The Failures of High Modernism

The utopian plans of Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Saudi Arabia's linear city addressed the hopes of high modernism to bring prosperity and freedom to city-dwellers. What they failed to address, however, was the possibility that their obsession with creating new urban order through the destruction of complexity and diversity may bring more harm to urban areas than good. With the understanding of how high modernism has failed cities by erasing individuality and diversity through leveling what once existed and starting from the ground up with little-to-no acknowledgement for the people who exist in the society, planners such as Jane Jacobs have formed contrasting ideologies.

Jane Jacobs placed immense value on the diversity of a city, contrasting the high-modernist utopian ideologies of Howard, Wright, and Le Corbusier. Jacobs argued that her predecessors were choosing to look at the aspects of the city that aligned with the goals of their utopias, negating to even consider understanding the aspects they deemed unworthy (Jacobs, 1992). While her predecessors looked at cities as a disease that should be destroyed and remade, Jacobs valued the rehabilitation of what already exists. Unlike high modernism which tends to simplify people down to a statistic, Jacobs argued strongly that cities are not about the buildings that line the streets, but rather they are about the people that live in them. Space, under Jacobs point of view, is a social product, influenced by the people who occupy it. Therefore, in order to understand how to fight the injustices that have come as a cost of industrialization, the answer is not future based with trust in technological innovation, but rather present based with an understanding for what real life communities in urban neighborhoods are in need of.

During the time that Jacobs was beginning to spread her ideology of cities as a body of diversity that must be preserved in order to maintain sustainable, equitable, and safe cities, urban renewalists such as Robert Moses were beginning to reshape cities into the inequitable, segregated, non-community based urban centers they are today (Larson, 2011). Robert Moses and other urban renewalists took a high modernism approach to urban planning despite Jacob’s warnings and began major public works projects that ended up deepening the issues they set out to fix. Rather than allocate money towards rehabilitating the run-down buildings that the urban disadvantaged were living in, the slums were leveled, destroying hundreds of communities, and forcing thousands of people into large Radiant City-style housing units that lacked street access and other aspects of a healthy community. Massive interstate systems were built, tearing cities down the middle in the process. Although urban renewal’s initial intent seemed to be to replace dilapidated housing for the lower class with new and improved affordable housing projects, in the end, it ended up as a form of class separation that removed the disadvantage from the bustling urban centers, opening up developable real estate for high-end housing.

I argue that high modernist thought in the planning realm is one of the main factors that has ledto the highly gentrified urban centers around the world, specifically in the United States.

Cities today are facing an urban crisis that has come as a result of urban planning without a critical understanding of how communities function. The fate of major United States cities such as New York that Jane Jacobs had forewarned is falling defeat to the inability of technology and innovation on its own to serve the people for the greater good. To believe that innovation alone holds the key to solving issues of urban social justice is naive as innovation and capitalism go hand in hand with the market economy continuing to thicken its control over cities and the societies they foster.

Land in New York is a prime commodity that is being used as a tool for manipulating the highest levels of profit possible for those in control. The urban urban landscape in New York is quickly changing as the working class is being priced out of neighborhoods they once called home. Developers are rebuilding the city with profit in mind, not the livelihood of the millions of working

class residents. To make way for luxury housing in once affordable neighborhoods, high density rent controlled buildings are being demolished (Chen, 2022). The buildings being torn down usually have enough units to sustainably house large numbers of residents. However, since developers, and often times the state, simplify people down to a dollar sign value, they are prioritizing the development of fewer larger, more expensive luxury units (Chen, 2022). Because of this, New York is experiencing a net loss of housing.

Flushing, a minority dominated community in downtown Queens, NY, is falling victim to the pressing forces on gentrification, leading to a displacement crisis among the communities working-class people. Flushing is located on waterfront property, which is seen as a high dollar value commodity by developers. Since planners neglected to observe the functionality of the bustling immigrant community that occupied Flushing, they saw the land as underutilized and prime for development (Ngu, 2020). This is exactly what Jane Jacobs feared would happen if high modernist planning ideologies continued to influence urban planning decisions, leaving me to argue that people are merely looked at with a dollar value in the eyes of the state.

To mitigate the net-loss of housing and the destruction of working class communities, thedistribution of resources, specifically in terms of choice of development, needs to bereconsidered with the people in mind; not buildings, and not profit margins.

Investment in rent-controlled subsidized affordable housing in lower-income areas has proved to reduce the segregation and general crime while the latter results in displacement and increased poverty and crime (Diamond & McQuade, 2019). It is crucial to understand the space that is being considered in planning debates as a community of people rather than just an opportunity for economic growth. The answer to solving the urban crisis is not to demolish the dilapidated and replace it with expensive new shine, but rather invest in the space in a way that benefits the people who already live there (Diamond & McQuade, 2019).

High modernist thought is an outdated way of planning that has proved to do little but create mediocre drafts of utopian societies that put too much emphasis on the value on innovation and too little emphasis on the importance of diverse communities. However, high modernism and the utopian visions its supporters have conjured up continue to heavily influence the design and function of modern day cities in the wake of heightening urban crisis. The solution is there, but they just need to be heard.

References

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https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/realestate/nyc-apartments-housing-shortage.html?searchResultPosition=2

Diamond, R., & McQuade, T. (2019). Who wants affordable housing in their backyard? anequilibrium analysis of low-income property development. Journal of Political Economy, 127(3),1063–1117. https://doi.org/10.1086/701354

Introduction. (1982). Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank LloydWright, and Le Corbusier, 3–20.

Jacobs, J. (1992). In The Death and Life of Great American Cities. introduction, Vintage Books.

Larson, S. (2011, November 15). Whose city is it anyway? Jane Jacobs vs. Robert Moses andcontemporary redevelopment politics in New York City. Berkeley Planning Journal. RetrievedSeptember 25, 2022, from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/86k5z9dp

Ngu, S. (2020, August 13). 'Not what it used to be': In New York, Flushing's Asian residentsbrace against gentrification. The Guardian. Retrieved September 25, 2022, from

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/13/flushing-queens-gentrification-luxury-developments

Scott, J. C. (1998). 3 Authoritarian High Modernism. In Seeing like a state: How certainschemes to improve the human condition have failed. essay, Yale University Press.

Wainwright, O. (2022, September 8). Nine million people in a city 170km long; will the world ever be ready for a linear metropolis? The Guardian. Retrieved September 25, 2022, from https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/sep/08/nine-million-people-in-a-city-17 0km-long-will-the-world-ever-be-ready-for-a-linear-metropolis