Italo-American City and Regional Planning and Housing Seminar
Ischia, 1955

 
 

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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.