Cities and City Planning

Can It Be Made More Humane? 4 CHAPTER ONE looked toward a significantly improved quality of life for city dwellers. We were no more than temporarily discouraged by the problems that stumped us. One of the most unsavory of these problems was the fate of the "gray areas": the broad swaths of low-standard housing. We predicted that as income rose with demand, residents would move from these areas, and an influx of new families seemed unlikely. We doubted such housing could be rehabilitated at costs low enough to permit attractively low rents; on the other hand, demolition for new use of the land seemed prohibitively expensive. We considered a few quasiutopian possibilities, such as converting some of these areas into "rural retreats in town, for there is a dearth of nearby inexpensive resorts where individuals or families may go for play or relaxation. " 2 But no one saw any easy solutions. We speculated on how technology might help the course of metropolitan development. If we could specify what was required, as had been done for defense and space programs, could not technology play a similarly successful role for cities? We noted several possibilities, among them substitution of messages for personal journeys, self-contained houses free of utility connections, and a car the size of a bus seat easily attachable to larger vehicles. But these ideas seemed better suited to long-range plans; we sought remedies that would make significant inroads into urban problems within a generation or less. We therefore focused on a recommendation-advanced, to be sure, with restrained optimism-to improve public transportation so as to make it competitive with the private car. We also proposed that investments in communications and transportation be treated not just as costs to be minimized, but as a means of controlling urban density, form, and growth, and as a way of giving all groups in the community the greatest variety of choices for living and working. We anticipated worldwide expansion in the physical plant and population of cities, in both the poorer and richer economies. Although the poorer countries have less capital, fewer qualified specialists, and a less mature system of cities, in some ways they Front Matter....Pages i-viii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 The Future Metropolis....Pages 3-7 Great and Terrible Cities....Pages 8-18 The Educative City....Pages 19-29 The Form of the City....Pages 30-60 Images of the City in the Social Sciences....Pages 61-78 Front Matter....Pages 79-79 Problems of the Metropolis....Pages 81-101 Conditions for a Successful New Communities Program....Pages 102-114 The New Communities Program and Why It Failed....Pages 115-136 Front Matter....Pages 137-137 Realism and Utopianism in City Planning....Pages 139-159 Changing Perspectives on Area Development Strategies....Pages 160-185 Front Matter....Pages 187-187 Four Approaches to Urban Studies....Pages 189-209 Training City Planners in Third World Countries....Pages 210-226 Front Matter....Pages 227-227 On the Illusions of City Planners....Pages 229-255 The Profession of City Planning....Pages 256-271 Acknowledgments....Pages 273-276 Back Matter....Pages 277-309