The Coming Reconstruction of
American
Cities
by Oskar Stonorov architect A.I.A
A.I.P.
Philadelphia.
Intuition, resting on
sympathetic understanding
of experience...
ALBERT EINSTEIN
Urbem virumque cano...
The future of American cities
is closely
tied to the problems of industrial automation. If mechanical brains
built
in to feedback systems of controls of robot production will make it
possible
to produce more and more goods by less and less human hands, then the 5
day week in America which has on the whole existed since 1945 will give
way to a 4 day week by 1960 and a 3 day week by 1970, etc. There is a
general
attitude by our Government and our Press that unemployment must be
stopped
at the present level and that a similar number of workers entering the
labor force (now 500,000 per annum and fast increasing) every year must
be used for public works such as highways, housing and schools.
Helas, automation and the
shortening work
week are already determining in the U.S.A. the shape of our cities and
will more and more contribute to the decision of either intense
recentralization
or unplanned decentralization or both. Before our decisions in the
field
of city planning become mature, our speculative eccentricities in the
home
building field - suburban dormitory towns of practically no acquisition
costs to the individual for the single houses - and the violence of
industrial
passion in locating factories planlessly into constantly changing
centers
of distribution may have run away with us. Such is the chaos of
American
productivity, the genius of improvisation, the parodox of our vitality,
sometimes exhibited to the despair and detraction of our friends
abroad...
Thus if we have increasing automation and a decreasing work week with
higher
pay for greater productivity, if we have more express highways to spend
long weekends fishing and hunting or simply “consuming”, we have not
only
an economic choice but a philosophical one to decentralize or to
recentralize
or both.
Cities with undesirable living
quarters
will be transformed to good places to live and enjoy and to work again
in clean, well landscaped plants, prototype laboratories or robot
factories:
these are some of the considerations in the planning projects. I have
taken
an interest in Detroit and Philadelphia... These are not fantasies...
we
are coming dangerously near the deconstruction of parts of large cities
on the basis of 300 to 600 acres in one operation. We have not yet done
it, but one of these fine days we will find ourselves in the midst of
doing
it ...this movement toward a new habitat in the centers of our large
cities
is characteristic of the work of a few of us. I, as an individual, am
not
any more interested in a building as an architectural entity but in the
architectural all-together of many buildings in the new habitat. The
problems
are those of transforming our 19th century cities into 20th century
cities.
The problems are both financial and administrative. We in the U.S. are
studying devices under the housing laws of 1949 and 1954 and the
renewal
administration, devices such as middle income public housing built by
public
agencies, non-profit, private or semi-public corporations, etc., to
realize
these project - projects which in Italy would depend more or less in
their
execution on the strong intervention of the central Government. We are
trying to husband the fanciful girations of a responsive capitalism to
the orderly process of regulatory Public Commissions sufficiently
attractive
with their subsidizing doweries for private enterprise to submit to
regulatory
procedures. Le Corbusier in 1925 fathered the city radiant, Frank Lloyd
Wright in 1932, the city decentralized, and influenced us deeply with
his
portrayal - physical as well as philosophical - of the architecturized
landscape - broadacre city... a concept of posthumous power, not as yet
fully grasped in its total portent by any of us...
I will characterize my own
planning activity
and that of a number of us as an attempt toward a new urbanity -
distinctly
not a new urbanism in the sense of Le Corbusier. Urbanity is both a
technique
and a human attitude springing from the behavior toward
recentralization
in America: our economic concern and our technological illimitness
converge
toward an immediate choice - the basis of American Democracy - and a
combination
of happenings which characterize our activity perhaps as a form of
organic
eclecticism. We wish so very much to preserve the traditional in money
and building and juxtapose it to the most untried forms of
architectural
coexistence of sociology and industrialism which is called city
planning.
Improvisation - not mechanization -takes command in America.
Improvisation
as a variety of pragmatism, the American pragmatism which your Papini
described
as really less of a philosophy than a method of doing without one. We
have
improvised large cities with millions of people. We are about to
improvise
without philosophical foundation, without a theory , the rebuilding of
our cities into 20th century organisms. Our approach to planning is
like
our approach to law to quote Morrison and Commager in “The growth of
the
American Republic” – “an organic growth that must be molded to the
changing
needs of a changing society”, a change which Roscoe found characterized
as an “adjustment of principles and doctrines to the human conditions
that
are to govern rather than to assume first principles”. Very often this
approach that characterizes our social life, or more precisely the
non-violent
revolution that is taking place today in the U.S., is seldom understood
abroad, where only our insularity in world affairs meets all too often
with raised eyebrows of non-understanding of the organic parodox that
is
the U.S.A. today. This struggle for progress in America - a term
utterly
untranslatable - must be understood when you will listen to what we are
concerned with.
Planning in America is all about
people,
about men and women and children, about their hopes and their
aspirations
and their dreams of a better tomorrow. A new united labor movement of
16
million union workers is about to speak strongly for even greater
“Progress”.
Our latest improvisation is the dormitory- town of single houses on 50'
x 150' lots wrapped around a giant shopping center that passes for an
organic
community. It has, of course little to do with “the new towns” of Great
Britain, yet after some expensive experiments on a gigantic scale we
are,
I believe, on the road to more thoughtful improvisation. I must say
that
our greatest planning concern is within the inchoate metropolitan area
of the big city in the search for new forms of urban living. Our
problems
in general are very different from Italian city problems or European
ones.
I do not believe that our contribution in this Seminar can be on the
narrow
basis of “technical assistance” to you, our colleagues. It would be
insult
to your professional skill and intelligence and also to the genius of
your
country .You know the structural qualities of reinforced concrete
better
than we do. We do not need to teach you the sizes of pipelines for
irrigation
ditches; you know more of the architecture of villages and communities.
We see in you, our colleagues, some of the finest talent in town
planning
and architecture that can be assembled anywhere, in the world. We are
as
curious about the advice to our problems that we may receive from you
as
we are hesitant to be of counsel to you. We may tell you our method of
approach. We may tell you of the forces that are at work in our
government
structure. We have a qualitative problem. You have essentially a
problem
of quantity. You have yet to create the abundance of material that is
about
to kill us less we find new economic concepts to make use of this
fantastic
power of production. You have the problems of organic transformation
together
with problems of providing more shelter and more food with less effort.
We face the problem of creating new cities and communities in the image
of the constitutional social and economic freedom of all the people in
the United States regardless of color or national origin.
Our people are economically less
stratified
as they are racially and socially non-integrated. One part of our city
planning is an expression of the struggle to master such problems: a
struggle
for instance to cope with our slums in other terms than just “public
housing”
which creates economic and social ghettos in the midst of our cities.
Yet
we had to have the experience of the last 20 years to advocate the
abandonment
of such utilitarian principles: only lately are we beginning to plan
integrated
neighborhoods of a heterogeneous economic character, neighborhoods that
win reflect American thinking at its best. One such example, the first
one, I shall deal with later. Out of these experiences we must create
new
forms for living, democratic forms in the image of our aspiration for
social
justice. There is really no logical path to these solutions to
paraphrase
the great Einstein, only “intuition resting on sympathetic
understanding
of experience”...
We have come together in Italy to
discuss
the problems of men and their cities. We do not wish to discuss these
problems
in a vacuum, or in the ivory towers of pure design. To me architecture
is a social victor for people and their society. However what occupies
me presently and a number of people I am associated with is not the
problem
of the single building, its architecture or even the relationship of
two
buildings; neither am I too concerned - important as I concede them to
be - with the new passion for site plans as the secret of greater
insight
and understanding of the past. I must confess that I am concerned
chiefly
with the possibility of a “new habitat” of the 20th century in America,
based on the far-reaching and truly revolutionary consequences of our
productive
ability and our mobility. The lack of official appreciation or the
ability
to deal with the 3 factors involving the relocation of substantial
portions
of the population win in my opinion determine for the next 100 years
our
new urbanization.
Here I ought to state one of the
characteristics
of our thinking as architect-planners in the United States - and I am
sure
everyone on our team represents by his very activity this point of view
- namely, that the practice of planning and architecture is more and
more
on the basis of the interprofessional team: statisticians, financial
analysts,
sociologists, real estate counselors, anthropologists, engineers,
social
workers, public administrators, site planners and architects comprise
the
building and planning team of the next decade in America.
When modern architecture was young
20
years ago, its aesthetic statement in a building isolated as a white
pure
cube in the midst of hodge podge regurgitated styles of the past was
important.
Today that same importance must be that of a total environment.
Building
a good building standing by itself amidst decay is useless. Too many
architects
- modem ones - are contented to design such isolated building. Though
they
may be very beautiful, they form part of a wrong environment. Their
architectural
importance is negated. The babel-attempts in New York: building greater
grand central stations or utilizing the air rights of Pennsylvania
station
amidst the helpless traffic is typical of such confused thinking of
architect-purists.
The past generation of Americans
was a
generation of builders who had the courage to make great mistakes. “But
you can only make great mistakes when attempt to do great things” - as
José Sert says in his dry Spanish humor. Our greatest mistake is
timidity. There are few examples of planning and building in our
generation
that - considering the means and tools at their disposal - compare with
the Eiffel Tower, the Brooklyn bridge, the Parkvay in Philadelphia, the
Mall in Washington and a few other victorian miracles. We are just
awakening
out of 50 years in which industrial productivity has outdistanced the
development
of our cities. Now we are faced with a dilemma in America as well as in
Europe - to negate or to affirm planning is positive action. Planning
is
affirmation.
U.S. city planning must face the
realities
of:
l) mobility: the automobile;
2) the production of building
materials
and house equipment which grows at a rate in which price and purchase
are
not interrelated and where the discovery of a financial formula to
consume
what we can produce becomes the only real problem;
3) the 4-day working week which
will unquestionably
become a reality within the next 10 years; in the language of
time-distance
of the planner it is, as we say, “around the corner”.
While our problems and the example
of
the Detroit project may perhaps seem of little immediate concern to
you,
I believe that you may usefully look at our problems which are so
different
both from a quantitative and qualitative point of view from yours to
deliberate
together how our common knowledge of architecture and planning may be
employed
to solve some quite different situations. I believe, however, that
Italy
too in the not-too-distant future will have understood the relationship
of high wages to consuming power and will create perhaps faster than
America
the productivity of the building industry through devices such as your
planned technical building Center and avoid the physical chaos that we
in the U.S. have created for ourselves in the last 25 years while we
were
acquiring prosperity and allowed planless expansion of our wealth.
I would like at this moment to
quote a
very important statement by a very important man, the President of the
C.I.O., Walter Reuther, who has just initiated a new revolution in
America
- but not a Marxist one. This quotation is from his introduction to
“The
New Technology”, a pamphlet which discusses the problems of automation:
“Automation must be met sanely and
constructively
so that the miracle of mass production - and the ever greater economic
abundance made possible by automation - can find expression in the
lives
of people through improved economic security and a full share of
happiness
and human dignity. Sensibly, rationally, scientifically we intend to
harness
this radical new force in our lives using its potential to produce an
era
in which well being, justice, and peace will be the universal
profession
of all mankind. Historically the problems of mankind have been set in
conflict
between people, groups, and nations each engaged in a struggle to
divide
op economic scarcity. We have had a world divided between the “haves”
and
the “have-nots” - those who were fed and those who were starving. Now,
science and technology have at last given us the tools of economic
abundance,
and we are confronted no longer with the need to struggle to divide up
scarcity. Economic abundance is now within our grasp if we but have the
good sense to use our resources and our technology, fully and
effectively,
within a framework of economic policies that are morally right and
socially
responsible. People and Nations have demonstrated the capacity to
achieve
total dedication in periods of great international conflict. Motivated
by common fears and hatreds in times of war, people and nations have
made
their greatest sacrifices and achieved the fullest measure of common
purpose.
Now, automation and the new technology, together with the promise of
peacetime
use of atomic energy, afford us the opportunity to give positive
expression
to our common hopes, common aspirations and common faith. These new
tools
of abundance provide us as free people with the opportunity to achieve
total dedication in the common task of building a better tomorrow in a
world in which people and nations can live at peace, free in spirit,
free
from tyranny, and free from the pangs of hunger... We in the Uaw-Cio
are
confident that we will not have to fight the new machines and devices.
Rather, we will use them to bring health and happiness, security and
leisure,
and peace and freedom to mankind everywhere”.
This is said by the man who is one
of
the prime movers of Gratiot neighborhood, the large central renewal
project
in Detroit. The significance of this statement lies in the fact of the
greatly accelerated productivity of industry and its impact on the
lives
of 70 million workers, almost momentarily forcing the largest l6 cities
of America to make fundamental decisions in terms of survival of their
center as cultural economic and physical entities. I believe that we
are
at the eve of the greatest re-evaluation of contemporary living in
America
that cannot be characterized by either word, decentralization or
recentralization,
but for lack of a better word, I shall call it a new concept of total
urbanization,
or as I should prefer to call it, a movement towards a new urbanity
because
it also describes a new frame of mind...
We are changing the direction of
our express
highways. They were conceived to take people away from the city. Today
we suggest that they have two directions and may bring people back to
the
city - a different center of cities, a new habitat for the new urbanity
of our large cities where people will be in walking distance from their
place of work. We have taken large industries out to the country. The
large
assembly plants have bred workers’ suburbs for 10 to 30,000 houses in a
few short years. Expressways and the rapid deterioration of our large
cities
will provide large new land areas for the relocation of automatic
assembly
plants where we now have slum and semi-slum areas. 4 days work to
produce
2 times as many automobiles by 1965 and 3 days leisure in the
automobile,
steel and electrical appliance industry will completely change our mode
of living. New great concentration of downtown living near automatic
assembly
plants and weekend colonies in the mountains, near lakes or the sea,
100
to 200 miles away from the tawdry neither-nor areas of our large cities
will create the new habitat. Some of my colleagues may not agree with
my
stating the problems in extremes. Nevertheless, Mr. Cole the Government
Housing authority with us, will agree that the ratio of suburban to
urban
building starts in the U.S.A. in 1955 is something in the nature of 8
to
l.
We have only very few big cities
with
large historical areas that compare to yours so it will be hard for you
understand our problems of redevelopment. Compare your large cities:
Milan -Venice - Genoa - Florence -
Rome
- Naples – Palermo
With ours
Boston -Philadelphia -
Pittsburgh
- St. Paul - Chicago -Minneapolis - San Francisco - Los Angeles - St.
Louis
- Baltimore – New Orleans - Houston
(Washington and New York are a
different
problem.)
Outside of Boston, Baltimore,
Philadelphia
and New Orleans, we have no large historical cities. A few churches and
cemeteries, a few small streets with a few hundred old houses... in our
country areas of real estate prosperity have supplanted and destroyed
previous
areas of prosperity by taking the prosperous tenants with them and
abandoning
the quarters to the next economic level... only recently have we begun
to appreciate continuity and conservation of neighborhoods so as to
keep
them desirable for living for longer periods...
I would now like to rather
formally address
myself to the problem I have come to call “The new Urbanity”: that task
- desirable in all cores of all our cities - which wishes to create a
new
environment all at once which expresses the real potential of the
second
50 years of our 20th century .We live essentially in cities created by
the 19th century and only some skin deep treatment has changed in the
last
20 years the hearts of our cities.
Consider Philadelphia. Has
Chestnut Street
changed? have Walnut or Broad Streets changed since 1930? A quarter of
a century without a physical change. Now all of a sudden we are
beginning.
The necessity to change will become more and more imperative. It has
become
a question of life and death for the political community, it has shaken
the financial equation of communal life. Such problems as automation
are
reaching the core of our communities. And business is sensitive - much
more as it will openly admit - to the emerging new financial realities
of life. Enterprise capital will become more difficult to admit its
investment
in central city stores with the 4 day week approximately 6 to 8 years
away
- provided we will have a peace economy. Sprawling suburbs,
decentralization
of commercial functions, will more and render city life ugly -
and
politically degrade the lower income city population - force more and
more
public housing into cities - unless an effort - As big an effort as
ever
was attempted - is put into action in our modern economy to implement
by
plan and finance the decision to maintain a core - cultural, political
and commercial in the large city.
In the meantime, the main forces
that
still fight a rear guard action downtown, the big department stores and
the satellite quality stores that live like pilot fish in the vicinity
of the shopping attraction of the competitive giant, are preparing for
ultimate withdrawal to the suburban shopping centers, leaving the
tax-wise
amortized plant at the disposal of low quality merchandising for the
increasing
low income customers that daily swell the downtown consuming
population.
The obvious reversal of this process can only be effected by an
increase
of quality consumership in the downtown shopping areas and such an
increase
must he effected fast to the degree of present consumer withdrawal from
the core of our cities. In other words, living downtown must become at
least as attractive as living in the suburbs. Can we create an
equivalent
to the amenities provided on the 50 x 100 lot with the split level
colonial
western ranch house at $ 12,000 with increasingly less and less of a
downpayment
and a decreasing degree of financial responsibility required to take
possession
of one of those completely equipped house boxes which will soon include
everything from refrigerator, freezer, TV set to sewing machine and
finally
a Ford or Chevrolet thrown into the deal. This “deal” to use the
American
vernacular may be the developer’s dream of a triple supercolossal ice
cream
soda with marshmellow icing hut in terms of the stability of the
downtown
community- it means “Haunibal ante portas”!.
I shall now take as an example of
the
thinking that I have outlined and describe the organization, the
physical
and administrative characteristics of a significant example of center
city
redevelopment in American planning. I am presenting the plan of the
Gratiot
neighborhood as the outcome of planning theory which has occupied me
ever
since i became acquainted with the ville radieus of Le Corbusier and
Broadacre
city of Wright. The 2 concepts are the spiritual parents of my design
philosophy
and have influenced my thinking in the last 20 years in the design of
housing
projects and the first attempt toward a new town - Willow Run in 1939.
In the planning of Gratiot, I am associated with two brilliant American
architects, Yamasaki and Victor Gruen. Yamasaki is the designer of some
of the most sensitive structures being presently built and Victor
Gruen,
the head of a super-efficient organization producing some of the best
giant
shopping centers in America - of which Northland in Detroit is the best
known example. Gratiot is a first cell of a possible total downtown
inner
Detroit organization. It is also, as far as I am personally concerned,
the other end of a polar system of agricultural and urban synthesis
which
is part of my urbanistic thesis but which I cannot discuss in this
paper.
Instinctive concern for plasticity
in
city planning - a 3 dimensional manipulation of people’s movement in
the
space of street and piazza is characteristic of the Italian tradition
of
town planning which has today our most profound admiration. This
Italian
talent reaches back to the days of the roman republic. It is real
urbanisme
and not the mechanical statistical approach to problems of city
planning
with its forecast techniques, land use maps, origin and destination
studies
for traffic, which are the basis of an unimaginative pragmatic approach
as against the method of the scientific-intuitive working hypothesis
which
is so necessary to take us out of the rot of numbers and percentages.
It
is important - so it seems to me - to make this distinction between
urbanisme
and city planning if we are to appreciate new solutions which start
with
assumptions of possible plastic solutions - architectural solutions:
of the movements of men
of the movements of vehicles
of the movements of goods
in America presently among the
planners
there is an important yet perhaps too unconscious conflict between the
architectural solution of urbanization and the statistical concern for
the immense problems we are confronted with in terms of population
growth
obsolescence factors and lack of roads for mobility. Gratiot is
conceived
as a plastic thesis - a working hypothesis toward a new habitat - it
aspires
to a beautiful architectural solution... This opportunity then is in
the
heart of Detroit where a 300 acre site will become the experimental
area
for a 20th century, democratically integrated neighborhood of 4500
families.
The outstanding facts are :
l) The location immediately next
to the
center of the city.
2) Its location immediately next
to and
therefore served by an expressway.
3) Organization of a mandatory
general
plan which may be developed by one or several developers.
4) Off-street parking for one car
per
house or family. 75% off street parking for visitors; access to each
house
door by automobile.
5) Integration of all known
physical and
sociological residential forms: single houses, town houses, row houses,
one story, two story and multi-story structures for single ownership,
rental
or cooperative ownership.
6) Controlled development of the
project
by a non-profit corporation of leading citizens legally recognized by
the
federal government and the city government.
7) Administration in perpetuity of
the
development by such corporation.
I shall now quote from the report
of the
architect-planners, Yamasaki, Stonorov & Gruen, to the committee
(preceding
the corporation) on the occasion of the transmittal of the plans for
Gratiot
neighborhood. This quote from the report will add to the knowledge of
our
Italian colleagues of American planning procedures and will also put in
relief the typical American democratic process whereby a number of
citizens
constitute themselves a committee, decide to take action, receive
public
approval and aid the process of government:
Introduction
The assignment by the citizens
redevelopment
committee to prepare an overall design for the Gratiot neighborhood
constitutes
a challenge which in many ways is without precedent. It calls for the
invention
of a new type downtown residential community, a concept radically
different
from either the so-called housing project or the suburban tract
development.
The assignment calls for the creation of a new way of life, in tune
with
the age of the automobile, as well as the need for rest and quiet - a
concept
which must combine the advantages of living in the suburban lot with
the
desirability of being close to the centro of a big city. In view of the
foregoing, we believed it to be our task not only to develop a site
plan
but, in a parallel endeavor, to engage in research, invention, and
design
of new types of living units which, by virtue of their layout,
arrangement,
and equipment, will achieve the possibility of informal indoor and
outdoor
living, efficiency and ease of housekeeping which is now associated
with
the suburban house. We, therefore, designed and developed in detail ten
different housing units located partly in low-rise and partly in
high-rise
building, and we have made these individual units the basic elements of
the total design.
One of our primary concerns was to
fit
the design of Gratiot-Orleans into the development plan of the city, as
conceived by the Detroit City Planning Commission. In this work, we had
at our disposal the studies which the city planning commission had
undertaken
previously in regards to this particular area. We also were guided by
the
desire to utilize, as far as possible, existing roads and existing
systems
of utility distribution. ..Upon the expressed desire of the citizens’
committee
the scope of this project was enlarged to include the entire area of
the
Gratiot neighborhood, as determined by the city planning commission...
it encompasses now the needs of an entire neighborhood, including
schools,
playgrounds parks, local food market, and service facilities. This area
is large enough for the creation of a true democratic community ready
to
serve all races and income levels.
However, in spite of the
considerable
size of the Gratiot neighborhood, we feel that its development makes
sense
only if looked upon as an integral part of an overall urban renewal
program
for Detroit. Gratiot-Orleans is visualized by the citizens committee as
a pilot project to be followed by a number of similar neighborhoods
encircling
the downtown business community. On the basis of information received
from
the City Planning Commission, the Gratiot neighborhood constitutes,
roughly,
1/25 of the potential redevelopment program.
Planning aims
The broad planning aim is to
reverse trends
which threaten the very life of our great urban centers, and which have
been brought about by the private automobile as a means of mass
transportation.
It is almost trite to state at this point that the automobile has
revolutionized
our way of life. However, as a matter of reality it has brought about:
The shrinking of the populations
in our
downtown areas, in contrast to vigorous population growth in the
suburbs
and surrounding towns.
A high percentage of low income
families
in downtown areas, totally out of proportion to the rest of the City’s
population.
A deterioration of the physical
character
of downtown residential areas, resulting in the formation of rings of
slum
areas now chocking the city business core.
An economic and cultural
impoverishment
of the downtown areas resulting in the emigration of business, stores,
and office buildings to the suburbs, and the stagnation of cultural and
social activities in the core area.
The deterioration of the downtown
area
endangers the economic cultural and civic base of Detroit. Only unusual
steps and new and courageously big concepts will successfully restore
downtown
Detroit it and the city core to the starring role as a true center of
business
and culture to which it is entitled as the focal point of a vast
metropolitan
area. Gratiot-Orleans is a fitting corollary to the City’s expressway
and
civic center program.
Planning considerations.
Downtown Detroit, in order to
flourish,
needs not only a greater share of population in the metropolitan area,
but it must attract a considerably higher proportion of the middle and
upper-middle income groups. Downtown, therefore, must provide
residential
units sufficiently attractive and set in such beautiful environment so
as to satisfy families of discriminating standards and taste.
Detroit, in contrast to many other
cities,
has at present hardly any high quality residential areas in the
proximity
of the city core. This fact, however, should not be misconstrued as a
lack
of demand and desire for downtown living. There are large groups of
people
now living in the suburbs, not because they like it, but simply because
there are no other places available downtown: bachelors of both sexes,
couples whose children have grown up, and families whose interests in
cultural,
social, or educational pursuits are predominant.
The rapidly changing pattern of
American
family living needs new floor plans to anticipate the availability of
an
ever-increasing mechanization of the home, the very basis of industrial
prosperity...
A problem is posed by the
existence of
plans to erect 3,800 public housing units within and adjoining Gratiot
neighborhood. We are convinced that such large enclaves of public
housing
units are undesirable. They create ghettos for the financially
underprivileged.
We favor the concept of smaller groups of public housing units, not to
exceed 200 to 300 units within a given neighborhood, keeping in proper
proportion the economic relation of low-income families to the balance
of the community. And we would find it desirable if such units could be
spread in a natural manner throughout the metropolitan area... Public
housing
should not become a social stigma either to itself or to the wider
community.
It is obvious that anybody who
designs
an urban residential area must realistically deal with the problem of
the
private automobile. We designed Gratiot neighborhood by taking into
consideration
the fact that Detroit is the auto richest city in the auto richest
country
of the world. We recognized, first, the fact that Detroiters want their
cars immediately near or within their homes and, second, that next to
100%
parking for apartment houses, we must provide for almost 100%
off-street
parking for visitors or second car owners. This recognition is the very
basis of the Gratiot neighborhood site plan.
In our complex civilization people
need
a variety of accommodations for living. The Gratiot neighborhood will
provide
for people who like gardening, and for those who hate it; for people
with
children of all ages and for those without children; for people who
enjoy
views from high up and for those who like to he near the ground. By
planning
for these different styles of living; by providing a large variety of
house
types, by grouping these house types in different patterns, Gratiot
neighborhood
will avoid the impersonal appearance of the typically suburban area
where
people recognize their homes only by looking at the house number. Many
of our business and residential areas are chopped up into small blocks,
making the automobile a nuisance and a menace. By the use of three
super
blocks, we have created areas reserved for pedestrians, areas where
children
can go to elementary school without crossing a street. We are creating
for each living facility areas for outdoor family dining, lounging, and
for the play pen. There are other organized play areas for the older
child
and adults.
Conclusions
On the basis of our research and
our studies,
we have been fortified in our conviction that Gratiot neighborhood is
excellently
suited for establishing this pilot project. Our reasons are the
following:
Gratiot neighborhood has immediate access to the expressway network,
which
will make it possible for residents of the neighborhood to drive in the
shortest time and under pleasant conditions to the country, to the
beaches,
or out of town.
Gratiot neighborhood is close to
the new
civic and cultural center, the completion of which is imminent. Gratiot
neighborhood is near places with large opportunities of employment. The
distance from the western boundary of the neighborhood to the business
center on Woodward avenue is only 3000 feet; thus, the hest and biggest
shopping facilities of Detroit are at the immediate command of the
residents.
The Gratiot redevelopment area is all cleared and ready for immediate
construction.
The other two component areas can be readied for development in the
near
future.
It would be a great mistake to
expect
that the construction of this one project would have the desired effect
if its lesson is not applied to the other poorly developed areas of the
city.
The Gratiot project, when
completed, will
provide approximately 4400 living units, with 4400 stable middle-class
families residing there. Over the next twelve wears another twenty five
similar developments should come to realization. They will provide for
100,000 families residing around the core of the city; people who will
have short distances to their money mostly in the downtown area. Such a
change in the economic makeup of the population relocated in stable
communities
will in turn result in a solidified business area; it will encourage
new
office building and store construction; it will provide greater
patronage
for theatres, restaurants, museums and educational institutions. The
development
of twenty-five neighborhoods will break up successfully the ring of
slums
which now separates downtown Detroit from its suburban residential
area,
and it will thus encourage the suburbanite to avail himself of the
benefits
which only the center of a big city can provide and which are now too
hard
to get at to make it worthwhile.
Gratiot-neighborhood can assume at
this
critical moment the importance of a symbol, a sparkplug and a working
model.
A most important part of the report is the part dealing with the
techniques
of covenants and protections of the physical plan and orderly
administration
of a new entity “the administered neighborhood”.
The Corporation is to adhere to
some general
ideas with respect to the protection of the master plan by means of
certain
covenants and directives which represent the significant singular
details
of the plan, without which the economical, financial, moral and
physical
security, that are the prime objects of large residential developments,
and the architectural integrity, which might be the visual expression
of
an integrated neighborhood concept cannot be achieved. The Gratiot
redevelopment
area proper will be developed under the complete control of the
corporation
as the master developer with the cooperation of other subdevelopers as
approved by the housing commission and the federal government under
conditions
as will be set forth in the by-laws of the Corporation.
The purposes of the
Corporation are:
l) Gratiot neighborhood is to be
developed
as an integrated democratic living organism in which several economic
and
racial groups of the community are represented in an organic way and
according
to principles which represent the natural interests of all the future
citizens
of Gratiot neighborhood.
2) Gratiot neighborhood is to be
developed
as the most highly desirable residential area in downtown Detroit, an
area
which, as the master plan aims to demonstrate, combines the advantages
of downtown vicinity with the qualities and amenities of suburban
living.
Within its confines all forms of individual and cooperative ownership
or
residential arrangements should exist side by side.
3) Gratiot neighborhood with its
variegated
forms of living units - from single free-standing houses to apartment
house
- is to establish a new mid-century American standard of living an
exhibition
of the nation’s industrial and human ambition: the completely equipped
physical living unit, intimately related to the cultural resources,
museums,
theaters, educational and commercial institutions of the downtown city,
areas of employment and social activity, and in close proximity with
the
wider suburban and rural areas of the metropolitan region through the
medium
of the express-highway system on which Gratiot neighborhood will be
bordering.
Measures to insure the aims:
It is suggested that the
Corporation:
l) Adopt the master plan of the
total
neighborhood as its master instrument in the legal sense for purposes
of
its own land development and construction and also in dealing with
actual
and potential outside developers.
2) Adopt a set of zoning
restrictions
- as further approved by City Agencies - and other covenants that will
set forth in detail standard of equipment, type of dwelling units and
construction
methods, similar in purpose to the rules and regulations governing
operations
of the federal housing administration or mortgage departments of
leading
insurance companies.
3) Adopt the principle that all
recreation
areas and landscaping including fountains, reflecting pools, playlots,
squares, etc., be designed, constructed and maintained by the
Corporation
and that the cost of such improvements and the main tenance thereof be
proportionately assessed to the several sub-developers or eventually
even
to individual home owners as part of the original cost of land and as
participating
assessment in the maintenance of the area.
4) Adopt the principle of common
overall
management (which in time will save money to the individual
participants
through the purchasing power of the corporation).
5) Adopt a unified promotion
leasing and
selling policy.
6) Adopt a program for public
relations
and education including the establishment of headquarters of the
corporation
within a sample dwelling in the Gratiot area.
7) Establishment of an overall
road pattern,
road design and landscape and open space design by the master developer
and built by the Corporation, a design to which all subdevelopers must
adhere; this will include the treatment of electrical distribution for
dwelling use and street lighting, both overhead and underground.
8) Purchase of electricity, gas
and steam
on a wholesale basis by the corporation.
9) Establishment of standards for
upkeep,
replacement and maintenance of equipment so as to keep Gratiot
neighborhood
in top physical condition and always provided with the latest technical
appliances available.
Conclusion
Too often we mistake “a housing
project”
for a contemporary form of living. We put suburbia into the heart of
the
city. Le ville radieuse of Le Corbusier is to idealize Manhattan.
(Chandigar
is a bad American suburb) Broadacre city is the frustration of
distances.
Gratiot attempts to be “a unity of
habitation”
as a whole: the working week habitat in the city of the 20th century ;
the one half of an American form of city-country living. It is beyond
functionalism
and utility. It is a new form of living. It can be beautiful.
It can be the reaffirmation of the
city.
It is our form of the “Hotel de Ville”. 1860 was the beginning of
suburbanization,
a process that has created the city we know now everywhere... it is
interesting
to note that we are all still living in these 19th century cities.
Today
we are at the threshold of building the city in a new image. The new
architecture
exists. Wright and Le Corbusier both have created this new architecture
in a prophetic demand for new cities - up to now I believe the fine art
of building predominates over the necessities for an architecture of
men.
Already in our country the new
habitat
exist in some industrial compounds and some colleges where large enough
examples of contemporary architecture have been created into an
architectural
climate of their own, such as General Motors center, the new air
academy,
etc. Now big capital, big government, have recognized the symbolic
power
of the contemporary language of building and politicians in America are
beginning to see the economic significance of a new frontier.
“Master Plans for Master
Politicians”,
as George Howe prophetically called for some 15 years ago, are needed
today
to channel automation, the second industrial revolution, into the
service
of men and social justice for the creation of beautiful cities, the
eternal
symbols of man’s spiritual aims.