Book review: URBAN UTOPIAS OF TWENTIETH CENTURY by Robert Fishman

INTRODUCTION What is the ideal city for the twentieth century, the city that best expresses the power and beauty of modern technology and the most enlightened ideas of social justice?  The three planners, author talking about in the book, tried to answer that question.  As the author writes of the three of the urban planning’s greatest visionaries, Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, they ‘hated the cities of their time with an overwhelming passion.

The metropolis was the counter-image of their cities, the hell that inspired their heavens.’  This book is the story of their dreams, each of whom saw the salvation of civilization in his own particular urban vision.  Their ideal cities resembled each other no more than they resembled real cities:

 Howard created the concept of the ‘Garden city’ where shops and cottages formed the center of a geometric pattern with farmland surrounding; Wright…conceived of ‘Broadacre City’, the ultimate suburb where the automobile was king, and Le Corbusier projected ‘Ville Radieuse (Radiant City),the city of cruciform skyscrapers set down in open parkland…  The book have a strong, clear explanation of the philosophical notions underlying the work of Howard, Wright and Le Corbusier.  All were Utopian visions of a total environment in which man would live in peace with his fellow man an in harmony with nature. They were social thought in three dimensions.

Urban Reconstruction + Social Revolution

BACKGROUND/LIVES EBENZER HOWARD  Founder of Garden City Movement.  He built 2 - Letchworth Garden city Garden Cities Welwyn Garden City Born in Fore street , city of London.

He left schooling at 15 and began working as stenographer in London. He subsequently had several clerical jobs . In 1871, at age on 21, influenced by a farming uncle, Howard emigrated with 2 friends to America. After his farming efforts failed, discovered he didn’t wish to be a farmer. In 1876,he was back in England, where he found job with Hansard Company, which officially produces verbatim record of Parliament. During that time, his ideas about social reform, and helped inspire his ideas for Garden City. He then read widely, and thought much about social issues.

I dislike the way modern cities were being developed and thought people should live in the places that should combine the best aspects of both the city and the countryside.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT Born in rural environment, in “The Valley” which shaped his later thinking.

He was born to strange home environment. His mother showed extreme affection towards him and held great ambition for her son. But she seemed to have no affection left for her husband, leading to deeply unhappy marriage and eventual divorce. This would shape Wright’s views that the family unit should be, central to society. He received no formal Architectural training like Le Corbusier. He began his architectural work at the firm Adler and Sullivan after moving to Chicago, a city which completely contrasted with rural setting of his childhood. As a sprawling urban metropolis, it was a place of both great grandeur and great social problems with its growing slums and unemployment. It exercised significant influence on him. He reacted against it, as most explicitly manifested in his radiant city.

LE CORBUSIER He was not born Le Corbusier – but rather Charles Eduourd Jeanneret. He was always inclined towards art and architecture. When he resettled in Paris in 1916, he reinvented himself as ‘Le Corbusier’, as a Parisian leader of revolution of modern architecture. He shared his dislike for the city with Howard and Wright, but had quite opposite reaction.

I believe great cities should be far more dense.

For e.g.., he loved Manhattan, but commented on a visit there…

I think the skyscrapers were just too small. I believe that great city should not be avoided – but rather that it must be mastered, that its potential for beauty and freedom be exploited by intensifying the elements of central organization.

OVERVIEW OF THE IDEAL CITIES: GARDEN CITY(Howard)  The goal for Howard it to combine the traditional countryside with the traditional town.  For too long residents have had to make the unfulfilling choice between living in a culturally isolated rural area or giving up nature to live in a city, but…

Human society and the beauty of nature are meant to be enjoyed together.  Technology, hardly a foe(enemy) to civilization in Howard’s view, is essential to healthy public life.  Industry and agriculture coexist in his ideal community – as do city and countryside, utopia and arcadia.  Howard’s sense of balance – in this case, the concentric circles of the garden city intersected by broad boulevards – assumes that ideal forms will shape perfect human functions.

 Howard’s solution to the related problems of rural depopulation and the runaway growth of great towns and cities was the creation of a series of small, planned cities that would combine the amenities of urban life with the ready access to nature typical of rural environments.  Main Features: i. The purchase of large area of agricultural land within a ring fence. ii. The planning of a compact town surrounded by a wide rural belt. iii. The accommodation of residents, industry, and agriculture within the town. iv. The limitation of the extent of the town and prevention of the encroachment upon the rural belt. v. The nature rise in land values to be used for the town’s own general welfare.

 This would be privately owned by the small groups of individuals; this company, in retaining ownership, would retain control of the land use.  Revenue, to pay off the mortgage and to fund city services, would be raised solely by rents.  Only a fraction would be built upon by the town’s inhabitants; the rest would be used for agricultural and recreational purposes.  CENTER OF THE CITY: Cultural complexes including city hall, a concert hall, museum, theatre, library and hospital.  Six broad main avenues would radiant from this centre.  Concentric to this urban core will be a park, combination shopping centre, a residential area, and then, at the outer edge, industry. Traffic would move along the avenues extending along the radii and concentric boulevards.

BROADACRE CITY (Wright)  Created at a time of his complete alienation from American society.  Decentralized beyond the small community of Howard to the individual family home. So massive rural decentralisation.  As each isolated home was a family home, the family was central to the stability of the whole community. As his unhappy childhood made him very intimate with the forces that tear families apart, he had little faith in this institution and this perhaps undermines the stability of is community. But he believed this offered the best chance for stability.  Joined by the network of superhighwayswhich is what could so radically revolutionise the organisation of space.  Everyone entitled to as much land as they could use, with a minimum of an acre per person. Against rent and for redistribution of land on this basis.

Frank Lloyd Wright speaking on cities…

The city is already an outmoded institution.

Obsolescence has been the enemy of our form of civilization and we have not taken care of it as we should… our cities have gradually been going out of their own accord.

They have no attention; they were never planned in the first place, and they have no planning now that is intelligent. We are concerned here in this consideration of the future city as a future for individuality being the finest integrity of the human race.

We are going to call this city for the individual Broadacre City because it is based upon the spacing of a minimum of an acre to the family.

 Man should be free, unpressured and independent.

Frank Lloyd Wright…

“When every man, woman and child may be

born to put his feet on his own acres and every unborn child finds his acre waiting for him when he is born–then democracy will have been realized..” “…bring the country to the city and take the city to the country— and I believe there is the city of the future. I think the city of the future is no longer a concentration. I think it is a decentralization.” “…the city is an antique, fit for collectors.I believe in taking all the blighted areas and planting grass there. I think that the only salvation that any city in this nation has, looking twenty-five or ten or fifteen years ahead, even, is to plant grass over two-thirds of the area of the city…”

Section A Section B Section C Section D Zoning by activity or function Sports and Physical Recreation Little houses Baseball stadium

Cultural Institutions • Aquarium • University • Cathedral • Museum • More little homes

Industrial • Small airport • Light manufactur ing • airplane factory • Vineyards & Orchards

Motels & Regional Shopping • Vineyards & orchards • Private clinics • Market • Music garden island

 The man-made environment is distributed over the open countryside until its structures appear to be natural, organic parts of the landscape.  Individuals would be generalists and selfsupporting, given the right by government to a one-acre piece of land, although some would have a one-car garage and some a five -car garage.

“ Wright believed that individuality must be founded on individual ownership.

Decentralization would make it possible for everyone to live to his own land.�

Frank Lloyd Wright..

“What became of the Broadacre City concept?

Nothing. It was never carried out.”

Lessons from Broadacre city:  Take the grid more seriously  Multimodal transportation?  Reintroduce aesthetics into sprawl  Housing harmonious with nature  Think of cities as evolving not static

RADIANT CITY(Le Corbusier)  Level all tracts of the center of Paris and other major cities.  Geometrically arranged skyscrapers of glass and steel would rise out of parks, gardens and superhighways. Incorporate trees and open spaces within the urban metropolis.  Towers = The command posts of the region housing a powerful government of planners, engineers and intellectuals.  First version of city placed most powerfully in luxurious apartments in the centre with their subordinates lesser important, to satellite cities on the outskirts.  Later version had everyone living in high rises.

CENTRAL THEMES: BELIEF IN PROGRESS AND ‘A SOLUTION’  Despite their very different utopian designs, shared number of similarities.  The first was the belief in progress and the idea that a society between individual and authority was obtainable – that this was industrial society’s natural state.

“ what gives our dreams their daring” Le Corbusier proclaimed “is that they can be achieved…”

REPUGNANCE TOWARDS EXISTING CITIES…  They believed this cities were unfitting for the imminent new social order and that they were aberrations that needed to be overcome.  The 19th and early 20th Centuries were times of immense urbanization, which to their inhabitants was a frightening and seemingly unnatural phenomenon, witj many associated problems in the form of pollution and slums.

 Chicago, a village in 1840 reached 1.7 million by the turn of the century. Paris grew from 500,000 to 2.5 million. London grew from 900,000 to 4.5 million inhabitants.

ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY  Central to all this and what sets them together in the 20th century is the role of technology.  Despite sharing the hopes of the 19th century socialists they were not constrained by the traditional architectural vocabulary.

“ Their ideal cities thus stand at the intersection of 19th century hopes and 20th century technology…”  Wright was fascinated by the automobile, convinced of its potentials to revolutionise modern life.  For him it had created the possibility of new communities based on new mastery of time and space.

 The rural isolation of Wright’s city is only potential through the superhighways that connect its homesteads.  Equally, the towering skyscrapers of Le Corbusier ’s Radiant city are only made possible by huge advances in building techniques and materials.  In terms of style, too, they believed – in fitting with the modernist movement – that a radical new machine age aesthetic needed to be created.  Again maximising the use of new materials such as concrete whilst still sticking to ideals of simplicity evoked by Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement.

ATEEMPT TO RECONCILE THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE AUTHORITY…  Individualism in Garden City is neatly balanced by the needs and common-sense requirements of the community.  Howard emphasizes that municipal authorities control little about housing except their observance of “harmonious departure” from the street line.

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Beyond the urban core, individuals or groups may construct charitable or philanthropic institutions without government interference.

On the other side, both Le Corbusier and Wright attempts to reconcile freedom and individuality with authority.

Wright was deeply concerned with preserving creative individuality but “always emphasized that creative individuality must have its roots in a stable community whose values the citizens shares and protects.”

He hoped to achieve this by rural decentralization.

Le Corbusier of coarse met the problem with a very different approach – believing in intense urban concentration.

To Le Corbusier…

“The details of social planning and

organisation are used to express an ideal as old as the Republic: the ideal of a society ruled not by ‘opinion’ but by truth… “

CLASSIC UTOPIAN IDEAL:

To unite everyone on the basis of universal principles. To reconcile or organisation and individuality, authority and freedom, mechanization and craftsmanship…

THE NEW ROLE OF DESIGN IN POLITICS…

“The design itself brings the residents together into a community and directs their relationships into co-operative channels… It not only symbolizes the harmony of society, it also creates harmony. It is a fundamental level of organisation…”

To Le Corbusier…, “The Plan of a city is its real

constitution…”

 All the three recognised that wellintentioned designs alone could not reform society. This is why they included detailed plans for the redistribution of wealth and power. But these were complements to the environment rather than the entirely of the utopian solutions.

“These ideal cities are perhaps the most ambitious and complex statements of the beliefs that reforming the physical environment can revolutionise the total life of society…”  They are more fascinating for their attempts to reconcile polar opposites: Organisation and individuality, authority and freedom, Mechanisation and crafts.., in very different ways.

CONCLUSION‌ Howard thought that there really is a human proclivity for the gifts of nature, which were being pushed away and cut off by dirty industries and crowded streets of 19th Century. Even if it is impossible for us to indwell nature as he purposes without killing it, we still yearn for the chance to visit, to remain connected.

Whereas, Wright and Le Corbusier believed that the social change was integral to any better society, the environment was not just its neutral vehicle but a necessary component. Their radical ideas for the reorganisation of space and a new machine age aesthetic were only made possible by technological advance and set them at a meeting point between 19th century hopes and 20th century technological innovation‌.

Thank you….