Notes to: Plans for Today and Tomorrow
by Frederick Gutheim
(1)
One of the most industrious of these scholars is Prof. Christopher Tunnard
of Yale University.
(2)
Cf. Robert A. Walker. The Planning Function in Urban Government (Chicago,
1941), p. 15.
(3)
The history of planning in the United States is littered with magnificent
planning conceptions which, like Robert Owen’s exhortation to the American
Congress to avoid the pitfalls of industrialism, came to nothing in a practical
way but exercised strong influences. An illustration is Thomas Jefferson’s
plan to divide the State of Virginia into hundreds of communities each
five or six miles square with a free school in the center, and divide the
State into ten districts in each of which there would be a college, and
to provide a single university to serve the entire State. (Letter to Joseph
Priestley, January 27, 1s00). Another is Henry Gallatin's Report on
Roads, Canals, Harbors and Rivers presenting a coordinated transportation
plan (briefly Frederick Gutheim, The Potomac (New York, 1950), p.
26s).
(4)
Lewis Mumford’s first book was The Story of Utopias.
(5)
This conflict among planners. and in the mind of every planner, has been
suggested by David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd, p. 34s (New York,
Doubleday, 1953) in the following words: “City planners comprise perhaps
the most important professional group to become reasonably weary of the
cultural definitions that are systematically trotted out to rationalize
the inadequacies of city life today, for the well-to-do as well as for
the poor. With their imagination and bounteous approach they have become,
to some extent, the guardians of our liberal and progressive political
tradition, as this is increasingly displaced from state and national politics.
In their best work, we see expressed in physical form a view of life which
is not narrowly job-minded. It is a view of the city as a setting for leisure
and amenity as well as for work. But at present the power of local veto
groups puts even the most imaginative of city planners under great pressure
to show that they are practical, hard-headed fellows, barely to be distinguished
from traffic engineers”.
(6)
The political, cultural and other problems presented by an emergent middle
class, so acutely foreseen by Gustave Flaubert, are now being rediscovered
as the United States considers the future influence of automation that
promises - factory workers at least!- a work week reduced from five days
to perhaps half that amount, as production techniques already instituted
spread to include more workers.
(7)
John D. Millet, The Process and Organization of Government Planning
(New York, 1947) best describes the growth of planning as an administrative
function. See also two reports by the Commission on organization of the
Executive Branch of the Government, viz., General Management of the
Executive Branch, and Task Force Report on Departmental Management
(Washington,1949). Herman Miles Somers, Presidential Agency (Cambridge.
1950) p. 23o ff. describes the evolution of programming offices in government
agencies during the last war.
(8)
Parallel with the better-known architectural planning of McKim and the
landscape design of Olmsted, the Chicago World’s Fair of 1s93 demonstrated
the most refined managerial types of planning.
(9)
John Galbraith, American Capitalism, is a useful current description
of the positive aspect of the great business corporation, a little less
romantic in view than Fortune magazine but substantially the same
orientation. It has been pointed out that in terms of its economic output
General Motors is as large an organization as Yugoslavia.
(10)
Rev. Cornelius A. Wood jr. has studied planning programs of General Motors,
Standard Oil of N. Y., and the Koppers Company, all of which were found
to have instituted planning and programming activities as a function of
top management.
(11)
Some of these aspects are treated, with special emphasis on their ethical
aspects, by Kenneth E. Boulding, The Organizational Revolution (New
York, 1953), esp. 20s ff. Mr. Boulding believes the large economic organizations
are a response to the ability to organize, not merely to economic demand.
(12)
I do not find it a paradox that planning was greater valued by the general
public during the war when it sustained hope and shaped the popular will
than after the war when it merely served the practical aims of reconstruction.
(13)
The coolness of American planners to the “new town” idea as it has been
formally stated by F. J. Osborn is partly due to their distrust of it as
only a further development of the individual planner’s static and futile
dream of escaping the realities of industrialism and the large-scale urban
complex.