Try Not to Make the Perfect City
…“the perfect is the enemy of the good”… Voltaire.
With the twentieth century and the rise of modern architecture, profound dislike of cities in America gained popularity. Negative views of cities began further back in the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries. Since then two broad trends continue in our societal view of cities relevant to planning. First, the more prevalent and popular trend, views cities unambiguously as horrific places to be avoided and suppressed. Political rhetoric always seems to love scapegoats and “the city” offers very few public defenders. The second, alternative view, less popular, more complex and more helpful, blends together a dynamic sequence of threats and opportunities in the life of cities.
This set of essays comes from that second, pragmatic view. Making the best, perfect cities will always fail and such failures, real or imagined, adds fuel to the opinions that cities must be bad. The second view supported here, advocates making good, albeit imperfect, good cities as possible but always difficult. Opinions about both viewpoints can be found in the writings and comments of many well known authors and professional organizations dedicated to denigrating or improving our existing cities.
Our History of Rejecting Cities
The hope of making perfect cities flourished dramatically during the first decades of modernism, championed by many notable architects. Even today, many planners remain frustrated with the problems of cities, and often blame bad cities on a lack of foresight shown by community leaders. Many planners still show an underlying longing to overcome city problems, wipe out the city, start over, and create a close-to-utopian city of the future. When I studied architecture more than fifty years ago in New York City, the two most commonly referenced visions of a utopian so-called “urban” future were Corbusier’s “Radiant City” and Wright’s “Broadacre City”. Years later Ulrich Conrads documented these, and many comparable manifestoes about cities and public places.
The photographs above illustrate critical ideas about “perfect” versus “good” cities. Upper left (Marseilles, 1967) shows Corbusier’s rooftop structures on his iconic Marseilles block housing intended as a model for all housing in his perfect city. This rooftop filled with “good” but not perfect social concepts (playground, day care, meeting rooms) should be emulated, but not the idea of replacing the existing city fabric (as viewed from the rooftop in the upper right) in order to make his “perfect” city. The two lower photographs are not part of anyone’s “perfect” city but they do illustrate the “good” idea of unique experiences linked to the social life of retail uses (Toronto on the left, 1975, and Copenhagen on the right, 1992).
Here are some excerptsfrom Conrads’ review of manifestoes from Corbusier and Wright:
From Corbusier (1929)
“The street wears us out. And when all is said and done we have to admit it disgusts us.”
A town! It is an assault by man upon nature.
There was a time when the reading of Camillo Sitte, the Viennese, insidiously won me over to the picturesque view of the city. Sitte’s arguments were skillful, his theories seemed correct; they were based on the past. In fact, they were the past…. …. It was the past of compromises.
At the present moment, vast masses of dilapidated house are being demolished…. A new city is being permitted to spring up over the old city that murdered life, and this new city will murder life all the more infallibly because it forms positive knots of stasis, without in any way modifying the street-plan. … These fruitless operations .. are like a cancer that is being allowed to overgrow the heart of the city.
… and then Frank Lloyd Wright (1930s)
“To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city”… “Is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.”.. “Cities force growth and make men talkative and entertaining, but they make them artificial.”…
Fortuitously, Corbusier’s and Wright’s visions could not be built as planned, although they were often emulated in ways that harmed our cities profoundly. Equally, if not more problematic, were the non-architectural concepts of Ebenezer Howard in his “Garden City of Tomorrow”. Embedded in Howard’s hope for the perfect city were approaches that were adopted and became models of suburbanization. His ideas of land use segregation were combined with pragmatic approaches to implementation that have, in my view, damaged cities for over a century. Even today, the concept of “mixed-use” – the antithesis of Howard’s Garden city – has entered our zoning codes superficially, usually as an apologetic afterthought (“let’s mix some uses, how bad could it be?”). Only a rare plan these days will reject Howard’s socially engineered segregated zones in favor of neighborhoods and districts that embrace multiple urban places of diversity and change.
A few decades after Howard advocated the segregation of uses, a more virulent concept of social engineering, proffered during World War II, appeared in the words of Walter Gropius and Martin Wagner who were intending to improve industrial production in America. When I read their following concept, also quoted from Conrad’s book, I was surprised to see prescriptions for aggressively authoritarian planning practices (especially since both Gropius and Wagner apparently fled from authoritarian, centralized control in Germany):
A Programme For City Reconstruction 1943
Former suggestions such as ‘The City beautiful’ and other pictorial schemes have proved to be incomplete. First of all the existing cities should be relieved of congestion … by removing those who cannot be permanently employed. Resettled around small industries in new ‘townships’ these people would regain their productive capacity and purchasing power. The new townships should settle along super-highways and be connected by fast feeder road with the old city centre.
Today, as in past decades, the call for a city of the “future” often becomes the rallying cry for making massive changes – for urban renewal, and its companion approach of never ending “suburban” garden cities. Add to this a rhetoric for celebrating a “new order”, for dismantling the “old way”, for building giant infrastructure, for moving whole populations. Usually, we propose massive changes as utopian, and then, once the ideas fail, condemn it as dystopian and immediately seek out the next utopia. Sometimes, without knowing it, planners are advocating the malicious behaviors Naomi Klein describes in her book “The Shock Doctrine”. For the planning profession this habit should be broken. I hope planners shock no one. Our future will not be utopian, and our past was not necessarily horrible. None of the “modern” cities, real or imagined, was completely perfect or imperfect.
Founding The Dislike for Cities in America
The roots of making perfect cities go back a long way. In America, these roots begin with the so-called founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson did not love cities. At best he tolerated urban living -- but not for large cities in America. We can guess that he loved Paris, but he seems to imply that the quality of the cultural achievement found in Paris should not be sought after in American cities. This attitude overlaps de Tocqueville’s fear of cities. Here are two sets of quotes, first from Thomas Jefferson and then Alex de Tocqueville, excerpted from an insightful array of anti-city writings compiled in the “Intellectual Versus the City” by Lucia and Morton White.
From Thomas Jefferson
In cities of Europe… “wanting of food and clothing necessary to sustain life has begotten a depravity of morals, a dependence and corruption, which renders them an undesirable accession to a country whose morals are sound.”
…”The yellow fever will discourage the growth of great cities in our nation & I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the arts, but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere, and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue & freedom, would be my choice.”
.. and then Alex de Tocqueville
“… The lower ranks which inhabit these cities constitute a rabble even more formidable than the populace of European towns. ….”
“… I look upon the size of certain American cities, and especially on the nature of their population, as a real danger which threatens the future security of the democratic republics of the New World.”
These illustrations show projects developed by two of the founding fathers – Jefferson’s University of Virginia (upper left 1989) and Washington’s Mount Vernon (lower left and right, 1989). Jefferson’s facades might be called “authentic” made out of brick and stone, housing his less-than-perfect academic city for privileged white male students. The siding used by Washington on Mount Vernon was made from large wood blocks, cut and chamfered to copy the form of more expensive stones, built by slaves. This colonial practice of superficial perfection is seen today in the upper right photograph of Disney’s palace. The palace is clearly an authentic theme park but not a perfect city, sustained by millions of tourists who pay for the mirage of a perfect community.
Both Jefferson and de Tocqueville fear the possibility that American cities will evolve into larger more powerful places that threaten the way of life admired by these two authors. These observers want cities to remain smaller so that they do not become places of bad behavior (or at least the bad behavior that threatens the way of life of the authors, AKA elite members of society). Their views are probably consistent with Howard’s Garden Cities and Wright’s Broadacre City. Maybe Jefferson was only observing that his new nation was not yet suitable for cities the size of Paris, London, and Rome. Could he have imagined, and disliked, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles?
Jefferson, at least, recognized that larger cities do have some merits in terms of the arts and culture. Interestingly Jefferson and de Tocqueville ignore the fact that some smaller cities necessarily rely on the goods and services (and behaviors) that come from larger metropolitan cities. The great cities referenced by Jefferson and de Tocqueville did, eventually, cross the ocean and, in fact, became New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Toronto and many others.
Various writers share a dislike for cities and offer little planning suggestions other than “don’t live there”. For example, Ralph Waldo Emerson (also quoted in the Intellectual Versus The City) sees cities as a having no value other than as a source of superficial culture…
“… Whilst we want cities as the centers where the best things are to be found, cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town a chop-house, a barbershop. He has lost the grandeur of the horizon, hills and plains and with them sobriety and elevation. He has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile to public opinion.”
If there is a hidden value in this dislike of cities it comes from the realization that many intellectuals have correctly understood that cities of different sizes and compositions all contain distinctive, varied sets of threats and opportunities. Bigger is not always better and a perfect city is not always good. As planners we have to “know our place”. In what type of city do we practice, what can we achieve realistically and as we grow, what should we guard against and what should we embrace and encourage.
These photographs portray ideas that many planners and designers intended as part of “perfect” cities. They have in fact, failed at perfection, but succeeded at providing ideas which can modified, humanized, and made parts of “good” cities (all photographs from the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal); upper left - Buckminster Fuller’s structural efficient geodesic dome; upper fight – the use of super scale graphics for branding places; lower left and right -- Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67 recreating a hill town on an island.
Second Guessing The Value Of Cities
A few commentators on cities of the “future” were more balanced in their appetite for major urban change. A telltale sign of balanced, and often achievable, city plans is the inclusion of historic city components in the “new” city. For example, Tony Garnier’s Cite Industrielle (1917) actually included an old city as part of the vision. A few decades earlier, Camillo Sitte demonstrated, to Corbusier’s dislike, how to blend new forms with old forms – creating neither a utopia or dystopia but something in-between.
Tony Garnier’s comprehensive concept for the Cite Industrielle portrayed a future city which, in his mind was a social utopia (without jails or religious institutions). It did, however include a hydroelectric plant, contemporary hospital, walkable streets, and an assembly line manufacturing plant. Surprisingly it also included a city of the past, as shown in the attached land use diagram of his plans. Unlike Wright, Corbusier and many other futurists, Garnier explicitly saw history as a key component in the future and went out of his way to invent a history for his future (clearly both imperfect and a step in the right direction).
As noted in a previous essay in this collection, Water Benjamin appreciated neighborhoods in which a passer-by could look at the different structures and see within them signs of their history and culture. In Benjamin’s world the collective composition of buildings was, at times, the equivalent of a visual poem written by societal culture. From that viewpoint some older suburbs (mostly before cars) have some poetic charm while the uniformity of recent suburbs probably does not.
Theodore Dreiser (also quoted in the Intellectual Versus The City) emphasized the discomfort and inhospitality of cities but also recognized, to his credit, that he was part of the problem.
“New York was difficult and revolting. The police and politicians were a menace; vice was rampant; wealth was shamelessly showy, cold and brutal. In New York the outsider or beginner had scarcely any chance at all, save as a servant. The city was overrun with hungry, loafing men of all descriptions, newspaper writers included.
Louis Sullivan, an acknowledged founder of modern architecture, admits the potential value of cities but doubts their success (also quoted in Conrad’s Theories and Manifestoes of Modern Architecture):
“Accepting, therefore, New York and Chicago as representing certain miscarriages of democracy, … expressible of certain phases of degeneracy afflicting our land and people, we have but to turn, to regain our balance of view, to the country at large and the people at large. In passing, let me say that I am not disposed to ignore or minimize the sane moral or mental emotional forces, within those cities, which make for righteousness. Far from it, I gladly recognize them and hope that someday they may prevail. But I do say that they are not characteristic of those cities, and the balance of forces at present is heavily against them.”
from Kindergarten Chats – 1918
In 1985, celebrated novelist, Don DeLillo embedded a comment in the mind of one of his characters that fits well with America’s suspicion of cities and the impending catastrophe of climate change. .
“… Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic, and people. … The heat of tall buildings. … Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. … The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. …” from White Noise by Don DeLillo 1985
In practice our planning and design team has tried to incorporate “good” features from many sources, especially from cities of comparable size and character. These photographs and images come from a string of projects in West Bend, Wisconsin (2000-2010) the project, known as Rivershores, includes the work of numerous architects, planners, local officials, and engineers. It creates both new structure and public places as well as preserving and reusing many of the older manufacturing facilities along the west “bend” in the Milwaukee River as it meanders along the downtown’s east side.
Liking Cities Unconditionally
Some observers were clear exponents of the great value of both cities as well as nature. When it came to cities, Walt Whitman’s admiration seems exhaustive as proclaimed back in 1855.
Walt Whitman from Song of Myself (1855 version)
“…This is the city and I am one of the citizens…
Whatever interests the rest interests me, politics, wars, markets, newspapers, schools,
The mayor and councils, banks, tariffs, steamships, factories, stocks, stores, real estate and personal estate.…”
I suspect Whitman would love our cities today even more, especially their congestion.
Several decades later Henry Drummond quoted by Charles Wacker makes clear the role and potential of contemporary city planning (also from Theories and Manifestoes of Modern Architecture)
“To make cities is what we are here for. For the city is strategic; it makes the towns; the towns make the villages; the villages make the country. He who makes the city makes the world. After all, although men make life, it is the cities which make men. Whether our national life is great or mean, whether our social virtues are mature or stunted, whether our [daughters and} sons are moral or vicious, whether religion is possible or impossible, depends upon the city. “ …
Holding this ideal before us, what is our position in America today? The answer is not an easy one. We are forced to recognize that the city planner in America today is a pioneer. -- Charles Wacker (head of Chicago Plan Commission – 1909)
Jane Jacob’s description of cites in the Death And Life of Great American Cities serves as a planner’s bible of celebrating cities and helping them thrive.
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Streets and their sidewalks – the main public places of a city – are its most vital organs. ...
Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind – no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be – there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
The underlying cultural philosophy for making good cities was best analyzed in Collage City (1979) by Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter:
Modern architecture was intended to replace the public realm because, in the modernist theories of cities, the public realm was not needed – facades between public and private could go away.....
the design of buildings was being confused with the design of cities
Modernism promised lots of things and got them wrong – it pretended to be objective when it wasn’t and pretended to make us free when it made us less so – it was a utopian concept that, when we tried to achieve it, made everything worse for cities – even if it produced beautiful buildings.
There were highly accepted theories of how to make architecture and cities – a scientific approach and a political approach (both of which have been proved weak, both of which are still popular, and neither of which is sufficient to make good cities)...
Let science build the town and Let people build the town
This is due, in part, to a lack of understanding that design and architectural talent are a significant part of the basis for good urban planning and design.
Perhaps one of the simplest expressions of this attitude comes from Leon Krier (1978) whose statement is a clear rejection of Corbusier’s dislike of streets:.
“The street and the square represent the only necessary model for the reconstruction of a public realm.”
Making Good Cities and Right-size Places
Planners should not aim for perfect cities. They must aim for better or “good” cities that always include the past with the present. Moreover, planners need to understand that good cities (like good neighborhoods, good plazas, and good streets) come in different shapes and sizes – one size never fits all. In the planning discipline, “central place theory” and the “rank-size rule” (as understood in the disciplines of geography and spatial economics) support the idea that cities of different sizes make sense – not as prescribed solutions but as natural outcomes in human settlements.
The appropriate size of “good” places also arises in theories of urban design. One of Camillo Sitte’s recommendations emphasizes that the size of plazas should be linked to the relative size of the city in which they occur. Big cities need big plazas and smaller cities should develop smaller plazas. This approach – of linking size to the planning of cities and places – comes not from the goal of perfection but from the understanding of urban areas and their natural human ecology.
Making good cities and places require talent as well as wisdom, along with complex, risky, and often undefinable actions. Nevertheless, if we want to avoid bad cities (that is, avoid proponents of the perfect city of tomorrow) we should make improvements to cities that accept existing problems; that do not claim to fix everything; and that, while hard to explain, and easy to condemn, still become desirable.
There is no universal formula for a good place, but we know it when we see it.
Topic Summary
Our History of Rejecting Cities
Founding The Dislike for Cities in America
Second Guessing The Value Of Cities
Liking Cities Unconditionally
Making Good Cities and Right-size Places