The next fifty years; Prologue to the Future

The next. One. National Education radio presents a series of programs expressing a variety of opinions on the future of the democratic environment. These views were given at the 50th year conference of the American Institute of planners held in Washington in October of last year. In attendance was any public affairs director Bill Greenwood. This is the third in our 13 week series of programs exploring urban needs in

America during the next 50 years. This week prologue to the future a discussion of the culture of American cities the history of American Physical Planning and the development of political planning in this country. To speak on these broad topics will be seven distinguished experts from a variety of disciplines. First urban historian Dr. John E. E. Burr chard professor of environmental design at the University of California's Berkeley campus. Dr. Bird chart is Dina Mehta wrists of the school of Humanities and Social Sciences at MIT. He has been widely honored for his work in urban affairs to initiate this week's discussion. Here is Dr. John Birch chard. It's safe to say I think that American culture is now almost totally urban without having become really ur brain. And without having changed very much in those larger national tendencies. But so many observers have noticed for so long we do seem to

have a greater interest in conquering nature than in living whether a painful belligerence is coupled to the nauseating piety about it. Frugality and a suspicion of exuberance happens are we are nervous in the presence of good public or literary matters. We doubt the expertise of experts and believe in the common sense of the cracker bar Cracker Barrel. We still seem to hope for a Frontiere to which we can escape from the ravages which we ourselves have wrought. We still crave for the sort of quick and magical solutions which make Daddy Warbucks into a sort of folk hero. For most of us money is if not the measure of all things at least a measure of competence. The marketplace still offers a preferred test of meaning. Science is great to the extent that it is useful. It is not only Martin White's philosophers it deprecate the city. Manhattan is full of people some consciously mourning. Why oh why oh why oh why did we ever leave Ohio. There may be a new and unhappy trend a growing disbelief in the credibility of our national and local leaders.

A consequent wonder where the democratic process can work with the people who are shielded from the truth for their own good and whose consensual vetoes may be both too little and too late. Along with this we're expected to continue to believe in transcendentalism where a young nation like Peter Pan We must really never grow up. This means we're always to believe mainly in the hope of youth and not of the cynicism of experience of age I say that with some pain. And now I'm not a very time when there are more and more young people who are convincing them to believe in adolescent wisdom and the incompetence of everyone over 30. Among those perennial youngsters who do not like the president and fear the homogenized future is Paul Goodman. He writes in praise of anarchy. And it gives him his ground in a rather definite social psychological hypothesis that forceful graceful and intelligent behavior occurs only when there is an uncoerced and direct response to the physical and social environment that in most human affairs more harm than good results from compulsion. Top down direction

preordained curriculum. Jails conscription States a marvelous combination. Though this is an eloquent description of a deep rooted American instinct which can bring as vigilantes as readily as libertarians. The fact is that it needs to be regarded with suspicion. Nature boys are fully as dangerous as establishment Ariens. As occurred to mindless government the goodman formula have value as a way of life. It's impossible formulations like good ones combined of the trivia contrived by our shiny young designers for Expo 67. Much of what we read every day. And the relentless mediocre or violent beat of television and above all airborne movies could be very depressing. They're a little less salt when we think of the behavior of all sorts of other national groups do all sorts of other history far even today. And we do seem still to be capable of great even heroic efforts when the occasion seems finally to demand. No doubt like the Australians we met the demand to be pretty deafening before we deign to hear it. Out of such reflections I'm unable to find a

national temper better or worse than it ever was. This leads me to land on the side of the optimist in a thermodynamic world optimism may rest less on progress that I'm not losing ground. The naysayers can readily enough paint a dismal present but they're on shaky ground when they compare with the rosy past for which they can deduce no reasonable statistical evidence to justify the trends they describe. My colleagues remarked that you would not think so badly about your time if you know the truth about any other was well taken. I believe that regional differences are good but they exist today and they will exist in 50 years despite the levelling influences of mass communications and entertainment and the speed of transportation. These may wash away little things such as fashions in dress or even architecture at least in the big top on the periphery local eclecticism is likely to remain prominent. I called eclecticism because you can be quite as bigoted about SI Rach as about up up a tree and on the parson Capen house and

even when the visual evidence may suggest a considerable ironing out. I would hope that a local botany and weather book intended to give the light a lotta manmade evidence. I'm all for perpetuating the myths held by San Franciscans that there's a sophisticated city or that there are sourdough bread is really superior to a fresh loaf in Paris. So long as they leave their climate and their view on corrupt. If you don't argue that no sensitive observer gets around much can you really believe there is a consistent national style. Our way of life. Boston is not Washington is not Miami is not New Orleans is not Chicago is not Dallas is not Honolulu is not fair banks. Everything may be up to date in Kansas City. But what is up to date is not exactly the same as what is up to date in New York. This is more than a mere matter of time lag weather so to speak a city has or has not passed through its Ruggles of Red Gap stage. Some cities prays they will never lose their Cousin Egbert flubs. In our cities there is by no means a uniform distribution of highbrows or an equal affection or disaffection for them. The existence

of wealth and its flagrant display are not equally admired the dominant religious expressions are enormously varied. The patronage of the council Fonteyn the underground press or the local baseball team on my take on this crab scheme varies in intensity. The power elites are different the composed approach modes of dress differ and so the tolerance or lack of it for deviations from the approved modes in some places Mrs. Kennedy can raise money for a charity. You know that you need Danny Kaye. Second class Dukes cause more furor here than there. There are differences in language and accent and topics of animated conversation. There are still cities where you know is not regarded as someone over articulate communication. And if you start pornography or start drinking before the sun is over they are I'm very. There are cities which prefer the very smooth cooking of Julia Child and others where General Eisenhower's Brunswick Stew writes according to the content of the newspapers very sort of the approach columnists among the local Kasandra some cities for the Liberal some the Tories

and some the unvarnished gossipers New York City as John Lindsay Boston could have a nice day x. I once took Francis Parkman and his fellows. This is noticeable not only among the middle and lower upper brow cultures where I suppose I belong. Professors are highbrow which is not a sure thing. Then the cultural differences among highbrows are striking. Even academic cocktail parties are strangely different in Cambridge Chicago and Berkeley. You need not be alone on a west coast campus after a life in the east to notice important differences even in the attitude of the local economists talk to Asian Chargers. You can know you can notice this. You can notice it's not trying to decide whether either is better or even whether either is good enough. Obviously I don't know what the differences are at the Bonanza cultural level or that of the generally poor. I suspect the differences may be fewer but I'm sure there are some. This regionalism I think you must regard as good and quite durable. Even countries which have had a central cultural capital like Paris and London have maintained a local colorations

in the provinces. Our country has no such accepted pacemaker and this gives a reason for optimism especially as a pacemaker of a cultural start is least of all to be found in our political capital. It seems to me that the maintenance of sensible regional differences is one of the considerable responsibilities of national planners if they cannot detect these differences and foster them at the regional level. They're unlikely to be sympathetic to the important Tropp urban diversities which are essential to the good life in any particular city. Since it was the intra urban diversity it seemed to me most challenging. I sought guidance in Dr Johnson Samuel Linden. He wrote. Sam Johnson wrote nobody can write the life of a man. But those who live in social intercourse with him Johnson would have been suspicious of China experts who have never been to China and you have to read Confucius and ma only in translation. So he was prepared to generalize adversely about Scottish meal he had himself tasted it he would have worried

about some of the Sunday morning quarterbacks in Newark. Through the device of an Inquirer reporter in my long paper I called up the testimonial Bledel mounds and hippie lovers of taxi drivers in the park the time wasted by TV and examining the Warren Report. Of subdividing with cookouts and sculpture in the plazas preserves of the suburban Orange County way of life of highway engineers of new plastic flowers and beautification kits of conservationists protecting every book against every power plant of auto workers headed for annual wages of twenty five thousand of unemployed dropouts a remark that is fun. I cited the jubilant mayor who promised I look for great things from the federal government next year. THE RELUCTANT governor who protested less is more a doc and yet surely not learned in Hollywood and a discouraged president to appoint another commission. We're all blind men trying to describe an elephant. But we think urban culture is and ought to be depends on where we sit and where we have sat. It takes a great deal of gall for any one person to propose that he knows much about it has seen

much of it has seen what he has seen on the hooded eyes or could be very sure of what somebody else ought to want. American urban culture is obviously the summation of an enormous variety of subcultures but a statistically Bentham mystic some nation is just not going to work. Sooner or later we're going to have to cope with the details. And I suggest that it better be sooner. It's certainly easier to conjecture some of the truths about the coming of age and some are after is not the serious and sensitive stay there. That is to do something comparable in Watts. In walks a culture may seem only mildly exotic. The telephone to near the plane to Washington to easy to board the Welcome to the marginal stranger student perhaps less friendly. Nonetheless these are the studies we need we need a sympathetic attention to the sub communities of our urban community. As has been lavish so brilliantly on a family or a village and of all clues and we need the results right now. It seems imperative that many sub cultural studies be launched now but we cannot wait for them. There's simply no time to wait. We must be prepared to spend a lot of

money and also prepare for some large and expensive failures now and then. We must learn to greet them with the same equanimity that we adopt to an accident of Cape Canaveral Cape Kennedy. It's no more immoral to fail in a city that is on a launching pad or in the Mekong Delta as long as we keep on trying. That is if not more moral if we made an honest try. The alternative is obviously chaos or large program of bad bread and circuses expressed in modern language and such programs have never had anything but disaster. This brought me to the question of what we ought to be trying to achieve. My belief is simple it is that man was not born soley to toil hard to atone for the sins of some early and quite undocumented sinful ancestors or to slave without recourse for the behest of any kind of tyrant or to increase a gross national product or to drown everything out in Dinan drugs. Given such belief I have to insist on the necessity for positive urban satisfactions and not merely the absence of poverty and pain. I said also that our city had to be megalopolis and not just central city and the problem of the black urbanite can be solved only in the suburbs and not

within the walls of the black central city. There are countless things already known and operable that could make our cities finer without any inventions at all. If only we were determined to use them and to pay for their use in money and that kind of political courage. All the pleasures of professional era tape may be a substitute for the consolations of revealed religion. This is most urban people church attenders are not quite dependent upon external urban satisfactions for all such people I submit the city is meaningless and even menacing unless it permits pleasure through life and they offer this player needs to be positive not merely the absence of pain. The enjoyment should be run early on can try. Certainly not all of it can be premeditated and intellectual. I suggested the plan I first needed to realize and remind himself that his was unlikely to be the general case. There was no such thing as a right taste. He needed to remember that one urbanite has the right to sleep peacefully in Rittenhouse Square unmolested by the din of the hippies but the hippies have a right to their place to night

or Haight Ashbury or Rittenhouse Square has a right to possess the whole are going to world and this is a difficult point for the rebellious young Rudo matic part of our culture for this and Sorious aged him of wiles to agree to this to demand national planning. But it didn't seem to suggest that the National Planning not be entrusted to a single circle of men however brilliant who clustered around one opinion. So there because the urban programme needs to be as diverse as the urban necessities and the urban experiment as wide ranging and I expressed I hope kind of a faith one that the people appointed direct the task would approach him with a personal humility and a lack of confidence in others who are humble but above all I hope they have a feeling of getting a nation which has always been plagued with surprise. It is not the same thing as levity or for a volley. And yet it is not inappropriate to our present needs. I wasn't proposing this all be turned over to grassroots consensus and neighborhood committees. I said in point of fact the grassroots are so often either long or green at the Poly and third was quite right to say the average Parisian like the average citizen everywhere is

Mark grateful for a frank off his attackers than from main drains are being used. Times haven't changed because of the money seems to come from somewhere else like the federal government that's different. Great things in our cities have come as a consequence of the energetic single mindedness of great individuals not committees or boards. When they come out well they've often been approved by later consensus. Unfortunately from the bottom alone in Central Park to Rockefeller Center they've been more often approach than emulated neighborhood advice and I thought she'd be courted and listened to but the advice was more valuable than a veto. So I ended with an optimism provided the planners would be done by people who themselves had a relish for the good life and not to those of it only through the smoky glasses of a step morality or the vicarious light of the library lamp. But the optimism rested as we almost know on one very serious assumption. It is of the clouds of the urban sky will be rolled away. I mean the budgetary clouds of Vietnam space and foreign aid and the moral cloud of great cities will not be made by

escapist by parasites by people on a trip or angry and impoverished rebels. And they won't come free. It's more important to save Cleveland than it is to save Saigon. It's more important to relieve our young people from the need to seek a scape and to offer free elections to the Vietnamese. It's more important to give chances to our own black population than to any number of East Indians. The most expensive program suggested by anyone from Senator Robert Kennedy to Mr. Daniel Monaghan is substantially cheaper in money matter materials than our fiasco in Asia. Ah. Ah the easy retort to all this of course is to call it a good isolationism or suggest the speaker believes if there's a one to one correlation between military and urban expenditure of course there isn't. But the fact remains that the greatest victory over communism had better be scored in the American city streets and not by the police or the National Guard or the regular army.

Neither the money nor the minds are going to be available under present foreign policy until we are magnanimous enough and courageous enough and great enough as a nation to settle for peace without victory a nation might insist upon victory in the American city that was Dr. Johnny Birch Gardena matter racin the MIT School of humanities and social sciences paralleling his remarks are those of urban design consultant Carl fights a pioneer in the field of city planning and former director of the planning and housing division of Columbia University Dr. Carl Feis. I do not feel that the planning accomplishments of the last 50 years with a with two or three exceptions are adequate to form the basis for planning accomplishments which must occur in the next 50 years. And I don't and I try to elucidate it in the paper. The reasons for this particular set of

conclusions. This is not a pretty thing to have to say before a group of this kind and I'm going to attempt to document at least in part the reasons for my conclusion. The conclusions are that. As far as large scale planet throughout this country we had one organization very great accomplishment that we killed. That was the national resources planning board and I recommend very strongly that. A similar organization within the federal government be reconstituted in contemporary terms. The Transportation report of the National Resource Planning Board was one of the great reports of its kind. That report if it had been any way you missed by any of the federal agencies between the time that it was published in about 1945 and the present time. Would

have been able to have solved or avoided. We would be able to solve or avoid some of the very specific problems we're facing at the present time. I therefore feel very strongly and urged very strongly that the AI P. and the other professional organizations of good will make every effort to persuade the federal government powers that be to re-establish the national resources planning board. In sum I don't care what is called in contemporary terms to pull together the very many threads of obligations federal law now requires scattered departments and agencies of the federal government. The confusion at the state and local level. The confusions of many of our large scale single purpose project programs and get some sense of knock some sense in order into the process of handling the major programs of this

country. Second I have felt and again this is documented in this paper. That's probably the only evidence of successful planning that we can point to with pride. It is the Tennessee Valley Authority. Looking at it from the standpoint of an attempt to achieve an ecological balance and human balance design balance a multipurpose balance and I don't need to lay it out but do build it and manage it and operate it over a longer period of time to prove that it works. And I do not see any sense in these single purpose project programs that we are proliferating and have been proliferating for the last two dozen years single purpose projects which could be multi-purpose projects power projects that could supply water

water projects that could supply power both kinds of projects that could spur supply recreation and conservation benefits. We don't seem to learn from our own accomplishments unfortunately and I recommend in this summary in the final summary of the paper. That we cover the United States with TVA type of organizations and operations to make it possible to handle Appalachian all the great river basins of the country. It's got some kind of an orderly fashion and process on the urban front. Most unfortunately it is very difficult as you go down through history to discover any major urban planning progress. After the Civil War you must remember that a founding of this country was based on two

movements that of planned communities and that of unplanned communities and this was a parallel system that occurred from the very first steps. I'm a continent by all of the various countries that landed here and the people. By the time the civil war is over the planned movement died out we had a tremendous history of New Community new top from the New England village on right on to the very successful settlements of the Mormons in Utah. These were planned communities and well planned. It was not until after World War One that we began to pick up with a few oddball new community designs that had some validity which your ship village in Camden New Jersey. Done for the ship for the U.S. shipbuilding

corporation as a war housing a war community project in 1918 is perhaps the best in the mid twenties. One new community was designed that survived the depression extremely well Kingsport Tennessee designed by John Nolan Sr.. Excellent job. Very interesting. Still survives and successful. But from the standpoint of dramatic impact upon the design of community it is the most important thing in the 20s of course was the invention of the Raburn plan by Henry Wright and Clarence. This was not a design for a whole community but the principles behind it have been applied with great success to portions of communities all over this country and abroad ever since. No philosophic design idea has superseded the Raburn plan since it was developed in the late twenties. It has been used in urban renewal it

has been used in every major urban development suburban development concept with varying degrees of success since that time where there has been a real attempt to do something reasonably good in the way of contemporary physical planet. However unfortunately the number of examples of emulation or absorption or making use of the Raburn plan there are so few. The application of it has not been encouraged by the Federal Housing Administration mortgage insurance programs and the result is in the proliferation of slurps. We find very very few examples anywhere in the country of the direct application of the Redburn idea. Also while there's cause there's been constant talk about new tops a new community. Actually we have no history or tradition of new towns or new communities after the

Civil War. We have only a history of episode a series of different little experiments like the suburban resettlement administrations three towns Greenbelt green hills and green day or the A C. The three of them. And there is nothing at the present moment that even remotely resembles a continuity and new community development. For a settlement or a resettlement pattern of the people of the United States for the next 50 years. And there is nothing in the present law or contemplated law that I am familiar with that would make it possible for us to do what Great Britain Scandinavia the Netherlands have been doing in the development of national programs for settlement of resettlement of population existing and future well-designed new communities meeting the requirements of

people and climate and the entire ecological breakdown of the location. All of you are fully aware of the fact that city after city throughout the country over the past 30 years the housing authorities have talked with a reluctance to the Planning Commission the planning commissions of talk with the reluctant to the urban renewal Authority's zoning boards have talked with reluctance to the planning of the so-called urban expediter a position that's been established from time to time is hardly any better than that of a UN observer in Israel at the time of the recent combat. Now. This has been a disaster. It's had a disastrous effect upon the programming for community development in our country. You would have heard and you will hear. Much discussion

about the pollution of our land our air and our water. And in a sense the pollution of our people. We have allowed the kind of license to occur to our resources and to the our people who are associated with a resource which is one which is one of the great shames of our democracy. I don't know how many of you in this room have ever seen that tragically despoiled area called Ducktown Tenn. and know that this vast area of clay exposed Clay is practically never irretrievable. We have destroyed our land to the point where we have created deserts. And we have not had the guts enough to go to the perpetrators of this to spoil ation and say

Look. Private enterprise is costing the public too much. Either you take responsibility for your for the damage that you have done to your country or you quit.