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

 
 

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Choice as an objective in Planning
By Vernon De Mars, A. I. A.

Introduction.
It is hard for the European, if he has not seen America, to appreciate the impact of the motor car on our civilization - perhaps I should say “way of life” to forestall controversy on this particular point. The term “mobility” will appear often in these discussions; used literally by the planners speaking of population movement or figuratively by the sociologists in reference to the status of the individual in society. The motor car is a prime factor in both cases. From mobility in both senses comes a pair of basic values in our society – “freedom” and “choice”. How these are used, of course, becomes the measure of a society. With us perhaps it is too soon to praise or condemn what we have done with it, but it seems to this writer that the pattern of motorized personal transportation is a trend in all industrial western societies. Perhaps a look at what has happened in the United States will help such countries as Italy to see what they must ultimately plan for - or against.

PART I - The new scale in urbanism and its problems

The physical scale.
Distance and time, as planning factors, have been virtually nullified by the motor car. The workman need no longer live by his job. The urban worker need not live in the city. The desire to flee from congestion can be accomplished although a new congestion of a different kind may result. It is becoming virtually impossible to drive back into the city for want of a place to leave the car on arrival. When one escapes the city to the country there may be no country left because everything is accessible - one can live almost anywhere that a car can go. So the very farms and orchards succumb to the tidal wave of suburban building and what space is left is filled with booths and hucksters and imprecations to buy - all directed at the motorist hurtling by in this lineal marketplace.

The Visual Scale of this new urbanism might be characterized by “endlessness horizontally”. Because it takes no more physical effort to drive ten blocks than one there is no compulsion to group things at a human scale in “highwayland”. There is thus a disappearance of “place” and “foci”. Yet groupings do take place. For whenever this space-man, the motorist, can be persuaded to abandon his vehicle he is once more a pedestrian and subject to the laws of his kind. Therefore we must sell him as many things as possible while we have him afoot. This is the theory of the new regional shopping centers. In the open countryside, perhaps far from any city but central to many, a cluster of buildings floats like a raft awash in a sea of asphalt and mobiles. Once inside this cluster, the narrow shopping street, free of traffic, has again appeared. It is like a mediaeval town except that no one lives here above the shops. There is no town hall or cathedral to thrust upward. Few of the aesthetics of urbanity are left to the designer because of this strict segregation of function: shopping only. There is no excuse for a plaza or square. No country folk will set up their booths ; here, no pageants or processions will take place. A brave attempt has been made at the Northland Center in Michigan to introduce planting, benches, sculpture and fountains in the pedestrian core but it still misses somehow the life and vitality that goes with the mixture of activities in a “real” city shopping center. The sea of cars mentioned before may number in the thousands. It is a visual nightmare as soon as one is on foot and attempting to reach the center itself from the edges of the lot. Planners must learn to break up such vast stretches of parking. In existing cities the need for parking has caused marginal income-producing buildings to be torn down and replaced with more profitable parking lots. Thus the center of one western city looks from the air very much like the victim of wartime bombing with a third of the buildings missing. This means that the city is filled with open spaces. But they are in their nature unplanned open spaces and the spaces are filled with cars. The spaces tend to break the continuity of facades and the pleasant urban experience of enclosure in streets and squares is lost. In residential areas the streets of the recent past have been designed to carry traffic indiscriminately when and if the need should ever arise. They are therefore often excessively wide visually for the popular low, one-story houses which line them. The specialized, relatively traffic free, and therefore legitimately narrower, residential-access-street is only occasionally used by the developers of land. One might say that “Agora-itis” is the handmaiden of the motor car. We are talking here about visual considerations. One can cite the fact that few photos are made of the current residential street. By the time a photographer has backed up enough to include both sides of the street the low houses form a narrow ribbon across his picture with the only vertical elements being the telephone poles. But telephone poles must never appear in pictures of homes. We have learned not to see them in reality; and we don’t wish to have our dream world shattered by documentary evidence.

The production scale.
The facts of mass production and industrialization are that the more identical units one makes of anything the less it costs to produce them. The merchant builders of America have proven that this applies to houses as well - a fact which some architects have claimed for many years. The architects had always thought of the products leaving the factory to be taken here and there by the separate purchasers in the manner of all our other manufactured products. They had never anticipated that the factory would be set up in the field and the product left right on the assembly line where it was put together. It has been shown that as few as 25 houses built in a group can effect great savings in material purchases and labor efficiency. With 50 or 100 something more is saved but the savings fall off rapidly as overhead mounts. Then why do builders often produce 500 homes in one continuous operation, or 5,000 or more (Levittown)? Once the machinery of mass housebuilding operation has been set going in a given location it is hard to stop, like the broom which fetched water for the sorcerer’s apprentice. It will not regulate itself and the planners have not yet found the magic word to get just the right amount of houses in the right place. The problem here is how to do this without losing the efficiency of the mass operation.

The time scale.
Time has virtually been eliminated as a factor in new community development. Neither social interaction or economic factors have time to shape large development schemes. Virtually everything must be predetermined from land uses to the overall look of everything. There is a new burden here for the planner and designer and a great new opportunity for error. The new communities which result from the efforts of “practical” men may contain no more aesthetic variety than a change of dressing to the fronts of identical houses marching across the landscape.
Community facilities such as parks and schools would only be included if demanded by vigilant planning authorities. The strong willed, “artist-planner” can be just as wrong as the “practical” man if he sees the community on which he is working as a vast canvas for his personal self expression. Both of these are inclined to ignore the individuals’ real needs and desires. They will try to prevent accident or diversity from interfering with their own particular preconception of what a community should be and the result is a sterility which puzzles its own creators as much as it dulls the sensibilities of those who live there whether they quite realize it or not. The new problem for the thoughtful townscape designer is to find the equivalent of accident and individually determined diversity to give life, interest and variety to the visual scene. One answer which is deceptively simple it to have life, interest and variety in all the land uses that can be seen from a given spot.
To summarize - the ability to create vast new communities virtually overnight is a new phenomenon of our times. There is a new scale that goes with this new landscape which is partly the offspring of the automobile. We are only beginning to understand the new scale and have scarcely begun to know how to deal with it.

PART II - Standardization and freedom and what they mean in terms of the United States housing and planning problem

What is happening and the causes.

1. Housing as merchandise:
a) the role of the developer;
b) the role of the planner;
c) the role of financing;
d) the result.

a) The merchant builder or “developer” is manufacturing an article for sale. It happens to he a house. Competition is keen and each builder is sensitive to what another is doing. Innovation in design is avoided for fear that it will not sell. But if a daring builder and his architect provide something new that people want, then all the other builders are forced to follow.
The typical builder’s pre-war and immediate post war house had two bedrooms, one bath and a single car garage. Real needs of the population, public demand, and builders and designers ingenuity now have added another bath, another bedroom, sometimes a “family room” for informal living, dining, child’s play, hobbies, television. The garage is a two-car size for greater flexibility, storage, etc. There is neither basement or attic and the living areas open into a patio or “outdoor room”. These are all things that the architect has foreseen for many years and often provided in a home; but the merchant builder can produce it and deliver it at half the price of the architect’s individually built house.

b) In this country, the planner concerns himself for the most part with considerations which are “long range, general and comprehensive”. Specific proposals must come from the entrepreneur, private or public, and the planner guides the undertaking by demanding through his police powers compliance with his standards.
However, he has an additionally effective tool - his power of persuasion. With some insight into human nature, some facts to support his theses, and creative imagination to strive for the possible, planners in many cities have inspired proposals that go far beyond their legal right to require obedience to the laws. Still, the concept of the planner’s role in this country is that he will guide what is about to happen anyway - try to have things better than they would have been without him. He is seldom required or given the opportunity to conceive of, initiate and carry out proposals.

c) The concept of financing which allows the use of an article while it is being paid for has had as much effect on the suburban landscape as the motor car and an equal effect on the detailed design of the dwelling. To own your own home was once the almost unattainable dream of most families. It was beyond the reach of the working man. Now almost anyone with a steady job of the most modest sort can own his home if he has managed to save up a few hundred dollars. If he is a war veteran he can purchase a house with no down payment at all and pay less per month than he would otherwise pay for rent. The cost of the house and all its parts and equipment are amortized over a period as long as 25 years. This applies, understandably, to fixed equipment. Stoves, refrigerators, etc., that could easily be removed and sold by a dishonest “owner” who planned to abandon his undertaking and write his payments off as rent - such equipment has not hitherto been included. The ingenuity of the equipment industry was equal to this challenge. Electric stoves, ovens, refrigerators, dishwashers, are made to be “built-in” to the structure and therefore not removable. When the costs of such equipment at the wholesale rate to the builder is spread over 25 years it seems like folly not to have it all. There are additional savings to the builder that may make a house cost less with this equipment than without it. A kitchen might need to be half again as large to accommodate an undetermined size stove and refrigerator. The cost of the floor area in the house might well pay for the equipment. In addition, a flue or chimney is usually required in case the undetermined stove burns fuel other than electricity. Clothes washing machines have not yet been included or financed as built-in equipment but many builders have included one as a gift to the house buyer and set it in kitchen or hall. They are thus able to eliminate entirely the space for a laundry. It can be observed that in the provision of housing as merchandise, choice, if it exists, is an incidental by-product. The economics of production force a builder’s own products to be pretty much the same. Competition and financing force it to be like all the others.

d) The three-bedroom, two bath house for sale is the norm. Two bedroom houses are seldom built. Little new rental housing is being provided right now because it is difficult to charge as little for rent as is charged for ownership payments, even for less space (under rental). Many types of accommodation are being provided hardly at all: special small units for elderly people, good apartments for bachelors and young families without children.
Except in rare instance, choice has seldom been set up as a positive objective in our new community building. We have been busy with other things and no one has quite thought about it. Yet this is the special problem of democracy. When the majority has prevailed and been provided for it must then concede the rights and needs of the minority. The concept of choice as an objective is gaining ground and it will not be opposed as such for it is part of our heritage. 

2. Housing as an institution of government. How it is produced in distinction to the above.
Direct production of housing by government (local or otherwise), has never had complete success or widespread popularity in this country. Its most important examples are from the low rent housing program of the Federal government, produced specifically with comparatively modest subsidies for families of low income. The housing was almost exclusively of distinctly urban type, usually row houses or apartments whose space standards sometimes exceeded facilities provided in the private market. Yet there was often an air of sanctimonius social uplift about it which tended to nullify some of the tenants’ pleasure in their clean new dwellings and to set them apart from the rest of the community. There might be an expensive community hall but no doors on the closets in the houses. The kitchen sink was of a utility type that no builder of the cheapest house would install because of sales resistance. Architectural detail was stripped to the bone and architectural amenity like porches, terraces and balconies were frowned upon simply as not necessary to a “simple, sanitary, healthful” living. Yet sculpture was sometimes used extensively on buildings or free standing, presumably to elevate culturally the less fortunate segment of the population. Someone else had decided what was good for them. The choice was not theirs.

3. Production: Prefabrication and the economics of building. Parts vs. assemblies. Housing compared with autos, furniture and clothing.
Prefabrication - i.e., the factory production of large parts or whole assemblies, has been given a good chance to prove itself in this country. It was used extensively during the war for speed rather than economy. Since the war, except in a few instances, it has not been able to hold its own against industrialized production in the field. The fact is that much of house construction materials are produced in a highly industrialized manner already and most of the labor saving and material saving techniques are as applicable in the field as they are in the factory. About the only price advantage left to factory production is protection of the work and workmen from the weather. This, perhaps, cost-wise, is offset by the factory rental and overhead, costs of storage for large assemblies, and the cost of transporting them to the site compared with the compactness of raw materials. Still there is a definite trend toward the further assembly of house parts: doors mounted in their frames are now available. Metal sash, sliding doors, closet doors, kitchen cabinets are standard items. Wall, floor and roof panels may be the next. They have never been sold except as parts of complete houses but it would appear to be an inevitable next step. Then combined in various ways there might be a natural and organic variety restored to the housing scene. It has always been a temptation to plead for industrialized housing production by comparing houses with automobiles. A further argument was that automobiles from an assembly line were identical and people didn’t seem to mind. These theorists overlooked the fact that the products of many companies were scrambled together in the natural environment of the auto whether parked or in motion. The finding of two identical cars, make, year, and color together is so unusual as to cause comment when it occurs. If it did occur frequently, measures from ingenuous to drastic would be taken to modify the situation. The auto is in truth one of the most successfully industrialized products. I believe the variety seen on the average street is sufficient to our demands of interest, identification and personal expression. The factors at work are completely natural and organic -different types, makes, designs, colors, ages, finishes. The “plans” are the same for the most part - 4 wheels, seats front and back.
This gives unity, harmony. Can we do as well with houses? Of course furniture and clothes are also mass produced. One seldom meets a man with the same suit (yet all are the same). When a woman meets another with the identical hat - well, it is one of the oldest jokes. Here we have mapped out the limits of expectancy in the average person concerning individuality and variety within a limited framework. As planners and architects we ignore this at our peril.

II. A survey of the problems that have been raised.

l. Physical. The new standardized family type community has been built in as short a time as one or two years. The houses are nearly all the same size and cost about the same amount. The families may be nearly all war veterans (because of the easy financing) so they are about of the same age. Their children are also about the same age. There is a great demand for schools at the lower grades. There are not many old people here because the houses are too big and there are not many teen-agers because the families are still too young. Therefore there are not many “baby-sitters”. In a few years there will be a great need for high schools and the elementary schools will stand half empty for the families are all growing older together. A time will come when most of the children will have grown up, gone away to school or gotten married. With the children gone the house is bigger than the parents may need but also more expensive than the newly married families can afford. They would like to stay in the neighborhood near enough so their parents can watch the children sometimes but there is no place else to live in the community so they must go away - some place where they can rent. Then the older folks in the empty houses are saddened because all the young folks have gone away. The houses, the streets, the schools, are only a generation old, yet the community has lived its life.
Now, no community is altogether like this sad story. Yet there are many that are something like it. A community must be planned to contain the seeds of its own renewal or functional obsolescence will occur before physical. Here again, choice must be an objective in planning. A range of dwelling types, for somewhat different income groups and somewhat varied social interests, will provide the physical framework for constant community vitality and self renewal.

2. Social. The one-building type community is inclined naturally to attract people of a similar income level and social group as well. There is nothing wrong, of course, for people of like income and interests to live together if they choose to. It is against the traditions of our county, however, for them to have no other choice. Perhaps our richest inheritance is that no man need follow the trade of his father. We are not without our prejudices, social and otherwise. Yet within limits we accept a man at face value. A boy or girl can move either way in the social scale with far greater case than has been customary in the old world. The planners should not undermine this tradition by endorsement of the one class community which seems more stable in the short range to the hanker and investor. In the long range the specialized one class community is, in fact, less stable because it cannot adapt to changing economics or living habits. For all the reasons just mentioned, the public housing “project” runs particularly counter to American traditions of social mobility. Here, a portion of the population proven to be of low income are set aside in special housing areas. This must be a trying personal burden to the boy or girl who need not, and does not wish to accept the social status of “low income family”. The public housing movement has shown admirable concern for the housing plight of the disadvantaged and low income people but it must now seek other formulas to achieve its ends more in conformity with our concepts of privacy and social mobility for the individual. Of course many families wish to conform strictly with what their friends and neighbors do and expect. This gives them a feeling of security and belonging to the group. Others find it necessary to be very different from their neighbors in what they have and do. Such non-conformists are usually conforming to what their friends, if not their neighbors expect of them. They usually follow their rules of non-conformity just as closely. There should be room in our community for both of them.

3. Esthetic. The esthetics of the new urban scene are often puzzling. What is put forth as “dynamic” may well be chaotic or at best, tiresome, if seen too often. The “rythmic” may be merely monotony. Strict control may result in dullness. When one observes that man, no matter how “modern”, is deeply moved by the great urban compositions of the past, is it not safe to conclude that most of the esthetic principles were discovered long ago and still are valid although we build in materials and for needs not dreamt of by our ancestors? Still, a special problem of today is the esthetics of repetition under mass production. There is a vast difference between handmade objects that might be called identical and the products of machines that are identical. The first, whether wine flasks, baskets, ceramics or stone houses with tile roofs, all have subtle differences and irregularities which allow identification. The machine product is terrifying in its uniformity. It must therefore tread only where this is a virtue. One cannot use the harmonious beauty of the identical tile roofed houses of an Italian hill town to defend the stultifying repetition of identically fabricated houses of a merchant builder.

III. A statement of solution approaches or an attempt to isolate problem areas and methods of attack by planner and architect.

l) The planner must draw on all students of human nature and our society to formulate a concept of the physical environment most truly appropriate to life in our times.

2) The architect must provide large blocks of the information needed in above. He is on dangerous grounds when he leans too heavily on his intuition if this flies in the face of ascertainable fact about people’s actual needs, desires and ways of life. He is on safest ground when he tries to find the visually and functionally satisfactory answers to clear-cut, definable physical problems in above.

The physical problems, while sometimes controversial, are often enough defined. The visual or esthetic problems have not been sufficiently identified. Here are some: changing taste - an honest appraisal of “new” esthetics. Are there any? Consistency in the arts and the validity of transference, i.e., should a painter’s experiments influence a large scale site plan? In the townscape, isn’t Paul Klee as valid a support to the designer as Maholy-nagy?