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JULIAN BEINART: This is the third
in the last of the three models of city form
that I've been putting forward.
To repeat these models, which is deduced in classes between 1956
and 1980 by Kevin Lynch and published in A Theory of Good
City Form, I've adapted them and added an enormous amount
of them subsequently.
But the basis of the idea was to put forward
some generalizations about the form of cities,
and try to see to what extent they had validity in relation
to current urbanism.
If the cosmic model paid attention
to the regularity of nature through the study
of the ecclesiastical systems, if the machine
model preoccupied it with the speed with which you could
build new places, and started off
at the beginnings of modern commercialism and colonization,
the appreciation of nature as a model for cities
is even vaguer than the others.
Nature has always been difficult to define.
Although it's palpable and existentially accurate,
its breadth is so large, and it needs a lot of acquisition
in order to transform it into a viable theory of form
of this form of the city.
Not that it hasn't been used.
In the class today, we'll look at the examples of urban form
which have set forth principles of natural accommodation.
I start with a piece from a German town planner.
First war-- 1948 this man who had been a Nazi, a regime
architect of the city of Stettin,
says the following in his 1948 book
Organische Stadtbaukunst, Organische Baukunst,
Organische Kultur, which in English means
organic city planning, organic architecture, organic culture.
AUDIENCE: What's the name of the city?
JULIAN BEINART: Forget about the city.
It's unimportant.
Stettin, it's a northern city in Germany.
The importance is his proposition.
The metaphors in his book are familiar-- the branching
of a tree, the structure of a leaf, the human lung.
He condemns all inorganic city forms,
be they simple grids, the machine model, or products
to the Grand Manner, the cosmic model.
He says they are static, which is nonsense.
He faults advocates of linear cities
for presenting this model as a complete urban solution.
In itself, the linear city is incomplete.
City expansion is organic when it occurs along radial lines
without losing power.
A radial-- an organic town is not clearly described,
but city expansion is organic when
it occurs along radial lines without losing
its interpretal power.
And analogical to the human body,
it would be like the heart being able to sustain
an extension of arms and the legs in the human body
beyond measure.
Of course, it's nonsense.
It actually it doesn't work that way, certainly
not in the organicism of the human body.
The heart is in the place where it is for reasons of geometry,
as well as reasons of performance.
I conclude, "The city will stop growing when it
has filled its natural space."
Here, again the term "natural" is used loosely.
What is the natural space of a city--
one which is 20 million people in size,
or one which is the size of Springfield, Massachusetts?
It's nonsense.
He ends up by saying, "The freedom of appearance
is a precondition of all natural beauty."
We will then discussing the sea attributes given
to nature, which are beautiful.
In this crazy phenomenon of biomorphism in architecture,
in one of the textbooks published by Yale University
Press--
God forbid that they should publish books like that,
you are instructed to avoid the rectangle because it doesn't
perform for human beings as much as the curved surface does.
It's nonsense.
They are metaphors to be gained from organic material
and organic processes, which are close to rectangular form
as it is to bent form.
What is by and large argued is that man has the capacity,
or should have the right to borrow
processes and forms which have worked in previous conditions.
This is an element of history and an element of science
which we abide by.
How selective you are and how much
learning it requires to choose a particular biomorphic example
is open to question.
It is not categorical at all.
The piece I've handed out to you today--
I haven't got a copy myself,
Here's some examples of cases which I'm going
to go into in some detail.
At the top of the first page, it tries
to set out some of the characteristics
of an organic system.
And then it tries to argue for the depiction
of these protocols in the form of settlement.
The diagram below from the regional plan
of New York 1923, which says, "The possible state
of the future in which each part serves its logical function
in support of wholesome activity and good living."
And a version of Patrick Geddes' linear valley section,
which I'll go into later, is below that.
What is the appropriate space that something
has in a natural system?
Patrick Geddes, the great Scottish biologist and town
planner, argues for in this valley section,
which is on the next part.
For him, there is a natural logic
in the location of quarrying at a distance from the water.
That a fishing village would be next to the water,
and that cattle farming would be somewhere
between market gardening and arable farming.
In the same way, he tries to build a section through a town.
Iron and steel far from the, center from the port.
What locates the furrier between a woodland goods
store and, I think, a timber and paper merchant?
It's not explainable.
It's only explainable according to a geography
of purpose, which is assumed by this man at the time.
As you'll see, when we talk more about theories which
derive from the social sciences, from economics,
they are economic theories, von Thunen
and others which locate things in a certain degree
of relationship with other things.
To argue that this is a natural state, I debunk.
It's not the natural state of a shopping center in 2013
in the United States.
I will share in the case study the Tennessee Valley Authority,
which I'll do later in this class,
that the conception of nature, which Roosevelt and Benton
MacKaye and Lewis Mumford and others, regionalists
and transcendentalists had in mind in 1933 for seven
American states, has been modified constantly
since then to today when there are protests
every few months against the use of nuclear power,
against the Manhattan Project, all of which
locate within the TVA idea.
The next page is from a book by an Englishman, D'Arcy Thompson,
called Growth and Form, which argues
that the organic species, as these fish,
do not achieve a new form every time they change marginally.
He shows that within these parameters of geometry,
these transformations take place.
However, in the natural system, there you
reach the threshold beyond which if you change,
you start a new entity.
You don't keep on growing and growing.
Ants don't get to be as large as elephants.
Cities do apparently grow to large sizes
without distinctively or disassociating themselves
from smaller, newer items.
This is the velocity of new towns.
New town construction follows the organic model
more than generalized metropolitan expansion.
The next pages deal with stages of the Tennessee Valley
Authority, which I'll go through with you in due course.
They say a few things about the organic idea,
and then followed by four major case
studies of its application.
An organism is an autonomous individual.
Secondly, it has a definite boundary.
Thirdly, it has a definite size and shape.
The enlargement of an organic item beyond its normal size
and appropriateness of size increase is comedic.
If you enlarge a mouse to the size of something that
parades down the street at the Macy's Day Parade,
it is humorous.
It is not a mouse any longer.
It's the human brain, which has activated
an unnatural premise--
that of rampant enlargement of an item beyond.
Reduction in natural size and enormous enlargement
to all the products of the human brain, not of nature.
If the human brain is part of nature, of course everything
is natural.
It's interesting to argue as to whether the human being,
as a superorganism like ants, does things in similar ways.
How do ants find a new site for their queen mother ant.
Do you know the phenomenon of the pheromone?
What is a pheromone?
It's what an ant secretes when he wishes
to make a mark on the ground.
The way a site is chosen is through a decision
made by the community to choose a particular cavity which
has the most pheromones secreted on it.
Each person has the right to choose a site,
but the site which has the most pheromone secreted on it
becomes the maternal site for the leader of the community.
The grammaticus in the Roman argument
uses a measuring stick, a geometrical measuring
[INAUDIBLE] for casting a shadow.
The astrobiologist in the cosmic model
uses a system of rules derived presumably from nature.
I think Feng Shui is a derivation
of natural observation of sun and stars and so on.
So in that sense, ants, who are probably the most sophisticated
of the superorganisms use techniques
for locating a new city in similar ways
than the human beings does.
We could secrete pheromones as voters
and decide on the best site for a new capital
for the United States, unlikely though that would be.
This very tension is [INAUDIBLE] in the notion
of the organic unit, which is turned over
into the organic settlement idea.
It's best explained by an example
from Patrick Geddes in India.
Patrick Geddes is asked by the Maharajah of Bahadur
to do something about the malaria
in the town of Balrampur.
Balrampur has water tanks which are polluted.
And the primary impulse by the maharajah
is to follow the British example and get rid of the tanks--
to use what is called urban surgery.
Geddes says no.
There's something good about these tanks.
So he says, let us rather employ old men to clean them
every day setting up a daily ritual of cleaning,
of cleansing, which will be picked up
by the kids in the town.
They will deviate from the ritual.
They will increase the size of the activity,
and you will have no more malaria.
So the notion is to use the organic model to retain.
Geddes does this in his plan for the reconstruction
of Balrampur.
He says narrow the streets.
Use the space alongside the buildings
to create greenery and trees.
This will help the health of the settlement.
So he looks at the chowk, the traditional enclosed linear
market inside blocks.
And he says, instead of taking these away,
let's built on them.
Quite the opposite of what Corbusier
does in Chandigarh in 1949, where
he uses a sector form which is derived
either from his work in Bogota or from the work of Clarence
Stein and Henry Wright in the American version
of the organic settlement.
I've said before that the organic [INAUDIBLE]
form reaches limits or thresholds at which time
the change in form is radical.
The organic idea has differentiated parts.
These parts are in close contact,
whether they work together in from each other in subtle ways.
If I were to improve the human body,
I would put the heart lower down in the body.
As we have grown in size, particularly American men,
the distance from the heart to the toes becomes enlarged.
And one of the phenomenal problems with diabetes
is that the vein system from the heart down to the legs
is at such a large distance that you get problems
with your feet.
And in severe cases, you have to have your feet amputated.
So nature doesn't always work.
Obviously, we die, which an organic model
is something which is difficult to take account of.
The towns then die.
Yes, in pre-modern times they did die.
We spoke to our friends who are not here today, on Tuesday,
about [INAUDIBLE] and the towns that did die.
It's not clear to me that urban death
is as finite a phenomenon as human death or organic death.
We all know we're going to die.
Detroit doesn't know whether it's going to die or not.
It's lingering in perpetual disease.
A perpetual disease may be a prolongation
of the inertia of the settlement ever since its first form.
I come back again to Marx's quotation, which
I said in the first class, where he
said one of the things about the creation of human settlements
is, for the first time, the distinction between what
is outside and what is inside.
For a long time, what is outside with nature
and it was dangerous.
Exeunt [? leones-- ?] there are lion out there.
Exeunt-- some Latin phrases, which
describe this phenomenon regarding
nature as both beneficial and dangerous.
To survive requires an understanding of nature
as both beauty and the beast--
when the sun shines after the floods in Egypt of the Nile.
Idiosyncracity becomes a major form of culture of phenomenon.
You get a town like Heliopolis On the other hand,
if the flood destroys half of your settlement,
because you can't predict the flood's behavior,
you're dealing with an untamed beast.
In some strange way, we have come full circle
around our appreciation of nature.
We are with climate change, both facing
on the products of the wonders of nature,
but for the first time, as a universe,
perhaps facing the beast-like qualities
of hurricanes and floods.
So human beings have always posited, in my view,
between a romantic appreciation of nature independent
of things.
The closing of the agricultural communal lands in England
prior to the Industrial Revolution,
in order to make land for parks or for the wealthy,
took away the living substance from poor people,
but created the great provenance of British romantic parks.
Who decides on nature being good or bad in that respect?
Nature's value-free.
That's what makes it so difficult for one
to easily assign value to natural circumstance.
Let's look very quickly at two more phenomena.
The two are-- the first one is fear of homeostasis.
One of the major characteristics of a human or any animal
organism is its capacity to repair itself.
When it's too hot, as in this room this morning,
you start sweating to cool down your temperature.
You don't need to turn on a machine-like switch.
It happens.
It's built into the organism's performance.
Homeostasis is an important phenomenon.
I've used it at times to explain urban behavior,
such as the notion that perhaps the return in the United
States to the center of the city,
after years of suburban expansion,
is a homeostatic phenomenon.
There is something in the organic model which
says if you stretch resources too far,
you will return to an original state of balance.
The other one is optimum size.
The organic model of an elephant is easily
understood by virtue of its major size as a male elephant.
What is the optimum size of a dinner party?
What is the optimum size of most social activity?
You'll recall my using Dunbar's theory of 150 people
as the appropriate community for the rapid increase of brain
size.
What about the history of optimal size?
Aristotle, 30,000.
Leonardo, 50,000.
Ebenezer Howard, 1905 and 1920 Letchworth
and Welwyn Garden City, 30,000.
The first of the British new towns,
30,000, second [? mark II ?] generation 50,000,
next 100,000.
Milton Keynes, 250,000 is an optimum.
What do you read that graph as saying?
What determines the optimal size of a city?
Come on, you must have--
you've thought about these things in some way or other
before.
Have a guess.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] geographic boundaries [INAUDIBLE]??
JULIAN BEINART: Los Angeles has geographic boundaries?
It started off as a [INAUDIBLE] small community in 1781.
Yeah, please.
AUDIENCE: How we can communicate or transport each other?
If there's technology, we can do it for further away,
and the boundary of the city [INAUDIBLE]..
JULIAN BEINART: Yes.
You could do that here, and it still remains 30,000.
I don't know how to answer this question absolutely.
I can make a couple of guesses.
The one has to do with urban health.
If you have high rates of mortality
and low rates of birthrate accomplishment,
you probably end up with something like 30,000 people
as being the largest number you can secure in general.
I mean, it took from Rome at the birth of Christ
to London in 1850 for a city to be a million people in size.
There are guesses in fact that Angkor Wat reached
a couple of hundred thousand.
There were cities in India which perhaps did.
But the basic proposition might have
to do with reproduction of population.
There's also a comparative index.
The world's population is probably increasing and doing
this is with the Industrial Revolution being here.
So there's a notion that we constitute an approximate size,
at least to optimum size, based on the social context
of demography and of other cultural phenomena.
Yes, absolutely, you have to be able to move
one part to another.
What is it in our contemporary ethos and scientific model
of life that allows us to build cities of 20 million people?
AUDIENCE: Penicillin and drugs?
JULIAN BEINART: Yeah, I mean, since the Industrial Revolution
the world changed phenomenologically
in almost every respect.
That's why I will start teaching the second section
of this class largely beginning with the Industrial Revolution.
The rest is a waste of time.
Not a waste of time.
I'm exaggerating of course.
But in one class, one can't do everything.
My preference is to start with the major changes which
took place with urbanization and industrialization.
So let's leave optimum size theory for a moment.
It's a strange phenomenon.
We still have a natural inclination
to order our world according to certain basic rules.
In the British New Towns of Ebenezer Howard, Letchworth
and Welwyn Garden City, Raymond Unwin, the architect
and collaborator said 12 units per acre
is an ideal distribution of population.
What measures 12 units at 12 houses per acre,
as an optimum for whom, under what conditions, and so on.
So just some characteristic form tools
which emanate from this model of organic item.
Each community should be a separate social and spatial
unit as autonomous as possible.
Number 2, the community should be balanced.
The idea of a healthy community is heterogeneous.
Again, the modeling it after the human being, the heart
and the pancreas are not the same thing.
They have different shapes.
They have different entities.
They work.
You can't have a human--
you can't have an organic element which is singular.
It has to be multiverse.
And the nuclear family in many of these settlements
is taken as a model with these differentiated supporting
roles.
In Sunnyside Gardens, the development,
which the American Garden City people did in the Bronx,
Mumford claims that there were 116 mechanics, 79 office
workers, 55 small tradesmen, five chauffeurs, and 49
salesmen, plus architects, writers, intellectuals as well.
This, he was happy to--
he lived there.
He was happy to testify this as a good town
based on its balance.
Seldom does the organic system produce indefinite similarity.
So the argument that it is a model in nature
for support of systems in harmony with each other
is interesting.
Why the nuclear family should still
be the model for urbanization, given
that we have large numbers of people who are not married,
people who choose not to marry, for example.
Plus if we wish to extend the model to a universal model,
what success have we had in nurturing each other
as a universe?
We cannot, in facing the fundamental challenge
of climate change, come to agreement about
[? sustenization. ?]
One has to remember that it was as recent in 1920
that Woodrow Wilson, the American president,
went to Paris, and was received by the largest
crowd in the history of Paris, which
is a large crowd, because he proposed that the world take
account of its organization and prevent
wars, such as the dastardly 1914 to 1918
war, which the world had just experienced.
So the idea that there is something organically
universal about co-operative systems is not true.
Maybe at the scale of a single family, if it works out,
if you love each other--
which more and more, seeing that 50% of Americans are divorced,
no longer seems to be the model as described by organicism.
The neighborhood unit, Clarence Perry
divined an organic sub-model called the neighborhood
unit for the regional plan of New York in 1923,
I think it was.
A neighborhood unit, again, is organic in its nature.
It argues that a community should be the size of a quarter
mile walk of a child to school.
Again, the organic model comes in.
What is the species which has the least protection naturally?
A child.
So you'll use that as the model for building
a circular community around the primary school.
The fact that people take their kids
to school by automobile, the fact
that people choose schools in a democracy based
upon the quality of school, based on the fact
that the linear model doesn't allow one to use this model
is distinctive, and so on and so on, renders this model.
But Radburn, New Jersey, was based
on the quarter mile walking distance to schools,
as well as Greenbelt Maryland, and the American greenbelt
towns.
160 acres around a school.
The next growth optimum size is the greenbelt. If you
have an optimum size, you can protect it from the forces that
work against optimization--
nasty forces like the market, developers, politicians.
When we were working on Chandigarh
as recently as 1990-something, we
noticed that land was being sold north of the Capitol Complex,
in the path of this wonderful diagram that Corbusier
[INAUDIBLE] made of this town stretching
in an untrammeled fashion towards the Himalayas.
What we discovered were real estate signs
for politicians selling land illegally in this sacred area.
We needed a studio with the Cambridge University
in England.
We found that the greenbelt around Cambridge
had, of course, increased land values,
and Cambridge significantly had been pocketed
with political development.
The notion which Ebenezer Howard so
favored in the city of Adelaide, for building parks
around the center of the city, has not
proven to be another solution.
First of all, how do you keep the land green?
You need a maintenance system.
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
JULIAN BEINART: This is a small example from a mining
town in South Africa.
Gold is discovered-- gold and uranium.
Here's a center built. An open space is left around the center
so it might grow.
And housing starts here.
This is a hot climate.
No money in the design of the town
has been invested in maintaining an open space.
It's a dusty, horrible bubble.
It prevents the centers from growing, and it's a silly idea.
To be a junior teacher at Cambridge University,
if you are married, you have to live beyond the greenbelt.
The British have not built enough roads
to take care of your commutation every day.
If you've got two cars, which you probably
haven't at that stage in your career,
the wife has to carry-- you can't afford
to live in Cambridge, because the university has preoccupied
most of the land, and raised the rent
levels of the rest in the center to such a degree
that you can't afford to live there.
So the greenbelt has turned out to be
a weak weapon against expansion
I'm generalizing.
There are cases where protective legislation has
changed the pattern of growth.
But the greenbelt as a generalized idea
is not sufficient in itself.
There's also two other items with these settlements.
There's a fascination with the organic quality of production.
Why we believe that the food which
we buy on stalls next to the road outside of town
are better and healthier than food, water in the supermarket
is beyond me.
Perhaps the cost is less and they seem fresher.
Maybe they are.
Sometimes, they are directly tilled from the gardens
of the farm next door.
But there is something assumed to be
natural in the conjunction of a producer and a purchaser.
This is an archaic form of goodness.
That if you buy from a farmer without a middleman--
that the middleman is an alien phenomenon
in the natural system, the heart sends blood directly
to the toes.
He doesn't need support systems.
Maybe I don't know human biology well enough.
Maybe there's this halfway heart in your knees
which take care of the support system.
Sometimes these things happen through complex instruments
of market and culture.
There are now 124 farmers markets
in the County of Los Angeles--
124, spontaneously developed without any government
intervention, without any government subsidy.
Just simple rules about where you may create
a weekly farmer's market.
The attraction of buying at a farmers market,
as opposed to buying at a supermarket, are complex.
I have a thesis student at the moment working--
doing a thesis in Seoul, where the advent of the shopping mall
has caused havoc with the informal market system.
And this is true also in the case
in Hong Kong, which somebody is trying to replicate
a traditional market system.
These are pointers to elements of goodness and difficulty
in the blatant acceptance of organic systems.
One last one is the question of social equity.
There's a long tradition of believing
that the value of land or activity in the city
is not the function of individuals.
It is the function of the community's
activities and investment.
Therefore, a private lot should not
be the beneficiary of communal growth.
This philosophy was made explicit in this country
by a man called Henry George, a middle 19th century economist
philosopher who wrote a book called Progress and Poverty.
The Lincoln Land Institute here in Cambridge
is a follower of the Henry Georgian view.
It raises difficulties.
In English town planning up till reasonably recent times,
there was always a conflict between the payment
of betterment or the penalizing of people.
For instance, if I have a gas station
on a normal arterial road and a decision
is made to build a national highway,
and I'm given the right to put my gas
station on the national highway, I
contributed nothing to the world to pay me for this goodness.
But can I be penalized?
Can I be given a negative option on its location?
It's much like if you decide to wash
my car without my permission.
Am I entitled to pay you or not?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
No.
JULIAN BEINART: No.
You're right, no.
On the other hand, if I own a gas
station on an arterial road, and the government decides
to close the road, I mean, am I entitled to compensation?
These are all elements in the land change system
that we now have rules about.
But according to Henry George, and before him even
our great Abraham Lincoln--
I won't be able to find his quotation, has this notion
that land is only a temporary gift.
That the communal work done by the government-- of course,
Lincoln is a big government sponsor.
It is a strange idea, seeing he was a Republican.
But the organic model in Sunnyside Gardens,
for instance, the communal value increase
of the property over a certain period
is returned to the seller of a particular unit of land.
Let's carry on and see if we can get through this stuff
more quickly.
There's also an organic model, as I mentioned before.
Interest in non-orthogonal forms--
radial patterns, bounded units, focus
centers, anti-geometrical layouts,
irregularly curving organic shapes, natural materials,
and so on.
Three years after he designed Central Park,
Olmsted laid out a piece of flat prairie
land a couple of miles outside Chicago.
He suggests, and I quote from him,
"Curved streets suggest and imply
leisure, contemplativeness, and happy tranquility.
In contrast is straight streets, which
imply eagerness to press forward without looking to the right
or left.
Riverside was called a suburban village."
I will show you in the slides the plan of Riverside.
Its separate parts are all designated by curved roads.
In 1873, the Northern Pacific Railroad
asked Olmsted to do a layout for a new town of Tacoma,
Washington, a plan that exploited
the topography of the site.
According to some reporter, "Olmsted's plan
was the most fantastic plan of a town that was ever seen.
There wasn't a straight line, a right angle, or a corner lot.
The blocks were shaped like melons, pears,
and sweet potatoes.
One block shaped like a banana with 3,000 feet in length
and had 250 plot.
It was a pretty plan for a park, but condemned itself
for a town."
It was never built.
Let's look at some of these individual cases.
Patrick Geddes was a young Scottish biologist
who went to work for one of the great 19th century
biologists, Thomas Huxley, and according to legend,
deciphered the mechanism by which a frog's eye operates.
He didn't get the benefit of it, so Huxley did.
But Geddes went on to be interested in urbanism.
He is regarded as one of the great minds
in urbanistic history--
modern urbanistic history.
Charles Darwin said, "I have read several
of your biological papers with very great interest
and I've formed, if you'll permit me to say so,
a high opinion in your abilities."
Einstein, Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi all
speak highly of, Lewis Mumford says
of Geddes, one of the truly seminal minds, and so on.
I'm just going to go through a couple of ideas of Geddes' that
emerge from our understanding of the best uses of nature.
First of all, he believes in the civic survey.
He [INAUDIBLE] in India to do a plan for a new town that
has trouble.
He insists on the town first doing a civic survey.
A civic survey is not only a method
of capturing what exists accurately on the land.
It is a way of revealing the possibilities of retaining
the pieces that work.
In his plan for Balrampur, the civic survey
shows what is existing in the land.
He then decides to extract from those the elements that
need improvement, the elements that can be retained,
the elements that can be built on.
Secondly, he believes in the synoptic version of nature,
getting multiple visions to coincide
with similar ends similar to native elements of life
in nature.
For him in nature, it is possible for all things
to come together, and for us to understand that.
He uses a diagram from the French philosopher Laplace,
which is a right angle crossing in which the corners are
acts, deeds, dreams, facts.
If you begin this piece of paper along these vertical and
horizontal lines, each of them comes into each other.
He then breaks down the components of each sector.
What is it about dreams of the imagined?
What is it about the imagination that has to do with work?
It's a diagram which a child can play with.
But it's, for me anyway, more of an indication of his notion
that simultaneity is a fundamental property
of organicism, and can be utilized effectively
in practice.
He's asked to do a plan for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
after 1917.
And his son-in-law, who was an architect,
does a plan with him.
Again, everything about the plan of the universities,
which I show you in these slides, deals with synopticism.
At the center of the university plan is a domed space.
Why does he use the dome?
He says the dome is the only architectural form that
is revered by Christians, Jews, and Muslims.
So even an architectural form, which
resonates with different often conflicting cultures,
he says there's no reason for these people
to kill themselves over things like a dome.
The fingers, which move out from the dome
locate aspects of the knowledge system
of the university in sequence, one after the other.
For you to get from architecture to the center,
you have to go through biology.
Much like the folded the diagram of a piece of paper
which connects dreams and work and play
and ideas, this planned university
is an attempt to resonate along the same system.
MIT's perhaps closer in its stupid grid system
to this synopticism than anything
that Geddes ever envisioned.
He put something called the [INAUDIBLE] tower in Edinburgh
to take people up into the top of the tower
to look down at the town.
For him, understanding and learning about the town
was an important element in civic education.
You needed to know about the town
in order to fulfill your role as a member of a community, which
had something to do with the change
of the shape of the place.
He proposed things like civic exhibitions.
He made a civic exhibition of the ideal town.
It was damaged and destroyed en route to India on a ship.
He nevertheless maintained this fundamental idea
of human nature is learning.
It is what Kevin Lynch stressed as distinguishing
the human being from other animal species--
brain size and its capacity to learn.
For Geddes, the human being was central as a humanist.
But he had observations about the way in which nature
we could accompany the human learning
capacity in the generation of good systems.
Participation of people is now an accepted political
of creation of modern urbanism.
The attempt by some of the people
we'll see in a few minutes to coordinate and make
sense of the inner world and the outer world
of transcendentalists, like Benton MacKaye
in the United States--
the notion that you can both cooperate
nature and the economy, such as the Tennessee Valley
Authority the new regionalism.
God, can you imagine in the United States
today getting seven states in the American South
to agree that the central government would
make a plan for all of them?
It's nonsense.
This capacity to see natural regions
as natural phenomena outside of political boundaries
is Geddesian idea.
The greatest piece of human intervention
in our time in this country must be the Tennessee Valley
Authority.
I'll end up these profiles with a quick look at the Tennessee
Valley Authority.
Ebenezer Howard was a young Englishman
who drifted to the United States at the age of 21
because he had uncle in Nebraska.
He was a dreamer.
He learned rapid transcription in Chicago.
Came back to England, made a living as a court reporter,
but had the idea that new towns could
be the salvation of industrial chaos.
He was the founder of what is called the Garden City
movement, and he built two towns.
Can you imagine a man with that economic background
being the sponsor of two towns?
Letchworth in 1905, about 80 miles
from London, and Welwyn Garden City in 1920,
these were towns which followed certain naturalistic
principles.
They were meant to take what is best of the center city,
take what is best of the countryside,
and amalgam the two in a kind of urbanistic master mix machine.
It would be identifiable parts of this community,
and so on and so on.
The Garden City movement had universal appeal.
Mumford regards it as the most extensive influence.
He says that the book Garden Cities of To-Morrow
has done more than any other single book
to guide the modern town planning
movement toward its objective.
We can't pay much more attention to this movement.
In the United States, we have Clarence Stein
and Henry Wright's book Towards New Towns for America.
The Regional Planning Association of America in 1923
was a group of architects, planners,
exponents of conservation, sociologists,
and economists who came together to make greater
sense of American urbanism.
They were influenced by the British Patrick
Geddes, who was invited to come and talk to them in 1923.
They mixed a strange kind of religious element
of transcendentalism, the movement
started here in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on the 8th of September 1836 by people
like George Putnam, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Frederic Henry
Hedge.
Nature was the vehicle which associated the mind and nature,
and not nature was [INAUDIBLE].
Combining the mind and the body through the element
of nature was one of the--
there was not enough to be argued in the functional
plan of things.
There had to be some transcendental-- some larger,
ethos associated.
And this ethos was not in conventional theism
or religion, but in an invented religion without religion--
a naturalist religion of a kind.
And so we go through Sunnyside Gardens in Radburn
in New Jersey.
[INAUDIBLE] another 5 or 10 minutes.
I'd rather spend the time on talking about the Tennessee
Valley Authority as a case study.
In 1930, the condition of the region was as follows.
30% of the region was afflicted by malaria, others
by hookworm, pellagra, and black lung disease.
The income was $639 per year per family.
Much of the farmland had been eroded or depleted.
In Tennessee alone, 14 million acres needed reclamation.
10% of the forests were being burnt each year,
and the river long used for transportation
by Native Americans had been clogged by floods.
The area covered by the--
over 90% of the people had no electricity in 1930.
30% had no toilets, and 65% had to walk over 250 meters
to get water.
There are a number of responses to this situation.
The first was the response by a group
who called themselves the Southern
Agrarians, an intellectual group who claimed that farmers were
ancient pioneers of hardy stock, capable of sustaining
themselves and only wanting to be left alone.
Twain had eulogized the great rivers of the South
in the new language of nature.
Beaten by the North in the Civil War,
the South resisted the invasion of their nature
by metropolitanization by the [INAUDIBLE] centralized
and the impersonal nature of modernism, machines,
and the central government, which the TVA represented.
See, here, we have a reaction to this kind of condition.
Leave it to us.
Do not intervene.
Do not bring large-scale intervention
to bear on us people.
We have lived through turmoil before, and we have managed.
This is an ethos of conservation.
The second perspective was that held by Roosevelt
and his colleagues, who led to the creation in 1933
of an authority which had large rights to change
this seven-state environment.
Roosevelt was very influenced in regionalism
by people like Benton MacKaye.
Mumford strongly supported-- who met with Roosevelt before he
signed the TVA proclamation.
The ethos, if there was one in Roosevelt's team, was, I quote,
"Multi-use use and seamless environments,
trees and nature are means to solve almost any human problem,
touching every river and creek and [INAUDIBLE] touches
and gives life to all form of human concerns."
If this isn't a naturalistic view, I don't know what is.
Yeah.
The TVA proceeded after '33 to develop fertilizers,
told farmers how to have great crop
yields and replant forests, controlled forests.
Devastation floods created an irrigation channel,
which carries more than 50 million tons of goods
on the Tennessee River.
They built 29 hydroelectric dams,
which made the TVA the nation's largest power company, and so
on.
A third alternative view of what was
seen as socialist intervention was
that proclaimed by Henry Ford.
Henry Ford in 1921 offered Congress $5 million
to buy the Wilson dam and the power facilities
to develop his alternative to Roosevelt's TVA.
Ford soon saw nature through the lens of agriculture,
which he believed had been mistakenly ignored
in the making of American Industrial cities.
To create a machine-agriculture balance that is
a machine-nature balance, Ford proposed to build a city
in a town called Muscle Shoals--
muscle in-- muscle, like on the human body,
and shoals, S- H- O- A- L- S. 120 kilometers long
and 24 kilometers wide, made of a string of small towns
from which workers commute to his factories.
Ford was rejected by Congress, led by Senator Norris, who
claimed this act of revitalizing the Tennessee Valley
Authority should be done by the public,
not by the private sector.
A strange thought these days.
Since 1973, there have been new conceptions of nature
that have little to do with the romance of tradition
nor with the efficiency of relational regionalism,
nor the reclamation of agriculture through industry.
First, in 1973, the construction of the Tellico Dam
on the Little Tennessee was halted
when a rare 9 centimeter long fish
was discovered in these waters.
The fish, which was claimed to be
a unique species and a potential demise
became a watershed event in the growing American
environmental movement.
It was taken to the United States Supreme
Court, who upheld the environmentalists' protests.
Since the controversy, the small fish
has been relocated to another in Tennessee, where it's thriving.
The snail darter [? conservaty ?] still stands.
The interesting thing about a 9 centimeter fish--
it's not quite interesting about it, I must admit.
But what is interesting is that it's within the large Tennessee
Valley Authority, which we've seen in relation to differing
views about nature.
Here's a microscopic element of nature causing an attempt
to stop a dam.
In the 1950s, as the demand for electricity
was outstripping the capacity of the hydroelectric facilities,
the TVA began to build coal-fired electric plants,
which account for about 65% of its electricity output.
Why I'm telling you this story is
to indicate for you, in one project
over 70 years, the conflicting and differing
ways in which nature is introduced
as the basis for critique and for revision.
Nobody cared about small fish in the dams in 1933.
Cultural and technological change
produced a new way of discovering nature
in the water.
The original idea to generate electricity
through the building of hydroelectric
turned out by 1950 not to be producing enough electricity.
So they switched to coal, which now is the predominant energy
source.
On December the 22nd, 2008, an earthen dike at one
of the plants at Lincoln broke, spilling a billion gallons
of wet coal ash across 300 acres of land
and into the tributaries.
The New York Times in the next day
called it quote, "The largest environmental disaster
of its kind in the United States."
In 1943, the US government built the Oak Ridge Laboratory
in Tennessee as part of its Manhattan Project
to separate and produce uranium 13 for use
in developing a nuclear weapon.
We start with a problem.
We have reactions to probably invoking
the best use of nature.
The idea of nature, the level at which it
had seen and discriminated changes over time,
over 80 years, we now have a completely different view--
not a completely different view.
We have a different set of tools with which
to understand nature.
So it argues as much for there not
being a fixed and determinant view of nature superseding
almost every possible alternative
view, but a fluctuating view of nature
as an important phenomenon in human existence.
This adds strength to the idea that the city
is a phenomenon of change.
And we will, in our subsequent classes,
be looking carefully at theories which attempt
to accommodate these changes.
How Roosevelt in 1933 could have known about the snail darter,
I don't know.
But I do know he couldn't have known.
This is the forward to [? Ilya ?] [INAUDIBLE]
father's book on the city.
It shows plans of London.
There is no evaluation, other than visually,
it looks like cancer.
That it may be performing better in terms of social equity
than under Henry VIII is not an issue.
He is an architect and looks at patterns of architecture,
and derives the observation that not only is this a more
complicated and more complex problem
to be resolved pattern-wise.
He would apply that solution to it
that is identifiable small units, either neighborhood
or idiosyncratic environments or patterns,
in a way which isn't as fragmented and difficult
as this.
This is a plan for the metropolis of tomorrow
by Victor Gruen, who simplified things everywhere he could.
The task is to learn how to identify patterns in this kind
of environment which are good and which are bad,
as opposed to creating a new geometry,
which for elementary reasons cannot accept a city form,
which is on the bottom on the left.
Next.
Patrick Geddes, the Scottish biologist and town planner.
The Laplace diagram-- if you follow the black lines,
you follow the acts, deeds, thoughts, facts all together.
Experience and ideation, work and synergy,
all are part of segments of thought and feeling,
experience emotion, ethnopolity, synergy and so on.
The whole idea is that everything
in the human experience touches on everything else.
It was a kind of vision of a synoptic world which
could make sense of everything, but particularly
in the relationship between things.
Next.
So one would expect the Hebrew University
plan, which he did with his son-in-law, who
was an architect.
The center is a center.
That is a biological constant.
It's fundamental.
If you believe [INAUDIBLE],, it's built into archaic man.
The dome on the building is a form
which is the only architectural form which is accepted by Jews,
Islam, and Christianity.
So bringing all these things together
suggests a form which can deal with all three
at the same time.
The ideation context, the branches
of science and the humanities, and the various aspects
of knowledge are branched out in arms from the center
in order to go from the bottom on the left.
I don't know what it is.
In order to get to the center you
have to pass through other bodies of knowledge.
Again, the whole idea is that what
makes a human environment most powerful
is the capacity to capture more than one element
of human experience.
When I talked today about a number of social science
theories of city form, this aspect
will be particularly missing.
The valley section-- there is a natural place
for things in a system.
He's wrong.
There is nothing natural about that at all.
The soil condition will determine to some extent
the kind of--
but we will see another version of this in von Thunen's
diagrams in southern Germany in the beginning
of the 19th century, which also lays out
a pattern of distribution, but it's largely
as a function of transportation costs.
Milk is produced close to the center of the city.
Further out is cream.
Why?
What is natural about cream being further from the center?
Cream is produced in smaller volumes than milk.
Therefore, the transportation costs are less.
It's assuming all transportation is towards the center.
Secondly, cream perishes less rapidly than milk,
so it's resistant to longer transportation possibilities.
Here, the valley diagram just assumes
there's a natural rightness of location.
There is no natural rightness of location.
Next.
OK, he's working in one of the Indian towns.
This is Balrampur, and he uses items,
such as conservative surgery.
Rather than bulldozing what the maharajah called the slum,
he looks to the possibilities of cosmetic surgery,
investing energy and money in key items.
But basically, probably what is there
is considered as good in itself, rather than the erasing.
The notion here is that you cannot--
by erasing a system, you retain very little of its capacity
to introduce new items.
It's one of the problems of new settlements.
They don't have the built-in connection between history
and memory and newness.
You can see how Geddes' mind as a biologist
exerts itself in a number of items.
Ebenezer Howard, on the other hand,
sees the distinction between the central city and the country
as the basis of making a division between the two.
Next.
He postulates the town country has low rents, high wages,
plenty to do.
Town is bad, country is great.
But country is dumb, town is too expensive.
Town-country brings together all the best things.
No sweating, pure air and water, cooperation, no smoke.
Why should there be more cooperation
in a town-country phenomenon than in an urban setting?
You may argue that in fact, quite the opposite is probably
true.
That the higher proportion of people likely to cooperate
learn to cooperate in a dense environment than in a loosely--
but that's not at issue for Howard.
Howard's a man who learned to be a court reporter,
but had the practical genius of an Englishman
to build new towns.
Next.
Here, you can see it again.
Yesterday, this is Manchester as described by Engels.
Today, tomorrow, living and working in the sun
at Welwyn Garden City, one of the two cities
that Ebenezer Howard proposed.
The early romanticization of suburbia,
it produces nature in a domesticated form.
Here's this benign husband and wife and little daughter
sitting in a man-made garden.
People are friendly.
Next.
The greatest asset-- the Garden City movement
became an international phenomenon.
It was taken up by the Regional Planing
Association of New York in 1923 as one of its great goals.
Here, you can see some of the charm.
There's a lot of invention in site planning in these towns.
Let's skip and go on to some of those.
Next.
The idea-- this is Letchworth, 1905.
But there was also the idea that you could break up
the facade of a street, largely straight because
of a mechanical system, by identifying opportunities
or creating a different relationship to the street.
Next.
You can see some of the items of this invented idea.
First of all, the cul-de-sac--
traffic should not run along its clearly identified path.
It should be stopped.
The cluster, the road which bends
informs the curve, the retention of our buildings.
So again, here is a combination of the old and the new.
And landscaping became an important part
of the manifestation of space.
Different types of landscaping in the form
of large trees, small trees.
This, in my view, is the major contribution
of Garden City knowledge.
Next.
Here is Nuovo Quartiere of Villini, a Garden City
suburb in Milano.
They occur in Cape Town.
They occur all over the world.
The shopping center, again, underscaled.
In relation to in the United States,
the ratio of parking space to floor space
would be phenomenally larger than here.
And one of the problems with these kinds of towns
has been the increase in car population.
Next.
The Regional Planning Association
in the United States-- this is again
a diagram of Victor Gruen, showing
how unsubtle the simultaneous relationship
with Patrick Geddes spoke of.
Yes, there are people who walk and there are people
who travel longer distances.
That they need to be separated by a mechanical system
is stupid.
It involves an introduction of a new infrastructure, which
is relatively purposeless.
You can take apart all the elements.
But the idea of cleanliness, of a kind of--
the Victor Gruen plan, the Washington plan,
has a kind of clarity of fundamentalism,
which is supposedly attractive, whereas in fact,
the cancer-like planned of London
has items in it which have a higher degree of intelligence
than this.
This is a lower level of intelligence.
The organic model again.
The possible state of the future in which each part serves
its logical function in support of wholesome activity
and good living.
Each part has its right place.
Central Park, a model of the insertion
of a natural phenomenon by Olmsted and Vaux.
I think it's 1859, I'm not sure.
And Olmsted, the progenitor of much the idea
of the cosmic model--
sorry, organic model, planned for Riverside
just outside of Chicago.
The curved surface, no straight lines,
idiosyncratic, speed at movement through the complex.
Next.
Sunnyside Gardens.
Well on the left Clarence Perry neighborhood theory measuring
the safe walking distance of a child to school
is giving a density of an appropriate walking
[INAUDIBLE].
And Sunnyside Gardens, Stein and Wright's
complex, where you internalize the urban world
into a safe environment and treat it as a communal asset,
with everybody contemplating the unity
of the social circumstance which created.
Over time, each owner started building
particular private space enclosures
eating into the public space.
But in recent years, there's been an attempt
to reformulate the original open space.
I don't know if that's Lewis Mumford, but he lived here.
Next.
Chatham Village, a number of these layouts occurred.
Chatham Village in Pittsburgh.
Next.
The phenomenon is the same--
the predominance of nature, the separation of places to walk
and places to drive, the capacity to fix things
in your own property, the kind of control of the world,
and really good neighborly relationship between houses,
at least that is accepted without somehow the community
is energized by the fact that the whole system is made
pro-humano in some way--
so it is thought.
A good biological system will animate its users
to believe in it.
You have no way of not believing in your body.
Next.
That's Radburn, New Jersey, on the left based
on walking distance of children and the externalization
of automobiles.
Next.
The greenbelt towns built under the Roosevelt administration--
again, the walking distance of children,
and the use of major curved geometries
to enhance the fact that the buildings and the streets
are not subject to simple mechanization.
But the patterns of the street in themselves
would animate or lead to an understanding
of the natural quality of this place.