[lit-ideas] Re: Massive Change (2)
- From: Robert Paul <robert.paul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 24 Mar 2005 01:43:19 -0800
John McCreery wrote:
The first major section of the Massive Change book is entitled We
will create urban shelter for the entire world population. The focus is
urban shelter because no change in human populations has been more
dramatic than their growing concentration in cities. In the
introduction to this section, the authors write,
We remain committed to a global program of extrusion upward and
repetition outward in an effort to provide shelter that is safe,
healthy, and uplifting. Underway on a scale never before witnessed,
one side effect of urbanization is the liberation of vast depopulated
territories for the efficient production of nature.
In its talk of upward extrusion and vast depopulated territories, their
vision recalls Le Corbusier’s dream of garden cities soaring into the
sky and scattered in a park-like landscape with plenty of greenery to
keep the air fresh and nature close at hand.
----------------------------
Yes, it reminds me of that too. But Corbusier’s ‘Cartesian city’ is
something no human being could endure for long. It is completely without
the street life (in the Radiant City there is none) that enriches the
great cities of the world and draws people to them. It is a sterile,
deserted place, an authoritarian template that would have pleased both
Stalin and Plato (although perhaps for different reasons). Corbusier’s
1930s nightmares have been built. They are 'the Projects' in New York
and Chicago, and although they’re clad in brick and concrete and not in
glass and steel, and the ‘nature’ surrounding them is nonexistent, they
do house people in a way that was meant to be safe and healthy—if not
uplifting. One thinks too of Brasilia, that failure of modernism whose
faults in reality would seem to mirror the potential faults in
Corbusier’s ‘solution’ to the messy and disordered human interactions in
real cities—a disorder that for psychological reasons he seemed unable
to tolerate. Re Braslia:
‘There is very little casual social interaction in the Pilot Plan. There
are no convenient meeting places, therefore people must arrange for
meetings in their own homes, a very undesirable location [?] for both
parties involved. The Pilot Plan was built for the unrestricted movement
of the automobile, therefore it is without street corners. [In the
Radiant City automobiles are to be banished to underground passageways.]
The traditional street corner society is dead and there are no urban
crowds in Brasilia. New residents in the city are easily disoriented
because of the lack of visual cues with which to navigate about the
city… Trying to find a particular address can be difficult because so
much of the city looks the same.’
I’ve seen what happens to cities in which high-rises set in ‘park-like’
grounds have been built for housing. Most such projects (there is one
from the 1960s in Portland), create unsafe, lonely sidewalks facing that
architectural cliché of the 1960s and 70s, the reinforced concrete wall
with the grain of its plywood forms etched in it. Because sidewalks are
lonely people do not use them (this is self-reinforcing); they use cars.
Because they use cars there is more air pollution. And worse: I. M.
Pei's glass towers rising out of No Man's Land, in Detroit.
Uniform, massed produced housing has been the dream of many social
planners, engineers, and architects. There are more than I can list, but
I’d put Buckminster Fuller and his Dymaxian house high on it. Frank
Lloyd Wright would be on it too. It isn’t for want of dreaming and
planning that such architecture has never caught on.
I always ask myself, What would Jane Jacobs do?
Robert Paul
living in a Leibnizian monad somewhere south of Reed College
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