The next fifty years; Creating a New Standard of Life

Oh. Oh. Thank. Thank you thank you. Science they are nice technology. They urban environment.

Well see rapid change during the next 50 years. National Educational radio presents a series of programs expressing a variety of opinion on the future of the democratic environment. Theys it was were given at the 50th year conference of the American Institute of planners held in Washington in October of last year. And attendance was any army public affairs director Bill Greenwood the American Institute of planners conference near the end of its third day of presentations architects and urban planners gathered to put forth their ideas on the shape of Housing and Urban Development. Over the next 50 years. Welcome to the 10th program in this 13 part series on planning for the future. This week ideas for creating a new standard of life with man as the measure through the contributions to be made in housing and urban form. The first to state his ideas on the next half century and housing is the

distinguished architect and town planner George Candelas. Mr. Kendall this is the winner of numerous awards for design in France Israel the Caribbean and Africa. Perhaps most noteworthy are his plans for the 100 mile city of Toulouse and the designs for the housing of Mar say both in France his work on Marsay was in association with one of the century's most notable architects and planners here to clear up what he calls the present confusion in the term housing is architect George Candelas. If he didn't meet the visuals symbiotes action is the key. The Greek temples the symbols of the civilization of happens. Yeah ran us forums and to military organisation express ancient drama. The mosque synagogues and

cathedrals express the Middle Ages. The oil Palace of Versailles while soulé are the symbols of the Renaissance. Terrible factory and slums the most trade the polluted and this trail of evolution of the 19 century. We saw something around us. We was a distraction and the right construction the money to station of the early twentieth century. I hope I hope that for the next 50 years a symbol of will be human. European housed. In housing or so we must eliminate the present confusion housing should the not to

mean only house. How many errors we separated in our planning for CPS. We develop the streets the schools big traffic we sup and center the place of leisure. The place of wall. By means of technological force and invention Delap on television gradually etc. etc. etc.. Our present that action lots to aid dissociation opium production of the human life of human society. Future cows must the brink about the way I associate should never be asked to see action of the man to the man to man you know seek to achieve

such a way as a CA Should we must repeat the plaza here. The problem is difficult. The professional cannot solve it by himself. She must walk in teams. SAS teams our I.T. in existence but. Their work is really a team or not. I Bapi it seem that we won't open each specialist engineer socialist architect job grafter etc.. It's simple done in a parallel way because you don't speak the same language

and we don't have the same aims of today. The fast bases the rights at the schools to learn and to compensate sheep the basics of the other disciplines. The day has come for the House but also to do the onus right to learn and become prey. I keep picture. Because to create to be human and be a woman of tomorrow it's nothing else but I. And I to keep textural at the Large scale of the mall of tomorrow.

You're going to be there said one who can create. While a simple architectural detail like a tall noble know all so how to create a city and vice versa. I want to add that the feature team need also to know the doctor at 50 and these days that's not well anyway. We have the habit to say that we war for the people. We must change your mask what we need people but how it's easy to say but to feel it difficult to do

it you know it better meet to meet to give you an example from my personal experience three years ago I had the good fortune of with my shadow woods and Alex joyously doing a very important French government competition with a sign that to be in a new city close me eyes. Well 100000 people in the southwest of France the day after the day after we won the peace competition many of Toulouse miss your biceps. A very clever and very important man. Told to me. To Lowe's has been built for. Two thousand a year by its own people.

We lose that we knew to lose them must also be be we the close participation of the city's people but you and not by you alone. From Barry's piece a simple basic tool. Let's try to get over to eschew the peoples but dissipation. We agreed that we started all talking at the very base of the social structure of the children. First the new CD was to be peeled. Be prepared. Seems the movie's gone mix and description in never any elementary school and be generated. Great interest. Oh people are obese children

who transmit it to their ass Byron's in every two Lucien family in the evening around to beat that dinner table. All the children explain the vision. OK and you see the Jell-O has started only after he sucked a campaign of prestidigitation graduate public making it said that I generally say keep the importance of preacher we told them the truth only the truth. At the most read the pred dominance of the public viruses the private interest everybody got in they morally engage in the act to be hese you see. He immediately result was a minister who was

against the new CPA whilst Howard and the mayor who were spec tied to all of these to rebuild his walls. He created a moral teaching and peace attitude. He's our best hope for success. Create a sad sad moral attitude. East and dispensable want decision for the next 50. Yes you'd been like a new boy is it a new policy. DC planning now even it's Funimation my last big big gamma base for anything else. It goes beyond a bonus yars OPA responsibility towards the future of

the wallets our children. Good for you. The economy's the source your loss. She also ensured the arsenic and space colonies separated and all together. Not for get but get this right through moral attitude for peace. We must go. In now planning teams. The most important man what I can. T. Stressing the importance of the human element in housing now and in the future was architect and city planner George Kandel as Mr. Kandel is

currently head of the urbanization commission of the International Union of Architects. This program in the series the next 50 years is discussing the future of housing and urban planning and continues now with this question What will housing be like in the year 2000. Urban planner Charles Abrams fears that the future of housing may be very much like the present. That is if certain objectives which Mr Abraham outlines are not met. Here are ideas on the future of housing from a man who has been a consultant in urban planning to many countries around the world. Author and urban planner Charles Abrams. Well. You can take any one of two views on what housing will be like in the year 2000 you can take a grim view. And you can find ample support for it because of all the. Commodities that have been touched by the Industrial

Revolution. The houses remain the most impervious to change. If you look at the picture I have in the book I wrote called for didn't know what future of housing in 1946 you will see a comparison of an elephant house. With some of the houses we live in in the United States. The elephant house had seven hundred fifty to 900 square feet. A porch fireplace the walls were plastered with clay it was set up on stilts over the Swiss lakes. And it would probably pass FHA. But but certainly I think it would bring fifteen hundred dollars a season in Miami. The American technicians can show the less developed nations how to put up a steel mill or a dam. But even in our own country we still have failed to mass produce a cheap

shelter. In the United States about a quarter of the population still live in slums while people in the less developed nations of the world build with their own hands as they did 5000 years ago. A man is not a builder as I go around the world I find out that he really can't build and I looked up Darwin he can't even make a hatchet or build a canoe except by imitating and watching somebody else do it he's not as efficient as a beaver. He's far from being as good as a bird. Certainly I am a head stock on which two people can stand he has no instincts for building housing is going to have a housing problem. Continuously particularly. As the urban population increases at the rate of about 400 percent higher than the population as a whole and these and in these developing countries how the housing optimists can make an equally good case. After all the Western world has now acquired the flushing apparatus to dispose of its waste and builders have adopted the

radiant heating used by the Romans and their bats. Four walls and a roof are still much the same as they were in the Stone Age. But we've discovered the elevator and how to pile one on top of the other. And as automation and nuclear power forge ahead the optimists would say that these and other innovations would spill off some of the gains on the sluggish housing economy. And there are estimates the fallout from these technical advances will bring thousands of new self-contained towns to our country sites Michaela fully equipped rooms will be bought in department stores. Sonic cleaning devices and Afro touring systems will be banishing direct and computerized microwave ovens will automatically mix and gradients from pre-selected recipes that will make Julia Childs a relic of a forgotten age. Everything will be instant.

Including not only rehabilitation but oatmeal which is now instant kitchen equipment will produce disposable dishes of powdered plastics as they already do and electronic devices will make the housewife work free so that after a husband leaves us three dimensional TV set in his three hour workday he'll be whisked to his destination on an unmanned tube in a split second. Bucky Fuller will be throwing down his geodesic domes all over the country. If the United States is to be the example of what a great democracy can achieve it must produce something more promising than the promise of a decent home and a decent environment for every American family on the way to begin is to define our objectives backed by programs to implement them. The first objective in my opinion is a land deployment program. Assuming continuity of present trends the United States will have about 350 million people a generation

hence by the by about the year 2000 to meet their needs. We'll have to build as many structures of all kinds as we've built since our earliest immigrants first moved into their caves. These structures would be consuming at least a million additional metropolitan acres up each year which isn't much around the city. But it's this land that must somehow be brought under constructive control of decent homes and environments. How to be more than promises. The House Of The Lamb is deployed not the amount of land but how that land is deployed will condition the height of the cost. The types of houses and shops how and whether man will use his feet for negotiating distance. I've always wanted cities to appoint commissioners of pedestrians to check on the incursions of the commissioners of traffic. Because of the length of

its work journeys will be conditioned. The expenditures for roads and throwaways have a proximity to friends and recreation and the future appearance of our cities all will be conditioned by this by the way we deploy our land resources. Now land regulation doesn't is not going to do it. In my opinion it needs a land acquisition and once acquired by a public agency the land could be planned. The schools water drainage and open space is provided and the improved lot so for private building or investment subject to suitable conditions governing its future development. The procedure is simple it would be. I said this 30 years ago but I was too late. The procedure would be no more than an extension of the urban renewal program to vacant land. It encompasses slum prevention instead of clearance. And

unlikely current version of a BN renewal and enforces no mass displacements. And it would entail no less a role for the private buildout than he has under existing land development operations only the sequence of the public and private efforts would be reversed. By making the approved land available for private home building contiguous land could be assembled. And all of these wasted fragmented land operations that very soon will be connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles will be avoided. The more not more convenient journeys to work will be assured and substantial economies in road building would be achieved. We now just stretch roads to where the accident of land assemblage happens to have occurred. The local autonomy would be subordinated at first but be restored thereafter because upon completion of each improvement it it would be turned over to the public school system or to the local. But a

lot of the city all the county. Land could be sold for the homes of the rich and the middle class. While federal low interest programs and family subsidies with provide for the lower income workers as well. What would be built would full fail. Only concept of a regional city a place in which people from all walks of life could work and live with comfort and with dignity. Now a second objective would be to make our existing suburbs better places in which to live. By 1980 a quarter of a billion people. May be weaving in and out of our urban and suburban areas in some 90 million automobiles. Making it virtually impossible to negotiate the work. And we'll have to as the years go by and allocate more and more funds. And take more and more swathes of precious space and dedicate it to road building. Or we may have to replant our future neighborhoods into tall compact sentences

negotiated by foot elevator and mass transportation. The third objective is to make our central city sound. But this means not only a physical revolution but a fiscal revolution. A generation ago municipalities were collecting more in taxes than the national and state governments combined. But their revenues which were 52 percent of total as recently as 1932 have dropped to seven point three percent of total. By the 1960s. And yet these cities are experiencing the major social problems of the nation and they haven't any recourse to the tax revenues which have been consigned to the federal Colossus unable to finance their requirements from taxation these central cities have resorted to borrowing in between 1946 and 1964 local debt per capita more than tripled

while federal debt to capital went down by $300. In other ways the federal government has failed to share the growing costs of education and safety and I believe that the federal government really has to support education by direct grants to cities. You don't need any new program such as we have in which some bright lad in h u d invents a new program under which the city can contribute 35 percent. The problem is not to invent programs but the say that the city is having a problem and education is having a fiscal problem and that the federal government which has the taxing power must support the costs of education and safety and health and other things which the city is desperately trying to support as its social problems are increasing. I've got about five more minutes Harry. Three more minutes. Then let me just run over these without discussing. The fourth

objective in my paper as a housing inventory in both city and suburb providing a variety of electives to every American family. A fifth objective is to provide variety and security in the forms of home tenure. A sixth objective is a national building industry capable of producing efficiently at low cost. The seventh objective freedom of movement by eliminating all restrictive barriers preventing people from. Living in areas of their choice. An eighth objective should be the assumption of leadership by the United States in the improvement of urban settlements in the world's less developed areas. And finally I'd like to read the last part. By January 1 2000 I shall be 98 years old an age in which my hindsight will be better than my eyesight. I shall be watching the second millennium of the birth of Christ to live in a stable during a housing shortage.

I suspect that there still be a shortage by the year 2000 but fortunately with all of the people coming closer together in the world. In my opinion and maybe the possibility that some of the nations in the area of the Open Society of the world will hesitate to destroy all of the peoples. It will bring another blessing. Maybe one of the main forces making for war in the past has been the necessity for expansion on the part of increasing populations. War was simply one of the special manifestations of the biological struggle for existence. And this manifestation spurred conquests since early times and until a Mauser was IJN doctrine and Hitler's more recent drive. Yet logically why would I have been ization is no insurance against either cupidity or stupidity. It

should bring with it a subsidence of some of man's compulsion is to conquer and kill. Because in an urban world his drives for space will be endless. And intensive rather than outward and extensive as it was in the world where it's not the land of a neighboring nation that's needed for urban expansion but the land within a nations own borders and the competition for this land will be intense. We may have civil wars but it will be mostly internal not external. This of course won't dispense with the competition for the food lands or the need for birth control as it will above all not dispense with the necessity for the most intelligent planning of the urban cores on the land around them. In this respect the present and future concentrations of people in the industry should be highlighting the overriding need for rationalizing the world's urban land resources and I wish I could discuss this at length I do do well on it in one of my

points. If the rule of law is to survive if Rebellion is to be avoided and if a measure of human happiness is to be secured for the urban society to come by the year 2000. It's this resource and it's proper planning proper planning of the land that should be engaging universal concern at this moment. In this sense resolving the mysteries of space problem on earth is I believe at least as important as resolving the mysteries of space in the outer regions of the universe. I think. It was. An urban planners design for the future in housing. That was the chairman of the division of Urban Planning at the School of Architecture Columbia University Mr. Charles Abrams from the University of

Chicago's Center for Urban Studies cum city planner Jack Meltzer who sees housing in the next half century in terms of a challenge to urban planners. Mr. Jack Meltzer.