The Decentralization Crisis: the Scarlet Letters of American Economic Development
And now we stand on the threshold of a nightmare—the central dramas of mid twentieth century economic development—suburbanization and urban renewal. These are our scarlet letters, forever etched into professional hearts and bosoms. Symbolically for most readers, suburbanization started on May 7 1947 with the opening day sale of the first post War suburban development, Levittown NY. The reality is decentralization had become the central drama of Big Cities by the mid-1920’s. I suspect most readers have only a vague sense of the timing of urban renewal; the initial federal legislation was 1937. Over the next several chapters, our history will detail the development and execution of our scarlet letters. In this section, I wish to sensitize and introduce the reader to the context and thought that linked suburbanization to urban renewal before launching into its description. In any case, by the end of the 1930’s, decentralization was the disease: slum clearance (later CBD-oriented urban renewal) the cure.
Suburbanization transformed the physical landscape of urban America between 1920 and 1980. According to noted economist John McDonald, “It can be argued that suburbanization is the most important economic and social trend of the second half of the twentieth century in America”.[1] Should a metropolitan area be dominated by its core central city/market (monocentric) or whether that core city instead a “first among equals” in a polycentric metropolitan area is a simplistic, but reasonably accurate summary of the themes confronted during our Age of Urban Renewal.[2]
Depicted, generalized, simplified, and stereotyped by TV shows, political ideologies, literature and zillions of academic studies and intellectual critiques, pre-1970 suburbs have indelibly etched them into America’s sub-conscious. For this history’s purposes, pre-1970 suburbanization, as characterized in Kenneth Jackson’s Crabgrass Frontier, shared five (and we add a sixth) characteristics: (1) peripheral location at the edge of the central city; (2) low density; (3) architectural similarity and styles and costs affordable to young families; (4) cheaper to buy in suburb than rent a comparable unit in central city; (5) economic and racial homogeneity; and, (6) car-oriented[3].
Reflecting its residents, they were family-oriented, with a “home is my castle” ethos. Education, services, zoning and infrastructure (hence planning) were especially central. Pre-1970 suburbs, labeled by Hayden as “sit-com suburbs”, Hanlon as suburban homogeneity, or by Jackson as the “cultural home of the white middle-class family”[4]. Pre-1970, there was little pressure for suburbs to form EDOs dedicated to business attraction. Growth happened naturally. Newly formed chambers of commerce provided integration, networking and governmental liaison. Chambers were particularly important in unincorporated geographies that by definition lacked focused governments.
Big Cities are Decentralizing—But is it Good or Bad?
The belief that suburbanization is a post-World War II phenomena is simply incorrect. Certainly, suburbanization exploded and became, arguably, the dominant feature of our metropolitan landscape after World War II is correct also. As detailed in this history and elsewhere, suburbs have been with us from Day One of the Industrial City. By the 1920’s suburban decentralization was a recognized reality. Decentralization, again arguably, was one of the two or three most important issues of urban America. What to do about Big Cities and suburbs, however, was much less clear.
The contemporary anti-suburban paradigm did not exist before the 1950’s. Before then a legitimate and influential strain of thought believed suburbs to be preferable to a very troubled central city. Even those that wished to preserve central city hinterland hegemony were uncertain as to how best to accomplish that goal[5]—indeed a pro-Big City consensus as to what the problem was had yet to develop. Different problems affected different groups differently. During the Thirties, a Community Development wing (housing reform) prospered. Using the New Deal federal government, this wing and its allies designed and secured approval for a major, page-turning economic development strategy, and secured the necessary authorization of tools and EDO-type. The next chapter shall present that story.
Other groups, primarily downtown and real estate-related, resisted, During the Thirties, they were mostly unsuccessful. Counter-intuitively, while pro-Big City housing reformers were successful using the New Deal and federal government, so were those who wished to “abandon the Big City” and develop new cities, suburban garden cities, for the middle and working classes. Tossed into the dustbins of history over the next decade, advocates for the latter approach played an important role in the interim period. One might keep in mind “things can change” and we might see these folks again in later years. Their tale is the subject of this section.
In the chapter dealing with the 1920’s, I introduced Lewis Mumford. Among other issues, his advocacy within the famous New York City Regional Plan movement for new garden city-like suburbs was discussed. That effort resulted in development of several new suburbs, Radburn being the most prominent. Mumford published his most important work, The Culture of Cities, in 1938. Mumford loved cities and regarded urbanity “as man’s greatest work”; but, he did not believe the 1940 industrial central city was the best urban form with which to house humanity. His work and thought, a continuation of Howard, Geddes and the garden city, attacked the scale, density, and the human pathologies, Mumford felt they conceived. As described by Gelfand “Mumford asserted central city revitalization was not possible and that the urban redevelopment (slum and blight removal) would provide only temporary relief, at best, and would merely serve the interests of the ‘real estate promoters’ in the interim. ‘As the city increases in population and wealth, it becomes less able to afford the things that make life generous, interesting, and amusing’.[6] Mumford did not advocate abandoning the central city; rather he perceived the Big City as the central employment center encased by a ring of residential areas. His vision was not very different from that of Wright’s Broadacre City.
Mumford and Stein “called for the dismemberment of the [central city as the] … ‘city of the dead’ in favor of a series of [well-planned] small scale ‘satellite cities’ [communitarian metropolis].[7]
Many prewar Progressives, like Mumford, advocated against the central city in effect because it had become a Privatist paradise. To him, “Cities were being designed by speculators, planners and engineers with little sensitivity to the nature and function of the community as a whole. Traffic and commerce had become the ‘presiding deities’ of the ‘sacred city”. [The] … continuous, building up, tearing down, and re-building, with their steady process of congestion … were motivated by the need to provide opportunities for new investment and additional profits”.[8] The solution to this was metropolitan planning that planned suburbs built around home and community designs. Mumford is no Privatist.
Privatists and the effect of their unrestrained profiteering were driving the middle class from the city. In his article “The Fourth Migration”, Mumford describes the first migration and second migrations pretty much as outline in our history. The second, for example, led to the rise of the factory towns in the early nineteenth century (mostly internal migration). The third migration occurred in the early twentieth century; it transformed the industrial city into a financial center. The fourth migration, then on going, was decentralization. Innovations in communication and transportation (telephone, truck and car) drove his fourth migration. The challenge of the fourth migration was whether to allow it to create new “dinosaur cities” as “destructive and inhumane” as previous migrations[9]. Hence, he advocated a proactive development of new suburbs that through planning to accommodate the human spirit of the working and middle classes. Necessarily, this reduced the residential role of the Big City.
The problem for Mumford, however, was the “dinosaur city” was still much beloved. The potential zero-sum scenario, inherent in the fourth migration, somewhat confirmed in the 1940 census; shocked urbanists only in 1970 “when it sprang out of the blue” along with regional change and deindustrialization. Unanticipated was the inevitable counter-response of the Big Cities and their political and business leadership to “save” their city. The embedded power of Big Cities and policy incoherence of hinterland suburbia, guaranteed Big City victory in any policy contest. That does not mean, however, that both sides of the argument during the 1930’s did not produce their policy advocates and practitioners—duking it out both in the Policy and Practitioner Worlds. To capture the flavor of each, the following sections will contrast the pro-Big City Le Corbusier and his de facto practitioner ally, Robert Moses with the suburban new cities proponent Frank Lloyd Wright and his practitioner friends Rexford G. Tugwell and the brilliant housing advocate Catherine Bauer.
Le Corbusier (the Radiant City)[10] and Robert Moses
The vibrant urban discussion of Manhattan cocktail parties in this era seemed unduly influenced by the designs and principles of Swiss architect-planner, Charles Edouard Jenneret. Jenneret, known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier, developed a model of city design and planning. Le Corbusier in the thirties hit intellectual America much like the 1960’s British invasion affected American teenagers. The role of Ed Sullivan, performed by Robert Moses, provided the physical expression of Le Corbusier in America.
Le Corbusier’s image consisted of a CBD composed of “very” high rise office buildings separated by wide boulevards between each high rise, and surrounded by parks through which crisscrossed multi-level roads and elevated high-speed highways. A large train station whose roof served as the airport for commuter aircraft was placed at the center of his drawing. Residential districts, also high-rise, adjoining a Central Park-like park, completed the picture. Each individual city is surrounded by a greenbelt.[11] The shock of clustered skyscrapers and concomitant human density struck observers like a bolt of lightning. It was wonderful.
In 1935, Le Corbusier dramatically altered his breakout Voisin Plan by publishing his most renowned work, “The Radiant City“[12]. “It is necessary, he muttered, to abolish the suburbs and bring nature inside cities”. High-rise apartment/office buildings were fewer in number and drawn dramatically higher. Thousands would live in each high-density apartment. Le Corbusier didn’t invent density, but he glamorized it and in short, order became a central element of city planning. He advocated central city density as a counter to metropolitan suburbanization. We are still fighting that war today.
Density must have been Le Corbusier’s middle name–his break with Howard’s Garden City was total, excepting perhaps his massive urban parks within the central city. Upon his 1935 arrival in New York City (the first time he had seen a skyscraper), however, he was unimpressed. Gotham to Le Corbusier did not fit his image: “The skyscrapers were too small and too close together“; he did not like zoning setbacks. Still, he embarked upon a twenty city university lecture series throughout the Northeast and Midwest. His ideas were well received by his student audiences—unlike the reception they received in the older cities of the Continent. In this respect, he was the Thomas Piketty of his day. The impact of Le Corbusier on American architectural design and urban planning communities was huge, providing a solution (a type of residential unit) to a pressing Depression-era crisis: public housing.
Timing is everything they say, and as far as Le Corbusier and America went, his timing was superb. Robert Moses, a scant four years after Le Corbusier’s American tour, “started to build a series of unusual residential projects [some urban renewal projects] in New York City. Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village have been described as American versions of the “Radiant City”. Moses-style public housing became the national motif for subsequent public housing in the Big Cities of America. Also, the Radiant City became the desired image of the American central city.[13] How? The 1939 World’s Fair (developed by Moses in Flushing Meadows outside of New York City), attended by an estimated 44 million visitors, included an immensely popular General Motors Futurama (designed by Norman Bel Geddes) Pavilion
The General Motors Futurama incorporated much of the Voisin Plan and the Radiant City’s high rise offices and apartments, elevated highways, wide boulevards–surrounded by suburbs and connected by superhighways. So, even General Motors loved Le Corbusier (something about those highways between the skyscrapers). Rybczynski[14] suggests there was much of “America” contained in Le Corbusier’s urban image. His ideas seemed too many to be a natural fit with car-dominated central cities–themselves dominated by skyscrapers. Le Corbusier’s separation of uses, blended nicely with then contemporary (1930’s) planning.[15] Le Corbusier, it would seem, had timed his visit exceptionally well.
Robert Moses
While it’s easy nowadays to blame Robert Moses for everything, he did function as a sort of “celebrity” opinion-leader as well as power broker. The incredible irony that a public bureaucrat, using public power and money served as proxy for Privatism in economic development policy-making, frankly takes one’s breath away. But he did. In the following chapters, one will find Moses conducting studies and plans in city after city (from Portland to Pittsburgh to coin a phrase). Since Daniel Burnham, American economic development has not seen a personality with such force and dimension. So, it is fitting that one additional area touched upon by Moses should be mentioned.
Moses in the Age of Urban Renewal (and he did not quit until 1968) personified the dominant element of American economic development—and make no mistake he operated out of the Practitioner World. His force and power was thrown at the Policy World in these years. He fought planners, architects and academics who he often labeled as “the revolutionaries”. He attacked Fortune for suggesting, “comprehensive planning was a panacea for urban blight”. He seemed driven by the fear “that the doer, the self-made man of action, might be displaced by the academically-trained professional and innovative architect”. He “drew a sharp distinction in discussing postwar municipal planning between ‘revolution and common sense, between subsidized lamas in their remote mountain temples and those who must work in the market place’.”[16] An untold element of the Age of Urban Renewal is that a new profession had appeared on the policy scene: the public redeveloper—the first major type of governmental economic developer was in this Age a serious force in our Big Cities.
Frank Lloyd Wright/Mumford’s and Tugwell/Bauer’s New Suburbs
Frank Lloyd Wright embraced the suburb. Wright did not believe the central city of his day would survive. The cause of its death: obsolescence. The pervasiveness of transportation modes in his Broadacre City image (rail, auto, planes, and believe it or not, a personal Jetson-like flying car) bespeak his recognition that Broadacre City and the post-industrial urban landscape rests upon decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies[17] “People can spread out–they no longer need to live in dense concentrations. Wright did not want to inject nature into dense concentrations; he advocated instead their dispersal people into the countryside. The home of the individual social unit will contain in itself … all the city … plus intimate comfort and free individual choice[18]. His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier, advocated for a “planned” city—a community of individuals.
He called his new conception of a city “Broadacre City” because it was based on a minimum of an acre for each family. Rybczynski assets that Wright was actually influenced by the old socialist, Henry George and conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme for the common person. Wright’s 1932 classic, the Disappearing City[19]presented Broadacre City, describing each community as largely self-contained, consisting of about fourteen hundred families, each home on a one-acre lot, each community with its own school, power grid, and diversified economic base—with small farms playing a vital role. Wright linked community, family, place of work, and located each planned, appropriately sized community in the hinterland—each community surrounded by a greenbelt.
Wright imagined a hypothetical site: four square miles of vaguely Midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river, and a section of hillside. Following Midwestern custom, a grid of roads divides the land into quarter sections; some of the roads are two level highways, cars above and trucks below, with specially designed interchanges… There is no functional zoning; instead, schools, civic buildings, factories, a county seat, and an arena are scattered among orchards, vineyards, farms, and recreational spaces. People live in houses on acre lots, as well as apartment towers, and on small farms…. There is no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown[20]
His incomplete depiction of a complete suburb arguably gave rise to the concept of subdivision. The “glass-roofed roadside markets” included in Broadacre City reasonably resemble an enclosed shopping mall. It depicts a suburban hinterland without boundaries. Wright never built a Broadacre City. But in its place, he designed the home, the housing around which it would be established. Publishing home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful, his concept (the “Usonian”) became Levittown’s “Rambler”, today’s pervasive ranch-style housing. He built over 150 examples.
Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing”. It didn’t–although in the 1970’s it came darned close. But Wright understood what many Americans wanted and Broadacre City was organized to permit the lifestyle and privacy, centered on the home. Economic developers today may believe that jobs “come first”—and then people; not so Wright. For him the home and the planned community were fundamental. Mel Scott in his celebrated history of American planning, concedes “Wright’s visionary amalgam of country and town impressed the defenders of the concentrated urban center [our Big Cities] as unrealistic, but both it and the English garden city were probably closer to the heart’s desire of a large number of Americans”[21].The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, centered about the individual and his/her family, but in fact the Progressivist centrality of community and the rationality imposed by planning dominate Wright’s vision. Broadacre City is not a random, market driven, uncoordinated phenomenon—it is metropolitan planning at its finest.
A “Multiple Nuclei” Alternative Future
Gathering together past strands such as Howard’s garden cities, Clarence Stein’s Radburn planned community, and now Wright’s Broadacre City, and combining them with Mumford’s pessimistic view of the viability and worth of trying to save Big Cities from their blighted fate, and FDR’s ambivalent, mostly opportunistic attraction to urban voters[22], the New Towns movement was a New Deal initiative designed to construct a successful alternative to rebuilding the Big City or letting the private sector loose to suburbanize the metropolitan hinterlands. The New Towns movement was nothing less than a real life effort to create Broadacre City and a planned suburban metropolitan hinterland. New Towns, if successful, would have created a poly-nuclear metropolitan area in what had been traditional perceived as mononuclear. The architect of this bold initiative was one of the New Deal’s most prominent and powerful leaders, Rexford G. Tugwell.
When the Supreme Court struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act, Roosevelt transferred several of its initiatives to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration which housed the National Resettlement Administration responsible for moving the unemployed out of the central cities into rural areas–“No sooner in operation than it was urging states to establish relief corporations to build agricultural and industrial satellite communities using federal funds and the planning, architectural and engineering services … of the Department of Agriculture[23]. Rexford G. Tugwell had been appointed Director of the National Resettlement Administration.
Beginning in 1935, Tugwell commenced planning, design, and construction of three “new towns”: Greendale, Wisconsin, Greenbelt Maryland, and Greenhills, Ohio. His “business plan”, as retold by Jane Jacobs in “Death and Life of Great American cities” was “My idea [was] to just go outside centers of population, pick up cheap land, build a whole community, and entice people into it. Then go back to the cities and tear down whole slums and make parks of them”.[24] To this end Tugwell assembled his own brain trust including leading authorities such as Jacob Crane (President of the American City Planning Institute), Warren Jay Vinton (chief economist, Resettlement Administration), Frederick Bigger (Pittsburgh), and Henry Wright and Clarence Stein “hisself”. Originally, selecting eight sites, politics, available funds, and lawsuits winnowed it down to three[25]. Construction commenced and the cities were opened in 1937and are presently vibrant communities.
New Towns challenged the prevailing orthodoxy of the age, and it didn’t help that what was supposed to be “low-cost” communities became rather more expensive in their making. The only factor that reduced cost was the “free labor” provided by PWA. Despite their “garden city” heritage, they were not a self-contained garden city or Broadacre City by any means. Quite small, attracting only 2,100 households at their opening and lacking space for industry, more sensitive to agriculture, workers had to go elsewhere for employment. They were garden-style suburban bedroom communities whose housing prices permitted only middle class buyers. “There was no place for poor people in ‘Tugwelltown’; just like most of the suburban neighbors, the ‘Greenbelts’ became single class communities”, very dependent economically, and culturally on their central city[26].
New Towns were never lacking opponents, critics and name-callers. They were the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Tugwell was forced out and left the agency in 1936. Called “Rex the Red”, Tugwell and the New Towns movement quickly moved past the “socialist” label and acquired the full-fledged “communistic” tag. The only friends, it seemed came from within the planning profession, where even today it is well received and regarded as a significant and path-breaking innovation. Congress thought otherwise and ended the agency in 1938—although late in the war (1944), the department received additional funds for war production employees. New Towns almost caught a second breath, however, with the passage of the 1949 Housing Act.
Catherine Bauer, a disciple of Mumford, involved in Radburn, author of the housing classic, Modern Housing (1934), organized labor’s chief lobbyist for low-income housing, and writer of the Housing Act of 1937 tried going through the back door of federal policy. She tried to use urban renewal funds for New Towns housing as an alternative, Plan B, to urban renewal. Her position on slum clearance that “ exclusive emphasis on slum clearance is as illogical as if the early automobile manufacturers had directed all their efforts to buying out the still prosperous carriage makers and razing their factories instead of building automobiles”. Rather than try “vainly to salvage the past, we must safeguard the future”. For her, the building of war plants in the suburbs, plus the anticipated postwar housing deficit, guaranteed an enormous further wave of decentralization. [Thus, it was] “too late, if indeed it was ever possible, to think of saving the old city centers in their congested nineteenth century form”. [Precedence had to be given to] “the protection of the outlying areas. The whole shape and quality and efficiency of the urban environment for a generation to come is about to be set. The location and design of the new suburban subdivisions will make, or finally break, our metropolitan regions.”[27]
So within months of the 1949 Housing Act passage, she made an interesting request to HHFA. Citing a Title 1 passage in the legislation which said eligible projects could include any “open land necessary for sound community growth which is to be developed for predominately residential uses”, Bauer wanted to make eligible for federal slum removal funds, open land, with no evidence of blight to be used for such purposes as “new towns” or satellite communities. The HHFA declined the honor of using the Title 1 wording to permit urban redevelopment funds to be used to create new towns outside the city periphery saying, “the dog is slum clearance, and the tail is community development”[28]. That statement proved to be a serious speed bump to Plan B and it made evident that the federal government was behind Plan A. Whether Plan A could work well enough to stop uncoordinated decentralization (Plan C) would be settled over the next generation.
Section III: SUBURBS and Mid-Century Economic Development Profession
Breakout: the Postwar Suburban Exodus
By May 9th, the developers had sold over 1000 housing units, a variant of Wright’s rambler, built by non-union labor, with restrictive covenants, and included for the first time kitchen appliances. The subdivision added 30 units daily to sell 4000 units by 1948. Ultimately, Levittown sold over 17,000 homes (1951). As William Bendix[29] would have said, “what a revolting development this is”[30]. There were two subsequent Levittowns in Pennsylvania in the 1950’s and later in New Jersey. The business model was copied throughout the East by the early 60’s. Levittown was a planned community and it kicked off a mass-based suburban exodus that gathered steam with each year.
The ticky-tacky Levittown (“little boxes” coined in a 1962 song by Malvina Reynolds and made famous by a subsequent Pete Seeger 1963 song) provided grist for many an academic and writers of fiction (Updike, for example). The stereotype acquired the visual images of Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best and Ozzie & Harriet and was saddled with the label of the American Dream. Like all TV and Hollywood visions, these shows were somewhat inaccurate characterization of families in the postwar era, but these shows became the avatar for all suburbs then, and forever after. That mental inflexibility proved to be a first class mistake[31].
The first postwar suburban developments were not only certainly aided by the federal government, and highways, but also (and arguably mostly) by the immediate post-war housing crisis. The return of the soldiers, the very quick household formation which followed, left the greatest generation and their newborn baby boomers sleeping (or not) in the bedrooms of their less than delighted grandparents. Deluded by the 1944 veteran benefit mortgages, thousands of former World War II veterans got into their newly purchased car and fled the central cities (and their parents). A new mass (multi-class) lifestyle was born and a new version of the American Dream had commenced—to the relief of all three generations.
Alongside all this was the creation of an innovative suburban business model that was able to largely accommodate demands generated by the post-war housing crisis. The new suburban-FIRE complex threw off substantial profits, created new occupations and redefined the BLS-FIRE sector classification. A new “developer-based” suburban real estate industry would evolve from the late 1940’s. This new sector both reflected and created consumer demand and achieved corporate profitability by understanding the American family’s post war dream and by recognizing the link between housing, employment and the car. Borrowing from Levittown, which was based loosely on Wright’s “Rambler” and his decentralized garden city, and using Ford’s assembly line technique, the developer community seized upon the long-standing American tradition of moving to the city periphery, now with a car not a streetcar.
By separating housing finance from housing construction, the developer-industry complex formed in the early twentieth century and was able to build cheap, ticky-tacky small Capes just outside the boundaries of the Progressive central city that had lost its earlier power to annex due to unfriendly state legislatures dominated through gerrymandering by rural and embryonic suburban communities. The loss of central city annexation authority was a critical factor in the postwar Northern suburbanization experience[32]— and annexation power (along with other factors earlier discussed), at least in the fifties, further differentiated Western from Eastern cities.
By 1957, ULI was publishing “extensive guidelines on the development of shopping centers, many of which contained two department stores”. The number of planned retail centers (all sizes) grew from an estimated under 1,000 in 1950 to over 25,000 in 1984 (40% of all retail sales in the nation).[33] In the latter years, many of these retail centers will be financed in part by TIF and certainly by the late 1950’s the CBD was under considerable competitive pressure. It is worth note that the “anchor” for the larger suburban retail centers was the department store and the “grocery store” was the anchor for the smaller centers. Finally, the ubiquitous role of the car in this retail revolution is expressed in a “cycle of dependence”[34] which resulted. The car was the how one got to the center, suburban land use design and transportation infrastructure accordingly reflected the needs of the car which inevitably meant that future users of these retail centers would, unless some acceptable alternative was created, be compelled to travel by auto. Both the cycle of dependence and its chief offspring, congestion became built-in attributes of the suburban lifestyle.
There is little reason to believe that economic development, as opposed to planning for instance, was universally a highly prioritized policy area in these early suburbs. The EDOs existing and formed in these growing jurisdictions, while largely unknown to us today probably were likely to be chambers and whether they were active participants in the jurisdiction’s economic development policy system is unstudied. Early Public Agency suburban entities were often as likely to be some poor soul within the planning department or the city manager himself, rather than a full-blown department. In some states, as we shall learn, the states themselves will empower sub-state jurisdictions to form Quasi EDOs and to participate in a state endorsed set of economic development programs and goals.
By 1950, suburban growth rates were ten times that of the central city and by 1954, nine million had moved to the suburbs[35]. What were these new communities like?
[1] John F. McDonald, Urban America: Growth, Crisis and Rebirth, op. cit. p. 85.
[2] Andrea Sarzynski, Royce Hanson, Hal Wolman, and Michael McGuire, “All Centers are not Equal: An Exploration of the Polycentric Metropolis”, Working Paper 015, 2005, George Washington Institute of Public Policy.
[3] Jackson, op. cit., pp. 238-243.
[4] Hanlon, op. cit., p. 15.
[5] During the 1920’s and 1930’s a serious multi-state “federation” movement, led by local “one percenters” abandoned city-county consolidation in favor of a co-equal “federation” of city and suburbs. Each jurisdiction would exercise powers and responsibilities deemed appropriate and desired by its residential population. See Jon C. Teaford, City and Suburb: the Political Fragmentation of Metropolitan America, 1850-1970 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), Chapter 5: the Suburban Ascendancy, 1910-1940.
[6] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Dissent, op. cit., p. 78.
[7] Andrew A. Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams, and the Invention of the Regional City, ,op. cit., p. 293; also, Michael N. Danielson and Jamison W. Doig, New York: the Politics of Urban Regional Development (Berkeley, CA, University of California Press, 1982).
[8] Robert Beauregard, Voices of Dissent, op. cit., p. 78.
[9] Lewis Mumford, “The Fourth Migration”, the Survey, 54 (May, 1925) as described in Robert Beauregard, the Voices of Dissent, op. cit., p. 80; Clarence Stein’s companion piece, “Dinosaur Cities” followed from Mumford’s fourth migration and expressed in vivid language and detail the congestion and unrestrained growth had destroyed the central industrial city: Clarence Stein, “Dinosaur Cities”, 54 (May, 1925). An excellent article embracing this motif is Andrew A. Meyers, “Invisible Cities: Lewis Mumford, Thomas Adams and the Invention of the Regional City, 1923-1929”, Business and Economic History, Volume 27, Number 2 (winter, 1998), pp. 292-306.
[10] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010), pp. 39-50.
[11] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit., p. 40.
[12] Le Corbusier, La Ville Radieuse (Paris, Vincent, Freal & Cie, 1964)
[13] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit., p. 48. For instance, the largest of the public housing projects, Chicago’s Robert Taylor Homes (1962) “consisted of twenty-eight identical apartment buildings lined up in lockstep precision on a two mile long superblock”.
[14]Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit., pp. 46-48.
[15] Edward Glaeser, The Triumph of the City
[16] Philip J. Funigiello, the Challenge to Urban Liberalism, op. cit., p. 208.
[17] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit., pp. 75-76.
[18] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 67-69.
[19] Frank Lloyd Wright, The Disappearing City (New York, William Farquhar Payson, 1932).
[20] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit., pp. 71-72.
[21] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p.336.
[22] Tugwell’s 1950’s remark that Roosevelt ‘always did, and always would regard the cities as rather hopeless’. Quoted in Philip J. Funigiello, the Challenge to Urban Liberalism, op. cit., pp. 254-255.
[23] Mel Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., p. 336.
[24] Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, op. cit., p. 310; Jacobs, we might observe, did not agree with Tugwell. The quote can also be found in Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 133.
[25] See Scott, American City Planning, op. cit., pp. 338-339.
[26] Mark I. Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, op. cit. p. 134.
[27] Drawn from Gelfand, A Nation of Cities, and from Bauer, Modern Housing quotes directly from Gelfand, pp. 135-136.
[28] Ashley A. Foard and Hilbert Fefferman, “Federal Urban Renewal Legislation”, op. cit., p. 668; see also Alexander von Hoffman, “A Study in Contradictions”, op. cit., p. 313.
[29] William Bendix was a postwar TV comedian whom the Curmudgeon loved. In respect for him, we include one of his trademark statements.
[30]Levittown today, a hamlet of nearly 52,000 residents within the town of Hempstead.
[31] See Alonso and Muth p. 92
[32] See McDonald p.90
[33] Handy, op. cit. p. 13. She cites from the 1985 ULI Shopping Center Handbook and J. Ross McKeever, “Shopping Centers RE-Studied: Emerging Patterns and Practical Experiences”, Technical Studies Bulletin No. 30 and 31, Urban Land Institute.
[34] Handy, op. cit. p. 18ff.
[35] Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (New York, Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 238
Ron W. Coan 