Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century (Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation)

KARGON AND MOLELLA

Robert Fox, Department of History, Oxford University

978-0-262-11320-5

Book design by Sharon Deacon Warne, jacket design by Margarita Encomienda

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02142 MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

“Invented Edens offers a profoundly original perspective on the interaction between technology and everyday life in the twentieth century. Using case studies of planned urban environments, the book makes a path-breaking contribution to our understanding of modernity. Kargon and Molella present a galaxy of visionaries—and show in fascinating detail how the interplay between the ideas and actions of these modernminded critics of the machine age contributed to the fashioning of cityscapes in which industrial technology and human values could exist in harmony, not in conflict.”

THE MIT PRESS

Robert Fishman, Emil Lorch Professor, Taubman College of Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan

Invented Edens TECHNO-CITIES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ROBERT H. KARGON AND ARTHUR P. MOLELLA

Invented Edens TECH NO-CITI ES OF TH E TW E NTI ETH CE NTU RY ROBERT H. KARGON AND ARTHUR P. MOLELLA

Industrialization created cities of Dickensian squalor that were crowded, smoky, dirty, and disease-ridden. By the beginning of the twentieth century, urban visionaries were looking for ways to improve living and working conditions in industrial cities. In Invented Edens, Robert Kargon and Arthur Molella trace the arc of one form of urban design, which they term the techno-city: a planned city developed in conjunction with large industrial or technological enterprises, blending the technological and the pastoral, the mill town and the garden city. Techno-cities of the twentieth century range from factory towns in Mussolini’s Italy to the Disney creation of Celebration, Florida. Kargon and Molella show that the techno-city represents an experiment in integrating modern technology into the world of ideal life. Techno-cities mirror society’s understanding of current technologies and, at the same time, seek to regain the lost virtues of the edenic preindustrial village. The idea of the techno-city transcended ideologies, crossed national borders, and spanned the entire twentieth century. Kargon and Molella map the concept through a series of exemplars. These include Norris, Tennessee, home to the Tennessee Valley Authority; Torviscosa, Italy, built by Italy’s Fascist government to accommodate synthetic textile manufacturing (and featured in an early short by Michelangelo Antonioni); Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, planned by a team from MIT and Harvard; and, finally, Disney’s Celebration—perhaps the ultimate techno-city, a fantasy city reflecting an era in which virtual experiences are rapidly replacing actual ones.

MD DALIM #970845 6/17/08 SILVER ORANGE GREEN PURPLE

Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation

“With imagination and wide-ranging scholarship, Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella bring together techno-cities from New Deal America to Fascist Italy to communist Russia. And behind this remarkable synthesis is a deep examination of the power and limitation of utopian planning to shape actual cities.”

Invented Edens

Robert H. Kargon is Willis K. Shepard Professor of the History of Science at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of The Rise of Robert Millikan: A Life in American Science and other books. Arthur P. Molella is Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center. He is the co-editor (with Joyce Bedi) of Inventing for the Environment (2003, MIT Press).

H T T P : / / M I T P R E S S . M I T. E D U

technology/urban studies

I n v e n t e d E dens

Leme lson Center S tudies in Invention an d I n n o v a ti o n Arthur P. Mol e lla and Joyc e Bedi, gene ra l e dit o r s

Arthur P. Molella and Joyce Bedi, editors, Inventing for the ­Environment Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005 Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, Invented Edens: ­Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century

I n v e n t e d E dens

Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century

Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella

The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England

© 2008 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information on quantity discounts, email [email protected]. Set in Engravers Gothic and Bembo by SPi Publisher Services, Puducherry, India. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Kargon, Robert Hugh. Invented Edens : techno-cities of the twentieth century / Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella.   p. cm. — (Lemelson Center studies in invention and innovation) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-11320-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—Effect of technological innovations on—20th century.   2. Information technology—Social aspects—20th century.  3. ­Telecommunication— Social aspects—20th century.  I. Molella, Arthur P., 1944–.  II. Title. HT166.K357  2008 307.7609'04—dc22 2007045982

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments  vii

Introduction: The Arc of Utopias  1 1 Neotechnics in the Garden: The Marriage of Country and Town  7 2 Planning for National Regeneration: Techno-Cities in the Interwar Years  25 3 Techno-Città: Technology and Urban Design in Fascist Italy  47 4 The Techno-City Goes to War: America in World War II and After  67 5 Utopia Revived: From Industrial Modernism to Communit y   91 6 The City of Disciplines: Utopia Denied, Utopia Restored   113 7 Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism   131 Conclusion: The Fate of the Industrial Eden  149 Notes  157 Index  187

Ack n o w le dgments

The techno-city was an international phenomenon, and hence each chapter of this book represents an adventure of sorts in a different time and place. Over the past several years, many individuals guided and enriched our journeys. We are grateful to Logiusto Oliviero and Enea Baldassi for welcoming us to Torviscosa, Italy, sharing their memories, and revealing the treasures of that techno-city’s Documentation Center. Elena Agnini assisted in translating our Italian correspondence.Verushka Leonardi provided an enlightening visit to the sister Mussolini city of Sabaudia. Patrizia Bonifazio took us on an unforgettable tour of her open-air museum for Olivetti’s Ivrea, while Jeremy Kargon’s architect’s eye enhanced our appreciation of the town’s modernism. Winfried Nerdinger led us to important Nazi-era publications about Salz­ gitter, Germany. For our study of Oak Ridge,Tennessee, we owe a deep debt of gratitude to our intern Michelle Kang for research assistance at the National Archives and Records Administration, whose archival experts greatly aided this project. Cynthia C. Kelly connected us with a host of curators and other specialists in Oak Ridge, at the American Museum of Science and Energy, in the Department of Energy, and in the National Park Service. Joseph Barnes of The Celebration Company gave freely of his time and his design philosophy during our visit to that Disney town. Equally indispensable to this project were archivists and staff at numerous repositories, including the Olivetti Archives at Ivrea, the MIT Archives, the Chicago Architects Oral History Project, the Chicago Art Institute, the Frances Loeb Library of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University Library, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Pennsylvania. We also wish to thank the many colleagues who listened to

viii

acknowledgments

and critiqued our various presentations along the road to this book. We ­cannot begin to name them all, but at the top of our list are Stuart W. Leslie, Morris Low, Miriam Levin, Alan Morrison, Simon Joss, and Geoffrey ­Copland. We also received many valuable suggestions from our colleagues at meetings of the Society for the History of Technology and at academic round tables held at Case Western University, at Westminster University in London, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History, and at The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of the History of Science and Technology We benefited greatly from the thoughts and suggestions of our editors at The MIT Press: Marguerite Avery for enthusiastically taking this book under her wing, and Paul Bethge for doing his best to blend the authors’ voices. Substantial parts of chapter 7 appeared earlier as “Culture, Technology and Constructed Memory in Disney’s New Town: Techno-Nostalgia in Historical Perspective,” in Cultures of Control, ed. Miriam Levin (Harwood, 2000). We are grateful to Dr. Levin and to Taylor and Francis Publishers for permission to reprint this material. None of this journey would have been possible without steadfast support from our respective home bases in Baltimore and Washington, DC. We are grateful to colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University, especially Sharon Kingsland, for reinforcement and encouragement. The Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center team kept us energized with their ideas and on track: we depended particularly on Joyce Bedi’s expert editorial judgment and pursuit of elusive illustrations and Claudine Klose’s adroit and ever cheerful handling of administrative logjams. Throughout this venture, we have been grateful for the constant assistance of friends and family. Marcia Kargon’s patience and support was essential to the success of this project and is much appreciated. Roya Marefat shared her keen perceptions of the built environment as culture, and Mina Marefat her enthusiastic appreciation of modern architecture.The generous aid of the Lemelson Foundation at every stage of this project is gratefully acknowledged. The book is dedicated to our parents, Giacinto and Betty, Ira and Inez.

I n v e n t e d E dens

I n t r o d ucti on: T he Ar c of Uto pi as

The birth pangs of the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis came on quickly and were painful in the extreme. Within living memory of many of their inhabitants, smoky, dirty, disease-ridden cities replaced small market towns and even open fields or marshes. The search for ways to create better housing and workplaces and healthier, more elevated lives began almost immediately. This book traces the history of some important ideas that were meant to chart this better way. The book rests on a series of exemplars, or case studies, of what we term “techno-cities,” defined as cities planned and developed in conjunction with large technological or industrial projects. No group ever marched under a “techno-cities” banner, nor, for that matter, did contemporary advocates even use the term “techno-city.” Rather, the notion of techno-cities is our retrospective category, putting under one roof those who advocated, variously, the concepts of Garden City, utopia (or eutopia), new town (or città nuova, or neue Stadt), or community (comunità)—always with the modifier “techno-” implied. The cities chosen for closer examination were subjected to one additional criterion: all were either actually built and inhabited or (in the case of Minnesota Experimental City) had substantial resources invested in them. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau advised: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not have been lost; that is where they should be. Now, put the foundations under them.”1 Our protagonists followed this path. As Thoreau suggested, they attempted to put life into their thought. Some of our cases have attracted the attention of a variety of scholars from a wide assortment of disciplines. Most of these studies place the cities in a particular national or disciplinary context—for example, German or American history, architecture, planning, utopianism, economic history, or urbanism. We

12 introduction

intend to bring cohesion and order to these various viewpoints and put them into a new and useful framework, bringing the perspectives of intellectual history and the history of technology into the story. As we see it, the techno-city represents an experiment in integrating modern technology into the world of ideal life. Our story involves tracing a variant of the utopian strain, born more than 500 years ago, that surged during the excesses of late-nineteenth-century industrialism. At the dawn of the twentieth century, utopian ideas were taken seriously; more importantly, they captured the imagination of multitudes and had a forceful influence on public life.2 In particular, leaders of the modern movement who came of age at the time of World War I were determined to create a new utopia by applying the latest technologies and an innovative style to the built environment.The techno-city phenomenon responded to many of the same utopian imperatives as modernism—in particular, a quest for renewal after the destruction of war—and shared much of the same social agenda, including affordable housing in healthy and livable cities. But there was a difference. For example, most designers of our techno-cities, more acutely aware of technological excess, never took to such radical Corbusian notions as the home as a “machine for living,” and often preferred vernacular styles for their housing projects. Nor, on the German scene, was the Bauhaus style unequivocally accepted. Rather, most techno-cities blended modernist elements with what could be interpreted as anti-modernist elements. As we will see, the marriage was interesting but difficult. Techno-cities, like all other cities, are rooted in their times and reflect their historical context.They mirror a society’s understanding of current technologies and their role in shaping lives. They expose, as well, aspirations for the future. Because they were planned in connection with large technological or industrial projects, techno-cities are especially interesting for understanding the complex relations between technology and its social environment in the industrial and post-industrial eras. They embody especially well themes that are present in the early reactions to the urban excesses of the industrial era and that continue to resonate. Techno-cities were the twentieth-century descendants of the paternalist company towns of the Industrial Revolution. As early as 1816, Robert Owen’s New Lanark was designed both to soften the austerity of industrialism and to provide a better way of life for his workers. The New England

The Arc of Utopias

13

mill towns built after the ideas of Robert Lowell and Titus Salt’s 1850 Saltaire were likewise artifacts of the family-owned companies of the later Industrial Revolution. The mask of paternalism slipped away, however, in the ill-fated town of Pullman (1880), revealing the social control beneath. The English city planner Ebenezer Howard knew of this earlier tradition and departed from it in both social and physical form, though Cadbury’s Bournville and Lever’s Port Sunlight are often seen as precursors.3 Finally, our techno-cities are purpose-driven inventions. Like some of their forerunners, many planners of techno-cities, our inventors, were drawn to the nostalgic notion of the pre-industrial village Eden. Might it not be possible to regain the lost virtues of village life without sacrificing the undoubted gains of industrial advance? Can we plan to incorporate in some new Eden the best parts of both worlds (including clean new technologies) while discarding the worst parts? We employ the neologism “techno­nostalgia” in the hope that some readers will find it useful enough to forgive its unattractive tone. The nostalgic quest for a reformed industrial village drew on powerful ideologies of localism in both the United States and Europe. Within the modern movement, which helped generate the techno-cities phenomenon, there have always been tensions between the local and the national and between the particular and the universal. As David Harvey points out, the “flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation” of modern capitalism intensified the search for a sense of place.4 Although dating as far back as the post-Civil War years, America’s “cult of the local” reemerged early in the twentieth century as a political reform movement, a reassertion of small-town political power against the growing national influence of urban elites and industrial managers.5 But it soon expressed itself in terms of values and a battle for cultural control.6 In their attempts to reconcile modern technology with small-town cultural values, the creators of the techno-city embraced a traditional village aesthetic in their architectural and city plans. In general, localism almost always involved a reassertion of communitarian values and social forms in an era of mass society and anonymous industrial labor. The theme of community was equally, if not more, powerful in the establishment of European techno-cities. In modern Germany, with the ­persistence of its rural, home-town tradition, the term Gemeinschaft—meaning “community,” in contrast with Gesellschaft (“society”)—epitomized a ­communal

14 introduction

sensibility that often spilled over into folk and race consciousness. In post­Fascist Italy, it went under the name “comunità,” which carried a strong political agenda as well as a cultural agenda. Both Gemeinschaft and comunità called for the strengthening of community social bonds in the face of the socially destructive effects of unchecked industrialization. In time, social scientists would enter the scene in both Europe and ­America with different core values that did not include the same sense of community cohesion. This would eventually lead, in the middle of the twentieth century, to a split among advocates of the techno-city between academic social scientists and more traditional planners who viewed the creation of new towns, not as a science, but more a form of artistic and moral expression. Despite these differences, both factions shared a common belief in the healing powers of modern technology.Within the techno-city ideal, there remained a tension bordering on paradox between traditional values and those of technological modernism. The vast literature on Garden Cities, planned decentralization, and alternative towns slights the important role that new technologies (more specifically, the idea of new technologies) played in their plans. Ebenezer Howard saw science and technology as a critical part of his “master key” to the success of his “social city.” Patrick Geddes coined the term “neotechnics” to refer to the new constructive technologies of the twentieth century, contrasting them with the older, dirtier, more destructive paleotechnics of the heyday of the Industrial Revolution. For Geddes and his American disciple Lewis Mumford, the Coketowns of Dickensian North Britain and the Pittsburghs of the United States would be cured by a regional approach to decentralization and the integration of the best of the town and the country. Electricity, radio, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane made this amalgamation possible. Rural isolation, urban congestion, disease, and separation from nature would be greatly reduced or even eliminated. The amelioration of human nature follows from the betterment of the environment. As the case studies selected for this book will show, this notion of amelioration transcended ideology. Views as different as New Deal liberalism, Italian Fascism, Soviet Communism, and German Nazism were able to accommodate a penchant for planning and a desire to improve the city by bringing it closer to a nation’s roots in its countryside. Norris, Torviscosa, Sotsgorod, and Salzgitter aimed at producing (respectively) the new democratic citizen,

The Arc of Utopias

15

the new Italian man, the new Soviet worker, and the new “blood and soil” German. The Garden City idea, malleable and seductive, survived into the years of World War II with the Tennessee city of Oak Ridge, and then into the years of the Cold War, emphasizing its decentralization aspect to make a transition from hope for the future to defense against atomic annihilation. Postwar reconstruction revived the utopian dreams and forms. Adriano Olivetti, in his plans for the town of Ivrea and for the Canavese region, expressly drew on the ideas of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford (the last of whom he personally cultivated) and developed an eclectic philosophy of development based on comunità. Postwar faith in the power of academic science led to the ambitions revealed in the planning of Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, by a joint Harvard-MIT planning team, and in the rejection of what the specialists called “utopianism.” The challenges of Ciudad Guayana also disclose a utopianism of another kind. The purpose of another form of interdisciplinary planning, that of the Minnesota Experimental City and France’s Le Vaudreuil, was in fact more openly and technocratically utopian. The Florida town of Celebration is a fit finale to the story of techno-­cities of the twentieth century. In an era in which virtual experiences are ­rapidly replacing actual experiences as the mainstays of our lives, it is not surprising that a fantasy city in support of the new industry of animation becomes the ­ultimate techno-city. Techno-cities were widespread in the twentieth century—far more so than we expected when we undertook this study. They extended from North and South America to Eurasia. This book addresses only a small sample of this broad phenomenon. Structured in this way, the book cannot, of course, be exhaustive; many worthy and interesting places are omitted. Further, this is neither a history of utopian dreams nor a history of the profession of urban planning, although both subjects are touched upon. We aim at the relationship of ideas about urban design, technology’s role in shaping societies, and an achievable future. This is, ultimately, the story of ideals confronting the reality of modern life.

1 Ne o t ec hn ic s in the Garden: The M arr iage o f C o u n t ry and Town

In 1898 the son of a small shop owner, a man with no special education or background, published a book that possessed an amazing energy. Despite lukewarm reception by critics, within a few years its influence spread around the world. Ebenezer Howard, a 48-year-old Londoner, had been trying for the better part of a decade to earn notice for his ideas. With the help of a £50 subsidy he self-published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. A year later, he founded the Garden City Association; in 1902 he published a revised and expanded version of the book as Garden Cities of To-morrow. Within a decade Howard was internationally recognized as an urban ­theorist and the Garden City idea had traversed the world. The origin of the idea lay in the widespread dismay, even revulsion, at the late-nineteenth-century growth and condition of large metropolises. The literature is wide and deep with critiques of the phenomenal growth of cities with its attendant crowding, pollution, poverty, disease, and crime. John Ruskin was far from lonely in reviling the “staggering mass that chokes and crushes.”1 Howard—a Londoner born, according to his own testimony, “within the sound of Bow Bells”—had left school at the age of 15 and had worked as a clerk in the City of London. In 1871, at the age of 21, he left England to farm in Nebraska. Howard survived a single winter in that harsh climate; the farming experiment was a clear failure. Moving to Chicago after the Great Fire, he took a position as a legal stenographer for the firm of Ely, Burnham and Bartlett. Howard’s four years in Chicago helped broaden his intellectual horizons. It was in Chicago (whose Latin motto translated as “the City in the Garden”) that his attention turned, according to his own later statement, toward “a defined conception of an intelligently arranged town, a sort of marriage between town and country.”2



Chapter 1

Isaiah Berlin described two kinds of minds: the hedgehog and the fox. The fox knows many things; the hedgehog pursues one Big Idea.3 Howard was a hedgehog. His Big Idea was to meld town and country into the “Garden City.” The intellectual roots of that idea have been explored by many scholars and at great length. Of the thinkers upon whom Howard is said to have drawn, great names abound: Benjamin Ward Richardson, Henry George, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, John Ruskin, William Morris, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Spence, Alfred Marshall, James Silk Buckingham, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy. Of these undoubtedly significant sources, one in particular stands out. Edward Bellamy was both inspiration and catalyst, for Howard was not only a man of ideas, he also saw himself as a man of action. The American writer Edward Bellamy was at the end of the nineteenth century, and is today, best known for his utopian novel Looking Backward 2000 –1887, first published in 1888. It sold in the millions and was translated into more than twenty languages. Ebenezer Howard came into possession of a copy of this book before it was published in Great Britain. The effect it had on him was, according to his ­biographer Robert Beevers, “electrifying.” In a 1910 article titled “Spiritual Influences Towards Social Progress” Howard wrote: “I was transported by the wonderful power of the writer into a new society. . . . There came to me an overpowering sense of the quite temporary nature of nearly all I saw and of its entire unsuitability for the working life of the new order—the order of justice, unity and friendliness.” He lobbied the ­publisher William Reeves to produce the book in Britain. The reluctant Reeves agreed only after Howard personally guaranteed the purchase of the first one hundred copies. Howard himself labored (unpaid) to provide an index to the volume.4 What most attracted Howard to Looking Backward was a vision of a nation organized cooperatively to eliminate both dire want and excessive wealth. In Bellamy’s words, “the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.”5 Bellamy’s utopia was decidedly urban (“at my feet lay a great city”) and suffused with high technology, anticipating transportation and communication innovations of the twentieth century, including the “musical telephone” (radio), the credit card, and electricity for heat as well as for light. But the calm beauty of Boston of the year 2000 was inspiring:

neotechnics in the garden 

Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings for the most part not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, along which statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late-afternoon sun. Public buildings of a colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.6

Even if, as many Howard scholars maintain, Howard retained reservations about the centralizing, even totalizing, character of Bellamy’s state-run society, he was without question invigorated and catalyzed by the prospect of a plan for a just society along socialist lines. After the British publication of Looking Backward, Howard began to meet with like-minded friends to discuss Bellamy’s ideas, and became involved with the Nationalisation of Labour Society (NLS), founded in 1890 to promote Bellamy’s ideas.7 By February 1892, according to its Nationalisation News, the NLS was actively engaged in planning a Bellamyite community for 2,000 people. Howard had already drafted an early attempt to picture the Garden City, titled “A City of Health and How to Build It,” and he allied himself, despite conceptual differences, with the cause. He presented his views—the first public presentation of his Garden City ideas—in February 1893, in an address before the NLS. Howard’s plan was warmly received and “adopted” by the Society. The NLS was, however, in no position to act on the plan, and Howard turned toward publishing his views in the form of a book.8 The earliest draft of To-morrow is a manuscript titled “The Master Key,” dated about 1892. The title page shows a large key, the shaft or barrel of which is labeled “Science, Religion.” (See figure 1.1.) This shaft operates “the wards,” or unlocking mechanism, which contains the labels “experimental or objectlesson method,” “love of society,” “love of nature,” and “a New City on New Land.” The lever is labeled with contemporary issues: health, recreation, education, land reform, temperance reform, old-age ­pensions, railway rates reform, etc. According to Howard’s biographer Robert Beevers, this document “reveals more explicitly than any other ­surviving document the philosophy underlying the garden city.” The project, Howard exclaims, “while appealing to the religious and altruistic side of our nature, appeals also to our love of the beautiful and even to our innate desire for material progress and personal advancement.” It is in the unlocking ­mechanism, the wards, that contradictions are resolved. There will be no split between nature and society, between country and town.9

10

Chapter 1

Figure 1.1

This unpublished diagram by Ebenezer Howard points out the importance of science and religion to his social vision. (Howard Papers, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies)

neotechnics in the garden

11

In the several drafts between “The Master Key” of 1892 and the published To-morrow of 1898, the name of the planned city metamorphosed from “Unionville” to “Rurisville” to “Garden City” as Howard searched for the right label to express the reconciliation between town and country. In 1896, Howard submitted to the Contemporary Review a long article, titled “A Garden City, or One Solution to Many Problems,” that was essentially a summary of what was eventually to be his book. The piece was rejected. Undeterred, he worked on, and at the beginning of 1898, with the £50 loan enabling Howard to guarantee most of the first printing, Swan and Sonnenschein agreed to publish the book which appeared in October of that year as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and republished in slightly altered form in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow.10 In his introduction, Howard claims that it is almost universally agreed that “it is deeply to be deplored that people should continue to stream into the already over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country districts.” The answer to the question of how to restore people to “that beautiful land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it . . . is indeed a Master Key.” This key can be found in the following passage: “There are in reality not only, as is so constantly assumed, two alternatives—town life and country life—but a third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country may be secured in perfect combination.” The town and the country, Howard continues, may be regarded as two magnets drawing population. The town attracts by offering employment and advancement, society and amusement. These are offset by high costs, anomie, air pollution, long working hours and commuting time. The country offers the beauties of nature, fresh air, and low rents, advantages that are offset by long hours of labor, lack of amusements, lack of social intercourse, and frequently drought. Why not harvest the best of both? “As man and woman by their varied gifts and faculties supplement each other, so should town and country. . . . Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.” He urges the construction of a new magnet to draw population, the “Town-Country.” The book To-morrow will show how social opportunities and enjoyment of nature can co-exist; how higher wages can be provided along with lower rents and taxes, how wealth can be created, and “how the bounds of freedom may

12

Figure 1.2

Howard’s “three magnets” as illustrated in Garden Cities of To-morrow.

Chapter 1

neotechnics in the garden

13

be widened.”11 Howard’s illustration of his “three magnets” is reproduced here as figure 1.2. Physically, the Garden City would be a new, planned town placed in the countryside. Howard projected a population of 32,000 on about 1,000 acres, surrounded by a large green space. Jobs would be provided by light, worker-friendly industries (engineering, boots, cycles, jam-making, etc.) and services. The town would have a circular form, with a radius of a little more than a kilometer, so that people could walk to their work. At the center of the city would be a park, ringed by impressive public buildings. Howard suggests a startling Bellamy-like consumerist innovation: surrounding the park at the center of the city will be a glass arcade, very wide, that he calls the “Crystal Palace.” “Here manufactured goods are exposed for sale, and here most of that class of shopping which requires the joy of deliberation and selection is done.” At the outer ring, “factories, warehouses, dairies, markets, coal yards, timber yards” enjoy frontage on the main railway line. Smoke is kept to a minimum; “all machinery is driven by electric energy.” The refuse is recycled for use in agriculture.12 (See figure 1.3.) How is all this to be financed and managed? The land will be purchased at low rural prices and vested in a trust operated by four gentlemen. As the Garden City grows, land values will rise and rents will increase. The four gentlemen will then be able to pay off the mortgage, and to provide for social benefits as old-age pensions, accident insurance, etc. Thus common land ownership will form the basis and ensure the future.13 Since the Garden City by its very nature is limited in size, population growth may be accommodated by the establishment of sister garden cities of the same type, interconnected (by the time of the 1902 edition) by a rapid rail link. (See figure 1.4.) Howard described this cluster as the “social city.” As Robert Fishman and others have pointed out, Howard preferred to call himself an “inventor” rather than a planner or theorist.14 But inventors cannot exercise perfect control over the understanding, use, and reception of their creations. There is a common phenomenon that one may term “the escape of invention.” The invention of the Garden City follows this pattern. Innovation often is as much political as economic; politics requires compromise. To institutionalize ideas is to transform them. Shortly after the publication of To-morrow, Howard formed the Garden City Association to move forward with the implementation of his ideas. The Association was

14

Chapter 1

Figure 1.3

A detailed view of Howard’s garden city in Garden Cities of To-morrow.

formed in close association with a group that demonstrated early interest in To-morrow, the Land Nationalisation Society (LNS), founded in 1881 by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The LNS attracted middle-class reformers, mainly professionals. Non-revolutionary, it reinforced Howard’s emphases on peaceful reform and common ownership of land. The first meeting of the Garden City Association took place on June 10, 1899, and many of its members were drawn from the Land Nationalisation Society. The chairman of the meeting, Sir John Leng, was a Liberal member of parliament from Dundee.15 A major change occurred in 1901 when Howard, encouraged by an article written by the barrister and former Liberal M.P. Ralph Neville, enlisted Neville’s support and services as chairman of the Garden City Association. Through Neville, Howard met the industrialists George Cadbury and William Hesketh Lever. The two Garden City evangelists convinced the industrialists that the Garden City was a continuation of their own company towns, Bournville and Port Sunlight.16

neotechnics in the garden

Figure 1.4

Howard’s diagram of clusters of garden cities in Garden Cities of To-morrow.

15

16

Chapter 1

By the time of the 1902 appearance of Garden Cities of To-morrow, the Garden City Association had more than 1,300 members, including peers of the realm, bishops, academics, representatives of the press, industrialists, writers, and 23 members of parliament. Neville was in effect the executive director.17 Howard’s social program was seemingly swamped by middleclass enthusiasm for the plan. His greatest supporters were not driven by his socialist program and his cooperative vision. They were intrigued, rather, by the allure of his solution to the problem of the metropolis and by the romance of the marriage of town and country. Money was raised and owing to a fortunate (for the Association) agricultural depression, land was bought inexpensively. Almost 35 miles northeast of London, the Garden City of Letchworth would rise. Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin were taken on as architect-planners. The escape of the invention of the Garden City was nearly complete. First came the land question. The Board, led by Neville, offered standard 99-year leaseholds as well as “Howard leases,” 999-year leases with rates reviewed every five (later ten) years, with the rise in rents paying off the stockholders. Almost all tenants chose the former. Next came the city plan. Parker and Unwin abandoned Howard’s geometric grid. Industries were placed in an industrial “park.” The Crystal Palace was replaced by a curving street of shops. The railway tracks separated the houses from the industries. Howard tended to make the best of it. Of the land situation, he wrote (1904): “In my book I set forth an ideal to be attained; in our practical scheme we have to advance gradually.” Of the city plan, he wrote: “I always felt I was merely putting forward a draft scheme which would naturally have to be altered in accordance with the circumstances in which it sought to express itself.” In the end, as Robert Fishman wrote, “the Garden City movement . . . gradually lost its commitment to social change and became a city planning movement in the narrow sense.”18 But the Garden City idea flashed around the world. By the beginning of the Great War, Garden City Associations were established in the United States, in France, in Germany, in Belgium, in Japan, in Russia, in Italy, in Spain, in the Netherlands, in Austria, and elsewhere.19 Garden cities were being planned and built. The idea of the marriage of country and town had crossed national and cultural barriers. Few around the world remembered Howard’s social plans and economic devices. Howard’s neo-Romantic love of the British countryside had tremendous appeal for his new middle-class, professional audience. Moreover, Howard’s

neotechnics in the garden

17

vision of glass pavilions, clean, electricity-run industries, and fast trains and his talk of science as a fundament of his program spoke of “progress” and “the future” to his constituency. Howard found a kindred spirit in Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), an eccentric Scots biologist, sociologist, and city planner. Howard first met Geddes in the summer of 1904, and the two kept up a friendly professional friendship for at least a decade.20 Despite some important differences in approach (such as Howard’s concentration on new towns), they shared a concern for the city in the region, and for the role of new, clean technologies as part of the path to the future. On July 18, 1904, Geddes, a founder of the new Sociological Society, made a forceful call for local observation and practical effort as a part of the new sociology of cities in order to appeal to civic workers and “practical men.” In an address titled “Civics: as Applied Sociology,” Geddes laid out his ideas of the “Regional Survey” as part of an effort to understand the evolution of urban life. Geddes starts with the notion of the geographic region as his basic unit. He describes what he would later call the “Valley Section”: Beneath vast hunting desolations lie the pastoral hillsides, below these again ­scattered arable crofts and sparsely dotted hamlets lead us to the small upland village of the main glen: from this again one descends to the large and prosperous village of the foothills and its railway terminus, where lowland and highland meet. East or west, each mountain valley has its analogous terminal and initial village, upon its fertile fan-shaped slope, and with its corresponding minor market; while, central to the broad agricultural strath with its slow meandering river, stands the prosperous ­ market town, the road and railway junction upon which all the glen­villages ­converge. . . . Finally, at the mouth of its estuary, rises the smoke of the great ­manufacturing city, a central world-market in its way.21

For Geddes’s audience, the message is clear: “It takes the whole region to make the city.” Ebenezer Howard rose to lead the discussion, terming Geddes’s paper “luminous and picturesque.” Howard’s concern remained population movement away from the country into the manufacturing city, leaving the former “more bare of active, vigorous healthy life,” and he proceeded to advertise the Garden City Association and the Garden City Company which “Prof. Geddes wishes well, I know.” Mr. J. M. Robertson urged that Professor Geddes’s “next paper should give us a definition of progress.” In January 1905 Geddes did so when he presented Part II of “Civics,” expanding upon his notion of

18

Chapter 1

urban evolution by concentrating on those institutions that bore the burden of development. These institutions are, in the main, knowledge-storing and knowledge-advancing foundations such as the school and the “cloister” or in special cases, the university.22 By 1915 and the publication of Cities in Evolution, Geddes reformulated the Valley Section and the industrial age, by analogy with the anthropologist’s use of paleolithic and neolithic, into paleotechnic and neotechnic, the former describing the “older and ruder elements of the Industrial Age” and the latter “the finer type.” The “town,” the paleotechnic accretion still dominated by earlier mental sets, specialized and narrow, develops into the “city,” its neotechnic descendant, through institutions which enable it to change and grow, to evolve to a higher level. The town has collieries, steamengines, and staple manufactures. It is “crowded and monotonous.” The neotechnic order, on the other hand, is characterized by “skill directed by life towards life and for life,” a better use of resources, “public conservation” and clean industries.23 As the paleotechnic gives way to the neotechnic, the school (the transmitter of craft knowledge, rote learning) gives way to the cloister or university (the promoter of new knowledge and its application). Pierre Clavel sees Geddes’s theoretical approach as adding new dimensions to Howard’s. Whereas Howard’s town-country magnet offers little to point the way to institutional change that makes the transition possible, Geddes stresses institution-building (school, cloister), expanding consciousness, and preparing for action. In short, whereas Howard proposes a plan, Geddes announces a movement. Howard, the utopian, lays out a map within which change would arrive, but Geddes elaborates a vision of citizenship (“civics”) that will prepare a population to build its change.24 Both Howard and Geddes were visionaries of influence. As is true of most visionaries, their appeal lay in the perceptions and interpretations of their varied audiences; in contrast with many visionaries, their charm was enhanced by their vigorous calls to action. Their call was heeded by Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), a New Yorker who stumbled upon Geddes’s ideas in 1914. Undeterred by Geddes’s “crabbed and cryptic prose,” the young Mumford was stirred by the Scotsman’s insistence that theory must be enriched by experience and completed by action. The budding ­urbanist devoured Geddes’s notion that the two main traditions in biology are “reflections of the urban and rustic”—that is, the abstract-analytic and the concrete-intuitive (which emphasizes the mystery and wonder of

neotechnics in the garden

19

life). Geddes carries over this idea into his understanding of the evolution of cities, and provides a biological basis for both Geddes’s and Mumford’s ­attraction to Ebenezer Howard’s proposed union of country and city.25 While a student at New York’s scientific-technical Stuyvesant High School, Lewis Mumford fancied himself a budding engineer, contributing five notes on radio devices to Hugo Gernsback’s Modern Electrics in 1911 and 1912. His career took a detour when he failed mathematics, but Stuyvesant’s modern curriculum, one stressing the union of mind and hand, served him well in charting a new course.26 For Mumford, Geddes’s call for the renovation of urban life and his program for civic action were the alarums that woke his talents. Exploring the New York area with an eye to adding experience to reflection, he took notes and sketched critical essays. In 1916 he began writing an essay titled “A Regional Policy for Manhattan,” his first attempt along Geddesian and Howardian lines. He followed this essay with notes for a longer comparative study of Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, which he proposed to a publisher; it was rejected. Undaunted, in 1920 he wrote “Counter-Tendencies: An Outline of Regional Policy,” which also failed to interest book publishers. Mumford succeeded, however, in seeing The Story of Utopias published in 1922. In this book, the regionalist plan was not far from the surface. In his historical survey of utopias, which he divides into those of escape and of reconstruction, Mumford retains, mostly in the background, his sense of “eutopia” or “good place” as the goal of reconstruction. In discussing Plato’s Republic, for example, he argues that the author “had an ‘ideal’ section of land in his mind—what the ­ geographer calls the ‘valley section.’ ” Toward the end of the book, Mumford shifts to a discussion of social archetypes that underlie contemporary towns and ­cities in the United States and in Europe. The three he singles out are the “Country House,” “Coketown” (the paleotechnic, industrial agglomeration of Dickens), and “Megalopolis” (the overgrown city-region of the modern bureaucratic nation-state). The Country House is the seat of the ­aristocracy and designed to serve the ease and comfort of the rulers of society. “Culture came to mean not a participation in the creative activities of one’s own community, but the acquisition of the products of other communities.” Coketown (Manchester, Pittsburgh, Newark) “is devoted to the production of material goods.” The status of a family, in Coketown, “can be told by the size of its rubbish heap.” Finally, in the service of the National State, is

20

Chapter 1

“Megalopolis.” Here Mumford expresses his most alarming concerns about the direction of modern life, for “the ultimate aim of the megalopolis is to conduct the whole of human life and intercourse through the medium of paper,” thus squeezing out the world of nature. “Whereas the inhabitants of a national Utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a forest, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda, as similar as telegraph poles.” While his critiques are damning, Mumford only hints at the character of his eutopian plans. He briefly praises Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, terming Howard’s book To-morrow “persuasive.” In closing, Mumford explicitly acknowledges his debt to his mentor as he would many times afterwards: “Professor Geddes is the outstanding exponent of the Eutopian method both in thought and in practical activity. . . . [His] books are mines from which all sorts of precious thoughts can be quarried.”27 Mumford had not yet met the man he considered his teacher and guide. As early as 1915 Mumford had written to Geddes’s Outlook Tower with the intention of studying there. In 1917 he began a correspondence with the great man himself, signing his first letter “your affectionate and respectful pupil.” The correspondence continued until Geddes’s death in 1932, and survived even the disastrous meeting of the two in the spring of 1923. Geddes’s visit to the United States, arranged by Mumford, was the occasion of a serious mismatch of expectations. Geddes had expected to find in the younger man an assistant willing to perform the tedious tasks of dissemination of his ideas, tasks for which Geddes had little patience. Mumford’s extravagant closings (“yours gratefully,” “yours devotedly,” “yours in discipleship”) may have given Geddes cause to assume Mumford’s compliance. And Mumford saw himself as a junior collaborator, a view encouraged by the weighty substance of the letters. In any case, the personal interaction seems to have freed Mumford from the thrall of Geddes’s methods, if not of his root ideas. Mumford generously, perhaps too generously, continued to acknowledge a large debt to the Scotsman for many years.28 In preparing for Geddes’s visit, Mumford joined what he described as “the group that is most prepared to receive you here.” It consisted of young planners, journalists, engineers, and architects drawn together by Charles Harris Whitaker, the editor of the Journal of the Institute of Architects. Members included, in addition to Mumford, Clarence Stein, the architect and future planner (with his partner Henry Wright) of Radburn, an American Garden City, who “is in

neotechnics in the garden

21

the act of starting a Garden City Association”; Benton MacKaye, the future developer of the Appalachian Trail, described by Mumford as “a forester who is bent on developing a eutopia in the Appalachian region”; “Stewart [sic] Chase, a public accountant who has followed Veblen’s lead”; and Henry Wright, a landscape architect. It was a heady time. Mumford described the group as “a real university.”29 Subsequently, the group’s mission was the establishment of what they termed the “regional city,” a combination of the ideas of Geddes and Howard. It was intended to be their solution to urban ills in America. The group coalesced as the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), with Stein as president and Mumford as secretary.30 Stein had proposed the name “Garden City and Regional Planning Association” as early as 1923, but Mumford convinced him to drop “Garden City” in order to emphasize the group’s commitment to regionalism.31 In a letter to Geddes in 1926, Mumford wrote: “We are attempting to discard the word Garden City, and Regional City is our present substitute, which must carry with it the notion of a balanced relation with the region, as well as a complete environment within the city for work, play and domesticity.”32 In May 1925 the group published a special issue of The Survey Graphic that laid out their vision of regionalism. The introduction, titled “The Regional Community,” acknowledges their debt for “its underlying idea” to Geddes, “a long-bearded Scot.” The plan, founded on “the seer of cities” Geddes’s principle of “relating masses of population to the land,” is “linked in spirit and practice with the garden cities of England” and “binds up the common hopes of scattered planners in many cities.”33 In one of two essays, Mumford expands on the RPAA’s regionalist philosophy. In “Regions—To Live In,” he exclaims: “The hope of the city lies outside itself.” The forces that have created the metropolis have created a hopeless situation for improvement within it alone. Regional planning, on the other hand, offers hope for the entire region within which a city can flourish. “It does not aim at urbanizing automatically the whole available countryside; it aims equally at ruralizing the stony wastes of our cities. . . . The civic objective of the regional planning movement is summed up with peculiar accuracy in the concept of the garden city.” Mumford envisions Howard’s town-country magnet: “urban in its advantages, permanently rural in its situation.”34 Clarence Stein’s contribution, titled “Dinosaur Cities,” analyzes in great detail the problems of the great metropolises, especially congestion with all its attendant costs. “The big city,”

22

Chapter 1

Stein writes, “is bankrupt. The little city that has adopted a program of mere expansion . . . is headed in the same direction.”35 Mumford’s second article, “The Fourth Migration,” provides the therapy. Mumford argues that there are two Americas: that of the original settlement and that of three “migrations.” (See figure 1.5) The America of the original settlement is Edenic, with “well-rounded industrial and agricultural life, based on the fullest use of their regional resources through the water-wheel, mill and farm” and a “fine provincial culture, humbly represented in the schools, universities, lyceums and churches.” It was the America of “Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and Poe.” Then came the three “migrations,” the first marked by the ­clearing of the western lands, the second by the creation of the dingy, crowded, ­polluted

Figure 1.5

Mumford described urbanization as the result of three internal migrations. His “fourth migration,” he hoped, would lead to a decentralized, regional solution to urban problems. (The Survey: Graphic Number, 1925)

neotechnics in the garden

23

industrial cities, and the third by the rise of the great metropolises of New York and Chicago. But now, Mumford argues, we are on the threshold of the Fourth Migration, which offers the hope of renewal. The key to the success of the fourth migration is the changed technological environment. Whereas the railroad, the factory, and the telegraph were centralizing technologies (what Geddes termed “paleotechnics”), the new technologies of transportation, production, power distribution, and communication are decentralizing and distributive—that is, neotechnic. For example, Mumford writes, whereas the railroad is linear, the automobile is “areal”: “The automobile has brought goods and markets together, not linearly as the railroads tend to do, but areally. . . . Chain stores have been quick to grasp the advantages. . . . Similarly the automobile has increased the radius of the school and library service.” But mainly, the automobile has liberated the concentration of population: “The tendency of the automobile . . . is within limits to disperse population rather than concentrate it.” Likewise, new means of communication, for example radio, are distributive and decentralizing rather than, like the telegraph, linear. Finally, electrical power transmission favors a wide distribution of population. The first three migrations have not favored a good environment; the fourth migration, aided by neotechnics, has a chance to restore the balance and harmony of the original settlement, between man and nature, between technology and culture. “Even if there were no fourth migration on the horizon,” Mumford concludes, “it would be necessary to invent one.”36 The idea of the lost Eden and the power of new, clean, powerful technologies to restore it is a powerful trope in modern Western societies, dating at least as far back as Francis Bacon. In its twentieth-century form it can be termed “technonostalgia.” We see traces of it in Enlightenment and nineteenth-century utopian writers; it reappears powerfully in Howard, Geddes, and Mumford. Mumford’s friend and collaborator Benton MacKaye expresses it this way: The pattern that we visualize would be based on that of New England up to the 1880’s . . . viz. a layout of small villages and towns. . . . The boasted and boosted American metropolis . . . mushroomed from the quick combine of steam factory, long rail haul, and high finance; it remains now as a hangover headache from these forces. Meanwhile new forces have appeared—those of the ‘motor and power’ era. Mumford’s conclusion was that “Megalopolis is not merely on the ­downgrade. . . . Its suicide . . . will probably take place in a decisive way within the next generation.”37

24

Chapter 1

The techno-nostalgia of the RPAA group is forcefully revealed in a 1939 film titled The City. Clarence Stein initiated the effort; Lewis Mumford wrote the narration. The City was directed by Willard Van Dyke and narrated by Morris Carnovsky. Aaron Copland wrote the music. The film was shown eight times a week during the run of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. In a review in the New York Post, Archer Winsten wrote: “If there were nothing else worth seeing at the fair, this picture would justify the trip and all the exhaustion.”38 The City is divided into three parts, loosely following the schema of Mumford’s article “The Fourth Migration.” Part one, filmed in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, begins with a lost Eden: a New England village in which nature and technology exist in harmony. The audience sees images of water wheels, a little boy on a wagon looking skyward, a smithy, a church spire, apples and vegetables, and a town meeting. It is an idyll, a world in balance. Suddenly we are thrown into part two (filmed in Pittsburgh), which depicts a world thrown out of balance. It is the arena of paleotechnics. Industry, smoke, and overcrowding have thrown the world out of kilter. There are hard images of belching smokestacks, girders, blast furnaces. We no longer experience Eden; we are in Inferno. The village has metamorphosed into Coketown. We see children playing in mud, swimming in polluted water, and crossing railroad tracks. Is this the future we wish for our children? Similarly, the section of part two depicting the large metropolis (filmed in New York) evinces the mechanization of modern life, the rush and hurry to nowhere, congestion, endless traffic: “Cities, where people count the seconds and lose the days.” Even Sunday, supposedly a day of rest and recreation, becomes a cacophony of sirens, stalled cars, and traffic jams. The music, which in the first part was pastoral, becomes cacophonic. And suddenly . . . calm. We enter a new world via a sleek airplane, a symbol of neotechnics. The audience is transported to the new Regional City (filmed in Greenbelt, Maryland and in Radburn, New Jersey). We see homes with grass, children riding bicycles, and men walking to work in clean factories and playing softball. We are shown clean water, vegetables, and fruit. The world of mankind and technology is in balance once again. The lost Eden is restored by good sense, good planning, and good technology.39

2   P l a n ni ng for N ati onal R egenerat i on: T ec h n o - Cit i es in the Interwar Years

The Regional Planning Association of America was hardly alone in its vision of embedding new, powerful technologies in rational plans. World War I and the ensuing worldwide depression refocused attention on the need for comprehensive approaches to economic and social development. In the 1920s and the 1930s, dramatic visions of the future mixed with often virulent ideologies in bold attempts to devise inventive solutions to long­standing problems. Powerful activist regimes were established in autocratic Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union as well as in democratic America. The European nations faced not only the worldwide economic depression but also the challenges of securing their authoritarian rule and building their military capacity for the eventual showdown with their enemies. As confidence in centralized planning was immense, to address these problems they established new planned cities in connection with technical enterprises. These “techno-cities” were created by visionaries in each country as exemplars for the environmental, economic, and moral regeneration of the nation. First, all advocated the decentralization of industry. “Back to the soil” provided a motto that was at once geographic, economic and, by recalling a simpler life, morally uplifting. Second, despite the nostalgia for a pre-industrial land and people bond, these attempts to transform the nation paradoxically extolled the central role of science and technology in building a new future. In an important sense, these techno-cities were inventions aimed at implementing a nation’s planned tomorrow. Debate over ways to remedy the town-country divide and other Garden City ideas occurred early and vigorously in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898, reissued as Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1902) was ­translated

26

Chapter 2

into Russian by Alexander Block in 1911, and two years later a Garden City Society was established in St. Petersburg.1 The original officers of the Garden City Society included two lawyers, two physicians, and an architect; membership was drawn broadly from within the Russian Empire, with one-third of the members drawn from outside Russia. The Howard banner was carried forthrightly by the architect and planner Vladimir Nikolaevich Semionov (sometimes transliterated as Semenov), who lectured on such subjects as “Basic Principles of Garden Cities.” Semionov (1874–1960) had met Ebenezer Howard while in a period of residency in England during which he worked for Howard’s colleague Raymond Unwin. In 1912 he published Bladoustroistvo [The Public Servicing or Planning of Towns], a book that was imbued with Garden City ideals.2 The Society’s hopes were advanced by Semionov’s planned city Prozorovka, whose civic center, radial plan, and greenbelt closely resembled English models.3 Prozorovka, about 25 miles from Moscow, was built as a town for railway employees. Its municipal center had services, recreation on the Moscow River, a small lake, public baths, and a laundry. The town was served by utilities unusual for Russia at the time: water from artesian wells, a sewage system, a garbage incinerator, and electricity. It was widely viewed as a model town.4 The Russian Garden City Society dispersed in 1918 amid the tumult of the Russian Revolution. It was re-founded in Moscow in 1922. Soon a plethora of garden cities associated with industrial efforts were begun, including a “Red Garden City” (planned by K. Karasov in connection with the Istomin Cotton Mill) at Smolensk and A. Ol’s “Red October” near Petrograd.5 The slogan “The Garden City—City of Liberated Labor”—was commonly heard.6 The occasion of the rebirth of the Garden City Society also initiated a great debate about the future of the city and the nature of city planning. All sides agreed on the importance of overcoming the town-country divide. More orthodox disciples of Ebenezer Howard, including V. N. Semionov, Alexander Ivanitsky, and Grigory Barkhin, argued for the efficiency, the public health advantages, and the aesthetics of the garden city.7 Generally aligned against them were the “Urbanists” or “Sotsgorod” (Socialist Town) group, among whom the theorist Leonid Sabsovich was prominent. The Urbanists usually advocated the planning of middle-size cities (usually under 80,000–100,000) in connection with industrial sites or state farms (sov­khozy). Sabsovich’s Sotsgorod would be composed of collective dwellings

Planning for National Regeneration

27

(“dwelling combines”) and would be based on a mixed agricultural and industrial economy.8 Opposing both the Garden City advocates and the Urbanists were the Disurbanists, led by Moisei Okhitovich and Moisei Ya. Ginzburg. They argued against the building of cities and towns and for a more uniform distribution of population. Anticipating Frank Lloyd Wright’s conception of Broadacre City, the Disurbanists relied on new technologies to make credible their vision of a dispersed population employed and resident over a dispersed territory connected by fast automobiles, good roads, accessible communication networks, and a readily available power supply. People would live and work in park-like settings along linear transportation routes.9 In 1930, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Miliutin published The Problem of Building Socialist Cities, a work widely seen as a middle way between the Urbanists and the Disurbanists. Miliutin was the most energetic Soviet proponent of the “linear” city, first proposed by the Spanish theorist Arturo Soria y Mata in 1882. Miliutin refit this concept to accommodate a communist society.10 Peppered with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin, The Problem of Building Socialist Cities begins with a statement of the essential problem: “The massive reconstruction of the economy on socialist principles inexorably demands a reconstruction in culture and in our way of life. . . . The Soviet village must be built in such a way as not to perpetuate the very conditions we are struggling against, but rather to create the basis for organization of a new socialist, collective way of life.” The problems of the industrial city of bourgeois society cannot be solved by the “liberals’ ideas of the green city or the garden city.” The problem must be formulated in a new way: “We must review the very meaning of the word ‘city’. . . .  The modern city is a product of a mercantile society and will die together with it.” The answer, Miliutin argues, has been provided by Marx, Engels, and Lenin: we must eliminate the differences between country and city.11 In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels advocated “the ­combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country.”12 Miliutin inserts a quotation from Lenin that was a favorite among Soviet planners of all types: “the ­unification of industry with agriculture on the basis of a conscious application of ­science.” Miliutin settles the disagreements among Soviet planners: “For us there can be no controversy about urbanization or disurbanization. . . . The city and

28

Chapter 2

the town stretch their hands to one another; thus will these arguments be solved.” In this way, the “marriage of town and country” of the bourgeois Howard, Geddes, and Mumford are sanitized for Soviet socialism by Marx, Engels, and Lenin.13 Miliutin calls his socialist linear city a “flowing functional-assembly-line system.” Residential and communal zones must be set up in parallel to the productive (industrial) zone and separated from it by a green belt no less than 500 meters wide, but the residences are no more than a 20-minute walk from work. The highway is placed between the residences and the productive zone and the railway lines are positioned behind the line of industrial buildings. Agricultural territory is positioned beyond the residences. Medical dispensaries are located in the residential zone, and hospitals sited at the borders of the settlement. Prevailing winds mainly blow from the residential toward the industrial. (See figure 2.1.) In The Problem of Building Socialist Cities Miliutin sketches out plans for two new techno-cities: Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Stalingrad (at one time Tsaritsyn and now Volgograd) on the Volga River. Magnitogorsk was conceived as a metallurgical center; the planning contract was awarded to the German architect Ernst May, who adapted the Miliutin-Soria idea of a linear city.14 Miliutin’s linear Stalingrad plan was later further adapted by the Garden City advocate V. N. Semionov.15 The city was destroyed in 1943 and rebuilt after the war.16 For Soviet architects and planners and for Communist Party officials, the building of new cities in new ways was an essential step towards creating the New Soviet Citizen: “All attention must be directed toward the creation of a real material basis for the new way of life.”17 This faith in the Plan cut across ideological lines. In the Soviet Union, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi Germany, and in democratic America the importance of planned ­ cities grew and strengthened. The remainder of this chapter will compare case studies of two such endeavors: Norris, Tennessee (established in connection with the Tennessee Valley Authority) and Salzgitter, Germany (established in connection with the Hermann-Göring-Werke, an ­ armaments factory). Norris was planned and built in the 1930s as a home for employees of the Tennessee Valley Authority, but its planners envisioned it as a model for the nation. Begun in the period of severe economic distress known as the Great

Planning for National Regeneration

29

Figure 2.1

Miliutin’s linear plan for Stalingrad included a green zone to separate residential from industrial areas. (Miliutin, Sotsgorod )

Depression, Norris was to exemplify what rational and humane planning could do for Americans as a people. As part of the early New Deal program of President Franklin Roosevelt, Norris was planned to improve, to innovate, to ameliorate, and, above all, to provide hope. Genetically linked to utopias of the nineteenth century, it was a product of the technological optimism so common in America. Using technology appropriately, the optimistic view held, Americans could protect themselves from the worst excesses of rapid growth : unchecked industrial capitalism, untoward urbanization, and rampant expansion of the population. In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Henry Ford was considered a genius who contributed to the technological marvel that was the modern age. In July 1921, Ford made a proposal to the U.S. government to take

30

Chapter 2

over, for $5 million, its dams and nitrate plants along the Tennessee River at Muscle Shoals in Alabama for the production of electric power and fertilizer. This offer brought to a head decades of debate over public versus private ownership of these resources. Senator George Norris, a Republican from Nebraska, opposed the plan. He pointed out that the listed properties were built at a cost of $90 million, and this figure did not include much real estate and natural resources. He submitted a bill to Congress for government operation.18 In January 1922, Henry Ford astonished the nation by coming out with an expanded version of his vision of the future of Muscle Shoals, a vision that greatly increased his popularity and changed the debate over Muscle Shoals forever. On January 12, the New York Times ran an article headlined “Ford Plans a City 75 Miles in Length.” The article, which went out on the Associated Press wire, outlined Ford’s plan for a new regional development model for the Tennessee Valley, including a city 75 miles in length for the Muscle Shoals area. “It would be made up,” the article stated, “of several large towns or small cities. This is in line with the manufacturer’s view that men and their families should live in small communities where benefits of rural or near-rural life would not entirely be lost.”19 Ford’s vision set off a frenzy of enthusiasm in the region and a wild boom in the real estate market. Thomas Edison, Ford’s good friend, publicly announced his support for the plan and advised Congress to accept it.20 The “Seventy-Five Mile City” was the subject of a long laudatory piece in the September 1922 issue of Scientific American. The new Tennessee Valley industrial center would depend on the establishment of linked “hydro-driven plants.” Between these factories would be the “farm-homes of the factory workers. An employe [sic] can . . . be a food-producer and salary-earner at the same time.”21 The “factory and farm close together, yet co-operation between them. . . . The automobile industry would be a pygmy beside it.”22 Shortly thereafter, in an interview with the magazine Automotive Industries, Ford envisioned “a great industrial city on the banks of the Tennessee, which will rival Detroit.”23 The idea inspired Lewis Mumford. He wrote to his mentor Geddes: “Here is a first-rate neotechnic project. . . . What are we to suggest? How are we to alter Mr. Ford’s plans as to what must be done? My only answer to this, so far, is to show him that the city is not merely a vehicle for commerce and industry, but a place where the social heritage is preserved and re-shaped.”24

Planning for National Regeneration

31

Mumford was saved from inevitable disillusionment and disappointment when Ford’s plan was rejected by Congress. The opposition was led by Senator Norris, an advocate of public power. Ford bitterly characterized the opposition as that of “the international Jews.” However, he made one claim that rings true: “If we haven’t done anything else, we have shown what Muscle Shoals are worth.”25 Ford had changed the public’s thinking about Muscle Shoals. No longer would the question be about fertilizer and hydroelectric power alone; it would increasingly focus on the larger vision—a regional plan to uplift the area from backwardness to leadership. The Tennessee Valley could be a great utopian experiment to reverse some of the excesses of the industrial revolution which Ford had done so much to advance. Ford, not a proponent of urbanization, decried the movement of farmers from the land into the cities. “Factory and farm,” he said as early as 1918, “should have been organized as adjuncts of one another, and not as competitors.” The city, in his view, had been a mistake.26 Others too, inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea, were intrigued by the idea of a union between farm and industry. The Farm Cities Corporation was incorporated in Delaware in 1921. Among its earliest members were the well-known American city planner John Nolen and his British mentor, Raymond Unwin; F. H. Newell of the U.S. Reclamation Service; Hugh MacRae, a banker; and Thomas Adams, a town planning advisor to the government of Canada. The charter of the Farm Cities Corporation stated that its purpose was to establish typical farm cities where “families can cultivate the land profitably, and, at the same time, can enjoy the social, intellectual and economic advantages of community life.”27 Nolen turned his attention directly to the planning of “farm-cities” and planned Penderlea in North Carolina and the more successful Clewiston, along the shores of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Clewiston began with the hiring of Nolen by the property owners John and Marian O’Brien and their successors, the Celotex Company of Chicago, a subsidiary of the Southern Sugar Company. The economy of Clewiston was based on sugar and on celotex, building materials made from by-products of sugar milling. Nolen’s plan included 30 square miles of homes, an industrial park, an airport, hotels, a marina, and farm plots.28 These ideas resonated with those of another public figure: Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. One historian of Henry Ford

32

Chapter 2

writes that within a year of signing the Tennessee Valley Authority ­legislation, Roosevelt, now president of the United States, invited Ford to the White House to discuss “getting people out of dead cities and into the country.”29 With Ford, Roosevelt shared a commitment to “the land.” Roosevelt, the Hudson Valley patroon, had a visceral distrust of high-­density urbanization. And, like Ford, Roosevelt was seeking a new way to mitigate the worst excesses of industrialization. For Roosevelt, unlike Ford, one way out was through planning, and especially regional planning. Roosevelt became interested in regional planning, by his own testimony, through his uncle Frederic Delano. Before World War I, Delano had introduced Roosevelt to the City of Chicago Plan. “I think from that very moment,” Roosevelt wrote in 1932, “I have been interested in not the mere planning of a single city but in the larger aspects of planning. It is the way of the future.”30 Upon his nephew’s election to the presidency, Delano moved to Washington as an advisor, and became head of the newly created National Planning Board.31 Delano had been, at 32, president of the Wabash Railroad, a sparkplug in the creation of Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan of 1908 and the chairman of the planning committee for the New York Regional Plan of the 1920s.32 While governor of New York State, Roosevelt had solidified his concern with planning, and, as Paul Conkin has written, his enthusiasm for “preserving scarce resources, for moving as many people as possible back onto the land, and for making cities as orderly and as countrylike as possible.”33 In a June 1931 address on state planning, Roosevelt foreshadowed his philosophy as president: “Government, both State and national, must accept the responsibility of doing what it can do soundly, with considered forethought and along definitely constructive, not passive lines.” One of the key areas of concern is land utilization: Hitherto, we have spoken of two types of living and only two—urban and rural. I believe we can look forward to three rather than two types in the future, for there is a definite place for an intermediate type between the urban and the rural, namely a rural-industrial group. . . . It is my thought that many of the problems of transportation, of overcrowded cities, of high cost of living, of better health for the race, of a better population as a whole can be solved by the States themselves during the coming generation.34

Planning for National Regeneration

33

Roosevelt’s interest in regionalism doubtless was behind the invitation to be keynote speaker at the July 1931 Roundtable on Regional Planning at the University of Virginia. Powerhouses of the New York-based Regional Planning Association of America were there: Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Henry Wright, and Benton MacKaye. Stuart Chase, Howard Odum, Charles W. Eliot II, Frederick Newell, and others made presentations. Roosevelt forcefully asked a receptive audience: “Isn’t there a third possibility [between urban and rural], a possibility to create by cooperative effort some form of living which will combine industry and agriculture?”35 This important theme, a third way between city and rural area, is repeated often during the years leading up to Roosevelt’s successful campaign for the presidency and during the first years of the New Deal. Over and over again, he would denounce “the profligate waste of natural resources” and the “gigantic waste” which industrial advance has entailed.36 After his election in November 1932 and before his inauguration as president, Roosevelt made a point of traveling to Muscle Shoals, where he made these ­extemporaneous remarks: I am determined on two things. . . . The first is to put Muscle Shoals to work. The second is to make Muscle Shoals a part of an even greater development that will take in all of that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia down to the Ohio and the Gulf. . . . Muscle Shoals is more today than a mere opportunity for the Federal Government to do a kind turn for the people in one small section of a couple of States. Muscle Shoals gives us the opportunity to accomplish a great purpose for the people of many States and, indeed, for the whole Union. Because there we have an opportunity of setting an example of planning, not just for ourselves but for the generations to come, tying in industry and agriculture and forestry and flood prevention, tying them all into a unified whole over a distance of a thousand miles.37

Within weeks of assuming office, Roosevelt moved to establish the Tennessee Valley Authority, combining Senator Norris’s interests in power, the agriculturalists’ concerns with fertilizer production, and Roosevelt’s vision of regional planning in an all-encompassing bill, which Roosevelt signed on May 18, 1933.38 Roosevelt next turned his attention to selecting a director for the TVA. He had consulted Arthur E. Morgan, president of Antioch University, a flood-control engineer and a scholar of the ­utopian writer Edward Bellamy. Morgan had shown a serious interest in ­community

34

Chapter 2

redevelopment. Morgan’s interview with Roosevelt reinforces the notion that Roosevelt was interested in the TVA as an exemplar of regional planning and not merely as a source of power and fertilizer. Morgan later reported that Roosevelt “talked chiefly about a designed and planned social and economic order. That was what was first in his mind.”39 Within a month of the signing of the TVA Bill, Roosevelt’s choice for its first director began planning for a new community associated with the new dam at Cove Creek, Tennessee. It would be a permanent town, rather than temporary housing for TVA workers, and it would, at Morgan’s insistence, be called Norris, after the senator who had fought so hard for the TVA bill.40 One of the people brought on board early was Benton MacKaye, stalwart of the RPAA, founder of the Wilderness Society, and conceiver of the Appalachian Trail. In an article in the May 1933 issue of Survey Graphic titled “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” MacKaye extolled the breadth, scope, and depth of Roosevelt’s plan for the Tennessee Valley: “President Roosevelt has spread it out from a dam to a river to a region. . . . He has done more—he has related a local project to a national emergency; he has sown the seed of that “national planning” announced in his inauguration speech.”41 MacKaye was ultimately concerned with the protection of “the basic settings”: wilderness, community, and wayside. To stem the tide of the “metropolitan slum” he urged the “townless highway” and the “highwayless town.” Highways would bypass the town and would be connected to it by spur roads. Surrounded by green spaces, the town would be to the region as the cul-de-sac was to the main road.42 “The Tennessee Valley project,” MacKaye concluded, “sows the seed of a national plan for the country’s redevelopment. . . . Further steps . . . must in due course carry on the national evolution conceived in the Roosevelt statesmanship.”43 The planning and the implementation of Norris were in the hands of Earle Draper, director of the Division of Land Planning and Housing of the TVA, and his assistant director, Tracy Augur. Augur had already earned a reputation as an eloquent advocate of American garden cities.44 Augur had completed a landscape architecture master’s thesis on planning and the Garden City at Harvard in 1921. He was working in the office of planner John Nolen, who had just developed an interest in “farm-cities” (a version of Howard’s town-country magnet).45 The TVA town of Norris was put on the fast track. The site for the town was picked in July 1933, and housing

Planning for National Regeneration

35

construction started in January 1934. (See figure 2.2.) The idea remained “high concept.” In December 1933, Earle Draper wrote: To serve the entire community a complete town center has been laid out adjacent to a 14-acre public recreation ground. . . . Here will be grouped the public hall and administration building, a small hotel, stores, public market, bus station and service garage and other community features as the need arises. Centered on the main axis of this group will be the public school, away from traffic. . . . The utilities, including electric distribution station and steam laundry are relegated to nearby but unobtrusive locations. . . . [Norris] will demonstrate that the unduly congested, insanitary, matterof-fact ugliness and the usual haphazard growth . . . can be avoided inexpensively.46

Tracy Augur, director of planning for Norris, drew a direct line from the Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal to Norris. According to Augur, the town had three “focal points”: a community center, a construction camp site, and a machine shop center devoted to attracting future industry. It

Figure 2.2

Tracy Augur’s plan for the resettlement of families displaced by Norris Reservoir, 1934. (The Tennessee Planner)

36

Chapter 2

Figure 2.3

Model homes in Norris Village. (Walter Creese and Earle S. Draper Jr.)

p­ rojected a population of 1,000–1,500 families. The houses were constructed to be simple, easy to maintain, and make the maximum use of electricity for heating and cooking.47 (See figure 2.3.) The town had a greenbelt around it and, consonant with Roosevelt’s rural-industrial ideas, provided places for a  ome instruction center (cooking, child care, budgeting and furnishing), a trades and engineering center (auto mechanics, aviation, plumbing, wrought iron work, electrical and mechanical skills), and in the greenbelt dairy and poultry farms so that Norris workers could engage in part-time agriculture. The intention remained to educate workers to become foremen and managers, and to provide an agricultural-industrial basis for everyday life.48 One important aim of the plan was to draw industry into Norris to balance its rural situation and to enable its residents to partake of a rural­industrial community, or what TVA literature described as “a community based upon the orderly combination of industrial work and subsistence and farming.”49 The planners drew explicitly upon the ideas of Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes. “What Howard proposed,” wrote Draper and Augur, “was a solution of the housing problem, not by building model tenements or workers’ suburbs, but by taking the population before it reached the slums and giving it housing facilities of a far superior sort.” The result was “not merely a new type of city but of a new type of region.” The town

Planning for National Regeneration

37

of Norris’s “single broad goal” was “the evolution of a way of living in the Valley.”50 According to Augur, “the fundamentals of the plan were never sacrificed—a recognition of the underlying purposes of the community—a sympathetic treatment of the site, abundant open space for children’s play and adult recreation, attractiveness in all things big and little, from the iron bracket of the street signpost to the roadway’s gentle curve and the school’s straightforward architecture, simplicity, economy, a place designed for pleasant living and convenient work.”51 The reality, however, fell far short of the dream. The costs of housing were higher than had been projected. As a result, members of the TVA’s professional staff were attracted to the original houses in Norris, while workers found themselves able to afford only the cinder-block houses in the southeast corner. Similarly, industry was not drawn into Norris. The small population and the rural location (approximately 25 miles from Knoxville) made Norris unattractive to businesses and industry. By 1936, when the major phases of construction were over, workers had begun to leave Norris, replaced in the housing units by outsiders from a waiting list. The original élan of Norris was undermined, and it began to look more and more like a bedroom suburb of Knoxville. Moreover, the TVA itself was undergoing great changes. The two additional directors appointed by President Roosevelt (David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan) consistently outvoted Arthur Morgan and increasingly turned the TVA into an agency for economic development.52 Lilienthal publicly asserted “I do not have much faith in uplift.”53 By 1937 the TVA had decided to sell Norris, having long before abandoned its ideas of regional development.54 While the early Roosevelt administration was developing Norris as a city of the future, Hitler’s Reich was laying plans for Salzgitter, a neue Stadt, or new town, about 20 kilometers south of the Lower Saxon city of Braunschweig. It derived its name from nearby salt springs and from one of the original towns of the area, Gitter. Salzgitter housed workers for a vast new mining and steelmaking complex known as the Hermann-Göring-Werke. Although having different proximate causes, the National Socialist new town of ­Salzgitter and the TVA project at Norris shared many ­ideological goals. Both experiments sought to reinvent the city and its environs in response to impending industrialization. Both identified with but were profoundly ambivalent about technology, hoping to temper modern technological civilization with

38

Chapter 2

rural values and appreciations of nature. And, as with Norris, the story of Salzgitter serves as a window on a fascinating process of invention and reinvention. But although Salzgitter mirrored the TVA in significant respects, it was a ­reflection in a distorted mirror, an image twisted by the extreme social, political, and economic conditions of Nazi Germany. In the words of Salzgitter’s architect, Herbert Rimpl: “With the rise of the [Hermann Göring] Werke the villages and the farm towns of the Salzgitter hills were awakened from their peaceful existence.”55 A farming area of 55,000 acres, approximately 20,000 people, and some thirty small towns became, in just a few short years, “one of the largest concentrations of industrial might in the world.”56 The agent of this astonishing transformation was the Reich’s secret rearmament drive of the 1930s. Having surrendered to the Allies its main iron and steel-producing regions in Alsace-Lorraine after World War I, Germany looked for areas that would provide alternative sources of ore. Extensive deposits in the Salzgitter hills, known since ancient times, had remained dormant because of the inferior quality of the ore. For centuries Salzgitter had been known as a bucolic agricultural district of wheat and sugar beet fields, its only claim to fame being mineral baths frequented by the princes of Braunschweig.57 Interwar German politics and an invention changed all that. A newly patented chemical process introduced an economical method for enriching Salzgitter’s low-grade ore. Hermann Göring, the powerful Field Marshall responsible for making Germany resource independent, incorporated Salzgitter in his Soviet-style four-year plan for putting Germany’s economy and natural resources on a war footing.58 In 1937 a huge industrial complex of mines, foundries, molding plants, forges, chemical and electrical facilities, and other support installations was coming into being at Salzgitter. Lacking a pool of local skilled labor, the project imported workers from elsewhere in Germany and Europe. When labor continued to fall short of needs, the regime erected a concentration camp nearby to supply slave labor.59 Salzgitter exploded in size, soon ranking as the fastest growing and the most densely populated region in Germany.60 With the huge influx of workers and their families, Göring was confronted with a housing crisis. An overall plan for new housing construction was needed. The Reich’s approach to the housing problem was more than a pragmatic measure. It reflected concerns deeply rooted in German history and

Planning for National Regeneration

39

culture. Salzgitter’s planners resolved to avoid the mistakes of Germany’s industrial revolution, whose rapid onset—the fastest in Europe—had generated extreme social and economic dislocations. (The anxieties from this rapid modernization are well documented in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West.61) The planners feared that the Hermann-Göring-Werke would inflict the same human and environmental problems as Germany’s industrialization: flight from the land, urban overcrowding and sprawl, noxious air, unhealthy living conditions, and working-class ghettos.62 Of even greater concern to Germans of this generation was the destruction of community, of Gemeinschaft (whose distinction from Gesellschaft was so critical to Ferdinand Tönnies and to the sociologists of the Frankfurt School).63 Who could predict what moral and spiritual damage would result from depriving citizens of rural community, open air, the healing light of the countryside, and natural connections to the land? Combined with Germany’s long history of anti-city sentiment, such concerns strongly colored the planning for Salzgitter. Yet the Reich was reluctant to forgo the technology that provided the foundation of economic, military, and political strength for the modern nation-state. In inventing Salzgitter, it pursued a seemingly paradoxical course of preserving the bucolic benefits of rural life while building up the Reich’s industrial and military might. Incorporating ideas from Britain, Italy, and the United States, Salzgitter retranslated the concept of the new town into National Socialist terms. The solutions to housing, industrial, and environmental problems were wrapped in a Blut und Boden (blood-and-soil) ideology that found expression in a paradoxical Nazi world view that combined awe of modern industrial might with a nostalgic pre-modern vision of das Volk, a romantic myth of small-town agrarian Germany—a cultural contradiction that Jeffrey Herf has labeled “reactionary modernism.”64 This contradictory ideology was the basis for Germany’s Siedlungsprogramme (settlement program), which created thousands of new towns of various sizes during the 1920s and the 1930s.65 Salzgitter served as a model project. An expression of German anti-urban sentiments that go back at least to the seventeenth century, the program was an offshoot of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City movement, which had spawned immediate imitators in Germany. Cities like Letchworth had German parallels in the new town

40

Chapter 2

plans of the anti-Semitic propagandist Theodor Fritsch.66 Relocating city dwellers to smaller settlements at the edge of cities or in the countryside, the Reich’s decentralization program—also referred to as “internal colonization” or “repatriation”—produced new housing projects around the country, often in conjunction with industrial sites. Nazi propagandists believed that resettlement would remove downtrodden city dwellers from corrupt urban environments and bind them spiritually and morally to Mutter-Erde (Mother Earth) in a new form of rural industrial town. In practice, the decentralization program became a tool of social control and forced migration of undesirables. Focused on minority groups and workers, the policy would eventually have deadly implications in the Holocaust. Two high Nazi officials, Richard Walter Darré and Gottfried Feder, developed the ideologies for the German Siedlungsprogramme. Darré, Hitler’s agriculture minister and one of the Nazi party’s most powerful figures, brought a fierce anti-urban and anti-technology bias to National Socialist thinking. His blood-and-soil philosophy categorized Europe’s aboriginal peoples as either “settlers” or “nomads.” Darré idealized the rural, land-loving peasantry—the settlers—as precursors of the Nordic race. In contrast, the nomads, progenitors of all non-Aryan and especially the Semitic and “oriental” races, were the citified purveyors of godless technology. Darré called for “repatriating” urban populations to the soil as the only way to restore Nordic values. When Heinrich Himmler appointed him head of the Race and Settlement Office of the Nazi SS, Darré was able to apply his racist mythologizing with deadly consequences.67 Gottfried Feder, the Reich’s Siedlungskommisar (Settlement Commissar) launched a program of invented cities that aimed to reconcile urban/technological and rural/agrarian values. He had a powerful role in shaping the Reich’s policy of decentralization and its blood-and-soil ideology. Not sharing Darré’s anti-technology biases, he envisioned green towns of about 20,000 people, combining industry and agriculture—Germany’s official development policy dating from Bismarck’s Sammlungspolitik (politics of “pulling together”) of “iron and rye.” Feder compared the new city to an organism, hierarchically organized in a nationwide system, much as groupings of cells constitute the body.68 His ultimate goal was “the dissolution of the metropolis, in order to make our people be settled again, to give them

Planning for National Regeneration

41

again their roots in the soil. . . . The reincorporation of the metropolitan populations into the rhythm of the German landscape is one of the principal tasks of the National Socialist government.”69 Nazi resettlement policies converged in the planning for Salzgitter, one of the Reich’s most ambitious attempts to blend industry and agriculture, town and country. Herbert Rimpl, Hitler’s chief industrial architect and after Albert Speer the leading architect of the Nazi era, had the contract for the overall planning of the Salzgitter Werke, including its administrative facilities and its housing. His company employed some 700 architects and had branches throughout Germany.70 One of Hermann Göring’s favored contractors, he built numerous air force and industrial installations for the Luftwaffe chief. Salzgitter was one of his most important commissions. In a book written a decade after the Salzgitter project, Rimpl revealed some of his philosophical thinking behind the new town.71 His love of nature emerges as a motivation. “Yearning for Nature” (Natursehnsucht), he wrote, “logically follows technology,” a sentiment that resonated with Nazi anti-industrial attitudes.72 “Already in 1905, after the epoch of the crassest materialism, the Garden City of Letchworth was built as a logical reaction.” A great admirer of Howard’s original garden city, Rimpl praised England’s new domestic style, in which the house “is oriented toward the sun and bound with nature. The garden is a part of the house, whose inner spaces it extends outward, over terraces or meadows, over flower or vegetable gardens.” Finally, “the basis for the rise of this kind of dwelling was the hated industrial city. . . . ” At times, Rimpl’s sense of nature verges on religious awe. For example: “The inclusion of the breadth of landscape in cities, the opening up to nature afforded by glass houses, the yearning for green, for gardens, the sun, water, the mountains, undisturbed forests, all of these are visible signs of the embodiment of a pantheistic point of view.” At the behest of Hitler, Rimpl laid out his plans and rationale for Salzgitter in a prominent Nazi art journal.73 (See figure 2.4.) Ordered by his ­government patrons to preserve a sense of the rural and natural within the heavily industrialized landscape, Rimpl confronted the contradictions in National Socialist ideology between nature and technology. He chose an eclectic blend of architectural styles to articulate the town’s distinct components. The principal public buildings—the Volkshalle and the Nazi

42

Chapter 2

Figure 2.4

Rimpl’s town plan for Salzgitter. (Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich,” Die Baukunst, April 1939)

Planning for National Regeneration

43

­ eadquarters—adopted the neo-classical gigantism of Albert Speer. (See figh ure 2.5.) For Salzgitter’s steel factories, Rimpl took advantage of the efficiencies of glass and steel construction of the International Style. (His firm employed many former Bauhäusler.) His plans for the projected 15,000– 20,000 workers’ homes embraced the vernacular style of traditional German housing.74 Figuratively unifying the disparate parts was an organic metaphor drawn from the heart of Nazi ideology.75 Like Speer, Rimpl viewed architecture as both a practical and symbolic art. Therefore, his plans for the Nazi technology town can be read not only as a literal blueprint but also as a set of signs and symbols. Rimpl’s plans embodied the notion of the “body politic,” a metaphorical comparison of the town to the human body. A tradition that goes as far back as Plato’s Republic and that found corroboration in contemporary German cell theory, the “body politic” concept justified social arrangements by declaring them “natural.”76 Salzgitter was to function as—and be—an organism at one with nature, a Nazi garden city. Both to separate it from and to connect it to major urban and industrial centers, Rimpl nestled Salzgitter in the heart of an existing rail and autobahn network, to which he added a canal as another mode of access. Environmental considerations—the availability of clean air and sun, the visual landscape, soil, water, and health factors—figured prominently in the choice of location. Rimpl located the town in a valley north of the foothills

Figure 2.5

Rimpl’s rendering of the main plaza for Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke. (Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, ” April 1939)

44

Chapter 2

of the ore-bearing Harz Mountains and west of the foundry areas, so that prevailing winds would carry airborne pollutants away from the town.77 Salzgitter was to serve as a hub for existing towns of the district and for new settlements built to accommodate the influx of workers. The town proper was projected to have a population of about 130,000; the entire region, including the mines and industrial sites, would eventually contain 250,000 people.78 Salzgitter was defined by the confluence of two rivers, the Flothe and the Fuhse. Rimpl invoked the “body politic” metaphor quite literally. The Flothe formed a 2-kilometer backbone for the town, while the convergence of the two rivers defined the skeleton. The juncture of valleys provided a setting for a sport and health complex—the town’s heart. This green area, conducting cleansing mountain winds through the town, served as the lungs. (“Die grüne Lunge,” the common expression for a city’s central green, took on in this instance a heightened metaphoric meaning.) The whole effect was to “give the new industrial city the character of a city in the country.”79 A transportation node at the town’s northeast end became the legs and arteries. A second symbolic point, the site of the Volkshalle and the Nazi Party’s headquarters, represented the head that directed the body’s organic functions. (See figure 2.6.) The head maintained the ­all-important

Figure 2.6

The Volkshalle and Nazi Headquarters represented the “head” that ruled the “body” of Salzgitter. (Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich,” April 1939)

Planning for National Regeneration

45

hierarchy and “Ordnung,” a reminder of the authoritarian subtext of Nazi organicism. The town’s residential areas operated on the same hierarchical principles. The apartment buildings and single-family dwellings formed cells, while the roads winding among them, coming off rectilinear major arteries, were the capillaries that gave them vitality.80 Green gardens and common areas kept the system sunned and oxygenated. The cells in turn formed a subsystem of small communities, each with its own schools, groceries, and public amenities.81 Multi-story buildings stood at the center of each community, preserving a sense of order and control from the center and above.82 Rimpl separated the main transportation routes from the residential areas, embedding them in Salzgitter’s greenbelt, the town’s outer “skin” and a buffer against other population centers. The body politic of Salzgitter, however, never fully matured. Rimpl’s grand scheme lay uncompleted at war’s end, remaining in the form of renderings and models. With Germany’s defeat, the Werke shut down, ceding their role back to the Ruhr and other revived iron districts. Salzgitter lived— and lives—on, however. During the Cold War, West Germany maintained the region and, to some extent, its industries, primarily for political reasons. In an area so close to East Germany, it wanted to maintain a show of stable employment. However, the garden city experiment was over. Both Norris and Salzgitter offer insight into perceptions of the urban condition as we enter the twenty-first century. Both were interesting early attempts to come to grips with problems left by the worst excesses of the industrial revolution and of unplanned urban sprawl through a union of town and country. Both displayed enormous confidence in planning for the future. Moreover, planners in both the United States and Germany tended to see the problems in regional terms, and ultimately in national terms as well, foreshadowing later attempts, in the 1980s and 1990s, to take up these issues. In the end, of course, both Norris and Salzgitter were failures, whether judged by their own initial goals or by today’s standards. Each failed owing to contingencies. Germany lost World War II and was disarmed. The Hermann-Göring-Werke ceased to function, and Salzgitter lost its raison d’être. After the war, the nationalist and Volkisch ideology of Salzgitter fell into disrepute; the German people wished to forget. Norris was practically stillborn. Just as it was beginning to develop, it lost its political backing. The New Deal, confronted by the stubbornly resistant Depression, turned

46

Chapter 2

away from visionary planning and toward practical, ad hoc solutions. The pragmatists at the TVA—David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan—ejected Arthur Morgan, and the TVA turned mainly to producing and distributing electrical power. Beyond contingency, however, both experiments were ultimately victims of an intrinsically untenable concept. The inner contradictions of the founding idea—a massive industrial complex within a “green” environment—may have doomed them from the start. In Seeing Like a State, James Scott calls the impulse behind this kind of planned city “high modernism,” an ideology combining faith in scientific and technical progress, rational design of the social order and control over nature.83 Salzgitter and Norris reflect all these, plus a characteristically pre-World War I nostalgia for the rural and a distrust of the industrial city. The legacy of the 1930s’ techno-cities is precisely this: they remind us once again of questions of the limits and strengths of planning; of looking for the optimum ways to deal with sprawl and congestion through the Garden City idea; of the role of visions of the future, utopian thrusts, and their dangers.

3  Te ch n o -C i ttà: Te c hno logy and Urban D e sig n in Fas ci st Ita ly

Like Norris and Salzgitter, the northern Italian town of Torviscosa drew on the rising optimism for centralized planning and on widespread regard for Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City notions. In line with Fascist doctrine and practice, Torviscosa was a government-industry partnership. It began with SNIA (Società Navigazione Industriale Applicazione) Viscosa, a company that produced viscose or rayon fiber, a synthetic material that came into heavy demand during the 1930s. Torviscosa was the creation of SNIA’s president, Franco Marinotti, an Italian strongman in the Mussolini mold, who built it under the auspices of Il Duce’s sweeping “città nuova” program. Instituted to reclaim agricultural land in Italy’s malaria-ridden coastal marshes and to create new jobs, the vast building program produced more than a dozen “città di fondazione” (meaning “foundation towns,” and referring to their role in anchoring the new Italy). One of the most promising of these foundation towns was Torviscosa. To realize this project, Marinotti needed land, easy means of transport, and a willing workforce, all of which Torviscosa appeared to satisfy. The Mussolini-Marinotti alliance was a marriage made, if not in heaven, at some other place of political and economic advantage. Torviscosa lies in the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, about 85 kilometers northeast of Venice along the major road and rail routes connecting Venice and Trieste. Although both town and factory have been restored and modernized since World War II, a visit to Torviscosa is still a journey into Fascist memory. Torviscosa and its chemical factory, now a SNIA subsidiary called Caffaro (Industrie Chimiche Caffaro), are well­preserved mementos of the Mussolini era, time capsules of nationalistic aspiration. Although Allied bombing had leveled the factory, its ­headquarters

48

Chapter 3

building has been carefully restored to its original form. Signs of faded Fascist glory can still be seen in the chemical plant and other buildings, in public art and sculpture, and in plaques and monuments dedicated to the town’s revered founder, Franco Marinotti. The original city hall and the Piazza del Popolo survive intact, as does the town’s central green space, with its gardens and sporting facilities, its movie theater, and its ristoro/dopolavoro (rest and “after-work” recreation center). Adjacent to the factory head­ quarters stands the chemical firm’s Franco Marinotti Information and Documentation Center, a substantial red brick structure of more recent vintage with a soaring 60-meter tower fashioned to evoke the town’s period Fascist style. Place names and other explicit tokens of the Fascist era, most dramatically a Fascist ax on one of SNIA’s chemical conversion towers, were long ago done away with. But Mussolini’s partiality for classic modernism, evoking the glories of ancient Rome, left a permanent imprint on Torviscosa, as it did on many Italian cities. A master at manipulating architectural symbols, Il Duce deployed a cadre of Italian architects, including the acclaimed Marcello Piacentini, to remake the Italian cityscape in the monumental style famously associated with his regime.1 Torviscosa, Sabaudia, and Rome itself testify to the power of his architectural influence. As of this writing, some of SNIA’s early managers and workers still reside in the town’s original housing district, preserved much as it was in the 1930s. I Primi di Torviscosa (Torviscosa’s Pioneers), historically self-­conscious retirees, remain proud of the role they played in Italy’s industrial revitalization and work hard to keep the historical flame alive. (See figure 3.1.) What binds them to Torviscosa beyond the housing they occupy—reputedly the most commodious of the città di fondazione—is devotion to the company’s memory.2 Since the 1940s, they have been the self-appointed keepers of town and company history. The Documentation Center, which they maintain on a volunteer basis, contains the archives, libraries, films, and exhibits about the city’s creation, including large-scale architectural models detailing the evolution of the city plan.3 The Center stands as a symbol of both historical consciousness and former grandeur. Its tower, designed by the architect Cesare Pea and visible from almost any location in town, looms imperiously, even ominously, a powerful echo of the town’s Fascist origins. It also serves to remind us that there are in fact two Torviscosas—the real town and its history, and the one that served as symbol and stage for Fascist

Techno-Città

49

Figure 3.1

Franco Marinotti and son Paolo meet with I Primi di Torviscosa in 1964. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa)

50

Chapter 3

ideology and propaganda. The twin Torviscosas remain so intertwined that it is impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins. Torviscosa’s origins lay in Mussolini’s war against cities, whose corrupted cores, he contended, were among the most destructive legacies of the Industrial Revolution. Inflamed by Spengler’s Decline of the West, he raged against urban man’s insulation from nature. From the German historian and philosopher, he learned about the superiority of honest country folk to degenerate urban “parasites” and “nomads.” Cities, Mussolini believed, bred worker alienation, class conflict, and, in some cases, even revolution.4 Advocating decentralization and the shift of population to rural areas, Il Duce issued a decree in 1939 restricting immigration to urban centers. Moving industry out of the city into the country would bind workers to rural values, and, it was also expected, to the regime that gave them land, home, and work—a Fascist corroboration of the Nazi blood-and-soil ideology. On the eve of the global depression, which formed the essential backdrop to all techno-cities of the period, the Fascist government launched an aggressive program of rural town building. It established thirteen new città di fondazione, constructing them in two waves.5 Towns of land reclamation and ruralization came first. Prominent among these were Mussolinia, renamed Arborea after the War, on the island of Sardinia in 1928 and Littoria (for the Fascist lictor), now called Latina, in 1932. Mussolini’s special showpiece cities were those founded on reclaimed marshlands in the Latium region southeast of Rome in the Pontine Marshes (Agro Pontino, in Italian). (See figure 3.2.) For centuries Roman rulers had tried but failed to drain the marshes in the hinterland of the imperial city. Where Caesars had fallen short, however, Il Duce prevailed. After clearing the mosquitoinfested, malarial swamps, his regime built five new towns on the reclaimed land, including Sabaudia and Littoria. At the latter’s formal inauguration, Mussolini claimed a historic victory: “That which was attempted in vain over the past twenty-five centuries today we are translating into living reality.”6 With the second wave of urban construction came the technologydriven towns designed specifically to support autarchy, the Fascist policy of resource and economic independence. Along with Torviscosa—the Città della Cellulosa—this wave also swept in the Città del Carbone (coal mining) and the Città dell’Aeronautica.7

Techno-Città

51

Figure 3.2

Mussolini saw the draining of the Pontine Marshes as a propaganda coup. (Associazione Culturale Novecento. Cover illustration for quaderno dell’ONC, 1936 by Duilio Cambellotti, as reproduced in Pellegrini and Vittori, Sabaudia)

52

Chapter 3

Whatever their varied rationales, all of Mussolini’s new cities bespoke the Fascist revulsion against the metropolis and a yearning for small-town life. At the same time, they stood for the modern, revolutionary face of Italian Fascism. Sabaudia, a resort town on the Pontine Marshes, was and remains famous for its futuristic “rational” modernism.8 Its Fascist architecture and its Art Deco elements echoed those of Torviscosa and other città di fondazione. Thus, at the core of the città nuove there was always the sense of an unresolved contradiction. While showing a futuristic drive, they also harkened to the past, often to the glories of imperial Rome.9 In Fascist propaganda, identifying the old and new worlds of Italian leadership promoted the nation’s image as a progressive leader. The forward-looking Torviscosa, too, claimed a Roman past in its buildings and statuary, and also incorporated local Friulian history and tradition. An equally powerful influence on Il Duce’s new towns was the Garden City idea. Luigi Piccinato, head of the group of four young architects belonging to the Italian Movement for Rational Architecture who won the competition to build Sabaudia, drew much of his inspiration from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city, the American architect’s variation on the Garden City. Piccinato envisioned a decentralized urban structure, free of crowding, slums, traffic jams, pollution, and crime.10 In her comparative study of New Deal and Fascist communities, Diane Ghirardo notes that “New Towns were of enormous propaganda significance for the [Italian] government.” The ability to create a whole new city from swampland in a strikingly short time seemed like a feat of magic.11 Through such achievements, the regime flaunted its power, advertising its superiority to both capitalist and socialist forms of government. Torviscosa, like its sister new towns, was as much cultural statement as political and economic strategy. In that city as well as others, Fascist cultural policies aimed to mobilize and reform, even remake the Italian people. The new towns program was instrumental to these reforms. Reclaiming swampland upon which new cities would arise stood for social redemption. In 1928, Mussolini declaimed: “Redeem the earth; and with the earth, man; and with men, the race.”12 As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has observed, land reclamation “merely constituted the most concrete manifestation of the Fascists’ desire to purify the nation of all social and cultural pathology . . . [part of ] a comprehensive project to combat degeneration and radically renew Italian society by ‘pulling up the bad weeds and cleaning up the soil.’  ”13 Out of the città nuove, Mussolini proclaimed, would emerge an Italian uomo nouvo—a new man.

Techno-Città

53

The town of Torviscosa was the invention of Franco Marinotti (1891– 1966), a leading figure in Milanese politics and in the Italian textile industry. After serving as vice-mayor of Milan, he became president of the Province of Milan, and “consigliere nazionale.”14 In 1938, he was elevated to Count of Torviscosa. Born and educated in the Veneto, Marinotti went to Milan to find work. Landing a job as an accountant at a silk-spinning firm, he gained his first foothold in the textile industry. In 1913, he worked as an attorney for a Russian-Italian textile firm, also specializing in silk. Work took him to Russia during the war, where he rose quickly through the company ranks. He returned to Italy after the war in 1918 to embark on a long career in the chemical firm that gave birth to Torviscosa.15 SNIA—originally the Società di Navigazione Italo Americana, a jointstock company—had it beginnings during World War I as a shipper of coal from the United States to Italy. After the war, the firm went into the synthetic textile and chemical business and became known as SNIA Viscosa (Società Navigazione Industriale Applicazione Viscosa). Soon it was a major player in the international textile industry. Marinotti joined SNIA Viscosa in the early1930s, after the company had fallen on hard times because of the Great Depression and bad management. He quickly assumed effective control of the firm, and in 1938 he became its president.16 Textiles assumed major importance in the Italian economy of the early 1930s. As an export commodity, they helped to offset Depression-­generated problems in trade, production, and currency instability. Attempting to align SNIA with the autarchic policies of the Fascist regime, Marinotti sold Mussolini on the idea of “Italian Cellulose,” an independent New Town for the production of viscose rayon that his firm would develop and control. It was conceived along the lines of the paternalistic industrial towns set up by such companies as Fiat, Pirelli, and Breda. Marinotti cited three reasons for choosing the Friuli region as the site for the new town: it had a great deal of unproductive agricultural land ripe for reclamation, it suffered high unemployment, and its existing transportation networks would facilitate reconstruction.17 Once its project was accepted by the regime, SNIA received massive infusions of government funds for constructing the new town. SNIA needed high-quality cellulose to produce its new fibers, but international sanctions imposed by the League of Nations after Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935 blocked the importation of pulp from Canada and other

54

Chapter 3

timber-producing regions. After experimenting with a variety of plants, including the fast-growing eucalyptus, SNIA’s labs discovered a replacement in an annual plant that could grow rapidly in Torviscosa’s Mediterranean climate: Arundo donax, a reed familiarly known as canna gentile (sweet cane). They also devised a calcium bisulfite process to extract cellulose from Arundo donax and convert it into viscose rayon. (See figure 3.3.) To make way for Torviscosa, the government expropriated land in and around Torre di Zuino. The medieval town lay at the center of a depressed agricultural region, largely swampland along the Lagoon of Marano on the Adriatic Sea. In the 1920s, the province of Friuli was struggling to recover from World War I, which had wreaked havoc on its agricultural and silkworm industries. SNIA acquired nearly 6,000 hectares of damaged land, 1,200 of which were to be devoted to the cultivation of canna gentile. After draining the swamps, the firm set up a subsidiary, SAICI (La Società Agricola Industriale Cellulosa Italiana), to farm Arundo donax and extract cellulose—the Garden City marriage of agriculture and industry. After completing the cellulose factory and its research laboratories, SAICI erected supporting industrial sites, including plants to produce hydroelectric power and soda. The company not only managed the research, development, and production of synthetics; it also ran the town, receiving both jurisdiction and generous funding from the state.18 Construction of the town commenced in 1937. In 1940 it became an independent commune under the name Torre di Viscosa (after the medieval town’s landmark tower), soon contracted to Torviscosa. The plan initially called for a peak population of 20,000, but projections were eventually scaled back to a more realistic 5,000. To design Torviscosa, Marinotti chose the architect Giuseppe de Min, a relative with whom he had worked for many years in Milan.19 On September 21, 1938, the initial phase of the town opened to great fanfare, Benito Mussolini doing the inaugural honors. In Fascist myth the town was built in less than a year: “In 320 days,” Marinotti declared at the inaugural ceremony, “faith, tenacity, labor have made a new conquest. In the sign of the Littorio [lictor, the Roman officer who carried the fasces], the new city of cellulose has emerged, clear and important evidence of the Nation’s autarchic victory.”20 In reality, the major elements of the town weren’t in place until the early 1940s.

Techno-Città

55

Figure 3.3

Wagons deliver sweet cane to chemical towers for the production of viscose. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa)

56

Chapter 3

In making his plans for Torviscosa, Marinotti drew on recent experience. As president of the province of Milan, he was responsible for the creation of new borgate semirurali (suburban hamlets). The effort involved experiments on worker housing, traffic flow, and integrating city and country. In his study of the origins of Torviscosa, Massimo Bortolotti points out that Marinotti’s hamlet initiative was part of a broader Italian movement for total or integrated architecture that focused on problems in “urbanistica rurale.”21 Marinotti encouraged Giuseppe de Min to apply what he learned about regional planning in Milan to Torviscosa. They also found urban models in England’s industrial villages, America’s company towns, and Germany’s workers’ settlements. Striving for a balance between city and country, they embedded the town’s factories and other buildings in large green spaces. Torviscosa sat in the midst of natural terrain, the Friulian marshes. De Min artfully used natural features (trees, hedges, meadowlands) to set off buildings and to articulate a harmonious relationship between factory and city.22 Dominating all was the gigantic cellulose factory, consisting of eleven sections, each devoted to a different phase of viscose production, ­combining to more than a kilometer in length. The street leading to the factory was lined with noble sculptures, memorial plaques, and stately urns. Across from the plant, arrayed on an arc, were a movie theater and a “ristoro/­dopolavoro”— an after-work facility that combined the functions of hotel, restaurant, tavern, and recreation center. The purpose of the ristoro/­dopolavoro was to restore not only the body but also the spirit. Such public amenities served the company’s paternalist desire to control all aspects of workers’ lives, during and outside work hours. Operating the dopolavoro was the Opera Nazionale Dopolavoro, a national organization established in 1925 to promote safe and healthy working conditions and the efficient employment of workers. Not only did it strive to ameliorate their physical conditions; it also looked after their moral and spiritual well-being, in keeping with Fascist precepts.23 Public service areas were integral to the town’s design. The ristoro and theater admitted to a large public park containing a swimming pool, soccer field, tennis courts, a bocce field, and other public recreational facilities. The park separated the factory complex from the civic center. Torviscosa had all the essential buildings of a typical Fascist città nuova: town hall, church, post office, youth center, and other government structures.24 At one end of

Techno-Città

57

Torviscosa’s central square was a combined town hall/Fascist Party building, notable for its Fascist-modern clock tower. (See figure 3.4.) Contrasting with the tower’s modernism was the traditional architecture of the porticos arranged laterally along the original Piazza of the Empire, known today as the Piazza del Popolo. The ground level was devoted to shops, and the second level to living areas. This mix of styles held political and cultural meaning. De Min’s approach was to combine forward-looking modernism (associated with the regime) with the references to Italy’s traditional culture of the contadini, or peasantry.25 Adjacent to the piazza were the school and nursery school—structures typical of the città di fondazione. On the city’s south side, there was housing for employees. In the tradition of the città nuove, the town houses were simple in plan and arrayed in rows, each with a small garden in the back. Heights of the spacious twostory units varied, but in general they reinforced a social order of uniform comfort centered on the family.26 In placing the workers’ housing, De Min carefully researched traffic patterns to the factories and their surrounding agricultural lands. (See figure 3.5.) The Fascists’ autarchic policy required the use of local resources and builders. De Min varied and modulated his materials, for example using red brick for the factory complex and traditional stone and plaster for civic structures. The blend of materials symbolized Torviscosa’s status as a private

Figure 3.4

Torviscosa Town Hall on the Piazza del Popolo reflects typical architectural styles of Mussolini’s cittá di fondazione. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )

58

Chapter 3

Figure 3.5

Employee housing was laid out in simple rows. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )

city within a state—the Fascist fusion of private capitalism and government. In Torviscosa, in contrast to some other città nuove, private power dominated. Built on private land owned by SNIA Viscosa, the commune rented its property from the corporation.27 Such was the real Torviscosa, as it was and, to a large extent, still is. But there was also the Torviscosa of Fascist ideology and myth. The original town was dressed up in Fascist symbols, most conspicuous the chemical conversion tower in the form of a colossal fasces. National-popolari statues, exemplars of the Italian social realist style, flanked the factory entrance, as they still do today. Sculpted by the artist Leone Lodi, one features a heroic male nude, an agricultural worker wielding a shovel, standing before his seated wife and son; the other features a second male figure reining in a rearing horse, symbolizing man’s control of nature and industry. (See figure 3.6.) Reliefs on the factory’s facade and remnants of statuary along the park project the Fascist goal of integrating agriculture and industry. Marinotti, even more prominent than Mussolini in Torviscosa, personally orchestrated the civic decor, toning down some of the Fascist references so as not to detract from his own power. In contrast with other Mussolini towns, there was no grand separate Casa del Fascio; it shared quarters with the town hall.

Techno-Città

59

Figure 3.6

Lodi Sculptures frame Cesare Pea’s distinctive tower for the Information and Documentation Center. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )

60

Chapter 3

Literary propagandists were enlisted in the selling of Torviscosa. In 1938, SNIA’s publicity office asked the Futurist poet and writer Filippo Tomasso Marinetti to give his imprimatur to the Fascist project, commissioning some lines of verse in honor of the town’s opening. The notorious Futurist had streaked to fame decades earlier with his polemic “Foundation and Manifesto of Futurism,” first published in 1909, which, like other writings by his ­fellow Futurists, glorified combat, speed, violence, and the Machine Age. Marinetti prefaced his ode, titled “Il Poema di Torre Viscosa,” with a typical manifesto calling for La Poesia dei Tecnicismi—Manifesto Futurista, a poetry of technics for the new era of Fascism. Long an ardent supporter of the Mussolini regime, Marinetti still showed some of his old fire, the boldness of Torviscosa’s technological experiment apparently fanning the flames anew. “Il Poema di Torre Viscosa” is a celebration of Fascist autarchy.28 Its theme is the confrontation of industry and nature, or, more precisely, the conquest of nature by technology, which would seem at odds with the harmony of nature and technology envisioned by Marinotti and Mussolini. But conflict was the essence of Futurism. The poem is not about human actors, but about the clash of forces. Marinetti animates nature, while deifying the physical and chemical processes that convert cane to cellulose and viscose rayon. The poet begins by setting a tragic scene: A field of graceful reeds, swaying in the breeze, in their gentle innocence almost inviting their impending doom at the teeth of mechanized harvesters. They were graceful, too graceful, Reeds in the immense cane fields of Porto Buso Each a spring that would tremble under the weight of a swallow So graceful as to deserve, indeed to require An improvised tempest of deadly steel.

Enter now the “Goddess of Geometry,” personifying the physical and chemical processes of cellulose conversion—indeed the very power of modern technology. Mercilessly, she mows down the tender reeds, then digests them in her boilers and chemical cauldrons. All to the greater glory of Fascism: O Goddess of Geometry, devour ever the fields of cane of the new city of Torviscosa Calcium bisulfite Swimming pools for the children of workers

Techno-Città

61

Playing fields for soccer and bocce The Avenues Vittorio Veneto and Arnaldo Mussolini Theaters and refectories for thousands of workers Lofty woods of plane trees and horse chestnuts for a myriad of bicycles Climb, climb! ever upward to the new constellation whose stars form the word AUTARCHIA!!

To further trumpet its achievements in industry and town-building, SNIA sponsored a series of documentary films. As the new towns arose at the astonishing rate of almost one per year, Mussolini made it a practice to attend groundbreaking ceremonies, using such events to promote his regime.29 SNIA’s filmmakers documented one such occasion: the dedication of Torviscosa on September 21, 1938. In the film’s opening sequences, Il Duce addresses the cheering masses. (See figure 3.7.) Framing the open-air scene were two enormous towers emblazoned with his Latinized title, “Dux, Dux.” In a stentorian voice-over, Mussolini pays tribute to Marinotti’s triumph for Fascism and autarchy: I declare today, the 21st of September of the 16th year of Fascism, as a day of victory in the battle that we have joined to achieve the ultimate possibilities for autarchy. Up to only a few months ago, this was a lost land [but] after only a few months of work and force we have created this establishment, among the grandest in Italy. In [your regard?] and above all others . . . , I nominate to be at the side of all of us our comrade Marinotti. He has faithfully obeyed my orders like a disciplined and clever soldier.

Another film clip, dating from 1940, documents the expansion and formal completion of Torviscosa. Swastikas on the factory’s facade advertise Mussolini’s recent alliance with Hitler. Giuseppe de Min, Torviscosa’s architect, marked the city’s opening with a whimsical poem, the “Ballata della canna” (Ballad of the Reed).30 De Min tells about troubles in Paradise. Adam is miserable, frustrated by Eve’s unceasing and insatiable hunger for expensive garments. Eve demands the finest dresses, woven only of the best fabrics. Pushed to exhaustion by his futile efforts to placate her, Adam learns of a wondrous chemical transformation, the process that turns canna gentile into dazzling synthetic fabrics: “Sette canne un bel vestito/accontentano il marito” (Seven reeds, one beautiful dress gratify the husband). Stunning new fashions are now cheap

62

Chapter 3

Figure 3.7

Mussolini and Marinotti, beneath the Fascist symbol, at the inauguration of the SAICI factory, September 21, 1938. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )

and widely available, even in Eden. The wonders of science have satisfied Eve and lifted Adam’s burden. Not only have Adam and Eve found contentment, but Torviscosa’s industrial workers are happy and Italy becomes rich in the process. In 1949, SNIA commissioned Michelangelo Antonioni, a native of northeast Italy, to produce a short publicity film about the cane harvest and viscose production. His film Sette canne, un vestito (also known as Seven Reeds, One Suit, echoing a line from Giuseppe de Min’s poem and probably drawn from a SNIA advertising slogan), celebrates how a reclaimed piece of swampland

Techno-Città

63

and research-based technology have pioneered an entirely new form of production. Viewed as a replacement for Friuli’s precarious silk industry, with its costly and laborious traditional methods, Torviscosa’s viscose factories require a mere seven reeds of cane to produce a new suit or dress. With millions of canes grown each year, the manufacturing possibilities are virtually limitless.31 At the time of the aforementioned commission, Antonioni was embarking on his film career with such short fiction-documentaries as Gente del Po (1943), Roma-Montevideo (1943), and Nettezza urbana (1948), dramatic inquiries into the everyday lives of working-class Italians. In contrast, Sette canne, un vestito, debuting in 1949, was a story not about workers—though workers do appear—but about a transformative technology. Still, it was a film in the emerging Antonioni style, a stark and original cinematic statement visually extending his earlier artistic efforts. Shot in black and white, scenes of industrious workers harvesting Arundo donax and producing rayon blended Antonioni’s signature neoverismo with an element of technological fantasy. With its oblique camera angles and its portentous score, Sette canne, un vestito echoed such iconic documentaries as Pare Lorenz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains. Although the documentary is only 9 minutes long, we can see the hand of a modern master. As Sette canne, un vestito opens, mechanical harvesters march through tall fields of Arundo donax. Trucks overflowing with reed then deliver their cargo to a distant castello misterioso—SNIA’s towering chemical processing plants. Theatrical factory scenes depict boiling cauldrons, automated machines, and flowing white viscose. Although workers are shown laboring in fields and factories, the film’s true protagonist is neither man nor nature, but the machine. The successive stages of cellulose extraction—boiling, ­dissolving, reconstituting, and washing, followed by the extrusion of the viscose filament—are portrayed as mysterious processes, magically generating stylish garments from a small bundle of cane. The story of Torviscosa’s research-based technology culminates in a final scene on the catwalks of fashion houses, where sleek models display brilliant garments of viscose rayon. In 9 minutes, Sette canne, un vestito has taken us from field to factory to fashion—a succinct chronicle of a new form of production that combines scientific research with industrial and consumer output. (See figure 3.8.) The integrated forces of agriculture and chemistry have achieved a singular victory pointing to a bounteous future.

Figure 3.8

Three scenes from Antonioni’s Sette canne, un vestito, taking us from field to factory to fashion. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )

Techno-Città

65

Sponsored by SNIA, Sette canne, un vestito would be expected to deliver the company’s message. Indeed, the contrast between this company film of technical triumph and consumer fantasy and Antonioni’s more socially aware productions is striking. Some critics have even suggested that the film’s final fashion scene was not the celebration of technology it purported to be but a subversive message about the trivial ends of industrial labor. Conceivably, by ending on a note of middle-class luxury, Antonioni intended to undermine the message of his corporate sponsors. Given other aspects of the film and Antonioni’s politics, however, this was not a likely scenario. There is no suggestion that the film’s farm and chemical workers belong to an oppressed underclass. Nor are there any hints of Chaplinesque satire of automation. An avowed but at best a tepid Marxist, Antonioni most likely believed in and faithfully delivered the company message: SNIA was at the technological forefront, and Torviscosa offered a progressive industrial model for the future Italy. The story of Torviscosa did not end with World War II. Thanks to Italy’s postwar economic boom, the town continued to grow. But SNIA grew faster, increasing its dominance over the town. The company was evolving into an industry giant, a global conglomerate with branches in Spain, South Africa, India, and Russia. In the 1960s, it stopped making cellulose and expanded aggressively into the area of chemical intermediates. Vertically integrated, SNIA grew to include a thermo-electric power station and hydroelectric plants. It also continued to pursue its strategy of agricultureindustry integration, eventually replacing its Arundo donax crop with other specialized cultures, including poplar trees, fruits, cereals, fodder, and dairy production. While its historic city core was rebuilt after the war in its original style, Torviscosa modernized. Today it advertises itself as an advanced technology city centered on Caffaro, a SNIA subsidiary. The needs of industry now clearly overshadow the town’s early utopian goals. Yet, despite the pressures of capitalism, these founding ideals are still recalled to some extent by the company’s founding employees. They remember once being part of something special, and they keep that memory alive today. Whether they will pass this dedication on to another generation, it is too early to say. Sabaudia, a sister foundation town, provides a revealing contrast. It, too, was an ideal city built on reclaimed swampland. Unlike Torviscosa, however,

66

Chapter 3

it served agricultural and recreational purposes. Besides being “an eminently agricultural town,” it became a popular Italian beach resort, renowned for its well-preserved examples of “architectural rationalism.” As such, its original justifications still make sense; there is no apparent gap between what was and what is. Torviscosa, on the other hand, has had the formidable task of blending industrial modernism with rural ideals. The tension between a pastoral tradition and modern industrialization verged on contradiction, one that afflicted almost all techno-cities of the era.32 Torviscosa’s booming industrial sector appears to have broken the tension, not by blending with its opposite, but by overwhelming the town’s animating utopian beliefs. The remnants of Fascist architecture and symbolism and the memory of its pioneers are practically all that remain of the original dream.33 In the end, nostalgia for a rural past and a distrust of the industrial urban future ran counter to history. Torviscosa may stake some claim to success, however. Despite sustaining severe damage during World War II, both the factory and the town survived and flourished. Torviscosa’s secret may lay in its ability to transform itself within its new environment. Less grandiose than its counterparts elsewhere, and better integrated into its surroundings, Torviscosa remains a pleasant industrial town. Some of the ideological dressing of the city—the neo-Fascist tower, the Lodi statuary, the memorials to Marinotti—remains frozen in time, though shed of the most explicit Fascist references. A more modest and positive legacy may be the town’s still extant ristoro/dopolavoro, a symbol of the optimistic visions of the town’s founders, who saw a chance for restoring harmony among workers, industry, and nature. What actually came to pass was neither the grandiose vision of Il Duce nor that of the Futurist Marinetti. Still, Torviscosa recalls the once fervent belief in the transformative power of planning and ­ technology, a belief that in many ways endures.

4  T h e T echno-C i ty Goes to War: A merica in W o rl d W a r II and After

Techno-cities conceived during the 1930s soon felt the effects of war. The defeat of Germany and Italy more or less marked the end of Salzgitter and Torviscosa as model environments, though the two cities managed to survive the conflict and, in Torviscosa’s case, even the leveling of its industrial core. Their postwar versions were only shells of what they once were, however: they had lost that flush of utopian enthusiasm. The trauma of war ended one generation of techno-city idealism and could have halted the techno-city project altogether. Yet in the United States, surprisingly, the Garden City concept continued to make its mark during World War II, though in a modified form and as an adjunct to wartime planning rather than as a guiding motif. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of three major “atomic cities” established in that period, represents a culmination of one branch of the techno-city story that began in Stalinist Russia: the isolated, specialized community in the service of larger state military goals. Though it is the focus of this chapter, Oak Ridge was only one species of techno-city planned for wartime America. Even before Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S. government had begun to mobilize the nation’s huge productive capacity. The path was not always smooth and even. A particularly ­compelling example is the Ford Motor Company’s plant devoted to bomber ­production at Willow Run, Michigan, a village about 20 miles outside Detroit. Ford broke ground for the Willow Run Bomber Plant in April 1941. Transportation shortages eliminated the original notion of having 10,000 workers commute from homes in Detroit and surrounding towns. But even the nearby city of Ypsilanti was overwhelmed by the demand. The conditions for workers and their families were understatedly described as “wretched.” The United Auto Workers were mounting

68

Chapter 4

b­ itter protests. In September 1941, Walter Reuther, vice-president of the union and chairman of its housing and education committee, was advocating an ambitious plan for “Defense City,” a new city with housing for workers and, in part, planned by workers. The plan’s chief author was the architectplanner Oskar Stonorov.1 Stonorov, born in Frankfurt in 1905, was educated in Italy and Switzerland. He arrived in the United States in 1929 and settled in Philadelphia. There he began to interest himself in public housing. Early on, he associated with a group that included Catherine Bauer (Lewis Mumford’s collaborator, friend, and lover, and the author of the influential 1934 book Modern Housing), Alfred Kastner (an architect), and John Edelman (research director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union). In the 1930s, Stonorov and Kastner designed the Philadelphia branch of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers’ Carl Mackley Houses, which, possibly for the first time, included the workers as “community designers.” Stonorov was not limited to providing shelter but rather envisioned changing society. “Housing,” he wrote, “is the demand for the reorganization of rotten communities into stable, sane and healthy societies.”2 In 1941 Reuther and Stonorov began a professional and personal friendship that lasted until they died together in a plane crash in 1970. In November 1941, President Roosevelt was prevailed upon by his labor allies to endorse the Reuther-Stonorov plan, and the United Auto Workers declared less than a week before Pearl Harbor that Defense City would be a “laboratory for post-war life and housing.” As a “park-living town,” it would dramatically advance the Garden City approach. The Detroit News called it a “slumless garden city.”3 Competing plans from real estate interests and even from the University of Michigan complicated the situation. By the spring of 1942, however, the National Housing Agency, under John Blandford, stepped in with ideas, not only for housing but also for a model city that they dubbed “Bomber City.”4 Tracy Augur of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the planners of Norris, was brought in to help in the planning of Bomber City.5 Despite Norris’s failure to develop as planned, Augur was eager to advance city planning by taking advantage of new technologies and new social and economic needs: “The country is ready for something new in cities. It is keyed up to streamlined trains, to television, to air conditioned homes and to ­transcontinental and transoceanic air travel that reduced days to hours. Never since the first colonies were planned . . . has there been such an oppor-

The Techno-City Goes to War

69

tunity to build completely new communities designed for the particular social and economic complex of our times.”6 The design of Bomber City was, in the words of Architectural Forum, “the best guide for postwar planning we have yet produced.” The five neighborhoods and the town center were each given to a different team of planners and architects. The town center was the responsibility of the firm of the Finnish architect Eliel Saarinen. A green space surrounded the city and reached into the neighborhoods. A main road provided a belt girdling the town, with four spokes reaching from center to periphery. Neighborhood Unit Three was designed by Stonorov and his partner, the young Philadelphian Louis Kahn, destined to become one of America’s most influential architects. “The character of the town,” Stonorov and Kahn wrote, “is neither urban nor suburban; its safety, spaciousness and convenience [offers] a powerful inducement to permanent settlement.” Both Stonorov and Kahn were dedicated, politically and socially, to worker-resident participation in planning. The “worker’s committee” chose to have the houses oriented not toward the street but to the garden side. They strongly preferred “super-blocks” of up to 100 acres. The neighborhood as a unit was determined by the elementary school, nursery and small shopping center. The houses were of the “ground-freed” type, with living space on the second floor and the ground floor devoted to utility and garage purposes. Skidmore, Owings, Merrill and Andrews were chosen for Neighborhood Unit Two. They used the county highway bordering the site as a collector road with no houses on it. “Both pedestrians and motorists would receive a more favorable impression of the development if the vistas were clear, extending down through the garden areas.”7 Tracy Augur reported that the plan (figure 4.1) was “social rather than physical.” People would be encouraged to enjoy community life, freed from heavy traffic, with social amenities (schools, playgrounds, nurseries, neighbors) within easy walking distance. “Despite the differences in site design [among neighborhoods], the provision of abundant open space was a common characteristic.” At the heart of the plan was the institution of the school, “serving all ages and catering to their many educational, recreational and other social needs,” a vote of confidence in America’s future.8 Bomber City was never built. The reports of the plans elicited a gale of opposition. Outraged protests came from real estate interests, from local politicians, and from the Ford Motor Company. The Washtenaw County

70

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1

Augur’s plan for “Bomber City” was a “social” diagram, not a “physical” one. (Architectural Record)

Board of Supervisors sent the county’s prosecutor, George Meader, to Washington to protest the proposed “social experiment” and the locating of “foreigners” in their county. Henry Riggs, professor emeritus of civil engineering at the University of Michigan, expressed concern for the pollution of the Huron River; he also feared that Bomber City would be a “foreign or colored settlement or a ‘ghost town.’ ” Henry Ford feared that his “archenemies” the DuPonts were behind the choice of the site, and ordered that federal employees be ejected from Ford-owned land. Attorneys announced the Ford Motor Company would fight Bomber City “with every legal method.”9 The federal government retreated in the face of a delay of bomber production. The vision of a model city was sacrificed, and ­permanent housing was transformed into temporary housing.

The Techno-City Goes to War

71

A radical new technology—nuclear fission and the atomic bomb—set the stage for another variation on the techno-city. Under the top secret Manhattan Project, three atomic cities sprang up virtually overnight in remote regions of the United States to house the tens of thousands of scientists, engineers, technicians, and construction workers who developed the bomb. Security and safety concerns dictated the isolated setting of these support cities away from major population centers, secret locations which the code name “Manhattan Engineer District” was designed to conceal.10 In this instance, technology moved into the garden out of wartime necessity rather than choice. Post-Hiroshima, the reality of the bomb had a further impact on urban planning. It forced a rethinking of how cities should be configured to maximize chances of surviving nuclear war. While these ideas had potential implications for all major U.S. cities, our story begins in a secluded setting in the American South. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of three Manhattan Project support cities established during the War to develop the atomic bomb. Begun in 1942, Oak Ridge became the headquarters of the Manhattan Project by late summer of the following year. Oak Ridge’s mission was to enrich uranium fuel by a process of separating the fissionable isotope uranium 235 from uranium 238. Although not so well known as Los Alamos, New Mexico, or Hanford, Washington, the Oak Ridge facility commanded more money and resources than the other two cities combined. And, while Hanford was the largest in area of the three sites, Oak Ridge had by far the largest population.11 The Army Corps of Engineers, which ran the Manhattan Project, lavished attention and money on the city commensurate with its strategic importance. For the duration of the war and beyond, Oak Ridge remained hidden behind security fences. Few Americans—indeed, few Tennesseans—knew of the city’s existence. With the opening of the gates of the Oak Ridge ­government reservation in 1949 and the slow declassification of documents, a still ongoing process, the city’s secrets gradually began to emerge. The first accounts of Oak Ridge, prepared under government auspices, were typically written from the top down, focusing on the project’s administrative, scientific, and technical history. They revealed little about the city itself or its residents beyond basic facts and abstract statistical milestones: the site’s total area, peak population, electric power requirements, and so on.

72

Chapter 4

The heroic achievements of atomic scientists and engineers dominated these early historical accounts. The patriotism and sacrifices of atomic ­workers and their families were also duly celebrated. Documentary films as well as exhibits at the local atomic museum, the American Museum of Science and Energy (AMSE), originally founded as the American Museum of Atomic Energy to preserve the city’s historic role, highlighted similar themes.12 (See figure 4.2.) The AMSE’s presentation on the Manhattan Project, its signature exhibition, tells the stories of Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other atomic pioneers, while offering visitors basic lessons in the physics of the bomb and of nuclear enrichment. The museum provided tantalizing but limited glimpses of the city’s construction and the lives of the workers. Forty years after the Manhattan Project, however, a fuller picture began to emerge, centering not on weapons laboratories or production plants,

Figure 4.2

Oak Ridge’s original “Atomic Museum.” (American Museum of Science and Energy)

The Techno-City Goes to War

73

but on everyday life in the atomic village. In their ground-breaking 1981 study City Behind a Fence, Charles Johnson and Charles Jackson offered new perspectives on the town. Drawing on oral histories and newly declassified documents, they looked behind the official facade and explored the realities of everyday life on the Manhattan Project.13 Johnson and Jackson shed important new light on the planning, design, and construction of this invented city. Their research showed that Oak Ridge’s planners hoped to achieve something innovative and livable, despite the gritty realities of life there—the lack of adequate housing for the ballooning population, the mud on unfinished streets and walkways, and the physical and psychological hardship of living behind security fences.14 According to the town’s official design criteria, the needs of the industrial plants and security came first, taking priority over “any endeavor to establish an ideal community in the social or aesthetic sense. It follows that, except for the essentials, the town was not provided with the number or quality of facilities available in normal American communities.”15 In view of these official priorities, Oak Ridge planners never made much publicly of the visionary aspects of their plan. Yet, despite the realities of war and the strict financial limits placed on housing construction, Oak Ridge was not a typical military support city. Its architects never gave up their idealism and the New Town model found a significant place in their plans.16 While Oak Ridge did not advertise a utopian vision, the idea of Oak Ridge as a techno-city is to be found in the mundane details of governmental budgets and brochures promoting the town’s business and building plans. Oak Ridge is a 30-minute drive from Knoxville in the heart of East Tennessee. It lies on the rugged Cumberland Plateau, in Bear Creek Valley and along the slopes of Black Oak Ridge. For the Army Corps of Engineers, the site was close to ideal. Land was cheap and there was an abundant supply of labor. The TVA provided for the enormous electrical needs of the enrichment plants. Its distance from the coast minimized the risk of enemy detection and attack. Nearby highways, a railway link, and the Clinch River provided ready-made transportation lanes. Its topography was also suited to building bombs: a series of parallel ridges and valleys allowed for separation of living from factory areas. Since dangers of nuclear accidents were largely unknown, production plants could be separated from one another in neighboring valleys, protected by intervening ridges from the effects of potential mishaps.17

74

Chapter 4

The production plants at Oak Ridge were overbuilt and strategically redundant. The Advisory Committee on Uranium, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1939, had determined that enriched samples of the uranium 235 isotope were the most promising fuel source for bombs. Uranium 235 existed in combination with the far more abundant uranium 238. Since the isotopes were chemically identical, separating them was exceedingly difficult, requiring physical, not chemical, means of separation. But no one knew in advance which technique would succeed. Oak Ridge was therefore required to experiment with four competing processes: the K25 plant used the so-called gaseous diffusion method of separating uranium 235 from uranium 238; the Y12 facility tested an electromagnetic separation technique; a nuclear pile, known as X-10, converted uranium 238 into plutonium; a high-speed centrifuge was designed to separate the lighter from the heavier isotope. The centrifuge was eventually cancelled.18 To make way for these plants and the new support city, approximately one thousand farming families were removed from the 59,000-acre site, their land hastily expropriated by the government. Planning for the new town began in June 1942, with Stone and Webster, the regular building contractors for the Manhattan Engineer District, taking the lead. Initially, they were responsible for building both the production plants and the town. From the beginning, Oak Ridge’s government planners wanted to build as habitable a city as possible, one designed to minimize the stresses on Manhattan Project personnel and their families. They had learned from reactions to the bare-bones government-issue approach used at the Los Alamos nuclear site where the bomb was made. It was widely regarded as a disaster for its inhabitants. Early on it was decided to “relieve Stone & Webster of the added responsibility of the design of the town (although it would retain managerial responsibility) so that its maximum efforts could be concentrated on the design of the Electromagnetic Plant.”19 But, there was more to the decision than a division of labor, according to transcripts of discussions between S&W principals and Colonel James Marshall, the military official who had initial responsibility for building Oak Ridge.20 Marshall urged General Leslie Groves, the army’s ranking officer on the Manhattan Project, not to accept Stone and Webster’s plans. He argued that they were little more than imitations of previous “government villages” in Ocala, Florida, and Eastport,

The Techno-City Goes to War

75

Maine. Marshall considered them uninspired and far less desirable than plans he had seen implemented at the TVA’s Norris. Instead Marshall recommended a team of the John B. Pierce Foundation of New York, pioneers of prefabricated housing during the Depression, and the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, fresh from their involvement with the unrealized Bomber City. He praised their broader, human-centered approach to mass-produced housing.21 They were known for their innovative designs and materials. SOM partner Louis Skidmore, who had a prominent design role in Chicago’s 1933 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair, used the fair as a testing ground for new scientific building methods, including prefabricated construction, new types of lighting, and synthetic building materials.22 Persuaded by Marshall, Groves reassigned Stone and Webster, leaving them in charge of building the uranium plants and the overall management of Oak Ridge construction. In 1943, construction began on the government reservation, originally known as Site X and later renamed the Clinton Engineer Works, after a nearby village. The town itself was named Oak Ridge, reportedly at the suggestion of the employees of the Manhattan Engineer District.23 Both names presumably sounded innocuous enough to avoid arousing suspicion of its secret mission. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill developed the architectural designs, while the Pierce Foundation served as consultants. Without ever knowing the secret purpose of Site X, the SOM-Pierce partnership produced a master plan for the federal enclave in record time. Manifesting the influence of the Garden City model, their plans separated work, recreation, and housing areas. Their street layout allowed for efficient transportation between home and work districts while diverting cars away from the neighborhoods. The planners were strongly influenced by the precedent of nearby Norris and had input from Tracy Augur, who served as an important link between Oak Ridge and Norris. They had also worked with Augur on the Bomber City project. In its quest for habitability, the Army wanted Oak Ridge “to approximate a typical American small town as much as possible.”24 SOM partner Nathaniel Owings divided the town into “a number of villages.” (See figure 4.3.) Each village, Owings wrote, “must be largely self-contained, everything within walking distance, sized to support efficiently the proper combination of educational units . . . , shopping centers—all facilities common to the neighborhood.” About 1,500 families, consisting of about 5,000–6,000

76

Chapter 4

Figure 4.3

An Oak Ridge neighborhood near Hillside Road. (National Archives and Records Administration)

adults and 1,800–2,000 children, constituted a village.25 Small and relatively close to one another, the neighborhoods made for a walking city. Workers, however, still had to commute to the production plants, kept at what was thought to be a safe distance from living areas. To house workers and their families, the architects and the Pierce Foundation employed an innovative, patented high-tech material, an ­asbestoscement fireproof blend called Cemesto. The product was manufactured by the Celotex Company, with whom the Pierce Foundation worked during the Depression. In the 1920s, the Celotex Company had been a developer of Clewiston, John Nolen’s farm-factory techno-city in Florida.26 Celotex’s Cemesto houses were shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.27 (See figure 4.4.) The components of these houses, produced in a factory, were quickly assembled on site. The so-called alphabet housings (A–H) included single-family and multi-family homes and apartments for families and single workers. (See figure 4.5.) Houses at Oak Ridge were designed to be low in cost and rapidly built—reportedly one could be put up in 30 minutes—but with a premium on “livability.” Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s Cemesto

The Techno-City Goes to War

77

Figure 4.4

Celotex’s Cemesto homes were featured at the 1939 NewYorkWorld’s Fair. (Smithsonian Institution)

78

Chapter 4

Figure 4.5

An “A House” was the smallest of Oak Ridge’s family of “alphabet houses.” (A. Molella)

houses allowed for very quick and cheap construction, falling well within the strict government limit of $7,500 per house. By 1945, more than 1,000 houses, 90 dormitories, and many smaller units, including trailers and hutments, were built. The government consistently underestimated how many personnel would be needed at Oak Ridge. Stone and Webster were originally told to plan for a population of 5,000, but the figure rose quickly to 13,000, eventually peaking in 1945 at 75,000. In three years, Oak Ridge would become the fifth largest city in Tennessee.28 Still, housing never kept up with demand, causing chronic shortages of living quarters for the city’s workers. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill began to import prefabricated housing from the TVA, adapting them to the conditions of Oak Ridge.29 (See figure 4.6.) As Oak Ridge continued to grow, Manhattan Project officials were concerned not only with housing, but with improving its status as a true community.30 They carefully planned the locations of drug stores, groceries, restaurants, community gathering places, and other amenities. Taking

The Techno-City Goes to War

79

Figure 4.6

An Oak Ridge neighborhood amidst the mud. (National Archives and Records Administration)

care of the needs of families was a priority. Planners paid much attention to schools, nursery schools, and play areas. Despite a reluctance to get involved in religious affairs, the government also made sure that spaces for religious observances continued to keep pace with the town’s population. In operating the plants and town, the government adopted the “GOCO” mode: Government Owned, Contactor Operated. Corporate contractors, including DuPont, Union Carbide, and Tennessee Eastman, operated the uranium plants. Although retaining final authority, the Army wanted to avoid the direct responsibilities of managing the town, Therefore, the A. C. Turner Company, which was responsible for building Oak Ridge, set up a subsidiary, the Roane-Anderson Corporation, to administer the town. Civilian management, it was hoped, would give residents a sense of self-determination in spite of federal controls. To promote a sense of community, Roane-Anderson gave the streets names rather than the numbers standard for military posts.31 They also worked closely with the Army to soften the psychological effects of the security fences and the restrictions on the movements of residents and workers.32 From the Garden City point of view, Oak Ridge’s most notable features were its greenbelt and the parklands surrounding its neighborhoods. While security needs dictated the isolated location, Oak Ridge’s planners took

80

Chapter 4

­ aximum advantage of the rural setting. Stone and Webster had initially bullm dozed much of the area, leveling hills and destroying much of the greenery. Doing their best to reverse this course (though never able to do away with the mud), Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill restored the native landscape as far as possible, artfully embedding within it the complex of research facilities, nuclear reactors, and enrichment plants. Green surroundings were deemed essential. Despite his training under the renowned modernist Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Ambrose Richardson, SOM’s architect in charge of the Oak Ridge project, favored a less austere aesthetic, noting that “the whole emphasis from my design point of view was on the green.” “I’m a strong believer,” he said, “that a building cannot be better than the setting that it’s in [and] in the landscape identified with the building.” He recalled a quotation from Nathaniel Owings: “A person can’t grow where a tree can’t grow.”33 Owings himself initially viewed the rugged Oak Ridge landscape as something of a tabula rasa to be manipulated at will, “a kind of clean, uncluttered, uncommitted area with nothing to stand in the way of an ideal plan.”34 Though soon discovering it was anything but a blank slate, Owings was able to work with the existing topography to incorporate landscape into the residents’ lives: “Their houses were to be oriented for sun and prevailing winds, ample land provided so that the grass and the trees and the flowers might grow. The alley in the gridiron city plan was banished.”35 “Here in one stroke,” Owings averred, “we could eliminate many of the vices inherent in existing city plans.” Garages, kitchens, furnace rooms, and other utilities were located at the back of the houses and were accessed by service lanes. On the front of the house, the living rooms and recreation areas looked out on a field, park, or garden, thus retaining the intimacy of man and nature. According to the historian Peter Bacon Hales, the planners conceived of a “community imbedded within and deeply respectful of nature—or, more appropriately, Nature. For all its modernity and technology and its application of an industrially streamlined assembly-line construction program, the plan harked back to the American romantic conceptions of the place of man in nature. . . .”36 While innovative in their overall plan for Oak Ridge and even futuristic in their construction methods, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill still wanted to project a traditional small-town ideal. Hales viewed the result as “a brilliant amalgam of forward-looking and deeply conservative themes.”37 The architects envisioned a medium-size community with tree-lined streets and

The Techno-City Goes to War

81

other features that made nostalgic reference to a small-town American past. Homes were built in traditional styles and arranged not in a modern grid pattern but in organic clusters to foster a sense of community. Porches and fireplaces adorned even the most modest homes.38 When a Washington official referred to Oak Ridge as a military camp, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Crenshaw, spokesman for the Clinton Engineer Works, took strong exception. “The government,” he said, “has built a village.39 Although slated for demolition after its job was done, Oak Ridge continued to exist after World War II, kept in business by the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Once it decided to maintain the town, the Atomic Energy Commission called on Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to draft a new master plan. The firm submitted its ideas in 1948.40 The objectives of the plan were to transform the “temporary layout built to serve a war-time expedient” into an “efficient, beautiful city.” With the population of Oak Ridge now standing at 36,000, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill wanted to preserve its small-town character. In the words of the plan, while “Oak Ridge was originally programmed and built to be a special type of city,” it was important that the “desirable small town characteristic should be maintained and fostered in the redevelopment and new planning.” The plan addressed both commercial and residential development, which was to be done by private investors and developers under government regulation. A greenbelt with embedded industries figured prominently in the new plan. If Oak Ridge was to be viable, provision for its future industrial needs could not be ignored. The plan set aside sufficient land for industrial use, consolidating it into “prescribed districts to protect residential areas.” These industrial areas “should be separated from residential areas by highways, recreation areas, or protective green belts.”41 A system of parks—small ones within neighborhoods and large ones in more central locations—took advantage of the natural assets of the Oak Ridge area. Tracy Augur, who served on the Board of Consultants for the plan, argued that Oak Ridge’s main shortcoming was its lack of an adequate commercial base. Much of the plan, therefore, focused on developing a central business district, shopping centers, and other commercial ventures that would guarantee the city’s postwar economic survival. Once detached from the federal government’s direct control and largesse, the town would have to prove

82

Chapter 4

its commercial potential to investors. But beyond economic considerations, Augur believed, Oak Ridge needed a community identity. “The new [city] center,” he noted, “is designed to be, in truth, the heart of the community, the place that is in the minds of citizens and visitors alike when they think of Oak Ridge. . . .  If it does not become a center of community life it cannot become a fully successful business center either.”42 A 1950 brochure promoting the proposed business district has an almost utopian feel. It presents Oak Ridge’s nuclear industry as a symbol of peace and security, avoiding any reminders of the bomb itself.43 Several other plans to “permanentize” Oak Ridge followed, all with the same objective of developing an inviting and economically sustainable community. Today the citizens of Oak Ridge, ever in search of new corporate and government contracts, continue to base their future on nuclear research and development. Independence from government support has not been achieved. Despite the expectations of planners, Oak Ridge remains almost entirely dependent on funding from the Department of Energy, successor to the Atomic Energy Commission. Cold War weapons programs continued to pump money into the area after World War II, stunting any prospects of economic diversification. A wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Energy, it remains the government equivalent of a company town long after the end of the Cold War. Its civic leaders are still wrestling with problems of becoming self-sustaining. The gap between the dream for Oak Ridge and the reality remains wide. It could hardly be described as the typical American small town. Its idyllic features stood out in the architects’ plans and blueprints. But, as one observer has pointed out, photographs of the site present a starkly different picture of “a harshly unrelieved landscape of conformity,” with houses aligned monotonously along the ridges on land “stripped of vegetation by District graders.”44 More importantly, there is no concealing what the city is really about: the monumental uranium enrichment plants that stand at its center. Building K-25, dedicated to the gaseous diffusion process, is by far the largest structure. A mile-long U-shaped behemoth, it covers 40 acres. When it was built, it was the largest building in the world under one roof. Today, it continues to loom over the rural landscape from behind formidable security fences. (See figure 4.7.) Despite the factories and all the intrusions of technological modernity, there remains in Oak Ridge a curious kind of small-town insularity that is less myth than cultural throwback. Oak Ridge is in many ways a city locked

The Techno-City Goes to War

83

Figure 4.7

The decommissioned Plant K-25, where uranium was refined by the gaseous diffusion process, still looms from behind security fences. (A. Molella)

in the past. It is tied to it economically, culturally, and by the force of its history. Its secret life and its special role in World War II continue to shape it. From the beginning, its population was distinct from surrounding residents: most came from elsewhere, often speaking in European accents. Better educated than their neighbors, they had better incomes, better schools, and, it was rumored, even better beer.45 The city was literally fenced off from the world and, despite its 59,000 acres, was omitted from maps until 1949, when its gates were opened. Today, its skewed economy, entirely dependent on government funding, reinforces its cultural and social isolation. Oak Ridge’s founders, planners, and citizens have always been keenly aware of their historic role. Their hopes and self-image are inscribed in the American Museum of Science and Energy, still supported by the Department of Energy but shaped also by the ethos of the local community. Within it are hints of a special technological destiny. Its exhibitions even repeat a popular local myth: around 1900, John Hendrix, regarded as something of a local prophet, had one of his periodic visions. He foresaw an amazing change in

84

Chapter 4

two local farming communities. Along the sides of the then sparsely populated Black Oak Ridge, he predicted the rise of a city and a railroad. Thousands of people would go down into the valley to work in large buildings and factories. The Hendrix story lent an air of inevitability to the town and its mission.46 The American Museum of Science and Energy presents an almost idyllic picture of Oak Ridge and its work. Its Manhattan Project exhibition and its presentation of nuclear weapons (the atomic museums are the official government repositories for such artifacts) are curiously sanitized of any mention of the destruction brought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or of the continuing threats to civilization of nuclear war. The bomb is presented as the guarantor of security rather than a weapon of mass destruction. (See figure 4.8.) One section of the exhibition documents the creation of the city and the construction of its housing. Photos taken by the Army Corps of Engineers show the original farmland and every phase of construction. The AMSE faces head-on some of the problematic aspects of that history, the removal of the original farming community and the treatment of segregated black workers. The cleanup of

Figure 4.8

The shell of a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb, on display at the American Museum of Science and Energy. (A. Molella)

The Techno-City Goes to War

85

nuclear waste, a big issue at Oak Ridge and other atomic cities today, is well documented at the museum. But it is presented as a largely successful work in progress, with little said about the dangers in human terms to the workers and residents in the area.47 In its unqualified confidence in nuclear R&D, the AMSE reinforces the booster mentality of Oak Ridge’s 1950s sales brochures. Despite the harsh realities of its conception, Oak Ridge was the product of an almost mythic vision. To be sure, the city lies in a pleasant rustic landscape, and most of its original homes and neighborhoods still stand, as does its first shopping center. But, the addition of modern strip malls and traffic congestion hardly suggest an ideal community. Today’s Oak Ridge would never be mistaken for a nineteenth-century American village, and certainly not for one of the farming villages it displaced. In the end, Oak Ridge presents an incongruous scene. As a birthplace of the bomb, it is at the epicenter of one of the most terrifying realities of our time. But it was also a place of imagined, even idealized visions. While a unique city invented for a unique purpose, Oak Ridge resembled other techno-cities in several ways: It was a combined government-private effort. It was built around a large technological enterprise. It was also conceived in part as a Garden City. Despite official disclaimers, there was a utopian strain in the designs of its planners. The town also manifested an element of techno-nostalgia in Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s effort to evoke the feeling of a traditional American village. And like other techno-cities, Oak Ridge was both a real city and a symbol. Ultimately, it was less than its planners envisioned but more than a typical military support city.48 The enduring and indisputable legacy of Oak Ridge would always be written in the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two Japanese cities were destroyed by the first atomic bombs used in warfare. The stunning and dramatic end to the war in the Pacific continued to imprint itself onto American public life in the years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon after the bombing, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, in June 1946, raised an “insistent question”: “What if the target for the bomb had been an American city?”49 The report of the Strategic Bombing Survey noted that the two cities were chosen because of their concentration of activities and population. Despite Nagasaki’s greater population density, it suffered only about half as many deaths as Hiroshima. The difference was due to the dispersed

86

Chapter 4

built-up pockets at Nagasaki; Hiroshima’s population was concentrated at its center. “The casualty rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the report continued, “applied to the massed inhabitants of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, yield a grim conclusion.” Further, the report noted, “an enemy viewing our national economy must not find bottlenecks which use of the atomic bomb could choke off to throttle our productive capacity.”50 Earlier in 1946, the sociologist William Ogburn launched a discussion on the problem of dispersing urban populations and resources with his essay “Sociology and the Atom.” Despite the drastic dislocations it would entail, Ogburn suggested, dispersal might be a blessing in disguise, for the quality of life would improve “with well-planned smaller cities and towns.”51 The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki especially shocked the scientific community.52 Very early on, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists took up the issue of civil defense and, in particular, the re-forming of cities to minimize damage to their populations, industries, and civil life. The nuclear physicist Edward Teller was one of the contributors to the dialog on the dispersal of cities and industries. In May of 1948, the Bulletin published an article by Tracy Augur, who was then consulting on the master plan for Oak Ridge. Augur seized on the defense issue to promote what he saw as sound city planning. In “Dispersal of Cities as a Defense Measure,” he notes that the United States was about to do a great deal of city building. We may, he argues, just as well build our cities to reduce our vulnerability to outside attack. And, “it happens that a sound program of dispersal for our cities would improve our position for a life of peace at the same time it improved our chance of averting war and of surviving one if it came.” Like the scientists who wrote for the Bulletin, Augur argued for cluster cities.53 In another article, published in October of 1948, he pursued the theme of peacetime advantage by fleshing out the argument for smaller, dispersed, planned cities.54 Augur was later hired by the National Security Resources Board to help formulate a plan for the dispersal of the federal government’s resources in case of emergency.55 A disciple of Ebenezer Howard since his graduate student days at Harvard, Tracy Augur invoked the English planner’s authority to buttress the argument for dispersal.56 In an August 1946 speech to the American Institute of Planners, he said: “Howard made a convincing presentation of the case [for cluster cities] almost fifty years ago when he proposed the reorganization of

The Techno-City Goes to War

87

great urban concentrations into clusters of garden cities separated by greenbelts of farm lands and recreation areas.”57 Howard, said Augur, “had a keen eye for the causes of urban decay and the national decay that comes with it.” Augur asserted that Howard’s case for the Garden City as the ideal combination of the urban and the rural “has never been successfully challenged.” Although Howard conceived of the decentralized city in the days of the horse and buggy, when “mass transportation was the almost exclusive province of the steam railroad; and when telephones, radios, and movies were unknown,” it was also a concept for the atomic age.58 Augur argued that the Garden City was eminently compatible with modern science and technology. He urged his audience of city planners not to fixate on the destructive power of the atom, but to consider the benefits as well. The problems of modern cities—congestion, slums, crime, unhealthy air and water—stemmed from their failure to keep pace with technological change and scientific knowledge. Echoing the “cultural lag” theory of William Ogburn, an advocate of urban dispersal, Augur wrote: “In discussing the planning of cities to take advantage of the atomic age, it must be remembered that they have not yet caught up with the age of steam. They have a long, long way to go! Ever since the industrial revolution gave them pre-eminence in national affairs they have lagged behind the technical advances of the times in the rate at which they passed on the social and economic benefits to their citizens.”59 Like Ogburn, Augur believed that Americans were addressing technological change with outdated nineteenth-century attitudes. In considering the advantages of atomic energy, Augur asked “Is there in prospect any such dramatic change in the way of living as that which has been brought to our way of dying?”60 His answer was an emphatic yes. Among the possibilities were virtually limitless sources of heat and power. He envisioned central heating systems, “smokeless and odorless,” that would cheaply heat entire cities, power plants that would take electric power to poor isolated regions of the country and the world, and, “of even greater promise . . . the use of radioactive materials in medicine and to facilitate new researches and discoveries in every field of science.” To use the language of Patrick Geddes, Augur foresaw a neotechnic revolution in the Garden Cities of the atomic age. To those who argued that limiting the size of cities to 100,000 or less would deprive them of advantages gained from the industrial revolution, Augur gave a “systems” counter-argument. Although much smaller than modern cities,

88

Chapter 4

the new dispersed cities were intended to be separate but not isolated from one another. The net of modern communications would bind them together. Each city had a specialized function that it performed in concert with other cities. The resulting interconnected whole, when viewed on a national scale, would add up to considerably more than the sum of the parts. Recalling the organic metaphors popular among German city planners of the 1930s, Augur compared dispersed cities to biological cells. “The simpler biologic forms,” he explained in a speech to the American Institute of Planners, “are those composed of a single cell or of a group of cells all filling simple functions.” In contrast, “the higher forms come with specialization.”61 In Augur’s opinion, the solutions to the problem of updating the city for the new age were not technological, but rather social and rational. Calling for new ways of planning and action, he advised against “the old devices of widening streets, zoning stores out of residential districts or redeveloping old slums with new ones.” Instead, he urged American city planners to define the desired “qualities of social life” and then to develop urban structures conducive to those social goals.62 In 1949, Ralph Lapp, a well-known Office of Naval Research and Manhattan Project scientist, published a book titled Must We Hide? 63 Chapter 13, titled “Dispersion,” envisioned dispersed cities as healthier, happier places. Not only will dispersion of population and industries reduce the attractiveness of cities as targets, but—forced by the bomb—we have a chance for “a social revolution comparable in scope to the industrial revolution.” The optimum city, Lapp argues, has a population of about 100,000. “The plan” he writes, “should contemplate the spreading out of industry and residences into close-knit but not highly concentrated units. These units might consist of a series of small satellite cities with the individual units separated by perhaps 3 miles. . . .  Another possibility is the doughnut city . . . in which the usual congested central area is replaced by a park or an airport, with the important facilities located around the periphery. . . . The rod-like city . . . might make for a simple solution of the transportation problem if the geography permitted such a development.”64 Lapp’s book was generally well received in the journals of opinion and in the newspapers, though its optimism about enduring the perils of the atomic age did not sit well with others.65 Lapp continued to proselytize for urban dispersal in a series of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and in more popular journals.66 Among city planners, the dispersal strategy was appropriated by two very different groups of thinkers about the future of the city. Some, like Tracy

The Techno-City Goes to War

89

Augur, saw in the devastation wrought by World War II bombing impressive justification for their already strong views that decentralization and regional planning by preserving a balance between city and country. Augur was a member, along with Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Clarence Stein, of the Regional Planning Association of America, a group heavily influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas and by the organicist views of the Scots philosopher and city planner Patrick Geddes. Others saw decentralization as advancing the postwar program of what the historian Robert Fishman has termed “corporate regionalism,” which saw the urban future in a movement away from the center to the periphery and away from the congested over-developed northern and eastern regions of the country to the relatively under-developed South and West.67 Both groups drew on a long history of decentralization planning schemes, including those of Arturo Soria y Mata’s nineteenth-century “linear city,” Howard’s Garden Cities of the early twentieth century, N. A. Miliutin’s pre-World War II linear industrial city, postwar British new towns, Swedish satellite towns, and many other exemplars.68 In the postwar era, dispersal strategies began to blur with another important phenomenon: the wholesale suburbanization of America. Indeed, as Katherine Tobin has shown, American policy makers promoted suburban development in the 1950s in part as a strategy to withstand an atomic attack.69 In signing the Federal Highway Act of 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower noted that the new road system would permit quick evacuation in the event of such an attack. But many urban reformers found little comfort in suburbia, which they believed failed to address the fundamental problems of large cities. Rather, planners like Augur were offering an alternative to both large cities and suburbs in their modified Garden City notion. After August 1949, when the Soviet Union’s test of an atomic bomb broke the United States’ monopoly on atomic weapons, the prospect of nuclear war took on a new and shocking meaning. On January 31, 1950, President Harry Truman announced his decision to proceed with the development of the hydrogen bomb or “Super.” The Federation of Atomic Scientists warned: “No nation is secure against the hydrogen bomb. Of all the cities in the world not one presents a better target than New York.”70 When the Korean War began, in the summer of 1950, the probability of nuclear confrontation rose uncomfortably. A number of scientists again weighed in with dispersal plans. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert

90

Chapter 4

Wiener, founder of cybernetics, even made a brief foray into the re-design of cities that was reported in a December 1950 issue of Life magazine.71 In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for May 1950, the physicist Robert Bacher pointed out that with a hydrogen bomb a thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb, the radius of destruction would be about 10 miles. “Such a hydrogen bomb,” he noted, “would be sufficiently great to cause almost complete destruction of any metropolitan area known today.”72 Confident in the powers of science and technology to solve all problems, postwar scientists and engineers now confronted their limits. A June 1954 article in Architectural Forum explored “What the Hydrogen Bomb Means to City and Industrial Planning.”73 “Some planners,” it noted, “think urban dispersal is now hopeless but far more agree with government experts who say the big bomb only makes wide dispersal more urgent.” The quoted experts included Tracy Augur, then Director of the Urban Targets Division of the Office of Defense Mobilization. “Too many of our eggs are in too few baskets and the baskets are too big and easy to hit,” Augur said about the concentration of the U.S. population in large cities. What counts is not the survivability of individual cities but their vulnerability as a group. As a practical strategy, Augur advised that our great cities could remain as they are, as long as “new growth is diverted to the smaller zones and reasonable steps are taken to reduce excessive population densities.” Early in 1954 came the critical event that demonstrated that the technological moment for the dispersal “movement” was over. On March 1, the United States carried out its BRAVO nuclear explosion tests at Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Eighty-five miles away, the soon-to-be-famous Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon was hit by radioactive fallout and most of its crew came down with radiation poisoning. “Fallout” became a hot issue, along with the massive destructiveness of the blast. At a press conference later that month, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, told reporters that “an H-bomb can be made. . . . large enough to take out a city.” “Any city?” the reporters asked. “Any city,” Strauss replied, even New York’s “metropolitan area.” The New York Times’s account of this press conference bore the headline “H-BOMB CAN WIPE OUT ANY CITY.”74 In 1955, radioactive rain fell on Chicago. It seemed clear to many that the day of urban dispersal for defense was at an end. Advocates of the techno-city ideal would now return to more traditional justifications.

5  Utopia Revived: From Industrial Modernism to Community

In 1933, Adriano Olivetti, 32 years of age, was named Director General of his father’s company. Adriano had joined the Olivetti company as an unskilled worker in 1924. It was not, of course, a long, hard climb upwards for him: “As the eldest son of the factory owner, I rapidly progressed in a career which others, although more gifted than I, could not follow.” In 1925 his father, Camillo, sent him to the United States to study management techniques. Upon his return the following year, a vast reorganization of the company began. In the decade before Adriano assumed the general directorship, the results of his American experience were apparent: assembly methods were improved, an advertising department and planning offices were established, allied companies were founded in Spain, Latin America, and Belgium, and the portable typewriter was introduced. The workforce more than doubled, and production (in terms of units produced) sextupled.1 Once a small, private company, Olivetti became a global corporation. Adriano’s father, Camillo, was an enlightened factory owner. From a Piedmontese Jewish family of farmers and small-time real estate brokers, Camillo Olivetti studied engineering at the Politecnico of Turin under Galileo Ferraris. He built his typewriter factory in his home town, Ivrea, in 1908. Described as a “friend and admirer of the great Italian socialists, Filippo Turati and Oddino Morgari,” he contributed to the anti-Fascist weekly Tempi Nuovi. Camillo was no Marxist; instead of class warfare, he advocated cooperation between workers, managers, and owners. Within his own firm he acted to establish generous worker welfare programs.2 Adriano, however, assumed responsibility within the firm during the apogee of the “planning” movement in Europe, planning the company’s business, planning the physical plant, planning the company’s urban setting, and planning

92

Chapter 5

the company’s locale. Like his father, Adriano studied engineering at the Politecnico of Turin. Already steeped in modern management according to F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford, an interest reinforced by his relationship with the Ente Nazionale per l’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro, Adriano entered the cultural world of modernism. The “modernist” drive included a new emphasis on design aesthetics, graphics, a renewed emphasis on social policies and, decisively, modern architecture.3 Robert Fishman has defined modernism as “the ideology of the Plan. The architect was to emerge as the Planner, leader and organizer of a whole industrial society whose ends were beauty and order.”4 Adriano was swept up. He brought Le Corbusier to Ivrea in 1934 to discuss management, architecture, and planning.5 He brought together a stellar group of young architects and planners to help him plan for the expansion of his company’s facilities and for the development of the region. The architects Gino Pollini and Luigi Figini were commissioned to design modernist additions to the Officine Olivetti complex. Later Adriano came into association with the BBPR architectural group (Ernesto Nathan Rogers, Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Belgiojoso, and Enrico Peressutti), who helped draft the Valle d’Aosta Plan, about which more later.6 Pollini and the BBPR Group were members of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier, Siegfried Giedion, and others and dedicated to the integration of modern architecture and urban and regional design in an industrial age. Its founding document, the “La Sarraz Declaration,” insisted that the economic and social demands of industrialization required “rationalization and standardization.” Architecture, industry, and politics could no longer be separated, and “town planning is the organization of life in all regions.” Urbanization’s “essence,” the declaration continued, “is of a functional order.”7 From 1931 on, the CIAM promoted the theme of the “Functional City” which was previewed at Milan’s Triennale, organized by CIAM members Gino Pollini and Piero Bottoni in the spring of 1933. At this meeting work of Wright, Mies, Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and other architects were shown, and 26 model houses were displayed, including Figini and Pollini’s Villa-Studio for the Artist. There Adriano Olivetti learned of their work and of the CIAM’s Functional City.8 The CIAM’s 1933 Congress was held on the cruise ship Patris II, which sailed from Marseille to Piraeus-Athens on July 29. On July 30, Le Corbusier

Utopia Revived

93

addressed the Congress and outlined his idea of the Functional City—a city planned according to the four basic functions: dwelling, work, leisure, and circulation (transportation, communication). He spoke of the “new scale” introduced by the railway and the automobile. After docking at Piraeus, the Congress continued its deliberations in Athens, and opened a Functional City exhibition organized by Emil Roth at the National Polytechnic School. Owing to internal disagreements, final resolutions were not passed; however, an article in the September issue of the journal Beaux Arts laid out the principles that Le Corbusier later published as The Athens Charter (1941). The principles emphasized human scale, the importance for town planning of the four functions (dwelling, circulation, work, and leisure), and the necessity of seeing and understanding the town as part of its region.9 Inspired, Adriano initiated studies in 1934 that would later emerge as the “General (Regulatory) Plan of the Valle d’Aosta,” and by 1935 he had begun to collect around him a group of architects and planners.10 Chief among these architects and planners were Gino Pollini, Luigi Figini, Piero Bottoni, and the afore-mentioned BBPR group. The BBPR architects and planners had gained considerable notice with their Pavia Plan of 1933. For a competition to re-plan the ancient town of Pavia, they had submitted (along with the engineer Gaetano Ciocca) a “fascist” or “corporativist” plan to make Pavia a model city laid out according to the principles of the CIAM’s and Le Corbusier’s Functional City. For Ciocca and the BBPR group the “corporativist city” was a new approach to modernization, a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. The chief aim was “to shape the perfect Italian of tomorrow.” Their plan began with Ciocca and Rogers’s theoretical position, declaring corporativism as a response to the congested, unhealthy capitalist city bequeathed by the Industrial Revolution. The new Pavia would be planned according to the principles of the CIAM’s Athens meeting: a reasoned segregation of residences, industrial, and leisure zones, an emphasis on healthy living, access to green spaces, and the use of modern technology in transit and communication plans. Three zones of the city included the “old city core” (part of which would be razed and rebuilt for reasons of aesthetics and hygiene), the “expanded city” (comprising industrial and military areas), and the “new city” (a place of innovation, with transportation links, a “city of study,” and a “city of sports”). The plan was rejected by the Italian government in favor of a more classical approach.11 Some of the

94

Chapter 5

ideas, however, found their way through the BBPR group into Adriano’s regional approach to Ivrea and its surroundings. Over a three-year period, Olivetti’s team produced an Aosta Valley plan which was finally published by the Olivetti company in 1937 as the Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta.12 (See figure 5.1.) As early as 1936 the team laid out their ideas at the Milan Triennale, and early in 1937 they displayed their ideas in Rome at the Galleria della Confederazione Nazionale Artisti Professionisti and also at the Paris Exposition of 1937. In his introduction to the 1937 publication

Figure 5.1

Pamphlet cover for the regional plan for the Valle d’Aosta, 1937. (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti )

Utopia Revived

95

of the Piano, Adriano stressed that the published plan was only an example of what can be done and a provisional indication of their methods.13 The central concept of the Plan was regionalism. The conception of the region was historical, cultural, and industrial, not administrative. Adriano’s focus was the modernization or rationalization of industry in all its forms, and the Plan brought together architects and social scientists to integrate the development of industry, the town, and the entire region.14 The Plan projected a Valle d’Aosta energized by tourism (not surprising, perhaps, as Adriano was president of the local tourist board). The document consisted of four individual development plans: an Aosta urban plan (designed by Banfi, Peressuti, and Rogers), a ski resort at Pila, a settlement plan for the Breuil Valley (designed by Belgiojoso and Bottoni), and a development plan for Courmayeur at Mont Blanc (designed by Pollini and Figini). Decked out with scientific observations, statistics, and diagrams, the Plan presented itself as rigorous, rational, and factual. In 1943 the studies and projects were edited into a volume titled Studi i proposte preliminari per il Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta. An industrial district for Ivrea, first conceived in 1934, was included.15 The Valle d’Aosta Plan failed to obtain the requisite political backing. Adriano Olivetti’s biographer, Valerio Ochetto, notes that Mussolini bluepenciled “no” on the plan and pointedly refused to visit the Olivetti factory during his visit to Ivrea in 1939.16 But Adriano pushed forward on other fronts. In 1937 he founded the journal Tecnica ed Organizazzione, the first of many important publishing ventures of this kind. The new journal’s subtitle, Uomini machine metodi nella costruzione corporativa (Men, Machines, Methods in Corporate Manufacturing), reflects Adriano’s commitment to industrial modernism along with a sensitivity to the political climate. The journal’s articles concerned the organization of factory and firm without bureaucracy, sales networks, what services a company should offer its workers and the public, professional education, the market, industrial architecture, and urban planning. The third number of the journal (1937) featured an article on the Bata shoe company of Zlin, Czechoslovakia, whose design department prepared a manuscript on the ideal industrial town. Ultimately, three new satellite towns were built according to modernist-CIAM or Functional City principles: Batovany (called Partizanske since 1949), Zruc nad Sazavou, and Sezimovo Usti.17 Adriano also turned again to planning, this time with a more limited goal. He returned to Figini and Pollini’s plan for Ivrea and financed studies for a

96

Chapter 5

general plan for the town. The commission was given to Figini alone, but he brought in Egisippo Devoti of the National Fascist Union of Engineers (Adriano was the local president of that organization) and Luigi Piccinato, the planner of the Fascist new town of Sabaudia. In the period 1938–1941 a number of studies were made dealing with rehabilitating the roads and structures that were in poor condition, renovating the historic center, widening the streets, and expanding the city with three new neighborhoods and a new industrial district along the lines of Figini and Pollini’s 1934 proposal. This plan for Ivrea, too, went for the most part unbuilt.18 Internal company reform was also on the agenda. With Figini and Pollini hired on as architects, Adriano transformed the company with new modernist glass and concrete buildings. (See figure 5.2.) Workers’ benefits were expanded with a factory cafeteria service (1936), extended vacation time (1936), transport systems and enlarged social services (1937), and planning for a village for employees (1937). Adriano became president of Olivetti in 1938, succeeding his father. The following year, a high school was added to the existing mechanics training center, and a summer camp for children was begun. Figini and Pollini’s dramatic new nursery school, begun in 1930, was completed in 1942. Despite the exigencies of the war, employee housing (Borgo Olivetti) was opened, and construction of the Via Castellamonte housing was underway.19 (See figure 5.3.) The historian Giorgio Ciucci sees the Borgo and the Via Castellamonte as exemplars of Adriano’s rationalist vision. Buildings, sports areas, and even the neighborhoods themselves are arranged along an axis that coincides with that of the factory. “These designs,” Ciucci remarks, “expressed that search for a rational order which marks Adriano Olivetti’s whole program.”20 (See figure 5.4.) Adriano’s relationship with the Mussolini regime had been complex, and after Il Duce’s fall the situation became even more tangled. He was arrested and imprisoned by the Badoglio government in Rome in 1943 for warning the United States about Pietro Badoglio’s trustworthiness.21 In February 1944 he escaped to Switzerland, where he remained until May 1945.22 In exile, Adriano was in contact with like-minded intellectuals and was able to think deeply about the political and social meanings of his modernism. For Adriano Olivetti, exile in Switzerland was a difficult but life-changing interlude. It provided time for him to order his ideas—which had been gestating well before his exile—about postwar political and industrial ­planning.

Utopia Revived

97

Figure 5.2

The second addition to Olivetti workshops at Ivrea, designed by L. Figini and G. Pollini (1939–1940). (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti )

98

Chapter 5

Figure 5.3

The modernist tradition continued when Adriano Olivetti’s son Roberto commis­ sioned Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro d’Isola to build the West Residential Unit (1968–1971). Completely below ground on the outer semicircle, the housing was known to its inhabitants as “Mole City.” (Roya Marefat)

By the summer of 1942, he considered the outcome of the war a foregone conclusion: Italy and the Axis powers were bound to lose now that the United States had entered the hostilities. He and his allies immediately began to plan for Italy’s postwar reconstruction and “resurrection.”23 Programs and manifestos for the future Italy were passed among the co-conspirators, and in 1942 and 1943 Adriano circulated typewritten essays that were the germ of larger works to come.24 Adriano’s doctrine of “Comunità concreta,” a grand utopian vision of cooperative communities, was beginning to take shape. Adriano returned from Switzerland ablaze with regionalism, impressed by examples of planning’s successes, and inspired by the spirit of grass-roots community. According to his biographer, his new “maestri” included the philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, the architect-planner Erwin Gutkind, the urbanist Lewis Mumford, and David Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley Authority, all of whose recent books Adriano eagerly devoured.25 In The

Utopia Revived

99

Figure 5.4

Eduard Vittoria’s Olivetti Study and Research Center, Ivrea, 1951­–1955. ( Jeremy Kargon)

Culture of Cities (1938), Mumford stressed the importance of the region, “an area large enough to embrace a sufficient range of interests and small enough to keep these interests in focus and make them a subject of collective concern.” Under the new regime of regionalism, “it is necessary . . . to create centers of industrial and civic life and to re-invigorate with new plans and activities such older towns and villages as are favorably situated. . . . The standards set for production must not only include private consumption but public works—houses and highways, parks and gardens, cities and civic institutes and all the interconnecting tissue that finally compose an organic region. . . . The re-animation and re-building of regions, as deliberate works of collective art, is the grand task of politics for the opening generation.”26 Another writer influenced by Mumford, and read closely by Olivetti, was the architect and planner Erwin Gutkind. In 1943, Gutkind—a refugee to London (and ultimately Philadelphia) from Nazi Germany—­published a twovolume work anticipating postwar reconstruction. In Creative Demobilisation,

100

Chapter 5

the first volume of which is titled The Principles of National Planning, Gutkind lays out an argument for regional planning, decentralization, and the importance of the community: “The interests of the community must govern every scheme in general and in detail. Private interests must be subordinated to this principle without impeding personal freedom.”27 A prime example used by both Mumford, and Gutkind was the success of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been created by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. In 1944, TVA chairman David Lilienthal published a book dedicated “to the people who live in the Tennessee Valley region” and titled TVA: Democracy on the March. This book’s optimism and its faith in science and in the boundless energy of democracy resonated with Adriano’s experience and purpose. “This is a book,” Lilienthal writes, “about tomorrow.” He believes “in the great potentialities for well-being of the machine and technology and science” and “that through the practice of democracy the world of technology holds out the greatest opportunity in all history for the development of the individual.”28 Adriano had found a kindred spirit! In a chapter titled “Planning and Planners,” Lilienthal refutes the canard that planning is soulless, anti-democratic, and intrinsically bureaucratic. “A great plan,” he writes, “a moral and indeed a religious purpose, deep and fundamental is democracy’s answer both to our own homegrown would-be dictators and foreign anti-democracy alike. . . . Here is the life principle of democratic ­planning—an awakening in the whole people of a sense of this common moral purpose.”29 Moreover, it can be accomplished and accomplished now. “There must be more than a conviction, a sure confidence that it can be done. There must be a sense of urgency, a sense that this is the day on which to turn the first shovel.”30 Adriano’s theoretical discourses, which germinated in Switzerland, reflected the profound influence of these writers and activists. Ordine politico delle comunità (1945)31 and L’idea di una comunità concreta (1950) were, as Chiara Mazzoleni has opined, “an original re-interpretation of the regionalism of Lewis Mumford.”32 Adriano’s theory of community offered a regional solution to what he regarded as the era’s most urgent problem: out-of-control industrialization and urbanization. While valuing technology, the factory, and its power as primary generators of wealth in society, he saw in them a peril as well.33 Siegfried Giedion’s compelling question—would man or mechanization

Utopia Revived

101

“take command”?—deeply worried him. But Adriano believed that the root of the problem went deeper: “The crisis of contemporary society arises not from the machine, but from the persistence, in a world profoundly altered, of inadequate political structures.”34 To address the crisis, he would soon call for wholesale reform of the Italian political and economic system. After such a transformation, the problem of man and machine would be simply and quickly resolved. Adriano Olivetti offered a sweeping solution in the form of the comunità concreta, a combined material and spiritual conception. During his exile in Switzerland, he outlined his theory in an epigrammatic treatise titled L’Ordine politico delle comunità. Though born of a period of crisis, it was the result of years of philosophical reflection. Adriano derived many of its essential features from his personal experience as a factory owner and manager and native of Ivrea and the Canavese region. “Prima di essere una istituzione teorica, la Comunità fu vita,” he wrote, acknowledging that his models actually preexisted, albeit in a latent form, ripe for theoretical generalization.35 Time and again Adriano returned to his native Ivrea and Canavese as a personal touchstone. The Ordine was in effect a codification of that personal experience. In a later book, Democracy Without Political Parties, Adriano chronicled his life’s journey, including his disillusionment with socialist revolution in 1922, the inspiration of his father’s humanitarian, paternalistic factory management, and his own awakening to the community idea.36 Adriano shared his father’s benevolent paternalism as well as his social reformist zeal. But whereas Camillo had thought of the Olivetti plant more as an artisanal workshop than factory, Adriano aimed to transform the firm into a modern industry and sought more sweeping scientific and rational approaches to industrial problems. As a political-economic concept, his community idea provided a “third way” for postwar Italy. “To escape [the present] complex crisis,” he wrote, “many make the error of restricting our choices between state Socialism and Liberalism. . . . The present plan is a tentative attempt to indicate concretely a third way that responds to the multiple exigencies of the moral and material order.”37 As a new regional model, community was Adriano Olivetti’s answer to what he identified as Italy’s fundamental political dilemma: its administrative units were either too large or too small for human needs. Ideally containing between 75,000 and 150,000 inhabitants, the community was designed to

102

Chapter 5

be midway between the Italian province and the commune, or county. In territory, the community was roughly equivalent to the ­traditional diocese or electoral district. He envisioned Italy as a federation of 400–500 autonomous communities, organized in a hierarchy of ever-larger g­overning units.38 According to Olivetti’s “organic plan of industrial decentralization,” com­ munities were rural nodes, each centering on a factory, an industry, or a technology.39 For his immediate models, Olivetti looked to “the Fiat Com­ munity at Mirafiori, the Ansaldo Community at Cornigliano, the Galileo Community at Rinfredi.” Also mentioned were such “new industrial villages of America” as “aluminium city”—a reference to Aluminum City Terrace, a defense housing project built on the outskirts of Pittsburgh by Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.40 Central to the concept was the inclusion of large swaths of agricultural land within the jurisdiction of each community, thus forming a complete regional entity. By putting agricultural and industrial activity under unified administration, he aimed for a symbiosis between an agricultural and industrial economy. Although no more an admirer of Marx than his father, he traced this notion to a passage in the Communist Manifesto which asserted that combining farm and industrial labor would eventually erase all meaningful distinctions between city and country.41 Agricultural reform was an important prerequisite to the success of his plan. Olivetti called for breaking down feudal estates into units owned by small proprietors at the community level. Under this scheme, small farmers would band together in community groups or cooperatives to pursue a more modern, scientific agriculture.42 But the community plan was far more than a purely political-administrative measure. It was designed to transform all human relations. The community was a “natural unit” built to the measure of man and, as such, the ultimate vehicle for political and spiritual expression: “The ‘misura umana’ of a community,” according to the Ordine, is defined by the natural ­limits of human social relationships—“by the finite possibilities which are at the ­ disposal of every person for establishing social contacts.” For a community to function optimally, its citizens must be directly in touch with one another and, as much as possible, with their political leaders: “an ­organism is ­ harmonious and efficient only when the people in charge of certain ­determined tasks can explain those tasks through direct contacts.”43 Reminiscent of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” the community represented

Utopia Revived

103

the “spazio ­ naturale dell’uomo.” After the destruction and disintegration caused by the war, it would provide a new “organic unity.” It was “meant to recall once more the lost harmony to the works of man,” a harmony that would transcend all conflicts.44 While it was true that modern forms of transportation could expand human space by technologically extending human physical limits, Olivetti was wary of them. In modern Italian society, such technologies often served as vehicles of political control rather than facilitators of human capability and spontaneity: “The Community shall be the dominion of man, the Region can be controlled by means of a motor-car, the State by means of an aeroplane or a railway. Only the Community is unique, completely human.”45 Like other techno-cities, Olivetti’s community was a walking city, not a motorized zone. In effect, the human-sized community functioned as a single great organism: “The Community is an organ of the Region and of the State: it is later transformed, since it is based on a natural body, into an economic organ, later into a means of spiritual and moral affirmation.”46 Quoting the town planner Giovanni Astengo, Olivetti likened communities to cellular organisms, whose combination leads to ever-larger forms.47 Originating in the realm of the body, the community ultimately rose to the level of the spirit, its highest manifestation. Olivetti’s organic holism was just one of the many holdovers from fascist organicist ideology. Olivetti thought deeply about the implications of community for human liberty. A major theme of the Ordine is the tension between individual freedom and state power. In the community concept, Olivetti aimed to redefine the relationship between individuals and society. Drawing on the writings of Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, he made a fundamental philosophical distinction between the “Person,” one who is closely connected to others and to the community, and the “Individual,” an isolated egocentric, a creature of capitalist individualism.48 The community structure would provide for a satisfying “personhood” without totally submerging and subordinating the individual in society, as he believed communism had done. Large cities, Adriano Olivetti maintained, were the antithesis of community and therefore incapable of delivering the desired degree of unity and harmony. Products of unbridled industrial expansion, they were antiquated, oppressive, congested centers, ever on the verge of chaos. But Olivetti was

104

Chapter 5

no revolutionary. Admitting that cities had made great contributions to civilization and culture, rather than demand their demolition, he called for their gradual transformation into more human-centered, natural agglomerations.49 In theory, he believed, the community and the city could co-exist, at least for a time, as long as cities gradually shifted course in the direction of Olivetti’s community ideal. The Ordine offered a vision of a communitarian utopia, to be sure, yet it was a distinctly earth-bound utopia. Olivetti chose the term “concrete community” advisedly. It anchored the community in real experience, in material life, and, above all, in the land itself. Ever the pragmatist, Olivetti was suspicious of purely theoretical gestures. Experience had taught him the dangers of ideal systems. He had seen the Nazis and the Fascists adopt a perverse form of Hegelian philosophy to justify the apotheosis of the state, brutal dictatorship, and a toxic “racial metaphysics.” At the other end of the political spectrum, he had witnessed similar distortions in the name of Hegel in Marx’s historical materialism. Condemning all forms of “state-idolatry,” Olivetti aimed to restore individual freedoms within the context of a liberal society, the sort of social contract that he believed had prevailed in Europe before the rise of Fascism and Nazism.50 In the end, he believed, the true community is a synthesis of the material and the spiritual. Despite his pragmatic bent, at times Olivetti’s deep belief in the idea of a homogeneous concrete community, binding people to their region, to their land, and, through the land, to one another, seemed to look back to the blood-and soil ideology of the previous fascist generation of planners. Love of nature, verging on worship, infused Olivetti’s notion of the concrete community (echoing the romantic rhetoric of Salzgitter architect Herbert Rimpl.) The call for a return to the land and to nature was a revealing sub-theme of the Ordine. The Italian commune, in its current form, he lamented, “almost always excludes nature and the countryside.” Integrating agricultural lands into the new order will gradually put modern life back into direct contact with nature. Olivetti even saw hope for modern cities, where nature had been wantonly suppressed, if not eliminated. He envisioned their gradual transformation into “urban organisms in which nature is once more given its rightful function and man has the sentiment of a more harmonious and more complete life, both in and outside his work.”51 He was confident that, properly directed, the city would

Utopia Revived

105

eventually find its way back to nature. Drawing inspiration from his native Canavese, Olivetti paints his regional landscape in rhapsodic brush-strokes: “ . . . the Community itself was already born, in natural and human dimensions, in my small native land: the Canavese. The straight line of the Serra, the twisting course of the river Dora, the scenery of the beloved mountains of the Val d’Aosta, then, amid the green fields, the wheat-fields, the closely worked vineyards, encircling the towns through which I had passed, ten, a hundred times. These were the natural limits of a territory which the faith and imagination of a tenacious group of men could save from the shut provincial atmosphere, preparing a happier place when tomorrow the factory, nature, life, brought back to a spiritual unity, may give new dignity to a new man.”52 Olivetti sees the community as a Christian polity. He thus pictures a natural paradise, a Garden of Eden before the fall. Out of it will emerge a redeemed “Uomo nuovo,” the New Man promised by a generation of Italian community reformers. While Olivetti reveled in nature, the community was in the end a human construct, requiring a strong, carefully considered political framework. Accor­ dingly, the Ordine outlined a system of government. A hallmark of the community was its unitary outlook—the unity of the organism—which implied oversight by a single authority that could coordinate its complex activities. As a model, Olivetti held up the “unified approach” of the TVA in its role as a ­single territorial authority.53 Yet he worried about the threat of centralized power to democracy and liberty. His remedy was to divide that authority among coequal bodies, each one a sub-organism in its own right. Such a strategy limited central control while also serving as a check on the masses, who might ­otherwise be invested with too much power under a pure democracy. Olivetti’s ­governmental structure predicated a balance among the popular sovereignty of the masses, the power of trade unions, and the cultural authority of experts. Power was vested in three entities: a president elected under universal suffrage, a vice-president elected only by workers and trade unionists, and a cultural representative elected by “men of competence.” Framing all was a governing moral and ethical system rooted in Christian belief and doctrine.54 As important as religion was as a guide for Olivetti, he believed equally in the cultural authority of secular elites of scientists, engineers, architects, and artists. Expert knowledge played a fundamental role in community governance, even as it put a brake on democratic mass rule. Cultural elites, Olivetti asserted,

106

Chapter 5

must lead, but not oppress. In addition to wielding political power, the communities were to serve as cultural centers to inform and nourish the spirit. Olivetti assigned especially high social and political status to science and to academic organizations as sources of independent, disinterested power and criticism. The “scientific tradition of the universities or of the superior scientific institutes” is responsible for making critical judgments about the culture of a community. Accordingly, Olivetti advocated freedom of scientific research, but with the proviso that knowledge should always be at the service of the community and of “the exigencies of economic life.” Science, above all, should never be “separable from ethical ends, since it is clear that when this last is lacking science and technique submit man to the dominion of the machine which he is no longer able to control, and which might lead civilization towards its own auto-destruction.”55 In view of his artistic sensibilities, it no surprise that Olivetti also favored artists and artistic freedom. But again, such freedoms had to serve society and, therefore, function within prescribed limits. Just as Mussolini imposed strong direction on the design of his città nuove, Olivetti insisted on rules of harmony and form in community planning. Choices of architectural style or public art, such as murals, must be “entrusted to organizations which represent living forces and critical-scientific traditions in the domain of Art itself.” Under such a regime, private homes could be independently designed, as long as they remained “in harmony with a determined artistic tradition.”56 Otherwise chaos would prevail, not only in art but also in society. Olivetti carried these same precepts into town and regional planning. As head of the 1937 Val d’Aosta plan, he strictly enforced aesthetic standards. He contrasted his own “unitary vision” of the valley with a botched plan developed by the Italian government a decade earlier. Conducted without central planning or strong direction from the top, the prior results were confused and chaotic—an affront, Olivetti sharply noted, to the area’s grand artistic heritage from Caesar Augustus. Compared to such disastrous attempts at city planning, he wrote, “those modest tentatives of organic solutions undertaken by Fascism in Littoria and Sabaudia” deserved a measure of praise.57 After his return from Switzerland, Olivetti turned from reflection to action. In 1946, convinced by his study and his experience that (as Lilienthal urged) a sense of urgency was necessary, Olivetti founded the journal Comunità. (See figure 5.5.) In 1948 he established the “Movimento

Utopia Revived

107

Figure 5.5

Adriano Olivetti in front of his factories in Ivrea. This photo was used on cover of Communità no. 78 (1960). (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti)

di Comunità.” The Movimento was to be a forum for debate, organizing political discussion, political education, and political action that would utilize newly established community centers (as Gutkind had suggested in Creative Demobilisation), staffed by Movement volunteers throughout the Canavese region and eventually throughout Italy, to spread its artistic and cultural precepts, as well as providing a variety of community services. These Community Centers were allied with other regional and national institutions to resolve social conflicts in the factory and to promote the merging of light industry and farming.58 Olivetti’s “Edizioni di Comunità” published articles, pamphlets, and books, including Italian translations of works on architecture and planning by such urbanists as Lewis Mumford and Erwin Gutkind. This same group published the art and society journal Sele Arte between 1952 and 1966. The Movimento shifted from its educational role into the political arena by entering the elections of 1953 and

108

Chapter 5

1958. The community ­movement reached its peak in the mid 1950s, and in 1956 Olivetti was elected mayor of Ivrea, his highest political office. In 1948 Olivetti joined the steering committee of the Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica (INU). In 1950 he would become that ­organization’s ­president. In 1949 he financed the resuscitation of its journal Urbanistica. Olivetti assumed the title of direttore and appointed Giovanni Astengo ­editor-in-chief. Astengo (1915–1990), a graduate architect of the Politecnico di Torino who was associated with the Movimento di Comunità, helped Olivetti reorganize Urbanistica and became vice-president of the INU in 1950.59 (See figure 5.6.) The first number of the newly revived Urbanistica ( July–August 1949) highlighted an opening statement, titled “Resuming the Road,” in which Olivetti asserts that “urbanistics” will reclaim planning for the future of the Paese (country). The first featured article was a translation of Lewis Mumford’s “Planning for the Diverse Phases of Life.” Mumford contributed three articles in the first thirteen issues, including a biography of Patrick Geddes. A biography of Mumford appeared in the second issue (as did a sketch of Siegfried Giedion), one of Ebenezer Howard in the third issue, and one of Mumford’s collaborator Clarence Stein in the thirteenth. Erwin Gutkind was a favored invitee, contributing six articles in the first fourteen issues, more than any other non-Italian. Meanwhile Gutkind was attaining a worldwide reputation for “social ecology” with such books as Community and Environment: A Discourse on Social Ecology (Watts, 1953) and Expanding the Environment: The End of Cities—The Rise of Communities (Freedom Press, 1953). The latter, according to Mazzoleni, was one of the most popular texts among Italian architects and “stood at the centre of the discussion regarding nucleated development.”60 Once again Adriano Olivetti took it upon himself to organize a general plan for Ivrea, this time for the town and the Canavese region. In early 1952 he formed the Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento Urbanistico del Canavese, which included the architects Ludovico Quaroni, Nello Renacco, and Annibale Fiocchi and the engineer Enrico Ranieri. (See figure 5.7.) The anarchist writer and urbanist Carlo Doglio was general secretary and was mainly concerned with the social and political aspects of the plan. The organization of the effort was ambitious; no other large city in Italy had such a general plan. Sociologists, statisticians, agricultural, and labor economists were brought in. The plan proposed a “cluster organization” of the city

Utopia Revived

Figure 5.6

Olivetti revived the journal Urbanistica. (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica )

109

110

Chapter 5

Figure 5.7

The Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento Urbanistico del Canavese developed this town plan for Ivrea in 1955. (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti )

Utopia Revived

111

based on a “federation of residential units,” and a reworking of the communications system.61 The plan, initially rejected by the Ivrea Town Council, was adopted in modified form in 1956. One of the most interesting projects and one most closely consonant with regionalist, decentralizing philosophy was the Istituto per il Rinnovamento Urbano e Rurale [Institute for Urban and Rural Renewal] program, begun in late 1954 and known by its Italian acronym, I-RUR. I-RUR was an attempt to realize many of the theoretical notions about linking town and country ­outlined in the Ordine. The high unemployment rate and the encroached-upon rural character of the Canavese spurred Olivetti to rethink the relationship of town and country in an industrializing economy. Olivetti was concerned to preserve the best in Italian life. In an address titled “Community Ideals,” he stated: “Town and country planning becomes extraordinarily important, because it has the function of organizing and adapting the plans which closely reflect the life and resources of the community.” Like Howard, Geddes, and Mumford, Olivetti rejects the conventional conception of a rigid separation between the urban and the rural, and looks instead to “1st, a symbiosis between industrial and agricultural economy, 2nd a gradual organization of modern life in touch with nature in the farming areas, 3rd the transformation of big and congested metropolitan areas into urban organisms where nature can be restored to its rightful place . . . 4th the extension to isolated villages of the benefits of medical care, educational and recreational activities which are generally the privilege of more important centers.” The main building block of this symbiosis is “an intermediate structure between the individual and the state—a new real community.”62 Accordingly, Adriano Olivetti established I-RUR, with himself as president. It was an association of public agencies, ­private companies and private individuals. The organization was closely linked to the Olivetti Company, which made payments to I-RUR, and to Adriano Olivetti himself through personal relations with I-RUR members such as Franco Momigliano, Ignazio Weiss, Roberto Giuducci, Geno Pampaloni, and Umberto Rossi.63 The mission of I-RUR, as outlined in its charter, was to study and to build agricultural and industrial settlements in order to improve the economic and social conditions of the Canavese, to raise the level of cultural life of the population, to improve the unemployment situation, and to promote, create, develop, and eventually manage artisanal, industrial, and

112

Chapter 5

agricultural activities. Eventually nine settlements were constructed, four of them agricultural (including the agricultural cooperative of Montalenghe) and five of them industrial (including a laboratory at Vidracco, designed by the architect Eduardo Vittoria). After the sudden death of Adriano Olivetti in 1960, I-RUR went into decline. No further new projects were begun, and I-RUR was phased out in the period 1965–1972.64 Lewis Mumford, in his memoirs, characterized Adriano Olivetti as a modern version of Aristotle’s “Magnificent man,” one “who uses his riches to some purpose.”65 Olivetti would have been pleased; his labors indeed had a philosophical end. In an address before a conference at Berlin in 1956, Adriano summed up the framework within which he moved: Both history and reason lead us to the solution which is the optimum community, neither too big nor too small; a community that can be measured on the human scale. The large, the huge, the gigantic in all times, in all fields—enormous factories, overcrowded metropolises, authoritarian monopolistic states, mass parties—all are under indictment. They are the Leviathans of our age, doomed to disappear, and give place to more pliant, more harmonious, in a word, more human forms of life.66

The fundamental idea, Olivetti continues in a vein directly adopted from the Ordine, is to create communal interests, both material and moral, out of the natural affinities of the region in which people live and work. The effort he had begun, the creation of a Canavese regional community, had now begun to produce results. “We employ a variety of instruments in the fields of culture, economics, administration and labour organization; and attempt to focus them on a single spiritual goal: a real community. In this process, they also become political.”67 Thus, Adriano Olivetti’s evolved modernist version of “the Plan,” organized around comunità, was infused both with what he termed “spirit” and with politics. The sociologist Robert Nisbet tartly remarked that Adriano “collected intellectuals as other industrialists collected art.”68 Olivetti was, however, no dabbler. Inspired by the utopians and strengthened by sociologists, planners, architects, and historians, Olivetti approached his Plan as a philosophical enterprise. Unfortunately for that enterprise, in the brave new postwar world utopia was yesterday’s world.

6 Th e Ci t y of Di s cipli nes: Uto pi a Deni ed, U t o pia R e stored

Tough-minded idealism was required. Fascism and Nazism had been swept away by World War II, and the worldwide depression was over, but the task of reconstruction was both an opportunity and a burden. Lloyd Rodwin, an intellectually ambitious graduate student of land economics at the University of Wisconsin, grappled with big issues in “Garden Cities and the Metropolis,” a curious article that appeared in the August 1945 Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics. Spurred by defense-related interest in decentralizing cities, Rodwin mounted a scathing attack on Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City thesis,” claiming that it “overlooked some of the essential tasks of the metropolis” and that it neglected “problems confronting existing communities.” He blasted Howard’s views on rural migration, population growth, the location of industry, urban costs, and municipal government. The urgent challenge, he maintained, was to understand “how to rebuild our existing cities and solve some of their pressing problems,” instead of conceiving new towns. Rodwin criticized Lewis Mumford’s Culture of Cities for its interest in the ruralization of industry and for the notion that neotechnics or biotechnics will lead to urban dispersal.1 Remarkably, two well-known Regionalists, admirers of the Garden City, responded to young Rodwin’s paper. Catherine Bauer (later Catherine Bauer Wurster), while agreeing that it would be “worse than useless to try to gear city planning to the fantastic potentialities of atomic warfare,” was much less optimistic about the future of metropolitan (as opposed to decentralized) development, and asserted that it was “too soon to bury the Garden City movement.” Lewis Mumford, too, weighed in. Joining with Rodwin and Bauer in dismissing the military reasons for dispersal, Mumford reaffirmed his critique of highdensity planning: “Howard realized, as apparently Mr. Rodwin does not, that a million people, grouped in twenty or thirty Garden Cities, would have

114

Chapter 6

advantages for living that a million people grouped in a unitary city do not possess.”2 In an extended and rather cutting rejoinder, Rodwin wrote: “Not only must our present cities be reckoned with but a crucial element for the success of most new cities lies in the nature of the relationships that must govern existing and new communities.”3 He continued to be harshly critical of Mumford’s “inadequate documentation and analysis,” and dismissive of his “premature flair for generalization.” He charged Mumford with lack of attention “to what is essentially the heart of a ­community plan, viz. economic background and trends.”4 Rodwin ­consistently underscored the contrast between his social science approach, grounded in economics, and Mumford’s less disciplined views. By the spring of 1946, when the exchange was published, Rodwin had received his master’s degree in land economics and had entered Harvard University to pursue a doctorate in planning, which he received in 1949. His first published book pointedly continued the debate with the Howardians. Titled The British New Towns Policy: Problems and Implications, and published in 1956, it picked up where the 1945–46 exchange had left off, with Rodwin openly critical of a “utopian” approach to urban problems. He discussed the British New Towns approach that was growing out of the New Towns Act of 1946 and the Town Development Act of 1952 in the context of “Newtopia versus Megalopolis.”5 The American Sociological Review praised Rodwin’s “emphasis on the need for research in the social sciences as a necessary condition for sound planning.”6 But in another review, Howard’s disciple Frederic Osborn complained that “Mr. Rodwin has produced no evidence that they [difficulties in building Garden Cities] were due to innocence or slovenliness in the thinking of the proponents.” As a rejoinder to Rodwin, he charged that “the Achilles Heel of Social Scientists [is] the belief that the art of juggling can be acquired by studying the theory of three-dimensional dynamics.”7 Rodwin’s approach to planning—to transform it into urban studies by draw­ing on many disciplines across the social sciences and the ­humanities— was already clearly outlined in The British New Towns.8 He gained the chance to act on these principles in 1958 when he was appointed director of the new Center for Urban and Regional Studies in MIT’s Department of City and Regional Planning. The establishment of centers for multi­disciplinary practices was rapidly becoming a part of MIT’s ­culture. Leaders in both the faculty and the administration saw these centers as important

The City of Disciplines

115

instruments. The former saw them as means of addressing contemporary problems that crossed disciplinary boundaries; the latter viewed them as ways of overcoming departmental barriers within the university. These centers became prominent foci of research and education not only in the sciences and engineering but also in the social sciences. MIT, more than any other American university, took up the challenge, first laid down as the “fourth point” in President Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, to “embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas.” The main instrument was MIT’s Center for International Studies (CENIS), widely perceived as a source of knowledge on foreign policy and economic assistance for the Eisenhower administration. Max Millikan (a former CIA director of economic research) and Walt Rostow (an economist and an economic historian) of CENIS stressed modernization theory and “nation building” as America’s foreign policy agenda for the developing world.9 In 1959, Rodwin co-founded (with Martin Meyerson, Harvard’s Williams Professor of City Planning and Urban Research) the interdisciplinary Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. Meyerson became that center’s first director and Rodwin the chair of its Faculty Committee.10 Meyerson and Rodwin agreed on the need for an infusion of social science rigor into planning. In an essay titled “The Utopian Tradition and the Planning of Cities,” Meyerson argued that the social scientist “describes rather than prescribes,” whereas the utopian’s “arbitrary, simplified view” results in caricature. “Unlike utopia,” he continued, social science “specifies the means of achieving” a desirable future.11 “The “main reason” for the founding of the Joint Center was, according to Rodwin, “to push for a broader more direct involvement on the part of the social sciences in urban and regional studies.”12 A golden opportunity presented itself. More precisely, Rodwin helped create a splendid chance to apply their conception of urbanism in rapidly developing, oil-rich Venezuela. In 1960, Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Romulo Betancourt, created the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) to develop the underpopulated and relatively undeveloped southeastern region of his country.13 Of special interest was the area at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni rivers, a region rich in iron ore, timber, and hydroelectric power. Two U.S.

116

Chapter 6

companies had constructed iron-ore processing facilities there in the 1950s, and the Venezuelan government began to build a steel plant nearby. The CVG was charged with developing an overall plan for the region. Needing trained assistance, the CVG turned to Meyerson and Rodwin’s Joint Center for help. The president of the CVG was Colonel (later General) Rafael Alfonzo Ravard, a graduate of MIT.14 While Rodwin was in Venezuela at the invitation of a former MIT planning student, Colonel Alfonzo Ravard persuaded Rodwin to accompany him on a tour of the area. Rodwin recalled “the handsome hydroelectric facilities and the elegant, still unfinished steel plant, conventional but still powerful symbols of big dreams.” Apparently Rodwin was not immune to the lure of Big Dreams: “I suggested that the Joint Center might organize a team that—together with a group of Venezuelan ­associates—might work out some strategies for attacking the problems of regional development in the Guyana. The team could be backed up by specialists in planning, architecture, law, economics sociology, public administration, civil engineering, and other relevant disciplines at both universities.”15 Rodwin’s group would have all this and a research component too. It was, to be sure, a City of Disciplines, an academic dream project. Rodwin clearly saw the importance of the project both for Venezuela and for the practice of urban planning. Modernization envisioned economic growth and promised the transformation of what Rodwin termed “backward regions.” The chance to create a new city provided the opportunity “for boldness, imagination, and innovation in urban design on a scale rarely possible elsewhere.”16 Rodwin’s plan for the multi-disciplinary team was difficult to execute. Norman Williams (a visiting professor of urban planning at MIT, a graduate of the Yale Law School, and an expert on planning law) was named the project’s director. His tenure was scheduled to end in December 1962 owing to previous commitments. In any case, his family’s housing needs precluded residency on site; he required a swimming pool, and therefore he located in Caracas. The project’s director of urban design, Wilhelm von Moltke, also was unable to live in Ciudad Guayana; his wife, a concert pianist, required a piano. Von Moltke was a Philadelphia urban designer who was also on the staff at the University of Pennsylvania. He had previously worked with Stonorov and Kahn, who had developed an important part of the urban plan for Bomber City at Willow Run. Alexander Ganz, an economic consultant with extensive Latin American experience, was chosen

The City of Disciplines

117

as chief of economic analysis. He mainly worked from outside the area. In the end, a multidisciplinary team of specialists was assembled, comprising urban designers, economists, architects, a political scientist, and an anthropologist.17 Most commuted from Caracas; some, like the anthropologist Lisa Peattie, lived on “the site.” Peattie had been an anthropologist at Queens College and at the Bank Street College of Education. She had had some field experience in Latin America.18 The first task, as Rodwin saw it, was to assess the economic potential of Ciudad Guayana. By 1961 the town’s population had grown from 4,000 to more than 40,000. Within a year, it had added 10,000 more. By the end of the first planning phase, in 1964, the population was 70,000. The demands for water, electricity, roads, schools, sewers, and bridges were becoming urgent. The team had to accommodate immediate needs and, at the same time, prevent these needs from interfering with the long-range plans. While the economic planning was proceeding, the physical layout of the city was charted under the direction of von Moltke. The first estimates projected a population of 415,000 by 1975; later the projection was reduced to 221,000. According to Rodwin, the central question was “Should the new city be built around the steel plant? The planners finally decided that . . . it would be far preferable to form the city by uniting the existing elements.”19 Von Moltke’s plan of December 1964 lays out what he terms the “visual development strategy.” (See figure 6.1.) He sees three “visual units”: the concave bowl of the town of San Felix in the far east of the district; the central valley to the west; and, closer to the steel mill at the western extremity, the western plateau. The main idea is to connect the three visual units with a central boulevard, the Avenida Guayana. Several design concepts were considered and rejected in favor of a “linear city” extending from the steel mill in the west to San Felix in the east. The rationale for this choice boiled down to two factors: the importance of the heavy industrial complex, which had to be situated near the steel mill, and the idea that the east-west pole would foster growth and development along the central boulevard. Such a pattern of development would facilitate the use of a unitary system of services and transport, rather than have them duplicated at greater cost.20 In von Moltke’s plan, a sense of unity for Ciudad Guayana depends on the Avenida Guayana. All the major elements of the linear city are laid out as nodes along it. From the west, one proceeds from the steel mill along the

118

Chapter 6

Figure 6.1

Von Moltke’s comprehensive physical concept for Ciudad Guayana, as illustrated in “The Evolution of Linear Form” (1964). (Lloyd Rodwin and Associates, Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Program of Venezuela, MIT Press, 1969)

Avenida to the heavy industry district, and thence to the airport and on to Alta Vista, the commercial district. Alta Vista is located halfway between the steel mill and San Felix. “All traffic from existing residential areas to central Venezuela and to the western industrial areas passes through it.” Traveling east, at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni rivers, near the site of the bridge across the Caroni, is Punta Vista. Here, according to von Moltke, are situated the activities that “symbolize the highest aspirations of the city”: the cultural center, institutions of higher education and research, and “high-quality” residences. (See figure 6.2.) Punta Vista’s buildings are in a park-like setting, “creating a unique environment at this unique site.” East of Punta Vista lies a Medical Center with a 280-bed general hospital. Finally we reach the lagoon on which San Felix sits, with apartment houses, sports center, shopping center, and a waterfront recreational area. “This series of nodes along the urban spine will establish visual continuity from the steel mill in the west to San Felix in the east; it will also provide continuity of experiences and activities. The development strategy has as its goal to use the Avenida Guayana as a catalyst for public and private investments through the creation of a strong image.”21 (See figure 6.3.)

The City of Disciplines

119

Figure 6.2

This architect’s rendering highlights tree-shaded semi-public spaces and pedestrian pathways for middle-class housing. (Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School of Design)

The geometric plan, embedded in the topography, fit well into the contours of the economic plan. It must be remembered, however, that Ciudad Guayana’s plan was not written on a blank slate. By the time the team arrived in Caracas and Ciudad Guayana, nearly 45,000 people were living there. Although most of the land was publicly owned, some private development already existed, and a municipality with a Chamber of Commerce and even a Rotary Club was already in place. The planners planned, but the residents, many of whom were oblivious to the existence of the CVG and the Joint Center, saw the development occurring around them as spontaneous or the result of efforts by “the companies” that operated the steel mill and the iron mines.22 The team’s anthropologist, Lisa Peattie, was charged with developing ideas on “customs and values” affecting housing and commerce, and with illuminating social problems arising from the development process. Peattie, one of the very few top team members who chose to live in Ciudad Guayana, saw the design process as a social process, and looked

120

Chapter 6

Figure 6.3

This plan for Ciudad Guayana shows the original town of San Felix, mining company towns, a steel mill, and a new bridge across the Orinoco. (illustration by John Langley Howard, courtesy Daniel Bernstein)

at the whole from the bottom up. “Anthropologists,” she wrote, “have a notable tendency to think small.”23 Lloyd Rodwin’s early assessments were very positive. In 1965 he opined: “Ciudad Guayana is now a lusty, booming town whose future is still in the balance.” The CVG showed “remarkable acumen and leadership” and maintained “an impressive reputation and political backing.” The relationship between the CVG and the Joint Center revealed differences in outlook and “point of view” but demonstrated the need for “sincere respect for different views and sympathy for failings.” Most importantly, however, “the outstanding lesson” of the Ciudad Guayana “experience” is that “political leaders and builders of cities can profit from the formal enlistment of the skill and resources of knowledge available in universities.”24 In his 1969 edited volume Planning Urban Growth, Rodwin republished the 1965 piece, adding a new chapter (“Reflections on Collaborative Planning”) that was considerably more candid about the variety of schisms that opened in the project at its inception.25 One of the most fundamental divides was described by the anthropologist Lisa Peattie as the Platonic City versus the Aristotelian City. The latter appears as a congeries of neighborhoods, ­ businesses, local

The City of Disciplines

121

­ rganizations, and individuals; the former is visualized most clearly in diagrams, o plans, and architectural renderings. The classical division in thinking (dating at least as far back as St. Isidore in the seventh century) about cities is the physical city (urbs) versus the socio-political city (civitas). In this case, more popularly, it can be seen as plans vs. people. One team member is recalled to have remarked: “Willo [von Moltke, the urban designer] lives in the Platonic City; Lisa [Peattie, the anthropologist] lives in the Aristotelian City.”26 Rodwin thought of himself as a bridge between the two—a social reformer who, unlike the utopians, would base reform on good science. “Our main concern,” he told Peattie in 1983, “was to introduce social and economic considerations into planning. I thought that if you could introduce solid technical thinking, it would be solid thinking socially.”27 Rodwin was a liberal reformer who wished to plan not only for development but also for community and a humane society. He believed, not without nuance, that the social sciences would provide the path. Other specialists inevitably saw the city through different sets of eyes. An old proverb sagely explains that “to a man with a hammer, the whole world is a nail.” Accordingly, each discipline possessed its own tool, and its own set of priorities. The economists’ goal, industrial growth, set the framework. Their vision did not include the social or the aesthetic. The urban designers, however, added to it the goal of a “livable” city of beauty, one that was aesthetically pleasing and provided desirable amenities. The transportation planners focused on efficiency of movement, a potential source of conflict with the designers. The anthropologist, who described herself as a liberal with a “commitment to the underdog,” lived at the “site,” whereas the economists, planners, and designers felt no need to do so and visited from Caracas. The anthropologist, reprovingly, saw the planners’ efforts as aimed toward “a future middle class” and toward developing a model for future urban planning enterprises. Just as the planner of Brasilia refused to visit the site in order to avoid sullying the purity of his design, the designers and planners of Ciudad Guayana were reluctant to involve themselves with the city’s residents or, in some cases, their concerns. One of the directors of the Joint Center noted that “the current population was a small group of people compared to the population of the city of the future.”28 Another feature of the “Caracas versus the site” split was the inevitable divide between the perspectives of the Venezuelan leadership of the CVG and

122

Chapter 6

their American consultants. The head of the CVG, Colonel Rafael Alfonzo Ravard, possessed a reputation, according to Peattie, for “clean technocratic administration.” MIT trained, he presented himself as an engineer with engineering proclivities. As a technocrat, Alfonzo Ravard was able to survive the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule under Betancourt. One American staff member reported that Alfonzo Ravard’s main interest was the Guri Dam and its hydroelectric facilities; “Ravard liked electric power.” A Venezuelan member confirmed that he “wanted to justify the dam.” The high-level administrators around Alfonzo Ravard were bound to him personally as well as professionally. According to Peattie, they were all Catholics, products of the Caracas Jesuit school, and either Opus Dei activists or in the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano. Alfonzo Ravard’s engineers were project oriented and viewed the American planners as idealists somewhat out of touch with the hard realities of Venezuelan development.29 The American planners, generally, were far more sensitive to the social aspects of the enterprise, and were as a group politically to the left of Alfonzo Ravard and his associates, and ethnically and religiously more diverse. In his 1965 assessment Rodwin guardedly referred to “deep rooted differences in outlook between the Venezuelan experts and their foreign consultants from the U.S.” By 1969 Rodwin was willing to be more explicit. Most of his people, he said, were “do-gooders,” and the Venezuelans wanted to prevent the Ciudad Guayana locals “from botching up the job.” He noted that his desire to collaborate with the Central University of Venezuela had been squelched by the leadership’s firm admonition that the academic group was “infested with left-wing and irresponsible elements.”30 The resultant effort was inevitably a compromise of visions. Today Ciudad Guayana is a city of more than 800,000 stretching 25 miles along the Orinoco. It is an important port. Its population is growing relatively fast, owing to its continuing economic importance.31 The dreams of its Joint Center planners are, nonetheless, not necessarily embedded in the life of the city. Peattie’s 1987 retrospective reviewed the original goals and the apparent results. The Joint Center planners wanted “economic efficiency, amenity, social equity and community.” In 1987 the city lacked all four. Regarding efficiency, Peattie described a city in which 75 percent of the population lived at one end of a linear city while two-thirds of the employed worked at the other end. The long commute was subject

The City of Disciplines

123

to bottlenecks and delays over a bridge and business districts. Both parts of the city lacked amenities. San Felix was still a shantytown with badly paved or unpaved streets. Only one-third of the houses were connected to the water system. Many children remained unschooled. Peattie excoriated the social inequity. The CVG invested almost 40 times as much per capita in the upper-class sections as in the working-class districts. It was not surprising, therefore, that Ciudad Guayana lacked community. Peattie reported “strong social segregation within the urban area.”32 Where does the fault lie? One can blame the limitations of the planners, the politics of the situation, outside interference, or the very essence of planning. The beauty of planner’s dreams is always sullied by hard reality. In the case of Ciudad Guayana, as one Venezuelan economist said, “No matter how well they plan it, people keep moving in and messing it up.”33 But in the end, Rodwin’s dream of creating a City of Disciplines, the social science answer to urban problems, remained unattainable. If Lloyd Rodwin’s multi-disciplinary “urban studies” approach did not— in this case—meet its practitioners’ high expectations, there were others who envisioned the “new city” terrain with different eyes. For some of them, the dramatic successes of engineering and science during and after World War II in cooperatively developing both military and civilian technologies was a lesson to be carried over to the increasingly pressing problems of the American city. Moreover, the proven ability of intersectoral coordination (i.e., combining the intellectual, economic, and political resources of academe, government, and industry) to accomplish even visionary goals could be brought into play.34 One such effort was spearheaded by the ­ scientist-­engineer Athelstan Spilhaus. Born in South Africa, Spilhaus received ad­vanced degrees at MIT (M.S., 1938), and Cape Town (Ph.D., 1948). His scientific research centered on upper atmosphere meteorology and oceanography; his interests ranged even more widely. He was the inventor of the bathythermograph, a device that made possible the measurement of ocean temperatures and depths from a moving vessel. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946, and in 1949 he was appointed dean of the Institute of Technology at the University of Minnesota, a position he held until 1966.35 In 1966, before leaving the University of Minnesota, Spilhaus wrote an article for the Minneapolis Tribune proposing an experimental city in which new technologies for urban living could be developed, tested, and used. It

124

Chapter 6

would be a laboratory and a pilot plant for new systems, such as his own ideas for urban recycling, urban transportation systems, and environmental balance. Spilhaus enlisted as allies Otto Silha (a University of Minnesota trustee and the Tribune’s publisher) and Wayne Thompson (the city manager of Oakland, California, who had organized a conference to examine how NASA technologies could be applied to urban problems).36 Spilhaus elaborated on his vision in an address before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in December 1967. Just as Lewis Mumford was abandoning his faith in the renewing promise of neotechnics, Spilhaus revived and reinterpreted in contemporary terms the vision of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford. In this address, later published in Science, Spilhaus proposed the “development of a system of dispersed cities of controlled size . . . surrounded by ample areas of open land. The proposed Minnesota Experimental City will be a prototype.” The initial planning committee included Silha, Thompson, and Spilhaus, plus Walter Vivrett and Max Feldman, so that business, industry and the University of Minnesota were all represented. The first year’s funding was a joint effort of ten private industrial firms and three federal cabinet departments (Housing and Urban Development; Health, Education and Welfare; Commerce). The Minnesota legislature was soon brought in and supplied further backing. Spilhaus added, as well, a national steering committee that included the inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, the economist Walter Heller, General Bernard Schriever, the University of Minnesota political scientist Malcolm Moos, the theologian Martin Marty, Whitney Young of the Urban League, and others.37 Spilhaus’s address renewed the Garden City idea, updating neotechnics to include not only the application of the latest technologies, but also research and development: Planning, constructing, populating and managing a dispersed city highly suitable for industry, commerce and human occupation will require the leadership, imagination and enthusiasm of scientists, industrialists and educators alike. We must be prepared to discard convention and to experiment with new and radical ideas. We must utilize the most advanced methods of construction, transportation, communications, waste removal and city management.

For this “demonstration model” approach to succeed, a “blank slate” must be prepared. An entirely new city, far from and independent of existing

The City of Disciplines

125

metropolises, must be fashioned. New technologies such as atomic power enable us to build cities even in desert areas, to desalinate ocean water, and to use the residue to fertilize areas vast enough “to feed the entire populations of ten cities the size of the proposed experimental city.” The Minnesota Experimental City (abbreviated MXC) would be built on an enormous underground substructure housing power and utility lines, storage facilities for water and building materials, heating plants and cold storage, underground pipes for wastes, and underground parking. Police, ambulance, and emergency services would utilize underground roadways. Above ground, at least parts of the city would be under a temperature-­controlled dome two miles in diameter. Transportation above ground would be free. “It is obvious to me, “Spilhaus concluded, “that we must use all of our land for living, not just tiny fractions of it. To do this we must look at solutions that envisage urban dispersal, and if we are to disperse into new planned cities, a national experimental cities program is an urgent must.”38 The Experimental City effort would be based at the University of Minnesota, which would invite “interested national experts from many disciplines.”39 In 1969 the state of Minnesota created a Minnesota Experimental City Authority with a two-year appropriation. The work of design was funded with private contributions totaling more than $500,000. Representatives of the Ford Motor Company, the Boise Cascade Company, North Star Research, the Dayton Hudson Corporation, and Northern Natural Gas all had representatives in the early planning stages.40 Martin Marty has left a wry account of his service on the steering panel: The real theorist behind this was a great technocrat, Athelstan Spilhaus who could never see something without asking how technology could improve it. When he retired from Minnesota to Florida, the golf course people complained that metal tees were always there and were grinding up the mowers. And he thought, “I have a good idea.” He compacted manure into tees and therefore when you just leave them there, they’ll disintegrate and they’ll fertilize the greens. What he didn’t know was that a lot of guys in the locker room pick their teeth with their tees!

Marty also recalled: R. Buckminster Fuller—Mr. Twenty-First Century—was on the panel. . . . We were to build a city—utopia—of two hundred and fifty thousand people. It had to be at least seventy-five miles from any other urban centre. It would be built around

126

Chapter 6

a branch of the University of Minnesota; 3M and all the other big firms would have a base there. We thought of everything.41

A site in Aitkin and Cass counties, near Swatara, was selected. An opposition group, Save Our Northland, emerged. Its president, Dale LaRoque of Grand Rapids, organized a marathon walk to oppose the Experimental City. The group began a campaign of letter writing and an effort to pack hearing rooms of the legislature with opponents was undertaken. Legislators began to be concerned about what was originally seen as a project without serious opposition. At the same time, cost estimates began to rise sharply. A report to the legislature estimated the costs at between $10 billion and $15 billion. Fuller’s idea for a covering dome was seen by some as the last straw. Whatever the causes, the result was that the Minnesota Legislature denied further requests for funds for land acquisition, and the Minnesota Experimental City died.42 Though never implemented, the MXC initiative is an indicator of a deep vein of confidence in the ability of new technologies to resolve problems created, in part at least, by old technologies. MXC also provides ample testimony to the resilience and continued power of the Garden City idea and to the hope of neotechnics. The French government was more successful, up to a point, in mounting a multidisciplinary new city in the 1960s. Le Vaudreuil is located in the lower Seine valley about 15 miles southeast of Rouen, a city of oil refineries and textile factories. On the axis of a major transportation corridor between Paris and Le Havre, it sits astride not only the river route but also an electric railway, a major Normandy highway, and a nexus of oil, gas, and electrical lines.43 The original rationale for the new town was to help alleviate the growing population pressure on central Paris without strangling the capital city in suburban sprawl. Among some eight new towns planned for the capital region, Le Vaudreuil was conceived as a self-sustaining satellite city with its own industrial core. The French government appropriated the equivalent of $120 million for planning, housing, and public works for Le Vaudreuil. Under a bilateral agreement between Presidents Georges Pompidou and Richard Nixon, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development cooperated in the venture, which was to serve as a model for the development of new urban technologies. In 1967, the Délégation Général à l’Aménagement Territoire et à l’Action Régionale (DATAR—the French government agency charged with France’s five-year national development plan) designated Le Vaudreuil

The City of Disciplines

127

an experimental city and projected an eventual population of 140,000. Having studied the weaknesses and the strengths of British new town planning extensively, the French planners wished to avoid “over-planning” (by which they meant static and self-contained planning). They envisioned an organic evolution from a 500-acre central core (“le germe de ville”), with the population growing slowly from about 15,000 in 1970 to 140,000 by 2000. (See figure 6.4.) The multi-disciplinary team also had to find a way to navigate around the powerful legacy in France of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose bold artistic vision of urban reconstruction was fundamentally antithetical to their cautious, technocratic approach.44 Rather than dispersing cities, Le Corbusier had called for concentrating urban populations in “immeubles villas” (large blocks of stacked apartment modules) and, even more radically, in monumental, high-density central skyscrapers surrounded by green spaces. According to the satellite-city model, Le Vaudreuil was to have its own employment base in an industrial zone centered on the manufacture of plastics and pharmaceuticals. Anchors for the new area included the pharmaceutical firm Upjohn and new production laboratories of the Pasteur Institute, which the French parliament decided to locate in the new technocity. Construction plans also included a National Agricultural Engineering School.45 It would be neither a company town nor an industrial dormitory. Zoning would be kept minimal, with shops, businesses, and light industry interspersed with housing. Besides absorbing overflow population in the capital region, the new town of Le Vaudreuil had a second major goal: to serve as a model for the abatement of urban air and river pollution. New kinds of systems would reduce pollution and costs. For example, solid wastes would be transported under ground to treatment plants and incinerators, helping heat the city. As at MXC, there would be underground storage, and also underground parking for automobiles, although the use of automobiles would be discouraged. Above ground, walkways would encourage pedestrian traffic, and microcenters of commercial areas would encourage residents to walk, not ride. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent fourteen representatives, all of whom resided either at the site or in Paris. The French engineer-in-chief, Jean-Paul Lacaze, organized a multi-disciplinary team of about thirty specialists, including architects, designers, urbanists,

128

Chapter 6

Figure 6.4

This map of Le Vaudreuil, published in Science, shows industrial and recreational areas. (reprinted with permission from AAAS)

The City of Disciplines

129

environmentalists, demographers, psychologists, sociologists, programmers, experts in industrial development, and futurists.46 Lacaze sent this team to Washington to consult with American experts.47 With the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and heightened environmental awareness in the United States, the American team was particularly interested in observing the French government’s multidisciplinary approach to pollution reduction. According to a State Department cable on the ­project,48 the principal value of the Le Vaudreuil experiment lies in a unique development of techniques, probably over a considerable time scale, for multidisciplinary environmental planning and management and for the practical application of pollution control measures to urban development. It is expected that standar[d]s, regulations, measurement methods, monitoring, measuring and abatement equipment and citizens’ participation will be investigated for air, water, noise, solid waste, ecology and other environmental factors, all within the framework of a comprehensive approach to the improvement of the quality of the urban ­environment and the protection of nature.

Although the Garden City movement may have had few followers in France, the environmental city concept can nevertheless be seen as a spiritual descendant of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City.49 Despite (or perhaps because of) the impressive array of governmental sponsors, opposition to Le Vaudreuil arose at once. Uprooted landowners and local residents fearful of a major alteration in their way of life ­condemned Le Vaudreuil as a monstrous creation of technocrats.50 Skeptics of the claims of Le Vaudreuil’s pollution-control experts also soon raised their voices. Rather than a “city without smoke, pollution, without escaping ­gases . . . where one can see the sky, where you can fill your lungs,” according to a Paris Match exposé, there would be a city of noxious gases spewed forth by the textile firm Sica.51 However, resigned to inevitable urbanization and disdaining the urban sprawl infecting most postwar growth, most in the area accepted the new town. By 1977, 1,300 residences had been built.52 But the obstacles to the de novo creation of a city made themselves apparent. By the year 2000, the population of the town, renamed Val-de-Reuil in 1984, was only about 14,000, one-tenth of the original estimate. Perhaps too close to Rouen and too far from Paris, Val-de-Reuil still struggles.

130

Chapter 6

Neither social science, nor engineering futurism, nor Le Vaudreuil’s flexible planning solved the conundrum of the new town. Jane Jacobs, author of the 1961 book The Death and Life of American Cities, was an influential critic of postwar urban renewal and planning schemes. Distrustful of beforethe-fact blueprints that governed the lives of city dwellers, she was a thorn in the side of bureaucrats, city planners, regional visionaries, and academic planners. Lewis Mumford and others scorned “Mother Jacobs’ home remedies” and insisted that not all urban areas could be her beloved Greenwich Village. However, her critique of the planning enterprise remains powerful and influential.

7 Te c h n o -N osta l gia and the New U rban ism

In 1996, the Walt Disney World Company opened for settlement a new town in Florida and bestowed on it the upbeat name “Celebration.” The origins and the character of this new place shed considerable light on the ideas of progress, the ideas of urban design, and the ideas of technology’s role in society that are held by important elements of American culture. Though its small-town visage effectively disguises it, Celebration is as much an industrial city as Ivrea, Italy or Gary, Indiana. The industry is entertainment, and the heart of it is what Southern California calls “The Industry”: the film business. With Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney built on the popular success of his feature-length cartoon movies by pioneering a multimedia link with the tourist trade. Today the town of Celebration sits amidst a budding technopolis, an attempt to create a “Florida High Tech Corridor.” The regional technology experiment, still in its early stages, is anchored by several central Florida universities and by Space Coast companies allied with NASA. The Orlando branch of Walt Disney Imagineering helps anchor this twenty-first-century high-tech complex.1 Indeed, Walt Disney World Resort’s importation of talent for its creative industries helped create the skilled labor pool undergirding this regional initiative. Undoubtedly, many of these knowledge workers and their families call Celebration home. Still, despite these local developments, it would be a mistake to confuse Celebration and its industries with an ordinary high-technology region. As we will suggest in this chapter, Celebration may represent a new stage for the techno-city, a transcendent realm located somewhere between the real and the imagined. Celebration began as Walt Disney’s utopian dream, born of the technological optimism of the 1920s and the 1930s—the optimism that culminated

132

Chapter 7

in the representations of the future city at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New York. This potent vision took concrete form in Disney’s theme parks and, especially, in his plan for a real urban development that was to be known as EPCOT (standing for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow). The original concept drew broadly on American technical enthusiasms in urban design, exemplified by Henry Ford’s 75-mile city, by Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse and City of Towers, and even by Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. It is a tradition that persists in the “futuropolis” ideas of Paolo Soleri.2 These exemplars of rational planning married to unbounded technical pro­gress were intended, through architecture, spatial configurations, ­ transportation systems, and other infrastructure, to shape the behaviors of the inhabitants for the better. This chapter will trace the evolution of Walt Disney’s new town idea from EPCOT through the succeeding generation of Disney planners who brought to the enterprise new ideas of urban design and future-oriented technologies appropriate to the 1990s. Along with the “New Urbanism” and the emphasis on the new information technologies, there is in Celebration evidence of a continued belief in technology’s power to shape human behavior and forms of social organization, which fits very comfortably in the well-defined Disney corporate formula for success. The incongruities inherent in this attempt to mold society via planning and high technology will be evident in the history of the development of Disney’s new town. After 1955, when Disneyland Park opened at Anaheim, California, the Disney company found itself in an entirely new situation. It had gained a great deal of experience in matters that were far from its original business of animation, including transportation, electronic systems, crowd manipulation, and the efficient handling of huge numbers of people. In short, the Disney Company was facing problems that cities faced daily. It had also established an international reputation for ingenuity and innovation. In 1963, before a Harvard University audience, the developer James Rouse—the creator of Columbia, Maryland, and a pioneer of “recreational shopping” venues such as Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and Harborplace in Baltimore—asserted that “the greatest piece of urban design in the United States today is Disneyland.”3 Walt Disney was pleased with this attention and liked to think optimistically of his role in molding the future. Disney conceived the idea of a city that would be a living experiment show-

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

133

ing the way for others. According to the Disney Family Museum, “Walt imagined Epcot as a real city, in which tens of thousands of people could work and live—and enjoy the latest technologies produced by American corporations.”4 “EPCOT,” Disney said, “would be like the city of tomorrow ought to be . . . a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American industry and research.” In Walt Disney’s original vision, EPCOT was to be a model city for 20,000 Disney employees.5 (See figure 7.1.) Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, before Walt Disney World in Florida was built and before EPCOT could be established. But he left a film outlining his ideas, and by means of this film he “testified” posthumously before the Florida legislature. The futuristic city EPCOT would be laid out like a wheel, the hub containing a downtown under an air-conditioned dome. The 50-acre downtown would contain a 30-story hotel, a convention

Figure 7.1

“Project X,” an early conception of the city EPCOT, as rendered by George Rester and painted and modified by Herbert Ryman (1966). (© Disney Enterprises, Inc.)

134

Chapter 7

center, theaters, restaurants, shops, and office buildings. There would be a minimum of traffic; monorails would connect the center with the residential areas. High-density apartments and low-density housing in greenbelts would serve a population of 20,000.6 In the film that was shown to the Florida legislature, Disney asked for exemptions from existing building codes and regulations so that the Disney company would have the “freedom to work with American industry” and the “flexibility” . . . to keep pace with tomorrow’s world.”7 His wish was granted in the form of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which has surprising—even startling—autonomy.8 From Disney’s viewpoint, the Reedy Creek Improvement District drastically reduced the prospect of messy politics interfering with the plan. It was necessary, Disney believed, both to protect the company’s interests and the technocratic version of ­utopia—an experimental city—that he was proffering. Walt Disney’s plans were a variation on optimistic, consumption-­oriented utopian dreams like those imagined in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward.9 And Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow was one of three volumes that reportedly inspired his urban vision. Walt Disney’s successors at the Disney corporation soon realized that Walt’s utopian plans placed great burdens on the company. If they were to be carried out, the company would be faced with enormous development costs, uncertain financial return, and perhaps the political problems that go along with a real population. EPCOT evolved into Epcot Center, an amusement park with ­ ambitions—some would say pretensions—to educate. Epcot Center is a huge tract of land to the south and east of the Magic Kingdom and the Disney Resort Hotels. It has two distinct areas: World Showcase (in which various “nations” are represented) and Future World. The latter has pavilions, each with a corporate sponsor, “celebrating the limitless potential of science, industry and technology in creating a better tomorrow.”10 Instead of Disney’s original idea of a living “experimental community,” the new version is a perpetual and vastly updated 1939 World’s Fair. It was a harbinger of what two decades later would become a relatively big business: edu-tainment. By the 1990s, the Walt Disney Company was in the hands of new people and under different corporate circumstances, but there was a great deal of continuity in its corporate culture. The old corporate culture—an extension of Walt Disney—was a business selling the American idea of progress driven by private initiative, know-how, up-to-dateness, and small-town values.

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

135

The new culture of the 1990s commodified these themes and wrapped them in new packages appropriate to the times: community, environmental sensitivity, social and ethnic diversity. It is important to note that in the business environment of Disney in the 1990s the amusement parks were no longer a mere addendum to a film empire; they were the driving force. Synergism between parks, films, and merchandising is a powerful Disney strategy. At Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort there emerged a ring of new “themed” hotels and resorts displaying such synergism. It was in this context that, in the early 1990s, Michael Eisner, then chief executive officer of the Walt Disney Company, began to see a future for the undeveloped land west and south of Epcot. Eisner was fascinated by architecture, building design, and development. Under his leadership, the Disney Company began a greatly accelerated development strategy, the crown jewel of which—sometimes referred to as “Dream City”—was an update of Walt Disney’s original concept of a high-technology experimental prototype city.11 “Dream City” was renamed Celebration (the choice, one version has it, of Eisner and his wife). Celebration is a town for a projected population of 20,000 in about 8,000 housing units. It comprises nearly 5,000 acres, plus a greenbelt of comparable size to “protect” it from clutter such as is perceived to surround California’s Disneyland. Not only had the Disney Company evolved from Walt Disney’s ideas under Eisner; prevailing ideas about architecture and urban design had changed too. In 1966, the artist’s rendition of EPCOT depicted structures drawn from 1930s “futuristic” ideas and a modernist city with greenbelt-protected suburbs. The original EPCOT city is strikingly reminiscent of the model city of 1960 that Norman Bel Geddes created for the 1939 World’s Fair. The new town of Celebration, on the other hand, draws heavily on post-modern architecture and on the New Urbanism (an urban design movement popular in the 1990s). Michael Graves is among the Walt Disney Company’s favored architects. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, pioneers of the New Urbanism, were brought into the planning of Celebration early on, and their Florida town, Seaside, is one of the models for Celebration. The concept of “New Urbanism” is somewhat loose, but most agree that its ingredients include higher density than most suburbs allow, a ­ disdain for the automobile and a preference for the pedestrian, a positive attitude

136

Chapter 7

toward public transit, public open spaces, mixed land usage, and easy access from residential areas to shops, schools, and workplaces. All of these together are intended to encourage a closer sense of “community,” a notion often invoked in this context but rarely defined. Here Celebration drew on the experiences of the builders of Seaside, a resort town of about 80 acres on the Gulf Coast.12 Some of these ideas were consonant with those of Walt Disney (for example, “pedestrianism” and “community”), but most of them developed in reaction to suburban sprawl and to the rise of edge or beltway cities—changes that occurred long after Disney’s demise. The Celebration Company opened the first phase of its master plan on July 4, 1996. By 2000, Celebration had about 1,500 residents in several hundred homes and apartments, a downtown, and a business park. The model utopian community was projected to take about 15 years to complete. Even in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Celebration is a complex, evolving phenomenon with many interesting facets (political, cultural, aesthetic, social, and technological). From the start it received a great deal of attention from journalists, scholars, and cultural critics. Of special interest is the cultural role of technology, both actual and ideological, in the new town.13 To the visitor, Celebration makes a bold and colorful first impression, but it seems at first glance far from the futuristic spectacle originally envisioned by Walt Disney. A dramatic tension between the past and the future has always been a hallmark of a Disney theme park. It is the tension between the nostalgia of Main Street, U.S.A. and the futuristic wonder of Tomorrowland. However, when it came to building Celebration—not a fantasy world, but a real community for real people—the past seemed to emerge triumphant. Celebration’s planners apparently believed that only a return to the past could truly serve the imperatives of the new urbanism. At first sight, then, futuristic technology—in fact, technology of any sort— seems to have receded into the background at Celebration. The in­formed visitor can easily discern the outlines of a Norman Rockwell scene in the making: tree-lined streets, old-fashioned architectural styles, picket fences, a golf course, a town square facing a small man-made lake. And everywhere there are front porches, which Celebration’s planners saw as a prerequisite for neighborhood intimacy. (See figure 7.2.) Conspicuously absent are any signs of advanced forms of public transportation (such as that old Disney standby the monorail), TV and radio towers, and other familiar accoutrements of modern technological society.

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

137

Figure 7.2

A view of Teal Avenue in Celebration, Florida. (© The Celebration Company)

Celebration suggests a new model for the future of technological society, a radical departure from the sort of futuristic thinking that animated Walt Disney and his generation. It is fixated less on physical transformation than on the essentially invisible but no less powerful applications of the telecommunications revolution—a revolution designed to give us both our past and our future at the same time. Despite their invisibility, advanced digital technologies played a prominent role in the Disney scheme for Celebration. Disney’s promotional ­brochure proudly listed technology as one of the five cornerstones anchoring the new ­community, the others being place, health, education, and community. Information and communications are the featured technologies. In the early days, the sales pitch to prospective owners was made in techno-jargon meant to appeal to enthusiasts of the Information Revolution. The telecommunications firm AT&T, which at the time had the contract to build the local ­communications network for Celebration, advertised its fiber-optics systems in breathless prose:

138

Chapter 7

When completed, the Celebration Network is envisioned to be a comprehensive, digital, fiber-to-the-curb network providing voice, data and video communication throughout the community. Plans called for the centerpiece of this infrastructure to be an AT&T SLC-2000 Access System with FLX Switched Digital Video. The ­System, a joint development between AT&T Network Systems and BroadBand Technologies Inc., is planned to enable Celebration subscribers to obtain services ranging from standard telephone service to full motion high-definition digital ­interactive multimedia services.14

To implement the system, AT&T planned to invite Celebration’s first 300 families to participate in a “living laboratory” designed to “analyze and evaluate consumer attitudes and behavioral data concerning proposed products and services.”15 Some of Celebration’s critics have decried its unbridled technological enthusiasm. Yet what is remarkable about Celebration, in view of the Disney Company’s record of technological flamboyance, is the attempt to temper this enthusiasm with humanistic concern. According to Eisner, “the real magic is not in the building, physical structures, or even in the technology. . . . We are interested in the civic infrastructure, because it is the human element that will make the community great.”16 Technology, in short, would seem tightly bonded to the community ideal, the most important of the five “cornerstones” set down by Celebration’s planners. In an interview with the present authors, Joe Barnes, Celebration’s architectural manager and for a long time the arbiter of its rigidly controlled architectural standards, paid very little attention to the technological infrastructure; that was someone else’s department. His eye was, rather, on aesthetic matters, on community values, and, above all, on tradition. In architectural terms, “tradition” meant conformity to the six architectural styles deemed acceptable for Celebration: Colonial Revival, Coastal, Classical, Victorian, Mediterranean, and French. Customers were able to buy ready-made designs, or they were free to use their own architects (who were then required to adhere to the detailed specifications contained in a mammoth “pattern book” developed by the Pittsburgh-based firm UDA Architects). According to Barnes, the styles adopted for Celebration’s apartments and homes reflected the demands of the market. Extensive surveys and focus groups had determined that the public preferred the psychological ­comforts

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

139

of pre-World War II architectural styles. Inspired by these responses, Celebration’s planners conducted extensive research in Southern vernacular architecture, which eventually provided the template for most of the town’s homes and apartment buildings. But Celebration’s downtown departed from this vernacular tradition, becoming instead a showcase for the creations of star architects. Among these are a post office by Michael Graves, a bank by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, a visitor center by Charles Moore, and a town hall by Philip Johnson. Cast in colorful pastels, the downtown is a study in a kind of conservative post-modernism. (See figure 7.3.) The only hint of futuristic fantasy is in Cesar Pelli’s impressively spired two-theater cinema. (See figure 7.4.) Although designed as part of the master plan, Celebration’s downtown looks less like a planned ensemble than a mélange of showpieces—a kind of architectural theme park. At Celebration—in sharp contrast to Buck Rogers-style futurism, in which ultra-modern skyscrapers, crystalline domes, soaring highways, and ­personal flying machines dominated or even defined imagined urban scenes— ­technology is discreetly hidden. Celebration’s technologies are underground, within the walls, or tucked in the garage behind the house. Disney’s planners clearly sensed that familiar versions of technological progress no longer sold

Figure 7.3

Celebration’s downtown. (© The Celebration Company)

140

Chapter 7

Figure 7.4

Celebration’s Associated Cinemas, designed by Cesar Pelli. Used by permission of The Celebration Company.

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

141

as they once had—at least when it came to how people want to live. They worked hard to give the impression of subordinating technology to human needs, rather than vice versa. In terms of technical expectations, a visit to the first phase of model homes in Celebration turned out to be almost anti-climactic. The only visible signs of technology were baseboard outlets for a central vacuum cleaner system and a slightly enhanced entertainment center housing a CD player, a computer station, a radio, a television, and a video recorder. Celebration’s developers did not claim that its technology per se was anything more than state-of-the-art. What was new, they claimed, was the application of an advanced fiber-optics network to the whole community environment. They were particularly proud of the Celebration School, where students “have access to the latest technology, and work in flexible ‘neighborhood’ classrooms with a team of teachers.” The network was designed to connect students’ homes with their schools and with an electronic library. The Celebration Health Center, designed by Robert Stern Architects “in the manner of a grand spa hotel” and emphasizing health maintenance, was similarly high-tech. Plans included telemedicine facilities, allowing doctors, for example, to monitor a patient’s heart rate and blood pressure via the network. Among other future benefits of Celebration’s information network promised by Disney were interactive banking, voting from home, virtual offices at home, home energy management, instant communication among the residences and between residents and community facilities and retail establishments, and, not least, electronic home security networks linking each resident to a central monitoring station.17 Clearly, however, Eisner and company had grand designs for this infrastructure. It was basic to their plan. The Disney Company’s faith in information technology as a cornerstone of community may indeed seem, to some, utopian fantasy, but it is nothing new; it is typical of the high—perhaps exaggerated—hopes frequently associated with the telecommunications revolution. Information technology is often seen as fostering egalitarianism, as shifting power from large urban centers to towns and villages, and as preserving person-to-person communication in mass society—all values of the “new urbanism.”18 Celebration’s communications system as originally designed was not only an advance into the future; it was also a technological fix. Within 10 years of Celebration’s opening, it was recognized that some of the early experiments

142

Chapter 7

in new urbanism were losing their original community spirit. According to reports from the new urbanist frontier, citizens in Columbia, Maryland have shown signs of putting self-interest before the welfare of the community. Evidence ranges from a preference for private over public schools to avoidance of neighbors at mailboxes, which were purposely clustered to promote encounters.19 In the face of these anti-communitarian trends, information networks offer both physical privacy and personal communication. In a way, the new digital technologies offer a virtual community should the physical community flag. Even if people decline to sit on all those front porches in Celebration, they can at least meet on the Internet. Even allowing for the fact that Celebration is still evolving, a visitor will find that there are remarkably few people on the street, and almost none on their porches. Whether the new information networks will work for or against the communitarian ethos so many desire is yet to be worked out on stages larger than Celebration. Perhaps the Celebration case study will ultimately illuminate the issue.20 Moreover, whether the new information networks ultimately empower the individual and the village or instead greatly enhance the power of central authorities is one of the great questions of modern technological society. The reaction to Celebration has been ambivalent in this respect. Those skeptical of Disney’s utopian aspirations emphasize the disturbing aspects of communications technologies, while the believers, of course, emphasize the positive.21 Critical reaction to Celebration has tended to reflect modern society’s general ambivalence about the Information Revolution. The initial public response to the opening of Celebration was extraordinary. So many customers lined up to purchase new homes in Celebration that the Company had to institute a lottery. Twelve hundred people paid $1,000 deposits just to make an appointment to discuss buying a lot.22 The winners were first in line to build residences in the new town, billed as “a nineteenthcentury town for the late twentieth century.” Not only potential residents, but also journalists, academics, architects, builders, and sightseers patrolled the streets of the downtown and the unfinished neighborhoods. The early appraisals, as expected, were mixed. John Kasarda of the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina was positive: “Disney again has its thumb on the pulse of the American public.” Patrick Burke of Michael Graves Architects declared “I think they’ve done the right thing. . . . I just wish

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

143

it had a different name.” Peter Miller, an urban planner at the University of Miami, opined on the allure of the Disney “name.” Visitors’ reactions varied. A retiree said “Anything Disney touches, everything they do is first class.” A psychologist from a nearby town said “This really scares me. I just asked the girl if she heard of the movie The Stepford Wives and she hadn’t. I’m not sure I believe that.” Some visitors rejected the insistent emphasis on community: “I want my privacy.”23 Some early residents, as if expecting McGuffey’s Reader, were dismayed by the experimental ideas for schooling. Some architectural and planning professionals, too, were dissenters. John Henry, an Orlando architect, called Celebration “a subdivision on steroids” and said “There is nothing cultural there, nothing scenic there. . . . A nucleus for a community it is not.” Aesthetically, Henry maintained, Celebration reeks of “pastel banality with homogeneous finish (due to single developer build-out of the entire ensemble and too much stucco finish).”24 A Florida developer who chose to remain anonymous said “It looks more like an amusement park to me. Everything is so cutesy and looks so artificial, like out of a Disney movie.”25 The Celebration concept found its market. Many people found the Disney corporation comforting. For example, the Erharts sold their home in the Maryland suburb of Rockville and moved to Celebration, where they spent more than $550,000 (1996 dollars) on their new home. “If it wasn’t Disney,” said Joe Erhart, “we wouldn’t be moving there.”26 Many willingly traded political responsibility for what they perceived to be a benevolent and protective corporate authority associated with the Disney image.27 In a perceptive account of his year in Celebration, the sociologist Andrew Ross emphasized the “blurring of the lines between public and private.” It was, he wrote, “the embodiment of something called the private-public realm.” Walt Disney made that the heart of his original concept, and his version of “private government” was part of its attractiveness to many of its residents. “Most Celebrationites,” according to Ross, “were attracted to the efficiency of private government. . . . Many spoke to me of their loss of faith in public institutions.”28 Their faith seems to lie with the Disney corporation and with its grip on the future. The sociologist Sharon Zukin pointed out that EPCOT joined “entertainment values to motifs of social control.” As originally conceived, it was to embody a “conservative utopia,” with comfort designed in and conflict designed out. Celebration appears to have confirmed her judgment.29

144

Chapter 7

On the surface it may seem that Celebration is not the high-tech utopia that Walt Disney envisioned shortly before his death. In a New Yorker article titled “Tomorrowland,” Witold Rybczynski wrote that Michael Eisner’s Celebration is actually the opposite of Walt Disney’s urban vision. Whereas Disney imagined a world in which problems would be solved by science and technology, Celebration puts technology in the background and concentrates on putting in place the less tangible civic infrastructure that is a prerequisite for community.30 But is it really the opposite? Celebration is a 1990s version of the blend of technology and old-fashioned values that Walt Disney held dear. Most journalists and commentators, when discussing Celebration, invoke the name of Norman Rockwell, conjuring up images of the small-town America of the past. But though outwardly Celebration may bring to mind Norman Rockwell, underneath it is more like Rockwell International, the aerospace company. The advertising for Celebration invoked the small-town, homespun image, but it also emphasized high technology. (See figure 7.5.) Early on, prospective residents were often reminded of the “feature-rich communications tapestry” provided by AT&T’s Advanced Technology Panel for Celebration.31

Figure 7.5

A promotional image from an advertisement for Celebration. (© The Celebration Company)

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

145

The Economist noted that “what people want in their homes . . . are all the conveniences and technology of modern life, but hidden in ‘timeless’ architecture.”32 Inside the small-town skin, a fiber-optics network was to link every resident to the Internet and to Celebration’s own network. When the industry standard changed, the ads claimed, so would Celebration’s advocacy. A brochure on Celebration’s “strategic alliances” boasts an impressive list of high-tech companies, including AT&T, Honeywell, and General Electric. Andrew Ross explains that these allies (which the Disney Company sometimes calls “coopetitors”) are there “to showcase their names and products.”33 Celebration was, in fact, a better-thought-out combination of Walt Disney’s Main Street nostalgia with his love for the “futuristic” than his original 1966 idea for EPCOT. Celebration was built on a shrewd “technonostalgia” that combines a yearning for a mythical “way it used to be” with a profound admiration for technical progress. In a deep sense, Celebration remained true to Disney’s enduring formula for success: draw out from within each of us our images and stereotypes, and use clever techniques to make them “real.” Whether by means of fairytale films, Epcot World Showcase pavilions, the Magic Kingdom Park, or resort hotels with simulated histories, the Disney visitor is furnished with memories of a simulated past. These “memories” reinforce the images or stereotypes that the visitor already possesses upon arrival. For example, in Epcot’s World Showcase France pavilion one finds men in berets, striped shirts, and neckerchiefs; in the Japan pavilion, women in kimonos; in the Germany pavilion, men in lederhosen. One guest excitedly exclaimed that he “saw more here in two hours than . . . in two weeks in Europe.” What Disney does, and does expertly, is draw out these constructed memories from each individual and make them tangible with flair, style, and technical wizardry. The simulation becomes, in a sense, more real than the original. While crowds are gaping at artificial alligators in some pirate’s lagoon in the Magic Kingdom Park, few are encountering real alligators a few short miles away in a Florida river. Celebration does precisely the same. It invokes a simpler, more neighborly life, one that draws more from Andy Hardy movies than from historical research or living memory. Consider this passage from a Celebration brochure titled “Downtown Celebration Walking Tour”:

146

Chapter 7

Before World War II, many Americans lived in small towns, enjoying a convivial and comparatively simple existence. The intimacy of small town life has vanished over the past five decades. As cities grew and suburbs sprawled, neighborliness became little more than a memory. Celebration is designed to offer a return to a more sociable and civic-minded way of life.

As one commentator has put it, Celebration “promises to enact memories that most Americans have never experienced but desperately desire.”34 But even though Celebration may present itself as old-fashioned in the best sense, it insists on its futuristic credentials. Consider this, from a brochure titled “Celebration Network”: Every apartment and home in Celebration will be linked by a fiber optic network that will carry telephone, video and all data services. The idea is old-fashioned oneon-one communication, but with sophisticated technology.

Russ Rymer, in a perceptive article titled “Back to the Future: Disney Reinvents the Company Town,” characterized Walt Disney as the Louis Pasteur of history—as a man who perfected ways to protect people from the viral effects of memory by injecting it back into them in a denatured form. As long as the technique was used in the service of amusement, it could be very amusing. Applied to public life, as it is in Celebration, it becomes something more grave.35 Savoring constructed memory is one thing; trying to “relive” it is another. Celebration’s planners understood very well that few citizens were prepared to return to a small-town past, even if that were possible—no matter how inviting the “memory.” Twentieth-century Americans left the security of small towns for the cities, and then the suburbs, for a variety of compelling reasons, including jobs, schools, health care, consumer goods, and cultural life. To be sure, a reverse trend is now under way. But, as we have seen, even carefully planned experimental communities such as Columbia are losing some of the communitarian ideals that were deemed so important by their founders. No small part of Disney’s genius in selling Celebration was to combine the inducements of a rose-tinted past with those of a fabricated future—a sort of reverse nostalgia. Disney advertises a new brand of futurism based on the promises of up-to-date technologies.36 Since the full implications of

Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism

147

new technologies are always only partially understood, what Celebration offers is as much an incompletely drafted hope as a reality. Whether these technological advantages can make the urban village work for a new generation of Americans remains to be seen.37 But, as Disney theme parks have proved beyond a doubt, a simulated past and a fantasy future make a potent blend—a blend that few consumers can resist. Celebration is, appropriately, our last example of the techno-city. We live in a world in which, by choice, artificial or virtual experiences increasingly substitute for real ones. Stage-set cities increasingly replace real ones as desirable tourist destinations. The popularity of Disneylands in Japan and France (with their ersatz visits to America’s Main Street and Wild West) and that of Florida’s Epcot (with its “France,” “Germany,” and “Japan” pavilions) attest to the trend. Las Vegas, too, has become Disney-fied—consider the Paris Las Vegas Hotel (with its Eiffel Tower), the New York, New York Hotel (with popular local landmarks conveniently bunched together), and the Venetian Hotel (with its “almost exactly to scale” Piazza San Marco). In a world in which one of the most important industries is entertainment, movies and television programs have become “experiences” for most people. All aspects of culture consequently tend to veer toward entertainment and are measured by its standards. Architecture becomes an “attraction”; museums are increasingly organized around “blockbuster” shows (Impressionism preferred); all levels of education are required to be amusing as well as edifying. So too is it with cities. Celebration is a fantasy to live in. To grasp this concept more fully, one need only visit the town in winter and witness, on the half-hour, the artificial snowfall. Children and adults in shorts and tank tops cheerfully frolic in ersatz snow. Truly, at one and the same time, it is jolly and creepy. Throughout the twentieth century, actual techno-cities were faced with contradictions, some of which were impossible to erase. An artificial ­experience, on the other hand, is much easier to control. Since we “experience” the world of fun and imagination at Walt Disney World Resort, the ­planners of Celebration ask (innocently enough), why not live in it?

C o ncl u s i on: T he Fate of the Industr ial Eden

Techno-cities, as we have defined them, abounded in the twentieth century, but we make no claims about the existence of a techno-cities “movement.” If not a movement, techno-cities represented an ideal. This new vision of technology in the country had its prophets. As seminal influences, certain names surface repeatedly, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis Mumford, and Tracy Auger among the most prominent. These men—who were aware of one another and who often referred to one another—went on to influence other visionaries and men of action: Herbert Rimpl, Vladimir Semionov, Franco Marinotti, Andrea Olivetti, Oskar Stonorov, James Marshall, Lloyd Rodwin, and Jean-Paul Lacaze. But, more than a dispassionate high ideal, techno-cities were inventions with politics, exemplars of ideology frozen in concrete, brick, and steel. An ideology is a framework of ideas that structures the way individuals and groups look at the world.1 These organized beliefs were part of the great early-­twentieth-­century obsession with the impact of modern science and technology on ­society. There was really only one basic question: Does ­science-based technology ultimately improve or worsen the human condition, and, if the latter, can technology heal what it has injured? As we have observed, every techno-city had at its core a deep structural tension, a fault line waiting to break. It was a tension arising from trying to bind together two seemingly opposed ideals: that of modern technology and industry and that of a pre-industrial Eden. Combining hopes or expectations for the future with a yearning for the past engendered what we term “techno-­nostalgia.” These were fundamental contradictions within the culture of modernity. Modernism brought with it the Machine and urbanization, forces widely celebrated as progressive and liberating. But to some it was a problematic

150

Conclusion

b­ enefactor. From the beginning, the modernist camp bred renegades, still believers, to be sure, but wary of the dark side of the modern. These dissenters focused on the human costs of technology. Were the benefits of the machine, automation, and the industrial city worth the degradation of work, the ­ravages to the natural and the human-built environment, the loss of community, and the wounds to the human spirit? Such views did not represent the abandonment of modernism, but rather exposed inner contradictions within modernist ideology. As David Harvey and Jeffrey Herf have pointed out, modernism both extolled and condemned technology.2 Unlike those radicals who called for destroying the machine and returning to a pre-­industrial Eden, the modernist reformers sought reconciliation between machines and society. Assuming that society and the environment are mutually shaping, their ­solutions were in effect evolutionary and ecological. They offered holistic and organic interpretations of the relationship between nature, technology, and community. At once fascinated and repulsed by the Machine, pioneering modernist critics like Sigfried Giedion and Lewis Mumford embodied the two sides of modernism. Reconciliation came in the form of holistic reintegration of man into his natural and artificial environments.3 Both regarded the aesthetics and spirit of the built environment as essential to man’s spiritual regeneration. The invention of the techno-city offered a concrete approach to harnessing a new kind of technology to the cause of harmony and community. Our city-builders approached technology as both problem and solution. This paradox is more generally a birth spasm of modernity, a concept redefined by industrialism during the course of the nineteenth century. The Industrial Revolution was a rapid, dramatic alteration in the conditions of life in Western European nations (led by Great Britain, France, and later Germany), and also in the United States. Driven by technology and new forms of industrial and commercial practice, the first Industrial Revolution created new social classes and drove dramatic increases in population, a rise in food production and distribution, and the creation of immense cities. These cities became both causes and effects of change. They became both the producers and the products of “the modern.” What defined “the modern”? As Marx and others saw, industrialism— especially in its capitalist form—instituted a regime of endless and seemingly limitless transformation. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx

The Fate of the Industrial Eden

151

and Engels described the new age: “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.”4 What defines modernity is the core belief that this constant change can be controlled and rationalized. The second industrial revolution, coming late in the nineteenth century, bonded science and technology, institutionalized that bond, and held out the promise of the production of knowledge and the fruits of knowledge— a cornucopia of new technologies. The dark side of industrialism, already apparent in London, Manchester, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and elsewhere, demonstrated the effects of congestion, pollution, and disease. And the cure? The remedy suggested was a blend of old and new, of past and present, of nature and artifice. Techno-cities used technology in two primary ways. Some were designed to support a dominant central technology; others incorporated new technologies in their infrastructures. Most used technology in both ways. Central technologies ranged from Salzgitter’s heavy industries in mining and steel, the TVA’s hydro-electric power, Willow Run’s bomber factories and Oak Ridge’s nuclear weapons plants to lighter research-based technologies in viscose at Torviscosa, pharmaceuticals at Le Vaudreuil, office machines in Ivrea, and entertainment technologies at Disney’s Celebration —Mumfordian neotechnics. Infrastructure technologies embraced innovative building techniques and materials like “Cemesto” (Oak Ridge) and “gas-concrete” (Salzgitter), public housing experiments at Willow Run, architectural modernism in Salzgitter and Ivrea, traffic and demographic studies produced for Ciudad Guayana, environmental plans for Salzgitter, Torviscosa, and Le Vaudreuil, and the Internet-based communications ­network designed into Celebration. Allowing for national and regional differences, techno-cities shared certain basic characteristics, similarities born of a common response to a changing international political, economic, and cultural environment. All represented a reaction against the classic industrial city. Most were rooted in Howard’s original Garden City concept: the three-way marriage of town and country and industry, and a faith in a revamped modern technology. They were designed to be towns of strictly defined geographical and population limits,

152

Conclusion

with ­walkable streets and distances, separate but closely connected work and residential areas, open air, recreation spaces, and greenbelts. For the most part, they also shared ideological goals: the renewal of mankind (Mussolini’s “uomo nuovo”), regionalism (Olivetti’s plan for the Valle d’Aosta, the Regional Planning Association of America’s ideals for Norris), community (Ivrea), organic ideologies (Rimpl’s concept for Salzgitter), the melding of agriculture and industry (Torviscosa and I-RUR in Olivetti’s Canavese), back to the soil (Salzgitter), and romantic love of Nature (Ivrea and, to some extent, Oak Ridge). Despite these common features, techno-cities displayed significant regional and national differences. They were designed as local solutions, with hoped-for wider implications. Back-to-the-soil dogmas, strongest in the 1930s and the 1940s, firmly rooted the techno-city in its place, where it occupied a unique ecological niche. Thus, Salzgitter resembled but did not mirror contemporary Torviscosa, nor was postwar Ivrea in any sense a clone of Fascist Torviscosa. All powerfully reflected different local conditions. The techno-city proved to be an exceptionally durable instrument, mainly because of its adaptability. It had none of the rigidities or limitations of a dyed-in-the-wool ideological movement. For more than a century, it served widely disparate agendas. Bellamy, Howard, Geddes, and Mumford used it as an escape from the industrial city. Wedding utopian­ ism with innovative technology, they provided the foundations of the techno-city concept. Recovering from World War I and confronting the Depression, governments in the United States, Russia, Germany, and Italy seized on the techno-city for purposes of cultural and economic regeneration. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, Mussolini’s Autarchy, and Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich produced technologically enhanced Edens that were to be the birthplaces of a “new man.” The techno-city of the late 1920s and the 1930s thus had a special romantic allure. The realities of World War II dispelled much of this romanticism, but the mystique of the techno-city lived on, turning now to war work. Drawing on experiences in the TVA and on futuristic exhibitions at World’s Fairs, the planners of Oak Ridge hoped that the Garden City notion combined with modern building techniques would mitigate the harsh realities of working and living in the strange new world of nuclear weapons. They undertook the ultimate challenge of converting a nuclear weapons site into

The Fate of the Industrial Eden

153

a classic American small town, a feat of architectural alchemy. The technocity seemed to provide the answer. It even found a place in the postwar urban dispersal movement as a means of coping with nuclear apocalypse. But despite these war-related projects, the techno-city ideal seemed to be in retreat. A revival of a sort occurred in northern Italy. Restoring community was an aim for all techno-cities, but in Adriano Olivetti’s vision of Ivrea, comunità became a supreme goal. A man of grand philosophical and aesthetic vision, Olivetti saw in his family’s original company town the basis for a new form of community that would restore war-ravaged Italy to its former glory. With him we have the vision of utopia as work of art. Indeed, it was a reaction against grand artistic approaches that led down another road to utopia. Lloyd Rodwin and like-minded planners turned to scientific multi-disciplinary methods that signaled a major shift in the approach to the techno-city. Ciudad Guayana was undertaken by the MITHarvard team not primarily for the sake of Venezuelans but as an experiment to prove the efficacy of their theoretical approach. This was a significant turning point for the concept of the techno-city. The sociologist Max Weber distinguishes between two rationalities: Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) and Wertrationalität (values rationality). The former is the sagacity of means; the latter establishes the ends or goals. Instrumental reason helps us to move efficiently from point A to point B. Values rationality helps us to define or understand those end points. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea, subsequently embraced by Geddes and Mumford, was a means to a clearly defined “values rational” goal: namely, a humane life, harmonious with the natural world and, owing to neotechnics, in tune as well with the constructed environment. This value-permeated, idea-rich end is often termed “utopian.” But instrumental reason tends to crowd out other forms of rationality. Technique, especially successful technique, has its own special magnetism. It was the plan, the technique of marrying country and city, of uniting the natural and the artificial, that was taken up, at first by the newly emerging profession of city planners and subsequently as a means of national regeneration by state planners during the course of the 1930s. Part of the planning vocabulary by the post-World War II period, it fit snugly into atomic age decentralization and diffusion civil defense strategies. It was the postwar

154

Conclusion

reconstruction of Europe that gave Olivetti and his disciples the opportunity to resurrect the goals of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford as part of his values-centered movement of comunità. By the mid 1950s, in most of the Western world, such utopianism had begun to appear quaint. The planned city was not only to be professionalized, it was to be scientized and engineered. Ciudad Guayana benefited from a team of social scientists; Minnesota Experimental City was planned as a “prototype”; Le Vaudreuil’s planning was to be “flexible.” In the end, even the powerful instrumentality of science and technology would give way to the power of marketing. Celebration, Florida marks the transformation of the utopian socio-political goals of the founders into a myth—a myth, moreover, commodified and attractively packaged. All the techno-cities examined in this book still exist today. Their core industries continue to sustain them. Some of those industries, including Torviscosa’s SNIA/Caffaro and the nuclear industries at Oak Ridge, are thriving. But, with the possible exception of the contested ideals of Celebration, it is fair to say that little of the initial idealism lives on. These techno-cities survive as hollow shells. This is not surprising, since their time has passed; there is nothing quite so stale as last year’s utopia. What finally defeated them, however, were the inner contradictions of the attempt to combine big technology and nature. In short, the center was too weak to hold. The machine in the garden is a seductive dream, but a problematic reality. Hence, judged by the standards they had set for themselves, Norris, Torviscosa, Salzgitter, Ivrea, Ciudad Guayana, and other towns discussed in this book were ultimately failures. Perhaps the model was flawed from the beginning. In the final chapter of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs criticized Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model as a simplistic solution to the complex problem of cities—simplistic because it was based on outdated physical science: Garden City planning theory had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century, and Ebenezer Howard attacked the problem of town planning much as if he were a nineteenth-century physical scientist analyzing a two-variable problem of simplicity. The two major variables in the Garden City concept of planning were the quantity of housing (or population) and the number of jobs. These two were conceived of as simply and directly related to each other, in the form of relatively closed systems. In turn, the housing had its subsidiary variables, related to

The Fate of the Industrial Eden

155

it in equally direct, simple, mutually independent form: playgrounds, open space, schools, community center, standardized supplies and services. The town as a whole was conceived of, again, as one of the two variables in a direct, simple, town-greenbelt relationship. As a system of order, that is about all there was to it. And on this simple base of two-variable relationships was created an entire theory of self-contained towns as a means of redistributing the population of cities and (hopefully) achieving regional planning.5

Jacobs argues that cities are not two-variable mechanical systems but living, organized structures with myriad variables—systems of organized complexity. They are organizations of living entities. And, as such, cities must be understood in biological rather than physical terms. From her vantage point of the early 1960s, Jacobs argued that solutions will come from new approaches suggested by the biological sciences. If we accept Jacobs’s argument, the techno-city was based on an obsolete form, a simplistic utopian scheme for a complex age, and perhaps destined for failure. Yet we would argue that the techno-city did evolve beyond Howard’s Garden City model in some of the directions Jacobs suggests. In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford advanced a theory of “organic mechanism” to supersede the classical mechanical view of the universe.6 This theory, Mumford contended, would reconcile the machine and urban civilization. The organic metaphors Rimpl used in Salzgitter, endemic to Nazi thought, similarly invoked contemporary shifts in scientific paradigms from the physical to the vitalistic and biological, with cell theory providing a model of hierarchical organization for the town. More generally, Olivetti’s artistic approach represented an attempt to grasp the living complexity of human social organization. In comparison, perhaps the attempt to scientize the process of techno-cities at Ciudad Guayana or Minnesota Experimental City was a step backward in engineering human relations. The fact remains that the techno-city was a complex historical phenomenon whose rise and fall require intricate scrutiny. In any event, the techno-city experiment had largely run its course by 2000. Having lost that inner spark of idealism, most techno-cities have been absorbed in conurbations as industrial nodes or as bedroom communities, dissolving into suburbia. Techno-cities have been succeeded by “technopoles” such as Northern California’s Silicon Valley, the Boston area’s Route 128, and Sophia Antipolis near Nice; by the growing fad for technology corridors

156

Conclusion

around the world; by the rise of edge cities such as Tysons Corner, Virginia; and by “science cities” such as Tsukuba, on the outskirts of Tokyo. These new forms can be dynamic and economically robust, but they are devoid of utopian impulse and increasingly immersed in their own urban problems. In comparison with their rather soulless successors, despite repugnant fascist dogmas in 1930s Germany and Italy, our fading techno-cities might be judged bold social experiments. Most of them arose in response to crises— urban blight, disease, social and political revolution, national humiliation, economic depression, environmental devastation, war (even nuclear war). In such trying circumstances, visionaries of various stripes dared to dream of inventing a new Eden. Although no city plan could ever live up to such high expectations, each of these ventures offered hopes for a new beginning and, at a least for a time, made those hopes into a living reality.

Notes

Introduction

1.  Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Houghton Mifflin, 1960 [1854]), 215. 2.  Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Blackwell, 1987), 419–420. 3.  Robert Fishman, “The Bounded City,” in From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, ed. K. Parsons and D. Schuyler ( Johns Hopkins ­University Press, 2002), 61; Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia (Macmillan, 1988), 47, 133; Françoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (Braziller, 1970), 30. 4.  David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1989), 276–277, 303. 5.  Bill Kirkpatrick argues in his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation Localism in American Media, 1920–1934 (University of Wisconsin, Madison) that the localnational split influenced the shape of early American broadcasting. 6.  Robert Wiebe defined it as a split between local power and politics and “nationalclass values” (Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy, University of Chicago Press, 1995, 144–149). Chapter 1

1.  Ruskin (1881) is quoted in Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought 1820–1840 (Columbia University Press, 1985), 39. 2.  Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (Macmillan, 1988), 2–7. Our understanding of Howard also owes a significant debt

158

notes to chapter 1

to Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (Basic Books, 1977), 23–88. 3.  Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History ­(Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953), passim. 4.  Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 27–28. 5.  Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Signet, 1960 [1888]), 73. 6.  Ibid., 43. On Bellamy as a city planner see John Mullin and Kenneth Payne, “Thoughts on Edward Bellamy as City Planner: The Ordered Art of Geometry,” Planning History Studies 11 (1997): 17–29. 7.  Stephen V. Ward, “Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times,” in From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, ed. K. Parsons and D. Schuyler ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 19. 8.  Fishman, Urban Utopias, 53–54; Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 30. 9.  Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 40–42. 10.  Ibid.,57 11.  Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F. Osborn (MIT Press, 1965), 44–49. We are using the edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow edited by Osborn, which restores the elisions from the 1898 edition. 12.  Ibid., 51–57. 13.  See Peter Hall and Colin Ward, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard (Wiley, 1998), 25–28 14.  Fishman, Urban Utopias, 27. 15.  Dugald Macfadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement (MIT Press, 1970), 25–26. 16.  Fishman, Urban Utopias, 57–62. 17.  Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 79.

notes to chapter 1

159

18.  Fishman, Urban Utopias, 64–68, 80; Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 92–98, 103. 19.  Ward, “Ebenezer Howard,” 28. 20.  Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 98. 21.  P. Geddes, “Civics: as Applied Sociology,” in F. Galton, E. Westermarck, P. Geddes, et al., Sociological Papers, volume 1 (Macmillan, 1905), 105. 22.  Ibid., 106, 119–123; Geddes, “Civics: as Concrete and Applied Sociology, Part II,” in F. Galton, P. Geddes, M. Sadler, et al. Sociological Papers, volume 2 (1906), 83–92. 23.  Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1950 [1915]), 32–42. 24.  Pierre Clavel, “Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes,” in From Garden City to Green City, ed. Parsons and Schuyler, 47–52. 25.  Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life (Dial, 1982), 144–149. For broad interpretations of Mumford and Geddes, see Thomas Hughes and Agatha Hughes, eds., Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual (Oxford University Press, 1990). 26.  Arthur Molella, “Mumford in Historiographical Context,” in Lewis Mumford, ed. Hughes and Hughes, 23–27. On Geddes, see also Rosalind Williams, “Mumford as an Historian of Technology,” in ibid., 43–65. 27.  Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (Boni and Liveright, 1922), 33, 138, 205, 218, 229–230. 28.  Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes, Correspondence, ed. F. Novak Jr. (Rout­ ledge, 1995), 43–153. 29.  Mumford to Geddes, 25 March 1923, in ibid., 172 30.  Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 115. See also Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America, ed. C. Sussman (MIT Press, 1976), 17–21; Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920’s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963). 31.  Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning (Guilford,1995), 77. See also Kermit Parsons, “Collaborative Genius: The Regional

160

notes to chapters 1and 2

Planning Association of America,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60 (1994), 462–482. 32.  Mumford to Geddes, 9 July 1926, in Mumford and Geddes, Correspondence, 248 33.  “The Regional Community,” in The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925): 129. 34.  Lewis Mumford, “Regions—To Live In,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925), 151–152. 35.  Clarence Stein, “Dinosaur Cities,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925), 134–138. 36.  Lewis Mumford, “The Fourth Migration,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925), 131–133. 37.  Benton MacKaye to Ellery A. Foster, 30 July 1940, in Mumford Papers, University of Pennsylvania. A separate letter, written by Mumford to MacKaye in July 1940, is quoted in this letter. Compare ideas of a Lost Eden and techno-nostalgia with Bacon’s notion of a “Second Creation,” as discussed in Thomas P. Hughes, HumanBuilt World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004). 38.  Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 142–143; Archer Winsten, “The City Goes to the Fair,” New York Post, June 23, 1939. 39.  The City, presented by American Institute of Planning; directed and photographed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke; commentary by Lewis Mumford. Chapter 2

1.  Robert Beevers, A Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard (St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 177–178. 2.  Catherine Cooke, “Russian Responses to the Garden City,” Architectural Review 163 (1978), 353, 356. 3.  S. Frederick Starr, “The Revival and Schism of Urban Planning in TwentiethCentury Russia,” in The City in Russian History, ed. M. Hamm (University of Kentucky Press, 1976), 232–234. Semionov is described as a “student” of Howard on p. 78 of Andrew Elam Day’s Ph.D. dissertation, Building Socialism: The Politics of the Soviet Cityscape in the Stalin Era (Columbia University, 1998).

notes to chapter 2

161

4.  Cooke, “Russian Responses,” 357. 5.  Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture (Rizzoli, 1987), 274. See also R. Antony French, Plans, Pragmatism and People: The Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today’s Cities (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 31–32; Starr, “Revival and Schism,” 236. 6.  George Sprague, “Introduction” to N. A. Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities (MIT Press, 1974), 5 7.  French, Plans, Pragmatism and People, 35–37. 8.  Milka Bliznakov, “Urban Planning in the USSR: Integrative Theories,” in Hamm, The City in Russian History, 246–248; Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers, 284–285. 9.  Bliznakov, “Urban Planning in the USSR,” 249, Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers, 335 10.  Ervin Galantay, New Towns: Antiquity to the Present (Braziller, 1975), 55. 11.  Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 50, 54, 60. 12.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. Feuer (Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 28. 13.  Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 56, 60. 14.  On the building of Magnitogorsk, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press, 1995). 15.  French, Plans, Pragmatism and People, 45. On Semionov’s role see Day, Building Socialism, 92–96. 16.  For an account of a later Soviet techno-city, see Paul Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton University Press, 1997). 17.  Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 120. 18.  Judson King, The Conservation Fight (Public Affairs Press, 1959), 98. 19.  “Ford Plans a City 75 Miles in Length,” New York Times, January 12, 1922. 20.  Preston Hubbard, Origins of the TVA (Vanderbilt University Press, 1961), 40.

162

notes to chapter 2

21.  Littell McClung, “The Seventy-Five Mile City,” Scientific American, September 1922, 156. 22.  Ibid., 214. 23.  “Ford Tells What He Hopes to Do with Muscle Shoals,” Automotive Industries 47 (October 19, 1922), 753. 24.  L. Mumford to P. Geddes, January 15, 1922, in Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes, The Correspondence, ed. F. Novak (Routledge, 1995), 115–116. 25.  “Ford Tells,” 753. 26.  Allan Nevins and F. E. Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge 1915–1933 (Scribner, 1957), 227. 27.  George H. Gall, “Making Farm Life Profitable and Pleasant: Building a Farm City,” National Real Estate Journal 24 (May 21, 1923): 29–32, 29. 28.  John L. Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History of Culture Change and Response, 1900–1940, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, 396–397; Lower Charlotte Reconnaissance Report, Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program, Draft, 2005, 25; Richard Amero, “John Nolen,” http://members.cox.net/ramero. 29.  Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (University of Michigan Press, 1972), 193. 30.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Growing Up by Plan,” The Survey 67 (February 1, 1932), 483. 31.  Walter Creese, TVA’s Public Planning (University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 38–39; Donald Krueckeberg, “Norris and Environmental Tradition,” paper presented at conference A Planned Community: Norris Tennessee after 50 Years, October 14–16, 1983, 7–8. 32.  Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 38–39. 33.  Paul Conkin, “Intellectual and Political Roots,” in E. Hargrove and P. Conkin, TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (University of Illinois Press, 1983), 24. 34.  Franklin D. Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses (Random House, 1938), 486–487, 494.

notes to chaPter 2

163

35.  Roosevelt, quoted in Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 51. 36.  Roosevelt, Address at Oglethorpe University, May 1932, in Public Papers and Addresses, 642. 37.  Roosevelt, “Informal Extemporaneous Remarks, January 21, 1933,” in Public Papers and Addresses, 888–889. 38.  Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown, 1973), 351. 39.  Ibid. 40.  Roy Talbert Jr., FDR’s Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA (University of Mis­ sissippi Press, 1987), 115. 41.  B. MacKaye, “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” Survey Graphic 22 (1933), 251. 42.  Ibid., 293. 43.  Ibid., 294. 44.  Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 40. 45.  Tracy Augur, Industrial Growth in America and the Garden City, thesis, Harvard University, 1921), 21; Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement, 424, 622. 46.  Earle Draper, “The New TVA Town of Norris, Tennessee,” American City and County 48 (1933), 68. 47.  Tracy Augur, “The Planning of the Town of Norris,” American Architect and Architecture 148 (1936), 19–26. 48.  Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 258–259. 49.  Charles Stevenson, “A Contrast in Perfect Towns,” The Nation’s Business 25 (1937), 19. 50.  Earle Draper and Tracy Augur, “The Regional Approach to the Housing Problem,” Law and Contemporary Problems 1 (1934), 173–174.

164

notes to chaPter 2

51.  Tracy Augur, quoted in National Resources Committee, Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee, II (Washington, 1939), 72. 52.  Thomas McCraw, Morgan vs. Lilienthal, the Feud within the TVA (Loyola University Press, 1970), 36; Richard Lowitt, “TVA 1933–45,” in Hargrove and Conkin, TVA, 44–45. 53.  Daniel Schaffer, “Ideal and Reality in 1930s Regional Planning: The Case of the Tennessee Valley Authority,” Planning Perspectives 1 (1986), 31. 54.  Daniel Schaffer, “The Tennessee Transplant,” Town and Country Planning 53 (1984), 316–318. 55.  Herbert Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” in Die Baukunst, Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, April 1939, 140. Translations are by the authors unless otherwise indicated. 56.  Winfried Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus (Prestel, 1993), 172. We are grateful to Dr. Nerdinger, Director of the Architecture Museum at the Technische Universität München, for his insights about German sources on Nazi architecture and town planning. 57.  By far the best source on the development of the Salzgitter region is Christian Schneider, Stadtgründung im Drittten Reich, Wolfsburg und Salzgitter (Heinz Moos Verlag, 1978). 58.  Ibid., 55–57. 59.  Jean Chardonnet, Métropoles Économiques (Armand Colin, 1968), 101; Hans Günter Schönwälder, Werden und Wandel des Industriegebietes Salzgitter, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1967, 81. 60.  Schönwälder, Werden und Wandel, 81–83. The population was initially projected to grow to 300,000 but never actually reached that size. See Chardonnet, Métropoles Économiques, 113. 61.  On Spengler’s and the National Socialist reaction against the modernist city and industrial state, see Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage to Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1998), 52–53. 62.  On the Nazis’ ideological antipathy to cities and industrialization, see Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Harvard University Press, 1968), 155; Schneider, Stadtgründung im Drittten Reich, 9, 11.

notes to chaPter 2

165

63.  On Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in response to industrialization, see Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three Sociologists of Imperial Germany (Knopf, 1973). 64.  Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1986). 65.  Among them were edge cities near Düsseldorf, several in industrial areas of Berlin, and elsewhere. By 1941, some 355 million Reichsmarks had been spent to create a reported 184,000 “Kleinsiedlungen”—new mining, steel, and agricultural towns—and more than 275,000 dwellings, apartments and “Volkswohnungen,” for middle class, working class, poor, and unemployed Germans. One of the most interesting examples of a new German industrial town (recalling places like Pullman, Illinois, and, to some extent, Norris, Tennessee) was the Stadt des KdF-Wagens, the Volkswagen factory town near Braunschweig. This town was built under Reich auspices by Ferdinand Porsche, a great admirer of Henry Ford. See Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 63. 66.  On the adoption of the Garden City movement in Germany, see Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 10. Schneider notes that the German movement directly followed the Howard model, not Fritsch’s. See also Ute Peltz-Dreckmann, Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau (Minerva, 1978), 43–45, 203f.; Gerhard Fehl, “The Nazi Garden City,” in The Garden City: Past, Present, and Future, ed. S. Ward (Spon, 1992), 88–106. 67.  Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 154–56. 68.  Heavily influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal, Feder sketched out a “new city” plan that established the template for towns like Salzgitter in “Versuch der Begründung einer neuen Stadtbaukunst aus der sozialen Struktur der Bevolkerung.” For outlines of Feder’s proposals, see Peltz-Dreckmann, Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau, 43–45, 193–204. 69.  Quoted and translated in Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 205–206. 70.  In December 1937, “Wohnungs A.G.” was incorporated in Braunschweig to build and manage the housing for the employees of the Reichswerke. See Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 62. 71.  Herbert Rimpl, Die Geistigen Grundlagen der Baukunst unserer Zeit (Verlag Georg D. W. Callwey, 1953) is written in a grand philosophical mode often affected by architects who have achieved a certain degree of eminence. The book provides insights into Rimpl’s ideology.

166

notes to chaPter 2

72.  All quotations from Rimpl, Geistigen Grundlagen, 6, 134–135, 137. 73.  Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke.” 74.  As Nerdinger points out (Bauhaus-Moderne, 172), Rimpl’s firm was known for hiring modernists, including a considerable number from the Bauhaus and Gropius’s office. The “Bauhäusler” assumed leading positions in Rimpl’s giant Salzgitter operation, making it “the largest reservoir in Germany” for the modern architects who did not flee the country after the rise of the National Socialists. For photographs of the workers’ housing, see Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 79–80. 75.  See Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1996). 76.  See especially The Republic, Book IV, where the components of the state are compared to those of the individual. On the German biological theories underlying the notion of the state as organism, see Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 59. 77.  Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” 148, 179. Rimpl justifies the choice of site and layout in terms of its harmony with the natural environment and topography. 78.  Ibid., 140–141. The projected size of Salzgitter fell well beyond the population guidelines of Feder, who envisioned as an ideal “Mittel-Stadt” a city of approximately 20,000––large enough to be self-sufficient and to avoid the backward conditions of small German villages but small enough to avoid dependence on special modes of transport and other disadvantages of big cities. See Peltz-Dreckmann, Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau, 194, 197. 79.  Ibid., 148. 80.  Among the dwellings were about 300 experimental homes, using such new materials as “gas-concrete” and novel building techniques. See Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne, 172. 81.  See Chardonnet, Métropoles Économiques, 114. In this respect, Rimpl’s designs showed the influence of the “Neighborhood” concept developed by American city planners in the 1920s. See Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 67. 82.  Rimpl explains: “The architectonic Gestalt leads from the green outer areas in the form of settlers’ houses, and the single-storey row houses and detached homes through the two-storey apartment areas to the closely adjacent city center whose dominating structures give the general impression that the city was designed by an

notes to chaPters 2 and 3

167

overpowering Will.” (“Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” 149) It has been suggested that the overall organization of Salzgitter represented the hierarchical organization of the Nazi party, reminding the people graphically of the precedence of the social and political order. See Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne, 67. 83.  James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998), 89–90. Chapter 3

1.  Borden W. Painter Jr., Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), xvi–xvii. Painter cites Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870–1950: Traffic and Glory (exhibition catalog, University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1973), 39. See also Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), 18. 2.  On a visit to Torviscosa, we received the fortunate guidance of a retired SNIA manager, Logiusto Oliviero, who also invited us to his townhouse, one of the originals built for Torviscosa. The Primi di Torviscosa maintain a website on the town’s history at www.primiditorviscosa.it/. 3.  We are deeply grateful to Enea Baldassi, volunteer head of the company’s Documentation Center, for his assistance with the history of SNIA and Torviscosa. The photographs, models, exhibits, and records he preserves provide an in-depth glimpse of the firm’s and the city’s past. 4.  Roberta Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 1890–1962, thesis for architectural degree, Istituto Universitario di Architettura Venezia, 1991–1992, vol. 1, p. 86. Spengler is quoted in Riccardo Mariani, Facismo e Città Nuove (Feltrinelli, 1976), 796–797. 5.  Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 24. 6.  Ibid., 26. 7.  Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 91 8.  Giorgio Pellegrini and Massimiliano Vittori, Sabaudia, 1933–1943, L’Utopia Mediterranea del Razionalismo (Comune di Sabaudia, Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Agro Pontino, 2002), 4. 9.  Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 25. 10.  Ibid., 4.

168

notes to chaPter 3

11. Ibid., 26. 12.  Quoted in Henry Millon, “Some New Towns in Italy in the 1930s,” in Art and Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. H. Millon and L. Nochlin (MIT Press, 1978), 326. 13.  Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (University of California Press, 2001), 4. 14.  Massimo Bortolotti, Torviscosa, Nascità di una Città (Casamassima Libri, 1988), 68. 15.  Marinotti, “Note Autobiografiche,” in Viaggio Nella Memoria, Storia delle Origini Industriali di Torviscosa e del suo Fondatore Franco Marinotti, Associazione “Primi di Torviscosa” con la collaborazione delle Industrie Chimiche Caffaro, Torviscosa, 1998, 9–24. 16.  Bortolotti (Torviscosa, 65–105) outlines Marinotti’s relationship with SNIA. Marinotti was formally named president in 1939. 17.  “Torre di Zuino, alla Vigilia dell’arrivo della SAICI,” from Cooperative Culturali Friuli-Venezia Giulia, n.d., from Archives of SNIA. We are indebted to Enea Baldassi for showing us this 50th anniversary document. 18.  Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 86–87. 19.  Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 70. 20.  The quotation is from “Torre di Zuino, alla Vigilia dell’arrivo della SAICI.” The translation is ours. 21.  Bortolotti, Torviscosa, 83–84. For examples of this architectural scholarship, he refers to the writings of Giuseppe Pagano, particularly the text by Pagano and Guarniero Daniel on L’architettura Rurale Italiana. 22.  Bortolotti, Torviscosa, 92. 23.  Ibid., 98. 24.  Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, 24. 25.  Bortolotti (Torviscosa, 85, 89) contrasts Marinotti’s philosophy with Olivetti’s “progetto di razionalizzazione,” though he tends to overestimate the latter’s Taylorist and “productivist” approach.

notes to chaPters 3 and 4

169

26.  Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 110–112. 27.  Ibid., 119–120; Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 55, 87. 28.  First published as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il Poema di Torre Viscosa. Parole in libertà futuriste, Gli Aeropoeti Futuristi dedicano al Duce (Milan, Officine Esperia, 1938). We are citing the version reprinted in Bortolotti, Torviscosa, La Poesia industriali di Marinetti, 47–62. Translation by the authors. 29.  Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, 85, 87. 30.  Reproduced in Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 175: 1–3. 31.  Although listed in Antonioni’s filmography, the short documentary was lost until the early 1990s, when a scholar from the local cinema society rediscovered it in the SNIA archives. Happily, Torviscosa’s Pioneers had the foresight to preserve it along with other documentary films about SNIA and their town. 32.  Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 60. Promotional literature today on Sabaudia celebrates the town’s dual assets: its agricultural richness and seaside beauty. 33.  Such cities need not lose sight of their founding mythos. Greenbelt, Maryland, in the Washington suburbs, still retains some of the socialist, communitarian flavor imparted by its founders. Chapter 4

1.  Sarah Jo Peterson, The Politics of Land Use in World War II Michigan: Building Bombers and Communities, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002, 138–141. 2.  Ursula Cliff, “Oskar Stonorov, Housing Pioneer,” Design and Environment 2 (1971), 50–57. 3.  Peterson, The Politics of Land Use, 142, 163. Roosevelt’s letter is reprinted in United Automobile Worker, December 1, 1941, 6. 4.  Margaret Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks and the Struggle for Public Housing,” in World War II and the American Dream, ed. D. Albrecht (MIT Press, 1995), 114–117. 5.  Peterson, The Politics of Land Use, 184.

170

notes to chaPter 4

6.  Tracy Augur, “New Towns in the National Economy (March 1937),” Augur Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. Box 1. Published in Planner’s Journal 3 (1937), 42. 7.  “The Town of Willow Run,” Architectural Forum 78 (1943), 37–54, 52. On community involvement, see Stonorov and Kahn’s 1954 pamphlet Why City Planning is Your Responsibility (Revere Copper Co.). 8.  Tracy Augur, “Planning Principles Applied in Wartime: An Account of the Planning of a Town for Willow Run Workers,” Architectural Record 93 (1943), 72–76. 9.  Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front,” 118; Peterson, The Politics of Land Use, 184–186. 10.  Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic bomb by Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2007). Robert S. Norris’s essay “Manhattan Project Sites in Manhattan” reinterprets the code name not as arbitrary but as designating the original location and headquarters of the Manhattan Project. 11.  Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1942–1946 (University of Tennessee Press, 1981), xx. 12.  The American Museum of Atomic Energy opened in 1949 when the security fences came down. Its name was changed in 1978 to reflect the transformation of the AEC into the Department of Energy and its expanded energy mandate. A typical film treatment is Keith McDaniel’s 2005 documentary The Secret City: The Oak Ridge Story. 13.  Johnson and Jackson opened the way for other studies of American atomic cities, among them, Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, The Growth of an Atomic Community (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Patrick Kerry Moore, Federal Enclaves: The Community Culture of Department of Energy Cities: Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 1997; and Hales, Atomic Spaces, cited below. 14.  Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 35. 15.  National Archives and Record Administration, Atlanta [hereinafter NARA, Atlanta], RG #326 Accession #326–DO-8505, Job #4NN-326–8505, Box #160, File “Manhattan District History, Book I: General Vol. 12—CEW Central Facilities,” 83–84.

notes to chapter 4

171

16.  Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (University of Illinois Press, 1997), 78–79. 17.  Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (Center of Military History, United States, Army 1985), 432–435. 18.  For more details on the physical techniques, see U.S. Department of Energy, The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, 1999 edition (available from Office of Scientific and Technical Information, Oak Ridge), 5–6, 14. 19.  “Manhattan District History,” 83–84. 20.  Hales, Atomic Spaces, 81. 21.  Ibid., 3. 22.  Louis Skidmore, “Science Dictates the Building Mode for 1933,” Chicago Commerce 26 (February 21, 1931), 1. 23.  Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 36. 24.  Ibid., 35. 25.  Nathaniel B. Owings, The Spaces In Between: An Architect’s Journey (Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 93–94. 26.  John L. Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History of Culture Change and Response, 1900–1940, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, 396–397; Lower Charlotte Reconnaissance Report, Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program, Draft, 2005, 25; Richard Amero, “John Nolen,” http://members.cox.net/ramero. 27.  The Celotex House: The Town of Tomorrow Demonstration Home No. 17, New York World’s Fair 1939 (Smithsonian Institution Libraries, National Museum of American History, NA7208.C39 1939). 28.  Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, xx. 29.  “Manhattan District History,” 7.3 (111). 30.  “Clinton Engineer Works,” Folder 620. Box 80, “General Correspondence, 1942–1948,” RG 77, Entry 5, NARA, College Park, Maryland.

172

notes to chapter 4

31.  Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 36. 32.  Such restrictions on residents were not unprecedented. America’s Resettlement Administration, for instance, controlled New Deal towns with guards and other means. See Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), 55. 33.  Oral History of Ambrose M. Richardson, FAIA, interview by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture (Art Institute of Chicago, 1990 [rev. 2005]), 230. 34.  Owings, The Spaces In Between, 95. 35.  Ibid., 93. 36.  Hales, Atomic Spaces, 85. 37.  Ibid., 82. 38.  Ibid., 83. 39.  Quoted in Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 38. 40.  “Preliminary Master Plan, Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” 9–12, RG #326, Accession # Direct, Job # 326–88–004, Box #6: Community History Files, 1943–1962, NARA, Atlanta. 41.  Ibid., 27, 34. 42.  Augur to L. Z. Dolan, December 28, 1949, filed with Master Plan. 43.  “Community Management, Commercial Development in Oak Ridge,” Box 1: “Community History,” RG 326, Job #326–88–004, NARA, Atlanta. 44.  Hales, Atomic Spaces, 87–88. 45.  Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 50–51. 46.  The story is also reported in George Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story: The Saga of People Who Share in History (Southern Publishers, 1950), 17–19. 47.  Russell B. Olwell, in At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of Oak Ridge, Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), uses newly declassified

notes to chapter 4

173

material to document worker concerns about radiation and chemical accidents and about the effects of low-level radiation. 48.  Today, Oak Ridge has returned in some respects to its wartime isolation. The events of September 11, 2001, have placed it in lockdown mode, and nuclear weapons are again a live issue. Access to some of its main historical sites, such as the X-10 Reactor, has become limited. For the public, the mysteries and mystique of this techno-city are likely to remain for some time to come. 49.  United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (Washington, 1946), 36, quoted in “The Atomic Bomb and Our Cities . . . from Report of U.S. Strategic Bomb Survey,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist 2 (August 1, 1946), 31, and in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985; reprint, with new preface, 1994) 15. 50.  “The Atomic Bomb and Our Cities,” 29–30. 51.  Quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 176. 52.  See Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chapter 1. 53.  Tracy Augur, “The Dispersal of Cities as a Defense Measure,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4 (May 1948), 131–134. For an interesting and valuable discussion of urban planners’ ideas about dispersal of cities in reaction to the bomb, see M. Q. Dudley, “Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 21 (fall 2001), 52–63. 54.  Augur, “The Dispersal of Cities—a Feasible Program,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 4 (October 1948), 312–315. 55.  Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America (Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 79–80. 56.  Tracy Augur, Industrial Growth in America and the Garden City, Master’s thesis, Harvard University 1921, Augur Papers, Box 1, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. 57.  “Planning Cities for the Atomic Age,” typescript dated May 5, 1946, Augur Papers, Box 1, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. The August speech was later excerpted in “Planning Cities for the Atomic Age,” American City, August 1946, 75–76.

174

notes to chapter 4

58.  Ibid., 7. 59.  Ibid., 6. (Cultural lag, as defined by Ogburn in his 1922 book Social Change, was the idea that social change does not occur at same rates as technological invention and diffusion.) 60.  Ibid., 5. 61.  Ibid., 6. 62.  Ibid. 63.  Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 91, 314–315. 64.  Ralph Eugene Lapp, Must We Hide? (Addison-Wesley, 1949), 161–165, 180. 65.  Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 321. Many anti-war and pro-international control activists were vehemently opposed to these civil defense ideas. In 1948, David Bradley, a physician, published No Place to Hide, a New York Times “bestseller” and Book-of-the-Month Club selection, in which he argued that there was, in fact, no defense. 66.  Ralph Lapp, “The Strategy of Civil Defense,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (August-September 1950), 241–43; “The Atom—the Defense of Our Cities,” The Reporter 3 (September 12, 1950), 26–30; “Hydrogen Bombs IV. What Is the Problem of Organizing an Effective Civil Defense Against It?” Scientific American 182 ( June 1950), 11–15. 67.  Robert Fishman, “The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning,” in The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. R. Fishman (Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000) 179–181. 68.  Ervin Galantay, New Towns: Antiquity to the Present (Braziller, 1975), 53–78. 69.  Kathleen A. Tobin, “The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s American Suburbanization as Civil Defense,” Cold War History 2 ( January 2002), 25. 70.  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (March 1950), 74. 71.  Kargon and Molella, “The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal,” Technology and Culture 45 (October 2004), 764–777.

notes to chapters 4 and 5

175

72.  R. Bacher, “The Hydrogen Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (May 1950), 135. 73.  Pages 39–40. A clipping of the article is among Augur papers (Box 2, Notebook dated 1954, no. 8). 74.  Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture (Oxford University Press, 1994), 60. Chapter 5

1.  A. Olivetti, “Toward the History of a Factory,” in Olivetti 1908–1958, ed. R. Musatti, L. Bigiaretti, and G. Soavi (Ivrea, Ing. C. Olivetti & c., S.p.A., 1958), 11–12, 173–176. 2.  “Camillo Olivetti,” in ibid., 22–24. 3.  Patrizia Bonifazio and Paolo Scrivano, Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea, Guide to the Open Air Museum (Skira, 2001), 23. 4.  Robert Fishman, “Utopia and Its Discontents,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39 (1980), 153. 5.  Giorgio Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui no. 188 (1976), 7. 6.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 49–50. 7.  Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (MIT Press, 1970), 109–111. 8.  Eric Mumford, CIAM Discourses on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (MIT Press, 2000), 76; Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” 7. 9.  Mumford, CIAM Discourses, 77–87; “CIAM: Charter of Athens: tenets,” in Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, 137–145. 10.  Valerio Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti (A. Mondadori, 1985), 88; Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 103. 11.  Jeffrey Schnapp, “Excavating the Corporativist City,” Modernism/Modernity 11 (2004), 89–104. See also Schnapp, Building Fascism, Communism and Liberal

176

notes to chapter 5

Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Architect, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford Uni­ versity Press, 2004), 71–79. 12.  Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta (Ivrea, 1937). 13.  Elio Riccarand, Storia della Valle d’Aosta Contemporanea 1919–1945 (Stylos, 2000), 179–185. 14.  Patrizia Bonifazio, “Mass-Production, Territory, Community in Adriano Olivetti’s Experience 1933–1960” Ivrea MOMONECO Seminar 12 (September 13, 2003), http://72.14.209.104/ 15.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 105. 16.  Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 91. 17.  “Batovany-Partizanske,” at http://momoneco.kotka.fi. See also Henrieta Moravcíková, “Social and Architectural Phenomenon of the Bataism in Slovakia,” Slovak Sociological Review 36 (2004), 519–543. 18.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 105–110; Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” 10. 19.  R. Musatti, L. Bigiaretti, and G. Soavi, eds., Olivetti 1908–1958 (Ing. C. Olivetti & c., S.p.A., 1958), 179–180; Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 23–24, 49–59. 20.  Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” 10. 21.  Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 116–118. Olivetti’s debriefing by the American O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) is in the Records of the Office of Strategic Services, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 226, Box 367. 22.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 17. 23.  Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, chapter 7: “Cospiratore per la Libertà.” Adriano Olivetti, Società, Stato, Comunità (Edizioni di Comunità, 1952), 17. 24.  “Riforma politica, riforma sociale” and a “Memorandum sullo stato federale delle Comunità.” Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 115. 25.  Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 141, 175.

notes to chapter 5

177

26.  Lewis Mumford, Culture of Cities (Harcourt, Brace 1938), 314, 346–348. 27.  Erwin Gutkind, Creative Demobilisation, volume 1: The Principles of National Planning (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1943), 284. 28.  David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (Harper, 1944), xi–xii. 29.  Ibid., 197–198. 30.  Ibid., 223. 31.  L’Ordine politico delle comunità dello Stato secondo le leggi dello spirito (Nouve edi­ zioni Ivrea, 1945). 32.  Chiara Mazzoleni, “The Concept of Community in Italian Town Planning in the 1950s,” Planning Perspectives 18 (2003), 326. 33.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 30; Adriano Olivetti, Democracy without Political Parties (Edizioni di Comunità, 1951), 9. 34.  Olivetti, Democracy, 96; quotation from Olivetti, L’Ordine, vii. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Ordine are by the authors. 35.  Ibid., xi. “Before becoming a theoretical institution, the Community lived.” 36.  Chapter 11, “Notes for the Story of a Factory,” Olivetti, Democracy, 157–168. 37.  Olivetti, L’Ordine, viii. 38.  Olivetti, Democracy, 17, 18, 24; Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 126. 39.  Olivetti, Democracy, 17, 62, 87. 40.  “Aluminum City Terrace,” http://www.archinform.net 41.  Olivetti, Democracy, 64. See p. 27 above. 42.  Ibid., chapter 9, “Technique of the Agrarian Reform,” 99–114. 43.  Olivetti, Ordine, 4–7. 44.  Olivetti, Democracy, 29.

178

notes to chapter 5

45.  Olivetti, Ordine, 5; Olivetti, Democracy, 14–15. 46.  Olivetti, Democracy, 10. 47.  Ibid., 86–87. 48.  Olivetti, Ordine, 13–15. 49.  Ibid., 11: “Le grande città saranno trasformate e non distrutte.” 50.  Olivetti, Democracy, 26, 28, 31–33. 51.  Ibid., 19. 52.  Ibid., 167–168. 53.  Ibid., 93–94. Olivetti quotes David Lilienthal at length on the necessity of central control in the TVA. 54.  Ibid., 12, 15–152. 55.  Ibid., 11, 36, 44. Olivetti, Ordine, 30–31. 56.  Olivetti, Democracy, 36. 57.  Ibid., 84–85. 58.  Eleanor Brilliant, “The Vision of Adriano Olivetti,” Voluntas 4 (1993), 108. See also Umberto Serafini, Adriano Olivetti e il Movimento comunità: una anticipazione scomoda, un discorso aperto (Rome, Officina, 1982). 59.  Paolo Scrivano, “The Elusive Politics of Theory and Practice: Giovanni Astengo, Giorgio Rigotti and the Post-war Debate over the Plan for Turin,” Planning Perspectives 15 (2000), 8. 60.  Mazzoleni, “The Concept of Community,” 332. 61.  Nello Renacco, “Il piano regolatore generale di Ivrea,” Urbanistica no. 15/16 (1955), 188–194; Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 112. 62.  Adriano Olivetti, Community Ideals (Milano, 1956), 21–22.

notes to chapters 5 and 6

179

63.  Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 115–116. 64.  Roberto Olivetti, “La Società Olivetti nel Canavese” Urbanistica no. 33 (1961), 85–86. 65.  Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life (Dial, 1982), 482. 66.  Adriano Olivetti, Community Ideals, 6–7. 67.  Ibid., 11, 16. 68.  R. Nisbet, review of Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers. American Journal of Sociology 79 (1973), 724. Chapter 6

1.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21 (1945), 268–281; “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Rejoinder,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 69. 2.  Catherine Bauer, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Reply,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 65–66; Lewis Mumford, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Reply,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 66–69 3.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Rejoinder,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 77. On Rodwin’s letter to Mumford (December 16, 1945, Mumford Papers, University of Pennsylvania), Mumford penciled in “Garden City principle has gained with war experience.” 4.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Review of L. Mumford, City Development,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21 (1945), 304–305. 5.  Lloyd Rodwin, The British New Towns Policy (Harvard University Press, 1956), 24 ff. 6.  N. Gist, “British New Towns Policy,” American Sociological Review 21 (1956), 647–648. 7.  F. J. Osborn, “The British New Towns Policy,” Land Economics 32 (1956), 281–284. See also F. J. Osborn and A. Whittick, The New Towns: The Answer to Megalopolis (MIT Press, 1969), 106.

180

notes to chapter 6

8.  Rodwin, British New Towns Policy, 194–195. 9.  Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), charts the rise and fall of modernization theory through the Alliance for Progress, the Peace Corps, and the Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam. For an insider’s look at CENIS, see Walter Rostow, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Foreign Aid (University of Texas Press, 1985). For a more critical perspective, see Allan A. Needell, “Project Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences” and Bruce Cumings, “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War, ed. C. Simpson (New Press, 1998), 3–38, 159–188. On the “MIT idea” and the engineer’s role, see Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, “Exporting MIT: Science, Technology and Nation-Building in India and Iran,” Osiris 21 (2006), 110–130. 10.  Christopher Klemek, Urbanism as Reform: Modernist Planning and the Crisis of Urban Liberalism in Europe and North America, 1945–1975, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 2004, 108–109 11.  Martin Meyerson, “The Utopian Tradition and the Planning of Cities,” in The Future Metropolis, ed. L. Rodwin (Braziller, 1961), 235, 247. 12.  Lloyd Rodwin and B. Sanyal, eds., The Profession of City Planning (Rutgers University Press, 2000), 19. 13.  Cathy Rakowski, “Evaluating Development: Theory, Ideology and Planning in Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 26 (1989), 71–73. See also Clara Irazabal, “A Planned City Comes of Age: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana Today,” Journal of Latin American Geography 3 (2004), 22–51. 14.  Lisa Peattie, Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana (University of Michigan Press, 1987), 27. 15.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Introduction,” in Planning Urban Growth and Regional De­velopment: The Experience of the Guayana Program of Venezuela (L. Rodwin and Associates, 1969), 1–2. 16.  Rodwin, “Planning Guayana: A General Perspective,” in Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development, 10. 17.  Peattie, Planning, 42, 45, 48–49.

notes to chapter 6

181

18.  Thomas Herrick, “Preliminary Outline—Volume II—History of Project,” Ciudad Guayana Papers, Loeb Library, Harvard University, chapter IV, 1–2. 19.  Rodwin, “Planning Guayana,” 16. 20.  W. von Moltke, “The Visual Development Strategy for Ciudad Guayana, December 1964),” Frances Loeb Library, School of Design, Harvard University, 4. A later published version appears as Wilhelm von Moltke, “The Visual Development of Ciudad Guayana,” in Taming Megalopolis, ed. H. Eldredge (Doubleday Anchor, 1967), I, 274–287. 21.  Von Moltke, “Visual Development” (1967), 278–282. 22.  Lisa Peattie, “Conflicting Views of the Project: Caracas versus the Site,” in Rodwin, Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development, 453–454. 23.  Lisa Peattie, The View from the Barrio (University of Michigan Press, 1968), 1. 24.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Ciudad Guayana: A New City,” Scientific American, September 1965, 130–131. 25.  Lloyd Rodwin, “Reflections on Collaborative Planning,” in Planning Urban Growth, 467–491. 26.  Peattie, Planning, 56–58. 27.  Ibid., 36 28.  Ibid., 58, 61. 29.  Ibid., 27–28. 30.  Rodwin, “Reflections on Collaborative Planning,” in Planning Urban Growth, 469–470. 31.  Irazabal, “A Planned City Comes of Age,” 22–51 32.  Peattie, Planning, 11–12. 33.  Ibid., 16. 34.  See Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, “Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick Terman’s Model for Regional Advantage,” Business History Review 70 (1996),

182

notes to chapter 6

435–472; Robert Kargon and Stuart W. Leslie, “Imagined Geographies: Princeton, Stanford and the Boundaries of Useful Knowledge in Postwar America,” Minerva 32 (1994), 121–143; R. Kargon, E. Schoenberger, and S. Leslie, “Far Beyond Big Science: Science Regions and the Organization of Research and Development,” in Big Science: The Growth of Large Scale Research, ed. P. Galison and B. Hevly (Stanford University Press, 1992), 334–354. 35.  William Nierenberg, “Athelstan Spilhaus,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 144 (2000), 343–347. 36.  James A. Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City: The Case of Minnesota Experimental City,” in Innovations for Future Cities, ed. G. Golany (Praeger, 1976), 113. 37.  Athelstan Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” Science 159 (1968), 710–715; Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City,” 114. 38.  Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” 714–715. 39.  Athelstan Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” in America’s Changing Environment, ed. R. Revelle and H. Landsberg (Beacon, 1970), 230. 40.  Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City,” 115–116. See also James R. Prescott, “The Planning for Experimental City,” Land Economics 46 (1970), 68–75. 41.  Martin Marty, http://209.85.165.104. For an expurgated version, see “But Even So, Look at That: An Ironic Perspective on Utopias,” in E. Rothstein, H. Muschamp, and M. Marty, Visions of Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2003), 85–88. 42.  “Our Newest New Town” Time, February 26, 1973. See also excerpt from Leo Trunt, Beyond the Circle (Gateway, 1998) at http://209.85.165.104/. 43.  Jean Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil (Dominique Vincent, 1977), 20–21. 44.  Ibid., 42–43. 45.  National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of State, Central Foreign Policy Files, Record Group 59, Electronic Telegrams, November 2, 1973. 46.  Francois Caviglioli, “On ne pourra pas vivre dans la cité modèle: ça sent trop mauvais,” Paris Match, January 15, 1972, 17.

notes to chapters 6 and 7

183

47.  Constance Holden, “Le Vaudreuil: French Experiment in Urbanism without Tears,” Science 174 (1971), 39–42. 48.  National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of State, Central Foreign Policy Files, Record Group 59, Electronic Telegrams, November 2, 1973. 49.  “Parfaitement ignorée en France, où la conception même de cité-jardin fait sourire de commisération l’immense majorité de nos architectes, l’oeuvre d’Ebenezer Howard, dans les pays anglo-saxens, garde un très fort écho.” (Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil, 37) 50.  For a description of the powerful reaction against the town and its technocratic creators, see Loic Vadelorge, “Val-de-Reuil: une histoire nécessaire,” Études normandes, no. 2 (2004), 5–18. 51.  Caviglioli, “On ne pourra pas vivre dans la cité modèle,” 16 (our translation). 52.  Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil, 11–48; Gale Crouse, “Review of Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil,” French Review 53 (1980), 626–627. Chapter 7

1.  Carmo A. D’Cruz, Tom O’Neal, et al., “Technopolis Creation: Critical Success Factors and Creation of the Central Florida Technopolis,” in Program for the NCIIA 11th Annual Meeting, Tampa, Florida, March 22–24, 2007. O’Neal noted that Disney World continues to lend support, albeit minor support, to local hightech industries (personal communication). See also http://www.floridahightech. com/. Walt was fascinated by the space program and was an early supporter of NASA, which “acknowledged that Disney’s early drumbeating for its program was instrumental in generating public support for space exploration” (Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), xiii, 517). 2.  Little McClung, “The Seventy-Five Mile City: What Henry Ford Wants to Do with Muscle Shoals,” Scientific American, September 1922, 156–157; Robert Scheckley, Futuropolis (Bergstrom, 1978), passim. 3.  Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (Hyperion, 1994), 387. 4.  Quoted in Michael Lassell, Celebration: The Story of a Town (Disney Editions, 2004), 20. 5.  Quotation from Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World (University of California Press, 1991), 224. On the original purpose of EPCOT, see

184

notes to chapter 7

Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value in Disney’s New Town (Ballantine Books, 1999), 53. We thank Margaret Adamic of Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc. for assistance with permissions for the illustrations in this chapter. 6.  “Disneyworld Amusement Center with Domed City Set for Florida,” New York Times, February 3, 1967, 1. 7.  Quoted in John Findlay, Magic Lands (University of California Press, 1992), 111. 8.  See Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves (Westview, 1992), 121. See also Joshua W. Shenk, “Hidden Kingdom: Disney’s Political Blueprint,” The American Prospect no. 21 (1995), 80–84. On “special districts,” see Richard O. Brooks, New Towns and Communal Values (Praeger, 1974), 61. 9.  See Krishan Kumar, Utopianism and Anti-utopianism in Modern Times (Blackwell, 1987); Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (University of Chicago Press, 1985); T. J. Jackson Lears and R. W. Fox, eds., Cultures of Consum­ption (Pantheon, 1983); Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), 608. 10.  Epcot brochure. 11.  Ron Grover, The Disney Touch (Business One Irwin, 1991), passim. 12.  James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere (Simon and Schuster, 1996), 150–152. 13.  In view of the incipient state of the enterprise, particularly in its technological features, the description that follows relies on both promotional literature outlining the overall Disney concept and our personal observations. 14.  “AT&T and Disney to Build High Tech Community of the Future,” AT&T news release, July 26, 1995. Later, VISTA United assumed ownership and maintenance of the community network. 15.  Ibid. 16.  The Celebration Company, “Celebration: American Town Taking Shape in Central Florida,” Disney brochure, 1. 17.  “AT&T and Disney to Build High Tech Community.” 18.  For an example, see Mike Mills, “Orbit Wars,” Washington Post Magazine, August 3, 1997, 8–13.

notes to chapter 7

185

19.  Katherine Shaver, “Columbia’s Community Values,” Washington Post, August 24, 1997. 20.  See Steven Lubar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions (Houghton Mifflin, 1993). This theme is widely discussed in the popular periodical Wired. 21.  Mark Slouka, “The Illusion of Life,” New Statesman and Society, January 12, 1996, reprinted in World Press Review, May 1996, 28–29. 22.  Caroline Mayer, “The Mickey House Club,” Washington Post, November 15, 1996. 23.  Craig Wilson, “Celebration Puts Disney in Reality’s Realm,” USA Today, October 18, 1995. 24.  Mayer, “The Mickey House Club”; John Henry, “Is Celebration Mayberry or a Stepford Village?” ProBuilder Magazine News, September 1, 1996, 47. 25.  Mayer, “The Mickey House Club.” 26.  Jean Marbella, “Mickey House,” Baltimore Sun, May 20, 1996. 27.  This has led to the first signs of political dissent within Celebration. See Michael Pollan, “Town Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation,” New York Times Magazine, December 14, 1997, 56 ff. 28.  Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 310–311. 29.  Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 224, 231. Though the fact that residents are treated like customers rather than citizens has its attractions, it sometimes can be exasperating. One resident exclaimed “I’ve had enough of this. I’ve got pixie dust coming out of my ass.” (Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 325) 30.  Witold Rybczynski, “Tomorrowland,” New Yorker, July 22, 1996, 38 31.  N. Sullivan, “Virtual mouse people.” Home Office Computing, October 1995, 136 32.  The Economist, December 1995, 27. 33.  Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 62.

186

notes to 7 and conclusion

34.  Andrew F. Wood, “Spaghetti Dinners and Fireflies in a Jar” (http://www.sjsu. edu/faculty/wooda/celebessay1.html). 35.  Russ Rymer, “Back to the Future: Disney Reinvents the Company Town,” Harper’s, October 1996, 77. 36.  Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s Brave New Town (Henry Holt, 1999), 147–158. 37.  Ibid., 325–327. Conclusion

1.  On ideology and utopia, see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (Harcourt Brace, 1936), passim. 2.  David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1989), 24; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1984). 3.  Arthur P. Molella, “Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002), 374–389. 4.  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. Feuer (Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 10. 5.  Jane Jacobs, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), 435. 6.  Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt Brace, 1934), 368–373.

Index

Adams, Thomas, 31 Alfonzo Ravard, Rafael, 116 American Museum of Science and Energy, 72, 83–85 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 62 Arborea, 50 Astengo, Giovanni, 108 AT&T, 137, 138, 144 Atomic bomb, 71, 85, 86, 89, 113 Augur, Tracy, 34–37, 68, 69, 75, 81, 82, 86–90 Autarchy, 50, 53, 54, 57, 60–62, 152 Bacher, Robert, 90 Banfi, Gian Luigi, 92 Barkhin, Gregory, 26 Barnes, Joe, 138 Bauer, Catherine, 68, 113 BBPR Architectural Group, 92, 93 Bellamy, Edward, 8, 9 Betancourt, Romulo, 115, 116 Blandford, John, 68 Blood and soil, 39, 41, 50 Bomber City, 67–70 Bottoni, Piero, 92, 93 Bournville, 3, 14 Brown, Denise Scott, 139 Cadbury, George, 14, 16 Canavese, 101, 105, 108–112

Celebration, 136–147 Celotex, 76–78 Cemesto, 76–78 Center for International Studies, MIT, 114, 115 Center for Urban and Regional Studies, MIT, 114, 115 Chase, Stuart, 21, 33 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne), 92, 93 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 18 City (film), 24 City Behind a Fence (Johnson and Jackson), 73 Ciudad Guayana, 115–123 “Civics: As Applied Sociology” (Geddes), 17, 18 Clewiston, 31, 76 Cold War, 45, 81, 82 Columbia, Maryland, 132, 142, 146 Community movement, 101–108, 111, 146 Conservative utopia, 143 Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana, 115, 116 Corporativist city, 93, 94 Crystal Palace, 13 Cultural lag theory, 87 Czech modernist towns, 95

188 index

Darré, Richard Walter, 40 Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 154, 155 Decline of the West (Spengler), 39, 50 Defense City, 68 Delano, Frederic, 32 Délégation Général à l’Aménagement Territoire et à l’Action Régionale, 126, 127 De Min, Giuseppe, 54–58, 61, 62 Democracy without Political Parties (Olivetti), 101 Disneyland, 131, 132 Disney, Walt, 131–133, 136, 144, 146 Disurbanists, 27 Draper, Earle, 34–37 Duany, Andres, 135 Edelman, John, 68 Eisner, Michael, 135, 138, 144 Eliot, Charles W. II, 33 Environmental city concept, 129 EPCOT, 132–134 Farm Cities Corporation, 31 Fascism, 4, 52, 60–62, 104, 106, 113 Feder, Gottfried, 40, 41 Feldman, Max, 124 Figini, Luigi, 92 Ford, Henry, 29–32, 70, 132 Ford Motor Company, 67–70 Foundation towns, 47, 65 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 124 Functional City, 92, 93 Futurism, 60

Garden City movement, 13–18, 36, 39, 40, 47, 52, 67, 75, 79, 85, 124, 125, 129 Garden City Society, 26 Geddes, Patrick, 17, 18, 21, 36, 89 Giedion, Sigfried, 92, 100, 101, 150 Ginzburg, Moisei Iakovlevich, 27 Göring, Hermann, 38 Graves, Michael, 135, 139 Greenbelts, 26, 28, 29, 34, 36, 69, 79, 81, 87, 134–136, 152, 155 Groves, Leslie, 74 Gutkind, Erwin, 98–100, 108 Hanford, Washington, 71 Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies, 115 Heller, Walter, 124 Henry, John, 143 Herf, Jeffrey, 39 Hermann-Göring-Werke, 37 Howard, Ebenezer, 7, 8, 16–18, 21, 36, 39, 86, 87 Industrial Revolution, 2–4, 31, 39, 45, 50, 87, 88, 93, 150, 151 Istituto Nazionale de Urbanistica, 108 Istituto per il Rinnovamento Urbano e Rurale, 111, 112 Ivanitsky, Alexander, 26 Ivrea, 91, 92, 95, 96, 108–111, 151 Jackson, Charles, 73 Jacobs, Jane, 130, 154, 155 Johnson, Charles, 73 Johnson, Philip, 139 Kastner, Alfred, 68

Ganz, Alexander, 116, 117 Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Howard), 7, 11, 25, 26 Garden City Associations, 13–16

Lacaze, Jean-Paul, 127, 129 Land Nationalisation Society, 14 Land reclamation, 50, 52, 54

Index

Lapp, Ralph, 88 Latina, 50 Le Corbusier, 92, 93, 127, 132 Leng, John, 14 Letchworth, 16, 39, 40 Le Vaudreuil, 126–130, 151, 154 Lever, William Hesketh, 14, 16 Lilienthal, David, 37, 46, 98, 100 Linear city, 27, 28 Littoria, 50 Looking Backward (Bellamy), 8, 9 L’Ordine politico delle communità (Olivetti), 101–104 Los Alamos, 71, 74 MacKaye, Benton, 21, 23, 24, 34, 89 MacRae, Hugh, 31 Magnitogorsk, 28 Manhattan Project, 71–73 Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, 60 Marinotti, Franco, 47, 53 Marshall, James, 74, 75 Marty, Martin, 124, 125 Marx, Karl, 27, 28, 102, 104, 150 May, Ernst, 28 Meyerson, Martin, 115 Miliutin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 27 Minnesota Experimental City, 124–126 Modernism, 39, 40, 92, 149–151 Moore, Charles, 139 Morgan, Arthur E., 33, 34, 46 Morgan, Harcourt, 37, 46 Mounier, Emmanuel, 98 Mumford, Lewis, 18–22, 30, 98, 99, 108, 112, 155 Muscle Shoals, 30, 31 Mussolinia, 50 Mussolini, Benito, 47–50, 54 Must We Hide? (Lapp), 88 National Housing Agency, 68 Nationalisation of Labour Society, 9

189

National Planning Board, 32 National Security Resources Board, 86 National Socialist ideology, 4, 37–45 Nature worship, 104, 105 Neville, Ralph, 14, 16 New Deal, 29, 33, 45, 52, 100, 152 Newell, Frederick H., 31, 33 New Lanark, 2 New towns, 37–45, 114 New urbanism, 132, 135, 136, 141 Nolen, John, 31, 34 Norris, George, 30 Norris, 28, 29, 34–37 Oak Ridge, 74–86, 151 Odum, Howard, 33 Ogburn, William, 86, 87 Okhitovich, Moisei, 27 Olivetti, Adriano, 91, 92, 96–107, 112 Olivetti, Camillo, 91 Owings, Nathaniel, 75, 80 Parker, Barry, 16 Pavia Plan, 93 Peattie, Lisa, 117, 119, 120 Penderlea, 31 Peressutti, Enrico, 92 Piacentini, Marcello, 48 Piccinato, Luigi, 52 Pierce Foundation, 75 Planning movement, 91, 92, 100 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 135 Pollini, Gino, 92 Pontine Marshes, 50–52 Port Sunlight, 3, 14 Problem of Building Socialist Cities (Miliutin), 27, 28 Reactionary modernism, 39, 40 Regionalism, 16–24, 89, 95, 99–104, 111 Regional Planning Association of America, 21–24, 33, 89

190 index

Regional Survey, 17 Reuther, Walter, 68 Reverse nostalgia, 146, 147 Richardson, Ambrose, 80 Rimpl, Herbert, 38, 41–43, 104 Rodwin, Lloyd, 113–117, 120, 121 Rogers, Ernesto Nathan, 92 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 29–34 Rouse, James, 132 Sabaudia, 50, 52, 65 Sabsovich, Leonid, 26, 27 Saltaire, 3 Salzgitter, 37–45, 151 Schriever, Bernard, 124 Seaside, 135 Semionev, Vladimir Nikolarvich, 26, 28 Seri, Paolo, 132 Sette cane, un vestito (film), 62–65 Silha, Otto, 124 Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 75–81 SNIA (Società Navigazione Industriale Applicazione) Viscosa, 47, 53, 61 Sociological Society, 17 Soria y Mata, Arturo, 27, 28 Sotsgorod, 26, 27 Speer, Albert, 41, 42 Spengler, Oswald, 39, 50 Spilhaus, Athelstan, 123–125 Stalingrad, 28 Stein, Clarence, 20–22, 33, 89 Stone and Webster, 74 Stonorov, Oskar, 68 Story of Utopias (Mumford), 19, 20 Strauss, Lewis, 90 Suburbanization, 89 Survey Graphic, 21–24

Tennessee Valley Authority, 28–31, 38, 73, 98, 99, 105, 151 Thompson, Wayne, 124 Torviscosa, 47–66, 151 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, 25–28 United Auto Workers, 67, 68 Unwin, Raymond, 16, 31 Urban dispersal, 86–90 Urbanism, 26, 27, 108, 109 Urban studies, 114, 115 Utopianism, 1, 5, 152, 154 Val de Reuil (Le Vaudreuil), 126–130, 151, 154 Valle d’Aosta plan, 94, 95 Venturi, Robert, 139 Vivrett, Walter, 124 Volgograd, 28 Von Moltke, Wilhelm, 116 Walt Disney Company, 134, 135, 145–147 Walt Disney World Resorts, 131 Weber, Max, 153 Wiener, Norbert, 89, 90 Whitaker, Charles Harris, 20, 21 Williams, Norman, 116 Willow Run, Michigan, 67–70, 151 World’s Fairs, 24, 75–77, 132–135, 152 World War I, 2, 25, 29, 53, 54, 152 World War II, 45, 47, 66, 67, 81, 89, 113, 139, 152 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 52 Wright, Henry, 21, 34 Young, Whitney, 124

Techno-cities, 1–5, 25, 46, 149–156 Techno-nostalgia, 23, 24, 137–141, 149 Technopoles, 155, 156 Teller, Edward, 86

Zukin, Sharon, 143