THE DECENTRALIZATION CRISIS
The last chapter introduced Lewis Mumford. His advocacy within the famous New York City Regional Plan for new garden city-like suburbs resulted in development of several new suburbs, Radburn being the most prominent. Later, in 1938, Mumford published his most important work, The Culture of Cities. 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 to house humanity. His work attacked the scale, density and human pathologies caused by Big Cities His vision was not very different from that of Wright’s Broadacre City. The problem for Mumford was that his “dinosaur city” was still much beloved. 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 does not mean, however, that each view did not produce their visions of the future during the 1930s. These competing visions proved very impactful in the post-World War II era. Through the Depression and the war years, the conversation concerning Big City decline driven by decentralization deepened: decline and decentralization perceived in physical terms—obsolescence, blight, physical decay—with growth perceived as the opposite. All the rest were mere symptoms and derivatives. For Mumford, the Big City was a lost cause; that pessimism, however, was not universally shared. To those who wanted to return the Big City to full vigor, some form of redevelopment was necessary. Both views required an “image,” an ideal visual from which design and planning initiatives could be fashioned. To capture the flavor of each image, we verbally 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 friend Rexford G. Tugwell and housing advocate Catherine Bauer.
Le Corbusier and Robert Moses
Swiss architect-planner, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, better known by his pseudonym Le Corbusier, hit intellectual America in the thirties like the 1960s’ British/Beatle’s invasion affected American teenagers—the role of Ed Sullivan in this era, however, performed by Robert Moses. Le Corbusier’s initial image of his future Big City, the Voisin Plan, rested upon “very” high-rise office buildings separated by wide boulevards between each high rise, and surrounded by parks through which crisscrossed multilevel roads and elevated high-speed highways. A large train station whose roof served as the airport was located at the center. Residential districts, also high-rise, adjoined a central park. Each individual city was surrounded by a greenbelt (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 39–50). The shock of clustered skyscrapers and spirit-crushing human density struck observers like a bolt of lightning. It was wonderful. They loved it.
American architecture/planning/housing intelligentsia woke up to “Le Corbu” after his exhibit was included in the 1932 Museum of Modern Art’s “Modern Architecture International Exhibition.” Commencing in New York City, the exhibition tastefully traveled across the Big City Northeast and Midwest—reaching cities like Toledo and Worcester, and even Los Angeles. Divided into two sub-areas, architecture and housing, the exhibition also included European “Modernists” such as Gropius and van der Rohe, as well as American “housers” like Mumford, Bauer, Stein and Henry Wright. European Modernism infused their designs (high-rise, functional and minimalist); these designs later wandered into neighborhood/slum/public housing design.10 From my perspective, the exhibition could have been entitled “residential housing meets the office skyscraper.” It may have marked the birth of American “density-based planning.”
Le Corbusier dramatically altered/updated his breakout Voisin Plan in 1935 with his most renowned work, La Ville Radieuse/The Radiant City (1964). It was necessary, he muttered, to abolish suburbs and bring nature inside cities. High-rise apartment/office buildings were fewer, but dramatically higher. Thousands would live in each highdensity apartment. Le Corbusier didn’t invent density, but he popularized it and, in short, order became a central element of city planning where it fit remarkably well with its goal of “efficiency.” Density emerged as the Big City’s counter to metropolitan suburbanization.
Le Corbusier’s break with Howard’s Garden City was total, excepting perhaps his massive urban parks. Upon his initial visit to New York City in 1935 (oddly, the first time he had seen a skyscraper), Le Corbusier was unimpressed. Gotham did not fit his image: “The skyscrapers were too small and too close together”; he also did not like zoning setbacks. Embarking on a 20-city lecture series, his ideas were well received by 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. Rybczynski suggests there was much of “America” in Le Corbusier’s urban image. The Radiant City seemed to many to be a natural fit with car-dominated central cities—whose CBD skyline is iconically characterized by skyscrapers. Le Corbusier’s separation of uses blended nicely with 1930s’ planning concepts and priorities.
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, built his version of the Radiant City, the 1939 World’s Fair, in Flushing Meadows outside New York City. Attended by an estimated 44 million visitors, the Fair included an immensely popular General Motors Futurama Pavilion (designed by Norman Bel Geddes). That pavilion incorporated much of the Voisin Plan/Radiant City’s high-rise offices and apartments, elevated highways, wide boulevards—surrounded by suburbs and connected by superhighways. General Motors loved Le Corbusier (something about highways between the skyscrapers). Moses’ World’s Fair conveyed the desired image of the future American central city (Rybczynski, 2010, p. 48).
The power broker didn’t accept Mumford’s argument. Removal of sums were key. The Big City could, and should, redevelop to preserve its hegemonic position over the hinterland: “It is safe to say that almost no city needs to tolerate slums. There are plenty of ways of getting rid of them” (Moses, 1945, p. 64). Moses followed up shortly after with a series of residential projects in New York City (some of which were urban renewal projects): Parkchester, Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village. Moses-style housing became the national motif for subsequent Big City public housing. High-rise residential units combined with large-scale neighborhood slum clearance provided an answer for a pressing Depression-era crisis: public housing and CBD redevelopment.
Frank Lloyd Wright
Frank Lloyd Wright embraced the suburb; he could not imagine how the central city of his day could survive. The cause of its death: obsolescence. The centrality of transportation modes to his suburban vision, called Broadacre City (rail, automobiles, planes and, believe it or not, a personal Jetson-like flying car) bespeak his recognition and belief that the post-industrial urban landscape was caused by decentralizing transportation (and communication) technologies (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 75–6):
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. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 67–9) His ideas, the polar opposite of Le Corbusier’s, advocated for a “planned” city composed of a “community of individuals.” Broadacre City provided an acre for each family. Rybczynski suggests the old socialist Henry George influenced Wright; he conceived of Broadacre City as a land redistribution scheme.
Wright’s classic, The Disappearing City (1932), presented Broadacre City, imagining a hypothetical site: 4 square miles of vaguely midwestern topography including farmland, a portion of a river and a section of hillside. Each community/suburb was self-contained, consisting of about 1400 families; each home on a 1-acre lot; each community with its own school, power grid and diversified economic base—with small farms playing a vital role.
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 … Having no center or commercial core, nothing that resembles a traditional downtown. (Rybczynski, 2010, pp. 71–2)
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. Wright never built a Broadacre City. In its place, he designed the home, the housing around which it rested. Publishing home designs in House and Home and House Beautiful, his concept (the “Usonian”) became Levittown’s “Rambler,” today’s pervasive ranch-style housing.
Wright saw the central city of his day as “disappearing.” It didn’t—although in the 1970s it came darned close. Nevertheless, Wright understood what many Americans wanted. Broadacre City permitted the family-oriented lifestyle and privacy. 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” (Scott, 1969, p. 336). The thrust of Broadacre seems very Privatist, centered on the individual and his/her family. In fact, Broadacre City reflected a Progressivist community whose rationality was imposed by planners. Broadacre City is not a random, market-driven, uncoordinated phenomenon—it is metropolitan planning at its finest. In its way, Broadacre City reconciled individualism, planning and community better than had any previous conceptual image. That image was embraced by Rexford Tugwell and Catherine Bauer and described below.
Tugwell/Bauer’s New Town “Multiple Nuclei” Alternative
The “New Town” movement was a New Deal initiative that gathered Howard’s garden city, Clarence Stein’s Radburn planned community and now Wright’s Broadacre City, combining all with Mumford’s pessimistic view of Big City viability and FDR’s ambivalent, opportunistic attraction to urban voters.11 New Towns represented a successful alternative to rebuilding the Big City or letting the private sector loose to suburbanize the metropolitan hinterlands. New Towns were nothing less than a real-life effort to create Broadacre City and a planned suburban metropolitan hinterland. If successful, New Towns would have created a poly-nuclear metropolitan area. 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 (1935), Roosevelt transferred several of its initiatives, in particular the National Resettlement Administration, to the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). The National Resettlement Administration housed the earlier-mentioned program responsible for moving the unemployed out of central cities and into rural areas. FDR appointed Tugwell 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, 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” (Jacobs, 1961, p. 310).12 Tugwell assembled his brain trust, which included leading authorities such as Jacob Crane (president of the American City Planning Institute), Warren Jay Vinton (economist, Resettlement Administration), Frederick Bigger (Pittsburgh) and Henry Wright and Clarence Stein “hisself.” Originally, selecting eight sites—politics, available funds and lawsuits winnowed it to three (Scott, 1969, pp. 338–9). The towns opened in 1937. They are vibrant communities today.
Like Radburn, New Towns unfortunately, did not deliver what it promised. What were 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 the PWA. Despite their “garden city” heritage, they were not self-contained garden cities or a Broadacre City by any means. Quite small, attracting only 2100 households at their opening, lacking space for industry, more open 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 … dependent economically, and culturally on their central city (Gelfand, 1975, p. 134).
New Towns never lacked for opponents, critics and name-callers. Called “Rex the Red,” Tugwell and the New Towns movement quickly moved past the “socialist” label, acquiring the full-fledged “communistic” tag. The only friends came from within the planning profession. Congress thought otherwise, and ended the agency in 1938, although late in the war (1944), the department received additional funds for war production employees—the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Tugwell left in 1936. 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 and author of the classic Modern Housing (1934)—organized labor’s chief lobbyist for low-income housing. An influential writer of the Housing Act of 1937, she tried going through the back door of federal policy-making. She attempted to use Housing Act urban renewal funds for New Town housing as an alternative to Big City slum clearance. Her position on slum clearance was that “exclusive emphasis on slum clearance is as illogical as if the early automobile manufacturers had … buying out the still prosperous carriage makers and razing their factories instead of building automobiles” (Gelfand, 1975, pp. 135–6). For Bauer, the building of war plants in the suburbs, plus anticipated postwar housing, 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 … The 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. (Gelfand, 1975, p. 136)
Within months of the Housing Act’s passage, Bauer made an interesting request to the Housing and Home Finance Agency (HHFA). Citing a Title 1 passage that specified eligible projects could include any “open land necessary for sound community growth which is to be developed for predominantly residential uses,” Bauer wanted federal slum removal funds for undeveloped suburban land, with no blight for new towns or satellite communities (Hoffman, 2000, p. 313). The HHFA declined the honor of using Title 1 urban redevelopment funds to create new towns on city peripheries, saying: “the dog is slum clearance, and the tail is community development” (Foard and Fefferman, 1966, p. 668).
Ron W. Coan 