The Myth of City Planning

City planning today lives within the tension of an historic contradiction: the idealization of urbanity as the summum bonum of social life and the crass realities of urban decay. In theory, at least, the city is revered as the authentic domain of culture, the strictly man-made social substance from which humanity fashions the essential achievements of consociation. In this tradition, the city is viewed as society distinguished from nature, territory from kinship, rationality from custom and myth the civic compact of individuals from the archaic group cemented by the blood oath. Ideally conceived, the city is the arena for a mode of human propinquity that is freed from the deadening grip of custom, irrationality, the vicissitudes of natural contingency; in sum, the social domain in which the sovereign citizen is free to fashion her or his selfhood and personal destiny. Herein lies the utopian content of urban theory; and in truth, from an historic perspective, it would be difficult to dispute Max Horkheimer’s assertion that the “fortunes of the individual have always been bound up with the development of urban society. The city dweller is the individual par excellence.”[31]

Yet contemporary urban reality presents an entirely different picture. Today, urban history at its best grins scornfully at the modern city, and its ideals, tarnished beyond recognition, lie buried in the rubble of their own high precepts. No longer is the city nature domesticated, the arena of unfettered human propinquity, the space for individuality and rationality. The modern city reverts beyond even the archaic blood group to a herd territory of alienated humanity and to all that is demonic in human society.

I he city in our time is the secular altar on which propinquity and community are sacrificed to a lonely anonymity and privatized atomization; its culture is the debased creature of commodity production and the advertising agency, not the gathered wisdom of the mind; and its claims to freedom and individuality are mocked by the institutionalized manipulation of unknowing masses among whom crass egotism is the last residue of the selfhood that once formed the city’s most precious human goals. Even the city’s form — or lack of form — bespeaks the dissolution of its civic integrity. To say with Marx that the modern city urbanizes the land is testimony not so much to its dominance as to its loss of identity. For the city, by the very nature of the case, disappears when it becomes the whole, when it lacks the specificity provided by differentiation and delineability of form.

Caught in the contradiction between ideal and real, city planning emerges not merely as ideology but as myth. The myth originates in the very term “city planning,” in the nomenclature and pedigree which this seeming discipline appropriates for itself. Juxtaposed to the megalopolis, to the formless urbanity that sprawls across the land and devours it, the word “city” has already become a euphemism, an erstwhile reality digested by what Lewis Mumford so justly calls the “anti-city.” In dealing with the putative as fact, city planning enthrones the shadow of the real city in a futile effort to stake out a legacy to what is forever gone. Even more basely, it subtly devalues this memory in the very act of invoking it, for if the shadow must be presented as the real, the real must be degraded. Accordingly, city planning reduces all that is vital in the traditional city, including the ideal itself, to a deadening caricature — the megalopolis as “city, the non-city as the representation of its very antithesis. All the high standards of urbanity, as these have been developed over the centuries, are degraded to establish a false continuity between past and present, to offer up the death of the city as the token of its life.

The word “planning” merely compounds this grotesque act of violation. To the modern mind, “planning” implies rationality, a conceptual purposiveness that brings order to disorder, that reorganizes chance and contingency into humanly meaningful design. Behind the seeming rationality imparted to this word lies an inherent social irrationality. Under capitalism, “planning” is basically the conscious organization of scarcity amid abundance, the attempt to impose a social nexus of want, denial, and toil on a technological system that, potentially at least, could remove all pf these dehumanizing conditions from social life. Thus, “planning” emerges not only as the validation of the given — as opposed to revolution — but as the rationalization of the irrational. City planning does not escape from the contradictory nature of contemporary social planning as a whole. To the contrary, it is the application of rational technique to urbanity gone mad, the effort systematically to piece together a fragmentation that constitutes the very law of life of modern urbanity. Reinforcing the myth that the megalopolis is a city is the myth that planning can transcend its unquestioned social premises, that technique is a value in itself apart from the ends to which it is captive.

The critique of city planning can be true to itself only if it becomes a totalistic process of demystification, if it reaches into the social whole that yields the negation of the city. Its point of departure cannot be the techniques which the planner tries to place in the forefront of the discussion, a procedure which retains the illusory notion that design can be a substitute for the basic processes of social life. Critique must scrupulously examine the hidden premises which urban design assimilates. Accordingly, the megalopolis can no longer be examined in separation from the larger context of social development and the emergence of its urban ideals. To treat the city as an autonomous entity, apart from the social conditions which produce it, is to participate in the city planner’s typical reification of urbanity, to isolate and objectify a habitat that is itself contingent and formed by other factors. Behind the physical structure of the city lies the social community its workaday life, values, culture, familial ties, class relations, and personal bonds. To fail to consider how this hidden dimension of urbanity forms the structure of the city is as valueless, indeed misleading, as to ignore the role of the structure in reinforcing or undermining the social community. As a design isolate, the city is nothing but an archaeological artifact; as the expression of a social community, it could well sum up the totality of a society’s life processes.

These seemingly obvious considerations require emphasis because city planning is cursed by the nature of its origins: it usually emerges as a distinct discipline when the city has already become problematical. Before the city acquires a structural consciousness of itself as the unique object of self-study, its design and development are invariably functions of social processes other than urbanism. Not surprisingly, city planning wears a mien of introspection rather than innovation, all its futuristic pretensions aside. The problematically given predetermines the elaboration of the planner’s techniques and designs. City planning, in effect, tries to “solve” problems, not remove them. It thereby retains the status quo in its solutions even when it seems most occupied in altering the urban structure, hence the mystifying role its ideology plays in modern social life. Critique must puncture this myth — not by denying the validity of design, but by relating it critically and in a revolutionary fashion to the social conditions of life.

Perhaps the first step in formulating a critique of city planning is to recover some sense of the urban tradition at its best, a tradition against which we can compare the thrust of contemporary planning and urban development. Without some notion of what was achieved by the city in the past, we tend to lose our perspective toward the extent to which it has declined in the present. This is not to say that any specific early city forms a paradigm on which we must model our own urban future; merely, that certain high standards were achieved and formulated that are valuable in themselves and which we may usefully regard as criteria for judging the direction that urban society has followed in our own time. A “model city” that might have existed prior to the modern city is a fiction, yet examples exist in the past that have an imperishable value of their own, examples which comprise, by their mere existence, a devastating critique of the degradation that afflicts contemporary cities.

What obviously makes urban space unique is that it provides a strictly human basis for association. Economic and social life ceases to depend exclusively on a sexual division of labor and kinship ties — the biological matrix of social life that segregates the labor process according to brute physical capacities and views the stranger as enemy — but rather is organized along territorial lines that open the possibility for social life as a function of self-worth and uniquely individual capacities, thereby establishing the basis for a community that is properly human and social. This development was a long and complex process of disengagement from specifically non-urban, indeed, highly biologically conditioned social organisms, a slow crystallization of civil society out of the family, clan, and tribe based on blood ties and a sexual division of labor. In this respect, the early cities with which we are most familiar were not authentically urban entities. Like Tenochtitlan in Indian Amercia, the city was essentially the religious and administrative center of a clan and tribal society, hierarchical, to be sure, and drifting toward bureaucratic modes of civic management, but nevertheless anchored in archaic naturalistic forms of social organization and based materially on a rural economy with dominant strata whose primary social interests were agrarian in character.

Looking toward the centers of our own civilization, this essentially agrarian type of city persists as the prehistory of urban society for thousands of years in the Near East and Asia. It becomes increasingly elaborated into administrative hierarchies and a more complex division of labor, without changing its intrinsically rural character. The city may divest the clan of any administrative function in civic management; it may collect thousands of artisans, priests, bureaucrats, nobles, and soldiers within its confines; indeed, it may resemble the modern city structurally and in terms of its size and density of population. Yet this kind of city belongs to urban prehistory in the sense that its social wealth consists primarily of agricultural surpluses and its rulers are defined by their roots in the countryside rather than the town. Accordingly, its internal market is poorly developed and its merchant class is a subordinated stratum in the service of agrarian rulers. The countryside dominates the town just as thousands of years later, in our own era, the town will dominate the countryside. In their monumental architectural forms these cities express the power of agrarian interests. Their civic structure and social relations, reinforced by religious precepts and tradition, imply the denial of individuality, indeed, the incapacity of the individual to find self-expression in a psychological space of her or his own, apart from the suzerainty of the supreme ruler. The ruler’s sole claim to personality as the embodiment of the archaic communal conditions of life effaces the right of personality to the obedient mass below. Hegel quite appropriately describes the “gorgeous edifices” of this era as the expressions of a world “in which we find all rational ordinances and arrangements, but in such a way, that individuals remain as mere accidents.” These ordinances and arrangements “revolve round a center, round the sovereign, who, as patriarch — not as despot in the sense of the Roman Imperial Constitution — stands at the head.” As Hegel goes on to note: “The glory of Oriental conception is the One Individual as that substantial being to which all belongs, so that no other individual has a separate existence, or mirrors himself in his subjective freedom.”[32]

Not until we arrive at the Hellenic polis do we find a mode of civic life that acquires its own mainsprings of development and an urban organism that acknowledges the individuality of all its citizens, indeed, that promotes individuality without denying its base in an integrated social community. I do not want to romanticize or idealize the polis. The Hellenic city was reared in no small measure on the harsh confinement of women to the domestic sphere and its degradingly mundane chores. The leisure that made it possible for the citizen to fully participate in civic affairs depended partly upon slave labor. The polis was also a class society even within the citizen body itself, which conferred material benefits on the few that were largely denied to the many. Moreover, it was the closed fraternity of the demos, of the ancestral citizen, which, although guaranteeing safety and legal protection to the stranger, denied him any role in the management of its political life.

Yet, after all these qualifications are noted — and they are characteristic of the ancient world as a whole — we cannot help but admire the extent to which Hellenic civic rationality contained, and in many ways surmounted, its own archaic roots. That women were confined to the household, that the muscles of slaves made it possible for the citizen to acquire the free time for reflection and civic activity, that the stranger performed those commercial functions which temporarily insulated the demos from the debasing effects of trade and self-interest, are the consequences not merely of an archaic tradition that reaches back to tribal life, but perhaps more compellingly, of an undeveloped technological base and meager agricultural resources. Tradition, in fact, often becomes a thin rationalization for a real poverty of material resources — and Greek thought reveals a surprisingly secular candor about the relationship between the two, as one can glean from a reading of Thucydides and Aristotle. Yet, paradoxically, the very agricultural poverty of Greece made the polis possible as a fairly independent urban entity. The poor soil of the Hellenic promontory and the isolation fostered by its rugged, mountainous terrain precluded the development of the strong centralized agrarian power we encounter in the fertile agriculturally rich river valleys of the Near East and Orient.’ Accordingly, to a degree virtually unknown up to the classical era the polis could create and enlarge a uniquely urban space of its own — not as a society in which the land dominated the city or the city the land, but as an almost artistic equipoise of town and country, and psychologically, a balance that reflected the outlook of the yeoman farmer and urban citizen harmoniously united in a single personality.

From these conditions of life, I believe, emerges the Hellenic notion of autarchia which, apart from its popular economic connotations of material self-sufficiency, implies for the Greek a balance between mind and body, needs and resources, individual and society. Neither collectivity nor subjectivity are uncon- ditional; the Hellenic individual is, in microcosm, the society of which he is a part. But this relationship implies no denial of individual uniqueness; merely, that the wholeness and roundedness of the individual is a function of the polis, a civic entity that includes not only the city proper but its rural environs. The relationship, in effect, is reciprocal and mutually reinforcing To speak of the priority of the community or the individual over each other is to project our own sense of social alienation back to Hellenic times, for the very essence of the polis is its integration of the two. Greek individuality is an integrated constellation of the personal and social, not a separation of the two components into an antagonistic dualism. The polis, far from establishing a priority over personality, is at once its constitutive material and the laboratory for its elaboration. We grossly misread Hellenic dualism when we permeate it with our own anxious sense of apartness and polarity, for this dualism is always synthesized by Hellenic culture, hence the enormous difficulties we encounter in classifying Greek philosophy into “materialistic” and “idealistic” schools of thought.

The integration of individual and society is clearly revealed by the very structure of the polis itself and its theoretical conception of urbanism. The underlying theory of civic management is amateurism — the accessibility of virtually all organs of power to the citizen, the conscious despecialization of municipal agencies, the formulation of policy in face-to-face assemblies, and the use of the lot in the selection of public officials. The civic structure both affirms individuality and contains it. By the unimpaired expression which this structure gives to the citizen, it individuates him along social lines. Thus, life is to be lived not in the home but in the agora — the municipal square and market place — where matters of state become subjects of personal talk. Ironically, the fact that politics becomes “gossip” does not degrade politics but personalizes it and gives it a vitally existential dimension. The remarkable power of Aristophanic mockery is its capacity to interpret immense themes in the rough jargon of the public square. This desanctification of great themes, their rough- and-ready vernacularization, implies not a debasement of important ideas, but a largeness of mind in the community itself, an acknowledgment of its capacity to discuss them and a conscious despecialization of thought as the preserve of an elite. The agora, in turn, prepares the way for the ecclesia, the assembly of all citizens which convenes each tenth of the year. Here, in the open hillside of the pnyx, the citizen body assembles to debate the policies of the community. The practice of formulating policy in the open reveals the essential commitment of the polis to public purview and face-to-face relationships.

We find, here, a transcendence of the city that is not often made in the historical literature on urban society. Until the Hellenic era, the city had a typically magical or cosmological orientation; structurally, in the layout of its streets and in the symbolism of its architecture, it provided testimony to the authority of natural forces and suprahuman powers. Tech- nochtitlan is laid out according to a traditional orientation along the cardinal points, an orientation we find not only throughout Eastern cities but even in Rome. By contrast, the Hellenic mind turned its civic outlook from nature and cosmology to man by adding a vividly humanistic dimension to the largely religious concepts of Eastern urbanism. Athens, like the free people who nurtured it, was a spontaneous civic creation. The apparent “anarchy” of the city’s residential quarters marks a sharp break with an earlier urban outlook that placed nature and the cosmos above human beings. Dwellings are located where they are simply becauses the locations are places where people live — not planned according to recipes contrived by a priesthood Location is a function of life and sociability, of community and intercourse freely and spontaneously expressed, not of magic or religious cosmology. The Hellenic sense of space is completely humanistic and communitarian; its pell-mell character suggests that the Greeks found their civic fulfillment more in themselves and m their interrelationships than in the privatized domain of their dwellings and work places.

If territoriality is conceived merely as the historic solvent of blood ties, then the Greek sense of space added a uniquely positive dimension to this conception that transcends it A territory defined by human propinquity and intercourse implies the complete subordination of territoriality to the people who occupy an area — the humanized space of a true community that is internalized and acquires a subjective character, not merely a geographic one. Thus, as Zimmern observes, wherever the ancient Greeks came together there was a polis, that is, a free community, and it mattered little where it was located. When the polis finally passed into the shadows of history, it mattered little if or where they came together: the polis was gone forever The abstract externalized sense of territoriality that marks the modern city, like the priority it gives to design over community is in every sense an urban atavism. If the priests of pre-Hellenic urbanism were architects who imposed a cosmological design on the city, the architects of modern urbanism are priests whose designs are crassly utilitarian. Both are architects of the mythic insofar as they subserve the human essence of the city — its communitarian dimension — to suprahuman or inhuman ends.

A polis so large that it transcended a scale comprehensible to the citizen meant that it became merely territorial and vitiated its goal as a community. Accordingly, Aristotle establishes the rule that the polis should properly house “the largest number which suffices for the purposes of life and can be taken in at a single view.”[33] In sharp contrast to the modern metropolitan impulse to unlimited growth — an impulse that Hegel would call a “bad infinity” — the Hellenic impulse always emphasized limit, and the polis was always limited by what the Greek could take in “at a single view.” This high regard for limit, E. A. Gutkind observes, “dominates Greek town planning to such a degree that, to give only one example, Syracuse at the time of its greatest expansion consisted of five different towns, each surrounded by its own wall. Strabo called it Pentapolis.”[34]

Space limitations do not make it possible to discuss the reasons why the polis declined except to remind the reader that it was a class society and hence an inherently contradictory one. Eventually it fell victim to a growing Mediterranean commerce that undermined its most precious civic values while precluding its development along authentically bourgeois lines. The urban values of the polis appear again, more than a millenium later, in the medieval town — but only intuitively, without the clear rationality that the Greeks brought to their social life. Like the polis, the medieval town emerged in the space left for urban development by a weak agrarian society, decentralized by geography and by internal conflict. Again like the polis, the medieval town and outlying countryside achieved a certain balance that is reflected in the modest dimensions of the town itself and its early democratic structure. Both were scaled to human dimensions and could be taken in “at a single view. But between the polis and the medieval town there are significant differences that partly account for the diverging historical developments they followed. The polis was not structured civically around the family but rather around the agora, which was more public square than market place. The medieval town merged work with the family in a domestic economy that turned the public square as much into a market place as an arena for social intercourse. The intense political interests of the Greeks, indeed, the fact that they were farmers as well as urban dwellers, relegated commercial activity to a secondary place in their lives; actually, the Greek tended to disdain commerce and left it in the hands of resident non-citizens. The medieval burgher, by contrast, was mainly an artisan or merchant, and only incidentally a food cultivator in the garden behind his home. His principal interest focused on trade and not surprisingly he pioneered the path toward capitalism and the bourgeois city.

Trade is the reduction and quantification of the world to commodity equivalents, the leveler of quality, skill, and concrete labor to numerical units that can be measured by time and money, by clocks and gold. What sets this abstract quantified world in motion is competition — the struggle for self-preservation on the market place. Capitalism, the domain of competition par excellence, has its fair share of violence, plunder, piracy, and enslavement; but in the normal course of events its mode of self-preservation is a quiet process of economic cannibalization — the devouring of one capitalist by another and the ever-greater centralization of capital in fewer hands. This takes place as a ritual peculiar to the capitalist mode of production notably, as production for the sake of production, as growth for the sake of growth. The bourgeois maxim, “grow or die, becomes capitalism s very law of life. The inevitable impact of this unceasing expansion on the city can only be appreciated fully in our own time by the limitless expansion of the modern megalopolis, as the arena both for the endless production of commodities and their sale. If the Greeks subordinated the market place to the city, the emerging bourgeoisie subordinated the city to the market place — indeed, it eventually turned the city itself into a market place. This development marked not only the end of the small, sharply contoured medieval town, but the emergence of the sprawling capitalist megalopolis, a maw which devours every viable element of urbanity. Precapitalist cities were limited by the countryside, not only externally in the sense that the growth of free cities inevitably came up against social, cultural, and material barriers reared by entrenched agrarian interests, but also internally, insofar as the city reflected the social relations on the land. Except in the case of the late medieval cities, exchange relations were never completely autonomous; to one degree or another, they were placed in the service of the land. But once exchange relations begin to dominate the land and finally transform agrarian society, the city develops according to the workings of a suprasocial law. Production for the sake of production, translated into urban terms, means the growth of the city for its own sake — without any intrinsic urban criteria or even uman criteria to arrest that growth. Limit becomes the enemy of growth; the human scale, the enemy of the commercial scale; quality, the enemy of quantity; the synthesis of dualism, the enemy of the buyer-seller dichotomy. Paradoxically, capitalism yields an urbanized world without cities — a world of urban belts that lack internal structure, definition, and civic uniqueness.

Bourgeois society, which abolishes urban limit and dissolves urban form, acquires an historic dynamic that has very far- reaching civic and psychic consequences. Competition tends to transform the numerous small enterprises that marked the inception of the industrial era into fewer and fewer highly centralized corporate giants. All the elements of society begin to change their dimensions. Civic and political gigantism parallel industrial and commercial gigantism. The city acquires dimensions so far removed from the human scale and human control that it ceases to appear as the shelter of individuality. Urban space reaches not only outward over the land but upward into the sky, blotting out the horizon as well as the countryside. The faceless geometric architecture of soaring skyscrapers and immense complexes of high-rise dwellings bespeaks a monu- mentalism that reflects the authority not of superhuman persons but of suprahuman bureaucratic institutions. No natural or human forms adorn these structures, forms on which the imagination can fasten in awe or defiance. Their cold geometry and functional design instill a sense of powerlessness in the urban dweller that precludes the presence of human meaning, for these structures appear no longer as the works of man but of institutions. They even tend to bear the names of the corporations that erected them. Before such gigantic, undefinable, bureaucratic entities, the urban dweller feels psychically as well as physically dwarfed. Unlike the monumental structures of the Baroque city, whose ornamentation was evidence of personified power, the institutional monumentalism of the megalopolis becomes a source of bewilderment and disorientation. Confronted every day by this architectural nullity, the urban dweller finds no monarch against whom she or he can rebel, no gods to defy, no priests and courtiers to overthrow. There is nothing, in fact, but an interminable bureaucratic nexus that traps the individual in an impersonal skein of agencies and corporations. These soaring geometric structures exude social power in its most reified form: power for the sake of power, domination for the sake of domination.

The urban ego, driven back from the social basis of individuality, must desperately learn to fend for itself. In this highly privatized world of isolated monads, the great crowds that surround the individual in the megalopolis lack any communitarian content. Louis Wirth, a generation ago, could remark upon the superficiality of urban relationships, of acquaintanceships that “stand in a relationship of utility” to each other and the disappearance of “the spontaneous self-expression, the morale, and the sense of participation that comes with living in an integrated society.”[35] The gay Parisian crowds in which Baudelaire loved to immerse himself a century earlier had become, by Wirth’s time, the blase crowds whose spontaneity was carefully regulated and whose contacts were coolly superficial. Spontaneity of intercourse had been replaced by a prudent courtesy. The megalopolis carries this degradation to its most primal depths. Cornered in a sense of isolation that is accentuated by the massive, unknowing, impersonal crowds that surround the urban dweller, the individual ceases to be gay or even blase, but fearful. The egoistic, calculating mentality which the bourgeois market normally generates in its isolated monads and by which it corrodes the sense of community that marked precapitalist urbanity is heightened by the megalopolis into a hostility that verges on mutual terror.

The megalopolis, in effect, atavistically travels the full circle of urban history back to the primitive community’s dread of the stranger — but now, without the solidarity that the primitive community afforded to its own kind. The freedom which urban territoriality increasingly provided for the outsider, the individuality which the city eventually generated in all who inhabited its environs, the right of the urban dweller to be taken on her or his own merits apart from kinship ties and blood lineages, and perhaps more fundamentally, the solidarity the city forged among its citizens qua individuals into a purely social community unified by propinquity and an urbanely rational heritage — all of this is dissolved by the megalopolis into an alienating, crassly utilitarian, externalized mode of sociation in which everyone now reverts to the status of the outsider, to the primal stranger as real or potential foe. The barbarism of the past returns to settle over the forest of skyscrapers and high-rise dwellings like a sickening miasma. If the medieval town celebrated the fact that city air is ‘‘free air,” the bourgeois megalopolis chokes on a polluted air that is poisoned not only by the toxicants of its industries, motor vehicles, and energy installations, but by a darkening cloud of hostility and fear. By virtue of a dialectical irony unique to itself, the city at its “height” in the most urbanized of urban worlds regenerates the mythic traditions of a humanity that has barely advanced beyond animality, yet without the redeeming innocence that marked this primal age.

The tribalism of the past reappears in the megalopolis as mocking caricature — as a ubiquitous process of ghettoiza- tion. To the degree that dread replaces spontaneous intercourse and its degradation into courtesy, panic unites normally alienated people of the same area and status in a hierarchy of fears against those who are sequentially more different and more removed from the familiar conditions of their lives. Tribalism appears in the degenerated form of the urban enclave. The ghetto is not merely the condition of the blacks and the poor who occupy the central districts of the megalopolis: as the beleaguered enclave of suburbia, exurbia, and the residential pockets of the well-to-do-in the inner city, the ghetto becomes the condition of everyone who is caught in the megalopolitan skein. The outward radiation of modern urban society from its civic nuclei reads like a spectrum of either increasingly deprived or seemingly privileged ghettoes: the materially denied black and Puerto Rican ghettoes in the central parts of the city (marbled, to be sure, by well-policed enclaves of fearful whites); the materially more aflluent but spiritually denied suburbanite fringe, united merely by its aversion for the city proper; and finally that pathetic caricature of all privilege in bourgeois society, the beleagured exurbanite fringe, inwardly paralyzed by a suspicion of invaders from the central city and suburbs. Just as the bourgeois market place makes each individual a stranger to another, so the bourgeois city estranges these central and fringe areas from each other. The paradox of the megalopolis is that it unites these areas internally not in the felicitous heterogeneity of unity in diversity that marked the medieval commune — a heterogeneity unified by mutual aid and a common municipal tradition — but rather in the suspicions, anxieties, and hatreds of the stranger from the “other” ghetto. The city, once the refuge of the stranger from archaic parochialism, is now the primary source of estrangement. Ghetto boundaries comprise the unseen internal walls within the city that once, as real walls, secured the city and distinguished it from the countryside. The bourgeois city assimilates archaic parochialism as a permanent and festering urban condition. No longer are the elements of the city cemented by mutual aid, a shared culture, and a sense of community; rather, they are cemented by a social dynamite that threatens to explode the urban tradition into its very antithesis.

To these historic contradictions and tendencies, city planning and its disciplinary cousin, urban sociology, oppose the platitudes of analytical and technical accomodation. Leonard Reissman does not speak for himself alone when he affirms that, while “there have been recurrent crises” in urban history, “there is little chance for a perfect solution...” The thrust of this thinking is strictly ideological: the megalopolis is here to stay, and the sooner we learn to live with it, the better. A dysutopian mentality increasingly pervades contemporary city planning and urban sociology, an outlook misleadingly formulated in terms of a regression to rural parochialism or adjustment to an “urbanized world.” Radical critique tends to be denigrated. Typically, Reissman belabors “rural sociologists” for seeking “a rural idyll or an urban utopia.” Such thinking, he scornfully adds, is “supercritical, with the result that “we continue to criticize the city more often than we praise it, to magnify its faults more often than we stress its advantages.” These remarks conclude with the pragmatically triumphant note that “In any case, such discussions have hardly slowed the pace of urban growth.”[36]

Reissman is unique in that he examines the assumptions of urban sociology. More often than not, these assumptions are simply taken for granted. Urban sociology presupposes that the city can be taken as a social isolate — often, quite apart from other social factors that define it — and examined on its own terms. Economics becomes “urban economics”; social relations, urban relations , politics, urban politics”; and the city dweller, an “urban man” in an “urbanized world.” “Urbanism,” in effect, replaces capitalism as the legitimate object of social investigation. On this derivative level, urban sociology becomes descriptive rather than critical, analytical rather than censorious. To the more vulgar urban sociologist, the problems of the megalopolis are to be explained as the work of the self-seeking, the greedy, and the indifferent. Even Reissman is not above this level of discourse; “the economics of avarice, the politics of ignorance,” we are told, “make the perfect city only a utopia.”[37] These villainous traits are imputed not only to land speculators, construction barons, government bureaucrats, landlords and banking interests, but rather flippantly to the general public. People, we are told, do not 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 concerned — the ordinary urban dwellers who must endure the megalopolis not only as a place of work but also as a way of life.

In city planning the counterpart of this abstract “we” is the abstract design: the architectural sketch that will resolve the gravest urban problems with the most sophisticated knowhow.” “One question about city planning,” observes Frank Fisher, “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 at the height of the 19^th century’s Industrial Revolution ?”[38] Fisher’s questions, quite humane in themselves, are nevertheless loaded with presuppositions about the nature of residence, work, the relationship of town to country, and structural size that require critical examination before “the magnificent volumes” can be compiled. For the purposes of our discussion, however, the most important of these presuppositions is that a rational city is primarily a product of good designing — that “green spaces,” “pleasant residential districts,” “equally pleasant factory and working areas,” not to speak of “carefully placed skyscrapers,” in themselves produce human, rational, or even viable cities.

The priority that city planning assigns to structural design represents a fairly recent development. Western notions of the city, certainly as we know them from earlier visionaries of urban reconstruction, were clearly linked to a larger, often sharply critical, conception of the nature of society itself. Plato’s Republic advances a notion of the polis not only in terms of what it ought to be, but how class relations, education, social attitudes, modes of administration, and ownership of property form its very essence and determine its size and configuration. To the degree that design factors enter into the dialogue, they are seen as a function of social life. However unpalatable the hierarchical bias of the dialogue may be, Plato follows a tradition that discusses the city as the result of a distinctive social configuration, not as an autonomous entity that can be isolated and reserved for analysis and design on its own terms.

This tradition is perpetuated by Aristotle, More, Campanella, Andreae, indeed, by virtually all the visionaries of the city well into the early nineteenth century. A high point is reached in the works of Fourier, who combines social critique and reconstruction in a strikingly revolutionary manner. In contrast even to Owen, the English utopian, Fourier conceives of the phalanstery not merely as a sober community of labor, but a shelter of sensuous pleasure. A delightfully unguarded hedonism pervades his notions of work, of the relationship between the sexes, of food and adornment, even of the design of the phalanstery itself which will provide “elegant communication with all parts of the building and its dependencies.”[39] Here, Rabelais’ Abbey of Theleme is thorougly democratized. The right to “Do what thou wouldst,” which forms the rule of the “Thelemite order,” ceases to be the privilege of a Renaissance elite and becomes the prerogative of society at large.

The notion that design dictates urban conditions of life becomes dominant in an ambiance of social protest, when cities in Europe and America had undergone appalling decay under the impact of the Industrial Revolution. Although the emergence of the modern city planning movement is usually dated with the publication in 1898of Ebenezer Howard’s Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (later retitled Garden Cities of Tomorrow), Howard’s efforts had been preceded by L’Enfant’s plan for the city of Washington and, in the case of a more sinister enterprise, by Haussman’s remodeling of Paris, an immense effort visibly designed to deal effectively with the insurrections that had plagued the French ruling classes. No less significantly, the middle years of the century were marked by legislation and regulations to cope with the disastrous hygienic conditions of the time. Major cholera epidemics threatened not only the poorer quarters of European and American cities but also the wealthy ones, and these could be brought under control only by serious efforts to improve urban sanitation and living conditions. Moreover, 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 cites ouurieres, state-subsidized “model villages” for English workers, and the Krupp settlements in the Ruhr. On the whole, however, these programs did not appreciably affect the established cities, nor did they greatly alter the urban landscape of Europe and the United States. As to the latter country, 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.”[40]

Howard’s impact on this state of mind, both by means of his book and his practical endeavors in creating the first “garden city” of Letchworth, is almost legendary. “Garden Cities of Tomorrow,” Mumford rightly observes, “has done more than any single book to guide the modern town planning movement and to alter its objectives.”[41] id In many respects, it originated this movement, for the idea that town planning should be a cause, an ideal around which to mobilize popular interest, state resources, and social opinion, must be ascribed more to Howard than to any of his predecessors and successors. Yet Howard can also be regarded as fathering, however unintentionally, the myth that structural design is equatable with social rationality. Although deeply influenced by Henry George and Peter Kropotkin, Howard’s social ideals are repeatedly vitiated by the exigencies of design and by a British proclivity for a compromising “realism.” As F. J. Osborn, one of his closest associates, emphasizes, Howard “was not a political theorist, not a dreamer, but an inventor. The curious juxtaposition of these words and the pragmatic, indeed technical bias it reveals tells us much about the “garden city” movement as a whole. As Osborn explains: “The inventor proceeds by first conceiving an idea of a possible new product or instrument, next by evolving a design on paper with patient thought for the adaptation of the structure to the conditions it has to fulfill, and finally by experimentation with models to test the design in practice.”[42]

This crudely Baconian mentality pervades modern city planning. To Aristotle, the city was a way of life: its achievement was gauged not by its size, population, or logistical efficiency, but by the extent to which it enabled its citizens “to live temperately and liberally in the enjoyment of leisure.”[43] To Le Corbusier, by contrast, the city is a “tool,” a logistical device.[44] Even Frank Lloyd Wright once described the city as “the only possible ideal machine...”[45] This mechanistic orientation has its conceptual antecedents in the functionalist theories of the bourgeois Enlightenment architects — figures such as Lodoli, who provocatively expressed a greater admiration for the sewers of Rome than the sacristy of St. Peter’s. Speculative thought tends to be replaced by pragmatic realism, human values by operationalism, ends by the hypostasization of means. With Lodoli, as Alexander Tzonis observes, we see an end to 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 (‘Accomodation, Handsomeness and Lastingness) or Perrault s dichotomy between ‘Positive’ and ‘Arbitrary’values.”[46]

Modern city planning is the stepchild of this degraded rationalism and functionalism. Inspired as Howard’s intentions may be, he assigns to design the task of achieving goals that involve sweeping revolutionary changes in the economic, social, and cultural fabric of bourgeois society. Compared to the megalopolis, Howard’s garden city is attractive enough: a compact urban entity of some 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 is to 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 this proposal, but he was careful to emphasize at the very outset of his book that these were “merely suggestive, and will probably be much departed from.”[47]

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, neither more nor less than what such a design can perform. The design may provide the basis for greater human contiguity, the structural instruments for community, and easy communication with places of work, with shopping centers, and with service enterprises. Nevertheless it leaves undefined the nature of human contiguity, community, and the relationship between the urban dweller and the rural environs. Most importantly, it leaves undefined the nature of work in garden city, the control of the means of production, the problem of distributing goods and services equitably, and it leaves unanalyzed the conflicting social interests that collect around these issues. Actually, Howard’s “invention” does provide an orientation toward all of these problems — namely, a system of benevolent capitalism that presumably avoids the “extremes” of “communism” and “individualism.”[48] Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow is permeated by an underlying assumption that a compromise can be struck between an inherently irrational social reality and a moral ideology of high-minded conciliation.

Yet the offices, industrial factories, and shopping centers that are intended to provide garden city with the means of life are themselves battlegrounds of conflicting social interests. Within these entities 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 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 the highly progressive criteria advanced by earlier utopias and historical experiences 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. Garden city has none of the recall mechanisms that were established by the Paris Commune of 1871. Unlike More’s Utopia, there is no proposal for rotating agricultural and industrial work. In garden city, the mode of social labor is decided simply 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 simply absent from his work.

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 aborning in the United States, are that these communities do not encompass anywhere near 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 warped criteria that serve to obfuscate rather than clarify the high attainments of the urban tradition. Although people may earn their income 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 community concern. A crucial area of life is thus removed from the community and delivered to a socio-economic system that exists apart from it even as it exists within 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 and domination, and economic exploitation. Although people are brought together to enjoy certain conveniences and pleasantries, they remain as truncated and culturally impoverished in garden cities and “new towns” as they were in the megalopolis, with the difference that in the big cities the stark reality of urban decay 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 of 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.[49] Nor has there been any promise that they will remotely approximate such far-reaching goals. In the best of cases, the new towns differ from the suburbs by virtue of the ease with which people can reach their work places and acquire services within the community. In the worst of cases, these communities are little more than bedroom suburbs of the big cities and add enormously to their 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 Jacob’s spirited defense of traditional neighborhood life partakes of all the illusions that mar Frederic J. Osborn’s defense of Howard’s vision. Culturally, this neighborhood world if faced with extinction: the same forces that truncate the inhabitant of the “new town” are delivering the small shop over to the supermarket and the old tenement complex to the aseptic high-rise superblock. Colorful enclaves of neighborhood culture will doubtless continue to exist as urban showpieces — contemporary counterparts of the existing medieval and Renaissance towns that attract tourists to Europe for visual respite from the urban monotony that is rapidly prevailing in most cities of the world.

To the degreee that the urban dweller becomes disenchanted with an undisguisedly functional design rationality, city planning begins to flirt with a design exotica that rehabilitates this very rationality in a mystified form. A pop ideology of urbanism — half science fiction, half fraud — tends to defuze the urban dweller’s frustration by evoking design elements that are unique only in the nightmarish dimensions they add to prevailing modes of city planning. In Buckminster Fuller, Paoli Soleri, Constantinos Doxiades, Yona Friedman, Nicolas Schoffer, and a bouquet of newly arrived Japanese designers, the system tries to recover its social credibility with the shamanistic and occult. Fuller, to examine the most prominent of these shamans, finds no inconsistency in trying to reconcile an appeal for individual spontaneity with a suprahuman tetrahedronal structure that will house a million people. Perhaps more absurdly, he tries to combine an ecological perspective with an air-conditioned dome over Manhattan Island.

Fuller, in fact, is an artist in advancing an outlook so “cosmic” in its insensibility to qualitative distinctions that individuality and community dissolve into mere digits in a computerized “world game.” His inflated, oversize vision lacks not only human scale but even natural scale. Yet once we strip away the “mega”- verbiage he borrows from cybernetics, systems analysis, and the aerospace industry, what remains of his thinking is a mechanistic reductionism embodying the crudest features of the prevailing functional rationality. “The environment,” we are told, “always consists of energy — energy as matter, energy as radiation, energy as gravity and energy as ‘events.’” An environment so divested of qualitative distinctions beggars even the machine-like Cartesian world of mere matter and motion. In this universe, everything is interchangeable. Accordingly, Fuller adds: “Housing is an energetic environment-controlling mechanism. Thinking correctly of all housing as machinery (one is tempted to ask, not as home or community? — M.B.) we begin to realize the complete continuity of interrelationship of such technological evolution as that of the home bedroom into the railway sleeping car, into the automobile with seat-to-bed conversions, into the filling-station toilets, which are accessories of the parlor-on wheels; the trailer, the motels, hotels, and ocean liners.”[50] Portability replaces community and mobility a sense of rootedness and place. The individual becomes a camper who belongs everywhere — and nowhere. Perhaps more appropriately, Ful- lerian social theory envisions the individual as an astronaut who pilots the earth as a mechanical spaceship. Here, hypostasized design leaves even the mundane world of conventional planning for the interstellar space of Kubrick’s 2001. This magic is essentially cinematic — as synthetic as the film on which it unfolds.

That Fuller’s work arouses popular interest can be explained by default — that is, as a result of the vacuum left by the absence of a searching radical theory of the city and community. Why, it may be asked, did Fourier’s interpretations of community fail to acquire relevance for so many of the generations that followed his own? At what point — and for what reasons — did the generous utopian visions that surfaced in the early nineteenth century lose continuity with later periods that so desperately required their elaboration and fulfillment? The rupture can be dated from the ascendancy of Marxism as a social movement. Largely under the impetus of Marx’s class theory, the city ceased to be a matter of serious concern to radical analysts and the notion of community a goal in social reconstruction. Radicalism found an almost exclusive locus in the factory and proletariat. Just as bourgeois urban sociology neglected the work place for the city, so radical social theory neglected the city for the work place. That the two arenas could have been integrated as a unified realm of critique and reconstruction occurred to only a few radical theorists of the last century, notably Kropotkin and William Morris.

Yet even the worker does not exist merely in a factory milieu and her or his social experiences are not exhausted at the point of production. The proletarian is not only a class being but also an urban being. Capitalism generates a broad social crisis that often makes workers more accessible to revolutionary visions as urban dwellers — as victims of pollution, congestion, isolation, real estate extortion, neighborhood decay, bad transportation, civic manipulation, and the spiritually dehumanizing effects of megalo- politan life — than as exploited producers of surplus value. Marx and Engels were far less oblivious to this fact than the epigones who were to speak in their names. In The Housing Question, written in 1872, Engels creditably links his views with the most vital concepts of Owen 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. The same theme is taken up 13 years later in Engels’ highly influential work, Anti-Duhring. With the vulgarization of Marxism and its transformation into a powerful political ideology, this tradition receded into the background. The notion of “scientific socialism” fostered a distinct bias against Marx’s utopian predecessors and the communitarian visions that permeated their works. By the turn of the century, urban problems ceased to be an issue of any real significance in Marxist theory. Even the notion of decentralization was airily dismissed as a “utopian” absurdity.

Not until the late 1960s do we begin to see design emerge as a function of an entirely new way of life. That this approach had its isolated devotees in the long interim between Fourier’s day and our own is evident enough from any reading of urban history. The Sixties are unique, however, in that the concept of community began to develop on a broad popular scale — indeed, a largely generational scale — when young people in considerable numbers, disenchanted with the prevailing society, reoriented themselves toward reconstructive utopistic projects of their own. New values were formulated that often involved a total break with the commodity system as a whole and charted the way to new forms of sociation.

The young people who began to formulate these new values and forms of sociation — values and forms that have since been grouped under the rubric of “the counterculture” — unquestionably comprised a privileged social stratum. For the most part, they came from the 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 for the trifling nature of the movement itself sidesteps a key question: why did privilege lead to a rejection of the social and material values that had spawned these very privileges in the first place? Why, in fact, 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 an historic change in the material premises for the radical social movements in the advanced capitalist countries. By the Sixties, the so-called “First World had undergone unprecedented technological changes. 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 privatization and individuation based on egotism, seemed obsolete in the light of technological achievements that afforded entirely contrary alternatives — freedom from a lifetime of 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 but odious. There is no paradox 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.

Which is not to say that the technological context of the counterculture was consciously grasped and elaborated into a coherent perspective for society as a whole. Indeed, the outlook of most middle-class dropout youth and students remained largely intuitive and often fell easy prey to the faddism nurtured by the established society. The erratic features of the new movement, its feverish and its quixotic oscillations, can be partly explained by this lack of adequate consciousness. Often, young people were easily victimized and crudely exploited by commercial interests that shrewdly pandered to the more superficial aspects of the new culture. Large numbers of this dropout youth, exultant in their newly discovered sense of liberation, lacked an awareness of the harsh fact that complete freedom is impossible in a prevailing system of unfreedom. Insofar as they hoped rapidly to replace the dominant culture by their own merely on the strength of example and 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, their culture has a compelling relevance as part of an historic enlightenment that eventually may change every aspect of social life.

The most striking feature of this culture is the emphasis it places on personal relations as the locus of abstract social ideals, its attempt to translate freedom and love into existential realities of everyday life. This personalistic yet socially involved approach has yielded not 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 has been written about the extent to which ecologically minded young people began to subject city planning to a devastating critique, 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 extent to which the city expedites traffic, communications, and economic activities. Rather, they were primarily occupied with the relationship of design to the fostering of personal 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 and efficiency, but from an explicit critique of the status quo and a conception, rooted in developing life-styles, of the free human relationships that were to replace it. The design elements of the plan followed from radically new social alternatives that were already being practiced as subcultures in many communities throughout the country. To use an expression that was very much in the air: the attempt was made to replace hierarchical space by liberated space.

Among the many plans of this kind to be developed in the late Sixties and early Seventies, perhaps the most impressive was formulated in Berkeley by an ad hoc group from People’s Architecture, the local Tenant’s Union, and members of the local food cooperative. The plan 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 with police for more than a week 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” — a movement, unfortunately, that has yet to live up to these high hopes. The thrust of the plan, entitled Blueprint for a Communal Environment , is radically countercultural. “The revolutionary culture,” declare the writers ,of 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.”[51] The Blueprint is a project not only for reconstruction but also for struggle on a wide social terrain against the established order.

This document of the Berkeley planners aims at more than the structural redesigning of an existing communty; it avows and explores a new way of life at the most elementary level of human intercourse. The new way of life is communal and seeks as much as possible to divorce itself from commodity relationships. The goal of the design is “Communal ways of organizing our lives (to) 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.” The social and private are thoroughly fuzed in this one sentence. Design gives expression to a new life-style that stands opposed to the repressive organization of society.[52]

Shelter is redesigned to “overcome the fragmentation of our lives... to encourage communication and break down priva tization.” The plan’s authors observe 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 multi-purpose rooms which promote more interaction, ‘such as communal dining rooms, meeting spaces and work areas.” Methods are suggested for creating roof openings and converting exterior upper walls into communicating links with neighboring houses as well as between rooms and upper stories.[53]

“All land in Berkeley is treated as a marketable commodity” observe the young planners. “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 restore nature to the urban dweller’s world, but to open avenues of intimate communication. The plan focuses not merely on public plazas and parks, but the immediate neighborhoods in which people live their daily lives. Indeed, with magnificent 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.[54]

Half the streets of Berkeley, the plan notes, could easily be 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 in use and to share the human experience of common travel. Community services will make a “quantum leap,” observe the planners, 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 childcare 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 the destruction of recyclable resources.[55]

The Blueprint advances a refreshingly imaginative program for ruralizing the city and fostering the material independence of its inhabitants. It suggests communally worked backyard gardens for the cultivation of organic food, even entering into the specifics of composting, mulching, and the preparation of seedlings. It proposes the establishment of a “People’s Market... 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 “People’s Market is visualized as a “solid example of creative thinking about communal use of space. Its structure will be portable, and will be built in such a way as to serve neighborhood kids as play equipment on non-market days.”[56]

The Blueprint leaves no illusion that this ensemble of reconstructive ideas will “liberate” Berkeley or other communities. It sees the realization of these concepts as the first steps toward reorienting the individual self from a passive acceptance of isolation and dependence on bureaucratic institutions to popular initiatives that will recreate communal contacts and face-to-face networks of mutual aid. Ultimately, society as a whole will have to be reorganized by the great majority who are now forced into hierarchical subservience to the few. Yet until these revolutionary changes are achieved, a new state of mind, nourished by working community ties, must be fashioned so that people will be able to fuze their deepest personal needs with broader social ideals. Indeed, unless this fusion is achieved, these very ideals will remain abstractions and will not be realized at all.

Many of the Blueprint’s structural suggestions are not new. The idea of using roof openings to link houses is obviously 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. What makes the plan unique, however, is that it derives its design concepts from radically new life-styles that are antithetical to an increasingly bureaucratic society. Doubtless, each of its design elements could be assimilated in piecemeal fashion to conventional ways of life as has been the case with so many radical ideas in the past. The plan is sensitive to this possibility. From the outset, it adopts a revolutionary stance. Its premise in advance of any design is a culture that is counter to the prevailing one — one that emphasizes community rather than isolation, the sharing of resources and skills rather than their privatized possession, independence from rather than dependence on the bourgeois market place, loving relations and mutual aid rather than egotism and competition. The Blueprint clearly articulates the social preconditions for a free community that other, ostensibly radical, plans leave unexamined. It is humanistic, not “iconoclastic”; it is radical, not “original.” And whether or not the planners were fully conscious of their historic antecedents, they were presenting a Hellenic vision of urban life. The truly human city, to them, is a way of life (not a mere “design”) that fosters the integration of individual with society, of town with country, of personal needs with social ones without denying the integrity of each.

The Sixties have passed — and with them many of the high hopes raised by dropout youth and radical students. An insecure, so-called “middle American” adult public, seeking respite from challenges to traditional values, is trying to entrench itself in the status quo, indeed, to evoke an “innocence” imputed to the past that is apocryphal in any case. Where the counterculture has managed to hold its own against overtly hostile forces, it has had to contend with a political mode of dope-peddling in the form of sectarian Marxism and “Third World” voyeurism. Here, archaic ideologies and modes of organization assume the semblance of “radicalism” and, like toxic germs, fester in the wounds opened by public malaise and political repression.

Yet even this ebbing phase of what is surely a much larger cultural and social development could be valuable as a sobering period of maturation. A new world will not be gained merely by strewing the pathway to the future with flowers. The largely intuitive impulses that exploded with such naive enthusiasm in the Sixties, only to become bitter, harsh, and dehumanizing in the pseudo-radicalism 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 form possible — arrogance and a senselessly violent rhetoric. Far more than the flowers of the mid-Sixties, the angry clenched fists of the late Sixties served to alarm and utterly alienate an uncomprehending public.

Yet many of the demands raised by this movement of young people are imperishable. No matter how far the movement may recede from its earlier eminence, these demands must inevitably be recovered and advanced if there is to be any social future. In calling for a melding of the more abstract ideals of social liberation with personal liberation, in seeking to form the nuclear libertarian communistic relationships so necessary to the rearing of 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 sensuality and a humanistic sensibility, in challenging hierarchy and domination in all its forms and manifestations, in trying to synthesize new decentralized communities based on an ecological balance with the natural world — in raising all of these demands as a single ensemble, the counterculture gave a modern expression to a long historic mainstream of human dreams and aspirations. And however intuitively, it did so on the basis of the historic challenge posed by technological advances unprecedented in history. These demands can never be fully submerged by political repression; they have become the voice of an increasingly self-conscious reason that is sedimented into the very perspective of humanity toward its future. What were only recently the hotly debated views of a small minority of the young are almost unconsciously accepted by millions of people in all age groups.

What strongly favors the growth of these demands is the harsh fact that society is left with very few choices today. 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 megalopolis which completely dominates the countryside, marks the absolute negation of the city as we have known it in history. With the modern city, we can no longer speak of a clearly defined urban entity with a collective urban interest of its own. Just as each phase or “moment” of the city in history is marked by its own internal limits, so the megalopolis represents the limits of the city as such — of civitas as distinguished from communitas. The political principle in the form of the state dissolves all the elements of the social principle, replacing community ties by bureaucratic ones. Personified space dissolves into institutional space — and with the violent ghettoization of the modern city, into what Oscar Newman crassly describes as “defensible space.” The human scale is enveloped by urban gigantism. This “anti-city,” neither urban nor rural, affords no arena for the development of community or even humanistic sociation. At most, the megalopolis is pieced together by mutually hostile enclaves each of which is internally “united” by its hostility to the stranger on the perimeter. At its worst, this urban cancer is in physical, moral and logistical decay. It ceases even to function on its own terms, as an efficient arena for the production and marketing of commodities.

City planning validates the urban crisis by dealing with it as a problem of logistics and design. The conventional planner’s concern for efficient movement involves the reduction of human beings to little more than commodities that circulate through the capitalist economy as exchange values. The triumph of computer-simulation techniques in city planning reflects the degradation of the urban dweller from the status of “brother” in the medieval commune to that of “citizen” in the traditional bourgeois city and ultimately to that of a mere digit in the megalopolis. If the traditional city emancipated human sociation from blood ties, the megalopolis dissolves sociation as such and reduces it to digital aggregation. City planning presents this dissolution as ideology. In the dynamic design, people become “population” and their relations mere movement guided by the needs and constraints of the prevailing system.

We see, here, the profound difference between the sensibility of the young Berkeley planners and their conventional counterparts. The Berkeley planners start from the premise that urbanity does not emancipate human sociation from the blood tie merely to deliver the individual to the alienated and privatized world of the bourgeois market place. In the Blueprint, sociation is recovered in the commune, in ties freely formed by human affinity rather than ancestral lineage. Urbanity, in effect, is fulfilled as a commune composed of communes. Conventional city planning, by accepting the city as it is, prevents us from understanding what humanized territory could be — namely, a new polis that would be a commune made up of communes, of nuclear groups united by choice and selective affinity, not simply by kinship and blood ties. Accordingly, just as people become mere “population,” territo- rialism becomes mere “space” through which people, vehicles, and commodities flow. City planning becomes the mechanical organization of space by design, not the ecological colonization of territory by people. Civitas completely assimilates communitas; the political principle, the social principle.

To restore urbanity as a humanized terrain for sociation, the megalopolis must be ruthlessly dissolved and its place taken by new decentralized ecocommunities, each carefully tailored to the carrying capacity of 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 ecotechnologies that rescale the most advanced elements of modern technology to local dimensions. The equilibrium between town and country will be restored — not as a sprawling suburb that mistakes a lawn or a woodlot for “nature,” but as an interactive functional ecocommunity that unites industry with agriculture, mental work with physical. No longer a mere spectatorial object to be seen from a window or during a stroll, nature will become an integral part of all aspects of the human experience, from work to play. Only in this way can the needs of the natural world become integrated with those of the social to yield an authentic ecological consciousness that transcends the instrumentalist “environmental” mentality of the sanitary engineer.

Our place in the history of the city is unique. Precapitalist cities, owing to an incomplete technological development that perpetuated material scarcity, either stagnated within their limits or exploded destructively beyond them, only to fall back again to their original dimensions or disappear entirely. Where 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 system and market place. This was the fate of the polis. 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 between human beings and between humanity and the natural world. This ecocommunity would be more than what we have always meant by a city; it would be a social work of art, a community fashioned by human creativity, reason, and ecological insight.

Alternatively, we are confronted by an urban development that is almost certain to disintegrate into bureaucratic mobilization, chronic social war, and a condition of permanent violence. If the earliest hieroglyph of the city was a wall intersected by two roads, the symbol of the megalopolis may well become a police badge on which a gun is superimposed. In this kind of “city,” the revenge of social irrationality will claim its toll in the form of an absolute division of human from human. This is the very negation of urbanity. Perhaps more significantly, 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 its own development, the megalopolis spells the doom not only of the city as such but of human sociation. For in such an urban world, technology, subserved to irrational and demonic forces, becomes not the instrument of harmony and security, but the means for systematically plundering the human spirit and the natural world.