4. Community and City Planning

Can the bourgeois city be rescued from itself? Or, to ask a more basic question, can the high traditions of urbanism be instilled in the modern metropolis? In the United States, where science acquires the aura that the archaic world once reserved for magic, the answer tends to be biased toward technical expertize. The problems of the modern city can (and presumably will) be resolved by those who have the greatest urban “know-how” — the city planners. Not that these specialists are beloved by people, particularly those in the older urban areas whose neighborhoods are being savagely revitalized. Hut the prestige of American know-how, of professional technique., mystifies the minds of its victims even as it disillusions them in practice. As to the widening gap between ideal and real, the city plan and its grotesque actuality, this is comfortably explained as the work of the self-seeking, the greedy, and the indifferent. These villainous traits are bestowed not only on land speculators, construction barons, government bureaucrats, landlords, and corporate interests, who eminently possess them, but rather flippantly, on the general public, People, we are told, don’t care enough about their urban environment to do anything for it. An abstract “we” is distilled From the medley of conflicting social interests, a target of insidious propaganda that demands concern, but denies the power of action to those who are most victimized — the ordinary urban dweller who must endure the metropolis not only as a place of work but also as a way of life.

In urbanism the counterpart of this abstract “we” is the abstract design: the architectural sketch that will resolve the gravest urban problems with the most sophisticated know-how. Frank Fisher observes:

One question about city planning must have come to the mind of anyone who has fingered the magnificent volumes in which the proposals of planners are generally presented. Why do those green spaces, those carefully placed skyscrapers, those pleasant residential districts, and equally pleasant factory and working areas, still remain dreams for the most part? Why are our cities hardly any less ugly and unpleasant than they were the at the height of the nineteenth century’s Industrial Revolution? [30]

Fisher’s reply, as we shall see, is more reasonable than most, but the question itself is commonplace and it normally contains loaded presuppositions. The most important of these is that a rational city is primarily a product of good designing. Will “green spaces,” “pleasant residential districts,” “equally pleasant factory and working areas” — not to mention “carefully placed skyscrapers’ — in themselves produce human, rational, or even viable cities?

As a distinctive discipline, city planning arose in the nineteenth century net only because the great cities of the world had deteriorated appallingly, but because planning and more precisely design had become mystically reified. The central notion that the city was essentially a man-made arrangement of space imputed to the Organization of space problems that basically inhere in society. This cunning operational approach begs the very questions it proposes to resolve. The external attributes of an entity, the obvious fact that the entity is located in “space” and “time/’ arc made into its essence. The far more important fact that cities embody modes of social relations — that those relations may be hierarchical or egalitarian, based on domination or liberation, promote conflict or harmony, governed by the market or by people — are evaded by a perspective that focuses on socially neutral categories.

The spatial criteria of city planning do not provide us with an index For judging |be viability of urban entities. Indeed, some of the most socially and culturally vital cities in history were spatially chaotic by modern standards. The residential quarters of classical Athens, for example, have been described by Mumford as a “rubble of houses... built of unbaked brick, with tiled roofs, or even mud and wattle.”[31] A maddening disorderly maze, the streets were often no wider than the span required For a man and a donkey. To find one’s way through this confusion, one, in typical Greek fashion, had to know the city intimately. Dicaearchus, in his description of Athens around the second century B.C., complains that the “streets are nothing but miserable lanes, the houses mean, with a few better ones among them. On his first arrival a stranger would hardly believe that this is the Athens of which lie lias heard sa much.”[32]

But Athenian life was not meant to be lived indoors in resplendent privacy, for to do so would have vitiated the polis as a community. Life was to be spent in the agora, the large square in which citizens gathered daily to transact their affairs, gossip, argue politics, and sell their wares. To fulfill this function, the polis had to be scaled to human dimensions — in Aristotle’s words, a city that could be “taken in at a single view.”[33] Urban space evolved spontaneously out of the desire for intimate sociation, not out of a priori considerations of trade, religion, or a geometry of formal urban esthetics. Since the agora was the authentic arena of Athenian life, the “street was not treated as the principal design element but as the minimal leftover space for circulation,” notes Paul Spreiregen — the agora, that is, and the Acropolis, which served as fortress and religious center Seen from an aerial view, the structures of the Acropolis lack any orderly arrangement; indeed, to later observers, “the component buildings were once thought to lack visible design relations,” Spreiregen observes. The Hellenic mind, however, concerned itself little with a design that is meant to please a cosmic suprahuman deity that views man’s works from the skies, or, for that matter, an Olympian architect who places geometric symmetry above the mundane experiences of everyday life, The Acropolis’s Structures “were conceived, built, and rebuilt over a long period of observation and reflection — to be seen by the human eye and experienced by people moving on foot. Their design principle was not the abstract plan: it was the real experience of people.” [34]

The medieval commune retained this spirit of spontaneous human design and human scale — not From any knowledge of the polis, but as a natural actualization of the social relations that formed the basis of urban life. One must be blind to urban charm and beauty to dismiss these early European towns as “chaotic,” although this term has been used repeatedly an accounts of the commune. Close to nature and to the land, the medieval town as a matter of course followed the contours of the terrain, and in serpentine fashion formed those twisting lanes, delightful cul-de-sacs, and narrow curving streets that still charm the modern visitor. Mumford has captured the commune’s beauty and visual variety with unmatched descriptive passages:

One awoke in the medieval town to the crowing of a cock, the chirping of birds nesting under the eaves, or to the tolling of the hours in the monastery on the outskirts, perhaps to the chime of bells in the new bell tower in the market square, to announce the beginning of the working day, or the opening of the market.[35]

In walking down the streets of the medieval town, one finds “no static architecture,” but a dynamic heterogeneity.

The masses suddenly expand and vanish, as one approaches them or draws away; a dozen paces may alter the relation of the foreground and background, or the lower and upper range of the lino of vision. The profiles of the buildings, with their steep gables, their sharp roof linos, their pinnacles, their towers, their traceries, ripple and how, break and solidify, rise and fall, with no less vitality than the structures themselves.[36]

From an esthetic viewpoint, Mumford notes:

a medieval town is like a medieval tapestry: the eye, challenged by the rich intricacy of the design, roams back and Forth over the entire fabric, captivated by a dower, an animal, a head, lingering where it pleases, retracing its path, taking the whole only by the assimilating of its parts, not commanding the design at a single glance.[37]

This is the space of a leisurely craft society that looks not only to quality but to detail. The totality acquires its unity by an interweaving of unique particulars. We see in this design pattern the civic evidence of an awakening individuality that, aside from the Greek polis was the western world’s claim to freedom and personality — that is, until this claim was debased by massification and egotism. It was also an egalitarian space of modest houses arid shared responsibilities. Contrast this civic tapestry with Baroque hierarchy and absolutism, and the change introduced by the courtly cities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries becomes painfully evident. Mom ford adds perceptively:

For the baroque eye, that medieval form is torturous and the effort to encompass it is tedious; for the medieval eye, on the other hand, the baroque form would be brutally direct and over-unified. There is no one “right” way to approach a medieval building: the finest face of the Chartres cathedral is the southern one; and though perhaps the best view of Noter Dame is from across the Seine, in the rear, that view, with its engirdling green was not opened up till the nineteenth century.[38]

In a sense the same is true of the Acropolis, despite, its seemingly classical coldness. Viewed from almost any angle and distance, it presents the ascending planes that invite the eye to move step by step from each structure to the Parthenon.

This spontaneous artistic achievement Hows from a complete integration of esthetic sensibility with workaday life. Accordingly, it would have been difficult for the Greeks and medieval burghers to exclude shops and vendors from their public squares, to reduce these squares merely to the visual object of passive loiterers. One did not merely linger in these squares during the afterhours of work; one lived in them and often conducted the main business of life there. The people who built the polis and medieval commune were independent, civicly dedicated smallholders — farmers and craftsmen — for whom esthetic sensibility fuzed with work, trade, and politics, This sensibility was not reserved for religion and the more abstract realms of life. Indeed, art itself was a craft, the “extraordinary” rendered ordinary. In this context, where good taste inhered in the social relations themselves, these relations could be trusted to spontaneously evolve the city as a vital civic entity and a work of art.

City planning, on the other hand, is an expression of mistrust in the spontaneity of contemporary social relations, and for good reason. Bourgeois society divides virtually all spheres of life against each other; it universalizes competition, profit, and the primacy of exchange value over mutual aid, art, and utility. Esthetic sensibility, if it can he called that in this context, becomes a merchandisable device; art, even the city itself, a marketable commodity. The damage and dislocations that “free enterprise” inflicted on the cities of the western world over the past two centuries remind us that bourgeois social relations, if left unchecked, would ravage beyond redemption every esthetic treasure that the past has left to the present. City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society cannot not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

But the critical self-consciousness of city planning did not go far enough. Rarely could city planning transcend the destructive social conditions to which it was a response. To the degree that it turned in upon itself as a specialized profession — the activity of architects, engineers, and sociologists — it too fell within the narrow division of labor of the very society it was meant to control. Not surprisingly, some of the most humanistic notions of urbanism come From amateurs who retain contact with the authentic experiences of people and the mundane agonies of metropolitan life. Furthermore, the overwhelming pragmatic mentality of bourgeois society muted city planning’s visionary outlook, one had to deal with the “facts of life” to get anything done, not with “utopian schemes.” To get anything done, in effect, meant to do one’s city planning within the parameters established by the social system. But the system is inherently irrational to begin with, so that city planning found itself in the impossible situation of trying to render rational a social organism whose very essence is irrationality — production for the sake of production and the subservience of human goals to economic ones. Insofar as city planning did not make bourgeois social relations as such the valid subject of critical analysis — a work that was done by the radical Utopians, the anarchists, and by Marx — it was rapidly assimilated (aside from “eccentric” who fringe every discipline) into the prevailing social order. The hypostatization of design and technique is simply the shadow that planners cast on the harsh outlines of dehumanizing social relations — relations that debase not only the urban dweller but the city itself. The outlines, in effect, are both softened and obscured. As Leonardo Benevolo observes, “town-planning technique. Invariably lags behind the events it is supposedly controlling and it retains a strictly remedial character.” [39] Even this statement has ideological elements: the problem is not one of “technique” keeping up with events; city planning plays not a “remedial” role but an exacerbating one.

A critical summary of the city-planning movement’s development lends compelling support to Benevolo’s verdict. Until the late Middle Ages, city planning was rarely centered on the city as an autonomous entity, nor could it be called “planning” in the modern sense of the word. Conceptually, the pre-Hellenic ancient city was seen as a temple or a fortress, whatever additional Functions it acquired along the way or however significant they became at a later point. Its “planners” were priests and warriors, not the general populace or specialists in urbanism. The layout of the city, when it was more than a military bastion situated in a defensible terrain, was defined by religious considerations. These considerations had an urban value in themselves, for they gave the city a formal unity that resisted the corrosive effects of trade and commercial self-interest.

E.A. Gutkkind, drawing upon the example of precapitalist cities in India, gives us a glimpse of the factors that guided this formal unity.

The old towns of India were limited in size. They reflected the ground plan of the world as devised by the Jainas, a religious group of North India related to the Buddhists. The innermost circle is occupied by the Earth, which is surrounded by a circular ocean. In the center rises Meru, the world mountain, from which issue four rivers separating four continents. Beyond the circular ocean is another circular continent with its mountain, Followed by another ocean and another continent. The bounding of’ the town by a wall, the situation of the temple or the palace in the center, the principle of walled-in quarters, the symbolism of figures as seen. For instance, in the number of gates (twelve gates corresponding to the twelve signs of the Zodiac), the symbolism of colors — all these factors were a direct transposition of the world concept into architecture, even though the cities were mostly rectangular, and only very occasionally, as in the case of the old town of Crikshatra in Burma, circular. [40]

Significantly, early cities were not only economically dependent upon the land, but they often included space For Food cultivation within the urban perimeter. Tenochtitlan, for example, contained many of the famous “floating gardens” that the Aztecs created in Lake Texcoco by anchoring mud with osier reinforcements, adding trees whose roots fed the entire ensemble to the lake bottom. The Mesopotamian cities, Gutkind points out, “included large open spaces that were used as fields, gardens and orchards, contributing to the food supply of the population.” [41] Until the medieval towns became overcrowded toward the end of the Middle Ages, gardening and dairying were a normal part of family life. Plots were reserved for growing food and each family retained some pigs, chickens, and a cow or two which could be postured on common land. And if open space was in short supply, the countryside was easily accessible to the urban dweller. “Even ancient Rome, with its million inhabitants” observe Lynch and Rodwin, “was in visible relation to its surrounding countryside. One could easily walk from one district to another or From the central to the rural area.” [42]

The striking feature of precapitalist urban design is that it is conditioned by extraurban factors. Limited by a metaphysical or human focus, it subserves trade and material production to ends other than themselves. In the Asian cities, this focus may be the gods, a religious cosmology, or the deified monarch and state bureaucracy; in the polis the Focus shifts strikingly to the human community and finds expression in the centrality that is given to the agora; and in the medieval town the urban focus is directed toward the home, despite the growing Importance of the marketplace. Until late medieval times, not only is urban development physically and socially limited by the land, but its design criteria are guided by religious, political, or distinctly human considerations. One may find these criteria oppressively monumental owing to the supremacy they give to political and ecclesiastical authority; but rarely are the precapitalist cities ugly in the notable absence of esthetic values. However oppressive the monumentality of such urban environments may be, they clearly engaged the emotions of the urban dweller — in the polis and in the free medieval town. Ids direct civic participation as well — and imposed distinct esthetic limits on the rampant egotism that was later to be generated by the bourgeois marketplace.

Planning of sorts surety existed, initially, as we have noted, by priests and warriors; later, by architects and engineers, But in the ease of the latter, we encounter — no less than among the priests — a strong emphasis on religious or metaphysical considerations which Alexander Tzonis rather unfelicitously describes as “irrational planning” as distinguished from modern “rationalist” urban design. Yet, in all fairness, it could be said that the “planner” of the precapitalist city followed a rationality of his own. His goals were defined not merely by functional considerations, but by canons of balance, harmony, and beauty derived from cosmological or philosophical speculations. From what little we know’ of Hippodamus, perhaps the earliest professional “city planner” of antiquity, to whom Aristotle erroneously imputed the discovery of the rectilinear gridiron layout, he strikes us as more of a Pythagorean-type mystic than the functionalist designer we encounter so commonly in our own time. Hippodamus was obsessed, with the coherence provided by triads. The land is divided as Aristotle tells us

into three parts, one sacred, one public, the third private: the first was set apart to maintain the customary worship of the gods, the second was to support the warriors, the third was the property of the husbandmen.[43]

Apart from the practically-minded Romans, this order of thinking guides city planning well into the Renaissance.

Increasingly, this thinking centered on specific structures and districts, rather than on the city as a whole, reflecting the particularizing process and individuation that marked the transition to the modern era, But religious and cosmological canons of architecture temper this development block thee reduction of the city to a mere arena for trade and commodity production. As Tzonis observes:

Many Renaissance and Medieval architects shared the belief that churches and other buildings of specialized functions should he designed according to rules dictated by a “divine model.” ... Both periods required certain buildings to be formed according to absolute rules created and determined by God. As God was considered in Medieval times the Architect of the Universe, “elegans architectus,” whose rules man as designer had to obey, so in the Renaissance the architect was valued “like a demigod (‘come semidei’) when he complied with God’s creations.” Accordingly, architectural rules “were expected to establish the link between the design product audits divine model” Therefore architectural investigations were aimed toward accomplishing two tasks; the identification of the structure of the divine model, and the invention of means for implementing it in the architectural products. A design product is “true” or “harmonic” or “perfect” if it is “according to measure,” if it complies with the sacred prototype. [44]

In a sense, this approach spontaneously guided the development of the city as a whole. To found a city was a sacred act and insofar as the city was built around the temple, it was initially sacred territory. Not that urbanism lacked secular dimensions, indeed the gradual divorce of the sacred from the secular (already reflected consciously in the pragmatic features of Hippodamus’s triad) is an important guide to the steady assimilation of the city to commercial ends. Yet even in its secular aspect, the early city revealed the influence of the land on the towns, of rural pursuits on urbanism — not only in terms of the gardens that craftsmen cultivated, but also in the contours and layout of the city. The rectilinear pattern of the gridiron city followed the “logic of the plow”; the circular form of settlement, the logic of pasturage, for the circle is “an ideal form for fencing in cattle” by enclosing “a maximum of land with a minimum of fence.” [45] Roman towns were laid out ceremoniously by priestly guidance. The plow that described the perimeter for the walls and the city’s system of four quarters, with major and minor streets at rectangles to each other, had an agrarian religions significance, The secularization of these techniques and their transmutation into economic, military, and administrative criteria for city planning is a later development. This development reflects the increasing separation of the social from the sacred, of separate and growing antagonistic social interests from an internally coherent community life.

In Europe, from the late Renaissance onward, the process of secularization quickened as an echo of the growing expansion, of capitalism. As wealth and social power became increasingly privatized, the architect’s vision shifted, in Tzonis’s excellent formulation, from that of “mirroring the secret map of the ‘Celestial City’ to that of creating the concrete reality of a ‘Pleasing Object.’” Lacking any guidance

from a superhuman formula of cosmic order, the designer had to search into the desires of the individual. If the desires of the individual recommended disorder, then disorder was acceptable to guide the organization of the design product. [46]

In architects like Perrautt, structural design acquired an increasingly psychological bias, a matter of courtly taste and manners. A century later, in the work of Lodoli, the emphasis shifted to structural efficiency, which marked a continuation of the late Renaissance development rather than a break with it, Characteristically (and to the horror of the eighteenth-century Romans), Lodoli expressed a greater admiration for the sewers of Rome than the sacristy of St. Peter, which he regards as the worst building in the city, In fact, Lodoli, as Tzonis observes,

marks not only the beginning of the period of rationalization in architecture, but also the end of the period of the “Speculative mind,” the end of the brief period when the individual was thought to be emancipated from authority. Lodoli also marks the end of the period when theories of architecture considered the design of a building to be determined by a set of independent objectives, whether the Vitruvian triad (“Accommodation, Handsomeness and Lastingness”) or Perrault’s dichotomy between “Positive” and “Arbitrary” values.[47]

Thereafter, architecture and its theoretical offspring, city planning, was to be dominated by structural efficiency and by functionalism. “Handsomeness” inhered in the capacity of the design product to facilitate the goals that society, specifically the bourgeois market economy, assigned to a structure or a city. We may bypass the various phases of architectural history since the Enlightenment, from the “rationalism” of the utilitarian era to that of the Modernists, to validate these goals. The romantic periods, inspired by Rousseau and Buskin, were interludes in a much broader development that debased ends into means, the speculative mind into the pragmatic, the metaphysical into the instrumental. To the precapitalist or metaphysical mind, design was the servant of cosmic or human goals; fundamentally, it was the means to express and reinforce the coherence of the community. In the archaic (Tzonis’s “prerationan era”) efficiency and function are not ends in themselves:

Given the insecurity, the grave danger, the intellectual capacity and the love; of man, combined with the fact that the means of affecting production are poor, the means of conservation of products are elementary, and means of transporting products are very ineffectual, prerational man does not economize. He creates conditions under which the fluctuation of available goods do not permit hostility, aggression, or oppression between human beings of the same social group. Thus the order of the man-made environment is the projection of the non-oppressive social organization which has to be maintained at any cost.[48]

With the development of capitalist industry, particularly in the present century, efficiency, reduced costs, and stark functional utility in the interests of the marketplace become the all-important criteria for gauging the success of any enterprise, whether economic or esthetic. Modern architecture and city planning translate these instrumentalist criteria into canons of beauty and civic integrity, Le Corbusier’s description of the city as a “tool” and Frank Lloyd Wright’s view of it as “the only possible ideal machine” are a perfect fit, despite the expressed opposition of Wright to Le Corbusier’s work. Whether consciously or not, design is hypostatized all the more as a means of neglecting the social relations that vitiate its most rational goals, this by programming the irrationality of the society into the design product. Accordingly, the most well-intentioned designs are subverted by the very social relations whose ill-effects they are meant to mitigate. As garnish, these design products Function like a lid over a sewer. Tzonis’s pessimism about the Future of modernism in an inherently oppressive society is unerring:

The rationalistic acrobatics of the Modernistic Movement collapse. The contradictions between efficiency of production and expansion of the market are irreconcilable. Therefore, visual form assumes the force to consume as a value in itself and not for the sake of the acquisition of utilities. The so-called Pop Movement which is created (I am referring to architecture, in art the phenomenon is more complex) reflects neither the values of the consumer nor his style. It carries the values of consumption, consumption as a utility. In other words, once more it expresses the characteristics of the present organization of power. [49]

Or stated in bald terms: Modernism and the Pop movement become commodities.

In the case of city planning, this debasement of community and human values to commodities assumes the dimensions of an immense environmental tragedy. Unlike architecture, which deals with a single structure or complex of structures, city planning tends to affect the general surroundings of the urban dweller. Until the late nineteenth century, attempts to reconstruct systematically old cities or lay out new ones were largely isolated projects or, at most, utopian visions whose actualization rarely went beyond experimental endeavors, L’Enfant’s plans for Washington and Haussmann’s remodeling of Paris stand out, for better or worse, as rare programs for dealing with cities as a whole. Most of the cities in Europe and America were simply left to the tender mercies of the new “free enterprise” system with the results we have already described.

Generally, the first steps toward city planning consisted of legislation and regulations to deal with the terrible hygienic conditions that the Industrial Revolution had produced during the first half of the nineteenth century. Increasing epidemics of cholera threatened not only the poorer quarters of die city but also the wealthy ones, and these could be brought under control only by conscientious efforts to improve urban Sanitation and living conditions. The 1840s reminded the European bourgeoisie that it had a restive, increasingly class-conscious proletariat on its hands; accordingly, the middle part of the century opened a period of bourgeois paternalism; toward working class dwellings, as witnessed by the construction of Louis Napoleon’s cities ouvrieres state-subsidized “model villages” for English workers, and the Krupp settlements En the Ruhr. These programs did not appreciably affect the established cities, nor did they greatly alter the urban landscape of Europe. As for the United States, Mel Scott not unjustly observes that as late as

that painful decade now ironically called the Gay Nineties there were few urban Americans who would have subscribed to the belief, or hope, that entire cities and metropolitan regions can be developed and renewed by a continuous process of decision-making based on long-range planning. [50]

Not that such plans were absent or lacked a certain amount of support among sectors of the English and French working classes, which were most victimized by the reckless urbanization of the early nineteenth century. These plans, formulated primarily by such so-called utopian socialists as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, envisioned a total restructuring of urban life along lines that merged town with country and industry with agriculture. Owen’s ideal village was spelled out in great details “squares of buildings” were to be erected “to accommodate about 1,200 persons each; and surrounded by a quantity of land, from 1,000 to 1,500 acres.” The village was to have a central building with a public kitchen, an infant school and lecture room, a place of worship, “lodging houses, chiefly For the married,” “dormitories for all the children exceeding two in a family, or above three years of age,” and so forth. The Owenite village allowed for gardens in which workers could cultivate their own food, and beyond these, “buildings for mechanical and manufacturing purposes.” A stern moralist, Owen provisioned for the instruction of the young to prevent “children from acquiring bad habits,” and for the population generally, a program of training, labor, and education “as shall remove them from unnecessary temptations, and closely unite their interest and duty.”[51]

Fourier, by contrast, envisioned new communities that would remove restrictions on hedonistic behavior and, almost embarrassingly to his disciples, sought to harmonize social relations on the basis of pleasure. His famous "phalansteries," like the Owenite scheme, were meant to combine agriculture and industry, but Fourier emphasized cooperative living under a single roof. This roof was ample enough. “A Phalanx is really a miniature town,” observed its designer,

but without open streets, exposed to all the inclemencies of nature; all parts of the building can be reached by a wide street-gallery on the first floor at the ends of this “street” excellently designed corridors, supported on pillars or not as the case may be, heated and ventilated at all times of the year, provide protected, warm and elegant communication with all parts of the building and its dependencies.[52]

The emphasis in Fourier’s work is on elegance, pleasure, and comfort. Every detail of life is clearly specified: the number of inhabitants in each Phalanx (1,6201), based on Fourier’s notion of a “complete scale of characters”: the ratio of sexes; the division of profits; the layout of rooms, dining-halls, libraries, workshops, etc. Fourier, as a child of the Enlightenment, was in his own way a meticulous scientist, a veritable social Newton, who formulated a complete cosmology to replace the order of his era. Among the Utopians, he is unequaled in his imaginative scope, in the coherence be tried to provide to Iris schemes, and in the remarkably liberatory concepts he advanced in nearly all spheres of social and personal activity.

Such reconstructive notions began to wane in significance as labor unions acquired official recognition in the latter part of the nineteenth century and increasingly assimilated the working classes to the social order. Economic and political struggles, largely contained within the established framework, began to gain eminence over ideas for fundamental social change, despite the lip service which labor parties gave to the dream of a new society. Moreover, these reconstructive notions suffered a telling theoretical setback with the spread of Marxism on the European continent. As a system of “scientific socialism.” the Marxian critique Scrupulously distinguished! itself from its “utopian” antecedents. The issue of urbanism began to fall by the wayside. Friedrich Engels, in The Housing Question (1872) firmly devalued my attempts to formulate new schemes for the city and for working class housing until after a socialist revolution. Based on German material, Engels’s work made a number of incisive and relevant critiques of attempts to immobilize the German workers with stable housing sites and to reduce wages by providing them with gardens for cultivating food. Creditably, he links his views with the most vital concepts of Gwen and Fourier; to resolve the housing problem — and, one may add, the urban problem as a whole — Engels argues that the big cities must be decentralized and the antithesis between town and country overcome. [53] But with the vulgarization of Marxism and its transformation into a powerful political ideology, even this tradition receded to the background. After the publication of Engels’s work, the problems of urbanism did not become a major theme in Marxian theory and (he notion of decentralization), even when taken up by Marxists, has been dismissed as a “utopian” absurdity.

Benevolo, with considerable justification, marks the 1848 revolution in Europe as a crossroads in the separation of reconstructive technical design from its roots in a larger popular movement for social change. Owenites, the Fourierists, and other utopian socialists had not merely confined their notions of ideal cities to paper; they were activists, who agitated for the practical realization of their views. During the first half of the nineteenth century, design united theory with praxis. The 1848 revolution exploded any myth that the urban crisis could be resolved merely by good will, moral suasion, and ruling class benevolence The future of design, as an integral part of social analysis, depended heavily upon how deeply reconstructive ideals could become integrally wedded to the revolutionary movement of the period. The influence of Marxian ideology largely foreclosed this development. As Benevolo observes,

Marxist Socialism, intent on explaining the 1848 Revolution and its failure in strictly political terms, stressed tine contradictions of the earlier movement but completely Lost sight of the link between tendencies in politics and in town-planning which, even if Formulated in over-simplified terms, had previously been firmly maintained Marx’s overwhelming economic emphasis on the struggle between wage-tabor and capital almost completely blanketed any civic issues.

From that time onward political theory almost always tended to disparage specialist research and experiment, and attempted to assimilate proposals for partial reform within the reform of society generally Town-planning, on the other hand, cut adrift from political discussion, tended to become increasingly a purely technical matter at the service of the established powers. This did not mean, however, that it became politically neutral!; on the contrary, it fell within the sphere of influence of the new conservative ideology which was evolving during these years, of Bonapartism in France, of the reforming Tory groups in England and of Bismarckian imperialism in Germany. [54]

Thus, from the outset, the modern city-planning movement — which has its authentic inception with Ebenezer Howard’s “garden city” scheme of the 1890s — turned to design as a substitute For radical social analysis and action, for both of these arenas had been largely monopolized by Marxian socialism. As Frank Fisher observes, Howard

was less concerned than the socialists with the social, economic, or political causes of urban misery. Frankly utopian, he combined certain ideas of his time in a specific and creative conception that has guided most of the thinking of city planners ever since. The garden city, or the notion of the balanced urban environment, was his original idea. Instead of letting industrial cities grow planlessly and depopulate the countryside, he proposed to build cities that would combine the social and cultural facilities of the city with the closeness to nature of the village. The “idiocy of rural life” and the slumminess of city life would both be obviated. “Town and country,” wrote Howard, “must be married, and out of this union will spring a new life, a new hope, a new civilization.” [55]

Howard, in fact, had been strongly influenced by socialist ideas, particularly Bellamy’s Looking Backward and the work of Peter Kropotkin, the Russian anarchist theoretician. But as a pragmatic man, Howard essentially divested his scheme for the “marriage” of town and country of its socialist and anarchist elements. Fisher’s judgment of Howard’s social horizon is not inaccurate, It is worth noting, however, that the socialists were as lacking in reconstructive vision as Howard was in social and economic insight. Even so mild a group a& the Fabian Society initially denigrated the garden city proposal in terms so shallow and pragmatic as to reveal more about the British socialist mentality at the turn of the century than the feasibility of Howard’s project. With smug satisfaction the Fabian News of December 1898 noted:

His plans would have been in time if they had been submitted to the Romans when they conquered Britain. They set about laying-out cities, and our forefathers have dwelt in them to this day. Now Mr. Howard proposes to pull them all down and substitute garden cities, each duly built according to pretty colored plans, nicely designed with a ruler and compass. The author has read many learned and interesting writers, and the extracts be makes from their books are like plums in the unpalatable dough of his Utopian scheming. We have got to make the best of our existing cities, and proposals for building new ones are about as useful as would he arrangements for protection against visits from Mr. Wells’s Martians.

Yet, these inane comments must not deter us from recognizing the limits of the garden cities’ proposal. In Howard’s work, design is assigned the task of achieving sweeping goats that actually involve revolutionary changes in the entire economic, social, and cultural fabric of bourgeois society. Compared to the metropolis, Howard’s garden city is attractive enough: a compact urban entity of about thirty thousand people, scaled to human dimensions, and surrounded by a green belt to limit growth and provide open land for recreational and agricultural purposes. Suitable areas of the green belt are to be occupied by farmers (Howard limited this agricultural population to two thousand), the larger urban population of thirty thousand will engage in manufacturing, commerce, and services. All land is to be held in trust and leased to occupants on a rental basis, Howard spelled out many design and fiscal details, of his proposal, but he was careful to emphasize at the very outset of his book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, that these were “merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed from,”[56]

But even, the most generous modifications of Howard’s garden city do not alter the fact that the project is a structural design — and, as such, is limited in what it can offer. Doubtless, even a structural design, if it is good enough, has a value of its own, but for all practical purposes it falls Within the framework of the “pleasing object.” It may provide the basis for greater human contiguity, the structural instruments for community, a measure of contact with nature, possibly tasteful architecture, and easy access with places of work, shopping centers, and service enterprises. Nevertheless, it leaves undefined the nature of human contiguity, community, and the relationship between the urban dweller and the natural world. Most important, it leaves undefined the nature of Work, the control of the means of production, the problem of distributing goods and services equitably, and the conflicting social interests that collect around these issue. Actually, Howard’s scheme does provide an orientation toward all of these problems — namely, a system of benevolent capitalism that presumably avoids the “extremes” of communism and “individualism.” Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow is permeated by an underlying assumption, so typically British, that a compromise can be struck between an intrinsically irrational material reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation.

Yet the offices, industrial factories, and shopping centers that arc intended to provide the garden city with the means of life are themselves battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. Within these arenas we find the sources of alienated labor, of income differentials, and of disparities between work-time and free-time. By itself, no structural design can reconcile the conflicting interests and social differences that gather beneath the surface of the garden city. These interests and differences must be dealt with largely On their own terms — by far-reaching changes in social and economic relations. Which is not to say that a social resolution of the problems created by the bourgeois factory, office, and shopping center obviates the need for a structural design that will promote community and a balance between town and country; rather, that one without the other is a truncated solution, and hence, no solution at all.

Howard’s garden city, it is worth noting, falls far short of utopias and historical experiences that advanced highly progressive criteria in dealing with problems of social management and modes of work. In contrast to the Greek polis, which administered its affairs on the basis of a face-to-face democracy, Howard merely proposes a Central Council and a departmental structure based on elections. The garden city has no mechanism for recalling political representatives of the sort that was established by the Paris Commune of 1871. Unlike More’s Utopia, there is no proposal for rotating agricultural and industrial work. In the garden city, the mode of social labor is decided by the needs of capital. Inasmuch as Howard’s economic horizon is not substantially broader than that of any benevolent bourgeois of his day, notions of industrial self-management are absent from his work, Mumford’s encomiums to Howard’s “statesmanship” notwithstanding, Garden Cities for Tomorrow is not overly burdened by great insights into the social and economic problems of the day: its superficiality on ibis score reveals that Howard was more of a designer than the perceptive social analyst Mumford makes him out to be.

The intrinsic limits of Howard’s garden city, indeed, of the thirty-odd “new towns” that have been constructed in England and those that are emerging in the United States, arc that these communities do not encompass the full range and possibilities of human experience. Neighborliness is mistaken for organic social intercourse and mutual aid; well-manicured parks for the harmonization of humanity with nature; the proximity of work places for the development of a new meaning for work and its integration with play; an eclectic mix of ranch-houses, slab-like apartment buildings, and bachelor-type flats for spontaneous architectural variety; shopping-mart plazas and a vast expanse of lawn for the agora; lecture halls for cultural centers; hobby classes for vocational variety; benevolent trusts or municipal councils for self-administration. One can add endlessly to this list of misplaced criteria for community that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the high attainments of the urban tradition Although people may earn their incomes without leaving these communities — and a substantial portion must travel for considerable distances to the central city to do so — the nature of their work and the income-differentials that group them into alien social classes are not a matter of serious community concern. A vast area of life is thus removed from the community and delivered to a socio-economic system that exists apart from it. Indeed, the appearance of community serves the ideological function of concealing the incompleteness of an intimate and shared social life, Key elements of the self are formed outside the parameters of the design — by forces that stem from economic competition, class antagonisms, social hierarchy, domination, and economic exploitation. Although people are brought together to enjoy certain conveniences and pleasantries, they remain as truncated and culturally impoverished as they wore in the metropolis, with the difference that the stark reality of urban decay in the big cities removes any veil of appearances from, the incompleteness and contradictions of social life.

These internal contradictions have not been faced with candor by either the supporters or opponents of the garden city concept. That the “new towns” of England, the United States, and other countries modeled on the garden city design have not awakened “the soft notes brotherliness and goodwill” Howard described as their essential goal; that they have not placed “in strong hands implements of peace and construction” so that implements of war and destruction may drop uselessly down” — all of this is painfully obvious fact. [57] Nor is there any promise that they will approximate such far-reaching goals. In the best of cases, the new towns differ from suburbs primarily because job-commuting is short and most services can be supplied within the community itself. In the worst of cases, they are essentially bedroom suburbs of the metropolis and add enormously to its congestion during working hours.

Nor has reality been any kinder to the devotees of the metropolis. The old cities keep growing even as the number of new towns multiply, each urban form slowly encroaching on the other and creating urban belts that threaten to undermine the integrity of both. Jane Jacobs’s spirited defense of traditional neighborhoods shares all the unrealities that mar Frederic J. Osborn’s defense of Howard’s vision. This neighborhood world is dying: the same forces that truncate the inhabitant of the new town ate delivering the small shop over to the supermarket and the old tenement complex to the aseptic high-rise superblock. Doubtless enclaves of neighborhood life will continue to exists but they will remain merely enclaves — in contemporary society the counterpart of the existing medieval and Renaissance towns that attract the tourist to Europe for visual respite from the urban monotony that is rapidly prevailing in most cities of the world.

Modern city planning offers no solution to this dismal tendency, for it presupposes the very social factors that are producing the present urban blight. Even the social goals that Howard hoped to achieve primarily by means of design are giving way to an acknowledgment that the city, as we know it today, is here to stay — and the sooner we accept this fact, the better. This acquiescence to the urban status quo (doubtless subject to new design elements) is fatal. To Fisher, the failure of city planning today stems from the need For planners “to think more deeply about the kind of life for which they are planning, and understand its ideals and its meaning, and the variety of forms in which it may express itself,”[58] In a sense, modern city planning, by unconsciously assimilating commodity relations as social ideals, has lived up to Fisher’s demand with a vengeance. It has helped to produce designs that debase the city to a marketplace and raised structures that have turned it into she home of concentrated bureaucratic power. Here, the tack of consciousness becomes a form of consciousness, and the opportunism of technical success as a goal in itself degrades urban life precisely to the degree that technique celebrates its power to control the city’s destiny.

But Fisher’s demand is obviously not designed to validate the ideals of the status quo. And insofar as he sees the city as a way of life, his words might well have been taken from Aristotle’s Politics. To the Greeks, the city was more than a product of designing technique or of rationally placed structures, These considerations were secondary to the vision that the city was the domain of freedom and the “good life,” an arena in which people formed an organic totality without losing the individuality so essential to diversity and creativity.

Modern city planning offers us functional urban designs without human values and rationally organized space without civic content, To relieve congestion without providing for intimate communication — or even to open new lines of communication without creating the social soil for meaningful human contact — is a parody of the high traditions of urbanism. Historically, the basis for a vital urban entity consisted not primarily of its design elements but of the nuclear relations between people that produced these elements. Human scale was more than a design on a drawing board; it emerged from the intimate association provided by the clan, the guild, and the civic union of free, independent farmers and craftsmen. Knitted together at the base of a civic entity, people created a city that formally and structurally sheltered their most essential and meaningful social relations. If these relations were balanced and harmonious, so too were the design elements of the city. If, on the other hand, they were distorted and antagonistic, the design elements of the city revealed this in its monumentalism and extravagant growth. Hierarchical social relations produced hierarchical apace; egalitarian relations, egalitarian space. Until city planning addresses itself to the need for a radical critique of the prevailing society and draws its design elements from a revolutionary transformation of existing social relations, it wilt remain mere ideology — the servant of the very society that is producing the urban crisis of our time.

The 1960s opened an entirely new era in the modern definition of the city, or, more precisely, of a humanistic community. It is a noteworthy fact that this era acquired little of value from the work of the professional city planners, who continued to sink deeper into shallow problems of design and technical expertize; rather, its inspiration came from the countercultural values and institutions formulated almost intuitively by young people who were breaking away from suburbia and the regimentation of the multiversity. In the communes of dropout youth and in activist upsurges such as People’s Park in Berkeley, far more than design criteria were formulated. However naively, new values for human sociation were posed that often Involved a total break with the commodity system as a whole. The full implications of this movement — a movement that has yet to find its own confidence and its way through the maze of mod and pop culture — have not received the attention they deserve from the “urbanists,” For the values of this culture, carried to their logical conclusion, pose the problem of developing entirety new communities in a harmonized, ecologically balanced society.

The young people of the sixties who tried to formulate new valuer of sociation — values that have since been grouped under the rubric of the “counterculture” — unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. They came s For the most part, from affluent, white, middle-class suburbs and the better universities of the United States, the enclaves and training grounds of the new American technocracy, To adduce their privileged status as evidence of the trifling nature of the movement itself and casually dismiss it, as so many writers have done, sidesteps a key question: why did privilege lead to a rejection of the social and material values that had produced these very privileges in the first place? Why didn’t these young people, like so many before them in previous generations, take up the basic values of their parents and expand the arena of privilege they had inherited?

These questions reveal a basic change in the material premises for radical social movements in the advanced capitalist countries of the world By the sixties, the so-called First World had undergone sweeping technological changes — changes which opened a new social perspective for the era that lay ahead. Technology had advanced to a point where the values spawned by material scarcity, particularly those values fostered by the bourgeois era, no longer seemed morally or culturally relevant The work ethic, the moral authority imputed to material denial, parsimony, and sensual renunciation, the high social valuation placed On competition and “free enterprise,” the emphasis on a privatization and individuation based on egotism, seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements that offered alternatives entirely contrary to the prevailing human condition — a lifetime free from toil and a materially secure social disposition oriented toward community and the full expression of individual human powers. The new alternatives opened by technological advances made the cherished values of the past seem not only obsolete and unjust but grotesque. As I have pointed out elsewhere, there is no parade, in the fact that the weakest link in the old society turned out to be that very stratum which enjoyed the real privilege of rejecting false privilege.[59]

Which is not to say that the technological contest of the “counterculture” was consciously grasped and elaborated into a larger perspective for society as a whole. Indeed, the outlook of most middle-class dropout youth and students remained largely intuitive and often fell prey to the faddism nurtured by the established society. The erratic features of the new movement, its feverish metabolism and its quixotic oscillations, can be partly explained by this lack of adequate consciousness. Quite often, many young people were victims of cheap exploitation by commercial interests. Large numbers of them, exultant in their newly discovered sense of liberation, lacked a significant awareness that complete freedom, is impossible in a prevailing system of unfreedom insofar as they aspired to rapidly to replace the dominant culture by their own example and by moral suasion, they failed. But insofar as they began to see themselves as the most advanced sector of a larger movement to revolutionize society as a whole, they succeeded in keeping the counterculture alive, and it lives today in alternating ebbs and flows as the mainstream of a historic enlightenment that may eventually change every aspect of social life.

The most striking feature of the new movement is the emphasis it places on personal relations as the locus of seemingly abstract social ideals — the attempt it makes to translate freedom and love into existential realities of everyday life. If freedom in its fullest sense is a society based on self-activity and self-management, a society in which every individual has control over her or his daily life, then the counterculture may be justly described as the attempt to produce that self, free of the values spawned by hierarchy and domination, that will yield liberated social forms of management and activity. We have already emphasized that this degree of freedom can be definitively achieved only after sweeping revolutionary changes in society; but young people were quite right in sensing that existential personal goals must be defined and striven for even today, within the realm of unfreedom, if future revolutionary changes are to be sweeping enough and not bog down in bureaucratic modes of social management. This focus added ail essential psychological element to abstract social doctrines that were formulated by traditional radical theorists. Accordingly, in its most advanced and theoretically conscious forms, the counterculture reached directly into and sought to change radically the lived relationships between people as sexual beings and as members of families, educational institutions, and work places. One must return to the Writings of the early anarchists, whose appeal was often limited, to recover the moral and psychological dimensions this approach added to socialist theories of the sixties, most of which had become so denuded of humanistic qualities that they were little more than economistic strategies for social change.

This personalistic yet socially involved approach yielded riot only an increasingly explicit critique of doctrinaire socialist theory, but also of design-oriented city planning. Much has been written about the “retreat” of dropout youth to rural communes. Far less known is the extent to which ecologically-minded countercultural youth began to subject city planning to a devastating review, often advancing alternative proposals to dehumanizing urban “revitalization” and “rehabilitation” projects. Generally, these alternatives stemmed from a perspective toward design that was radically different from that of conventional city planners. For the countercultural planners, the point of departure for any design was not “the pleasing object” or the “efficiency” with which it expedited traffic, communications, and economic activities. Rather, these new planners concerned themselves primarily with the relationship of design to the fostering of persona! intimacy, many-sided social relationships, nonhierarchical modes of organization, communistic living arrangements, and material independence from the market economy. Design, here, took its point of departure not from abstract concepts of space or a functional endeavor to improve the status quo, but from an explicit critique of the status quo and a conception of the free human relationships that were to replace it. The design elements of a plan followed from radically new social alternatives. The attempt was made to replace hierarchical space by “liberated space.”

Among the many similar plans to be developed tn the late sixties and early seventies, perhaps the most impressive was formulated by an ad hoc group in Berkeley from People’s Architecture, the local Tenants Union, and members of the local food cooperative or “Food Conspiracy” The plan (erroneously attributed by Theodore Roszak in his excellent work Sources to the Berkeley Tribe, an “underground” newspaper) shows a remarkably high degree of radical social consciousness. It draws its inspiration from the “People's Park” episode in May 1969, when dropout youth, students, and later ordinary citizens of Berkeley fought for more than a week with police to retain a lovely park and playground which they had spontaneously Created Out of a neglected, garbage-strewn lot owned by the University of California. The park, eventually reclaimed by its university proprietors at the cost of a young man’s life, many severe injuries, and massive arrests, is at this writing a parking lot and paved soccer field. But the memory of the episode has waned slowly To the young Berkeley planners, “People’s Park was the beginning of the Revolutionary Ecology Movement.” And the plan, entitled a Blueprint for a Communal Environment is radically “countercultural.” “The revolutionary culture,” declares the Blueprint, “gives us new, communal, eco-viable ways of organizing our lives, while people’s politics gives us the means to resist the System.”[60] The Blueprint is not only a project for reconstruction but for struggle on a wide social terrain against the established order.

The plan aims at more than the structural redesigning of an existing communityit avows and explores a new way of life at the most elementary level oh human intercourse. This new way of life is communal and economically divorced as much as possible from commodity relationships. The design gives expression to a basic goal; “Communal ways of organizing our lives help to cut down on consumption, to provide for basic human needs more efficiently, to resist the system, to support ourselves and overcome the misery of atomized living.” In this single sentence, the social and private are thoroughly fuzed, Design is assigned the function of articulating a new life style that stands opposed to the repressive organization of society.[61]

Shelter in the Blueprint is redesigned to “overcome the fragmentation of our lives ... to encourage communication and break down privatization.” The plan observes that with “women’s liberation, and a new communal morality the nuclear family is becoming obsolete.” Accordingly, floor plans are proposed which allow for larger multipurpose rooms which promote more interaction — “such as communal dining rooms, meeting spaces, and work areas.” Methods are suggested for turning roofs and exterior upper walls into communicating links with neighboring houses as well as between rooms and upper stories. [62]

“All land in Berkeley is treated purely as a marketable commodity,” observes the Blueprint. “Space is parceled into neat consumer packages. In between rows of land parcels are transportation ‘corridors’ to keep people flowing from workplace to market.” The Blueprint proposes the dismantling of backyard and sideyard fences to open land as interior parks and gardens, Platform “bridgeways” between houses are suggested to break down the strict division between indoor and outdoor space. The purpose of these suggestions is not merely to bring nature into the urban dweller’s horizon, but to open intimate avenues of communication between people. The concern of the plan is not merely with public plazas and parks, but the immediate neighborhoods where people live their daily lives. With magnificant insouciance, the plan tosses all considerations of private property to the winds by suggesting that vacant lots be appropriated by neighborhoods and turned into communal space.[63]

Half the streets of Berkeley, the plan notes, could be easily closed off to stimulate collective transportation experiments and reduce traffic congestion in residential areas. This would “free ten times more land area for public use than we now have in park acreage. Intersections could become parks, gardens, plazas, with paving material recovered and used to make artificial hills.” The plan recommends that Berkeley residents should walk or bicycle to places whenever feasible. If motor vehicles must be used, they should be pooled and maintained on a communal basis. People should drive together to common destinations in order to reduce the number of vehicles.

Community services wilt make a “quantum leap” when “small groups of neighbors mobilize resources and energy in order to cement fragmented neighborhoods back together and begin to take care of business (from child care to education) on a local level and in an integrated way,” In this connection, the Blueprint suggests that men and women should rotate the use of their homes for child care centers. First-aid skills and knowledge of more advanced medical techniques should be mobilized on a neighborhood basis. Finally, wastes should be collectively recycled to avoid pollution and waste of resources.[64]

At its core, the plan advances a refreshingly imaginative program for ruralizing the city and fostering the material independence of its inhabitants. Communally worked backyard gardens could be created and food cultivated organically. Here, the plan enters into the specifics of composting, mulching, and the preparation of seedlings. A “People’s Market” could be established “which will receive the organic products of rural communes and small farmers, and distribute them to the neighborhood [food] conspiracies. Such a market place will have other uses — craftspeople can sell their wares there.” The plan sees the People’s Market as a “solid example of Creative thinking about communal use of space. Its structure will be portble. and will be built in such a way as to serve neighborhood kids; as play equipment on non-market days.”[65]

The Blueprint creates no illusion that this ensemble of reconstructive ideas will “liberate” Berkeley or other communities. It sees in the realization of these concepts the first steps toward reorienting the individual self from a passive acceptance of isolation, egotism, and dependence on bureaucratic institutions to initiatives from below that will recover communal contacts and face-to-face networks of mutual aid. Ultimately, society itself will have to be reorganized by the great majority who are now forced into hierarchical subservience to the Few. But until these sweeping changes are achieved, a new state of mind, buttressed by working community ties, must be fashioned so that people will be able to fuze their deeply personal desires with higher social ideals. Unless this fusion is achieved, these ideals will remain abstractions and will never be realized at all.

Many of the Blueprint’s technical suggestions are not new. The notion of roof openings to link houses together is borrowed From Pueblo Indian villages, the urban gardens from medieval communes and precapitalist towns generally, the pedestrian streets and plazas From the Renaissance cities and earlier urban forms. In the contest of an increasingly bureaucratic society, however, the Blueprint is unique in deriving its concepts from radically new life styles and reinforcing them in a single ensemble with many details of traditional design. Doubtless, quite a few of the design proposals in the plan can be assimilated piecemeal to new construction projects without having a significant impact on conventional ways of life. This has been the fate of many radical ideas and art forms in the past. But the Blueprint is true to itself insofar as it is not merely a structural plan. The authentic content of its proposals is the kind of life in which its design elements are rooted. The premise of the plan, in advance of any design, is a culture counter to the prevailing one — a culture that emphasizes community rather than isolation, the sharing of resources and skills rather than their privatized possession and accumulation, independence from rather than dependence upon the bourgeois marketplace, loving relations and mutual aid rather than egotism and competition. The planners, whether or not they were conscious of their historic antecedents, were presenting their vision of urban life in Hellenic terms. The truly human city, to them, is a way of life that fosters the integration of individual and society, of town and country, of personal and social needs within a framework that retains the integrity of each. A new synthesis is to be achieved which makes the fulfillment of individual and urban needs complementary to the fulfllLmeni of social and ecological needs.

The countercultural movement has since subsided from the highpoint it reached in the sixties The beautiful hopes which young people so enthusiastically advanced in dropout and radical student communities have been diluted by the harsh 3 often brutal hostility of an adult public that, Owing to its own conditioning and insecurities, has entrenched itself in the status quo and sought respite from any challenges to traditional values. A Neanderthal state power, by characterizing creativity as “permissiveness” and enthusiasm as “license,” has added its own telling weight to the thrust against innovation and social change. Where the counterculture has managed to hold its own against overtly hostile social forces, it has had to contend with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Archaic ideologies and modes of organization assume the semblance of radicalism and fester like toxic germs in the wounds opened by public malaise and political repression.

Yet even this ebbing phase of a much larger development could he valuable, perhaps even indispensable, as a sobering period of maturation. A new world will not be gained merely by strewing the pathway to the future with flowers. The intuitive impulses that exploded with such naive enthusiasm in the sixties, only to become harsh and dehumanizing in the pseudoradicalism that closed the decade, were never adequate to the long-range historic project of developing a wider public consciousness of the need for social change. By the late sixties, the counterculture ceased to speak to America with understanding and in relevant terms, Its politicization took the worst possible form — arrogance and a senselessly violent rhetoric. Far more than the flowers of the mid-sixties, the angry clenched fists of the late sixties were irrelevant in trying to reach an increasingly alarmed and uncomprehending public. It has finally become evident that a crude commitment to muscle power by self-appointed political “vanguards” will no more effectuate radical change than an intuitive commitment to flower power. Only a unity of intuition with reason, of hopeful enthusiasm with patient wisdom, of emotional sensibility with a coherent consciousness can hope to make the counterculture an influential force, perhaps the paramount force, in reshaping American life and carrying it beyond the crests reached in the sixties.

Certain demands raised by the counterculture movement are imperishable. No matter how far the movement itself may recede From its earlier eminence, these demands must be recovered and advanced if there is to be any future for society at all. In calling for a melding of the abstract ideals of social liberation with those of personal liberation, in seeking to form the nuclear libertarian communistic relationships so necessary to rear a truly emancipated society, in trying to subvert the influence of the commodity nexus on the individual self and its relationship with other selves, in emphasizing the need for a spontaneous expression of sexuality, sensuality, and a humanistic sensibility, in challenging hierarchy and domination in all its forms and manifestations, arid finally, in trying to synthesize new, decentralized communities based on an ecological outlook that unites the most advanced features of urban and rural life — in raising alt of these demands as a single ensemble, the counterculture gave a modern expression to a historic mainstream of human dreams and aspirations. And it did so not from a hopelessly visionary utopianism, but based on the real technological and material possibilities at hand in the advanced capitalist countries of the world. Those demands can never be fully submerged by political or psychic repression. They are the voice of self-conscious reason that, once articulated theoretically and reinforced by material conditions that render them possible, are sedimented into the collective unconscious of humanity. The responsibility of the counterculture, when it matures to the level of theoretical self-consciousness and self-disciplined rationality, is to help make this collective unconscious acutely conscious. To fulfill this responsibility, the conscious nuclei that crystallize within the undefined countercultural matrix formed in the sixties require patience, wisdom, and an unflagging awareness that they are rooted in the mainstream of history that leads to the future, however much their efforts to promote consciousness may suffer periodic setbacks.

This project is strongly favored by the harsh fact that few choices are left today for the existing society. The. city has completed its historic evolution. Its dialectic from the village, temple area, fortress, or administrative center, each dominated by agrarian interests, to the polis and medieval commune during an era when town and country were in some kind of equilibrium, to the bourgeois city which completely dominates the countryside, now culminates in the emergence of the megalopolis, the absolute negation of the city. No longer can we speak of a clearly defined urban entity with an authentically collective interest or outlook of its own. Just as each phase or moment of the city has its own internal limits, the megalopolis represents the limits of the city as such — of civitas as distinguished from communitat. The political principle, an the form of tine state, dissolves the last vestiges of the social principle, replacing all community lies by bureaucratic ones, Personified space and the human scale disintegrate into institutional space and urban gigantism, hierarchically grounded in the impersonal domination of one human by another and the destruction of nature by a rapacious society motivated by production for the sake of production. This “anti-city,” neither urban nor rural in any traditional sense, affords no arena for community and genuine socitation. At most, the megalopolis is a patchwork of mutually hostile enclaves or gbettoes, each of which is internally “united” not by a positive harmony of creative impulses but rather by a negative hostility toward the stranger on its perimeter. Physically, morally, and logistically, this urban cancer is in rapid decay. It does not function on its own terms as an arena for the efficient production and marketing of commodities. To say that this creature is breaking down is an understatement: the megalopolis is an active force in social dissociation and psychic dissolution. It is the negation of the city as an arena of close human proximity and palpable cultural tradition, and as a means of collecting creative human energies.

To restore urbanity as a meaningful terrain for sociation, culture, and community, the megalopolis must be ruthlessly dissolved and replaced by new decentralized eco-communities, each carefully tailored to the natural ecosystem in which it is located. One might reasonably say that these ecocommunities will possess the best features of the polis and medieval commune, supported by rounded eco-technologies that rescale the most advanced elements of modern technology — including such energy sources as solar and wind power — to local dimensions. The equilibrium between town and country will be restored — not as a sprawling suburb that mistakes a lawn or patch of strategically placed trees for nature, but as an interactive functional ecocommunity that unites industry with agriculture, mental work with physical, individuality with community. Nature will not be reduced to a mere symbol of the natural, a spectatorial object to be seen from a window or during a stroll, it will become an integral part of all aspects of human experience, from work to play. Only in this Form can the needs of nature become integrated with the needs of humanity and yield an authentic ecological consciousness that transcends the instrumentalist “environmental” outlook of the social and sanitary engineer.

Our place in the history of the city is unique. Precapitalist cities either stagnated within their limits or destructively exploded beyond them as a result of the incomplete technological development that perpetuated material scarcity. If the city was not frozen as in Asia and the Near East by hereditary castes and agrarian hierarchies, its unity was dissolved by the commodity and marketplace. Modern technology has now reached so advanced a level of development that it permits humanity to reconstruct urban life along lines that could foster a balanced, well-rounded, and harmonious community of Interests among people and between humanity anti nature. This ecocommunity, which would be more than a city, would have no limits other than those consciously fashioned by human creativity, reason, and ecological considerations. The ecocommunity, supported by a rational eeotechnology, would be an organic urban entity respiritized by a new sensibility and reinforced by a new security in material life — an authentic arena for the harmonization and fulfillment of humanity’s deepest and most creative impulses.

The alternative to this development can only be the horrifying disintegration of urban life into a condition of chronic social war, personal violence, and bureaucratic mobilization. If the archaic hieroglyph of the city was a wall intersected by two roads, the symbol of the megalopolis is rapidly becoming the police badge superimposed by a gun. In this kind of city, social irrationality will take its toll as the absolute division of human from human until a final harvest is reaped in the revenge of nature on humanity. The limits of the megalopolis can be formulated as nothing less than the limits of society itself as an instrument of hierarchy and domination. Left to their own development, these underlying elements of the megalopolis spell the doom not only of the city as such but of human sociation. For in such a “world, technology, subserved to irrational forces, becomes the instrument not of harmony and security, but the systematic plundering of the human spirit and the natural world.