The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard: Contradiction and Meaning in City Form 9781487512811

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THE URBAN ARCHETYPES OF JANE JACOBS AND EBENEZER HOWARD Contradiction and Meaning in City Form

The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard Contradiction and Meaning in City Form

Abraham Akkerman

University of Toronto Press Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2020 Toronto Buffalo London utorontopress.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4875-0126-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-1282-8 (EPUB) ISBN 978-1-4875-1281-1 (PDF) Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: The urban archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard:   Contradiction and meaning in city form / Abraham Akkerman. Names: Akkerman, Abraham, 1948– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana 20190186615 | ISBN 9781487501266 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Jacobs, Jane, 1916–2006. | LCSH: Howard, Ebenezer, Sir,   1850–1928. | LCSH: City planning – Environmental aspects. Classification: LCC HT166.A45 2020 | DDC 307.1/216–dc23 University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

To Ashira and Bnayah

Contents

List of Figures  ix Preface  xi Introduction: Modernity and Its Urban Context  3 1 Paradigms of City Form in the Urbanism of Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs  22 2  Howard vs Jacobs: Ideal City or Authentic Street?  50 3  Twentieth-Century Transformations of the Garden and the City  75 4 The Neighbourhood as a State of Wonderment: The Urbanist Dream of Jane Jacobs  96 5  Spectacle and Contempt in City Form: Howard and Jacobs  120 6 The Ghost of Howard: Advent of the Masterplan and the Loss of Place  151 7  “Growth Ain’t Expansion”: Jacobs in Toronto  180 8  Urban Space: Medium or Message?  204 Bibliography 227 Index 251

Figures

0.1 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 3.1 4.1 4.2 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

Plan of Miletus, 442 BCE   7 Plan of Vitry-le-François, c. 1545   39 Plan of Charles Town, after John Locke, c. 1670   41 Diagram no. 7, Howard’s Garden City regional system, 1898   43 Plan of Karlsruhe, after Wilhelm Weinbrenner, 1715   45 Plan of the Happy Colony, New Zealand, Robert Pemberton, 1854   54 Diagram no. 3, “Ward and Centre of Garden City” (Howard 1898)   57 Place de l’Étoile (Charles de Gaulle), Paris   61 The city-body analogy, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, c. 1490   64 Workers colony at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, c. 1353 BCE   68 Plan of Radiant City, Le Corbusier, 1933   76 The Modulor, Le Corbusier, 1945   98 Neighbourhood unit, Clarence Perry, 1929   103 Plan for London, after “Ffirst Mapp of the designe for ye Cytie of London,” Richard Newcourt, 1666  123 Plan for London, after Sir Christopher Wren, 1666   124 Ideal city of Vitruvius, after Luca Pacioli and Pierro della Francesca, 1509  125 Plan of the ideal city Sforzinda, after Antonio Averlino Filarete, 1464  131 Place Dauphine, Paris, as of 1754   134 Plan of Chaux, after Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, c. 1774   136 Plan of Freudenstadt, after Heinrich Schickhardt, 1599   141 Brunelleschi’s representation of linear perspective   142 Plan for London, John Evelyn, 1666   152 Plan for the development of the Mall at Washington, DC, 1902   153 Plan of Priene, c. 432 BCE   156 The Egyptian hieroglyph O49 for “town”   170 The Karanovo roundel, d ≃ 6 cm, burnt clay, c. 4800 BCE   171

x Figures

6.6 6.7 7.1 7.2

The Tartaria roundel, d ≃ 6 cm, burnt clay, 5300 BCE   172 The Gradeshnitsa tablet, 7 × 9 cm, burnt clay, c. 5000 BCE   173 “The Three Magnets,” diagram no. 1, Howard’s Garden City, 1898   187 Spadina Expressway: Allen Road and cancelled segment, Toronto, 1971  198 8.1 Metropolitan access concept, diagram no. 5, Howard’s Garden City, 1898   215 8.2 Via Serafino Balestra, Como, Italy   219 8.3 Overhead arches with concealed wiring at Kramářská, Znojmo, Czech Republic  225

Preface

“What is the city but the people,” wrote William Shakespeare more than four hundred years ago ([1608] 1899, 114). Shakespeare could have hardly imagined how cities would change by the end of his millennium, but his insight, as usual, was timeless. The Bard could be seen to complement the Greek philosopher Plato who, almost two millennia earlier, had seen the city as a correlate and a reflection of the human soul. The present study is about two leading urbanists of the twentieth century, Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs, who very much represent mutually contrasting views on the modern city and on urban planning; yet, in their opposing viewpoints they only confirm the sayings of the two great minds that preceded them. The conflict between the urbanist ideas of Howard and Jacobs helps us understand that human thought and city form are intertwined. In this sense, the study attempts to cast an urbanist outlook that goes beyond the history of twentieth-century city planning. There is little doubt, though, that the struggles and hopes of cities and urbanists in the twentieth century were no better personified than by Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs. Yet, in seemingly opposing outlooks on the growth and planning of cities, Howard and Jacobs present views that have more in common than meets the eye. Howard envisaged small towns, newly built from scratch, founded on the idea of single-family homes surrounded by small gardens. Jacobs embraced existing inner-city neighbourhoods, emphasizing the verve of the living street. A direct dialogue between the two never occurred. Jane was a young girl in Scranton, Pennsylvania, when Sir Ebenezer died in 1928 in England as a celebrity urban-planning pioneer, his Garden City concept having spread across the industrialized world, east and west. Three decades later Jacobs came out swinging against Howard’s ideas, becoming an urbanist luminary of her own. By the turn of the twenty-first century, urbanist debate in North America had raged between two contrasting standpoints largely evolving from Howard’s and Jacobs’s original stances. On the one hand, sprawling suburbs, initially an expression of the American Dream of freedom and prosperity, had become the butt of criticism for their uniformity, alienation, and placelessness.

xii Preface

On the other hand, the inner-city neighbourhoods and their streets had come to be seen as victims of commodification, having become newly discovered hubs of urban authenticity, drawing commercial interest as well as prosperous descendants of the suburban patrons from the early twentieth century. The present book does not resolve the urbanist dilemma of North America, but it presents Howard and Jacobs within a broad psychocultural context that also suggests a synthesis of the two. Addressing our urban crisis is the recognition that city form is a gendered, allegorical medium expressing femininity and masculinity within two of the most fundamental features of the built environment: void and volume. These two features are deeply entrenched as paradigms of mind, expressed throughout the history of the built environment as projections of the archaic parables of the Garden and the Citadel. They bring to the fore the tensions, but also the opportunities of fusion, between pairs of urban contrasts: human scale against superscale, gait against speed, and spontaneity against surveillance. Jacobs and Howard, in their respective attitudes, embraced the two ancient archetypes, the Garden and the Citadel, leaving it to urban posterity to blend their two contrasting stances. In putting my thoughts on paper I have greatly benefited from discussions with colleagues, as well as students, both within my home academic setting, the Department of Geography and Planning and the Department of Philosophy, as well as throughout the campus community of the University of Saskatchewan. I have been fortunate to share ideas and discuss many of the issues raised in this study with my colleagues in the Regional and Urban Planning Program, Ryan Walker, Bob Patrick, and Jill Blakley. For many inspiring discussions on urban geography, planning, and design I owe a debt of gratitude to my other University of Saskatchewan colleagues, past and present, John McConnell, Jim Pooler, Kimberley Naqvi, Veronika Makarova, Louise Racine, Sarah Hoffman, Peter Alward, Jim Randall, Bill Barr, and Bob Bone. I am grateful to Joe Garcea, the former head of the Department of Political Studies at this university, for translating the original Italian text of Francesco di Giorgio Martini on p. 63. My thanks go to Paul Van Pul for his great artwork that has made this book into something better than it would have been otherwise. It goes without saying that the faults and errors in this study are entirely my own responsibility. My thanks go to the University of Saskatchewan for the support of this study. To Doug Hildebrand and Jodi Lewchuk, the outgoing and present editors of the University of Toronto Press, I express my thanks for their guidance and patience, and to the anonymous reviewers, for their constructive criticism on the previous version of this study. My children, Zak and Ariela, have been a great encouragement, and my grandchildren a vast inspiration. For that I will remain grateful forever. a.a. Department of Geography and Planning and Department of Philosophy University of Saskatchewan

THE URBAN ARCHETYPES OF JANE JACOBS AND EBENEZER HOWARD Contradiction and Meaning in City Form

Introduction Modernity and Its Urban Context

It is the city in which modernity has most often shown its breakthroughs. It was the urban environment that has been the place for the meeting of minds and for the emergence of trail-blazing ideas. Urban prowess manifest by the ingathering of ideas and phrenic discovery, coupled with intellectual exploration and the application of inventions, has been largely the privilege of modernity. While Babylon, Athens, or Alexandria were antiquity’s rare places of convergence of intellect, modernity has expedited interchange of ideas on a vast scale through multitudes of urbanizing centres. Human minds corralled in the small geographic spaces of rising cities of modernity had brought about the two uniquely significant periods in history: the scientific revolution between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century and, on its heels, the First Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such reflection alone seems to justify a critical overview of the return impact of the scientific and industrial revolutions upon urban transformations of modern times, particularly within the geographic regions where the first two industrial revolution mostly took place: much of Europe and North America’s Atlantic seaboard. The present study attempts to examine the unfolding of twentieth-century city, and of thought about the city, within a broad context of urban history through the work and ideas of two prominent urbanists of the period, Ebenezer Howard, considered one of the founders of modern urban planning, and Jane Jacobs, a celebrated detractor of twentieth-century urban planning in North America. The attempt in this book is to note the impact of esoteric sources upon Howard, within the background of his own time, while examining the psychocultural framework of Jane Jacobs’s urbanist crusade and her criticism of urban planning. Both Howard and Jacobs represent divergent views on the face of the city of the twentieth century, even while both are recognized for their influence upon urbanism and the course of urban progress. The foremost stamp of the twentieth century, of course, has not been necessarily progress, urban or otherwise, but also, or mainly, conflict. In spite of

4  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

the unprecedented number of major discoveries and inventions, it is doubtful whether twentieth century could be called a century of progress. It has been the bloodiest in human history, the worst in human degradation of the natural environment, and it was the century in which a Pandora box of perils was opened that could bring civilization to its knees, and humanity to the brink of extinction. Relative to the turmoil and crises of the twentieth century, Howard and Jacobs in their mutually discordant thought on cities, exemplify a feud of seemingly peripheral significance. But the importance of the built environment upon all aspects of well-being of humans within its midst ought not be under-estimated. Lingering mutual impact between humans and their built environments over historical periods had brought about the evolution of ideas, sometimes in conjunction with the progress, maturation, or decline of cities and urban communities. At times it has been during urban collapse that momentous new ideas have emerged. Some have linked the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans at 70 CE with the rise of Christianity (Brandon 1957, 167–84); the Sack of Rome by the Visigoths in 402 CE gave rise to St Augustine’s The City of God, a founding pillar of early modern thought (Hanby 2003); the Great Famine and the Black Death of the fourteenth century ravaged entire cities but their aftermath in Europe was the rise of modernity (Braudel 1992, 315). And while epidemics and famine of the early modern city have been gradually eradicated along with many other hardships, at the end of modernity the observation had been made that physical comfort of twentieth-century metropolis had become “the milieu in which the tie between information and human purpose has been ­severed, [...] information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose” (Postman 1993, 67–70). A piercing view on cities and humans within them does not lend itself to speculation on linear progression of perpetual improvement, but, quite to the contrary, it introduces the possibility of decline. Rapidly intensifying urbanization at the close of modernity had led to over three quarters of population in industrialized countries to inhabit cities, and the end of modernity spelled an unprecedented expansion of metropolitan areas in population and geography. The extraordinary demographic surge and spatial diffusion of cities have progressed in parallel to overall urban prosperity, but the striking urban change has evidently also brought about a range of newly unfolding problems in metropolitan areas of world regions that gave themselves the label “developed.” The ongoing population growth of metropolitan areas in the North Atlantic region has had a faint demographic blip at the end of the twentieth century. In the United States during the decade 1970–80, seven major metropolitan areas, most of them on the Atlantic seaboard, registered decline; during

Introduction 5

1980–90 five registered decline (Demographia, n.d.). Most metropolitan ­areas throughout Canada and Europe had experienced slowdown in population growth towards the end of the twentieth century (Statistics Canada 2017; Eurostat 2016, 79). More recently, at the time of low fertility and insignificant internal migration between non-metropolitan and metropolitan areas of large cities in the post-industrial Western world, population growth in metropolitan areas has recommenced. The reason many metropolitan populations in Canada, for example, are on the increase again is largely due to influx of international migrants (Gordon, in Proudfoot 2017). Throughout OECD countries, metropolitan areas have seen increasing strain on municipal resources and services (OECD 2013, 3), while in Third World countries much faster population increase in cities has been ominously signalling dearth of basic necessities, clean air, and clean water, as the crisis of population and resources is gradually engulfing the entire planet (Ripple et al. 2017). By the end of the century, global warming may raise oceans’ levels by one metre. But already more than a decade ago McGranahan et al. (2007) pointed out that two thirds of the world’s cities with over five million people were located in coastal areas that were less than 10 metres above sea level, and 13 per cent of the world’s urban population were living within these low-lying coastal areas. Over the last several decades, largely due to urban transportation and CO2 emissions, major cities throughout the world have turned into urban heat islands (UHIs) with average temperatures up to 7°C higher than their surrounding rural areas. In some world regions, the impact of extreme weather events reminds of past episodes of medieval upheaval, portending calamity for many metropolitan areas: “an examination of summer mortality rates in and around Shanghai yields heightened heat-related mortality in urban regions, and we conclude that the UHI is directly responsible, acting to worsen the adverse health effects from exposure to extreme thermal conditions” (Ten et al. 2010). Climatic warnings have been sounded for North American cities south of the forty-fifth parallel (Vanos et al. 2014), with suburban sprawl shown as possibly worsening urban rainfall extremes (Zhang et al. 2018). A joint study by the University of Maryland Center for Disaster Resilience and the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores of Texas A&M University, has qualified “the growing number of extreme rainfall events that produce intense precipitation [which] will continue to result in increased urban flooding” as a national challenge (Galloway et al. 2018). The end of modernity had not spelled the end of the city, but it has intensified some of the city’s modern predicaments. Much as the city has been in the past the source of human advancement, alarm has been raised already in the late twentieth century to the effect that the American metropolis, for example, has reached a stage of impasse, one

6  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

that might have a reverse effect on human development (Bradbury et al. 1982, 18–27). It has been likely the spreading denizen unease within the growing Western city that was behind the metropolitan demographic slowdown, perceptible near the end of the twentieth century but offset currently (Frey 2012). The metropolitan demographic aberration of the past few decades could be possibly a sign of a larger transformation of the post-industrial metropolis, in progress at the present time (Florida 2017). The question whether the city itself is in a state of a looming, ominous change is not one that could be easily dismissed, as the continuing debate on urban crises shows (Pearce 1996; Tibaijuka et al. 2005). All the same, the grim signs of global warming could spell some considerable opportunities for winter cities. The urban context of the twentieth century, therefore, is possibly quite relevant to the direction and forms that human settlement will attain in the coming years, decades, or even centuries.

In the first edition of his book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) Howard had introduced the concept of a harmonious, egalitarian, urban utopia, the Garden City. Absent were any drawings of possible street views, but the small book that never even mentioned police station or a courthouse was richly illustrated by a series of meticulously executed diagrams showing the Garden City laid out on a rigidly geometric plan of broad streets and avenues. Disputing regimented urbanist schemes, in her blockbuster book, Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs denounced urban planning that had followed in the footsteps of Howard’s garden city, while in her book she espoused the random pattern of traditional streetscapes supporting continual and spontaneous human encounter. In diametrical opposition to Howard’s handbook, Jacobs’s bestseller was illustrated with photographs of urban scenes but not a single streetscape plan was included. The present book examines the urbanist discourse of twentieth-century modernity as personified by Howard and Jacobs within the historic context of urban thought since early modern times. The onset of early modernity, commonly seen as coinciding with the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance in Europe, has been sometimes characterized by increasingly sharper sophistication of the city against the country, where during antiquity and much of the Middle Ages such a distinction had been blurred (Amelang 2015; Houston 2015). At the opposite chronologic end of modernity, the historical present of our own times, stands the inception of post-modernity. Earmarked by events through the second half of the twentieth century, the beginnings of post-modernity could be said also to coincide with space exploration and the reach of humanity outside its terrestrial habitat. The third

Introduction 7

0.1  Plan of Miletus, 442 BCE. Drawn by Keith Bigelow and Paul Van Pul. Source: Von Gerkan, Armin, 1925. Griechische Städteanlagen, Der Cicerone 17: 922.

millennium, through space colonization, will undoubtedly mark some epochal transformations in human settlement. Indeed, new forms of settlement seem to have often characterized major periods of human history. The Agricultural Revolution of the Neolithic had brought with it the founding of permanent settlements where agriculture and domestication of animals could be pursued. At the close of Greek antiquity the philosopher Aristotle had viewed “modern” aspects of his time mirrored in the city. In his Politics (VII, 12) Aristotle pointed to urban streets “built in the

8  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

modern manner, after the [grid] plan of Hippodamus” and to walls that “may be a proper ornament to the city, as well as defence in time of war, not only according to the old methods, but the modern improvements also.” A grid plan at Miletus on the shoreline of the eastern Mediterranean in Asia Minor, in today’s Turkey, circa 442 BCE, attributed by Aristotle to the architect and planner Hippodamus, is now known to have been applied millennia earlier at Harappa by the Indus Valley Civilization. Evidently, efficiency associated with the simple and harmonious grid pattern of streets has had a universal appeal and had captivated at various times the imagination of city builders. More than two millennia after Aristotle, the poet Charles Baudelaire in his 1864 essay about Paris, The Painter of Modern Life, defined modernity as “the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis.” Of course, ­“modernity” of the grid plan in antiquity would be anything but fleeting or ephemeral, but both Aristotle and Baudelaire show the planned city as a newfangled feature embodying the modernity of their respective ages (Baudelaire [1864] 1964, 22–40). Prior to their emergence as paradigms of modernity of their respective times, both ancient Miletus of the fifth century BCE and central Paris of the nineteenth century were destroyed: one by a naval invasion, an act of war by the king of Persia, Darius the Great, in 494 BCE; and the other in 1850 by an ­urban-renewal decree of Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the prefect responsible for the entire city of Paris and its environs. In both cases urban modernity had entailed a coercive streak that began with destruction or demolition, followed by the imposition of rigid schemes upon geographic space. The ethical, aesthetic, or cognitive impact of such imposition could be questioned, but there is no doubt that the very idea of an urban plan, exemplified by these two examples of perceived urban modernity, involves civic enforcement and regimentation. Observing the grid plan of Mannheim, a planned city of the German Baroque from the time of the early First Industrial Revolution, the urban historian Anthony E.J. Morris called it “a straightforward exercise in unimaginative drawing board geometry” (1994, 235), and the architect, planner, and urban design critic Camillo Sitte of the late nineteenth century said prophetically of the grid plan of modernity: “There exists not a single exception to the arid rule that all streets intersect perpendicularly and that each one runs straight in both directions until it reaches the countryside beyond the town. The rectangular city block prevailed here to such a degree that even street names were considered superfluous, the city blocks being designated merely by numbers on one direction and by letters in the other. Thus the last vestiges of ancient tradition were eliminated and nothing remained for the play of imagination or fantasy” (Sitte, quoted in Morris 1994, 236). Yet it is almost certain that impact of the grid pattern of streets in urban antiquity was cognitively affirmative. In 332 BCE, Alexander the Great, the ruler of

Introduction 9

a vast realm from eastern Mediterranean to India, appointed the architect and engineer Dinocrates of Rhodes as director of surveying and urban-planning work for Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt. The city was laid out on a strict grid plan, and it is no coincidence that a century later, the mathematician, poet, and astronomer Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276–194 BCE), the third head of the Library of Alexandria, was also the inventor of the grid system of overlapping parallels and meridians over the surface of the known Earth. Using this grid in a conceptual parallel to the gridiron streetscape, Eratosthenes had catalogued, for the very first time ever, over four hundred cities through their geographic coordinates and distances between them. The streetscape grid pattern of Alexandria would have carried an affirmative cognitive impact already upon Euclid, dubbed the Father of Geometry, who observed the construction of Alexandria as a child. Born at Alexandria in 323 BCE, Euclid had lived there much of his life, till his death in 285 BCE. Two centuries after Eratosthenes, Claudius Ptolemy (100–170 CE), who also lived in Alexandria, wrote there the astronomical treatise Almagest and his other work Geographia. In Almagest Ptolemy improved a previously developed celestial coordinate grid system, and in Geographia he assigned coordinates to all the places and geographic features he knew, establishing the convention of measuring latitude on Earth from the equator. Within the half-millennium between Eratosthenes and the destruction of the Library and parts of the city in 391 CE, Alexandria gave rise to the physicist, mathematician, and engineer Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BCE), to the mathematicians Heron (10–70 CE), Menelaus (c. 70–140 CE), Diophantus (c. 214–298 CE), Pappus (c. 290–c. 350 CE), Theon (c. 335–405 CE), and to the woman mathematician Hypatia (350–415 CE). An argument for the relationship between thoughts and streetscapes cannot be made unequivocally, but in his quote cited earlier Camillo Sitte had certainly made it, in the late nineteenth century, perhaps for the very first time ever. To Sitte, makers of grid plans inadvertently ensured that “nothing remained for the play of imagination or fantasy.” Yet, as the case of Alexandria suggests, its grid plan may have had some favourable influence upon the minds of the mathematicians and engineers in its midst, in contrast with Sitte’s observation. Sitte’s observation, in fact, holds, in the sense of a conjecture, to the effect that streetscapes can be a source of what is known in cognitive science as environmental enrichment, or they can be also a source of cognitive enfeeblement, the reversal of environmental enrichment. Sitte’s criticism is aimed against those regimented streetscapes used in a preventative and surveillance function, whose designers assume to be forging through harmonious forms some desired personality patterns in people, such as lawful behaviour. In his censure Sitte likely targeted the demolition of Vienna’s city walls along with adjacent medieval streetscapes, and their replacement by the Ringstrasse (ring road), now a

10  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

UNESCO heritage site. Designed by Ludwig Förster (1797–1863), the Vienna Ringstrasse is the outcome of Förster’s winning entry in architectural competition called in 1857 by the Hapsburg Emperor Franz Joseph II following uprising in the city ten years earlier and concomitant political unrest throughout the Hapsburg Empire. Sitte probably had in mind also the inspiration to Förster’s urban plan, the contemporaneous redesign of central Paris by Haussmann, where demolition of the old and introduction of the new streetscape came also in response to political violence threatening the rule of Emperor Napoleon III. In his allusion to numbered streets Sitte heralded criticism against the looming American City Beautiful movement of the same time. Promulgating transparent and geometrically aligned streets, quite analogously to the new urban planning in Paris and Vienna, the City Beautiful had addressed the unspoken fear of the middle-class arising from urban workers’ discontent. To Howard, as to many others, the urban street of modernity was to be a pleasant and safe conduit between places of origin and destination in the city, while to Sitte and Jacobs the street ought to be also a destination in and by itself. Howard’s diagrams of his urban utopia are subject to a strictly regimented layout of boulevards and avenues, while Jacobs enthuses about “organized chaos” of streets. Rather than rejecting one standpoint and embracing the other, the present study shows that both outlooks reflect gendered archetypes of the built environment. Together both can be conducive to cognitive enrichment and to civic progress. The question and challenge that this book poses is how to incorporate both within city form. As a preamble to the following brief outline of chapters, the aforesaid observations point to the twentieth-century city as bound to myths that have been a critical feature of modernity and post-modernity. The notion of myths throughout this study is not used in the sense of false beliefs but rather as parables and psychological paradigms in the sense employed by Carl Jung ([1954] 2014). That the founding myths behind the rise of the modern city have their origins in antiquity and the late Neolithic is a premise made elsewhere (Akkerman 2015). The life and work of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard exemplify archaic human bond with the built environment through two deeply entrenched traits: femininity and masculinity. Gender projections upon the built form are in the masculinity of urban volume, automated speed, and the solitude of towers as against the femininity of urban void, human gait, and urban multitude. Ensuing from these is the masculinity in spatial solemnity of a structure as against the femininity in temporal vibrancy of change, the masculine regime of a masterplan against the authenticity of an inner-city street. Gendered outlooks upon the built environment by Howard and Jacobs are the roots of what appear to be mutually opposing facets of modern urbanism. The discernment of gendered interaction between mind and city form is personified by Jacobs and Howard but is by no means unique to them only. It was

Introduction 11

already the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico who in his Scienza Nuova (IV, 982), alluded to warfare within families as the archetypal source of built edifices and cities that also gave rise to the masculine myth of the Citadel. Extending Vico’s premise, the heightened argument is that the cerebral origin of urban voids is the feminine myth of the Garden, whose reaches go deep into the Neolithic, and that built environments are the outcome of, as well as input into, the process of an ongoing environ-mental interaction.

That streetscapes and mind are in a mutual feedback progression was one of the founding tenets of Walter Benjamin, the philosopher of the city writing in the 1930s. In his Arcades Project Benjamin had alluded to ongoing synergy between mind and urban streetscapes: Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally restless, eternally moving essence that, among the facades of buildings endures, experiences, learns, and senses as much as individuals in the protection of their four walls. For this collective the shiny enameled store signs are as good and even better a wall decoration as a salon painting is for the bourgeoisie. Walls with the “defense d’afficher” are its writing desk, newspapers are its libraries, letterboxes its bronzes, benches its bedroom furniture – and café terraces the balcony from which it looks down on its domestic concerns after work is done. (Benjamin [1933] 1999, 423).

Chapter 1 shows how the regimented pattern of Renaissance planned new towns influenced two founding fathers of the Enlightenment and modern thought, René Descartes and John Locke, intellectual rivals living a generation apart, who never knew each other. The work of both Descartes and Locke seem to exemplify Benjamin’s proposition. Locke was just born when Descartes was at the height of his intellectual standing, and while Descartes’s urban context was in Europe, Locke had projected a utopian urban scheme onto the British Colony of Carolina in America. The chronological sequence of Descartes and Locke is somewhat meaningful to the parallel succession of Howard and Jacobs. When Howard was knighted for his lifetime urban planning work in England by King George V, Jacobs was a young girl in a small town in America’s industrial heartland. In the mid-twentieth century Jacobs’s rivalry with Howard had fuelled the urbanist discourse that recoils still today and that parallels, as chapter 1 shows, the spat between rationalism and British empiricism sourced, precisely, to Descartes and Locke. Chapter 2 addresses a major cognitive difference in the urbanist approaches of Howard and Jacobs. Howard’s harmoniously geometric and precision-guided

12  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

diagrams of purported city-plans of his garden city betray analogies made over historical times between ideal cities and the universe. In this regard, Howard’s garden city scheme ought to be seen based largely on a Neoplatonic myth, advanced by the spiritualist religion with which Howard was associated. The very publication of his handbook was due to financing that came from this esoteric occult movement, known to have espoused Plato’s mythical city of Atlantis as one of its pursuits. Jacobs’s no-nonsense urbanist outlook, relying on empirical observation and evidence of behaviour on the city-street, seems the striking opposite to Howard. Jacobs is most convincing when presenting the streetscape as a theatrical scene. Very likely unbeknown to her, the analogy between a theatre stage and a streetscape originates with the Renaissance architect Sebastiano Serlio in his urbanist interpretation of theatre stage design by the Roman architect and engineer of the first century BCE, Marcus Vitruvius Polio. Rendering of the streetscape as a theatre stage inevitably evokes archaic traditions that had come to a head in Ancient Greece. Female processions through the streets of Ancient Athens to the Theatre of Athens have been known as Dionysia, named after the god of wine, fertility, and ecstasy. The mythical complement of Dionysus was his half-brother, the god Apollo, patron of cities and colonies. The ideal city of Howard and the authentic street of Jacobs ought to be seen in this broad psychocultural context. Where geometric order was the guiding precept in Dinocrates’s plan of Alexandria, in Haussmann’s redesign of Central Paris, and in Howard’s diagrams of the Garden City, it was this precept exactly that became the butt of Jacobs’s scorn. Yet Jacobs’s denunciation of regimented order in urban planning and design comes into stark contrasts against her enthralment elsewhere with nothing less than Haussmann’s streetscapes of Paris (Schubert 2014, 145). How could the same streetscape be consistent with two mutually divergent urbanist approaches? The answer possibly lies in psychoanalysis as much as in the psychocultural dispositions of modernity. But already more than two thousand years ago the playwright Aristophanes in his comedy The Birds lampooned the geometric regimentation of an ideal-city plan, only to have similar such plan propounded a generation later by the philosopher Plato in his legend of Atlantis as chapter 2 shows. The contextual assessment of Howard’s Garden City and its impact is the main thrust of chapter 3. Howard’s naive concern for the betterment of humankind had emanated from his own experience of hardship facing the working poor of Victorian London, and his involvement with esoteric religions, spiritualism in the mid-1870s, followed in 1909 by his membership in the Theosophical Society (Buder 1990, 12–16). The subtler social concerns behind his Garden City idea was the fear of political violence spreading from Continental Europe, instigated by the communist ideology of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820–1895). Engels

Introduction 13

came to England in 1842, and Marx found refuge in London eight years later, just around the time Howard was born. By then London was the headquarters of the Communist League, and there could be little doubt that the violent ideology calling for the dictatorship of the working class had registered in the minds of mainstream community as well as among the working poor of London. Howard left England in 1871 for the United States, but Londoners would have been aware of the Paris Commune the same year, when some forty thousand poverty-stricken and radicalized citizens of Paris rebelled against the government and held the city for two months. In the aftermath of the bloody suppression of this rebellion, over seven thousand of the surviving Communards were deported to New Caledonia, a French territory in the Pacific. Marx analysed the events surrounding the Commune in one of his celebrated pamphlets, The Civil War in France, sold out almost immediately as it was published in London. While digressing about workers’ control of machines as the means of production, Marx failed to see the streetscape context of the Communards’ failure. The redesign of central Paris by the demolition of its winding, crooked lanes, replaced in the urban-renewal scheme of Baron Haussmann by wide boulevards, played role in the quick defeat of the radical Paris Commune. Even though the significance of the new boulevards in the direct assault of the army against the Communards is in dispute (Rougerie 2014, 115–16), there could be no question that during the army’s offensive the Communards were forced by the boulevards into specific, confined locations, having a very limited freedom of counter-attack. Back from the United States in 1876, and preparing his diagrams a decade later, Howard was possibly more discerning than Marx in this regard. Perhaps inspired also by the wide-scale deportations of the Communards after their defeat, Howard’s ostensible urban solution to the plight of the working poor seems to have been a scheme to alleviate workers’ discontent and potential violence by their voluntary relocation into garden cities with streetscapes disposed on a geometric plan not unsimilar to part of Haussmann’s Paris. Perhaps less enigmatic, but no less pointed, is the fact that shortcomings of Howard’s confiding stratagem would likely fail it, had it not been for his perseverance, management, and marketing skills, coupled with the brilliant design and architecture of Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker, key recruits to the Garden City project, who wholly rejected his diagrams. The fundamental incongruity of the Garden City, as chapters 2 and 3 point out, was not in the diagrams but in the very notion of urban garden homes as destinations of the relocated London poor. The Garden City concept found a fertile ground in the United States for the same reason as in England, notably during the Great Depression, when streets of the metropolis became a showcase of poverty, violence, and turmoil. Chapter 3 outlines the stupendous reception of Howard’s garden city, its impact

14  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

in the United States reinforcing the City Beautiful movement just prior to the Great Depression. No less significant was the garden-city leverage upon architects and planners both in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe. It was the individual ingenuity of European and American planners and architects that had transformed Howard’s idea into an appealing, widespread suburban concept for the rising middle class, without necessarily solving, but possibly exacerbating, the rudimentary problems of twentieth-century metropolis, quite consistent with the criticism of Jane Jacobs. The significance of the Great Depression in the success of the American Garden City movement is further discussed in chapter 4 in the context of Jacobs’s rise as a leading urbanist of the twentieth century. Urban planning of her time had not reduced the estrangement in North American cities, Jacobs observed, but quite to the contrary; deliberately planned suburban expansion had further increased the gap between various segments of the urban community. Jacobs’s discernment of dysfunctional communities insinuates that urban alienation has become an underlying sentiment that has penetrated the social fabric of the contemporary metropolis. Jacobs’s criticism had carried a significant message to urban planning of the late twentieth century. This was so also because Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, was the first in a rapid succession of two other books by feminist pioneers with major impact on American society. Rachel Carson published in 1962 the Silent Spring, an erudite conservationist statement sharply critical of the unholy alliance between pesticide-manufacturing industry and parts of the government that had led, as she showed, to increasing food contamination and environmental degradation. Then, in 1963, the bestselling book The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, dismantled the existing housewife-mother paradigm of the American woman, thus sparking the feminist movement of the late twentieth century. The three authors, writing entirely independently of each other, could be easily seen as interconnected through Jacobs’s plea for urban environmental conservation, consistent with Carson’s outlook, and presaging Friedan’s censure of the metropolitan suburb where the patriarchal dream-image of the mother-wife had been cultivated until then (Kanigel 2017, 450). Chapter 4 shows the feminism of Jane Jacobs as a combative stance that she had assumed against the masculine Grand Designer, in the person of Robert Moses, the lawyer and politician behind the construction of elevated freeways running through the Bronx neighbourhoods of New York, threatening her own domicile of Greenwich Village. Narcissistic patterns in Robert Moses’s personality have been well documented (Caro 1974, 859–84), ultimately leading to his undoing. His self-centredness and the ensuing downfall became also the turning point in Jacobs’s rise as an inner-city-neighbourhood heroine and a leading urbanist (Flint 2011, 44–5, 95–136). Consistent with such image was Jacobs’s

Introduction 15

unflattering attitude towards the North American suburb as a redundant and parasitic periphery of the city (Auchincloss and Lynch 1962). In the early twentieth-century, Howard’s utopia had sparked the first European garden city Hellerau, a fashionable upscale community near Dresden, Germany, designed by Heinrich Tessenow, Hermann Muthesius, and Richard Riemerschmid. Successful working-class garden communities followed, whether urban (such as the planned company town of Zlín, now Czech Republic, by František Gahura) or suburban (such as in Frankfurt-am-Main, by Ernst May). Criticized by Jacobs was the endorsement of economic or ethnic homogeneity behind the success of suburban neighbourhood design by planners and architects in the team of Henry Wright (1878–1936) in the early twentieth century, even though the early planned American garden suburb had contained virtually all of Jacobs’s ingredients for a good neighbourhood. Through the second half of the twentieth century in North America, however, it would be difficult to disagree with Jacobs, considering the suburban freeways and other infrastructure devouring the ever-increasing portions of land and municipal budgets, and the squandering of water and power in lawn maintenance of the front and back yards of suburban homes. Yet, since Greek antiquity, suburbs have been an integral part of many cities, and chapter 5 examines their historical evolution, initially as a refuge of the poorest of the poor in the city or outside it, and later, in early modernity, a haven of the rich. An ingenious sixteenth-century plan for a suburb at Romorantin, France, by Leonardo da Vinci, would have likely sparked many imitations throughout Europe and changed the face of urbanization, had it not been for Leonardo’s death and the subsequent abandonment of the suburban project. Leonardo’s discarded project notwithstanding, with the introduction of noisy and polluting industry into cities in early modernity, suburbanization became increasingly attractive option for urban elites. For the middle or upper-middle class to seek an exclusionary place in suburban residences in later modernity does not necessarily disqualify suburbs as a legitimate part of the city. But the growing reliance of suburbs on expensive and maintenanceintensive transportation infrastructure, payable by all taxpayers, certainly gives support to Jacobs’s grievance still today. The urban crisis that Jacobs had discerned has been triggered by the costs of intensifying sprawl of the North American suburbs towards the end of the century. While low-interest mortgage policies and housing-industry influence, coupled by the availability of cheap cars, helped developers lure households into suburbs, municipal budgets were left strained to deal with the resulting infrastructure costs. But the more profound, psychocultural roots of our urban crisis rest with myths of the Ideal City and the Grand Designer, as chapter 6 shows. The unrelenting interaction between mind and city form gave rise to Cartesian thought, science, and mathematics of modernity, which in return

16  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

had fed into modern-mythical urbanist views alternating between conceptions of the city as a mechanism and as an organism. The myths of the Ideal City and the Grand Designer in late modernity had brought about the advent of the Masterplan, a remote conceptual device, through which the planned city was envisioned as a contrivance subject to command and control. Measured by such a gauge, Haussmann’s masterplan for the redesign of central Paris would have been considered success not only due to the newly carved elegant boulevards but also for its expediency in suppressing the Commune in 1871. Half a century later, in Saint Petersburg the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, Russia’s most famous urban artery, became the focal venue in defeating its own purpose as the means of surveillance and crowd control. The spontaneous uprising of women, men, and mutinying soldiers against obscure and alien autocracy of Tsar Nicholas II, in February 1917, took place primarily on the Nevsky Prospekt, the elegant boulevard becoming a point where the tables were turned on an authoritarian bureaucracy. The larger question that remains unanswered, is to what extent have urban streetscapes determined the course of modern history or, indeed, of civilization. It was the unexpected and tragic consequence of the February Revolution that brought the grand-designer Marxist duo of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotzky to the stage of history later in October that year, in a coup that removed Russia’s relatively democratic provisional government. Brutal pursuit of a Marxist vision that followed enveloped one-sixth of the world that came to be known as the Soviet Union. No parallel could be drawn between the patriarchal utopia of the Garden City in the plan and diagrams of Ebenezer Howard, benevolent at heart, and the socialist purgatory of “workers’ paradise” in deceptive five-year plans of the entire Soviet Union. But, as chapter 3 shows, Howard’s Garden City concept was a significant element in early Soviet urban policy struggling to house millions of peasants forced from the countryside into urban factories. Across North America and much of the Western world garden cities had evolved, quite apart from Howard’s impassioned handbook, onto what appeared initially as a largely successful suburban project for housing the middle class. In the Marxist USSR, adaptations of the Garden City concept by Soviet urban planning in misguided housing schemes had been made worse by the broad contrivance of architectural determinism where the built environment was seen part of forging an ideal socialist personality (DeHaan 2013, 40–63). On both counts the masculine myths of the Grand Designer and the Ideal City had converged, in the first half of the twentieth century, into a fancy of multifunctional urban apparatus, which at the century’s end had faced the reality of a misconstrued suburban system in North America and – in the case of the USSR – the collapse of the world’s largest country. Chapter 6 shows that the parable of the Ideal City that had driven Howard’s garden city is, at one level, a mock-up of Plato’s Atlantis, processed through

Introduction 17

spiritualist esoterism with which Howard was associated. At a more profound level, Howard’s urban utopia is a link in an environ-mental chain that reaches deep into antiquity and prehistory. Clay roundels from the Balkans, Plato’s whereabouts, show undecoded carvings that could possibly represent a circular pattern of settlement on a plan of four orthogonal blocks. At least one such extant clay roundel from the Neolithic, uncovered recently only about a thousand kilometres from Plato’s later domicile at Athens, shows affinity with Plato’s Atlantis as disposed on a circular plan in four cardinal directions. Furthermore, seven radial zones of Plato’s Atlantis correspond to seven planetary spheres described by Plato at the very end of his Republic, and to seven walls of Ecbatana, the capital of the Median kingdom in northwestern Iran, as chronicled in a whimsical report by the ancient historian Herodotus of Halicarnassus, only a generation before Plato. An ideal-city plan inspired by Plato’s Atlantis is also one that Tommaso Campanella, Italian philosopher of the late Renaissance, had promulgated in his small treatise The City of the Sun (1613). Probably unaware of at least some of these links, the spiritualist religion with which Howard was associated was engrossed in the Platonic myth of Atlantis. Howard’s diagram of the Garden City that had shown seven arterial rings, had been omitted in the second edition of his handbook, most likely to conceal his ancient elitist, mythical source from his socialist audiences. The apparent geometric harmony of the ideal-city plans from Atlantis through Campanella to Howard imply regimentation, the one attribute of Renaissance new towns that had led Descartes to his notion of clear and distinct ideas, a key concept in critical thought and in Cartesian rationalism that had blazed the trail for the rise of the Enlightenment. It was the city-universe analogy that had largely led to the regimentation of city form, enabling the facility of surveillance that a geometrically harmonious streetscape pattern afforded the overseeing authority. The extent to which surveillance, and urban alienation associated with it, enter our consciousness is cheerlessly exemplified by Jacobs’s trademark slogan “eyes on the street.” A neighbourhood surveillance of strangers by the neighbourhood’s residents, whom she calls “natural proprietors of the street,” to her is the means of crime prevention (Jacobs 1961, 30–5). To make a distinction between “proprietors of the street” and strangers is a divisive suggestion, certainly questionable when it comes from a champion of social heterogeneity. Jacobs offers no alternatives to street crime prevention other than spontaneous surveillance by residents. There is, thus, an unacknowledged agreement between Jacobs and Howard on the supposed need for surveillance, as both of them express a fundamental urban angst: Jacobs, the fear of the outsider, and Howard, the fear of the pauper. Feeling increasingly apprehensive in the inner city, the North American middle class had been migrating to the suburbs in a protracted event

18  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

throughout much of the twentieth century. But once safety, security, and economic well-being have been allayed, the hankering of a new generation in the suburbs has been often for authenticity, a sentiment often found nowhere in the metropolis but back in the poverty-stricken and crime-infested neighbourhoods of the inner city. Taking the ravaged neighbourhoods of North Boston as an affirmative example of urban vitality, Jacobs in Death and Life alludes to their authenticity as a reversal of urban angst. Since the 1980s in North America, suburbanization has been slowly and gradually warded off by a counter-movement of upscale single professionals into inner-city areas in what may be called invasive gentrification, as distinct from neighbourhood improvement by residents, or incumbent gentrification. Meanwhile, due to rising cost of living, urban transportation in particular, households in North American suburbs have been becoming progressively poorer. As for the questionable aspects of gentrification at the turn of the twentyfirst century Jacobs’s own disappointment in Greenwich Village (her home before and during her activist years in New York) speaks for itself. From an authentic precinct Greenwich Village had transmuted onto a commercialized, insular hub at the end of the twentieth century, partly the result of Jacobs’s successful 1960s campaign and the widespread popularity of her book. Such transition qualifies the unintended fallout of her urban activism as congruent with Howard’s own. The aftermath of Howard’s urban co-operative utopia in the first garden suburbs could be said to be a version of the adage, “Socialism for the Rich, Capitalism for the Poor.” That outcome could be matched by a dictum reflecting the unintended outcome of Jacobs’s activism: Gentrification for the Privileged, Suburbs for the Rest. It is impossible to claim that Jacobs’s Death and Life was a trigger of invasive gentrification, just as it is doubtful that Howard’s garden city was the cause of contemporary suburbia. But it is evident that both were catalysts of the early nascent stages of these two trends. Furthermore, our two protagonists in their respective expressions – one through her sound bites, the other through his diagrams – have been the personification of an environ-mental progression behind the history of human settlement since its early origins in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The mind-environment progression is marked by gendered imprints. In Jung’s psychoanalysis, the anima is the feminine component of the male psyche, and, analogously, animus is the masculine component of the female psyche (Jung [1943] 2014). In advancing his notions of anima and animus, Jung draws on earlier terms, the Dionysian and the Apollonian, by Friedrich Nietzsche who introduced them as aesthetic dispositions in The Birth of Tragedy (Jung [1921] 2014; Nietzsche [1872] 2003; [1891] 2005). The notion of projection of masculinity and femininity in the aesthetic discernment between volume and void in the built environment could be said to track the Apollonian and the Dionysian in city form all the same. Such archetypal interpretation traces femininity and

Introduction 19

masculinity of the built environment to its archaic origins, the myths of the Garden and the Citadel. As a Jungian extension, the myths of the Garden and the Citadel are anthropomorphous projections of gender upon the environment by the mind. In the ongoing interaction the Garden and the Citadel are also paradigmatic reflections of the built environment in the minds of humans within it. The ideal city of Howard and the authentic street of Jacobs are only one pair of many in this Apollonian-Dionysian evolutionary, dynamic chain of interaction between humans and the material surroundings they create. Both Apollonian and Dionysian environmental parables are vital to a salubrious city form. But the self-centred myth of the Grand Designer that has engulfed the Ideal City, has also created an imbalance by suppressing the Dionysian disposition, the myth of the Garden, into a subservient allegory. The projection of the resultant mindset upon the built environment yields city form where urban volume thrashes urban void, where regimentation overwhelms spontaneity, and where rules subjugate change and movement. The Grand Designer is a masculine myth that is the self-centred reflection of the argument from design, a religious attestation of the existence of God from the ostensibly intelligent design of the world. The reverse of the deistic argument from design is a narcissistic myth proffering a human Grand Designer as capable of creating a faultless, multifunctional city or, in the most authoritarian rendition of this myth, an ideal society. To Howard, a humble and kindly English gentleman, the garden city was an urban scheme of an ideal city on a perceived grand mission to advance humankind. An adherent of otherworldly communications, Howard’s own stature was perceived as commensurate with this mission. Chapter 7 shows how Jacobs had embarked on a feminine complement of the masculine myth of the Grand Designer personified by Robert Moses, known as the “master builder” of New York, and by Fred “Big Daddy” Gardiner of Toronto. The public campaign of Jacobs against the two macho civic chieftains ought to be seen as a subliminal feminine endeavour to bring back the myth of the Garden – a feminine, Dionysian archetype – into the urban fold. Jacobs had achieved this task by assuming the parable of a feminine counterpart to the masculine Grand Designer: the prophetess and seeress about the city. The string of female oracles prophesying upon cities originates perhaps with Hulda, the s­eventh-century BCE prophetess in the Old Testament (2 Kings 22), and with the Pythia oracle, in the Iron Age lineage of Delphi divinations in ancient Greece. Female oracles of cities are evidenced in the Middle Ages through modernity, the latest of note before Jacobs being Cora Richmond, Ebenezer Howard’s conductress into spiritualism and his inspiration of the garden-city diagrams. Aside from her personality conflict with Robert Moses and with the legacy of Fred Gardiner, Jacobs’s substantive standpoint in regard to Howard’s garden city is usually seen as antithetical. This is, indeed, how Jacobs had presented her

20  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

urbanist outlook, and also how Howard’s disciple and her late nemesis Lewis Mumford had perceived the garden city. The concluding chapter 8 brings forth a hybridizing viewpoint that follows the postmodern outlook of Robert Venturi on architecture. Rather than resolving contradictions, Venturi says, architecture ought to incorporate them. Venturi views traditional architecture as a historical struggle of built form aimed at achieving man-made lucidity by rejecting ambiguity. But such endeavour, says Venturi, is bound to fail. Architecture, just as any other form of art, must incorporate ambiguity and contradiction within its substance and spirit (Venturi 1966, 20–33). Extending Venturi’s postmodern stance to urban design is not straightforward and quite an implausible task for urban planning. After all, the notion of a functioning entity assumes certain uniformity and universality, without which also running a city is impossible. Ambiguity and contradiction in urban planning is tantamount to dysfunction and accidents. Yet it is pointless to deny that in contemporary urban setting the tension in planning and design in central areas of cities, in particular, are a contest of volume against void, a masculine projection represented by buildings and their regimented surroundings, against a feminine imprint embodied by waterfronts, parks and public gardens, streets, squares, and lanes. Urban voids such as surface parking lots are seen as necessary evil, but other urban voids that become places of contempt to the mainstream community, often labelled as urban decay, are unplanned niches, brownfield sites of the industrial past, leftover spaces, inner-city back alleys, and some informal pathways. Whereas descriptions of the Ideal City, such as that of Atlantis in Plato’s dialogues Timaeus and Critias, show void as a component commensurate with volume, the two millennia on the heels of antiquity had witnessed gradual demise of parity between urban void and volume. Twentieth-century masterplans have sealed this historical retreat in a transatlantic urban breakdown, embodied by Le Corbusier’s metropolitan schemes fixated on automotive speed and the residential tower and by North America’s suburban sprawl epitomizing uniformity and monotonicity in geographic space. Twentieth-century sins against urban space had occurred in suburban ­development consuming rangeland, much as in inner-city precincts quashed by superscale modernity. The enablers’ physical manifestation of suburban sprawl and urban alienation has been the urban freeway. The legacy of numerous freeway schemes that municipalities had completed, oblivious to public interest, has been the disappearance of urban space for human encounter, vestige of the feminine myth of the Garden. In the exurban space it was the purging of unvarnished nature, giving place to new, sprawling subdivisions. Back in the inner city, freeways disconnecting neighbourhoods had led to the neglect, suppression, or eradication of small urban voids, destroying the spatial medium for spontaneous outdoor experience. Such was the Embarcadero Freeway in

Introduction 21

San Francisco, built in 1958 and later demolished, or in 1957, portion of the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, cutting off the Parkdale neighbourhood from its waterfront, to mention two examples. Through decisions arising from the self-centred euphoria of masculine myths of the Masterplan and the Grand Designer, twentieth-century degradation of urban voids occurred through the transformation of street corners, pathways, and alleys into places of abandon. Turning streets to transport channels, squares into intersections or parking lots, and nature into make-believe greenery had degraded places of human encounter into specious cavities signalling the eclipse of humanness in the metropolis. Edward Relph and Christian Norberg-Schulz had labelled the urban alienation surfacing from city space so violated, as the loss of place (Norton and Hannon 1998). Showing that fixation on freeways is a self-defeating urban anomaly, Jane Jacobs and Marshall McLuhan, by 1960s both leading cultural critics, had been successful in articulating opposition to one such grand metropolitan scheme focused on speed transportation by the private automobile. It is thanks to Jacobs’s book and activism, but also due to grass-root opposition to imposed urban strategies, that by the end of the twentieth century urban renewal had become a loaded term for all to see, with no genuine relation to neighbourhood community needs. Municipal policies since then, at least officially, have changed course. Time will tell whether Neighbourhood Improvement, a recent urban policy outlook, is an unaffected course protecting inner-city neighbourhoods (or what is left of them) or yet another label to invasive gentrification. Rehabilitation of the urban place ought to be pursued through recognition of human scale. A precondition to revival of the urban place is the admission that city form can be conducive to progress if human scale is successfully incorporated within the superscale of the metropolis. The objective aspects of human scale are human diminutiveness, as against immensity in the metropolitan superscale, and gait, as against mechanized speed. While architecture has been addressing the spatial relations between the human body and the edifice, the fluid aspect of relation between human scale and the superscale requires the resurrection of gait as the means of access between small urban voids. The advantage of slowness of human locomotion, and the efficiency and rapidness of mechanized speed, ought to find expression in the revival of small niches within the built form of the metropolis. This is possibly the greatest challenge at present to urban design and planning. Urban voids, with human gait as a vital link between them, ought to be discerned as environmental metaphors deriving from gendered landscapes, ingrained in primordial allegories of femininity and masculinity. Stewardship of civil society starts at small environments of our own lived space. Public sphere can be preserved and open society upheld when human scale and human encounter in the city can be reintroduced and safeguarded.

1 Paradigms of City Form in the Urbanism of Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs

Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs, half a century apart, two individuals on two distinct continents who never met each other, seem hardly the stuff of which bitter rivals are made. In 1898, after repeatedly being rejected by publishers, Howard (1850–1928), a London court stenographer, published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, a small handbook outlining the idea of an urban co-operative surrounded by a green belt, where most every household would occupy a detached, single-family dwelling with a small private garden (Howard 1898, 127). In London beset by poor infrastructure and permeated by soot from coal-burning factories, this became an appealing concept, a seeming solution to disease, crime, and increasing political discontent associated with the peak of the Second Industrial Revolution (often referred to as the Technological Revolution, 1870–1914). Through his urban housing scheme Howard shows a humanitarian concern that, to some, has constituted a significant stage in urban and human progress, while to others it has contributed to more, not less, urban problems. A century later, home gardens (front and back yards) have become defining features of suburbia that have brought to middle-class dwellers across North America the lifestyle they swear by, or rage against, today. Howard’s book had triggered a great deal of enthusiasm; a Garden City movement was founded in Britain chaired by Howard; and garden suburbs attributed to Howard’s idea arose not only in Britain and North America but also across Europe and other parts of the world during the first half of the twentieth century. With the advent and proliferation of the automobile, the North American suburb the way we know it today, as a sprawling community ever further from the inner-city, has evolved from Howard’s urbanist vision but also from similar urban notions, some of which had preceded the Garden City. Howard and Jacobs: Main Tenets Juxtaposed Some sixty years after Howard’s ground-breaking handbook, Jane Jacobs (1916– 2006), a journalist with no formal education beyond high school, wrote a book

Paradigms of City Form  23

rejecting the urban planning tenets that were based chiefly on Howard’s Garden City notion accepted as a standard by the mid-twentieth century. She pointed out that the attendant reliance on urban transportation infrastructure ensuing from automobile commutes between the expanding residential garden suburbs and employment hubs undermines humaneness in American cities, the way they were prior to the automobile era. As a civil alternative to dependence on the automobile, Jacobs, in her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), had sounded a call for walkable streets with no home gardens. Instead, compact, low-rise, and higher-density streetscape of residential living mixed with ground-level retail shopping and offices, was the idea put forward by Jacobs. The apparent contradiction between the two champions of the city is rather obvious. Unknown to each other, the two protagonists became the spirit of an urbanist conflict sparking the major controversies, and also the discourse, of urban planning in the second half of the twentieth century, particularly in North America. Howard, who had published the second edition of his handbook in 1902 as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, again in London, England, had not lived to defend his urbanist concept against the young American woman’s sharp-tongued critique. Jane Jacobs had called Howard’s urban scheme and its later spinoffs “city-destroying ideas” and launched her attack on modern urban planning that he had helped precipitate through the Garden City concept, occasionally taking a swipe at Howard himself (1961, 17–25, 116–18, 289). But the transformation and profusion of Howard’s Garden City idea onto garden suburbs, the suburban homes with front and back yards that became the epitome of twentieth-century’s North American dream, was also beyond anything that Howard could have anticipated. Mass production of the automobile that had commenced in America shortly after Howard’s book was published, the Great Depression of 1929–33, and the subsequent economic boom that followed the Second World War, had all transformed Howard’s Garden City concept into a variety of urban expansion schemes. City form – the spatial and temporal features of buildings, streets, squares, and other open urban spaces, along with infrastructure, that comprise a city – had to adapt to the unprecedented invasion of the private automobile. Among the multiplicity of impacts the automobile had on twentieth century’s built environment was, no doubt, the expanding suburbia. In what had appeared a beneficial correspondence between affordable cars, cheap gasoline, and inexpensive homes in sprawling cities, the belief in incessant success of the suburb seemed overwhelming during the economic and demographic boom of the mid-twentieth century. At least, this was the comfortable notion cultivated by municipal bureaucracies presenting as standard urban planning infrastructure schemes in support of alliance between the automobile and the suburb. Highbrow intelligentsia longing for the premodern style of compact urban fabric had found in such alliance a target to their grievances against motorized modernity, usually at the

24  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

derisive dismissal by civic administration pandering to middle-class suburban communities. It was Jane Jacobs who masterfully articulated resistance to such attitudes, unfortunately in one breath categorizing the people behind them as professional planners. Precepts about homes, yards, and gardens that she associated with planners had resulted in mundane suburbia, she observed, while at the same time cars from the suburbs were gnawing at the environment of people who lived downtown and in the inner city. In pointing to an alternative urbanist approach in her Death and Life, Jane Jacobs had put forward what was perceived as a censure of contemporaneous urban planning, capturing, by the 1970s, the hearts and minds of millions of ordinary people across Canada and the United States. Howard, who died two years after having been knighted for his urban planning work by King George II in 1926, had been inspiration, for better or worse, to leading architects and urbanists throughout much of the century. Jacobs’s critique of the urban planning outlook that followed the Garden City tenets, in her rebellious appeal for urban serendipity and human encounter in urban streetscapes, had forced ordinary people and urban planners alike to question twentieth-century automotive patterns of suburban sprawl. The underlying feature of Howard’s Garden City concept were small ex-urban towns comprising mainly single-family homes with private gardens, away from nineteenth century’s begrimed, polluted, disease- and crime-infested metropolis, at a distance conducive to commuting to work by rail. Alarmed by increasing deterioration of inner-city areas of the metropolis, Jacobs, half a century later, discerned suburban sprawl exacerbated through commuting by the private automobile as the major culprit of urban decline in North America. She had bluntly rejected automobile commuting, hailed by officialdom and the mainstream alike as the expression of freedom and prosperity, and condemned the increasing costs of infrastructure undermining the maintenance and preservation of traditional streetscapes in the inner city. While Howard envisaged carefully planned, small new towns of single-family homes, with occasional low-rise multi-family apartments, all sunk in the greenery of gardens, Jacobs rejected this notion as estranging people from one another. She countered with her own urbanist template, one that stresses human encounter through a traditional, high-density urban streetscape in a precinct of friendly and caring neighbours. It is due largely to the fiery interchange between Jacobs and the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), a Howard disciple, that the two contrasting urbanist approaches have been seen mutually contradictory. But even the brief exposition just made suggests that the differences between the two outlooks are not irreconcilable; idealized urbanist visions ensuing from differences in mindset, rather than contradiction in substance, have been at play. This follows largely from the different geographic and transportation linkages of the two: while Howard alluded to garden cities as ex-urban garden communities, Jacobs

Paradigms of City Form  25

was addressing the inner city of a metropolis; while Howard promoted commuting by public transit of the railway, Jacobs was denouncing commuting by the private automobile. From a formal standpoint each was focused on exclusive, geographical areas and on entirely different modes of commuting. The metropolitan region, of course, is a hybrid, and there are multiple aspects in which suburbs, exurban communities, and the inner city are intertwined, not the least of these being taxes and local government expenditures. The meaningful differences between Jacobs and Howard rest in their urbanist outlooks, but these were not unique to either of the two. There is a contrast, rather than contradiction, in their urbanist approaches, and it stems from gender imprints in the psychocultural milieu of modernity. Their polemics, furthermore, ought to be seen in context of a continual interaction between mind and the environment. Howard had espoused the home garden as the emissary of nature in the city, and it was precisely this approach that had made his garden city a runaway commercial success in the heavily industrialized and densely populated southeast England at the turn to the twentieth century. To Jacobs, large garden yards adjacent to homes ran against her urbanist concept advocating a habitat dense enough to allow casual interaction of individuals on streets, rather than isolation of households behind their front and back yards. The benefit of good city form is in the spontaneity of happenstance in streets and small public spaces, she writes in Death and Life (1961, 55–73), whereas from Howard’s garden-city diagrams, precision-guided, transparent, and predictable city form emerges, shielding private homes within equally private gardens – the one single reason for its incredible feat among the middle class. Jacobs had struggled with Howard’s idea of garden yards leading to sprawl, by contemplating vertical greenery. In Death and Life she alternately condemned a “vertical garden city” (22) and embraced vertical greenery hanging from “window boxes, trees, vines” (107). Hand in hand with Howard’s streetscape transparency and predictability go machine-like diagrams of his ideal city, where nature and gardens are presumed confined within limits that would not compromise safety and security. Taking for granted that physical harmony and social concord go hand in hand, the Garden City has a common ground with another urban movement, roughly concurrent to Howard’s. The City Beautiful was a stately approach to social conformity and urban grandeur, with impact on later urban-renewal and gentrification policies in the urban cores of cities. The more elusive aspect of the Garden City, as well as the City Beautiful, is their environmental determinism, a supposition that the environment is a one-way causal agent acting upon minds and behaviour of people within it. Such deep conviction, with its subtly discriminatory insinuation, was not unique. It had prevailed in several social circles of the time, and elsewhere it continued to constitute a pseudo-ethical validation of the Garden City concept (Coetzer 2016, 7–10, 158–80).

26  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

But Howard’s diagrams are also most instructive in the juxtaposition of the two urbanist approaches, endorsing or renouncing the Garden City, against the background of the paradigmatic Garden. Running through the history of humankind has been the recurring feminine environmental paradigm of the mythical Garden. From the epic of Gilgamesh, the Bible, and other similar allegories of the Bronze Age, through antiquity and the Middle Ages to Renaissance and modernity, the Garden has constituted a feminine imprint upon the environment. To Jacobs, the paradigm of the Garden comes to be expressed in built city form through naturalness of human movement, encounter, and spontaneity. Such outlook is entirely consistent with small-scale colonial towns of New England and the historical precincts of Philadelphia or New York that Jacobs would have recalled from her childhood in and around Scranton, Pennsylvania, where she grew up, or later in her youth. Howard’s garden context is different and strongly related to the modern history of urban gardens during and prior to the industrialization of England. The first two industrial revolutions brought rapid urban growth throughout England and Western Europe and with it also the desire of the urban elites for residences far enough from the industrial heart of cities. Origins of modern settlement planning in premodern England are in model villages built for displaced families formerly housed on land that was owned by overlords or moguls. These planned villages inform the broader understanding of Howard’s concept of the Garden City. The City Beautiful and the Garden City movements trace their historic roots to rich landowners of eighteen-century England, in later years called the Landed Gentry, who often built country houses on their rural estates. The shacks of the poor, employed by the gentry, and the accompanying noise and frequent lack of hygiene were nuisance to the estate proprietors, who then simply sought to demolish the poor precincts, rebuilding the strapped community out of sight from the landowners’ residences, yet close enough to remain under surveillance and control. The evicted site was then landscaped, creating beautiful environs to the gentry (Burchardt 2002, 58). Established under such conditions was Milton Abbas, the first planned village in modern England. In 1770s, Joseph Damer, a politician and owner of the Milton Abbey estate, in Dorset County, southwest England, had built a mansion house replacing some of his own existing buildings at the Abbey. A wealthy landowner, Damer felt that the small town of Middleton, now ­adjacent to his new residence, was too noisy and disturbed his view of nature. He commissioned the planning and design of a model village, Milton Abbas, about half a mile away, to which residents of Middleton were evicted. The town of Middleton was razed to the ground, the site was flooded by an artificial lake, and the rest of the area around the Abbey was landscaped – all planned and overseen by the leading eighteenth-century landscape architect Lancelot Brown (Brown 2011, 152–79).

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With rampant poverty and the increasing discontent of the urban poor during the Second Industrial (Technological) Revolution, the desire of middle and upper-middle classes to relocate away from sites of abjection and urban turmoil has evolved into a trend towards upscale suburban or exurban residential development. The sourcing of suburban sprawl directly to Howard (e.g., Wakeman 2016, 20–46), therefore, is imprecise. The first planned garden suburb was Blaise Hamlet, now a part of Bristol, in the west of England. Commissioned and built around 1811 by the banker and philanthropist John Harford for some of his retired employees, a group of some eight homes with their own gardens were built near Harford’s mansion known as Blaise Castle House. The hamlet was designed by another leading landscape architect, John Nash (1752–1835), who thus inadvertently created the first exemplar of a planned urban garden community. First Public Parks and Early Urban Garden Communities Behind the contrasting urbanist visions of Howard and Jacobs had been mental or environmental imprints, respectively espoused by the two exponents of the city. As chapters 3 and 7 will show, these imprints had made their debuts much earlier, have been present in various forms to this day, and presumably will continue so, long into the future. The imprints are gender based, the one represented by the feminine Garden, the other by the masculine Citadel. The Garden, representing void and nature, is easily detectable as far back as Iron Age sources (Genesis 2; Turner 2005, 34–80). The first historic garden community was that of Epicurus (341–270 BCE) in ancient Athens, where, based on hedonic philosophy and true to the visceral Garden archetype, women and slaves could join as equals (Turner 2005, 5, 305; Clay 2009, 9–28). Later, during the Roman period, Epicureanism had found a small group of adherents, the most prominent among them Titus Lucretius Carus (94–51 BCE). In his poem On the Nature of Things (De rerum natura), Lucretius expounded and interpreted Epicurean philosophy in asserting that the universe, rather than guided by divine forces, is subject to physical laws based on fortuna, or chance. But whereas the Epicurean Garden had a meaningful philosophical context, this was no longer the case during the Roman era, when the garden was largely a variation of Persian horticultural design. Associated with the most prominent of Roman gardens is the general, and later politician, Lucius Licinius Lucullus (118–57 BCE), the conqueror of Eastern kingdoms in Rome’s war against Persia. The Persians perceived their gardens as an earthly paradise, and Lucullus’s garden too was to provide a place for protected relaxation, spiritual as well as leisurely. Lucullus re-adapted the Persian garden idea, whose origins date back to King Cyrus the Great (600–530 BCE) and to the development of agriculture in Persia

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during the fourth millennium BCE (Khansari et al. 2003). About 60 BCE the lavish Gardens of Lucullus were laid out on the Pincian Hill at the outskirts of Rome, now the heart of the city, as a display of personal wealth and power. The Gardens of Lucullus thus exemplify a historic trend: since the dawn of Roman antiquity, gardens and parks have come to represent the contrast to the Epicurean philosophy. Rather than an expression of freedom and equality, personified by the Epicurean Garden, they became a subdued module of the primordial Garden paradigm, largely an accompaniment to private estates and property. By the time modernity had arrived, parks and gardens have become cowed and secondary to urban volume – to the large edifices that are the centrepiece of cities. When first public parks were introduced in cities as an egalitarian urban space where people can play and enjoy freedom, the green spaces in the city became also a fervent, albeit innocuous, substitute of the paradigmatic Garden. Such was Regent’s Park in London. Designed in stages through the years 1809–32 on an oval plan by John Nash for the future King George IV (then Prince Regent), along with adjacent streets, terraces, and crescents, the park was first opened to the general public in 1835, initially for two days a week only. In 1843 Joseph Paxton (1803–1865), a horticulturalist and an architect, designed the first publicly funded park in Birkenhead, near Liverpool. On the heels of his visit to Britain, Frederic Law Olmstead (1822–1903), American designer and social critic who introduced landscape architecture into the United States, had this to say on Birkenhead Park, the source of his own inspiration in the design of New York’s Central Park: The site of the park and garden was, ten years ago, a flat, sterile, clay farm. It was placed in the hands of Mr. Paxton, in June 1844, by whom it was laid out in its present form by June of the following year [...] And so, in one year, the skeleton of this delightful garden was complete. But this is only a small part. Besides the cricket and an archery ground, large valleys were made verdant [...] and avenues of trees formed, and a large park laid out. And all this magnificent pleasure-ground is entirely, unreservedly, and for ever the people’s own. The poorest British peasant is as free to enjoy it in all its parts as the British queen. (Olmsted 1856, 99)

Designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and the architect Calvert Vaux (1824– 1895) in 1857, Central Park in Manhattan opened on 778 acres (315 hectares) of city-owned land, and in 1867 Prospect Park was designed by Olmsted and Vaux on 585 acres (237 ha) in the New York borough of Brooklyn. In 1896 the landscaping firm of the brothers John Charles Olmsted (1852–1920) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr (1870–1957) was contracted to provide a plan for 538 acres (218 ha) of what came to be known as Forest Park in the New York Borough of Queens after several buildings within the area were auctioned out, dismantled, and removed (Jackson 1995, 428).

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The attempt at egalitarianism in Birkenhead Park and Central Park is unmistakable. Still, the drive behind public parklands in Britain and America on the heels of the First Industrial Revolution seems to have implied a more subtle formula: suburban garden homes for the rich, public parks for the rest. The benevolent, patriarchal attitude towards the working poor was integral to the increasingly appealing socialist thought, mainly on the European side of the Atlantic. In England during the 1870s, according to Buder (1990, 9), Howard had become familiar with modern visions of ideal societies, probably through the American Robert Dale Owen (1801–1877), the son of one of the founders of utopian socialism, the Welsh social reformer Robert Owen (1771–1858). In early nineteenth century the elder Owen, a Welsh manufacturer, set out to improve the living conditions of his workers at a residential site near his cotton mills at New Lanark, Scotland. Instituting also a ban on child labour and halting other work abuse at his cotton mills, Owen subsequently planned housing for the workers’ families, childcare and education for a progressive living at the residential site (Rosenau 1983, 150–1). Owen’s success in New Lanark reverberated through Britain and beyond. Endeavouring to extend his New Lanark success, Owen proceeded to form “villages of co-operation,” whose residents would work their way out of poverty by collaboratively growing produce, building and maintaining their housing, and making their own clothes (Harrison 1969, 122–34). Although his extended attempt to form such co-operatives in Scotland and later, at mid-nineteenth century, in the state of Indiana had failed, Owen’s ideas made a lasting mark on the fledgling socialist movement in Britain. In 1851 Sir Titus Salt (1803–1876), a textile industrialist, built a company village, Saltaire, near Bradford, West Yorkshire, for workers at his wool textile mills. The workers’ houses had tap water, baths, and central facilities such as library with a reading room, school for the workers’ children, a concert hall, and a gymnasium. In north Yorkshire, the philanthropist Joseph Rowntree (1836–1925), a cocoa and confectionery tycoon who wished to establish an egalitarian community near York, had a model village called New Earswick built in 1902 as an equitable mixed commune where workers and managers dwelt together in a nature setting, with gardens and fruit trees adjacent to each home. Two architects, Raymond Unwin (1863–1940) and Barry Parker (1867–1947), were commissioned to plan the new garden village and to design its first houses. Unwin and Parker were followers of the Arts and Crafts movement prevalent in the 1880s. The English Arts and Crafts movement in art and architecture, led by the painter and prominent art critic John Ruskin (1819–1900) and the architect, designer, poet, and novelist William Morris (1834–1896), both social activists, had primarily sought return to medieval naturalness in design as opposed to mechanized regimentation of the early modern metropolis.

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New Earswick houses were built in this style, as were many homes in future Howard’s garden cities (Rutherford 2014, 15–23). Howard had been in the United States over the years 1871–6 and later at least one more time prior to the first publication of his book in 1898. He founded the Garden Cities Association (later known as the Town and Country Planning Association), under which auspices the company First Garden City, Ltd, was incorporated in September 1903. The intent of the company was to create Letchworth Garden City, 34 miles (55 km) north of London. Inadvertently, this became a prelude to much of twentieth century’s urban planning, discussed in chapter 3. A year after founding the First Garden City, Ltd, Unwin and Parker were asked to submit a plan for Letchworth Garden City. The innovations that Unwin and Parker introduced into the plan of Letchworth included a greenbelt surrounding the town, land-use zoning, limit on housing-unit density, ­architectural controls, and advertisement ban, a true novelty for Britain where no planning legislation existed at the time. The stated purpose of the new garden city, never quite fulfilled, was not only to relieve the congestion of population in the metropolis polluted by industry but also to induce the agricultural labourer to remain on the land (Bonham-Carter 1951). Welwyn, the second garden city in Britain, was founded in 1920. Early residential development in America along some of the lines of English garden communities, anticipating Howard’s garden city, had begun with Adrian Iselin Jr, who in 1885 developed Residence Park on a former country estate at the time on the outskirts of the city of New Rochelle, New York State. In a design foresight Iselin based his planned wealthy precinct on houses built in American colonial or traditional English styles with large gardens, along carefully designed streets with sidewalks, small public spaces, all in correspondence to the natural topography. Residence Park was an urban design breakthrough since up until then American residential settings were either urban, with no green space except for parks, or rural, with little or no servicing infrastructure. After surveying Howard’s garden cities in England, Robert Winsor, a major Boston financier of early twentieth century, became inspired and sought to build Woodbourne, a model residential subdivision in Forest Hills, Boston, for the employees of his Boston Elevated Railway. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr was responsible for some of its layout, preserving the uneven character of the landscape to confer a country estate semblance. Contrasting the grid pattern elsewhere, streets were designed to meander through residential areas with homes imitating the English Arts and Crafts cottage style, on occasion surrounding a common courtyard (Vale 2000, 111). Hilton Village, another small garden community spurred on by Howard’s garden city, was planned by the landscape architect and elder Olmsted’s student Henry Vincent Hubbard (1875–1947), a Harvard University professor of landscape architecture. The planned town was built in the years 1918–21 near

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Newport News, Virginia, for families of workers at nearby shipyards. Homes designed on specifications from wives of the shipyard workers were grouped together and at walking distances to communal services. The plan of the community included churches, a public library, commercial spaces, fire station, and the Hilton Elementary School, along with a park and fishing pier on the riverbank (Quarstein 1998, 96–108). Emergence of the City Beautiful and the Garden City Movements The founding of Residence Park at New Rochelle triggered numerous imitations across America in the late nineteenth century, conditioned by racial restrictions on minorities as an acceptable norm. Residence Parks across late nineteenth-century America reveal also the factual background to the rise, and success of Howard’s garden city in England. In America, as well as in Europe, the time was marked by a series of financial crises stirred by over-speculation, corruption, and corporate incompetence. In 1873 a stock market crash in Vienna, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, triggered a ripple effect across the Western world, with economic crisis, dubbed the Long Depression, which lasted until 1879 in North America and longer in Europe. In America the crisis led to much turmoil in cities whose wealthy white residents sought haven elsewhere. Economic turmoil, frequently accompanied by violence, had a similar effect on the founding of some garden cities and suburbs on the British Isles and the European continent. During the period of 1860 to 1910 the US population had increased from 31.4 million to 91.9 million, and, by 1910, 46 per cent lived in urban settlements with populations of over 2,500 (Hines 1979, 81). The emergence in America of major urban design movements, the City Beautiful and the Garden City, had been heralded by urban turmoil ensuing from dire economic conditions and attendant attitudes of the middle and upper-middle classes. In 1884 a panic, triggered by a combination of depletion of national gold reserves across Europe and a series of New York bank failures and embezzlements, had led to the closure of over ten thousand businesses across the country. In late winter and the early spring of 1893 another financial crisis began looming as wheat price declined prompting a subsequent run on gold. The crisis became full blown by May 1893, at which time the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago. The glittering “White City,” as the Chicago exposition came to be known, was intended to be a masterpiece of urban design and architectural cohesion. The Beaux Arts, a pseudo-classical style with a full range of Grecian and Roman elements, including columns, arches, vaults, and domes, was the architectural mark of the fair and of the ensuing City Beautiful movement. Architectural monuments were of utmost significance, placed within tenets of urban order

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and perceived dignity and harmony. Director of Construction was Chicago’s Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912), under whose guidance the grand Court of Honour, surrounded by ostentatious historicizing buildings painted bright white, with uniform cornice height and tidily homogeneous decorations. Possibly not too many of the twenty-seven million visitors who came to the exposition during the two years 1893–4 saw through the pretention of glamorous buildings, water, and open green spaces. The awe-inspiring magnificence of the White City was also under tight surveillance and control. In sharp contrast with the outside world, only steps away, there was neither poverty nor crime here, no turmoil nor violence, only excellent sanitation and transportation facilities under the watchful eyes of the fair’s security personnel. But outside the exposition raging economic upheaval accompanied by street disturbances was taking place throughout the city, as well as in the rest of the nation. Over the following five years there were fifteen thousand business bankruptcies and five hundred bank failures, with unemployment reaching 18 per cent across the United States (Wood 2009, 101), Chicago itself becoming focal point of fuming unrest. Some buildings at the Chicago exposition were designed by Solon Spencer Beman (1853–1914), architect of the company town of Pullman, built just south of Chicago by George Pullman, the American engineer and industrialist, owner of the railway Pullman Palace Car Company. Built on a lakeshore of prairie plain over the five years 1880–4, Pullman was an industrial model town constructed upon its founder’s architectural determinism premise that a harmonious and well-functioning physical environment of a community will project the same features of harmony and orderliness upon the community itself. Workers had to meet behavioural criteria in order to rent Pullman’s distinctively designed rowhouses: The one thousand homes on a 4,000-acre (1.6 km2) tract had indoor plumbing, gas, and sewer lines, thus featuring superior housing standards of the time (Lindsey 1942, 38–55). A decade after its founding, a year after the opening of the Chicago exposition, on 11 May 1894, a strike by workers of the Pullman Palace Car Company shut down rail transport in Chicago, triggering further strikes against Pullman railcars across the country. Ensuing rampage had resulted in the torching of buildings at the Chicago Exposition, with many of the workers involved in the violence coming from the company town of Pullman. The Pullman Strike violence was started by rents in Pullman town being kept at pre-crisis levels while lay-offs at the company were taking place and wages were being reduced, the result of overall economic downturn. The Chicago exposition’s grounds, an obvious and openly visible feature of upscale urban environment, would have been a prime target for arson by enraged workers who had been evicted from their jobs and their dwellings. Intended to be a showcase of a harmonious built environment that brought about a moral mindset and the

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dignified behaviour of people, the City Beautiful, right at the outset, was shown to be a social failure precisely because of this violence. Rather than reflecting upon evidence from the Pullman strike violence, declarations to the effect that urban beauty promoted a harmonious civic society addressed the fears of the American middle class and contributed to the short-lived success of the City Beautiful movement at the turn to the twentieth century. Following his utopian White City, Daniel Burnham introduced his plan of Chicago in 1909 as a formal set of public gardens, a magnificent lake-front connected to major civic sites by an efficient network of tree-lined streets and a freeway system, another symbol of the City Beautiful movement (Foglesong 1986, 124–66). Elsewhere the imperial approach to urban design shored by trimmed greenery was followed in such renowned projects as Edwin Lutyen’s Hampstead Garden Suburb in north London or his plan of New Delhi in 1911, and Walter Griffin’s winning design for Canberra in 1912 (Peck 2006; Freestone 1986). With increasing political tensions in Europe and urban turmoil arising from economic hardship, the elimination of surprise, a transparent streetscape, and an overriding ability for command and control had begun to shape thoughts about the metropolis. The urban ideal at the turn to the twentieth century was marked by the celebration of the mechanized city, incorporating the idea of the English urban park within its midst as a carefully controlled urban element, at a safe distance from civic power centres. Decades later, an ominous observation on the father of the City Beautiful movement was made by the architectural critic Thomas Hines. Venturing into Burnham’s psychological make-up, Hines wrote: “[T]he lapse into derivative historicism was, then as always, a reflection, in part, of a spiritual and intellectual indolence, a lack of creative vision and courage. It involved, in some ways, a failure of nerve, just as, in other ways, it suggested the opposite: for in its frequently swollen grandeur and magnitude, in the megalomania of its vast proportions, it represented, indeed, an excrescence of nerve, a compensating thrust of indulgent bravado. And so, from a distance of over half a century, it is easy to see dark qualities in Burnham, qualities largely unknown to himself ” (Hines 1979, 368). The affinity between the City Beautiful and the Garden City movements parallels the similar mindsets of Burnham and Howard. Howard, who for a short time was a preacher in Ebenezer Baptist Church, Howard County, Nebraska, was a believer in divine order and later saw that “humanity needed to align itself with this divine order [...] This, he now believed, required the garden city” (Buder 1990, 63). Whereas in Jacobs there is more than a penchant of nostalgia for the urban past, in Howard as in Burnham there is a self-centred conviction of a divine mission benefiting the entire human race. In Howard as well as in Burnham the paradigm of the Garden attains a superficial form of confined nature privatized to homes, or carefully controlled through public spaces, guided

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by an overriding paternalistic Masterplan. Howard and Burnham presented their urbanist notions as ideal cities of modernity that had left behind those urban traits that, to them, were tantamount to chaos and unpredictability but that, to adherents of competing urbanist views during Howard’s time, as well as to his later challengers, Jane Jacobs among them, were essential to good city form. Both Jacobs’s vibrant urbanism and Howard’s ideal city in their fundamental voracities reach back into deep history and prehistory, producing, respectively, a dynamic, feminine outlook on city form or an urban utopia of a solemn, masculine civic scheme. The one outlook sees nature complemented and reflected in the built environment, while the other sees any penchant of nature confined and predisposed within a man-made environment. On the face of it, as further detailed in chapter 4, Jacobs celebrates the chaotic setting of a crowd in a neighbourhood streetscape, nature’s reflection of the sensual, spontaneous, and emotional aspects of the urban milieu, while Howard emerges as the designer of an ideal city built to detail in the image of a machine: nature becomes a private domain of homeowners, and the entirety of the urban environment is subject to surveillance and control. On this view, Jacobs’s urbanism epitomizes femininity in city form, whereas Howard’s garden city is a pre-set, masculine ideal city in which the gardens are acquiescing to and being protected by the Masterplan. It is the Masterplan itself, a latter-day version of the Ideal City, that typify the masculine projection upon city form. The Brave New Worlds of Howard and Jacobs: The Urban Environment as a Mirror of Mind Lewis Mumford, the renowned historian of the city, put Howard’s garden city on an equal footing with the Wright brothers’ invention of the airplane: “At the beginning of the twentieth century two great new inventions took form before our eyes: the aeroplane and the Garden City, both harbingers of a new age: the first gave man wings and the second promised him a better dwelling-place when he came down to earth” (Mumford 1965). Not to be outdone by such hyperbole, the New York Times qualified the tirade against the garden city by Jane Jacobs as “perhaps the most influential work in the history of town planning” (Fulford 1992). The conflicting passions that sparked the exaggerated praises of both Howard and Jacobs can be explained only by the vision and promise of some brave new worlds, which happened to largely collide: One new world was the ideal city integrating nature and fast, versatile transportation, manifest in Howard’s time by the steam locomotive. It was the train that could haul people as well as material between the garden city and the central metropolis. Against such mechanized urban expediency stood the other – a romanticized world of a medievalist townscape and the American colonial city, set in a twentieth-century metropolis – put forward by Jacobs.

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“If both were walking, in a cross walk, on a rainy day, I would not be able to find the brakes,” said a corporate observer and economic commentator, referring to two US presidential contenders. With no lesser measure of justification than the aggrandized accolades and overstatements for Howard and Jacobs, both brave new worlds of our two urbanist adversaries could be viewed as less than flattering urban caricatures. Yet the inflated applauses from Mumford and the New York Times directed, respectively, at the two proponents of competing urbanist views are rather opportune. Whereas the history of town planning reaches at least to the Bronze Age of the Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley more than five thousand years ago, the Wright brothers’ invention of the airplane opened an unprecedented era that likely tied the future of humankind to aerospace technology. Embroidered commentaries about Howard’s and Jacobs’s mutually discordant approaches to the city have continued virtually to this day. They carry merit in the sense that they point to the perpetual and underlying attitudes to the built environment that are beyond the specific personalities representing them. Several larger and mutually intertwined contexts, or frames of reference, ought to be considered in examining the thought of Ebenezer Howard and Jane Jacobs.The first frame of reference relates to epistemology, the concern with the constitution, sources, and limits of knowing and perceiving within the physical context of city form. A progression of mutual feedback between mind and the built environment has been detected by several thinkers over the past century or more. As we shall see in chapters 5 and 6, mind-environment feedback ought to be viewed as a formative force within this ongoing interplay. Early myth has been the primordial momentum in this powerful interaction, attaining in Greek mythology the features of the sun god Apollo (the patron of colonies, walls, and predictions) and his bisexual half-brother and complement, the god Dionysus (the patron of wine, fertility, ritual madness, and theatre). In psychoanalytic vernacular it is easy to see Howard, or Burnham for that matter, as an urbanist hero, unchallenged in his own time, on behalf of Apollo. Half a century on, Jane Jacobs is a heroine of Dionysus who comes to tackle these heroes and everything they represent in urbanism. The environmental counterparts of the two Greek gods are the parables of the Citadel (the Tower of Babel, the castle, the Ideal City, and the Masterplan) and the Garden (the Garden of Eden, the Earth, and wilderness). Howard and Jacobs ought to be seen as links in a long chain of interaction between mind and environment, manifesting respectively the Apollonian and the Dionysian traits in city form. The City Beautiful and the Garden City movements represent architectural determinism, a paternalistic culmination of the Apollonian in the city. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that both Howard and Burnham appointed themselves to the role of Grand Designer. As chapters 6 and 7 show, Jacobs’s urbanism divulges a deportment of the Dionysian, her own psychocultural posture animating a heroic version of Little Red Riding Hood.

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The second context is the evolution of material culture, the unfolding of city form in particular. Both Howard and Jacobs present archetypal dispositions towards city form, none particularly original within this context but both reflecting the evolution of a struggle between void and volume in the built environment. The contest between Howard and Jacobs thus is not focused only on gardens and parks, streets and squares, and edifices and urban infrastructure of neighbourhoods or entire cities, and the setting of their respective outlooks is not confined to the contemporaneous urban environments. Their urbanist encounter ought to be placed within a much larger context of human nature and psychocultural change in which the urban environment plays a dynamic role, along with the myriad minds within it. More than a conflict, the urbanist scuffle between Howard and Jacobs ought to be seen as a link in a chain of evolving cerebral dispositions of the mutual responses between humans and built environments. The cerebral bonds that Howard and Jacobs represent are deeply immersed in mythologies of gender, where Howard, on the one hand, is an all-too-willing participant in the mythology of the Grand Designer, deliberately concealing such association. Jacobs, on the other hand, is one in a long series of female oracles prophesying on the city, and this idiosyncrasy puts her within a mindset identical to that of Howard, as chapter 7 shows. The third context is the tension in early modern Western culture between rationalism and empiricism, the one originating with the French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, the other with the British philosopher and physician John Locke. Whereas Howard, albeit an Englishman, conceived of an ideal city that could be largely said to fit the rationalist milieu, Jacobs’s approach to city form was quite the opposite and consistent with the empiricist cultural proclivity. As chapter 7 shows, the origins of city form and urbanist thought reach deeply into early antiquity and beyond. The first and more immediate intellectual origins of contemporary urbanism, however, can be found largely in two contravening outlooks of eighteenth-century Enlightenment: rationalism and empiricism (Lang 1994, 46–7). It is commonplace for rationalism to be identified with the assertion of the autonomy of reason grounded in human mind, whereas empiricism is largely identified with the experiential acquisition of knowledge through the observation of nature, of which the human body is an integral part. Outlooks of twentieth-century urbanist thought on both sides of the northern Atlantic are thought to have been shaped largely by rationalism and empiricism, the one embracing reason as the foremost authority, and the other espousing sense experience as the pre-eminent tenet and the origin of all knowledge. One way to look at the twentieth century’s outcomes of rationalism and empiricism is, precisely, through the prism of the two urbanist approaches,

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the one represented by the founder of the Garden City movement in Britain, and the other by an American journalist, urban activist, and celebrated author of the avant-garde Death and Life of Great American Cities. On the face of it, both Howard and Jacobs might be considered to be embracing, from different angles, empiricist as well as rationalist approaches to urban planning. In his garden city, Howard, at the turn to the twentieth century, set out to bring nature fundamentally into the carefully planned urban milieu, thus inspiring a major urban-planning movement in Europe, North America, and the rest of the world where suburban life became the mark of success and well-being. Jacobs, in quite a contrarian approach to Howard specifically, advocated higher-density urban space with no room for private home gardens; she rejected urban sprawl and its associated high cost, while emphasizing human interaction and compact urban environments as paramount in good city form. Although much of twentieth-century urban planning, in North America in particular, emanated from the Garden City concept, contemporary strife for urban sustainability has been most certainly inspired by Jacobs’s work (Schaffer 1992). Mirroring the struggle between rationalism and empiricism that has dominated modern Western thought, the argument has been made that while Howard was largely a rationalist, the creator of a well-thought-out plan (Gibson 1977, 70), Jacobs was an empiricist who embraced sense experience and rejected a predetermined plan as essentially contrary to human nature (Westin 2015, 27–8). As chapters 6 and 7 show, the thrust of the present study is that in spite of the apparent intellectual currents within which Howard and Jacobs were immersed, their contrasting urbanist approaches fundamentally drew upon a psychocultural clout beyond rationalism and empiricism. The Rationalism of René Descartes and the Empiricism of John Locke: The Urbanist Context Both rationalism and empiricism, and the two major Enlightenment pioneers representing them, are crucial to the argument of mind-environment interaction. The reputed founders of modern European rationalism and of British empiricism are René Descartes (1596–1650) and John Locke (1632–1704), respectively. Both are shown to have been nurturing their philosophical ideas from their own cultural and environmental context in which city form had played a major role. Presaging the dispute between Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard, John Locke and René Descartes, also half a century apart, brought about an intellectual discord forever to be bound to city form. The planned New Towns of the Renaissance had a major impact on Descartes’s philosophy and on his discovery – independent of others – of coordinate geometry. It is his, now famous, disclosure in part 2 of Discourse on Method ([1637] 1968) of a reverie occurring to him at the end of a cold day, 10

38  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

November 1619, that reveals Descartes’s intellectual affinity with Renaissance planned New Towns against the disdain for the medieval city form: I was then in Germany, where the occasion of the wars which are not yet over there had called me; and as I was returning to the army from the coronation of the emperor, the onset of winter detained me in quarters where, finding no conversation to divert me and fortunately having no cares or passions to trouble me, I stayed all day shut up alone in a stove-heated room, where I was completely free to converse with myself about my own thoughts. Among the first that occurred to me was the thought that [...] ancient cities which have gradually grown from mere villages into large towns are usually ill-proportioned, compared with those orderly towns which planners lay out as they fancy on level ground. (Descartes [1637] 1988, 25)

What were the “orderly towns that planners lay out as they fancy on level ground”? Although orthogonal or linear street layouts had been used in Etruscan, Greek, and Roman town planning, clarity and simplicity in town building, contradicting the tangled, cryptic streetscapes of most medieval towns, resurfaced only in the late Middle Ages. The first geometrically laid New Towns emerged in the thirteenth century, likely due to the Latin translation, circa 1140, of the geometric treatise Elements by the fourth-century BCE Hellenic mathematician Euclid of Alexandria (Lilley 1998, 82–92). New Towns sprang first in southern France and northern Spain, then in England and in northern Italy, near Florence. By the end of the Middle Ages, Kostof estimates, as many as a thousand New Towns had been founded in central and western Europe, including Holland, Descartes’s repeated destination from 1618 to 1648 (Kostof 1991, 13–14). Many of the medieval New Towns, however, while intended to be laid out on a perfectly orthogonal grid plan, ended up deviating considerably from the ideal due to practical constraints of topography, private ownership, or commerce (Slater 1999, 115–16).It was primarily during the Renaissance that a strikingly novel architectonic style began penetrating the medieval urban ambience, not only through planned New Towns but also in the construction of public places in cities. One of the main distinctions of New Towns and urban places of the Renaissance was the increasingly concerted attention to symmetry and geometrical balance, leading to designed optical-perspective views that used streets as conduits of viewing (Panofsky 1957, 38). Two early Renaissance New Towns that symbolize the “geometrization of lived space”(Pérez-Gómez 1983, 19, 174–5) lie on a direct path between Paris and Ulm, the approximate whereabouts of Descartes in November 1619. One is Vitry-le-François, northeastern France, founded in 1545, and the other is Freudenstadt, southern Germany, founded in 1599. Vitry-le-François was built by King Francis I on a strict gridiron plan of four large street blocks, following

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1.1  Plan of Vitry-le-François, c. 1545. Drawn by Paul Van Pul and Keith Bigelow.

a design by the Italian engineer Girolamo Marini (1490–1553), on the site of a town entirely demolished after its damage during war hostilities (fig. 1.1). During Descartes’s time both Vitry and Freudenstadt became regional centres of Protestant religion and refuge, and the passage between the two towns would have been in frequent use (Bouchot 1878; Braunfels 1988, 149–50). Descartes continues his reflection in part 2 of the Discourse: It is true that we have no example of people demolishing all the houses in a town for the sole purpose of rebuilding them in a different way to make the streets more beautiful; but one does see many people knock down their own in order to rebuild them, and that even in some cases they have to do this because the houses are in danger of falling down and the foundations are insecure. With this example in mind, I felt convinced that it would be unreasonable for an individual to conceive the plan of reforming a State by changing everything from the foundations up and by overthrowing it in order to set it up again, or even to reform the body of

40  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard the sciences or the order established in our schools for teaching it, but that, on the other hand, as far as all the opinions I had accepted hitherto were concerned, I could not do better than undertake once and for all to be rid of them in order to replace them afterwards either by better ones, or even by the same, once I have adjusted them by the plumb-line of reason. (Descartes [1637] 1968, 41)

Descartes’s image of conceptual reconstruction in accordance with “the plumbline of reason” is the planned New Town of the Renaissance. Historical coincidence had it that less than half a century after Descartes’s Discourse, John Locke became the chief planner for the Province of Carolina, an English colony in America. It was in this capacity that he drafted the “Grand Modell for the Province of Carolina” in 1670 on behalf of King Charles II of England and at the behest of Anthony Ashley Cooper, the first Earl of Shaftesbury, one of the lords proprietors of Carolina. Locke’s Grand Modell included a constitution along with a detailed settlement and development plan for what is now South and North Carolina. Renamed Charleston in 1719 as the new capital of the state of South Carolina, Charles Town was to be built from scratch according to Locke’s model and following specifications by the Earl of Shaftesbury, as a strict gridiron plan upon virgin soil, on an Atlantic coastal plain at the confluence of two rivers (fig. 1.2). Several years later Locke commenced writing An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which would be published in 1689. In it he introduced his empiricist notion of a clean slate, tabula rasa, as the original state of human consciousness, the mind at birth. Only experience carves its marks and impressions upon the mind, suggested Locke, and only in this way reasoning emerges, writes Locke in his Essay (bk 2, ch. 1, sec. 2): “Let us then suppose the Mind to be, as we say, white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas; How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store, which the busy and boundless Fancy of man has painted on it, with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of Reason and Knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, From Experience: In that, all our Knowledge is founded; and from that it ultimately derives it self ” (Locke [1689] 2005, 66). In his New Essays on Human Understanding, published posthumously in 1765, Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) presented a comprehensive rebuttal of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Locke’s rejection of innate ideas was in error, pointed out Leibniz: the presumption that there were no innate ideas was itself an innate idea. For how else could Locke have arrived at such a statement? Putting it more diplomatically, Leibniz, in his New Essays (bk 2, ch. 1, sec. 2), deferred to St Thomas Aquinas: “there is nothing in the soul which does not come from the senses. But you must except the soul itself and its affections [...] Now the soul includes being, substance, the one, the same,

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1.2  Plan of Charles Town, after John Locke, c. 1670. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

cause, perception, reasoning, and many other notions which the senses cannot give” (Adams 1975). Leibniz would have been perhaps even less charitable had he been aware of the plan-making background of Locke’s empiricism. The analogy of a town plan drawn on a white paper to an actual town of bricks and mortar that was built from the very basic ingredients – with mind as a blank slate onto which observational experience carves impressions – seems inescapable. The mutually contrarian reasoning of Descartes and Locke, two intellectual adversaries, appears to be subject to strikingly similar sources: the planned New Towns of Descartes’s time and Locke’s own model for Charles Town. Less than three centuries later the cerebral impact of the built environment upon Howard and Jacobs in their respectively contrasting urbanist visions seems to mirror the contrary outlooks of Descartes and Locke. Outlines of the Descartes-Locke and Howard-Jacobs disputes appear to suggest a tangle and an interaction between the urban environment and mind, both disputant pairs posing certain conceptual parallels. Yet there is no exact analogy between Descartes and Howard or between Locke and Jacobs. Quite to the contrary, affinities could be drawn between Locke’s and Howard’s plans, just as similarities could be seen between Descartes’s and Jacobs’s outlooks. Howard proposed a plan of Garden City, emerging from a visionary harmonious layout, quite consistent with Locke two hundred years earlier in his Grand Modell for the province of Carolina and for Charles Town. Both Howard and Locke

42  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

present their plans as a progressive response to the past shortcomings of social or political conditions, reflected in their reciprocal contemporaneous urban milieus. In the case of Howard these shortcomings were the injustices he had observed, day in and day out, in London, engulfed in smoke and soot, where the working poor endured squalid housing conditions and crime of which they were both victims and perpetrators. The Grand Modell came on the heels of the return of King Charles II to England in 1660, following a nine-year exile and the turmoil of the third English civil war (1649–51) between the Royalists and supporters of the Parliament. This was strife between those who believed in the representation of commoners in the sharing of political power, particularly the enforcement and levy of taxes, and those who advocated absolutist rule by monarchy, deferring to the divine right of kings. Locke, a liberal royalist, saw his Grand Modell as a conduit for the perfection of society. Similarly, Howard’s garden cities (fig. 1.3), ostensibly, were bound to become urban co-operatives in a regional system based on socialist egalitarianism. Both Locke and Howard exemplify adherence to environmental determinism, by now a doctrine discredited both for its simplistic view of a single causal impact of the environment upon human demeanour and for its discriminatory overtone. The 1670s Grand Modell by Locke has been seen as a stage in his intellectual development and political views, from his belief in enlightened aristocracy to his later support of the liberal ideas that resulted in constitutional monarchy in England following the removal from the throne of the Catholic King James II in 1688 (Wilson 2016, 25–57). Howard’s garden city had its own political background in the rise of Marxism and in the ensuing fear of political violence at the end of the nineteenth century. In the impact of the urban environment upon mind, a parallel can be drawn also between Jacobs and Descartes. The contrast between the rigorous, mostly orthogonal, streetscape of the Renaissance New Town and the tortuous, unpredictable streets of the Romanesque gave rise to Descartes’s idea of rigour in thinking. A similar contrast between rigidly planned cities and the streets of traditional towns of colonial America, Jacobs’s childhood experience, triggered her profound rejection of rigid plans. No attempt is made here to compare the intellectual impact that Descartes and Locke had upon modernity with the leverage that Howard and Jacobs had on twentieth-century urbanism. Furthermore, within the scope of recorded urban history since Greek antiquity, the claim of a significant (let alone a leading) role in urbanist thought or in urban planning by Howard or Jacobs cannot withstand the asperity of a sustained examination. The significance in the comparisons made rests in the contrast that the two urbanists represent, a contrast that has been manifest in the environments humans have built over millennia.

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1.3  Diagram no. 7, Howard’s Garden City regional system, 1898

44  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

From the History to the Epistemology of the Urban Environment The historical evolution and sequence that led to the two rivalling outlooks of Howard and Jacobs ought to be seen as intimately linked with the epistemological context, a feedback pattern between the built environment and the minds within it. To begin with, as pointed out by Lewis Mumford in The City in History (1961, 175–84, 516–20), Howard’s urban utopia traces its origins to the legend of Atlantis, a capital city on an island by the same name, in a mythical tale written by the Greek philosopher Plato in about 350 BCE in his dialogues Critias (d117), and Timaeus (a25). The very idea of gardens adjacent to urban homes, however, comes from an early modern English fiction by the Renaissance scholar and statesman Thomas More, almost four hundred years prior to Howard’s Garden City concept. More’s Utopia, a fantasy tale, was written in 1516, becoming a significant intermediary between Plato’s Atlantis and Howard’s Garden City. In 1627 the English philosopher, jurist, and scientist Francis Bacon (1561–1626), a younger contemporary of Descartes, published New Atlantis ([1627]1915), a visionary novel describing an ideal commonwealth based on the premises of equality and the search for truth through knowledge and experiential discovery. Howard’s concern for the living conditions of London’s working poor certainly involved his observation of children who were forced to work rather than acquiring education and skills, and his socialist co-operative urban notion seems to have drawn on Bacon’s ideal in the New Atlantis. Similarly, Howard’s diagrammatic plans of the Garden City were not at all unique in the context of commensurable diagrams, whether current at the time or produced a century or two earlier. Some of those diagrams, as beautifully drawn as Howard’s own, also undoubtedly came in response to the chaotic medieval streetscapes of many European cities. Such was, for example, the radial streetscape laid on a perfect circular plan at Karlsruhe by Wilhelm Weinbrenner in 1715 (fig. 1.4) or the oval plan of an ideal city of Chaux by Claude Nicolas Ledoux, which was approved for construction by King Louis XVI in the 1770s but never completed (Rosenau 1983, 70–1, 104–6). Neither Howard nor Jacobs expressly drew on any or all of their predecessors, or, if they did, they never acknowledged it. There are more than enough similarities between Howard’s garden-city diagrams and the ideal-city plans that preceded him. Jacobs’s focus on the streetscape, however, is close in its main argumentation to a medievalist revival that was articulated prior to her own time. A commonality in the disposition of minds within their environment comes to the fore, yielding similar outlooks that were quite independent of each other, and this commonality emerges time and time again throughout history. The dispute between Howard and Jacobs must be seen within such a context and particularly in light of the correspondence to the profoundly preponderant disputant pair Descartes and Locke.

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1.4  Plan of Karlsruhe, after Wilhelm Weinbrenner, 1715. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

The similitude in the two contestant pairs affirms also the observation made sporadically throughout the twentieth century to the effect that the urban environment and mind were intertwined in a mutual feedback pattern. Origins of such observation can be traced to the philosopher and psychologist Herbert Spencer (Pearce 2010; Spencer 1870, 508), the cultural geographer Carl Sauer (1925), the cultural critic Walter Benjamin ([1933] 1999), the historical geographer David Lowenthal (1975, 1994) and the founder of sociobiology, E.O. Wilson (Lumsden and Wilson 1981, 192–236). The observed contrast in variety of urban environments, or their genealogies, had contributed to the advent of both Descartes’s rationalism and Locke’s empiricism. In the founding of British empiricism, Locke’s notion of the mind at birth as a void receptor was indispensable. The epistemological source in the progress of Locke towards his founding empiricist notion in his 1689 Essay was precisely his own plan of a region and of a city drawn on a “white paper.” A city built from scratch, based on a drawn-up plan, is an exact analogy to the blank slate of a mind at birth absorbing impressions and experience from observation and senses. This contention is reinforced by the early source of empiricist thought in Bacon’s New Atlantis, where scientific learning and discovery within the

46  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

confines of an ideal city, Bensalem, are envisaged on a mythical island. Behind Locke’s Grand Modell is also the desire to build an ideal community, and Bacon’s Bensalem of the New Atlantis appears to have been the inspiration (Anstey 2011, 49; Wilson 2016, 1–30, 99–102). The urban context of Descartes’s rationalism extends to his pioneering work in science, where his advent of coordinate geometry, in particular, was simultaneous to that of mathematicians Pierre de Fermat (1601–1665) and Girard Desargues (1591–1661). The simultaneity of their geometrical discoveries could be best explained by the fact that they shared the same built environment (Akkerman 2001). Similarly, strong circumstantial evidence in the case of Kepler’s astronomy and Galileo’s physics suggests the concrete and tangible impact of their respective environments upon their discoveries (Horský 1990, 189–90). Descartes’s rationalism and coordinate geometry, however, are unique in that they furthered a confined impact upon the urbanist thought and urban planning of the Enlightenment and modernity. Cartesian thought ought to be recognized, thus, as the pivotal point of reference for urban discourse all the way to the twentieth century. Jacobs’s rejection of Howard is nothing but a rejection of a Cartesian outlook on cities. The significance of the contributions that Howard and Jacobs made is in their shared urbanist intellectual lineage. This lineage rests on the view that the built environment and the humans within it are a composite entity. Descartes and Locke, on the one hand, and Howard and Jacobs, on the other hand, are considered here within such a lineage. Our concern is confined to the mutual and ongoing relationship between built environments and the minds within them as the underlying tenet of urban evolution. While Howard could be said to follow Cartesian rationalism, Jacobs follows Locke in her empiricist and liberal outlook. Yet there is also some important affinity of Jacobs with Descartes. More than the envisioned ideal cities of Locke and Howard, the perceptual frames of mind of both Descartes and Jacobs are explicit in their reliance upon confrontation with pre-existing urban environments: the one urban environment planned, the other accreted. Descartes juxtaposes the planned against the accreted townscape, very much as Jacobs does three hundred years later, with the obvious difference in attitudes towards the geometrically harmonious townscape imposed by a plan; Descartes espouses it, and Jacobs rejects it. Ostensibly, the outcome of the urbanist observations of Descartes has been fundamentally pivotal in comparison to that of Jacobs. In the case of Descartes, an epochal leap occurred towards the discovery of coordinate geometry and the advent of the Scientific Revolution. Descartes’s visual experience within a townscape that was designed according to a geometrically harmonious plan, against the background of the disorderly, chaotic streetscapes of the medieval town, had been, according to his own testimony, his inspiration. There could be little doubt that the Cartesian impact in science and

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mathematics had projected itself also onto urban plans of the Enlightenment and modernity. The urbanist critique by Jacobs, rejecting the built environment that had largely emanated from the Cartesian outlook, is at the same time a call for the return to the urban environment rejected by Descartes! Her cry was for the return to unmitigated and authentic streetscapes, against a predetermined plan, all the geometric harmony in urban layout being considered by her as a disingenuous imposition. The great French philosopher and the Scranton High graduate both had nurtured their contrary viewpoints by the contrast of antithetical urban environments. Observations of no lesser clout could also be made with regard to commonalities between Locke and Howard. Drawn on “white paper,” the masterplan of a city built from scratch upon a blank slate of virgin ground is the epistemological source of Locke’s empiricism, much as it was something of an interim result in Howard’s progress towards a programmed garden city. Howard’s sources of his garden city are the ideal cities of Plato, Thomas More, and possibly a few others, discussed in chapter 6. On this view too, therefore, the various epistemic modules, such as the Citadel or the Castle, leading to the Ideal City are exemplars of Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious, innate in the mind. In his notion of the mind at birth as akin to “white paper,” a tabula rasa or a blank slate, Locke would reject such psychoanalytic nativism, even though his very premise has been seen as a sort of innate idea. The Epistemology of Urban Modernity and Post-Modernity With close to a century of suburban sprawl and urban traffic congestion across North America, it is not easy to credit Howard’s garden city with a legacy of progressive and sustainable urbanism, as some would insist (e.g., Marr 2009, 246). It is, of course, the home garden that perpetuates low residential density, suburban sprawl, and associated, mostly detrimental externalities. In the continuum of ideas and within the context of early modern aspects of the built environment, Howard is among the champions of a mechanized city form in which the home garden becomes compensation to survival in the city, while perpetuating this very same mechanized city form. Explanation of some of the dysfunction in modern city form emerges at the level of an embryonic comparison between the urbanist visions of Locke and Howard. A straightforward observation is at hand. Similar to dozens of ideal-city plans throughout history, culminating in the Renaissance and the Baroque, the planning diagrams of both Charles Town and the Garden City adhere to strict and very rigid foundational geometric forms: the square and the circle. Locke’s diagram of Charles Town is patterned on a rectangular grid, almost square. Howard’s diagrams show concentric circles upon which avenues are laid out. Carl Jung points to the square and the circle as primordial

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expressions of the self in its synthesis with the world. In the immediate natural environment of humans, neither squares nor perfect circles are easily observable. Rather, the square and the circle are the perfectionist products of human intelligence: one yielding measurement on the Earth’s surface, the other arising mainly from observations of the sky. Jung points out that the square and the circle as a joint ornament, the mandala, is a universal cultural product and appears sometimes in dreams in response to chaotic psychic states of disorientation or panic (Jung [1950] 2014, 3868). Edward Edinger, a Jungian scholar, made the further claims that “mandala images emerge in times of psychic turmoil and convey a sense of stability and rest. The image of the fourfold nature of the psyche provides stabilizing orientation. It gives one a glimpse of static eternity” (Edinger 1972, 182). Jung found it captivating that quadratura circuli (squaring of the circle) is frequently found in alchemical texts (Jung [1950] 2014, 3869–74). Whereas the promises of alchemy and early science were the manufacturing of gold, the perpetuum mobile machine, and the production of an “elixir of immortality,” the promises of urban planning during much of the twentieth century were “urban renewal,” “urban revitalization,” “comprehensive” planning, or “new” urbanism. Entirely consistent with René Descartes’s admiring adage of straight, aligned streets that served him as a paragon for clear and distinct ideas, urban planning too has explicitly aimed at eradicating unpredictability in city form (Melehy 1997, 105). Striving towards the well-functioning ideal of modern science and technology, and in the image of a rational city form, ideal plans throughout the first two industrial revolutions adhered to this objective of predictability in science, projecting it upon urban planning (Pinson 2004). Geometric harmony and symmetrical balance are the common ground to the diagrams of Locke, Howard, and dozens of ideal-city plans preceding them. Much as algorithms and machines, so also the modern city was to be launched as an apparatus. Jacobs’s denunciation, of course, was aimed at precisely such urbanist attitudes. Her appeal for what Jacobs called the “organized complexity” of streetscapes and her call for vibrant, even chaotic streets in dense neighbourhoods reminiscent of the pre-automobile era, and the associated serendipity in human encounter, possibly draw on the nostalgia of her memories of childhood in the colonial towns of America. Already, in the late nineteenth century, however, Camillo Sitte had campaigned in Vienna against geometrically harmonious streets and urban squares, hailing the erratic environment of early Renaissance cities in northern Italy. In his City Planning According to Artistic Principles ([1889] 2006) Sitte pointed to essentially the same humanistic values associated with irregular streetscapes as Jacobs did over half a century later. Aristotle, writing in the third century BCE, in book 4 of his Politics, had lauded the element of surprise in a muddled built environment, albeit as a defence standard against armed intruders: “For the purposes of war, streets

Paradigms of City Form  49

ought to be winding and intricate, obstructed by impediments and entangled by perplexities.” Without a doubt, Jacobs had drawn on neo-traditionalists of Sitte’s kind (Ellis and Henderson 2014, 31). These neo-traditionalists are unambiguously identified with the Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in England, and later in America, during the second half of the nineteenth century. It was the vernacular style of the Arts and Crafts movement inspired by William Morris that Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin followed in the design of Letchworth Garden City, largely oblivious to Howard’s diagrams. This certainly was not Howard’s own choice as there is a clear note of Howard’s misgivings related to the insistence by the two architects to abandon his diagrams (Meacham 1999, 146). The success of Letchworth, thus, ought to be seen as due mainly to Howard’s foresight and activism, but its charm was undoubtedly the result of the traditionalist design of Unwin and Parker, in opposition to Howard’s regimented plan. Jacobs’s criticism of the garden city, on the other side of the urbanist dispute, ensues partly from her rhetorical oversimplification; her own attitude has more in common with real garden cities than she would have ever wanted to acknowledge. A fundamental strife remains, however, between the diagrammatic outlook of a masterplan, as represented by Howard, and the attitude rejecting precisely the counsel of a prescription for a good city form. An ongoing strain between the speculative notion of the Ideal City and the reality of the authentic street remains unresolved. Yet, hindsight on twentieth-century urbanism suggests that against the blueprint for a well-functioning city a malfunctioning city form has emerged. In the gap between the myth of the Rational City and the reality of urban incoherence at the end of the twentieth century, the candid observer, detecting deception similar to that perpetrated by medieval seers and fabricators, has sounded an alarm: “Modernism’s alchemistic promise – to transform quantity into quality through abstraction and repetition – has been a failure, a hoax: magic that didn’t work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished. Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited the idea of a new beginning. A collective shame in the wake of this fiasco has left a massive crater in our understanding of modernity and modernization” (Koolhaas 1998).

2 Howard vs Jacobs: Ideal City or Authentic Street?

In 1872, after staying in Nebraska for several months, Howard went to Chicago, “the City in the Garden,” as its Latin motto went. He saw a city whose entire downtown and north side had been consumed several months earlier in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, and witnessed the vast effort to rebuild the city almost entirely from scratch. As an experienced court stenographer Howard found steady employment with a legal firm while occasionally freelancing in the production of transcripts for newspaper reports. In November 1875 he was hired by the Chicago Times to provide a transcript of a public presentation by Cora Richmond (1840–1923), a celebrity spiritualist medium (Buder 1990, 10). Stanley Buder gives the following account of the spiritualist path of this charismatic woman and the immediate impact she had upon Howard: Cora Richmond had first encountered the spirits as a child in 1852 at Hopedale Community in Massachusetts, one of the two hundred recorded American communitarian experiments between 1840 and 1860 [a] hotbed for various enthusiasm such as spiritualism, food reform, and water cures. In 1856, however, two brothers gained control of the community’s property, ending the experiment. By then Cora Richmond no longer lived at Hopedale and had begun her career as a trance medium [...] The reporter for the Chicago Herald thought the meetings he witnessed extraordinary but unconvincing to the nonbeliever. Howard, transcribing for the Chicago Times, to the contrary, felt overwhelmed and became a lifelong disciple. Indeed, he underwent the profound and lasting “conversion experience” described by the philosopher William James in his study of mysticism. (Buder 1990, 8–9)

Howard returned to England in 1876 and was hired as a parliamentary stenographer. Three years earlier, on 1 March 1873, E. Remington & Sons, the manufacturer of guns, farm tools, and sewing machines, in Ilion, New York State, had started production of the first “Type-Writer” after buying a patent for $12,000 from the inventor, Christopher Sholes. The new writing machine made

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its way quickly to England and to the parliamentary stenographers in London. The mechanically gifted Howard soon made an improvement to the typewriter, inventing a variable space bar. Sometime in the early 1880s Howard patented his invention, and in 1884 he sailed to New York in an unsuccessful bid to sell his patent to Remington. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City as a Neoplatonic Myth Prior to returning to England in October 1884, Howard visited Chicago and, according to some notes found in his possession after his death, he may have also visited the industrial model town Pullman (Buder 1990, 28). Sharply contrasting Pullman was another planned community, the rustic village of Riverside, about fourteen miles (22 km) west of Chicago, laid out in 1868 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux. Featuring curved tree-lined streets with each home assured privacy, Riverside sported public walks that afforded attractive views to residents. Howard would have been aware of the affluent community from his past stay in Chicago and his work at the court. The landowner and part-developer of the 1,600-acre (647 ha or 6.5 km2) estate was David Gage, the treasurer of the City of Chicago, who in 1864 purchased the land and then sold parts of it. In 1873, after Gage had left the treasurer’s office, officials found a cash shortfall of $500,000, and in 1874 the new treasurer asked Gage to turn over the missing public funds. By then Gage was in Denver, Colorado, and the legal action brought against him resulted in court proceedings between 1874 and 1876. These were precisely the years when Howard was a court stenographer for the Chicago firm of Ely and Burnham (Creese 1966, 144–57). The literary inspiration to the Garden City, at least according to Howard’s disclosure, was an American novel by Edward Bellamy (1850–1898), portraying Boston in the year 2000 as an egalitarian urban co-operative. The book, Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (Bellamy 1888), was seen by Howard as expressing ideas of “a new civilisation based on service to the community and not on self interest.” Howard read Bellamy’s book a year after its publication in the United States, and he immediately offered to buy at least a hundred copies in support of a British edition (Marshall 1962). Bellamy, formerly an aspiring candidate to the West Pont military academy, had known affinity with hierarchy, rule, and discipline, and his bestselling novel about a socialist utopia in America has been judged as retaining features of strong regimentation: “Bellamy’s world was rational, orderly, friendly, technologically advanced (he foresaw the radio and other inventions), and offered material abundance not only to provide for basic needs but also for leisure. His world, too, was a static and rigid one” (Meyerson 1961). Notwithstanding his humanist yearnings, Howard, in formulating his Garden City ideal, had been sympathetic to Bellamy’s regime of order, if not his

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authoritarian socialism. Howard’s own social-democratic scheme was of no help when the tenet of a benevolent urban co-operative came to naught in the garden cities that he saw founded. Contrary to the proclamations in both editions of Howard’s handbook, none of his garden cities ever became an urban co-operative. The closest to the fulfilment of the socialist egalitarian promise was Homesgarth, a single structure at Letchworth, Howard’s first garden city, comprising thirty-two kitchen-less apartments with a separate space designated for communal cooking and dining, and housing middle-class families “who have a hard struggle for existence on a mere budget” (Fishman 1982, 71). Letchworth, less than 40 miles (60 km) from London, initially enunciated as an urban co-operative in its entirety, ended up having Homesgarth, along with Guessens Court, as its only two communal quadrangles. The communal cooking and dining areas of Homesgarth, in the spirit of Robert Owen’s utopia of a socialist co-operative, were on a layout scheme that was similar to that of an Oxford college. Such habitat configuration too, rather than specifically socialist, was in essence following the spatial arrangement found in medieval monasteries. And although the two communal quadrangles were intended for the lower middle class, working-class families, evidently, were not welcome, in spite of Letchworth’s proximity to London (Hayden 2000, 237). It is quite possible that the garden city concept might have never come to be attributed to Howard, had it not been for his personal charm and sympathetic sponsors as well as the skill and excellence of his two main recruits to the project, Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker. The fundamental incongruity of Howard’s garden city lies in the very notion of private urban gardens and the fairly exquisite design of homes against his egalitarian ideal. The premise of a small private garden to almost every home is hardly consistent with the solution of one Professor Marshall that Howard cites in addressing the problems of London’s working poor at the end of the nineteenth century: “Whatever reforms be introduced into the dwellings of the London poor, it will still remain true that the whole area of London is insufficient to supply its population with fresh air and free space that is wanted for wholesome recreation [...] There are large classes of the population of London whose removal into the country would be in the long run economically advantageous” (Howard 1902, 38). It was, of course, precisely for their design features that, instead of becoming havens of the working poor of London, Howard’s first two garden cities almost instantaneously became sanctuaries of middle classes seeking refuge from the ravages of the industrial metropolis and, particularly, from proximity to poor people. The notion of voluntary relocation of the working poor into garden cities could be thus questioned on Howard’s own terms. It is also worth noting that an idea of relocating the poor from London to “labor colonies” had been embraced by the social reformer Charles Booth in the 1890s along with his admission, called draconian by Peter Hall, that “the life offered would not be

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attractive [...] the difficulty lies solely in inducing or driving these people to accept a regulated life.” Howard was aware of Booth’s views but was not sympathetic to the forceful removal of the poor from London and also had no part in Booth’s well-known racist sentiments (Hall 2014, 94–5). Quite contrary to any bigoted stance, it has been pointed out several times, and most recently by David Pinder (2013), that Howard’s handbook drew on Utopia, a sixteenth-century fictional account of an egalitarian society by Sir Thomas More. The word Utopia, literally a “non-place,” was coined by Thomas More for his fantasy island somewhere in the southern Atlantic in his eponymous treatise of 1516. On his island of Utopia, More envisions thirty-two ideal cities that consist of egalitarian, proto-socialist urban communes with gardens forming the back yards of homes. Such is the fanciful city of Amaurot in More’s imaginary haven: “The streets are twenty feet broad; there lie gardens behind all their houses. These are large, but enclosed with buildings, that on all hands face the streets, so that every house has both a door to the street and a back door to the garden. Their doors have all two leaves, which, as they are easily opened, so they shut of their own accord; and, there being no property among them, every man may freely enter into any house whatsoever. At every ten years’ end they shift their houses by lots” (More [1516] 2014, 73–4). Not only is the egalitarian co-operative spirit evident from this excerpt, but also property in the urban communes is all common, shared by women and men, who have comparable rights and responsibilities. Unlike Thomas More, however, yet similar to countless visionary utopians before and after More, Howard founded his own Victorian urbanism upon a benign masculine paradigm (Hayden 2000, 264). Howard’s garden city was to cover 1,000 acres and be home to 32,000 people. Attaining a radio-centric form, the garden city was to be divided into six equal wards by six linear boulevards radiating from a central garden and named for some of the male pioneers of Western thought. A series of concentric ringed avenues, lined with trees, were to be the major locations for houses, with a 420-feet-wide grand avenue serving as both a three-mile continuous public park and the location of schools and churches. A rationalist egalitarian scheme of urban co-operatives, as an attempt to provide acceptable living conditions to the working class in England, was Howard’s stated purpose in his garden-city project. Leaving aside the question how sincere Howard’s proclaimed socialist garden city was, his urban projects were anything but accessible to England’s working class. As to the urban co-operative idea itself, Robert Fishman shows that there is a semantic chain between Thomas More’s Utopia, and Howard’s garden city (Fishman, 1982, 14). A few links in this chain suggest that Howard’s urban co-operative idea was significantly less original than initially presented. Some of the major authors who presaged Howard’s concern for the working poor were Henri de Saint Simon (1760–1825), who pointed out that human needs, rather than economic

54  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

2.1  Plan of the Happy Colony, New Zealand, Robert Pemberton, 1854.

demand, ought to be recognized in the forging of the economic and political objectives of a just society; Robert Owen (1771–1858), a socialist-minded industrialist, who endeavoured to banish child labour, associated small workers’ co-operatives with retail shop co-operatives, the latter much in the fashion known still today; and Charles Fourier (1772–1837), largely known for his idea of small working communes where labourers would be compensated by their contribution rather than by the whim of the employer. Less than fifty years prior to Howard’s garden city, in 1854, the traveller Robert Pemberton (1788–1879) charted a plan of a New Zealand utopia (fig. 2.1), which was published as The Happy Colony in 1895 in London. The Happy Colony was to be an egalitarian ideal city, built by and for workmen from Great Britain, seemingly as a conceptual replica of what Pemberton envisaged to have been Francis Bacon’s ideal city in the New Atlantis (Bowie 2017, 59–60). Pemberton’s chart is probably the design source of the garden-city diagrams (Armytage 1961, 223). The similarity with Howard’s co-operative notion is matched by the conspicuous similarity between the diagram of Pemberton’s Happy Colony and the diagrams of Howard’s Garden City.

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It was not Howard’s scheme for an urban co-operative but the idea in his handbook to inject nature into the design of a small-size urban community that almost immediately became a commercial real estate triumph. Not surprisingly, however, far from coddling the working class, the two garden city communities in England, Welwyn Garden City and Letchworth, as most of their later sequels elsewhere, have been rather elitist and anything but working class since their founding (Jacobs 1961, 17–25). As Lewis Mumford alluded, however, the Garden City traces its origins to a much earlier source: the ideal city contemplated by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato (428–348 BCE). Howard begins his handbook with a picturesque symbolism of the town, the country, and the town-country as the “Three Magnets.” Howard’s metaphor of the three magnets would seem to be an innocent literary device had it not appeared in conjunction with his concentric plan and his own association with a Neoplatonic religious movement. Platonic myths were espoused by spiritualism, the esoteric religion with which Howard was associated. In his treatise The Laws, Plato describes Magnesia as an ideal “city of Magnetes.” Built on the island of Crete by migrants from Magnesia, a region in northeastern Greece (Laws 4.714a–722b), the ideal city of Magnesia had its land apportioned, according to Plato’s advice to Magnesia’s ruler, into twelve radial portions of land: “Then we divide the city into twelve portions, first founding temples to Hestia, to Zeus and to Athene, in a spot which we will call the Acropolis, and surround with a circular wall, making the division of the entire city and country radiate from this point. The twelve portions shall be equalized by the provision that those that are of good land shall be smaller, while those of inferior quality shall be larger” (Laws 5.745c–811ce). In most diagrams of Howard’s garden city, radiating from the central square are six major linear boulevards, dividing the garden city into six equal sections. The affinity with Plato’s Magnesia is probably not accidental. Furthermore, the semblance of Howard’s garden-city plan with Plato’s ideal city does not end with Magnesia but continues with Plato’s mythical city of Atlantis on an island by the same name. Howard’s connection with the great philosopher of Greek antiquity, however, is superficial at best. As previously noted, it was in Chicago in the 1870s that Howard, through Cora Richmond, became associated with spiritualism, a slick occultist movement popular at the time in the United States, Britain, and many parts of Continental Europe. Plato’s myths, and the legend of Atlantis in particular, were central to the spiritualist movement in the United States (Gutierrez 2009, 8), the typewriter was afforded a paranormal ability, and a spiritualist aura was conferred on machines for contacting the dead or for spirit photography. It is noteworthy, in this regard, that after Howard’s book was repeatedly refused by publishers, its printing was finally secured through

56  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

spiritualist financial support: “Mr. George Dickman, an admirer of Cora’s, and the General Manager of Kodak, came forward with 50 pounds towards publishing costs of the book” (Macfadyen [1933] 1970, 22). In his dialogue Critias, Plato purports to give a factual description of the mythical island of Atlantis, with its elite seated at the very centre of its capital. In Plato’s myth the city of Atlantis was built by the god of the sea, Poseidon, who “enclosed the hill in which [the maiden Cleito] dwelt all round, making alternate zones of sea and land larger and smaller, encircling one another; there were two of land and three of water, which he turned as with a lathe, each having its circumference equidistant every way from the centre” (Critias 117d). The number of enclosed land areas among and outside the five zones in Atlantis has been shown to be seven (Golding 1975). In his diagram no. 3 (fig. 2.2), Howard charted his garden city around the Crystal Palace central square, with a circular garden walkway and five concentric-ring avenues, the entire city bounded by a circular railroad as the seventh ring. Howard’s penchant for mysticism notwithstanding, the early success of introducing nature into urban residential space in the Garden City concept is unquestionable. Yet placing Howard’s source in the Platonic Atlantis and Magnesia gives support to a notion quite contrary to his own annunciations. Presenting his garden city as a progressive co-operative addressing the plight of the working poor, and an egalitarian urban settlement whose design was founded on reason, Howard never mentioned Plato’s elitist myth of Atlantis as his source. Yet, projected into Howard’s plan of the garden city was, precisely, Plato’s ancient proclivity for a rigidly stratified society, along with Howard’s own spiritualist beliefs rather than his avowed rationalist egalitarianism. Representations of the City and the Street Howard’s purported rationalist urbanism is presented as a comprehensive plan for the Garden City, shown in his diagrams in what is known in drafting as a plan view – an idealized observation of a bird’s-eye view, often referred to as an orthographic projection of an object (in this case an entire city) onto a horizontal plane. Howard was careful to make a disclaimer to the effect that the actual city plan might differ from his diagrams. Yet regardless of the particular plan upon which a garden city might be disposed, it was the idealized plan view that Howard used to advance the regional and urban schemes of the garden city. In contrast, the visual imagery of Jacobs’s descriptions is one of a street scene, or a street view, often called in drafting an elevation or side view – defined as a horizontal orthographic projection of an object (such as a street canyon) onto a vertical plane. In principle, then, Howard’s visual outlook is that of a horizontal plane of an entire city or urban region, and Jacobs’s is that of the vertical confines of any one out of many urban streetscapes.

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2.2  Diagram no. 3, “Ward and Centre of Garden City” (Howard 1898)

58  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

Both horizontal and vertical standpoints upon the city have an extensive psychocultural backdrop. The plan view of a city ought to be traced to ancient Greece even before Plato and, very likely, to prehistoric times. With certainty, in ancient Greece a plan view of a city yielded Plato’s own philosophical reflection that set in motion an environmental progression that in turn yielded subsequent modules and later aspects of city form. Paradigmatic in this regard is Miletus as a tripartite city, on a plan later attributed to the Miletian planner Hippodamus (498–408 BCE), largely confirming a description made by the Greek philosopher, and Plato’s student, Aristotle in his Politics (2.8). Around 380 BCE, some sixty years after Miletus was rebuilt on the new plan, Plato, the foremost philosopher of Western antiquity, wrote The Republic, a ten-volume treatise whose central theme is the concept of justice, addressing the political, social, and economic traits of the virtuous city-state. Plato draws an analogy between features of the human soul and those of the ideal city: the survival instinct of the soul parallels the military and police force of the ideal city-state; various desires of the soul are the counterpart to the class of artisans and workers; and, finally, the soul’s ability to reason corresponds to the city’s ruling class of philosophers (Republic 4.435–40). Recent work relates that “Greek cities generally developed with a tripartite plan: upper city for defense, lower city for commerce, and surrounding rural areas for subsistence agriculture” (Kirkpatrick 2015). Plato’s ideal city appears thus to extend existing practices in the layout of classical Greek cities. Furthermore, an orthogonal plan epitomizes ease of land measurement along with exactitude and good faith in land division (Jameson 1991). It ought to be noted also that in Pythagorean geometry the number four attains a magic power, likely related to the four elements – fire, water, air, and earth – then believed to define the nature and complexity of all matter. Environmental determinism, today a largely discounted belief that the physical environment including built form is the one-directional and singular cause of human mental and moral predisposition, is latent in Plato’s city-soul analogy. It is implicit also in Howard’s diagrams and his stated purpose of the garden city: “[t]he task which is before us of reconstructing anew the entire external fabric of society, employing as we build, all the skills and knowledge which the experience of centuries has taught us [...] the newer call to build home-towns for slum-cities; to plant gardens for crowded courts, to construct beautiful water-ways in flooded valleys; to establish a scientific system of distribution to take the place of chaos, a just system of land tenure for one representing the selfishness which we hope is passing away” (Howard 1902, 139). Such attitude was not unique to Howard and can be found in most, if not all, authors of the ideal cities that preceded his own garden city. Furthermore, Hippodamian planning had not remained confined to the orthogonal layout, and, at least in one instance from classical Greece, it adopted a radial and concentric

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layout. The city of Rhodes, built in 408 BCE on a concentric plan, may have been laid out earlier by Hippodamus himself (according to the Hellenic geographer Strabo) or by one of his students: “Rhodes was built in the form of a theatre [so] that the water ran for most part into one place, the lower part of the city [towards the harbour]” (Diodorus 19.3; 1814, 356). Volume 5 of Cambridge Ancient History provides an account of excavations at Rhodes that confirms the radio-centric layout of the ancient city: “The Agora [of Rhodes] was probably near the main harbour, the central of three, on the east side where foundations of a temple of Aphrodite have been found. From there the ground rises gradually to west and south west, giving a theatre-like effect till it culminates in a plateau on the western side of the peninsula.” The Ideal City and Consciousness: The Circle and the Square The origins of the two basic geometric forms in ancient ideal-city plans, the circle and the square, reach deep into human consciousness and, very likely, to the collective unconscious of humanity. Carl Jung (1875–1961) pointed to the circle and the square as archetypal symbols of the self, suggestive of an Eastern pattern, known as the mandala: a square within a circle, or a circle within a square. In ancient religions the circle often represented the universe, or the sun, and the square commonly represented the Earth. The universality of the mandala pattern is exemplified by many instances through geographic space and historic time, such as the floor plan of Barabudur, a ninth-century Buddhist temple on Java island, Indonesia, or the 1490 drawing by Leonardo da Vinci of the Vitruvian man circumscribed by both a square and a circle. Observing a psychotic patient, Jung explicitly suggests that a city plan involving the mandala is a projection of the patient’s self upon the environment. In a time and a place not too distant from Howard’s and his Garden City vision, Jung describes the dream of one of his psychotic patients, in his essay “Concerning Mandala Symbolism”: The mandala was a spontaneous product from the analysis of a male patient. It was based on a dream: The dreamer found himself with three younger travelling companions in Liverpool. It was night and raining. The air was full of smoke and soot. They climbed up from the harbor to the “upper city.” The dreamer said: “It was terribly dark and disagreeable, and we could not understand how anyone could stick it here. We talked about this, and one of my companions said that, remarkably enough, a friend of his had settled here, which astonished everybody. During this conversation we reached a sort of public garden in the middle of the city. The park was square, and in the centre was a lake or a large pool. A few street lamps just lit up in the pitch darkness, and I could see a little island in the pool. On it there was a single tree, a red-flowering magnolia, which miraculously

60  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard stood in everlasting sunshine. I noticed that my companions had not seen this miracle, whereas I was beginning to understand why the man had settled here. (Jung [1950] 2014, 3972)

The air pollution enveloping the dreamer’s Liverpool was evidently the same as in Howard’s London. And similar to the dreamer’s vision, the centre of Howard’s garden city contains Central Park, which in turn encloses a “Crystal Palace” – an arcade of indoor shops and winter gardens, along with civic institutions such as the town hall and the library. The radio-concentric features of the garden city, as of so many ideal cities prior to Howard’s, are also emerging very clearly in Jung’s description of his patient’s dream: The dreamer went on: “I tried to paint this dream. But as so often happens, it came out rather different. The magnolia turned into a sort of rose made of ruby-coloured glass. It shone like a four-rayed star. The square represents the wall of the park and at the same time a street leading round the park in a square. From it there radiate eight main streets, and from each of these eight side-streets, which meet in a shining red central point, rather like Place de l’Étoile in Paris [since 1970, Place Charles de Gaulle]. The acquaintance mentioned in the dream lived in a house at the corner of one of these stars.” The mandala thus combines the classic motifs of flower, star, circle, precinct, and plan of a city divided into quarters with citadel. “The whole thing seemed like a window opening on to eternity,” wrote the dreamer. (Jung [1950] 2014, 3972–3)

It is quite implausible to ignore the cerebral triangle Haussmann-Jung-Howard in the mention of Place de l’Étoile in this passage (fig. 2.3). The concept of the Ideal City, in a bird’s-eye view as a harmonious streetscape radiating from a monumental centre, is ingrained within the mind as something of a primordial paradigm, entirely consistent with Jung’s notion of psychological archetypes. Jung had pointed to the archetypes of the psyche as archaic and innate, as prototypes of thought common to all humanity. The Ideal City appears to be one such archetype. People, of course, are not birds, and schemes such as the one by Haussmann rose the ire of Camillo Sitte and won the scorn of Jane Jacobs. More than two millennia earlier, the Greek playwright Aristophanes (446–c. 386 BCE) had mocked the harmonious plan view of an ideal city, precisely by presenting it as a horizontal radio-centric scheme in his comedy written sometime in the fifth century BCE and appropriately entitled The Birds: “With the straight ruler I set to work to inscribe a square within this circle; in its centre will be the market-place, into which all the straight streets will lead, converging to this centre like a star, which, although only orbicular, sends forth its rays in a straight line from all sides” (Aristophanes 1909, 996).

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2.3  Place de l’Étoile (Charles de Gaulle), Paris. Drawing by Paul Van Pul.

Aristophanes’s satirical description of the ideal city is presented by the theatrical persona of the fifth-century BCE astronomer Meton of Athens, a city from which the play’s two vagabonds have just escaped due to its unbearable chaos. Similar to Aristophanes, two and a half millennia later, Jane Jacobs ridicules Howard’s Garden City as “feudal” (1961, 289). It is hard to deny that we are facing here, indeed, a universal pattern of mind-city interaction in which the archetype of the Ideal City is the pivotal reference point. But there is a fundamental enigma in the dispute invoked by Jacobs’s denunciation in Death and Life of “regimented regularity” in urban design (Jacobs 1961, 375), so clearly manifest in the geometric order of Haussmann’s Parisian redesign and of Howard’s garden-city diagrams. A hundred years after Haussmann, the regimented streetscape of central Paris has not changed much, yet, in her own testimony of her visit to Europe, Jacobs, as most everyone else, was enthralled by Paris (Schubert 2014, 145; Kanigel 2017, 257). How could the same streetscape be consistent with two mutually divergent urbanist approaches? The answer, if there is one, lies more in psychoanalysis than in logic. The mind’s connection with its immediate environment, on the one hand, is subjective and gender based. The perception of an entire city as a whole, on the other hand, appears to have usually a more objective, and a masculine, trait. The open question, yet to be addressed, is how psychocultural dispositions of modernity have coloured perceptions of, and have projected imprints upon, city form.

62  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

As if presaging Jung’s notion of psychological archetypes, Plato’s city-soul analogy too posits the Ideal City as a prototype of mind. Countless other such mental prototypes exist, according to Plato, and are referred to as Forms. Plato’s Forms represent the common, idealized features of all various objects and of all different attributes, and Plato’s ideal city then is nothing but an example of a Platonic Form – that of a city. Furthermore, the myth of the Ideal City is not only consistent with Plato’s theory of Forms, but the Ideal City is a primary prototype of a Platonic Form, as the ancient philosopher states in his Republic 9.592: “But in Heaven, perhaps, a pattern is laid up for the man who wants to see and found a city within himself on the basis of what he sees. It doesn’t make any difference whether it is or will be somewhere. For he would mind the things of this city alone, and of no other.” Plato’s ideal city, Atlantis in particular, had an ongoing and variably intense impact upon the history of city form in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Some four hundred years after Plato in Roman Egypt, Plotinus (c. 204–270 CE), a Neoplatonic philosopher of Greek descent, exhorted the Roman emperor Gallienus (r. 260–8 CE) and his wife, Salonina, to pursue the construction of an ideal city. Had it not been for the fierce opposition of the Senate, Platonopolis would have been founded on the plains of Campania, near Rome. Later during the early Renaissance, mandala was the design motif in the proposed imaginary ideal city of Sforzinda by Antonio Averlino Filarete (1400– 1469). The outline of two squares, diagonally overlaid, form the plan of city walls with equidistant corners, circumscribed by a moat along a circular plan. Watch-towers are placed upon the outer corners of the intersecting perimeter squares, and gates at the inner corners. All inner and outer corners of the perimeter wall are radially connected to a central square by sixteen linear avenues. Much as in Plato’s Magnesia and Atlantis, Filarete’s ideal plan reflected an environmental determinism, which continued to linger in later urbanist notions, including Howard’s, whereby a perfect city form was believed to guide a similarly perfect society. Evolution of the Ideal City in Images of the Soul, the Human Body, and the Universe The orthogonal grid was adopted in many European New Towns throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Two such New Towns, San Giovanni Valdarno and Terranuova, both founded by the Florentine Republic in the late thirteenth century, were in the vicinity of Siena, the birthplace of Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439–1501). Their orthogonal plans likely had some perceptual impact on Francesco’s own urban thought. During the 1470s Francesco worked as a military architect and engineer in the service of Lorenzo de’ Medici, a dedicated sponsor of the Platonic academy

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in Florence. Through the Medicis Francesco would have become familiar with and been influenced by the Platonism of the Florentine academy, much as Howard, centuries later, was absorbed in the Platonism of the spiritualist movement. The major difference between the two movements is that American spiritualism was largely represented by an occultist in the person of Cora Richmond, and the Florentine academy during Francesco’s time was led by the foremost humanist philosopher of the Italian Renaissance, Marsillio Ficino (1433–1499). Several years prior to Leonardo’s famous drawing of the Vitruvian man, the mandala image was employed by Francesco to extend Plato’s city-soul analogy onto a city-body analogy. In Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare (c. 1480) Francesco wrote: “I will describe the various parts of city areas and how they have the same structure and form as the human body. First, thinking of a human body stretched out on the ground, I will place a thread on the navel, and pull it in a circular motion around that body. Similarly, squared and angled the design shall be. Moreover, just as the body has all its parts and limbs with perfect measure and size, the same should be noted of those cities [sic]” (Francesco quoted in Friedman 1988, 252n4; translation from the original text by Joe Garcea). It would have been likely due to the teachings of the Florentine academy that Francesco’s hominine urban conception drew on the Republic, in which the social structure of the ideal city is presented by Plato as analogous to the make-up of the human soul (Republic 2.368d–369a, 4.434d–435c). As the Platonic Form of a city, the ideal city had set Plato’s city-soul analogy to a universal standard presumed to be shared by all humankind (Republic 4.435). But, except for brief descriptions of his two apocryphal cities, Atlantis and Magnesia, Plato did not elaborate at any great length on the ideal city’s physical design. Francesco seems to have filled this gap by extending Plato’s city-soul analogy to a city-body analogy. Francesco’s illumination of the outline of an ideal city does not quite follow his own description but is suggestive enough to involve the circle and the square in his Neoplatonic city-body analogy (see fig. 2.4). A hundred years after Francesco, a further Neoplatonic analogy, one between the city and the universe, was advanced by Tomasso Campanella, who matched Francesco’s Neoplatonic city-body metaphor with his own city-universe parallelism. A city-universe analogy had been a latent feature of Plato’s Republic, particularly in his description of the layout of both Magnesia and Atlantis (Akkerman 2014). Campanella seems to have been influenced by the depiction of Atlantis in another of Plato’s dialogues, the Timaeus (Donno 1981, 7–27), with the City of the Sun thus becoming Campanella’s Neoplatonic embellishment of the city-universe analogy. Written in 1602 by Campanella during a long stay in prison, and translated into English in 1885 by Thomas W. Halliday, The City of the Sun could have hardly escaped Howard’s attention. The garden-city diagrams suggest that Howard was likely aware of Campanella’s urbanist vision that alludes clearly to

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2.4  The city-body analogy, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, c. 1490. Licensed by the Ministero per i Beni e le Attività Culturali, Musei Reali-Biblioteca Reale, Turin.

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a city-universe analogy: “The city is divided into seven large circuits, named after the seven planets. Passage from one to the other is provided by four avenues and four gates facing the four points of the compass” (Donno 1981, 27). Campanella wrote his utopian account, La città del Sole in the Italian original, during his repeat imprisonment for heresy and sedition. His ideal city, however, was due not only to Plato’s Atlantis but also to his first-hand experience of a new streetscape design of Rome, which had commenced with the architectural initiatives of popes Nicholas V (1447–55), Alexander VI (1492–1503), and Gregory VIII (1572–85), and fully pursued by Sixtus V (1585–90). The papal redesign of Rome at the time ought to be seen in the background of Campanella’s City of the Sun, much as Plato’s Atlantis. In 1591 Campanella had spent about a year in Rome, prior to moving to Padua. In Rome he would have witnessed the final stages in colossal streetscape design by the architect and engineer Domenico Fontana (1543–1607) in the layout of long, straight avenues connecting medieval churches with other monuments extant in the city from earlier times. In 1594 Campanella was arrested for blasphemy in Padua and thrown into a convent prison in Rome until his release in 1597, during the final stages of the papal redesign of the city. The new streetscape of Rome would have had as momentous an impact upon Campanella as the planned New Towns in Germany, Holland, and France did on Descartes two decades later. The redesign of papal Rome ought to be seen also within the context of rising secular forces. The late Renaissance and early Baroque periods in Italy were marked by the rise of secular discourses surrounding early modern science. In order to counter the secular threat to its authority, the Church had to consolidate the support of believers from afar. Pilgrimages were an occasion for improvements of Rome’s infrastructure, the cleaning and paving of its streets, and the adornment of the city’s temples. The monumental redesign of Rome was commenced by Pope Nicholas V for the jubilee celebration of 1450, continued by Pope Alexander VI for the half-millennial celebration of 1500, and completed a century later by Pope Sixtus V. In order to support large crowds of pilgrims, Rome’s plan under Nicholas V linked major monuments through a newly built network of straight, radiating roads converging on a wall fountain, mostra, which was sustained by an ancient aqueduct that had been restored from Rome’s time of glory more than a millennium earlier. The creative spirit behind the new street plan of Nicholas V, and the designer of the mostra, was the architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), the author of De re aedificatoria (1452), a ten-book treatise linking architecture with urban planning. The 12-mile (20 km) aqueduct restored under Nicholas to carry water to the mostra came to be known as the acqua Vergine; its cusp was expanded later into numerous terminal fountains throughout the city of Rome to sustain residents and pilgrims alike.

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To accommodate pilgrims and to alleviate crowding, mainly during jubilee celebrations, Pope Sixtus IV (1471–84) built the Ponte Sisto and restored other bridges on the Tiber River in Rome. A new Vatican library was built during his pontificate, and a ruined hospital was rebuilt, as were many walls, gates, and towers in the city. The inspired force behind these projects was Bartlomeo Pontelli (1450–1492), who, on the pope’s commission, redesigned the Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo into a church and was also the likely architect of the church of Santa Maria della Pace. On New Year’s Day, 1475, Sixtus IV issued a decree on the maintenance of Rome, following which major streets of the city were linearly aligned and paved, and later, during the year 1480, prominent buildings were demolished, probably as a security measure to allow clear street views. The official pretext was street paving, and the justification for the demolitions was that such buildings were a hindrance to traffic. Roman streetscape design continued under Pope Alexander VI, who had a brand new street, via Alessandrina, constructed in 1499 to accommodate large numbers of pilgrims in the coming jubilee year. The aesthetic concern in the newly carved route led to the first deliberate creation of an early modern urban vista by stipulating that buildings have a height of at least sixteen metres. During his short papacy Sixtus V oversaw the final and most significant alterations that transformed the streetscapes of Rome into a linear plan, further facilitating traffic flows as well as crowd control. Largely thanks to the prudence and imagination of Domenico Fontana, Sixtus V thus also became the early modern force behind the change in a large-scale urban traffic network from a tortuous medieval townscape onto a plan of straight Baroque streets. Supplementing the mostra of Alberti and its acqua Vergine were also Domenico’s newly designed monumental fountain wall, the fontana dell’Acqua Felice, and its aqueduct, which was restored from Roman antiquity by Giovanni Fontana, Domenico’s brother, also under the papacy of Sixtus V (Riegl [1908] 2010, 160–202). As a terminus of the Acqua Felice, a twenty-mile-long aqueduct, the new fountain enabled the further renewal and growth of Rome, becoming at the same time a showpiece of a church struggling against reformation and early modern science. Campanella’s urbanist vision undoubtedly drew on the new striking images of Rome, his own first-hand experience, as another link in a chain of ongoing dynamic feedback between mind and city form. Through alternate aspects of emphasis in the epic redesign of Rome at the dawn of modernity, the Howard-Jacobs dispute over city form might now be also considered. On the one hand, there are the plan-view aspects evolving from the papal Baroque plan concerned with traffic flows and crowd control, to later early modern utopian plan visions, to Howard’s diagrams. On the other hand, amplified in the century-and-a-half redesign of Rome, there are the elevation views emerging

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through the city’s newly carved street canyons creating an optical perspective that carried its varied impact elsewhere upon people’s perception, from Campanella to Jacobs. Rome’s new built form of the early Baroque did not remain confined in its cognitive thrust to Campanella’s ideal city. The following two centuries saw its mark in the plans for London and Washington, DC, and some of twentieth-century city form also took a cue from Rome’s ideal-city design (Berg 2008, 93–116). Historical Perspectives on Urban Depictions by Howard and Jacobs In 1600 Campanella was imprisoned again and for a very long period. Enduring suffering and torture by the Inquisition, he wrote The City of the Sun during this time. Following his release in 1627, he found refuge in France under the auspices of the Cardinal Armand Richelieu (1585–1642). Upon his arrival in France, he urged the cardinal to build an ideal city (Yates 1999, 376). Less than a decade later, the city of Richelieu was founded, built on a perfectly rectangular perimeter, with an immaculately orthogonal street layout and large formal gardens (Lancaster 1945). The Baroque unfolding of city form, exemplified by the redesign of Rome or the plan of Richelieu, proceeded along the rise of the scientific revolution. Edmund Bacon, an American architect and planner (1920–2005), in his book Design of Cities credited the hundred-and-fifty-year progression in the plan of Rome with the development of perspective drawing at the plan’s final stage during the second half of the sixteenth century. Experiments with linear perspective, however, had been conducted by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) in 1420s Florence, a city laid out in late antiquity on a grid pattern. Yielding the same or similar visual effect of vanishing point as the later linear streets of redesigned papal Rome, Brunelleschi’s study of perspective originated in the streets of Florence. Arguably, street views instrumental in the discernment of linear perspective can evolve only through the perception of a person moving across a linear streetscape. Seldom is there in nature a perfectly straight line, let alone two parallel straight lines, and during early modernity an idealized linear streetscape would likely be the sole environment where an incisive perception of optical perspective could emerge. It was the visual perception in the streetscapes of early modernity that planted the seeds of coordinate geometry and painting alike in the minds of Descartes, Brunelleschi, and others. Already in archaic times orthogonal streetscapes had been built at Mohenjodaro in the Indus Valley, about 2500 BCE, and at about the same time at a workers’ village in Giza, Egypt. A thousand years later at Tell el-Amarna, some three hundred kilometres south of Giza, a workers’ colony of some seventy houses was built, yet again, on an orthogonal pattern (fig. 2.5).

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2.5  Workers colony at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, c. 1353 BCE. Drawn by Paul Van Pul based on descriptions from Petrie (1894).

It may be rightly presumed that the orthogonal streetscape design of the workers’ colonies was to facilitate surveillance and oversight by the controlling authority. Given the competing influence of secular elements and papal authority, it is likely that the purpose of the papal redesign of Rome, including street clearance, was not only crowd control but also interception of possible insurgency that might threaten the papal authority (Rollo-Koster 2008, 118– 57). Similar could have been also the unspoken reasoning behind Howard’s diagrams, given that no police station placement is mentioned anywhere in his handbook, while surveillance of streets as charted in the diagrams would have been easily procurable. The plan views of Howard’s diagrams, much as those of his many predecessors, are synoptic and all encompassing, ultimately having been instrumental in the transmutation of the Ideal City onto the Masterplan and comprehensive planning during the twentieth century. Largely due to Howard’s Garden City planning concept, comprehensive planning became a favoured process addressing the full range of community goals in terms of transportation, utilities, land use, recreation, and housing. Comprehensive planning, typically covering large urban areas and addressing a wide range of issues, along with claims of predictive ability, was later rebuffed precisely due to ambitions that were not

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only overarching but entirely out of touch with urban experience and dynamics. The very adoption of comprehensive planning early in the twentieth century can be explained, indeed, by the Ideal City concept as an archetypal drive. This is reinforced by considerations of urban transportation and the distribution of urban infrastructure that by necessity mainly involve a comprehensive plan view of the entire city, or large parts thereof. From Hippodamus and Plato to Thomas More and Campanella to Howard and much of twentieth-century planning, the notion of the Ideal City, or its transmutation in the Masterplan, rests on the image of a view from the sky – the abode of gods, as it were. The unacknowledged myth behind the plan view finds a counterpart in the street-view elevation. Akin to a theatrical stage, the street view often contrasts with the solemnity of the linear streetscape and the patronizing Ideal City. Jacobs’s regard for authenticity in the neighbourhood street and in other small urban spaces as the heart and soul of the city draws precisely on street views. Not surprisingly, Jacobs finds no kind words for comprehensive masterplans. The emphasis in Jacobs’s urbanist approach is on the appealing street scenes and on the human encounter within the confines of a street canyon. Jacobs’s urbanism is thoroughly consistent with numerous notions of streets throughout Western history. Not only does Jacobs’s urbanist view evoke notions of medieval streetscapes and markets, but it is also consistent with aspects of Greek and Roman theatrical stage design. Jacobs’s admiring reference to pedestrian movement as “ballet of the street” (1961, 50–4) unwittingly evokes theatrical scenes of streetscapes by Marcus Vitruvius Polio (c. 80–15 BCE), the Roman architect, in his De architectura (5.6.9): “There are three kinds of scenes, one called the tragic, second, the comic, third, the satyric. Their decorations are different and unlike each other in scheme. Tragic scenes are delineated with columns, pediments, statues, and other objects suited to kings; comic scenes exhibit private dwellings with balconies and views representing rows of windows, after the manner of ordinary dwellings; satyric scenes are decorated with trees, caverns, mountains, and other rustic objects delineated in landscape style.” The Renaissance architect and writer Sebastiano Serlio (1475–c. 1554) published an architectural treatise over the period 1537–1606, which was translated into Dutch and then into English as The Five Books of Architecture (1756). In book 2, Serlio expounded the Vitruvian stage scenes that applied pictorial representations by his mentor, six years his junior, the perspective painter and architect Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1537). The tragic scene pointed to royalty in their palaces, in public buildings, and in monumental open spaces, while the comic scene involved commoners in their dwellings and on their streets. Serlio describes the tragic scene (bk 2, 68r–69v) as possessing buildings that “should be those of characters of high rank, because disastrous love affairs, unforeseen events and violent and gruesome deaths (as far as one reads in ancient tragedies, not to mention modern ones) always occur in the houses of noblemen, Dukes,

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great Princes, or even Kings. Therefore in scenery of this sort there should only be buildings that have a certain nobility.” Whereas Serlio’s exposition of the tragic scene attains meaning of dejected sadness through the solemnity of a formal urban environment associated with nobility, his interpretation of the comic scene is shown through humorous joy within a less formal urban environment that might be usually associated with common folk or mainstream community. Serlio thus stipulates (bk 2, 67r–67v) that on the comic stage “buildings should be private houses; that is, belonging to citizens, merchants, lawyers, parasites and other similar characters. Above all there should be a bawd house and an Inn. A temple is absolutely necessary.” Serlio’s urban scenes, particularly the tragic stage, were inspired also by some of the urban environment of his day, where perspective had turned the built environment into a three-dimensional plastic art, with the viewer in motion. At the turn of the sixteenth century the new quarters of Ferrara, northern Italy, under Duke Ercole I (d. 1505), for example, featured rectilinear architecture often disposed on a contemporaneous orthogonal street layout (Burckhardt 1985, 171). His third satiric scene represents only rudimentary built form, at the absence of city form. It is wilderness itself that emerges in this stage. He views the satiric scene (bk 2, 69v–70v) as one in which people “who have dissolute and devil-may-care lives are criticised (or rather they are mocked); in ancient satire the corrupt and the criminal were practically identified. However, it is understandable that this sort of licence was granted to characters who spoke their minds, that is to say, rustic folk. For this reason Vitruvius, when discussing stage scenery, wanted this type to be decorated with wooden groves, rocks, hills, mountains, greenery, flowers and fountains. He also stipulated some typically rustic huts.” The significance of Serlio’s scenography is important because it also implies a typology of actual streetscapes. Serlio thus might be viewed as extending the Vitruvian stage architectonics onto a reverse situation, of genuine streetscapes as theatrical scenes. This is quite consistent with the meaning of streetscapes suggested later by Jacobs: “The fountain basin in New York’s Washington Square is used inventively and exuberantly. Once, beyond memory, the basis possessed an ornamental iron centerpiece with a fountain. What remains is the sunken concrete circular basin, dry most of the year, bordered with four steps ascending to a stone coping that forms an outer rim a few feet above ground level. In effect, this is a circular arena, a theatre in the round, and that is how it is used, with complete confusion as to who are spectators and who are the show. Everybody is both” (Jacobs 1961, 105). The contrast in the street views and sceneries proved affirmative in bringing about the reigning ideas that had defined modernity. The elevation street view facilitates a perceptual contrast emerging from the antinomy between transparency and predictability in a linear street, on the one hand, and ambiguity in

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the surprise-laden crooked lane of tortuous medieval streetscape, on the other hand. Historical evidence shows that when spatial contradiction takes place within the same urban vicinity, it can yield prodigious results. Kepler’s First Law of Planetary Motion has been shown to be an exemplary illustration of antonymous environmental impact upon reason. In about 1608, after unsuccessfully trying for years to fit observational records of the planet Mars to a circular orbit, Johannes Kepler made one of the major discoveries in the history of science: the First Law of Planetary Motion. It is this law that emerges as a synthesis of Kepler’s mind and his built environment. Kepler’s first law states that planets revolve around the sun in elliptical orbits, with the sun at one focus of the orbital ellipse. The point has been made that Kepler’s residence at the time was just opposite the Italian chapel in the Old Town of Prague. The Italian chapel, still extant today, is disposed upon an obtrusively elliptical plan, and this chapel’s plan is thought to have been an architectural model that inspired Kepler in his astronomical discovery (Horský 1990, 189–90). Set in the midst of the enigmatic medieval edifices of Prague’s old town, the Italian chapel is a blatantly harmonious structure radiating clarity and perspicacity. It is apparent that Kepler inferred the plan view of the chapel from the street view and then projected the chapel’s plan upon the presumed plan view of the orbital path of the planet Mars. Kepler’s repeated perception of the contrast between the harmonious design of the Italian chapel and the disordered streetscape within which it was set led him to his discovery. A similar relationship has been suggested in the case of discoveries by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642). In 1638 Galileo published his formulae for inertia and the movement of the pendulum in his Discorsi, known in English as The Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations Relating to Two New Sciences. Much of the Discorsi relates to mathematical representations in physics and mechanics, utilizing the notions of the square and of arithmetic series. Galileo spent much of his life in Florence and its vicinity, and his experiments, including those concerning motion, were also made in Florence. Buildings in and around Florence might have imparted on Galileo the aura of mathematical series. The Foundling Hospital (Ospedale degli Innocenti) in Florence, designed in 1419 by Brunelleschi, is unique for its colonnaded arcade; the long series of columns is proportioned so that they are spaced exactly as far as they are tall, thus defining squares in their elevation. In the Church of Santo Spirito, also in Florence, Brunelleschi created in 1436 a harmonious interior that, when viewed from the end of the church’s nave, yields perspective series of units increasing in a proportional progression of 1:2:3:4:5 (Roth 1993, 354). These two examples suggest a perceptual impact of street views upon creative mathematical thinking. Such consideration would implicate street views, the emphasis of Jacobs’s outlook, in the stimulation of the mind towards serendipitous and prolific thought, as she most certainly implies. Yet it is the plan view,

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such as exemplified by Howard’s diagrams, that remains the ultimate statement in communicating ostensibly rigorous reasoning in urban planning. Following Serlio, street views might be interpreted in accordance with the Vitruvian threefold classification. Such streetscape interpretation, in fact, goes beyond the much narrower meaning that Jacobs elicited from her own favourite streetscapes, those that would appropriately correspond to the comic stage. The tragic stage of a streetscape corresponds to rigid design schemes of regimented city form: from the layout patterns of Baroque streetscapes to the mechanized aesthetics guiding the City Beautiful. Howard’s garden-city streetscape might be envisaged too as close to the tragic stage because its gardens are entirely subject to a uniform and reserved urban world of alignment and proportion. The characters within the satiric scene are vagabonds, those who lived outside cities, among wilderness satyrs, and who, since late antiquity, had been referred to as rustics (Spivey and Squire 2011, 130). The outgoing, humorous amusement of Serlio’s rustic scene points to the wilderness beyond the city, past the gardens of Epicurus and Lucullus, and certainly far from anything represented by the garden city. The Urbanist Legacies of Howard and Jacobs Jane Jacobs was very successful in presenting her struggle against administrative interference and control as a dilemma between the authentic streetscape and an impersonal and dispassionate masterplan. The vertical view of one portion of one single street against the horizontal plan view of an entire city suggests that the juxtaposition of a street’s authentic closeness and a plan’s remote formality has a visual expression. A street view is hardly assimilated without showing some people in it; a streetscape can conceivably be deserted but only for parts of the twenty-four-hour diurnal cycle, and in an architectural rendition it is always shown at daytime. The daytime–night-time change in a street, mainly through the presence and absence of people, is implicitly understood in such a rendition. A permanently deserted streetscape would seem almost a contradiction in terms. Jacobs’s effusive portrayal of streetscapes is important precisely because of her main argument: streets deserted by pedestrians are an urban absurdity. Yet this has been exactly the evolution of the North American streetscape during the twentieth century. The reason is apparent: North American streetscapes have emerged from formal plans that have often considered motorized traffic rather than the movement of people (Bertolini 2017, 48–69). For motorized movement, the need to discern daytime and night-time patterns of the diurnal cycle is projected mainly onto freeway access between the suburbs and the downtown. Howard’s diagrams, in this context, are very instructive. The commercial success of the garden city occurred in spite of and against Howard’s

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proclamations for it to be an urban co-operative, and it was certainly not due to his diagrams that garden cities proliferated throughout the world. The initial success was largely due to the architectural mastery of Unwin and Parker who would have been dismissed by Howard, had he been able to afford architects of similar standing who were willing to pursue his radio-centric urban fantasy. Howard’s beautifully drawn diagrams can be assumed to be a true reflection of his soul; delusion of symmetry, harmony, and balance as seen from the sky by the Grand Designer, rather than perceptual experience by people on the street, was his primary concern. In an exemplary case of architectural determinism, Howard’s harmoniously designed ideal cities, one by one, were to bring harmony to humankind, “a peaceful path to real reform.” The ominous torching of the budding City Beautiful section at the Chicago Exposition by rioting Pullman workers did not stop Burnham, just as the failure of the Garden City promise to cater to the urban poor did not stop Howard. With even greater vigour, the totalitarian autocratic regimes of twentieth-century Europe adopted the diagrammatic outlines of these same urbanist formulae in the pursuit of their own versions of architectural determinism. But do the two brands of urbanism represented by Howard and Jacobs indeed signify the contrast between a mannered ideal and the celebration of authenticity in lived space? Careful reading of Jacobs shows that her witty style often borders, or spills into, the domain of journalistic spin. Much of her criticism of Howard and urban planning remains at the level of sharp rhetoric and does not cross into a thorough analysis. There are, in fact, several instances where her biting tongue exaggerates or oversimplifies in the interest of winning an argument against contemporaneous urban planning. Half a millennium before Jacobs, however, Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), a Renaissance architect and urbanist, had specifically distinguished between successful and unsuccessful streetscape design. In his four-volume treatise, I quattro libri dell’architettura, Palladio hailed streets that were carefully planned to confront the harshness of nature’s elements, as opposed to streets that he considered poorly designed because they ignored, for example, the direction of prevailing winds or excessive sunlight exposure: “[W]hen laying out streets one must ensure very carefully (as Vitruvius teaches us in book I, chapter 6) that they do not follow the direction of any wind so that one does not suffer furious and violent gusts along them but the winds are dispersed, mollified, weakened and enfeebled, contributing to the greater healthiness of the inhabitants; one should avoid the mistake made by those who, in ancient times, laid out the streets of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos” (Quattro, bk 3, 2). Jacobs’s much celebrated notion of “ballet of the street” is one of many examples where she erroneously extrapolated a failure of urban planning and design from an instance of poor urban design by a single person. Such was the case of Government Center in downtown Boston, which was largely rebuilt in an

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alienating superscale of the 1960s, eliminating pedestrian movement upon the razing of the historic Brattle and Court streets, on guidelines by Ed Logue, a lawyer, urban administrator, and, at the time, the head of Boston’s Redevelopment Authority (Kruh 1999, 126–46). Jacobs’s misgivings about Logue’s Government Center project are understandable, but, knowing Boston quite intimately, she would have experienced a different “ballet” on treacherous icy sidewalks covered with freezing rain during three or four months of the year. Her blissful observation of children happily playing on neighbourhood sidewalks would have been, most certainly, confined largely to times of clement weather only. On this view, the butt of her criticism might have been better aimed at the lack of urban planning, and particularly so for winter-city streetscapes. The disappearance of small shopkeepers from whom neighbourhood children can pick up their keys left by parents, bemoaned by Jacobs, is not the fault of urban planning but the result of the supply and demand of urban land, as Edward Glaeser points out in his Triumph of the City (2011, 147–8). Similarly, Glaeser points out, her one-liner “New ideas must use old buildings” has no particular support in experiential evidence or theoretical reflection and often can be counterproductive to the vibrancy of a neighbourhood. Her disregard, whether wilful or unwitting, for efficient metropolitan transit, as Alex Marshall points out, is another major gap in Jacobs’s rhetoric (Marshall 2003, 92–100). Any shortcomings in Jane Jacobs’s urbanism are hardly justification for the Neoplatonic dogma from which the garden city and its sequels emerged. As an archetypal model in his theory of Forms, Plato’s ideal city on the background of Hippodamian planning constitutes the lasting but little acknowledged historical context of Western city form. Plato’s myth of the Ideal City becomes a link in a powerful psychocultural chain perpetuated in urban thought, design, and planning throughout history. The industrialization period between the first urbanist reflections in modern philosophy by Descartes and Locke and the respective adoption and rejection of the Garden City concept by Howard and Jacobs constitutes yet another link in an extended, ongoing progression.

3 Twentieth-Century Transformations of the Garden and the City

The mass production of the automobile provided an immense import to the exurban notion of the Garden City. A synthesis between the two new concepts, the automobile and the Garden City, gave rise to the contrasting urbanist notions of the Broadacre City of Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) in America and the Radiant City (ville radieuse) of the Swiss architect and planner Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier (1887–1965), in France. Whereas Wright’s urban concept, described and propounded in his book The Disappearing City (1932), was the epitome of automobile-reliant suburban sprawl, Le Corbusier’s notion was urban space of high residential density, in which ultimately suburbs would no longer exist. In his project of the Radiant City (fig. 3.1), influenced by utopian urban planning in the Soviet Union, Le Corbusier ([1933] 1964) envisaged people living in skyscrapers amidst abundant greenery. Elevated freeways carrying automobiles between places of residence and places of work would be entirely separated from the walking trails in the parkland underneath. A Vertical Garden City? In Le Corbusier’s conception, the street was to be revamped, after some five thousand years, from a horizontal conduit through a settlement into a vertical passage in the elevator within the high-rise tower. Residential, retail, office, and public spaces were all in Le Corbusier’s skyscraper concept, which in effect became the village transformed. Much as Jane Jacobs, who like him had later endorsed high residential density (1961, 203), in his vision of the Radiant City Le Corbusier rejected the Garden City all the same: The authorities want to force us to live in suburban garden-cities (60 to 120 residents per acre) [...] I propose to turn the city back into itself, enclose it within its own limits, and raise its population level to 400 residents per acre. We must

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3.1  Plan of Radiant City [Plan de la ville radieuse], Le Corbusier, 1933 © FLC/SOCAN (2019).

eliminate garden-cities, with their spuriously natural surroundings. This will solve the transport crisis. And we must turn the dull-witted, retrograde, and suffocating city of Paris into a green city, a radiant city. We must bring nature inside the walls of Paris; it will be no more, nor less, contrived than that of garden-cities, but it will be much more useful. (Le Corbusier, quoted in Guiton and Guiton 1981, 102–6)

Jane Jacobs brushed off Le Corbusier’s premises as not much more than a by-product of Howard’s garden city, branding both urbanist outlooks, along with Burnham’s City Beautiful, “architectural design cults” (Jacobs 1961, 375). No doubt, there was a considerable measure of myth and eccentricity in the urbanist conceptions emerging early in the twentieth century. But Jacobs’s own nonconformity would not remain immune to exigency. Her ideas on vertical greenery conserving urban space, and facilitating higher densities, were presaged by none other than Le Corbusier himself: a “vertical garden city” comprising tall buildings with terrace gardens, originally set in a parkland, was the explicit feature of Le Corbusier’s unité d’habitation at Marseille, a building commonly referred to as Cité radieuse (Dunnett 2005; Pinder 2013, 83). Beautifully articulate, the

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Cité radieuse is a spin-off of the less eloquent Narkomfin building in Moscow, designed and built in the image of a progressive communist project. Both buildings, extant still today, had little impact on later urban design or architecture, the Narkomfin becoming decaying urban grounds in Moscow, and the Cité radieuse of Marseille, an architectural repository, now a UNESCO world heritage site. Le Corbusier’s idea of the vertical gardens in his unité d’habitation came almost simultaneously with another, profoundly adduced and elaborate study, The Minimum Dwelling (1932), by the Czech avant-garde literary and architectural critic Karel Teige (1900–1951). Considered now a landmark in twentieth-century architectural literature, Teige’s book drew initially little attention by urban planners. Teige had absorbed Howard’s idea and reintroduced it in an eloquent and visionary urban scheme of high urban density. In the book he broaches an urban continuum that starts at the interior space of a dwelling and terminates at the urban expanse of edifices, streets, and squares. Vertical greenery as an urban feature promoting higher density in a livable urban space, as enunciated by Teige, surpasses Howard’s initial design concept: In a vertical garden city, the term “house and garden” is interpreted in a new way, differently than envisioned by the romantics of the English garden city movement. Here, the green open areas between the rows of high houses are [not] ornate show gardens, nor should they be confused with English type parks. We are not dealing with pretentious formal gardens or with replicas of public city parks [...] The primary function of the garden is to extend the interior space virtually into outside, natural space: well then, let it now physically enter into our homes and merge with their interiors, which in turn extend their space into nature outside. Let us integrate our dwellings with flowers, grass and trees by uniting nature with human-built form. (Teige [1932] 2002, 315)

Teige’s vertical garden-city notion has reverberated through time and geography. Japan’s Mori Building Company has been designing areas of commercial-residential mix in Tokyo and elsewhere in Asia along Teige’s vision, creating high-density precincts of tall buildings amidst an abundance of vertical greenery. It is hard to say who first introduced the idea of a vertical garden city, Le Corbusier or Teige; it is unfortunate, however, that Jane Jacobs, did no justice to her own stance by failing to recognize an idea presented thirty years earlier. Furthermore, vertical gardens during the cold season in northerly latitudes pose an aesthetic problem that few urbanist contestants addressed. There appears to be also a larger and more profound context to the dilemma of nature in the city. A necessary condition to the proper functioning of a city is order and predictability. These are precisely the elements that Jacobs denigrated and that Howard, particularly through his diagrams, accentuated in the garden city. Order in a mechanical complex entails functionality and the ability

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to control, whereas disorder yields mechanical malfunction, further accompanied by helplessness or frustration in the human agent. Natural terrestrial micro-environments are more about capriciousness than about predictability and more about chaos than order. Within the contemporary metropolis, functionality is based upon mechanistic premises of rule and convention, its natural environments thus inevitably subject to curtailment and control. This contrasts sharply with pre-industrial city form. Within medieval city walls there was almost no nature, as urban space was limited and at a premium. The city-wall, as a physical growth boundary, gave rise to a compact city form, while a short walk outside the city there was always nature in abundance. The capricious and deliberately chaotic streetscape of the Romanesque, while functioning quite efficiently with low-speed traffic and mostly low-rise buildings, in a way also complemented the nature outside the city. More than two millennia ago, Aristotle in his Poetics (part 4) asserted that Nature found her own creative extension in the art of humans. Arguably, much of human creativity involves disorder rather than order, and, as Sitte and Jacobs point out, the orderly city form given to the command and control of an overseeing authority suppresses human creativity. The constructive impact of irregular streetscape upon mind is credible if it is hybridized within a contrasting environment, such as in the midst of an orthogonal grid. The grid plans of antiquity ought to be seen in this light too: stepped streets in Miletus and small market squares interspersed through Dinocrates’s Alexandria provided much perceptual variance and cognitive stimulation for an overall affirmative urban environment. In an ominous boast, almost two thousand years after Aristotle, René Descartes in his Discourse on Method (part 6) asserted that we humans “can make ourselves, as it were, the lords and masters of nature.” As a human extension of nature’s fickleness on the one hand, against human infringement upon nature’s realms on the other hand, the city divulges both Aristotelian advance towards, as well as Cartesian withdrawal from, nature’s traits. Urban imposition upon nature usually constitutes rationalist, solemn, and rigid features related to predictability in streetscapes, emanating from concerns for safety, security, and control – largely Platonic and Cartesian traits. This urban outlook is also followed by Howard, expressing a perceived need for control, order, and functionality within city form. Howard’s gardens, as well as most gardens and parks in contemporary cities, are attempts to introduce nature as only a secondary and subservient element in a mechanized city form. As the largest artificial entity ever created by humans, and the quintessence of resourcefulness and imagination, the city is primarily a personification of the taming and suppression of nature. Few urban contradictions show this incongruity more vividly than does the earth-centred greening of cities, a feature fundamentally inspired by Howard’s contrivance. Within the city, greening has

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embodied some inspiration and creativity, but with no lesser validity it could be said that urban greening has been also about conflict and conquest. The paradox of greening in city form came to be epitomized at the end of the twentieth century in strategies combating mainly the fallouts of urban greening: sprawling garden suburbs had led to an increasing spiral of traffic accidents, car pollution, road congestion, and maintenance costs, not to mention mounting water usage and lawnmower noise. The artificial preservation of nature in the city’s private green spaces, it can be argued, thus yields a factual contradiction, manifest by suburban sprawl and its inevitably attendant urban malfunction. The existence of private lawns and gardens in the city was also the underlying urbanist principle of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City concept. The epitome of the North American dream, the private garden and the front and back yards as expressions of private property and possession are far from the Dionysian spontaneity associated with the primordial Garden. The legacy of the garden city, thus, is increasingly viewed as constituting an unambiguous affront to sustainable urban development (Joss 2015, 84). As an extension of the Garden City concept, the notion of urban greening, therefore, involves a measure of controversy. It contributes to sprawl, with the bloating suburbia exerting a growing sway over infrastructure and its maintenance, while consuming the natural environment that once surrounded the city. Suburban sprawl intensifies the need for maintenance of an expanding urban infrastructure, transportation in particular, with a heavy and increasing burden to taxpayers. That which seems to be a genuine greening to suburbanites, however, is nothing but an assault upon true nature to others. During the twentieth century and beyond, runaway sprawl due to the increasing demand for private green space, encouraged by mortgage bankers as well as government, has become a compulsion enveloping North America. In the United States this led to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis, a housing-finance calamity that contributed to the short but intense global financial crisis of 2007–8, one that the Western world had not faced since the 1929 Great Depression. Critics looking back at the financial crisis justifiably blame big banks, along with government, but they never look at the role that the much less visible suburban-residential development lobbies throughout North American cities have played since the founding of the Garden City movement. The century-old idea of Teige and Le Corbusier of vertical garden cities is a challenge to architects and urban planners but constitutes no attractive source of revenue to municipal treasuries and to most developers. Nature in the City: Urban Greening in the Age of Automation The garden-city aftermath of habitual demand for private green space in the suburbs has been one, but not the only, facet of greening that contributed to

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suburban sprawl during the twentieth century. A seemingly more legitimate aspect of urban greening has been the carving and design of public green space. The introduction of public green space was, undoubtedly, one of the background aspects to Howard’s concept. As a modern urban standard, public green space emerged for the first time during the French Revolution, when in 1792 the Parisian Garden of the Tuileries, adjacent to the royal palace by the same name, was opened to the public. Since then the private and the public greening of urban space have been viewed as radically different from one another. Yet, even though public green space as nature’s place within the city, equally accessible to all, echoes nineteenth-century ideals of egalitarianism, urban green spaces, public greenery, and private gardens alike carry their own sustainability cost. Horizontal greenery of any kind contributes its own share to urban sprawl. While the argument is obvious in the case of private greening, in the case of public green space one only has to recognize that protecting an urban river corridor or an existing nature sanctuary within the city, for example, has a price as well. The consequential redirection of potential growth into other places within the city pushes residential development mainly into urban periphery, thus inadvertently contributing to sprawl and the consumption of nature in exurban space. But there is another unholy alliance between public and private green space. Ever since the fostering and protection of green space in the city during the nineteenth century, its declared function has been to provide a calming contrast to the urban mainstream space and to the attendant mechanized and automated routines that necessitate the functioning of the metropolis, along with the well-being of its inhabitants. The one important observation of Jane Jacobs, to the effect that by mid-twentieth century the planning of urban space had overwhelmed its inhabitants, points also to the extent to which people have become ingrained in automated city form. The city must be functional in order for its inhabitants to survive. But survival in the sprawling city, an outgrowth of the garden city, has been commensurate with the loss of human authenticity. And urban green spaces, always subject to regiment and rule, have done little in the way of safeguarding spontaneity and human authenticity. There also could be little doubt in Jacobs’s criticism that at the turn to the twentieth century and during its first half there was no foresight with regard to the negative externalities the Garden City model involves. Suburban sprawl and access by automobile were seen as signs of progress and prosperity rather than omens of an impending turmoil. Yet, one person who saw the dangers implicit in the Howard model was Le Corbusier. To alleviate the danger of excessive sprawl, while retaining the idea of open green space, he regarded the vertical garden city as a technologically advanced exemplar of an ideal city, one based upon the proliferation of the skyscraper throughout public greenery, or, in Le Corbusier’s own words, “a city in the park.”

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The skyscraper was conceived in the United States, the first being built as an office tower in Chicago in 1884 by William LeBaron Jenney (1832–1907), an architect and engineer. A few decades later, Le Corbusier envisaged the tall tower as housing people, administration, and retail at once. Le Corbusier’s first sketches of his skyscraper concept were introduced in 1925 at the Pavillon de L’Esprit Nouveau in the Paris-based International Exposition of Modern Decorative Art. His skyscraper was not a tall monolithic slab, in the way its US or Eastern European counterparts were built later, but rather a multilevel, multi-purpose building of a cruciform shape, radiating light and stability. Through its cruciform tower Le Corbusier envisaged the end to the notion of the street as a horizontal open-air conduit, and its conversion to the rue interieure, a vertical “street” of the elevator shaft, a “street in the air.” He appropriately named the cruciform high-rise tower “Cartesian skyscraper.” Le Corbusier’s city in the park had at its core a group of such multi-purpose Cartesian skyscrapers set largely in green space and connected with the rest of the city through elevated freeways for speedy and uncongested traffic. This was the gist of Le Corbusier’s essay Urbanisme (1925), translated into English as The City of Tomorrow (1995) – a response as well as a sequel to Howard. In L’Esprit Nouveau, a short-lived journal founded by Le Corbusier in 1920, the renowned designer introduced his Five Points of Architecture, through which his urbanism ought to be understood. Le Corbusier’s Five Points, implemented in 1927 at the housing project Weissenhof in Stuttgart, Germany, were summed up the same year in a German journal as follows (Le Corbusier and Jeanneret 1927): • Pilotis – reinforced concrete stilts that bear the structural load of a building, creating space available for continual ground movement of people, and almost unbroken greenery. • Free dwelling groundplan – the absence of permanent supporting walls in dwellings, apartments in particular, whereby unrestrained internal use of available space is facilitated. • Free façade design – allowing, through the pilotis, freedom in the design of the façade without any concern for its traditional function as a structural support for the building. • Horizontal window – allowing light entry throughout the entire width of a building, cutting the façade along its entirety. • Roof garden – allowing to conserve space on the ground level, as another version of the vertical garden. Le Corbusier’s urbanism, however, came at a cost. Introduction of the five points within the Cartesian skyscraper meant also a move towards consolidation of

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regimentation within a city form that overwhelmingly linked urban functionality with an unfounded belief in an urban mechanism. A drawback of the regimented, Cartesian city form is that, unlike the characteristic Romanesque town, it resists unstructured change and, by implication, flouts urban memory. Furthermore, the notions of a free façade or free ground-plan cannot hide its clockwork feature. Cartesian city form is the champion of repetitive routine and the master of predictable settings. In absorbing humans in its fold, this mechanistic aspect of twentieth-century city form has also denied them much of their own spontaneity, veritableness, and autonomy. The private and public green spaces that had been injected into the city through the twentieth century as an attempt at counterbalance had become usually a deprived replica of natural wilderness, and patching over this failing has not fundamentally resolved it. A counterbalance to the failure of regimented city form to absorb nature within its midst is the late nineteenth-century critical observation of Camillo Sitte, the Viennese architect and planner. In a careful survey of late-medieval and Renaissance towns in northern Italy, Sitte had observed that, instead of superficial green nature, the medieval streetscape design – or often the entire lack of a deliberate street layout – had created a built environment tantamount to spontaneity and to the randomness of nature: the medieval built form itself was an extension of the natural environment. His book City Planning according to Artistic Principles (1889) alluded to serendipity and surprise as a wondrous impact of the medieval city form upon people in its midst. The unpredictable streetscapes of the medieval town had been impregnated with a visual mastery of small plazas, facilitating continuous human encounter as well as the prevalence of visual appeal: “[B]y leading the streets off in the fashion of turbine blades, the most favourable condition results, namely, that from any point within the plaza no more than one single view out of it is possible at a time, hence, there is only a single interpretation in the enclosure of the whole. However, from most vantage points within the plaza its whole framing is seen as an unbroken continuity” (Sitte [1889] 2006, 34). Aware of Haussmann’s redesign of Paris and possibly also of the budding City Beautiful movement in America, Sitte had rejected the mechanized, geometrically aligned city form as a superficial product of industrial modernity: Every special emphasis is placed nowadays on straight thoroughfares of interminable length and particularly on the hair breadth regularity of urban squares. This is, however, quite unimportant, and the whole effort is expended uselessly – at least as far as artistic aims are concerned [...] It is generally realized from personal experience that irregularities do not have an unpleasant effect at all, but on the contrary, they stimulate our interest, and, above all, they augment the picturesque quality of the tableau [...] How unnecessary strict symmetry and geometric

Twentieth-Century Transformations  83 exactitude are to the creation of pictorial or architectonic effects [...] is true to an even greater degree in the building of cities. (Sitte [1889] 2006, 50)

Sitte found an ally in the Arts and Crafts movement in England and North America of the nineteenth century. Rejecting industrial modernity, William Morris (1834–1896) and John Ruskin (1819–1900), the movement’s leading spokesmen, had called for a return to medieval authenticity in art. The evident distaste for the frequently oppressive standardization of modernity brings these medievalists into a single fold of those recognizing nature’s whim as a potent force that ought to be absorbed by the work of humans. Contrasting the sprawl of mechanized built form that overruns nature’s space is the dynamic, Aristotelean element in city form that is founded in the enigma of a small, irregular streetscape as an extension of nature’s quirk within a confined urban environment. The Garden City as a Prelude to Twentieth-Century City Form The aforesaid points to the lasting pertinence of Jacobs’s criticism aimed at the garden city and its offshoots. Probably unbeknown to Jacobs herself, however, there was more than meets the eye in her remark on garden cities as design cults. On the face of it, if it was a myth rather than an objective concern for humans in the city that had guided Howard’s hand, how successful could his outcome be? Although it is common knowledge among his biographers that during his first visit to the United States Howard became immersed in spiritualism, less known – and even less acknowledged – has been the extent to which spiritualism had forged his Garden City concept. An esoteric religion sometimes masquerading as a sort of Neoplatonic creed, spiritualism was a modern mythology that had found, among its many eminent adherents, also numerous supporters of Howard’s first garden city at Letchworth. Notable among these were the explorer and naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace, the novelist H.G. Wells, and the playwright and Nobel laureate George Bernard Shaw, Howard’s friend (Macfadyen [1933] 1970, 88). According to several accounts, Howard was immersed in spiritualism his entire adult life, and following his wife’s death he hosted seances in order to communicate with her soul (Beevers 1988, 37–43, 83). As to the first garden city, according to Paul Emmons, “after its founding, Letchworth was dubbed a place for ‘cranks’ by the popular press and still today is a center of spiritualism” (Emmons 2015). Similarity in the premises of the Garden City movement and of the idealized urbanist concepts ranging from Burnham to Le Corbusier, which Jacobs brought up, is readily at hand. The radial pattern has featured in urban planning throughout history, and City Beautiful schemes have adopted it as well. This

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trait, perpetuated throughout the history of urban planning, was amplified as a guiding principle in these early twentieth-century planning schemes. planning schemes. Clarity in the streetscape, ensuring safety and security as well as command and control, resulted in an attempt for a transparent and predictable city form in which uniformity suppressed serendipity, conformity muzzled iconoclasm, automatism conquered spontaneity, and later in the twentieth century, mechanized movement replaced gait. Juxtaposing the predilection towards automatism and conformity with Howard’s absorption in spiritualism is quite startling: “Over the course of his adult life, almost all of his activities and interests can be understood through his fundamental commitment to spiritualism uniting religion with science. Stenography was associated with spirit writing. Howard also devoted many years to creating an advanced typewriter. The new technologies allowing communication at a distance – including typewriters, telegraphs, telephones, phonographs and photography – were all considered important advances for spiritualist science” (Emmons 2015). Sacred geometry has been identified as a guide in the 1912 award-winning plan of Canberra by Walter Burley Griffin (Fischer 1989), and, within such a context, Howard’s own superstitious mindset in his garden-city plan might not be seen much as a surprise. The circular and radio-concentric plan of the garden city can be easily viewed as a caricature of the mythical Atlantis and Magnesia, the ideal cities described by Plato in the fourth century BCE. Numerous other ideal cities, as we have seen already, have sprung up along rigid geometric patterns, some of them on a circular or concentric plan. What distinguishes Howard from the earlier ideal urban plans, of course, is mainly his incorporation of home gardens, an idea borrowed from More’s Utopia. But the four hundred years between More’s Utopia and Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow entailed also some dramatic changes in the city form of modernity, many of them due to the first two industrial revolutions. The newly emerging city form of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be discerned, for better or for worse, as arising from geometric regimentation whereby greenery in the city becomes acquiescent to a mechanized urban scheme. Regimented city form arises from Descartes’s premise that humans are to become “masters and possessors of nature, as it were,” joint with his admiring view of “the orderly towns that planners lay out as they wish on level ground,” both remarks in his Discourse on Method. It is also through Cartesian regimentation that the professed perfection of Plato’s ideal city finds expression in authoritarian notions relating urban design to urban governance and control, exemplified not only by Burnham’s elitist City Beautiful movement but by an entire modern chain of urban prototypes. Countering an ostentatious display of paternalism by the City Beautiful were socialist utopian blueprints, often no less authoritarian, emerging in reaction to growing urban populations and attendant substandard labour conditions, along with a disintegrating social

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fabric. The middle-class attitude to keeping the peace, and the working class at bay, is implicit also in the garden city, through which a benchmark was set for much of twentieth-century urban planning. Emanating from the perfectionist notion of Platonic ideal Form, Neoplatonic urbanism guided urban plans during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Modernity extended this course, absorbing further the mechanistic tenets of regimented city form. Howard’s garden city continued this trend in reinforcing the City Beautiful movement in America and in giving rise to garden cities throughout Western Europe. More pointed, and less recognized, is the transformation that Howard’s urbanist myth assumed under twentieth-century socialism, inspiring urban planning in the Soviet Union, a society that had declared war on myth and religion – excepting its own Marxist orthodoxy. The latter link is particularly daunting, given the subtitle that Howard gave to the first edition of his book: “A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.” The socio-political atmosphere in Europe and England at the end of the nineteenth century was increasingly defined by the fear, or championship, of Marxism as an ideology seeking social and economic reform through political violence. Howard’s “peaceful path,” apparently, was to achieve the goals of equality and social justice without violence. Yet his planning charts of the garden city, masterfully executed as they were, leave little doubt as to the peaceful path that the garden city was to achieve. Command and control over his Ideal City emerge through Howard’s diagrams, with little wonder that neither courthouse nor fire station are shown in the artwork. Barely mentioned in Howard’s book is police, and in his detailed description not even a single police station is identified. It is quite evident from Howard’s charts that the entire city is under easy and continual watch due to its wide linear boulevards and spacious avenues, with little need for overt policing. It is also difficult to argue that omission of law enforcement was due to some naive optimism emerging from an ideal community. Rather, the same urban feature of transparent and wide boulevards is one that had emerged a few decades before Howard in the redesign of central Paris by Baron George-Eugene Haussmann. The wide boulevards that Haussmann carved in his renewal plan proved useful, even if not decisive, in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 because they rendered the raising of barricades implausible. Clarity and predictability were cast also onto the urbanist doctrine of the City Beautiful movement in America and became the defining moment in much of Marxist urban planning in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe after the Second World War. Marxist Transformations of the Garden City “Man is not an automaton,” proclaimed the Soviet architect V. Kuzmin in a 1930 article, which he also enhanced with a list of recommended minute-by-minute

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daily life routines for Soviet workers (Stites 1989, 202). The article came on the heels of a disastrous central plan, the New Economic Policy, that had followed the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and according to which Soviet industrialization was to be fuelled by the manpower of peasants relocated from the countryside to cities. As Soviet urban infrastructure imploded under rapidly increasing urban populations, a debate ensued in the 1920s Soviet Union between the urbanists, those architects and planners who embraced Le Corbusier’s Urbanisme, and the disurbanists, those who opposed it. The urbanists group, led by Alexander Vesnin (1883–1959) and his two brothers, and initially also by Moisei Ginzburg (1892–1946), a noted architect, advocated adaptation of the Garden City concept as a new model for Soviet urban planning, while the disurbanist group, represented by Mikhail Okhitovich (1896–1937), and later by Moisei Ginzburg who abandoned the urbanist ideas, advocated population dispersal throughout wide tracks of the countryside along transport routes and greenery. The disurbanist utopia stopped short of the ultimate Marxist answer to the problem of disparities between town and country: the abolishment of both town and country. Kuzmin’s article was published in the Russian language journal SA – Sovremennaya arkhitektura (Contemporary architecture), issued by OSA, a group of Soviet architects founded by Ginzburg. Promoting authoritarian collectivist notions in urbanism under the misleading label of “constructivist” architecture, OSA envisaged architecture absorbing the latest technological advances in construction and material science in order to forge, through architectural design and urban planning, a communist society featuring communal housing and a uniform lifestyle. A Russian translation of Howard’s Tomorrow was released in Saint P ­ etersburg as early as 1911, and, shortly after, a Russian Garden City association was established (Wakeman 2016, 22). For the authoritarian urbanism in Stalin’s ­Russia, Howard’s communal quadrangle, the Homesgarth, became a conceptual foundation. Ginzburg merged the Homesgarth egalitarian experiment with Le Corbusier’s Five Points of Modern Architecture to create a Moscow proletarian apartment complex, the Gostrakh, in 1926. Two years later in Moscow, Ginzburg, with Ignaty Milinis, designed the Narkomfin, the model collectivist housing project completed in 1930 for the National Commissariat of Finance. The Narkomfin, today a decrepit edifice still standing in Moscow, was a city block comprising a single elongated building set in a park and designed for communal living, with kitchens absent in most dwelling units. This Marxist co-operative city block had a communal kitchen designated for most of the inhabitant households, with only a few apartment units having their own kitchens. The commissar of finance and a sponsor of the project, Nikolai Milyutin, a self-appointed urban planner, had a penthouse on the upper level, under a rooftop garden (Sherwood 1978, 118–19).

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The emergence of the urbanist-disurbanist schism in the USSR came on the heels of a severe housing crisis, exacerbated by the mass migration of peasants into cities, encouraged or forced by Bolshevik authorities. As the Soviet urbanists and disurbanists were arguing their respective illusory schemes, households in cities were forced into shared accommodation within single apartments. Each such communal apartment, the kommunalka, accommodated up to seven families that were compelled to share the hallways and the communal kitchen and bathroom, and each family had usually only one room at its own disposal. The family room thus served as a living room, dining room, and bedroom for the entire family. Meanwhile Narkomfin fell out of favour almost as soon as it was finished for fear that the fanciful concept behind it was too extreme. To help alleviate Moscow’s severe housing shortage, the space between the pilotis on which the building was suspended was filled with flats and turned into a ground floor. While it was continually inhabited, an adjoining block was built in a uniform Soviet style, only to gradually bring the entire Marxist apartment complex into disrepair. Perhaps recognizing the futility of extending the kommunalka scheme to the Narkomfin, as it was being completed, some of the OSA members’ aberrant thinking shifted away from such collective city blocks forming an entire city in the park. The SA journal started publishing Mikhail Okhitovich’s alternative theories on applying telecommunication, roads, and infrastructure to create diffused, linear settlements, by which time Ginzburg himself had joined the disurbanists. His major disurbanist project then became the Zelenyi gorod, or Green City. Zelenyi gorod (Ginzburg, together with Mikhail Barshch) was the winning entry at the 1930 competition for a new resort town for workers to be built north of Moscow. The capital city, swamped with peasant migrants from the countryside who were being turned into workforce in factories, was in acute need of reducing its density and alleviating its housing crisis. According to the plan, which never materialized, Moscow’s population would shrink sharply, residential construction there would stop, and functionless buildings would be torn down to be replaced by parks. In his 1922 project Immeubles Villas (Sherwood 1978, 96–9), Le Corbusier had called for large blocks of cell-like individual apartments stacked on top of one another, with plans that included a living room, bedrooms, and a kitchen, as well as a garden terrace. Presaging Teige’s concept of minimum dwelling, Le Corbusier observed: “Let us examine the needs of a household (a cell) and the needs of a certain number of cells in their necessary relationship, and let us estimate the number of cells that can usefully form a manageable group – manageable like a hotel or like a commune – a community that itself becomes a clear and defined organic element in the urban plan, having a well-defined

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function that allows strict needs to be recognized and the problem to be stated” (quoted in Vidler 2011, 282–3). Le Corbusier’s idea was transformed in the Zelenyi gorod concept into a quixotic scheme whereby the state would grant each adult a prefabricated light-weight house, allowing the combination and arrangement of the modules at will from a single unit to family or community clusters: “As many ex-Muscovites as possible, now ‘agricultural proletarians’ at one with nature, were to be distributed along the main roads connecting Moscow with nearby centers” (Colton 1998, 241). The Zelenyi gorod plan went far beyond the idea of a self-contained garden-city satellite for a central city. In the Soviet literary media it was presented as a vision of mobile agglomerating glass boxes or entire mobile cities floating across the countryside with the aid of a magnetic levitation. Moscow, which would be liberated from the massive influx of migrants, was to be converted into a park (Staub 2009; Cooke 2005, 1978). Possibly or partially in response to the eccentric Zelenyi gorod plan, Okhitovich and Ginzburg, together with Alexandr Zelenko and Alexandr Pasternak, prepared a disurbanist alternative that came to partial fruition at Magnitogorsk in south-central Russia, near Kazakhstan. It was put forward in 1930 as a prototype of disurbanist planning and a rejection of the conventional centralized city, seen as a decadent capitalist formation. Reflecting on the failure of Narkomfin, the disurbanists now “pictured the country striated by bands of prefabricated and mobile residences wrapped around transportation lines” (Colton 1995, 241). Historically, linear pattern in settlement growth along transport routes goes back to medieval Europe, some of the linear settlements still retaining the pattern today. The towns of Spillern (thirteenth century, Lower Austria), Mileham (sixteenth century, Norfolk, England), Diane Capelle (seventeenth century, northeastern France), and the town of Champlain (seventeenth century, now part of the metropolitan area of Trois-Rivières, Quebec) are all linear settlements. As a planning concept, the linear city was initially introduced in 1882 by the Spanish architect Arturo Soria y Mata (1844–1920), who replaced the conventional urban pattern of a city centre and a periphery with the notion of constructing linear sections of infrastructure – roads, railways, and utilities – along a focal channel, such as river, and then, gradually adjacent to it, urban features including residences and industry. Soria’s city grows in a controlled fashion, rather than expanding spontaneously in a centrifugal sprawling pattern. The process of urban expansion, then, is contrived, allowing multiple cities to expand into each other’s territory. At Magnitogorsk, the concept of individual rooms of the communal house had reverted to the conventional notion of separate dwellings for households, and the objective became the scattering of population over large tracts of land. Ostensibly, the city was to deliver the Stalinist urban and industrial enterprise of an awe-inspiring triumph of collectivism. The truth of the matter was that this was only one example of the ruthless displacement of peasants in which

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the Soviet Union had repeatedly engaged following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. In the late 1920s, as peasants were forced off their land to cities to expand the industrial labour force, the Magnitogorsk plan was to be a linear city project presented as a progressive disurbanist solution. The forcible displacement of peasants in the USSR, largely cut-off from world affairs until the Second World War, was due to policies of Lazar Kaganovitch, Stalin’s henchman and the minister of public works, and the Gosplan, the Soviet State Planning Committee. In the countryside, in the meantime, the forced farm collectivization associated with farmland and grain confiscations on a vast scale had ultimately resulted in a famine during the years 1932–3. Both Zelenyi gorod and Magnitogorsk, as disurbanist projects, were conceived as part of the myth that a fitting settlement pattern would somehow forge the enhancement of the socialist personality and aid its progression towards a communist mindset. The distancing from the architectural determinism of the bizarre Narkomfin communal scheme, however, was unmistakable. In Ginzburg’s own words: The house-commune [such as Narkomfin] canonized a pre-determined way of life for its inhabitants; in contrast, these two projects upheld the principle of providing options for a variety of free associations among the people who are housed together. The actual mode of living would generate a variety of solutions in various forms depending on the individual peculiarities, interests, needs and possibilities of the inhabitants in each dwelling. The Magnitogorsk project resolved the above problem in the following manner: a free-standing dwelling for each human being if he lives alone; free-standing dwelling for groups of various sizes, from one couple to any desired fraternity – professional or voluntary union of co-workers; yet in all cases a separate dwelling, surrounded by space and greenery, permeated by light and sun, freed from being squeezed into the narrow limits of the city block. (Bliznakov 1994)

The legacy of urban planning emanating from schemes detached from human nature and needs is unmistakable here. According to a recent, undated report of PureEarth, Blacksmith Institute, Magnitogosk was the source of “650,000 tons of industrial wastes, including 68 toxic chemicals, polluting some 4,000 square miles of Russia. Pollution discharges are still very high and local authorities have no resources to address the problems” (PureEarth, Blacksmith Institute 2017). Die Architektin: Kitchen Design and Urban Planning Not to be outdone by his fellow disurbanists, Nikolai Milyutin, the penthouse commissar, in his book on the socialist city dubbed the Sotsgorod, had a vision

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of urban settlement as a “flowing functional assembly-line” (Milyutin [1930] 1974, 65). The book, published in 1930 by the State Publishing House, was titled The Problem of Building Socialist Cities: Basic Questions Regarding the Rational Planning and Construction of Settlements in the USSR. In the bright point of the book, translated as Sotsgorod: The Problem of Building Socialist Cities (1974), Milyutin as commissar of finance during the pre–Second World War period of rapid industrialization in the USSR focuses on budgetary restrictions and construction costs. His disurbanist concept was based on the decentralization of industry, which he envisaged as spreading thinly along a mainline railroad route, while the communes and the dwellings would be planned with the main objective of efficient work productivity (Collier 2011, 34–5). The geographical direction of the industrial zone would then proceed in the sequential flow of production from raw materials into finished goods ready to be exported or consumed. Adjacent dwellings would be allocated to workers according to their specialization in the production process. Although in the West during the Great Depression the high unemployment among architects and the lack of commissions were acute, the Gosplan realized it needed Western expertise to meet the goals of its five-year plan set by the Kremlin government. In 1930 architects and engineers from Western Europe flocked to the Soviet Union, including the noted German architect Ernst May and his team of fifteen architects and planners, who joined Ginzburg’s team at Magnitogorsk. May’s intent at Magnitogorsk was to adapt a model he had employed in Frankfurt am Main during the years 1925–30, modifying Howard’s garden city into a decentralized planning concept. In what came to be known as Römerstadt, or New Frankfurt in the English-speaking world, some twelve thousand apartments were built in the northwestern part of Frankfurt, in housing complexes of innovatively designed private apartments. Up until then the typical worker’s household in Germany and west-central Europe had occupied a tworoom apartment, in which a kitchen had multiple usage. Although incomparably better than their Soviet counterparts, the apartments of German workers after the First World War had much to be desired. Besides being used for cooking, the kitchen was also the living room where household members not only dined but also bathed and slept, while the second room was reserved for relaxation or social occasions. In 1926 May brought into his planning team the Austrian architect ­Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897–2000), the inventor of the Frankfurt kitchen. A milestone in interior design, and a forerunner of the modern fitted kitchen, the Frankfurt kitchen was a small, low-cost, detached space, connected to the living room by a sliding door, thus separating the space for meal preparation from other dwelling spaces. Schütte-Lihotzky’s 1926 Frankfurt kitchen probably influenced further Karl Teige in The Minimum Dwelling.

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The “May Brigade” was credited with the planning of more than a dozen cities in three years, of which Magnitogorsk was the first. The May guideline for settlement planning in Magnitogorsk, as elsewhere, consisted of identical, equidistant, five-storey, communal apartment buildings and an extensive network of dining halls and other public services. There were six to eight hundred other Western architects and planners in the Soviet Union during the period 1930–3. But, with the increasingly unbearable political conditions in Stalin’s USSR, May and the entire team, along with other teams of Western urban planners, left Russia between 1933 and 1937 as their contracts expired and as the tidal wave of Stalinist terror enveloped the country. It became much worse for May’s Soviet colleagues. The SA magazine of the OSA architectural group, initially a polemical journal open to various ideas, was forced to become a platform for communist propaganda in architecture and urban planning, advancing collectivist housing ideas and promoting uniform living conditions. When the Communist Party’s Politburo realized that the OSA group was largely irrelevant to the urban problems of the USSR in its detachment from reality, it dissolved the group in 1930, its SA magazine carrying the acronym for a new journal, Soviet Architecture, until it too was shut down in 1934. In 1935 Okhitovitch was sent to the Gulag, where he was shot two years later, while Milyutin withdrew from public life to avoid persecution. Ginzburg redirected his talent into utilitarian projects such as the design of workers’ resorts and railway stations. Rail transport was seen to be of critical significance in its purpose to relocate members of the labour force into industrial zones and urban centres where factories had been built along transport lines. The most dramatic showpiece of rail transport was the Moscow metro. In June 1931 the decision to build the Moscow subway was made by the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Construction plans, engineering, and routing design were handled by specialists recruited from the British-American Metropolitan Vickers Electrical Company, which built and maintained the London Underground. In 1933 the Vickers engineers were detained and put on trial based on trumped-up charges of subversion and espionage, and deported, ending the role of British business in the USSR. The Moscow metro opened in 1935 and immediately became not only the master work of the transportation system but also a tool of Stalinist propaganda and control (Robbins 1997). Towards the Malfunctioning Metropolis: The Masterplan as a Cartesian Myth Howard’s attempt at a “peaceful path to real reform,” to apply the Garden City concept in order to prevent urban and social turmoil, found enthusiastic adherents both in the United States and in the countries of its Western political

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allies, as well as in their communist foe, the USSR. During the twentieth century the United States and the USSR became inimical rivals, the only two global adversaries on the planet in the aftermath of the Second World War; their animosity culminated in the 1963 Cuban missile crisis with a conflict that took the world to the brink of an all-out nuclear catastrophe. Yet these bitter enemies embraced enthusiastically, through their respectively opposing ideologies, the same urban concept, looking to the Garden City as, conversely, an expression of the American Dream, or a “socialist reconstruction.” To shed light on this enigma it might be appropriate to look outside urban planning and architecture and inside the minds of Howard, Le Corbusier, and others. In a strange twist, Howard’s conviction that his purpose in life was to bring about practical proposals for the betterment of society led to his belief that the garden city would align humankind with the divine order of harmony and unity (Buder 1990, 63). Howard’s eccentric view on the garden city’s purpose is quite consistent with socialist utopias of the nineteenth century, and it is particularly congruous with the messianic message of Marxism, leaving out the latter’s violent overture. Against the devotional archetype of the Ideal City and its twentieth-century version, the Masterplan, stood individual desires and household preferences, along with interests and ulterior motives of various economic or administrative groups. The masculine drive for urban command and control had yielded attempts at a machine-like predictable city form, but between the follies of Marxism in the East and developers’ lobbies or special-interest hegemonies in the West, an inherently dysfunctional city form had emerged. The foremost absurdity of this city form in the West came to its full expression at the end of the twentieth century in strategies combating accidents and traffic congestion – urban ills that were largely created by the planned city form in the first place. In 1930s USSR the conflict between centralized, authoritarian planning and the dynamics of a city had become pronounced to the extent of threatening the central government in Moscow. As avant-garde constructivists were engaged in their utopian plans, Moscow was drowned in chaos and breakdowns due to a lack of housing and the disintegration of infrastructure (Colton 1995, 215–52). In December of 1930 a report had alerted the Communist Party Politburo “to the absence of well-conceived planning of urban service provision, poor integration with industrial construction, and inattention to the rising expectations of the masses.” Lazar Kaganovitch, as cited by Colton (1995, 252), recalled: To probe Moscow’s urban services a special Central Committee commission was appointed with Comrade Stalin as a member [...] He spent hours hearing out specialists and discussing water supply, paving, the straightening of streets and squares, housing construction, and the like. From how to fix snags in fuel and water delivery, he moved on to matters such as [...] the building of new bridges and

Twentieth-Century Transformations  93 of a subway, the demolition of [a sixteenth-century] wall and of old and decrepit houses [...] and to crown it all, a Stalinist master plan for reconstructing Moscow, whose execution has resulted in old Moscow [becoming] Stalin’s Moscow.

In other words, the urban planning disaster that Moscow had become by 1930 due to a centralized plan, the New Economic Policy, was to be resolved by another ideal-city plan, a communist adaptation of Haussmann’s redesign of Paris. The planning ideas for Moscow now also took a cue from other European metropolises of the early twentieth century. While Haussmann had managed to almost entirely demolish the historical centre of Paris by carving wide, fashionable boulevards through it, his plan for Paris was considered the mark of urban progress, inspiring the creation of similarly wide boulevards, cutting through the medieval quarters of Brussels, Rome, and Vienna. Even more bizarre were the Ideal City notions of Le Corbusier as he saw them for Moscow: “Le Corbusier, winging a reply to a [Moscow committee on the economy] questionnaire from his Paris studio, recast Moscow into rectangles of housing, industry, and central uses. Housing would consist of hotel-like skyscrapers protuberating from grassy downs, 1,000 tenants per hectare. Le Cobusier’s scheme depended on eradication of Moscow’s established street pattern and the best part of its building stock, leaving only the Kremlin and a few other museum wards as mementos of Russian history” (Colton 1995, 243). Moscow, however, could ill afford the Haussmann-like ostentation. Following responses to its questionnaire, the Moscow committee on the economy decided to shelve most of the planning ideas that were put forward. In the view of Timothy Colton, the Ideal City notion against the factual disintegration of Moscow had become a deadly spiral: “For Moscow, the gist of the resolution of May 1930 was unmistakable: speculation on an ideal socialist city was a luxury that Soviet society in its present fettle could not afford; schemes based on such quixotism were best left on the drawing boards. A police action several months later added a more ominous moral: fantasizing about the Soviet capital could be seditious as well. In September 1930 the economist Alexandr Chayanov was arrested and charged with helping organize an anti-Communist Peasant Labour Party; he was shot in 1939” (Colton 1995, 246). What was left as the Marxist city’s most impressive achievement was urban design facilitating military parades to intimidate the proletariat, not entirely unlike features of the City Beautiful movement in America. As if forgotten was the declared purpose of the garden city to facilitate spatial separation between polluting industries and residential areas that would improve the overall well-being of workers and all urban dwellers. In the Soviet Union that purpose was ceded to make room for grotesque ideological arguments consummated by the state terror of the 1930s.

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Through its own fashionable design, City-Beautiful planning too had placarded over the polluted and poverty-stricken neighbourhoods on the fringes of its own splendid boulevards. Concern with the environmental degradation of low-income urban residents was replaced with an environmental determinism similar to that promoted by Soviet urbanists. Planners East and West envisaged an urban order that was to advance “appropriate” moral and civic virtue, whatever its meaning, among urban dwellers (Boyer 1978, 261–83). Working-class residential areas near coal-burning factories was the rule, rather than the exception, in Soviet cities, but many inner-city areas in what became the American Rust Belt were similarly afflicted for much of the twentieth century. Three hundred years earlier in London the engraver and horticulturalist John Evelyn (1620–1706) had prepared a report to King Charles II on the deplorable impact of emerging industries on residents in the capital. Evelyn had observed toxic pollution from the burning of coal, mainly by manufacturers and businesses, and its ill effects upon the health and well-being of Londoners. In 1661 he published his royal report, Fumifugium, or The Inconveniencie of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated, the first document on the growing air-pollution problem in London. Rendered in eighteenth-century wording, Evelyn’s observation, without too many niceties, should have reverberated well into the twentieth century: This Godly City challenges what is her due, and merits all that can be said to reinforce her Praises [...] And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEA-COALE which is not onely perpetually imminent over her head [...] but so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumption, rage more in this one City, than in the whole Earth besides [...] So corrosive is the Smoake about the City, that if one would hang up Gammons of Bacon, Beefe, or other Flesh to fume, and prepare it in the Chimnies, as the good House-wifes do in the Country, where they make use of sweeter Fuell, it will so Mummifie, dry up, wast and burn it, that it suddainly crumbles away, consumes and comes to nothing. (Evelyn [1661] 1976, 17–30)

A series of smog-related events in European cities over centuries, and in London in particular, culminated in the winter of 1952. As a direct result of respiratory and cardiovascular complications caused by coal-generated smog during a cold and windless period between 5 and 6 December, more than 4,000 people died in London, an additional 8,000 died during the next several months,

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and more than 100,000 people were hospitalized for varying periods (Corn 2006, 42–5). Perhaps the most significant conclusion of Evelyn’s essay was his recommendation: Removal of such Trades, as are manifest Nuisances to the City, which, I would have placed at farther distances; especially, such as in their Works and Fournaces use great quantities of Sea-Coale, the sole and only cause of those prodigious Clouds of Smoake, which so universally and so fatally infest the Aer, and would be in no City of Europe be permitted, where Men had either respect to Health or Ornaments. Such we named to be Brewers, Diers, Sope and Salt-boylers, Lime-burners, and the like: These I affirm, together with some few others of the same Classe removed at competent distance, would produce so considerable (though but partial) a Cure, as Men would even be found to breath a new life as it were, as well as London appear a new City, delivered from that, which alone renders it one of the most pernicious and insupportable abodes in the World, as subjecting her Inhabitants to so infamous an Aer, otherwise sweet and healthful: For (as we said) the Culinary fires (and which charking would greatly reform) contribute little, or nothing in comparison to these foul mouth’d Issues, and Curles of Smoake, which (as the Poet has it) do Coelum subtexere fumo, and draw a sable Curtain over Heaven. (Evelyn [1661] 1976, 33–4)

Pre-empting Howard a quarter of a millennium before the Garden City movement became the leading urbanist notion, Evelyn had called for the relocation of industry, instead of people, outside the city. Consistent with the preservation of much of the existing built environment, Evelyn heralded Howard’s notion of placing industry at the periphery of the garden city, while contrasting with the Garden City idea itself: “I propose therefore, that by an Act of this present Parliament, this infernal Nuisance be reformed; enjoyning, that all those Works be removed five or six miles distant from London, or at the least so far as to stand behind that Promontary jetting out, and securing Greenwich from the pestilent Aer of Plumstead-Marshes” (Evelyn [1661] 1976, 34–6). By the turn of the twentieth century Evelyn’s words had been lost among books and letters in libraries and archives. On the heels of the First World War and throughout the 1920s the vision of urban order collapsed. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 American cities became the site of tents and rickety assemblages of cardboard boxes in which people lived. While the urban poor found their places of abode in ramshackle sheds in metropolitan centres, the first design of an exquisite “town for the motor age” took place at Radburn, New Jersey (Hutter 2016, 122–4). A charming American version of a middle-class garden city was created at a safe distance from polluting industry, urban poverty, and street turmoil.

4 The Neighbourhood as a State of Wonderment: The Urbanist Dream of Jane Jacobs

The primordial myth of the Garden likely originated in the agricultural revolution of the early Neolithic period and later prehistory. With the increasing prevalence of sedentary patterns among humans in the late Neolithic and the Bronze Age, the myth of the Citadel arose from the Garden allegory, evolving across historic times into a myth of the Ideal City. First citadels, according to Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), may have emerged as a result of feuding between or within families (Vico [1744] 1968), rather than as a defence against outside intruders as happened later in the Bronze and Iron Ages. The Garden and the Citadel were the two formative myths through which built environments emerged and continually transmuted according to climatic, economic, religious, or defensive exigencies. In time, the Garden stood for multitude, the Citadel for solitude. The early citadel, Vico theorized, had emerged during the age of heroes in the distant past, as a consequence of alliances formed between fathers of families. In his Scienza Nuova (bk 4, 982) Vico presented these alliances as fostering the defences that had been organized by the fathers who “savagely slew any who entered within their confines.” As the myth of the Citadel metamorphosed into the Ideal City, an allegory of the Grand Designer gradually emerged. On this view, parables of the Grand Designer arose, bound with the progressively evolving myth of the Ideal City. In the West, between classical antiquity and modernity, the Grand Designer became increasingly the pervasive consort accompanying the myth of the Ideal City, steadily shunting the Garden to a peripheral allegory. The Myth of the Grand Designer Projection of the designer’s perceived grandeur of self or of a revered other human being upon an ideal plan seems to have been implicit in Francesco’s fifteenth-century urban design. Francesco’s treatise that included the malebody outline as a guide to his ideal city was published about eight years prior

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to the famous drawing of the Vitruvian man by Leonardo da Vinci.It seems, therefore, that the Vitruvian notion of ideal male-body proportions, projected by Francesco to inform the spatial features of an ideal city, may have not only been a source to Leonardo’s own drawing of the Vitruvian man but also expressed a masculine metaphor of correspondence between an ideal city and a faultless body, presumably Francesco’s own. Such a view is consistent also with the suggestion that the image of Leonardo’s Vitruvian man is none other than Leonardo’s own (Mack 2005, 66; Lester 2012, 216). The founding of Alexandria in 331 BCE is an early and even more explicit example of the two myths, the Ideal City and the Grand Designer, yielding an actual city plan. A year earlier, in 332 BCE, Alexander the Great had himself declared Master of the Universe by Egyptian priests, and subsequently the Greek architect and planner Dinocrates of Rhodes designed Alexandria on a rigid orthogonal plan. According to Vitruvius, Alexandria was founded in lieu of an initial, pompous scheme by Dinocrates, according to which a gargantuan statue of Alexander was to be carved on the flank of Mount Athos, Greece. The statue was to hold in its hand a city (Vitruvius 2.1–2), but the delusion behind the project was probably too much even for Alexander. Still, Luisa Ferro and Giulio Magli have shown that at the time of Alexandria’s founding the main longitudinal axis of Dinocrates’s plan was directed to the rising sun on the date of Alexander’s birthday, while at sunset of the same day the axis was aligned in the approximate direction of the rising star Regulus, associated in Babylonian tradition with royalty (Ferro and Magli 2012). More than two thousand years later Timothy Colton writes about another self-appointed grand designer, Joseph Stalin, and the major urban debacle in the reconstruction of Moscow, prior to and following the Second World War: The liturgy of Soviet politics from 1930 until 1953 consecrated the city “Stalinskaya Moskva,” Stalin’s Moscow. Read one psalm from 1949: “Comrade Stalin, in spite of all his multifaceted activity in leading the country, is concerned on a daily basis with the needs of Muscovites and pays special attention to the problems of rebuilding Moscow. There is no more or less significant aspect of the development of Moscow that Comrade Stalin has not addressed or on which he has not issued precise instructions. The Soviet people rightly call Moscow, Stalin’s Moscow. The great architect of socialism, Comrade Stalin, is the animator and organizer of Moscow’s reconstruction [...]” Sycophants truckling to Stalin’s ego tried to rename Moscow Velikii Stalingrad (Great Stalin City), Stalingrad-Moskva (Stalin City-Moscow), Stalinodar (Stalin’s Bounty), or simply Stalin. (Colton 1995, 249–50)

Between Dinocrates’s stamp of sumptuousness on the plan of Alexandria, and Stalin’s Moscow more than two millennia later, stand Francesco di Giorgio

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4.1  The Modulor, Le Corbusier, 1945. © FLC/SOCAN (2019).

Martini, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Ebenezer Howard, and scores of others, each of whom saw himself as designer of the ideal city and, pending a measure of narcissism, also the grand designer. A corresponding myth appears to be behind the Modulor (fig. 4.1), Le Corbusier’s version of the Vitruvian man, showing human proportions as consistent with two different series of anthropometric scales, both approximating the golden ratio, 1.618. Both anthropometric series of the Modulor amount to the formal basis for the “ideal” design of Le Corbusier’s urban dwellings (Le Corbusier [1954] 2004, 131). Similar to the Vitruvian man drawn, according to some suggestions, to the likeness of Leonardo himself, or Francesco’s ideal-city layout tracing an outline of a male figure, possibly Francesco’s own, so too the impression that Le Corbusier designed the Modulor in the image of himself seems compelling. Le Corbusier’s Radiant City (fig. 3.1) is most salient, in this regard. As against the runaway success of the garden city, the 1924 plan of the Radiant City, joint with Le Corbusier’s cousin, Pierre Jeanneret, never materialized. The plan shows zoning in parallel bands, from offices at the top end of his blueprint, to

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housing in the centre, to industry at the bottom. In the words of the architectural historian and critic Kenneth Frampton, the plan of the Radiant City shows an “anthropomorphic metaphor [...] inserted into this model” (1992, 180). The resemblance to the allegoric setting of Francesco’s ideal city five centuries earlier is unmistakable. In both cases the anthropomorphic metaphor recalls the Platonic myth, even as the outline of a masculine super-creature, a Neoplatonic demiurge, permeates through the plan of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. The projection of the Grand Designer myth onto twentieth-century city plans is perpetuated in the notion of the Masterplan. It was the Masterplan that Jacobs had in mind in her 1981 lecture in Hamburg entitled “Can Big Plans Solve the Problem of Renewal?” The expectedly resounding, feminine response to the rhetorical question in the title of her presentation is perfectly consistent with the pursuit of an urbanist outlook often posited as her own. More appropriately, however, the millennia-old allegory of the Garden, embracing the vibrancy of small streetscape spaces where humans encounter each other as they transit on foot, emerges through Jacobs in a combative posture confronting the Grand Designer. Metropolis and Alienation A common trait in the myth of the Ideal City is the notion of a perfect built form that chronologically precedes its inhabitants. Such are Plato’s Atlantis and Magnesia, Plotinus’s Platonopolis, Campanella’s City of the Sun, Schickhardt’s Freudenstadt, Ledoux’s Chaux, and Howard’s garden city. The Grand Designer, rather than the multitude of urban dwellers, is the human force behind the built form emanating from the Ideal City. The tantalizing myth of the Grand Designer is also the force that reinforces narcissism and self-centredness in its carrier. Self-centredness is, by default or by intent, also the diminution of the other in a community. As such it is one aspect of alienation. How good can a city plan be when its author is the victim of a borderline personality disorder? Le Corbusier is said to have had a “monomaniacal, narcissistic and pugilistic temperament” (Knox 2011, 51) and was almost certainly a victim of narcissistic personality disorder (Evenson 1979, 199–219, 232–8); other instances of architects or planners of like affliction abound (Hagman 2010, 110–12; Lahiji 2011). Instances of less severe cognitive infirmity emerge in Frank Lloyd Wright, the father of the urban-sprawl idea in his Broadacre City concept (Friedland and Zellman 2006, 251–340, 543–61). Walter and Marion Mahony Griffin were followers of Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), an architect and the inventor of anthroposophy, an arcane pseudoscience based on medieval mysticism (Storr 1996, 65–84). Their plan of Canberra, including some minute design details, followed the occult ethos of Steiner’s esotericism (Weirick 1998). It is not too overbearing to claim that the result of a large-scale urban scheme whose author, or entire team, is entangled in an autocratic, self-centred

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disposition is the rise of a built environment that itself is more a stamp of the author’s strife for grandeur than the need of people for livable environments. Worse yet, whereas confined mechanical malfunction may cause frustration, but often can be repaired, it is the projection of grandeur intertwined with ingrained multiple dysfunction of an urban environment that irreversibly plants the seeds of alienation in the metropolis. More often than not, reality comes knocking on the door, or crashing down, to dissipate ideal-city schemes before they are realized, and usually this is due to the great cost that these projects involve. In the case of Daniel Burnham’s plan of Chicago, this truism had the unfortunately opposite outcome. The plan of Chicago, years after Burnham’s death, became the darling of developers and corrupt municipal officials alike as a major source of revenue and kickbacks, with Mayor William “Big Bill” Thompson on the take (Bukowski 1998, 133–40). Burnham himself sensed the coming problem when he urged the Commercial Club of Chicago, in 1904, to establish an independent organization dedicated to the transparent implementation of the plan, in an attempt to force the Chicago civic administration to act honestly (Smith 2006, 51–2). Ideal-city plans that have successfully materialized have always been confined into relatively small, middle-class communities, such as Howard’s garden city or its suburban sequels. Large-scale idealized urban projects have come to be judged as failures. Such was the 1930s plan for the administrative section of New Delhi by Edwin Lutyen’s (1869–1944), which resulted in monumentally beautiful urban expanses – entirely detached from the indigenous reality of the Indian subcontinent. Amplifying the real-estate business success of Howard’s garden cities, Lutyen’s Delhi, housing the residence of the prime minister, is presently also the most expensive land in India. But almost a century after the plan, parts of Lutyen’s Delhi have become incoherent and placed by the World Monuments Fund on its “Most Endangered Sites” list (Josh 2005). Possibly faring worse are the planned ideal cities of Chandigarh (also in India) by Le Corbusier and Brasília by Lucio Costa (1902–1998), both capital cities featuring awesome, grandiose architecture, the latter by Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012). Both Chandigarh and Brasília have been largely considered an urban-planning blunders. In Chandigarh, due to the planners’ failing demographic assessments, there has been a severe housing shortage, while much of the streetscape plan, reflecting Le Corbusier’s engrossment with the automobile, is orthogonal, ignoring bikes and rickshaws, the prevalent means of urban transport in India. Street vending, an essential part of Indian culture, has found its way on its own onto the city’s streets in spite of the fact that it was not accounted for in the plan (Hindustan Times 2016). Brasília has long attracted even more censure. Years after its completion in 1960 the Berkeley anthropologist James Holston showed the city plan as a

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parody of ancient mythology and depicted Costa as a pretentiously reluctant grand designer (Holston 1989): As in a creation myth, the capital’s construction functions as an ordering event for an entire region and, by extension, for the nation. In the almost universal tradition of founding myths [...], the plan presents the ordering event itself through ideal geometries [...] Costa is playing the role of an improbable bard who is visited by muse, in this case of architecture and city planning [...] With great skill, Costa manages to give the plan of a new city the suggestion of a legendary foundation, to give technical planning devices the aura of sacred symbols, and to invest Brasília with a world mythology of cities and civilizations. (Holston 1989, 65, 74)

Giving the city’s plan a political context, Holston says: “Brasília was planned by a left-center liberal, designed by a Communist, constructed by a developmentalist regime, and consolidated by a bureaucratic-authoritarian dictatorship” (1989, 40). No less damning is a later assessment of the impact upon the community by Richard Williams, a reputed authority in visual culture, to whom Brasília “came to represent an authoritarian and inflexible urbanism that for residents was profoundly alienating” (Williams 2005). Discernment of alienation in the metropolis emerges against the contrasting background of the authentic closeness of friendship or kin, such as sometimes occurs in an inner-city slum, an old neighbourhood, and a small town. These were the qualities of some of the destitute neighbourhoods in cities across North America and Europe that were ravaged by the widespread economic calamities occurring sporadically between 1873, the commencement of the Long Depression, and the early 1930s Great Depression. In the early 1940s a poverty- and crime-stricken neighbourhood of North End Boston drew the attention of William Foote Whyte (1916–2000), a Chicago sociologist, who identified in its midst vitality and human authenticity (Whyte [1943] 2012, 269–72). Whyte’s Street Corner Society possibly inspired Jacobs in her own admiring observations of North End Boston, which, she claimed, had “unslummed” itself (Jacobs 1961, 203). Jacobs thus was not alone, and certainly not the first, to embrace the ardour of the inner-city neighbourhood. Aware of the fraternity within poor neighbourhoods, in the early 1900s Clarence Perry (1872–1944), a New York sociologist, had introduced an urban-planning notion of a middle-class neighbourhood exuding similar quality. At the time, Perry resided in Forest Hills Gardens, a model housing community commissioned by the Russel Sage Foundation and designed in 1909 by the two noted planners and architects Grosvenor Atterbury (1869–1956) and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr on the premises of Howard’s garden city (Perlman 2015, 16). It was from within his residence at Forest Hills Gardens that Perry further integrated Howard’s notion of the Garden City with his own idea of the planned neighbourhood unit. Perry’s neighbourhood unit

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was to be a suburban tract that included all vital community services within an area bounded by main roads, thus separated from the rest of the city, while allowing access to and from the neighbourhood. A unique spin-off from Howard’s garden city, the novel urbanist concept of Perry’s neighbourhood unit became a milestone in the history of twentieth-century planning, creating conviviality of togetherness in a planned neighbourhood. During the years of the intermittent economic upheaval, culminating in the Great Depression of 1929, Perry’s planning concept of the Neighbourhood Unit transmuted onto the American Garden City movement. The overwhelming urban manifestation of the Great Depression was larger metropolitan areas that became hotbeds of street crime and vice. Displays of poverty could no longer be obstructed by the urban design of the City Beautiful, a movement that had appeared increasingly irrelevant as the Great Depression set in. Not only for the newly impoverished but also for those spared the wrath of financial misfortune, the city beautiful was far from pertinent, and it evoked an overriding sentiment of derision. To those of modest means and to the more affluent, the city beautiful could offer no venue of escape from the sights of privation and hardship, food riots and unemployment protests, and from the ensuing violence as law enforcement and troops were being called in. Although the planning concept of the garden city had started in ­America well before Howard, British town planning had captured the imagination of American architects and planners after the First World War. In 1919 the Development Plan for Greater London was put forward by the London Society, a philanthropic organization seeking the public’s interest in the urban planning of London. The hallmark of the plan was its detailed proposal for a greenbelt around London to prevent sprawl. Following the development plan for London, the American version of greenbelt surrounding a city found its way to the drawing board of the office of the planners Henry Wright (1878–1936) and Clarence Stein (1882–1975), who were joined in 1924 by the landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley (1891–1954). Assimilating Perry’s idea of the neighbourhood unit (Perry 1929), Henry Wright and his colleagues proceeded with the planning of what would become the most remarkable American suburbs and garden cities. Meanwhile, in England, the lasting influence of the development plan for London, halting sprawl while shaping open spaces, culminated in the Greater London Plan (1944) by Sir Patrick Abercrombie (1879–1957), a leading, award-winning British town planner, who had followed some of Howard’s diagrammatic outlook (Bruegmann 2005, 173–6). The earliest suburban garden communities planned by Wright’s office were those of Jackson Heights, New York State (1917), and, shortly after Sewell Cautley joined, Sunnyside Gardens, New York State (1924), where Lewis Mumford later resided. By the time Jacobs wrote her Death and Life in New York City, these planned communities were already part of the expanding New York borough

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4.2  Neighbourhood unit, Clarence Perry, 1929. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

of Queens, literally in her backyard. None of these planned communities was mentioned by Jacobs, and possibly for a good reason. They contained much of the wish list of Jacobs’s good neighbourhood, even though her present nemesis, Mumford, was living in one of them. The magic and allure of these suburbs, later landing them on the US Register of Historic Places, clearly did not fit within her notion of planners as the evil-doers and of urban planning as promoting “powerful and city destroying ideas.” Perry’s neighbourhood unit (fig. 4.2) and the planned garden suburbs of Queens are like a page from Jacobs’s book, only written thirty years early. Pointedly, the architect Laura Heim and the urban historian Jeffrey Kroessler organized a recent Jane’s Walk through Queens; it was a walk through Sunnyside Gardens that stopped at Jacobs’s possibly least felicitous destination: Lewis Mumford’s House (Municipal Art Society of New York 2016). The Great Depression and the American Garden Suburb It is against the background of Perry’s neighbourhood unit that the American following of Ebenezer Howard became the harbinger of the American

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Garden City movement. Similar to its English inspiration, the design of exquisite Radburn, New Jersey, envisaged as the first American garden city, was taking place some thirty kilometres from New York City, cautiously detached from the decrepit sheds of the American urban poor (Hutter 2016, 122–4). In her argument that planning was an urban malefactor, Jacobs singled out Radburn and Chatham Village (near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) as examples of counter-productive intervention. These planned communities were socially homogeneous middle-class suburbs, she pointed out, as exclusionary as Howard’s garden cities, and thus out of reach to low-income households. Rather than a garden city, Radburn became, indeed, only a subdivision, largely due to financial constraints associated with the Great Depression. The main objectives of the Radburn plan, however, remained intact. Residential pathway clusters, known as superblocks, were ringed by roads from which cul-de-sacs led to the interior of each neighbourhood. The principle behind the superblock was the complete separation of pedestrian and motorized modes of movement. Motor traffic passed under or above the pedestrian paths that linked the superblocks with each other and with the town centre, thus achieving separation of the two main traffic modes. A similar approach was later adopted in the planning of Vällingby (1950–4), a Stockholm garden suburb, and Cumbernauld (1955–7), near Glasgow. Unlike Jacobs in her urbanist prescription, the architects and planners of the early American Garden City concept never claimed a universal solution for an entire city. Quite to the contrary, they did not present the American garden suburb as the paragon of universal urbanism – certainly not as one that could accommodate the vast army of the working poor, as Howard would initially have had it on the backdrop of late nineteenth-century London. North American offshoots of Howard’s garden city had skipped over his notion of a large-scale regional masterplan and focused on the planning of suburbs or small towns. In time, as metropolitan areas have grown, many of the planned towns, retaining much of their designed charm, have become appealing suburban neighbourhoods absorbed within metropolitan areas. In America, housing in many of the newly proposed garden communities was out of reach to the depression-stricken mainstream of impoverished households. But, just as Letchworth and Welwyn garden cities had shown in England, and as early garden communities proved in the United States, so too did the Garden City model enjoy considerable success in the housing and lifestyle of the American middle class throughout the first half of the twentieth century. As a concept applied to public housing in low-income precincts, the same model turned usually into a decisive failure (Woodward 1997). One notable exception was the factory town of Zlín, Czechoslovakia, where an urban hybrid of Le Corbusier’s city in the park and Howard’s garden city had in 1935 yielded an arrangement of walk-up apartment blocs and the Tomáš Baťa shoe-factory

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complex, connected through an efficient public transit network set within urban greenery. Homogeneity was certainly a condition of the success of planned communities such as Radburn or Zlín. A good measure of homogeneity was also the key to the success of the working-class North Boston neighbourhoods that Jacobs so fondly embraced, for example. Neighbourhood homogeneity may consist of identical socio-economic traits such as ethnicity, income level, or religion, as was the case of early American garden cities. Shared communal memory and history also are homogeneity traits, as was the case of old Boston or New York City neighbourhoods. Jacobs points to an important characteristic of well-functioning urban precincts that both her admired neighbourhoods and planned new American garden cities actually had in common. By the same token, joint urban-communal memory is a quality usually lacking in dysfunctional neighbourhoods. The physical design of the early American garden suburb that encouraged human encounter within the planned community, and that buoyed community connectedness and cohesion, has been regarded a lasting gauge of success (Arthurson 2012, 109–24). Radburn and Chatham Village are examples of urbanist success even though the Radburn plan was never fully executed due to the dire economic situation of the time (Birch 1980; Huston 2003). The Great Depression was largely behind the prominence of these two planned communities, both of which emerged during the 1930s; they also filled the void left by the demise of the City Beautiful movement. It was during this economic upheaval that the Radburn plan, the early stages of which had commenced in 1928, a year before the onset of the Great Depression, and Chatham, four years later, became some of the most impressive achievements of the American version of the garden city. Radburn was the brainchild of members of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), founded in 1923 by Stein, Mumford, Henry Wright, and others. It was constructed as America’s first garden city under the sponsorship of the City Housing Corporation, a private, limited dividend company. Intended to be located at a distance from large cities, Radburn was to be a showpiece of pastoral urbanism laced with higher-density development and of landscape architecture based on appealing public spaces. The City Housing Corporation went bankrupt with the onset of the Great Depression in 1929, and, instead of the thousands of new inhabitants that Wright’s team had been planning for, only 336 upscale families called Radburn home. As a community shielded from the poverty, crime, and squalor of the Great Depression, Radburn (similar to Howard’s garden cities) was far away, enough not to be of concern to its inhabitants, yet at a comfortable commuting distance from the metropolis. “Being out of the city appealed to us most when moving to Radburn,” one resident said (Conn 2014, 70–5). Never completed to its intended design, Radburn became a small

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community and was eventually absorbed as a garden suburb within the borough of Fair Lawn, New Jersey. Bergen County, in which Radburn is located, is still one of the wealthiest counties in the United States. Radburn, clearly, could hardly be a universal prescription for urban progress, but it never pretended to become one in the first place. The reason behind the founding of Chatham Village was different from that of Radburn, with a like result. Designed during 1932–6, Chatham was to provide housing for the working poor of Pittsburgh. Similar to Letchworth and Welwyn garden cities, Chatham was designed so well that it became a real-estate boon, much sought after by well-to-do households, and ultimately out of reach of its intended community (Cusack and Pomeroy 2006). As small, attractively designed communities, Radburn and Chatham were warded off the turmoil elsewhere, both becoming progenitors of shared communal interest and the source of an affirmative community growth. Such a favourable disposition was largely brought about by the varied land-use mix within the confinement of each community. Within these carefully designed and cushioned communities, there was no pervasive alienation or widespread vice, and with continuing infrastructure maintenance there were also no other symptoms of urban social dysfunction. For those of the middle class who could afford it, the American garden suburbs that followed provided not only a haven from the ravages of the Great Depression but often also an oasis of fraternity within a homogeneous socio-economic stratum. Under such condition the Radburn model has continued to be a limited success (Lee and Stabin-Nesmith 2001). Most garden communities, in time, have been absorbed within the expanding metropolitan areas, becoming well-functioning neighbourhoods, often retaining their exclusionary stature from the rest of the metropolis. But, as Jacobs pointed out, and as is quite evident, such model could not apply to more contemporary, diverse communities. It is safe to say that during the difficult years of the Great Depression the fear of the outsider, often due to violence, was at the forefront of community concerns. The insular placement of the first planned suburban neighbourhoods that followed, their borders delineated by collector roads or main streets, consolidated this attitude. Suburban planning past Radburn, as much as it addressed efficient access to services within neighbourhoods, expressed also community’s anxiety of the stranger. The main roads, hugging the neighbourhoods within, seem to have been conceived as a modern version of the medieval wall surrounding a city. The alienation that gave rise to North America’s garden cities and suburban neighbourhoods was dispelled within the early planned subdivision but not in the metropolis as a whole. By the second half of the twentieth century a careful observation had detected discord surfacing with the increasing geographic distance between the suburbs and the inner city (Haney and Knowles 1978). The unease that had

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given rise to North America’s garden cities and suburban neighbourhoods in the twentieth century’s early years remained intact at the century’s end, as it is often still today. Urban alienation features only implicitly in Jacobs’s critical observation but is insinuated by her as an underlying sentiment that has coloured the social fabric in the contemporary metropolis. In Death and Life she rejected the stance of mainstream North American planning at the time, which had embraced a rigid zoning ordinance with a single land-use type in any given precinct. Juxtaposing the familiarity and fondness of small urban places with the impersonal space of the superscale metropolis, Jacobs’s overture was for random and spontaneous meets within the intimacy of a traditional neighbourhood space. That space, Jacobs points out, constitutes for a single patch of urban land a mix of land uses, rather than a single land use. A neighbourhood of urban residences that includes also a mix of offices and retail shopping brings people together through casual human encounter, contributing to a cohesive community, she notes. Jacobs’s message had a positive impact on urban planning of the late twentieth century, her criticism of the early American garden suburb notwithstanding. The fact that a land-use mix had been essentially the pattern of the early American garden city very likely crossed her mind, yet she never acknowledged it. Jane Jacobs vs Lewis Mumford: Authenticity and Alienation in City Form There can be no denying that Jacobs’s favourite neighbourhoods have much in common with early American planned garden suburbs. The communal fraternity in both types of urban communities had been founded on a strong common trait: a joint community history in the case of Jacobs’s favourite neighbourhoods or a common discomfiture in the case of Depression-era garden communities. Additionally, and in spite of Jacobs’s claim to the contrary, these communities likely had no marked disparity in household-income levels, as this tends to be also a universal characteristic of cohesive residential precincts across the world (Cheung and Leung 2011). In contrast, for example, large gaps in economic status were commonplace within the small confines of walled medieval cities, in colonial towns of America, and in early modern city neighbourhoods. These historic communities, however, were homogeneous in ethnicity or religion, thus compensating for heterogeneity in household wealth. Similarly, some measure of socio-economic homogeneity appears inevitable for the functioning of a community geographically confined to a neighbourhood or a small town. A common state of mind or lifestyle or, on the negative, a common concern constitutes a measure of social cohesion. A measure of homogeneity might be a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one, to a successfully functioning community, as continuing deliberations indicate (Betancur and Smith 2016, 29–36).

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Examining Jacobs’s insistence against neighbourhood homogeneity, Sharon Zukin has suggested that Jacobs was disingenuous in her call because “she did not support more permanent rent controls to ensure a mix of poorer and richer tenants, of successful businesses and start-ups” (Zukin 2011). The argument might be extended further, into questioning Jacobs’s criticism of the American garden city for its socio-economic homogeneity, while she herself shied away from supporting controls that would bring about the poor and the rich residing in a single precinct. A candid attempt at a realistic approach to housing low-income families in America was introduced by Catherine Bauer Wurster (1905–1964), only to win dismissal from Jacobs. Bauer was among the chief social and urban activists who had instigated housing reform following the Great Depression. As a Mumford protégé, Bauer attained professional and academic acclamation in public housing and joined, along with Marjorie Sewell Cautley and Clarence Perry, the Regional Planning Association of America. She pursued the idea of local public-housing agencies, leading to the first government initiatives on subsidized housing for low-income families. Inspired by Bauer, in 1937 the US Housing Act to handle government subsidies aimed at improving the living conditions of low-income households was passed, and a year later the National Housing Act, addressing the same concerns, was passed into federal law in Canada. An acknowledged pioneer of planning for low-income housing, Bauer addressed social dysfunction by pointing to the interdependence of social and economic policy, on the one hand, and architecture and urban planning, on the other (Bauer 1934, 14–23). Thirty years before Jacobs’s Death and Life, Bauer stood forcefully against indiscriminate slum clearance (Bauer 1934, 243–7; 264–7). Jacobs, in sharp contrast to her later crusade, in a ten-page article written for the August 1950 issue of Amerika, a US State Department publication, hailed slum clearance, high-rise residential towers, and strict zoning to separate residences and shopping (Kanigel 2017, 108–27). Jacobs gradually grew apart from the notion of slum clearance, and by 1957 she had broken away from writing on behalf of the homebuilding and development lobbies (Laurence 2007). But, emerging as a successful author on matters urban in Death and Life, she had been tracking, in Mumford’s eyes, a fairy tale of village-like neighbourhoods, in what he perceived as an outdated image of medieval or American colonial towns. He saw Jacobs as having a romantic outlook on the curing of urban ills, akin to a priestess’s elixir. To Mumford, deriding her insistence on high-density inner-city neighbourhoods in Death and Life, even as she ignored the journeys to work in the expanding post-war metropolitan areas, she was “Mother Jacobs peddling home remedies for urban planning.” Without a doubt, the early American traditional neighbourhood could be hardly a prescription for all-out metropolitan growth where not only upscale and middle-class families find their place but also struggling single-parent households and poor families (often marked by their ethnicity or through

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outright exclusion by the mainstream) ought to be accommodated. Describing the charms of the outdoors in a dense urban neighbourhood, Jacobs, in Mumford’s eyes, appeared as Alice in a southern wonderland. For a person who spent more than one winter in Boston and New York City, Jacobs had an indiscriminate call for open-air human encounter that happened to be, indeed, somewhat disingenuous. If Mumford were alive today, he might have added that, with the same measure of justification as Jacobs had called the Garden City movement an “urban design cult,” so could one label the recent global Jane’s Walk movement (since 2007) as her own urban “walking cult,” suitable to be pursued mostly in the spring or fall, but hardly so during the long seasons of cold winters or scorching summers. Mumford, a vigorous participant in the early American Garden City movement, would have agreed with Jacobs that human scale in physical design called for walkable urban environments. Walkability and walking are critical constituents for streetscape human encounter but pose a winter challenge in northerly climates and an increasing hurdle throughout urban heat islands in the summer, which Jacobs did not or could not address. Consistent with walkability as a means for otherwise unmitigated human encounter was Jacobs’s call for mixed land use and against land-use uniformity: “On successful city streets, people must appear at different times. This is time considered on a small scale, hour by hour through the day [...] The continuity of [pedestrian] movement (which gives the street its safety) depends on an economic foundation of basic mixed uses[,] the workers from the laboratories, meat-packing plants, warehouses, plus those from a bewildering variety of small manufacturers, printers and other little industries and offices” (Jacobs 1961, 152–3). A downtown walk, of course, is not only good for downtown commerce; it is a simple measure of countering urban alienation and automatism in behaviour. An increasingly common case of urban alienation arises from acrimony between pedestrians and drivers due to the incompatible movement scales of gait and car speed. Whereas mixed land use has been always the expression of urban dynamics facilitating people interaction, mixed modes of urban movement can have the opposite effect. An assortment of open-air malls as a shared space for pedestrians and cars alike, as a solution to the conflict, can make streetscapes safer but also deem motor traffic inefficient due to an enforced low speed (Hamilton-Baillie 2008). While such a consideration reaffirms the use of sidewalks, on the one hand, or urban freeways, on the other hand, small open-air precincts exclusively dedicated to pedestrians and expressly closed to motorized traffic have been intermittently introduced in European cities since the second half of the twentieth century (Klein and Avensberg 1974). Open-air pedestrian-only precincts have remained elusive in North American winter cities, likely for reasons other than harsh weather. Converting one half of a street block into a pedestrian-only zone is a small budget item that

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usually carries an achievable solution to diverting automobile traffic, but conversion to pedestrian-only zones has no appeal to developers interested in the construction of downtown towers, skywalks, underground passageways, and parkades. It has also no allure to civic administrations seeking the favour of voting drivers and revenues from downtown parking stalls. In the suburbs too, most twentieth-century North American neighbourhoods have featured the specifications of real-estate developers, rather than the design of landscape architects attuned to the significance of human encounter to community cohesion. The range of neighbourhood functionality has been confined to a sort of comfortable survival of homeowners and their families, trapped in new subdivisions. The commercial interests of contractors and developers in suburbs have been usually focused on sheltering private comfort, rather than designing for neighbourhood accord. With the difficulty of attaining urban design specifications for suburban streetscapes, the long-lasting results have been monotonous neighbourhood streets lined with driveways in otherwise safe, but uniform, repetitive, and surprise-free streetscapes that cater to cars rather than to human beings (Ewing and Handy 2009). Suburban transportation-allied infrastructure projects such as overpasses and freeways, of interest to building contractors, have only reinforced the trend of excessive car usage against active transportation and of uniformity against variability in streetscapes within the ever-expanding suburbs. In her book Naked City (2010), Sharon Zukin observes that the human response to the uniformity in the North American built environment of the ­second half of the twentieth century has been the craving for authenticity (1–24). By the end of the twentieth-century, authenticity and automatism in humans had become two opposing poles in the psychocultural range within which people in the city vacillated. Modernity has embarked on a trend where increasingly there is too little of the former and too much of the latter. Alienation, as the estrangement and distancing of individuals from one another, sometimes culminates in wanton crime, road rage, gratuitous violence, or racial slurring and undoubtedly manifests social dysfunction in the city. Measured by these yardsticks of urban alienation, social dysfunction has been intensifying along with the increasing automation of our cities. In addressing alienation, the built environment can play either a helpful or an adversarial role. People become estranged from one another due to a lack of shared communal experience or collective memory. Although the engagement of pedestrian amenities can help create new, affirmative community experiences, no amount of pedestrian contraptions can bring back an urban community’s past. One major culprit in the snatching of communal memory during the mid-twentieth century was housing projects displacing families from vibrant, albeit poor and often crime-ridden, neighbourhoods. Tracing the contours of urban alienation, the social symptoms of debilitating public

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housing in the 1950s and 1960s have been largely attributed to the displacement of poor neighbourhoods in their entirety (Keating 2000). The inner-city slum clearances of that time, usually under the appealing name of “urban ­renewal,” caused entire neighbourhoods to undergo traumatic transformations – sometimes ­expatriation short of forced removal (Cord 1974). Many of the dwellers of poor neighbourhoods would rather look for other ways to accommodate their families than to move into a public housing project: “[R]elatively few people enter low-income projects by free choice; rather, they have been thrown out of their previous neighborhoods to make way for ‘urban renewal’ or highways and, ­especially if they are colored and therefore subject to housing discrimination, have had no other choice. Among the dislocated, only about 20 percent [...] go into public housing; among those who do not are many who are eligible but will not go because they can find some other way out” (Jacobs 1961, 400). Both suburbanization and inner-city urban renewal have done much to alienate city inhabitants from one another. As a variation of the large-scale muscular approach that was started by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, urban renewal can be seen as a stage in a continuum of urban dislocation measures, the effeminate version of which was invasive gentrification and the City Beautiful movement. Jane Jacobs’s stance of promoting the retention of inner-city neighbourhoods and reversing the deterioration of their housing stock through in situ housing improvements and the rekindling of neighbourhood infrastructure is still recognized as the most important means to the lasting vitality of the inner city (Schill et al. 2002). Confronting the Grand Designer: Jane Jacobs vs Robert Moses Pernicious as it is, urban alienation ought to be seen as an aspect of an ongoing and largely unpredictable epochal course of mind-environment interaction. Primordial dispositions have been the enduring thrust in this interaction since prehistory and early antiquity. In Greek mythology the sun god Apollo is cool headed but remote, whereas his half-brother, the bisexual wine god Dionysus, has no schemes or plans and, rather, is impulsive, associated with wildness and rampancy. The Ideal City, the archetypal counterpart to the Garden, has evolved from Apollonian parables of the built environment – the Hill Fort, the Castle, the Citadel, the Biblical Tower of Babel, the Sun – and the primordial architectural notion of volume in mythologies of creation. The environmental archetype of the Garden has unfolded from the Dionysian allegories of wilderness – such as the Forest, the Garden in the Epic of Gilgamesh and in the Bible, and the Earth – and from the primeval formlessness and mythical void before creation. Howard’s garden city is primarily about the harmonious distribution of garden homes, volumes in urban space, whereas Jacobs’s inner-city neighbourhood is focused on the unmitigated human dynamics within its

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voids – its streets, squares, and corner stores. Both outlooks are organic links in a continuing chain of environ-mental interactions marking the Apollonian and Dionysian traits of city form. This effervescent and incalculable chain of interaction in geographic space and historic time occurs in myriad links. The spat between Jacobs and Mumford, Howard’s disciple, is perhaps one striking case showing alienation as a certain culmination of the mind-city interaction in contemporary urban communities. The conceptual differences between Jacobs and Mumford were not colossal at all. It was more due to mutual estrangement, rather than substantive aberrations, that the two urbanists parted ways. Their very dispute is witness to twentieth-century urban alienation. After all, both Jacobs and Mumford, in their happier days of early urban activism, had joined together in the storm of freeway revolts that engulfed North America in the late 1940s through the 1960s (Gratz 2010, 61–94; Bruegmann 2005, 129–32). In the 1950s they jointly fought Robert Moses’s project of elevated expressways cutting through Manhattan after Jacobs had recruited Mumford for her neighbourhood protest movement (Flint 2011, 61–94). Robert Moses of New York was hired by the Louisiana Department of Highways in 1946 as a consultant on an expressway project to connect New Orleans with the interstate highway system. An elevated freeway was proposed that would cut through the historic Vieux Carré French quarter of New Orleans. A small portion of the planned freeway was built in the early 1950s but was stopped due to a lack of funding. Postponements and growing protests forced the cancellation of the project in 1969 (Souther 2013, 63–72). In Berkeley, California, the Ashby freeway was proposed in 1952, but by 1959 growing grass-roots opposition led to gradual withdrawal from the project, which was eventually cancelled in 1961 (Homburger 1973). Across the Golden Gate bridge, in San Francisco planned expressways were cancelled following protests after journalists and neighbourhood activists in 1955 had become alarmed by freeway constructions in the heart of neighbourhoods. Similar protests in Boston of the late 1960s were also successful (Gillham 2002, 48–51). In 1965 in Cleveland, Mary Elizabeth Croxton and other women in a freeway protest successfully blocked the construction of the planned Clark freeway that was to run through parkland and close to neigbourhoods. Two other linked freeways were also cancelled as a result (Stradling and Stradling 2015, 181–2). In 1968 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, community leader Betsy Horowitz started a campaign against the Riverside expressway that was to be routed through a neighbourhood, and the freeway project’s cancellation in 1972 opened the way for the creation of Tulsa River Parks trail system (Tulsa World 2009). In Montreal of the early 1960s the architect and planner Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, together with her architect husband, Daniel van Ginkel, prepared a report to the city planning department in which they argued against expressway

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A-720, known also as autoroute Ville-Marie, that was to slice through Old Montreal. The report gained large public support, the A-720 was rerouted, and Old Montreal was literally saved (Adams and Tancred 2000, 67–70). On the Pacific coast of the country, a citizens’ freeway revolt against Vancouver’s Georgia and Dunsmuir viaducts was waged in 1967. Following the demolition of Hogan’s Alley, a black community hub in the inner city, it was the turn of Vancouver’s Chinatown, Gastown, and Strathcona historic districts to give way to the extension of the Georgia viaduct. Instrumental in the protest were Mary and Shirley Chan, a mother and her young daughter, residents of Chinatown (Compton 2010, 95). The destruction of Hogan’s Alley notwithstanding, the rest of historic downtown Vancouver was preserved. Urban freeways were to expedite motorized access for suburban residents to and from places of work downtown, as well as link cities with the cross-country highway system. At a time when the post–Second World War economic boom in North America put comfort in suburbia and in male-earner access at the top of middle-class concerns, women often took leadership roles in the freeway revolts in low-income inner-city precincts. Without ever mentioning it by word, urban alienation appears to have been an added concern with which Jacobs struggled. And even though Jacobs herself may have fallen prey to estrangement, her plea for human encounter in the city comes to tackle alienation as a fundamental problem of contemporary city form. In a letter of 1 June 1955 to the Manhattan borough president and to New York City mayor Robert Wagner, Jacobs described her efforts to refurbish her own home while plans were underway to build the Lower Manhattan elevated expressway (LOMEX) next to her neighbourhood. Then in the same letter she penned a single sentence, perhaps the most powerful statement in urbanist literature of the twentieth century: “It is very discouraging to do our best to make the city more habitable, and then to learn that the city itself is thinking up schemes to make it inhabitable” (Flint 2011, 65). In New York, Jacobs had struggled, initially together with Mumford, against slum clearance and the all-powerful arterial coordinator behind it, Robert Moses, also the commissioner of parks. As early as 1941, Moses had conceived of an elevated highway cutting through New York’s lower Manhattan Island. As he presented his megaproject, the ten-lane LOMEX was intended to be part of an interstate highway between north-central Pennsylvania and New York City. In the late 1950s, Moses used the US Housing Act of 1949 to introduce his project as slum clearance in order to level fourteen blocks of a historic area along nearly the full width of Manhattan Island. The expressway was to run as an elevated freeway through one of the city’s poorest ethnic neighbourhoods, Little Italy, and immediately adjacent to Greenwich Village where Jacobs resided at the time (Flint 2009, 24). Members of the affected communities, with Jacobs’s active involvement, joined together to fight the proposed expressway

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project, which included also a plan for the Mid-Manhattan expressway, another urban freeway. The LOMEX was to be constructed almost simultaneously with the Cross Bronx expressway, New York’s first expressway, which had been under construction since 1948. In South Bronx, Robert Moses took a cue from the brutal attitude of Haussmann and Le Corbusier towards small-scale traditional urban environments, leaving out the architectural finesse of both. As Haussmann had done in Paris during the previous century, Moses dislocated poor residents and small businesses in the South Bronx by running the expressway through neighbourhoods and was then able to reshape the streetscape to achieve what was presented as an optimized configuration within the borough. The human, aesthetic, and financial cost of this vast Cross Bronx urban-renewal project notwithstanding, Moses’s predilection was to be emulated in his plan for the LOMEX. Jacobs was part of the organizing spirit of the rallies, appearing at hearings to block the expressway project, and ultimately becoming the chair of the Joint Committee to Stop the LOMEX (Klemek 2007, 11). The group included prominent members, such as the anthropologist Margaret Mead, the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, the housing anti-discrimination activist Charles Abrams, and Lewis Mumford. A strong supporter of Jacobs who also joined the group was the urban planner William Hollingsworth (“Holly”) Whyte (1917–1999), a renowned champion of human scale in urban design and expounder of human encounter in urban space through his critical survey of streetscapes (1980, 102–11). Following unrelenting public protestations, with Jacobs becoming a local heroine, the expressway project was cancelled in 1962 by Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York. Less callous policies of gentrification have encouraged the relocation of upscale residents to inner-city neighbourhoods, thereby raising rents and the value of land and displacing old-time residents by economic, rather than physical, means. On the face of it, one might wish to recognize two types of gentrification. The one is renewal through resident community, or what David Varady (1986, 16) called “incumbent upgrading.” The other type of gentrification is invasive, whereby neighbourhood physical improvement occurs simultaneously and as a result of the influx of higher-income individuals or households into the neighbourhood. It is the latter type of gentrification that also yields gradually unaffordable rents to incumbent residents, thereby forcing them to relocate. This gentler displacement of old neighbourhood communities has sometimes received the flair of a deliberate policy (Smith 2002). Over the latter part of the twentieth century, low-income families and long-time residents of inner-city neighbourhoods across North America and in much of the Western world endured property-tax hikes and soaring rents as a result of invasive gentrification (Walks and Maaranen 2008). Imputations to the effect that invasive gentrification has been the new means to dislocate poor

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inner-city residents has been seen as the other side of the same coin: “But when slum clearance enters an area, it does not merely rip out slatternly houses. It uproots the people. It tears out the churches. It destroys the local business man. It sends the neighborhood lawyer to new offices downtown and it mangles the tight skein of community friendships and group relationships beyond repair. It drives the old-timers from their broken-down flats or modest homes and forces them to find new and alien quarters. And it pours into a neighbourhood hundreds and thousands of new faces” (Jacobs 1961, 137). As an urbanist term, gentrification was coined by Ruth Glass in the introduction to her sociological survey London: Aspects of Change (1964, xviii), and Jacobs used the word in her later writings (Jacobs 2005, 214). In Death and Life Jacobs discerned between incumbent gentrification, which she called “unslumming” (1961, 283–7), and slum clearance (137) a form of invasive gentrification. Unequivocally rejecting the displacement of people as either a means or the result of the invasive gentrification of poor urban areas, she called instead for guiding and assisting unslumming through the renewal of communities by simultaneously improving their social and environmental conditions. This meant that the construction of new schools, parks, and mixed-income housing would come at once with job training, public health, education reforms, public safety, and similar efforts closely integrated with each other in incumbent gentrification. Jacobs’s message was that upward mobility ought to be enacted through helping the neighbourhood to reinvent itself by redirecting local government investment away from large-scale suburban infrastructure projects to inner-city neighbourhood infrastructure improvements. Revitalizing an inner-city neighbourhood meant to her the retention and improvement of existing housing stock, and the expansion of human services. Jacobs has been often seen as carrying the crown of primacy in advancing neighbourhood self-reliance, and her call for upward mobility within low-income urban precincts continues to be a constructive challenge to urban planning for incumbent gentrification. In her pleading for the autonomy of neighbourhoods, Jacobs, however, was not the first. She was preceded by Catherine Bauer Wurster and, much earlier, by Octavia Hill (1838–1912). An English social reformer, Hill also pre-empted the idea of the Garden City decades before Howard. Instead of extracting the inhabitants of cities into exurban areas, along Howard’s later garden-city regional plan, in the second half of the nineteenth century Hill advocated assisting the working poor in their place within the city, rather than relocating them. Hill had a passionate distaste for bureaucracy and government, to the extent that she opposed the municipal provision of housing. With the monetary help of her friend John Ruskin and driven by her belief in community self-reliance, Hill initiated the development of a London low-cost housing estate for impoverished tenants, whom she came to know personally, assisting them in ongoing community improvement.

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Concerned about the availability of open space for the poor, Hill, in a remarkable foresight to conserve woodland, successfully fought to prevent development in suburban areas of London. The Inner City and the Other Jane It is unclear whether Jacobs was cognizant of Octavia Hill and her early urban initiatives, but the century between Octavia Hill and Catherine Bauer had constituted a vivid urbanist chain of feminist links, some of which Jacobs could have hardly been unaware of. One major difference in attitudes towards the inner-city neighbourhood was the difference in emphasis on urban crime prevention. Jacobs saw street crime largely as a manifestation of poorly designed streetscapes, preventable through neighbourhood self-reliance and incumbent gentrification leading to the continuing presence of pedestrians. The attitude espoused by Hill and her following saw street crime as a manifestation of urban poverty and a lack of guidance, particularly for juveniles, preventable through social welfare combined with education towards self-reliance. Octavia Hill, along with a group of like-minded and dedicated young women followers, was at the vanguard of early housing experiments on behalf of the underprivileged. In 1869 she became the co-founder of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) in Britain, assisting the urban poor not only through donations but also by counselling towards personal autonomy and responsibility. In the same year, Hill’s urban reform group was joined by Henrietta Rowland, a young social activist, later known as Dame Henrietta Barnett (1851–1936). Samuel Barnett, an Anglican priest and a social reformer instrumental in the founding and running of COS, was introduced to Henrietta by Hill, and in 1873 Samuel and Henrietta married. Soon thereafter they moved to Whitechapel parish, a poverty-stricken section of East London, with the intent to help improve the conditions of the area. Henrietta focused on women and children,and in 1875 she co-founded the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, an organization that aimed to prevent girls from becoming prostitutes by providing them with opportunities to work as domestic servants. In 1884 the Barnetts founded and moved to Toynbee Hall, a settlement house for some of the most impoverished families in Tower Hamlets, another part of east-end London. At Toynbee Hall they were joined by students from Oxford and Cambridge universities, who also came to reside in the facility to guide and help the needy residents. Following the success of Toynbee Hall, settlement houses spread throughout low-income neighbourhoods of British cities, offering food and shelter provided as charity by donors, and education by instructors who volunteered their time. In this pioneering endeavour the Barnetts launched an entire reformist agenda, the Settlement movement, a concerted attempt to bring rich and poor to live within a single community.

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In 1888 American reformer Jane Addams (1860–1935), together with her companion Ellen G. Starr (1859–1940), visited Toynbee Hall. Two years later, the inspired couple founded in Chicago the Hull House, named after the original owner of the property. Targeting needy European immigrants, Hull House grew by the end of the nineteenth century to thirteen buildings in the United States, and by 1900 there were over a hundred settlement houses across the United States and the United Kingdom. During the next decade, social, educational, and artistic programs began to be provided in settlement houses, which by 1920 amounted to as many as five hundred (Goldfield 1987). A prolific writer, Jane Addams wrote scores of papers and several books, her most influential literary work being The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets (1909). Against the manicured model city of Ebenezer Howard, and in contrast to the dream world of the working-class neighbourhood later put forward by Jane Jacobs, Jane Addams presented a picture of inner-city neighbourhoods that the other two authors had preferred to avoid. And whereas Jacobs saw urban crime as an ill to be countered by pedestrians’ “eyes on the street” (Jacobs 1961, 35), Addams saw it largely as a symptom of a problem, the roots of which rested in juvenile delinquency where youth lacking guidance had no activity outlet on inner-city streets other than mischief: I cite here a dozen charges upon which boys were brought into the Juvenile Court of Chicago, all of which might be designated as deeds of adventure. A surprising number are connected with railroads. They are taken from the court records and repeat the actual words used by police officers, irate neighbors, or discouraged parents, when the boys were brought before the judge. (1) Building fires along the railroad tracks; (2) flagging trains; (3) throwing stones at moving train windows; (4) shooting at the actors in the Olympic Theatre with sling shots; (5) breaking signal lights on the railroad; (6) stealing linseed oil barrels from the railroad to make a fire; (7) taking waste from an axle box and burning it upon the railroad tracks; (8) turning a switch and running a street car off the track; (9) staying away from home to sleep in barns; (10) setting fire to a barn in order to see the fire engines come up the street; (11) knocking down signs; (12) cutting Western Union cable. (Addams [1909] 1972, 55)

Urban juvenile delinquency was the major issue that Addams had addressed in founding Hull House. Observing the reality of inner-city streetscapes, she implied that municipal governments were reneging on their responsibility to recognize the street as a medium of major impact upon children in inner-city neighbourhoods: [T]he streets, the vaudeville shows, the five-cent theaters are full of the most blatant and vulgar songs. The trivial and obscene words, the meaningless and flippant

118  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard airs run through the heads of hundreds of young people for hours at a time [...] to incite that which should be controlled, to degrade that which should be exalted, to make sensuous that which might be lifted into the realm of the higher imagination. It is as if our cities had not yet developed a sense of responsibility in regard to the life of the streets, and continually forget that recreation is stronger than vice, and that recreation alone can stifle the lust for vice. (Addams [1909] 1972, 18)

Addams fought back against what she saw were the deteriorating morals and demeanour of children brought about by the mix of urban poverty and automation following the first two industrial revolutions. A children’s summer camp, the Bowen Country Club, which she co-founded in 1911, saw some forty thousand children from inner-city neighbourhoods attending between 1912 and 1960. In 1931 Jane Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her lifelong literary and activist work on behalf of inner-city neighbourhoods. Back in England, Ebenezer Howard may have been reflecting upon Toynbee Hall and other settlement houses when he founded the co-operative Homesgarth House in Letchworth in the early 1900s. In turn, Garden City’s impact upon Henrietta Barnett’s urban activism led, perhaps unfortunately, to a vision of a model suburban neighbourhood accommodating the middle class and the poor alike. With the publication of Howard’s handbook and heartened by the example of Letchworth Garden City, the Barnetts set out to found a model housing development just outside London. Earlier in 1889 the Barnett couple had acquired a weekend home in Hampstead, northwest London, and that area was to become an exemplary neighbourhood for both the working poor as well as middle-class families. In 1904 they established a trust that bought close to 250 acres of land in the tract, the kernel of Hampstead Garden Suburb on London’s urban fringe, for a co-operative neighbourhood to be designed by the architects and planners Barry Parker, Raymond Unwin, and Sir Edwin Lutyens. Although the suburb was never fully developed to the planners’ specifications, it grew into an appealing neighbourhood of 800 acres, comprising over five thousand dwelling units and housing some thirteen thousand people (Meacham 1999, 146–77). Intended to provide urban parks and home gardens to both poor working-class and middle-class families, Hampstead Garden Suburb, just as Howard’s own garden city projects, never fulfilled this promise. Due to its exquisite design, it evolved into a suburban precinct for the upper-middle class, and by the eve of the First World War Hampstead Garden Suburb had become an upscale residential estate. This was not the expected outcome for Dame Henrietta who had spent the previous thirty years improving the housing conditions of London’s poor. By the 1930s Hampstead Garden Suburb had some of the most expensive real estate in the whole of Britain.

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It is not without interest that Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs’s neighbourhood, which she put forward in Death and Life as a model of grass-roots’ urban accomplishment, succumbed to a similar trajectory of urban economics. Fortunately for Jacobs, her aura of progressive urbanist pioneer has never left her. Also the commercial success of her book, an instant bestseller, sharply contrasts with the first edition (1898) of Howard’s book, which was repeatedly rejected by publishers and ultimately printed only through a spiritualist donation. Her indisputable flair for confrontational rhetoric, however, leads to the question of whether the reason for Jacobs’s achievement was the substance of her book or its entertaining, biting delivery. As a public persona, Jacobs was defined in no small measure by her triumphant struggle with Robert Moses, the grand designer whom many in New York and beyond loved to hate. It is very likely that Jacobs the wordsmith contributed to the poor reputation that Robert Moses elicited in the 1960s and later, leading to his further eclipse. The master builder who displaced half a million people by carving freeways through their neighbourhoods in the South Bronx became the perfect villain and thus handed Jacobs her greatest and lasting victory. In the fairy-tale myth of Hollywood America, this powerful and evil “planner” could be no other than the Big Bad Wolf. Such psychocultural assignment put the damsel from Scranton High, handbag stowed in a wicker basket on the handlebars of her bicycle, in the role of none other than Little Red Riding Hood. The attitude and style of Jane Jacobs contrast starkly with those of Jane Addams and her British female mentors. Jacobs made herself a visible celebrity largely through public struggle against male urban elites, whereas Addams, Barnett, and Hill had physically joined the urban underclass to guide and help alleviate their daily striving for livelihood and core well-being. All the same, in building her legacy through successful public and literary campaigns with an undertone of lore, Jacobs no longer contrasts with Howard but is quite consonant with his own contrivance. Whereas behind Howard’s garden city had been a spiritualist Neoplatonic myth, hidden from the public eye, Jacobs was about to create her own mystique as an urbanist “guru, philosopher, thinker, elder” (a direct quotation from the front cover of her last book, Dark Age Ahead, 2005) by drawing heavily on people’s usual distaste of government. Both Howard and Jacobs sought genuine progress, but their urbanist endeavours were to varying degrees self-centred. As a Jungian psychoanalyst might say, they both came to play their respective parts in their ultimate archetypal roles.

5  Spectacle and Contempt in City Form: Howard and Jacobs

The urban archetypes of the Garden and the Ideal City have found their most prominent twentieth-century chaperons in Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard, respectively. But it was Clarence Perry who created a conceptual amalgam in which both archetypes were represented through his inventive fusion into what came to be known in his 1929 report as the neighbourhood unit. Perry seems to have been inspired by the built environment of his own neighbourhood of Forest Hills Gardens in the New York borough of Queens, planned by Atterbury and Olmsted Jr. Perry’s concept of the neighbourhood unit was assimilated as a standard by the office of Henry Wright, yielding designed residential-garden precincts as showpieces of ingenuity and suburban spectacle. The distinctiveness of Perry’s neighbourhood unit emerges from several features that together make an urban subdivision into a cohesive communal unit. Perry summed up these features in seven urbanist principles as follows (Perry 1929): 1. A school at the geographic centre of the neighbourhood of about 160 acres (65 ha), allowing a child to walk to the school without traversing a large distance and without crossing a major street 2. The continued presence of a neighbourhood school consistent with the neighbourhood demography, corresponding to between 5,000 and 9,000 residents, at a density of ten dwelling units per acre (or 25 units per hectare) 3. Multiple use of the school building to allow for neighbourhood meetings and activities, with a large play area around the building for use by the entire community 4. Arterial streets defining the perimeter of the neighbourhood, eliminating unwanted through-traffic, and in effect also discouraging the entry of outsiders 5. Curvilinear local streets within the neighbourhood to warrant safety as well as to offer variety within the neighbourhood streetscape 6. Shops largely at the perimeter of, or entrance into, the neighbourhood, discouraging non-local shoppers from coming into the neighbourhood

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7. Ten per cent, or more, of the neighbourhood land area dedicated to parks and open spaces for play and communal interaction Perry’s neighbourhood unit was an urban design feature warranting, fairly explicitly, the separation of middle-class neighbourhoods from the rest of the city. As a planning concept the neighbourhood unit was perceived as a guardian of neighbourhood community cohesion, safety, and security, as well as convenience in access. The explicit features giving an exclusionary character to Perry’s neighbourhood unit against the rest of the city have made it a target of legitimate criticism by Jacobs and many others. The unresolved dilemma that such criticism elicits is the problem of segregation in the city in general. Perry never claimed to resolve the problem, but, to the contrary, his neighbourhood unit had come to address concerns of the middle class only. The common retort has been that, in fact, the criticism faults the rest of the city rather than the neighbourhood unit (Friedman 2002, 39–50). History of Suburbia and the Subordination of Urban Space Overriding the seven principles behind Perry’s design in Radburn was the attempt of Henry Wright’s designers to separate pedestrian and motorized traffic modes. The initial modern idea to separate traffic modes is attributed to Le Corbusier, who, denouncing the traditional street, insisted on the strict separation of traffic modes in his Radiant City project: We have, needless to say, eliminated corridor-streets, now prevalent in all parts of the world. Our apartment buildings have nothing to do with streets. We have, moreover (and in perfectly good faith), completely reversed the present policy of urban planners, who want to make pedestrians run about in the air on elevated footbridges and let cars drive on the ground. We have given the entire ground surface of the city over to pedestrians [...] And since our apartment buildings are raised on stilts, they can walk from one end of the city to the other in all directions. I add: No pedestrian will ever, under any circumstances, meet a car. (Le Corbusier, quoted in Guiton and Guiton, 1981, 105)

Four hundred years earlier, anticipating Radburn and Le Corbusier, pedestrian movement was to be separated from wheeled traffic in an Ideal City concept by Leonardo da Vinci at Romorantin, central France. Rather than focusing on pedestrian street environment, however, Leonardo’s project was centred on the comfort and good health of the upper class, relegating pedestrians to grade level while nobility’s carriages were to traverse elevated roadways (Richter and Pedretti 1977, 202). Urban evolution and historic evidence on both sides of the Atlantic suggest that the suburbs and the heart of the city alike, with their different

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socio-economic textures, are intrinsic features of urban growth. Lewis Mumford claimed that the first archaeological evidence of suburbs dates back to ancient Ur in Mesopotamia and that a “free-standing suburban villa set in a garden shows up quite early in Egyptian paintings and tomb models,” ultimately asserting that “the suburb becomes visible almost as early as the city itself ” (Mumford 1961, 63, 483). The attitude that Jacobs evoked towards suburbs, however, was one of redundancy and derision. In this, Jane Jacobs, the would-be unorthodox dissident, gave a hand in sustaining the continuance of alienation within the urban community. The historical context of twentieth-century neighbourhoods in cities of the industrialized West is the layout of urban parishes, such as those in historic England or continental Western Europe. Two varieties of the “Plan for London” following the Great Fire of 1666, one by the cartographer Richard Newcourt (c. 1610–1679), and other by Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), were both based on the outline of English urban parishes of the Baroque. Perry likely did not directly utilize any of the early plans, but certain affinities are at hand. Newcourt had proposed a gridiron plan of eight main avenues orthogonally intersected by eight ancillary roads, dividing the city into fifty-five rectangular blocks of 285 by 190 yards each, with an urban square containing the guildhall and St Paul’s Cathedral at the centre. The main avenues of this urban grid run north-south, and the lesser roads run east-west (fig. 5.1). Anthony Morris pointed out that many eighteen-century American plans embody similar principles (Morris 1994, 338–40), and Locke’s “Grand Modell” of Charles Town is one such plan. The plans for London after the Great Fire were, in fact, shown to Locke by the Earl of Shaftesbury (Wilson 2016, 99–103). The similarity with the neighbourhood unit, of course, is not in the street pattern but in the fact that each gridiron precinct in the Newcourt plan is defined by a parish church in its centre, analogous to Perry’s identification of the neighbourhood unit by its school, also at its centre. In both Perry’s and Newcourt’s plans, community cohesion is maintained by a focus on a central edifice, and the shift from a parish church to a neighbourhood school is quite understandable over the period of 250 years between the two urban schemes. Wren’s plan for London saw a number of large piazzas linked by wide, linear avenues (fig. 5.2). The north of the River Thames would have become a large open quay, and the River Fleet, a tributary to the Thames, would have been transformed into a canal. The Royal Exchange, Goldsmiths’ Hall, the Royal Mint, and the Post Office were all to be found clustered around a large open space, the Royal Exchange Piazza. The Custom House was sited on the riverbank next to the Tower of London, near where it actually is today. In Wren’s plan too, a hierarchy of streets is evident, and circular roads form perimeters of important urban precincts in the same way that walls were seen to circle some ideal cities during the Italian Renaissance. The octagonal pattern of the

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5.1  Plan for London, after “Ffirst Mapp of the designe for ye Cytie of London,” Richard Newcourt, 1666. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

circular roads in Wren’s plan follows the Tuscan early Renaissance rendition of the Vitruvian ideal city (De Architectura 1.3) made by the friar Luca Pacioli (1447–1517) in his 1509 treatise De divina proportione. The treatise was an unauthorized copy of a text by Luca’s teacher Piero della Francesca (1415–1492), a painter and mathematician (Herz-Fischler 1987, 150) to whom Wren’s rendition ought to be sourced (fig. 5.3). The use of arterial roadways by Perry, and particularly by Henry Wright and his team, to separate the neighbourhood from the rest of the city, analogous to a medieval defensive wall, is also consistent with Wren’s plan for London. The use of perimeter roads to segregate communities within the urban area was proposed by Wren, possibly for the first time. The Great Fire of 1666 consumed two thirds of the city of London, its religious, civic, and commercial heart, while properties in outlying areas were spared. The growth of suburbs had begun in early modernity a century earlier, in London as in other cities, for a variety of reasons. Evidence from Edinburgh, Scotland, as one example, shows that financial considerations had driven some residents away from the city proper. The reason was simple: craftsmen bypassed

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5.2  Plan for London, after Sir Christopher Wren, 1666. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

municipal taxation by settling outside of the town walls. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, successive Edinburgh town councils had attempted to extend jurisdiction over these constantly growing suburbs, in effect competing with the city’s craft guilds who also sought control over their suburban cohorts (Allen 2011). As in Edinburgh and in other industrializing cities of early modernity, the trend towards suburbanization involved the middle and upper-middle classes in cities. With urban expansion, Howard had perpetuated upscale exurbanization, and Jacobs perpetuated alienation towards the suburbs. In spite of Howard’s proclamations, it is doubtful that the garden city, even according to Howard’s own regional plan, could have become an egalitarian community. Jacobs’s criticism of social homogeneity in suburban neighbourhoods, however, flew in the face of the history of the city, since the city’s outlying areas in antiquity and the Middle Ages had always been homogeneous: almost solely the abode of the poor (Goodman 2006, 3–6, 200–31). Consistently distinct features of the outlying precincts against the city’s core have been for the most part an inherent characteristic of city form throughout the ages. The embryonic distinction can be found in Aristotle’s Politics, in which suburbs and the city’s core are discerned by features of their streetscape layout. Ancient urban-defence needs ordained a tortuous, irregular streetscape for the suburbs to protect the affluent civic core of aligned streets and open spaces against outside intrusion:

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5.3  Ideal city of Vitruvius, after Luca Pacioli and Pierro della Francesca, 1509. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

The arrangement of private houses is considered to be more agreeable and generally more convenient, if the streets are regularly laid out after the modern fashion which Hippodamus introduced, but for security in war the antiquated mode of building, which made it difficult for strangers to get out of a town and for assailants to find their way in, is preferable. A city should therefore adopt both plans of building: it is possible to arrange the houses irregularly, as husbandmen plant their vines in what are called “clumps.” The whole town should not be laid out in straight lines, but only certain quarters and regions; thus security and beauty will be combined. (Aristotle’s Politics 7.11)

Carnes Lord in his note 44 (in Aristotle 1984, 267) explains: “A ‘clump’ of vine plants consisted of five plants arranged like the five spots of a die. Aristotle appears to suggest that houses could be grouped more or less irregularly in this fashion in the city’s outlying parts, while large boulevards and public areas would be reserved for the protected center.” In Athens the western suburb near Dipylon Gate was the site where in 307 BCE the philosopher Epicurus founded the Garden, a school open equally to all, slaves and women included. Later, during

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Roman antiquity, suburbs were recognized as geographic areas connected with the city but clearly discerned as a highly stratified residential destination of choice, at least as far as the city of Rome was concerned (Mandich 2014). In walled cities during antiquity and the Middle Ages the urban periphery near or outside the walls was inhabited by the poor because it was considered the least desirable location. Distinction between the city and its outlying districts continued through the onset of urbanization during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Sometimes poor villages adjacent to a city’s outer walls cropped up; sometimes city walls were expanded in order to accommodate a large influx of newcomers. Late medieval examples of planned suburbs are within the two Florentine new towns San Giovani Valdarno (founded in 1296) and Terranuova (founded c. 1337). These two towns are also examples of the exurban security measures of Florence, which surrounded itself with defensive towns, forming in essence a human shield against potential invaders. Leonardo’s suburban project at Romorantin was of a different kind, showing a change in attitude towards the suburbs due to a plague hazard observed in dense urban areas, compounded by the increasing redundancy of city walls. In 1516 Leonardo was commissioned by François I, the king of France (1494– 1547, r. 1515–47), to design a grandiose royal palace and court, with an aristocratic urban district, adjacent to the town of Romorantin, some two hundred kilometres south of Paris. Leonardo conceived the project as a plan for an ideal city that would involve sparsely populated suburbs in order to minimize contagion during frequent epidemic outbreaks. It is hard to overlook his attitude to the rest of the urban community while he was planning the aristocratic outskirts of Romorantin. The haughty suburb was to be away from “such a considerable agglomeration of people, packed one on top of the other like a herd of goats, on each other’s backs, who fill every corner with their stench and sow pestilence and death” (Codex Atlanticus 1607, 65v–b). For the planned suburb Leonardo proposed urban gardens similar to the gardens he had planned earlier for Ludovico Sforza (1452–1508), the duke of Milan (r. 1494–9). Reservoirs were to be built behind the suburban gardens so that, by means of a discharge pipe, water would be brought to the gardens at will (Arasse 1998, 163). The urban project at Romorantin commenced in 1517 but was left unfinished with Leonardo’s death in 1519 (Richter and Pedretti 1977, 202). Leonardo’s sordid denunciation of the human multitude reflects the increasing urbanization of much of Europe during the late Renaissance and onward. The beginning of industrialization and the relative security of towns had increasingly attracted people from villages surrounding cities. The ensuing First Industrial Revolution was marked by the founding of early small pre-industrial plants. Rural migrants in the new urban foundries, at a time when labour laws were non-existent, endured despicable working conditions. Yet, the rural migration

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into cities continued, precisely due to the opportunity for a relatively secure livelihood in the manufacturies. This led to a rapid urban-population increase during the Renaissance and, with it, to the geographic expansion of cities. From early modernity onwards, in Europe, villages that were close to cities were gradually absorbed within the expanding urban areas, progressively becoming suburbs that often retained a rural milieu. In the meantime, swaths of the urban core that were inhabited by the working poor became increasingly repugnant to the incumbent residents, the more affluent among them increasingly seeking alternative residences in suburban areas. Within cities, early modern neighbourhoods had emerged from the parishes’ geographic boundaries, retaining an initial link with the local church. There could hardly be a question about the homogeneity of the emerging neighbourhoods. Religion and ethnicity, as well as socio-economic status, were, more often than not, the shared community features of new precincts. Perry’s neighbourhood unit in America would retain communal homogeneity, implicitly setting it as a necessary, albeit unacknowledged and ignominious, condition for success. With the advent and profusion of the automobile in the early twentieth century, the conceptual appeal of Perry’s neighbourhood unit in America underwent a further transformation. Increased geographic mobility within metropolitan areas threatened the homogeneity of model neighbourhoods, while automobiles within neighbourhoods created a conflict with pedestrians. Henry Wright and his colleagues resolved the newly emerging problem created by the automobile by augmenting Perry’s neighbourhood unit. On the one hand, the notion of the superblock was introduced within the garden suburb as a pedestrian cluster in which motorized traffic did not intrude, or it was directed at a separate level from pedestrians, somewhat akin to the separation of traffic modes in Leonardo’s Romorantin and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. On the other hand, serving the same purpose as Wren’s perimeter roads in his 1666 “Plan for London” were arterial roadways that Henry Wright’s team utilized to circumscribe neighbourhoods, thus discouraging permeability. The Masterplan and Its Sources: Myth and Reason in Baroque Plans for London In 1851 Joseph Paxton introduced a magnificent structure of cast iron and glass, the Crystal Palace, housing London’s world fair, the Great Exhibition. Fifty years later, Howard proposed to plant a version of Paxton’s architectonics as a civic structure at the centre of his garden city. In Howard’s exurban utopia, designed beauty would thus diffuse from the civic centre, throughout the wide boulevards and avenues, to the garden homes.

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Mainstream urbanist outlooks of early twentieth-century America extended this trend. Although prominence was given by the City Beautiful movement to civic elegance focused on the heart of the city, the American Garden City movement had shifted the emphasis from urban appeal to the neighbourhood unit in the suburb. The concern of both movements was for the middle class, being focused on the more affluent strata of the urban community (Gandy 2006). The plans of both Howard and Burnham converged on urban spectacle rather than on a keen observation of urban dynamics. These plans, in fact, fostered a dark streak running through the niches of splendour within any metropolis, and its sources rest in the historic origins of the modern city. The commonality entailed in urban grandeur is the condescension for much of the rest of the urban space. It is emblematic that the expanded adaptation of the neighbourhood unit through the superblock was founded on the notion of a hierarchy of streets. That very approach attests to the human tendency to rank urban space whereby the planned urban place of glory is the pinnacle of such rating scheme. The propensity of people to rank urban space is an archaic feature, and it goes to the very essence of the allegory of the Citadel and its later portrayals in the Ideal City and the Masterplan. It also is the reflection of separateness and alienation as a constraining human sentiment. The allegory of the Garden could be said to embrace inclusiveness and spontaneity, rejecting disaffection and separateness, while the allegory of the Citadel, or the Ideal City, along with the Grand Designer, retains and reinforces hierarchy and a patriarchal reassurance in order. The Masterplan, the latest version of the Ideal City, is a remote conceptual device, mimicking an objective scientific statement. It is no coincidence that the Masterplan is largely based on plan views, images of a distant observation of the city from the sky, the haunt of deities – or of the Grand Designer. The solemn impersonal device of an ideal-city image is also the venue through which estrangement had been infused into the planned city form of the twentieth century. Neighbourhoods ­ensuing from a masterplan are construed through their separateness, their main spatial link with the rest of the city usually being the freeway. Street views, if at all present as part of a masterplan, are secondary in substance in their rendition, always constituting illustrations beyond urban reality. The ordered formation of urban precincts into socially unique and internally cohesive geographic units has been evident since the time of direct democracy in ancient Greece. The new plan of Miletus, applied sometime between 479 and 442 BCE, following an earlier destruction of the city, was characterized by a clear division into three different city sectors. As described by Aristotle, the new plan had a strict tripartite division into distinct precincts, each about the size of today’s neighbourhood. Attributing the new plan to Hippodamus, Aristotle pointed out that the division of Miletus reflected both public interest and the three classes of the citizenry:

Spectacle and Contempt in City Form  129 Hippodamus, the son of Euryphon, of Miletus, who invented the division of cities and laid out Piraeus, [...] wanted to institute a city of ten thousand men, divided into three parts, and to make one part artisans, one farmers, and the third the military part and that possessing arms. He also divided the territory into three parts, one sacred, one public and one private [...] The rulers were all to be elected by the people, the people being the three parts of the city; those elected were to take care of common matters, matters affecting aliens, and matters affecting orphans. (Aristotle, Politics 2.8)

Internal cohesion and the outward distinctiveness of urban precincts have been recurring in cities throughout history. During the Middle Ages in Europe the manor and the church were the principal units of local administration and justice, the division of land into parishes was linked to the manorial system, and local taxes to the overlord (tithe when collected by the church) were levied accordingly (White 1838, 64–7). The parish system of the Church of England largely survived the Reformation and secession from papal Rome of the 1530s, using the local parish churches in defining its basic geographic units. This was the situation in London in the late summer of 1666, when a spark in a baker’s oven near the fish market turned into a disastrous conflagration. John Evelyn recorded the event in his Diary as follows: 2. Sept. This fatal night about ten, began that deplorable fire neere Fish Streete in London. 3. [Sept.] I had public prayers at home. The fire continuing, after dinner I took coach with my wife and sonn and went to the Bank side in Southwark, where we beheld the dismal spectacle, the whole Citty in dreadfull flames neare the water side; all the houses from the Bridge, all Thames Street, and upwards Cheapeside, downe to the Cranes, were now consum’d: and so returned exceeding astonished what would become of the rest [...] I went on foote and saw the whole South part of the Citty burning from Cheapeside to Thames, and all along Cornhill, Tower Streete, Fen-Church Streete, Gracious Streete, and so along to Bainard’s Castle, and was now taking hold of St. Paule’s Church, to which the scaffolds contributed exceedingly. The conflagration was so universal, and the people so astonish’d, that from the beginning, I know not by what despondency or fate, they hardly stirr’d to quench it, so that there was nothing heard or seene but crying out and lamentations, running about like distracted creatures, without at all attempting to save even their goods [...] 10. [Sept.] I went againe to the ruines, for it was now no longer a Citty. (Bray 1889, 318–20)

To the more affluent ranks of the community, the Great Fire of London came as something of a relief. Prior to the fire, with public health knowledge almost non-existent, there had been no sanitation in London, and open sewage ran

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through the streets. Whatever paving there was, it was slippery with animal dung and refuse thrown from the windows. Municipal workers removed the worst of the smut to mounds outside the walls, where it accumulated and continued to putrefy, accompanied by an overwhelming stench (Leasor 1962, 14– 15). Since the Black Death of 1347 a series of smaller plagues had ravaged the city. In the overcrowded tenements and garrets of the poorer parts of London, hygiene was impossible to maintain. This may have been one reason for the bewildering public inaction to the Great Fire, with no meaningful effort being made to extinguish the raging flames, and resulting in five-sixths of the walled area of the city being burnt down. Already prior to the Great Fire, the gradual outmigration of the rich who were able to leave the city had led to the construction of country estates in what would be later the suburbs of Greater London. In July 1665 an epidemic hit London, and the entire royal family and court left the city. The epidemic, later dubbed the Great Plague of London, lasted until the end of 1666, killing close to 100,000 people, a quarter of the city’s population, mostly in its poorer parts (Leasor 1962, 103). While both calamities ruined many city merchants and property owners, for many of the more affluent the Great Fire was seen as an opportunity for a new beginning (Leasor 1962, 193–6). There was another reason for inaction during the Great Fire. In 1664 and 1665, comets observed in the sky over England had been seen as heralding evil events. The mainstream community saw the Great Plague, the Great Fire, and the Anglo-Dutch war of 1665–7 as fulfilling such portentous signs (Schechner 1997, 76). While the Royal Society was discussing the origins, velocity, and distance of the comets (Boschiero 2009), most people’s critical thought, if there was any, gave way to medieval superstitions. As the flames of the Great Fire were dying out, King Charles II issued a proclamation outlining his wish to impose order and direction in the city that was to be rebuilt. The opportunity to rebuild implied the need to address fire-safety standards, mainly with minimum setback distances and the prohibition of timber material for buildings. It also called for efficiency in the transportation of people, animals, and goods throughout the city. Other than Wren’s and Newcourt’s plans, several other plans for the rebuilding of London were submitted to the king, one by Robert Hooke, a renowned physicist, and one by John Evelyn. In accordance with the king’s directive, Evelyn’s proposal, similar to Wren’s, which had been submitted two days earlier, was to link the city’s major focal points of religion and public affairs through arterial roads. The various plans for London submitted by Wren, Evelyn, and others were attempts to adhere to expediency and efficiency. But Wren’s and Evelyn’s plans seem to imply considerations in myth. Wren, a Freemason and a master of his masonic lodge, was keenly interested in the architecture of Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem (832–587 BCE), and suggestions have been made that some

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5.4  Plan of the ideal city Sforzinda, after Antonio Averlino Filarete, 1464. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

cabbalistic considerations found their way into Wren’s redesign of the burntout St Paul’s Cathedral (Kravtsov 2005). Claims to the effect that other parts of Wren’s plan for London were grounded on mythical masonic considerations have not been substantiated. The octagonal design of traffic circles in Wren’s plan, suggesting the superimposition of two squares, however, implies the magic allure of the circle and the square from alchemy. In their design Wren had followed Luca Pacioli’s octagonal rendition of Vitruvius’s ideal city (Rosenau 1983, 14–17). There is even an earlier source of “squaring the circle” in the plan of the ideal city of Sforzinda, in the Libro architettonico written in 1464 by Antonio Averlino Filarete, where the city’s walled perimeter is laid out upon two superimposed squares (Rosenau 1983, 46–8). Filarete’s plan circumscribes Sforzinda by a moat, a likely allusion to the alchemic premise of squaring the circle (fig. 5.4).

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Origins of myths surrounding the circle and the square go back to the rituals of prehistory (Seidenber 1981), but alchemy in England came to full force following the publication in 1643 of the book Religio Medici by Sir Thomas Browne. Browne specifically addressed the alchemical hieroglyph “squaring the circle,” which came to denote the creation of the philosopher’s stone, a coveted substance that was to turn mercury into gold. As a Freemason, Wren would have had an association with alchemy, as did Robert Boyle (1627–1691), the founder of modern chemistry. Both attained the highest scientific repute of the time by founding in 1660, along with Evelyn, the Royal Society, with Wren becoming its first president. The king’s concerns following the Great Fire, however, were more mundane. The English civil war (1642–51) between the parliamentarian revolutionaries and the royalist forces of his father, Charles I, were carved deep in his memory, and Charles II was absorbed in anxiety over security in the capital. Only Wren’s plan, with his wide linear avenues, could properly address the royal apprehension, and it was Wren’s proposal that was accepted. In the wake of his plan following the Great Fire and the effort to rebuild the cathedral, parish churches, and public buildings, Wren was appointed surveyor of the king’s works in 1669 (Wade 1839, 372). In the end, however, the actual rebuilding of London could not follow Wren’s plan due to the expense involved in the expropriation of land parcels and the general reluctance of property owners. The king’s political weakness and his more pressing budget items, the first of which was war with the Dutch, buried Wren’s plan for good. The multiple plans for London produced after the Great Fire had no significance for the future growth of the city. Inadvertently, however, they had an impact on the plan of Charles Town in the Province of Carolina and, through it, on the philosophical thought of John Locke guided by the notion of the mind as a blank slate. It was following the Great Plague and the Great Fire that Shaftesbury, one of the seven future lords proprietors of the Province of Carolina, ill with a liver infection, left London in October of 1666 for Oxford, where the young John Locke, at the time a substitute physician at Christ Church College, saved his life. Becoming subsequently Shaftesbury’s personal physician and assistant, Locke moved to the earl’s London home; while there, he became employed by the proprietors of Carolina and named Carolina’s chief planner. Charles Town was founded in 1670 in honour of King Charles II of England, on the blank slate of America’s coastal virgin ground. It is impossible to say how, or whether at all, Locke’s plan would have varied had it not been for the Great Fire of 1666, but it is likely that Locke’s empiricism of the tabula rasa, and the modern thought he helped found, would not have emerged in his philosophical work, as we know it, without the plans for London and his own plan of Charles Town.

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Anticipating Howard and Jacobs: From Wren’s Streetscapes to L’Enfant’s Plan A distinction, equally applicable to Miletus and to planned cities of the Renaissance and the Baroque, ought to be made between views and vistas in streetscapes. Whereas a view refers to different images on the same street as a result of the viewer’s changing position, a vista relates to a relatively constant image of an urban imagery fronting the viewer, which does not change as a result of the viewer’s changing position on the street. In Miletus the grid pattern was conducive to the measurement and ownership of land, and also to air circulation and drainage, whereby waste disposed on streets would be naturally flushed into the sea with rainwater, given the city’s elevation differences. Although these may have been the main reasons for the grid pattern in Miletus, some of its streets would have been stepped, and, albeit inconvenient to the passage of the elderly and the disabled, they would offer interesting street views as well as an attractive vista of the Aegean Sea. These concerns too would remain an occasional issue in streetscapes throughout the Renaissance and early modernity. Street views were certainly of concern to Sir Christopher Wren in his placement of edifices. In traversing the streets planned by Wren in Oxford, for example, one sees his meticulous consideration of street views revealing architectural spectacle, sometimes entirely unexpectedly, sometimes gradually. There is neither necessity nor desire for an abundance of shops or for mixed land uses during Wren’s street walk, a wondrous experience in the artistry of spectator movement and correspondingly changing street views. Changing views of architecture pieces by the moving pedestrian have been a consideration since Michelangelo (Gombrich 1964), but Wren’s articulation of street views took a casual walking experience in a neighbourhood to a different level – posing a challenge to Jacobs three hundred years later. In his plan for London Wren expressed several additional aspects of modern aspiration in urban architecture and planning. The one was Cartesian objectivity and efficiency, translated into the straight, broad avenues. The other was the creation of deliberate vistas that followed the grand redesign of Rome during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and large symmetrical open spaces. In Paris, broad avenues and large piazzas had been introduced by Henri IV at the turn of the seventeenth century, intended mainly for military parades, but the true benefit of such design was the reduction of future fire and plague calamities. This urban design had thus addressed simultaneously public health, even if sanitary knowledge was still minimal; transport of people, animals, and goods, now streamlined largely onto the main roadways; and easy policing with the ability to quell any insurgency and dissipate political unrest.

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5.5  Place Dauphine, Paris, as of 1754. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

The opportunity to successfully compete with the newly designed parts of Paris was not the least of Wren’s considerations. In 1599 Henri IV had recommenced the construction of the Pont Neuf, which was begun by Henri III in 1578 but stopped during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) between the Catholics and the Huguenots. Henri IV finished the bridge in 1607, the first of Paris’s bridges to be without houses and to have sidewalks. It was also Henri’s original thought to carve open public places within the Paris streetscape. In 1594 planning for three major urban plazas in the capital had begun: Place Royale, in the image of a perfect geometrical square; Place Dauphine, a monumental open space on a triangular plan (fig. 5.5); and the semicircular Place de France. The Place de France, designed in 1610, was never executed, but the Place Royale and Place Dauphine were inaugurated in about 1612 (Sutcliffe 1996, 21–3). Parisian open spaces and Weinbrenner’s design of Karlsruhe (inspired by the gardens of Versailles), along with modern concerns of safety, security, and transportation, became the ultimate inspiration in the plan of Washington, DC, by the French military architect and engineer Pierre Charles L’Enfant

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(1754–1825). Commissioned in 1791 by President George Washington, the capital of the United States was planned by L’Enfant after he had examined a dozen city plans brought from Europe by Thomas Jefferson, then the secretary of state. L’Enfant’s plan for the city included a simple grid plan, overlaid with diagonal avenues radiating from the president’s mansion and the Capitol. Large Parisian-like urban squares emerged from L’Enfant’s design at the points of intersection of the diagonal and orthogonal streets. L’Enfant’s plan for the US capital city was essentially Baroque. Henry W. Lawrence observed that “[the plan] relied on tree-lined boulevards and plazas for its structure. And like the Baroque boulevards of France it [used] the carefully regulated rows of trees to symbolically represent the power of the ruler of the land” (Lawrence 2008, 170). The attitude to greenery as subjugated to the geometry of the city and in support of crowd control in the layout of streetscapes continued through Howard’s garden city and Burnham’s City Beautiful movement. The facility of surveillance and control has been an implicit urban feature of most gridiron street plans ever since the time of the Egyptian workers’ colony at el-Lahun (Rawlinson 1887, 343). From the redesign of Rome in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the towns of the late Renaissance, spectacle and crowd-control hybridized in the early modern streetscape. In the two hundred and fifty years between Descartes and Howard, dozens of geometric plans, not unlike Howard’s own garden-city plan, were put forward, most if not all of them featuring the dual attribute of spectacle and control. Exemplary is the urban concept of Claude-Nicholas Ledoux (1736–1806) in his volume L’Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l’art, des moeurs et de la législation, published in 1804 in Paris. Ledoux’s plan for a workers’ settlement, Chaux (fig. 5.6), was based on the project of a small salt-works colony that he had built during 1773–9 for Louis XIV on a tract near the Swiss border. His proposal for Chaux was dominated by the administrator’s house, a spectacular edifice with a glaring entrance portico upon which images of gushing, presumably saline, water were carved. The entire Chaux urban-design scheme was otherwise strictly functional, set on a symmetrical, rigidly circular plan with the administrator’s house at the exact centre, adhering to the perfection of Cartesian rigour (Hersey 2000, 55–8). Ledoux here attempted to create an explicit cosmic paradigm, furthering his own archetypal city-universe analogy, inaccurate as it was, of a planetary system, faithful to the Age of Reason. A semicircular layout on one side of the director’s house was intended to contain guardrooms, a prison, and a forge, as well as quarters for carpenters, coopers, and other labourers. The semicircle on the other side of the director’s house was to consist of the salt-works themselves, where drying ovens, heating pots, supervisors’ quarters, and the salt stores were to be located. The apparent affinity of Ledoux’s plan of Chaux with Howard’s diagrams of the garden city is probably due to, among other things, the Panopticon prison

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5.6  Plan of Chaux, after Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, c. 1774. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

project of Jeremy Bentham (1747–1832) as an intermediary. Bentham’s penitentiary project (Bentham [1791] 1843) was inspired by his younger brother Samuel (1757–1831), who in 1786, while employed at Krichev, White Russia, by Prince Giorgi Potemkin, had prepared a plan for a circular labour compound with a central surveillance hub as a means of allowing him to oversee the activities of a large, unskilled workforce of peasants. In the same year Samuel was also instrumental in the erection of a fake village at Krichev, a realistic theatrical set assembled upon a barren countryside to hearten the prince’s lover, the empress Katherina, and to impress her entourage of foreign dignitaries touring Russia (Werrett 1999). In his circular plan of the labour compound Samuel had likely borrowed from Ledoux the principle of a single director overseeing the salt-mine workers through one-way vision, effectively securing constant subordination. In 1797 Jeremy Bentham published Pauper Management Improved: Particularly by Means of an Application of the Panopticon Principle of Construction, and in 1813 he became a partner in Owen’s New Lanark cotton mill and housing project, though there is no evidence that he attempted to apply the Panopticon principle there (Rosenau 1983, 151–3; Trincado and Santos-Redondo 2014). Bentham saw the architectural concept of surveillance

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as applicable not only to prisons but also to hospital units or mental asylums where patients required constant monitoring. A direct line of reasoning from Ledoux to Bentham has been in fact suggested as well (Bender 1987, 18–22). Not surprisingly, the extension of surveillance to architectural design has been considered a tool of oppression and social control (Foucault 1995, 195–210). Within such a context, Howard’s subtitle, A Peaceful Path to a Real Reform, to his handbook gives a chilling meaning to his garden-city project. Bentham’s own outline of the principle of the circular plan carries an eerie resonance: “it should be clearly understood what circumstances are, and what are not, essential to the plan. The essence of it consists, then, in the centrality of the inspector’s situation, combined with the well-known and most effectual contrivances for seeing without being seen [... T]he person to be inspected should always feel themselves as if under inspection, at least as standing a great chance of being so” (Bentham [1791] 1843, 44). Surveillance, command, and control have been the nameless, paternalistic principles in planned settlements since archaic times. Hence, in the context of their influence on Howard, it is not without interest to note a less severe view of Bentham’s Panopticon “as the product of a realistic, kindly man looking for ways to ameliorate the lot of the poor” (Semple 1993, 314–15). Given the wide scope of perceived reasons behind the early modern concept of urban surveillance, it is of substance to consider its overall impact on modernity, also within the broader context of optical viewing in built environments. Descartes’s Clear and Distinct Ideas: Spectacle and Control in Cartesian City Form Ledoux’s plan of a transparent and tractable townscape at Chaux is a Baroque transformation of the Renaissance planned town. Amenable to surveillance and control, meticulously disposed on a regimented square grid or perfectly radial geometry, the rigidly aligned streetscapes inadvertently led René Descartes to his reverie in the stove-heated room. Whereas to Bentham the rigid geometric principle upon which his Panopticon was conceived would be social progress, or at least a utilitarian benefit to society, to Descartes the precision and rigour emanating from a geometrically laid-out plan begat precision and thoroughness in philosophical contemplation. Descartes’s discovery of coordinate geometry is the best evidence of the perceptual impact that the harmonious geometric plan, juxtaposed against the unpredictable Romanesque streetscape, had on the rise of rigorous, critical thought. Descartes’s interest in architecture and planning was due to his background in military architecture and his engrossment in painting. These two lesser-known avocations of Descartes also constitute a firm link with his compatriot L’Enfant. Prior to his arrival in the United States L’Enfant had studied painting at

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the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in the Louvre under his father. A hundred years after Descartes, L’Enfant’s schooling would have inevitably included a good portion of Cartesian philosophy and geometry. In L’Enfant’s plan of Washington the impact of Cartesian philosophy and geometry upon city form can be detected (Ferguson 1994, 30–5). Descartes had published the Discourse in a single volume together with three other short treatises, Optics, Meteorology, and Geometry. The centrepiece of all four essays is the concept of clear and distinct ideas. This notion was introduced by Descartes in juxtaposition with another notion, that of obscure and confused perceptions. The genealogy of both Cartesian notions ought to be traced to Descartes’s physical environment: climate and the built form of the Renaissance. Descartes lived through one of the coolest segments of the half-millennium period known as the Little Ice Age (LIA), as did L’Enfant on the American side of the Atlantic. The LIA was a cooling event between the late Middle Ages and the end of the First Industrial Revolution, approximately 1350–1850 (Behringer 2009, 86–7; Fagan 2000, 49; Mann 2002, 504–9). Wolfgang Behringer has shown how weather during the LIA was inextricably linked with early modernity (Behringer 2005, 415–508). More recently, the impact of the resulting urbanization upon mind has been specifically linked to Descartes’s rationalism (Akkerman 2016, 155–68). The architectural and urban aspects of the onset of the LIA were marked by orthogonally planned new towns of the late Romanesque, the bastides, initially in southern France during the early thirteenth century. Expedited by the twelfth-century translation into Latin of Euclid’s Elements by the English monk Adelard of Bath (1080–1152), the bastides were laid out on a grid plan with a central square, drawing also on the standard plan of the Roman military settlement, the castrum, from a millennium earlier (Boerefijn 2000). By the fourteenth century, at the onset of the Gothic period and the LIA, there were hundreds of bastides throughout southwestern Europe. Contrasting the simplicity of the bastide plan during the early LIA was the elaborate Gothic design that spread from Germany, primarily as a vertical feature in the built form of churches. Pointing to the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Erwin Panofsky has shown that medieval scholastic thought was a spatio-cerebral process of transaction between the monastic mind and Gothic architecture (Panofsky 1957).The same feedback transaction process continued from the Renaissance city form onto the minds of people, such as Descartes’s, with a return impact on late Baroque planning, and culminating in the work of L’Enfant in Washington, DC. Artistic expressions specific to the second half of the LIA, namely landscape painting and urban design, seem to have had a significant impact on Descartes, much as they constituted, a century later, the background and the product of L’Enfant’s labour.

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Weather during the LIA has been viewed as acting upon cerebral disposition: emotion but also visual perception (Behringer 1999). The masterpiece engraving Melencolia I (1514) by the German Renaissance painter and printmaker Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) points to inclement weather as inducing gloomy sentiment, while the perception of distance was articulated by Flemish painters of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries who introduced haziness as a technique into their art. In contrast to obscurity, unpredictability, and the absence of straight lines in natural environments, the unbent beeline implied spectacle, wisdom, and perfection – not only in the urban planning of the Renaissance. Insomuch as Descartes applauded “those orderly towns which planners lay out as they fancy on level ground,” against “towns usually ill-proportioned,” already two and a half millennia earlier the Old Testament prophet Isaiah had exclaimed: “Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4). The Latin word planum means “level or flat surface,” and the straight line in a plan, correspondingly, facilitates the functioning of control and surveillance. There often is only a small step from surveillance and control by the overseeing or policing authority to condescension and contempt for people under such surveillance and control. Much as the height of the Gothic cathedral inspired but also intimidated, so did the wide linear street of the Renaissance. Alienation and mutual contempt arose from within a built environment that classified spaces by their facility for security, clarity, and reconnaissance. Transparency and distinctness through clarity of linear perspective emerge from the 1475 painting Ideal City by Piero della Francesca, the mathematician and painter. It is difficult to speculate to what extent Piero’s painting inspired the actual plans of Renaissance new towns, but it is certain that the perspective innovations from Florentine Italy became particularly popular with Flemish painters who adopted them to give a sophisticated appearance of things receding into distance. Even though Descartes did not explicitly mention paintings in his writings, his letter to the early Dutch scientist Isaac Beeckman (1588– 1637) leaves little doubt about his encounter with the Flemish painters’ art: “I have never been more usefully employed – but on matters which your intellect, occupied with more elevated subjects, no doubt despises, looking down on them from the lofty heights of science, namely painting, military architecture and above all, Flemish” (Descartes [1619] 1991, 1). Aspects of city form, the natural environment as expressed in the Flemish paintings, and the weather all had a significant impact upon Descartes’s early notion of obscure and confused perceptions. These environmental features were the perceptual stimuli and the common background to Descartes’s philosophical work and to his research in the Geometry, the Optics, and the Meteorology.

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To Descartes, clarity versus obscurity, and distinctness versus confusion, seemed to apply equally to visual perception and to thought. He offered the ultimate analogy between visual perception and reasoning in Principles of Philosophy, employing an “optical metaphor” (Rubin 1977): “I call a perception ‘clear’ when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind – just as we say that we see something clearly when it is present to the eye’s gaze and stimulates it with a sufficient degree of strength and accessibility. I call a perception ‘distinct’ if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear” (Descartes [1644] 1988, 174–5). A simple perceptual source of Descartes’s notion of “clear” and “distinct” would be the street of a planned new town of the Renaissance. In the account Descartes gave of his reverie in the stove-heated room on that cold evening of 10 November 1619, in part 2 of his Discourse on Method, a momentous impact of a streetscape contrast emerges. The archaic Romanesque city form and its tortuous narrow streets, juxtaposed against the new towns’ linear streetscapes from which the Renaissance planned urban environment had arisen towards the second half of the LIA, had provided perceptual contrariety: Looking at the buildings of the former individually, you will often find as much art in them, if not more, than in those of the latter, but in view of their arrangement – a tall one here, a small one there – and the way they make the streets crooked and irregular, you would think they had been placed where they are by chance rather than by the will of thinking men. (Descartes [1637] 1988, 25)

Conspicuously, the concept of clear and distinct was introduced, for the first time anywhere, in the Discourse, only a few paragraphs following Descartes’s famous contradistinction between “those orderly towns which planners lay out” and “streets crooked and irregular.” It was following his celebrated account from the stove-heated room that Descartes came to pledge “to comprise nothing more in my judgment than what was presented to my mind so clearly and distinctly as to exclude all ground of doubt” (Descartes [1637] 1988, 30; italics mine). The meticulously designed Renaissance new towns of Germany and France, with which Descartes would have been familiar through his travels, had provided an important perceptual impetus. The new town of Freudenstadt, across the border from Swabia, southern Germany, near the location of the stove-heated room in Descartes’s account, was designed by Heinrich Schickhardt in 1599 on a plan that traced the Bavarian board-game Mühle (Schickhardt [1599] 1966, 135–8) (fig. 5.7). Whereas in the Discourse Descartes used the paradigm of the planned town as a scheme for his own new philosophy and science, the orthogonal layout of Renaissance new towns clearly paralleled the basic notion of coordinate geometry, to which he laid the ground in the Geometry, leading to geometric representations of algebraic equations.

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5.7  Plan of Freudenstadt, after Heinrich Schickhardt, 1599. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

Sight and Order: From Masterplan and Spectacle to Crowd-Control and Contempt The other observational stimulus in the geometrically aligned streetscapes of the planned new towns was the linear perspective. Schickhardt placed at the four corners of Freudenstadt a church, a city hall, a hospital, and a market-hall. In sharp variance from the crooked Romanesque streetscape, in Freudenstadt one end of any street would be clearly and distinctly observable from the street’s other end, with four major edifices providing impressive terminal beacons. Furthermore, the street edges running fastidiously parallel to each other would have provided Descartes with yet another perceptual stimulus.

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5.8  Brunelleschi’s representation of linear perspective. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

Notions of the vanishing point in optical, or linear, perspective that were also extensively applied in Renaissance paintings would emerge from parallel street views of the moving pedestrian in the planned new towns of the Renaissance. Linear perspective of the vanishing point was most famously illustrated in an experiment made during the second decade of the fifteenth century by the Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) (fig. 5.8). On a wooden panel Brunelleschi painted the Florentine baptistery as viewed frontally from the western portal of Florence’s cathedral, where a viewer of the painting was then placed for the experiment. In the wooden panel a hole was drilled at the centric vanishing point of the baptistery painting. The viewer in the experiment was facing the baptistery, looking through the hole in the panel from its unpainted backside. Further away from the viewer and facing the panel’s painted side a mirror was placed, reflecting the painting on the panel. The mirror too had a hole in it, to allow a view of the actual baptistery when both the panel and the mirror were placed between the viewer and the baptistery. The mirror was then moved into and out of view so that the observer could see the striking similarity between the actual view of the baptistery and the reflected view of Brunelleschi’s painted perspective image of the baptistery (Field 1997, 21–5). A contemporaneous use of a perspective view was presented in The Feast of Herod, a bronze relief sculpture created by Donato Bardi, better known as Donatello, circa 1427. The floor, shown in perspective view on a sixty-bysixty-centimetre relief sculpture affixed to the baptistry of Siena Cathedral, has a rectangular, square-tiled pattern. Description of linear perspective, as devised by Brunelleschi, was first formulated in 1435 as a set of rules that artists could follow. In the short treatise De pictura by Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), which he dedicated to

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Brunelleschi as a way of crediting him with the innovation, the surface of a painted picture was offered as an “open window” through which a painted world was seen. A perspective “checkerboard pavement” was created within the picture space in which the receding parallel lines represented the visual rays connecting the spectator’s eye to the vanishing point in the distance (Field 1997, 25). In his plan of Freudenstadt, Schickhardt seems to have been inspired by the Florentine perspective art that utilized checkerboard patterns, but it is also likely that his plan had an additional or possibly overriding reason for adopting its board-game design: clear street views would facilitate the easy monitoring of streetscapes by the policing authority, which would be alerted to any unruly behaviour by the inhabitants, who were Protestant refugees from Austria, employed nearby as miners, presumably under harsh conditions (Lewis 2016, 57–94). The clarity of view intended for the monitoring and control of people might have appealed to Descartes’s interest in military architecture, and it obviously expressed the ruling authority’s overriding concern for security. This streetscape feature appears to have been retained in much of later urban planning as well, becoming a common denominator between Haussmann’s boulevards and Howard’s diagrams. Cartesian Streetscapes, East and West: From Nevsky Prospekt to the National Mall It is emblematic that the modern planning of Berlin, the capital of Prussia, was the organizational domain of none other than the Urban Planning Police (Baupolizei), a unit within the Prussian imperial ministry of the interior. On 21 April 1853 a decree was issued by the Baupolizei that called for streetscape changes throughout the city. In 1858 James Hobrecht (1825–1902), a German land surveyor employed by the Baupolizei, was put in charge of the planning team whose task it was to address the straightening and widening of main streets to facilitate transportation by streetcars. A horse-drawn bus line had been introduced to Berlin in 1847, and Hobrecht’s street design was to ensure the incorporation of iron tracks for a horse tramway. The Great Berlin Horse Railway actually started operating in 1864 (Plewnia 1996, 52). Berlin of the mid-nineteenth century, just as other large European cities, was a filthy place. Factory pollution and dust clogged the air while raw sewage flowed in the streets and splashed pedestrians each time a carriage passed them. Hobrecht, inspired by the Paris plan of Georges-Eugène Haussmann, was set to propose an underground sewer and water-pipe system for the city where, at different designated sites, burghers’ apartment houses as well as working-class tenement buildings were to be erected. Presaging Howard, Hobrecht proposed

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railroad tracks to circle the city, but, in deference to Berlin’s historical street network, his plan had arterial roadways largely tracing existing streets. With a remarkable concern for the history of the city, he addressed the security misgivings of Frederick William IV, the king of Prussia, as well as the alarming public hygiene situation of Berlin at the same time. The Cartesian principle of clarity and distinctness had been applied to Berlin streetscapes, but Hobrecht’s intent was to retain also much of the idiosyncratic street network as a stamp of the city’s history. Enigma and surprise on Berlin streets, however, were not to be tolerated, and in 1861 Hobrecht was dismissed (Ladd 1990, 77–110). Following the Paris International Exposition of 1867, William I, the successor Prussian king and the later emperor of Germany, brought back to Berlin a detailed map of Haussmann’s streetscape, which further influenced the planning of his capital city, reinforcing the mandate of the Berlin Baupolizei (Maneglier 1990, 263). The purpose of urban planning and design now was the shielding of the authority and the provision of public safety and security. Judging from his first edition’s subtitle, A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, matched with his diagrammatic plans, Howard had a similar undeclared objective. Surveillance of people and crowd-control had been rarely acknowledged as objectives in the urban planning by paternalist administrations. In Saint Petersburg under tsars Alexander III (r. 1881–94) and Nicholas II (r. 1894–1917), Nevsky Prospekt grew from a late medieval road into a strategic boulevard of 4.5 kilometres (3 miles) connecting the main railway station with the headquarters of the Admiralty Board and with the Winter Palace, the seat of the emperor. Initially known as the Great Perspective Road, it was laid out circa 1717 by the Swiss-Italian architect Domenico Trezzini (c. 1670–1734), who had been commissioned several years earlier by Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725) to design the coastal water canals and streets of what would become the new capital city of the Russian empire. The reconfiguration of streetscapes in Saint Petersburg would have presaged Haussmann in Paris, but the overhaul never happened. In 1718 the French landscape architect Alexandre Jean Baptiste LeBlond (1679– 1719) came into the employ of Tsar Peter the Great, replacing Trezzini, and completing the design of Nevsky Prospekt into an elegant boulevard that in time would become the most famous thoroughfare in Russia. In 1724 a university was established in Saint Petersburg, along with the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences, inadvertently giving rise to a new public sphere as the university became associated with social, academic, and professional groups. By 1860, political unrest in Europe had spilled over into Russia, and, largely due to its university, Saint Petersburg became the country’s main locale for the formation of political groups, with protests against the government also taking place there. Alarmed by these developments, the government in 1861 had the gates of the university shut for two years (Morrissey 1998, 22).

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In December of 1904, in the midst of the Russo-Japanese War, a series of industrial strikes paralysed Saint Petersburg. On Sunday, 22 January 1905, demonstrating workers, aiming to deliver a protest petition to Tsar Nicholas II, mingled with a peaceful crowd strolling on Nevsky Prospekt. Troops started firing at the protesters, killing hundreds of workers and peaceful strollers alike on the Nevsky and unleashing the Russian revolution of 1905. In the aftermath the imperial regime agreed to institute extensive reforms, the most important of which were the constitution and the creation of the imperial Duma, an elected legislative assembly. Nicholas II refused the formation of a full constitutional government, however, and sporadic unrest continued. “There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospekt, at least not in Petersburg,” had proclaimed the writer Nikolai Gogol in his satirical short story of 1835 named after the thoroughfare, and continued, “for there is everything. What does this street – the beauty of our capital – not shine with!” Eighty years later, with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, Nevsky Prospekt remained as chic as ever, apparently unconcerned with the rising political tensions. Florence MacLeod Harper was a Canadian journalist on assignment to cover the war on the eastern front. Helen Rappaport cited her first-hand corroborating account of the Nevsky Prospekt: Even in 1916 you could still window-shop in front of the big shining plate-glass windows of the French and English luxury stores along the Nevsky Prospekt: Petrograd’s equivalent of Bond Street. Here the French dressmakers, tailors and glovers – such as Brisac, couturier to the Empress, and Brocard the French perfumier, who also supplied the imperial family – continued to enjoy the patronage of the rich. At the English Shop you could buy the best Harris tweeds and English soap and enjoy the store’s “demure English provincialism”, fancying yourself in the High Street in Chester, or Leicester, or Truro, or Canterbury. (Rappaport 2017, 2–3)

With Russian losses mounting after the outbreak of the First World War, the tsar left Saint Petersburg to lead his troops against Germany and Austria-Hungary, thus detaching himself entirely from the unfolding unrest. On 8 March 1917 (23 February in the Russian Julian calendar, Old Style) an International Women’s Day parade on the Nevsky had turned into a popular protest at bread shortages and included thousands of marchers, the majority of them women. Scores of middle-class pedestrians strolled on the Nevsky, some oblivious to the protest and unaware of police troops stationed on rooftops. It was largely due to incompetence and the poor chain of command that the troops opened fire on the crowd on the Nevsky: From the window of his room in the Hotel d’Europe as he dressed for a concert, British socialite Bertie Stopford had seen all the well-dressed Nevsky crowd

146  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard running for their lives down the Michail Street, and a stampede of motor-cars and sledges – to escape from the machine-guns which never stopped firing. He saw a well-dressed lady run over by an automobile, a sledge turn over and the driver thrown into the air and killed. The poorer-looking people crouched against the walls; many others, principally men, lay flat in the snow. Lots of children were trampled on, and people knocked down by the sledges or by the rush of the crowd. (Rappaport 2017, 68)

The shooting only fuelled violence elsewhere on the Nevsky and on nearby streets. Many of the women protesting the government’s food rationing dispersed into factories to recruit workers for the demonstrations, to join other workers who had already been striking for a week for higher wages. The rallies quickly turned into a full-blown popular uprising, as violent confrontations of the crowd by police and army cadets continued. Both men and women flooded the Nevsky and nearby streets, demanding an end to food shortages, the war, and the tsar’s autocracy (Salisbury 1981, 372). The result of mismanagement of an entire country, from the inept tsar Nicholas II and his government down to the trigger-happy, poorly trained police, was more bloodshed: It was the police manning machine guns on the roofs of buildings who had done most of the killings. The demonstrators had responded with every kind of weapon they could lay their hands on: revolvers, home-made bombs or missiles – bottles, rocks, metal, even lumps of snow. Some had hand-grenades that had found their way back from the Eastern Front. And all day long they had continued to urge the troops to come over to their side [...] The dead were thick; the wounded were screaming as they were trampled down. Soon everyone was prostrate, hugging the pavement or lying in the snow [...] It felt as though hell itself had broken on the Nevsky, for they were under fire from every point, bar the shops behind them. Bullets were also coming at them from machine guns on the roofs of buildings and sweeping all around. (Rappaport 2017, 68–73)

On the morning of Sunday, 11 March 1917 (26 February, O.S.), Tsar Nicholas II issued orders forbidding public assembles in the city. The angry crowds disobeyed the order, and some two hundred were killed by mounted police and a detachment of soldiers near the Kazan Cathedral on the Nevsky. Open mutiny of a Saint Petersburg garrison followed when the news of the killings spread. Soldiers of the garrison fired upon the police and the detachment, disarming both, and marking the first open mutiny in the city. On the following day other army regiments joined the mutineers. Military and government buildings, the law courts, and police stations were set ablaze. By nightfall, sixty thousand

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soldiers had joined the revolution. Order broke down, and members of the Duma tried unsuccessfully to restore order (Rappaport 2017, 82–105). Nicholas, who was currently overseeing army manoeuvres at the front line, decided to return to the capital, but his train was diverted by railway workers. A provisional committee of the Duma was formed and demanded immediately that the tsar abdicate. With no choices left, on 15 March, Nicholas II surrendered the reins of power to the committee, which became the provisional government, installed at the Winter Palace. The fashionable Nevsky Prospekt, far from remaining a tool of crowd-control, had facilitated the political violence that led to the government’s downfall. It was this Nevsky violence that had spearheaded the February (also known as the March) Revolution, when close to a quarter of a million protesters, including mutinying soldiers, filled the thoroughfare at the height of the uprising. The February Revolution paved the way for far greater turmoil in Russia and the rest of the world. The centrality of the carefully planned Nevsky Prospekt in the unfolding of the revolution points to engendered urban dynamics that is not only different from the intent of the designers (Trezzini, LeBlond, and the tsars) but quite contrary to it. It is instructive, in this regard, to see also Howard’s diagrammatic urban design proposal for his utopian Garden City in the context of these events. The shape and design of the Nevsky Prospekt was instrumental in the violence leading to the February Revolution but not something that Trezzini or LeBlond could have fathomed a hundred and fifty years earlier. The avenues and boulevards of Howard’s ideal-city diagrams, in contrast, were drawn less than thirty years after the 1871 successful suppression of the Paris Commune in which Haussmann’s radical streetscape alteration had played a role. The diagrams are also consistent with much of the redesign of strategic centres within other cities that had introduced wide boulevards for the purpose of elegance, security, and surveillance. This had served well eighteenth-century Karlsruhe or nineteenth-century Berlin but had turned out to be entirely counterproductive to the objective of the tsars at Saint Petersburg. Within this context, Jacobs’s criticism of the garden city is quite persuasive: Howard’s diagrams that were to pave a peaceful path in a garden city where thousands of London’s working poor were to be relocated, in accordance with his proclaimed scheme, could be considered nothing but a caricature. In the brutal aftermath of the February Revolution the Nevsky Prospekt no longer played a formative role. On 7 November (25 October, O.S.) 1917, following a takeover of much of the city by government troops who had sided with the Marxist leaders Vladimir Lenin and Lev Trotsky, the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg was raided and overrun, and the provisional government toppled. The coup involved little resistance or bloodshed but was officially named

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the Great October Socialist Revolution by the new Marxist government led by Lenin and Trotsky. Shortly thereafter, the violence began with a civil war that lasted until June 1920, during which time the entire country came under gradual control of the Marxist government through widespread atrocities. State terror of varying intensity was unleashed against real or perceived enemies of the Marxist regime throughout the newly established Soviet Union, which would span one sixth of the world’s surface and last for much of the twentieth century. In 1918, Nevsky Prospekt was renamed Prospekt dvadtsat’ pyatovo Oktyabra (Avenue of the 25th October). Safety and security, along with stately elegance, had been the objectives of regimented city form, from Saint Petersburg to Berlin to Washington, DC, with the analogy drawn between regimented plans of Renaissance and Baroque streetscapes and clear and distinct perceptions. Tortuous Romanesque patterns were expunged from city form wherever government or municipal bureaucrats found it expedient. To thinkers of early modernity, the patterns of past fortuitous urban growth, “streets crooked and irregular,” epitomized “chance, rather than the will of men using reason.” Yet these streets had been a source of serendipity, ultimately allowing the juxtaposition with the planned and predictable streetscapes of the Renaissance and the Baroque. It was not the uniformity of the planned new town, which Descartes so admired, that had inspired him in his discoveries but the contrast in built environments, planned and unplanned, a mind-provoking fertile ground to creative thought emerging from the contradiction between the predictable and the unpredictable in the built environment. But within the context of the planned streetscapes of Paris, Berlin, and Saint Petersburg there is another consideration that emerges. Romanesque streetscapes were constituted on a human scale whereby governance had occurred at close range. While the feudal overlord had little choice in avoiding the daily suffering of his subjects, the sovereigns and the administrators of the nineteenth-century metropolis were, by design, entirely detached from the common folk on the city streets. To the extent that it has survived as a remnant of a city’s bygone age, not only is an accreted streetscape a source of charm and mystique, but also at some level it points to a more direct, unmediated style of urban governance in the past. Such consideration implies that a fusion of transparent and cryptic street patterns could, in fact, yield an affirmative city form. If one agrees that a regimented plan as well as spontaneously accreted niches in the city may somehow reside together for community benefit, the dispute between Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard might be restated. Observing that Jacobs embraced accreted streetscapes in the inner city, while the figurative Ebenezer Howard espoused regimented streetscapes in suburbia or exurbia, raises the question whether a

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hybrid of surprise-free and surprise-full features of streetscapes is possible. To that question Aristotle already gave his answer more than two millennia ago in Politics: “A city should therefore adopt both plans [...]; thus security and beauty will be combined.” One example of a match between regimented and non-regimented environments in the city is the National Mall in Washington, DC, an exquisite straight avenue of 1.8 kilometres (1.2 miles) linking the grounds of the Capitol with Lincoln Memorial, a cenotaph honouring the sixteenth president of the United States. A century after the L’Enfant plan, the National Mall came to epitomize the City Beautiful tenets in monument planning. At the turn of the twentieth century, surrounding the site of the future National Mall was a large swath of open space, initially designated by L’Enfant to connect the president’s mansion and the Capitol. By the early 1900s these areas were occupied by slums with names like Swamppoodle, Murder Bay, and Hell’s Bottom (Dickey 2014, 192–204). A redesign of the National Mall area was tasked to the McMillan Commission of the US Senate, with Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr being its most prominent members. Quite predictably, Burnham suggested carving “‘broad thoroughfares through the unwholesome district’” so that monumental design could be applied to the entire area of the mall (Boyer 1978, 271–2). The mall itself had magnificent vistas formed by the Capitol in the east and by the Lincoln Memorial, fronted by the Washington Monument (an obelisk commemorating the first president), in the west. Still today the thoroughfare is fully transparent through the entirety of its length, and the sentiment it evokes is reverence, exactly as Burnrham intended it. It is difficult to overestimate the design of the National Mall as a site of beauty and patriotic symbolism. The success of the grounds design, however, does not rest in the National Mall itself but rather in the contrast created by the mall and its immediate vicinity. The geometrically harmonious space of the National Mall is counterposed by the surrounding greenery of the memorial parks and the numerous public gardens adjacent to nearby museums and other buildings. The greenery is a secondary and submissive feature of the National Mall, but at the same time it poses a contrast of natural, organic environment as a condition for its success. The auspicious design is attested, a hundred years on, by the tens of thousands of people for whom it is a choice destination, including visits to its museums and galleries and outdoor activities – from jogging, picnicking, and other light recreation to mass peaceful political demonstrations. The approach to civic site design, a category of urban design, is entirely different from the approach to suburban design and different yet again from that to streetscapes in a business district. All three features are necessary, albeit implicit, traits of city form, along with land-use categories for industry, recreation,

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education, and other institutional facilities. The urbanist outlooks of Jacobs, Howard, and Burnham, targeting mutually different and disparate geographic locations within the metropolis, can be also viewed as divergent urban ideologies complementing each other (Gordon and Janzen 2013; Gordon 1998). Yet it seems that the late nineteenth-century call of Camillo Sitte to recognize the affirmative impact of irregular streetscapes on human cognition has remained unheeded, and a successful integration of regimentation with variability and contrariness, as equal elements of the urban built environment, has not been an agenda item in urban planning or design, barring a few isolated voices (Lévy 2008; Panerai et al. 2004, 134–57).

6 The Ghost of Howard: Advent of the Masterplan and the Loss of Place

Evelyn’s 1666 plan for London alludes to an outline of a fish, pointing in the downstream direction of the adjacent River Thames (fig. 6.1). It is not too difficult to understand the emotion behind Evelyn’s diagram. The Great Fire started at Pudding Lane, near London’s fish market. Fish is also a Christian symbol, having been mentioned several times in the Gospels, and some of Jesus’s twelve Apostles were fishermen. The myth behind Evelyn’s proposal is, understandably, impregnated with lament and is fairly overt. It may come as a consternation, however, that the proposed new design of the National Mall area in 1902 (fig. 6.2) carried an unmistakable resemblance to Evelyn’s “Plan for London.” Be it Christian symbolism of the fish, or some other reason to maintain a lineage with Evelyn’s plan, Burnham’s moniker in the Mall proposal is apparent. A few years later, the plan of Canberra by Walter Griffin was also grounded in mythical allegories, unfortunately quite irrelevant to the future inhabitants of the city (Proudfoot 1994). Modernity’s Built Environment: Myth, Reason, and the Unplanned Howard’s garden-city diagrams too had been the continuance of myths, not the least of them the myth of the Rational City, modernity’s ideal city. Such an approach, in and by itself, is questionable. To fathom a city, or any part thereof, according to a rational scheme, a masterplan, is an alchemistic drive akin to medieval follies such as the construction of perpetuum mobile or the manufacture of gold. But whereas the vain effort to create a perpetual machine had harmed a few imprudent investors at most, modernity’s labours to create its own versions of an ideal city emanated at times from a personality disorder of its author and at other times from superstitious notions of a kind rejected by critical thought elsewhere. Some of these schemes did not remain the fancy of would-be grand designers but forced their way onto the drawing boards of urban-renewal plans. Countless people dislocated from poor but vibrant

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6.1  Plan for London, John Evelyn, 1666. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

neighbourhoods of mid-twentieth-century cities into social engineering experiments of urban renewal would become victims of a long-lasting impact that, decades later, is still difficult to appraise (Klemek 2011, 187–201). The myth of modernity’s Ideal City was at the birth of the metropolis as the largest artefact ever created by man, and one that turned on its creator. Yet throughout history the myth of the Ideal City has been often positively seminal. Over historical time the allegoric Citadel yielded the Ideal City, an Apollonian brainchild of the environmental paradigm of reason in the built environment. Haussmann’s redesign of Paris and Howard’s garden city were its nineteenth-century culmination of sorts. All the same, Jacobs’s rejection of ordered city form had been presaged multiple times in urban allegories of the Garden. As an early paradigm, the Garden was the celebration of the primordial wildness of the Earth Mother, the goddess, and the priestess. From the myth of Dionysus that had played out in group intoxication and open-air theatres of cities during Greek and Roman antiquity, urban wildness transformed into the medieval open space of the market and the open-air performances in a variety of places within European cities. During the Neolithic and the Bronze Age the Citadel was a companion guardian myth of the allegoric Garden, projected onto defensive towers and ramparts

6.2  Plan for the development of the Mall at Washington, DC, 1902. In the American Monthly Review of Reviews: An International Magazine 31 (January–June 1905): 310. Robarts Library, University of Toronto; digitized by the Internet Archive.

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protecting agricultural settlements. Throughout antiquity and the Middle Ages, and towards modernity, the roles switched, and the Garden became a consort of the Ideal City, manifest in market places and accreted streetscapes at the foot of a castle, chateau, or cathedral. Gradually the narcissistic myth of the Grand Designer came to dominate the Ideal City, leading to the diminution and curtailment of the urban allegory of the Garden. Surveillance and control is the compulsion of the Grand Designer, toiling continually to subdue the allegory of the Garden, the Dionysian state of being out of control. The self-centred parable of the Grand Designer, ingrained in Haussmann’s redesign of Paris and in Howard’s garden-city utopia at the founding of contemporary urban planning, transmuted the myth of the Ideal City into the concept of the Masterplan. Haussmann’s, Howard’s, and Burnham’s passion for regimentation in their planned urban environments ensued from the lasting pursuit of control, power, and oversight by authority, increasingly palpable in evolving varieties of the grand designer, ever since Hellenic antiquity. The autocratic desire for command, control, and surveillance of people through urban space was an ancestral disposition of the myth of the Grand Designer, imbuing concepts of the Ideal City with a proclivity for oversight and regulation, increasingly so during modernity. Urban allegories of the Garden, even if they are secondary or entirely subdued, however, remain an integral feature of any built environment. They are epitomized by unexpectedness and surprise and, at times, danger; they are the urban niches of the unplanned. The approbation of a regimented city form, as well as the contrasting feature of whim, capriciousness, and menace in townscapes, has reverberated through history. The plan of Miletus, of 442 BCE, is an early example of a rigid plan superimposed upon an entirely non-conforming terrain. Liberated after the Persians’ defeat at the naval battle of Mycale (479 BCE), Miletus had a new grid plan that was a repetitive pattern of wide thoroughfares crossed by minor streets or alleys, yielding multiple, seemingly identical blocks, some of which were occupied in their entirety by commercial or religious buildings. Excavations at Miletus have confirmed a strictly orthogonal plan based on at least two distinct grids of uniform housing blocks, separated from each other by a zone of public buildings (Ward-Perkins 1974, 14). The excavations and the assumed plan of Miletus based upon them, of course, do not show the dynamics of its urban environment, the spontaneously accreted niches associated with a children’s playground, an elders’ meeting place, or a dubious hostelry – places that arose not due to a plan but due to a chance opportunity, individual drive, or group dynamics. Revealed in the reconstruction plan of Miletus, where an unyielding geometrical layout is imposed upon the topography, rather than following it, is the Pythagorean legacy of an orderly universe (Burns 1976). Pythagorean philosophy and geometry were behind the orthogonal grid of other Greek planned

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colonies as well (Boyd and Jameson 1981). The uniformity of the horizontal street pattern was also contrasted by the variety of vertical street views. At Miletus and at other planned towns or colonies the street views and vistas would emerge through significant elevation differences and across stepped streets. Traversing streetscapes in Miletus would have been anything but a repetitive experience. There would have been much surprise on the trodden streets of Miletus, with Mediterranean Sea vistas revealed at hill-tops and with continuing chance encounters of humans in its open spaces. Notwithstanding the polemic over his authorship of the plan of Miletus, tradition associates Hippodamus also with the planning of Olynthus and Priene. Founded in 432 BCE, the hill-top city of Olynthus had a short history of less than a hundred years. Its earmark was the pattern of several major avenues flawlessly laid out in a north-south direction, intersected at regular intervals by streets running perpendicularly east-west. Priene (350 BCE), sited upon the steep lower slopes of Mount Mycale, on the west coast of central Anatolia in modern Turkey, also displayed a relatively rigid orthogonal pattern of streets (fig. 6.3). It is certain that many of its streets and lanes consisted of steep stairwells, gracing the city with superb views of both the surrounding country and its own townscape (Ward-Perkins 1974, 14). Vistas from streets high above the sea were possibly only a by-product of the main planning objective, which was to enable the refuse accumulating on streets to be washed away throughout the seasons. That, of course, does not diminish the urban-design value of sloped streetscapes. A similar assumption could be made of Miletus and, to an extent, also of Olynthus. In 300 BCE Aristotle, acknowledging the benefit of the orthogonal grid plan as well as the deliberately irregular street plan, advised in his Politics (7.11) that a city should adopt both plans. During Rome’s republican and imperial eras the prevalent attitude towards regimentation in the layout of planned towns was implied in a mocking remark by the statesman and philosopher Cicero (106–43 BCE). In book 2 of his De lege agraria, Cicero compared the orderliness of Capua, a new colony laid out on the site of an old Etruscan settlement in the Campania region of the central Italian peninsula, with the disarray of Rome and its suburban towns, crowded on hills (Cicero [63 BCE] 1930, 35.95–6). By the second century BCE the planned Roman town had followed the layout of Roman legionnaires’ encampments. Disposed on an orthogonal grid, the planned town’s main artery coincided with the north-south axis and was referred to as the cardo. Secondary streets were at a right angle to the cardo, and the main secondary street was often called decumanus maximus. Those Roman and medieval streetscapes that were laid out according to a planned pattern were in time affected by various excrescences or protrusions of buildings through spontaneous modifications by inhabitants, yielding a vertical variety and contrasting the orderly and repetitive street configuration.

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6.3  Plan of Priene, c. 432 BCE. Drawn by Paul Van Pul. Source: Martin Schede, Die Ruinen von Priene (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1934), 2–3.

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Commerce too helped transform the planned streetscapes into a confounding puzzle, even in towns laid out initially in a regimented alignment of streets. An unpredictable and unplanned street mesh was, more often than not, the characteristic of the accreted Romanesque town of the early Middle Ages. Later medieval planned new towns, however, used Euclidean geometry or the emerging trigonometry in the layout of streets. The two Florentine towns of San Giovani and Terranuova were prominent cases. In both towns the deepest lots faced onto the main street at the centre, assumed as the first or the central city block. Retreating towards the city wall, several rows of blocks succeeded the first block. With proximity to the town wall, the blocks within each row, and their respective lots, became progressively shallower. While lots in different rows retained the same width, they differed from one another in their depths, which were determined by the distance of their respective row from the central block. In San Giovanni (founded in 1299) the lot depth was determined by the shorter and the longer side of right-angled triangles opposite the angles of thirty and sixty degrees, respectively. In Terranuova (founded in 1377) the depths were determined by the sides of right-angled triangles, opposite the corresponding angles of fifteen, thirty, forty-five, sixty, and seventy-five degrees (Friedman 1988, 120–9). Other medieval examples of orderly plans, often intimating aspects of property development and speculation but also of trade and commerce, can be found as far away as the British Isles (Slater 1990). Most cities during and prior to the Renaissance had open sewers, and household waste was thrown into the streets from houses to be washed off, hopefully, by rain. A walking experience would have multiple aspects, some pleasant, some very unpleasant. First and foremost, walking through the street was not a predictable and uniform experience but a varied, good and bad tryst of the senses. Such urban experience had attained a sordid public-health dimension into the late Middle Ages when increasing urbanization and the intensity of hygiene problems were pegged by frequent epidemic outbreaks, which were most catastrophic in densely occupied urban areas. Filth, crime, and deteriorating morals became the wildness mark of opaque urban environments, scorned or ignored by aristocracy and the emerging middle class of early modernity. A nostalgic and romantic concept of wildness as pure, primordial nature emerged from occasional denunciations of the fraudulent attitudes of the emerging modern civilization. In 1776 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), a leading and controversial philosopher of the Enlightenment, came to be associated with the landscaped park in Ermenonville outside Paris, which was inspired by a rejection of urbanized civility and a belief in the nobility of nature. A century later, the Arts and Crafts movement in England and North America censured industrial modernity, calling for medievalist authenticity in art. In a befitting sequel, on the Continent Camillo Sitte in his City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1889) propounded an admiring analysis of medieval and

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early Renaissance streetscapes, denouncing regimented plans, while Haussmann’s regimented redesign of Paris was becoming the source of admiration throughout Europe and America. Similar to Haussmann’s approach, the City Beautiful carried the desire for command and control into twentieth-century urban space. A significant secondary feature of the City Beautiful was its striving to eliminate contingency and randomness from city form. Pursuing the same concern for security as had Domenico Fontana and Sixtus V in Rome of the sixteenth century, the City Beautiful all but discarded the unplanned place within the public space of the city. Gardens would be confines of private space, while parks became increasingly aligned with and subject to urban blueprints dominated by concerns with security, public health, and transport. The Masterplan and Its Victims: Collective Unconscious and Collective Memory The contribution that Haussmann, Hobrecht, and Burnham had made, along with Howard’s Garden City concept, was the idea of a comprehensive approach to urban planning. Later, in twentieth-century parlance, this approach came to be known as the Master Plan, or simply, the masterplan. Modern urban planning has been largely conceived on the notion of the Masterplan due to its seemingly scientific purport of an exhaustive, wide-ranging spatial scheme that encompasses simultaneously all significant facets of community and the built form. Contrary to the underlying objective of the Masterplan, however, the unplanned place has not disappeared from the city; in the contemporary city it has emerged in places of urban decay and contempt. The causes for the emergence of places of decay and contempt in the city may be multifold, but one of the main reasons is the Masterplan itself. The twentieth-century masterplan has been detached from the daily errands and concerns of ordinary people, particularly those of lesser means. Moreover, masterplans have been often based upon irrational symbolism, detached from community needs. Thus, ignominiously, at the height of the Scientific Revolution the men who are now considered the founders of modern urban planning – Howard, Burnham, Griffin, Le Corbusier, and Costa – were obsessed with occult or sacred signs projected onto their wide-ranging planning diagrams, oblivious to the earthly day-to-day needs of families, neighbourhoods, and communities. Noticeably, much of the myth surrounding modern ideal-city masterplans has been Apollonian, masculine. The masculine tinge of command and control in the masterplan is not coincidental, but there is another, severely adverse aspect that a masterplan often carries. In the Garden City and the City Beautiful movements there is more than a penchant for planned spectacle in urban space. Disdain for the other,

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in the sense of urban space outside the spectacle, is inevitable and emerges inadvertently. Conversely, poor neighbourhoods have attained a flair of authenticity due to the ingenuity and the common sense of their inhabitants and, as a consequence, have become a target of invasive gentrification. There could hardly be better examples of schemes that have introduced invasive gentrification into underprivileged precincts than the twentieth-century downtown masterplans of North American cities: City mayors, in partnership with local economic elites, clearly prioritized the redevelopment of the central business district. Federal funds were issued to local housing agencies, which worked with private developers to clear “slums.” These clearance programs often led to a mass displacement of existing residents and local business, particularly poor and working-class whites and African Americans who had settled in deteriorating but affordable neighborhoods near the CBD. Little effort was made to develop affordable housing to replace slum housing, although some funds were used for public housing projects [...] Banks used the process of redlining – literally using red lines on maps to identify neighborhoods that were poor investment – to determine their loan pattern, irrespective of the qualifications of the individual. (Langston 2010, 382)

The construction of elevated freeways was the weapon of choice in a war waged by Robert Moses against indigent black neighbourhoods in New York’s South Bronx. Neighbourhoods that would be dismembered by the urban expressways slivering through them, later often demolished, had their residents displaced through urban-renewal relocation schemes. A hundred years earlier, Baron Haussmann had levelled poverty-stricken neighbourhoods at the heart of Paris in order to construct elegant boulevards slicing through them. The application of brute force led to the ultimate undoing of both Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Robert Moses as master builders. It was not the lack of humaneness that led to their demise but, characteristic of the mainstream views applauding their downfall, the excessive costs of their narcissistic projects. As if to prove the alienating impact of Haussmann’s masterplan, a few of the middle-class public may have railed also against the destruction of history-laden streetscapes, but almost none expressed sympathy with the dislocated incumbent residents (Harvey 2008). During the century between Georges-Eugène Haussmann and Robert Moses, hundreds of urban neighbourhoods or historic sites were demolished across the world for the sake of hallucinatory ideal-city images by self-appointed grand designers of a greater or lesser stature. In August of 1936 Le Corbusier wrote to Benito Mussolini, the Italian fascist dictator, to offer the redesign of Addis Ababa, capital of the recently occupied Ethiopia. Le Corbusier’s letter to the Duce, along with an accompanying sketch, is related by Rixt Woudstra (2014):

160  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard Le Corbusier’s sketch shows Addis Ababa literally as a tabula rasa: the rigorously superimposed plan cleared the land of all signs of humanity and centuries of urban culture. In his letter, Le Corbusier described his drawing perfectly by writing that he was attracted by “ ... models so severe, that one might think the colony was a space without time, and therefore, without history, and without any particular geographical meaning.” Further in his letter he added: “ ... the city is direct dominion; the city becomes the city of government, in which the Palace of the Governor must stand overall.”

Le Corbusier wrote his letter to the Italian dictator, a devout ally of Nazi Germany, only four years after his proposal for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow had been rejected, ending his relationship with the Marxist USSR. The great architect and designer appeared not to be bothered by the alternating communist and fascist association throughout his political preferences, which suggests his own inclination towards absolutism of one sort or another and, above all, his own conceitedness (Weber 2008, 359). His lawyer was Phillipe Lamour, who together with Pierre Winter, editor of the urban planning journal Plans (1930–2) and a member of the Congrès internationaux d’architecture moderne (CIAM), had founded the Parti Fasciste Revolutionnaire in 1928 (Jennings 1990, 203). It is instructive to note that Le Corbusier had been the leading member of CIAM, a group of prominent European architects and planners in the first half of the twentieth century. Fascism and communism found at various times a venue in CIAM. Founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier and Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968), a distinguished architectural critic, the group, during its existence until 1959, largely promoted functional urban architecture and design. Known for issuing prescriptive manifestos following its conferences, the group focused on the ideal of the Functional City, one in which land planning would be based upon function-based zones (Mumford 2000, 25). In its most questionable outcome, CIAM, unilaterally represented by Le Corbusier in what came to be known as the Athens Charter, suggested that social problems faced by cities could be resolved by a firm functional separation of land uses and urban activities and through the distribution of population into tall apartment blocks, Cartesian skyscrapers, at widely spaced intervals (Curtis 1986, 208–14). Designed in accordance with CIAM functional-separation standards was the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St Louis, Missouri, comprising close to three thousand apartments in thirty-three buildings of eleven storeys each. The housing project, designed by Minoru Yamasaki, an architect later renowned for designing office towers and an international airport, was built in 1951 under strict federal guidelines and, proving entirely dysfunctional, was dynamited in its entirety in 1972. The personality profile of some CIAM members and followers seems to have befitted the grand designer. The Pruitt-Igoe fiasco illustrates the mental disposition behind much of the twentieth century’s urban-renewal initiatives: an

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urbanist approach emphasizing focused functionality in a high-rise spectacle, on the one hand, and an outlook increasingly implying contempt for existing, traditional urban community structures, on the other hand. The Pruitt-Igoe event illustrates the twentieth-century transition to superscale in urban projects, insinuating a psychological dimension that also reflected upon the architectural movements that emerged during this time, occasionally attending to political ideologies. Commensurate with the patronizing attitudes of persons of power behind the demolition of hundreds of urban neighbourhoods or historic sites across the world was the displacement of countless people throughout cities, sometimes without much notice, sometimes with much fanfare. In Seoul, Korea, during the Japanese colonial period (1910–45), a plan was prepared to pave over an 8.5 kilometre creek called the Cheonggye Stream. The Japanese colonizers never went ahead with the plan: The plan was taken up by the postcolonial Korean government as it paved the stream with cement (1958–1979) and built overpass above it (1967–1971). The urban project to construct a new Seoul, led by the appointed mayor of Seoul, Kim Hyon-ok (1966–1971), nicknamed “bulldozer,” cleared up shanty houses built along the river banks and covered the river with an elevated highway. On top of this, a thirty-one storey building, the highest structure at the time, was built in 1970 to mark the entrance to the express highway. (Kal 2011, 106–7)

Throughout the Western world large- or small-scale urban demolitions and evictions under various subterfuges were gradual and subtler, often shepherded by faceless bureaucrats. In an exemplary case of Halifax, Nova Scotia, the process of eviction, demolition, and rebuilding under the label of urban renewal occurred in reverse order. A magnificent garden suburb was built first, only to be followed decades later by the demolition and eviction of an adjacent destitute neighbourhood in a gradual and deliberate process. The Halifax urban-renewal episode had followed a disastrous explosion at the Halifax Harbour in 1917. The catastrophe resulted in two thousand dead, many more injured, and the entire northeastern portion of the city laid to rubble. Redesign of part of the devastated area, near the shores of Bedford Basin on the northern edge of peninsular Halifax, was commissioned to Thomas Adams (1871–1940), a Scottish architect who had just moved to Canada. Following on Howard’s Garden City concept, Adams designed an exquisite garden suburb of lasting charm, still known today as Hydrostone. It was certainly no fault of Adams that a nearby poor, ethnic neighbourhood, Africville, would be completely razed in the 1960s –the result of neglect by successive Halifax city councils, lasting decades. A slaughterhouse, a hospital for infectious diseases, and a prison had been moved into the vicinity of the black community during the first half of the twentieth century, and railway lines, a

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bridge, and a freeway, used as land-control tools, had finally sliced the area near the impoverished quarter, which by then had become a subject of derision in Halifax. Barely two kilometres apart, Hydrostone and Africville are only some examples of the many where urban spectacle resided next to a place of contempt. Estrangement is the human sentiment involved in this configuration. It was also estrangement – alienation – that, as a key concept, was at the forefront of Marxist ideology and its doctrine of political violence. Karl Marx and his fellow ideologue Friedrich Engels had perceived alienation as the social product of the capitalist exploitation of one human by another. Only fierce revolution, according to Marxism, would materialize the messianic goal of fraternity and equality for all, whereby alienation would dissipate. Resentment and urban alienation that were traits of the twentieth-century metropolis cannot be easily explained by the Marxist doctrine. Howard too, referring to his own project as a “peaceful path for real reform,” had repudiated violence, but his diagrams suggest command and control in the best of later Marxist tradition. It is hardly a surprise that Howard’s handbook was translated and embraced by Soviet urbanists only a few years after the Bolshevik coup of 1917. Not only did Marxism fail to resolve its goal of eliminating alienation, but, more often than not, in the Soviet Union as elsewhere, it perpetuated alienation in cities and in society at large. Alienation could often be traced to the loss of collective community memory, and urban alienation specifically could be attributed to dislocation, voluntary or forced, that disrupted or erased joint communal reminiscence. Even if Jacobs never mentioned alienation by name, this was indeed a good deal of her urbanist argument. She may have rightly seen crime as an outcome of alienation, but she fell into the fold of the City Beautiful planning outlook that set surveillance as its underlying objective: “Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. To any one person, strangers are far more common in cities than acquaintances [...] The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all these strangers [...] there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call natural proprietors of the street” (Jacobs 1961, 30–5). Dividing people in the city into natural proprietors of the street, on the one hand, and strangers, outsiders, on the other hand, is unhelpful for cohesion within the urban community. Jacobs recognized urban alienation, but “eyes on the street” – surveillance of strangers by “natural proprietors” – seems to only reinforce separation and estrangement. With such a divisive outlook she unwittingly joined the fold of urban planners close to the City Beautiful movement. Jacobs, through her words, expressed fear of the stranger, and Howard, through

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his diagrams, expressed fear of the urban poor; both point to a fundamental urban angst of the mainstream. Neither Jacobs nor Howard – nor Burnham, for that matter – offered alternatives to surveillance, to address the anxiety that had evolved specifically within the built environment of modernity. Dirk Schubert (2014, 62) opined that “Jacobs’s reflections also point towards the shared dimension of mental city images.” Disruption or erasure of collective communal memories through dislocation was commonplace in communities that became the target of various urban-renewal initiatives around the world before and after the Second World War; these initiatives were the ultimate focus of Jacobs’s urban critique. Recurrently, she inferred, urban-renewal and resettlement schemes had been prone to built-in dysfunction. Those responsible for the destruction of old neighbourhoods in cities, however, were seldom planners. Robert Moses of New York and Ed Logue of Boston were both lawyers, and Kim Hyon-ok was a career military officer, who was appointed mayor under the military regime of General Park Chung-hee. Like a contagion, the twentieth-century bureaucrat had infused dislocated communities with his own ill of alienation and contempt. The frustration of the displaced people was amplified by their powerlessness, poverty, and inability to articulate their rights of abode, the result being more crime and violence, possibly only diffused throughout the metropolis. The Halo of Modernity’s Hero: Mechanistic Myth and the Eclipse of Humanness Proclaiming patronage of the working poor, Ebenezer Howard cemented the rudiments of urban alienation in his garden-city diagrams. The intent of the garden-city project was to syphon people from the polluted and plague- and crime-infested metropolis into garden cities. In his pursuit of the Garden City utopia, Howard set an artificial limit of thirty-two thousand people to a garden city, at which limit a new garden city would be founded nearby for the ancillary population. Even according to its most favourable interpretation, such a project would constitute continuing dislocation on a vast scale. A growing population would result in far greater expatriation than would the displacement of neighbourhoods in the South Bronx, for example. Half a century before Moses’s most offensive urban-renewal scheme, the promise of the garden city as an urban haven conferred the halo of modernity’s hero on Howard, and, were it not for Jacobs’s critique, Howard’s image as an urbanist champion might have continued unabated for a while. The perimeter of Howard’s garden city was rigid, created by an inter-municipal railroad set within an industrial belt, in effect also preventing urban expansion beyond the industry-railroad perimeter. Quite obviously unaware of the human dimension of displacement and the disruption of communal life, or

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ignoring them, Howard engaged in a mental exercise of urbanist prescription that guaranteed perpetual dislocation, fuelled resentment, and thus solidified urban alienation. From an existentialist view, alienation is a primordial human condition, but, clearly, neither Howard nor Jacobs had overtly concerned themselves with it. Addressing urban alienation meaningfully were two other urbanist approaches contemporaneous with the Garden City and the City Beautiful. The French architect Tony Garnier (1869–1948) introduced his own socialist urban utopia in an elaborate plan initially under the exhibit title Une cité industrielle (1904) and later in book format (Garnier [1918] 1989). A thoughtful analogue to Howard’s garden city, Garnier’s suburbs have a Neo-Romanesque flair of organic accretion resulting from individual initiatives rather than from a plan imposed by authority. Garnier’s utopia has residents living in garden suburbs where continuous human contact takes place on wayward pedestrian nature trails that lead to places of work in the centre of town. In contrast, the exposed and rigidly aligned avenues and boulevards of Howard’s diagrams hardly ensure spontaneous encounter, even as nature is confined to tree-lined sidewalks and manicured gardens of properties along the streets. Somewhat similar to Howard’s, Garnier’s utopia too was inspired by a futuristic novel. In Emile Zola’s Travail (1901), an imaginary, Marxist-inspired, egalitarian ideal city, similar to the garden city, has no police. In Garnier’s Cité industrielle, as well, there is no indication of any controlling authority. A measure of spatial regimentation emerges only in the urban centre where employment and administration are located, while the freedom to design their own small environments is conferred on suburban residents. Tony Garnier thus provided an important alternative to the fashioning of built environments solely through a premeditated plan, by proposing an operational outlook that allowed for gradually coalesced streetscapes, facilitating the ongoing dynamic unfolding of the built environment from within kindred precincts. Such an environment he viewed as facilitating natural human contact through unregulated pedestrian access. Separate residential, industrial, public, and agricultural zones were described in Garnier’s plan, later adopted by Le Corbusier and embraced in elaborate administrative schemes in conventional urban planning. It was the elaborate categorizing of urban land uses, and their allocation to separate zones, that further disrupted spontaneous human encounter in modern cities. The land-use-separation concept, in America adopted first on racial-segregation grounds in nineteenth-century San Francisco (Schafran 2013), had been an urban-design measure in the Middle Ages. There is evidence of zoning in bastides, the planned new towns of the thirteenth century in Portugal and southern France. “Tanning, fulling, and milling were all activities which needed to be near water and tanning in particular isolated from habitation because of the use of lye” (Barrett 2014). By the fourteenth century, land-use zoning was

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occurring in larger cities of Europe, such as Montpellier (Reyerson 1997). Early zoning in antiquity, as reported by Aristotle in his description of Miletus (Politics 2.8), had likely already occurred in the Bronze Age Harappan civilization (3300–1300 BCE) of the Indus Valley (Rykwert 1976, 147). Similar to medieval zoning, in Garnier’s Une cité industrielle the separation of land uses was of only a general character, while autonomous layout and streetscape design took precedence. Inspired by Camillo Sitte, Garnier proposed deliberately irregular patterns in streetscapes, while civic buildings were to be, presumably, in the Beaux Arts style. The mix of an uneven street layout in the suburbs against uniform streetscapes in the centre would most certainly have elicited an affirmative sensory stimulation conducive to walking. Garnier may not have been aware of his own contribution to concerns addressing human perception and cognition in the built environment, but the Neo-Romanesque style he embraced remains a valid alternative to elaborate designation of land uses and their rigid allocation to strictly separate zones. The other consideration in urban planning, grounded in realism and observation of human nature, came during the period between the early 1920s and 1933, in the work of Patrick Geddes (1854–1932). Contrasting mechanistic masterplans of the early twentieth century, the Scottish biologist and town planner, in his lectures at Bombay University, put forward an alternative view of a masterplan: instead of a fixed, solemn, and all-encompassing scheme, a framework for a dynamic progression would be based on citizen participation in urban decision making (Fagence 1977, 101–4). Primary human needs would be considered at every stage of this dynamic planning process and its implementation (Mumford 1947). Geddes reinterpreted Howard’s notion of a regional plan by viewing the urban region as an ecological system, a conurbation, encompassing also nature and all its living things. Within this ecological context Geddes adopted some of Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary outlook on society. Spencer (1820–1903), an English biologist, anthropologist, and philosopher, saw the communal expression of human society in the link between needs and care, evolving from the primordial relations within family to the welfare system of state (Miller 2000). Following Spencer, Geddes pointed to human needs in a community as a conceptual counterpart to considerations of economic demand in society. Having acquired worldwide acclaim for his planning approach that emphasized needs rather than economic demand, Patrick Geddes was knighted shortly before his death in 1932. In 1943 the psychologist Abraham Maslow, unaware of Geddes’s planning approach, proposed a hierarchy of human needs, ranging from the most basic needs of physiology and safety to the cerebral needs of esteem and self-actualization (Maslow 1943). Geddes and Maslow, without saying as much, addressed alienation by articulating the notion of human needs, and Geddes also pointed to the expectation of local governments to

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meet them. The urban design for human encounter and interaction by Garnier as well as Geddes, in contradistinction to Howard or the City Beautiful, was a profound attempt to alleviate alienation. In a strange twist, the urbanist ideas of Garnier and Geddes towards planning for human needs and designing for human encounter went largely unheeded, and much of twentieth-century city form fell, instead, under the spell of the Grand Designer myth. The City Beautiful movement, as one example, generated incongruity in social integration and absurdity in its occasional reliance on occult mythology (Fischer 1989; Meyer 2001, 223–46). A decade or two past its demise in the early 1930s, metropolitan masterplans led to the dislocation of low-income communities through urban-renewal projects in Europe and across North America. Progressively throughout the twentieth century, alienation has been rendered an overriding and universal sentiment in the metropolis. It is no coincidence that placelessness (Relph 1976) and the loss of place were coined as urbanist notions in the second half of the twentieth century: “We only recognize the fact that man is an integral part of the environment, and that it can only lead to human alienation and environmental disruption if he forgets that. To belong to a place means to have an existential foothold, in a concrete everyday sense. When God said to Adam, ‘You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the Earth,’ he put man in front of his most basic problem: to cross the threshold and regain the lost place” (Norberg-Schulz 1980, 23). Even prior to Howard’s project, much could have been observed from the demolition of central Paris by Haussmann and, though less dramatic and more contained, from urban-renewal projects that followed elsewhere in Europe. The emerging urbanist attempt at a surprise-free environment, distilled from bewilderment and mystery, had quickly replaced the poverty-stricken hubs of ghostlike, petrifying reality throughout the poor urban districts of Europe. One of the last vestiges holding off nineteenth-century urban renewal in Europe was the Josefov quarter of Prague, a former Jewish ghetto. Entirely chaotic juxtapositions of edifices, accompanied by a disorderly alignment of their internal spaces, had been the trait of long-lasting depravity in the quarter, but it conferred a serendipity and authenticity that in its naked, often tragic truth could not be replicated. Confiding to a friend, the writer Franz Kafka (1883– 1924) described the Dionysian sights of Josefov thus: Beneath the eaves of these strange medieval houses grouped together under one roof, there were [...] gloomy little rooms, that reminded the visitor more of an animal’s lair than a space for human beings [...] There, below, in the smoke-blackened rooms the ears of the visitors would be deafened by the excruciating sounds of the harmonica, or the strings of a badly-tuned harp, plucked by the arthritic fingers of an old, blind harpist. They would awaken profound feelings of melancholy, whilst on the opposite side of the road, behind brightly-lit windows, people would be

The Ghost of Howard  167 shouting and dancing to the strains of the piano. Here, among the dreg of the metropolis both easy and hard-earned money, health and youth were squandered away and buried for good. (Frynta 1960, 57–8)

Human suffering and pain were the bequeathal of many a resident of Josefov. Poverty brought also incredible abutments and startling formations in the confined built environment of the Jewish ghetto. Creativity and providence had aligned with the unexpected and the bizarre, quite contrary to the comfort of mediocrity, which is often espoused by the mainstream. At their very onset, at the turn to the twentieth century, urban-renewal schemes failed to discern and retain the affirmative qualities of built form that had spontaneously fused over decades or centuries. Exemplified in Kafka’s further description of Josefov is the effect of urban renewal on this urban niche, a disconcerting conundrum to many a Prague resident. In 1893 the Law of Sanitation was decreed, and much of Prague’s Josefov quarter was razed and rebuilt anew, meeting a fate similar to that of central Paris a few years earlier. Ancient houses and crooked lanes were demolished and replaced by fashionable buildings and orderly streets. A stylish arterial road, named Paris Boulevard, cut through the impoverished precinct. No longer would there be litter and raw sewage marking the streets, but now trash containers were being put out for orderly refuse collection by municipal workers in a streetscape that could be branded as none other than aseptic. Here is what Kafka had to say after the urban renewal of Josefov: “The dark corners, the mysterious passages, the boarded-up windows, the dirty yards, the noisy beer-shops and the shuttered inns still live in us. We walk through the broad streets of the newly-built town. Yet our steps and our glance are unsure. Innerly we still shiver as we did in the old streets of misery. Our hearts still know nothing of the re-sanitation that has been carried out. The sick old Jewish Town is much more real to us than the new hygienic town now surrounding us” (Frynta 1960, 59–60). Between the lines, Kafka tells us that forcing gentrification into an authentic urban environment constitutes a dispossession of the local community equivalent to its displacement. Even without the removal of people, in situ privation can occur through invasive gentrification. Through his novels The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926) Kafka became the prominent Continental expositor of the conflict between authority and authenticity, and the attentive eyewitness of internal dislodgment and alienation in the city. Hausmann’s style of urbanism in Europe and the City Beautiful movement in North America, along with their architectural complement, the Beaux Arts, had emerged not only as an architectural innovation but also as a design contraption of urban administration, a feature that came to permeate European city form throughout the twentieth century. It is instructive to notice that Kafka’s anti-hero in The Castle is none other than a “Land Surveyor.” Traversing the streetscape towards an elusive castle, the

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land surveyor finds his own estrangement, emerging from a built environment controlled and regulated by the castle, in a singular observation of the town: “again and again the same little houses, and frost-bound window panes and snow and the entire absence of human beings” (Kafka [1926] 1992, 17). It is on the margin of a city, perhaps a suburb, that Samuel Beckett (1906– 1989), a celebrated Irish playwright, places two vagrants in his play Waiting for Godot (1953). The two engage throughout the entire play in debating whether and when Godot will arrive. Godot, of course, never arrives. Alienation through the fraudulent promise of Godot’s arrival is the air of the play, and it is amplified when the play is performed with the two speaking out of trash cans, and a modern city’s skyline, skyscrapers and all, is shown in the background of the scene. With Kafka and Beckett, the three streetscape scenes of the classical Greek theatre, interpreted by Vitruvius and reinterpreted by Sebastiano Serlio, receive accompaniment in a fourth theatrical stage. As a milieu of urban alienation, Waiting for Godot offers the fourth, now completing the classical three scenes. To the tragic, comic, and satyric scenes, twentieth-century city form has added the aseptic scene: a sterile void amid the meaninglessness of urban modernity. Hardly a streetscape at all, the aseptic scene is more akin to the space between the high-rise buildings of Pruitt-Igoe. To Kafka’s land surveyor in The Castle, the aseptic scene reverberates through the words of the city’s superintendent: “You’ve been taken as Land Surveyor, as you say, but, unfortunately, we have no need for a Land Surveyor. There wouldn’t be the least use for one here. The frontiers of our little state are marked out and all officially recorded. So what should we do with a Land Surveyor?” (Kafka [1926] 1992, 61). Archetype of the Ideal City and Its Origins The profoundness of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is in its cast that parallels Aristophanes’s comedy The Birds in which two elderly runaways, escaping the corruption, filth, and grime of Athens, are looking for an ideal city, the City of the Birds, or Cloud Cookooland, the idyllic counterpart of the debased Athens. They encounter Meton, a famous Athenian astronomer of the fifth century BCE, who is now dabbling as a town planner and attempting to peddle to one of them, Pisthetaerus, a plan of an ideal city. Here again is Aristophanes, in a broader textual context, mocking the astronomer planner as the Grand Designer who is applying his cosmic vision to a streetscape: pisthetaerus: What are these things? meton: Tools for measuring the air. In truth, the spaces in the air have precisely the form of a furnace. With this bent ruler I draw a line from top to bottom; from one of its points I describe a circle with the compass. Do you understand?

The Ghost of Howard  169 pisthetaerus: Not in the least. meton: With the straight ruler I set to work to inscribe a square within this circle; in its centre will be the market-place, into which all the straight streets will lead, converging to this centre like a star, which, although only orbicular, sends forth its rays in a straight line from all sides. pisthetaerus: A regular Thales! Meton.

(Aristophanes 1909, 995–6)

The play’s Meton provides the audience with a bird’s-eye-view depiction of a city laid out on a circular plan divided into equal quadrants, with the agora at the centre. This is consistent with the Egyptian hieroglyph for “town,” introduced into Egyptian script sometime around 3000 BCE and coded as O49 in Egyptian Grammar (1957) by the British Egyptologist Sir Alan Gardiner (1879– 1963) (fig. 6.4). Between the Egyptian hieroglyph O49 and Howard’s diagrams of the garden city there was Aristophanes lampooning a plan of an ideal city that has, in its outline, remained intact across millennia. That in itself may suggest that the Ideal City, as a mental imprint, has been ingrained in the minds of humans for epochs. It is in this sense that Howard’s own ideal city ought to be seen. Mythic association of the disc, the circle, or the sphere with the universe has been traced to early China, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and pre-Socratic Greece (Needham 1986, 498; Horowitz 1998, 260). Mandala has become a generic term for any diagram involving a circle and a square that represents the cosmos. The mandala as a circle divided into four quadrants, the sun cross, and the wheel cross are frequently found in the symbolism of prehistoric cultures, particularly those in the European Neolithic to Bronze Age periods (Hahn 1998, 329). Later, the mandala became also a spiritual and ritual symbol representing the universe in Indian religions and in features of material culture, as Carl Jung points out: “From the circle and quaternity motif the symbol of the geometrically formed crystal and the wonder-working stone is derived. From here analogy formation leads on to the city, castle, church, house, and vessel” (Jung [1951] 2014, 4228). Millennia before Howard and Jung, Aristophanes ridiculed such a myth in The Birds. Written sometime before 414 BCE, the play, through the character of Meton, seems to address some parable in which an ideal-city plan mimics the rules of geometry and the universe. One of the protagonists in the play is a hoopoe, as a metamorphosed legendary king of Thrace, a historic region in the southeastern range of the Balkans, between today’s Greece and Bulgaria. Several Bronze Age clay discs excavated in the Balkans throughout the twentieth century carry carvings variably presumed to be an early script or

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6.4  The Egyptian hieroglyph O49 for “town.” Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

ornamentation. One such clay disc is a roundel in cross-like division into four equal and inscribed parts, conjuring Meton’s ground plan in The Birds (fig. 6.5). About six centimetres in diameter and two centimetres in thickness, the roundel, perhaps a whorl-like seal, was unearthed in eastern Thrace, at Karanovo, Bulgaria, in 1968 and has been dated to about 4800 BCE (Makkay 1971, 1–9). The carvings on the Karanovo disc in the four crossed sections have never been decrypted, and the suggestion that they could, in fact, represent an asterism or some other pattern in the sky has been put forward as a possible interpretation (Pellar 2009). The Karanovo disc could be a later adaptation of an even older Thracian clay disc with carvings, similarly divided into four equal sections, from Tartaria, Romania, dated to about 5300 BCE (fig. 6.6). Whereas the Tartaria tablet was probably an amulet, the Karanovo disc could have served as an inscribed stamp-seal (Gimbutas 2007, 24). As the roundels from Karanovo and Tartaria are both intersected, they allude to association with a solar myth, on the one hand, and with early settlement ground plans, on the other hand. Lending support to the view that these roundels are administrative records or symbolic maps of a town, possibly its streetscape, is a similar stamp-seal from Beycesultan in the adjacent region of western

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6.5  The Karanovo roundel, d ≃ 6 cm, burnt clay, c. 4800 BCE. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

Anatolia that has been interpreted as a record referring to town topography and administration (Woudhuizen 2012). Another carving of interest is on a clay disc from the fifth millennium BCE, uncovered at Gradeshnitsa in the same geographical area of eastern Thrace in today’s Bulgaria (fig. 6.7). As a script the carving has remained undecoded (Milisauskas and Kruk 2011, 268), but features of the carving compare quite well with the famous clay carving of the plan of Nippur in Mesopotamia, which was created some thirty-five hundred years later. Rather than a script, the Gradeshnitsa carving could very well be interpreted as a plan of a settlement, in which case the Karanovo and Tartaria roundels might be viewed in a similar light, reinforcing the view that they too are symbolic or literal representations of a settlement layout. Viewing the roundels of Karanovo and Tartaria as referring to a settlement suggests that they too may represent an Early Bronze Age myth of a town-universe analogy, one whose later mutation was ridiculed by Aristophanes in The Birds (Akkerman 2015).

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6.6  The Tartaria roundel, d ≃ 6 cm, burnt clay, 5300 BCE. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

If the Karanovo and Tartaria tablets are indeed plans or symbolic maps, they could also allude to a radial street pattern. Evidence of radial planning, corresponding to Aristophanes’s description in The Birds and closer to his own time, comes from the northeastern part of the Peloponnese peninsula where the stronghold Mycenae grew, over the period 3200–1000 BCE, into a major political and military entity controlling much of southern Greece. Based on excavations, one observation states that “Mycenae still stands alone as the only center with a highly evolved, well-planned radial pattern of built roads covering the immediate hinterland” (Castleden 2005, 31). The perceived correspondence between the ideal city and the universe seems to be implied in the Mycenaean radial plan and is consistent also with the ideal city of Magnesia, contemplated by Plato in his Laws, c. 350 BCE. Plato’s ideal cities, Magnesia and Atlantis, much as Howard’s garden city and Burnham’s City Beautiful more than two millennia on, came as a masculine response to the imperfections of the accreted city form, feminine in

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6.7  The Gradeshnitsa tablet, 7 × 9 cm, burnt clay, c. 5000 BCE. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

its seeming spontaneity of the random street pattern. The unfolding of the mind-environment composite is manifest through its gender traits. It is instructive how in analytical psychology Carl Jung distinguished between the anima, as the feminine archetype of the male, and the animus, the masculine archetype of the female: “Their opposition is that of the sexes. They therefore represent a supreme pair of opposites, not hopelessly divided by logical contradiction but, because of the mutual attraction between them, giving promise of union and actually making it possible” (Jung [1951] 2014, 4272). In discerning the anima and animus as hybrid, intertwined archetypes, Jung pointed to their manifestation in the Dionysian and Apollonian impulses, introduced earlier by Friedrich Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy as contrasting aesthetic dispositions that jointly gave rise to the Greek drama (Jung [1921] 2014; Nietzsche [1872] 2003, [1891] 2005). Extending Jung, the suggestion that volumes and voids of the built environment are masculinity and femininity imprints is consistent with seeking Apollonian and Dionysian traits in

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city form. Such outlook traces the archaic origins of femininity and masculinity in the built environment to the myths of the Garden and the Citadel. In the Dionysian-Apollonian evolutionary chain of interaction between humans and the material surroundings they create, the myths of the Garden and the Citadel are archetypal impressions of the environment upon the mind, much as they are also anthropomorphous projections of the mind upon the environment. The imposition of volume upon void in the history of modern city form, rather than an interplay of these two foundational urban paradigms, has been due to the encroachment of the self-absorbed myth of the Grand Designer. During pre-industrial urbanization, indiscretions in the built environment were usually on a small scale. Throughout much of history, cities grew largely in the manner of small, cumulative adaptations, even if these were along a previously imposed plan. Furthermore, due to technology limitations, most edifices and open spaces were built to human scale. Cathedrals and castles were exceptions. Barring great fires and epidemics, any malfunction that occurred in urban space too was usually on a small scale, relatively easily addressed ad hoc. The industrial and post-industrial ages, and specifically the introduction of structural steel, enabled construction to be geared to height and speed, yielding a metropolitan complex on a superscale. The unforeseen dynamics of metropolitan change does not lend itself to ad hoc responses in the way the medieval town did. The myth of the Grand Designer comes at great cost to community, not only in terms of financial loss but mainly as the civic torment of insulated suburbs, freeway congestions, line-ups, and other, increasingly common facets of urban dysfunction. The myth of the Grand Designer is a self-centred reversal of the religious argument tendering the existence of God from the ostensibly intelligent design of the world. The fancy of the Grand Designer is the inverted rendition of the deistic deposition; it is a narcissistic myth proffering human agents as capable of creating a faultless, multifunctional city or, in the extreme rendition of this myth, an ideal society. The Grand Designer is a masculine myth that thrives on surveillance and control and, as such, negates the Garden. It is perhaps the mark of modernity that the Grand Designer has gradually attempted to engulf city form. Creating an imbalance in the two foundational paradigms of the built environment, the Grand Designer stifles the Dionysian myth of the Garden, turning it into a subservient allegory. Much of twentieth-century urban development was an expression of the clash of parables, where the Grand Designer incessantly attempted to purge the Garden as the consort of the Ideal City. Yet both Apollonian and Dionysian environmental figurations are vital to a salubrious city form. Projection of the Grand Designer mindset yields an urban environment in which volumes devour voids, and regimentation, rule,

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and control streamline change and movement and deny spontaneity. Usually, however, an ideal-city plan, a masterplan, cannot easily identify incongruities, let alone anticipate them. Unfortunately modern construction and demolition technology allow for urban incongruities to be applied on a vast scale. All too often during the twentieth century, masterplans were typified by innate misjudgment leading to a large-scale dysfunction in a metropolis (Hall 1982, 187–241). “Form follows function” was a famous adage attributed to Louis Sullivan (1856–1924), the functionalist architect of the first skyscrapers, who rejected superfluous and unnecessary ornamentation in architecture as the visual analogue of fable. “Form follows fable” seems to have been the underlying urban motif from early modernity to the masterplans of the twentieth century. In its urban geniture the fable of the Grand Designer most vividly marked comprehensive planning schemes in pursuit of streetscapes for command and control. Ebenezer Howard, the courteous and soft-spoken Victorian inventor and also one of the benevolent expositors of the Grand Designer myth, was the embodiment of such a broad psychocultural mélange. To Howard, an adherent of otherworldly communications and of a cosmic purpose, the Garden City was consistent with the eminence of his own perceived compassionate mission to advance humankind towards the Neoplatonic spiritualist ideal for the perfection of humankind: “In ‘Modern Spiritualism’ Howard believed he had acquired knowledge of the God-given harmonious order of the universe and, from this the road that humanity must travel to reach higher civilization promised by grand design” (Buder 1990, 13). The Hidden Sources of Howard’s Diagrams As opposed to the streets of Howard’s garden cities designed by Unwin and Parker, Howard’s diagrams could easily serve as the milieu within which Kafka’s land surveyor and Beckett’s two vagrants found themselves. Paul Emmons (2015) suggests that his diagrams of the garden city ought to be seen in the context of the mythical symbolism of the spiritualist religion within which Howard was immersed. Furthermore, they extend a primordial myth of a city as a microcosm of the universe. Such qualification applies also to the several unacknowledged sources of Howard’s garden-city diagrams, the Plan of a Model Town by James Silk Buckingham (1849) and The Happy Colony by Robert Pemberton (1854). Additionally, Emmons points to a diagram in a nineteenth-century fugitive, rambling pamphlet by one Gideon Ouseley as the source of Howard’s diagram no. 7: “Gideon Ouseley (1835–1906) was a member of clergy suspended for anti-Christian views [...] who credits the writing of his book to two spirits who dictated it to him [...] The Plan of Heptapolis, or system of Seven Cities has an

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astonishing similarity with Howard’s plan [diagram no. 7]. They both consist of seven circular cities, each chief city generating six around it” (Emmons 2015). The spiritualist religion is Howard’s most intriguing association. Paramount in the spiritualist movement of the northeastern United States between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been Plato’s myth, and the story of Atlantis was among those that “trumped the finer points of rhetoric in the imaginations of Americans” (Gutierrez 2009, 8). Plato’s city-universe analogy in Atlantis is implied repeatedly by avenues radiating in four cardinal directions (Saunders 1976) and is similar to the mythical plan that was ridiculed by Aristophanes in The Birds a hundred years earlier. Howard’s garden city was to follow a similar cosmic analogy. Naomi Golding (1975) counted seven zones of land and water in Atlantis, and the seven concentric ring roads in Howard’s diagram no. 3 are likely not a coincidence. It has been pointed out that in Atlantis Plato had followed the concentric circular plan of Ecbatana, the capital of the Median empire in the late eighth century BCE, as reported by Herodotus of Halicarnassus in Histories, written around 440 BCE (Naddaf 1994). In the historically unreliable report Herodotus, who was a contemporary of Plato’s teacher Socrates and an intermittent resident of Athens, described Ecbatana as an ideal city of seven concentric walls, against the seven planets in Babylonian astronomy. The seven enclosed land areas of Atlantis seem to correspond to the fanciful seven walls encircling Ecbatana, while the dwelling place of Poseidon and his wife Cleito was located on a hill at the centre of Atlantis, similar to the palace of the Median king Deiokes (r. 727–675 BCE) on a hill at the centre of Ecbatana: “[Deiokes] builds large and strong walls, which are now called Ecbatana – one wall placed within the other, of a circular form. Now this wall was so contrived, that one circle was higher than the other, by ramparts alone; and the ground favoured this construction, being an easy ascent; and the most remarkable thing effected was, that the palace and the treasury are in the last of those circles which were seven in all” (Herodotus 1.98). Five spheres of the known planets and the two spheres of the moon and the sun, accepted as a fact in early astronomy, confer cosmic harmony on the plans of both Atlantis and Ecbatana (James and Van der Sluijs 2008). Save Herodotus, the only other known literary source of circular – concentric or radial – city plans prior to Plato was Aristophanes who in The Birds lampooned ideal-city plans, precisely, by linking them to sky patterns. Seven planetary spheres along with an eighth sphere of fixed stars are described in the very last part of The Republic, in what appears as Plato’s final message to legislators of the ideal city-state. In it he gives a cosmogonic account commonly known as the Myth of Er, a vision of the universe by the soldier Er who had returned from the afterlife to tell of the seven planetary spheres of the universe (Republic

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10.618). It is more than likely that Howard saw himself as the addressee of Plato’s message. Taking this literary context into consideration does not fare well for a person considered to be one of the founders of contemporary urban planning. Howard presented his regional plan in diagram “No. 7, Group of Slumless and Smokeless Cities.” Each garden city in no. 7 is shown with exactly twelve radiating avenues, dividing each garden city into twelve equal radial sections. This, however, is inconsistent with Howard’s diagrams “No. 2, Garden City,” and “No. 3, Ward and Centre of Garden City,” which have six avenues radiating from the centre to the perimeter, dividing the garden city into six equal radial sections or wards. Also, the regional plan no. 7 is intersected by six canals connecting each of the six satellite garden cities with the central city, and the six satellites are connected by a circumscribed seventh, “Inter-Municipal Canal.” In Howard’s no. 2 and no. 3 diagrams the canals are absent. Furthermore, the regional plan of Howard’s diagram no. 7 is included only in Howard’s 1898 edition of To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. In the 1902 edition, diagram no. 7 “was sadly omitted,” according to Hall and Ward (1999, 23). Says Emmons, “Omitting the diagram from the second edition may have been regarding concern for it appearing excessively spiritualist.” If Emmons is right that diagram no. 7 was deliberately omitted, it was not because of its inherent folly but because of Howard’s fear of the ridicule that it might elicit among mainstream audiences. Such a fear had proved justified two-and-a-half millennia earlier. The ridicule of Aristophanes did not stop Plato from pursuing his myth of Atlantis as a city-universe analogy, just as it did not stop Campanella from pursuing the same in his City of the Sun. Howard probably did not know about The Birds, but he would have been aware of the derision his diagram no. 7 would evoke among socialist-minded audiences after they realized that he was showing a cartoon of an elitist myth, twenty-five-hundred years old (Akkerman 2015). Howard’s diagram no. 7, as a representation of his spiritualist belief in a metaphysical analogy between the universe and his own Garden City utopia, can hardly be qualified as anything but impetuous. One has to agree with Jane Jacobs that to imagine cities and urban regions as actually built according to such a scheme is a frightening thought. Twentieth-century masterplans carry, nevertheless, the ghost of Howard’s scheme in his garden-city diagrams. The early twentieth-century attempts to generate large-scale automated cities, along with their later sequels, had a detrimental impact on city form and the humans within it. People in an automated, machine-like urban environment inadvertently enter into an alarming feedback of latent dysfunction between themselves and their built environment, a “domain of hell” as the philosopher Massimo

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Cacciari, the former mayor of Venice, dubbed the twentieth-century metropolis in his Architecture and Nihilism (1993). Less than half a century after Kafka, this is how his Czech compatriot Milan Kundera perceived the urban environment of the late twentieth century: She said to herself: when the onslaught of ugliness became completely unbearable, she would go to the florist and buy a forget-me-not, a single forget-me-not, a slender stalk with miniature blue flowers. She would go out into the streets holding the flower before her eyes, staring at it tenaciously so as to see only that single beautiful blue point, to see it as the last thing she wanted to preserve for herself from a world she had ceased to love [...] Suddenly, the sharp sound of a motorcycle pierced her being. She could not help but immediately look towards something that had caused such physical pain: a young girl in jeans, her black hair waving behind her, erect on a small motorcycle as if she were sitting at a typewriter; it had no muffler and made a horrific noise [...] It wasn’t the machine that was making the noise; it was the “I” of the black haired girl, trying to make herself heard, to penetrate the consciousness of the rest by linking her being to the deafening escape of the engine. Agnes looked at the hair streaming behind that noisy aggressor and realized she intensely wished the death of that girl [...] Her hate immediately frightened her and she said to herself: the world has arrived to the frontier of something disastrous; if it crosses it, everything will turn to madness: the people will wander through the streets with forget-me-nots in their hands or will kill each other on sight. It will take very little, the drop of water that overflows the glass: just one car, person or decibel more. (Kundera 1991, 21–2)

Kundera describes an urban environment that implodes, certainly not an environment that is evolving on a sustainable course. The notion of sustainable development has usually drawn on a statement from the Bruntland Commission’s report to the United Nations: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED 1981). Surely, to many, automated environments, even if sporadically malfunctioning, are sustainable as long as they do not waste energy, for example. The conventional understanding of sustainability does not extend to aspects of the ingrained dysfunctionality in interaction between humans and their built environment. Evidence in industrialized countries, however, points to the increasing incidence of mood disorder in cities as opposed to rural regions (Peen et al. 2010; Lederbogen et al. 2011). Urban sustainability cannot be detached from community well-being, yet mental health within the city slips under the radar, so to speak, of sustainable-development watchers. If there is, indeed, a spiralling feedback between

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environmental dysfunction and mood disorder, it can hardly come to a halt unaided. Automated environments and automatism in humans seem to be intertwined features of the postmodern metropolis, perhaps more so in the developed than in the developing countries. Sustainable development, the neologism that over the last four decades has often become an overused catchphrase of bureaucracies, can go in a direction quite opposite to the one intended by its original authors. Within urban environments, increasingly automated as well as prone to malfunction, mood disorders point to urban alienation as an ominous association of post-modernity’s vicious circle. When built environments become the accrued result, by design or by default, of the actions or inactions of victims of a mood disorder – narcissism, alienation, or other personality aberrations – such a vicious circle can only perpetuate itself.

7  “Growth Ain’t Expansion”: Jacobs in Toronto

Ebenezer Howard and the founders of the City Beautiful movement avoided the opportunity to address human needs for safety, security, and public health through urban design that preserved affirmative surprise and serendipity in city form. Rather, in a mythical expectation that safety, security, and social harmony in the city could be warranted by surveillance of transparent urban space, geometric symmetry in a plan, and architectural classicism in buildings, their urbanist conception rejected riddle and happenstance in the built environment. Quite contrary to expectations of the City Beautiful, in the quest for social harmony through architectural spectacle and geometrical balance this urbanist movement’s outlook intensified unresolved tensions. Urban schemes that often addressed self-centred myth more than communal needs never cleared the strain between security and freedom and the struggle between administrative authority and human authenticity. In rejecting the Garden City and City Beautiful concepts, Jacobs’s Death and Life had emerged as the voice of common sense against what she and initially mostly highbrow public across North America perceived as injustice and ­improvidence in urban affairs. Inner-city neighbourhoods were the only authentic remnants of urban fabric and communal memory, Jacobs pointed out in marshalling thoughtful resistance to the encroaching artificial forest of steel, glass, and concrete, connected through a web of freeways to the ever-sprawling suburbs. The Sham of Gentrification and the Rise of Jane Jacobs It is to Jacobs’s credit that she had discerned a relationship between expanding suburbs and the decline of the inner city. In an accusing common-sense narrative she showed how, instead of municipalities maintaining or replacing crumbling sidewalks, lighting fixtures, and water and sewer mains throughout the inner city, their funds earmarked for infrastructure were being increasingly

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siphoned off into haughty megaprojects, often embodied by urban freeways and overpasses carrying motorists from middle-class suburbs to their places of work in downtown office towers (Benfield et al. 1999, 118). Supporting comfortable private transportation from the suburbs required exorbitant and extensive new infrastructure, the cost of which had been not only monetary but also social. This part of her message is as relevant today as it was half a century ago. Politically expedient to municipal administrations, large-scale transportation infrastructure projects had constituted the crucial link in the unholy alliance between developers and civic decision-makers. As both votes and taxes were increasingly coming to city hall from the suburbs, Jacobs saw through the scheme, largely designed to sustain civic bureaucracy by catering to suburban middle-class voters: “[G]roups of citizens will always apply their pressures on an elected official if they can – and back him up with their support if he comes through – when they are manoeuvring to get administration to see things their way. Voters, perceiving alternatives for applying their influence, are intelligent enough to use their power where it has a handle” (Jacobs 1961, 423). Jacobs’s polemics could be debated, but there certainly is no better bolstering of her criticism than twentieth-century expressways across North American cities, cutting through old neighbourhoods and displacing their residents. Against masterplans and large-scale urban projects, and beyond her opposition to urban freeways in the prosperous North America after the Second World War, Jacobs pointed to small-scale neighbourhoods fashioned on the charms of the antebellum city of the American South. It is from this vantage point that she launched her attack against Howard, his disciples, and the various assortment of those whom she lumped together as adherents of “powerful and city-destroying ideas” (Jacobs 1961, 18). True, Howard’s diagrams alluded to an urban environment that was subject to command and control, and garden cities were anything but the socialist haven for the working poor that they were proclaimed to become. Howard’s could hardly be a universal solution to the urban problems of the twentieth century. The success of Howard’s garden cities was commercial, based on their exclusionary design, out of reach to the ordinary workers to whom the garden cities had become not much more than a failed promise. Affordable to the middle-class and upscale strata only, garden cities became a real-estate showpiece. Howard moved to Letchworth in 1905 to participate in the building of the first garden city, and he relocated in 1921 with his second wife to a modest house on Guessens Road in charming Welwyn Garden City, where he died seven years later. Howard’s resting place is in Letchworth. Half a century later, Jacobs, from within her humble home in the midst of the enthralling streetscape of Greenwich Village, complained about the rigidity of New York’s municipal administration. Years earlier Greenwich Village had been exempted from adopting the grid plan, to which the rest of the city was

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subjected, by none other than New York’s municipal administration. Jacobs’s misgiving may have been no more genuine than Howard’s promise to the workers of London. Equally spurious is Jacobs’s call for vertical gardens, and her vehement stand against traditional urban gardens, none of which prevented her from tending to her own small garden at the back of her home at 555 Hudson Street. Before then she had lived at 55 Morton Street, also in Greenwich Village, a community that would become the standard against which she appraised neighbourhoods, but from her writings we know nothing about a nearby large garden adjacent to 46 Morton Street. Notwithstanding the humble residences of both, Howard and Jacobs lived within urban environments that were out of reach to most of the lower middle class. In that regard, Howard and Jacobs remind one somewhat of the theory and practice of Nikolai Milyutin, the Soviet commissar of finance. It was from his rooftop penthouse in a building where all other tenants had to share a communal kitchen that Milyutin wrote his visionary essays on egalitarian urbanism. The privilege that both Howard and Jacobs accorded themselves, to reside in or to protect their exclusionary precincts, is entirely legitimate on its own. But proclaiming the garden city as the intended abode of the working class, or demanding vertical gardens across a city, in their own respective instances, amounts to preaching water and drinking wine. Furthermore, their contrasting urbanist arguments have one fundamental flaw: it is not possible to claim universality in an urban pattern of an exclusionary precinct for an entire metropolis or region. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, a far cry from Howard’s diagrams, are still delightful urban communities. But in his regional plan Howard failed to discuss seriously the urban pattern of the central city of fifty-eight thousand inhabitants or the self-sufficiency of the entire garden-city regional complex. Even if one ignores the oddities of Howard’s exurban utopia and of Jacobs’s vertical gardens, the allure of Letchworth and Welwyn could not serve as a possible template for an entire regional system, and the idea of vertical gardens could hardly be applied across a contemporary metropolis. As for Jacobs, from within her gentrifying neighbourhood she would never claim that New York City should look like Greenwich Village. Yet it is then unclear how one is to understand the proffering of Greenwich Village as a guiding vision. The success of Greenwich Village and Howard’s two garden cities has been largely confined to the property owners, and it points to the exclusiveness of these communities, successfully contrasting the more mediocre metropolis, rather than to a cure-all remedy for a good city form. Ultimately, the claim of universality in the urbanist guidance by both Howard and Jacobs was eroded by real-estate finance in Howard’s own time and further undermined more recently by national central banks whose interventionist policies, in their impact on sharply rising real-estate costs, were beyond what Jacobs could have imagined at the time. “Whenever I’m here [...] I go back

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to look at our house, 555 Hudson Street, and I know that I could never afford it now,” she said, bewildered, visiting New York from Toronto in the early 2000s (Gopnik 2004). Intervention in financial markets by the US Federal Reserve Bank during the second half of the twentieth century through the injection of newly printed money into the economy sharply, and quite possibly artificially, lifted the cost of many financial assets, including urban real estate. The dull and mundane garden suburbs of Middle America, in the mirage of rising real-estate costs, have been becoming poorer as a result, while gentrified inner-city areas, the outcome in part of Jacobs’s activism, have attained uniqueness and exclusivity. Only a few years following her last visit from Toronto, a further and much dimmer observation of Jacobs’s celebrated precinct was made: Ms. Murphy, who has lived in the West Village for over 30 years, said that all her friends who used to own stores and restaurants in the West Village have been pushed out by the rising costs. “There’s nobody left,” she said [...] “Bleecker Street [a block from Hudson Street] is a mall now,” said Ned Kell, 76, an owner of Treasures and Trifles, one of three antiques shops left on Bleecker. “They’ve ruined the Village, as far as I’m concerned.” Bleecker’s few remaining antique shops are also doomed to close. Les Pierre Antiques co-owner Isabelle Pilate-Drufin said that the landlord will inevitably force them out after the lease expires in a few years – most likely to replace them with a designer store. Mr. Kell of Treasures and Trifles – which was also founded in 1967 – said that when he and his co-owner retire, the store will also retire. (Kavoussi 2009)

By 2010 the architect Witold Rybczynski had made a remark on the outcome of Jacobs’s urbanist dream, one that applies equally to her and to Howard: “The most successful urban neighbourhoods have attracted not the blue-collar families that she celebrated, but the rich and the young” (Rybczynski 2010, xiii). Back at the beginning of the twentieth century, on the backdrop of egalitarian promises of the garden city, the working poor of London stayed put in their wretched confines because even an apartment in Howard’s Homegarth co-operative building in Letchworth was beyond their reach. Similarly, once the model American garden suburbs of Henry Wright and Clarence Stein had become a story of the past, the mass-produced suburban subdivisions later in the twentieth century were a far cry from their early precursors. Built in the manner of an assembly line during the late 1940s and the 1950s, the suburban tract homes of William Levitt, along curved streets placating over their uniformity, were the housing equivalent of the private automobile, and the Levitt & Sons construction and development company was the housing parallel to the Ford Motor Company. Whereas at the Ford assembly-line parts were added to a semi-finished car by stationary workers skilled in one task, at a

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sequence of workstations, until the car was assembled, at Levittown suburbs the specialized, skilled workers moved from one house to another, applying their singular skill to corresponding building materials. In both cases the finished product, automobile or house, was constructed faster and with less labour than if workers had carried out the task of assembly or construction by applying multiple skills. The efficiency of automation and uniformity in the emerging suburban developments quashed the flickers of creativity and imagination that had risen years earlier from within the North American vernacular architecture of the early twentieth century. Enticed into new suburbs throughout the later twentieth century by cheap mortgages, cheap gas, and cheap cars, on the one hand, and the fear of the inner city, on the other hand, most suburban dwellers in North America, in time, have come to endure much stress and related ill health (Frank and Engelke 2001; Verderber 2012, 1–5). The health-care costs associated with suburban housing and commuting have become a significant and disturbing feature of North American health-care expenditures, even leaving aside the hardship to individuals and families (Vandegrift and Yoked 2004). Due to the rising cost of living, commuting in particular, since the turn of this century, the older suburbs in at least four major metropolitan areas of the United States have become poorer (Sugie and Leigh 2007). More recent observation is outright damning and further widespread: “The magnitude and pace of growth in suburban poverty after 2000 far outstripped [...] earlier indications of inner-ring suburban economic decline” (Kneebone and Berube 2013, 9). A century’s perspective is appropriate. Those who could escape the turmoil of the Great Depression between the two world wars sought safety and comfort in the suburbs. Half a century later, however, the tide had started turning in the other direction, with trickles of young and single professionals refusing to remain within the monotony of their parents’ reproduced identity in the suburbs. A century-long urban activism that emerged from the garden cities of Ebenezer Howard and from the Greenwich Village of Jane Jacobs points to the commodification of urban authenticity, whereby economically powerful groups in the city are the ones to dominate the process of gentrification. Young professionals who can afford it have been escaping suburbia for decades, buying into a make-believe authenticity of the gentrifying inner city (Smith 1987). Emerging from the manicured lawns of the car-dominated garden suburb has been the unspoken cognizance that against the myth of the Masterplan stands the authentic street of the inner-city slum or the offbeat precinct. William F. Whyte’s ethnography book, The Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (1941), became a bestseller after its second printing in 1955 and possibly contributed to the interest in gentrification by middle- or upper-middle-class professionals. Unperturbed, the urbanist myths of the Masterplan and the Grand Designer have upheld urban

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alienation through traffic jams, commuter frustration, and suburban lethargy. The human craving for authenticity, and the alienating outcome of urbanist myths juxtaposed with the verity of the inner-city street, have been quickly priced into real-estate markets, as Sharon Zukin points out (Zukin 2011, 219–45). Gentrification has been largely the result of urban authenticity turned into a priced commodity. Jacobs and Howard: A Meeting of the Minds? A lineage could be traced over the last hundred years, leading from Howard’s Garden City and the City Beautiful movements, to garden suburbs and inner-city urban renewal, to more contemporary urban-planning currents. Chief among these, New Urbanism, an approach aimed at walkability between varieties of housing types and daily destinations within the neighbourhood, remains reliant on distance commuting outside the neighbourhood, just as Howard’s garden city was. New Urbanism retains the thrust that the Garden City concept gives to suburban sprawl, while its proclaimed aim in the ongoing development of new walkable suburbs is the solidification of dependence on suburban land-development companies, on commuter access to employment elsewhere in the metropolis, and on automobile reach to big-box shopping that is inaccessible to pedestrians. Discerning observation points out that both exurban neighbourhoods of New Urbanism and gentrified inner-city precincts such as Jane Jacobs’s transformed Greenwich Village have become “consumable spectacle rather than [authentic] lived experience” (Wortham-Galvin 2008). But there was another century-long progression, consistently consonant with Jacobs’s outlook and contrasting with the urbanist path aligned with Howard. This evolving alternative approach had commenced with Camillo Sitte, Howard’s Continental contemporary of a contrarian brand, and was furthered in the early twentieth century by the rejection of mechanical urbanist schemes, in favour of an accreted city form through small urban spaces designed for spontaneity of human encounter within a townscape. Much of this alternative approach was expounded in the works of Tony Garnier and Patrick Geddes, and not even Jacobs’s off-hand dismissal of Geddes’s urban and regional approach could alter this inclusive view of twentieth-century urban planning thought. The two contrasting outlooks – the one espousing mechanistic uniformity in streetscapes, the other embracing medievalist whimsy in street patterns – ran parallel to one another throughout the twentieth century, respectively mirroring the Apollonian and Dionysian dispositions in art and architecture (Mitias 1999, 29). Howard’s own Garden City utopia was rescued from oblivion largely by the anti-industrial, traditionalist craftsmanship in the urban design of Unwin and Parker, and in America by the dense residential planning and superb garden home design of Henry Wright’s team.

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Geddes and Jacobs share an organic outlook on city form. Jacobs, furthermore, stood for a firmly feminine approach to urban growth and change. At an event where Jacobs was said to have been present, someone quoted Daniel Burnham’s famous saying: “Make no little plans, they have no magic to stir men’s blood [...] Make big plans.” As the Toronto Star reported it, Jacobs replied: “Funny, big plans never stirred women’s blood. Women were always willing to consider little plans” (Kidd 2011). The twentieth century’s two urbanist paths seem to clearly emanate from a gender divide that was vocalized by Jacobs as much as it was by Burnham. Moreover, the two contrasting urbanist outlooks, traced through the last hundred years, extend far beyond the twentieth century. Paul Emmons, in his critical essay on Howard, points to a prolonged historical context in mutual opposites of settlement styles that goes back to archaic times. Reflecting on Howard’s three-magnets allegory of settlements (fig. 7.1), he says: “Howard describes the third magnet in an extraordinary way, as the result of a marriage between the two sexes. ‘Town and country must be married, and out of this joyous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.’ Finding male spiritual aspects in the city and female [...] elements in the country, their wedding produces a unity of the sexes in an androgyne, a widespread notion among spiritualists and theosophists” (Emmons 2015, 38). Spiritualism and theosophy made a superficial clone of the archaic myth of sacred marriage, and Howard seems to have joined in presenting a rather mediocre caricature of an ancient lore in his own urbanist allegory of the three magnets. The important issue that Emmons brings up in this regard is the connection of archaic female myth with marriage and renewal allegories and with the emergence of primordial civic space. In Greek myth of the Iron Age (c. 1200 BCE), Gaia, the Great Mother and the archaic goddess of the Earth, is in a marital union with Uranus, the god of sky. Earlier, in Mesopotamian myths of the Bronze Age (c. 3000 BCE), Kishar, the Earth Mother, is the wife of Anshar, the primeval god of heavens. The union of the male deity Shiva with the female goddess Shakti in the Hindu religion represents the merger of a masculine divinity, limitless and unchanging, with a cosmic femininity, a deity manifest by uncontrollable energy. C.G. Jung pointed out that in contrast to the union of deities and the unity of the world, the multiplicity of the world arose in Hindu belief from the splitting of the divine cosmic union of femininity and masculinity ([1950] 2014, 3863–5). In some early societies, Jung explained further, the matrimony of gods and goddesses had signified ancient religious proceedings towards a union of opposites ([1935] 2014). Mimicking this union of gods and goddesses across archaic cultures was the hieros gamos sexual ritual, a theatrical performance between a priest and a priestess in a temple ([1951] 2014). Emmons unmistakably implies that in the three-magnets allegory, allusive of a divine marriage, Howard attempted to confer a mythical city-universe

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7.1  “The Three Magnets,” diagram no. 1, Howard’s Garden City, 1898

188  The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard

analogy to his garden city. Rather, in his paternalistic project Howard essentially manifested a one-sided masculine aspect of (as well as a single link in) an environmental chain that has extended over millennia. This chain had begun with the myth of the Garden and was later conjoined with the Citadel, its consort in allegory. In Howard, as in many of his urban-design contemporaries, the masculine myth of the Citadel, transmuting to the Ideal City, is coupled with the narcissistic myth of the Grand Designer. The twentieth century marked a certain culmination in a millennial progression, whereby the Grand Designer became the dominant force in the built environment. Over this period the myth of the Citadel gradually mutated onto the myth of the Ideal City, with its latest variety, the Masterplan, becoming the venue of expression for the Grand Designer. Garden allegories in city form have become correspondingly subdued and suppressed over the millennium of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and modernity. The preservation and protection of niches of natural wildness within the confines of a city has been a modern tradition in Europe and the British Isles. In much of North America, however, urban wilderness conservation has become an item in deliberate policy only since the late twentieth century, as Timothy Beatley shows (2000, 13–23). Beatley also points to the inherent tension between the urban built environment and wildness within the city (2011, 17–44). The strain between nature’s wildness and the solemnity of built form has been evident in premodern and early modern transformations, most vividly in Serlio’s rendition of the mutation of the satyric scene into the comic scene as a feminine transition. U ­ rban modernity signalled a masculine shift from the solemnity of Serlio’s tragic scene to Beckett’s aseptic scene. Whereas the myth of the Garden expresses a sense of dynamic organism, parables of the Citadel and the Ideal City, culminating in the Masterplan, convey a flair of static or mechanistic perfection. It was in the 1960s that the mechanistic outlook on modern city form began to give way to organic views of urban dynamics. In a ground-breaking article entitled “Requiem to Large-Scale Models,” Douglas Lee (1973) showed the futility of comprehensive masterplans, against the unpredictability, randomness, and free will of the human agent. But already in 1924 a monograph by the French historian Marcel Poëte had suggested that, while urban planning – in his view – was an attempt to mirror mechanical science, the city in fact was an organic hybrid (Poëte 1929). Poëte saw the city as a self-organizing system, a living organism that continually changed in response to economic conditions, while retaining its past historic features. The specific historic features of each city ought to be considered, in Poëte’s view, when addressing the needs of the urban community, and respected during the process of industrialization (Periton 2006; Calabi 1996). Similar to and independent of Patrick Geddes, Poëte too emphasizes human needs rather than economic demand in a community.

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In Death and Life Jacobs joined the organic posse of urban thought, reiterating the argument that the city should be perceived as a synergic, living thing rather than a mechanism. Vaguely acknowledging the success of Perry’s neighbourhood-unit concept and Henry Wright’s suburban planning, she lauded the dynamics of the city as an organism: “Neighbourhood planning units that are significantly defined only by their fabric and the life and intricate cross-use they generate, rather than by formalistic boundaries, are of course at odds with orthodox planning conceptions. The difference is the difference between dealing with living, complex organisms, capable of shaping their own destinies, and dealing with fixed and inert settlements, capable merely of custodial care (if that) of what has been bestowed upon them” (Jacobs 1961, 132). It is the epistemological underpinning of organic urbanism that brings Jacobs and Howard, again, closer together. Howard’s cartoon of the three magnets, a gender projection in myth upon the environment of humans, as Emmons observes, disclosed the chimerical aspect of Howard’s urbanism. That aspect appears to be allusion, albeit unacknowledged, to something akin to the myths of the Garden and the Citadel. The Garden City was to be Howard’s apparent mitigating ideal between the country (or the Garden) and the city (or the Citadel). Against the urban ideal that Howard had espoused belies now, on the one hand, his mystical engagement with an esoteric religion and, on the other hand, the public’s reception of his overt message, which had transformed him into a celebrity. Herein rests also a psychosocial thread admixing Howard’s and Jacobs’s outlooks. Jacobs as the Reluctant Post-Marxist At nineteen years old Jane Butzler (Jacobs’s maiden name) moved to New York with her sister. There she slowly grew to become a living legend, from a young lass standing up for women in the workplace to a vociferous author taking on the masculine power of the municipal bureaucracy. Jacobs’s encounter with the male establishment in New York was first marked by her experience of discrimination at Iron Age magazine. She started as a secretary to the managing editor, Thomas W. Lippert, working her way to become an editorial assistant and writer. She became an advocate for equal pay for women and for the workers’ right to unionize (Flint 2009, 11), and that, along with her custom to smoke a pipe in the office, earned her a label by Lippert of a “troublemaker and agitator who would cause trouble no matter where she went.” She left Iron Age in 1943 to become a feature writer of government-information pamphlets for overseas distribution, and then in 1944 a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the US State Department. Five years after she had left Iron Age, Lippert made the fabricated observation that “she followed the communist party line all during her period of employment” (Laurence 2016, 65–6).

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With the onset of the cold war, following the Second World War, an infamous hunt for suspected communists and their sympathizers commenced. In the anti-communist hysteria that enveloped the United States in the period 1948–54 the House Committee on Un-American Activities, together with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, conducted investigative reviews against thousands of Americans. Jacobs was questioned in 1948, and J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s director, in a memo of that year specifically mentioned her as a part of larger investigation into suspected communists in the government. The anti-communist panic intensified with the 1950 speech of Senator Joseph McCarthy in West Virginia. The senator claimed that he had a list of 205 known communists who had infiltrated the US government to take control of American policy. It is likely that Jacobs, even though she was an outspoken anticommunist, was on McCarthy’s list (Laurence 2016, 84–5). In 1952 Jacobs became the associate editor of Architectural Forum magazine. In the same year Robert Moses finalized plans to extend Fifth Avenue through Washington Square Park, a public park in Greenwich Village. As part of his urban renewal, the Fifth Avenue extension was to cut through the area south of the park, very near the house on Hudson Street where Jacobs lived with her husband and two young boys. Area residents, including the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt, opposed the plans, and several of them, led by a housewife, Mrs Shirley Hayes, initiated the “Save the Square!” campaign, a seven-year battle during which Hayes prepared an alternative plan to keep automobiles out of Washington Square Park. In 1955 Jacobs, still a writer for Architectural Forum, joined the growing support for Mrs Hayes’s plan, but there is no evidence yet of any leadership role she might have taken in the ensuing public contest against Moses. Hayes’s campaign ultimately proved successful, and in April 1959 New York City’s Board of Estimate approved a policy statement for Washington Square Park, still in effect today, whereby all vehicular traffic, except emergency, would be barred from the area. Jacobs’s next involvement in the melee with Robert Moses came in 1959 when she co-founded a citizens’ committee that was opposed to yet another urban-renewal project, on Manhattan’s Cooper Square, less than a kilometre away from Washington Square Park. The citizens committee was under the direction of Walter Thabit (1922–2005), a MIT-trained city planner. In the account of Gotham Gazette, Thabit was New York’s anti-Moses. In 1959 he helped found The Cooper Square Community Development Committee and Businessmen’s Association (now The Cooper Square Committee), which organized against and defeated a giant urban-renewal plan proposed by the city’s official master builder Robert Moses that would have wiped out 11 blocks in the Lower East Side. The project would

“Growth Ain’t Expansion”  191 have displaced 2,400 tenants, 450 single room occupants, 4,000 homeless beds and over 500 businesses. City officials planned to turn over the land to a union-backed developer who would have created 2,900 units of middle-income housing. In 1961, after more than 100 community meetings, Thabit completed the Alternate Plan for Cooper Square, which proposed that the original residents of the area should be the beneficiaries and not the victims of urban renewal. Community leaders Frances Goldin, Esther Rand and Thelma Burdick were joined by many others [...] to implement the community’s vision for a stable neighborhood affordable to people with modest incomes. (Angotti 2005)

In the early stages of the struggle Jacobs herself was probably barely noticed, if at all, by Moses or New York City bureaucrats, and, later, almost certainly a tacit communist label would have tainted her image. In Death and Life Jacobs took on Moses, whom she described as “genius at getting things done [...] using control of public money to get his way with those whom the voters elect and depend on to represent their frequently opposing interests” (1961, 131). Perhaps she felt that her own aura of a rebel leader would diminish if she associated herself with the activism of Thabit, but, be it as it may, Walter Thabit was never mentioned by Jacobs. It seems that the role of dissident that Jacobs enjoyed cultivating while at Iron Age was revived through her engagement, inconspicuous at first, in conflicts between the citizens’ groups and Robert Moses, and was reinforced also by the McCarthy-era prejudices against her. As an architecture and urbanism writer denouncing Moses’s urban-renewal projects, Jacobs paved her way to become the spokesperson for the public opposing the transportation tsar of New York City: In August 1960, Father Gerald La Mountain became the pastor of [a] church on Broome Street. That year Robert Moses and his allies took advantage of the federal Highway Act of 1956 [...] and moved ahead with the scheme to run the Lower Manhattan Expressway right through the city. To show their determination, city officials approved a city map with expressway on it. Father La Mountain knew he had to fight to save his church and the community. In late April 1961 he called a meeting to gather support. People from different religions, opposing political parties, and all sorts of professionals attended. Although they normally would not have spoken with one another, they all agreed on a common purpose. They formed the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway. Father La Mountain had invited Jane, now a well-known author, to the meeting. Although she intended to serve as a sympathetic observer, she accepted the pastor’s request to chair the meeting. (Lang and Wunsch 2009, 94)

Since her childhood Jacobs had refused to be compliant, once telling an interviewer: “I thought that most of my teachers were rather stupid. They believed

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a lot of nonsense. I was always trying to educate them, so we would get into conflicts sometimes” (Kanigel 2017, 37). As a rebel against the municipal establishment, following her growing involvement in the public struggle with Moses, she had likely given rise to a modern female version of Robin Hood, and, as a muted “communist” in the eyes of the city’s officialdom, she may well have become a new hybrid, the “Little Red Robin Hood.” Repudiating urban paternalism from Howard to Moses, however, Jacobs had a strong distaste for Marxism all the same. Her urbanist creed was filled with her own Jungian profile and dipped in an affectation of the Nikolay Milyutin rendition. Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, undoubtedly thanks to the public’s struggle to protect it, became “a mythic space of dissent [...] the Village, as packaged in the early Sixties, spiced tradition with eccentricity but tempered rebellion with frivolity,” certainly an exclusionary dwelling place for ”citizenry ranges from unimpeachably middle class types to real Bohemians” (Banes 1993, 14–16). Jacobs was set to lead the struggle for Greenwich Village in a process that would make her into an urbanist oracle. With her experience and past struggles for equality in the workplace, Jacobs called for heterogeneous neighbourhoods through mixed land use (1961, 154–67). But mixed land use, an identifying feature of the medieval city, is not associated in any way with heterogeneous communities. Heterogeneous neighbourhoods are the exception rather than the rule and usually the result of social engineering. Neighbourhood heterogeneity, largely a socialist vision, contrasts the urban reality of almost anywhere in the world since the Second World War. It has had little in common with social heterogeneity, while equality and an open society are entirely consistent with aspects of homogeneity in neighbourhoods. That is not to say that the first decades of the cold war did not harm Western notions of the open society. In the United States this period will always be associated with the assault on civil right (Formisano 1991, 23–8). The ­McCarthy era is one example, and Robert Moses’s oppressive use of political power in New York is another. The growing resistance to authoritarian power, however, and the genuine defence of public interest found a growing number of adherents. One such partisan, profoundly studied and articulate, was the urban planner Paul Davidoff (1930–1984). During the time that Jacobs was beginning to enter the public arena of struggle against Robert Moses, Davidoff was teaching in the City Planning Department of the University of Pennsylvania. Later in the 1960s, as Jane Jacobs was questioning New York’s port authority paternalism, Davidoff became a professor and founding director of the Urban Planning Program at Hunter College, an hour’s walk from Greenwich Village. Focused on the needs of underprivileged urban communities, Davidoff, in a shattering article in the American Institute of Planners’ journal in 1965, introduced advocacy planning

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that pointed to underprivileged groups who, unlike the middle class, had no means to articulate their needs to political power centres (Davidoff 1965). In his article Davidoff extolled Thabit’s 1961 report as a particular example of advocacy engagement on behalf of a community. Recognizing imbalances in the political system and in the bargaining and lobbying process at city hall, advocacy planning points to the large numbers of people who are unorganized and unrepresented in municipal proceedings. In comparison to Jacobs’s confrontation with the authority at the top, advocacy for the underprivileged and under-represented at the bottom tackles fairness in urban policy from the grass-roots low end of urban policy-making. The main points of Davidoff ’s advocacy planning were later summed up by Angotti and Marcuse (2008, 14): • Ethical values are part of every planning process, and the planner is not a value-free technician. • The planning process should be pluralistic, representing a diverse range of interests, especially minority interests and needs. There is no single plan that represents the “public interest” but rather multitude of plans represents the varying interest and needs of different groups. • Neighbourhood groups and community associations should prepare their own plans, rather than reacting to official plans through so-called “citizen participation,” usually a lip service to officialdom. • Recognition ought to be made of the fact that urban politics is at the very heart of urban planning and that planning commissions are political, even though set up as supposedly neutral bodies acting in the public interest. Planning commissions have no constituency and thus all too often are counterproductive. • Urban planning is fixated on the physical city: “The city planning profession’s historical concern with the physical environment has warped its ability to see physical structures and land as servants to those who use them” (Davidoff 1965). Urban (and regional) planning must integrate physical and economic aspects of the built environment with social characteristics and concerns of communities. Davidoff ’s theory was matched by his practice. He founded the Suburban Action Institute, which challenged exclusionary zoning in the suburbs, and he was a member of Planners for Equal Opportunity, the first national organization of advocacy planners. It stands to reason that the principles of advocacy planning would bring Jacobs over to Davidoff ’s two thoroughly articulated notions, the one being advocacy for the truly disenfranchised, and the second taking a bottomto-top approach, as opposed to confrontation with the top echelon in municipal

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bureaucracy. Such mutual assent never happened. Addressing the same issues as Death and Life, only more broadly and in a careful scholarly fashion, Davidoff, at that time a leading planner and activist on behalf of the disadvantaged, was never mentioned by Jacobs, receiving the same silent treatment as Walter Thabit did. Paul Davidoff and Kevin Lynch on Urban Ethics and Epistemology Advocacy planning made Davidoff into Jacobs’s intellectual double. Jacobs’s puzzling disregard of Davidoff can be understood against the background of a book published by another prominent author a year before Death and Life. In The Image of the City, first published in 1959, Kevin Lynch (1918–1984) formalized and classified essential physical features of city form. Lynch’s book became one of the most authoritative texts in urban design, but he too received a cold shoulder from Jacobs. In The Image of the City Lynch had addressed in a scholarly and rigorous manner the same issues of the built environment as Jacobs would, and more. He introduced the epistemological notion of mental maps of the urban environment, proposing five categories: Districts, Edges, Landmarks, Nodes, and Paths. With his category of Districts, Lynch most vehemently parted ways with Jacobs. He identified Districts as homogeneous areas that had distinctive social or physical characteristics. Edges were defined by Lynch as seams, lines along which two areas were adjacent, or barriers which separated one urban area from another. Landmarks were local or global beacons, singular and unique, visible within a district or throughout the entire city. Nodes were important locational foci, as origins and destinations within the city. Paths were streets, sidewalks, trails, or other channels through which people travelled. Along with an increasing number of planners, Lynch was concerned about the problems generated by the introduction of motor vehicles into cities, and wrote, with Donald Appleyard and John Myer, The View from the Road (1964), examining how highways and freeways might be more sensitively planned. The authors pointed out that superscale applied not only to edifices but also to speed: “One of the strongest visual sensations is a relation of scale between an observer and a large environment, a feeling of adequacy when confronted by a vast space: that even in the midst of such a world one is big enough, powerful enough, identifiable enough. In this regard, the automobile, with its speed and personal control, may be a way of establishing such a sense at a new level. At the very least, it begins to neutralize the disparity in size between a man and a city” (Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer 1964, 13). In several of the seven books and dozens of articles that he wrote or coauthored, Lynch showed an acute awareness of the fact that urbanist deliberations had been largely lacking the consideration of temporality. The View from

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the Road addresses temporality in urban diurnal change as Lynch’s early concern: “At night a new order reigns in the city. The chaotic skylines, jagged spaces, erratic signs, forms, and shapes disappear into the darkness, to be replaced by luminous dots, strips, and diffused light. The path system becomes clearer. Light is needed for circulation, and so cars, streetlights, shop windows, and advertising signs build up from the softly lit residential streets to the clamor of lights on the commercial avenues” (Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer 1964, 57). As a dimension of city form, heretofore largely ignored, temporality became the focus in Lynch’s What Time Is This Place? (1971). Lynch drew on an innate sense of time and an organic sense of place, as opposed to the Cartesian, mechanistic, and measurable sense of time and space, questioning the impact of the urban environment upon the ways it is perceived by humans and upon their actions to effect changes in it. Lynch’s Good City Form, published in 1981 and 1984, consolidated a quarter of a century’s examination of urban problems and potentialities, seldom or never considered, and far beyond the scope of the street that was Jacobs’s main priority. Lynch discerned and confronted the intensifying problem of urban decay, primarily through the recognition that it was, and always has been, a feature of city form. Furthermore, whereas Jacobs’s thrust was to conserve, enliven, and safeguard daytime streetscapes, Lynch pointed out that urbanist concerns had all too often ignored fringe areas, those that Ignasi de Solà-Morales, a Catalan architect and philosopher, later called “terrains vagues,” the city’s leftover spaces or places of contempt (Armstrong 2006; Solà-Morales 2014, 24–30). And whereas Jacobs’s concern was the inner-city, Lynch pointed out that consummate urbanist consideration ought to encompass all “physical features of a city: street and transportation systems, housing, open space, centers, general map pattern. But since that is not a logically inclusive system, it conceals the gaps in the series. There is little here about the workplace, for example, or about the marginal spaces of a city – the wastelands, fringe areas, transition spaces, vacant lands, dead storage areas, and underutilized places. The street system is a prominent concern, but not the remainder of the flow system: those flows of goods, wastes, energy, and information which are not carried in [streets]” (Lynch 1984, 285). With the publication of Death and Life, Jacobs had succeeded not only in labelling planners as stooges of outside special interests but also in outwitting leading urbanists in a personal confrontation. Mumford’s scathing 1962 “Mother Jacobs” article in the New Yorker was followed by a scholarly jab that Lynch too could not resist. In his preface to Good City Form Lynch derided “a trivial preference, based on personal experience [of] a Sunday journalist” (Lynch 1984, 1). By that time, however, Jacobs had moved north of the border. In Toronto a battle was raging over construction of expressways in a similar way that it had in New York a few years earlier. Jacobs’s move had been prompted by the Toronto workplace of her husband, the architect Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr, and her

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opposition to the Vietnam War. The rise and demise of Robert Moses in New York had taken place at a time of increasing prosperity throughout the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and Canada, where escalating suburbanization and car ownership fed into one another in a spiral, with urban transportation becoming a major focus of urban policy. During that period the attempt in New York to build a ten-lane Lower Manhattan expressway was emblematic of the dynamics of displacement. The only unusual ancillary was that the urban megalomania of Robert Moses, nicknamed “Big Bob the Builder” by New York’s Newsday (11 January 1961), found a formidable foe in his articulate feminine opponent. In broader perspective, however, the archetypal roles played out as urbanist opposites by Jane Jacobs as the “Little Red Robin Hood” and by Robert Moses as the “Big Bad Grand Designer” ought to be seen as psychocultural transmutations of archaic allegories onto the twentieth century’s unsung sentiment of mutual contempt. Jacobs’s move to the Annex neighbourhood in Toronto, through which a contested expressway was to run, augured not only a repeat of her earlier successful public stunt but also the elevation of her stature to urbanist seeress. The Oracle of Toronto The urbanist outlooks of Jacobs and Howard ought to be seen as constituting their respective subliminal projections of the environmental allegories of the Garden and the Citadel onto twentieth-century city form. While the driving force for Howard, as for many others, was the myth of the Grand Designer, for Jacobs it was the confrontation of the Grand Designer with her own twentieth-century urbanist mythology. Arriving in Toronto, she was already a renowned author, and now her celebrity as a rebel for an urbanist cause was to be sustained by the legacy of a new nemesis. Fred Gardiner (1895–1983), a successful businessman and political figure, had left his post as chairman of the Municipal Board of Metropolitan Toronto in 1962, seven years prior to Jacobs’s arrival in the city. Jacobs now posed her newly extended public persona against the urbanist bequest of Fred Gardiner, in a parable transforming the urban tale of the “Little Red Robin Hood” into an urbanist sibyl of modernity and post-modernity. In the early twentieth century the myth of the Grand Designer had been summed up by heroic slogans, such as “Make no small plans” by Daniel Burnham, or “A city made for speed is a city made for success” by Le Corbusier. While the Garden and the Citadel are environmental myths emanating from the interaction between minds and their physical settings, the Grand Designer is a myth of self-absorption pursuing a one-directional and total vision of a modelled, comprehensive perfection. The Grand Designer is on a quest for the Ideal City at the cost of repudiation, suppression, and subjugation of the Garden, the emblem of randomness, spontaneity, and serendipity. “Growth and

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expansion” was the slogan attributed to Fred Gardiner, nicknamed “Big Daddy” by the Toronto media. “Growth ain’t expansion” was the ultimate message of Jane Jacobs in her unmitigated conflict with the legacy of Big Daddy of Toronto. Fred Gardiner was no Platonic demiurge, nor was he an architect, and his urban planning concerns were different from those that had prevailed during the first half of the twentieth century, when advances in urban planning were made mostly by architects. Among these, Burnham and Le Corbusier were the most notable. Burnham designed several outstanding office towers in the northern United States: the Flatiron Building, a remarkable skyscraper design on a triangular plan, in New York; Union Station, a major train and transportation hub as well as a leisure centre, in Washington, DC; the Continental Trust Company Building, a Beaux Arts office tower constructed with steel structural members and clad with terra-cotta fireproofing that saved it from a major fire in downtown Baltimore in 1904; and a number of sumptuous skyscrapers in Chicago. Similarly, Le Corbusier’s achievements made him one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished architects, largely due to his groundbreaking architectural principles of the terrace gardens, the pilotis, free floor plans, the free façade, and the single long window. They exemplify Cartesian mastery that is most expedient in the design of the static and pensive vertical edifice within the matching solemnity of a masterplan. In contrast to the architectonic concerns in urban design, the fascination of Gardiner – not unlike that of Robert Moses, with whom he was thrilled to be compared – was with metropolitan transportation (Scallan 2012). The shift of attention from towers to the freeways connecting them can be noted in Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, and other leading architects. But architectural genius in verticality does not suffice in guiding horizontal access within cities. Throughout the twentieth century, with expanding suburbs, efficient transportation had become the paramount urban concern of the middle class. In the second half of the twentieth century urban transportation became the dominant consideration of municipal governments in North America and the largest budget item drawing the attention of developers and politicians alike. Increasingly throughout the twentieth century urban malfunctioning came to be related to transportation. In a vicious, spiralling circle politicians channelled ever-increasing funds into expanding the transportation infrastructure serving sprawling suburbs brimming with middle-class voters. Progressively frequent malfunction associated with freeway access had turned into a structural ­urbantransportation dysfunction. Caught up in the spiral was Fred Gardiner, the granddaddy of Toronto whose overriding urban concern was none other than metropolitan transportation. Continuing protests by residents in old Toronto neighbourhoods against an expressway under construction were taking place at the time of Jacobs’s arrival from New York. Initially advanced by Gardiner in the mid-1950s, the

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7.2  Spadina Expressway: Allen Road and cancelled segment, Toronto, 1971. Drawn by Paul Van Pul.

Spadina Expressway was a proposed north-south freeway that would connect downtown Toronto with the suburb of North York and serve Yorkdale, a major shopping-centre project (fig. 7.2). Gardiner put forward the Spadina Expressway project as part of a network of freeways for Metropolitan Toronto, and actual work on the expressway began in 1960. Opposition to the project started before Jacobs’s arrival, and even before construction had begun, but organized protest against Metropolitian Toronto Council in the late 1960s became more efficient owing to her involvement. Citizens’ groups rallied against not only the Spadina project but also all the other freeway projects that were to comprise the regional transportation network. The protests had no impact at first, and the expressway construction went on unabated. In October 1969, however, a protest group that included Jacobs, students, academics, politicians, resident ratepayers, and business people successfully petitioned the Ontario provincial government, until then reluctant to yield (Redway 2014, 43–83). Giving in to the organized public dissent, the

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Ontario premier, Bill Davis, cancelled the unfinished Spadina Expressway in June of 1971, saying famously: “Cities were built for people and not cars. If we are building a transportation system to serve the automobile, the Spadina Expressway would be a good place to start. But if we are building a transportation system to serve people, the Spadina Expressway is a good place to stop” (quoted in Sewell 1993, 68). The Spadina Expressway project and its cancellation (as well as that of the rest of the planned network) illustrate a simple but powerful truth about expanding suburbs. In a purely geographic sense, in a delimited physical environment there are in essence only two fundamental alternatives to accommodate the growth of human habitat: expansion beyond the geographic space or densification of existing habitat within a boundary. Between the variances of these two modes of growth, or their assorted amalgams, there really is no third alternative, short of no growth or of population decline. In geographically expanding cities, urban transportation becomes a critical issue. Between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, urban transportation grew from an innocent and exalted benefit facilitating access, to an unpleasant but necessary service and an acrimonious municipal duty. The essential needs of a metropolis are shelter, employment, health, education, culture, sports and recreation, even entertainment, but transportation was always meant only to facilitate access between them. From a mere facilitator of access to essential services, transportation itself has become the largest single problem in the metropolis that does not address the immediate needs of people. Urban transportation has turned into a necessary evil due to inadvertent urban design of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gardiner’s obsession with a transportation network of elevated freeways and Jacobs’s leadership in its cancellation also point to a transformation in urbanist discourse. Such transformation ought to be understood within the evolutionary urbanist strife between the masculine emphasis upon magnitude and speed and the feminine focus on small-scale human encounter. Such gendered outlook recognizes the psychocultural context of mythology guiding urban evolution. Whereas Gardiner was yet another grand designer captivated by an image of an ideal city, Jacobs can be seen as the feminine spirit of urbanism, its complementarian restatement: “The contemporary view has taken the form of deification, with the phrase ‘What Would Jacobs Do?’ (a play on ‘What Would Jesus Do?’) and description of her as ‘Saint Jane,’ and ‘apostle,’ and a ‘goddess,’ suggesting that her divine wisdom and martial powers appeared spontaneously and fully formed, like Athena from Zeus’s forehead” (Laurence 2016, 3). The question that ought to be asked is whether her late stature had evolved spontaneously or came to be cultivated. A clue is provided in a further account by Peter Laurence: “[S]he harbored feelings of personal guilt for some of her early writings on urban development. Indeed, as she indicated in her letter to [Grady Clay of March 1959], Jacobs not only wrote favorably about a number of

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public housing projects in Philadelphia, but also wrote favorably about suburban development and urban development projects in much of her early writing, in her work for both Amerika and Architectural Forum” (Laurence 2016, 5). Without a doubt, then, Jacobs had undergone a conversion. Yet the common ground to her changing urbanist views could be one constant: the desire to become a spiritual authority, a modern priestess. If so, she fits within an historical continuum of female oracles specifically focused on cities or other forms of the built environment. It was the priestesses, or cults associated with them, who inspired the Minoan civilization on the Mediterranean island of Crete during the Bronze Age, circa 2700 to circa 1500 BCE. The Minoan priestess ritual was performed in sanctuaries in caves or designated open spaces atop mountains, and archaeological finds on Crete point to a prominently gynocentric Minoan culture and religion (Kerényi 1976). An important feature of many Minoan peak sanctuaries, such as the open-air peak sanctuary on Mount Iuktas and the adjacent palace at Knossos, is their alignment with adjacent palaces on a north-south axis (Marketou 1988, 28–31). Another sanctuary, the sacred cave of Kamares at Mount Ida, similarly has a north-south alignment with the palace at Phaistos. Circa 2700 BCE a northsouth orientation could have been attained most expediently by alignment with the star Alpha Draconis, or Thuban to the Egyptians, as the north star (Karetsou 2010). Alpha Draconis is a faint star, and even if it was brighter in 2700 BCE than it is today, it still would have required an observational skill to be identified as the north star. There are no bright stars in the sky in the vicinity of Alpha Draconis. The Egyptians considered the dark area in the night sky in the vicinity of Thuban to be the void around which the rest of the universe revolved. In Egypt, after the burial of a pharaoh, his soul was believed to ascend to the abode of gods, and some Egyptian pyramids were designed specifically for the magical purpose of launching the soul from the pharaoh’s burial place to this celestial void (Hadingham 1984, 10–24). There are no extant written records by the Minoans, but it is fair to presume that, due to the lack of any clearly visible stars about the north celestial pole at the time, common Minoans might have considered the celestial north, a dark area round which the rest of the celestial sphere turns, to be a great void, much as the Egyptians did. The configuration of Minoan ritual places as open-area peak sanctuaries pointing to the north could be explained, therefore, as an expedience to the priestesses linking the void in the sky with the female on Earth (Akkerman 2015). In Plato’s mythical account made in the fourth century BCE, at the founding of Atlantis more than nine thousand years earlier had been the maiden Cleito, mortal wife of the god of sea, Poseidon (Critias 117d). In archaic and classical Greece, shrines such as Delphi followed in the Minoan priestess tradition (Kerenyi 1976). In the Temple of Apollo the oracle of Delphi would exclaim

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prophecies while enduring theia mania, a state of trance. The site in the temple dedicated to the oracle had been assigned in the eighth century BCE, and a priestess, always referred to as the Pythia, assumed the lifelong role of the oracle (Malkin 1987, 17–91). The oracular power of the Pythia during her trance was recalled by Cicero (106–43 BCE) in book 1 of his treatise On Divination, where he asks rhetorically: “And when was there ever an instance of Greece sending any colony to Aeolia, Ionia, Asia, Sicily or Italy, without consulting the Pythian or Dodonaean oracle, or that of Jupiter Hammon?” (Cicero [44 BCE] 1853, 143). According to Alexander John Graham, a historian of ancient Greek colonization, Delphi oracles maintained, in fact, a tradition of ongoing association with colonial expeditions, and it was through this connection that the female oracle became ultimately also the arbiter in the founding of cities (Graham 1999, 26). The duchess Libuše, mythical founder of the Czech Přemyslid dynasty sometime in the eighth century, was one of three sisters said to be endowed with supernatural powers. One sister was proclaimed a healer, another a spell-caster, and Libuše a prophetess. According to the legend, Libuše climbed a rocky cliff high above the Vltava River and prophesied: “Behold, I see a great city whose glory will one day touch the stars” (Wagnerová 2008, 3). Saint Hildegard, a twelfth-century Benedictine abbess (1098–1179) at Bingen on the Rhine, was a polymath, botanist, herbalist, and diviner (Bennett 2001, 317), and one of her visions had an aberrant urbanist cast: “After this I saw the image of a woman as large as a great city, with a wonderful crown on her head and arms from a splendor hung like sleeves, shining from Heaven to earth. Her womb was pierced like a net with many openings, with a huge multitude of people running in and out. She had no legs or feet, but stood balanced on her womb in front of the altar that stands before the eyes of God, embracing it with her outstretched hands and gazing sharply with her eyes throughout all of Heaven” (quoted in Obbard 2012, 30). In the fifteenth century Margery Kempe (c. 1373–1438), daughter of the mayor of the prosperous town of Lynn, Norfolk, in England, turned to religion following ill fortune and subsequent hardship and became a pious Christian. She went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, giving a written account of her religious experiences at various holy sites in Jerusalem. There she went into a religious trance, common to many other pilgrims, and one that later came to be called the Jerusalem Syndrome (Atkinson 1983, 50–63). Margery was perhaps the first to be identified with the syndrome, which is now characterized as a religious obsession or delusion through psychotic experience triggered by arrival at the holy city. Ursula Southeil (c. 1488–1561), better known as Mother Shipton, is said to have been an English soothsayer and prophetess. In a rhymed form she prophesied what could be interpreted as automobiles and skyscrapers (Thiel 2009,

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48). And in 1847 Marie Lataste, a French nun of the Sacred Heart, reportedly had a vision for Paris: She had once a vision on the subject, which she relates in a letter to her director. One day, she says, writing June 2, 1842, “while I was working I felt in my heart a strong attraction which I could not resist, for I found it impossible to be at rest anywhere. I abandoned myself to this attraction, and then I seemed to find myself in a large square in Paris. In the middle of this square I saw a young man standing on a low pillar. He was clothed in a red garment; he had a diadem on his head, and in his hands he held a sheathed sword and a bow. His glances were like lightning, and his lips seemed ready to pour forth menaces. Over his head I saw inscribed, in characters of fire, The Destroying Angel. At this sight, strange feelings of fear, grief, and compassion came over me, and I exclaimed several times, Lord, preserve Paris.” (Thompson 1877, 124)

One of the most celebrated seance mediums of the spiritualist movement during the second half of the nineteenth century was the American Cora Richmond (1840–1923), Howard’s close associate, also known by her other surnames, Hatch and Scott. Reminiscent more of a psychiatric patient of Jung’s than of a mentor of a city planner, on one occasion Cora reportedly said to Howard: “‘I see you in the centre of a series of circles working on something that will be of a great service to humanity.’ That suggestion coming from a woman he regarded as a seer gave him confidence when he came to draw his plan of a Garden City in concentric circles” (Macfadyen [1933] 1970, 11). Cora who, indications are, saw herself as something of a modern Pythia, reportedly told Howard during her visit to London in 1881: “‘[Y]ou have a message to give the world.’ Howard thereafter thought his purpose in life was ‘to put forward [...] practical proposals to uplift society.’ Howard’s desire for reform rested on a solid belief in a God-given purpose of harmony and unity in the universe[,] in the world vision offered by Modern Spiritualism” (Buder 1990, 63). Also a writer of pamphlets whose content was said to have been dictated to her by spirits, Cora Richmond appears as a shared link to both Howard and Jacobs. Such association brings Howard and Jacobs to a single milieu of urban myth: Howard as a pseudo-Platonic proponent of a harmonious utopia; Jacobs as an urban seeress in a lineage starting with the Minoan priestess and ending with Cora Richmond. This twofold association with Cora could be of concern also in light of observations such as one made by the novelist Henry James. Intrigued by Cora’s charismatic personality, James characterized the contents of her trance messages as “a string of [...] arrant platitudes” (Buder 1990, 9n11). On a contextual level, however, Howard and Jacobs, as representatives of two ostensibly competing urbanist outlooks, are the imperfect chaperons of

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the Citadel and the Garden, two allegories that have forged city form from the outset. These allegories are indispensable in the very concept of the city, and thus their place in the evolution of city form seems acutely important. Void and volume, the Garden and the Citadel, the feminine and the masculine faces of city form, projected by human makers, ought to be recognized and celebrated equally and at parity. The history of the city, though, has not been a balanced process of equal representation. Increasingly over centuries, urban voids have become a secondary urban feature, successively subjugated to volume by the self-centred myth of the Grand Designer. Assigning a lesser role to voids in the urban environment appears to be a deformity, a dispossession of features grounded in a feminine allegory, which, at its very origin, was integral to the built form. It may be no far-fetched conjecture that the ongoing feedback between built environments emerging through such dispossession, on the one hand, and humans, on the other hand, yields a corresponding distortion of authentic human nature.

8  Urban Space: Medium or Message?

The story of the struggle to cancel the Spadina Expressway project was somewhat cryptic. Protests against the Spadina Expressway began immediately as construction started in 1967, about a year before Jacobs’s arrival in Toronto. Despite the public protests, the then Ontario premier, John Robarts, did not change his mind about the project. Two years later the cultural critic Marshall McLuhan, as part of his effort to consolidate protests against the expressway, approached Jacobs, now a resident of Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, and beseeched her to join him in the production of a documentary film against the project to galvanize the protest movement, which now carried the label Stop Spadina, Save Our City Co-ordinating Committee (SSSOCCC). In 1971 Bill Davis became the new premier of Ontario. Imploring Premier Davis to annul the expressway project, Marshall McLuhan wrote in a letter of 26 April 1971: “Instead of catching up by matching up with the nineteenth century of American cities, Canada has a unique opportunity to make cities for the seventies. Making, not matching, is an Ontario possibility lost to the U.S.A.” (Plummer 2011). The original budget for the Spadina Expressway was less than $80 million, but by the time almost all the money had been spent, only a portion of the intended freeway was finished, and an additional $150 million would have to be expended to complete the Spadina project alone (Rose 1972, 139). On 3 June 1971 the provincial government of Bill Davis withdrew its support for the expressway, leaving behind only the portion already built, today known as Allen Road. Killing the Spadina project effectively also buried the entire expressway-network transportation plan for Metropolitan Toronto. Deliberate Ambiguity and Contradiction in Urban Space: McLuhan and Venturi Even though it was likely that the provincial government would be forced to cancel the entire freeway-network scheme due to budgetary reasons, the film

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that McLuhan and Jacobs produced, The Burning Would (1970), was instrumental to the growing SSSOCCC movement and accelerated the annulment of the entire expressway-network project. The film and the Spadina protests had been preceded by McLuhan’s book Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man ([1964] 1966), in which he coined his famous aphorism “The medium is the message.” McLuhan identified media as broadly based communication means ranging from language and speech to cars and light bulbs (8–9). To McLuhan, observing the vast increase of urban populations, the twentieth century meant the gradual shifting of attention from substance in interpersonal communication to the means and the modes of mass communication. He pointed out that to the human crowd the medium itself, rather than the content it carried, became the primary focus of attention: messages are perceived according to the medium through which they are conveyed, and their substance becomes secondary. The example of light bulbs and cars shows one extremity in the entire range of McLuhan’s media observations. Light bulbs and cars, of course, are not couriers of articulated messages, but to a human the mode of their usage has a meaning on its own. With his light bulbs and cars example, McLuhan stopped short of addressing the ultimate medium of the vast majority of humans: the built environment and the urban space. Where McLuhan stopped, the architect and urban designer Robert Venturi continued. In his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) Venturi, who later won the Pritzker Prize for Architecture, focused on architectural form as a spatial medium of perception and questioned the meaning carried by the artistic message so created. Said Venturi: “There is no way to separate form from meaning; one cannot exist without the other. There can only be different critical assessments of the major ways through which form transmits meaning to the viewer” (1966, 11). While meaning in a conventional communication medium is aimed to elicit emotional, aesthetic, or reasoned response in recipients, to Venturi meaning in architectural form ought to be different. Only some architecture elicits reasoned response, and to that extent it is through the efficacy of usage of the object it forms. But, to Venturi, that was not the ultimate purpose of contemporaneous architectural form. Whereas in a reasoned message ambiguity is unacceptable, and contradiction of two statements in the same message implies the falsity of at least one of the statements, to Venturi ambiguity and jointure of opposites were vital to architecture. Inadvertently ushering in a definition of postmodern architecture, Venturi saw the emerging purpose of architectural form in the late twentieth century as quite the opposite of rationality and reason: “I speak of a complex and contradictory architecture based on the richness and ambiguity of modern experience, including that experience which is inherent in art. Everywhere, except in architecture, complexity and contradiction have been acknowledged, from Gödel’s proof of ultimate inconsistency in mathematics

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to T.S. Eliot’s analysis of ‘difficult’ poetry and Joseph Albers’ definition of the paradoxical quality of painting” (1966, 16). Venturi viewed traditional architecture as a historical struggle aimed at achieving man-made lucidity by rejecting ambiguity. From antiquity to modernity, this has been exemplified by the architectonic statements made in the design of temples or other buildings of authority that elicit reverence and veneration in religious or civic power. In secular architecture such statements can range from congruity and harmony with the environment to command and dominance (Warburton 2012, 3–20). To the extent that such architectonic statements are about order or power, they are essentially masculine, Apollonian. To Venturi, however, the essence of postmodern architectural form ought to be enigma, deliberate ambiguity, and incongruity. It is in this sense that he defined the message of postmodern architectural form as eclectic and containing contrasting, even contradictory features: I like elements which are hybrid rather than “pure,” compromising rather than “clean,” distorted rather than “straightforward,” ambiguous rather than “articulated,” perverse as well as impersonal, boring as well as “interesting,” conventional rather than “designed,” accommodating rather than excluding, redundant rather than simple, vestigial as well as innovating, inconsistent and equivocal rather than direct and clear. I am for messy vitality over obvious unity. I include the non sequitur and proclaim the duality. I am for richness of meaning rather than clarity of meaning; for the implicit function as well as the explicit function. I prefer “both-and” to “either-or,” black and white, and sometimes gray, to black or white. A valid architecture evokes many levels of meaning and combinations of focus: its space and its elements become readable and workable in several ways at once. (1966, 16)

Contradictory features in postmodern architectural form do not struggle to overpower one another but coexist side by side. This alludes to a feminine rather than a masculine disposition. It follows that an object designed for varied uses, albeit not a courier of an articulated message, may nevertheless convey a statement: a Dionysian expression emanating from a multiplicity of modes through which an object is used or perceived. The message is indeterminate and can be bidirectional when the observer is not a passive viewer but an active participant in forging a range of possible usages of the object. One striking example is Parc de la Villette in Paris, designed in the late twentieth century as part of a project by the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the architects Bernard Tschumi and Peter Eisenman (Tschumi 1988). The architects interspersed follies throughout the park, leaving the visitors to interpret them by becoming active participants through interplay with the objects (Derrida and Eisenman 1997, 125–60).

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The deliberate ambiguity of follies in Parc de la Villette, or Venturi’s definition of postmodern architecture, however, does not lend itself to a straightforward extrapolation to streetscapes, not even as a guide to mainstream urban architecture. Streetscapes have always been primarily the medium of physical access. Premodern urban streetscapes certainly possessed a multiplicity of uses, not the least of them spontaneous outdoor entertainment, but it was only in the twentieth century and later that we realized, in hindsight and largely thanks to Jane Jacobs, that premodern urban space was also the facility of human encounter. That facility was all but stripped from the urban streetscapes of twentieth-century modernity, whereby urban space has been increasingly used and perceived as a means of transportation, command, and control, conditioned by would-be rational efficacy and expediency. Under such circumstances the role of urban streetscapes, as the medium for the communal interaction of humans, has been progressively stymied. Whereas architecture may be said to emphasize the static, vertical object of the built form, urban planning and design, along with landscape architecture, are focused on the horizontal aspects of the built environment that facilitate movement and change. In a generic urban setting the distinction could be characterized by the tension of volume (a masculine projection represented by buildings) against void (a feminine imprint embodied by streetscapes). The notion of the projection of masculinity and femininity in the aesthetic discernment between volume and void in city form follows the outlook of Apollonian and Dionysian dispositions in Greek art, introduced by Nietzsche. Such discernment, further, suggests an archetypal interpretation of city form that is traceable to masculinity and femininity in the archaic origins of the built environment. Yet whereas descriptions of the Ideal City, such as in Aristophanes’s The Birds or in Plato’s Atlantis, had shown urban void as a component commensurate with volume, the following two millennia witnessed the gradual demise of parity between urban void and volume. Twentieth-century masterplans sealed this historical retreat in a transatlantic urban failure, exemplified by Le Corbusier’s urban schemes focused on speed and volume and by North America’s suburban sprawl as an attendant feature of uniformity in geographic space. A view on the failings of twentieth-century city form suggests that, more often than not, they were the result of an excessive focus on edifices, on account of and in sharp contrast to the neglect of urban voids. Obsession with construction projects, with a disregard of streetscape design and the preservation of existing built heritage, was the major trait of twentieth-century urban decline, entirely consistent with masculine projection in the erection of office towers and residential high-rises. All the same, the common denominator of these urban traits was the contrived introduction of greenery into city form: Le Corbusier’s City in the Park, on the one hand, and the front and back yards of North American subdivisions, on the other hand. Urban greenery was largely a

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superficial compensation for the prevalence of automation, repetitiveness, and uniformity in the metropolis of the twentieth century dominated by attempts at expectedness. Against the disingenuous introduction of specious greenery into modern city form stands the convoluted Romanesque streetscape from which greenery is entirely absent. In the walled medieval city open space was at a premium, while unpretentious nature was abundant outside city walls. The medieval city wall of the Romanesque and the Gothic constituted a physical urban-growth boundary within which spatial arrangement of the built environment could hardly accommodate greenery. The disarray of the haphazard streetscapes of the Romanesque town inadvertently facilitated a spatial continuum of unexpectedness, while usually accommodating people and animal traffic throughout the town. Marshall McLuhan on the Decline of Urban Space More than a modicum of contradiction defines the range of urbanist ideas from Jane Jacobs’s dream of small-scale neighbourhoods to the Neoplatonic myth of the Rational City proffered by Ebenezer Howard. Howard’s scheme for judicious urban space as a peaceful path to social harmony was, not only in Jane Jacobs’s view, a delusion responsible for the disappearance of street happenstance. The strength of Jacobs’s observation to the effect that twentieth-century metropolitan decline due to urban-renewal schemes was inspired by Howard’s myth, however, was weakened by her promotion of other urban parables. She did this also in her support of the lore of the metaphorical – certainly unproven – hypothesis that the city was an organic whole (Jacobs 1961, 432). The claim, articulated by Marcel Poëte and Patrick Geddes, that the city is a biotic entity is an appealing surmise, but Jacobs employed it more as an allegory than a subject for further scrutiny. It is, however, precisely through the allegories they adopted that Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard ought to be seen as largely defining twentieth-century urbanist discourse. This discourse has pitched Howard’s desire to fashion built environments through foresight and premeditated planning against Jacobs’s urbane outlook to see dynamic streetscapes that facilitate spontaneous human encounter from within felicitous neighbourhoods. One attempted hybrid of these two apparently contradictory outlooks has been the commercial real estate scheme of New Urbanism, a version of Howard’s idea with walkable local access in exclusionary suburbia, disengaged from the rest of the city (Frampton 2005). Jacobs’s sneer at the word new involving urban initiatives is a dim view of urban development that applies to New Urbanism as a latter-day merchandising aspiration for more urban sprawl. Referring to a development plan of her own time in Manhattan, Jacobs memorably quipped that “in its very nature [it] is a track for the gravy train. It hands

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great chunks of the city over to officially anointed barons [...] Whether their motives are pure or greedy is beside the point” (quoted in Laurence 2007). It is doubtful that her view of underhanded municipal links to the land-development industry was any different after she moved to Canada, but in her fight against the Spadina Expressway she refrained from such accusation. It was Marshall McLuhan, Jacobs’s brother in arms during the struggle for the preservation of Toronto’s old neighbourhoods, who supplemented her observation by his own one-liner: “The most spectacular and successful, but unseen, hijack has been the takeover of the North American city by the commercial developers” (Kilbourn 1984, 324). Tracing the very origins of the transatlantic urban explosion of the twentieth century following such comments, one might question to what extent urban development since Howard’s garden city has been the result of the accommodation of special interests within and outside cities. This is a far cry from presenting contemporary city form as the product of a highbrow struggle between genuine urbanist ideas. The aesthetic dilemma between void and volume in city form, at our own particular point in urban history, culminates thus in the further, ethical implications for urban planning and design, standing against pressures from downtown property owners, suburban developers, the automobile-driving public, and municipal administrators. The prevalence of invasive gentrification, for example, has occurred not necessarily due to carefully prepared planning initiatives but rather due to interests of property owners downtown or in the inner city and of large investors, responding to or enticing upscale demand. Throughout the twentieth century, housing and automobile manufacturing, the largest consumer-product sectors of the North American economy, have increasingly become clients of corporate welfare. The beneficiary of sprawling suburbia, of course, has been not only the North American automobile and mortgage industry but also the much less conspicuous local companies of developers, landowners, and builders. A question could be asked whether the sweetheart deals between Big Bill Thompson and the Chicago underworld of the early twentieth century were a single exception or an ominous sign of things to come. Both Jacobs and McLuhan were pointing to a mellower but wholesale conflict of interests within twentieth-century municipal administrations. The sins against urban space in twentieth-century North America occurred in suburban development much as in the old urban neighbourhoods that became the prey of speculators later in the twentieth century. No less disconcerting might have been the twentieth-century proposals for new cities. Absurdly, at the height of the Scientific Revolution, designers such as Daniel Burnham, Le Corbusier, and Lucio Costa were often guided by self-centred myths, largely extraneous to the needs of human communities. Common to almost all grand designers of the twentieth century were

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personality aberrations, including documented mood disorders. In a “subliminal state of Narcissus trance” twentieth-century urban design of grand schemes yielded arterial roads and urban freeways in a self-defeating fixation on speed transportation (McLuhan [1964] 1966, 15). The legacy of such schemes has been mainly the disappearance of urban space as a medium for human encounter, the effluence of placelessness, and the eclipse of humanness in the metropolis. Henri Lefebvre: Production of Space and the Unplanned Place The Spadina Expressway protests had a transatlantic context. The Toronto urban dissent paled against the escalating urban turmoil that had been confronting political elites in Europe and the United States, culminating in 1968. On 4 April 1968 Martin Luther King, leader of the African American civil rights movement, was assassinated, triggering urban riots across the United States. Urban protest movements in communist Eastern Europe led to the Prague Spring, a short-lived return to an open society, which was violently suppressed by a Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968. The same year, in what was then West Germany, urban violence in Frankfurt by the anarchist Baader-Meinhof Group set ablaze department stores, and a leftist student leader was shot in an assassination attempt in Berlin. In France a major students’ and workers’ uprising brought the entire country to a standstill, and the French president was forced to seek temporary refuge at a French military base in Germany. The French unrest had begun with a student sit-in on 22 March 1968 in the administration building of the Paris Nanterre University. When the student demands to publicize their rejection of capitalism and consumerism were met by the authorities, the protest ended. But the event triggered further student rallies mixed with violence, and on 2 May authorities shut down the university, prompting fierce demonstrations largely centred on Paris. By 10 May, crowds throughout the city had erected barricades in a confrontation that brought hundreds of arrests and resulted in numerous injuries. Among the major advocates of the student uprising was Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991), an urban sociologist and a philosopher at Nanterre. The Paris events of 1968 shaped Lefebvre’s urbanist outlook to a great extent, resulting in the 1974 publication of La Production de l’espace, later translated into English as The Production of Space (1991). Lefebvre’s argument is that spatialization in the built environment has always constituted an imposition of social values upon the environment, an act which he called “production of social space.” Lefebvre argued that, as the social product of humans, urban space in turn affects humans’ spatial behaviour and perception. The impact of social values upon built form, to Lefebvre, had been occurring since antiquity. This had a particular meaning in regard to the spatial

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differentiation by gender: “All historical societies have diminished the importance of women and restricted the influence of the female principle. The Greeks reduced the woman’s station to that of the fertility of a field owned and worked by her husband. The female realm was in the household: around the shrine or hearth; around the omphalos, a circular, dosed and fixed space; or around the oven – last relic of the shadowy abyss. Women’s social status was restricted just as their symbolic and practical status was – indeed, these two aspects were inseparable so far as spatiality (spatial practice) was concerned” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 247–8). The masculine aspect in the return impact of built form upon mind has expressed itself, since time immemorial, in the exploitation of space for surveillance, command, and control in the interest of acquisition or retention of power. To Lefebvre, this spatial quest had always led to a desperate attempt to control the uncontrollable. The interaction between humans and a built form thus manipulated could not be subdued indefinitely, Lefebvre points out, and ultimately escapes control. It was the impudent belief of those who through power had initially forged urban space that “also serves as a tool of thought and of action; that in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power; yet that, as such, it escapes in part from those who would make use of it. The social and political [...] forces which engendered this space now seek, but fail, to master it completely; the very agency that has forced spatial reality towards a sort of uncontrollable autonomy now strives to run it into the ground, then shackle and enslave it” (Lefebvre [1974] 1991, 26). One of the tools to control humans in urban space has been what Lefebvre called the uni-functional division of urban space. The origins of such division of urban space, commonly known as traditional zoning, can be traced not only to Greek antiquity but to perhaps even earlier, Bronze Age Egypt and Mesopotamia (Moeller 2016, 249–300; Adams 1981, 141–55). In this way urban space has gradually become functionalized and stripped of opportunity to provide a measure of ambiguity, perceptual stimulation, or, generally, spontaneous appropriation by its casual users. To Lefebvre, urban space had fallen “under the sway of those that have manipulated it so as to render it uni-functional [...] The more space is functionalized [...] the less susceptible it becomes to appropriation, because in this way it is removed from the sphere of lived time” ([1974] 1991, 356). An entire range of feelings or sentiments that a human dweller of a city casually endures, clearly, cannot be easily associated with the uni-functionality in the division of urban space. Increasingly, thus there is no place in the metropolis with which feelings or human sentiment may be associated. Lefebvre had self-identified as a Marxist thinker, but his observations of urban space have no Marxist doctrinal assumptions and rather seem to reflect and appeal to reason.

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Lefebvre’s notion of uni-functional division of urban space speaks directly to Norberg-Schulz’s notion of loss of place as an inherent failure of the twentieth-century metropolis (Stanek 2011, 136). A hundred years earlier, Friedrich Nietzsche had remarked in chapter 4 of his Gay Science: “It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets [...] An insight is needed (and that probably very soon) as to what is specially lacking in our great cities namely, quiet, spacious, and widely extended places for reflection, places with long lofty colonnades for bad weather [...] for us godless ones to be able to think our thoughts in them. We want to have ourselves translated into stone and plant, we want to go for a walk in ourselves when we wander in these halls and gardens” (Nietzsche [1882] 1974, 224–5). Many urban parks and squares, as well as suburban gardens, deliberately planned or designed, only augment their own subordinate standing within city form, in the North American winter city in particular. Edward Relph called such locales inauthentic. It is, however, the guileless space in the contemporary city, the unplanned place, emerging inadvertently but representing the pre-rational, the unadulterated, and the authentic, that Relph alluded to as a genuine place (1976, 79–121). The occasion to allow an unplanned place to re-emerge from within city form as a conduit for reflection and authenticity is a call that addresses issues beyond the range of urban planning. Property interests, sometimes paraded as public interests, have come to justify the proliferation of gaudy and preordained spaces, often sheltered and under surveillance. Yet this is how placelessness in the twentieth-century metropolis has emerged. The unplanned place, though, often a very small leftover space between buildings, of no qualitative value to property owners or developers, has become the “reverse side” of the city, often addressed as a place of urban decay. To mainstream community a place of urban decay is also a place of contempt. But the emergence of a place of contempt in the city is ancillary to the loss of place (Solà-Morales 2014) and not necessarily to urban decay. The place of contempt as an urban feature and the loss of place as an urban process seem, paradoxically, to reflect each other in urban space and time, respectively, and quite unrelatedly to a deliberate plan or the lack thereof. Perhaps one of the best expressions of both these spatial and temporal idiosyncrasies is Jean-Paul Sartre’s psychoanalytic observation of the regimented city form as a place of contempt, in his 1938 novel, Nausea: They come out of their offices after their day of work, they look at the houses and squares with satisfaction, they think it’s their city, a good, solid bourgeois city. They aren’t afraid, they feel at home. All they have ever seen is trained water running from taps, light which fills bulbs when you turn on the switch, half-breed, bastard trees held up with crutches. They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything

Urban Space: Medium or Message?  213 happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m. They are peaceful, a little morose, they think about Tomorrow, that is to say, simply, a new today; cities have only one day at their disposal and every morning it comes back exactly the same. (Sartre [1938] 1964, 158).

The entire mainstream urban space and much of the middle-class community occupying it are evidently the butt of Sartre’s scorn. As pegs in the mechanistic milieu of the twentieth century’s metropolis people appear to be losing their humanness. The only place in the city where the ardent witness clings to remnants of his own humanity is in the unadulterated, forgotten section of the city, in the place of abandon and decay, the “reverse side” of the city. In Sartre’s psychoanalytic reflection the place of urban decay is a refuge where authenticity has trumped the mendacity of urban regimentation, the one place that does not hide ugliness and disgust but displays them as pure qualities. As ­opposed to ­urban greenery, a constitutent part of the mechanized and automated ­metropolis, the place of decay and of contempt to the mainstream is also the last vestige of urban authenticity: I am on the curb of the Rue Paradis, beside the last lamp-post. The asphalt ribbon breaks off sharply. Darkness and mud are on the other side of the street. I cross the Rue Paradis. I put my right foot in a puddle of water, my sock is soaked through; my walk begins [...] I am cold, my ears hurt; they must be all red. But I no longer feel myself; I am won by the purity surrounding me; nothing is alive, the wind whistles, the straight lines flee in the night. The Boulevard Noir does not have the indecent look of bourgeois streets, offering their regrets to the passers-by. No-one has bothered to adorn it: it is simply the reverse side [...] The town has forgotten it. Sometimes a great mud-coloured truck thunders across it at top speed. No one even commits any murders here; want of assassins and victims [...] The Nausea has stayed down here, in the yellow light. (Sartre [1938] 1964, 24–6)

It is instructive to view Sartre’s description from the perspective of Carl Jung’s archetypes and Nietzsche’s genderized outlook. Postulating voids as Dionysian and edifices as Apollonian features of the city, as spatial allegories suggesting the projection of cerebral or physical human attributes upon city form, might be helpful. As opposed to the narcissistic projection of the grand designer upon city form, these figurations are not centred on one individual but offer a universal archetype of human minds within their built environments. In an extension of such Jungian outlook to Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis in Nausea, the city’s place of decay might turn out to be none other than the urban subconscious.

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Superscale and the City without Streets Twentieth-century urban space has largely become the medium of motor transportation on a premise that grew from euphoria into belief in a necessary evil. Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), the French counterpart of Marshall McLuhan in cultural and media criticism, pointed out that automation in the urban environment during the twentieth century had increasingly led to automatism in human behaviour. The dream of a world dominated through automation, in Baudrillard’s view, leads to automatism in individuals. It goes hand in hand with loss of authenticity and with turning participants in the world into mere spectators, resulting in a human crisis across the urban community (Baudrillard 1988, 166–84). Automatism in human behaviour as countering, or entirely undercutting, human authenticity could in large part be attributed to mechanized motor transportation, perhaps more so than to any other facet of our automated metropolitan infrastructure. Speed and automation, matched by burgeoning malfunction, have become features increasingly inherent in city form. Paul Virilio, a contemporary urbanist and cultural critic, shows that the pursuit of automation following the Technological Revolution of 1870–1914 has led to a universally escalating attempt at optimization and to increasing reliance upon speed and automation itself ­(Virilio 2005). The spiralling efforts at optimization, and the attendant, increasing reliance upon speed and automation have been in mutual feedback with growing urban infrastructure impairment. The frenzy of urban crowds within twentieth-century city form, as the collective attempt of humans optimizing their returns in the city through speed, automation, and malfunction, has become the urban superconscious. On this view, systemic urban dysfunction has been repeatedly patched over by the use of increased automation, speed, and expansion – the very same means that had helped bring about dysfunction within city form in the first place. During the second half of the twentieth century the intensification of automation, speed, and sprawl caused the dysfunction to extend. Furthermore, the place of the individual within the urban community largely remained a missing link in the city form of the twentieth century, as Michael Poulton pointed out (1991). In the sprawling cities of North America the contradiction between physical accessibility and transportation has become acute. Half a century ago the notion of urban access was the topic of Lefebvre’s other book published in the wake of the 1968 student uprising, Le Droit à la ville. Lefebvre introduced the call for “right to the city” as “transformed and renewed access to urban life.” Yet in the ensuing medley of interpretations it has become unclear what his catchphrase specifically meant (Purcell 2002). Physical access itself within the city has been anything but egalitarian, and the coincidence of deterioration of urban access, on the one hand, and the loss of place in the city, on the other hand, suggests that

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8.1  Metropolitan access concept, diagram no. 5, Howard’s Garden City, 1898

both occurrences of urban decline are intertwined. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s companion, expressed this view in observing Brasília as a metropolis facilitating transportation at the cost of human encounter. Calling Brasília a city without streets, de Beauvoir’s comment was made even more pertinent in the context of later critique of Le Corbusier’s urbanism (Beauvoir 1992, 273; Dunnett 2000). Throughout history, access and encounter came hand in hand in the city where the street and the market square facilitated both functions. Twentieth-century city form, in its reliance on automation and speed, and the repeated attempts to preserve spatial coherence, safety, and security in its midst, detached the attributes of urban access and human encounter from one another (fig. 8.1). The twentieth-century myth of the Rational City, epitomized in geographic space by the masterplan, and by speed in its temporal features, was an attempt at a surprise-free city – automated, uniform, and universal, at times also celebrating a “grand designer” behind it.

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Automation, uniformity, and universality in city form emanate from the planning for and maintenance of an urban superscale infrastructure of office and residential high-rise buildings and of freeways and overpasses, where change, variety, and diversity are considered disruptive. Jane Jacobs’s lament of little shops, grocery stores, and neighbourhood cafés that had been pushed out of traditional neighbourhoods was also a condemnation of the conquest of human-scale streetscapes by superscale infrastructure. The large-scale strategic plan as an overall metropolitan framework, inspired by the legacies of Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier, however, is here to stay, and the necessity of speed transit in the contemporary metropolis can hardly be questioned. But in replacing the comprehensive masterplan that had attempted to address myriad details through command and control, urban strategic thought has been focusing more recently on integrated transportation plans that recognize priorities in access modes and incorporate them accordingly (Newman and Kenworthy 2015, 169–200). The twentieth-century hierarchy of streets in the North American metropolis, favouring the automobile, is presently starting to be complemented by a hierarchy of access modes, whereby, to advocates of human scale in the city, the most preferred of all such modes, in downtown areas in particular, is the street-level gait (Hass-Klau 2003, 189–99). Recognition of gait as the primary mode of urban access is of crucial urban value. A street walk is the common denominator of all access, barring that of the very frail and the disabled, and thus it is a mode that facilitates the access needs of almost everyone. Clearly, an outlook addressing access needs contrasts significantly with that espousing transportation demand. A need is not a want, and “access to urban life” ought to be, first and foremost, the right of the most rudimentary of all urban-access modes – walking in the city. Such right can be implemented through infrastructure, the cost of which is minute in comparison to that of urban-transportation megaprojects. Human gait, whether casual or purposeful, confers an element of life and organic change upon the streetscape. Over two millennia ago Aristotle forged his world view as a reflection of change observable in the living nature. It is emblematic that the prominent physical feature of Aristotle’s Lyceum in ancient Athens was the peripatos (board-walk) where philosophical discourse took place. On the board-walk of the Lyceum, walking and pensiveness complemented each other. Walking in the city, a biosocial expression of change, represents an effervescent contrast to urban automation, uniformity, and superscale. In the city form of pre-industrial societies, variety, diversity, and human scale were inevitable due to a lack of technology that could enable rapid construction of monumental projects. In modern cities, the design to human scale, upholding variety and diversity, has all but disappeared for exactly the opposite reason. Postmodernist architecture has been afforded expression mainly thanks to new materials and technology that never existed previously. But, while late advances in physical movement in urban space have been focused largely on

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metropolitan expressways and on high-speed or light-rail transit, no similar level of sophistication has been accorded to urban voids and to street-level human gait in cities. If urban voids are to be successful as conduits of human access, they must be built primarily to human scale. Superscale architecture and high-speed traffic are consistent with one another but are often also a fundamental affront to human movement, human scale, and discerning perception. New materials and technologies, employed in whimsical architecture and in high-speed transportation infrastructure, ought to find their way to small-scale applications at pedestrian precincts, addressing the challenges of inclement weather. Scorching summer heat or winter wind chill in urban niches ought to be addressed as creatively as they have been in the architecture and transportation of the superscale. Heated sidewalks have been installed throughout Norway and Iceland. Snowmelt systems in public spaces have been introduced in Michigan and Illinois. Cooling materials for rooftops or pavements through urban heat islands have been employed in numerous world regions. In winter cities too, urban space can turn from being an adorned transport medium or a mere conduit of traffic to being a destination in its own right, where the steps of people and affirmative human encounter carve a place in the city. Towards a Neo-Romanesque Streetscape Design No one in their right mind would install an automatic door in their home unless they were disabled. And uniform subdivision development, the epitome of twentieth-century North American suburbia, is today considered an affront to most, not the least to those who reside in them. But half a millennium ago, Saint Thomas More, in book 2, chapter 1, of his Utopia, presented superscale, automation, and uniformity as the ideal mark of emerging modernity: He that knows one of their towns knows them all, they are so like one another, except where the situation makes some difference. I shall therefore describe one of them; and none is so proper as Amaurot [...] Their buildings are good, and are so uniform that a whole side of a street looks like one house. The streets are twenty feet broad; there lie gardens behind all their houses; these are large but enclosed with buildings that on all hands face the streets; so that every house has both a door to the street, and a back door to the garden. Their doors have all two leaves, which, as they are easily opened, so they shut of their own accord.

In the post-medieval world where narrow, chaotic streetscapes were awash with refuse and where fear of the unpredictable was present in the all-encompassing Dionysian nature, there emerged the coveted Apollonian ideal of uniformity, predictability, and automation. It was at Miletus, Priene, and Alexandria, but also in the planned new towns of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where the Dionysian met the Apollonian. It was also

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from this meeting of opposites within the urban milieu that More’s Utopia, Descartes’s rationalism, and Locke’s empiricism emerged, founding the Enlightenment and modern thought. Such historic reflection challenges the postmodern city form into seeking an opportunity for the mingling of uniformity with randomness, of automation with spontaneity, of predictability with positive surprise, of superscale with human scale and human interaction. But urban design solutions, just as architectural styles, can hardly be applied uniformly across an entire city. All the same, criticism of architectural or urban design proclivities cannot usually apply across the board indiscriminately. The City Beautiful movement, despite all the misgivings one may have about it, did much for monumental design in the United States, leaving behind superb waterside promenades, stately plazas, and classicist buildings housing civic and cultural centres. Chicago Lakefront, specifically intended to serve also adjacent poor neighbourhoods, or Cleveland’s Mall, a vast public space consisting of a large parkland area flanked by the city’s major civic and cultural edifices, are perhaps the most prominent examples of the movements’s favourable impact on urban design. Notwithstanding Jane Jacobs’s dim view of them, American garden cities and suburbs of the early twentieth century, too, were inspiring environments. Yet not even the most ardent supporters of the City Beautiful or the Garden City could insist on an entire city being built in their praiseful style. Following on some of Beatley’s creative ideas in sustainable urban design, the priority design for pedestrians, in particular, ought to be considered for those urban voids that have retained a modicum of human scale (Beatley and Manning 1997, 40–85). Human scale, of course, is not only about the size of buildings; it is also about environmental attributes linked to time as much as to space – the speed and aural qualities of objects, cars in particular, in the street environment. Successful allocation and design to human scale in small environments, to contrast and complement the existing urban superscale, brings the Dionysian and Apollonian features of city form, and the humans within it, into multiple dynamic contexts. The unhappy result thus far of the City Beautiful and the Garden City legacies has been the suppression of affirmative surprise in the built environment. The attempt for a safe, controlled, and surprise-free city form has been pursued through wide, transparent streetscapes. This attempt resulted in a superficial warrant of transportation safety and personal security. Continuing exposure to a regulated, controlled, and predictable environment constitutes sensory deprivation, dulling perspicacity and retarding creativity. In historic cities of Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, Romanesque streets are about the same width as the North American back alley (fig. 8.2). The narrowness of such city street is due not only to reasons related to constrictions on land but also – in southerly locations – to deliberate design aimed at protecting the pedestrian from scorching summer heat. The narrowness of a winter city’s back alley has a corresponding mitigating effect in

Urban Space: Medium or Message?  219

8.2  Via Serafino Balestra, Como, Italy. Photograph by Alena Valentová.

the winter: warmer temperatures in the alley than in the open streetscape. Opportunely, it is this urban climatic feature of the narrow alley that has yielded a charming street environment in premodern cities, facilitating dense pedestrian movement and residential population, while in the North American winter city it has turned the back alley into a hub of crime. Adaptive design of at least some back alleys in North American downtown precincts is an open-ended occasion, the success of which would manifest in increasing pedestrian movement all year round and in reduced blight and crime. Careful back-lane and street design could confer the same effect on the winter city’s downtown, as it did on the historic centres of European cities: safety and aesthetic appeal, drawing the mainstream community during the daytime as well as after hours. As a narrow street canyon, the downtown back alley has a significant design potential for accommodating and encouraging pedestrian traffic. Whereas

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automotive transportation has largely delineated the modern metropolis, it was the urban place – the squares, street corners, and sites bringing humans into a casual, single fold – that facilitated the progress of urban communities and the public sphere throughout history. It is, however, the peculiarity of contemporary urban access, with its motorized automotive fashion, that has led to the loss of place in the modern metropolis. With the absence of affirmative human encounter in urban space, the loss of place, particularly in winter cities, can be seen as attributable also to the lack of opportunity to walk in the open air. Well-intentioned, step-by-step design manuals for pedestrian precincts can be useful (e.g., Ewing and Bartholomew 2013), but transforming the city’s downtown precincts into a real heart of the city, into a communal place, is precisely the challenge of integrating the Dionysian and the Apollonian in an urban milieu. Randomness and surprise can be brought into some streetscapes, while ensuring safety, security, and comfort in access. Change, variety, and diversity in chosen streetscapes can bring the ambience of hybrid interaction in a flow of affirmative human experience, even though not each and every street in the city can or should fulfil such an expectation. A lead article in a September 2012 issue of MacLean’s, Canada’s news magazine, pointed out that depression in young adults in Canada was approaching an epidemic level. Such worrisome observation ought to be juxtaposed with the acknowledged need for winter sunlight exposure and the conjecture that human movement through open space is integral to, and a deeply ingrained feature of, cerebral development. There is ample evidence pointing to the cumulative health risks involved in physical inactivity and a shielded lifestyle tracked to motor vehicle dependency, in suburbia specifically. Yet the mounting evidence of physical and mental health problems associated with a sedentary, automotive, and sheltered lifestyle, to which winter cities as well as urban heat islands are particularly vulnerable, has not stopped governments from subsidizing vast suburban projects that entice just such urban regime. Central areas of major North American winter cities, too, still cling to their twentieth-century skywalks or underground passageways, sheltering pedestrians from vital daylight. Contrastively, there has been a meaningful shift of focus in urban planning and design towards walking in the city in the open air, not the least due to the recognition that, by reducing street-level pedestrian movement, skywalks and underground walkways are also counterproductive to safety. In North American cities along and north of the forty-fifth parallel, where seasonal changes in daylight length are pronounced, the challenge has yet to be tackled. Scholarly evidence points to an apparent decrease in seasonal affective disorder and to a lesser incidence of other mood disorders among outdoor – as opposed to indoor – workers in northern latitudes (Hahn et al. 2011).The extrapolation of the peril of continuous sheltering of people under the pretext of harsh weather,

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as well as the benefit of outdoor pedestrian movement, in the winter specifically, is not difficult to make. The wind chill on a January night in Holland or the scorching summer heat of southern Europe is no less distressing than the winter cold on a Canadian street. Yet where outdoor pedestrian movement in North American cities has been gradually minimized over the last century due to urban design for automobile access, and owing to the ill-advised unconditional demand for climatic comfort, the historically compact European city form has been largely conducive, still today, to outdoor street walking. City form and walking in the open air are two considerations that bring the notion of extreme weather within a historical context that cannot be ignored. If for this reason only, European cities of the pre-industrial age, built to human scale upon wisdom gained over centuries of observation, trial, and error, ought to provide inspiration to North American urban policy and design. Since the late twentieth century, walking and walkability downtown have been drawing the attention of landscape architects and urban planners, mainly in the context of historic precincts, sporadic shopping zones, or recreation trails (Kärrholm 2008). Designing for pedestrians, however, ought not to be aimed only at recreational or shopping experience. Within the framework of sustainable urban development, in the winter city in particular, designed sidewalks and open-air walkways ought to become part and parcel of existing transportation networks, as outlined in Toronto’s Walking Strategy, for example (City of Toronto 2009). Such an approach inverts the conventional urban transportation hierarchy, favouring open-air walking as an egalitarian mode of access, and one that is also the most preferred in selected niches of the downtown or elsewhere in the city (Toth 2012; Burden 2016). Conclusion: From a Place of Contempt to a Place in the City Human scale in streetscapes inevitably means the reduction in volume and speed of automobile traffic. Unfortunately this simple truism has been blurred by the notion of “eyes on the street,” Jacobs’s famous aphorism calling for public presence in urban space as the best guarantee for street-crime prevention. Oscar Newman further amplified Jacobs’s celebrated catchphrase in his concept of defensible space, whereby pedestrians in streetscape constitute “natural surveillance” (Newman 1976, 89–106). With Newman’s elaboration, the notion itself becomes an expression of urban fear. True, Jacobs wanted to see streetscapes more as a playground rather than a confrontation zone in need of surveillance. But expression of urban fear of the outsider is undeniable in Jacobs, amplified by Newman. Given the political turmoil in late nineteenth-century Europe, Howard’s diagrams of the garden city, ostensibly warranting safety and security, address an allied urban angst: the fear of the urban poor.

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Sigmund Freud sourced existential anxiety associated with urban survival to a mind-environment ambience that he called the uncanny (das Unheimliche). He associated it with his description of an urban scene in northern Italy, quite possibly in a charming medieval town near the Austrian border. Any such town would have precisely the kind of convoluted Romanesque streetscapes that had been the locus of Camillo Sitte’s admiring urban-design analysis. Freud’s portrayal includes such a streetscape, but void of pedestrians, in the town’s red-light district. Far from describing the joy of walking in the city, Freud’s account involves the panic of a stranger fearing for his life: As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt. Nothing but painted women were to be seen at the windows of the small houses, and I hastened to leave the narrow street at the next turning. But after having wandered about for a time without enquiring my way, I suddenly found myself back in the same street, where my presence was now beginning to excite attention. I hurried away once more, only to arrive by another detour at the same place yet a third time. Now, however, a feeling overcame me which I can only describe as uncanny, and I was glad enough to find myself back at the piazza I had left a short while before, without any further voyages of discovery. (Freud [1919] 1955, 237)

At the absence of other humans on the street, even the most charming of urban precincts becomes uncanny to a person being watched and aware of it. The ambience of the uncanny in such an environment seems to be evoked by the apprehension associated with a primeval anxiety or allied (as Freud intimates) with the fear of castration or rape. Both Jacobs and Newman, in their call for defensive streetscapes, much as Howard in his diagrams, expressed the fear for survival mixed with an unacknowledged mythic desire for surveillance. The expectation of urban dwellers, indeed, is that the metropolis, first and foremost, will warrant their survival, their existence in the city. This is nothing but a facet of the myth of the Citadel. After all, it is in the very core of the Citadel to protect, to defend, and to warrant community continuity. To a careful observer, one that Sartre exemplified in Nausea, however, the cost of existence in the city is the loss of essence of being in the city. The myth of the Citadel is in the background of the call for “eyes on the street,” an allegory that since time long past has accompanied the founding and growth of human settlements, and that has been at work also through the twentieth century’s conflicting urbanist standpoints. Myth and urban fear engaged both Howard and Jacobs in the forging of their urbanist notions and remain unescapable features of our own built environments today. Thus, the grievance against leading twentieth-century urbanists and urban planners as confounding

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urban reality with myth ought to be recast. Already at the end of the twentieth century the view had been presented to the effect that exposure to underlying myths is, in fact, what is needed in contemporary urban design (Aravot 1995). After all, myth has been integral to city form throughout its long history. The grievance, therefore, ought to be recast in the affirmative. Whereas the myth of the Citadel has come to dominate city form, the myth of the Garden has over centuries become subdued and suppressed. The allegoric task of contemporary urban design, thus, is not so much to confront urban fear, as it is to reintroduce safety as a biproduct of the myth of the Garden in city form – a stretch of a streetscape emphasizing variety and change over sameness and solemnity, a small urban niche addressing human scale and joyful surprise over superscale and automation. They all bolster human engagement and with it pedestrian presence that yields safety and security as a by-product. Walking, the most rudimentary human movement, is a necessary component in a process towards urban vitality, contrasting uniformity, automation, and superscale, without denying their necessity in the contemporary metropolis. Gait is the quintessence of human disposition in urban time and space because it encompasses change, variety, and diversity. Not solely as a mode of occasional urban recreation but as a pronounced means of access in cities, walking can help bring back human spontaneity, creativity, and serendipity. Empowering human gait while reducing or eliminating automobile traffic in select tracts of the downtown area, or other parts of the city, can help address the downtown-suburb vicious circle of spiralling dysfunction (Newman and Kenworthy 2015, 141–68). Access in downtown areas ought to aim at reduced motor transportation and increased active transportation. In addition, vehicle-sharing arrangements, either simultaneously by travellers to the same destination or over a daytime period where travellers share cars, or bicycles, thus also sharing travel costs, can reduce cars in downtown areas (Kent 2014). A car-free precinct, in turn, could be more amenable to human-scale design, facilitating a walking entry and egress at street level into and out of people’s daytime destinations. Alasdair Jones has shown (2014, 87–142) how street-level gait and other forms of active transportation helped revive the notion of public space as an authentic urban concept in London. In the North American winter city it is the back alley and the parking lot that afford perhaps the most immediate opportunity for conversion into reinvigorated public space, and possibly also the greatest potential for dense, open-air pedestrian movement downtown. So far, mostly an emblematic leftover space, usually a depository of rubbish, assorted appliances, and fixtures as well as an epithet for service-vehicle parking and back entrances, the back alley offers a potential of place that, through adaptation into an open-air pedestrian mall and a playground, could become safe and attractive. Some cities, notably Seattle, have taken notice of this, showing that contemporary urban design can

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significantly reduce or eliminate downtown menace by enticing scores of pedestrians into back alleys that have been turned into appealing passageways, thereby also conferring security and safety upon them. Since they protect from wind chill better than do most other urban outdoor spaces, winter-city back alleys turned into pedestrian malls can also have some of their segments converted into children’s activity areas. A Neo-Romanesque streetscape could see storefronts redirected onto newly designed lanes with lighting fixtures and street furniture appropriate for moving or lingering pedestrians. The adaptation of back alleys into pedestrian malls through measures such as custom street lighting and designed street furniture can transform them into magic places of urban allure. Their metamorphosis into serendipitous environments might be worthwhile even at the cost of introducing such mock textures as false stone ramparts or rubberized surfaces for children and seniors. North American municipal policy has changed direction from urban renewal, by now a term that has fallen into much disrepute, to neighbourhood improvement. If neighbourhood improvement is to be a genuine plan for neighbourhood action, rather than yet another label covering up for invasive gentrification, it must seek not only the improvement of edifices but also the preservation and enhancement of existing niches, lanes, leftover spaces, and other voids in the inner city. Thoughtful design for street-level pedestrian movement in the inner city, and the retention of its incumbent residential population, can allow for access and for small-scale, casual human encounter at the same time. Anatomically, modern humans have retained an identical body structure for hundreds of thousands of years, with human perception and thought having evolved along the premise of human scale. The superscale dimension of the built environment of the last century is unprecedented and must find a mitigating link with the dimensions of the human body. Such a link can be sought in looking back at medieval streetscapes and Romanesque towns, particularly when addressing the physical improvement of some of the small areas within the contemporary metropolis. Neighbourhood improvement and smart growth, or “Compact City,” the contemporary strategy for sustainable urban development, ought to consider incorporating elements of the Romanesque built environment if they are set to enliven urban streetscapes towards less automation and more authenticity. In the medieval city, street arches, for example, were used to facilitate above-ground movement between adjacent buildings or to support building walls, preventing them from collapsing (fig. 8.3). The arches, however, had an obvious aesthetic effect as well. Many back alleys could incorporate such design elements for similar purposes. Overhead wiring, transformers, and many other municipal utilities and hardware can be placed in overhead arches, which at the same time provide an affirmative aesthetic feature. Furthermore, throughout the twentieth century, small urban squares all but disappeared from North American cities, often modified into intersections

Urban Space: Medium or Message?  225

8.3  Overhead arches with concealed wiring at Kramářská, Znojmo, Czech Republic. Photograph by Alena Valentová.

now as lethargic as the traffic lights that control them. Yet Sitte’s groundbreaking analysis of medieval squares was extended later in the twentieth century in a typology of urban squares by the Luxembourg architect Rob Krier ([1975] 1979, 30–50). Similar to back alleys being selected for pedestrian malls, parking lots, the eyesore of the North American city, have been recently hand picked for conversion along Krier’s typology (Czerniak 2013). Urban squares lined with small shops and colonnaded walkways for inclement weather are one such mode of conversion. Downtown parking lots turned into small urban squares linked by redesigned back alleys can yield appealing outdoor space, becoming strategic turning points of policy for increased pedestrian traffic. Thoughtful design for street-level pedestrian movement, downtown in particular, can facilitate both access at a small-scale and casual human encounter at the same time. At a fraction of the cost of a freeway overpass, selected back

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alleys and converted parking lots in downtown areas of our winter cities can be turned into charming walkways and attractive urban squares (Akkerman and­ Cornfeld 2010). The neglected, feminine aspect of the twentieth-century metropolis has been the urban voids in their multiple kinds. Many urban voids are consonant with human physical dimensions, and they constitute an opportunity for contemporary urban design that is able to discern also the qualitative aspect of human scale. Recognizing city form as a gendered landscape deriving from ingrained, primordial allegories is a guiding consideration in conducive urban design. The acceptance of city form as a metaphor of femininity and masculinity in such a consideration pursues also the foremost challenge in urban design today: the revival of pedestrian access and human encounter. Integration of quantitative and qualitative aspects of human scale within the superscale of the metropolis addresses basic access needs while facilitating informal human encounter as the right to the city for everyone. An old American proverb says, “All politics local.” Stewardship of civil society starts at small environments of our own lived space. Reintroducing and safeguarding human scale and human encounter in open-air small urban spaces endorses the public sphere and bolsters open society.

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Index

Abbas, Milton, 26 Abercrombie, Sir Patrick, 102 accessibility, 21, 72, 80, 102, 106, 121, 185, 197, 207, 208, 214–17, 221; human encounter and, 113, 164, 199, 220, 223–6; inaccessibility, 185; visibility and, 140 accidents, 20, 79, 92 accretion, 164 Addams, Jane, 117–19, 227 aesthetics, 8, 18, 49, 66, 72, 77, 114, 173, 205, 207, 209, 219, 224 Africville, Halifax, NS, 161, 162 agriculture, 7, 27, 58 air, 5, 52, 58–60, 81, 94, 109, 121, 133, 143, 146, 152, 168, 200, 220, 221, 223, 226 alchemy, 48, 131, 132 Alexandria, 3, 9, 12, 38, 78, 97, 217, 234 alienation, 14, 17, 20, 21, 99–101, 106, 107, 109–13, 122, 124, 128, 179, 185; Marxism and, 162–4; masterplan and, 72 Allen Road, Toronto, 198, 204 ambiguity, 20, 70, 205–7, 211 American garden suburb, 15, 105, 106, 183 Ancient Greece, 8, 17, 19, 55, 58, 59, 62, 128, 201, 216 angst, 17, 18, 163, 221 anima, 173

animus, 173 anthropomorphism, 19, 99 antiquity, 3, 6–8, 17, 20, 26, 28, 36, 55, 58, 66, 67, 72, 96, 111, 126, 152, 206, 210, 211, 239, 248; late, 67, 72; urban, 8, 10, 15, 42, 78, 124, 125, 154, 165 Apollo, 12, 35, 111, 200 Apollonian, 18, 19, 35, 111, 112, 152, 158, 173, 174, 185, 206, 207, 213, 217, 220 Aquinas, St Thomas, 40 arch, 31, 224, 225 archetype, 10, 19, 27, 47, 60–2, 92, 111, 120, 173, 213 Archimedes, 9 architects, 24, 160, 197; North American, 102; and planners, 14, 86, 90, 104, 118, 160; and urban planning, 79 architecture, 13, 20, 21, 29, 65, 70, 92, 100, 101, 130, 175, 184, 185, 205–7, 216, 217; landscape, 26–8, 30, 102, 105, 110, 138, 144, 207, 221; military, 62, 134, 137, 139, 143; Soviet, 77, 86, 91; and urban planning, 92, 108, 133, 137, 160, 191 Aristophanes, 12, 60, 61, 168, 169, 172, 176, 177, 207, 228 Aristotle, 7, 8, 48, 58, 78, 124, 125, 128, 129, 149, 155, 165, 216, 228 arson, 32

252 Index Arts and Crafts movement, 29, 30, 49, 83, 157 Athens, 3, 12, 17, 27, 61, 125, 160, 168, 176, 216 Atlantis, 20, 44–6, 54, 62, 63, 65, 84, 99, 176, 177, 200, 207, 228, 243; and Howard’s Garden City, 12, 16, 17, 44, 55–6, 173, 175, 177 Augustine, St, 4, 236 authenticity, 18, 19, 47, 49, 72, 73, 80, 83, 101, 157, 159, 166, 167, 180, 184, 185, 203, 212–14, 223, 224. See also urban redesign automation, 110, 118, 184, 208, 214–18, 223, 224 automatism, 84, 109, 110, 179, 214 automobiles, 48, 80, 127, 146, 183, 184, 185. See also downtown avenues, Haussmann, 10, 60–2, 85, 147, 149–55 Babylon, 3 back alley, 20, 218, 219, 223–5 backyard, 15, 22, 23, 25, 53, 79, 103, 207 Bacon, Sir Francis, 44, 54 Baroque, 8, 47, 65–7, 72, 122, 127, 133, 135, 137, 138, 148, 236, 245 Barshch, Mikhail, 87 Baudelaire, Charles, 8, 228 Beaux Arts, 31, 165, 167, 197 Benjamin, Walter, 11, 45, 229 Birkenhead Park, Merseyside, 28, 29 Boston, 18, 30, 51, 73, 74, 101, 105, 109, 112, 163, 229, 231, 233, 234, 239, 245 boulevard, 16, 144 Bronx, 14, 114, 119, 159, 163 brownfield, 20 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 67, 71, 142, 143 buildings: city and, 23, 181, 224; Le Corbusier, 76, 83, 86–8, 91–3, 160, 161, 164–5; plan and, 26, 38, 148, 149, 153–5, 216–18

built environment, 4, 11, 34–6, 41, 95, 96, 137, 174, 177–9, 188, 193; authenticity in the, 10, 18, 19, 71–3, 110, 111, 166–8, 180, 212–14; automobiles and, 100, 110, 194, 199, 200, 220–3; outlook on, 16, 82, 83, 150, 163–5, 180, 202, 203, 210 bureaucracy, 16, 23, 115, 163, 179, 181, 189, 194 Burnham, Daniel H., 32–5, 76, 83, 84, 128, 135, 150, 151, 154, 163, 186, 196, 237, 247; and Chicago, 51, 73, 100, 197, 209 Campanella, Tomasso, 17, 63, 65, 66, 67, 69, 99, 177, 233 Canada, 5, 24, 108, 145, 161, 196, 204, 209, 220, 221, 232, 234, 235, 244, 247, 248 Canberra, 33, 84, 99, 151, 234, 244 Carolina, Province of, 11, 40, 41, 132, 234, 249 Carson, Rachel, 14 Cartesian outlook, 46, 47, 133, 138, 197 Cartesian rationalism, 17, 46 Cartesian regimentation, 84 Cartesian rigour, 135 Cartesian skyscraper, 81, 160 Cartesian thought, 46 Cartesian traits, 78 causality, 25, 42 central city, 88, 182 Central Park, New York City, 28, 29, 60 centralization, 88, 92, 93 Charles Town, 40–2, 47, 132 Charleston, 40, 244, 245 Chaux, ideal city of Claude Nicholas Ledoux, 44, 99, 135–7 Chicago, 50, 55, 81, 101, 117, 218, 227–31, 237, 239, 241, 245, 247–9. See also Burnham, Daniel H.; City Beautiful movement Chicago World Columbian Exposition, 31, 32

Index 253 circle, 47, 48, 59, 60, 63, 122, 131, 132, 144, 168, 169, 176, 179, 197, 223 City Beautiful movement, 10, 14, 25, 26, 82, 85, 93, 105, 111, 128, 162, 164, 166, 167; Burnham and, 35, 73, 83, 84, 149, 158, 173; Chicago and, 31, 33, 235, 236; Garden City and, 14, 25, 26, 31, 33, 85, 180, 185, 218 city form: accreted, 46, 148, 154, 157, 173, 185; affirmative, 25, 37, 49, 148, 182; automated, 80, 217; Baroque, 67; Cartesian, 82; Dionysian and Apollonian, 112, 218; history of, 62; mechanized, 47, 78; mind and, 10, 15, 66; modernity and, 84; multifunctionality in, 16, 19, 174; ordered, 152; planned, 92, 128; predictability in, 25, 84, 92; preindustrial, 216; premodern, 188; regimented, 82, 85, 148, 154, 212; Romanesque, 82, 157, 208, 224 City of the Birds, 168 City of the Sun, 17, 63, 65, 67, 99, 177, 233 city: American colonial, 26, 30, 34, 42, 48, 107, 108, 201; apocryphal, 63; contemporary, 78, 113, 158, 209, 212; North American, 14, 23, 79, 95, 159, 181, 204, 209, 221, 224, 225 city-body analogy, 63, 64 city-soul analogy, 58, 62, 63 city-universe analogy, 17, 63, 65, 135, 172, 176, 177, 186 collective memory, 105, 110, 180 collective unconscious, 47, 59, 158, 238 colony, 11, 40, 54, 67, 68, 135, 155, 160, 201, 235 command and control, 16, 33, 78, 84, 92, 158, 162, 175, 181, 216 commune, 29, 87, 89 communism, 12, 13, 77, 86, 89, 91–3, 101, 160, 189–92, 210 community needs, 21, 158

Como, Italy, 219 conflict, 3, 19, 36, 79, 92, 109, 127, 167, 197, 209 congestion, 30, 47, 79, 92 consciousness, 17, 40, 59, 178 contradiction, 20, 23–5, 71, 72, 79, 148, 173, 205, 206, 208, 214 contrast, 27, 28, 41, 42, 47, 51, 89, 95, 107, 119, 139, 154, 155, 182, 188, 192, 197, 216, 218; cryptic streetscape, 37, 38, 56, 147–9; streetscape, 32, 33, 44, 45, 47, 108–10, 117, 140, 141, 164, 185, 207, 208, 222, 223; urbanist, 12, 69, 75, 76, 101, 102, 186 control, 30, 108 co-operative, 22, 29, 44, 52, 53, 54, 56, 86, 118, 183 country, 26, 31, 32, 52, 88, 97, 113, 130, 144, 146, 148, 155, 186, 189, 210 countryside, 8, 16, 86, 87, 88, 89, 136 crime, 18, 24, 42, 101, 102, 110, 116, 117, 157, 219, 221. See also poverty crowd, 16, 34, 65, 66, 68, 135, 144, 145, 146, 147, 205, 210, 214 cultural criticism, 21, 24, 204, 214 cultural geography, 45 culture, 21, 24, 36, 37, 45, 48, 100, 101, 160, 169, 199, 200, 204, 214, 218 Czech, 15, 77, 178, 201, 225, 239, 247 Davidoff, Paul, 192–4, 232 Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs), 14, 18, 25, 61, 107, 108, 115, 119, 189, 191, 194, 237, 239, 240, 243, 249 della Francesca, Pierro, 125 demolition, 8, 9, 10, 13, 93, 113, 161, 166, 175 density, urban, 23, 24, 30, 37, 47, 75, 77, 87, 105, 108, 120 Descartes, René, 17, 39, 40, 41, 42, 45, 46, 65, 67, 84, 135, 137–9, 141, 232,

254 Index 233, 242, 245; and buildings, 11, 74, 78, 140, 143; and built environment, 44, 46–8, 139, 148, 218; urbanist outlook, 36–8 diagram, 17, 44, 47, 49, 54, 56, 73, 102, 144, 147, 151, 169, 175–7, 187, 215 diagram, Howard’s, 13, 49, 56, 73, 77, 162, 163, 175, 222 Dinocrates, 9, 12, 78, 97 Dionysian, 35, 111, 112, 154, 166, 173, 174, 185, 206, 207, 213, 218, 220, 237; nature and the, 18–20, 79, 216–18 Dionysus, 12, 35, 111, 152 discontent, 10, 13, 22, 27 disease, 22, 24 dome, 31 domestication, 7 downtown, 50, 72, 109, 110, 113, 115, 159, 181, 197, 198, 219–21, 223–6; and automobiles, 21–4, 73–5, 209, 216 dysfunction, 20, 47, 92, 100, 105, 106, 110, 160, 174, 175, 177, 179, 214, 223 Earth, 9, 35, 48, 59, 94, 111, 152, 166, 186, 200, 241, 245 Ecbatana, Media, Iran, 17, 176 economic conditions, 23, 31, 113, 165, 188 economic decline, 32, 33, 102, 105, 184 economic well-being, 18 egalitarian community, 29, 124 egalitarianism, 6, 28, 51–4, 56, 86, 164, 182, 183, 214, 221 Egypt, 9, 67, 68, 169, 211, 242, 245 Emmons, Paul, 175–7, 186, 189, 233 empiricism, 11, 36, 37, 41, 45–7, 132, 218 enforcement, 8, 42, 102 Engels, Friedrich, 12, 162 Enlightenment, 11, 17, 36, 37, 46, 47, 157, 218 environment, 47, 59, 61, 70, 100, 138–40, 154, 174, 181, 199, 203, 206, 210, 214–19; nature and, 32–4, 58,

67, 79, 164–7, 175–8; urban, 18, 19, 24–6, 48, 78, 82–4, 138, 149–52, 164, 193–5 Epicureanism, 27, 231 Epicurus, 27, 72, 125 epidemics, 4, 174 epistemology, 35 Eratosthenes of Cyrene, 9 ethics, 8, 25, 209 Etruscans, 38, 155 Euclid of Alexandria, 9, 38, 138 Europe, 3–6, 37, 38, 44, 55, 61, 62, 85, 88, 93, 143, 152, 158, 188, 210, 219; architecture and architects, 21, 22, 26, 29, 90, 104, 117, 138, 160, 216–18, 221; Garden City impact, 95, 101, 109, 229, 230; modernity and early modernity, 31, 165, 135, 72, 73, 126, 127, 236, 237. See also garden cities; Haussmann, Georges-Eugène Evelyn, John, 94, 95, 129, 130, 132, 151, 153, 230, 233 evolution, 4, 15, 36, 44, 46, 72, 121, 199, 203 expansion, 4, 14, 23, 79, 88, 102, 106, 108, 110, 115, 127, 180, 197, 199, 214 exurban, 20, 24, 25, 27, 75, 80, 115, 126, 127, 182, 185 failure, 13, 20, 33, 49, 73, 82, 88, 104, 162, 207, 211, 212 fascism, 159, 160, 249 femininity, 11, 18–20, 26, 27, 34, 99, 173, 186, 188, 196, 199, 203, 206, 207, 226 feminism, 14, 116 Filarete, Antonio Averlino, 62, 131 Florence, 38, 63, 67, 71, 126, 142, 145 Fontana, Domenico, 65, 66, 158 Forest Hills, Queens, New York, 30, 101, 120, 244 Forest Park, Queens, New York, 28 Förster, Ludwig C.F., 10

Index 255 freedom, 13, 24, 28, 81, 164, 180 freeways, 20, 33, 72, 112–14, 128, 162, 174, 198, 204, 225 Freud, Sigmund, 222, 234 Freudenstadt, 38, 39, 68, 99, 140, 141, 143, 246 Friedan, Betty, 14 gait, 10, 21, 84, 109, 216, 217, 223 garden: private, 22, 24, 25, 52, 79, 80; public, 20, 33, 149; urban, 13, 26, 27, 52, 126, 182 ; vertical, 25, 76, 77, 79–81, 182 garden cities, 13, 16, 24, 49, 75, 76, 83, 100, 102, 106, 107, 124, 163, 175, 177, 181, 182, 184; Europe, 29–31, 73, 85, 218; United States, 51–2, 104–5 Garden City, 17, 41, 43, 47, 49, 55–7, 59, 68, 74, 128, 147, 161, 163, 181, 187, 215, 231, 232; and countryside, 6, 16, 30, 55, 86, 91; in Death and Life, 23, 24, 37, 102; and London, 13, 22, 44, 51, 115, 118, 182, 202, 243, 246; Mumford and, 34, 35, 242 Garden City movement, 14, 26, 33, 35, 37, 79, 83, 95, 102, 104, 109, 128 garden communities, 15, 24, 27, 30, 102, 104, 106 garden suburbs, 18, 22, 23, 27, 79, 104, 107, 161, 164, 183–5 Gardiner, Fred, 19, 21, 169, 196–9, 235, 246 Garnier, Tony, 164–6, 185, 235 Geddes, Sir Patrick, 165, 166, 185, 186, 188, 208, 242 gentrification, 25, 114, 116, 167, 180, 183–5, 224, 247, 248; incumbent, 18, 115; invasive, 18, 21, 111, 114, 115, 159, 167, 209 geography, 3, 4, 8, 9, 20, 24, 59, 77, 106, 112, 120, 125, 127–9, 150, 199, 207 geometry, 12, 61, 82

Germany, 15, 38, 65, 81, 90, 138, 140, 144, 145, 160, 210, 229, 239 Ginzburg, Moisei, 86, 87–91 Gordon, David, 5, 150, 232, 235 Gradeshnitsa, 171, 173 “Grand Modell for the Province of Carolina,” 40–2, 46, 122 grandeur, 25, 33, 96, 100, 128 Great Depression, 13, 14, 79, 90, 95, 101–6, 108, 184 Great Famine, 4 Green City, Moscow, 87, 88, 89 green space, 28, 30, 32, 79–82 greenbelt, 22, 102 greenery, 21, 24, 25, 33, 70, 75–7, 80, 81, 84, 86, 89, 105, 135, 149, 207, 208, 213 Greenwich Village, 14, 18, 113, 119, 181, 182, 184, 185, 190, 192, 228 grid, 8, 9, 30, 38, 47, 62, 67, 78, 81, 122, 133, 135, 137, 138, 154, 155, 181 grid plan, 8, 9, 38, 78, 135, 138, 154, 155, 181 Griffin, Walter Burley, 33, 84, 99, 151, 158, 249 growth, urban, 4, 5, 26, 66, 78, 80, 88, 106, 108, 122, 123, 132, 148, 184, 186, 199, 208, 222, 224 Halifax, NS, 161, 162 Happy Colony, 54, 175, 244 Harappa, 8, 35, 165 harmony, 9, 17, 25, 32, 33, 60, 73, 92, 111, 137, 149, 176, 180, 202, 206; modernity and, 6, 8, 41–2, 46–9, 70, 71, 174, 175, 208 Haussmann, Georges-Eugène, 8, 16, 93, 98, 111, 114, 158, 159; impact in Europe, 11, 12, 13–15, 81–2, 143–5, 166, 167 health, 94, 115, 121, 129, 133, 157, 158, 167, 178, 180, 184, 199, 220 heritage, 10, 77, 207 hieroglyph, 132, 169, 170

256 Index Hilton Village, Virginia, 30 Hines, Thomas, 31, 33, 237 Hippodamus of Miletus, 8, 58, 59, 69, 125, 128, 129, 155, 231 history, 6, 34, 35, 71, 74, 107, 155, 193, 203, 206, 211, 220, 223; architecture and design, 18, 20, 26, 44, 45, 47, 62, 102, 105, 122, 124, 144, 152, 154, 205, 221; housing, 15, 16, 42, 93, 159, 160, 200, 207, 209; science and technology, 3, 7, 8, 26, 84; urban, 4, 12, 20, 35, 69, 82, 83, 128, 129, 174, 185, 186, 215 Hobrecht, James, 143 Holland, 38, 65, 221 home gardens, 22, 23, 37, 84, 118 homeowners, 34, 110 homes, 13, 23–5, 27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 44, 52, 53, 77, 111, 115, 127, 183 Homesgarth, 52, 86, 118, 183 homogeneity, 15, 105, 107, 108, 124, 127, 192 housing, 29, 30, 68, 81, 86, 87, 90, 92, 98, 101, 104, 106, 108, 127, 136, 154, 185, 195; municipalities and, 22, 23, 79, 100, 117, 118, 191, 192 Howard, Sir Ebenezer, 3, 16, 19, 22, 23, 35, 51, 98, 103, 163, 175, 180, 202, 208, 216; Howard and Jacobs, environmental attitudes, 3, 4, 10, 23, 25, 34–6, 41, 42, 44–6, 222; and Jacobs, 6, 11, 17, 22, 27, 37, 67, 72, 73, 119, 120, 133, 182, 185, 196, 202; and London, 147, 148, 232–4, 236, 241; and neighbourhoods, 116–19, 163, 180 Hubbard, Henry V., 30 human body, 21, 36, 62, 63, 224 humanness, 21, 210, 213 hybrid, 25, 104, 149, 173, 188, 192, 206, 208, 220 Hydrostone, Halifax, NS, 161, 162 hygiene, 26, 130, 144, 157, 167

ideal city: Bacon’s Bensalem, 46; Campanella’s City of the Sun, 67; Filarete’s Sforzinda, 62; Garnier’s Une cité industrielle, 164, 165, 235; Howard’s Garden City as, 25, 34; Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, 99; Ledoux’s Chaux, 44; Martini’s, 96, 99; Ouseley’s Heptapolis, 176; Pemberton’s Happy Colony, 54; Plato’s Atlantis and Magnesia, 74, 84; Rational City, 151; Vitruvian, 123 ideal community, 46, 85 imbalance, 19, 174, 193 impasse, 5 Indus Valley, 8, 67, 165 industrial belt, 163 industrialization, 26, 74, 86, 90, 126, 188 infrastructure, 22–4, 30, 36, 69, 86–8, 106, 110, 111, 115, 197, 216, 217; and water, 15, 65, 79, 92, 180–2, 212–14 injustice, 180 inner city, 10, 14, 24, 25, 101, 106, 113, 117, 148, 180, 183, 185, 195, 209, 224. See also poverty Iron Age, 18, 19, 96, 186 Iron Age magazine, 189 Iselin, Adrian, Jr, 30 Jacobs, Jane, 14, 34, 35, 60, 61, 77, 80, 117, 197, 234, 235, 238–40, 242, 246, 249; on human encounter, 21–4, 107–11, 207–10, 215–16, 227–8; and modernity, 3, 10, 23, 34, 61, 196, 207; on neighbourhoods, 119, 120–2, 180, 181, 218; on streets, 146–8, 196; on urban planning, 37, 72–6, 184, 185, 192–3 Jerusalem, 4, 130, 201, 230 Jung, Carl G., 10, 18, 47, 48, 59, 60, 62, 169, 173, 174, 186, 202, 213, 237, 238

Index 257 Karanovo, 170–2, 241 Karlsruhe, 44, 45, 134, 147 kitchen, 52, 86, 87, 90, 182 lake-front, 33 Le Corbusier, 77, 92, 98, 100, 114, 196, 197, 209, 233, 236, 240, 248, 249; and Garden City, 75, 79, 80, 83, 104, 158, 164, 234 Ledoux, Claude Nicolas, 44, 99, 135–7 Lefebvre, Henri, 210–12, 214, 240, 245, 247 leftover space, 20, 212, 223, 224 Leibniz, Gottfried W., 40, 41, 227, 240 Lenin, Vladimir I., 16, 147, 148 Leonardo da Vinci, 15, 59, 63, 97, 98, 121, 126, 127, 228, 240, 245 Letchworth, 30, 49, 52, 55, 83, 104, 106, 118, 181–3, 230 Levitt, William J., 183 lived space, 21, 38, 73, 226 Locke, John, 11, 36, 37, 40–2, 44–8, 74, 122, 132, 218, 227, 228, 241 London, 54, 60, 95, 123, 130–3, 227, 229–31, 237–9, 244, 247; and Europe, 12, 33, 94, 122, 127, 129, 228, 233, 235, 240, 242, 245, 248, 249; housing, 30, 52, 91, 116, 183; streets, 28, 53, 65–7, 222–3 loss of place, 21, 166, 212, 214, 220 low income, 94, 104, 108, 111, 113–16, 166 Lowenthal, David, 45, 241 Lucullus, Lucius, 27, 28, 72 Lutyens, Sir Edwin L., 33, 100 Lynch, Kevin A., 15, 194, 195, 228, 241 machines, 25, 34, 48, 50, 92, 146, 151, 177, 178 Magnesia, 55, 56, 62, 63, 84, 99, 172, 173 Magnitogorsk, 88–91 mainstream community, 13, 20, 70, 130, 212, 219 maintenance, 15, 24, 66, 79, 106, 216 malfunction, 78, 79, 100, 174, 179, 197, 214

mandala, 48, 59, 60, 62, 63, 169 Martini, Francesco di Giorgio, 62–4, 96, 97–9 Marx, Karl, 12, 162 Marxism, 16, 42, 85–7, 92, 93, 147, 148, 160, 162, 164, 189, 192, 211 masculinity, 10, 18, 19, 21, 174, 186, 207, 226 masterplan, 10, 21, 34, 35, 47, 49, 69, 141, 151, 155, 157, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 179; Garden City, 68, 128, 161, 163; Le Corbusier, 99, 127, 159, 215, 216; and urban planning, 16, 72, 91, 92, 154, 158, 177, 188, 197; vs precinct, 104, 184 McLuhan, Marshall, 21, 204, 205, 208–10, 214, 242, 244 mechanism, 16, 82, 189 medieval city, 38, 78, 82, 107, 192, 208, 224 Mediterranean, 8, 9, 155, 200, 228 metropolis, 4–6, 8, 13, 14, 18, 29, 30, 33, 52, 80, 105–7, 152, 166, 167, 178, 182, 208, 211; and human scale, 21, 148, 174–5, 216, 220, 221–4, 226; and malfunction, 78, 79, 100, 101, 174, 179, 197, 212–15; and superscale, 21, 74, 161, 174, 194, 216–18, 223, 226; urbanist outlook on, 24, 25, 34, 99, 100, 128, 150, 161–4, 179, 180, 185, 186, 199, 200, 210 middle class, 14, 15, 17, 25, 27, 31, 33, 52, 104, 106, 118, 121, 124, 157, 182, 192, 193, 197 migration, 5, 87, 127 Miletus, 8, 58, 78, 128, 129, 133, 154, 155, 165, 217 mind-environment, 18, 35, 37, 111, 173, 222 minimum dwelling, 87 modern architecture, 85, 86, 127, 157, 158, 236 modernity, 3, 5, 49, 66, 67, 96, 123, 133, 152, 154, 168, 188, 231; postmodernity and, 19, 20, 205–7, 217, 218; poverty

258 Index and, 15, 26, 110, 124, 137, 151, 163; United States, 4, 12, 13, 14, 23–5, 28, 81–3, 137, 138, 148, 149, 175, 176, 196; urbanist outlook, 10–12, 16, 20, 34, 61. See also harmony, modernity and Modulor, 98, 240 monotonicity, 20, 110 More, St Thomas, 44, 47, 53, 69, 217, 242 mortgage, 15, 79, 184, 209 Moses, Robert, 14, 19, 111–14, 119, 159, 163, 190, 191, 192, 196, 197, 228, 231, 234, 235 Mumford, Lewis, 20, 24, 44, 55, 102, 103, 105, 107–9, 112–14, 122, 160, 165, 195, 237 municipality, 5, 15, 115, 124, 148, 163, 167, 181, 182, 189, 193, 197, 199, 209. See also housing myth, Platonic, 17, 55, 99 myth of the Citadel, 11, 19, 27, 35, 47, 96, 111, 128, 152, 174, 188, 189, 196, 203, 222, 223 myth of the Garden, 11, 19, 20, 96, 174, 188, 223 myth of the Grand Designer, 19, 99, 154, 174, 188, 196 myth of the Ideal City, 19, 20, 34, 35, 60, 62, 69, 74, 96, 99, 111, 128, 152, 154, 169, 174, 188, 207 mythology, 35, 36, 83, 101, 111, 166, 196, 199 narcissism, 19, 99, 154, 159, 174, 188, 213 Nash, John, 27, 28 National Mall, the, 143, 149, 151, 153 naturalness, 26, 29 nature, 20, 21, 25–9, 33–7, 48, 55–8, 67, 73–9, 80, 82–8, 157, 203. See also Dionysian; environment; Geddes, Sir Patrick neighbourhood, 18, 36, 48, 94, 107, 122, 127, 152, 159, 161, 180, 181, 208,

209; destitute, 101, 161; dysfunction, 14, 108, 163, 197; ethnic, 113, 161; and housing, 110, 111, 114, 115, 183–5, 191, 192, 218; inner-city, 21, 101, 108, 111, 114–18; old, 101, 114, 163, 181, 209; plan, 101, 102, 104, 105, 158, 191; streets, 20, 106, 112, 117, 121, 215–17; suburban, 15, 106, 107, 118, 124; unit, 101–3, 120–2, 127, 128 Neolithic, 7, 10, 11, 17, 96, 152, 169, 242 Neoplatonic, 12, 51, 55, 62, 63, 74, 83, 85, 99, 119, 175, 208 Nevsky Prospekt, 16, 143–8 New Delhi, 33, 100, 244 New Earswick, North Yorkshire, 29, 30 New Lanark, Lanarkshire, Scotland, 29, 136 new towns, 17, 24, 126, 138–42, 157, 164, 217 new urbanism, 48 New Zealand, 54 Newcourt, Richard, 122, 123, 130 noise, 26, 79, 178 Norberg-Schulz, Christian, 166, 212, 243 North American city, 14, 23, 79, 95, 159, 181, 204, 209, 221, 224, 225 North American planning, 107 North American suburb, 15, 18, 217 occult, 12, 99, 158, 166 offices, 23, 98, 107, 109, 115, 212 Okhitovich, Michail, 86–8 Olmsted, Frederic Law, 51, 101, 120, 149, 243 Olmsted, Frederic Law, Jr, 28, 30, 149 open society, 21, 192, 210, 226 oracle, 19, 192, 200, 201 orderliness, 32, 155 orderly towns, 38, 84, 139, 140 Ouseley, Gideon, 175 Owen, Robert, 29, 52, 54, 136, 236, 248

Index 259 Pacioli, Luca, 123, 125, 131 paradigm, 14, 19, 26, 28, 33, 53, 60, 135, 140, 152 Paris, 12, 13, 38, 76, 126, 147, 148, 157, 202, 206, 210, 233, 234, 240–8; Haussman and, 8, 10, 16, 60–2, 81, 82, 85, 93, 114, 133–5, 143–5, 166, 167 Parker, R. Barry, 13, 29, 30, 49, 52, 73, 118, 175, 185 parking, 20, 21, 23, 110, 223, 225, 226 parks, 28, 30, 31, 53, 59, 60, 104, 113, 115, 118, 149, 158, 190, 206, 212, 213; Le Corbusier on, 20, 81, 86, 87, 121; public, 28, 29 Paxton, Sir Joseph, 28, 127 Pemberton, Robert, 54, 175, 244 Perry, Clarence, 101, 102, 103, 108, 120–3, 127, 189, 244 Persia, 8, 27 perspective, 38, 67, 69, 70, 71, 139, 141–3, 184, 196, 213 Place Dauphine, 134 Place de l’Étoile, 60, 61 plan, city, 16, 24, 30, 42, 65, 73, 90, 92, 102, 103, 154, 164; Garnier’s, 164, 165, 235; Haussman’s, 8, 10–15, 111, 112, 147, 155–7; Howard’s, 27, 49–51, 118–20, 133, 194–6, 216–17 Plan for London, 123, 124, 153 planners and architects, 15, 101; American, 14 Platonic Form, 62, 85 polemics, 25, 181 politics, 10, 12, 22, 33, 42, 54, 58, 97, 101, 132, 133, 144, 145, 147, 161, 162, 172, 196, 211, 226; United States, 91, 191–3, 210, 221; urban planning and, 85, 91, 149, 150, 160 pollution, 60, 79, 94, 143 population, 4, 5, 30, 31, 52, 75, 86–8, 127, 130, 160, 163, 199, 219, 224 post-modernity, 6, 10, 47, 179, 196

poverty, 13, 27, 29, 44, 52, 53, 73, 92, 95, 104, 108, 126, 145, 147, 159, 161, 166; and crime 17, 22, 32, 104, 105, 161, 162, 218, 219, 221; and the inner-city 17, 18, 20–2, 94, 101, 102, 108, 111, 114–16, 118, 184 precinct, 18, 26, 105, 107, 113, 115, 120, 122, 124, 128, 129, 159, 182, 183, 217, 219, 223; and street, 60, 77, 109, 118, 167, 185; and surveillance, 221, 222 premodern, 23, 26, 207, 219 preservation, 24, 30, 79, 95, 188, 207, 209, 224 Priene, 155, 156, 217 progress, 3, 4, 6, 10, 21, 22, 45, 47, 80, 93, 106, 119, 137, 220 prosperity, 4, 24, 80, 181, 196, 201 psychoanalysis, 12, 18, 35, 47, 61, 212, 213 psychocultural disposition, 3, 12, 15, 25, 35–7, 58, 61, 74, 110, 119, 175, 196, 199 Ptolemy, Claudius, 9 public interest, 20, 128, 192, 193, 212 public sphere, 144, 220, 226 Pullman, George, 32 Pullman Strike, 32, 33, 241 Pythia, 19, 201, 202 racism, 31, 53, 110, 164 Radiant City, 75, 76, 98, 99, 121, 127 rationalism, 11, 36, 37, 45, 46, 53, 56, 78, 138, 218 reason, 5, 13, 25, 36, 40, 56, 58, 70–2, 103, 106, 119, 123, 130, 143, 148, 151, 152, 193, 205, 211, 216, 221 rectangular, 8, 47, 67, 122, 142 reform, 39, 50, 73, 85, 91, 95, 108, 116, 162, 202 regimentation, 8, 12, 17, 19, 29, 51, 82, 84, 150, 154, 155, 164, 175, 213 regional system, 39, 43, 56, 104, 115, 124, 165, 177, 182, 185, 193, 198

260 Index religion, 12, 17, 39, 55, 83, 84, 85, 105, 107, 130, 175, 176, 186, 189, 200, 201 relocation, 13, 52, 95, 114, 159 Relph, Edward, 21, 166, 212, 245 Renaissance, 6, 37, 38, 40, 42, 44, 47, 48, 69, 122, 123, 135, 148, 188, 231, 234, 236, 240, 241, 246; Neoplatonism and, 11, 12, 62, 63, 73, 74, 82, 83, 85; new towns, 17, 126, 127, 140, 142, 157, 158, 217; planning and architecture, 26, 62, 65, 133, 137–9 Residence Park, 30, 31 retail, 23, 54, 75, 81, 107 Revolution, Agricultural, 7, 96 Revolution, February, 16, 145, 147 Revolution, Industrial, 3, 8, 22, 26, 29, 84, 118, 126, 138 Revolution, Scientific, 3, 67 Richmond, Cora, 19, 50, 55, 63, 202 Ringstrasse, Vienna, 9, 10 Romanesque, 42, 78, 82, 137, 138, 140, 141, 148, 157, 164, 165, 208, 217, 218, 222, 224; streetscape, 137, 141, 208, 222 Rome/Romans, 4, 27, 28, 62, 65–8, 93, 126, 129, 133, 135, 155, 158, 235, 245 Romorantin, 15, 121, 126, 127 roundel, 17, 170–2 Rowntree, Joseph, 29 rural, 26, 30, 58, 126, 127, 178 Ruskin, John, 29, 83, 115 Russia, 16, 86, 88, 89, 91, 136, 144, 147, 245, 249 safety and security, 18, 25, 32, 33, 78, 84, 121, 134, 144, 180, 215, 218, 220, 221, 223, 224; and urban planning, 84, 139, 143, 144, 158, 220 Saltaire, West Yorkshire, 29 sanitation, 32, 129, 167 Schickhardt, Heinrich S., 68, 99, 140, 141, 143, 246 Scotland, 29, 123

settlement, 6, 7, 17, 18, 26, 40, 56, 75, 88–91, 135, 138, 155, 170–2, 186 Settlement House, 116–18 Sewell, Marjorie, 102, 108 sewer, 32, 143, 180 Sforzinda, 62, 131 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of, 40, 122, 132 Sitte, Camillo, 8, 9, 10, 48, 49, 60, 78, 82, 83, 150, 157, 165, 185, 222, 225, 240, 246 skyscraper, 75, 80, 81, 197 socialism, 16, 17, 29, 42, 44, 51–4, 84, 85, 89, 92, 93, 97, 164, 177, 181, 192 Socrates, 17, 176 solitude, 10, 96 Soviet Communist Party, 91, 92 Soviet Union, 14, 16, 85–7, 89, 90–3, 148, 160, 162, 232 Spadina Expressway, 198, 199, 204, 209, 210 Spain, 38 spectacle, 120, 128, 129, 133, 135, 139, 158, 159, 161, 162, 180, 185 speed, 10, 20, 21, 78, 109, 174, 194, 196, 199, 207, 210, 213–18, 221 Spiritualism, 12, 17, 19, 50, 55, 56, 63, 83, 84, 119, 175–7, 186, 202, 236 spontaneity, 19, 25, 26, 79, 80, 82, 84, 128, 173, 175, 185, 196, 218, 223 sprawl, 15, 20, 22–5, 27, 37, 47, 75, 79, 80, 83, 88, 99, 102, 180, 185, 197, 207–9, 214 square, 47, 48, 55, 56, 59, 131, 132, 134, 137, 138, 142, 169, 202, 215; urban, 20, 21, 23, 36, 48, 62, 71, 77, 82, 92, 112, 122, 135, 212, 220, 224–6 Saint Petersburg, 16, 86, 144–8 street, 12, 17, 23, 25, 70, 72–4, 140, 144, 146, 162, 194, 213, 221 street views, 6, 67, 69, 71, 72, 133, 142, 143, 155

Index 261 streetscape, 9, 33, 34, 44, 47, 71, 78, 84, 110, 116, 117, 144, 159, 164, 165, 171, 185, 195, 207, 220, 222; cryptic, 38, 148, 204; traditional, 24; urban, 11, 16, 24, 56, 207, 224 Stein, Clarence, 102, 183 subdivision, 30, 104, 106, 120, 217 suburbanization, 15, 18, 23, 111, 124, 196 suburbia, 18, 22–4, 79, 113, 148, 184, 208, 209, 220 Sullivan, Louis, 175 superconscious, 214 surveillance, 9, 16, 17, 26, 34, 68, 135–7, 154, 162, 163, 174, 211; and security, 32, 147, 180; and urban planning, 139, 212 survival, 47, 58, 80, 110, 222 symmetry, 38, 48, 73, 82, 133, 135, 180 tabula rasa, 40, 47, 132, 160 Tartaria, 170–2 technology, 35, 48, 86, 174, 175, 216 Teige, Karel, 77, 79, 87, 90, 247 Tell el-Amarna, 67, 68 theatre, 12, 35, 59, 61, 69, 70, 136, 168, 186 Third World, 5 To-morrow, 6, 22, 177, 237, 243 Toronto, 19, 21, 153, 209, 210, 221, 227, 231, 232, 234, 237, 239, 242, 245, 246, 248; Jacobs in, 180, 183, 186, 195–8, 204 tradition, 49, 185 Trotzky, Leon D., 16 unemployment, 32, 90, 102 uniformity, 20, 84, 109, 110, 148, 155, 183–5, 207, 208, 216–18, 223 United States, 30, 51, 55, 79, 91, 92, 104, 117, 135, 190, 192, 197, 210, 249; safety and security, 32, 106, 184, 218, 221 unplanning, 20, 148, 154, 157, 158, 210, 212

Unwin, Sir Raymond, 13, 29, 30, 49, 52, 73, 118, 175, 185, 240 uprising, 10, 16, 146, 147, 210, 214 urban change, 4 urban collapse, 4 urban community, 14, 55, 122, 126, 128, 161, 162, 188, 214 urban co-operative, 18, 42, 51, 52, 53, 55, 73 urban decay, 20, 158, 195, 212, 213 urban design: contemporary, 84, 149, 166, 180, 218, 223, 226; eighteenth century, 44, 45, 99, 134, 135, 136, 137, 147; fifteenth century, 62, 65, 96, 131; nineteenth century, 27, 28, 30, 121, 133, 143, 144, 152, 154, 158; seventeenth century, 122, 123, 124, 130, 138, 153; sixteenth century, 65, 66, 68, 99, 140, 141, 143, 158, 246; sustainable, 218; twentieth century, 33, 76, 77, 87–9, 102, 108, 110, 114, 199, 210, 218, 221, 246 urban expansion, 23, 88, 163 urban greening, 79, 80 urban order, 31, 94, 95 urban place, 21, 38, 107, 128, 220 urban planning, 48, 83–6, 91–3, 108, 150, 160, 165, 177, 188, 193, 197; contemporary, 14; criticism of, 3, 6, 16, 20, 23; Garden City impact on, 91, 92; London 23, 42, 102, 103, 150; order in, 12; precincts, 20, 24, 30, 108, 164, 220; twentieth century, 10, 11, 19, 23, 56, 77, 84, 122, 207; United States, 14, 107, 122; and urban space, 20, 23, 37, 185, 207, 209, 212. See also environment, urban urban problems, 22, 91, 181, 195 urban redesign, 13, 16, 61, 65, 93, 133, 135, 147, 152, 154; authenticity, 10, 12, 66–9, 110; buildings and, 66–9, 81–3, 85–7, 91–3, 130–2, 149, 158–60

262 Index urban scene, 12, 56, 69, 70, 72, 168, 188, 222 urban space, 69, 75–8, 80, 111, 114, 128, 158, 159, 174, 180, 205, 208–14, 216–21, 226. See also urban planning urbanism: contemporary, 36; Howard’s, 81; Le Corbusier’s, 20, 81, 98, 215; mechanistic outlook, 78, 82, 85, 163, 165, 185, 188, 195, 213; sustainable, 47 urbanist conflict, 23 urbanist outlook, 23–6, 69, 76, 99, 102, 128, 161, 196. See also built environment; Descartes; modernity urbanist thought, 4, 36, 42, 46 urbanist vision, 22, 24, 27, 41, 47, 63, 66 urbanization, 4, 15, 126, 138, 157, 174 utopia, 6, 10, 15, 16, 17, 18, 34, 44, 51, 52, 54, 86, 127, 154, 163, 164, 177, 182, 185, 202 Utopia, St Thomas More, 44, 53, 84, 217, 218, 229, 242, 248 value, 48, 114, 155, 193, 210, 212, 216 Vaux, Calvert, 28, 51 Venturi, Robert, 20, 204–7, 248 Vico, Giambattista, 11, 96, 248 Vienna, 9, 10, 31, 48, 93 village, 26, 29, 51, 67, 75, 108, 136, 238 Visigoths, 4 vista, 66, 133 Vitruvius, Marcus Polio, 12, 69, 70, 73, 97, 125, 131, 168, 248 Vitry-le-François, 38, 40, 230

volume, 4, 10, 18–20, 28, 36, 58, 73, 111, 135, 138, 174, 203, 207, 209, 221 walking, 31, 35, 109, 133, 157, 165, 216, 220–3 Washington, DC, 67, 138, 148, 149, 153, 197, 229, 230–5, 239, 240 water. See infrastructure waterfront, 21 Weinbrenner, Friedrich, 44, 45, 134 well-being, 4, 37, 80, 93, 94, 119, 178 well-functioning city, 32, 48, 49, 105, 106 Welwyn, 30, 55, 104, 106, 181, 182 White City, 31, 32, 33 Whyte, William Foote, 101, 184, 245, 249 Whyte, William Hollingsworth, 114, 249 wilderness, 35, 70, 72, 82, 111, 188 Winsor, Robert, 30 winter city, 74, 109, 212, 217, 218–21, 223, 224, 226 Woodbourne, Boston, 30 working poor, 12, 13, 29, 42, 52, 53, 56, 104, 106, 115, 118, 127, 163, 181, 183 Wren, Sir Christopher, 122–4, 127, 130–4 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 75, 79, 99, 197, 234 Wright, Henry, 15, 102, 105, 120, 121, 123, 127, 183, 185, 189 yards, 24, 25, 122, 167 Zelenyi gorod, 87–9