Читать книгу Sunnyside Gardens - Jeffrey A. Kroessler - Страница 11

The idea that the city could and should be remade has persisted from the Victorian Age into the present. Reform-minded architects and planners in England and the United States knew too well the social and environmental ills of the cities around them at the turn of the century. Lewis Mumford and other social critics emphasized the dehumanizing aspects of the contemporary city, with its “mechanization and regimentation,” and how its forms, from overcrowded tenements to alienating towers in the park and sprawling suburbs, contributed to the unraveling of the social fabric.² Indeed, that generation of visionaries introduced the very idea of the livable city. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this meant reimagining how city dwellers could live, how the buildings and spaces of the city might produce happier, healthier, and more fully realized human beings. “No form of industry and no type of city are tolerable that take the joy out of life,” wrote Mumford. This was not a matter of merely altering the form of the built environment, for “the task of city design involves the vaster task of rebuilding our civilization,” of coordinating “on the basis of more essential human values than the will-to-power and the will-to-profits, a host of social functions and processes that we have hitherto misused in the building of cities and polities, or of which we have never rationally taken advantage.”³ It was an ambitious, even utopian aspiration.

No one, perhaps, was more influential in advancing this line of thought than Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928). Neither an architect nor a planner, Howard might be termed a Victorian utopian.⁴ He was in fact a great admirer of Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward (1888), and he arranged for the printing of that book in England.⁵ Mumford, too, admired the book, calling it “one of the most important political pamphlets” of its time, a work illustrating how a community must prioritize the common good and tame the chaotic impulses of the individual. Furthermore, Bellamy understood that “socialization in one department was incompatible with unlimited individualism in every other.”⁶ It was a principle Mumford found appealing. The physical ordering of society would mold the people, and the people would shape its physical forms.

In 1898, Howard self-published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. Reissued in 1902 under its more familiar title, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, that slim volume outlined his vision of an urban future, drawing upon various strains of English socialist thought. In contrast with the unregulated and uncoordinated free market development that then characterized urban growth, Howard proposed building entirely new garden cities beyond the confines of the existing metropolis. For a tract by an unknown, marginal figure, the book had a surprisingly immediate and widespread impact. Within a year of its publication, Howard was leading the newly formed Garden City Association, with local chapters springing up across Britain.

Such was the optimism and confidence of the age. The garden city idea gained traction across the Atlantic before the Great War, and for much of the twentieth century its principles, modified by American pragmatism to fit American conditions, were applied almost as a matter of faith by urban planners. The garden city as defined by Howard—a self-contained community with a limited population size, a mix of homes and industry, and surrounded by a greenbelt—would never be fully realized in the United States.

Mumford certainly embraced the utopian aspects of the garden city movement. This was an attempt “to build up a more exhilarating kind of environment—not as a temporary haven of refuge but as a permanent seat of life and culture, urban in its advantages and permanently rural in its situation.” This was nothing less than “a movement towards a higher type of civilization than that which has created our present congested centers.”⁷

As much as its physical form, the underlying economic and social arrangements of Howard’s idea held great appeal to the generation that came of age during the Progressive Era. Frederic C. Howe recognized the fundamental difference between the ordinary city and the garden city: “The former is left to the unrestrained license of speculators, builders, owners, to a constant conflict of public and private interests; the latter treats the community as a unit, with rights superior to those of any of its individual members. One is a city of unrelated and, for the most part, uncontrolled private property rights; the other is a community intelligently planned and harmoniously adjusted, with the emphasis always on the rights of the community rather than on the rights of the individual property owner.”⁸

Theories of ideal communities, innovative design, and urbanism were insufficient by themselves to transform cities. Even after a century of model tenements and planned communities, urban renewal and social engineering, the problems of urban America in the mid–twentieth century seemed as intractable as ever. Poverty and inequality, crime and vice, racial and ethnic tensions, and educational systems of limited effectiveness continue to bedevil cities. One aspect of life that has improved over the last century, at least in the developed world, is the urban environment. The air is cleaner; rivers, lakes, and oceans are far less polluted; streets are better lit and have less debris; and living conditions are far healthier and more comfortable for even the poorest citizens. Housing laws generated during the Progressive Era proved to be remarkably effective in mandating minimum standards of light, air, heat, and sanitation. The era also introduced zoning to regulate use and scale; New York passed its first zoning resolution in 1916.⁹ Population densities dropped dramatically since the turn of the century, and the age of frighteningly overcrowded tenements all but faded from popular memory in the United States and Britain.

At the same time, however, we seem to have lost faith in the idea that motivated those urban visionaries: that by remaking the physical city, by providing new homes in a healthy and wholesome setting, we will not only improve people’s lives, but actually foster the elevation of the human condition. For that generation, elimination of inferior housing and the building of well-designed new homes in a rational context became an imperative for the betterment of society, and no one doubted that the betterment of society should be our common goal.

Over the course of the twentieth century, many acclaimed housing experiments and planned communities were built in and around London and the city of New York based on those idealistic principles. Each embodied the faith that better housing would produce better people, that social ills were the result of the conditions of life rather than moral failings of the individual. Remove slum dwellers from the slums, the thinking went, and we will eliminate the social pathologies associated with the slum, and it was widely recognized that the slums were infecting the body politic.¹⁰ In 1944, New York mayor Fiorello La Guardia exhorted, “Tear down the old. Build up the new. Down with rotten, antiquated rat holes. Down with hovels. Down with disease. Down with crime. Down with firecraft. Let in the sun. Let in the sky. A new day is dawning. A new life. A new America.”¹¹

Only later, after too many solid residential neighborhoods had been demolished in the name of urban renewal, did the question arise as to whether it was indeed necessary to wipe the slate clean, to demolish the old completely and build anew under supposedly enlightened planning principles.¹² Adding to the civic pushback was the banality of much of the new construction that replaced the familiar, human-scaled city, and certainly very little of the new housing embodied any of the ideals of the garden suburb.

By the middle of the twentieth century, urban planners and the government agencies that enabled them had embraced ideas of urbanism antithetical to the principles espoused by Howard and his followers. Rather than fostering community, economic and social diversity, and density, the ascendant standards emphasized the separation of land uses; a rejection of the street and street life; a rejection of traditional elements like squares and public plazas; the treatment of individual buildings as objects in space, not integrated into a complex urban fabric; and the primacy of the automobile, as evidenced by the construction of high-speed expressways through urban neighborhoods. As a result, compact and thriving urban neighborhoods were wiped away to make way for clean modernist spaces. Outside the city, the misinterpretation of garden city principles yielded suburban sprawl.¹³ With the embrace of those anti-urban design principles by the federal bureaucracy came mandates for their universal application in all projects receiving federal funding.

Lewis Mumford thought that with urban renewal the city was only exchanging slums for super-slums. The design—elevator buildings, long anonymous corridors destined to become breeding grounds for crime (as indeed happened), dysfunctional open spaces—ordained that outcome. Yes, the real estate industry was profiting from urban renewal, but more damning was that they were not creating environments designed to foster community, but places seemingly designed to stifle human potential.¹⁴ Nathan Glazer offered a particularly sharp critique of the result. Contrasting the cold and uniform public housing projects that replaced a vibrant, if run-down tenement neighborhood in East Harlem, the very neighborhood where he had grown up, in fact, he suggested that it “reflects what the housing reformers in league with the early modernists wanted.” Examining the resulting social landscape, he wondered whether the established principles of housing reform actually benefited their intended beneficiaries.¹⁵ What they represented was a perversion of the goals and design principles of Progressive Era urban reformers rather than a faithful application of them.

Austere, cold, and anonymous public housing projects of the mid-twentieth century may have been the unfortunate end, but unhappiness with that outcome ought not to negate the hopeful idealism of that first generation of urban planners. No doubt they, too, would gasp at Corbusier-inspired towers situated within superblocks, and nowhere more so than in the postwar public housing projects. As Mumford remarked, “There is nothing wrong with these buildings except that, humanly speaking, they stink.”¹⁶ The misappropriation of an idea does not necessarily invalidate it. The wonder is that alternatives had been built in and around New York decades earlier—Forest Hills Gardens, Jackson Heights, Sunnyside Gardens, Phipps Garden Apartments, and Radburn. Why, we must ask, did the builders of cities and suburbs turn away from those successful, human-scale precedents?