THE CENTENARY 01' MODERN PLANNING

CHAPTER

development - econornic, social, poltical - was linear 01' cyclical. But the
convention will serve to capture many of these underlying changes, and in
particular some o~ the key t~emes: the birth of the garden city movement, its
extension into regional planmng, the attempt to create ideal modernist cities, the
shift from top-down to bottom-up planning, and the attempt to forge a
freewheeling entrepreneurial style of urban regeneration.

The Centenary

21

01Modern

Planning

Peter Hall

The modem planning movement is just a little older than the twentieth century.
It was in October 1898 that Ebenezer Howard published the original edition of
To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, to be republished four years later
under the more familiar title Garden Cities of To-Morrow (Howard, 1898, 1946,
1985). And, though there were other important foundation stones of the modern
planning movement - in France, in Germany, in the United States - surely
without doubt this was the most significant.
It was not of course the birth of town planning, which had occurred rnillennia
before that in the cities of the Middle East. But it was the effective birth of
modem planning; a significantly distinct movement, distinguished by its social
purpose. Classical town planning, which reached its apogee in the two centuries
that began with Pope Sixtus V's reconstruction of Rome and ended in the
building of Georgian London, Edinburgh and Dublin, was in essence a purely
formal movement, an exercise in c1assical civic design that was an outgrowth of
Renaissance architecture. Modem town planning, too, had its strong aesthetic
side and even its aesthetic controversies: consider only Le Corbusier's tirade
against Camillo Sitte (Le Corbusier, 1998), or the postmodernist reaction against
the movement that Le Corbusier and Gropius represented. But, throughout the
twentieth century, aesthetic considerations have been subsumed under social
ones. Thus, for Le Corbusier, straight streets were preferable because they more easily
accommodated his twentieth century 'machines for living in' and those other
machines he worshipped, the machines we use to drive around. Equally, frorn
Raymond Unwin to late twentieth century New Urbanists, others have contraargued that the street pattern should be used to curb traffic, not to promote it.
So the story starts in 1898 and can conveniently be ended exactly a century
later. Rather remarkably, we can consider the intervening century in the form of
five snapshot pictures, taken almost exactly a quarter century apart. Of course,
that is a huge simplification that could produce a historian's Procrustean bed:
important developments occurred between those dates, and in particular much

1898:

THE RE]ECTlON

OF THE PALAEOTECHNIC

CITY

The first key date is of course 1898 itself. That year not only saw publication of
Howard's tome, but of Kropotkin's influential Fields, Factories, and Workshops
(Kropotkin, 1898, 1913). Howard later paid tribute to Kropotkin, then long \
resident in England: both books powerfully argued the case for planned
decentra1ization from the congested Victorian industrial city, aided by the shift
from what Patrick Geddes a1most simultaneously called palaeotechnic to
\ neotechnic urbanism, from the age of coal and steam to the age of electricity and
the motor vehicle (Geddes, 1912, 1915; Kitchen, 1975; Mairet, 1957). Geddes
was then conducting his early experiments in cornmunity self-help in the slums
of Edinburgh, and inviting speakers to his surnmer schools. Irnmediately after
reading Kropotkin, he could see the new technologies as the key to large-scale
regional deconcentration of people from London and the other big cities to
'eutopia', communities in the open countryside, each in organic relationship
with their surrounding agrarian regions.
These were theorists, utopians even; but Howard, in particular, was a doer as
well as a thinker. He was instrumental in creating the Garden City Association in
London, in June 1899, a mere eight months after publication of his book; the
'-first garden city at Letchworth was already started by 1903. Even earlier than
that, the London County Council (LCC) were building their first peripheral
cottage housing estate at Totterdown Fields in Tooting, served by a new electric
tramcar line that opened in 1903: the garden suburb was running neck and neck
with the garden city.
It is significant that all were British, either by birth or adoption. The birth of
modern planning took place in London and in Edinburgh. And the key
individuals - Howard, Kropotkin, Geddes - met frequently in the first decade of
the new century, at lectures and conferences and summer schools, commenting
on each others' contributions. All were involved in the great London town
planning conference of 1910, from which carne the birth of an organized
professional Town Planning Institute in 1914.
For all these people, and from those who carne from mainland Europe for the
1910 conference, housing was the central question. The root problem was urban
overcrowding and its inevitable consequences for public health. And on that
~core, it was difficult to say which city was worst. In London, it was typical to
IOd one family of up to eight people in a single room, sharing with others a

*,

22

THE CENTENARV OF MODERN PLANN1NG

URBAN PLANN1NG IN A CIIANGING WORLD

single water supply and water closet. Nearly one half of London families had to
pay over one-quarter of their earnings for rent, and the poor could not escape,
because of the casual nature of so much of their work (GB Royal Comrnission
on Housing, 1885, 1, pp. 7-9, 17-18). In Paris, the historie city's 2.45 rnillion
people, in J 891, lived at a density twice that of the LCC area; 14 per cent of the
Paris poor, 330,000, lived in overcrowded dwellings; the poor were even worse
housed than in London. Sellier calculated in 1911 that the total was stil]
216,000, with another 85,000 in the suburbs, living at two or more per room
(Sellier and Bruggeman, 1927; Basti, 1964). Berlin, which nearly doubled in
twenty years, from 1.9 rnillion in 1890 to 3.7 rnillion in 1910, accommodated its
growth in densely-packed five-storey 'rental barracks' around courtyards as
narrow as 15 feet wide, the mnimum necessary to bring in fire-fighting
equipment. As late as 1916, no less than 79 per cent of all dwellings had only 1
or 2 heatable rooms (Eberstadt, 1917). In New York, the Tenement House
Commission of 1894 estimated that nearly three in five of the city's population
lived in tenement houses, so grossly over-built that on average nearly four-fifths
of the ground was covered in buildings. In 1893, the 10th Ward, main destination
of Jews from Eastern Europe, counted over 700 people to the acre, 30 per cent
more than the most congested part of any European city. Part of the adjacent
11th Ward, had nearly 1000 to the acre, and was almost certainly the most
crowded urban neighbourhood in the world. In 1908, half of East Side families
slept at three or four to a room, nearly a quarter at five or more to a room,
depending on a few communal taps. Fixed baths were non-existent (Ford, 1936;
Howe, 1976; Scott, 1969).
The reformers sought an answer to these conditions - but also, in the case of
both Howard and Kropotkin, to the problems of a depressed and depopulating
countryside (figure 2.1). The answer would be central urban renewal at lower
densities, accompanied by new garden cities and garden suburbs on green fields.
These would be built either by public agencies such as the LCC, by limiteddividend philanthropic companies modelled on the Peabody and Waterlow Trusts
which had built early tenement housing, by voluntary groups based on the
principIe of cooperation, or by philanthropic industrialists (in schemes as Port
Sunlight, Bournville and New Earswick in England, or Margarethenhohe in
Germany - some of which actually predated and influenced Howard). The
means to this planned dispersion would be the new technologies of electric
power and low-cost public transport, above a11the electrc tramway.
The planning movement was thus an outgrowth of the housing reform
movement, and remained firmly coupled to it. It was also a by-product of the
intense discussion of land reform in late nineteenth century London, which
mainly arose from the problem of landlordism in Ireland and the Highlands of
Scotland. Howard's solution - purchase of land at depressed agricultural values
followed by deployment of progressively rising values to create a local welfare
state - was essentially a variant on land nationalization. Conversely, Howard

h t once decentralization

23

had done its work, ground rents in London

t a, d the population of the County of London, then 45. nu11

be heved II
IOn, wou Id

. . (Beevers, 1987; Hall and Ward, 199 8).

would fa anfifths to less than one rnillion
11 by four- I
.
fa
.
decade or so after 1898 the first actual expenments were under way:
Withm a
'
.
.
th and Hampstead Garden Suburb, and m early LCC estates like
t Letc h W O 1
..
a
d
Felds White Hart Lane and Norbury; at Margarethenhohe and
Totter own
,
in Germany and at Forest Hills Gardens (the first conscious
Hel Ierau
'
.
...
.
bodiment of the neighbourhood urut principle) m New York City. Not long
efm rhat frorn 1916 carne the sixteen cits-jardins around Pars, designed and
a ter,
,
built by the Office Public des Habitations a Bon March du Dpartement de la
Seine under Henri Sellier. What is most notable about these schemes is that the
reat majority were garden suburbs, not garden cities. Indeed, only Letchworth
~ell into the select category of garden city, in that it aimed to decentralize people
and their jobs well outside the range of the parent city. This was conscious; from
1912 Raymond Unwin was arguing that garden suburbs were a perfectly
satisfactory solution. Henri Sellier well understood that his interpretation was
not pure Howard, but Unwin's Hampstead variant; he took his architects to visit
Unwin in England, in 1919, and used the Unwin text as a basis for design (Read,
1978; Swenarton, 1985).
Whether garden cities or garden suburbs, they shared a picturesque neovernacular style, which derived on the one hand from the Arts and Crafts
movement of Ruskin, Webb, Morris, Lethaby, Unwin and Parker and their many
continental allies in the craft workshop movement, and on the other hand from
CamiIJo Sitte's immensely influential book Der Stiidtebau, published in 1889
(Sitte, 1965). Unwin spent long summer holidays in the small towns of France
and Germany, seeking in his sketchbooks to capture the essence of their
informal, organic designo His continental co11eagues, such as Georg Metzendorf
at Margarethenhohe or Heinrich Tessenow at Hellerau outside Dresden, designed
their garden suburbs in the same idiom (Unwin, ] 911). Small gabled cottagetype homes, semi-detached or in short rows, cluster along curving streets or
sometimes around greens or the dead ends of short streets; abundant tree growth,
matured now over a century, contri bute to a note of arcadian calm. And this
quality is remarkably consistent across cities and countries: Unwin seems to be
borrowing from German models in his shopping parade at Hampstead Garden
Suburh, yet the same kind of grouping is repeated by Grosvenor Atterbury at
Forest Hills Gardens.

1923:

THE TRIUMPH

OF VISION

AND THE FAILURE OF PRACTICE

The original impetus extended over at least the following quarter century,
culminating in the vision of the Regional Planning Association of America
(RPAA), which from 1923 effectively married the ideas of Howard, Kropotkin
and Geddes into a central concept of decentralized corrununities in the distant

'7

~
~
~
--.:;

24

countryside,
powered by electricity and accessible through the private
automobile (Sussman, 1976)0 Indeed, 1 May 1925, the date of publication of the
RPAA's manifesto in the New York magazine The Survey, was a date almost as
important to planning history as October 18980 But this grand vision was never
realized. Through Alexander Bing's City Housing Corporation, the RPAA
succeeded merely in building a smal1 development, Sunnyside Gardens, in New
York City, and the beginnings of a garden city, Radburn, just outside it, but the
recession killed off the latter. Rexford Tugwell's plan for hundreds of Greenbelt
cities was effectively truncated by a conservative Congress. And~the ~nnessee
"yalley Authority - essentially the realization of the RPAA's ideas on a huge
spatial scale - became in essence a power generation and agricultural extension
scheme, with just one rninuscule new town, Norris in Tennessee, to recall th;'Ciriginal visiono In Australia, Walter Burley Griffin's plan for the new feder;
capital of Canberra was continually stalled by disagreements and rivalries
EIsewher~, as in the United States, !be prevailing ethos was to assist suburban
~ent
by private enterprise.
-During the 1920s, in contrast, the significant developments were on the
European mainland. Le Corbusier was publishing his Voisin Plan, proposing that
central Paris should be razed to the ground and replaced by a new world of
cruciform towers and multi-lane freeways. That vision, perhaps mercifully, was
never realized. But Henri Sellier's team was at work on Suresnes, one of the first
of the new Parisian cits-jardins. In Germany, Ernst May was appointed as
Architect-Planner
of Frankfurt am Main, there to develop his celebrated
Trabantensiedlungen or satellite towns in the Nidda Valley. In Berlin, the city
planner Martin Wagner was collaborating with other leading architects of the
Federal Republic - Hugo Haring, Hans Scharoun, Walter Gropius - on a set of
new housing developments which resolutely employed the Bauhaus principlesof
design for living. Vienna was at work on its great series of housing projects,
most notably the Karl Marx Hof, which became so influential that it directly
influenced similar developments in London (the Ossulston Street redevelopment)
and elsewhere. In Amsterdam, H'P Berlage was laying out the great Amsterdam
South scherne.
All these European developments, though sometimes they confusingly
adopted the garden city label, were quite different frorn the original British
formulation. A few were pure inner-city renewal schemes; for the most part
however they were peripherally-Iocated, but even here they were essentially
quite high-density schemes in the form of terraces, quite often with an admixture
of apartment blocks. They were planned as an integral part of the city and were
connected to it by good public transport. They stemmed from a very distinct
continental style of urban apartment living, and although they were imitated in
British slum clearance schemes, they did not become the norm there.
They also shared a new architectural style, derived from Le Corbusier and
fram the graup under Walter Gropius that taught at the Bauhaus in Dessau frorn

THE CENTENARY OF MODERN PLANNING

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

25

kl functional with a strong emphasis on clean lines and on rational

26 star Y
,
19 00
aximize exposure to sunlight, The predorrunant form was long,
1 nOlng to m
o 1 b d
Pa
ght terraces of houses or apartrnents (Zeilenbau), typical y ase
eraIly strat
o
o
gen
cess and so between three and five storeys in height, surrounded
n walk-up ac
o
o
o
ol
Ilective open space and with predorrunantly straight or modestly
b malO y co
'
o
o
o
y d
ts It was a deliberate reaction agamst the picturesque neo-vernacular
curve stree o
oo
1 f rhe earliest garden cines and suburbs.
st\eh~ reaction failed to travel across the English Channel. British housing
the same era remained traditional in style, only occasionally
schemes of
the
modernist tides from Europeo One reason for that was that
swep t by
o
most foIlowed the governmental pattern books that had been effectively
drawn up by Raymond Unwin in 19190 The largest of al!, the combination
arden city-garden
suburb of Wythenshawe
outside Manchester,
was
~eSigned by Barry Parker, What they did have in common with their
continental counterp~
was mOlivation and agency: they were essentially
social housing schemes,
built either by municipal
agencies or by
- cooperative-type housing associations, Throughout this period and beyond,
the link between housing and planning remained the key, as the American
planner Catherine Bauer stressed in her influential book Modern Housing
(Bauer, 1934)0 It could hardly be otherwise: everywhere, the slum legacy of
the nineteenth century remained, and progress in removing it was all too
0

slow.

America remained quite special in this regard from the turn of the century. It
made no provision for public or cooperative housing on the European model,
with the exception of a few emergency schemes for shipyard workers in World
War One. Lawrence Veiller's irnrnensely influential New York Tenement House
Commission report of 1901 set the model: it relied on impraved building codes
and zoning regulations for privately-constructed housing, both in the cities and
in the suburbs (Marcuse, 1980)0 With these in place, rising living standards plus
increasing owner-occupation would deal with the problern. And indeed, after
1900, streetcar construction (plus subways or elevated lines in a few larger
cities) had a major impact in allowing a second generation of inner-city
tenement dwellers to escape into new suburban homes. Manhattan in 1910 had
2.3 million people, shrinking to 1.9 rnillion in 1940; the Bronx's population shot
from 89,000 in 1890 to 1.4 million in 1940; that of Queens increased from
100,000 to 1.3 million over the same periodo In 1905, half of New York's
population lived within four miles of City Hall, falling to only 30 per cent by
1925 (Jackson, 1985)0
A It ~as perhaps significant that London, the one European city to follow this
Amer~can model of mass suburbanization in the 1920s and 1930s, injected
o menean capital and operating expertise into its Underground system. Here, as
~~American cities, there was a rninimal kind of planning for the new suburbs in
e fOrm of road layouts and segregated land uses and open space provisin. But

IIANGING WORLO

--

it was Iar from ambitious, and the resulting suburban sprawl was savagely
criticized
by architect-planners
like Britain's
Thomas Sharp and Clough
Williarns-Ells, and by the RPAA's Lewis Mumford - most notably in the latter's
celebrated criticism ofThomas Adams' New York Regional Plan of 1929-31 for the
Russell Sage Foundation, which he berated for encouraging further comrnercial
congestion at the centre and further sprawl at the periphery (Mumford, 1932). However
the results ofthese criticisms were significantly different. In Britain, architects and rura;
conservationists
joined forces with the garden city movement to produce a
united front, which pro ved effective when Neville Chamberlain, a politician who
was a housing reforrner and garden city enthusiast, became Prime Minister in
1937. Within months, he was instrumental in setting up a Royal Commissio
n
whose report of 1940 laid the essential foundations of the post- World War Two
planning system. In the United States, the RPAA essentially broke up in the
early 1930s, at just the point when it could have been expected to exercise
mximum influence on the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt _ a very
similar politician to Chamberlain,
who as Governor of New York State had
enthusiasticalIy
espoused the cause of regional planning. Perhaps its demise
provides part of the reason for Roosevelt's extraordinary failure in this field.
Bauer at that time broke away frorn the RPAA and began her one-woman
crusade for public housing in America, which bore fruit in the federal Housing
Act of 1937 - nearly half a century later than equivalent legislation in Europe,
and without much effect on the ground until after World War Two.

1948:

THE

GREAT POSTWAR REBUILD

In this quarter-century
chronology,
the historie British Town and Country
Planning Act of 1947 fell a few months early; but it was only one event in an
unprecedented
burst of planning activity that occurred immediately around and
after World War Two, especially
in Europe: in the United Kingdom, the
publication
in 1943 of Abercrombie
and Forshaw's
County of London Plan
followed in 1945 by Abercrombie's
Greater London Plan 1944, and then by the
1946 New Towns Act and the 1947 Act; in Copenhagen, the Fingerplan of 1948;
in Stockholm,
the Generalplan of ,1952.
This activity was overwhelmingly
driven by the strong motivation to begin comprehensive postwar reconstruction
of bomb damage and (in a few cases exclusively) of outworn slum housing. In
effect, it represented a continuation or completion of the earlier movements alter
a long delay brought about by the great Depression and the war. Again, carried
over from these earlier waves, there was the same emphasis on comprehcnsive
schemes of urban renewal and construction of new communities by public agencies.
The underlying assumption was that this was all part of a comprehcnsive 1
programme
to create a welfare state, adrninistered
by well-meaning
public
professionals
invariably,
architect-planners
with
little
involvement
either
~
from the private developer, or frorn the ordinary citizen.
.-l

'--

TI-!E CENTENARY OF MODERN PLANNING

'L/

---.
sequence and perhaps because a generation of planners were
h 5 m con
,
per ap
ch other there is a certain remarkable sarneness about many of
.
from ea,
.
learOlng .
hemes: consider the earliest pedestnan town centres (Coventry,
resuItmg se
.'
li C
h
lh e
he mixed high-riseflow-nse
housing schemes (Ber In, open agen,
uerdam),
t
..
(L
d
Ro
S kholrn) and the satellite 01' new town cornrnuruties
on on,
ndon,
toC
.
.
.
ff
Lo
) Paris was a late arnval on the scene, making little e ort to
Stockholm . or modernize its huge backlog of obsolescent
housi
ousmg unti '1 t h e
econstruC t
.
r
b t rhen with Paul Delouvrier's
1965 Schma Directeur for the Paris
19605' u
,
. ' ordered by Charles de Gaulle, the city began a massive job of catch-up.
reglon,
.,
h'
b b
d
ain the results were the same: major surgery 111t e mner su ur s,
An ag
,
fi h
. .
'd h
with construction of ive uge new cines OUtSI e t em.
coup Ie d
.
.
One point about these schemes, however, recalls the earlier episodes.
The British, propelled by the enthusiasm and persuasiveness of Frederic Osborn,
realized Ebenezer Howard's
vision half a century late, building no less
than twenty-eight
new towns - eleven of them around London alone.
lronically, however, they did so through government-financed
development
corporations, quite contrary to his original prescription. What they did share with
the original models at Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City was their location:
well outside the rnajor cities and their cornmuter rings (though sornetimes
absorbed into those rings later), separated by green belts 01' similar areas of open
countryside, and designed to be both self-contained
and socially-balanced
cornmunities. That meant a massive exercise in relocating not merely people but
also jobs, made possible by the fact that in the long postwar boom, industry was
expanding and therefore footloose. In mid-Hertfordshire
north of London it even
resulted in a fair approximation
to Howard's original vision of Social City:
Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, together with two post-1946 new towns,
Stevenage and Hatfield, correspond to his prescription for a polycentric garden
city conurbation set against a rural background and linked by high-quality public
transporto
No other nation attempted
anything as ambitious.
In Stockholm,
Sven
Markelius and Goran Sidenbladh consciously diverged frorn the British rnodel
by building satellite towns close to the city, from which residents could commute
by a new transit system. In Copenhagen,
the Fingerplan relied on the same
mechaniSIl1. Paris in 1965 followed thern, by placing the five new cities (villes
nouvelles) at the edge of the agglomeration and connecting them to the city, and
to each other, by new motorways and the new Rseau Express Rgional. In
other words, the model was precisely the same as Unwin had used at
Hampstead, Sellier in Paris or May in Frankfurt: garden suburbs or satellites
dlrectly linked to the parent city. The pure garden city/new town rernained
almost exclusively a British device though one can catch some shadow of it
el
'
b sewhere, for instance the new town of Elizabeth outside Adelaide in Australia,
. ased on a new car factory, or the attempts at commercial new town construction
In America such as Reston in Virginia or Columbia in Maryland, which made

-lIlE

l.,.'""ENTENARY UI'

lV1VUC,.KJ'II

.1-

l.J\..l

..
' .IIH

...

-------some attempt to attract industry but ended by being absorbed in the Washington_
Baltimore commuter belt.

1111

Driven by the huge housing backlog in most European countries, and fUrther
by the postwar and subsequent baby booms, the resultant programme of
construction lasted fully a quarter of a century, until the end of the 1960s or the
start of the 1970s, and was indeed prolonged beyond that by a further wave of
building beginning in the early 1960s which produced the British Mark Two
New Towns such as Milton Keynes and Peterborough, or the Parisian new cities
(villes nouvelles), which were realized mainly in the 1970s and 1980s. It
produced many of the landmarks of the twentieth century planning movement
including the comprehensive reconstruction of London's East End, the Mark
One and Mark Two British new towns, and the Stockholm satellite communities.
I
They had many remarkable similarities - though perhaps that is less
remarkable when one considers the many common influences that entered into
them. There was a very strong emphasis on the neighbourhood unit principIe, in
which housing was grouped around local shops and schools and other necessary
services, and on the pedestrian scale of movement, reinforced in many cases by
Radburn-style segregation of vehicles and pedestrians. There was also a stress on
pedestrianized town centres which were focal points for public transport (buses
in the British new towns, a metro system in the Swedish satellites). Housing was
of uniform size and style, with limited variations: whether single-family housing
in the British new towns, apartments in the Stockholm satellites, or a mixture of
the two in the reconstruction of London, the main emphasis was on housing for
farnilies with children. Further, these developments represented a consistent
ethos of growth-oriented comprehensive planning in which public planning took
the lead and the private sector was reduced to a residual roleo Indeed - especially
in the 1960s, when the public housing programme reached a frenetic peak, and
industrialized building methods were favoured - the resulting landscapes in
Westem European cities often came to be almost indistinguishable from their
Eastern European socialist equivalents in Prague or Warsaw.
There were few parallels outside Europe. In the United States, despite further
Federal housing legislation, large-scale American urban renewal, beginning in
the 1950s, effectively uprooted urban ethnic communities without creating any
effective means for overspill. In the worst instances, as in Chicago, the very peor
were segregated in ghetto-style housing projects within the inner city (Bowly.
1978). Undoubtedly, that reflected the balkanized fragmentation of local
government, which set suburb against city, coupled with underlying resistance 10
any large-scale movement of low-income ethnic minorities from the cilies.
Frederic Osbom gently chided Lewis Mumford for the RPAA's failure to
emulate his own Town and Count:ry Planning Association, which had scored
such a triumph in the new towns programme (Mumford and Osbom, 1971): but
it may have been that no such movement could have been effective in America.
There, as the white middle class continued to spread out into ever more distau!

bs following the rnodel of the Levittown developments of the immediate

subur
. after city,
. stwa , years, a potentta. 11Y hi g hl Y divi
IVISlve pattern resu Id'
te : 111 city
r
poi entratio
of ethnic minority populations, often ridden by unemployment
ns
co~csocial problems, ringed by white suburbia. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, an
an . ent urban sociologist turned politician, drew attention to the phenomenon in
ernlll
.
1965 (Moynihan, 1965). Yet more money was poured mto
urban renewal, but the
underlying problem was not being sol ved, because America could never bring
itself LOcountenance large-sca]e planned urban dispersion from its urban slums.
New LOwns,in this prescription, were essentially just a better kind of suburb,
produced by commercial developers for buyers in the open market.

1973:

THE GREAT SHIFT IN ZEITGEIST

Between 1967 and 1975, but especially in 1971-1975, a remarkable disjuncture

occurred in these same countries, and indeed worldwide. It was dramatically
illuslrated by the almost simultaneous abandonment of the schemes to
reconstruct London's Covent Garden and to bui!d several hundred kilometres of
urban motorway in London, in 1973; but there were many parallel events in
other places. It was a change in Zeitgeist coinciding with the arrival of the
postwar 'baby boomers' into active political and pub!ic life, and it was first
marked by the remarkable public manifestations on university campuses, from t
Berkeley to Paris, in the middle and late 1960s. Essentially this generation, for
the most part reared in postwar affluence, rejected many of the values of its
parents: comprehensive reconstruction and construction, large-scale development
and automobility were now seen as positively bad, and the prevailing slogan,
borrowed from the influential environmental campaigner E.F. Schumacher, was
Smal/ is Beautiful (Schumacher, 1973). Protection of the environment now
became a basic imperative, following the immensely influential 1972 Club of
Rome report, The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972).
----l
Underlying this - fuelled by the civil rights movement and the war on poverty,
the protests against the Vietnam War, and the campus free speech movement was a general hostility to the advanced capitalist system and a desire for a return
lO simpler lifestyles, coupled with deep distrust about the ways in which the
entire 'military-industrial complex' was managed by professiona! technocracies.
The~e was now a widespread dstrust of expert, top-down planning, and in
partl~ular a positive paranoia about the prevailing 'systems' approach, which
was Identified with the military machine. And all this was underlined by the riots
~al tore apart American cities, from Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964 to Watts, Los
ngeles, in 1967. The reaction, embodied in highly influential contributions
frorn pla
.
.
nners l'ike Richard
Bolan and Paul Davidoff,
was to turn the tables:
I
ptheanners
m
t nrar-f
..
.
s
. us pracuce bottom-up planning by becorning advocate-planners
111
the servlce of local communities (Bolan, 1967; Davidoff, 1965). In particular,
y woulct not try to set goal s and objectives for their c1ients, but would help

30

---

their cornmunities set their own agendas, try to inform their c1ient publics about
possible alternatives, force public planning agencies to compete for public
support, and help critics to develop alternative plans. The underlying assumptio
n
",:,astha.t the planner did not have mu~h po.wer and did not deserve to have much )
either; indeed, one can date from this pomt a long decline in the status of the
planning profession, frorn which it continues powerfully to suffer in the 1990
s
(Hall, 1996).

J~
~'l~

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

The immediate result was that public participation in planning for the first
time became a major issue, particularly in the United States and the United
Kingdom, where the influential Skeffington report appeared in 1969 (GB
Department of the Environment, 1969). During the 1970s, in many countries,
one result was a series of celebrated urban c1ashes in which local community
groups c1ashed with established urban planning bureaucracies, sometimes
triumphing (as at Covent Garden in London in 1973 or the celebrated Eldonian
cooperative in Liverpool a few years later); sometimes engaging in protracted
political battles (as in Berlin's Kreuzberg during the 1980s).
There was an interesting parallel in the developing world, where the British
planner John Turner, heavily influenced by the kind of anarchist thinking that
had permeated the origins of the modern planning movement, first proposed
self-build site-and-service housing in Latin America - in effect, a legalization
and planned organization of the urban occupation movements that had taken
place on a large scale in these cities in the 1950s and 1960s, a result of
movement off the land (Turner, 1967, 1976). Rather remarkably, it soon became
orthodoxy in the World Bank, which saw it as a low-cost and effective
alternative to bureaucratically-organized public housing schemes. By the l 980s,
such schemes were proliferating throughout the fast-growing cities of the
developing world. The problem that emerged, in the poorest such cities, was that
it proved virtually impossible to maintain even minimal standards of site and
service provision in advance of the occupation of the land; the resources were
lacking (Alfaro, 1996).
These themes - bottom-up planning, environmental concern, adaptive urban
change - continued to re-echo throughout the 1970s and beyond. They appeared
to represent effectively the beginnings of a new political platform, and in
Germany the Green Party had considerable success in local elections for some
cities. During the 1980s, they existed rather anomalously side-by-side with rightwing movements stressing econornic liberalism and freedom from control,
which in the United Kingdom resulted in an attempt - ultimately futile, as it
turned out - to scale down the planning system. Effectively it could be said that
planning constituted one of the dimensions on which a new political division
was being forged in advanced countries, replacing traditional c1ass movements
and interests.
On one issue both sides agreed: the need to regenerate decaying urban
econornies by injecting new activities into them. That resulted from a set of very

THE CENTENARY OF MODERN PLANNING

31

mic changes the outlines of which acadernic observers just

ntal econo
'
fundarne
. In 1I1e early T970s. There was the globalization of the
--------tO percelVe
;.
.
.
1)egan
.
hi h transnationm corporatlOns could shift big parts of production
_.
[Oy III W IC
.
.
.
eCono '.'.
l anufacturing locations to new industrial countnes and regions.
tradltlOna m
.
from
. h this a locational divorce was operung up between command and
.
d .
.
Coupled wit . s , with their attendant producer services,
and pro uction sites.
ntrol funcuon ,
.'
.
CO
d conomies were increasingly shifting towards knowledge-based
Advance e
.
.
including both high-technology
manufactunng
and advanced
industnes,
.
.
.'
~
.
Information technology was having an mcreasmg mpact on
serYlces.
. .'
.'
r--- d non particularly through the ability to displace more routme service
pro uc
,
..
..
.
. iti s frorn major global ciues to smaller lower-cost cines. Parallel to this,
aCUVI le
..'
business travel increasingly depe~ded on . Illter-~lty ~ransp~rtatlO~ hub~,
including international airports and high-speed inter-city tram stations. Finally, it
became evident in the 1980s and 1990s that cities were acquiring an important
enhanced role as cultural, creative and tourist centres (Castells, 1989; GB
Government Office for London, 1996; Hall and Landry, 1997; Landry and
Bianchini, 1995; Sassen, 1991).
......In combination, these changes drastically transformed the economies of major
cities. London lost 289,000 manufacturing jobs but gained 168,000 jobs in
banking, financial and business services between 1981 and 1991. Overall,
though it was successful in creating wealth, it suffered a net loss of 304,000 jobs
during the decade. In New York, the core of the region (New York City plus
Newark) lost 155,000 jobs while the suburban ring gained 1,882,000 (GB
~ernment
Office for London, 1996).
The urban econornies, then, must be revived; on that, there was general
~ment:-Bunnetwo
Sdes disagreed both on objectives and on mechanisms.
During the 1970s, left-wing local councils emphasized the revival of the
traditional manufacturing and goods-handling
economy and the use of
democratic mechanisms which c1early gave the predorninant weight to existing
interests. Right-wingers proposed the creation of new urban economic bases,
especially in the knowledge-intensive service industries, through private real
estate development supported by public infrastructure, using mechanisms which
bypassed elected local councils. During the 1970s, there were years of dithering
and delay in European cities, but both mechanisms eventually produced results.
In the 1980s, the city of Rotterdam successfully redeveloped its waterfront,
Salford in Greater Manchester did the same, while in New York, London and
rnany other British cities, Urban Development Corporations (UDCs) achieved
~Iar
impacts. In Britain, the early attempts to establish UDCs - above
all, m ondon 'Docklands _ proved fiercely contentious, being fought through
the courts, and local councils pursued policies of non-cooperation for years after,
tOIno avail. The evidence eventually showed that, whatever the mechanism, the
o d ind
.
ustries,
once lost, would not come back. Even successful cities saw theirmanufacturing base erode and their more routine service activities relocate to

(j~-

tyN

32

r!
I

II

111:

.\ ir

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHAJ"IGINGWORLD

THE CENTENARY OF lYI0DERN t'L.Al"N1Nv

-----

smaUer cities in the wider suburban rings around them. The key to success \Vas
the ability to develop employment in the new service industries, and this proved
quite difficult because these too were beginning to show increases in
productivity because of the injection of information technology.
, The impact on planning was however quite clear: whereas in the long pOst\Var
boom the mai~phasis
had been on accommodating demographic and
economic growth in new developments, now it was on urban regeneration. Plans
- fornew towns were scaled back or abandoned, and resources shifted back into-'
the cities, as in the United Kingdom through the Inner Urban Areas Act of 1978. iban -regeneration sought not only to rebuild the economic base, but also to
create new housing in the cities in order to try to reverse long-continued
population decline. Because deindustrialization and port closures had left large
tracts of urban land derelict, it eventually proved possible to create large-scale
schemes; in some cases, city populations actually began to rise again for the first
time in decades.

1998:

THE

SEARCH FOR SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT

One hundred years after Howard wrote, people in the advanced capitalist
countries live in a very different world from his: one in which the great majority
have achieved relative affluence, albeit with some reduction in economic
security compared with the long boom years of the 1950s and 1960s, and in
which as a result they have a considerable stake in their own homes and their
own local environments. The majority, typically two-thirds in many advanced
countries (though lower in some, such as Germany), own their own homes, at
least on mortgage; they also tend to live in suburbs even if they still work in
central cities, and many both live and work in suburbs, increasingly bypassing
cities in the course of their everyday lives.
__ One key result is that, for the first time since the beginning of the modern
planning movement, housing and planning have become decoupled: the socalled housing question has shrunk to the problem of how to provide for an
unfortunate low-income minority, as in fact has been the case from the start in
the United States and to a considerable degree in Australia (Hall, 1998). In some
Zountries, such as the United Kingdom, large-scale municipal housebuilding has
effectively come to an end; social housing is provided by housing associations,
and is often scattered widely in and among owner-occupied housing. At the sarne
time, the tenant rnix has changed: the deserving poor, effectively the higherincome blue-collar workers and their families, who were the main concem of
nineteenth century philanthropists and early twentieth century municipalities,
have disappeared as blue-collar workers have ceased to be significant and as
their grandchildren have been absorbed into the middle-class mainstream. Their
place has been taken by a variety of new low-income groups, including poor
Ione parents, refugees, ethnic minorities suffering from high unemployment and

-----1 .

tegration older people on basic pensions, and people suffering

sOCIa JO
'
.'
poor
.: t of medical or mental problems. Because of this change, social
m
a vaile Y
....
tends to carry a stigma long familiar JO the United States or
f ro .
uSIllg. now
..
.
. I
but previously unfamiliar
JO European
welfare states. In particu
ar,
ho
ustralia,
"'d
1
.
emaining areas of urban public housing were Wl e y perceive d as
A
om large r
.
.
.
s e f multiple social problems, with high rates of long-term structural
seatS o
. rates o f petty cnme
.
(GB
ent high rates of family breakup, and high
unemp loy m ,
.
S 'al Exclusion Umt, 1998).
o~ecause of this fundamental shift, the role of planning has been weakened:
70viding social housing is no longer seen as a key government priority (whether
that is true in fact or not), and its occupants are no longer seen as particularly
deserving by the mainstream majority, But planning is denigrated in other ways
for different reasons: critics, ranging from Prince Charles to social policy
an-d
makers. generallY accuse ltOf ~aving destroyed traditional urban communities
'-;;d of creating soulless, mechanistic urban environments (Charles, 1989). The
r'act, that in many of the most notorious cases planners had virtually no power
and no role, is conveniently avoided; mistakes by architects and engineers are all
too readily heaped at the doors of the 'planners'. Planning was widely perceived
as a routine, unimaginative, bureaucratic regulatory activity, generally disliked
~egarded
as a necessary evil. Part ofthe reason was that, in the great majority
of cases, it did not seem to play a very positive role: the great majority of
development, whether for new jobs or new homes, carne through private
initiatives, to which the planning system was essentially reactive. That view
downplayed the role of the planner in drawing up development plans and in
shaping the system, but it seems to have been a widespread perception. At the
same time, planning became more and more highly po1iticized, because planning
decisions were seen as powerfully affecting people's quality of everyday life;
'Nirnbyisrn' was a prevailing movement in the more affluent suburban and
exurban areas around the cities.
This directly stemmed from another major trend: the continued movement of t
people and jobs from the cities. However, this is not universal; perhaps to a
greater degree than ever before, there is now a divergence between the advanced
Industrial (or post-industrial) nations. In the United States and many parts of I
Europe, the continued out-migration of people and economic activity, from the
cures to the suburbs and the countryside, has led to the emergence of afeas of I
concentrated multiple deprivation, particularly of ethnic minorities, in the cities.
These in turn have become a negative element encouraging further out-rnigration
by the affluent majority, including the middle-class members of the minorities
(Wilson, 1987, 1996). Coupled with the rapid growth in household numbers in
these
cou ntnes
. - a product less of population
. growth than of household fiSSIOn
.
h
t rough more young people leaving home, divorce and separation, and longer
~~nods of ~idowhood _ this brings a central dilemma for strategic planning:
\V far IS it desirable and possible to repopulate and reanmate the cities for

34

--

URBAN PLANNING IN A CI-IANGING WORLD

affluent households, thus promoting the objective of sustainable development?

There is widespread enthusiasm for such policies from a wide and pOwerful
coalition of interests: from environmentalists, from the city administrations themselves
from a new generation of architect-planners interested in creating new styles O[
urban living, and from defenders of the countryside, including many of the
recent migrants from the cities (Hall and Ward, 1998; Rogers, 1997).
The problem is that, powerful as these interests may be at the turn of the
century, they are trying to reverse a strong tide of people who show every sign

THE CENTENARY OF MODERN PLANNING

35

rhey want to escape the cities - above all, young parents with children, who
thate very negative perceptions of urban life and urban education. Proponents of
ha~an revival point to the remarkable fact that the demographic projections show
urlarge majority of single-person households. However, the question remains as
a whether all of thern, in their tum, will develop ataste for urban living. There
to
ci - In New York and a host of other
are undoubtedly signs o f a return to thee city
major American cities, in London and one or two provincial British examples
but rhey are so far scattered and small-scale. Evidence suggests that, predictably,

N~ 1.
THE
THREE

MAGNETS

tZ?f1.m
l~lf!dlmUm

WHEBl "W'lLL THEY bO,?

I ~ ) <'<tYi'W'='SJ:' - 7'73"T" zr ;~J

WHEftE
WILL THEY "o7

""
-.;

.
:

1>

"", TOWN-IN-COUNTRY
-:;.. '"
~

<1,~
,.~

'\t " .
..
~ 0 ls .

1-

~'" C- -1'te )o~

&..'

<o

~1

.,

"'0

/."

T ftAIL

s.

SHOIt

,t'

J:>.
.

"I.t

-1((,.
.su

,.:

ONOM"Y.

~'i>

o
~o

.' : \ o~
~~.'.j...\.~\ ~o".~

o'llfl.t/J;~ LoS. NO.;

C-~.",,>
e~

.~~
Q

O/l!i-.

T
~CJ

~o ..

..
J9:;

~\.~
fO
O~~

,Iii .~~

"

..

'i>'i>'

~.'~
.....
Ow
.ICES.

WI.P,....!'::
~(' \- ~GG~
\~.
UES.
;1l"
~'i>'"

.s,...rIV et\;t*..
...:._~~~o\-o~

Figure 2.1. The Three Magnets, 1898. Howard's original diagram.

The toWn
offered economic and social opportunity,
but a degraded environment.
The
country, aIter years of agricultural depression, in contrast offered an unpolluled
environment but few jobs, poor social opportunities and overall poverty. But tbe
third magnet, town-country, could offer all the advantages of town and country
without the concomitant disadvantages. (Source: Howard, 1898)

Figure 2.2. The Three Magnets, 1998. Howard's diagram still encapsulates the
COntrasts, but the polarities are reversed. Today, the deindustrialized
town lacks
econOmic opportunities for many workers, marginalized in social exclusion. The
c~untry has a buoyant economy because of electricity and highways and
~: ecommunications,
but is often socially exclusive. Oddly, town-in-country has
r ppe~ed
through
decentralization,
but seldom
according
to Howard's
p eSCnption. (Source: Hall and Ward, 1998)

RBAN PlANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

--

affluent single-person households want space and current developments

including the tendency for more work to be done at home, can only fortify tha;
demando Unless a significant share of the projected growth can be housed in the
cities, the prospect is one of large-scale greenfield developments outside then.
and this will bring forth further large-scale Nimby counter-movements.
'
These issues have less resonance in North America and in Australia, with their
lower densities and their long traditions of unfettered suburbanization. But there
are international trends shared by all the advanced nations. The most important
surely, is the new stress on sustainable development, marked in 1998 by th~
publication in English of a remarkable German work for the Club of Rome,
Factor Four: Doubling Wealth - Halving Resource Use (Weizsacker et al.,
1998). For planners, sustainability is widely interpreted to mean urban
consolidation and compaction. Related to this is the attempt by many architect_
planners to assert a more compact and traditional style of development - the
'new urbanism' in the United States, represented by such celebrated cases as
Seaside in Florida, Kentlands in Maryland, and Laguna West in California
(Calthorpe, 1993; Katz, 1994; Mohney and Easterling, 1991). Also there is the
increasing emphasis in every country on preservation and conservation of
historie buildings and entire urban districts, which over thirty years has spread
from a few cities and countries to embrace countries and cities formerly
immune, as in Pacific Asia.
CONCLUSION

Thus, against a totally transformed economic and social backcloth, the issues
seem strangely similar to those of a century before; not least because rising
agricultural productivity has again rendered substantial areas of countryside
superfluous for farming, so that there is maximum pressure to preserve
countryside against development at just the point when there is a mini mal
economic case for it. There is however an obvious and vital difference. When
Ebenezer Howard drew his celebrated diagram of the Three Magnets, in 1898,
the city offered economic and social opportunity while the countryside offered
neither. Now, with the out-rnovement of people and activity, the roles are
reversed. What in fact has happened is that twentieth century technology, in the
shape of electricity and the motor cal' and the telephone and the Internet, have
made Howard's Third Magnet, Town-Country, as effective and attractive as he
argued it would. But it has very seldom been realized in the planned forrns, and
via the planning mechanisms, which he proposed (Hall and Ward, 1998). The
challenge he presented is as topical and as urgent now as then (figure 2.2).
Has planning taken a century to go around in a circIe, then? Hardly, for in the .-/
~~it
has powerfully helped to shape beuer urban environments. That
influence is not to be found merely in the classic achievements - Letchworlh,
Romerstadt, Radburn, Greenbelt, Harlow, Vallingby and the rest of the PantheOIl

THE CENTENARYOF MODERN PlANNING

- bu

37

t in their indirect influence on thousands of imitations, many reasonably

sful some few partial failures. City folk live irnmeasurably better Jives

succes
'
than a centu~,
and much o: that ~they owe to what Keynes once memorably
jed science and compoua interest. But they also owe something to better
t c~anned environments, which economic growth made possible, but which in turn
~'" ""nnibo'ed directly
economic efficiency and indirectly
better housed
and more contented workforce. At the turn of the century, when it is fashionable
in some quar:ers to attack plann~ng as a brake.an economic progress, that lesson

'0

from history

IS

worth remembenng

'0'

and repeating.

.~

REFERENCES
lf
R. (1996) Linkages Between Municipalities and Utilities: An Experience in
A Overcoming
aro,
S . . Worki ng Papers Senes,
Urban Poverty. Urban Environmental arutation
UNDP-WorldBank.
Basti, J. (1964) La Croissance de le Banlieue Parisienne. Paris: Presses Universitaires
de France.
Bauer,C. (1934) Modern Housing. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Beevers,R. (1987) The Carden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard.
London:Macmillan.
Bolan, R.S. (1967) Emerging views of planning. Journal of the American lnstitute of
Planners, 33, pp. 233-245.
Bowly, D., Jr. (1978) The Poorhouse: Subsidized Housing in Chicago, 1895-1976.
Carbondale:Southern IIIinois University Press..
Calthorpe, P. (1993) The Next American Metropolis: Ecology, Community, and the
American Dream. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press.
Castells, M. (1989) The Informational City: Information Technology, Economic
Restructuring and the Urban-Regional Process. Oxford: Blackwell.
Charles, Prince of Wales (1989) A Vision of 8ritain: A Personal View of Architecture.
London: Doubleday.
Davidoff, p. (1965) Advocacy and pluralism in planning. Journal of the American
lnstitute of Planners, 31, pp. 186-197.
Eberstadt, R. (1917) Handbuch des Wohnungswesens und der Wohnungsfrage. Jena:
Gustav Fischer.
Ford, J. (1936) Slums and Housing, with Special Reference to New York City: History,
Conditions, Policy, 2 volumes, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.
GB Department of the Environment (1969) People and Planning: Report of the
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GB GovernmentOffice for London (1996) Four World Cities: A Comparative Analysis of
G London, Paris, New York and Tokyo. London: L1ewelynDavies Planning.
B Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (1885) Vol. 1. First
Report, Vol. n. Minutes of Evidence and Appendices. London: Eyre and Spotiswoode
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G etghbourhood Renewal. London: Stationery Office.
e~des,p. (1912) The twofold aspect of the industrial age: palaeotechnic and neotechnic.
OWnPlanning Review, 31, pp. 176-187.

4
\

38

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

----

Geddes, P. (1915) Cities in Evolution. London: Williams and Norgate.

Hall, P. (1996) Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning
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Hall, P. (1998) Cities in Civilization: Culture, Technology and Urban Order. LOndo .
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Weidenfeld and Nicolson,
Hall, P. and Landry, e. (1997) Innovative and Sustainable Cities. Dublin: Europe
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an
Hall, P. and Ward, C. (1998) Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard. London'
John Wiley.
.

THE

CENTENARY OF MODERN

PLANNING

39

1969) American City Planning since 1890. Berkeley: University of California

Scott, M . (
pressi-r and Bruggeman, A. (1927) Le Problme du Logement: Son lnfluence sur les
Selher,
.
'
des vil!
p.ans: P resses U
Conditions
de ['Habitation et l'A menagement
vI es.
nrversitaires
.
.
...
.
. de France.
e (1965) City Planning
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Sltte, .
.
.
Oerman by O.R. Colhns and C.e. Collins. New York: Random House.
Sus
, e. (ed.) (1976) Pla~ning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the
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University Press.
Schumacher, E.F. (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered.
London: Blond and Briggs.

London: Marion Boyars.

Unwin, R. (1911) Town Planning in Practice: An lntroduction to the Art of Designing
Cities and Suburbs. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
Weizsacker, E.U. von, Lovins, A.B. and Lovins, L.H. (1998) Factor Four: Doubling
Wealth - HalvingResource
Use: The New Report to the Club of Rome. London:
Earthscan.
Wilson, W.J. (1987) The Truly Disadvantaged: The lnner City, the Underclass, and
Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Wilson, W.J. (1996) When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor. New
York: Knopf.

THE NEIGIIBOURJ

The Neighbourhood Paradigm:

From Carden Cities to Cated
Communities

ver 50 such settlements.

o From around the turn of the century,

Dirk Schubert

evaluation

identified

the phenomenon

sociologist

Ferdinand

Toennies

periodo Toennies

res, neighbourhood

and

of society.

and the condition

positively

influence

neighbourhood
terms

space

unit'

and built aspects,

social interaction.
of

urban

its true

idea 01' 'the neighbourhood'

and foster

have no clear definition

'neighbourhood

planning

by the planning

of the local built environrnent

meaning

and

cornrnunity

and

'neighbourhood

concept'

whereas

'neighbourhood

relations'

often

used

is undergoing
as

an

empty

tenninology
is again found in urban development
as real estate brochures.
In this chapter,
be

examined

development
considered.

sorne of the meanings

in their
The relevance

new millennium
also examined.

AND PLANNED

phenomenon

permanent
hygiene

and

rapidly

denote

is concemed

phrase,

with

stripped

neighbourhood
literature,

differentiation

The

origins
States

in planning
of the

idea

and Germany

theory as a planning
and increasing

terms will
and

its

URBAN

of large

cures

irreversible

since

the

with housing,

1983). Reforrners

North

rnid-nineteenth

and national

America
century.

and international

urban hygiene
motivated

the

has preven
problems

organizations

and urban development

by social pedagogy,

religion

of
and
grew
and

economic,
Ch~"enged,

the
Cooley

and

neighbourhoods

problems
also

massing

'the

social

together,
did

families

accumulate

developed

social and cultural

if not replaced,

Cltles carne to be regarded

as

trends.

developed

and based

his

groupings

on

in
they

environment

physical

people

as 'curable'.

individuals.

in London
gui Ids.
and

city

life.

interests

for

and insecurity
The damage

By the end of the nineteenth

of
were

small

environments,

and knowledge.

ideas

concepts

in one

laboratories

Stanton

and New York

The

similar

different

Fear, inexperience

by experience

'community

part 01' urban

from the land, and cities

people

beca me

did extensive

areas',

of disconnected

large

of

their

as an important

together,

Sehool

with organic

'natural

of all

a hostile

was concerned

movement
life

for

wrote

(secondary)

neighbourhood

the settlement

the

the city

01' the people',

in the Chicago

on his experience
of

Therefore

Park and E.W. Burgess,

organization,

on

Family,

city and state are

foundations

School

based

and in the metropolis,

and 'social'

like Robert

theory

guilds,

[bringing] neighbors
(Bliss, 1908, p. 821).

and

Horton

was

in the

on blood

of reward.

whereas

and death

communities

work based

to organize

were

interaction

was most influential

as the dangerous

as reliant

as such ...

laying

(prirnary)

on the city, social

encouraged

Social
.
utrons

Charles

human

published

neighbourhood

sol

social

in this sense was seen as tearing

were represented
that

REFORM,

in Europe

between

Urbanization

for the
is

246),

in the 1920s. The Chicago

and how to establish

Coit (1891)

concept

242,

1973). Sociologists,

will be

social disintegration

244,

between

the lauer dominant

and expectations

is the decline

work. But the model

research

whilst

distinction

community

are forrns of communities,

of 'communal'

relationships

units',

in Germany,
The German

important

Large cities typify society

pp.

hurnan ecologists

survey

especially

in large cities.

'In large cities, that is in capitals

of society

(1887,

Toennies'

an

disadvantages,

perception of large cities.

The American sociologist

(Blowers,

as well

COMMUNITIES

concerned

(Sutcliffe,

to

of
The

Toennies

developed

in cities were resolved

institutions

tend

and planning

the United

of neighbourhood

and spatially.

a renaissance;

of neighbourhood

contexto

in England,

in times of globalization

DECENTRALIZATION,

The

historical

and reception

can

life. The concepts

and are vague socially

This 60 year old vision

- the

and social interaction

roots'

defined

friendship,

of advantages,

family is in decay ...

have long been raised

one's

made

post-industrialization

clan, village and friendship

idea that manipulation

social scientists,

of 'losing

(Gemeinschaft) and society (Gesellschaft),

comIllunity

categories

Hopes

119

PARADIGM

.
thr
tried to support the poor financially and practically. In the slUI11Sof
hilan 10Py
P
's East End social reformers such as Reverend Sarnuel Barnett, created
London s
'..
.
.'
. l'
ttlell1ents' with neighbourhood
centres like Toynbee Hall. Barneu, his
sOCia se
. .
.
.
d rhers wanted to mix the poor people of the slums with those who were
wlfe an o
'In the hope that they would learn from each other (Schubert,
1998).
better o ff
This movement had many followers and before World War One, England had

CHAPTER

1000

district
together'

but

many

the

latest

would be
done by
century,

~:~eral re.forms had. fused into one. The housing reform rnovernent dealt with
housll1g conditions
and tned to improve these mainly by controls and

120

URBAN

PLANNING

IN A CHANGING

WORLD

legislative measures. Model flats and model estates were to show realisf
alternatives. The discipline of urban planners largely sought to control t~C
processes ?f urbanization spatially. Lower densities and structuring of the urba~
configuration became a standard approach. The profession was in the forefront
of the search for ordered, structured, zoned environments to replace the chaos of
the unplanned city. The main opportunity arase when problems of ownershi
and compulsory purchase in built-up areas became insurmountable and th~
planning of new settlements on the urban periphery commenced.
Both the housing and planning movements were unified by the aim of
decentralization. Suburbanization was one means; the more radical step was the
planning of new towns with their own places of work and service institutions
outside the sphere of influence of large cities. The garden city movement tried to
solve rural and urban problems of employment and housing simultaneously by
clearing away inner city slums. It also combined various ideals, such as land
reform and the co-operative movement. Although the concepts of reform had
differing priorities, they were all meant to be synthesized in practice. This would
illustrate the possibilities of a new spatial order, better housing, healthier cities
and living conditions, which would in turn lead to a better civilization. The subtitle of Ebenezer Howard's book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform
(1898) is an accurate summary. Howard's vision was of 'social cities', a
comprehensive socio-spatial reform achievable without revolution. With so many
theoretical ideas of decentralization, model communities, lower urban den sities,
slum clearance and housing reform in the air, actual physical experimentation
was inevitable.
Before World War One, employers in Germany had built factory housing,
which served as model settlements for their employees. Often these paternal
employers were open to ideas of housing reformo Industrialists, such as Alfred
Krupp in the Ruhr district, were celebrated as 'fathers of the new settlements'.
Suggestions for housing and land reform came from diverse and sometimes
unpalatable sources. Two years before Ebenezer Howard, the anti-Sernite
Theodor Fritsch, had said in his book Die Stadt der Zukunft how the severe
damage of large cities can be rectified through garden cities with different zones
and neighbourhoods (Schubert, 1982). Whilst Howard was con cerned with
social reform, Fritsch criticized (Jewish) land speculation and tried to use his
new town concept to advance the 'renewal of the German race'.
Factory estates like Paterson in New Jersey, Humphreysville in Connecticut,
and Pullman in Chicago were built in the United States (Crawford, 1995). The
integration of estate and landscape with curving residential streets had been
mastered in the planning of Riverside (1869) in Chicago by Frederick ~aw
Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. In 1913, the City Club of Chicago held a compeut~on
for neighbourhood centres. Drawing on theories of settlement, decentralizatwn
and urban expansion, the architect William E. Drummond had developed a
concept of neighbourhood units by 1912. He defined neighbourhood units as

TT-lE NEIGI-IBOURT-lOOD

PARADIGM

121

. al and social fabric strictly in the context of Daniel Burnham's Chicago

hyslC
P
nd rhe local urban improvement scene (Johnson, 1998).
~ana
.
.
In England, new garden settlements were occasionally built. They were often
hilanthropically motivated, like the industrial housing estates of 'gentlemen
~eformers' like William Lever (Port Sunlight) and George Cadbury (Bournville).
rne founding of Letchworth (1903) and later Welwyn Garden City (1919)
roves rhat the idea of the garden city could be turned into reality. But the
~agnetism of large cities prevailed, and the garden suburb emerged as a more
realistic vehicle for the spatial reform of community. One example serving as a
widely used model was Hampstead Garden Suburb (1906) in London, planned
by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker.

AMERICAN EXPERIMENT5 IN THE 19205 AND 19305

Unlike Britain, city planning in the United States was primarily based on the city
beautiful, 'city scientific' concepts, and private initiatives. The issue of planned
urban expansion was explored primarily in a suburban context with garden city
overtones. The Russell Sage Foundation formed the Sage Foundation Homes
Company to implement a model development project, Forest Hills Gardens in
Queens, New York, between 1908 and 1917. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. replaced
the original rectangular grid with curving streets, following the Letchworth
precedent. The relatively high cost of land led to the construction of expensive
housing and the idea of a socially mixed settlement was relinquished for
economic reasons. In contrast to prewar England, postwar United States saw two
important changes which influenced planning. The increase in income made it
possible for a larger segment of the population to finance a home and growing
mobility afforded by the automobile made it possible for many citizens to fulfil
the dream of the 'American way of life' on the urban periphery.
Much of the experience of planners in the United States had been obtained in
the context of war-induced housing programmes (Scott, 1969). They then aimed
to continue this form of unitary planned development motivated by housing and
social ideals. In 1923, the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA)
was formed in New York through the driving force of Henry Wright (Lubove,
1963; Schaffer, 1992; Sussman, 1976). An informal interdisciplinary 'think tank'
of no more than a dozen individuals, including Catherine Bauer Wurster, Lewis
MlImford, Benton MacKaye, Frederick Ackerman, Stuart Chase, Edith Elmer
Wood and Clarence Stein, discussed the idea of state-wide regional planning,
low-income housing and, especially, the concepts which could lead to the
construction of such a settlement representing their goals. Anticipating
'ncreasing social disintegration in the metropolis, problems of unplanned sub~rbanizat.ion, and urban sprawl, the RPAA met these with a vision of planned
ecentrahzation by regional planning and the establishment of neighbourhoods.
In 1923, a RPAA delegation including Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, and real

TI-IE NEIGIIBOURl-IOOD

122

J:'ARADIGM

J."-J

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

estate developer Alexander M. Bing, visited Ebenezer Howard and Raymond

Unwin to see English garden city projects. They returned converted and decided
to create an American version. In 1925, the RPAA hosted the first International
Conference of the International Federation for Town and Country Planning and
Garden Cities outside Europe. Howard, as well as Unwin, Barry Parker and
Patrick Geddes joined the conference and endorsed RPAA ideals. In 1924, the
RPAA founded the City Housing Corporation, which was, with limited assets, to
master the synthesis of theory and practice to produce an American modet
settlement. In 1924, the corporation bought a piece of land in Queens and Stein
and Wright began to plan and build Sunnyside Gardens, constrained by the pre.
existing grid street systern (Stein, 1966). In 1928, the project was completed,
including about 1200 housing units and garden areas inside the blocks. A
community centre was bought and the Sunnyside Association organized
comrnunal activities. Residents of this planned garden community included
Lewis Mumford, popular singer Perry Como, jazz musician Bix Beiderbccke,
and other intellectuals and artists.
Also in the early 1920s, a private organization, the Advisory Cornmission on
City Planning, cornmenced work on a Regional Plan of New York and Its
Environs to be sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation. Thomas Adams, with
experience in the British garden city movernent, assumed the responsibility of
'General Director of Plans and Surveys' (Johnson, 1996). While working on the
Regional Plan of New York, Clarence Perry (a rnernber of the RPAA) forrnulated
the first definitive expression of the neighbourhood unit. Perry predicted the
need for new urban planning solutions because of the increase in private car
ownership: 'The cellular city is the inevitable product of the automobile age'
(Perry, 1929, p. 31). He identified six key principIes revolving around size,
boundaries, open spaces, institution sites, local shops, and the internal street
system. He set a ceiling population of 5000 for an area surrounding an
elementary school, placing services required on a daily basis within easy
walking distance along streets on the edge of the estate, re-routing throughtraffic, and segregating modes of transportation (figure 7.1). Perry had tricd to
transpose the positive experience of the settlement movement - with its strong
social links and networks seen as strengthening a sense of community - to a
flexible planning concept for built-up areas and new developments (Silver,
1985). Some technical planning principles which had been an integral element of
urban design textbooks since the nineteenth century resurfaced in a new
package. Perry lived in Forest Hills, and also drew from this positive personal
experience in developing his ideas. He said that the social mix of the population
in the neighbourhood units should be 'a wide range of incorne classes'. hut
meant a socially homogeneous population (Silver, 1985).
In 1928, after completion of Sunnyside Gardens, the City Housillg
Corporation bought a site in Fair Lawn, New Jersey to translate Perrv>
theoretical framework into built reality as Radburn. Stein and Wright were again

~.-~--Figure 7.1.
_~_

\~C.

"

Clarence Perry's neighbourhood unit, This version emerged frorn the

Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs (1929). The conventional grid streei
system is eschewed as the neighbourhood becomes a self-contained suburban
subdivision.

(Source.

Perry, 1929)

responsible for the planning and architecture of the estate. Not one element of
the Radburn plan was truly new, although Lewis Mumford praised the plan as
'the first major departure in city planning since Venice' (1975, plate 5 1). It was a
(sub)urban model which promoted communal lifestyles and was meant to meet
modern demands. The transport concept was the main innovation of Radburn.
Car ownership in the United States rose from 1.2 rnillion in 1914 to over 23
mil1ion in 1930. By 1926, the number of cars per household was eight times that
of Great Britain and 35 times that of Germany (Hass-Klau, 1990). The road
systern laid out on a grid in suburban areas proved increasingly disadvantageous
with mass-motorization. Road accidents and deaths gave rise to the idea that
pedestrians should be better protected from car traffic. A hierarchy of roads was
pursued by making residential streets culs-de-sac and further segregating the
modes of transport. This concept was adopted worldwide in the planning of
suburban settlements
(Fagence,
1973; Mil1er, 1969). It marks the
Americanization of the Garden City concept by responding to modernization
with regard to demands rnade by the automobi le (figure 7.2).
S In May 1929, the first owners moved to Radburn; in autumn carne the WaU
treet crash. Many residents lost their jobs and had to move. Radburn was never

1 Ht. 1"t,H...
oI-ltlUUKJ-1vVU
~ru-..r

J.-r:J~NN-rNG-1N-A

1. n..1V\..U1VI"1

WORLD

----completed and became a victim of the global recession (Schaffer, 1981). Three
neighbourhood
units with about 25,000 inhabitants had been planned, each built
around an elernentary
school and all c1ustered around a single high school. The
neighbourhoods

were designed

was not possible

to attract

in a way that children

industries

not implemented.
The houses
operative land ownership.

to Radburn

were

sold

could

walk to schooj lt

and a proposed

off,

there

being

green belt was

or co.

no public

h Radburn
was soon transformed
from urban planning
ideal to
AlthOUdg ter Roosevelt's
New Deal in the 1930s created other opportunities
nClal Isas
,
.. of the nelghbourhood
. e neW
town design and the further evolutlOn
filOa
f or ProgreSSIVchstone of community planl1lng.
.
..
In 1934, the National
Housing Act
dea
as ased
toUand rhe Federal
I

...
Housmg

.
AdmJl1lstraUon

(FHA)

set up. The degree to

wa~ pa:
FHA influenced rnodel housing policies during the following decades
whlch t he
. zatio. n b Y b UlildiIOg Iarge
easily be overestimated.
It advance d su b ur b a 111
canno
.
h d
.
N hb
suburban settlements with nelghbour
00
uruts.
erg our h 00 d s, accor diIOg to
FHA were to be socially and racially homogenous
to promote a sense of
~:mmun:ty

among

Greenbell

the residents

Towns programme

(McKenzie,

was adopted

1994).

In

1935,

by the Federal

an innovative

government

to create

employm
planning
three

,
rnake availabJe cheap housing,
and to demonstrate
new urban
ent
concepts. Fifty new towns ,,:,ere planned, later ~educe~ t~ eight, with

actually

Greenbelt
English

built:

Greendale

(Maryland).
Garden

The

Cities,

(Mllwaukee),

Greenbelt

as they

were

Adnnistration,

of population,

had declared

pick up cheap

could

srnall

households without places of work.

What of the existing
city? Rexford
Resettlement

Greenhills

towns

Tugwell,

localities
planners

to be rebuilt

of old tenements,

attack [on slum districts]

Director

...

rebuilding
housing

planners

inhabitants

held

residents

were

predominantly
Jersey
incomes',

than

1986).

'It

should

and a housing

wrote Louis Brownlow

'Radburnites'
estates

Association
Citizens

would

became

conformed
(Birch,

and

the

conservative

average

(1930,

a Mecca

borne

to discuss
for

on the whole

but

Radburn
of moderate

were organized

of communal
the

is

of the International

Residents

questions

planners,

were

that

for families

p. 7), the President

resident.

The

and

to New York and New

in mind

development

and Radburn

Association

1983).

be

but its

values.

population

class; over 70 per cent commuted

a community

in the Radburn

housing

conventional

educated

rniddle

City Management
Radburn

predominantly
more

(Christensen,

essentially

had high hopes for the new sense of community,

daily

interes!.

lives

with those of other American

01"

the

suburban

can be indirectly
in the suburbs

satisfactory

policies,

continued
Radburn's

and new housing

the slum areas themselves.

yield cornpletely

results'

the construction

to emphasize

peripheral

of

than

Roosevelt's
centres

and entice

was for problem

estates

1000

people

slums and make parks

of neighbourhood

but the decentralist

model home neighbourhoods

Figure 7.2. Aerial photo of Radburn (1929). A new suburban model segregating
modes of traffic and integrating roads and paths into the landscape.
(SOUTCe. Stein, 1966)

the lines

less

to the

'My idea is to go just outside

1990, p. 176). The concept

linked redevelopment

demolition

of

land, build a whole community,

along

and

be compared

settlements

into it. Then go back into the cities and tear down whole
of them' (quoted in Buder,

(ClOclOnatl),

not

unit

inner city

theory.

Many

with slum c1earance

urge was again decisive.

assisted

and
"The

by the development

of

just as much as by replanning

and

No direct attack on the slum districts

wil!

(Adams,

1934, p. 265). Those

industry,

and

private

urban expansion,

in control

cornmunity

causing

of

builders

the inner city to be

neglected.

NEIGHBOURHOODS
During

IN ENGLAND

the 1930s, an urban

lo:, densities,

design

decentralization,

with neighbourhood

units.

re-organization

It was realized

slmply

inner

Pnnciples
conference

the

of structuring

city

large

of the International

London in 1935.

became

dominant

and the restructuring

The

was a major concern.

clearing

model

slums
cities

were

Federation

envisioned

of the urban conglomerate

of the nineteenth-century

that this could

and

which

no longer

developing
a major

new

theme

of Housing

city

be achieved
housing

by

estates.

at the international

and Town

Planning

in

---

Critics in England complained about the absence of social mix in public

housing estates. 'The los s of neighbourhood values has its further bearing on
socially disorganized areas' (Tylor, 1939, p. 177). Neighbourhoods composed of
only flats for lower income groups were seen to promote youth crime and
vandalismo For this reason, estates with a uniform social structure were avoided
New estates were to be developed with neighbourhood units containing socia]
facilities such as schools and other communal institutions. They were to help
minirnize crime and act positively against forms of deviant behaviour. In this
context, different models were discussed, based on the situation found in
London. In 1940, the Barlow Report (Royal Commission on the Geographical
Distribution of the Industrial Population) suggested a new spatial distribution of
the industrial population in Britain and new towns with 'rnixed neighbourhoods'.
Lower densities in inner city areas were suggested, making re-housing
operations necessary. The damage caused by bombing in World War Two gave
impetus to the arguments for decentralization, lower densities, and neighbourhood
organization. The focus was always on London. From a military point of view,
'London was the weakest place on earth ... the Achilles heel of Britain and the
British Empire', a journalist wrote in 1939 (quoted in Lees, 1985, p. 263).
The MARS plan of London (1942), deveJoped by a group of architects and
town pJanners in private practice, was also based on neighbourhood units to
structure the metropoJis. Borough units and neighbourhood units, with schools
and infrastructure based on public transport corridors, formed the basic idea.
'Only by forming clearly defined units, which in turn are part of larger units, can
social life be organized' (Korn and Samuely, 1942, p. 143). The East End of
London was to be comprehensively remodelled with modem housing estates
along neighbourhood lines.
The neighbourhood unit also formed the central planning element in London's
official plan, the London County Council Plan (1943). The plan prescribed
extensive action, even in areas which had escaped destruction during the war. It
foresaw new dimensions of rebuilding in accordance with the neighbourhood
ideal. 'Partial solutions are not sufficient', Forshaw and Abercrombie wrote in
the foreword to the plan, redevelopment and slum clearance on a big scale were
mandatory. The planning goal s were demonstrated using a neighbourhood unit
in Shoreditch and Bethnal Green in the East End. The community of Eltham,
was clearly structured on these principies. Another plan was made for
Bermondsey and the South Bank. The redevelopment areas were to be similar in
size to New Towns. They were to have 60,000 to 100,000 inhabitants in
neighbourhood units of 6000 to 10,000 people each: 'The composite plans
which we have prepared provide a proportion of lofty blocks of flats, spaced
well enough apart for groups of trees, with terraced houses dispersed in regular
but not monotonous form, the whole interspersed with open space and
organically related to the smaller neighbourhood centre and finally the centre of
the whole community' (Forshaw and Abercrombie, 1943, p. 9).

1 after the war began, discussion grew on how postwar England should
ShO~ ~as accepted unanimously that large-scale redesign of the cities was
look.
It became evident that town planning would not only play an
necessary. role but occupy t h e centra Lnosi
... m creanng a new E ng lando
position
.rrnportan t of bis' prelintinary work for the County of London Plan, Patrick
Becausoembie who worked for the Ministry of Country and Town Planning, was
Abercr
usted with' the design of a plan for the Greater London area. Whereas the
e~~3 plan had concentrated on the administrative area of the London County
~ouncil, the new plan covered a larger area within a 30 miles radius of the city
centre. One element of the plan of 1943 to be developed further was the concept
of organic communities. Abercrombie wrote:
Both the neighbourhood and the town should be given physical definition and
unmistakableseparateness,and the population should be socially stable. This stability
can JargeJybe achievedby the provision within the community of a variety of houses
and dwellings to meet the needs of all popuJation groups ... We have used the
communityas the basic planning unit ... Each community wouJd have a life and
characterof its own, yet its individualitywould be in harmony with the compJexform,
lifeano characterof its region as a whole. (Abercrombie, 1945,pp. 112-113)
The East End of London, again, served as a model for rebuilding according to
modem principIes of neighbourhood planning. Abercrombie thought that the
buildings and dwellings in the slum areas of the East End which were not
destroyed by German bombs should also be demolished. Redevelopment are as
were established and the relocation of the population
necessary for
implementing the idea of modern neighbourhood units was planned.

THE 'LOCAL GROUP AS A SETTLEMENT CELL' IN GERMANY

In 1930s Germany, discussion had a much stronger ideological taint. The

National Socialists saw a direct connection between urban planning, physical
arrangements, and the 'Volk without space' ideology. Their urban design
concepts drew upon the anti-urban critique of large cities and postulated 'dedensification'. 'The city as the seat of Judaism' and 'place of Marxism', in the
words of leading National Socialist ideologist Gottfried Feder, was to be thinned
out and brought to order. Feder also suggested the Volksschule (elementary
school) as a basis for creating a new order. 'This urban organism will be
composed of a series of cells, which wil! be grouped in cel! associations within
dlfferent sub-cores around the centre of the city' (Feder, 1939, p. 19). By means
of urban development, the 'health of the body of citizens' was to be achieved.
Prograrnmatic statements by the National Socialists called for a decrease of
urbanization, or even its reversal in back-to-the-Iand mgration. They were
con.nected to ideas of autarky in an agrarian society, 'blood and soil', population
pohcles, and anti-aircraft defence. But by the late 1930s the Nazis had come to
see larg e citres
'.
as a necessary evil.

128

URBAN PLANNING IN A CT-tANGINGWORLD

American
international
Articles

and English
conferences

by Gurlitt

German

(1929)

periodicals.

neighbourhood

plans for neighbourhood

and sparked discussion
and Lederer

Henry

(1930)

Wright

idea to the German

about Radburn

(1932)

planning

but,

1935).

rather,

prohibitive

the

'backward

world

without

There

merely

were conflicting

aspects

Hitler

of the idyllic

himself

motorization
cities

was

a (secret)

fol1ower

conversion

by new

concepts

was an integral

planning.

Hitler had to postpone

criticism,

planning

that

the East' - to be

claims

of hostility

towards

production,

between

of economic

of Fordism

who

modernization.

was

in support

The disintegration

settlements

were

orderliness

democracies?

of motorways.

of cities

the

Die Neue

of bringing

armament

and the ideals

in

of

of Radburn

raised

and 'developing
Western

industrialized

home1and

be accelerated

The

which

Western

in the ideological

and the construction

would

1990).

vision
of

'decadent'

the city and the reality of a highly

the image

views'

the Fhrer-cities

imitating

vision

in the journal

But how was the principie

to the city - of redesigning

adopted

his

a map and photographs

It was not the Anglo-American

to implementation.

were published

described

community

Stadt. In 1935, Bruno Schwan also published

(Schwan,

units had been presented at

among German
planners.

for car owners

to accornmodate

cars

part of the link between

and

political

mass-rnotorization

(Hass-Klau,

new

settlement

power

as a secondary

of

of large

and spatial
poltical

goal

frarnework

as a settlernent
and planning

cell')

kinship,

Socialist

was a consensus

practice.

ends. The emphasis

design

It adapted

Workers

In Hamburg

and

Gutschow,
Gutschow

of an arnorphic
to structure

to evolve

again,

the settlement

organizational

of the urban

of the party. According

imitated

in the planning

German

society. A mixture
buildings

offered

In the design of housing

of various
a typically

of terraced

estates

houses

was planned.

was

principies

as far

as

and neighbourhood

international

to represent

In the wake

neighbourhood

roots, German
Different

planners
design

principIe

practice,
of the
it more

neighbourhood

of

unit planning
rnodels

not be allowed

to

organizational

structure

of

the

inflicted

1944, pp. 13-14)

during

the

Secret Information

housing

in the central

if implemented

a reduction

had traditionally

housed

war,

a general

densities

Service.

with

the

comrade

of

'local

This concept
Hamburg

areas

more

gradually,

the Communist

wanted
realistic

or less for granted.

was

population

A totally

densities

future,

in the areas

The new master

'electorate'.

effective

for a very distant

reserved

which

plan is based
... and the
its size, no

but is the member

of a

1944)

was to form the basis for spacious

and Schubert,

units within

as

to avoid the danger of

had to take the existing

(Volksgenosse) feels like a mere number,

(Pahl-Weber

nelghbourhood

the

group

it aggressively:

of the irresponsible

(Gutschow,

for

about the

His plan fol1owed

goal

on the reality of destruction

and the entirely new possibilities
it offered
new master plan sees it as its task to build a city in which, despite
national

plan

in 1944. He was well informed

1991).

an ideological

rebuilding
Bornbed

of residential

areas

organization

were

reflecting

areas in

divided

into

the political

structure of the Nazi Party.

were

including

insisted

political

in Lehmann,

cell' and developed

neighbourhood.

the political

density

the

by Gutschow

of reducing

especially

1941). The

perrnitted

(Quoted

London plans by the Foreign

of urban

small blocks of

and population
buildings

with

of destruction

was created

even

a cross-section

(owner occupied),

storey

solution.

to follow

conform

groups.

situation

to make

(Gutschow,

possible,

renewal,

1991).

in private

scale should

Volksgemeinschaft, organized in cells, local groups and districts. The urban form
appropriate to the local group would, in this sense, consist of small cells and ultimately
in small scale streets, as well as the clear arrangement of squares, residential courtyards

physical

'The anonyrnity

on a massive

areas, with a view towards developing

the community,
can be drawn from the same
source which guides the political structure of the Volksgemeinschaft [the community of
all Germans in the National Socialist sense]. The structure of housing areas must thus,

National

units of the Nazi Party were

DweJling

of three

German

the

areas, schemes

take over. lnstead, homely settlements for the prornotion of the common good should
be created in the interest of urban design ... The criteria for the structure of housing

Every previous master plan for Hamburg

which
becoming utopian and which attempted
to remain

order. For neighbourhoods

set apart'

local group units of 6000 to 8000 people. Although

was the product

of

It is necessary

to this principie,

of new housing

to be kept low and a maximurn

an architect
declared:

landscape

group

to link cornrnunity

ideas

to establish

it to create

units rnust be clearly

principie

flats and tenernent

forrnation.

and design

of

Socialistic

cells (Pahl- Weber and Schubert,

for town planning.

transparent

('local

to National

origins
The

Party were expanded

city is the result

idea

and expansion

from Nazi Party theory

theory

camaraderie.

in 1941, Konstanty

was responsible

emerged

was placed on Germanic-national

neighbourhood

German

which

neighbourhood

with local groups as settlernent

structure

to the redesign

towns. The idea of the Die Ortsgruppe als Siedlungszelie

existing

with

was also transposed

129

PARADIGM

d: 'organic' ones, like those of architect Hans Bernhard Reichow, or

develop~ 'ones by Walter Hinsch, with a mix of housing densities and a party
.
ge..ornetnC n a 'central axis. But these plans were never wholly mplemented
buIldIng o
during the Nazi periodo
..
1 groupS were also to be used as a structunng
element II1 the conquered
Loca
l'
b '1 . .
rn zones. The 'local group as a settlement cel was never
Ul t II1 ItS pure
easte
..
h d . d
H'
. h
but there are many plans which illustrate t e esire appearance.
einnc
forrn,
d
his
nri
I
'
Hirnm , the Reichsfhrer
of the SS, planne
to use t IS pnncip e 10 secure
1er
Ger
national tradition in the new east'. He announced:
rnan

Hamburg

until the war was won.

The political

----

THE NEIGHBOURHOOD

that rhe
were

NEIGHBOURHOODS
After
because

IN POSTWAR RECONSTRUCTION

1945, in Germany,
of the analogy

the term

to 'cells'

neighbourhood

and 'blocks'

had negative

and the Nazi Party's

connotations
mechanisms

130

-----

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

of discipline

and contro!.

As the concept

of the 'local

group as neighbourhood

cell' was discredited

because of its National Socialist origin, it was variously
renamed
'cell', 'node' or 'estate unir'. National Socialist town planning and
architecture

remained

the goals formulated

forbidden

the quasi de-nazification

hour')

of 1945,

continuity
National

Socialist

node'. The
anaJogies.

of study for a long time. Nevertheless,

'local

groups

was misleading.

and, of course,
as neighbourhood

envisioned

neighbourhoods

to the pre-1945

vision,

The myth of the Stunde

new start,

involved

democratically

depoliticized

similar

of the terminology.

as a completely

in the people

into a Western,

subjects

after 1945 appeared

cell'
then

was some

paradigms.

The

idea was transformed

neighbourhood
were

There

in the planning

despite

NulI ('zero

unit called
founded

on

the 'estate
biological

Reicho , having propagated

the 'local group as neighbourhood
cell' in
w
RB.
before 1945, later switched
to planning
'organic
neighbourhoods'
Gerrnany
.
hh w 1948). Once employed
by Gutschow, he had no trouble mutating
(ReIC
ol Socialist
,
hni
I
.
1
hi
terminoJogy
into an apparently
tec ruca termino ogy w ICh
NatiOna
.
.
d from examples in nature. He used the concept of branchmg
for creanng
deOve

.
housing

estates and borrowe d t hee Iid ea o f segregatlon.

street
P of transport from Radbum (figure 7. 3) . HIS proJects are consi d ere d
f odes
o ne of rhe most influential
in postwar Gerrnany, and his books Organische
atterns in postwar

~~~tbaukunst

(1948)

(Organic

rinciple',

were best-sellers.

~iOIOgiC anaJogies,

City

Planning)

Similarly,

although

Low-Density

Rainer, pointed

1,

.J:I~

, .'. (

~~:~~-

~~J~ .......

\
-:;.

>.;;:.,.'-

~1

planning

models

Perry's

and lacking

theory

Radbum

Socialist

era and

One of the authors,

Roland

as early as 1948 and published

in German.

with rnany similarities

et al., 1957) did

(Gbderitz

during the National

the terminology.

to the neighbourhood

plans of Clarence

Stadt

the 'Radburn

more technocratic

City). Its authors

not disguise the fact that it had been drafted

to change

propagates

work Die Gegliederte und Aufgelockerte

was the influential

mus made no attempt

Die Autogerechte

and

City), in which he primarily

(1959) (The Car-suitable

Stadt (The Structured,

.\

131

THE NEIGHBOURI-IOOD PARADIGM

So there

between

the

was a continuity

the expansive

of

plans during the

war and postwar plan s which were al! based on the neighbourhood
unit.
In postwar Great Britain, lower densities, decentralization,
slum clearance,
housing

construction

conventional

and spatial

wisdom.

of the most influential

Radbum

planners

Planning

Chair of Town Planning

publicist of important

in the land.

at Liverpool

neighbourhoods

for physical

lay in the development

of major

William

Holford

Thomas

1948). Frederick
schemes,

but pointed

by so me

had visited

in the Ministry
Sharp,

saw neighbourhoods

urban

structuring,

backed

Stephenson

positions

University.

books on planning,

of number

Gordon

and later succeeded

into an integrated

was central,

important

in rings around the city (Sharp,

for the design

were fused

concept

in 1929. He had held various

Town and Country

expansion

re-structuring

The neighbourhood

planner

as defining
Gibberd,

stressed

of

to the Lever
and
urban

responsible

the meaning

of

out that their significance

of a sense of community:

The object of arranging the town housing in the form of neighbourhoods is to enable
the family unit to combine, if it so wishes, with other families into a community
which has definite social contacts and a recognisable physical unity. The
nelghbourhood is essentially a spontaneous social grouping, and cannot be created
by the planner. (Gibberd, 1969, p. 229)
I~ 1946, the New Towns Act was passed. New towns and the dispersed
regIonal
cit y were part o f the dream of physical
..
. .
and SOCIal reconstructlon,.
of a

Figure 7.3. Neighbourhood

as a settlement
cell. A design by German
H.B. Reichow. The idea was developed in his 1948 book Organic Cily
(SOUTCe: Reichow, 1948)

architect
Pl({l/l/l/lg

VISI?~ for a new, planned Britain transcending

'the interwar years of social
stenhty ~ p h ysica
. l sprawl and architectural
New
banality' (Cherry, 1986, p. 16). The
.
owns represented
a large-scale
experimental
field for building
the
nelghbourh
in .
00 d concept (Bracey,
1964). Most used neighbourhood
units varying
size from 5000 to 10,000 'but their effectiveness

in creating

"neighbourhood"

132

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

consciousness seerns to vary' (Osborn and Whittick, 1969, p. 146). A 'balanced

social composition' avoiding segmentation was a social planning goal (Osbo
rn
and Whittick, 1969). The sociologist Peter Mann (1958) suggested 'SOcially
balanced neighbourhood units', each a small-scale copy of the social structure or
the entire city. By the early 1970s, planning according to the principIe of
neighbourhood units with segregated routes of transport on Radburn lines was
practised in most local planning departments in Britain.
In England, the concept of neighbourhood planning found its greatest
expression in municipal housing construction and new communities; the private
housing market operated along other principies. By contrasr, in the United
States, where government subsidized housing construction was nearly nonexistent, real estate speculators
co-opted
selective elements
of (he
neighbourhood concept as selling devices. The dominance of marker forces was
in no way affected by the fact that the neighbourhood concept was propagated
by the government. The preamble of the Housing Act of 1949 required that the
homes of citizens be integrated into neighbourhoods. In 1969, eighteen of the
most important planning and building organizations in the United States gave
clear support or general advocacy to the concept of neighbourhood units
(Banerjee and Baer, 1984, p. 26).

EPILOGUE

AND CONCLUSIONS

Rarely has there been such international consensus among planners in the
twentieth century as that reached on the neighbourhood concept. The goal of
(re)structuring the city was internationally accepted. The method of achieving
this aim - using smaller, cellular urban units - was widely accepted. Only the
question of what exact forrn the city should take caused opinions to drift apart.
Some of the best-known residential estates worldwide are based on the
neighbourhood
unit
theory,
including
Vallingby
near
Stockholm,
Sondergaardsparken in Copenhagen, and Linda Vista in San Diego. There is a
multitude of other examples in many different cultural settings (e.g. Attia, 1963;
Dahir, 1947; Rasmussen, 1957; Ritter, 1960-61; Tarantul, 1962).
The worldwide planning euphoria of the 1960s produced technocratic models
which reduced and restricted the neighbourhood
theory to technical,
organizational norms of infrastructure planning. Even representatives of the
Modern Movement, such as Walter Gropius, supported the neighbourhood
theory and the goals it denoted. He stated that lower densities and no! the
complete diffusion of the city, was the goal of organic neighbourhood planning
(Gropius, 1956). Jane Jacobs, on the other hand, strongly criticized the myth of
the neighbourhood; the 'doctrine of salvation by bricks' was a worn out ideal of
planning, she argued (Jacobs, 1969, p. 79).
Many empirical studies since the 1960s have demystified the neighbourhood
myth. The anticipated strengthening of community has rarely happened. It

----

THE NEIGHBOURJ-IOOD PARADIGM

133

. ely became apparent that human behaviour, social integration and

rogreSS1V
.
.
P .' 1 consensuS could not, or could only marginally, be induced, steered,
d
h
.
. l
Palluca
affected by spatial concepts. The attempt to pro uce e ange m SOCIa
change d o r
.
mixing of class and political harmony proved a context of false
behavJQur, .
. .
.
Now at the start of a new century, the age of globalization and
prenuses.
,
. . 'dualization causes a further dissolution of traditional family ties (Rohrnd~~r 1998). Increased mobility, pluralization of lifestyles, social isolation,
;:d de~reased feelings of solidarity promote spatial dispersal and the ~issolving
f traditional spatial neighbourhood
contacts. At the same time, and
~aradoxical1Y, we find c~lls for a greater .Iocalization of social life th~oug~ placebaund environments which can be expenenced and strengthen local identity.
In real estate propaganda, the old ideology of neighbourhoods is still an
important issue, the concept instrumentalized as an empty formula in advertising
brachures. Stripped of its original reform connotations, it is used as a marketing
tag, along with terms like 'garden cities'. Two contrasting concepts have been
developed in the North American residential property market which culminate in
re-interpretations of the neighbourhood concept.
Developers have long offered 'rnaster-planned communities' or 'planned unit
developments' (PUDs) which have open spaces and sports facilities for
communal use. At the end of the 1980s, 12 mili ion Americans lived in 'Common
Interest Developments' (CID s) and more than 225,000 of such settlements were
in the development pipeline for the year 2000 (McKenzie, 1994). ClDs are
generally put on the market by developers for groups with special demands, such
as elderly people, golfers, and singles. Security, a sense of community and
'neighbourhood' are promised. The homogeneity of the residents and their
common interests should give rise to mutuality and community. The purchase of
such properties means the contractual acceptance of conditions which govern
life in the 'community' in detail. Unwanted neighbours can be excluded and a
form of voluntary segregation and 'positive ghettoism' emerges. The current
trend is for wealthy Americans to enclose such precincts with high fences. These
'gated communities' not only give their owners a feeling of stronger social
co.ntrol, but also simulate the feeling of neighbourliness. T'C. Boyle describes
this paranoia in bis novel The Tortilla Curtain. (1995) in which he describes the
Conti'adiction of wishing for a peaceful neighbourhood in a globalized worId.
The approach of the 'New Urbanism' - a return to an intact world of compact
s~all towns, mixed land use and ample community facilities - is similar, but
wth the exc lusi
US1Vltymanaged more subtly by property prices rather than security
~ys~ems. The so-called 'Congress for the New Urbanism' sees its role as
lIlJtIating
.
N
a renewal of the urbanized world (Kegler, 1998). The 'Charter of the
ew Urbanism' states:
We stand for the res toration
.
..
. . coherent
o f existmg
ur b an centres and towns within
~e:roPOlitan regions, the reconfiguration of sprawling suburbs into communities of
ea nelghborhoods and diverse districts, the conservation of natural environments,

134

URBAN

..
'M'

N'

IN A CHANGING

~~;.:::::=~

SS"-=:.::\

s.:.:..-"'--'

...

THE

WORLD

M'
"'

PlANNING

i;i,=-:.:.:.:::=

NEIGHBOURHOOD

PARADIGM

135

d rang of housing types and price levels can bring people of diverse ages, races
e
~~a incom
into daily interaction, strengthening the personal and civic bonds
es
essential to an authentIc cornrnumty.

NeW urbanists explicitly refer to Perry's neighbourhood theory. Andreas

and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, for example, nominate several familiar
Duany
. .
.
rinciples of ideal neighbou~hood desi
esign: glV~ng
p:ec1l1cts
.diI.St1l1.Ct
centres an d
pd S' definino an optimal size based on walking distance; 1I1Ject1l1ga balanced
emix
ge of, activities;
"., artlculat1l1g through an d loca 1 tra ffiIC networ k s; an d pnontlz1l1g
ori
. .
ublic space and the location of civic buildings (Katz, 1994; Krieger, 1991).
~lthOUgh the list is dorninated by built spatial aspects, it is presumed that such
planning will have community forrning effects (figure 7.4). Calthorpe (1993)
refers explicitly to the Radburn precedent.
Tbere are many examples of model settlements of both movements. Whilst
purchase of a property is voluntary, membership in the community and the
adrninistrational organization are compulsory. In the United States, most of the
settlements are located in the Sunbelt States, especially Florida and California
(Mohney and Easterling, 1991). These developments are reactions to criticism of
large cities in the guise of encouraging community cohesion. Communitypromoting architecture and planning are said to strengthen neighbourhood links.
These surrogates promise to save the city via a form of social cleansing and
exclusion (Bodenschatz, 1998). Many gated communities are enclaves for the
rich based on the exclusion of undesirable outsiders and the abrogation of social
responsibilities for 'outsiders' (Aguilar-San Juan, 1997, p. 35). In this sense, the
trend is a perversion of the social ideals, however flawed, of the early
neighbourhood propagandists.
History has illustrated that the planning theory of neighbourhood units has
always had a technical content manifest as a physical design paradigm for traffic
segregation, culs-de-sac, progressive housing layouts, and provision of social
~nfrastructure. But it also contained elements of social engineering and political
ideology, Hopes were continuaJly raised and dreams nurtured, making the idea
so enduring and so successful. This adaptability also proved to be one of the
limitations of the theory in the twentieth century.

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set within a larger 'master-planned-community'
in the neo-conservative
style 01' the
'New Urbanism'.
(Source: Calthorpe, 1993)
and the preservation of our built legacy ... The neighborhood, the district, and the
corridor are essential elements of development and redevelopment of the
metropolis. They form identifiable areas that encourage citizens to rake
responsibility for their maintenance and evolution ...
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136

------

URBAN PLANNING IN A CHANGING WORLD

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R. (ed.)
1~
InlernatiO/la

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The twentieth century has seen the worst horrors of human history. Planners and
designers, unfortunately, have been involved in genocide, if only by glorifying
tyrants in monumental architecture and laying out concentration camps. In less
murderous regimes, even in democratic ones, they have helped to enforce
segregation on the basis of race, ethnicity or class. Yet, at the same time, this
century has shown that planning, as a collective effort to shape people's living
conditions, can do good. Much of what we know as urban planning today
follows from a genuine desire to remedy the evils of the industrial metropolis. If
some reformers were mostly interested in increasing the economic efficiency of
the congested city, many others were bent on making it, first of all, a better place
to live. Social workers, sanitary engineers, landscape architects, public officials
and activists of various stripes fought for decades to enact laws and institute
programmes to improve people's well-being, in particular to ameliorate their
horne and work environments. One outcome of this crusade was the creation of
professional urban planning.
Reformist efforts did not take on the same form everywhere, nor did they
rernan identical over time. Different problems call for different solutions,
dlfferent ideologies for different actions. An important, though not radical,
cha.nge has occurred over the century in the way progressive planners and
PO.hcy-makers define their mission, a change that can be captured in a discursive
shlft. In 1909, the American reformer Herbert Croly defined the aim of good
government as the fulfillment of the century's 'promise' to the masses: 'What the