, within walking distance of most children. This is the most useful civic building, providing a meeting place for the adult population as well.

Size is determined by the walking distance of five minutes from center to edge, rather than by number of residents. Density is determined by the market. A community coalescing within a walkable area is the invariant.

• Neighborhood Unit: A diagram and description from the First Regional Plan of New York (1927) which conceptualizes the neighborhood as the fundamental element of planning.

NEIGHBORHOOD UNIT

Figure 23. Neighborhood planning revived: Duany Plater-Zyberk’s version of the concept introduced by Clarence Arthur Perry in 1929. Copyright 䉷 Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co, used by permission.

©

• Neighborhood: the fundamental human habitat; a community sustaining a full range of ordinary human needs. In its ideal form, the neighborhood is a compact walkable urban pattern with a balanced range of living, working, shopping, recreational, and educational program. There exists a variety of models, some old, and some of relatively recent derivation that incorporate the attributes of the neighborhood.

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Figure 24. Good fences and shallow setbacks from the street make good neighbors: streetscape in Kentlands, Gaithersburg, Maryland, an early model of New Urbanist development. Copyright 䉷 Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co, used by permission.

types, including apartments over garages, were intended to assure mixed use and a measure of affordability, a goal that proved difficult in greater Washington’s booming real estate market.19 Given their early success, Dunay and Plater-Zyberk were bound to attract many imitators. Duany reports that a slide presentation of a consumer study he attended in a Disney office in the late 1980s changed his life by suggesting how the values of security and responsibility associated with the 1950s could be linked to the individual freedoms and personal choice favored by the ‘‘me generation’’ of the 1970s.20 Given the connection, it should not have been surprising that Disney offered its own contribution to the New Urbanism movement by building the neotraditional community of Celebration adjacent to its theme park in Orlando. Disney officials met with Dunay and with Rouse in the planning process, but the commission went to New York architect and neotraditional enthusiast Robert A. M.

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Stern. The same principles pioneered in Seaside were adopted in Celebration with the exception that Disney commissioned a number of well-known architects for individual civic buildings, with an overall effect of greater eclecticism than uniformity of design. Marking community as one of its five cornerstones, along with place, health, education, and technology, the Disney Corporation, according to Andrew Ross, went beyond the promises typically offered in the consumer housing industry: ‘‘Celebration planners set out to raise the bar in the industry by offering a deluxe, next-generation version of the all-inclusive community package, far beyond the ‘enclaving’ model that promised a safe retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city and the ‘lifestyle’ model that threw in golf and other sports. . . . The demand for such a place rests on the perception that community is everywhere else an endangered species, especially in the nowhere of suburbia.’’21 More closely associated with the environmental movement than commercialism through its claim to be ‘‘one of the country’s first conservation communities,’’ Prairie Crossing took form in the mid-1990s in Grayslake, forty miles northwest of Chicago. Developed by George and Victoria Ranney, he the guiding force behind Chicago Metropolis 2020 (greater Chicago’s regional advocacy organization), and she a Frederick Law Olmsted scholar, the development emerged in reaction to a fifteen-year battle against a plan that would have brought over 1,600 homes to the site. Instead, construction was limited to some 400 homes in order to save natural areas and farmland. Standard New Urbanist features include a Station Village, designed by Calthorpe Associates of Berkeley, California, and a mixed-use Station Square, with condominiums, offices, and retail facing a train station. Another village incorporates civic buildings: a community center in a restored 1885 timber-frame barn and the free public Prairie Crossing Charter School. The 667-acre site concentrates homes on only 264 acres, thereby opening up some 400 acres to support ecologically restored prairies and wetlands and a commercial organic farm. Connecting trails are designed, according to principles laid out to guide development, ‘‘to be places where people can meet to enjoy and care for the land.’’ Rail connections to Chicago and O’Hare Airport with over fifty train stops per weekday have alleviated reliance on the automobile. Overall, Victoria Ranney asserts, the design is intended to echo Olmsted’s concept of a landscape layering of uses, meanings, and views. At Prairie Crossing, history, nature, and stewardship are intended to allow residents to become attached to the land that surrounds them and to have the landscape shape them as well.22 Although efforts were made to assure affordability and mixed use at

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Prairie Crossing, prices that began under $180,000 soon rose, a problem common to such efforts.23 At Orenco, outside Portland, Oregon, for instance, prices rose 30 percent even before homes were built, not because buyers thought they had found a perfect re-creation of the nineteenthcentury small town, Alan Ehrenhalt reports, but because ‘‘mere hints of that life strike them as an appealing contrast to the neighborhoods they see around them, and worth taking a chance on.’’ A 2008 report found the cost for developments designed according to New Urbanism principles 40 to 100 percent more than for conventional subdivisions.24 Despite such costs, by 2004 as many as 600 projects could be associated with the principles of the New Urbanism, 250 alone designed by DPZ.25 At the 100-acre Laguna West site eleven miles south of Sacramento, California, Peter Calthorpe set yet another new direction when he converted a traditional office park to a town center. Incorporating all the previous revenue-generating elements but those defined and animated by public spaces and amenities, he included a number of civic functions contained in a north-south axis culminating in a core area that was further connected by radial boulevards originating in neighborhood parks.26 Using physical planning to create medium- and high-density building linked to pedestrian pathways with good access to shopping and civic functions was intended to encourage close encounters of a face-to-face nature. Such contact, Calthorpe argues, generates the ‘‘social capital’’ deemed essential to healthy communities. Pedestrians, he asserts in terms that echo Victor Gruen a generation earlier, ‘‘are the catalyst which makes the essential qualities of communities meaningful. They create the place and the time for casual encounters and the practical integration of diverse places and people. Without the pedestrian, a community’s common ground—its parks, sidewalks, squares, and plazas—become useless obstructions to the car. Pedestrians are the lost measure of a community, they set the scale for both center and edge of our neighborhoods.’’27 Such efforts have the additional social, as well as ecological, effect of reducing reliance on the automobile and its isolating effect. Peter Katz notes that ‘‘While some argue that Californians will never give up their cars, Laguna West’s example shows that many would like to live in a place that at least considers another option.’’28 Hopes that other options might prevail strike some critics as the New Urbanism movement’s Achilles heel. ‘‘When it comes to building communities, the 20th century isn’t over yet,’’ Alan Ehrenhalt writes. ‘‘The automobile is still king. You can challenge the car culture, even land some serious blows against it, but cars will exact their tribute before you are done.’’29

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Figure 25. Upper Rock district, Rockville, Maryland, 20-acre mixed use development sited near Shady Grove Metro stop and a proposed light rail facility, in line with principles associated with transit villages. Copyright 䉷 Duany PlaterZyberk & Co, used by permission.

University of California planning professor Michael Southworth agrees, arguing that even the best New Urbanist examples, Kentlands and Laguna West, have failed to reduce dependency on cars.30 Calthorpe’s concept of ‘‘transit villages’’ as part of the New Urbanist assault on sprawl addresses that critique. Collaborating with Duany and Plater-Zyberk, Calthorpe envisioned

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that planning would take place within a regional hierarchy, moving from the smallest scale of the block and street to the midsized scale of the neighborhood and district to the town and culminating in the metropolitan region. The region, he asserted, ‘‘can be designed in much the same way as we would design a neighborhood. . . . Both need protected natural systems, vibrant centers, human-scale circulation systems, a common civic realm, and integrated diversity.’’ Transit ‘‘can organize the region in much the same way a street network orders a neighborhood. Transit lines focus growth and redevelopment in the region just as main streets can focus a neighborhood. . . . A diverse population and job base within a region supports a resilient economy and a rich culture in much the same way that diverse uses and housing in a neighborhood support a complex and active community. The suburban trend to segregate development by age and income translates at the regional level into an increasing spatial and economic polarization. . . . Both trends can be countered by policies that support inclusionary housing and mixed-use environments.’’31 Together with William Fulton, Calthorpe made his case for a new regionalism that included the New Urbanism, not just in the suburbs but also in inner-city areas. As the best proof of that potential partnership, leaders of the Congress for the New Urbanism in 1996 convinced Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Henry Cisneros to incorporate their principles in the HOPE (Housing Opportunity for People Everywhere) VI program, which had been adopted three years earlier with the intention of replacing high-rise public housing units with mixed-income communities that would look more like traditional neighborhoods. Here, landscaped streets that were treated as public spaces to encourage walking and dwelling units facing those streets helped foster sociability as well as a sense of security. 32 As an example of what happens through such transformations, Ray Gindroz, a cofounder of the Pittsburgh-based architectural firm Urban Design Associates and a leader in the Congress for the New Urbanism, sees a return to ‘‘civility’’—what he defines as elements of courtesy, refinement, polish, courtesies, and amenities—that was lost in the second half of the twentieth century. ‘‘The physical structures themselves create a framework for successful mixed-income development. In contrast with the conventional wisdom that suggests that people prefer to live and mingle only amongst ‘their own,’ the New Urbanist approach fosters a spirit of community in neighborhoods such that very different people share the space amiably, and with respect, appreciation and a sense of personal investment in its character and continued quality.’’33

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Figure 26. Hope VI conversion: Crawford Square, Hill neighborhood, Pittsburgh, before and after reconstruction. Courtesy Urban Design Associates.

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Gindroz denies charges that New Urbanists discourage community input. When the design process is opened to public review, he says, ‘‘you get contact with real places and real people. It becomes impossible to impose artificial and abstract ideas.’’34 While proponents recognize that the New Urbanism is not a substitute for full-fledged housing, economic development, and social service initiatives in the inner city, they see a positive role for community development nonetheless. As a case study of Pittsburgh New Urbanism initiatives concludes, ‘‘Design matters because inner-city residents deserve to inhabit an everyday environment that is safe, healthy, hospitable, and beautiful; that has good pedestrian and transit connections; and that offers housing opportunities for people of different incomes, ages and family compositions.’’35 ‘‘As an isolated approach,’’ one especially thorough review of inner-city experiments concludes, ‘‘New Urbanism is open to the criticism that it represents a quick fix that relies on the discredited notion of physical determinism. As part of a coordinated strategy, however, it provides a flexible, incremental approach for revitalization that blends with the city and complements it, rather than fragmenting and dissolving it.’’36 An even deeper challenge to the New Urbanism lies in its claims for desirable social outcomes from design. In a thorough review of the appropriate literature, Emily Talen concludes that contemporary social science research does not support claims that physical design fosters community in particular. Citing clear evidence that such designs can facilitate one important aspect of community, resident interaction, she arrives rather darkly at ‘‘the real possibility that resident homogeneity, not the more socially desirable goal of heterogeneity, is a prerequisite for form to have an effect on social life.’’37 Such a conclusion would leave the new urbanism subject to the same criticisms directed at Clarence Arthur Perry’s neighborhood planning approach, that its success rested on its exclusionary capacity.38 Not satisfied with Talen’s suggestion that New Urbanists simply tone down the claims for their work, sociologist David Brain, even as he identifies limitations in the New Urbanist creed, embraces an even more ambitious agenda for linking a revitalized citizenship to the process of place-making. The chief difficulty in the dialogue surrounding New Urbanism, Brain argues, is the conflation of desirable civic goals with the concept of ‘‘community.’’ Community is easy enough to achieve through the congregation of like-minded peoples. Such efforts can promote communitarian activity without, however, enhancing any larger common good. The chief problem of contemporary American suburbs, he suggests, lies precisely in the aggre-

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gation of common interests. In a process he describes as the segregation of functions, developers create single-use zones—residential subdivisions, office parks, and shopping malls—all oriented to automotive transit, with open areas merely left over space between uses. Such packaged landscapes can maximize the appearance of choice and can even enhance, through physical features such as cul-de-sac design, focused spaces for neighborly interaction and a sense of community. Where such ‘‘communities’’ form, in which the larger world of strangers are experienced solely as ‘‘traffic,’’ Brain suggests, they become ‘‘inward looking, exclusive, and defensive in . . . orientation towards those perceived as outside these little enclaves of interpersonal, face-to-face-connection.’’ The larger, more important goal of urbanism, which like Gindroz, Brain identifies with civility, is lost. This larger public world, what we might identify here as civitas, he says ‘‘implies a tempering of communal solidarity by the embedding of personal ties in a context of broader and more impersonal connections, mediated sometimes by the material conditions of place and place-based representatives and reflected in the constitution of a political space in which one finds citizens rather than just neighbors.’’39 In a complementary essay, on the allusive goal of promoting ‘‘community’’ through physical design, Emily Talen urges planners to ‘‘substitute specific elements of community that make better sense in the context of physical design, such as resident interaction,’’ complemented by support for capacity building which, through such encounters, can deepen social bonds and enhance civility, as Brain defines it.40 New Urbanists distinguish themselves, according to Brain, by focusing on the form in which uses are assembled and the ways proximity and a mix of uses can generate positive effects as a result of qualities of form: ‘‘Whereas conventional planning has focused on managing an aggregation of individual decisions within a framework of procedural fairness and technical problem solving, traditional neighborhood development sets the goal of creating a framework within which choices can be understood as contributing to a common outcome.’’ 41 The thorniest problem of sustainability, he claims, ‘‘is not determining such things as the carrying capacity of a piece of land but the problem of constituting the capacity for collective responsibility necessary to organize social practice in terms of positive choices cumulatively producing a life that is both good and sustainable.42 This participatory model, in which ‘‘neighbors’’ and ‘‘strangers’’ are each engaged, is widened through regional precepts, most notably Calthorpe’s concept of the urban-rural transect, which offers the ‘‘illuminating way choices at different scales concentrate to produce valued outcomes (rather

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Figure 27. New Urbanists envision rebuilding and redesign of Gulf Coast communities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Copyright 䉷 Duany PlaterZyberk & Co, used by permission.

than a cumulative degradation of the shared environment).’’ Rather than being prevented from taking effective action as citizens for the collective environmental consequences of our settlement patterns by existing practices that shield the sources of causation and relieve anyone from responsibility, Brain envisions New Urbanism as part of a ‘‘civic renewal movement’’ that through ‘‘action research’’ can create a ‘‘feasible ecology of choice.’’ By ‘‘organizing our engagement in place,’’ it can ‘‘put architecture and design in service to the realization of diverse and liveable communities that add up to sustainable cities.’’43 As a prescription, Brain’s conception was heady enough. Little could he have conceived, however, that within months of his publication New Urbanists would have a unique opportunity to realize some of their greater ambitions in the reconstruction of the Gulf Coast in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The devastation that wracked most of the coast offered the chance for dramatic change. Seeing a way that President Bush could rebound from the inept performance of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), columnist David Brooks envisioned a Republican Tennessee Valley Authority, ‘‘a laboratory for the Bushian vision of energetic but not domineering government.’’44 Such a vision in reality shrank to a school vouchers program in New Orleans and suspension of the Wade-Davis Act, which required federal contractors to pay union wages and use union workers. Alternatively, liberals hoped the dispersion of so many poor black residents from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty would open opportunities for those in flight in other parts of the country, a goal that proved as elusive as a

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‘‘Republican New Deal.’’45 Rebuilding could not proceed without planning, however, and the governors of both Mississippi and Louisiana asked Andres Duany to help chart visions for reconstruction in each state. Like others, he saw the possibilities in rebuilding, remarking, ‘‘For a city to become a city that’s planned, it has to destroy itself; the city literally has to mold. Usually this takes 20 years, but after a hurricane, it takes five years. The people can see the future in their own lifetime.’’46 Not surprisingly, New Urbanist principles informed Dunay’s approach. ‘‘It’s always about community,’’ Associated Press reporter Robert Tanner quoted him: ‘‘it’s always about walkability, it’s always about diversity of use and people.’’47 Only weeks after the hurricane struck on August 29, 2005, some one hundred planners associated with the New Urbanism joined with an equal number of local professional volunteers in the Mississippi Gulf town of Biloxi for six days of intensive evaluation. Inspired by Governor Haley Barbour’s charge to renew the Gulf Coast as a ‘‘better place,’’ their deliberations led to separate recommendations for eleven towns, but recommendations that were unified by goals to create more transportation options, enhance each community’s downtown, and build a network of healthy neighborhoods. As Dunay explained in the introduction to the combined reports, the permanent scarcity of petroleum, let alone the immediate crisis, called for the reversal of patterns generated by modern, auto-dependent development: ‘‘it will catalyze the restoration of communities to what they were historically—places that are traditional, walkable, mixed-use, mixedincome neighborhoods, towns and villages. It is certain that such places will sooner or later arrive everywhere, as all places will molt over time adjusting to this reality. What is so extraordinarily hopeful in Mississippi is that the devastation of Katrina will allow the Gulf Coast to arrive at this inevitable future faster—before anywhere else in the United States.’’48 The town plans that emerged from these meetings, according to Emily Talen, who with David Brain coauthored the social section of the report, served as a microcosm of New Urbanist social doctrine: ‘‘An accessible public realm, neighborhoods that are socially diverse, and walkable access to life’s daily needs.’’ In strategies familiar to New Urbanists, planners stated their intention to ‘‘recentralize and connect a diverse (and dispersed) population,’’ including public transit, ‘‘civic sites and buildings that reinforce community identity,’’ housing variety, and ‘‘the location of institutional and commercial uses within walking distance.’’ As the heading ‘‘Design Matters’’ noted, ‘‘Every road, transit and bridge project should pay attention to the details of place-making.’’49

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Such design principles, Talen reported, were aimed at achieving ‘‘social equity,’’ which she defined as ‘‘equalization of access to resources.’’ That approach, as illustrated in the town of Bay St. Louis, drew specifically on the neighborhood unit based on a quarter-mile, five-minute walk from the center to the edge, thus providing ‘‘for basic needs and civic expression within a reasonable distance.’’ In Biloxi, planners envisioned new neighborhoods designed ‘‘according to the best traditional New Urbanist principles to accommodate as many as 2,000 families: an interconnected grid of pedestrian-friendly streets; a variety of housing types and densities; a wellformed network of public space; access to transit, commercial and civic activities; and direct view and access to Central Park.’’50 In line with Peter Calthorpe and William Fulton’s regional analysis, the transportation section of the report called for a multimodal network of transit, ferries, bikeways, promenades, and trails that would reinforce the viability of neighborhoods and connect them with town centers. Planners further proposed incentives to recapture a portion of retail activity for downtowns, where they would be located in amenity-rich settings convenient to pedestrian traffic. A renewal plan for Escatawpa Village in Moss Point, for instance, envisioned a new village center with shops, restaurants, a small hotel, and a variety of housing types clustered around an open town square, a virtual Yorkship Village.51 Planners even succeeded in getting Wal-Mart to accept for its rebuilding plans a pedestrian-friendly design as part of a mixed-use district in Pass Christian.52 These decisions were to be made with the full engagement of local residents. ‘‘A facilitated rebuilding process,’’ planners contended, ‘‘would ensure an open dialogue (and restore trust), mobilize civic assets, nurture leadership, and help to build consensus.’’53 Those goals proved especially difficult in the aftermath of the disaster, however, with survivors coping with the challenges of recovery to say nothing of returning to what was left of their homes. Planners had to settle therefore for working directly with public officials, and though they made some headway in achieving local commitments to altering zoning practices through the new urbanist ‘‘SmartCode’’ approach that would help advance pedestrian and mixed-use neighborhoods, on larger policy issues their recommendations were ignored, not least because the state supported rapid highway construction to assist the rebuilding of casinos, highways that defied transit-oriented planning. While Talen remained committed to design-based planning, she acknowledged that ‘‘the realization of social equity will require more than a physical plan—it will require a concomitant set of policies and programs

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originating from the public and non-profit sectors.’’ In what, under the particular circumstances, had to be an especially formidable set of tasks, she concluded: Residents will be required to think like citizens and not solely taxpayers, and in addition, they will need to be convinced that living in mixed-income neighborhoods can be a positive experience. Bureaucrats will need to think like generalists who value social goals, not as specialists with narrow technical interests; and the private sector will need to think in terms of new ways of realizing profits. All of these constituencies will need to recognize that social equity goals do not undermine their interests.54

The difficulty of achieving such socially ambitious goals was well illustrated in Biloxi, one the few remaining working-class coastal communities in the country. There, a New Urbanist team started with strong local support for planned reconstruction, but once the plans were made public that support quickly dissipated. At issue were conflicts involving not just federal bureaucrats representing FEMA, but also local residents who had never been included in the planning charettes, as well as some public officials who had. With plans for affordable housing priced at $140,000, well above the $65,000–95,000 that realtors estimated town residents could afford, the typical reaction was, ‘‘A poor lady like me, what the hell am I going to do with that? Walk by it and admire it? We can’t buy it. The white man will always have us pushed to where we have to just . . . go by and admire it and then go home somewhere and eat them old beans and bread and be thankful.’’ The reporter recording this reaction could not help but note the New Urbanists’ hubris, describing their plan for the city as looking ‘‘like a quintessential sleepy Southern city, or perhaps a parody of one.’’ New Urbanism, he concluded, ‘‘is like Whole Foods: it’s meant to be good for you, but it’s expensive, at least on the front end, and it comes with a set of cultural connotations that generally play best among the prosperous and the selfconsciously progressive.’’55 Other criticism followed, none more cutting than from Michael Sorkin, director of the urban design program at City College in New York. Although initially convinced that Katrina might offer a silver lining in the form of a chance to think systematically about twenty-first-century communities, as plans emerged for the Gulf Coast, Sorkin reacted critically. Claiming that the New Urbanist proposals contained ‘‘an overwhelming fixation on architecture’’ and ‘‘a unitary fantasy of perfection’’ lacking ‘‘any real attention to the issues of natural systems so crucial in the wake of a

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disaster,’’ he leveled the ultimate insult at the effort by comparing its prescriptions to those of the Congre`s International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), the universally recognized voice of modernism. ‘‘Modernism, informed by a dreamy utopian socialist ideology,’’ he wrote, ‘‘was grounded in the idea of producing a universal subject—‘a new man’—and in architecture’s potential to help mold these reborn citizens, happy workers in identical flats set in a sunny, salubrious landscape. . . . The New Urbanists’ ideal subject may be a happy consumer committed to traditional family values but the fallacy is the same: the idea that architecture is not to be designed for people in all their messy, squalling, and delightful difference but as a means of assuring that they converge into behavioral sameness. Instead of towers in a park, CNU citizens will happily inhabit their dryvit Taras, rocking rhythmically back and forth on their obligatory porches, ears cocked for the tinkle of the approaching Good Humor man.’’56 As extreme as its rhetorical flourish may have been, Sorkin’s critique reflected two common refrains, especially among academics—that the New Urbanism was overly determinist as well as too deeply embedded in capitalist ideology. Citing anthropologist Mary Douglas’s contention that the ‘‘whole universe is harnessed to men’s attempts to force one another into good citizenship,’’ Jill Grant describes the thrust of design reformers as an unfortunate turning ‘‘to government apparatus and private covenants to set and enforce codes of conduct.’’57 On the second front, critics accuse the New Urbanists of relying too heavily on market forces to achieve their goals, thereby propping up an unjust system with the predictable consequences of pricing out the poor that mixed building usage, whether in inner-city public housing conversions or in the suburbs, was intended to avoid.58 Both Grant and geographer Jeffrey Zimmerman argue that the environmentally friendly terms New Urbanists employ mask the class bias behind their efforts. Rather than challenging ‘‘the fundamental logic and patterning of capitalist urbanization,’’ Zimmerman asserts, New Urbanism ‘‘has remained fixated on producing and marketing the luxury consumption of natural urban amenities for those who have the resources to consume them.’’ He perceives a marriage between identity politics and real estate with the effect of creating ‘‘new forms of segregation that parallel the niche-marketed and increasingly fractured nature of social life in the United States.’’59 The New Urbanist reliance on market solutions that some critics have labeled neoliberalism is not a charge New Urbanists are likely to dispute. Whatever the movement lacks in theoretical rigor, New Urbanism has

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clearly made up in popular response. And, as Dunay and Talen admit, to be politically viable, innovative approaches to design-regulation have a better chance of success if they are cast as an extension of consumer choice.60 ‘‘Academics may wish to argue for structural changes in the capitalist system,’’ Cliff Ellis adds, ‘‘but as practising urban designers New Urbanists must tack more toward the political centre, where at least some high-quality products can be created. The alternative is to be mired in the swamp of unbuildable paper architecture and theorizing unconnected with implementation.’’61 Yet in Mississippi, even with the governor behind the effort, that strong inclination to rely on market solutions undermined the New Urbanist approach. Talen concludes, ‘‘In reality, the implementation of social equity goals is going to require a lot more than simply turning things over to the private sector.’’62 Even as Jill Grant recognizes the many ways New Urbanism has taken hold, she remains critical, as a number of others are, of the movement’s limited commitment to its professed goals of advancing greater social equity. ‘‘Despite its progressive rhetoric, new urbanism facilitates gentrification, displacement, and segregation in some places,’’ she concludes. ‘‘Its critique of the problems of the city has proven superficial, and its solutions do nothing to overcome the inherent inequity embodied in urban structure and replicated through new development.’’63 David Harvey is even more pointed when he charges that ‘‘New Urbanism builds an image of community and a rhetoric of place-based civic pride and consciousness for those who do not need it, while abandoning those who do to their ‘underclass’ fate.’’64 Emily Talen is, in fact, one of those few active members of the Congress for the New Urbanism who consistently articulates the socially responsible goals embedded in the organization’s charter, even as she presses the organization to do more to live up to them. Those objectives were boldly stated in the preamble to the organization’s charter in the claim that ‘‘The Congress for the New Urbanism views disinvestment in central cities, the spread of placeless sprawl, increasing separation by race and income, environmental deterioration, loss of agricultural lands and wilderness, and the erosion of society’s built heritage as one interrelated community-building challenge.’’ A powerful critic of the consequences of divorcing design from desirable social objectives, Talen nonetheless, in the assessment of the Gulf Coast experiment and elsewhere, makes clear how formidable the obstacles are to their achievement. A movement that seeks to break down the divisions among specialists in the building industry still has a long way to go to incorporate the ideas as well as the trust of those who embrace a socially

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progressive agenda. In turn, we will see in the next chapter that critics and activists committed to socially progressive causes are themselves relatively indifferent to considering design as part of the solution to the causes they address. A unitary vision that makes design a full partner in strengthening the civitas thus remains elusive as we take up the challenges of assuring vital communities in the twenty-first century.

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Civitas in the Design of Low-Income Housing

If nineteenth-century reformers considered the home the crucible for shaping individual citizenship, their twentieth-century successors thought increasingly in terms of affecting whole communities of citizens. From the Progressive Era to the present, activists have sought not just decent homes but better neighborhood environments. The introduction, in the 1930s, of publicly provided housing added new powers to shape urban civic life. Here, in what was originally considered temporary quarters for those whose incomes excluded them from the opportunities available only in the private market, it was believed that proper design could encourage sociability and enhance solidarity. Increasingly, the goal of housing reform became that of producing ‘‘better citizens.’’1 Yet such hopes, if realized in particular instances, proved illusory over the long term. Well before the Department of Housing the Urban Development adopted New Urbanist design guidelines for public housing in 1996, the promise of civic revival in such conditions had turned darkly sour. Concentrations of poor residents, many them appearing permanently excluded from private markets, struggled with the dire social effects of poverty, carrying the extra burden of the stigma of living lives apart from mainstream society. A late twentieth-century consensus called for their dispersal, their once exclusively poor neighborhoods replaced with mixed-income communities, and their own lives changed by their exposure to those of greater means. Physical design remained important in such decisions, not least in the HOPE VI reconstruction projects. Still, significant problems remained. If critics agreed that concentrating the poor was bad, they did not necessarily agree on what better alternatives existed for those of limited income. Once income limits were lifted in new public housing projects, it became increasingly difficult to accommodate all former residents. The Department of Housing and Urban

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Development offered rent certificates to help them enter the private market, many in suburbs rich in opportunities lacking in the urban areas they were leaving. But there they faced all the elements of social as well as physical isolation complained about by the New Urbanists. Where was the formula for integrating concepts of social justice with good design? In addressing poverty in place, civitas-by-design faced its most difficult test. Publicly supported housing emerged in the 1930s out of mixed motivations. Created as part of the New Deal primarily as a stimulus to a depressed economy, the opportunity nonetheless represented the culmination of a long campaign forged by those who had come to believe in the necessity of a noncommercial source of shelter for those most in need. That movement gained the support of many advocates of philanthropic housing as well as a number involved in the federal government’s brief experiment in housing during World War I. Catherine Bauer, RPAA member and an admirer of the communitarian elements of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal,2 provided the chief intellectual framework for the movement, most prominently in her 1934 book, Modern Housing. Working with unions that had been converted recently to the concept of public housing as a means of sustaining solidarity among its members, Bauer took a lead role in making that idea a permanent government commitment through passage of the National Housing Act of 1937. Not incidentally, Robert Kohn, fellow RPAA member and director of the Emergency Ship Corporation during World War I, served as the initial director of the New Deal’s Public Works Administration’s Housing Division. Before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1936 that the federal government could no longer provide housing directly to communities, Kohn utilized federal funds to support limited dividend companies across the country. True to his commitment to community-oriented design, these early models incorporated the best elements tested during and after World War I.3 One of the first and most prominent examples of New Deal efforts were the Carl Mackley Houses in Northeast Philadelphia. Built for the American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers, Mackley was intended to offer an alternative to conventional homes, what project architect Oscar Stonorov labeled ‘‘fortresses of individualism.’’ Instead, he envisioned a complex that by offering opportunities for sociability would build solidarity among workers. ‘‘Housing projects must be more than mere sanitarily constructed and equipped dwellings,’’ he wrote. ‘‘They must be sources of community happiness. They fail if these sources, namely equipment for recreation and education of the baby, the child, and the adult, are

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Figure 28. Public investment in a good environment: the Carl Mackley Houses, showing the pool and community hall. Courtesy Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

not provided.’’4 The placement of four apartment buildings around open space offered safe areas for play among children as well as gatherings of adults. Balconies and recessed porches in each unit facilitated exchange outside the home, even as a border of trees around the facility directed attention back to other common amenities—a community swimming pool, a cooperative grocery store, an auditorium, even roof space devoted to socializing. These represented tangible products of Stonorov’s hope that a ‘‘community outlook’’ would transform the lives of tenants. As the new complex opened to considerable fanfare, Hosiery Worker claimed, ‘‘You will live with your friends where the spirit of unionism is strong and where there will be a real feeling of understanding between the families within the development.’’5 Mackley attracted Bauer’s attention and became a primary talking point in her campaign to generate support for additional federally provided housing. Even at the height of the New Deal effort, public housers failed to em-

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brace widely provisions for integration. Of the sixty Public Works Administration projects listed by Robert Leighninger, a third were set aside for black occupancy, while only six were available on an integrated basis.6 To its credit, however, the government designed model facilities for African Americans, most notably in New York and Washington. The Harlem River Houses incorporated all the amenities considered ideal to modern housing, including a central courtyard to enhance sociability, a nursery school with an attached outdoor play area, social rooms, and a large athletic field.7 The Langston Terrace complex in Washington, designed by the city’s most prominent black architect, Hilyard Robinson, incorporated a range of recreational facilities concentrated in a central courtyard, described by one historian, ‘‘with its changing grade, open plan, and broad vistas,’’ as offering ‘‘a democratic space within the compound where neighbors and visitors could meet.’’ Every much as influenced by the socially conscious models abroad that had shaped Catherine Bauer’s concept of modern housing, Robinson, the same historian writes, intended no less than ‘‘to engineer working class life.’’8 If these projects remained fully ‘‘separate’’ from projects designed for whites, they nonetheless proved ‘‘equal’’ in execution as well as intent in enhancing civic life through design. That effort was short lived, however. Public housing always attracted intense opposition, most overtly from associations of Realtors, who fought every form of government competition to their industry. With the waning of New Deal powers, even before Franklin Roosevelt’s death, congressional allies succeeded in paring back subsidies, restricting amenities in order to reduce costs, and, over time, limiting access to all but those with the lowest income. Decent housing did not disappear, because local agencies managed both to design buildings in tune with local traditions and to incorporate a number of amenities.9 As Gail Radford demonstrates so clearly, the result was a dual housing market. Even as the Federal Housing Administration subsidized low-cost capital for private construction as it bourgeoned in the suburbs after World War II, it placed stringent restraints on what local housing authorities could spend for publicly constructed and maintained urban units.10 Private interests did embrace public housing in one particular instance, in the urban renewal program launched after World War II. Working under the national housing acts of 1949 and 1954, planners responsible for redeveloping whole sections of older cities faced a relocation crisis when areas targeted for reconstruction contained large numbers of older homes filled with poor, most often minority occupants, who lived there in

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crowded conditions because of the lack of affordable alternatives. To clear the way for the more economically productive use of valuable land close to business centers, planners and their business supporters favored use of public funds for the construction of multistory units in clustered developments away from downtowns. In Philadelphia, in New York, and most notoriously in Chicago, these units proliferated, creating whole neighborhoods at even higher density and even greater concentration of poverty than had previously existed.11 The Robert Taylor and Cabrini-Green Homes, to take the most prominent examples in Chicago, could be described as improvements over the structures they replaced. These were not to be the dingy tenements of early twentieth-century New York. By their concentration of units in towers, each new project assured plenty of open space for resident use. Other common facilities were included, such as laundry and meeting rooms, following the lead of the earliest model public housing efforts. In its first twenty years of existence, according to an assessment based on interviews with tenants from the period, the Chicago Housing Authority ‘‘fostered an environment that created a strong sense of community—these projects were true ‘villages’ raising children.’’12 In St. Louis, in what soon became the nation’s most notorious example of dysfunctional design, initial expectations for the Pruitt-Igoe complex were just as hopeful. Following design principles established by Henry Wright and Clarence Stein at Radburn, residences were arranged in large superblocks to discourage through traffic and within easy access to nearby commercial shopping. In these high-rise structures planners incorporated the innovation of deep corridors on each floor, intended both to create light, open-air hallways and to function as accessible play space for small children. Adjacent laundry rooms allowed mothers the opportunity to exercise supervision, even as they completed household duties. ‘‘In a bizarre twist on the community planning tradition that had informed Garden Citystyle housing projects in the United States and Europe,’’ Alexander von Hoffman notes, ‘‘tower-in-the-park theorists subscribed to the notion that elevator buildings would reproduce earthbound neighborhoods in the air.’’ The effects of economizing, through such practices as putting elevators only on alternate floors and imposing income limits, however, subverted the communities such designs were intended to sustain. Over time Pruitt-Igoe’s deep corridors became ‘‘gauntlets’’ dominated by thugs. Public spaces, especially stairwells and parks, became dangerous when shorn of common and productive purposes.13 The decision to demolish Pruitt-Igoe in 1972, only seventeen years after construction, became a widely recognized symbol

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of the failure to sustain poor communities through design. Those complexes that remained stood out not just physically from all surrounding communities. They represented a completely different population from the vast metropolitan majority. Little wonder such structures quickly became stigmatized. Such conditions did not go without criticism or efforts at reform. In 1957 Catherine Bauer decried the ‘‘dreary deadlock of public housing’’ that reduced the right of decent and affordable housing to shelter of last resort.14 Five years later Jane Jacobs’s highly influential Death and Life of American Cities showed how even the good intentions of the superblock as pioneered by Stein and Wright could turn to disaster in single-use projects such as public housing. She called for ‘‘unslumming’’ such areas through the diversification of uses and incomes. Reflecting the larger theme of her book and establishing principles later embraced by New Urbanists, she called for a return to city streets and sidewalks. These, she claimed, would deliver ‘‘casual public characters, lively, well-watched, continuously used public spaces, easier and more natural supervision of children, and normal city cross-use of their territory by people from outside it.’’ Such efforts to make the projects ‘‘safe and otherwise workable for city life’’ were necessary in order to make them ‘‘capable of holding their populations through choice,’’15 she claimed. Lee Rainwater subsequently provided chilling details of the consequences of warehousing the poor in towers, however benevolent they might have been intended, in his scathing description of PruittIgoe.16 It was Oscar Newman, however, who after he became familiar with Pruitt-Igoe’s failed promise while teaching at Washington University in Saint Louis, subsequently translated these observations into an alternative design agenda. Working with funds under a federal safe streets act, Newman traced high incidences of crime in public housing projects not to poverty as such but to the lack of ‘‘eyes on the street,’’ the term Jacobs used so effectively as a measure of effective crime prevention, and the lack of defined markers between public and private areas that could assist residents in defining the spaces they lived in and thus encourage commitment to their maintenance. Architectural design, he claimed, ‘‘can make evident by the physical layout that an area is the shared extension of the private realms of a group of individuals.’’ This ‘‘defensible space’’ would then inhibit crime by creating the physical expression of a social fabric that defends itself, ‘‘becoming a living residential environment which can be employed by inhabitants for the enhancement of their lives, while providing security for their families, neigh-

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bors, and friends.’’17 Here, at last, seemed to be design elements that could enable tenants to assert control over their own lives and, in the process, provide the foundations for viable civic and community exchange. Newman anticipated some of the criticism he knew would come his way, writing, ‘‘Defensible space, it may be charged is middle-class thinking. The poor have their own culture. They don’t want the peaceful, secure, dull life of the middle class.’’ Claiming that most poor have the same goals and aspirations as the middle class, however, he responded to his own question, ‘‘This romantic view of the poor is without foundation. . . . The desire for a living environment over which one has personal control is part and parcel of the desire for a life which one controls.’’18 But first, government planners had to recognize the faults in their own efforts. Citing Jacobs directly, Newman criticized the superblock and especially the closing of streets, which had provided paths for concentrated pedestrian and vehicular movement. Windows and doorways, when facing streets, he argued, extend the zone of residents’ territorial commitments and allow for the continual casual surveillance by police in passing cars. Such observations can scarcely be made from upper floors, so a fundamental recommendation was to eliminate high-rise towers and to make sure individual units were given high definition, though private entries, for example, as a way of affirming the sanctity of private space. Such elements, he argued, were critical in making a project a dwelling space and a ‘‘home’’ worth protecting. Architecture, he noted, in such circumstances acts more as an area of influence than control: ‘‘It can create a setting conducive to realizing the potential of mutual concern. It does not and cannot manipulate people toward these feelings, but rather allows mutually benefiting attitudes to surface.’’19 In a subsequent volume, Community of Interest, published in 1981, Newman extended his commentary to other environments, deepening at the same time his analysis of factors preventing public housing projects from working. Looking back to Jacobs and anticipating the HOPE VI program, he now argued for communities mixed in income but clustered according to interest and dominated by those with higher incomes. Recognizing the controversial nature of quotas, he argued nonetheless that if economic and racial integration was to work, it had to be codified and strictly managed. Poor children would learn better in communities where middle-class norms of ambition and high levels of teaching and supervision could better assure learning success. Too many low-income residents frighten the middle class, so there had to be limits. To encourage mixing,

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in light of this conscious class- and potentially race-mixing approach, he urged the siting of public facilities designed to draw local residents together, a virtual reinvention of Perry’s neighborhood plan.20 Although Newman’s first book was not widely reviewed or commented on initially, its argument did eventually make its way into the thinking about residential environments of the poor. Lawrence Vale’s examination of the redevelopment of three public housing sites in Boston showed that if translating Newman’s concepts sometimes proved difficult, they nonetheless could work, especially when resident tenants were allowed significant input into design decisions.21 While some social scientists remained skeptical about the power of design to diminish crime, let alone enhance community under late twentieth-century conditions,22 Newman’s approach was not without its spirited defenders. Linking Newman directly to New Urbanist emphasis on mixed use and its ability to draw private parties into common public spaces, Neal Kumar Katyal points to the possibilities in design for nurturing vital elements in crime prevention through the generation of social capital, defined as the ways individuals and communities create trust, maintain social networks, and establish norms enabling participants to act cooperatively toward the pursuit of shared goals.23 Combining elements of natural surveillance associated with Jane Jacobs and territoriality stressed by Newman, he argues for the creation of semipublic spaces capable of generating feelings of commonality: ‘‘With certain forms of architecture, individuals will feel less isolated and less compelled to commit crimes, residents will find it easier to distinguish strangers from others, and bystanders will be much more likely to prevent crimes or come to the assistance of a victim after a crime takes place.’’ He asserts that ‘‘Architecture by itself cannot stop crime, nor can it replace law. Architectural determinism is dead, for good reason. Nevertheless, its death should not blind us to the many subtle and important ways in which architecture alters human behavior, in crime as well as in other areas.’’24 Combined with principles of the New Urbanism, Newman’s strictures gave the HOPE VI projects the look of homes and the feel of neighborhoods.25 The evaluative literature of the effort remained mixed, however, with success dependent on a number of local factors and those most at risk remaining vulnerable to further ill effects from change. With the Department of Housing and Urban Development committed to rebuilding at lower densities and reserving units for those whose incomes previously would have been considered too high, a considerable number of former public housing residents necessarily were displaced. With waiting lists al-

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Figure 29. Park Duvall public housing complex, Louisville, before and after conversion of 1,100 units to a mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhood. Courtesy Urban Design Associates.

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ready high for assisted housing, whether in other projects or for vouchers to take to other locations, providing suitable alternative options became a pressing policy question. In her assessment of the effects of the HOPE VI program, Susan J. Popkin reports that many former residents were likely to experience improvements in housing and neighborhood quality when they moved to new locations. Still, ‘‘Without special support or assistance, many residents might end up in neighborhoods that are not much different than their original public housing developments.’’ Even if residents find adequate alternative housing, she adds, there is no guarantee ‘‘that the anticipated benefits will likewise follow.’’26 Indeed, Sheila Foster contends, ‘‘While accounting for the ways in which urban design can promote interaction in new communities, regional policy reformers have yet to come to terms with the limitations of their spatial determinism in transforming existing communities. . . . To achieve the social capital and equity goals that reformers want requires a deeper accounting of social networks on community and formation and sustainability.’’27 The difficulties and the dilemmas involved were nowhere better illustrated than in Camden, New Jersey. Once an industrial powerhouse, Camden by 2000 had declined to the point that it was considered one of the poorest cities in the nation, its poverty rate well over 30 percent, its population more than 95 percent black and Hispanic, and its budget in deep and perpetual deficit. The city had a high number of public housing units, the product of effective political bargaining in the 1930s and 1940s, which became a distinct liability as the city entered its post-industrial phase. Understandably, city authorities were anxious to take advantage of HOPE VI funding, and the first project to be replaced was Westfield Acres. Designed by Oscar Stonorov, who had designed the Mackley Houses in Philadelphia, Westfield had been another model environment at its inception.28 As in many other cities and despite protests from the NAACP, public housing in Camden through the mid-1960s had been segregated by race, with whole projects reserved for whites as long as demand persisted. The transition to minority occupation that followed desegregation in the late 1960s was not in itself traumatic. Living conditions at Westfield were stable and desirable until the 1980s, according to tenant leader Donza Harmon, who had herself grown up in public housing originally constructed for veterans in another part of the city. Westfield maintained into the 1990s all the physical attributes that were touted in an early brochure promoting the place: community facilities, common spaces between buildings suitable for children’s play as well as for adults to socialize. Units were grouped in two-

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story buildings so they suffered none of the problems Newman identified with high-rises, and commercial facilities were accessible nearby along Westfield Avenue, which defined the southern border of the project. What changed the character of Westfield was not a transition of race or even of income but drugs, which arrived with a vengeance with the crack epidemic of the 1980s. Spaces that once nurtured community activity now screened outsiders from scrutiny as they pursued their drug deals. When I visited the complex in the late 1990s, I was greeted with furtive looks from a number of young men, described to me as dealers, even as they must have wondered if I, as the unusual white visitor, represented law enforcement. Offered a full tour of the complex, I saw that the community room that once had been central to the life of the complex, was now empty and largely devoid of the signs of ongoing activity, such as bulletins, magazines, or recreational space. The equipment in the play area behind Harmon’s complex was weathered almost beyond use, the most prominent sign of activity being the graffiti on the wall in the form of a dealer’s signature. Private entranceways of the kind prescribed by Newman had not prevented conflict for Harmon, who recounted how, as dealing became more pervasive and brazen, the public space leading to her second-floor apartment had become crowded with noisy visitors as late as 2 a.m. Relief came not from neighbors banning together to secure their own space but from her own action. One night when the commotion was especially acute, she got out of bed, poured some vegetable oil into a glass, took up her Bible, and went outside where dealers congregated. Not saying a word to her tormentors, she began reading the Bible as she touched the surrounding ground with the oil, as though she were anointing the area. The dealers moved off right away and did not come back. Harmon’s action represented an act of faith, one that helped carry her though the turbulent 1980s into the 1990s. When the Camden Housing Authority gained clearance with HOPE VI funding to tear down Westfield Acres, she was among those who received a voucher to live elsewhere. After a protracted struggle to find suitable quarters in a tight housing market, she found space in the suburb of Pine Hill, some dozen miles outside the city. Her quarters there were clean, quiet, and secure, in marked contrast to the neighborhood she had left behind. Without a car and without friends in nearby units, however, she found herself more isolated than any previous time in her life, a situation not unfamiliar in a period when new housing policies stressed moving former tenants to alternative housing, often in the suburbs. Her only son lived some miles away, and try as he might, he could

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not get his mother to the increasing number of doctor’s appointments her deteriorating health required. Although she spoke hopefully of moving back to the city, no unit was reserved for her in a reconstructed Westfield Acres. Two years after she left Camden, Donza Harmon died of complications associated with diabetes. She was only forty-six years old.29 Harmon’s difficulties dealing with a new, if improved suburban environment were not isolated. Whether concentrating on the dispersion of residents through the Gautreaux decision in Chicago requiring the relocation of public housing tenants to the suburbs, or on broader efforts such as HUD’s short-lived move-to-opportunity program, studies showed more improvement in the prospects of children than among parents, whose employment prospects appear not to have improved much if at all and whose social ties were weaker than they had been in the housing projects they had left behind.30 As Sheila Foster notes in reviewing the unintended effects of programs created to move the poor to areas of greater opportunity, the loss of existing networks ‘‘might create more damage than the promised benefits that more affluent communities will bring.’’31 Moreover, even the most ambitious projects, such as the Plan for Transformation in Chicago, left many tenants stranded seven years after it was adopted, as available units lagged well behind demand.32 Even as Harmon’s own tribulations came to an end, Camden entered into a much larger test of policy for dealing with concentrated poverty and its effects. In the summer of 2002, newly elected Governor James McGreevey signed municipal recovery legislation placing Camden under the supervision of a state-appointed chief operating officer, providing at the same time $175 million intended to leverage private investment in the city. Although more than half those funds were dedicated to downtown institutions on the presumption that they represented the chief engines to spark the city’s dormant economy, another $35 million remained for neighborhood improvements. According to a revitalization plan required under the legislation, Camden residents were to receive first priority for both new employment opportunities and improved housing. The chief thrust of the plan, however, made a ‘‘smart growth’’ case for attracting new middle-class residents to the city. In the report’s words, good job generating strategies would have the benefits of reducing ‘‘high levels of commuter traffic while increasing expenditure potential in the city’s neighborhoods.’’ The attendant effect would be to attract to the city the kind of ‘‘social capital’’ that was lacking among its predominantly low-income residents.33 The theory, as Audrey McFarlane describes it generally, was that ‘‘the middle class pro-

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vides a stable social group that can be observed by the poor as a model of hard work, property maintenance, and social cohesion. With this middle layer gone, it is believed that there is no stable class for the poor to aspire to or upon which to model themselves.’’34 Such an approach was precisely what a volume released by the American Planning Association prescribed. Calling for ‘‘destroying underclass neighborhoods—America’s breeders of crime and destroyers of schools,’’ Steve Belmont claimed this could be accomplished ‘‘by dispersing America’s concentrations of at-risk households and priming the liberated neighborhoods for an influx of middle-class families.’’35 Hardly an approach that gave priority to inner-city residents themselves, Camden’s redevelopment emphasis represented a stark example of a policy McFarlane describes as ‘‘restructuring of urban space’’ though incentives for capital reinvestment and an explicit policy of favoring the affluent in making development choices. Within a year, McGreevey embraced this method as he announced with great fanfare a plan submitted by the Cherokee Investment Partners of North Carolina to remake the working-class Cramer Hill neighborhood. This $1.2 billion private investment envisioned the conversion of abandoned property along the Cooper River into a marina and private housing complexes, the conversion of a city landfill to a golf course, and a number of market rate homes. True to principles adopted from Clarence Perry at the height of the urban renewal frenzy of the 1960s, the plan called for wholesale redevelopment and the relocation of current residents to make way for replatting and replanning the whole area. More than 1,200 families faced the loss of their homes, among them residents in a public housing project that had been recently rehabilitated and a heavily subsidized apartment building nearby. Although existing public housing was slated for replacement by a HOPE VI project, the chief destination for those displaced were to be new units in greater concentration in one corner of the neighborhood, away from the central section transformed by redevelopment. Predictably, neighborhood residents, the great majority retired and living on limited incomes or the working poor, rose up in nearly unanimous opposition to the ‘‘improvements’’ directed their way.36 Despite a series of challenges to the Cramer Hill proposal that landed the city in court, the Camden Redevelopment Agency persisted in a clearance and rebuilding strategy, publicly asserting that it intended to turn all of Camden’s nine square miles into redevelopment zones, where every property would be subject to eminent domain. That the target audience re-

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mained the middle class was especially clear in the Bergen Square neighborhood, located adjacent to a waterfront that had already been converted from abandoned industrial use to an entertainment destination, complete with an aquarium, a minor league ballpark, and the region’s most successful outdoor musical venue. Stating its strong belief ‘‘that the principles of good design are essential to building a community that will attract families and investment and create a beautiful place to live,’’ the city’s plan envisioned a complete restructuring of land uses. Central to the vision was the creation of a new avenue cutting through the area from the interstate highway at the city’s outer edge to the waterfront. At the heart of the neighborhood, along this avenue, would be created a new Bergen Square Town Center, described as ‘‘an entire two block open space with generous trees, water fountains, public walkways and sidewalk cafe´s which will encourage this area to become a vibrant destination for civic events and for regional entertainment and shopping.’’ To ‘‘physically and symbolically bring the community together,’’ the plan further envisioned a one-mile pedestrian-friendly path looping the area that ‘‘will utilize enhanced sidewalks along the street system, and will link together many of the parks, schools and commercial centers.’’ As examples of ideal use, it suggested that ‘‘the morning routine for a resident could become dropping the children off at school, then meeting friends at the coffee shop, and then walking together around the community.’’ Described as consistent with principles of ‘‘smart growth,’’ the plan clearly embraced principles enunciated by the New Urbanism.37 By contrast, its vision ignored the working poor, with the single exception of promising them alternative housing in unspecified locations. Concern for luring the middle class into Camden either for work or housing was not the only vision for the city. Believing that Camden’s hopes of success as well as the roots of its decline lay in its regional setting, the Ford Foundation made a commitment to a wider effort intended to assure Camden residents that whatever new opportunities were created in the city for homes or employment, they would not be excluded from those opportunities already in place in suburbs. As a tool, the foundation looked initially to a provision of the municipal recovery legislation creating a regional impact council intended, as its chief sponsor put it, to engage the support of surrounding suburbs with issues associated with recovery, such as improving affordable housing opportunities, transportation networks, and employment options. More broadly, the Ford Foundation expected to work within the framework of the state’s historic Mount Laurel court decisions requiring every New Jersey municipality to provide its ‘‘fair share’’ of af-

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fordable housing opportunities. Because affordable housing remained highly concentrated in Camden, however, and because job growth remained concentrated in surrounding suburbs and access to those jobs remained problematic for many inner-city residents without automobiles, Ford hoped to use the city’s transition as an opportunity to help some Camden residents move closer to those opportunities. One of Ford’s chief consultants to the effort, the urban critic David Rusk, in particular, claimed that helping relocate Camden residents near suburban employment opportunities would have twice the impact of in-place job training and job creation programs and ten times the effect of moving an equivalent number of middle-class families into the city.38 Here might have been a complementary strategy, where both city and suburb each took a role in dispersing concentrated poverty and the problems associated with it while at the same time concentrating resources in the city to make it more fiscally viable. The politics of the situation did not point that way. The regional impact council never emerged as a viable partner in addressing the Camden area’s problems. Tellingly, at the council’s first meeting, two full years after the recovery legislation had mandated its creation, Camden’s chief operating officer reiterated what he had been saying in Cramer Hill and in other neighborhoods facing redevelopment: current residents would be relocated inside the city. Clearly the message to the suburbs was that to the degree they would have to address Camden’s poverty, it would not be within their own borders.39 Such was a welcome message to suburban communities facing pressures to meet Mount Laurel affordable housing obligations even as they proceeded to tear down older garden apartments in order to upgrade their own tax bases. Given the lack of commitment among area municipalities to dispersing the poor to other locations, the Ford Foundation launched its own program, teaming up with the Annie E. Casey Foundation to devise a plan to provide the resources for purposeful, supportive, and voluntary relocation. Calling its program the Camden Area Opportunity Project, sponsors spelled out an agenda of counseling, work preparation, and advocacy that would aid those residents who sought better opportunities of residence, employment, and schools outside the city. Out-migration had been taking place without such coordination over several previous decades, but only to nearby suburbs where, by the early twenty-first century, employment was declining even as minority concentration was rising. To assure that those who relocated did not simply end up in situations similar to those they left behind in Camden, Ford targeted those outer suburbs where employment

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growth was robust, where tax revenues were high, and where, not incidentally, minority presence was sharply limited. To make the effort work, the program embraced a faith-based organizing effort devoted to placing relocated residents in high-opportunity locations. That effort included surveys of existing affordable housing opportunities; efforts to assure necessary assistance to bridge the financial gap between lower-income family incomes and suburban rents; recruiting host congregations and suburban networks to assist relocated families; and monitoring discriminatory rental or sales practices in high-opportunity towns. The plan embraced an approach, often overlooked in previous move-to-opportunity programs, to provide adequate bridges to their new communities to help new residents make necessary adjustments to unfamiliar if not always hostile new environments. This proposal to advance regional equity, as it was called, did not tout particular design standards, emphasizing instead the belief that democratically grounded communities work best when they are not exclusive by income, whether high or low. Within the Camden area, however, there existed a prominent model, the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel. Developed by the Fair Share Housing Corporation headed by Peter O’Connor, one of the lawyers who litigated the Mount Laurel case (on behalf of the original plaintiff, Mrs. Lawrence), the complex opened in 2002 to great fanfare, including a stirring address by national NAACP chairman Julian Bond. Built only after many years of opposition, the Lawrence Homes consisted of 150 units for families ranging from 10 to 80 percent of median income.40 Approximately a quarter of the families came from Camden, the rest from throughout the region. Demand was extremely high. When the second set of units opened in 2003, some 1,200 people—approximately 500 from Camden—stood in line for a chance to occupy one of the 40 units available.41 Located along a road lined with high-end modern housing developments, the Lawrence Homes were virtually indistinguishable from their exclusive neighbors. Meticulously maintained flower beds and landscaping blanketed the grounds. Enough open space separated homes to assure both individual privacy and common spaces for children to play. Neither the RPAA nor the New Urbanist community would have objected to the design or the community-oriented intent of the development. There was no denying, however, that physical amenities, so rare in impoverished areas, could not themselves overcome social deficiencies born in concentrated poverty. As hard as the staff worked to ease the transition of resident children to

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Figure 30. Decent homes in a safe environment. Ethel Lawrence Homes, Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Courtesy Mark Lozier Photography.

the Mount Laurel schools, many problems arose, from overcoming learning deficits to simply finding coverage for day-care supervision while parents worked. Performance may have risen in school for some, who as the scholarly literature would predict, benefited from mixing with middle-class children. But finding that such exposure was not enough to meet the special needs of low-income students, Fair Share Housing made a commitment to build its own learning center for the benefit of all children living in Mount Laurel housing that qualified under state rules as affordable. The introduction of another level of social service provision represented a tacit acknowledgment that even in the best of circumstances, a good physical environment is not the only criteria for civic vitality. Indeed, some have made the opposite argument, that viable social networks can overcome even the most unpromising physical circumstances. Chief among these critics has been the sociologist Herbert Gans, who as part of a team of consultants to James Rouse in Columbia questioned the expectations the developer brought to that community. In Boston’s East End and in Pennsylvania’s Levittown, Gans found high levels of satisfaction among residents

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Figure 31. Children at risk, Bailey Street at Fourth, North Camden, New Jersey. Courtesy Camilo Jose Vergara.

for environments criticized on the one hand as blighted and on the other as bland.42 His argument that residents could make the best of even the most difficult environments influenced a generation of urban renewal critics that included at least one who challenged the assumptions of positive environmental intervention in older urban areas going back to the Progressive Era. In his study of Washington, D.C.’s notorious alley dwellings, James Borchert argued that such structures, far from fostering antisocial behavior by their nature as inadequate facilities and their isolation from greater public scrutiny, actually sustained community. If illicit behavior such as numbers running and prostitution took place in such areas, these were crimes without victims. More positively, alleys formed safe areas for children to play free from street traffic and under the easy supervision of adults. Borchert elevated the designation of such space to that of a ‘‘commons,’’ where adults could gather, share information, and sustain relationships. Following the lead of Oscar Newman, he further described these areas as ‘‘defensible spaces’’ that could provide sanctuary for its largely African American inhabitants from a hostile world.43

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Figure 32. Washington, D.C. alley: a poor environment, but one still capable of supporting social interchange. Library of Congress.

Such work has since been challenged as romanticizing the past, but when one compares the images produced of Washington’s alleyways to the idealized inner courts of Stein and Wright’s superblocks, the results appear similar. The main difference is the class and the race of those occupying the space. In both cases spatial arrangements supported sociability though they did not necessarily create it. High concentrations of poverty, though often associated with the breakdown of positive social norms and associated networks, do not necessarily destroy them nor exclude other forms of social

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Figure 33. Inner court, Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, built to foster sociability. Reprinted from Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), copyright 䉷 MIT Press, used by permission.

capital. What happens, then, when the physical basis for sustaining those networks is suddenly destroyed and the beneficiaries are stripped of all the place-based measures of support they have come to rely on? This was the situation created by the devastation brought by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The resulting policy impasse revealed how far the country was from agreement as to how good design might be enlisted to the advantage of the poor. The floodwaters left by Katrina had not yet receded when the Ford Foundation’s Carl Anthony sent an e-mail to colleagues urging them to bring issues of regional equity to the planning discussions expected in the devastated area. ‘‘Traditionally, the charrette methodology is overly focused on architectural and urban design, not on issues of racial, economic or environmental justice, and related issues of institutional development,’’ he wrote. Urging colleagues to seize this ‘‘important organizing opportunity,’’ he asked ‘‘what can be done to insure that the planning teams conducting the charrettes are supported by consultants and staffs knowledgeable about issues of equity and justice?’’ Anthony’s message prompted a flurry of responses, including several from David Rusk, whose 1999 examination of the

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ill effects of concentrated poverty in New Orleans had convinced him that the great majority of those refugees from the hurricane would be better off not returning to areas that were already in steep economic decline. In contrast to President Bush’s modest promise of aid to individuals, Rusk argued for housing vouchers of up to $100,000 for homeowners or $600 in monthly rent, supplemented by impact aid to receiving communities. Philanthropists, he asserted could direct their assistance to existing networks of community-based organizations in the Gulf Coast region: ‘‘The few millions that private foundations can provide to the Second Reconstruction should be focused on helping local residents assure that the many billions being spent are achieving the goals of an economically viable, environmentally sustainable, and socially just New Orleans-Gulf Coast region.’’44 Rusk’s position was subsequently supported by another Ford consultant, john a. powell, who nonetheless argued equally for rebuilding the city through a fully social inclusive policy,45 a position supported by the director of the Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, Bruce Katz. In a formula closely approximating Camden’s revitalization plan, Katz argued both for converting ‘‘neighborhoods of isolation and deprivation’’ to those of ‘‘choice and connection’’ and a program of vouchers to help the displaced to increase their mobility: ‘‘America knows how to promote housing choice and build mixed-income communities that work economically and socially. The only question is whether we have the political will to apply the best lessons and innovations not only to the rebuilding of New Orleans but to the housing of Katrina-displaced and other low-income families throughout the country.’’46 An Urban Institute policy paper asserted that ‘‘Whatever decisions are ultimately made about how to move forward, reconstruction should be based on what is known about how to incorporate high-quality, affordable housing into healthy mixed-income communities that offer real opportunities for low-income families.’’47 The case for sustained social intervention on a regional basis, including relocation assistance and counseling, appeared elsewhere with plenty of analytical support.48 Such commentaries failed, however, to account for the powerful attachment to place demonstrated by many of those displaced and their determination to return to an environment that they recognized, even in the best of circumstances, would remain physically vulnerable, yet which they expected would also continue to be hospitable to basic emotional as well as material needs. Preservationist Randall Mason put that attachment into context, describing the power of cultural values to exceed economic values as ‘‘pricing the priceless.’’ In a context he had previously applied to

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uses of eminent domain, Mason asserted, ‘‘you cannot just exchange ‘place’ or ‘home’ for money.’’ With that in mind, rebuilding made sense, he argued, because ‘‘Sufficient cultural infrastructure, knowledge, and material exist for the New Orleans landscape to be able to sustain itself—traditions of literature, decoration, music, food, spiritual life, architecture, inhabiting the land . . . are intact.’’49 In a similar vein, Nick Spitzer, the creator of National Public Radio’s American Routes and a New Orleans resident, made the case for rebuilding from ‘‘the inside out,’’ by which he meant according to indigenous traditions of music and food as well as architecture. ‘‘In the modern world, we are increasingly cut off from community, but in New Orleans, this is much less the case,’’ he told one reporter. ‘‘Here, the culture is at the center of the civitas; it is not an add-on. A jazz funeral, a carnival parade, a great meal, a crawfish boil and the Jazz Fest are part of communal life, and they inspire a huge attachment.’’50 Here was where the New Urbanists most formidably ran into trouble. One of the achievements that appeared to flow from the Mississippi forums was the development of the ‘‘Katrina cottage,’’ a model low-cost temporary house described as a ‘‘308 square-foot tribute to costal Mississippi style.’’ Intended initially as a desirable alternative to FEMA trailors, designers considered them ultimately appropriate for adaptation as secondary buildings for in-laws, for rent as affordable spaces, or as the basis for a larger home as additional resources became available.51 To a student of local building traditions, however, such generic building types failed to recognize the evolving social context that had helped produce different styles and uses in the first place and give them different identities as time passed. Asserting that the racial and class structures that shaped the city historically ‘‘cannot be wished away,’’ architectural historian Dell Upton derided the Katrina cottage’s ‘‘faux-shotgun envelope,’’ which had been constructed without appreciation of the city’s historical geography. Lacking understanding of the largely invisible social relationships that had given meaning over time to the physical environment, Upton concluded, these codes would remain remote to insiders, whose own efforts he deemed essential to recovery of the communities that had been shattered.52 Janet L. Smith agreed, describing the limits of the New Urbanist approach: ‘‘The static form of architecture or pedestrian pathways did not make a community; rather it is the process of moving forward in time and mediating the experiences of daily life— dealing with the messy issues that build a community.53 Architecture critic for the New York Times Nicolai Ouroussoff reached a similar conclusion. Describing the New Urbanist vision of how cities work as ‘‘sentimental,’’

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he disparaged any approach incorporating compartmentalized historical styles—shotgun house, camelback, or Creole cottage—as endorsing ‘‘a theme park version of the past. It reflects an absurdly reductive historical narrative, one that ignores the reality that conflicting historical strands are what give great cities their vitality.’’54 Although much of the discussion about the power of place focused on the Lower Ninth Ward, it extended as well to the subject of public housing. Like Camden, New Orleans relied on a large number of units to house a high proportion of its population living in poverty.55 As in many other housing projects nationwide, the early structures had included amenities, such as courtyards built around grassy lawns and trees and other plantings, that had been well preserved for the most part over the years. Low-rise housing that related well to nearby private housing represented a distinct city asset. As Martha Mahoney reports, the history of public housing in New Orleans ‘‘reveals there was no inherent quality in the projects that brought ghettoes into being. Instead, public housing developed a negative image in the context of expanded project size, decreased project quality, and a simultaneous, ongoing segregatory process that reshaped the whole city and distanced the projects from employment.’’56 As the projects segregated, they lost many of the services that had once been central to their operation: nursery facilities, on-site medical care, adult and youth groups. Still, strong networks of association persisted, despite rising incidences of social pathology. These networks represented an important source of social capital to residents. Before the storm, the New Orleans Housing Authority, already beset with management problems, fell under federal control, and plans were advanced to substitute HOPE VI formulas for current projects. Thus, in the several years before Katrina hit, tenants were experiencing fears that existing social assets might be lost. Afterward, the government simply prohibited rehabilitation, whatever the condition of the particular unit, thus essentially uprooting the city’s poorest residents without a master plan or attendant support for purposeful relocation. To protests from its critics, HUD’s deputy chief of staff Scott Keller responded, ‘‘The policy decisions that concentrated poverty where people are stacked like cordwood in barracks is not conducive to stable families and stable neighborhoods. What you see now in these projects is almost like economic segregation, the way they’re on the outskirts of concentrations of activity.’’57 Yet the planned destruction of 5,000 units prompted widespread criticism, including from presidential candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards, among others. While not

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suggesting that all projects should be painstakingly restored, Ouroussoff argued that modest improvements at a well-situated project such as Lafitte, adjacent to the downtown—additional buildings, extensive landscaping, and extending the existing street grid to anchor the project—‘‘could transform the project into model housing.’’ This project already contained an ideal matrix of pedestrian roads fusing the apartment blocks into the city’s street grid and surrounding neighborhood, he claimed. ‘‘Low-rise apartments and narrow front porches, set around what were once beautifully landscaped gardens, are intended to encourage a spirit of community.’’58 Ouroussoff’s contention was not uniformly shared, even in the liberal media. Dismissing ‘‘the romantic vision’’ of preservationists, a December 2007 Washington Post editorial supported HUD’s plans for demolition. ‘‘What makes no sense,’’ the paper asserted, ‘‘is perpetuating a housing policy that trapped people in poverty. As the saying goes, ‘The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ Maintaining New Orleans’s failed public housing would be a prime example of that.’’59 It was the proposed alternative, Ouroussoff countered, that was unsatisfactory, pointing especially to a reconstructed New Orleans HOPE VI project, New Fischer, as simply replacing one vision of social isolation with another. With its cheery pastel colors, the row of porch-lined two-story houses ‘‘are straight from a Norman Rockwell painting of smalltown America,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But in many ways, the development is also an illusion. Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut of from the lifeblood of the surrounding city—the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. . . . By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists. This is a fool’s game. The challenge in New Orleans is to piece together the fragments of a shattered culture.’’ Sadly, he concluded, ‘‘Cast as the city’s saviors, architects are being used to compound one of the greatest crimes in American urban planning.’’60 Despite clashes inside as well as outside City Chamber Councils that led to the arrest of fifteen protesters, all seven members of the council voted on December 21, 2007, to approve demolition.61 The debate over public housing offered, as Tulane law professor Stacy Seichnaydre contends, something of a false dichotomy, between affordable housing supplied on a segregated basis or none at all. Recognizing the validity of purposeful relocation strategies embracing workforce housing, she called for a just housing policy that would be resident-conscious, focused on the replacement of an equal number of affordable units for those de-

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stroyed, embrace inclusionary zoning, and include both project-based replacement and portable vouchers.62 There is some reason to believe that the chosen developers of Lafitte’s 27.5-acre plot will meet those obligations.63 As in Camden, however, the accommodation of the poor remains as yet more a promise than a reality. With the second anniversary of the storm, a few spot successes could be reported in New Orleans, as preservationists managed to salvage some elements of historic neighborhood structures. Overall, however, the assessment was bleak both in terms of progress toward rebuilding and the fortunes of the city’s poorer residents whose homes had been disproportionately affected. In contrast, then, to the hopeful statements made as efforts to direct recovery first emerged, much of that population remained disconnected from their old social networks as well as from the familiar territory that supported their sense of belonging to a particular place. An assessment offered in December 2007 noted a marked shift toward recognition that a bad situation was not going to change soon. ‘‘There is nothing to go back to,’’ one resident said. ‘‘Everything was gone,’’ another added. ‘‘All that was gone—community, friends—scattered. You feel like, when you go there, you’re walking into a strange country. It’s just totally different.’’64 Although the evidence about those displaced was necessarily fragmentary, it would be hard to argue as a whole that such persons had succeeded in moving to opportunity.65 One of many thoughtful assessments of the effect of the city’s plight on national consciousness concludes, ‘‘Katrina created poignant images and left a liquid arc of almost unparalleled destruction, but it has not effectively nationalized the issue of inequality or significantly altered the civic debate over social and economic rights and privileges. . . . Unless systems are in place to guide the market-driven recovery from Katrina toward egalitarian ends, the Katrina marketplace will mostly reward the powerful and well-connected, and poverty, like water, will dictate the city’s future.’’66 That drift in policy not only dictated the destruction of public housing but failed to direct investment into the building or rebuilding of homes offering affordable rents.67 Nearly sixty years after Congress declared that ‘‘the general welfare and security of the Nation and the health and living stands of its people require . . . the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,’’ that goal remained highly elusive. Despite the professed hopes invested in Camden’s revitalization and the many opportunities for purposeful public intervention in New Orleans, chances to improve the economic, let alone the civic, vitality for

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those most vulnerable residents of those cities had not been realized. Perhaps the most telling epitaph to the lost opportunities on the Gulf Coast appeared in Spike Lee’s mournful dirge to the spirit of New Orleans, When the Levees Broke. As the film nears the end of its sad chronicle, the camera tracks a funeral procession through a broken neighborhood. Behind the ‘‘second line’’ procession, praised by Nick Spitzer as so central to the New Orleans vernacular, is a funeral carriage labeled ‘‘Katrina.’’ As the ‘‘mourners’’ lower ‘‘Katrina’’ into its grave, the tempo—and the spirit—in the music rises. But New Orleans remains broken, its future and that of its former residents very much in doubt.68 Were any further measure needed for the failed expectations for the city’s recovery, they can be found in john powell’s early vision of what might have been: ‘‘A new New Orleans has an opportunity to be a model for the entire world. As a historically black city, it can now be at the forefront of addressing some of the patterns of metropolitan development that we argue are central to the way racism still functions in this country. We must evolve our thinking beyond the narrow view of individual acts and actions to a vision of race that accounts for the ways they interact with structures. By doing this, we can make race a useful tool capable of bolstering democracy and ushering in meaningful transformative change that benefits the nation as a whole.’’69 Certainly the city will be rebuilt some day, albeit on a smaller scale and with a very different feel to it. Many of its most loyal residents will have relocated permanently, some in better situations, and the place they left behind might not be nearly so beleaguered as the one they remembered before the storm. But the health of the civitas—the community of citizens who remain—will be very much in doubt. For without confronting and working through what a reconstructed environment should be, how it should both be fairer and at the same time more responsive to existing social needs than the one it replaced, New Orleans like many other postindustrial cities in America, will be destined to remain what it was before the storm—a city divided by race and class, only now those who have been dispossessed will lack a place that is socially or economically supportive. One could not have created a worse situation had it actually been designed.

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Conclusion

There is little doubt across the spectrum of opinion that design of the built environment matters to the health and well-being of communities and the individuals who make them up. Opinions differ markedly, however, on what role such environments play in influencing behavior, especially as they might contribute to desirable social ends. While historian John Archer can argue, ‘‘There is no question that architecture extensively structures human behavior,’’1 sociologist Herbert Gans, in a famous critique of architectural practice, disagrees: ‘‘Society cannot be remade through architecture, and architects cannot solve problems of poverty, mental illness, or marital discord through better design. . . . Their designs can make people’s lives a little more comfortable or uncomfortable, but human behavior, and social as well as political relationships, are shaped by so many causal factors that rarely is any single factor of crucial importance.’’2 Planning professor Jill Grant agrees with Gans, asserting in her extended critique of the New Urbanism, ‘‘Good design cannot cure a sick society.’’3 Alexander von Hoffman disparages efforts over several generations to affect social behavior through housing policy, arguing that such environmental determinism has led repeatedly to disillusionment. Similarly, Eric Monkkonen faults Lewis Mumford in particular for embracing an ‘‘architectural fallacy’’ that masks the nature of urban life by privileging physical structures over the people who use them, calling such practice ‘‘superficial efforts to understand cities.’’4 However pointed such criticism has been, it is difficult to avoid the question whether we can afford to ignore the connection between built form and civic function, as Jon Lang suggests has been the tendency for the past quarter century. Most critics share Lang’s proposition that the built environment is not deterministic. It is hard to contest, however, his associated argument, that if the built environment does not afford a desirable

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behavior, the behavior cannot take place.5 The issue, Charles Bohl contends, is not spatial determinism but what he calls ‘‘environmental affordance,’’ the proposition that design can shape spaces to afford opportunities for positive social activities.6 Coincidently, it is hard to challenge John Archer’s contention not just that architecture helps structure human behavior, but that ‘‘the more such processes are understood, the better the architecture can serve human needs.’’7 A review of past practice reveals, however, how difficult it is for good ideas to make their way into widescale practice. Even the most ardent proponents of shaping civic life through environmental intervention in addition to Mumford—Howard, Perry, Rouse, and Dunay, among them—found that their best intentions had unintended and undesirable effects. Mumford called the violations of intent he witnessed the ‘‘law of cultural seepage,’’ in which innovations introduced by elites make their way into the mainstream only to be degraded in the process.8 His observation is confirmed to some extent by the current status of the best experiments associated with a progressive environmental tradition. They still survive, but largely as distinct artifacts of their time that set them apart from mainstream tradition. The original Greenbelt, Maryland, complex, for instance, is protected by the National Register of Historic Places. The rest of the town, however, is hard to distinguish from the suburbs around it. Homes are larger; shared open space is rare; traffic proceeds in conventional patterns; civic structures, including schools, are reachable primarily by car. Similarly, the section of Fair Lawn designated as Radburn stands apart from the rest of the town, which was largely developed after World War II. According to Alexander Garvin’s review of best city practice, ‘‘Despite the obvious superiority of Radburn’s planning, none of the developers in Fair Lawn chose to copy it. They created typical subdivisions with look-alike houses on streets with prominent utility poles. The overwhelming majority of America’s developers have done the same.’’9 Eugenie Birch describes the process by which ideal plans such as those formulated for Radburn were adopted only selectively, noting that ‘‘while the planning movement accepted the Radburn plan as a model, its few practitioners, frequently operating with a relatively unsympathetic environment, could execute only those aspects which melded easily with pre-existent customs.’’ Thus builders avoided the superblock in suburbs while applying the technique in distorted form to group public housing.10 In more general terms, regional shopping malls, which were intended to be crucibles of civic vitality, have undergone not just crass commercialism, but privatization of public spaces that damp-

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ens the free expression and social exchange early enthusiasts such as Rouse and Gruen envisioned.11 Urban visionaries have had their successes. In England, Garden City principles were institutionalized and widely implemented as early as the Housing and Town Planning Act of 1909 and extended in the New Towns Act of 1946 and the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947. Although realistic about the movement’s limitations, Mumford could write approvingly, ‘‘With the institution of the new towns policy on a large scale the way has been opened to carry Howard’s bold vision to a fuller, if not its final, consummation, by the deliberate union of many related cities into a new kind of urban unit . . . [which] will have all the dynamism of a great metropolis.’’12 Jonathan Barnett takes a more somber view, noting the transformation in approach that made Howard’s concept acceptable: On the fashionable side of major metropolitan areas are miles and miles of towncountry, much as Howard defined it. There are office and industrial parks, regional shopping centers and spread-out residential neighborhoods. People can live, work and shop in these districts, without entering the old downtown more than a few times a year, if at all. What is missing, of course, is the city-design structure that Howard imagined; the greenbelts and tight clusters of development so appropriate to the railroad and so difficult to achieve in the age of the automobile. The social diversity that Howard had hoped to achieve is also missing.13

In the United States, design elements promoted by the Regional Planning Association of America have been widely incorporated, by individual builders as well as in large developments, both through clustered development and, more formally, through the practice of planned unit development.14 As RPAA versions of Garden City concepts were promoted by federal agencies starting in the 1930s and adopted by private enterprise, however, Keller Easterling notes, ‘‘they were translated into organizations of an entirely different character. In some cases, exposure to more anarchical forms of real estate development added intelligence to the organization. In other cases, as in the context of postwar FHA (Federal Housing Administration) subdivisions, use of these formations as planimetric templates erased their functional relationships entirely.’’15 Certainly, such practices failed to assure the deeper goals of civitas. Many neighborhoodfriendly commercial developments have parodied Perry’s planning goals by featuring cul-de-sacs to enhance child safety without, however, paying equal attention to providing ready access to public and related civic spaces such as schools and community centers characteristic of the Garden City

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ideal.16 Buzz words, such as community and neighborliness, Emily Talen reports, have been appropriated so indiscriminately as to be virtually codified into suburban master formulas without investing either in amenity or deeper civic purpose.17 Gated communities enhance ‘‘community’’ without deepening the civility associated with an engaged citizenry, David Brain has argued. The planned environment has not disappeared, in fact, so much as taken two different forms, each with its own set of problems. The more pervasive environment—and the one Mumford clearly considered perverse—that has dominated the metropolitan landscape since World War II has taken design elements and turned them to replicable formulas: commercial strips connected by highways to specialty districts and residential enclaves relentlessly sorted by income. This approach, which has drawn the repeated criticism of New Urbanists, is decidedly environmentally wasteful and lacking intentionality for common civic purposes. It has the advantage, however, in its very pervasiveness, of being predicable in the same sense that Disney’s theme parks leave very little in the way of the built environment to chance. Clearly not all Americans find such options as stultifying as the New Urbanists claim, as these areas continued to expand throughout the latter part of the twentieth century. At the same time, alternative communities designed according to New Urbanist principles have proved popular enough as the exception to the rule that they are in great demand, hence raising prices and too often making them every bit as exclusive as the gated communities New Urbanists deplore.18 In the process, they have found it difficult to achieve the socially desirable goals of equity or diversity. Contemporary critics find the appropriation of social goals for private profit in modern communities predictable if not inevitable. In an age of Foucault, Habermas, and Benjamin, no responsible critic will see the provisions of ‘‘public spaces’’ as unproblematic in terms of access or use. Even Habermas’s enduring concept of ‘‘civic republicanism,’’ which David Brain employs in conjunction with his case for the New Urbanism, prompts extended challenges from contemporary scholars who argue that practices in the name of the ‘‘common good’’ can easily become hegemonic and stultifying to select groups under contemporary conditions. Jill Grant takes this step by converting the widely embraced view, first articulated by Jane Jacobs, that ‘‘eyes on the street’’ provide a welcome sense of security to a repressive vision, following Foucault, ‘‘in which everyone believes that someone may be watching and adjusts behaviour accordingly.’’19 The New Urbanist approach, in its very lack of ambiguity and faith in knowledge and

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expertise, has inevitably drawn criticism from contemporary theorists. That lack of ambiguity puts it especially at odds with postmodernists, whose attitude toward history, Robert Beauregard notes, is primarily aesthetic with no claims regarding its behavioral consequences.20 Much of the criticism directed at New Urbanists is exaggerated, and to their credit their advocates have publicly tackled the most difficult questions facing those seeking to advance greater democratic opportunities in the built environment. Douglas Kelbaugh, an architect and charter member of the Congress for New Urbanism, suggests there are really only three options identified by contemporary critics as alternatives to what he calls the unself-conscious ‘‘market urbanism’’ that dominates contemporary metropolitan development. New Urbanism is at once the most proscriptive and normative ‘‘in that it posits that good design can have a measurably positive effect on sense of place and community, which it holds are essential to a healthy, sustainable society.’’ It is also civic, he contends, because ‘‘it sponsors public architecture and public space that attempts to inspire citizens to feel they are part, even proud, of both a culture that is more significant than their individual, private worlds and of an ecology that is connected to the natural loops, cycles, and chains of life.’’ ‘‘Everyday Urbanism,’’ a trend associated here with the writings of Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, and more recently John Kaliski and Margaret Crawford,21 embraces ordinary life and reality, with little pretense of achieving an ideal environment. Downplaying the relationship between physical design and social behavior, it ‘‘delights in the way indigenous and migrant groups informally respond in resourceful and imaginative ways to their ad hoc conditions and marginal spaces.’’ A third approach, which Kelbaugh identifies as Post Urbanism and associates especially with architectural theorist Rem Koolhaas’s Generic City projects, discounts shared values as no longer possible in a fragmented world. Distrustful of efforts to order the built environment, this approach privileges those zones that foster new hybrid possibilities and unpredictable forms of freedom.22 Whether or not one shares Kelbaugh’s preference for New Urbanism’s artful purposefulness, his description sets the New Urbanists apart in their willingness to resolve the breach between social welfare and the material world that has bedeviled intellectuals for a full century dating back to the first national meeting of city planners in 1909. Sociability, evidence from a variety of sources suggests, exists in a variety of built settings: exclusive middle-class suburbs, dense working-class neighborhoods, even public housing before such areas became plagued with drugs, gangs, and the ag-

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gressive acquisitiveness that accompanied them.23 But if different environments can support deep personal ties, do they not have to be relatively homogeneous? Clarence Arthur Perry came to think so, as did a whole generation of realtors. Even Oscar Newman concluded that too much diversity would undercut the potential good effects of a desirable environment. For those who have sought deeper results, of civic vitality as well as social compatibility, for those who have sought civitas, more is expected, however. In promoting mixed land use to afford a variety of housing types, and hence a variety of costs as well as appropriate settings for different stages of life, New Urbanists have actively worked to assure inclusiveness in their communities. Clearly, however, their efforts, like many of the utopian efforts that preceded them, including the first garden cities in England as well as Forest Hills Gardens and Columbia in the United States, have fallen short of their goals. Acutely aware of these shortcomings, New Urbanists David Brain and Emily Talen, among a few others, have criticized both planners and social scientists for not tackling holistically the larger geographic structures that balkanize communities so profoundly that they prevent the formation of diverse and hence more richly democratic communities. Far from an environmental determinist, Talen nonetheless argues persuasively for socially and physically integrated actionable goals: ‘‘The appropriate question for planners is not whether the built environment creates diversity, but whether diversity thrives better, or can be sustained longer, under certain physical conditions that planners may have some control over. We know how the built environment readily separates people and functions (from gates and highways to single-use subdivisions and corridors), but how can the design of place be enlisted to bring them together in meaningful ways?’’ New Urbanist theory stresses advancing social proximity in order to promote ‘‘cross cutting identities,’’ a term Talen borrows from Robert Putnam. Such efforts are made, not in ignorance of the growing acceptance that communities of interest transcend communities of place, but with recognition that face-to-face interactions remain central to human welfare and to democratic practice.24 ‘‘Spatial proximity and civilized, shared use and public space,’’ Cliff Ellis writes, ‘‘can help weave the fabric of an otherwise fragmented society.’’25 No single path beckons irresistibly at the outset of the twenty-first century. Still, it should be clear from the essays in this book that without purposeful intervention, the built environment is subject to countless compromises on the health and well-being of those affected by it. Inevitably,

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opinions differ over what elements in design are desirable and practical. In this modern age, dominated by commercial messages directed at and received by niche constituencies, it is increasingly difficult to grasp choices that might be necessary and possible. Despite such challenges, those seeking a better urban environment need not despair for lack of direction. A good deal of good work pointing to alternative modes of development and redevelopment has been produced over time, work that has included in recent years especially powerful visions for achieving greater social justice in the places we live. We need not as scholars or as citizens continually reinvent an ideal world. Ideas to reform urban areas have circulated widely over time. They have been tested and, as the record shows, appropriated repeatedly for other purposes. Time and again prospects for social engineering have paled alongside the power of markets and established cultural preferences. To promote plans for reforming metropolitan areas is not to guarantee their execution. Still, unless we discard all prospects of exercising agency over the structural forces that shape the communities we live and vote in, we have an obligation to act and to do so in an informed way. Learning from the past constitutes one element of that practice, not for purposes of imitation but for amendment and revision as new insight dictates. Lewis Mumford made it clear in correspondence with Roy Lubove regarding the origins of the RPAA that their purpose was to improve upon the Garden City ideal.26 More recently, New Urbanists have extended the critique advanced by the RPAA,27 even as they have been forced to struggle with some of the same market forces that undercut earlier efforts to shape the environment for broad social purposes. Their concepts too, like history itself, are subject to revision. Finding the best means of harnessing the power of private investment to meet pressing social needs remains a huge hurdle to shaping just communities of citizens. A period of national fiscal crisis is not necessarily the best time to expect reforms at the heart of widescale recovery efforts, though the New Deal offers precedent in that regard, not the least in the introduction of public housing and new town development. Still, the slowdown of the market economy offers the opportunity for reevaluation. Such times of uncertainty and peril, as Robert Fishman observed well before the most contemporary fiscal crisis arose, offer the best opportunities for a critical reexamination of dormant intellectual traditions. The metropolitan vision of Mumford and others described here, Fishman asserts, ‘‘is important to us now not only because it speaks to our need to address the urban crisis, but because it preserves options, alternatives, choices that are not easily apparent in our

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culture today. It contains a rich legacy of possibilities for the economic and cultural revitalization of the inner city, for a balanced transportation system, the limitation of sprawl and other policies, but above all it encourages us to try to understand the great city as a whole and to imagine the metropolis as a coherent organism with a center and an edge and an irreplaceable role to play in the creation of American democracy.’’28 Will the gulf between academic criticism and the public be bridged? Will policy makers see the opportunity to improve communities even as they strengthen their physical structures? Only time will tell. But taking seriously the visions for a new urbanism, a new suburbanism, or a new metroplitanism has never been more important than it is now, as the United States faces environmental and social challenges of monumental proportions. We can only hope that the nation summons the will as well as the wisdom to meet these challenges more effectively in the years ahead.

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Notes

Introduction 1. Cited in Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 4. 2. See Christine Haynes, ‘‘The Coupling and Decoupling of Urbs and Civitas,’’ Journal of Urban History 33 (January 2007): 298, on the evolution of the term ‘‘civitas.’’ 3. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 3. 4. See my review essay, ‘‘Urban Renewal Revisited,’’ Journal of Urban History 33 (January 2007): 343. 5. See Eric Mumford, The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), especially 269, noting the association of Le Corbusier’s brand of modernism with ‘‘anti-urbanism’’ and symbolized by the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis described in Chapter 8; Emily Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005), 49–58. 6. See my essay ‘‘Towards Effective Environmental Intervention in Cities: Roy Lubove’s Evolving Critique of Urban Planning,’’ Pennsylvania History 68 (Summer 2001): 325–35. 7. For a summary of these trends, see Jason Hackworth, The Neoliberal City: Governance, Ideology, and Development in American Urbanism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007). 8. Such hopes are generally stated by New York Times architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff’s reflections on the possible effect on cities of the new president’s stimulus package (‘‘Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now,’’ March 29, 2009), and more explicitly by advocacy organizations. See, for instance, the report of the Oakland, California, PolicyLink, and the St. Louis-based Transportation Equity Network report, ‘‘An Engine of Opportunity: Achievable Goals to Advocate for Transportation Equity,’’ issued electronically April 1, 2009. 9. Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a PostIndustrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 247. For a summary of environmental traditions in urban and regional planning and their relationship to issues of social equity, see Thomas L. Daniels, ‘‘A Trail Across Time: American Environmental Planning from City Beautiful to Sustainability,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (Spring 2009): 178–92.

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Notes to Pages 5–8

Chapter 1. Progressive Reform Through Environmental Intervention 1. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 187, provided an early and enduring definition of Progressives: ‘‘The right of every individual to the normal life, to those material and cultural necessities without which he could not function as a healthy, productive member of society, was a goal which linked together the disparate reform crusades of the Progressive era.’’ 2. Charles Mulford Robinson, Modern Civic Art, or the City Made Beautiful, 2nd ed. (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1904), 257–58. 3. Bonnie Yochelson and Daniel Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis: Exposure Journalism and Photography in Turn-of-Century New York (New York: New Press, 2007), 37–68. 4. Quoted in Howard Gillette, Jr., Between Justice and Beauty: Race, Planning, and the Failure of Urban Policy in Washington, D.C. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995; reprint Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 116–17. 5. Lubove, Progressives and the Slums, 125. For one example of how Riis drew inspiration from Roosevelt’s example, see Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘The Military Occupation of Cuba, 1899–1902: Workshop for American Progressivism,’’ American Quarterly (October 1973): 408–25. This essay does not take up environmental intervention as such, but it does argue that government interventions in Cuban cities and society were highly influential on the Progressive movement that followed. 6. Richard E. Fogleson, Planning the Capitalist City: The Colonial Era to the 1920s (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), 74, 77. 7. M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983), 16–18. 8. Alice N. Lincoln, ‘‘Improved Dwellings,’’ Charities Review 4 (June 1895), 433, quoted in ibid., 15. 9. Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis, 39. ‘‘Unsafest of all is any thing or deed that strikes at the home, for from the people’s home proceeds citizen virtue, and nowhere else does it live,’’ Riis wrote in 1902. ‘‘The slum is the enemy of the home. Because of it the chief city of our land came long ago to be called ‘The Homeless City.’ When this people comes to be truly called a nation without homes there will no longer be any nation.’’ Riis, The Battle with the Slums (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 7. 10. Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 101; Lubove, Progressives and the Slums, 66, 67. 11. Lubove, Progressives and the Slums, 73, citing Riis, The Battle with the Slums, 407. I missed Lubove’s treatment of Riis’s community center approach when I first wrote about Clarence Arthur Perry in the essay that is the basis for Chapter 4. Lubove describes such places as ‘‘a kind of neighborhood commons’’ (80), noting, ‘‘If the school became, as Riis hoped, a social and intellectual beacon for adults as well as children, it would help restore the family cohesiveness which the tenement had wrecked.’’

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12. Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis, 117. 13. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 124. 14. Fogleson, Planning the Capitalist City, 70; Eugenie Birch and Deborah Gardner, ‘‘The Seven-Percent Solution: A Review of Philanthropic Housing, 1870– 1910,’’ Journal of Urban History 7 (August 1981): 424. 15. Lubove, Progressives and the Slums, 109, 112. He concludes, ‘‘Gould . . . and others could proclaim the value of model tenements all they wished, but no amount of rhetoric could modify the speculative structure of the housing market or force wealthy individuals and corporations, on any large scale, to channel their capital from more lucrative fields of investment into tenement ‘investment philanthropy’ ’’ (113). 16. Robert B. Fairbanks, ‘‘From Better Dwellings to Better Neighborhoods: The Rise and Fall of the First National Housing Movement,’’ in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 26–31. 17. Robert W. DeForest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem (New York: Macmillan, 1903; Arno Press, 1970), 3. 18. M. C. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 31; Shelton Stromquist, Reinventing ‘‘The People’’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 90. 19. Joel A. Tarr, ‘‘The Pittsburgh Survey as an Environmental Statement,’’ in Maurine W. Greenwald and Margo Anderson, eds., Pittsburgh Surveyed: Social Science and Social Reform in the Early Twentieth Century (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996), 171. See also John F. Bauman and Edward K. Muller, Before Renaissance: Planning in Pittsburgh, 1889–1943 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 55–58, for the local context of the Survey. 20. Lubove, Progressives and the Slums, 192. 21. Allen F. Davis, American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Wright, Building the Dream, 128. Nor was Addams atypical in bending prevailing views of the separation of the spheres to new ends, as Robyn Muncy points out in surveying the movement of women into the settlement movement, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890– 1935 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 9–11, 30, 36. 22. See M. C. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 20, 25. 23. Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 224; Stromquist, Reinventing ‘‘The People’’, 86–87, 97–98; Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 35. 24. Daniel Eli Burnstein, Next to Godliness: Confronting Dirt and Despair in Progressive Era New York City (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 143. 25. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Florence Kelley and the Nation’s Work: The Rise of Women’s Political Culture, 1830–1900 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 306–11; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 21–22.

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Notes to Pages 12–17

26. Dale Allen Gyure, ‘‘Playgrounds,’’ in David Goldfield, ed., Encyclopedia of American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2007), 577. 27. M. C. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, 22; Allen F. Davis, Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 61–62. 28. P. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 243; Dominick Cavallo, Muscles and Morals: Organized Playgrounds and Urban Reform, 1880–1920 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 29. 29. Cavallo, Muscles and Morals, 32, 2. Pittsburgh was among the cities that responded to civic efforts to institute play areas accessible to working people. In 1910 voters overturned a city decision not to fund playgrounds after the plight of the city’s children had been publicized by the president of the city’s nascent playground association. Tarr, ‘‘The Pittsburgh Survey,’’ 177. 30. Theodore J. Smergalski, superintendent of playgrounds, West Chicago Parks, writing in 1918, quoted in Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), 67. 31. Burnstein, Next to Godliness, 91, 105, 114. 32. Jon A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 141. In this assertion, Peterson directed his attention especially at P. Boyer’s Urban Masses and Moral Order. 33. Peterson asserts that ‘‘it was the City Beautiful movement as it interacted with the new scheme for Washington, D.C . . . that established comprehensive planning as a civic ideal and made it the basis for an entirely new body of thought, to be called ‘city planning.’ The Washington effort thus marked the first of a new, generalized method for shaping a city; the Columbian Exposition had been only the beginning of a wish that some such means would be found.’’ Birth of City Planning, 132. 34. Michele Bogart, Public Sculpture and the Civic Ideal in New York City, 1890–1930 (1989; Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 6–7. 35. George Kriehn, ‘‘The City Beautiful,’’ Municipal Affairs 3 (December 1899), 600. 36. Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City, citing Robinson, 51, 44. 37. Harvey Shepard, ‘‘Municipal Housekeeping in Europe and America,’’ American City 6 (May 1912): 713. 38. Randall Mason, ‘‘Historic Preservation, Public Memory, and the Making of Modern New York City,’’ in Max Page and Randall Mason, eds., Giving Preservation a History: Histories of Historic Preservation in the United States (New York: Routledge, 2004), 132–33, 143, 157, 140. 39. Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘White City, Capital City,’’ Chicago History 18 (Winter 1989–90): 26–45; Kenneth Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 57–59. 40. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 170; Daniel Burnham and Edward H. Bennett, Plan of Chicago (Chicago: Commercial Club, 1908), cited in John D. Fairfield, The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877–1937 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), 123–24.

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41. Fairfield, Mysteries of the Great City, 122. 42. Carl Smith, The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15, 102. Notably, Burnham, like Riis, pointed to school buildings and their playgrounds as key agents for inculcating civic values, expressing his hope that ‘‘each child will become attached by those ties of remembrance that are restraining influences throughout life’’ (102). 43. William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 282; P. Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order, 275. 44. Davis, Spearheads of Reform, 70. 45. Foglesong, Planning the Capitalist City, 168–79. 46. Jon A. Peterson, ‘‘The Birth of Organized City Planning in the United States, 1909–1910,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (Spring 2009): 131. 47. Peterson, Birth of City Planning, 246–55. See also Wilson, City Beautiful Movement, 286–87. 48. Fogelson (Planning the Capitalist City, 234) points especially to the conflict between private ownership of land and the conflicting social needs of capital and residents, with the result that planning did not become democraticized as Marsh and other more fundamental critics of the industrial order would have hoped. 49. Cited in Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 72. For a full account of the concept, see Suellen M. Hoy, ‘‘ ‘Municipal Housekeeping’: The Role of Women in Improving Urban Sanitation Practices, 1880–1917,’’ in Martin V. Melosi, ed., Pollution and Reform in American Cities, 1870–1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 173–98. 50. For a description of the shift in historiography in this direction, see Maureen A. Flanagan, ‘‘The City Profitable, the City Livable: Environmental Policy, Gender, and Power in Chicago in the 1910s,’’ Journal of Urban History 22 (January 1996): 163–90. 51. Nancy Schrom Dye, ‘‘Introduction,’’ in Noralee Frankel and Nancy Schrom Dye, eds., Gender, Class, Race, and Reform in the Progressive Era (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991), 4. In the same volume, Nancy A. Hewitt, ‘‘Politicizing Domesticity: Anglo, Black, and Latin Women in Tampa’s Progressive Movements,’’ cites Jane Addams’s 1910 pronouncement to similar effect: ‘‘As society grows more complicated it is necessary that woman shall extend her sense of responsibility to many things outside her own home if she would continue to preserve the home in its entirety. . . . [I]f woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside her immediate household’’ (24). 52. Ardis Cameron, ‘‘Landscapes of Subterfuge: Working-Class Neighborhoods and Immigrant Women,’’ in Frankel and Dye, Gender, Class, Race, and Reform, 62–63. 53. Cited in Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 86.

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Notes to Pages 20–27

54. Ibid., 95–96, 98. Flanagan summarizes the gendered differences between men’s and women’s approaches to reform after 1909 in ‘‘The City Profitable, the City Livable,’’ ‘‘The city profitable was dedicated to mastering and controlling the environment for specific uses through centralized planning. The city livable emphasized cleanliness, health, safety, and protecting and preserving the environment for common use and common good’’ (183). Alison Eisenberg makes a complementary point: ‘‘The 1910s, then, framed a cooperative tension between women as ‘natural’ leaders and men as economic leaders. The female housekeepers, as urban designers, believed their unique talents allowed them to see and modify the moral properties inherent in the physical landscape. . . . Their work was designed not only to upgrade the appearance of Main Street and make it safer and more prosperous, but also to set higher standards of citizen participation.’’ Eisenberg, Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 22. 55. Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, 38–65. 56. Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (New York: Scribner’s, 1906), 312–13, reprinted in Jack Tager and Park Dixon Goist, eds., The Urban Vision: Selected Interpretations of the Modern American City (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1970), 22. Chapter 2. The Garden City in America 1. Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier (New York: Basic Books, 1977), 24. 2. Ibid., 37. 3. Standish Meacham, Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 51–52. 4. Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 14–15. 5. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 33. 6. Kermit C. Parsons and David Schuyler, eds., From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4. 7. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 34. 8. Ebenezer Howard, To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: S. Sonnenschein, 1898. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, ed. and pref. F. J. Osborne (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), 48. This was the original edition; it was slightly revised and reprinted in 1902 and brought out again in 1946 with a preface from Mumford (London: Faber and Faber, 1946), 48; this is the volume that circulates currently. 9. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 47. 10. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century, updated ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996), 93. Because later editions of Howard’s book truncated the diagram, as Hall and Colin Ward report, many readers missed Howard’s faith in the Social City, not

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the isolated Garden City, for realizing his ideal. Peter Hall and Colin Ward, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (New York: Wiley, 2000). 11. Standish Meacham puts it succinctly, ‘‘Though class antagonisms were to be banished from the suburb, class distinctions would remain.’’ Regaining Paradise, 159. 12. Tristram Hunt, Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City (New York: Henry Holt, 2005), 437–38; Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs (London: T. Fisher, 1909), reprinted in The Legacy of Raymond Unwin: A Human Pattern for Planning, ed. Walter L. Creese (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), 74. 13. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 70–71; Margaret Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (London: Verso, 1995), 74; Mervyn Miller, ‘‘The Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood,’’ in Parsons and Schuyler, From Garden City to Green City, 105–8. Meacham (Regaining Paradise, 105), reports that only three such quadrangles were realized at Letchworth, in subdivisions on the eastern end of the city. 14. Susan L. Klaus, A Modern Arcadia: Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. and the Plan for Forest Hills Gardens (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 36. 15. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 75. 16. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin, The Art of Building a Home (London: Longmans Green, 1901), 92–93, 105. 17. M. Miller, ‘‘Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood,’’ 115. 18. Buder, Visionaries and Planners, 158–60; Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, 75; Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 90. 19. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 193. 20. Sheldon Stromquist, Reinventing ‘‘The People’’: The Progressive Movement, the Class Problem, and the Origins of Modern Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 89; Rogers, Atlantic Crossings, 163. 21. M. Miller, ‘‘Origins of the Garden City Residential Neighborhood,’’ 31. 22. Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, 108–9. 23. Grosvenor Atterbury, ‘‘Model Towns in America,’’ Scribner’s Magazine 52 (July 1912), www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/atterbur.htm. 24. Klaus, Modern Arcadia, 155; Kristin M. Szylvian, ‘‘Industrial Housing Reform and the Emergency Fleet Corporation,’’ Journal of Urban History 25 (July 1999): 651. 25. Szylvian, ‘‘Industrial Housing Reform,’’ 651 quoting Crawford, Building the Workingman’s Paradise, 101; John S. Garner, ‘‘The Garden City and Planned Industrial Suburbs: Housing and Planning on the Eve of World War I,’’ in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 43–59. 26. Lawrence J. Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 113–14.

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Notes to Pages 31–33

27. Michael H. Lang, Designing Utopia: John Ruskin’s Urban Vision for Britain and America (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1999), 136. 28. Ibid., 146. Years later, the neighborhood, now known as Fairview and part of a city known as one of the most dangerous and poorest in the country, drew the praise of the village historic society coordinator, who described it as ‘‘the kind of neighborhood that was built to foster interaction with your neighbor, yet still give you a private space that you can make your own.’’ Kevein Friel, quoted in Philadelphia Inquirer, Camden County Neighbors section, May 27, 2007. 29. Szylvian, ‘‘Industrial Housing Reform,’’ 668, 671–72; Michael H. Lang, ‘‘The Design of Yorkship Garden Village,’’ in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century American City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 142; Sylvester Baxter, ‘‘The Government’s War Housing,’’ Architectural Record 45, 2 (1919): 137, quoted in Vale, From the Puritans to the Projects, 134. For information on other war housing embracing Garden City designs, see Jonathan Barnett, The Elusive City: Five Centuries of Design, Ambition, and Miscalculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 78–79. 30. Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 19. For the larger context of the visit, see Kermit C. Parsons, ‘‘British and American Community Design: Clarence Stein’s Manhattan Transfer,’’ in Parsons and Schuyler, From Garden City to Green City, 131. 31. Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning (New York: Guilford Press, 1995), 17–18, 75; Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 14–16, 113. For Geddes’s connection to Howard’s Garden City concept and related principles, see Volker W. Welter, Biopolis: Patrick Geddes and the City of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), esp. chap. 3, ‘‘The City and Geography,’’ 54–80. For Geddes’s influence on Mumford, especially with regard to civic revitalization, see Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 197–201. 32. Donald L. Miller, Lewis Mumford: A Life (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), 190. Mumford stressed his own enthusiasm for Howard’s ideas in the introduction to the 1946 reissue of Garden Cities of To-Morrow: ‘‘This is not merely a book for technicians: above all it is a book for citizens, for the people whose actively expressed needs, desires, and interests should guide the planner and administrator at every turn. Letchworth and Welwyn themselves have still something to teach the American planner, but Garden Cities of To-morrow, the repository of the ideas that begot Letchworth and Welwyn, has still far more to teach. Howard’s ideas have laid the foundation for a new cycle in urban civilization: one in which the means of life will be subservient to the purposes of living, and in which the pattern needed for biological survival and economic efficiency will likewise lead to social and personal fulfilment’’ (40). 33. Clarence S. Stein, The Writings of Clarence S. Stein: Architect of the Planned Community, ed. Kermit Carlyle Parsons (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 105.

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34. Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 24. Describing the mix of row houses and apartments around the open green as ‘‘a daring and successful experiment,’’ Carl Sussman reports that these spaces were maintained for communal use by deed restrictions. Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), 24. 35. Quoted in Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 27. 36. Lewis Mumford, ‘‘Regions to Live In,’’ Survey Graphic 7 (May 1925), reprinted in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 90, 92. 37. Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 37. 38. Ibid., 44, 34. 39. Letter from Lewis Mumford to Roy Lubove, September 22, 1962, Roy Lubove Papers, University of Pittsburgh. 40. City Housing Corporation, ‘‘Radburn: Garden Homes’’ (1930), copy in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, library, 4, 21. In addition to Stein and Wright, the flyer listed as technical staff Frederick Ackerman, British Garden City enthusiast Thomas Adams, Robert Kohn, and Raymond Unwin. Progressive social scientist Richard T. Ely served on the board of directors of the City Housing Corporation, and the company listed Mary Simkhovitch, Lillian Wald, Edith Elmer Wood, and Eleanor Roosevelt among the members of its advisory board. 41. D. Miller, Lewis Mumford, 206; Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 127. 42. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow, 127. 43. Tugwell quoted in Cathy D. Knepper, Greenbelt, Maryland: A Living Legacy of the New Deal (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 19. Planning historian Mel Scott describes Tugwell as contending ‘‘that competitive industry operating under the profit motive was inherently unstable and would have to be transformed into a completely planned economy to save America’s mechanized civilization from utter disaster.’’ American City Planning Since 1890, 199. 44. Buder, Visionaries and Planners, 176. Carol Christensen reports that Tugwell ‘‘fervently believed’’ in the Garden City concept ‘‘and was apparently more deeply influenced by Howard than by any other idea in his conception of the new towns he proposed to build.’’ Christensen, The American Garden City and the New Towns Movement (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1986), 78. 45. Christensen, American Garden City, 88–89. 46. Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 127–28, 130. 47. Knepper, Greenbelt, 39, 18. 48. Stein quoted in Christensen, The American Garden City, 91. In Toward New Towns for America (119), Stein described the Greenbelt program as the amalgamation of conceptions formed in the Garden City, the Radburn Idea, and the Neighborhood Unit. Although he was enlisted early as a consultant to the program, he was disappointed not to land the commission to design one of the towns himself. The Writings of Clarence S. Stein, 178. 49. Knepper, Greenbelt, 39, 241. She provides more detail in her second chapter, ‘‘Creating a Cooperative Community,’’ 40–58. Knepper’s upbeat conclusion reflects the first and most comprehensive assessment of the new towns program, Jo-

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Notes to Pages 39–43

seph Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Town Program, 1935–1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), especially 244. 50. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938), 218, 222, 471, 484. 51. Helen A. Harrison, ed., Dawn of a New Day: The New York World’s Fair, 1939–40 (New York: Queens Museum, 1980), 4. 52. New York Times Magazine, March 5, 1939. 53. Harrison, Dawn of a New Day, 14. 54. Describing Democracity as ‘‘curiously static, sterile, and unreal,’’ Francis V. O’Connor charged, for instance, that it represented ‘‘a planner’s version of regional suburban sprawl’’ that ‘‘seemed to deny the existence of the poor, the incompetent and the racially and ethnically dispossessed.’’ ‘‘The Usable Future: The Role of Fantasy in the Promotion of a Consumer Society for Art,’’ in Harrison, Dawn of a New Day, 62. 55. Jeffrey L. Meikle, Twentieth-Century Limited: Industrial Design in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 202–3. Journalist Walter Lippmann captured the spirit of the display when he wrote, ‘‘General Motors has spent a small fortune to convince the American public that if it wishes to enjoy the full benefit of private enterprise in motor manufacturing it will have to rebuild its cities and its highways by public enterprise.’’ Cited in Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 134–35. Rydell describes the 1939 fair as one in a series of expositions representing ‘‘a powerful defense of corporate capitalism as a modernizing agency that would lead America out of the depression towards a bountiful future’’ (115). 56. Referring to the dashed hopes of community planners, Mumford complained, ‘‘Today wreckage is strewed about the Fair, so thoroughly smashed and disfigured that their own fathers could scarcely identify the corpses. Democracity, in the Perishphere is one of those wrecks; the Town of Tomorrow is another. As for the film The City, . . . it is a belated attempt at salvage.’’ ‘‘The Sky Line in Flushing: Genuine Bootleg,’’ New Yorker, July 29, 1939, 38, cited in Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 144. 57. Meacham, Regaining Paradise, 92. 58. William Fulton, ‘‘The Garden Suburb to the New Urbanism,’’ in Parsons and Schuyler, Garden City to Green City, 163; Paul Adamson, ‘‘Looking Back on Our Future: Conflicting Visions and Realities of the Modern City,’’ in Thomas Deckker, ed., The Modern City Revisited (London: Spon Press, 2000), 232. 59. Hunt, Building Jerusalem, 447. See also John Brewer’s review of the book, ‘‘City Lights,’’ New York Review of Books, May 11, 2006, 18–21. 60. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1961), 518, 522; Mumford, The Urban Prospect (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 131. See also Robert Fishman’s conclusion that regional efforts to promote decentralization inadvertently advanced suburban sprawl, ‘‘The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning,’’ in Fishman, ed., American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), 82.

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61. Emily Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005), 200–202.

Chapter 3. The City: Film as Artifact 1. Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 167. 2. National Resources Committee, Research Committee on Urbanism, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1937), cited in Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 96–98. 3. Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (1938; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1970), preface, ix. 4. Richard Griffith, ‘‘The Film Faces Facts,’’ Survey Graphic 27 (December 1938): 595. 5. Joseph L. Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs: A History of the Greenbelt Town Program, 1935–1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1971), 47. Mumford later claimed that ‘‘had it not been for the ideas that the Regional Planning Association of America, under Stein’s presidency, had put into circulation during the twenties, the Greenbelt Towns undertaken by the Resettlement Administration in 1934 would have been inconceivable.’’ Introduction to Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971), 14. 6. See Tracy B. Augur, ‘‘Radburn: The Challenge of a New Town,’’ Michigan Municipal Review 4 (February 1931): 19–22, 30. 7. Ralph Steiner, interview with James Blue, Center for Media Study, State University of New York, Buffalo, July 12, 1973. 8. Tugwell hired Lorentz to make films for the Resettlement Administration in June 1935, just at the time the decision to implement the Greenbelt Town program was being finalized. See Robert L. Snyder, Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 24–25; Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs, 36–44. Tugwell’s college textbook, American Economic Life, coauthored with Roy Stryker and Thomas Munro, contained a picture of Sunnyside Gardens in the first illustrated edition, in 1925. The next edition, five years later, added illustrations of the Radburn town plan and town planning diagrams from the 1925 Regional Plan issue of Survey Graphic, edited by Stein and Mumford. Neither text discussed the illustrations, however, and it is most likely that their inclusion can be credited to Stryker. See F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1972), 12. 9. Robert Snyder suggests that Lorentz saw his role primarily in alerting the public to the problems he addressed in his films, rather than spelling out a government solution: ‘‘His task was to make the country see the need to spend money for these solutions. He believed he could make the audience see this need by showing the problem as powerfully as possible. Interestingly enough, the same approach to

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Notes to Pages 49–52

balance the treatment of problem and solution can be seen in the scenario Lorentz wrote for The City.’’ Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film, 191. 10. Willard Van Dyke, interview with author, New York City, July 8, 1975. In an interview with Harrison Engle, Van Dyke made a similar comment in explaining why he shifted his professional interest away from photography: ‘‘I left photography because it could not provide the things I knew films could provide. I was excited and interested in film as a pure medium of expression, but I was more interested in using it for a social end.’’ Cited in Richard Meran Barsam, Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1976), 275. 11. Willard Van Dyke, interview with James Blue, Center for Media Study, State University of New York, Buffalo, August 2, 1973. Grierson had written in 1939 that the basic force behind the documentary movement was social, not aesthetic. ‘‘We were, I confess, sociologists, a little worried about the way the world was going. . . . We were interested in all instruments which would crystallize sentiments in a muddled world and create a will towards civic participation.’’ John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber, 1966), 18, quoted in Barsam, Nonfiction Film Theory, 38–39. 12. G. Roy Levin, Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-Makers (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971), 189. 13. Undated letter, Ralph Steiner to the author, July 1975. 14. Ibid. 15. Henwar Rodakiewicz, ‘‘Treatment of Sound in ‘The City,’ ’’ in Lewis Jacobs, ed., The Movies as Medium (New York: Farrar Straus, 1970), 285, 282. 16. Ibid., 281. 17. Transcribed from film. 18. William Alexander, Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to 1942 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981), 251. 19. Steiner interview with Blue, July 12, 1973. 20. Letter, Ralph Steiner to the author, July 1975, as amended September 1976. 21. ‘‘The first documentary films in America achieved camera beauty and maybe some social significance, but not often and not well did they come close to human beings,’’ Richard Griffith wrote. ‘‘What made this film is not a knowledge of lenses but an instinct for the experiences shared in common by everyone who lives in America. These experiences, big and little, really get on the screen for the first time in ‘The City,’ and they pack a wallop, as is shown by audience reaction. Whether or not the people who see this picture are convinced, or half-convinced about city planning, they understand the point because it is put over in terms of traffic jams and hurried meals instead of statistics.’’ Griffith, ‘‘Films of the World’s Fair of 1939,’’ paper for American Film Center, March 1940, 27. Sight and Sound (June 6, 1939) made a similar point that The City ‘‘has rendered urban life so sharply that it stands as one of the landmarks of the movie turned to public use.’’ Writing for the June 3, 1939, issue of the Nation, Franz Hoellering said, ‘‘Both as picture and social document ‘The City’ is in parts superb. The shots of the steel town with many an epigrammatic detail, the sequence of the skyscrapers with the thousand voices dictating letters, the satirical portrayal of the congested highways go far beyond de-

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scriptive newsreel shots. They tell an exciting story in which are moments of great movie art.’’ 22. Letter from Lewis Mumford to the author, July 6, 1977. 23. From a copy of the original Lorentz outline in the possession of Professor William Alexander, Department of English, University of Michigan. 24. Roy Lubove, ‘‘New Cities for Old: The Urban Reconstruction Program of the 1930s,’’ Social Studies 53 (November 1962), 205. Perry presented the first full formulation of his idea under the title ‘‘The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community,’’ in Neighborhood and Community Planning, Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs (New York: Regional Plan, 1929), 7: 22–140. 25. Lewis Mumford, ‘‘The Neighborhood and the Neighborhood Unit,’’ Town Planning Review 24 (January 1954): 264. 26. Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 119. 27. Mumford’s commentary reflected his feeling extending back to the early twenties that suburbs represented a ‘‘failure to create a common life in our modern cities,’’ becoming ‘‘a common refuge from life.’’ ‘‘The Wilderness of Suburbia,’’ New Republic 28 (September 7, 1927): 44–45. 28. Lorentz listed the cart, locomotive, automobile, and airplane as ‘‘symbols of continuity’’ in the first page of his outline. Mumford had used similar references in explaining what he called the ‘‘fourth migration,’’ out of the cities, with the covered wagon representing the first migration to the west, the train for the centralization of industrial cities, and the automobile as the symbol of the modern metropolis. Although he alluded to the possible impact of the airplane, it was too early to anticipate its commercial impact when he wrote in 1925. See Mumford, ‘‘The Fourth Migration,’’ Survey Graphic 7 (May 1925), reprinted in Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), 57–58. 29. See especially the May 1925 special regional planning issue of Survey Graphic, edited by Stein and Mumford, much of it reprinted in Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, and Benton MacKaye, New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928). Appropriately enough, the opening sequence of The City was shot in MacKaye’s home town of Shirley Center, Massachusetts, to which he had dedicated his book. 30. Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 294–95. 31. Paul Rotha, Documentary Film: The Use of the Film Medium to Interpret Creatively and in Social Terms the Life of the People as It Exists in Reality, 3rd ed. (New York: Hastings House, 1952), 361. 32. Mumford specifically cited the Greenbelt towns as ‘‘a universal indication of biotechnic city design,’’ in The Culture of Cities, 452. 33. Original Lorentz outline. 34. Mumford, The Culture of Cities, 3. 35. Park Dixon Goist argues that while both Wirth and his colleagues at the University of Chicago and members of the RPAA viewed city life as an organism, the architectural planners shared none of the deterministic tendencies of the socio-

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Notes to Pages 57–61

logical ecologists. ‘‘The City as Organism: Two Recent Theories of the City,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, 1967, iv. 36. Lewis Wirth, ‘‘The Urban Mode of Life,’’ in New Frontiers in Planning: Proceedings of the National Planning Conference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Conference, 1937), 25. 37. Lewis Wirth, ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life,’’ American Journal of Sociology 44 (July 1938): 2. 38. Griffith, ‘‘Films of the World’s Fair of 1939,’’ 27. 39. Wirth, ‘‘Urbanism as a Way of Life,’’ 15. 40. Ibid., 13.

Chapter 4. The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning 1. Roger S. Ahlbrandt, Jr., and James V. Cunningham, ‘‘The Ungreening of Neighborhood Planning,’’ South Atlantic Urban Studies 4 (1979): 9–15. Since the original appearance of this article in 1983, other essays have extended Ahlbrandt and Cunningham’s criticism of Perry’s approach to neighborhood planning. Associating Perry’s work more closely with middle-class improvement associations as they emerged in the 1920s, planning historian Christopher Silver charges that Perry’s later emphasis on the value of ‘‘self-contained’’ communities was Perry’s code word for social homogeneity: ‘‘The neighborhood unit plan sought to insulate affluent city residents from the disruptive influence of forced interaction with supposedly incompatible social groups.’’ Silver, ‘‘Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective,’’ American Planning Association Journal 51 (Spring 1985): 166. The argument is restated in Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, ‘‘Planning the New Metropolis,’’ in Sies and Silver, eds., Planning the Twentieth-Century City (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 463–64. Raphael Fischler places Perry within the emerging planning ethos that promoted zoning with the intent of protecting detached family homes as ‘‘the best means of raising future citizens.’’ Although he would appear to place Perry among those planners who stressed order and efficiency over social uplift, his own summary of Perry’s neighborhood unit plan places him closer in intent to early proponents of zoning for social betterment, such as Benjamin Marsh. Fischler, ‘‘Health, Safety, and the General Welfare: Markets, Politics, and Social Science in Early Land-Use Regulation and Community Design,’’ Journal of Urban History 24 (September 1998): 690, 706. The other major revision in the assessment of Perry’s contribution has come from Donald Leslie Johnson in 2002. He claims that Perry’s role in conceiving neighborhood planning was secondary to that of architect William E. Drummond, whose visualization of the concept appeared first as part of a design competition in Chicago in 1912. By overlooking Perry’s own work in the community center movement and its influence, Johnson’s argument seems incomplete. Johnson, ‘‘Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit,’’ Planning Perspectives 17 (July 2002): 227–45. 2. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press 1969), 9. For further background on Forest Hills Gardens and Perry’s involvement there, see John M. Glenn, Lilian Brandt, and F. Emerson Andrews,

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Russell Sage Foundation 1907–1946 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947) 1, 49– 51, 322. 3. See Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962), 22–28. 4. Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1939), 210. 5. Jean B. Quandt, From the Small Town to the Great Community: The Social Thought of Progressive Intellectuals (New Brunswick, N.J.,: Rutgers University Press 1970), 50. For a historical account of the community center movement, see Jesse F. Steiner, Community Organization: A Study of Its Theory and Current Practice (New York: Century, 1925), 136–45. 6. Perry, Housing for the Machine Age, 205. Lewis Mumford noted Perry’s debt to settlement work, suggesting, ‘‘What the new Settlement houses had seemed about to achieve in the first generation of their existence, he and his fellow-workers hoped to introduce in every community.’’ The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), 501. 7. Civic League of St. Louis, A City Plan for St. Louis (St. Louis: Civic League, 1907), 37–53. 8. Charles Mulford Robinson, ‘‘Ambitions of Three Cities,’’ Architectural Record 21 (May 1907): 337–46. 9. See the report of the committee on the city plan study, chaired by John Nolen and presented to the 1913 National Conference on City Planning, in Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning (Boston: National Conference on City Planning, 1913), 163–87. See also Arthur Coleman Comey, ‘‘Neighborhood Centers,’’ in John Nolen, ed., City Planning (London: Appleton, 1916), 117–38. 10. Perry’s association with Henry Wright through the RPAA is mentioned by Lewis Mumford in the introduction to Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), 15. I am indebted to Professor Jon Peterson of Queens College for pointing out Wright’s involvement in the 1907 St. Louis plan. 11. The Playground Association of America, founded with the assistance of the Russell Sage Foundation in 1906, quickly broadened its purpose from training recreation leaders to organizing the use of leisure time as a force for constructive citizenship, according to one of the association’s organizers, Henry Curtis. Lawrence A. Finfer, ‘‘Leisure as Social Work in the Urban Community: The Progressive Recreation Movement, 1890–1920,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Michigan State University, 1974, 159. See also Curtis, ‘‘The Neighborhood Center,’’ American City 7 (July 1912): 14–16; John Collier, ‘‘City Planning and the Problem of Recreation,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 51 (January 1914): 209–13. 12. Civic League, A City Plan for St. Louis, 37. 13. See Robert A. Woods, ‘‘The Neighborhood in Nation Building,’’ American Journal of Sociology 19 (March 1914): 577–91, reprinted as chapter 13 of his autobiography, The Neighborhood in Nation-Building (1923; New York: Arno, 1973). Follett wrote, ‘‘Neither our cities nor our states can ever be properly administered until representatives from neighborhood groups meet to discuss and thereby to correlate the needs of all parts of the state.’’ Mary Parker Follett, The New State: Group Orga-

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Notes to Pages 63–66

nization the Solution of Popular Government (New York: Longmans Green, 1918), 245. 14. Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization: A Study of the Larger Mind (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 26. 15. Follett, The New State, 196. 16. Perry, Housing for the Machine Age, 215. 17. Clarence Arthur Perry, Wider Use of the School Plant (New York, Charities Publication Committee, 1910), 366, 372. 18. Ahlbrandt and Cunningham, ‘‘The Ungreening of Neighborhood Planning,’’ 15. 19. Lewis Mumford, ‘‘The Neighborhood and the Neighborhood Unit,’’ Town Planning Review 24 (January 1954): 260, 262. 20. Clarence Arthur Perry, ‘‘Planning a City Neighborhood from the Social Point of View,’’ Proceedings of the National Conference of Social Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the Conference, 1924), 421. 21. Clarence Arthur Perry, ‘‘The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community,’’ in Perry et al., Neighborhood and Community Planning, Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs (New York: Regional Plan, 1929), 7: 25, 129. 22. The committee on city planning and zoning, for instance, opened a section on neighborhood unit planning by stating that ‘‘loyalty to a community of comprehensible size, something between the family and the great metropolitan city, may be fostered as an appropriate introduction to training in citizenship.’’ President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, Report of the Committee on City Planning and Zoning (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1931), 1: 7. The principal recommendation of the committee on housing and delinquency was ‘‘that any large-scale plan for the development of housing should be related to a plan for the construction of neighborhood units in which the problems of social life, including delinquency problems, can be more readily brought under control of the local group.’’ President’s Conference, 8: 48. 23. President’s Conference, 7: 104. 24. Architectural Record 71 (January 1932), 41. 25. ‘‘A Housing Policy for the Government,’’ Octagon 5 (June 1933), 6. 26. Lewis Mumford, ‘‘The Planned Community,’’ Architectural Forum 58 (April 1933): 253–54; Catherine Bauer, Modern Housing (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), xv, 154–56. 27. Whitnall arrived at this approach to neighborhoods in the 1920s, according to Mark S. Foster, ‘‘The Decentralization of Los Angeles During the 1920s,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1971, 149–50. Whitnall reiterated his approach at a 1941 conference on principles of city replanning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, declaring that ‘‘big cities do not need to lose the pleasant amenities of daily living enjoyed by smaller communities if they will design their component parts into smaller neighborhoods, each provided with all the essential requisites to make it a complete city plan, well balanced and functionally sound.’’ Urban Land Institute Bulletin 1 (November 1941): 3. 28. Clarence A. Dykstra for U.S. National Resources Committee, Committee

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on Urbanism, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1937), 85. 29. Mary K. Simkhovitch, Group Life (New York: Association Press, 1940), 8. Simkhovitch maintained ties with RPAA as a member of the advisory board to the City Housing Corporation, which sponsored the Sunnyside and Radburn developments. Judith Ann Trolander, Settlement Houses and the Great Depression (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 120. 30. J. Joseph Huthmacher, Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism (New York: Atheneum, 1968), 206. 31. See John F. Bauman, ‘‘Public Housing in the Depression: Slum Reform in Philadelphia Neighborhoods in the 1930s,’’ in William W. Cutler, III, and Howard Gillette, Jr., eds., The Divided Metropolis: Social and Spatial Dimensions of Philadelphia, 1800–1975 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 230–33. 32. Both James Dahir, reviewing the impact of neighborhood planning for the Russell Sage Foundation, and Reginald Isaacs, criticizing the concept, agreed on its popularity in the planning profession. James Dahir, The Neighborhood Unit Plan: Its Spread and Acceptance (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947); Reginald R. Isaacs, ‘‘Are Urban Neighborhoods Possible?’’ Journal of Housing 5 (July 1948): 177. 33. Jesse Steiner, ‘‘Whither the Community Movement?’’ Survey, April 15, 1929, 130–31. In his 1925 text on community organization Steiner had praised settlement work for directing attention to the value of the neighborhood as a social unit. But even then Steiner recognized the growing power of specialized association, noting that ‘‘this tendency toward the breaking up of the traditional neighborhood unit is one of the most serious obstacles with which the school community center movement has to contend.’’ Community Organization, 117, 146. 34. Niles Carpenter, ‘‘Neighborhood,’’ in Edwin R. A. Seligman and Alvin Johnson, eds., Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (New York, Macmillan, 1933), 11: 356–57. In a 1913 textbook Carpenter challenged Cooley’s emphasis on the primacy of the urban neighborhood, calling it ‘‘an anemic social organism,’’ which ‘‘in many areas has all but disappeared.’’ Carpenter, The Sociology of City Life (New York: Longmans, Green, 1931), 240–41. 35. Reginald R. Isaacs, ‘‘The Neighborhood Theory: Analysis of Its Adequacy,’’ Journal of the Institute of Planners 14 (Spring 1948): 17–18. 36. For continued support of the neighborhood unit approach, see the series of comments on Isaacs’ article in the Journal of the Institute of Planners 15 (Summer 1948): 38–43. For additional criticism, see the report of a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin in September 1948 entitled, ‘‘Frontiers of Housing Research,’’ as reprinted in Land Economics 25 (February 1949): 67–88. Suzanne Keller, The Urban Neighborhood: A Sociological Perspective (New York: Random House, 1969) carries over the criticism of neighborhood planning, as does Quandt, in From Small Town to Great Community. 37. Mark Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 109. 38. Clarence Arthur Perry, The Rebuilding of Blighted Areas: A Study of the Neighborhood Unit in Replanning and Plot Assemblage (New York: Regional Plan Association, 1933), 47, 12.

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Notes to Pages 70–73

39. Perry, ‘‘Planning a City Neighborhood,’’ 420. 40. Perry, The Neighborhood Unit, 110. 41. Prospective purchasers, Perry reported, were ‘‘required to give references and their former status was looked into with a view to discovering whether they would make congenial members of the colony. Thus through all these processes came about that residents, as a class, were marked by rather more than the usual homogeneity as respects those characteristics which affect living co-operatively together and realizing through concerted efforts common ends. The special features of the development bound them together and furnished a motive for uniting in efforts to perfect and preserve them’’ (The Neighborhood Unit, 94). 42. Ibid., 128. 43. ‘‘A Method for Private Enterprise to Rebuild Cities,’’ Architectural Record 81 (January 1937): 11–17. 44. Henry Wright, ‘‘Rehabilitation of Blighted Areas,’’ in Mabel L. Walker and Wright, Urban Blight and Slums: Economic and Legal Factors in Their Origin, Reclamation and Prevention (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 94. 45. Frederick Gutheim, Worthy of the Nation: The History of Planning for the National Capital (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1977), 232, 314–15. 46. Harland Bartholomew, ‘‘Technical Problems in Slum Clearance: The City Planner’s Viewpoint,’’ in National Conference on City Planning, Planning and National Recovery: Housing Problems Presented at the Twenty-Fifth National Conference on City Planning (Philadelphia: Wm. Fell for the Conference, 1933), 121–29; Norman J. Johnston, ‘‘Harland Bartholomew: His Comprehensive Plans and Science of Planning,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, 205–33. 47. Harland Bartholomew, ‘‘The Neighborhood—Key to Urban Redemption,’’ in Harlean James, ed., American Planning and Civic Annual: A Record of Recent Civic Advance (Washington, D.C.: American Planning and Civic Association, 1941), 246. For Bartholomew’s early comments on competing with suburbs, see his ‘‘Can Blighted Urban Areas by Rehabilitated?’’ National Real Estate Journal (September 1, 1931): 17–20. 48. Harland Bartholomew, in ‘‘Neighborhood Rehabilitation and the Taxpayer,’’ American City 53 (February 1938): 57. 49. Herbert U. Nelson, quoted in ‘‘For the Replanning of Cities by Neighborhood Areas,’’ American City 53 (February 1938): 56. 50. Scott, American City Planning, 364–65. 51. Ibid., 384; see also Garnett Laidlaw Eskew, Of Land and Men: The Birth and Growth of an Idea (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1959), 88–89. 52. New York Times, January 28, 1941, March 14, 1941. 53. Urban Land Institute Bulletin 2 (June 1943): 3; Eskew, Of Land and Men, 94. 54. See Urban Land Bulletin 8 (October 1949): 2. 55. See William R. Barnes, ‘‘A Battle for Washington: Ideology, Racism, and Self Interest in the Controversy over Public Housing, 1943–1946,’’ Records of the Columbia Historical Society 50 (1980): 45–83. 56. New York Times, February 20, 1941; Arthur Simon, Stuyvesant Town,

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U.S.A.: Pattern for Two Americas (New York: New York University Press, 1970), 21–22. 57. Fortune, April 1946, quoted in Simon, Stuyvesant Town, 15. Mel Scott emphasized the importance of Stuyvesant Town, writing that ‘‘the Metropolitan scheme brought to national attention most of the issues debated by state legislators and members of Congress as they considered redevelopment legislation in the period 1943–1949.’’ Scott, American City Planning, 421. 58. Joseph D. McGoldrick, ‘‘The Superblock Instead of Slums,’’ New York Times Magazine, November 19, 1944, 54–55. 59. Tracy Augur, ‘‘An Analysis of the Plan of Stuyvesant Town,’’ Journal of the Institute of Planners 10 (Autumn 1944): 9. 60. John Ihlder, ‘‘A Housing Policy—And Planning,’’ Planners’ Journal 2 (January/February 1936): 39–40. 61. Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, Neighborhood: My Story of Greenwich House (New York: Norton, 1938), 293. Eugenie Ladner Birch describes the change in housing policy during this period as a shift away from a particularly feminine perspective with the eclipse of leadership after 1937 of such prominent women as Bauer, Simkhovitch, and Edith Elmer Wood, in ‘‘Women-Made America: The Case of Early Public Housing Policy,’’ Journal of the American Institute of Planners 44 (April 1978): 130–42. Her point might be broadened to mark a shift away from the social issues with which settlement workers, many of them women, were most concerned in the first part of the century. For Simkhovitch’s own emphasis on women’s special contribution to housing reform, see her ‘‘All-Women Committee Gives New York Authority Feminine Housing Views,’’ Journal of Housing 4 (February 1947): 50. 62. Catherine Bauer, ‘‘Good Neighborhoods,’’ Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 242 (November 1945): 104–5. ‘‘The feudalistic planning and racial discrimination of Stuyvesant Town was only one example of what might happen,’’ she said of the Metropolitan project. ‘‘It is inconceivable that we should have to tolerate private enclaves’’ (112). 63. Simon, Stuyvesant Town, U.S.A., 32–40. 64. William R. Barnes, ‘‘The Origins of Urban Renewal: The Public Housing Controversy and the Emergence of a Redevelopment Program in the District of Columbia,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1977, 125–26, 139. 65. Reginald R. Isaacs, ‘‘The ‘Neighborhood Unit’ Is an Instrument for Segregation,’’ Journal of Housing 5 (August 1948): 215–18. 66. Mary K. Simkhovitch, ‘‘Neighborhood Planning and the Settlements,’’ Survey 79 (June 1943): 174–75. 67. H. Daniel Carpenter, The Neighborhood: Grass Roots of Democracy (New York: New York Society for Ethical Culture, 1949), 24. 68. See, for instance, Nelson’s signed editorials for the NAREB newsletter, Headlines, ‘‘Realtors Against Socialism,’’ November 29, 1948 and ‘‘Public Housing is the Foundation of a Socialist Economy,’’ April 11, 1949. Rodney M. Lockwood, president of the National Association of Homebuilders, was among those businessmen who claimed that rigid code enforcement, as publicized especially in Baltimore, was sufficient remedy to slum conditions. House Committee on Banking and Currency, 81st Cong., 1st sess., 1949, 321.

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Notes to Pages 76–78

69. The logic of the 1949 Housing Act was extended in the 1954 Housing Act, according to Harold Wolman, who writes that a Republican administration ‘‘moved urban renewal from a program whose primary purpose was to improve housing for poor people towards a program whose purpose is more to renew the central city tax base and to recall middle- and high-income whites from the suburbs to the city.’’ Wolman, The Politics of Federal Housing (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 40, quoted in Jeffrey R. Henig, Neighborhood Mobilization: Redevelopment and Response (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1982), 24. 70. My argument here that specific efforts to redirect Perry’s integrative approach paved the way to the brutally elitist and racially charged pattern of urban redevelopment has since been confirmed to a degree in Emily Talen’s assessment of the roots of the contemporary New Urbanist movement, when she describes the effect of a transformed ‘‘Perry-Bartholomew neighborhood idea’’ as the ‘‘worst kind of anti-urbanism produced in this century.’’ Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005), 270.

Chapter 5. The Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City 1. See Margaret Crawford, ‘‘The World in a Shopping Mall,’’ in Michael Sorkin, ed., Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 3–30; Lizabeth Cohen, ‘‘From Town Center to Shopping Center: The Reconfiguration of Community Marketplaces in Postwar America,’’ American Historical Review 101 (October 1996): 1050–81. See also Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), chap. 6, ‘‘Commerce: Reconfiguring Community Marketplaces,’’ 257–89. M. Jeffrey Hardwick, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), recounts Gruen’s ultimate disillusionment with suburban malls, even as he recounts his early optimism about their potential beneficial effects. David Schuyler details the ill effects of Gruen’s work specifically in Lancaster in A City Transformed: Redevelopment, Race, and Suburbanization in Lancaster, Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 2. Roy Lubove, The Progressives and the Slums: Tenement House Reform in New York City, 1890–1917 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962); Lubove, Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh: Government, Business, and Environmental Change (New York: Wiley, 1969). 3. J. Ross McKeever and Nathaniel M. Griffin, Shopping Center Development Handbook (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1977). 4. Homer Hoyt, ‘‘The Status of Shopping Centers in the United States,’’ Urban Land 19, 9 (1960): 3–6. 5. Geoffrey Baker and Bruno Funaro, Shopping Centers: Design and Operation (New York: Reinhold, 1950); J. C. Nichols, ‘‘Mistakes We Have Made in Developing Shopping Centers,’’ Urban Land Institute Technical Bulletin 4 (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1945); Nichols, ‘‘Planning and Management of Nichols Shopping Centers,’’ National Real Estate Journal 40, 2 (1939): 48–55.

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6. James Dahir, Communities for Better Living: Citizen Achievement in Organization, Design and Development (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950); H. Evert Kincaid, ‘‘A New Community Design for Better Living,’’ American Planning and Civic Annual (Washington, D.C.: American Planning and Civic Association, 1951). 7. Baker and Funaro, Shopping Centers. 8. Clarence S. Stein and Catherine Bauer, ‘‘Store Building and Neighborhood Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Record 75, 2 (1934): 175–87; Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1971); Daniel Schaffer, Garden Cities for America: The Radburn Experience (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982), 160–61. 9. Clarence Arthur Perry, ‘‘Planning a City Neighborhood from the Social Point of View,’’ in Proceedings of the National Conference on Social Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924), 421; Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning from the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act,’’ Journal of Urban History 9, 4 (1983): 421–44. 10. Peter O. Muller, Contemporary Suburban America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1981), 122. 11. Hoyt, ‘‘Status of Shopping Centers,’’ 5; ‘‘Shopping Centers 1964—Where Do We Go from Here?’’ Shopping Center Age 3, 1 (1964): 10–11. 12. S. O. Kaylin, ‘‘The Planned Shopping Center,’’ Chain Store Age (administrative edition) 28 (May 1954): 14. 13. Edward T. Thompson, ‘‘The Shopping Center Macy’s Built,’’ Fortune 61, 2 (1960): 195–200. 14. Bruno Funaro and Geoffrey Baker, ‘‘Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Record 106, 2 (1949): 129. 15. New York Times, January 16, 1957; ‘‘Boomtowns on the Byways,’’ Time, July 20, 1953, 73; ‘‘Planned Postwar Shopping Centers Come Big,’’ Business Week, October 11, 1952, 124–28. 16. Robert W. Dowling, ‘‘Neighborhood Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Forum 79, 4 (1943): 76–78. 17. Kenneth C. Welch, ‘‘Regional Shopping Centers: Some Projects in the Northeast,’’ Journal of the American Institute of Planners 14, 4 (1948): 7. 18. Gordon H. Steadman, ‘‘The Rise of Shopping Centers,’’ Journal of Retailing 31, 1 (1955): 14. 19. ‘‘Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Record 114, 4 (1953): 197; ‘‘Shopping Centers: Story of Three New Giants,’’ Department Store Economist 17, 2 (1954): 40–43. 20. New York Times, January 22, 1956. 21. Meredith L. Clausen, ‘‘Northgate Regional Shopping Center—Paradigm from the Provinces,’’ Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 43, 2 (1984): 144–61. 22. Muller, Contemporary Suburban America, 127–28. 23. Robert Jensen, ‘‘Shopping Malls in Suburbs,’’ Architectural Record 151, 3 (1972): 13–14. 24. Gurney Breckenfeld, ‘‘Downtown Has Fled to the Suburbs,’’ Fortune 86, 4 (1972): 80, 82.

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Notes to Pages 81–88

25. Gruney Breckenfeld, Columbia and the New Cities (New York: I. Washburn, 1971), 215; Muller, Contemporary Suburban America, 124. 26. New York World Telegram, January 31, 1941; Clausen, Northgate Regional Shopping Center,’’ 153; ‘‘Rye Shopping Center,’’ Architectural Forum 85, 2 (1946): 76–79. 27. Funaro and Baker, ‘‘Shopping Centers,’’ 130–31. 28. Victor Gruen, ‘‘What to Look for in Shopping Centers,’’ Chain Store Age (administrative edition) 22 (July 1948): 63–66. 29. ‘‘Northland: A New Yardstick for Shopping Center Planning,’’ Architectural Record 100, 6 (1954): 102–19. 30. Victor Gruen, Speech at Northland Shopping Center, March 15, 1954, Gruen Speeches, Library of Congress. 31. Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (New York: Reinhold, 1973), 22. 32. Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Towns USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 22–24. 33. Walter Guzzardi, Jr., ‘‘An Architect of Environment,’’ Fortune 65, 1 (1962). 34. Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns USA, 11, 23. 35. Gruen, Centers for Urban Environment, 11. 36. Victor Gruen, ‘‘Introverted Architecture,’’ Progressive Architecture 38, 5 (1957): 208. 37. Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, ‘‘Shopping Centers: The New Building Type,’’ Progressive Architecture 33, 6 (1952): 69. 38. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), 5–6. 39. Gruen, ‘‘Northland.’’ 40. Leonard K. Eaton, ‘‘A Historic Pattern: Pedestrian Planning in 17thCentury Holland,’’ Progressive Architecture 40, 7 (1959): 123. 41. ‘‘Towneast: The Integration of Shopping and Entertainment,’’ Architectural Record 147, 3 (1970): 123. 42. ‘‘Northpark Regional Shopping Center,’’ Architectural Record 139, 4 (1966): 51. 43. ‘‘A Breakthrough for Two-Level Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Forum 105, 6 (1956): 119. 44. Women’s Wear Daily, October 18, 1949. 45. Victor Gruen, Speech to Boston conference on distribution, October 18, 1955, Gruen speeches, Library of Congress. 46. ‘‘Downtown Needs to Learn from the Suburbs,’’ Business Week, October 22, 1955. 47. Victor Gruen, The Heart of Our Cities: The Urban Crisis: Diagnosis and Cure (New York: Reinhold, 1964), 214, 220. 48. Urban Land Institute, Conservation and Rehabilitation of Major Shopping Districts, Technical Bulletin 22 (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1954); ‘‘New Thinking on Shopping Centers,’’ Architectural Forum 98, 3 (1953): 122. 49. Women’s Wear Daily, November 18, 1955.

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50. Victor Gruen, ‘‘Dynamic Planning for Retail Areas,’’ Harvard Business Review 22 (November/December, 1954): 53–62. 51. Victor Gruen, ‘‘Highways and the Modern City,’’ speech to the Connecticut General Life Insurance symposium, Hartford, Conn., September 9, 1957, Gruen speeches, Library of Congress; Wilfred Owen, Cities in the Motor Age (New York: Viking Press, 1959), 46, 48. 52. Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics, 1941–1956 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 57, 61–62. 53. Jane Jacobs, ‘‘Downtown Is for People,’’ in William H. Whyte and the editors of Fortune, The Exploding Metropolis (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958). 54. Arthur D. McVoy, ‘‘Pedestrian-Way Business,’’ American City 72, 3 (1957): 136–38, 171–77. 55. Fred Forman, ‘‘A Downtown Shopping Center,’’ Traffic Quarterly 13, 4 (1959): 496–97. 56. ‘‘The Downtown Center: Rochester, New York, Opens ‘Midtown Plaza,’ ’’ Architectural Forum 116, 4 (1962): 112. 57. Gruen and Smith, Shopping Towns USA, 209. 58. New York Times, May 31, 1962. 59. Jeanne R. Lowe, Cities in a Race with Time: Progress and Poverty in America’s Renewing Cities (New York: Random House, 1967), 439. 60. Victor Gruen, ‘‘The Sad Story of Shopping Centers,’’ Town and Country Planning 46, 7/8 (1978): 350–52. 61. Gruen and Smith 1960, Shopping Towns USA, 258. 62. James Rouse, ‘‘Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?’’ Architectural Forum 116, 6 (1962): 105. 63. Breckenfeld, Columbia and the New Cities, 211. 64. Ibid., 222, 259. 65. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 498, 501. 66. James Rouse, ‘‘Will Downtown Face Up to Its Future?’’ Urban Land 16, 2 (1957): 5. 67. James Rouse, ‘‘The Regional Shopping Center: Its Role in the Community It Serves,’’ Ekistics 16, 3 (1963): 97–101. 68. ‘‘Pleasure-Domes with Parking,’’ Time, October 15, 1956, 80. 69. William Severinei Kowinski, The Malling of America: An Inside Look at the Great Consumer Paradise (New York: William Morrow, 1985), 310. 70. Harvey Oppmann, ‘‘Cleveland’s Old Arcade Casts a Magic Spell,’’ Historic Preservation 34, 2 (1982): 10–11; Floy Brown, ‘‘Dayton, Ohio: Rebirth of an Urban Market,’’ National Mall Monitor 9, 4 (1979): 60–61. 71. William Severinei Kowinski, ‘‘The Malling of America,’’ New Times 10, 9 (1978): 34–38; 1978; Gurney Breckenfeld, ‘‘Jim Rouse Shows How to Give Downtown Retailing New Life,’’ Fortune 97, 4 (1978): 85–91. 72. Penelope Lemov, ‘‘Celebrating the City,’’ Builder 7, 2 (1984): 90. 73. Ann Satterthwaite, ‘‘The Cultural Transformation of the Shopping Center: Bringing the Suburb Back to the City,’’ paper presented at Ninth Biennial Convention of the American Studies Association, Philadelphia, November 4, 1983.

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Notes to Pages 93–96

74. Washington Post, December 22, 1981. 75. Kowinski, Malling of America, 313–14. 76. Jack Meltzer, Metropolis to Metroplex: The Social and Spatial Planning of Cities (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 19. 77. ‘‘Broadway Plaza,’’ Architectural Record 155, 4 (1974): 138–52. 78. Kenneth Treister, ‘‘Historical Perspective Invaluable in Planning Rebirth of Lively Cities,’’ National Mall Monitor 11, 4 (1981): 65–66. 79. Jacobs, ‘‘Downtown Is for People,’’ 161. 80. William H. Whyte, ‘‘The Humble Street—Can It Survive?’’ Historic Preservation 32, 2 (1980): 34–41. 81. Stephen Kurtz and Fred Kent, ‘‘Pedestrian Power,’’ Design and Environment 3, 3 (1972): 20–29. 82. Patricia Leigh Brown, ‘‘Is South Street Seaport on the Right Track? Preservation News 33, 4 (1981): 10–19. Chapter 6. James Rouse and American City Planning 1. Two full-length biographies of Rouse have appeared since 1999: Joshua Olsen, Better Places, Better Lives: A Biography of James Rouse (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2003) and Nicholas Dagen Bloom, Merchant of Illusion: James Rouse, America’s Salesman of the Businessman’s Utopia (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004). Bloom’s book is the more critical, blaming Rouse’s ‘‘business utopianism’’ for the tilt in contemporary urban policy towards private over public interests. Both Olsen and Ann Satterthwaite, in Going Shopping: Consumer Choices and Community Consequences (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), esp. chap. 5, ‘‘Planning for Shopping: An Insurance Policy for Community WellBeing,’’ sympathize with Rouse’s environmental approach to commerce, including the suburban mall. But they too note the failed expectations Rouse encountered in his own work. 2. ‘‘Cities Are Fun,’’ Time, August 24, 1981. 3. Hunter Moss, personal communication, January 16, 1998. 4. Robert K. Landers, ‘‘The Conscience of James Rouse,’’ Historic Preservation 37 (December 1985): 61–62. 5. Morton’s study was commissioned by the Reid Memorial Guild House, on the 900 block of East Madison, an area undergoing racial succession from white to black when the church abandoned its mission there. The Sun stories publicized the kind of information first uncovered by Works Progress Administration surveys conducted in a number of cities in the 1930s, that 40 percent of Baltimore’s population was living in filth and blight, and that the city had the largest proportion of substandard housing of any of the nation’s large cities. William T. Durr, ‘‘The Conscience of a City: A History of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association and Efforts to Improve Housing for the Poor in Baltimore, Maryland, 1937–1954,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1972; Martin Millspaugh and Gurney Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal: A Study of the Attitude Changes Produced by Neighborhood Rehabilitation (New York: Ives Washburn, 1960).

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6. Huntington Williams, ‘‘City Health Department Aids Slum Clearance,’’ American City 58, 9 (1943). 7. Katherine Lyall, ‘‘A Bicycle Built-for-Two: Public-Private Partnership in Baltimore,’’ in R. Scott Fosler and Renee A. Berger, eds., Public-Private Partnership in American Cities (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1982), 20. 8. Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act,’’ Journal of Urban History 9 (August 1983): 436. 9. Frances. M. Froelicher, personal communication, October 19, 1993. 10. Millspaugh and Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal. 11. Miles L. Colean, Renewing Our Cities (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1953). 12. Durr, ‘‘Conscience of a City,’’ 399–400. 13. Ibid., 400. 14. Ibid., 472. In a 1993 interview, Frances Morton Froelicher claimed Rouse had narrowed the CPHA goals through his antagonism to public housing, which she identified as an essential ingredient of the program, along with redevelopment and code enforcement. Froelicher, personal communication, October 19, 1993. The vision Rouse presented to the mayor, however, went well beyond the technical aspects of enforcement to include such elements of intervention as Morton had stressed herself in the initial pilot project, education and recreation. (Frances Morton married Hans Froelicher after the death of his first wife.) 15. Frances Morton Froelicher, ‘‘The Urban Renewal Challenge to Community Leaders,’’ Vassar Summer Institute, Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA) papers, University of Baltimore Archives. 16. Fight Blight, Protect Your Home and Help Save Our City, brochure, 1954, CPHA papers, University of Baltimore Archives. 17. Millspaugh and Breckenfeld, The Human Side of Urban Renewal, 17. 18. Ibid., vii. This report, published originally by Fight Blight in 1958 with a grant secured by Rouse from the Fund for Adult Education, was published in hardcover for national distribution by Ives Washburn in 1960. Telephone interview with Martin Millspaugh, August 13, 1997. Hollyday made a similar claim, that ‘‘After the application of the Plan to a specific neighborhood for a reasonable period of time, the inhabitants of that neighborhood cease to regard themselves as slum dwellers.’’ Guy Hollyday, ‘‘Slum Rehabilitation Through the Baltimore Plan: A Challenge to Business Interests,’’ reprint of speech, Mortgage Bankers Association of America, Washington, D.C., January 16, 1953, CPHA Papers, University of Baltimore Archives. 19. Fight Blight, Protect Your Home. 20. Jack Siegel and C. William Brooks, Slum Prevention Through Conservation and Rehabilitation, Report to the President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1953), 112. 21. Durr, ‘‘Conscience of a City,’’ 481–82. 22. In her 1993 interview, Frances Morton Froelicher indicated that although she and Hans Froelicher favored the kind of reorganization Rouse argued for, they felt the necessary groundwork to plan a new agency and get public support for it had not yet taken place. Several years later the city formed just such an agency. In

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the meantime, the CPHA, by continuing to work with the mayor, got his support for extending the Health and Hygiene Act and for a reasonable replacement for Yates Cook, who had decided to leave Baltimore for a position in Washington, D.C. See also Cook’s obituary, Washington Post, December 10, 1996. 23. Nathaniel Keith, Politics and the Housing Crisis Since 1930 (New York: Universe Books, 1973). 24. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 500. 25. Richard M. Flanagan, ‘‘The Housing Act of 1954: The Sea Change in National Urban Policy,’’ Urban Affairs Review 33 (November 1997): 265–86. Rouse’s position naturally followed the division between labor and business over FHA mortgages, with the former believing that the FHA had been more interested in bailing out the industry than making it possible for working people to own their own homes. See also Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 188. 26. Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America, 1933–65 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). 27. Tony Schuman and Elliott Sclar, ‘‘The Enterprise of American City Building: The Exceptional Case of Columbia, Maryland,’’ paper delivered at the Fifth National Conference on American Planning History, November 18–21, 1993; Colean, Renewing Our Cities. Rouse indicated in 1985 that he had read Colean’s book and had carried away from it the phrase ‘‘urban renewal’’ ‘‘to describe the aim of a comprehensive program of redevelopment, rehabilitation and conservation.’’ Landers, ‘‘Conscience of James Rouse,’’ 62. This throws some doubt on William Durr’s claim that the term emerged somewhat earlier out of discussions between Rouse and Hans Froelicher. 28. President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, Recommendations on Government Housing Policies and Programs (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1953), 114–15. 29. Ibid. 30. Hearings before Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, 83rd Cong., 2nd Sess. (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1954), 71. 31. President’s Advisory Committee, Recommendations, 1953, 119. 32. Hearings before Senate Committee on Banking and Currency, 1954, 328. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 331. 35. James Rouse and Nathaniel Keith, No Slums in Ten Years (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1955), 3–4. 36. Ibid., 28. This statement followed almost directly from the summary conclusion of Rouse’s subcommittee report to the President’s Advisory Committee on Housing, which advised, on page 138, the integration of public dwellings into their neighborhoods, distribution of low-income dwellings as widely as feasible in urban areas, and avoidance of large-scale projects. Keith had served as director of slum clearance and redevelopment in the Housing and Home Finance Agency from passage of the 1949 Housing Act until 1953, when he left to enter private consulting in Washington, D.C. Scott, American City Planning, 465.

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37. Martin Millspaugh, Baltimore’s Charles Center: A Case Study of Downtown Renewal, Urban Land Institute Technical Bulletin 51 (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 1964); Lyall, ‘‘Bicycle Built-for-Two.’’ Like the redevelopment of Washington’s southwest, the Charles Center was a large institutionalized project, but Rouse had very little to do with its execution, according to one of its chief instigators, his former partner Hunter Moss. 38. New York Times, May 15, 1955. 39. See ‘‘Crusade Against Slums,’’ New York Times, September 22, 1955, Also serving as directors of ACTION were Washington Post publisher Philip Graham, a chief proponent of bold redevelopment measures in Washington, and Robert Weaver, who was then serving as chairman of the National Committee against Discrimination in Housing. Fred Kramer, president of the Metropolitan Housing and Planning Council of Chicago and a governor of the Mortgage Bankers Association of America, was named director of research. Washington Post, November 16, 1954. In 1965 ACTION absorbed a longstanding planning advocacy organization, the American Planning and Civic Association, which in 1956 had changed its name to Urban America. The new organization ultimately evolved into the National Urban Coalition. For a summary of ACTION publications and philosophy, see Martin Meyerson, Foreword to Meyerson, Barbara Terrett, and William L. C. Wheaton, Housing, People, and Cities (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), vii-xi. 40. ‘‘ACTION’s Rousing Mr. Rouse,’’ Architectural Forum 110, 5 (1959): 129. 41. Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Shopping Town USA: The Planning of Shopping Centers (New York: Reinhold, 1960), 258. 42. James Rouse, ‘‘Must Shopping Centers Be Inhuman?’’ Architectural Forum 116 (June 1962): 105 43. President’s Advisory Committee, Recommendations, 1953, 124; Schuman and Sclar, ‘‘The Enterprise of American City Building,’’1993. 44. James Rouse, ‘‘Building a Sense of Place,’’ in Donald C. Kline, ed., The Psychology of the Planned Community: The New Town Experience (New York: Human Science Press, 1978), 53. Columbia has rightfully provoked comparisons with another privately developed new town only an hour away, Reston, Virginia. Also influenced by Garden City principles, Reston nonetheless evolved somewhat less consciously as a moral as well as material enterprise. For the parallels, see Frederick Gutheim, ‘‘New Towns?’’ in Roger Revelle and Hans H. Landsberg, eds., America’s Changing Environment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 191–200. 45. James Rouse, memo to William E. Finley, July 23, 1963, Columbia (Maryland) Archives. 46. James Rouse, ‘‘It Can Happen Here,’’ paper presented to Conference on the Metropolitan Future, University of California at Berkeley, September 23, 1963 Columbia, Maryland, Archives. Rouse recruited Finley and Morton Hoppenfeld from the National Capital Planning Commission to coordinate planning for Columbia. Although Rouse used much the same language in the July 23 memo as in the September 23 address, his stated purpose of ‘‘making a city into neighborhoods where a man, his wife and family can live and work and above all else grow,’’ went back to an address Rouse made as president of ACTION at a conference in Newark, New Jersey, in May 1959. W. Hamilton, personal communication, April 8, 1964.

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Rouse continued to use similar language in public statements, as in his testimony in 1967 before the Commission on Urban Problems, where he stated that ‘‘the really important ingredient lacking in the city is a sense of community; that unless there is a physical organization of buildings, space, institutions, in a manner that gives identity, separation, and scale so that a person lives in a place he can understand, belong to and identify, get a handle on, feel proud of and ashamed of, have neighbors respond as neighbors and feel neighborliness—until these characteristics that are very fundamentally human, until these yearnings can be fulfilled and these demands be put upon us as a people—there are not the forces for responsibility working in a way that will cause a growth environment for people.’’ Hearings, National Commission on Urban Problems, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1968), 10. 47. Morton Hoppenfeld, ‘‘The Columbia Process: The Potential for New Towns,’’ Architects Year Book (1971): 14–15. Rouse gave credit to the Berkeley talk, saying that without the stimulus it provided ‘‘I would never have thought systematically or comprehensively about the city’’ (ix). Like a number of others who worked with Rouse earlier in their careers, Hoppenfeld returned to Columbia to work with the Enterprise Development Corporation after serving as dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico from 1975 to 1980. See his obituary in the Washington Post, March 28, 1985. 48. Carol A. Christensen, ‘‘The American Garden City: Concepts and Assumptions,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1977, 299. 49. ‘‘Pleasure Domes with Parking,’’ Time, October 15, 1956, 98. 50. See Edward Gunts’s series of articles on Rouse in the Baltimore Sun starting May 26, 1985, especially the May 27 article, ‘‘Rouse Works with Cities as Partners—or Not At All.’’ 51. Washington Post, July 2, 1980. 52. Ibid., December 22, 1981. 53. Herbert Gans, ‘‘Planning for the Everyday Life and Problems of Suburban and New Town Residents,’’ memo to James Rouse, Columbia Archives. Gans subsequently wrote that Rouse ‘‘wanted to plan Columbia as a small town, with neighborhoods, actually called villages, that would encourage face-to-face relationships, maximal citizen participation, and a strong sense of community. . . . I felt that most people would not want the village life, intense community participation, and adult education being proposed for them, and that they would be more interested in developing their personal and familial lives, and in getting along with their neighbors.’’ Gans used this experience to illustrate a central theme of his 1968 book of essays, contesting the idea that planning for the physical environment could improve living conditions. Poverty and discrimination, he argued, were the chief causes of the urban crisis, and they had to be addressed ‘‘if cities are going to provide the quality of life which planners are seeking.’’ Gans, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 130, ix. 54. James Rouse, ‘‘Rational Visions Generate Energy to Transform the Lives of the Poor,’’ Vital Speeches of the Day, March 15, 1992. 55. Patrick M. Costigan, personal communication, October 19, 1993. 56. Elizabeth O’Connor, Call to Commitment: The Story of the Church of the

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Saviour, Washington, D.C. (New York: Harper & Row, 1963); Robert O. Boulter, personal communication, October 18, 1993. 57. Jubilee Housing, ‘‘The Making of a Jubilee Coop: The Ontario Court’’ (Washington, D.C., n.d.), 26. 58. Boulter, personal communication October 18, 1993. 59. Newsletter of the Adams-Morgan Advisory Neighborhood Commission, 1983. 60. Enterprise Foundation, annual report, 1992, 1. 61. Enterprise Foundation, annual report, 1996. 62. America, Rouse said, lacked the conviction ‘‘that we can have good cities because nobody has seen one. The biggest single thing that could happen in the United States would be to produce one good city. If you produced one good city in America, the chain reaction, the generating force that it would have on this country would be incredible.’’ Hearings before National Commission on Urban Problems, 9. 63. Paul C. Brophy, ‘‘Emerging Approaches to Community Development,’’ in Henry G. Cisneros, ed., Interwoven Destinies: Cities and the Nation (New York: Norton, 1993). 64. Claire Carter, ‘‘Whatever Ought to Be, Can Be,’’ interview with James Rouse, Parade, May 12, 1991. 65. Edward Gunts, ‘‘Home Sweet First Home: How the Enterprise Foundation Is Helping the Working Poor Buy Homes and Save Their Neighborhoods in the Process,’’ Baltimore Sun Magazine, July 21, 1991. 66. Christensen, ‘‘American Garden City,’’ 299. 67. Patrick M. Costigan, personal communication, October 19, 1993. 68. These goals are outlined in a draft memo directed to Mayor Schmoke dated February 26, 1993, and reported in Neal R. Peirce’s column in the Baltimore Sun, July 12, 1993. 69. Richard C. Hula, Cynthia Y. Jackson, and Marion Orr, ‘‘Urban Politics, Governing Nonprofits, and Community Revitalization,’’ Urban Affairs 32 (March 1997): 459–89. 70. Harold A. McDougall, Black Baltimore: A New Theory of Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993). 71. Nicholas Lemann, ‘‘The Myth of Community Development,’’ New York Times Magazine, January 9, 1994. 72. Washington Post, April 14, 1996; Michael Porter, ‘‘The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City,’’ Harvard Business Review 73, 3 (1995): 55–71. 73. James Rouse, Foreword to Robert Tennenbaum, ed., Creating a New City: Columbia, Maryland (Columbia, Md.: Partners in Community Building and Perry Publishing, 1996), ix. 74. Ibid., x.

Chapter 7. The New Urbanism: ‘‘Organizing Things That Matter’’ The chapter title comes from David Brain, ‘‘From Good Neighborhoods to Sustainable Cities: Social Science and the Social Agenda of the New Urbanism,’’ International Regional Science Review 28 (April 2005): 226.

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Notes to Pages 114–115

1. According to Shelley Poticha, the organization’s first executive director, ‘‘CNU is one of only a few voices addressing the confluence of community, economics, and environment in our cities. And it is the only national organization dedicated to addressing these issues through urban design and planning.’’ Foreword to Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick, eds., Charter for the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000), 2. Peter Calthorpe links the movement to other major design movements of the twentieth century in the same volume (177–78): ‘‘Not since the City Beautiful and Arts-and-Crafts movements at the turn of the century, or the Congre`s International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM) in the 1920s, has there been an attempt to create a design vision that unifies the differing scales and disciplines shaping the built environment.’’ 2. The charter for the Congress for the New Urbanism may be accessed at the organization’s web site at www.cnu.org and is reprinted in Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 260–65. 3. New York Times, August 1, 1998 4. These connections are pointed out in two important reviews of the initial New Urbanist literature, David Schuyler, ‘‘The New Urbanism and the Modern Metropolis,’’ Urban History 24, 3 (1997): 344–58; and David L. Ames, Journal of Urban Affairs 24, 1 (2002): 118–22. See also Andres Duany and Emily Talen, ‘‘Transect Planning,’’ APA Journal 68 (Summer 2002): 247, 257–58; Emily Talen, ‘‘Beyond the Front Porch: Regionalist Ideals in the New Urbanist Movement,’’ Journal of Planning History 7 (February 2008): 20–47; John A. Dutton, New American Urbanism: Re-Forming the Suburban Metropolis (Torino: Skira, 2000), 32, 61, where he traces New Urbanist principles to Unwin and Parker’s ability to link enclosures, open spaces, street edges and intersections to the perception of the pedestrian moving along the street. Stephen M. Wheeler also connects the contemporary movement with earlier efforts, noting in ‘‘The New Regionalism: Key Characteristics of an Emerging Movement,’’ APA Journal 68 (Summer 2002): 273, a rebirth in the emphasis on physical design: ‘‘Regional-scale design in particular, largely dormant in the United States since the early decades of the 20th century, has been resurrected. New Urbanism, smart growth, and other physical planning movements are arising out of a new understanding on the part of planners and citizens that ‘design matters,’ and that good design must be integrated across regional, subregional, neighborhood, and site scales.’’ 5. Emily Talen, ‘‘Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism,’’ Urban Studies 36, 8 (1999): 1361. 6. Duany et al., Suburban Nation, 43–44. The New Urbanist critique of zoning is summarized in Jill Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2006), 50–51. As Robert Fishman points out, Mumford had come to much the same conclusion as early as 1968, describing suburban sprawl as the ‘‘anti-city’’ and claiming that because it was by nature fragmentary: ‘‘Any part can be built by anybody anywhere at any time. This is the ideal formula for promoting total urban disintegration.’’ Lewis Mumford, The Urban Prospect (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1968), 133, quoted by Fishman, ‘‘The Fifth Migration,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 71 (Autumn 2005): 361.

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7. Brain, ‘‘From Good Neighborhoods to Sustainable Cities,’’ 226. See also Charles C. Bohl, ‘‘New Urbanism and the City: Potential Applications and Implications for Distressed Inner-City Neighborhoods,’’ Housing Policy Debate 11, 4 (2000): 764. 8. Peter Calthorpe, The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the American Dream (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1993), 16; Bruce Stephenson, ‘‘The Roots of the New Urbanism: John Nolen’s Garden City Ethic,’’ Journal of Planning History 1 (2002): 100. 9. Michelle Thompson-Fawcett, ‘‘Leon Krier and the Organic Revival Within Urban Policy and Practice,’’ Planning Perspectives 13 (April 1998): 177–79; Grant, Planning the Good Community,’’ 52–53. 10. Vincent Scully, ‘‘The Architecture of Community,’’ in Peter Katz, ed., The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994), 225. 11. Duany et al., Suburban Nation, xiii, 83. 12. Katz, The New Urbanism, 63. 13. New York Times, August 1, 1998. 14. Duany et al., Suburban Nation, 47, 198. 15. Keller Easterling, ‘‘Public Enterprise,’’ in David Mohney and Keller Easterling, eds., Seaside: Making a Town in America (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1991), 55. 16. Ibid., 59; Grant, Planning the Good Community, 65. 17. Duany et al., Suburban Nation, 221–24. 18. Easterling, ‘‘Public Enterprise,’’ 60. 19. Katz, The New Urbanism, 30–45; Duany et al., Suburban Nation, 48–49. 20. Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (New York: Ballantine, 1999), 27. 21. Ibid., 220. 22. Rene C. Kane, ‘‘Prairie Flower,’’ Landscape Architecture (October 2003): 15. 23. New York Times, September 10, 1998, July 11, 1999; Jeffrey Zimmerman, ‘‘The ‘Nature’ of Urbanism on the New Urbanist Frontier: Sustainable Development, or Defense of the Suburban Dream?’’ Urban Geography 22, 3 (2001): 256. A case study evaluation of Prairie Crossing notes that single-family homes cost 23 percent more than comparable homes in the competitive market area. Still, demand remained high. In retrospect, the developers admitted that they might have assured greater economic and racial diversity had they partnered with a nonprofit development corporation. ‘‘Prairie Crossing,’’ in Jo Allen Gouse, ed., Developing Sustainable Planned Communities (Washington, D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2007), 208–9. 24. Alan Ehrenhalt, ‘‘Suburbs With a Healthy Dose of Fantasy,’’ New York Times, July 9, 2000; Grant, Planning the Good Community, 90, 99, provides additional information on Orenco Station and the heightened costs of New Urbanist developments. Reid H. Ewing, Keith Bartholomew, Steve Winkelman, Jerry Walters, and Don Chen, Growing Cooler: Evidence on Urban Development and Climate Change (Washington D.C.: Urban Land Institute, 2008), cited by William M. Rohe,

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Notes to Pages 121–125

‘‘From Local to Global: One Hundred Years of Neighborhood Planning,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (Spring 2009): 226. 25. NewYork Times, May 24, 2006. 26. Katz, New Urbanism, 18–29; Calthorpe, Next American Metropolis, 147–49. 27. Peter Calthorpe and William B. Fulton, The Regional City: Planning the End of Sprawl (Washington, D.C,: Island Press, 2001), 32–34; Calthorpe, Next American Metropolis, 17. 28. Katz, New Urbanism, 19. 29. Alan Ehrenhalt, ‘‘Suburbs with a Healthy Dose of Fantasy,’’ New York Times, July 9, 2000. See also comments of Alex Marshall, New York Times, August 1, 1998. 30. Michael Southworth, ‘‘Walkable Suburbs? An Evaluation of Neotraditional Suburbs at the Urban Edge,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 63 (Winter 1997): 28–45. Writing under the subtitle ‘‘The False Promise of Neotraditional Planning,’’ Steve Belmont cites Southworth on the way to charging that ‘‘Neotraditionalists’ efforts to create urban virtues in suburbs divert resources, intellectual energy, and middle-class households from distressed cities. . . . The neotraditionalists cannot, in their neosuburbs, come close to matching cities’ capacity to extract metropolitan benefits from urban density housing.’’ Belmont, Cities in Full: Recognizing and Realizing the Great Potential of Urban America (Chicago: Planners Press, 202), 215. 31. Calthorpe, Next American Metropolis, 49–50. 32. See historian Marc A. Weiss’s account of the rationale behind HUD’s decision and illustrations of a frequently cited early model for the conversion, at Diggs Town in Norfolk, Virginia, in Leccese and McCormick, eds., Charter of the New Urbanism, 89–95. Weiss was serving as special assistant to Secretary Cisneros at the time HUD adopted New Urbanist principles for the HOPE VI program. See also Dutton, New American Urbanism, 107. 33. Ray Gindroz, ‘‘New Urbanism and Smart Growth: City Life and New Urbanism,’’ Fordham Urban Law Journal 29 (April 2002): 1436. Douglas W. Rae makes a similar point in City: Urbanism and Its End (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003), 31. 34. Gindroz quoted in Sabina Deitrick and Cliff Ellis, ‘‘The Importance of Design: New Urbanism and Community Revitalization,’’ Shelterforce (March/April 2001): 20. Urban Design Associates, for which Gindroz serves as chairman, defines design on its web page (www.urbandesignassociates.com) as ‘‘a participatory process in which we bring together citizens, economists, engineers, architects, developers, policy makers, government officials, and builders to construct humane and appropriate visions for the future.’’ 35. Sabrina Deitrick and Cliff Ellis, ‘‘New Urbanism in the Inner City,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association (Autumn 2004): 439–40. 36. Bohl, ‘‘Urbanism and the City,’’ 794–95. The charge of physical determinism was made most famously by David Harvey, ‘‘The New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,’’ Harvard Design Magazine (Winter/Spring 1997) and taken up by Susan S. Fainstein, ‘‘New Directions in Planning Theory,’’ Urban Affairs Review 35 (March 2004): 463–66. Fainstein questioned the sincerity of New Urbanist charettes

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as the means of garnering citizen input for design decisions, a theme also taken up in Archon Fung, ‘‘Beyond and Below the New Urbanism: Citizen Participation and Responsive Spatial Reconstruction,’’ Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review 28 (Summer 2001), comparing a more incremental approach favorably to that of the New Urbanism, which he charged ‘‘aims at a . . . totalizing transformation of space, ambitiously imposing its principles and physical picture by erasing that which preceded it’’ (617). 37. Talen, ‘‘Sense of Community and Neighbourhood Form,’’ 1369. 38. See Christopher Silver, ‘‘Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 51 (Spring 1985): 161–74. 39. Brain, ‘‘From Good Neighborhoods to Sustainable Cities,’’ 219. In this formulation of civility, Brain approaches Robert Putnam’s explanation of social capital when he writes, ‘‘Frequent interaction among a diverse set of people tends to produce a norm of generalized reciprocity. Civic engagement and social capital entail mutual obligation and responsibility for action.’’ Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 21. 40. Emily Talen, ‘‘The Problem with Community in Planning,’’ Journal of Planning Literature 15 (November 2000): 179, 180. 41. Brain, ‘‘From Good Neighborhoods to Sustainable Cities,’’ 229. 42. Ibid., 234. 43. Ibid., 230, 235. 44. David Brooks, ‘‘A Bushian Laboratory,’’ New York Times, September 18, 2005. 45. Jason DeParle, ‘‘Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate,’’ New York Times, October 11, 2005; Peter Dreier, ‘‘Katrina and Power in America,’’ Urban Affairs Review 41 (March 2006): 528–49. 46. Quoted in New York Times, May 24, 2006. 47. Robert Tanner, ‘‘Experiment may revive devastated Miss. Towns,’’ Courier-Post, January 22, 2006. 48. Governor’s Commission on Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal, Mississippi Renewal Forum: Summary Report, posted by Town Paper, Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 2005, 4, at www.tndtownpaper.com. 49. Ibid., 8. 50. Ibid., 21, 40. Similarly, the report proposed for the town of Pass Christian a rebuilt town center ‘‘in the form of complete and integrated neighborhood blocks that contain housing, shops, work places, schools, parks, and civic facilities essential to the daily life of the residents.’’ A new network of green public spaces loosely based on the model of Savannah, Georgia, promised ‘‘an extremely high-quality environment for residents and visitors alike’’ (26). 51. Ibid., 13. For a summary of the recommendations, see Robin Pogrebin, ‘‘A Challenge for Six Days: Planning Mississippi’s Coast,’’ New York Times, October 19, 2005. 52. Sandy Sorlein and Leland R. Speed, ‘‘Walking to Wal-Mart: Planning for Mississippi and Beyond,’’ in Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, eds., Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 329–41. Sorlein served as head of the coding

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team for the Mississippi Renewal Forum. Speed, as Executive Director of the Mississippi Development Authority, was responsible for recruiting Andres Duany to head the forum. 53. Ibid., 11. 54. Emily Talen, ‘‘New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of PostKatrina Rebuilding in Mississippi,’’ Journal of Planning Education and Research 27 (Spring 2008): 286. In these comments, Talen reiterates a central concern for New Urbanists, to determine whether implementation of design efforts fail ‘‘because the structural basis—the political, economic, and social requirements for change—were not altered or alterable.’’ Talen, New Urbanism and American Planning: The Conflict of Cultures (New York: Routledge, 2005), 289. 55. Jim Lewis, ‘‘Battle for Biloxi,’’ New York Times Magazine, May 21, 2006. See also the report from Biloxi in the New York Times, December 8, 2005, and other locally generated criticism in the House & Home section for the same date. 56. Michael Sorkin, ‘‘Will New Plans for the Gulf Drown It Again, This Time in Nostalgia?’’ Architectural Record (February 1, 2006). Sorkin’s previous comments on Hurricane Katrina were reported in the New York Times, September 14, 2005. His criticism of New Urbanism as a modern version of Modernist determinism finds additional support in the book-length critique of the movement, Jill Grant’s Planning the Good Community (19): ‘‘Equipped with a theory of good urban form, and the power of their convictions, planners would have the expertise needed to generate good communities. In many ways, the new urbanist position thus seems closer to modernist view of expertise than the designers might like to admit.’’ The chief CIAM chronicler of Eric Mumford concurs, writing that contemporary approaches to the built environment, including the New Urbanism, ‘‘have held up the Modern Movement and CIAM’s Functional City solutions as the antithesis of what they propose, yet they too have tended to combine an appeal to future communal transformation with specific urbanistic forms and methods.’’ The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), 7. 57. Grant, Planning the Good Community, 21–22. 58. See Judith T. Kenny and Jeffrey Zimmerman, ‘‘Constructing the ‘Genuine American City’: Neo-Traditionalism, New Urbanism and Neo-Liberalism in the Remaking of Downtown Milwaukee,’’ Cultural Geographies 11 (January 2004): 74–98, an especially pertinent article as it evaluates Milwaukee in light of New Urbanist chairman and former Milwaukee mayor John Norquist’s efforts in the city and the way the Congress for a New Urbanism highlighted the city at its 1999 annual meeting there. See also A. Joan Saab’s comments on the New Urbanist community of Baxter in Fort Mill, South Carolina, in ‘‘Historical Amnesia: New Urbanism and the City of Tomorrow,’’ Journal of Planning History 6 (August 2007): 193–95. Similarly, Delores Hayden, in her synthetic survey, Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (New York: Vintage, 2004), concludes, ‘‘Better architecture cannot, in itself, change the larger patterns of social and economic exploitation developed by growth machines which profit from round after round of fringe development’’ (229). Like Steve Belmont (see note 31 above), she favors reinvestment in older suburbs in the cause of greater equity and sustainability.

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59. Grant, Planning the Good Community, 77; Zimmerman, ‘‘The ‘Nature’ of Urbanism,’’ 263. 60. Fainstain, ‘‘New Directions in Planning Theory,’’ 462; Duany and Talen, ‘‘Transect Planning,’’ 262. 61. Cliff Ellis, ‘‘The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals,’’ Journal of Urban Design 7 (October 2002): 273. 62. Talen, ‘‘New Urbanism, Social Equity, and the Challenge of Post-Katrina Rebuilding,’’ 286. 63. Grant, Planning the Good Community, 101–3. 64. Harvey, ‘‘New Urbanism and the Communitarian Trap,’’ 3.

Chapter 8. Civitas in the Design of Low-Income Housing 1. Robert Fairbanks notes that it was a concern for community—‘‘the need to encourage civic coherence and commitment by developing facilities for inculcating an appropriate urban way of life in neighborhoods across the face of the metropolis—that produced the extraordinary form of the first federally subsidized slum clearance public housing projects.’’ Fairbanks, Making Better Citizens: Housing Reform and the Community Development Strategy in Cincinnati, 1890–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 1. 2. John F. Bauman, ‘‘Catherine Bauer: The Struggle for Modern Housing in America, 1930–1960,’’ in Roger Biles, ed., The Human Tradition in Urban America (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 157. 3. Under the program the PWA built 21,000 apartments between 1934 and 1936. D. Bradford Hunt, ‘‘Public Housing,’’ in David Goldfield, ed., Encyclopedia of American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2007), 623. 4. Quoted in Eric J. Sandeen, ‘‘The Design of Public Housing in the New Deal: Oskar Stonorov and the Carl Mackley Houses,’’ American Quarterly 37 (Winter 1985): 667. 5. Ibid., 652–53; John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 24–25; Gail Radford, Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 24, 132. Mackley’s emphasis on community activity was the early norm in public housing, not the exception. A report issued by the Newark Housing Authority dated November 1944, for instance, claimed, ‘‘More different activities are found in a public housing project than at Madison Square Garden. Groups of all ages use the community halls and meeting rooms for dances, concerts, songfests, amateur shows, movies, handcraft, newspaper publishing, nursing and first aid classes, and almost anything else you can think of. There are baby-keep-well stations, health clinics and branches of the public library.’’ ‘‘Public Housing in Newark,’’ copy in the Department of Housing and Community Development library, Washington, D.C. 6. Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 126–29.

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7. Radford, Modern Housing for America, 147–76. 8. Kelly Anne Quinn, ‘‘Making Modern Homes: A History of Langston Terrace Dwellings, a New Deal Housing Program in Washington, D.C.,’’ Ph.D. dissertation, University of Maryland, 2007, 132, 127. Quinn notes as well the influence of Oskar Stonorov both on Hilyard’s design philosophy and in bringing him to the attention of PWA housing director Robert Kohn (120–21). 9. Gwendolyn Wright, Building the Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 229–30. Among the well-designed complexes Wright cites was the St. Thomas complex in New Orleans, ‘‘which incorporated the tall windows and cast-iron balconies of nineteenth-century Louisiana row houses.’’ 10. Radford, Modern Housing for America, 197–98. 11. Arnold R. Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Hirsch’s important contribution is the subject of evaluation twenty years later in a special section of the Journal of Urban History 29 (March 2003): 233–309. 12. Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh, American Project: The Rise and Fall of a Modern Ghetto (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 3–5; J. S. Fuerst with D. Bradford Hunt, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), 3. 13. Alexander Von Hoffman, ‘‘High Ambitions: The Past and Future of American Low-Income Housing Policy,’’ Housing Policy Debate 7, 3 (1996): 432; Alexander von Hoffman, ‘‘Why They Built Pruitt-Igoe,’’ in John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State Press, 2000), 187, 195, 201. As testimony to the positive effect the structure had at its outset, former residents attending a reunion in 2005 recalled the community fondly, saying they missed the sense of community they had been able to create. Catherine C. Galley, ‘‘Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project,’’ in Goldfield, Encyclopedia of American Urban History, 616. 14. Catherine Bauer, ‘‘The Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.’’ Architectural Forum 106 (May 1957), cited in Bauman, ‘‘Catherine Bauer,’’ 154, 167. 15. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 394–395, 398, cited in Lawrence J. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 19. For further comments on the shortcomings of the superblock, especially as applied to public housing projects, see Eugenie Ladner Birch, ‘‘Radburn and the American Planning Movement: The Persistence of an Idea,’’ in Donald A. Krueckeberg, ed., Introduction to Planning History (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1983), 141–42. 16. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 17. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 2–3. Sociologist William L. Yancey arrived at a similar conclusion in an essay published the same year. Using the term ‘‘defensible space,’’ he decried Pruitt-Igoe’s lack of semipublic areas capable of providing ‘‘the ecologi-

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cal basis around which informal networks of friends and relatives develop.’’ Based on his own funded research, the essay was informed by discussions with Lee Rainwater and his colleague Alvin Gouldner. Yancey, ‘‘Architecture, Interaction, and Social Control: The Case of a Large-Scale Housing Project,’’ in Joachim F. Wohlwill and Daniel H. Carson, eds., Environment and the Social Sciences: Perspectives and Applications (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 1972), 134. 18. Newman, Defensible Space, 19. 19. Ibid., 207. 20. Oscar Newman, Community of Interest (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1981). 21. In a bibliographical note, Vale reports that ‘‘Although Newman’s work was criticized for overstating the capacity of architecture and urban design to determine behavior, ‘‘his work must be seen as part of a well-established tradition of attempts to link the qualities of the built environment to the beliefs and actions of those who live in it, dating back at least to the slum-reformers of the nineteenth century. Newman’s work was different not only because it proposed a theoretical framework based on human predilections for territoriality, but also because it was accompanied by a wide array of empirical data to support his contentions that many of the most egregious failures of public housing environments could be ameliorated by more sensitive design. Despite an initial barrage of criticisms, Newman’s approach to public housing design and redesign gradually caught on, to the point where ‘defensible space’ became a part of the working vocabulary and state strategy of HUD and public housing authorities across the country.’’ Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing, 416. 22. See, for instance, Susan J. Popkin, Victoria E. Gwiasda, Lynn M. Olson, Dennis P. Rosenbaum, and Larry Buron, The Hidden War: Crime and the Tragedy of Public Housing in Chicago (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 28 23. Neal Kumar Katyal, ‘‘Architecture as Crime Control,’’ Yale Law Journal 111 (March 2002): 1076. The definition of social capital is drawn from Sheila R. Foster, ‘‘The City as an Ecological Space: Social Capital and Urban Land Use,’’ Notre Dame Law Review 82 (December 2006): 529. For the origins of the term, see Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 19–20. 24. Katyal, ‘‘Architecture as Crime Control,’’ 1062–63, 1046. Although he does not stress the value of design in citing the unusual success of New York City’s housing authority, emphasizing good management instead, Nicholas Dagan Bloom nonetheless cites the positive effect of landscaping innovation in the 1960s and a variation on Newman’s approach labeled Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design. Bloom, Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 161–66, 256. 25. Newman’s influence on New Urbanist thinking is clear in several central publications. In his contribution to a series of essays on the Charter of the New Urbanism, Ray Gindroz stresses the importance of public safety, noting, ‘‘Design, once considered only a minor factor in security concerns, is now known to be an essential component of urban safety.’’ While he appears to challenge Newman indi-

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rectly by asserting, ‘‘The issue is not so much how to create spaces that can be defended,’’ his own seven-point prescription closely follows Newman’s own evaluation, following the observation that the presence of well-maintained buildings ‘‘that show a way out and help us find our way through the city . . . seem safe (and are) because they are orderly, cared for, and therefore under control,’’ in Michael Leccese and Kathleen McCormick, eds., Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill: 2000), chap. 21, 133–35. See also ‘‘Safety by Design,’’ in Robert Steuteville and Philip Langdon, eds., New Urbanism: Comprehensive Report and Best Practice Guide, 3rd ed. (Ithaca, N.Y.: New Urbanism News, 2003), 19–5-6. Janet Smith connects the HOPE VI program not just to Newman’s influence but also specifically to the Pruitt-Igoe project that inspired his work. ‘‘Public Housing Transformation: Evolving National Policy,’’ in Larry Bennett, Janet L.Smith, and Patricia A. Wright, eds., Where Are Poor People to Live? Transforming Public Housing Communities (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2006), 32. 26. Susan J. Popkin, ‘‘The Hope VI Program: What Has happened to the Residents?’’ in Bennett et al., Where Are Poor People to Live?, 68–90, 71; Popkin et al., The Hidden War, 188. Popkin subsequently concluded , as reported in the Financial Times, August 17, 2007, that the Chicago Transformation effort, which she had followed closely, was a contentious situation had been successful: ‘‘They started with bumps, a lot of angry residents, and then they regrouped. They put a lot of money and effort into making sure they knew where all the residents were and that they were offered [alternatives to the old housing]. They did it, and I would not have predicted that in 2000. You need effective leadership who are willing to engage with people who are angry.’’ In his review of the literature on the effects of mixed income housing, in inner cities as well as suburbs, Mark L. Joseph reaches a similar conclusion, writing, ‘‘mixed-income development alone cannot reasonably be expected to promote more direct effects as behavioral changes and substantial gains in employment and self-sufficiency. Promoting sustainable changes in the lives of low-income residents who move from neighborhoods of concentrated poverty to mixed-income developments will require housing with investments in social services, education, job readiness, training and placement, and transportation. Moreover, it will require, above all, attention to more fundamental structural barriers that constrain access to opportunity by race and class.’’ Joseph, ‘‘Is Mixed-Income Development an Antidote to Urban Poverty?’’ Housing Policy Debate 17, 2 (2006): 223. 27. Foster, ‘‘The City as Ecological Space,’’ 562–63. 28. At Westfield, Stonorov succeeded in incorporating a number of communitarian features despite considerable bureaucratic pressure to eliminate them. A special point of contention was the use of generous insert porches extending from a stair landing to unite neighboring units as they had been pioneered at Mackley. Lisa Ann Greenhouse, ‘‘Oskar Stonorov: Building Community on Shifting Ground, 1934–1954,’’ M.A. thesis, George Washington University, 1997. 29. Howard Gillette, Jr., Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a PostIndustrial City (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 147, 167. Harmon’s experiences may be placed in the context of other black women whose activism was directed at making a decent home in public housing. See Rhonda Y. Wil-

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liams, The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women’s Struggles Against Urban Inequality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 30. Leonard S. Rubinowitz and James E. Rosenbaum, Crossing the Class and Color Lines: From Public Housing to White Suburbia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); John Goering and Judith D. Feins, Choosing a Better Life? Evaluating the Moving to Opportunity Social Experiment (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 2003); Susan Clampert-Lundquest, ‘‘HOPE VI Relocation: Moving to New Neighborhoods and Building New Ties,’’ Housing Policy Debate 15, 2 (2004): 415–47. 31. Foster, ‘‘The City as an Ecological Space,’’ 566. She cites an especially poignant example assessing Chicago’s effort to transform public housing: Sudhir Venkatesh and Isil Celimi, ‘‘Tearing Down the Community,’’ Shelterforce 138 (November/December 2004), http://www.nhi.org/online/issues/138/chicago.html. 32. Janet L. Smith, ‘‘The Chicago Housing Authority’s Plan for Transformation,’’ in Bennett et al., Where Are Poor People to Live?, 93–124; New York Times, March 18, 2007. 33. Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 220. 34. Audrey G. McFarlane, ‘‘The New Inner City: Class Transformation, Concentrated Affluence and the Obligations of the Police Power,’’ University of Pennsylvania Journal of Constitutional Law 8 (January 2006): 10. Emphasis on the importance of peer relationships and especially the absence of middle class role models in inner-city areas owes much to the work of William Julius Wilson, The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987);Wilson, When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (New York: Knopf, 1996). Janet L. Smith spells out the concept in conjunction with the New Urbanist philosophy in ‘‘Mixed-Income Communities: Designing Out Poverty or Pushing Out the Poor?’’ in Bennett et al., Where Are Poor People to Live?, 271. 35. Steve Belmont, Cities in Full: Recognizing and Realizing the Great Potential of Urban America (Chicago: Planners Press, 2002), 362. 36. Gillette, Camden After the Fall, 233–40. 37. City of Camden, ‘‘Bergen Square Neighborhood Redevelopment Plan,’’ Camden Redevelopment Agency Website, accessed February 10, 2005. In addition to listing among its design principles mixed use, transportation choices, and design codes along lines suggested by the New Urbanists, the plan embraced the goal of promoting ‘‘public spaces that are attractive, safe, uncluttered and work effectively for all people in the society.’’ 38. David Rusk, ‘‘Hurricane Sprawl—Worse Than Hurricane Katrina,’’ paper delivered at Rutgers University-Camden conference ‘‘Beyond the Post-Industrial City,’’ November 18, 2005. Camden’s place in the vision for ‘‘regional equity’’ is spelled out in Signs of Promise: Philanthropic Leadership in Advancing Regional and Neighborhood Equity, produced by the Funders’ Network for Smart Growth and Livable Communities (Coral Gables, Fl.,: Funders’ Network, 2005), 32–33. For a statement of the broader philosophy behind regional equity, see Manuel Pastor, Jr., Chris Benner, and Martha Matsuoka, This Could be the Start of Something Big: How Social Movements for Regional Equity are Reshaping Metropolitan America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 2–3.

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39. Statement of Camden’s Chief Operating Officer, Melvin R. Primas, at initial meeting of the regional impact council, as reported by Paul Scully, July 1, 2005, cited in Howard Gillette, Jr., ‘‘Planning After Mount Laurel: To Gild ‘the Ghetto’ or Disperse It?’’ Journal of Planning History 5 (May 2006): 160. Here, the dominant political interest asserted its intention to sustain what Steve Belmont describes as the Faustian bargain between liberals and conservatives to keep poverty entrenched in cities. Cities in Full, 330. 40. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 18, 2002. 41. Courier-Post, September 16, 2003. 42. Herbert Gans, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962); Gans, The Levittowners: Ways of Life and Politics in a New Suburban Community (New York: Knopf, 1967). 43. James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 108– 17, 128. 44. David Rusk, ‘‘Measuring Regional Equity in the New Orleans Area: An Unsentimental Assessment,’’ September 15, 2005, circulated electronically. Rusk subsequently, on October 5, circulated a series of essays he had written as a 1999 tabloid insert to the Times-Picuyune arguing that the combined effects of concentrated poverty and continued sprawl made differences in income in New Orleans the worst among 90 other metropolitan areas he had analyzed. ‘‘For effective economic development,’’ he wrote, ‘‘a region needs to disperse its poverty and concentrate its wealth strategically.’’ 45. Powell and his associates at Ohio State University’s Kirwin Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity urge a racially and economically just framework focused on access to opportunity: ‘‘Adopting a regional approach to planning, therefore, is essential. Segregation, fragmentation, and concentrated poverty create barriers to opportunity for people of color and undermine the vitality and competitiveness of the entire region. An approach to rebuild in a just way must look at regions as a whole unit and create ways to more equitably distribute resources and opportunity throughout the region.’’ john a. powell, Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Daniel W. Newhart, and Eric Stiens, ‘‘Towards a Transformation of Race: The Crisis and Opportunity of Katrina,’’ in Chester Hartman and Gregory D. Squires, eds., There Is no Such Thing as a Natural Disaster (New York: Routledge, 2006), 78. 46. Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program, New Orleans After the Storm: Lessons from the Past, a Plan for the Future (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, Metropolitan Policy Program, October, 2005), 30–31; Bruce Katz, ‘‘Concentrated Poverty in New Orleans and Other American Cities,’’ Chronicle of Higher Education, August 4, 2006, posted on Brookings website (accessed August 17, 2006). Sheryll Cashin took a similar position in her essay, ‘‘Katrina: The American Dilemma Redux,’’ in David Dante Troutt, ed., After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Katrina (New York: New Press, 2006), 35. 47. Susan J. Popkin, Margery A. Turner, and Martha Burt, ‘‘Rebuilding Affordable Housing in New Orleans: The Challenge of Creating Inclusive Communities,’’ in Turner and Sheila R. Zedlewski, eds., After Katrina: Rebuilding Opportunity

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and Equity into the New New Orleans (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute, January 2006), 9. 48. See, for instance, Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program, New Orleans After the Storm’’; Katz, ‘‘Concentrated Poverty.’’ See also Peter Dreier, ‘‘Katrina and Power in America,’’ Urban Affairs Review 41 (March 2006): 528–49. 49. Randall Mason, ‘‘Promoting Cultural Preservation,’’ in Eugenie L. Birch and Susan M. Wachter, eds., Rebuilding Urban Places After Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 273. 50. Nick Spitzer, ‘‘Rebuilding the ‘Land of Dreams’ with Music,’’ in Birch and Wachter, Rebuilding Urban Places, 305–28; Spitzer quoted in Mimi Reed, ‘‘Loving New Orleans, With a Ready Escape,’’ New York Times, June 7, 2007. Karen Kingsley reinforces the point: ‘‘If engineers, architects, and planers give cities their form, they do not control the meaning of their creations. Buildings and places derive their meaning from the way they are used, the events that grow up around them, the myths and stories that are created over time. Buildings and their neighborhoods were the setting where New Orleanians defined their identity, developed their customs and rituals, and understood their sense of place. After Katrina disrupted those histories and memories, people looked to their buildings and neighborhoods even more desperately.’’ Kingsley, ‘‘New Orleans Architecture: Building Renewal,’’ Journal of American History 94 (December 2007): 719. Helen A. Regis considers New Orleans’s second line tradition in particular an agent for building civil society across physical and social distance and accumulating cultural capital. ‘‘Second Lines, Minstrelsy, and the Contested Landscapes of New Orleans Afro-Creole Festivals,’’ Cultural Anthropology 14 (November 1999): 472–504. 51. Sandy Sorlien and Leland R. Speed, ‘‘Walking to Wal-Mart: Planning for Mississippi and Beyond,’’ in Birch and Wachter, Rebuilding Urban Places, 331–32. See also the report in the real estate section of the Philadelphia Inquirer, February 5, 2006. 52. Dell Upton, ‘‘Understanding New Orleans’s Architectural Ecology,’’ in Birch and Wachter, Rebuilding Urban Places, 286. 53. Smith, ‘‘Mixed-Income Communities,’’ 278. 54. Nicolai Ouroussoff, ‘‘Katrina’’s Legacy: Theme Park or Cookie Cutter?’’ New York Times, October 18, 2005. 55. According to a New York Times, November 22, 2005, report, public housing accommodated 20,000 persons in New Orleans before the storm, nearly 5 percent of the city population. 56. Martha Mahoney, ‘‘Law and Racial Geography: Public Housing and the Economy in New Orleans,’’ Stanford Law Review 42 (May 1990): 1267. For a more direct argument on the ways even the most notorious housing complexes can sustain communities, in this case focusing on Chicago’s Cabrini-Green complex, see Arthur M. Wolfson, ‘‘Lost in the Rubble: How the Destruction of Public Housing Fails to Account for the Loss of Community,’’ Chapman Law Review 9 (Fall 2005): 51–72. 57. Scott Keller quoted in ‘‘A Political Storm,’’ Financial Times, August 17, 2007. 58. Nicolai Ouroussoff, ‘‘All Fall Down,’’ New York Times, November 19, 2006.

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59. ‘‘A Better Life in New Orleans; Failed Public Housing Must Be Demolished,’’ Editorial, Washington Post, December 20, 2007. 60. Ouroussoff, ‘‘All Fall Down’’; Nicolai Ourussoff, ‘‘High Noon in New Orleans: The Bulldozers Are Ready,’’ New York Times, December 19, 2007. 61. New York Times, December 21, 2007. 62. Stacy E. Seichnaydre, ‘‘The More Things Change, the More they Stay the Same: In Search of a Just Public Housing Policy Post-Katrina,’’ Tulane Law Review 81 (March 2007): 1263. 63. ‘‘The Right Answer in New Orleans,’’ Editorial, New York Times, December 25, 2007. 64. New York Times, December 18, 2007. 65. Jason DeParle, ‘‘Katrina’s Tide Carries Many to Hopeful Shores,’’ New York Times, April 23, 2006, provides a nuanced picture of evacuees from New Orleans, looking at 17 counties associated with the two largest destination points, Atlanta and Houston. While new residents found themselves in areas of higher income and better schools than they had experienced in New Orleans, jobs were not always forthcoming. Moreover, the areas where they concentrated showed signs of moving toward greater minority concentration in schools, often a sign that neighborhood segregation would follow. 66. Kent B. Germany, ‘‘The Politics of Poverty and History: Racial Inequality and the Long Prelude to Katrina,’’ Journal of American History 94 (December 2007): 750–51. 67. According to a report from the Oakland, California-based think tank PolicyLink, of the 41,000 affordable units lost to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, only 43 percent could be expected to be rebuilt under federal programs. The figure was even lower, at 16 percent for those earning under $26, 150. Reported in an Associated Press story, Philadelphia Inquirer, January 26, 2008. 68. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, dir. and prod. Spike Lee, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks Production and HBO Home Documentary Films (2006), profiled in New York Times, August 3, 2006, reviewed in Journal of American History 93 (December 2006): 997–98. 69. powell et al., ‘‘Towards a Transformation of Race,’’ 81. Nicolai Ouroussoff was no more reassuring when he wrote of New Orleans in an extended article, ‘‘it’s still possible to imagine a more sustainable, socially inclusive city, one that could serve as a model as powerful and far reaching as the American subdivisions of the 1950s. For that to happen, however, a range of government agencies would need to work together to come up with a more coordinated plan.’’ Ouroussof, ‘‘Reinventing America’s Cities: The Time Is Now,’’ New York Times, March 29, 2009.

Conclusion 1. John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 342. 2. Herbert J. Gans, ‘‘Toward a Human Architecture: A Sociologist’s View of

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the Profession,’’ in Gans, People, Plans, and Policies: Essays on Poverty, Racism, and Other National Urban Problems (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 12. 162. Jill Grant, Planning the Good Community: New Urbanism in Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2006), xviii. 4. Alexander von Hoffman, ‘‘High Ambitions: The Past and Future of American Low-Income Housing Policy,’’ Housing Policy Debate 7, 3 (1996): 423–46. Eric H. Monkkonen, America Becomes Urban: The Development of U.S. Cities and Towns, 1780–1980 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 14. D. Bradford Hunt concurs with these assessments, asserting that while many Chicago highrise public housing units functioned poorly, ‘‘blaming architects for public housing’s failures exaggerates their importance. Such arguments assume that the complex social problems of families and cities could be solved merely by proper design—a variant of the environmental determinism that plagued the logic of progressive slum reformers. Instead, architects operated within planning assumptions and policy restrictions that tightly constrained design possibilities.’’ Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 122. 5. Jon Lang, Creating Architectural Theory: The Role of the Behavioral Sciences in Environmental Design (New York: Van Nostrand, 1987), 104. 6. Charles C. Bohl, ‘‘New Urbanism and the City: Potential Applications and Implications for Distressed Inner-City Neighborhoods,’’ Housing Policy Debate 11, 4 (2000): 761–801. 7. Archer, Architecture and Suburbia, 342. 8. Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformation, Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1961), 101, cited in Kenneth Kolson, Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 121. 9. Alexander Garvin, The American City: What Works, What Doesn’t (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996), 275. Radburn’s influence, Garvin asserts, was much more widespread in Europe, especially England, where government had a more direct role in development. He cites especially the new town of Stevenage, outside London, which includes superblocks, specialized road systems, and numerous pedestrian underpasses. 10. Eugenie Ladner Birch, ‘‘Radburn and the American Planning Movement: The Persistence of an Idea,’’ in Donald A. Krueckeberg, ed., Introduction to Planning History in the United States (New Brunswick, N.J.: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1983), 140. 11. For a summary of the ways commerce has overridden community goals in regional shopping centers, see Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 274–78. Shortly after her book appeared, Cohen dropped the idea of doing a signing in the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey, the only mall Gruen and Rouse collaborated on, when a Rouse Company representative said it would cost her a $5,000 fee to gain access to the mall’s customers. 12. Introduction to Frederic J. Osborn and Arnold Whittick, New Towns: Their Origins, Achievements and Progress, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Leonard Hill, 1977), xvii, cited in Robert Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian

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Theories for Architecture and Urban Planning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 160. 13. Jonathan Barnett, The Elusive City: Five Centuries of Design, Ambition and Miscalculation (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 88. 14. Planned unit development emerged in the 1970s as a means of giving developers of larger sites greater flexibility with lot size and density than traditional zoning might allow. According to a standard assessment of community design, such efforts offer ‘‘a flexible alternative to traditional zoning that can, if properly administered, result in developments that are more compatible with the landscape and with the lifestyles of humans who live in them.’’ Eric Damian Kelly and Barbara Becker, Community Planning: An Introduction to the Comprehensive Plan (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2000), 17–18. See also Garvin, American City, 275–80. William M. Rhohe, ‘‘From Local to Global: One Hundred Years of Neighborhood Planning,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (Spring 2009): 224, notes that the traditional neighborhood development approach was specifically designed to make up for the shortcomings of planned unit development. An early description of Wright and Stein’s approach to development by Roy Lubove makes clear the connection to contemporary efforts to cluster development: ‘‘By means of largescale grouping or clustering of dwellings—either row or detached—these innovators tried to minimize the space usually ‘wasted’ upon roads, alleys, narrow courts or driveways, or small non-functional lawns or yards and to combine this saved space for more effective use. The overall intent was to achieve compact design, reduced land coverage and density, economics in construction, and an organization of open space which would best serve human biological and social needs.’’ Lubove, ‘‘A Community-Planning Approach to City-Building,’’ Social Work 10, 2 (1965): 60. 15. Alexander Von Hoffman, ‘‘Housing and Planning: A Century of Social Reform and Local Power,’’ Journal of the American Planning Association 75 (Spring 2009): 236; Keller Easterling, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways, and Houses in America (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 165. For more detail, see 169–71. 16. Andrew Hope, ‘‘Evaluating the Significance of San Lorenzo Village, A Mid-20th Century Suburban Community,’’ CRM: The Journal of Heritage Stewardship 2 (Summer 2005): 55–56. 17. Emily Talen, ‘‘The Problem with Community Planning,’’ Journal of Planning Literature 15 (November 2000): 179. 18. Christopher B. Leinberger takes the optimistic position that the pendulum of consumer preference has already swung away from what he calls the drivable sub-urban environment to walkable urban centers, though the evidence for such a claim remains sketchy. Leinberger, The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2008). 19. Grant, Planning the Good Community, 196. Cliff Ellis dismisses such critiques as ‘‘driven by their own theoretical predispositions far more than careful analysis of New Urbanist communities.’’ Quoting Ronald Beiner, he asserts, ‘‘Living as we do in a postmodern life, it might be thought that we need least of all a postmodern philosophy that can only help destabilize further the often chaotic jumble of contemporary social relations.’’ Ellis, ‘‘The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals,’’ Journal of Urban Design 7 (October 2002): 272.

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20. Robert A. Beauregard, ‘‘New Urbanism: Ambiguous Certainties,’’ Journal of Architectural and Planning Research 19 (Autumn 2002): 185–86. 21. John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, eds., Everyday Urbanism (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999). 22. Douglas S. Kelbaugh, Repairing the American Metropolis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 170–73. The Post Urban view could also be associated with David Harvey, most notably his book Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1996). 23. As Robert Leighninger reports, some of the earliest New Deal public housing projects remain viable housing options, including recently rehabilitated Carl Mackley Houses. Robert D. Leighninger, Jr., Long-Range Public Investment: The Forgotten Legacy of the New Deal (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), 128. 24. Emily Talen, ‘‘Design That Enables Diversity: The Complications of a Planning Ideal,’’ Journal of Planning Literature 20 (February 2006): 242; Talen, ‘‘The Problem with Community Planning,’’ Journal of Planning Literature 15 (November 2000): 177. Talen further argues that a regional approach respecting nature to create a diversity of living environments, through what Andres Duany has called the transcept, supports a ‘‘diversity of physical frameworks within which a diversity of people may flourish.’’ ‘‘Help for Urban Planning: The Transcept Strategy,’’ Journal of Urban Design 7 (October 2002): 306–7. 25. Cliff Ellis, ‘‘The New Urbanism: Critiques and Rebuttals,’’ 277–78, quoting Yodan Rofe`, ‘‘Space and Community: The Spatial Foundations of Urban Neighborhoods,’’ Berkeley Planning Journal 10 (1995): 120. 26. ‘‘We were far more concerned with the total fabric, which included the rehabilitation of existing cities, than with the garden city as such,’’ Mumford asserted in a September 18, 1962, letter to Lubove. Claiming the Garden City concept was primarily useful as a means of convincing Americans that such utopian visions could actually be effected, and not merely ‘‘chimerical,’’ Mumford credited RPAA’s decision to associate with the idea as pragmatic, citing as evidence of the value of that strategic decision Paul Kellogg’s willingness to publish the special 1925 issue of The Survey highlighting the RPAA’s larger concept for regional development. Roy Lubove Collection, University of Pittsburgh. 27. David Brain’s critique of planning practice described in Chapter 7, for instance, follows rather closely Lubove’s description of the RPAA. The RPAA, Lubove asserted, was ‘‘a movement opposed to the commodity conception of land and housing and its consequences for the urban physical and social environment. . . . Above all, RPAA denounced the surveyor-type, pseudo-planning of cities which reflected speculative imperatives and had produced the standardized grid subdivision; the uniform, often wasteful road width; and the deep narrow house lot of American cities. RPAA complained that such mechanical subdivision had no necessary relationship to human biological or social needs, let alone the long-term economic needs of the community as a whole. Historically, RPAA conceded, the pseudoplanning of residential environments had brilliantly served the purposes of speculative subdivision, trade, and sale by expediting survey and transfer of title. But it had also produced economic waste, visual monotony, and a design motif that made it

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almost impossible to relate mass and open space effectively.’’ Lubove, ‘‘A Community-Planning Approach to City-Building,’’ Social Work 10, 2 (1965): 62. 28. Robert Fishman, ‘‘The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning,’’ in Fishman, ed., American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 65, 83.

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Ackerman, Frederick, 47, 177n40; director of design, Emergency Fleet Corporation, 33 Adamson, Paul, 43 Addams, Jane, 20, 173n51; and organized play, 12; and settlement work, 10–11 affordable housing, 34, 105, 109, 119–21, 147– 50, 157–58; Mount Laurel court decisions, 148; in New Orleans, 154–55, 210n67 Ahlbrandt, Roger, 60–61, 68, 75 Alexander, William, 51, 181n23 American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods (ACTION), 104 American Federation of Full Fashioned Hosiery Workers, 135–36 American Institute of Architects, 66 American Institute of Planners, 45, 47 American Planning Association, 146 American Scenic Preservation Society, 16 Annie E. Casey Foundation, 148 Anthony, Carl, 153 Archer, John, 160–61 architectural determinism, 131, 141, 160–61, 205n21 Arts and Crafts movement, 27 Atterbury, Grosvenor, 29–31 Augur, Tracy, 47, 74 automobile: effects of, 43, 53, 55, 94, 114–15; restrictions, 116, 121; traffic, 35, 51, 55, 79–81 Baltimore: Bureau of Housing, 97; Charles Center urban renewal project, 104; empowerment zone, 112; Fight Blight campaign, 100–101, 103, 111; Greater Baltimore Committee, 102, 104; housing code enforcement, 97, 187n68; Housing Council, 96; hygiene of housing ordinance, 96; Inner Harbor, 89, 106; Real Estate Board, 99–100; redevelopment, 96; Sandtown-

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Winchester neighborhood revitalization, 107–8, 111–12; shopping facilities, 90, 92 Baltimore Plan, 97–101, 103 Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), 111–12 Barbour, Haley, 128 Barnett, Jonathan, 162 Bartholomew, Harland, 71–72 Bauer, Catherine, 2, 75, 137; Modern Housing (1934), 135; and public housing, 66, 68, 135– 36, 139 Beauregard, Robert, 164 Bellamy, Edward, 23, Looking Backward (1888), 24–25 Belmont, Steve, 146, 200n30, 202n58, 208n39 Benjamin, Walter, 163 Biloxi, Miss., 128–30 Birch, Eugenie, 161, 204n15 blight, 60, 65, 69–70, 72, 74, 96–97, 100 Bloom, Nicholas Dagan, 192n1, 205n24 Bogart, Michele, 15 Bohl, Charles, 161, 199n7 Bond, Julian, 149 Borchert, James, 151–52 Boston: building regulations, 9; downtown revitalization, 90; East End neighborhood, 150; organized play movement, 12; public housing, 141 Boulter, Robert, 109–10 Boyer, M. Christine, 7 Boyer, Paul, 17 Brain, David, 115, 125–27, 163, 165; and postHurricane Katrina reconstruction, 128 Breckenfeld, Gurney, 80, 91, 101, 192n5 Bridgeport, Conn., wartime housing, 31 Broadway Plaza shopping center (Los Angeles), 93–94 Brodie, Jay, 107

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216

Index

Brooklyn, N.Y., housing reform, 9 Brooks, David, 127 Buckingham, James Silk, 24 Buffalo, N.Y.: building regulations, 9; retail sales, 81 building code enforcement, 103 building regulations, 9 Burgess, Ernest W., 63 Burlington Mall (London), 84 Burnham, Daniel, 17, 29 Burnstein, Daniel, 11 Bush, George W., 127, 154 Calthorpe, Peter, 121–23, 126, 129, 198n1 Camden, N.J.: Area Opportunity Project, 148; Cramer Hill neighborhood, 146; Housing Authority, 144; municipal recovery legislation, 145–48, 158; NAACP, 143; and New Urbanist principles for Bergen Square neighborhood, 147; public housing, 143–45; redevelopment, 146–47; Yorkship Village housing development, 31–32, 129 Cameron, Ardis, 20 Carl Mackley Houses (Philadelphia), 68, 135– 36, 143, 213n23 Carpenter, Daniel, 75 Carpenter, Niles, 68 Celebration, Fla., 119–20 central business districts, 80 Charities and the Commons, 10 Cherry Hill, N.J., mall, 81, 90–91, 105, 211n11 Chicago: building regulations, 9; civic center, 17; Gautreaux court decision requiring dispersal of public housing residents, 145; Housing Authority, 138; municipal ownership, 20; 1909 plan, 17; parks, 17; Plan for Transformation, 145; Planning Commission, 88; play space, 12; public housing, 138, 145, 209n56 Chicago School of Sociology, 181n35 child play, 12–14, 28, 52–54, 62–63, 79, 151; in public housing, 138, 143–44 Children’s Bureau, 20–22 Church of the Saviour (Washington), 108 Cincinnati, building regulations, 9 Cisneros, Henry, 123 Citizens Planning and Housing Association (CPHA), 96–98, 102, 107, 112 citizenship and design, 116 The City (film, 1939), 36–37, 42, 45–59

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City Beautiful movement, 5, 14, 62 City Housing Corporation (New York), 33, 35–36, 185n29 civic art, 5, 15–16, 27 civic centers, 27, 62–63 Civic Films, 46 civic regeneration, 1–3, 9, 12, 20 civil rights movement, 4 civility, 123, 126, 163, 165 Cleveland: building regulations, 9; civic structures, 17; shopping facilities, 92 Cohen, Lizabeth, 171n25, 188n1, 211n11 Cole, Albert, 102 Colean, Miles, 101–3 Columbia, Md., 45, 91, 95, 105–7, 111, 165 Columbus, Ohio, shopping facilities, 79 Committee on Congestion of Population (New York City), 18 The Commons (Trenton, N.J.), 94 communitarian values, 26, 39, 125, 206n28 Community Builders Council, 80 community center movement, 8, 61, 70 community organizing, 4, 149 comprehensive city planning, 18; origins of, 15 congestion, 18, 36., 42, 55 Congre`s International d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), 131, 198n1, 202n56 Congress for the New Urbanism, 114, 123, 132 conservation, 35 Cook, G. Yates, 97–98, 100 Cooley, Charles Horton, 53, 57, 62–63, 185n34 Copland, Aaron, 50 Cosby, Gordon, 108–9 Costigan, Patrick, 108, 111 Country Club Plaza (Kansas City, Mo.), 77, 82, 91 Crawford, Margaret, 164, 188n1 Crawford Square (Pittsburgh), 124 crime, 6, 112 Cross Country Shopping Center (Yonkers, N.Y.), 79 Cunningham, James, 60–61, 64, 68, 75 D’Alesandro, Thomas, 98, 102 Davis, Robert, 116 Dayton, Ohio, shopping arcades, 92 department stores, 78, 89 defensible space, 139–40, 151 DeForest, Robert, 9, 29

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Index design, effect on community vitality, 27, 116, 126–27, 129 Devine, Edward T., 11, 18 DeVito, Mathias J., 92 Democracity, 40–41 Disney Corporation, 119–20, 163 Disneyland, 93 documentary film, 45–46, 49, 59 Dore, Rheta Childe, 19 Dos Passos, John, 51 downtown: parking, 88–90; revitalization, 108; shopping, 77, 79, 85, 92–94, 106, 129 Dreyfus, Henry, 40 drugs, 144 Duany, Andres, 115–16, 119, 123, 132, 161, 213n24; and post-hurricane reconstruction on the Gulf Coast, 128 Dye, Nancy, 19 Easterling, Keller, 162, 199n15 Edwards, John, 156 Ehrenhalt, Alan, 121 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 102–4 Ellis, Cliff, 132, 165, 200n34, 212n19 Embry, Robert, 96 eminent domain, 70, 72, 74, 97, 146 Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (1933), 68 Enterprise Foundation, 93, 107–9 environmental intervention, 92, 96, 161; concept of, 3–4; and neighborhood planning, 63; and Progressive Era reform, 5, 10–11, 15 environmental reform, 4, 77, 90 Escatawpa Village (Moss Point, Miss.), 129 Ethel Lawrence Homes (Mount Laurel, N.J.), 149–50 Fainstein, Susan, 200n36 Fair Share Housing Corporation, 149–50 family life, 65, 69, 72–73, 85 Faneuil Hall Marketplace (Boston), 92–93, 106 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), 127, 130, 155 Federal Highway Act of 1956, 79, 88 Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 68, 96, 103, 137, 162 Finley, William, 113 Fischler, Raphael, 182n1 Fishman, Robert, 23, 27, 166, 178n60, 198n6 Flanagan, Maureen, 20, 173n50 Follett, Mary, 62–63, 66, 70

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217

Ford Foundation, 147, 153–54 Ford Motor Company, 40 Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, 23–24, 29, 36, 61, 70, 78, 117, 165 Fort Worth, Tex., plans for downtown shopping center, 85–88 Foster, Sheila, 143, 145, 205n23 Foucault, Michel, 163 Fresno, Calif., 89 Froelicher, Hans, 100, 102 Fulton, William, 42–43, 123, 129 Futurama exhibit, World’s Fair of 1939, 41–42 Gans, Herbert, 107, 150, 160 garden cities, 23–28, 47, 49, 162, 165; design influence, 3, 31, 35–37, 43, 60, 77, 105, 162, 166 Garden City Association of America, 28 Garvin, Alexander, 161, 212n14 gated communities, 115, 163 Geddes, Patrick, 28, 33, 44, 114 Gelfand, Mark, 46, 69, 102 General Motors Corporation, 41 gentrification, 132 George, Henry, 23, 36; Progress and Poverty (1879), 245; single tax theory, 18 Gindroz, Ray, 123, 125–26, 205n25 Goodwillie, Arthur, 71 Grant, Jill, 131–32, 160, 163, 199n24, 202n56 Greenbelt, Md., 36–37, 49, 161 greenbelts, 26, 35, 53, 162 Greendale, Wis., 38 Greenwich House settlement (New York), 66, 74 Gould, Elgin, 7, 9 Grierson, John, 46, 49 Griffith, Richard, 46, 57, 180, n21 Gruen, Victor, 81–83, 105, 121, 162, 181n Gulf Coast, 127–32, 154, 159 Gutheim, Frederick, 3, 186n45, 195n44 Habermas, Ju¨rgen, 163 Hampstead Garden Suburb, 28–30 Harborplace (Baltimore), 92–93, 95, 106–7 Harlem River Houses (New York), 137 Harmon, Donza, 143–45 Harvey, David, 132, 200n36, 213n22 Hayden, Delores, 202n58 Heiskell, Andrew, 104 highways, 42, 56, 74, 87–88 Hine, Lewis, 8, 53

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218

Index

Hollyday, Guy T. O., 97–98, 100, 102–3 home ownership, 65–66 homesteading, 31 Hoppenfeld, Morton, 106, 113 Housing and Town Planning Act (1909), 162 housing discrimination, 70, 75, 137, 143, 156 Housing Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) VI program, 140–42; adopts New Urbanist principles, 123–24, 134; in Camden, N.J., 143–44, 146; in New Orleans, 156–57 housing regulation, 9, 20 housing rehabilitation, 71, 97, 103 Hoover, Herbert, 65 Howard, Ebenezer, 33–34, 36, 161–62; Garden Cities concept, 1–2, 23–28, 35, 38, 60, 135 Howe, Frederick C., 21 Hudson’s Department Store (Minneapolis), 82 Hull House settlement, 10–11, 21 Hunt, D. Bradford, 203n3, 211n4 Hunt, Tristram, 43 Hurricane Katrina, 4, 127–30, 153 Ihlder, John, 28, 74 immigrants: and civic beauty, 15; living conditions, 6–7, 14–15; and settlement work, 10–11 immigration, 63 Isaacs, Reginald, 69, 75, 185n32 Jacobs, Jane, 43, 75, 88, 94, 163–64; The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1962), 60; and public housing, 139–41 Jacobs, Lewis, 50 Jefferson, Thomas, on cities, in Notes on Virginia, 1 Johnson, Tom L., 21 Jubilee Housing (Washington), 108–9 Katyal, Neal Kumar, 141 Katz, Bruce, 154 Katz, Peter, 115, 121 Keith, Nathaniel, 104 Kelbaugh, Douglas, 164 Kelley, Florence: head, Committee on Congestion of Population, 18; director, National Consumers League, 11; and settlement work, 20–21 Kellogg, Paul, 18, 34, 213n26 Kentlands (Gaithersburg, Md.), 117–18, 122

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Ketchum, Morris, 81 Kemp, Jack, 110 Klaus, Susan, 27 Kohler, Wis., 30 Kohn, Robert, 47, 177n40; and Committee on Design, 1939 New York World’s Fair, 40–41; director, Emergency Fleet Corporation, 33; director, Public Works Administration Housing Division, 135, 204n8 Koolhaas, Rem, 164 Krier, Leon, 115 Krummeck, Elsie, 81 Laguna West (Sacramento, Calif.), 121–22 land assembly, 70, 72–73 land use reform, 18–19, 25, 97, 147 Lang, Jon, 160 Langston Terrace (Washington), 137 Lathrop, Julia, 21 Le Corbusier, 2, 41–42 Lee, Richard C., 2 Lee, Spike, When the Levees Broke (2006), 159 Leighninger, Robert, 46, 137, 213n23 Leman, Nicholas, 112 Letchworth garden city, 27–28, 34 Levittown, N.Y., 78 Levittown, Pa., 150 limited dividend housing, 9, 33, 135 Litchfield, Electus, 31 Lincoln, Alice, 7 Lorentz, Pare, 45; The City (1939), 49, 51, 53, 55, 57; The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), 46–47; The River (1937), 46 Lowell, Mass., 31 Lubove, Roy, 3, 7, 166, 212n14, 213n27 MacKaye, Benton, 35, 56, 181n29 Mahoney, Martha, 156 Marsh, Benjamin, 182n1; director, Committee on Congestion of Population, 18, and city planning, 18–19 Marshall, Alfred, 24 Marx, Leo, 84 Mason, Randall, 16, 154–55 Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, 12 McFarlane, Audrey, 145–46 McGreevey, James, 145–46 Meacham, Standish, 42 Meltzer, Jack, 93 Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, 73

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Index Midtown Plaza (Rochester), 89 Miller, Donald, 33 Miller, Mervyn, 28 Milliron’s department store (Los Angeles), 81 Millspaugh, Martin, 101, 192n5 modernism, 2, 131 Mondawmin shopping center (Baltimore), 90, 92, 105 Monkkonen, Eric, 160 Morton, Frances (Froelicher), 96–98, 100, 102 Moses, Robert, 73–74, 97 Moss, Hunter, 96 Muller, Peter O., 79–81 Mumford, Lewis, 2–3, 44, 53, 75, 114, 160–61, 163; and The City (1939), 42, 45, 48–52, 56; Culture of Cities (1938), 38–39, 46, 56–57, 169n3; on garden cities, 43, 176n32; and neighborhood planning, 64, 66; and Radburn, N.J., 36; and Regional Plan Association of America, 33, 35, 166, 179n5, 213n; resident Sunnyside Gardens, 34; and town planning, 162; and World’s Fair of 1939, 39, 42, 178n56 Muncy, Robyn, 21, 171n21 municipal arts organizations, 14 municipal housekeeping, 19, 21 National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB), 72–73, 75 National Child Labor Committee, 12 National Community Center Association, 68 National Conference on City Planning (1909), 18, 66, 164 National Conference of Charities and Corrections, 11 National Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership (1931), 65, 71 National Commission on Urban Problems (1967), 110 National Consumer League, 11 National Housing Act: (1937), 68–69, 73, 91, 96, 102, 135; (1949), 60–61, 65, 68–69, 76, 102, 158; (1954), 88, 188n69 National Housing Association, 19, 28 National Housing Conference, 68 Neighborhood Improvement Act (1937), 72–73 neighborhood parks, 8

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neighborhood planning, 8, 28, 34–35, 53, 60– 76, 78, 111, 113 neighborhood shopping facilities, 78, 91 Nelson, Hebert U., 72 New Deal, 20, 128, 166; Committee on Urbanism, 46; National Recovery Act, 66; planners, 38; Public Works Administration, 47, 68, 135–37; Resettlement Administration, 24, 36–37, 47, 78 New England village ideal, 31, 47–48, 50, 53, 58 New Haven, Conn.: architecture, 116; civil disturbances, 2; downtown revitalization, 90 New Orleans: cultural traditions, 155, 209n50; Housing Authority, 156; poverty, 154, 158; preservation, 158; poverty, 208n44, n46; public housing, 156–58, 204n9, 209n55; reconstruction, 154–55; school voucher program, 127, second line tradition, 159, 209n50 New Towns Act (1946), 162 new towns program, 24, 36, 45, 47, 51, 56, 78, 91, 162 New Urbanism, 43, 45; and building codes, 117, 129, 155; and consumerism, 132; critique of plans for New Orleans, 155–56; design principles, 126, 164; and Garden City tradition, 3,114; and Katrina cottages, 155; and mixed land use, 129, 131, 141; in Milwaukee, 202n58; and modernism, 131; neighborhood planning, 114, 117–18; and neotraditional architecture, 116; and postHurricane Katrina reconstruction, 128; and social equity, 129–30, 132, 163; and sprawl, 132, 163; traditional neighborhood development, 126. See also Congress for a New Urbanism; Kentlands; Seaside New York Charity Organization Society, 9 New York City: beautification efforts, 15; Central Park, 35; draft riots, 6; Five Points area, 12; and historic preservation, 16; Lower East Side, 12, 73–74; public housing, 138, 205n24; street cleaning leagues, 13; tenements 6–9, 138; World’s Fair of 1939, 39– 42, 81 New York State: tenement law (1901), 9; Urban Redevelopment Corporation Act, 72–73 Newark Housing Authority, 203n5

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220

Index

neoliberalism, 4, 131 Newman, Oscar, 139–41, 144, 151, 165 Nicholes, Anna, 20 Nichols, J. C., 77–78, 80–81, 84 Norquist, John, 202n58 Northland shopping center (Detroit), 81–82, 84, 91–92, 105 Northpark shopping center (Dallas), 85 Obama, Barack, 4, 156 O’Connor, Peter, 149 Odgen, William, 40 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 3, 35, 120 Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr., 18, 29 Orenco (Portland, Ore.), 121 Ouroussoff, Nicolai, 155–57, 169n8, 210n69 Paramus, N.J., 79, 90 Park Duvall public housing complex (Louisville), 142 park planning, 26, 62 Park, Robert, 63 Park Forest, Ill., 78 parkways, 55–56 Parker, Barry, 29, 34, 42, 198n4; architect garden city Letchworth, 27 parks, 16, 26, 36, 52, 103, 121, 138 Pas Christian, Miss., 129 Paterson, N.J., 90 pedestrian malls, 81 pedestrian uses, 31, 35, 64, 79, 81, 87, 92, 115– 16, 121, 147 Peets, Elbert, 71 Perry, Clarence Arthur, 2, 8, 28, 35, 53, 161; and community center movement, 61–62; and neighborhood planning concept, 60, 63–68, 78, 116–17, 125, 141, 170n11, 182n1; and redevelopment, 70, 146; and residential homogeneity, 165 Peterson, Jon, 14–15, 19, 183n10 Philadelphia, public housing, 135–36, 138 physical determinism, 125, 131. See also architectural determinism Pittsburgh: New Urbanist design, 124–25; organized play, 12 Pittsburgh Survey, 10, 29 planned decentralization, 43, 69 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 115–16, 122 Playground Association of America, 12 Popkin, Susan J., 143, 208n47 Porter, Michael, 112

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Portland, Ore., 45 poverty, 11; concentrated, 14, 156–57 powell, john a., 154, 159 Prairie Crossing (Greyslake, Ill.), 120–21 President’s Advisory Committee on Government Housing Policies and Programs, 102–5 Progressive reform, 2, 61–63; factfinding, 10, 29; and women, 19–21 Providence, 90, 92 Pruit-Igoe public housing complex (St. Louis), 138–39, 169n5, 206n25 public housing, 60, 72, 102, 161, 164; amenities, 136–37, 156; New Deal programs, 135. See also HOPE VI program public-private partnerships, 107 public safety, 70, 103, 139–41 public spaces, 1, 5, 36, 43, 88, 123, 138–39 Pullman, Ill., 30 Putnam, Robert, 165, 201n39, 205n23 Radburn (Fair Lawn, N.J.), 35–36, 42, 47, 53, 161, 179n8; shopping facilities, 78, 117 Radford, Gail, 137 Rainwater, Lee, 139, 205n17 Ranney, George, 120 Ranney, Victoria, 120 Rapkin, Chester, 113 RCA-Victor Company, 40 redevelopment, 60, 70–72. See also urban renewal regional equity, 149, 153 Regional Plan Association (New York), 72 Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA), 2, 24, 33, 42, 45, 47, 53, 66, 115, 149, 162, 166, 213n27 Regional Plan of New York, 65, 70, 72 regional planning, 34–35, 40, 56, 123, 208n45 regional shopping malls, 79, 81–82, 85, 93, 105, 161–62; amenities, 84, 91 regionalism, 198n4 relocation, 146 residential homogeneity, 70, 125 Reston, Va., 45, 195n44 Riis, Jacob, 10, 53; and environmental reform, 6; How the Other Half Lives (1890), 6, 12; on housing conditions, 6–7; and organized play, 12 Robinson, Charles Mulford, on civic art, 5, 15–16, 62

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Index Robinson, Hilyard, 137 Rochester, N.Y., 89 Rockefeller Center (New York City), 82, 94 Rodakiewicz, Henwar, 47, 50–52 Rodgers, Daniel, 17 Roland Park (Baltimore), 77 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 36, 177n40 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 46, 137 Roosevelt, Theodore: on slum conditions, 6–7, and White House Conference on the Care of Dependent Children (1909), 21 Ross, Andrew, 120 Rotha, Paul, 56 Rouse, James, 119, 161; and American Council to Improve Our Neighborhoods, 104; Baltimore Citizens Planning and Housing Association, 96, 98, 102, 107; on community building, 106; developer of Columbia, Md., 105–6, 108, 112–14; early career, 95–96; and Enterprise Foundation, 107; and Fight Blight campaign, Baltimore, 100–101; and National Housing Act, 1954, 91, 102–4; as philanthropist, 101, 107–8; and public housing, 102; religious convictions, 108, 113; as shopping center developer, 90– 91, 104–5, 112, 162 Rouse, Patricia, 109 Rusk, David, 148, 153–54 Ruskin, John, 27, 33 Russell Sage Foundation, 10, 19. 35, 65, 71; support of Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, 23–24, 29, 61 Rye, N.Y., 81 Saint Louis: city plan, 1907, 62; Civic League, 62; public housing, 138 saloons, 6–7 sanitation reform, 10, 13, 20 satellite communities, 66 Satterthwaite, Ann, 93, 192n1 Schmoke, Kurt, 110, 112 schools, 63–65; as social centers, 63, 173n42; for recreation, 12 Scott, Mel, 61, 102, 187n57 Seaside, Fla., 116–17 settlement houses, 10, 12, 62–63, 75, 183n6 Schaefer, William Donald, 96 Schuyler, David, 188n1, 198n4 Scully, Vincent, 116 Seichnaydre, Stacy, 157

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shopping facilities, 70; as community centers, 80–81, 91; in garden city plans, 26, 36; growth of, 79; at Greenbelt, Md., 38, and neighborhood planning; 65, parking, 79, 87; signage, 85; suburban, 77–91, 95, 126 Silver, Christopher, 182n1, 201n38 Simkhovitch, Mary Kingsbury, 18–19, 74–75, 177n40, 185n29; and public housing, 66, 68; as settlement worker, 10 Sitte, Camillo, 29 slum clearance, 36, 66, 69, 71, 73, 101–4; conditions, 6–8, 96 smart growth, 115, 145, 147, 198n4 Smith, Carl, 17 Smith, Janet L., 155, 206n25, 207n34 Smith, Larry, 82, 90 social capital, 115, 121, 143, 145, 152–53, 201n39; in public housing, 141, 156 social equity, 129–30, 132; 143, 163, 169n9 social workers, 11, 65, 76 Sorkin, Michael, 130–31 South Street Seaport (New York City), 92, 94 Southdale Shopping Center (Minneapolis), 82–83, 85, 90, 105 Spence, Thomas, 24 Spengler, Oswald, 56 Spitzer, Nick, 155, 159 sprawl, 43, 82, 122, 132, 167, 178n60 Stein, Clarence, 2, 56, 65, 138–39, 152; and The City (1939), 42, 45–46, 49–51, 59; and new towns program, 37, 53, 177n48; and Radburn, N.J., 35–36; and Regional Plan Association of America, 33 Steiner, Jesse, 68 Steiner, Ralph, 47, 49–52 Stephenson, Bruce, 115 Stern, Robert A. M., 119–20 Stonorov, Oscar, 135–36, 143, 204n8 Strand, Paul, 47 street play, 13 Stuyvesant Town (New York City), 73–75, 97 suburban malls, 80. See also regional shopping centers suburbs, 53; competition to cities, 71–72, 76; development, 36; employment opportunities, 148–49; growth, 4, 137; land use, 115, 123, 126 Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, 33–34, 47, 153, 179, n8 superblocks, 34–36, 64, 74, 138–40, 152, 161

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Index

Survey Graphic, special issue on regionalism (1925), 34 Szylvian, Kristen, 31 Talen, Emily, 43, 125–26, 132, 163, 165, 188n70; and post-Katrina reconstruction, 128–30, 132 Tarr, Joel, 10 Taylor, Graham, 12 Tennessee Valley Authority, 47 Time magazine, 46, 92, 95, 107 Town East shopping center (Arlington, Tex.), 85 Town Planning Act, Great Britain (1909), 43 transit villages, 122 Triester, Kenneth, 94 Trump Tower (New York), 94 Tugwell, Rexford, 36, 47, 49; 177n44 Tunnard, Christopher, 2 Turner, Victor, 20 unions, 135 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 112, 141; move-to-opportunity program, 145, 207n30; on reconstruction in New Orleans, 156–57; New Urbanist principles for Hope VI housing program, 123, 134–35 U.S. Housing Corporation, wartime housing, 31 U.S. National Resources Committee, 66 U.S. Shipping Board Emergency Fleet Corporation, 47; wartime housing, 31, 33 U.S. Supreme Court, 135, ruling voiding federally provided public housing, 135 Unwin, Raymond, 29, 33–34, 42, 177n40, 198n4; architect of garden city Letchworth, 27–28 Upper Rock district (Rockville, Md.), 122 Upton, Dell, 155 Urban Design Associates (Pittsburgh), 123, 200n34 Urban Institute, 154 urban land commissions, 72 Urban Land Institute, 73; proposal for downtown rehabilitation, 88; symposium on suburban shopping centers (1946), 80 urban renewal, 60 103–5, 112, 137–38, 151; origin of term, 95, 100 urban sociology, 57, 62, 69

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Vale, Lawrence, 141 Van Dyke, Willard, 49 Veiller, Lawrence: as head of New York Charity Organization Society, 9, forms National Housing Association, 19 Victor Emanuel Galleria (Milan), 84, 91 Victorian cities, 43 Vienna, 81, 87 von Hoffman, Alexander, 138, 160 Wagner, Robert, 66, 73 Wald, Lillian, 18, 177n40 Waring, George, 13 Washington, D.C.: Adams-Morgan neighborhood, 108–9; alley dwellings, 6, 151–52; Associated Charities, 6; housing conditions, 6; redevelopment, 71, 73, 75; Senate Park Commission, 15–16; workable plan, 104–5 Watertower Plaza (Chicago), 94 Weiss, Marc A., 200n32 Welwyn Garden City, 33 Westfield Acres public housing complex (Camden), 143–45 White, Alfred T., 8–9 Whitnall, Gordon, 66 Whyte, William, 94 Wilcox, Delos, 13 Wilson, William Julius, 207n34 Windsor, Fla., 116 Wirth, Lewis, 46, 57–58, 69 Wouthworth, Michael, 122 Woods, Robert, 62–63 World War I, 2, 31, 33, 61–62, 78, 135 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 15–16, 62 World’s Fair of 1939, 39–42, 45, 47 Worcester, Mass., 30 Wright, Gwendolyn, 11 Wright, Henry, 2, 44, 62, 65, 71, 75, 138–39, 152; and Radburn, N.J., 35–36; and Regional Plan Association of America, 33 Yale University, 2, 116 Zimmerman, Jeffrey, 131 zoning, 65, 70, 129; critique of, 115, 117, 126; in Germany, 18; inclusionary, 158; and shopping centers, 80

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this volume was suggested by my wife, Margaret Marsh, and I am very grateful for her encouragement and support for making the book a reality. Robert Lockhart, Penn Press’s history editor, was equally supportive during the period of the book’s development, and I look forward to continued work with him in the years ahead. A semester’s leave from Rutgers helped me launch this project. An earlier draft of the manuscript benefited greatly from the review and commentary of David Schuyler and an additional anonymous reader. The book incorporates many of the ideas that have informed my career over the past forty years. I am indebted to the many colleagues whose work I cite in this volume. Their writing has opened the field of urban history to many new insights and considerations, helping guide me in my thinking over the years. Changes to the reprinted chapters have been kept to a minimum, with only modest changes to introductions to facilitate the flow between chapters and a few notes added to acknowledge subsequent writing on the topic. Chapter 3, originally titled ‘‘Film as Artifact: The City,’’ is reprinted with permission from American Studies 28, 2 (Fall 1977): 71–85. Thanks again to Willard Van Dyke, Ralph Steiner, Bernard Mergen, and Frederick Gutheim for their criticisms of an earlier draft of the essay, which was presented at the Fifth Biennial Convention of the American Studies Association, November 6, 1975. Thanks also went to Professor William Alexander of the University of Michigan for sharing material and insights he gathered in conducting a history of the documentary film tradition in America. The City can be viewed online at the Prelinger archive at www.archive.org/details/ CityTheP1939. Chapter 4, originally titled ‘‘The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act,’’ is reprinted with permission from Journal of Urban History 9, 4 (August 1983): 421–44. Chapter 5, ‘‘The Planned Shopping Center in Suburb and City,’’ originally appeared in Journal of the American Planning Association 51, 4 (Au-

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Acknowledgments

tumn 1985): 449–60. It was based on a paper presented at the Ninth Biennial American Studies Association convention in Philadelphia, November 4, 1983 and at the Eighteenth Annual Indian American Studies Association convention in Hardwar, India, April 4, 1984. Thanks went to George Washington University colleagues Frederick Gutheim and Richard Longstreth, for their comments on earlier versions of the article, and to C. Ford Petross, curator of architecture, design, and engineering collections in the Division of Prints and Photographs at the Library of Congress. Petross made portions of Victor Gruen’s papers, then not in circulation, available to me in May 1984. Chapter 6, originally titled ‘‘Assessing James Rouse’s Role in American City Planning,’’ has been reprinted with permission from Journal of the American Planning Association 65, 2 (Spring 1999): 151–67.

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