Thus they went along towards the Gate, now you must note that the City stood upon a mighty hill, but the Pilgrims went up that hill with ease, because they had these two men to lead them up by the arms; also they had left their Mortal Garments behind them in the River: for though they went in with them, they came out without them. They therefore went up here with much agility and speed though the foundation upon which the City was framed was higher than the Clouds. They therefore went up through the Regions of the Air, sweetly talking as they went, being comforted, because they had safely got over the River, and had such glorious Companions, to attend them.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into the aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in human history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there brooding on the old, unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926)

5
The City in the Region: The Birth of Regional Planning: Edinburgh, New York, London, 1900–1940

If the garden city was English out of America, then the regional city was undoubtedly American out of France via Scotland. Regional planning began with Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), an unclassifiable polymath who – after four unsuccessful attempts to secure a University chair – officially taught biology (more probably, anything but biology) at the University of Dundee,¹ gave India’s rulers idiosyncratic advice on how to run their cities, and tried to encapsulate the meaning of life on folded scraps of paper. From his contracts with French geographers at the turn of the century, Geddes had absorbed their creed of anarchistic communism based on free confederations of autonomous regions. Through his meeting in the 1920s with Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), a sociologist-journalist who could make his thoughts coherent in a way Geddes never could, this philosophy passed to a small but brilliant and dedicated group of planners in New York City, whence – through Mumford’s immensely powerful writings – it fused with Howard’s closely related ideas, and spread out across America and the world; exercising enormous influence, in particular, on Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the 1930s, and on the planning of the capitals of Europe, in the 1940s and 1950s. But, ironically, in this process – just as with Howard – the truly radical quality of the message was muffled and more than half-lost; nowhere on the ground today do we see the true and remarkable vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), distilled via Geddes from Proudhon, Bakunin, Reclus, and Kropotkin.

Geddes and the Anarchist Tradition

The tale must start with Geddes: a hard thing to do, since he always went round in increasing circles. A secretary, who (like all secretaries) was in the best position to judge, once said, “Geddes must be accepted … as a good Catholic accepts grief, with an open heart and no reserves, if he is to benefit those whom his presence scourges.”² He was the archetypal comic professor: “he had never mastered the art of making himself audible, either on the platform or in closer quarters”; he was “always forgetting engagements, or making two or three for the same time”; “The unformed theses, the unwritten books, mostly remained unformed and unwritten”;³ “in every short article he began again at the beginning, outlining and repeating his basic ideas endlessly”;⁴ he was, Abercrombie related, “a most unsettling person, talking, talking, talking … about anything and everything.”⁵ He obsessively developed his ideas on sheets of paper divided into nine blocks, his “machines,” which he filled with his endless intuitive ruminations, but which proved barriers to communication: when he gave a major lecture, the reporters refused to report it.⁶ One biographer said of him that

Geddes’ contributions to the academic social sciences were … at best marginally illuminating, and at worst, counter-productive … by his many idiosyncrasies, he cast himself and his ideas into the wilderness, where he remains in terms of modern scholarship.⁷

Early on, he had “begun on the idiosyncratic path which was to take him out of the mainstream of academic life, and eventually from the natural to the social sciences.”⁸ Through T. H. Huxley, under whom he studied briefly, he was enabled to work at the marine station at Roscoff in Brittany, from where, in 1878, he first visited Paris and became a fluent French speaker.⁹ Here he found his key ideas: “the central and vital tradition of Scottish culture,” he argued, “has always been wedded with that of France.”¹⁰ He took his central concepts from the founding fathers of French geography, Élisée Reclus (1830–1905) and Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845–1918), and from the early French sociologist Frédéric Le Play (1806–1882), whose new academic disciplines acquired respectability in France some years before they did in Britain or the United States.¹¹ Le Play – engineer, practical social scientist, and trusted counsellor of Napoleon III – played a key role as organizer of the 1867 Paris Exhibition, organizing it around work and social life; at the subsequent 1878 exhibition, Geddes first encountered Le Play’s ideas, with their trinity of Lieu, Travail, Famille: they stressed the family as the basic social unit, in the context of its environment.¹² After his death, Le Play’s disciples devoted a pavilion to his work; and here Jane Addams met Henrietta Barnett.¹³

From them he gained his idea of the natural region, as exemplified by his famous valley section, which he based on the ideas of Reclus.¹⁴ And it is significant that, like them, he preferred to study the region in its purest form, far from the shadow of the giant metropolis:

Coming to concrete Civic Survey, where shall we begin? … London may naturally claim pre-eminence. Yet even at best, does not this vastest of world cities present a less or more foggy labyrinth, from which surrounding regions with their smaller cities can be but dimly described … For our more general and comparative survey, then, simpler beginnings are preferable … the clear outlook, the more panoramic view of a definite geographic region such, for instance, as lies beneath us upon a mountain holiday … Such a river system is, as one geographer has pointed out, the essential unit for the student of cities and civilisations. Hence this simple geographical method must here be pled [sic] for as fundamental to any really orderly and comparative treatment of our subject.¹⁵ Geddes, 1905, 105.

Planning must start, for Geddes, with a survey of the resources of such a natural region, of the human responses to it, and of the resulting complexities of the cultural landscape: in all his teaching, his most persistent emphasis was on the survey method.¹⁶ This also he derived from Vidal and his followers, whose “regional monographs” were attempts to do just that.¹⁷ In the famous Outlook Tower, that craggy monument that still stands at the end of the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, he created a model for what he wanted to see everywhere: a local survey center, in which people of all kinds could come to understand the relationship of Le Play’s trilogy of Place–Work–Folk.¹⁸ The student of cities, he asserted, must go first to the study of such natural regions: “Such a survey of a series of our own river basins … will be found the soundest of introductions to the study of cities … it is useful for the student constantly to recover the elemental and naturalist-like point of view even in the greatest cities.”¹⁹

It sounds deceptively simple; but, as the great British planner Patrick Abercrombie once said, Civic Survey in actuality “is a sinister and complicated business,” the more so since it must widen to embrace the region and finally the world. Yet Abercrombie, who, if anyone, should have known, believed that in Britain in the early 1920s “the errors of our national reconstruction can be attributed to the neglect of this teaching of Geddes.”²⁰

For this great work, Geddes constantly argued, the planner’s ordinary maps were useless: you must ideally start with the great globe which Reclus proposed, but which was never built; failing that, you must draw cross-sections “of that general slope from mountains to sea which we find everywhere in the world” which “we can readily adapt to any scale, and to any proportions, of our particular and characteristic range, of hills and slopes and plain.” Only such a “Valley Section, as we commonly call it, makes vivid to us the range of climate, with its corresponding vegetation and animal life … the essential sectional outline of a geographer’s ‘region,’ ready to be studied”; examined closely, it “finds place for all the nature-occupations”: “Hunter and shepherd, poor peasant and rich: these are our most familiar occupational types, and manifestly successive as we descend in altitude, and also come down the course of social history.”²¹ In turn,

These variously occupied folk each come to develop their own little hamlet or village, with its characteristic type of family, and folk-ways, even institutions; not simply of home-building, though each with its germ of appropriate architectural style. In this way their villages are ranged, from fishing port to forest and mountain pass, from gardens and fields below to mine and quarry usually above.²²

And at the center of this region lay “The Valley in the Town,” where “we must excavate the layers of our city downwards, into its earliest past – the dim yet heroic cities over and upon which it has been built; and thence we must read them upwards, visualizing them as we go.”²³

Much of that, in outline, has become familiar, even trite; every freshman planner knows that the aphorism, Survey before Plan, comes from Geddes. And it derives from a kind of traditional regional geography, which – vulgarized in a thousand staple school texts – has long since been derided and swept away. But that misses its truly radical point. For Vidal and his followers, as for Geddes, regional study gave understanding of an “active, experienced environment” which “was the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings was the seat of comprehensible liberty and the mainspring of cultural evolution,” which were being attacked and eroded by the centralized nation-state and by large-scale machine industry.²⁴ (He believed that a woman’s function was to shape civilization through the upbringing of children.²⁵) So the deliberately archaic quality of the regional survey, the emphasis on traditional occupations and on historic links, was no mere quirk: like Geddes’s attempts to recapture past civic life through masques and pageants,²⁶ it was a quite conscious celebration of what, for him, was the highest achievement of European culture.

But this, quasi-mystical though it might be, has a very radical purpose. For Geddes, as for Vidal, the region was more than an object of survey; it was to provide the basis for the total reconstruction of social and political life. Here, again, Geddes was indebted to geography and to the French tradition. Élisée Reclus and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) were both geographers; but both were also anarchists. Kropotkin, who was exiled from his native Russia, was expelled from both France and Switzerland and lived for 30 years as a refugee in Brighton;²⁷ Reclus had indeed been expelled from France for fighting on the Communard side in 1871, and lived in exile, though curiously he was commissioned to design the great globe for the 1900 Exposition, which was supposed to convey a notion of universal citizenship.²⁸ Both based their ideas on Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), the French anarchist best known for his declaration “Property is Theft.” Ironically, Proudhon’s writings had been dedicated to proving the exact opposite; his argument was that individual property ownership was the essential guarantee of a free society, so long as no one owned too much. Such a society, he believed, could alone provide the basis for a decentralized, non-hierarchical system of federal government:²⁹ an idea shared by the Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin (1814–76), whose defeat and expulsion by Karl Marx in the First International conference at The Hague in 1872 was one of the decisive events in the history of socialism.³⁰

Reclus and Kropotkin were the inheritors of this tradition; and both met Geddes more than once during the 1880s and 1890s. Reclus’s most important work, a huge multi-volume study called L’Homme et la Terre,³¹ argued that the naturally collectivist small-scale societies of primitive peoples, living in harmony with their environments, had been destroyed or distorted by colonialism. But Kropotkin was even more significant; for he developed the anarchist philosophy and translated it into the conditions of the early twentieth century, and through him it had incalculable influence on both Howard and Geddes. His creed was “Anarchist Communism, Communism without government – the Communism of the Free”:³² society must rebuild itself on the basis of cooperation among free individuals, such as can be found naturally even in animal societies; this, he thought, represented the logical tendency toward which human societies were moving.³³

More than this, Kropotkin developed a remarkable historical thesis: that in the twelfth century, a “communalist” revolution had taken place in Europe which had saved its culture from suppression by theocratic and despotic monarchies. This revolution expressed itself both in the local village community, and in thousands of urban fraternities and guilds. In the late medieval city, each section or parish was the province of an individual self-governing guild; the city itself was the union of these districts, streets, parishes, and guilds, and was itself a free state.³⁴ And, he argued,

In those cities, under the shelter of their liberties acquired under the impulse of free agreement and free initiative, a whole new civilization grew up and attained such expansion, that the like has not been seen up till now … Never, with the exception of that other glorious period of ancient Greece – free cities again – had society made such a stride forwards. Never in two or three centuries, had man undergone so profound a change nor so extended his power over the forces of nature.³⁵

These achievements had been swept away by the centralized state in the sixteenth century, which represented the triumph of what Kropotkin called the Roman-imperial-authoritarian tradition. But now, he believed, this was in turn again challenged by its opposite, the popular-federalist-libertarian movement.

The reason, he thought, was the technological imperative: new sources of power, hydraulic and especially electric, meant that a big central unit of power was no longer needed; industries that depended chiefly on skilled labor had no economies of scale; observably, the newer industries tended to be small in scale. Thus, big industrial concentrations represented pure historical inertia: “There is absolutely no reason why these and like anomalies should persist. The industries must be scattered all over the world; and the scattering of industries amidst the civilized nations will be necessarily followed by a further scattering of factories over the territories of each nation.”³⁶ And

This scattering of industries over the country – so as to bring the factory amidst the fields, to make agriculture derive all those profits which it always finds in being combined with industry … and to produce a combination of industrial with agricultural work – is surely the next step … This step is imposed by the very necessity of producing for the producers themselves; it is imposed by the necessity for each healthy man and woman to spend a part of their lives in manual work in the free air.³⁷

This was one of the most crucial insights that Geddes borrowed from Kropotkin; already in 1899, presumably just after reading the first edition of Fields, Factories and Workshops, he had christened the new age of industrial decentralization the neotechnic era³⁸ the following year, in a display at the great Paris Exposition, he was using the terms “palaeotechnic” and “neotechnic.”³⁹ As he later wrote, “we may distinguish the earlier and ruder elements of the Industrial Age as Palaeotechnic, the newer and still often incipient elements disengaging themselves from these as Neotechnic.”⁴⁰ Only in this new era – here he directly followed Kropotkin – would we “apply our constructive skill, our vital energies, towards the public conservation instead of the private dissipation of resources, and towards the evolution instead of the destruction of the lives of others.”⁴¹

From Reclus and Kropotkin, and beyond them from Proudhon, Geddes also took his position that society had to be reconstructed not by sweeping governmental measures like the abolition of private property, but through the efforts of millions of individuals: the “neotechnic order” meant “the creation, city by city, region by region, of a Eutopia.” He was hostile to the Fabian centralized approach, and thus took himself out of the mainstream political debate of his time; he sought solutions capable of immediate implementation.⁴² After World War One he believed that the League of Nations should be a league of cities – and not of the capitals, which were the centers of the war-machines, but of the great provincial cities, which, regaining their former independence, would then voluntarily federate on a Swiss model.⁴³ This idea prompted a characteristic outpouring, which demands extended quotation – though, in Geddesian terms, it is a mere fragment:

The natural eugenic centre is in every home; its young go out to make new homes; these make the village, the town, the city small or great; so the would-be Eugenist has to work at all these towards their betterment. Federate homes into co-operative and helpful neighbourhoods. Unite these grouped homes into renewed and socialized quarters – parishes, as they should be – and in time you have a better nation, a better world … Each region and city can learn to manage its own affairs – build its own houses, provide its own scientists, artists and teachers. These developing regions are already in business together; can’t they make friends and organize a federation as far as need be … May not this be the time prophesied by Isaiah? … “When it shall come, then I will gather all nations and all tongues and they shall come” and “there shall be a new heaven and a new earth … and the former shall not be remembered … they shall build houses and inhabit them … and I will direct their work in truth.”⁴⁴

When his bemused questioner tried to have him explain himself, he replied that a flower expressed itself by flowering, not by being labeled.⁴⁵

Indeed there was more to come; much more. There were the themes first developed by Geddes’s equally discursive collaborator, Victor Branford: the role of the church and the university in practical relationship to the civic community;^46,47 the union of eugenics and civics with town planning and social welfare in a system of civic education⁴⁸ “the increase, within the civic domain, of woman’s influence and that of her friends and allies, the artist, the poet and the educationalist,” so to meet “the need to provide the women [sic] of the people with this cultural environment, necessary … for her full dignity as a spiritual power.”⁴⁹ Repetitively, circuitously, too often obscurely, the ideas pour out: the raw material for a score of still-unwritten dissertations. But there is one further concept, central to Geddes’s thesis of regional planning as part of social reconstruction.

In 1915, Geddes published his book Cities in Evolution. It is the most coherent exposition of his views, save for the articles collected in the American magazine The Survey a decade later (which, based on his 1923 lectures, it took two years to render into sense.)⁵⁰ In it, he drew attention to the fact that the new neotechnic technologies – electric power, the internal combustion engine – were already causing the great cities to disperse and thus to conglomerate: “Some name, then, for these city-regions, these town aggregates, is wanted. Constellations we cannot call them; conglomerations is, alas! nearer the mark, at present, but it may sound unappreciative; what of ‘Conurbations’?”⁵¹ In Britain he identified Clyde–Forth, Tyne–Wear–Tees, “Lancaston,” the West Riding and “South Riding,” “Midlandton,” “Waleston,” and Greater London; among the great European “World-Cities,” Paris, the French Riviera, Berlin, and the Ruhr; in the United States, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and New York–Boston.⁵² Presaging Gottmann’s celebrated study of Megalopolis half a century later, he wrote, “the expectation is not absurd that the not so distant future will see practically one vast City-line along the Atlantic Coast for five hundred miles; and stretching back at many points; with a total of, it may well be, well-nigh as many millions of people.”⁵³

The problem was that these spreading cities were still the outcome of the bad old palaeotechnic order, which he saw “as dissipating resources and energies, as depressing life, under the rule of machine and mammon, and as working out accordingly its specific results, in unemployment and misemployment, in disease and folly, in vice and apathy, in indolence and crime.”⁵⁴ The first step, since “the children, the women, the workers of the town can come but rarely to the country,” was that “we must therefore bring the country to them,” “make the field gain on the street, not merely the street gain on the field”;⁵⁵ “Towns must now cease to spread like expanding ink-stains and grease-spots,” but must grow botanically, “with green leaves set in alternation with its golden rays”:⁵⁶ the people of the city would thus grow up amidst the sights and smells of the country.

His ideas found an echo in Germany. Robert Schmidt (1869–1934), a councilor in the city of Essen between 1907 and 1920, then moved to head a new regional organization, the Siedlungsverband Ruhrkohlenbezirk (SVR; Ruhr Planning Association, today Kommunalverband Ruhr or Intermunicipal Association of the Ruhr District). Already, in 1913, he had formulated a comprehensive “open space” policy and also a strategy to optimize the traffic infrastructure.⁵⁷ In this he was clearly influenced by that of Charles Eliot for the City of Boston, with urban areas “penetrated by contiguous systems of parks and playgrounds, immediately connected with large forest areas and other open spaces outside the city,” as Werner Hegemann writes in a book commemorating a 1910 town-planning exhibition in Düsseldorf.⁵⁸ In a Denkschrift (Think Piece) of 1912, he proposed that the city should be encircled by a green ring and traversed by radial wedges of “green.” There would be a differentiated network of traffic routes serving long-distance and short-distance traffic, both for passengers and goods. This was the origin of the regional green open space by the SVR soon after its foundation in 1920.⁵⁹

All of these ideas of Geddes were no more than Howard had said, in one sense; but Geddes was saying it at the level of the entire city region, and that constituted its unique novelty. “Regional Survey and their [sic] applications – Rural Development, Town Planning, City Design,” he concluded,

these are destined to become master-thoughts and practical ambitions for the opening generation, not less fully than have been Business, Politics, and War to the past, and to our passing one … Already, for thinking geographers here and there, for artists and engineers, for town planners also, the neotechnic order is not only becoming conscious, but generalised, as comprehensively geotechnic; and its arts and sciences are coming to be valued less as intellectual pleasures, attainments, distinctions, and more in the measure in which they can be organised into the geographical service, the regional regeneration of Country and Town.⁶⁰

To say that geography is an essential basis of planning did not sound very radical in the 1980s, or indeed for 30 years before that; but in 1915, when for most people town planning still equaled the City Beautiful, it was revolutionary. The trouble was that, revolutionary as it was, it was also quintessentially incoherent; that quotation gives the all-too-characteristic flavor of the 402 pages, as of the many thousands of others that Geddes wrote. He was a lot better at exhibitions: he organized one for the very important 1910 London Town Planning Conference, stressing Le Play’s sociology and his own evolutionary perspective, which evidently influenced key figures like Unwin and Abercrombie.⁶¹ And it was at this time that he began to influence contemporaries, above all Patrick Abercrombie, then just beginning his academic career at the University of Liverpool. Practitioners, especially architects, turned to him because he seemed to have ready answers to vital questions.⁶² Abercrombie wrote in 1927,

It is perhaps safe to say that the modern practice of town-planning in this country would have been a much simpler thing if it had not been for Geddes. There was a time when it seemed only necessary to shake up into a bottle the German town-extension plan, the Parisian Boulevard and Vista, and the English Garden Village, to produce a mechanical mixture which might be applied indiscriminately and beneficently to every town in this country; thus it would be “town-planned” according to the most up-to-date notions. Pleasing dream! First shattered by Geddes, emerging from his Outlook Tower in the frozen North, to produce that nightmare of complexity, the Edinburgh Room at the great Town Planning Exhibition of 1910.⁶³

And a quarter-century later, at a meeting to celebrate the centenary of his birth, his academic successor William Holford quoted the Greek epigram on Plato: “Wherever I go in my mind I meet Geddes coming back.”⁶⁴ But he needed an amanuensis. That is why Mumford and his fellow-members of the Regional Planning Association of America were such critically important torchbearers. “Geddes,” Mumford wrote, “gave me the frame for my thinking: my task has been to put flesh on his abstract skeleton.”⁶⁵ In the preface of his greatest and most influential work, The Culture of Cities (1938), he was at pains to acknowledge that debt.

His fateful meeting with Geddes, in New York in 1923, was a disaster: on meeting him, Geddes wept, saying, “You must be another son to me,” and then proceeded to treat Mumford “more like an acolyte than an associate, dominating his time, ordering him around like a grammar school pupil, and even subjecting him to a blackboard grilling in the elements of his complicated graphs and diagrams”;⁶⁶ accommodated for a few days in the New School, he refused to move and stayed there all summer, taking possession of the entire building and filling it with his papers, which he had shipped in advance.⁶⁷

Geddes wanted to turn the 28-year-old rising star into an assistant. Mumford found no embarrassment in addressing Geddes as “Master,” which he did ever after; he was under Geddes’s spell, but found that the older man was seeking a kind of super-secretary to convert his “midden” of papers, his own term, into a coherent whole. Mumford’s own career as writer was just taking off, and he had neither the time nor the inclination for this role. So, for another nine years, their regular correspondence took on an increasingly anguished tone: Geddes with the sense that his life was ebbing away, with too little to show for it; Mumford, making elegant excuse after excuse for postponing his proposed visit to Europe.⁶⁸

Mumford, wrestling with Geddes’s writings, found a basic deficiency never evident when they met: “Geddes, by confining so much of his thought to his limited graph-bound vocabulary, was incapable except in spontaneous speech of drawing on the fullness of his own life experience.”⁶⁹ At the age of 80, in one of his last writings, Mumford composed a moving epitaph for his “Master”:

For me, Geddes’ greatest service was to open up the House of Life, from rooftop under the open sky to labyrinthine cellar. But I cannot forget that there are many chambers in that house we shall never, to the end of our days, penetrate; and that no single life, no single culture, no single philosophic or religious outlook, no single period or epoch, nor yet all the assembled products of science and technics, however condensed and computerized, will ever exhaust life’s boundless and unpredictable manifestations of creativity. Nothing less than the total effort of all creatures and all minds, aided by stars in their courses, is necessary to convey even faintly the meanings and values of life. And from whom did I first learn this lesson? From Patrick Geddes. But I did not find it in any of his graphs.⁷⁰

Yet Geddes, without knowing it throughout this long and anguished correspondence, had found the author for his gospel.

The Regional Planning Association of America

In his autobiography, Mumford recalls how the RPAA came into being. Already, in 1917, when he was only 22, he had written a piece, apparently unpublished, Garden Civilizations in Preparing for a new Epoch, on industrial decentralization and garden cities. In the autumn of 1922 he met Clarence Stein, an architect. The RPAA arose from a chance association of Mumford, Stein, Benton MacKaye (whose proposal for an Appalachian Trail Stein had published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921), and Charles Harris Whitaker. Other founder members of the group, at its inception around March 1923, included the economist Stuart Chase, the architects Federick Lee Ackerman and Henry Wright, and the developer Alexander Bing; Catherine Bauer was appointed Executive Director and Research Assistant to Stein.⁷¹ It was a small and diverse group, never exceeding 20 in number, mainly but not exclusively New York-based, with “no prima donnas”; its core members seem to have been Mumford, Stein, Wright, Ackerman, and MacKaye.⁷² In June 1923, during Geddes’s visit to New York, it adopted a fivefold program which included the creation of garden cities within a regional plan; development of relationships with British planners, especially Geddes; development of regional projects and plans to further the Appalachian Trail; collaboration with the American Institute of Architects’ committee on Community Planning to propagate regionalism; and surveys of key areas, notably the Tennessee Valley basin.⁷³

This ideology came from the RPAA. Formed in April 1923, it included several of the most remarkable people the twentieth-century planning movement has ever produced. They came from very diverse backgrounds and had very different personalities: Benton MacKaye was a Scottish New Englander, son of a playwright and student of the great Harvard geographer W. M. Davis, a lover of the country and small-towns, and a wilderness/rural conservationist; Clarence Stein was a cosmopolitan Jewish socialist and urbane community planner; Henry Wright was an established architect who worked with Stein on projects; Mumford was the literate urban critic. Finally, Alexander Bing, a real-estate financier who was elected President of the RPAA in 1923, played a crucial role in turning its ideas from theory into action; his City Housing Corporation provided mortgage guarantees to the Association’s two projects at Sunnyside Gardens in Queens and Radburn in New Jersey, which made them affordable for working people. Each of these people was individually talented, even a genius; but they had the capacity to work together in small creative groups. They became great friends, and their ideas fused into the concept of a “regional city”: a “utopian urban form” in which a great variety of urban communities would be sited upon a continuous green backcloth of farms, parks, and wilderness areas. The concept derived from Ebenezer Howard’s garden-city/green-belt idea; but it took it much further.⁷⁴

The RPAA believed that new technologies – electric power, the telephone, the car – were liberating agents, allowing homes and workplaces to escape completely from the constriction of the nineteenth-century city: a notion that Mumford had derived from Geddes’s notion of the palaeotechnic and neotechnic economies, which he would so effectively employ in his 1938 masterpiece The Culture of Cities.⁷⁵ Mumford would later come to doubt and then to reject that hypothesis, as he saw what mass automobility did to post-World War Two America; but at the end of the 1920s, it was still possible to see the car as a benign technology.

These ideas came together in the State Plan which Henry Wright drew up for the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning, of which Clarence Stein was the chair. Condemning past trends which had resulted in 80% of the people living on only 15% of the state’s land, notably in the 400-mile-long, 25-mile-wide Hudson-Mohawk corridor, Wright pointed to the contrast between congested cities and deserted countryside, and argued for planned long-distance dispersal of people and jobs throughout the state. It became the RPAA’s credo: their counter-plan, their radical alternative to Adams’s business-as-usual proposals. Unfortunately, Governor Alfred E. Smith, the plan’s patron, withdrew his support: he had his eyes on the White House and turned to support Robert Moses, the sworn enemy of planners and above all the RPAA.⁷⁶

Two years later came the RPAA’s first major opportunity: The Survey, a magazine with an influential circulation among liberal intellectuals and a special link with the social work movement, invited it to produce a special number for the New York meeting of the International Town Planning and Garden Cities Association. Conceived by MacKaye, it was commissioned and edited by Mumford.⁷⁷ Out of print for half a century until reprinted by Carl Sussman in his book Planning the Fourth Migration, it remains – apart from The Culture of Cities – the group’s definitive manifesto, and constitutes one of the most important documents of this history.

It opens as only Mumford could.

This is the Regional Plan number of Survey Graphic. It owes its underlying idea to a long-bearded Scot whose curiosity would not let him rest until from his Outlook Tower in Edinburgh he had seen clear through the pother of civilization to the land which sustained it and, in spite of human fumbling, nurtured it.

This number has been produced by a group of insurgents who, as architects and planners, builders and rebuilders, have tried to remold cities in conventional ways and, finding the task a labor of Sisyphus, have pinned their faith boldly to the new concept of the Region.⁷⁸

He had his audience in his hand: Geddes’s message would at last be understood. The opening article, The Fourth Migration, also came from Mumford. He wrote of two Americas: “the America of the settlement,” the coasts and the plains developed by 1850, and “the America of the migrations; the first migration that cleared the land west of the Alleghenies and opened the continent, the work of the land pioneer; the second migration, that worked over this fabric a new pattern of factories, railroads and dingy industrial towns, the bequest of the industrial pioneer; and finally … the America of the third migration, the flow of men and materials into our financial centers, the cities where buildings and profits leap upwards in riotous pyramids.”⁷⁹ But now, “we are again in another period of flow,” a fourth migration, based on “the technological revolution that has taken place during the last thirty years – a revolution that has made the existing layout of cities and the existing distribution of population out of square with our new opportunities.” The automobile and the trunk road had opened up markets and sources of supply: “The tendency of the automobile … is within limits to disperse population rather than to concentrate it; and any projects which may be put forward for concentrating people in Greater-City areas blindly run against the opportunities the automobile opens out”; the telephone, the radio, and the parcel post had the same effect; so did electric power.⁸⁰ The difference, as against the first three migrations, was that this time we had the capacity to guide the movement: “Fortunately for us, the fourth migration is only beginning: we may either permit it to crystallize in a formation quite as bad as that of our earlier migrations, or we may turn it to better account by leading it into new channels.”⁸¹

Clarence Stein, in the following article, takes up Mumford’s theme: unknown to almost everyone living and working in them, the new technologies were making New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, and the rest into “Dinosaur Cities,” which were breaking down under the weight of congestion, inefficiency, and escalating social cost, and finally complete physical collapse. The result was that these cities were fast becoming the least logical places to locate industry. In a remarkable prophecy – this, remember, was 1925 – Stein wrote,

When the local overhead cannot be shifted, and when smaller centers are, in spite of their poorer financial and business facilities, able to make their industrial advantages felt, the great city’s industries will have to migrate or declare bankruptcy. We are still in the day of postponement; but the day of reckoning will come; and it behooves us to anticipate it.⁸²

Robert Freestone has traced Stein’s regional city concept, “galaxies of modest-sized communities (not satellite towns) linked by modern means of communication,” back to Howard’s Social City via Geddes’s Cities in Evolution and the 1922 regional plan by Patrick Abercrombie and Henry Johnson for Doncaster and district.⁸³ The transatlantic connections were already busy at work.

In turn the group’s economist, Stuart Chase, developed the argument further: much of the American economy consisted in carrying “Coals to Newcastle,” moving goods across the continent that had no need to be moved at all. He asks,

Now what, specifically, is the matter? Where does the energy, particularly transport energy, go to waste, and how would planned communities reduce this waste so that the wayfaring man instead of falling behind, or making unheard-of efforts to keep where he is, can begin to make ground against the cost of living?

This marks an important shift in the argument: it is necessary not merely to go with the flow of technological change, as Mumford and Stein had argued, but to intervene in order to correct the grosser inefficiencies of the system. A “national plan” would involve “regions delimited on the basis of natural geographic entities”; “a maximum of foodstuffs, textiles and housing materials grown and manufactured in the home region”; “a minimum of interregional exchanges based only on such products as the home region cannot economically produce”; plus regional power plants, short hauls by truck, and “a decentralized distribution of population”:⁸⁴

The regional planning of communities would wipe out uneconomic national marketing, wipe out city congestion and terminal wastes, balance the power load, take the bulk of coal off the railroads, eliminate the duplication of milk and other deliveries, short circuit such uneconomic practices as hauling Pacific apples to New York customers by encouraging local orchards, develop local forest areas and check the haulage of western timber to eastern mills, locate cotton mills near cotton fields, shoe factories near hide producing areas, steel mills within striking distance of ore beds, food manufacturing plants in small giant power units, near farming belts. Gone the necessity for the skyscraper, the subway and the lonely country-side!⁸⁵

It was again prophetic: the argument for conservation, half a century before the Club of Rome. But it involved a plan, and a consequent interference with private business, that was frankly socialist; well did Chase say, a few years later, “We were mildly socialist, though not at all communist; liberal but willing to abandon large areas of the free market in favor of a planned economy. So we were not doctrinaire socialists. We were open-minded; kind of Fabian Socialists.”⁸⁶

That emerges clearly enough as the group moves into proposals. Mumford now returns specifically to that choice for the coming neotechnic era: society can have already-overgrown cities becoming bigger and bigger, “in Professor Geddes’ sardonic phrase, more and more of worse and worse.”⁸⁷ Or it can have regional planning.

Regional planning asks not how wide an area can be brought under the aegis of the metropolis, but how the population and civic facilities can be distributed so as to promote and stimulate a vivid, creative life throughout a whole region – a region being any geographic area that possesses a certain unity of climate, soil, vegetation, industry and culture. The regionalist attempts to plan such an area so that all its sites and resources, from forest to city, from highland to water level, may be soundly developed, and so that the population will be distributed so as to utilize, rather than to nullify or destroy, its natural advantages. It sees people, industry and the land as a single unit. Instead of trying, by one desperate dodge or another, to make life a little more tolerable in the congested centers, it attempts to determine what sort of equipment will be needed in the new centers.⁸⁸

Here it is, at last, what Geddes was struggling, through all those torrents of words, to say. But it is Geddesian, too, in its purpose: neotechnic technology can be the means not merely to greater mechanical efficiency, but also to

a fuller quality of life, at every point in the region. No form of industry and no type of city are tolerable that take the joy out of life. Communities in which courtship is furtive, in which babies are an unwelcome handicap, in which education, lacking the touch of nature and of real occupations, hardens into a blank routine, in which people achieve adventure only on wheels and happiness only by having their minds “taken off” their everyday lives – communities like these do not sufficiently justify our modern advances in science and invention.⁸⁹

This is where Howard comes in. For if regional planning provides the framework, the garden city provides the “civic objective”⁹⁰: “not as a temporary haven of refuge but as a permanent seat of life and culture, urban in its advantages, permanently rural in its situation.” But it meant “a change in aim as well as a change of place”: “our garden cities represent fuller development of the more humane arts and sciences – biology and medicine and psychiatry and education and architecture … all that is good in our modern mechanical developments, but also all that was left out in this one-sided existence, all the things that fifth century Athens or thirteenth century Florence, for all their physical crudity, possessed.”⁹¹

Kropotkin, again. But it is more than Kropotkin, more even than Geddes: there is another strain, which is specifically American.

Regional planning is the New Conservation – the conservation of human values hand in hand with natural resources … Permanent agriculture instead of land-skinning, permanent forestry instead of timber mining, permanent human communities, dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, instead of camps and squatter-settlements, and to stable buildings, instead of the scantling and falsework of our “go-ahead” communities – all this is embodied in regional planning.⁹²

That American theme is taken up by Benton MacKaye in his article The New Exploration. At one level it is pure Geddes: long transects through valley sections at different scales, from the Berkshires of upstate Massachusetts down to Boston and the ocean, down the little Somerset Valley along the Upper Deerfield River. And the plan for the Somerset Valley is intended to achieve just that ecological balance that Vidal and his followers found in those long-settled regions of France. The difference is that it is planned: it is based on “forest culture against forest mining,” for this alone “will keep Somerset Valley in a truly settled state.”⁹³ America, this relatively new-settled land, must learn the same time-scales, the same unconscious capacity for natural regeneration through good husbandry, that European peasants had passed on from generation to generation through centuries. This emphasis goes back to several different strands of nineteenth-century American thinking: to the concept of “structure, process and stage” of the early Harvard physical geographers, Nathaniel S. Shaler and William M. Davis; to the views of an even earlier geographer, George Perkins Marsh, on ecology and resource planning; to David Thoreau’s emphasis on the return to living amidst nature, and on natural balance.⁹⁴ And in addition, there was a newer skein of intellectual movements in the universities of the depressed rural South. There were the conservative Southern Agrarians at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, with their rejection of northern industrialism and their model of the rural medieval or early New England economy.⁹⁵ And, in sharp ideological contrast, there were the Southern Regionalists around Howard Odum, with their emphasis on decentralization of wealth and power, and on balanced regeneration of the region’s rich legacy of badly exploited natural resources, who were just then beginning to develop their thinking at the University of North Carolina, but whose major work would come in the 1930s.⁹⁶

These developing – though sometimes inconsistent – strains come together in MacKaye’s complete statement of his own brand of RPAA philosophy, “The New Exploration.”⁹⁷ Here, he developed the notion of two contrasting Americas: the indigenous, “a compound of the primeval and the colonial,” and the metropolitan, “a compound of the urban and the world-wide industrial.” The job of the regional planner was painstakingly to reconstruct and conserve the environments of that older indigenous America, the primeval wilderness, the early village communities of New England, and “the real city, the complement of the real village.”⁹⁸ But this would be difficult, for

The contest in the country will be between Metropolitan America and Indigenous America. These now stand vis-à-vis, not only psychologically, but also physically and geographically. The metropolitan world … is a mechanized molten framework of industry which flows … mightiest in the valleys and weakest on the mountain ridges. The strategy of the indigenous world is just the other way. It is still mighty within the primeval environment, as along the ridgeways of the Appalachian barrier … strong also in such regions as up country, where, although the farms and villages are depleted, the resources both physical and psychologic are still there, and are yet open to restoration and renewed development.⁹⁹

The problem, then, “concerns the remolding of the Metropolitan America in its contact with the Indigenous America.” For indigenous America was Mumford’s America of the settlement; Metropolitan America, his America of the migrations.¹⁰⁰ And Mumford’s fourth migration was a “backflow,” “a relocation of the populations and industries resulting from the second and third migrations,” which had become a flood from a broken reservoir.¹⁰¹ The question for regional planning then was “What manner of embankments … can we construct downstream to hold our deluge in check?”¹⁰²

MacKaye’s answer was a typical RPAA stratagem: it was to harness the new technology, but thereby to control its impact on the natural environment. The metropolitan environment would be extended by “motor ways”; between these, the hill areas would be kept as a primeval (or “near-primeval”) “wilderness area,” “serving the double purpose of a public forest and a public playground,” through which a system of open ways, “equipped for actual use as a zone of primeval sojourn and outdoor living,” would serve as “a series of breaks in the metropolitan deluge”: it would divide – or tend to divide – the flood waters of metropolitism into separate “basins” and thereby seek to avert their “complete and total confluence.”¹⁰³ Additionally, “as an adjunct of the motor way system” would run an intertown: “a series of open ways, or zones, straddling the motor road between successive towns and villages” and free of all inappropriate structures and land uses.¹⁰⁴ This was the very opposite of “Roadtown,” “the embodiment of the metropolitan flood.”¹⁰⁵ It would not be bereft of buildings – “Fear not, we have no notion of sounding a civic curfew” – but these buildings would not be “chucked together,” they would be “assembled” through good planning.¹⁰⁶ And, developing the idea two years later, he came up with the notion of the Townless Highway: a limited access road around Boston, with service stations at intervals, but with no other access. No wonder that, nearly 40 years after, Lewis Mumford credited MacKaye with the invention of the modern motorway; not quite true, as Chapter 9 will show, but fair testimony to the remarkable prescience of the RPAA founders.¹⁰⁷

How in practice this would look can be seen from the maps and charts prepared by Henry Wright for the New York State Commission of Housing and Regional Planning: “Epoch I” (1840–80), of “State-Wide Activity and Intercourse” is followed by “Epoch II” (1880–1920), in which population concentrates along main-line transportation. But in “Epoch III” we see “The possible state of the future in which each part serves its logical function in support of wholesome activity and good living.” A magnified close-up, “an ideal section,” proves to be Geddes’s familiar diagram applied to the land fronting on to Lake Erie: forests and storage reservoirs in the highlands, dairy farms in the bordering upland, two parallel motorway highways flanking the highway and railroad on the fertile plain, cities and towns neatly disposed like beads on a string.¹⁰⁸

Not much of this, in the America of the 1920s, was practical policy; even the constitutionality of zoning was in doubt until the historic Supreme Court decision of 1926.¹⁰⁹ True, as Governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt bought at least Stuart Chase’s prescription, for – by manipulating dairy health regulations – he protected New York dairy farmers against out-of-state competition.¹¹⁰ And, through the agency of Alexander Bing, the RPAA did manage to float the two experimental communities at Sunnyside Gardens in New York City and at Radburn in New Jersey (Chapter 4). But mostly, the RPAA was in the business of marketing long-term dreams.

The RPAA versus the Regional Plan of New York

In their one major clash over policy, they found an unlikely adversary. Thomas Adams had been one of the founding fathers of British town planning: first general manager of Letchworth Garden City, first planning inspector, founder-member and first president (though barely qualified)¹¹¹ of the Town Planning Institute.¹¹² And, arrived in North America, fully four years before the foundation of the RPAA he had emphasized “the importance of one of the most modern aspects of town planning, namely, the direction and control of the growth taking place within the rural and semi-rural districts where the new industries are being established,” arguing that “no city planning scheme can be satisfactory which is not prepared with due regard to the regional development surrounding the city.”¹¹³ So when Charles Dyer Norton – former Chairman of the Commercial Club of Chicago and thus commissioner of the Burnham plan, now treasurer of the Russell Sage Foundation – approached him to direct an ambitious survey and plan for the whole New York region, it was a challenge he could hardly refuse. Confirmed after Norton’s death by his successor Frederic Delano, he was appointed Director of Plans and Surveys in July 1923.¹¹⁴

This, as Robert Fishman has pointed out, was the culmination of a profound shift in American planning: from the City Beautiful to the City Functional, which emphasized business-like, technocratic, and survey-based approaches. Starting as early as 1907 in New York, St Louis, Grand Rapids, and Dubuque, it blossomed in the 1920s: John Nolen could report in 1928 that 200 cities with a total population of 26.5 million had been “broadly replanned.” These replannings – produced for city-planning commissions, predominantly advisory, sitting outside urban government proper and dominated by unpaid, middle-class, “public spirited” citizens and business leaders – were the work of a small and select band of private practitioners: Harland Bartholomew, George Ford, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr, and John Nolen. There was another significant trend here, presaged as early as 1909 in the Burnham Plan for Chicago: a shift in some places – Allegheny County (the Pittsburgh area), Los Angeles, Hamilton County (Greater Cincinnati) – from a focus on the central city to a wider metropolitan region.¹¹⁵

Always a team player, Adams recommended that the New York Plan be drawn up by a group including an engineer, an architect, a lawyer, and a regional planner who would act as coordinator. There was, however, another respect in which he was the perfect candidate, for this was to be a businessmen’s plan, the core movers of which were ex-Chicago business leaders, that would cost them a total of more than $1 million over a decade,¹¹⁶ and Adams, in his fifties, “his philosophical mould long set,” was a businessman’s planner. He believed that the plan must represent the art of the possible: “the Regional Plan was to be no revolutionary prescription but rather the imposition of mild public controls on a free development pattern so as to improve metropolitan efficiency and curb the market’s worst abuses while adding non-controversial public benefits like modern motor roads, parks and beaches.”¹¹⁷ This, needless to say, was a recipe for headlong conflict with the idealists of the infant RPAA.

It was not the geographical scope of the plan that was wrong. For Norton had called for a wide compass: “From the City Hall a circle must be swung which will include the Atlantic Highlands and Princeton; the lovely Jersey hills back of Morristown and Tuxedo; the incomparable Hudson so far as Newburg; the Westchester lakes and ridges, as far as Bridgeport and beyond, and all on Long Island.”¹¹⁸ The resulting area – over 5,000 square miles, with nearly nine million people – was a far bigger canvas than any plan before had covered.¹¹⁹ Nor was it the survey methodology: Adams assembled an unrivalled team, whose detailed volumes constitute some of the uncontested classics of planning literature, with conclusions that echo those of Mumford, Chase, and Stein. Here is Robert Murray Haig on the urban economy,¹²⁰ showing that many activities were already moving out because they had less need of a central location, and arguing for zoning controls to take account of negative externalities: “Zoning finds its economic justification in that it is a useful device for ensuring an approximately just distribution of costs, of forcing each individual to bear his own expenses.”¹²¹ Here is the volume on population and land values, arguing that the problem was the excessive concentration of transportation facilities which in turn encouraged excessive concentration of economic activities, hence further congestion, hence economic waste.¹²² Here is the volume on zoning and land use, arguing that high land values in New York are the direct result of the permitted height and bulk.¹²³ And here is Perry’s volume on neighborhood units, with its recognition that the automobile was naturally creating the cellular city.¹²⁴

It was none of this: it was the philosophy, which Adams shared with his committee. It was the belief that in practice the form of the region was fixed and that only incremental, marginal change was possible. It expressed itself in a hundred ways: in the acceptance of the existing highway plan, with merely “by-passes or belt lines … to permit free circulation between the major subdivisions of the Region”; in the costly investment in yet more radial commuter rail links into Manhattan;¹²⁵ in the advocacy – though his name was nowhere mentioned – of the Corbusian principle of widely spaced skyscrapers in a park;¹²⁶ above all, in the suggestion that “what is needed in connection with the problems of concentrated industrial and business growth in a region is not decentralization but a reorientation of centralization on the basis of making all its centers and sub-centers healthy, efficient and free from congestion”;¹²⁷ and the resulting suggestion that “recentralization” of business and industry into sub-centers within the region could relieve congestion;¹²⁸ in the associated rejection of the garden city as a general solution, “except for the very small part of industry and population that could be made to move to new centers”;¹²⁹ in the rejection of any wider unit of government to plan for the entire region.¹³⁰ Above all, it was in the passive assumption that the region would continue to grow, from 14.5 million people to perhaps 21 million by 1965, coupled with the lack of any firm proposals as to where the extra people were to go¹³¹ the basic aim was “to decentralize and decongest New York enough for it to continue functioning in traditional ways.”¹³²

Predictably, it provoked a bitter response. In a celebrated review, Mumford condemned the plan in almost every last particular. Its spatial frame, wide as it might seem, was too narrow; it accepted growth as inevitable, ignoring the potential of planning to influence it; it failed to consider alternatives; it continued to allow overbuilding of central areas; it condemned the last remaining piece of open space near to Manhattan, the Hackensack Meadows of New Jersey, to be built over; it dismissed garden cities as utopian; it condoned the filling-in of suburban areas; through its rejection of the principle of public housing, it condemned the poor to live in poor housing; it favored yet more subsidy for the commuter lines into Manhattan, thus helping create more of the very congestion it condemned; its highway and rapid-transit proposals were an alternative to a community-building project, not a means toward it. Its central fault was that it appeared to support everything: concentration and dispersal, planning control versus speculation, subsidization versus the market. But, despite appearances to the contrary, it really meant a drift to yet more centralization.¹³³ Mumford concluded,

In sum: the “Plan for New York and its Environs” is a badly conceived pudding into which a great many ingredients, some sound, more dubious, have been poured and mixed: the cooks tried to satisfy every appetite and taste, and the guiding thought in selecting the pudding-dish was that it should “sell” one pudding to the diners, specially to those who paid the cooks. The mixture as a whole is indigestible and tasteless: but here and there is a raisin or a large piece of citron that can be extracted and eaten with relish. In the long run, let us hope, this is how the pudding will be remembered.¹³⁴

Adams, clearly irritated, decided to sting Mumford by calling Geddes in aid:

This is the main point on which Mr Mumford and I, as well as Mr Mumford and Geddes, differ – that is whether we stand still and talk ideals or move forward and get as much realization of our ideals as possible in a necessarily imperfect society, capable only of imperfect solutions to its problems.¹³⁵

That was the essence of a profound philosophical gap that would never be bridged. Mumford, he suggested, was guilty of being “prepared to let the wish become father to the thought. How happy I would be if I could do the same!”¹³⁶

That was the end of this extraordinary exchange: “Adams and Mumford, committed reformers both, had sailed past each other like ships in the night.”¹³⁷ The irony was that the car would before long create a sprawling city, equally unacceptable to either party.¹³⁸

There were rich paradoxes here. Adams, too, continued to believe that New York was too big and that “from an economic, and perhaps from a health standpoint we should get as many people and industries out of their central areas and into garden cities as is possible.”¹³⁹ But the very success of garden cities, he argued, was lessening the need for them as a solution: the solution “is not to be found in an indiscriminate process of decentralization, but both in well-planned decentralization in Garden Cities and equally well-planned diffusion in urban regions.”¹⁴⁰ And Mumford’s alternative prescription was not as straightforward as it might seem. He wrote of

the conditions that are precedent to finding a solution. These are: (1) lessen the pressure of congestion in Manhattan by recentralizing the business areas of the metropolis; (2) lay down new cities and direct the exodus to these new cities outside the New York region: this means a widespread system of state aid for city building and housing, such as that promoted in England, Germany and Russia; (3) rebuild the blighted areas and take care of part of the increase of population, while it continues, by a process of intensive internal colonization.¹⁴¹

This is not the Mumford most of his readers recognize: he argues against overspill of population from blighted areas, and for razing and rebuilding them as neighborhood communities, more intensively but with an increase of usable open space. Here, he seems almost Corbusian in his enthusiasm for the bulldozer: he estimates that there may be room for five million more people in these blighted areas, in which he includes recently developed areas like Queens, which must be totally rebuilt.¹⁴² For “the building of houses fit for the nurture of human beings is dependent upon making production and distribution directly subservient to biotechnic standards of consumption, available for the whole community.”¹⁴³ Machines for living in, indeed. Nor was this an isolated aberration. In 1934, the year the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) was formed, the Housing Study Guild – Mumford, Wright, Mayer, and Carol Aronovici – made a study which concluded that high land values made high-rise the most economic form of building for New York. (And reviewing the NYCHA’s first project after the 1937 Federal Housing Act, the Red Hook Houses in Brooklyn, with its bleak low-cost 25-story blocks, Mumford criticized its repetitive quality but found it “miles above the product of any commercial apartment builder.”)¹⁴⁴

In any event, Adams and Mumford parted ways; Adams tried to set up a continuing dialogue, but Mumford – though remaining personally amiable – became ever more savage in his criticism.¹⁴⁵ The New York plan went ahead, through the medium of a Regional Plan Association under business elite leadership, and Planning Commissions for each area; it was particularly successful in its highway, bridge, and tunnel proposals, mainly because the master-builder Robert Moses was in charge.¹⁴⁶ Meanwhile, Mumford’s alternative prescription – state-aided new cities and the extensive rebuilding of blighted areas – remained on paper.¹⁴⁷

New Deal Planning

This might seem a strange outcome; for in 1933 Franklin Delano Roosevelt was inaugurated as President and the New Deal began. And Roosevelt was heavily committed in principle to a program along pure RPAA lines. In 1931, he had floated the idea of a mass return to the land, by providing a house and a few acres and money and tools; he was also borrowing RPAA ideas when he argued that electric power and the truck were aiding decentralization of industry to small communities and rural areas, while electricity, radio, cinema, and parcel post were bringing an urban quality of life to the countryside; he specifically proposed a State Commission on Rural Homes, to establish a plan based on “cooperative planning for the common good.”¹⁴⁸ A few months later, he had called for “a definite plan by which industry itself will seek to move certain firms … out of the congested centers where unemployment is greatest into the smaller communities, closer to the primary food supply.”¹⁴⁹ And in 1932, just before election, he asked “if out of this regional planning we are not going to be in a position to take the bull by the horns in the immediate future and adopt some kind of experimental work based on a distribution of population.”¹⁵⁰ His uncle Frederic Delano had guided the New York Regional Plan, and had given him, he said in 1931, an abiding interest in the question; the day might not be far distant, he said, when planning would become part of the national policy of the country.¹⁵¹

He was as good as his word: following Rexford Tugwell, who in turn was advised by Stuart Chase, he pushed a Public Works Bill through Congress in June 1933, providing $25 million to resettle people on the land, thus giving people the chance “to secure through the good earth the permanent jobs they have lost in the overcrowded, industrial cities and towns”¹⁵² but the people would not go.¹⁵³ The response was the green-belt towns program of the Resettlement Administration, in 1935, already described in Chapter 4: a glorious failure, with hardly anything to show on the ground.

The RPAA were deeply disillusioned; always a loose and informal group, perhaps too loose ever to be effective, they went into suspension in 1933.¹⁵⁴ They had reasons for disillusionment. Despite the New Deal, despite the hopes they still had of Roosevelt, they may already have felt that the political inertia was just too strong. Or perhaps they were simply exhausted, not least by the vehemence of the great debate on the Adams plan. Mumford, bruised by a relationship with Catherine Bauer that had turned steamily unplatonic and then stormy (partly, at least, when she pipped him for an important magazine prize),¹⁵⁵ retreated in stages with his long-suffering Sophie to Amenia in rural New York, to write his masterpieces Technics and Civilization (1934) and The Culture of Cities (1938). In the latter book, which brought him great fame, he broadened and deepened his attack on the “Insensate Metropolis,” the “Megalopolis” that became almost the quintessence of evil: “Concentrated upon war, the metropolitan regime opposes these domestic and civic functions: it subordinates life to organized destruction, and it must therefore regiment, limit, and constrict every exhibition of real life and culture.”¹⁵⁶ He contrasted this with “the organic order” based on “the primacy of life, and of autonomous but perpetually inter-related organisms as vehicles of life” in which “to maintain its life-shape the organism must constantly alter it and renew itself by entering into active relationships with the rest of the environment.”¹⁵⁷ But to achieve that would demand that the neotechnic era be succeeded by a new eotechnic order, and that – though he never brings himself to use the word – would require the replacement of American capitalism by a socialist, or at least a social democratic order:

The increase of collectivism, the rising of municipal and governmental housing, the expression of co-operative consumers’ and producers’ associations, the destruction of slums and the building of superior types of community for the workers – all these are signs of the new biotechnic orientation.¹⁵⁸

Indeed, when he spoke in 1932 to students at Barnard College, he seemed to be thinking of a general communist-style upheaval; he had no faith in FDR, regarding him as “a sort of political Mary Baker Eddy,” a political faith healer who would never cure a disease because he did not believe in radical operations.¹⁵⁹ But, as his biographer Donald Miller has stressed, his great problem was that he always believed in the primacy of mind over matter; apolitical in early life, he lacked an effective concept of political action. “Mumford’s so-called communism was a creature of his own creation”¹⁶⁰ throughout his life, “he maintained an almost Erasmian aloofness from all organized political movements.”¹⁶¹ That, Donald Miller convincingly demonstrates, finally makes The Culture of Cities a magnificent failure; as Bauer said of its successor, The Condition of Man (1944), he was always seeking a messiah, to begin some spiritual transformation. The comment was so on-target that it stung Mumford to vehement response. Significantly, after laboring for many years to rewrite The Culture of Cities, he published it in 1961 as The City in History, missing out the prescriptive part. And, in the long correspondence with Frederic Osborn, the contrast is palpable: Osborn chides Mumford for not founding an American Town and Country Planning Association, Mumford pleads that he has to earn his living as a journalist.¹⁶²

Stein, the Association’s true mover-shaker, was consultant to Tugwell’s Resettlement Administration and its green-belt new towns program, but soon became disillusioned when Roosevelt failed to overcome the rooted opposition of Congress to the program. Stein’s letters, magnificently published,¹⁶³ reveal both his admiration for Roosevelt’s intellect and charisma (and, it emerges, his habit of hardly ever allowing anyone a word in edgeways), but also his deep suspicion of Roosevelt’s capacity to agree with everyone he ever spoke to. Stein’s perception of his failure had tragic consequences: in the mid-1930s, he fell victim to a manic-depressive illness that incapacitated him increasingly over the decade that followed. It stemmed not merely from the failure of his campaigns and his difficulty in finding professional commissions, but also from the extraordinary strain of his marriage to the stage and movie actress Aline MacMahon, whom he married in 1928 but who spent much of her time on the other side of the continent in Hollywood. He emerged from this mid-life crisis as an international guru of the planning movement, in constant contact not merely with old fellow-warriors like Benton MacKaye and Lewis Mumford, but with the increasing circle of international correspondents like F. J. Osborn and Göran Sidenbladh, and Gordon Stephenson, whom he assisted on the design of the pioneer exercise in pedestrianized town-center design at Stevenage in 1950; he survived to the age of 94.¹⁶⁴

But Stein’s letters also confirm what students of the RPAA have long surmised: that they were effectively closet socialists, who admired the Russian model (Stein visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s), but who were ambivalent and confused about introducing it to the United States. Of course, at the time of the Great Depression the great majority of liberal thinkers in every western democracy had effectively embraced socialist planning: Stein and Mumford and their colleagues were hardly unique. What was unique was their dilemma. They looked to FDR to make the transition, ignoring the huge inbuilt forces of conservatism that were and are inherent in the American federal system. The tragedy of this small and select band of brilliant individuals was simply that they lived in the wrong country at the wrong time.

This was clear enough in Mumford’s exchange with Adams, when he affirmed that no effective plan could be produced under the existing order.

It may be more effective, as well as more clear-sighted and honest, to say that no comprehensive planning for the improvement of living conditions can be done as long as property values and private enterprise are looked upon as sacred, than it is to draw pictures of parks that may never be built, playgrounds that may never be opened to children, and garden cities that will never be financed.¹⁶⁵

Because the Regional Plan avoided any proposal for effective public control of land or property values, buildings, or human institutions, it could effect no substantial change; and so it must be condemned.¹⁶⁶ It was vital not to accept the existence of the metropolis, as Adams had done, but to fight against it; “for to carry it further is only to broaden its capacities for mischief.”¹⁶⁷

Bauer, the sole woman in the group, was the great exception, the truly effective operator; she used her prize to make a second professional trip to Europe, where she visited top German planners like May and Wagner,¹⁶⁸ and came back to write a book on modern housing, which made a big stir. Her thesis was that the European programs had achieved several breakthroughs: modern housing as for use rather than profit, built as part of comprehensively planned neighborhoods with social facilities, and built in a modernist style. Whether the residents appreciated this last feature was not made clear.¹⁶⁹

She was now drawn into the New Deal’s housing effort. With Mumford’s encouragement, she took a position in Philadelphia as principal adviser and executive secretary of the Labor Housing Conference, where she became involved in an affair with Oskar Stonorov, the chief designer; she threw herself into lobbying and into writing her book, and now returned to New York only infrequently.¹⁷⁰ She now began to attack Mumford and the RPAA, for their ineffectuality: “There isn’t a society in which the isolated intellectual, an intellectual, as an individual writing and talking to the general public, can expect to provide direct leadership, straight-line influence on policy and action.”¹⁷¹ In 1934 they quarreled and parted as lovers, just before the appearance of Technics and Civilization; she had not the time to read even part of it.¹⁷²

Established in Philadelphia, over three long years of lobbying, after many setbacks, she proved brilliantly effective in securing the 1937 Federal housing legislation.¹⁷³ She alone managed both to recognize the political forces, and to work around them; but, as one of America’s greatest academic planners said of her shortly before his death, she could make every man in the room fall in love with her and do exactly what she wanted.¹⁷⁴ Charles Abrams, another great figure in the American housing movement, coined a limerick:

Beyond that, New Deal policy on regional planning mainly meant a prodigious multiplication of paper. The National Resources Planning Board and its variously named predecessor organizations, which survived exactly a decade (1933–43), have been described as “the most nearly comprehensive national planning organization this country has ever known”¹⁷⁶ when first created in 1933 as the National Planning Board, they numbered three of the most distinguished names on the roll of American planning, Frederick Delano, Charles E. Merriam, and Wesley C. Mitchell; in all they produced some 370 printed and major mimeographed reports, totaling 43,000 pages.¹⁷⁷ Yet for all that, it is hard work to find anything out there on the ground. The 1935 report of the National Resources Committee (as it was then known), Regional Factors in National Planning, recommended regrouping the field districts of the various federal agencies in a limited number – say 10 or 12 – of major regional centers; the resulting regional planning commissions would have no regional executive, so that they would require “a conduit running to an established executive,” a National Planning Agency.¹⁷⁸ But there is no record of the outcome. And their 1937 report, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, though it drew attention to the problems of blight, speculation, social disruption, crime, and urban public finance that were even then wracking American cities, failed in its recommendations to take explicit note of the regional dimensions; on the critical question of centralization versus decentralization it sat firmly on the fence, stating that “the most effective environment for the urban dweller and for the effective use of human and material resources is more likely to be found between these two extremes”; the aim, it concluded vaguely enough, was “to loosen up the central areas of congestion to create a more decentralized urban pattern,” a statement to which both Adams and Mumford would doubtless have acceded.¹⁷⁹ Both FDR and Congress proved massively uninterested, and the report fell into a political limbo.¹⁸⁰

The TVA

To the mountain of paper, of course, there was one shining counterweight on the ground: the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), undeniably the greatest achievement of New Deal planning, and – at least in legend – the realization of the most radical ideas of both the RPAA and the Southern Regionalists. Addressing the last RPAA conference in 1932, Roosevelt described the TVA idea as an example of regional planning; but this, like so much of his language, was “a phrase so loose and imprecise that it could fit almost any program, and yet so elusive that it involved few specific commitments.”¹⁸¹ In fact, it brought together several strands: to improve navigation at Muscle Shoals in Alabama (a pet Corps of Engineers project since the previous century), develop power there, provide an armaments production facility there, and control floods; Roosevelt’s achievement was to pull all this together with notions of rural planning and regional development, and to drop arms production.¹⁸² Yet all these concerns proved tangential in the actual negotiations that led to passage of the Act; and the directors in consequence had little notion of what the planning sections mandated or allowed.¹⁸³ FDR certainly did not offer them any guidance, perhaps because he did not know either.¹⁸⁴

Geography ensured also that the TVA was bound to make an odd example of regional river-basis planning. The river was 650 miles long, its basin the size of Britain, the region diverse in climate, resources, racial composition, and cultural patterns.¹⁸⁵ What it had in common was poverty: the eastern Appalachian half was possibly the poorest part of the poorest region in the United States, with thousands of families subsisting on cash incomes of less than $100 a year.¹⁸⁶ They were to be lifted out of their condition by a set of multipurpose dams – themselves a challenge to the conventional engineering wisdom – around which a series of programs would develop the region’s natural resources. At least, that was the theory implicit in the passage of the Act and in the early policy of the TVA Board.¹⁸⁷

Soon, however, it blew apart. To the TVA Board, Roosevelt appointed three members who would make a totally, explosively incompatible mixture. In the chairman’s seat he put A. E. Morgan, President of Antioch College: a utopian, ascetic, almost mystical visionary, who – though neither a socialist nor a Christian – had much in common with the early utopian communitarians.¹⁸⁸ He saw the job as his life’s opportunity to realize his personal vision of a new physical and cultural environment: a vision he believed FDR to share.¹⁸⁹ As second member, and as the expert on public power development, he put David Lilienthal: an immensely ambitious, driving young man with the reputation of stealing any show he joined.¹⁹⁰ And as third he chose Harcourt A. Morgan, no relation of the chairman: President of the University of Tennessee, representative of the conservative agrarian interests at Vanderbilt, obsessed with the idea of rural extension services and in particular with a scheme for a phosphate fertilizer program, he readily made common cause with Lilienthal. Within five months they were condemning the “variety” – later to become “vagaries” – in the chairman’s grand design.¹⁹¹ Within two years, the chairman was openly criticizing his colleagues in the public prints: a major tactical error, as it proved.¹⁹²

Soon, Lilienthal and Harcourt A. Morgan outvoted the chair and divided responsibilities: Lilienthal was given power development, H. A. Morgan agricultural extension work. From now on, these were to be the TVA’s work: A. E. Morgan’s vision of a regional planning authority – for many, the true TVA mission – was simply buried.¹⁹³ The agriculturalists were sworn enemies of the Land Planning Division, whom they pejoratively called “the geographers”; they fought over powers to acquire public lands around reservoirs, which were progressively whittled down to the absolute minimum.¹⁹⁴ Their opponents described the agriculturalists as “fanatical,” identifying less with the Authority than with local interests.¹⁹⁵ Finally, after two years of agonizing indecision – during which both A. E. Morgan and Lilienthal suffered nervous breakdowns – in 1938, FDR dismissed A. E. Morgan for “insubordination and contumacy”; “contumacy” was a word he was rumored to have found in a dictionary and used it in the hope no one would look it up; Morgan was later exonerated by a Congressional Committee.¹⁹⁶ Thus, despite Lilienthal’s insistence in the much-read popular official account that policies were based on “principles of unity,”¹⁹⁷ they had evidently long since ceased to be based on anything but violent dissension.

That was the effective end of the TVA as a regional planning agency. One victim of these bitter battles was Benton MacKaye. He had written about Appalachian regional development as early as 1921–4, before his work on the New York Plan, apparently coining the term “New Deal”; his vision for Appalachia was based on hydro-electric power as the source of a new industrial revolution, as the basis for a 2,000-mile linear city, of which his famous wilderness trail would be but a small feature. Spelling out his ideas for the Tennessee Valley in an article of 1932, he was hired together with the architect-planner Tracy Augur, another RPAA supporter, to work in Earle Draper’s Department of Regional Studies.¹⁹⁸ Hired to produce a comprehensive regional plan, what he called “The American Magna Carta of regional planning,”¹⁹⁹ he worked for the TVA for just two years between spring 1934 and summer 1936. Very soon, he became the “resident philosopher in a world occupied largely by builders and bureaucrats,” and never moved beyond general principles²⁰⁰ soon sidelined, he was finished when Morgan went.²⁰¹ Thus, “Except for initiatives at Norris Reservoir, the TVA’s regional planning ideas remained more rhetoric than reality”;²⁰² MacKaye left when it became clear that his ideas could not be turned into a practical blueprint, though he did inspire a younger generation of TVA planners to carry the torch.²⁰³

Yet to the outside world at the time, the TVA was a triumphant example of “grassroots democracy.” Lilienthal’s argument was that it was “a policy, fixed by law, that the federal regional agency work co-operatively with and through local and state agencies.”²⁰⁴ The reality seems to have been that this was a “protective ideology,” allowing the TVA to appear as the champion of local institutions and interests; in order to justify its autonomy, and head off possible opposition from powerful local groups and individuals, it delegated the agricultural program to an organized constituency, the land-grant colleges, thus compromising much of its role as a conservation agency. (Selznick’s study of the TVA acidly commented that “The way to get democratic administration is to begin by organizing a central government strong enough to eliminate those conditions which make much of our life grossly undemocratic.”²⁰⁵)

In one way, however, the TVA went against the ideology of the rural fundamentalists at Vanderbilt University. They, recall, had shared with RPAA the notion that movement from the land should be slowed and even reversed; and FDR had appeared to side with them. Yet in practice, under the Lilienthal–H. A. Morgan alliance, the TVA became more and more a power-generating authority, devoted to creation of a big industrial-urban base. As Tugwell put it, “From 1936 on the TVA should have been called the Tennessee Valley Power Production and Flood Control Corporation.”²⁰⁶ By 1944, it was already the second largest producer of power in the United States, generating half as much as the entire national production of 1941.²⁰⁷ The reason was ironic: it was the huge increase in power demand arising from the establishment of the Atomic Energy Authority’s plutonium production plant at Oak Ridge, as basis for production of the Atomic Bomb.²⁰⁸ The one element that Roosevelt had removed from the TVA prescription, munitions production, was now driving the economic development of the Valley.

The dams and the reservoirs must have looked good to the pilgrim tourist, rather like all those dams on the Volga and the Dnieper, over which left-wing visitors enthused at the end of the 1930s. But of regional planning – especially that radical variant espoused by the RPAA – there was an imperceptible residue: community development, health, and educational services received a minuscule sliver of the total budget;²⁰⁹ the new town of Norris next to the great Tennessee dam, though planned by an RPAA member (Tracy Augur) and extolled by Benton MacKaye as a first step in regional community development, was most accurately described by the TVA’s Planning Director as a “rural village.”²¹⁰ A. E. Morgan’s idealistic hopes for Norris – a town where rich and poor would live together, and where the inhabitants would combine agriculture and craft industries – were never fulfilled. Built in a hurry, minimally financed, the tiny town – a mere 1,500 people – is almost buried in dense woods; so informal is its layout that its origins might never be guessed.²¹¹ Designed for 1,000 houses on 4,500 acres, it ended up with only 294 houses, at 2.7 families per acre, tucked away in the woods.²¹² This was deliberate. The form was to be anti-urban, “loose, bucolic, pastoral, running free.”²¹³ It was “a large model implemented in a small way”:²¹⁴ an interesting footnote to garden-city history, in terms of the RPAA’s grand vision it represents a ridiculous mouse. The fact was that America – even New Deal America – was not politically ready for that vision.²¹⁵ Morgan’s two partners told Morgan there would be no more Norrises; they sensed that Congress was implacably opposed to public housing.²¹⁶ Catherine Bauer’s lobbying would change that, not long after, but in a very different geographical context.

There was another more sinister aspect, glossed over in Creese’s description of idyllic parks where “people, particularly in the South, tended to bridge over social and economic difficulties with great politeness and courtesy,” helping to stave off armed insurrection. In reality, as illuminated by Nancy L. Grant, in 1938 and again in 1940 the park management reiterated that there were no plans to provide Negro facilities at Norris. Among the reasons given was another plan to build Booker T. Washington Park in Chattanooga, over 100 miles away, where surveys had shown over 400,000 black people living within 200 miles of the site. The park at Chattanooga was built, with facilities for swimming, boating, picnicking, and two unusual features: a camping ground and vacation camps. “These last two features,” Grant notes, “were provided because no private tourist areas admitted blacks.” She finds that there were complaints about the park’s proximity to an industrial site and about the swimming pool (for 400,000 people) that remained closed for lack of pumping equipment. (Donald Krueckeberg drily comments that the TVA is primarily a hydro-power authority; moving water is what they do!) And, “in addition, there were no lavatories in the park.”²¹⁷ Krueckeberg comments that this “certainly helps explain why there were no armed insurrections. There were more pressing matters, little difficulties that evidently did not appear in Creese’s glossy pictures.”²¹⁸

The Vision Realized: London

Thus, by one of the many ironies in this history, the real impact of Mumford and Stein and Chase and MacKaye was not to be on their own unsympathetic country, but on Europe’s capitals. And there London was to provide the exemplar. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, British and American planners continued a vigorous two-way transatlantic traffic. Thomas Adams crossed the ocean almost every year, sometimes three or four times a year, between 1911 and 1938; Stein and Wright met Howard and Unwin in England in 1923; Geddes met the RPAA in 1923, Unwin and Howard in 1925.²¹⁹ So, throughout these doldrum years, a small group of planners was already applying American ideas in a variety of British contexts.

One of the most successful, ironically, was the RPAA’s bête noir. During his years on the New York Regional Plan, Thomas Adams continued as a partner in the planning practice of Adams, Thompson, and Fry, who between 1924 and 1932 produced eight out of twelve exercises in the emerging field of advisory regional plans for the area around London. To these plans Adams brought many American concepts: parkways in West Middlesex and the Mole Valley, green girdles and green wedges to limit urban sprawl.²²⁰ But the philosophy, as in New York, was planning as the art of the possible: planning should remain an advisory function, it should not try to achieve more than marginal changes, and it must work within the limits of existing powers.

The remaining four plans carry an equally significant name: they come from the partnership of Davidge, Abercrombie, and Archibald. Leslie Patrick Abercrombie (1879–1957), ninth child of a Manchester businessman, oddly owed his career to gutter journalism; starting his career as an architect, he converted to town planning through a research fellowship established at the University of Liverpool by the soap magnate William Hesketh Lever, founder of Port Sunlight, with the proceeds of a successful libel action against a newspaper. He proved so apt that in 1914, when the first Professor of Civic Design at Liverpool, Stanley Adshead, moved to a new chair in London, Abercrombie was his logical successor.²²¹ Through his editorship of the Town Planning Review, he early acquired unrivalled knowledge of what was happening in the world of planning. Even before World War One he won a prize for a town plan for Dublin, which, setting the city in its regional context, demonstrated his debt to Geddes (who happened to be on the jury).²²² But it also interestingly demonstrated two contrasted aspects of his personality and approach, which would persist. The city center would be Haussmannized, with boulevards, street widenings, a Dublin “Place de la Concorde” and sites for new public building – even a bourse. But outside the center, to accommodate 60,000 people to be “thinned out” from the city-center slums, Abercrombie and his Liverpool colleagues developed suburban housing layout plans reflecting the new ideas being developed across the Irish Sea in response to the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act of England and Wales. In parallel, the plan provided for a hierarchy of open spaces, metropolitan bus and underground transport systems, the suburbanization of industry, and even extensive infilling of Dublin Bay to accommodate housing, open space, and industry.²²³

After it, his growing reputation led him to a pioneer exercise in regional planning for the Doncaster area, in 1920–2, and thus in 1925 to a plan for East Kent: a new coalfield, set in the garden of England, in which Abercrombie boldly set out to demonstrate a Geddesian thesis that in the neotechnic age, even palaeotechnic industry could be absorbed into the landscape. He proposed eight small new towns, each in a fold in the rolling chalk landscape, set within a continuous green belt;²²⁴ a prophetic echo, down to the precise number, of his strategy 18 years later for Greater London. That report, widely reviewed though in practical terms a failure, set him on a career in regional planning that would lead him on to the heights of the Greater London Plan.

But Abercrombie owed another important debt, to a report that has almost been forgotten but that he himself acknowledged. The London Society, founded in 1912, was an extraordinary assemblage of the Great and the Good. Its chair was Sir Aston Webb, architect of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Admiralty Arch, and the facade of Buckingham Palace. Its Council and Executive Committee members included Sir Reginald Blomfield, President of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Raymond Unwin, Stanley Adshead, and a host of architects including T. H. Mawson and E. L. Lutyens; its Vice-Presidents included Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, John Burns, then President of the Local Government Board, Lord Northcliffe, the owner of The Times, and the retail tycoon Gordon Selfridge.²²⁵ Fundamentally, despite a mission to evangelize ordinary Londoners, the Society was a middle-class group of male professionals; The Builder in March 1914 commented, “Architects are the backbone of the London Society.”

Significantly, it was on October 1, 1914, that a special meeting was called to discuss an opportunity for providing employment for architects and planners during war time: the creation of a Development Plan for London, “special consideration being given to the new arterial roads and the provision of open spaces.” Those attending were architects: Sir Aston Webb, Carmichael Thomas, Raymond Unwin, H. V. Lanchester, and Professor Adshead. A Plan Committee was formed (other members included Arthur Crow, W. R. Davidge, H. J. Leaning, and D. B. Niven), and by 1916 they had virtually finished; they called it their “War Work.”²²⁶ By 1920 it was published and exhibited “at various Town Planning exhibitions around the country”; in 1929 it was the subject of an exhibition at the London Museum. Although it never became the “official” plan for London, in December 1925, Abercrombie presided over a meeting of the Society in which he wholeheartedly supported the work. When Abercrombie finally produced his own plan for the London County Council (LCC) almost 20 years later, he acknowledged his debt to contributions made by “the great voluntary societies either taking in the whole scope of the physical environment or devoted to some special aspect of it,” saying,

There is finally the London Society, pioneer of Metropolitan Planning; to its Vice-Chairman, Mr. W. R. Davidge, PPTPI, we owe a debt for help and guidance given, out of his inexhaustible knowledge, towards the solution of London’s problems, so many of which he himself is actively engaged in resolving.²²⁷

The failure in implementation, though, was indicative: here as elsewhere, regional plans were advisory; they depended on cooperation among many different small district planning authorities, often not forthcoming. Particularly this applied to limiting suburban sprawl, which just then (Chapter 3) was becoming a very vexed question in southern England. Abercrombie in East Kent thought that even with existing powers, local authorities could buy up the land to build new towns; the North Middlesex Joint Committee also advocated satellite towns.²²⁸ But nothing was done in either place. Otherwise, both Adams’s and Abercrombie’s plans sought to achieve control by rural – that is, very-low-density – zoning; on the efficacy of that, opinions differed. Even so, according to one calculation the 12 plans together set aside enough land to house 16 million people at the then prevailing densities.²²⁹

The fact was that these plans, impressive as they might look on paper, were little more than ameliorative exercises. Indeed, they were probably less effective than Adams’s New York plan for the simple reason that in England organized business had less clout. The more radical concept of regional planning, represented by the RPAA, could come only if by legislation the British government gave comprehensive powers to plan a whole region, including the ability to stop urban sprawl; and of this, as seen in Chapter 3, there was no trace down to 1939. This is well illustrated by the sad story of Raymond Unwin’s Committee.

In 1927, Neville Chamberlain used his position as Minister of Health to give a boost to regional planning by the creation of a Greater London Regional Planning Committee, covering some 1,800 square miles within a 25-mile radius of central London, and with 45 members from local authorities; in 1929, on retirement from the Ministry of Health, Raymond Unwin was made its technical adviser.²³⁰ Its interim report of the same year proposed a complete reversal of the then planning system; instead of planning authorities trying to reserve pieces of land for open space, they should allocate certain areas for building, on the assumption that all the remainder be left open: towns against a background of open space. This was more radical than the simple idea of limiting London’s growth by a green belt, which had been invented as early as 1892 by Reginald Brabazon, twelfth Earl of Meath, after a visit to American parkways, and had been taken up by the influential London Society in 1915.²³¹ It would require an overall Joint Regional Planning Authority with executive powers over larger regional matters, including reservations for building. Local authorities, it thought, should be able to deny development without compensation, but offer ex gratia payments from a common pool owned by all the local landowners – a proposal, originating from Unwin, that the then Minister found impracticable.²³²

Meanwhile, in a major address of 1930, Unwin had spelt out his concept of regional planning: “Regional Planning schemes should be made effective,” he said, “…without depriving the local authorities within the region of their freedom to make Town Planning Schemes for their areas.” “The main purpose of the plan,” he went on, “is to secure the best distribution of the dwellings, the work and the play places of the people. The method shall be to lay out this distribution in a convenient pattern on a protected background of open land.”²³³ “If development were guided into reasonably self-contained nuclei, forming attractive urban groups of different sizes, spaced out on an adequate background of open land, there would be ample space in the Region for any increase in population which may reasonably be expected, still leaving the greater part of the area as open land.”²³⁴ But at present, “All land is potentially building land”; anybody could build anywhere, so that sporadic building and ribbon development would continue.²³⁵

At this point Robert Schmidt made an appearance in London, revealing the interest within the Ministry of Health in his regional planning work in the Ruhr. In 1928 he was invited to London to speak at the Town Planning Institute. Although fog prevented his flight, an impressive audience heard George Pepler read Schmidt’s paper. They included the future leader of the LCC and Deputy Prime Minister, Herbert Morrison, who had met Schmidt in the Ruhr while part of a Labour Party delegation the previous year. Schmidt’s work was particularly close to Pepler’s heart because at the time he was trying to persuade British local authorities to join together voluntarily to undertake regional planning to guide and coordinate their own local statutory plans. He naturally envied the legal force that Schmidt could theoretically wield to compel the Ruhr’s local authorities. Yet he increasingly understood that, compulsion or not, Schmidt’s powers of persuasion remained essential to carry through the regional plan.²³⁶ In 1929, Harris reported on this and other German developments to the recently formed Greater London Regional Planning Committee, of which he was part-time secretary. Unwin, its chief planner, enthusiastically adopted the proposal for a “green girdle” around London. The Times newspaper in 1924 had already reported on Fritz Schumacher and Konrad Adenauer’s notable plan, initiated shortly before, to create a double green belt (Grüngürtel) for Cologne. This was reported on more fully for the Committee in 1929, detailing the special land readjustment powers by which it had been created.²³⁷

The Committee’s final report appeared in 1933. It came back to the same theme: there should be a narrow green girdle around the existing built-up area of Greater London, to provide space for playing fields and open spaces; through this could run an orbital parkway; outside that, “every effort should be made by full powers in the Town and Country Planning Act to define the areas … which may be allowed [for] building development, and thus secure the background of open lands from which public open spaces may be obtained as and when needed.”²³⁸ New industrial areas should be planned in self-contained satellites within 12 miles of central London, and in garden cities between 12 and 25 miles distant. And both industrialists and developers, the report argued, could benefit from such a clear plan; the problem, again, was to compensate those whose land would not be developed, and this would require legislation.²³⁹ All this would call for a new ad hoc authority, empowered to acquire and manage land and open space and to coordinate local planning schemes. As an alternative, local authorities could buy unbuilt land in their area, but compensation would present enormous problems.²⁴⁰

Already, when this final report emerged, it had effectively been put in cold storage by government spending cuts.²⁴¹ As early as 1931, Unwin was deeply depressed about the Committee’s future: “My chance of a Green Belt is gone … and I expect our Regional work to be cut down to ⅓ or ¼ this year.”²⁴² On that much he proved wrong: when Labour gained control of the LCC in March 1934, its leader Herbert Morrison was a supporter, and after a long-running Public Inquiry approval was granted in May 1935.²⁴³

That was a minor victory, but there were major defeats. The Town and Country Planning Bill, before Parliament in 1931, fell victim to the election; it was revived and passed in 1932, but in a weakened form. Unwin, embittered, decided that the possibility of good legislation had been put back for years;²⁴⁴ in a sense he was right, since it took until 1947 to secure the powers his committee had thought vital. Increasingly he deserted Britain; in 1936 he succeeded Henry Wright as Visiting Professor at Columbia.²⁴⁵ Arriving in the United States just before the outbreak of war for an international forum which was canceled, he and his wife were stranded there; after a two-month illness, he died of jaundice in his daughter’s country home at Old Lyme, Connecticut, on June 28, 1940.²⁴⁶ A few weeks before, his home, Wyldes, had been hit by an incendiary bomb, destroying many of his papers;²⁴⁷ a sad and ironic outcome, given his passionate love of German cities.

One thing he had, however, achieved: there was at least a clear vision of a future planned region. Not all of it was new; as with Howard’s ideas, curious students can find individual elements of the plan in George Pepler’s “green girdle” and associated parkway, of 1911, or Austin Crow’s plan for 10 “cities of health” at a distance of 14 miles from London, the same year.²⁴⁸ And, of course, Howard’s diagram of Social City provides the theoretical basis for almost all subsequent schemes.²⁴⁹ But it is more fully worked out than any of these; and the link between it and the 1944 Abercrombie plan is clear. Unwin had, in a sense, atoned for his great apostasy of 1918–19, when he had steered the course of English urban development away from garden cities and towards suburban satellites. It was a trend that, much later, even Osborn said he could probably have not avoided, given the state of opinion at that time.²⁵⁰

But in the 11 years between Unwin’s final report and the Abercrombie plan, as seen in Chapter 4, a lot of water had flowed under Thames bridges. Neville Chamberlain, on becoming Prime Minister, had almost as a first step created the Barlow Commission. Patrick Abercrombie, appointed to it, had been carefully steered by Frederic Osborn to his minority report and his dissentient memorandum with their demands for a national planning framework, for stringent general powers over industrial location, and for powers to make regional plans stick;²⁵¹ Reith had come and gone as first Minister of Planning. And Abercrombie had collaborated with Forshaw, the LCC’s Chief Architect, on the County of London Plan.

For purists like Mumford or Osborn, Abercrombie could never be forgiven for selling the pass, in the County Plan, on the vital question of density and decentralization: “I was too confident about Abercrombie,” Osborn wrote to Mumford, “I kick myself that I didn’t sit on his doorstep at County Hall as I did on Barlow’s doorstep during the sittings of the Commission. But I could not have believed that any planner could state in full detail the case for Decentralization, and then produce a Plan that doesn’t do the main thing necessary – permit the majority of people to have decent family homes.”²⁵² A year later, in his Greater London Plan, when Abercrombie was free of the LCC influence, he came closer to the Osborn view in arguing for densities of 100 and 70 persons per acre, the latter allowing everyone to go into houses, the former giving 80% houses, so that no family need go into a flat unless it wanted one. But the LCC, for Osborn, were too concerned at the loss of votes and rateable value, and so settled for what he called “token” decentralization, or just over a million people.²⁵³

Osborn, of course, was less than fair; Abercrombie, working with LCC officials, must have been acutely sensible that here above all, planning was the art of the possible. And, viewed as half of the single regional plan which the two volumes represent, the County Plan has striking qualities that should have commended it to the most pure-minded RPAA member. There is, first, its insistence on Geddesian survey methods to tease out the elusive community structure of London, that metropolis of villages. Then, there is its brilliant combination of Perry’s neighborhood-unit principle with Stein and Wright’s roads hierarchy – as interpreted by a Scotland Yard traffic policeman, Alker Tripp, in two influential books²⁵⁴ – to create a new spatial order for London in which fast-traffic highways not only solve the traffic congestion problem but also give definition and shape to the reconstruction communities they separate, by flowing through green strips which additionally bring much-needed open space to London. Georgian and Victorian London’s major problems – congestion, obsolescence, incoherence, lack of greenery – are tackled simultaneously, in a solution that imposes order on the world’s least orderly great city; but in a way so natural that no one would notice.²⁵⁵

Specifically, the County Plan used the new road system to create a cellular London; the new order was to be implicitly organic.²⁵⁶ Abercrombie’s debt to Geddes is clear here, though there was also an important strain that came from Perry via Wesley Dougill, Abercrombie’s inspired assistant and ex-Liverpool colleague, an enthusiastic advocate of the neighborhood-unit principle for London, who died as the plan was nearing completion.²⁵⁷ The important point is that in going from the County Plan to the Greater London Plan, Abercrombie retains this same organic structure. There is first the basis in concentric rings, of decreasing intensity of popularity and activity: Inner (slightly larger than the County, with central London forming an innermost ring), Outer or suburban, Green Belt, Outer Country. Then, again, there is the way in which each of these is neatly defined by a ring road, part of the hierarchical system that produces the cells: the innermost A ring encloses the central area, the arterial B ring effectively defines the edge of inner London, the C ring runs through the suburbs and the arterial D ring encloses them, the parkway E ring is the central feature of the green belt and helps define the start of the outermost ring.²⁵⁸

And again, there is the use of open space as a structuring element. Here, Abercrombie pays his debts to Unwin:

Sir Raymond Unwin first posed the alternative solutions to London’s outward spread: either a continuous zone of free-entry for universal building at varying degrees of density (some of them, in high-class [sic] districts, quite low), its continuity broken at intervals by areas of green (as public open space) and, in practice, by patches of farmland left over from the builder’s demand: or a continuous green background of open country in which are embedded at suitable places compact spots of red, representing building. We have unhesitatingly adopted the second alternative, which he advocated, for the two outer rings.²⁵⁹

There would be “a gigantic Green Belt around built-up London,” with special stress on outdoor recreation; but there should also be “lesser girdles for the separate communities, old and new; this local girdle need not be wide, if beyond it is open agricultural country.” Finally, green wedges would run inward from the Green Belt into the heart of built-up London.²⁶⁰

Of the total of 1,033,000 people to find new homes as a result of reconstruction and redevelopment in inner London, all but 125,000 would move beyond the Green Belt: 644,000 would go to the Outer Country Ring (383,000 to new towns, 261,000 to extensions of existing ones), nearly 164,000 just beyond this ring but within 50 miles of London, 100,000 farther still. There would be eight new towns, of maximum population 60,000 people, between roughly 20 and 35 miles from the center of London.²⁶¹ The point was that out here, the organic structure would be retained; but it would now be turned inside out. Instead of highways and narrow park strips defining the communities, the basic element would now be the green background, against which the individual communities – each, like those in London, consisting of smaller cells or neighborhoods – would appear as islands of urban development.

It was the vision of the RPAA, at last realized. Mumford himself, in a letter to Osborn, called it “the best single document on planning, in every respect, that had come out since Howard’s book itself; in fact it may almost be treated as the mature form of the organism whereof Garden Cities of Tomorrow was the embryo.”²⁶² “The original job of making the ideal credible has been performed,” he continued, “and the main task now is to master the political methods that will most effectively translate it into a reality. We have not yet reached that stage here … And I fear the results of our immaturity here once the post-war building boom … gets under way.”²⁶³

A latter generation of academic planners has deconstructed Abercrombie. Michael Hebbert has powerfully argued that London’s uniquely chaotic structure – the collection of villages celebrated in the traditional (but true) cliché – simply needed leaving well alone.²⁶⁴ But Abercrombie’s vision could have preserved all this, and more: it would have enhanced the structure, because the villages would have been more clearly defined by his planned urban motorways, and the buses would still have trundled along the radial roads past the shopping centers, now free of the chaos of the other traffic. Abercrombie loved London, his adopted city. His plans did no violence to it.

His vision was so compelling because it was expressed in powerful visual imagery.²⁶⁵ Aerial photographs portrayed endless vistas of haphazard and uncoordinated urban growth stretching to the horizon.²⁶⁶ Lord Latham, Labour Leader of the LCC, emphasized the point: the plan centered on the visualization of a “series of great projects extending over the next half century … forming part of a general pattern by which ordered progress could be achieved.”²⁶⁷ And the timing was propitious; the launch, on July 9, 1943, coincided with the allied invasion of Sicily, and a fresh Soviet offensive on the eastern front, together with intensified bombing of German cities. The London Evening News placed its announcement of the “50-Year Plan to Rebuild London” next to front-page banner headlines and photographs showing the devastation in Cologne.²⁶⁸

But there was another turning point, on the Home Front. In December 1942, William Beveridge announced his comprehensive review of the social security system, Social Insurance and Allied Services. Six months later, almost simultaneously with the County of London Plan, R. A. Butler, the Education Secretary, produced his far-reaching white paper on postwar state education. Key LCC Labour politicians, such as Herbert Morrison and Lewis Silkin, worked to position the plan as part of this debate over national reconstruction. In his foreword, Latham deliberately echoed Beveridge – as there were giants blocking the path to social security, so similar giants obstructed the march of planning: “conflicting interests, private rights, an outworn … scale of values, and lack of vision.” The Daily Mirror presented the plan as part of a radical agenda, a “war without end.”²⁶⁹

Abercrombie’s own view of the world, reflecting his youth in late Victorian and Edwardian liberal England, was “grounded in his belief in the power of professional expertise and in the confidence of a genteel, high-bourgeois outlook,” shared by many of his generation, intellectuals like Keynes and Beveridge, politicians like R. A. Butler and Anthony Crosland. It was an eclectic, even contradictory, set of values: Frank Mort writes that “In Abercrombie’s case competing accounts of the urban future struggled for ascendancy, often within the same planning statement and within his own social personality: monumental civism versus communityminded programs, a grandiose urban aesthetic as opposed to an intense localism, state-driven schemes versus more commercially nuanced expansion. This complex legacy continued to shape political and professional debate about the future of London during the postwar years.”²⁷⁰

The “political methods” were learned soon enough. The new Minister for Town Planning, Lewis Silkin, quickly told the planning authorities that the Abercrombie plan would serve as the interim development guide for the region.²⁷¹ Even before this, as told in Chapter 4, he had accepted the principle of the new towns and had appointed John Reith to head a committee to tell him how to build them. With equal dispatch the committee gave him the answer: establish bureaucracies, in the form of development corporations, to bypass the complexities and foot-draggings and compromises of local democracy. In a strictly instrumental sense, it proved right: the New Towns Act received the Royal Assent in the summer of 1946, just as Abercrombie was retiring from his academic chair to an afterlife of consultancy and touring (during his Australian visit in 1948 a councilor referred to him as “Saint Patrick,” which was brilliantly right);²⁷² all the eight Abercrombie new towns were designated by 1949 (though not always in the places he proposed), and were well on the way to completion by the mid-1960s. The machinery for the other major element of the plan, the expansions of existing towns, took longer to establish and even longer to put into motion: the relevant Town Development Act was passed in 1952, the first notable results did not appear until the 1960s.

But they too finally appeared as major elements of the Abercrombie landscape. Even though during the 1950s and 1960s implementation almost became overwhelmed under unexpected population growth and continued industrial development in and around London – necessitating three further and much bigger new towns, started in the second half of the 1960s – an odd fact is that the basic Abercrombie principles proved remarkably resilient to stresses and strains. Odd, because as the American commentator Donald Foley noticed, the Abercrombie plan’s most striking feature was its fixed, unitary quality, which “stresses the primacy of striving toward a positively-stated future spatial form as a physical environmental goal product. The plan is characteristically presented for a hypothetical future point or period of time.”²⁷³ Yet, as Foley also noticed, it soon came to be absorbed into a political and economic process within central government that represented the very opposite: an adaptive approach, evolutionary rather than deterministic, that recognizes the importance of political and economic decisions in the planning process.²⁷⁴ And, in this very different context, it worked: it proved capable of being bent without breaking. Details soon had to be changed: Abercrombie’s new town at Ongar was dropped, while one in the Pitsea–Laindon area appeared; White Waltham, west of London, was dropped and replaced by Bracknell nearby;²⁷⁵ later, after a change of government, the whole policy came into question, and was nearly truncated prematurely.²⁷⁶ Somehow, it survived; and the London region is one of the few places in the world where it is possible to see the Howard–Geddes–Mumford vision of the world made actual.

But finally, doubts remain. One is that the policy did survive precisely because, in a complex and also conservative society, it served – imperfectly, to be sure – as a consensus among very different, indeed conflicting, political views. Liberal–socialist idealists could join forces with the conservative squirearchy to support a plan that simultaneously preserved the English countryside (and the traditional English rural way of life), and also provided model communities that would consciously seek to erode traditional English class barriers. It was useful that, as Robert Freestone has commented, “Greenbelts are said to be practically the entire issue on which all parties agree.”²⁷⁷ “They are able to transcend local tensions by a kind of mystical, symbolic status, which deems them capable of delivering all things to all people.”²⁷⁸ So this fragile alliance did survive, at least until the late 1970s when it fell victim to demographic and economic stagnation; but the result was far from the original vision of the founders, which in the process almost became obscured. The inhabitants of Stevenage and Bracknell were certainly part of the neotechnic economy, but they did not, as Kropotkin had supposed, spend part of their days in the fields.

What in fact triumphed was a very different vision: a top-down patrician vision devised and imposed by benign and superbly capable politicians and devoted public servants. And, for two decades, it worked. In 1967, the peak year for housing completions in the United Kingdom, the machine was producing regional plans for the South East and the West Midlands and the North West, starting Milton Keynes and Peterborough and Telford and several other new towns, and beginning the first sub-regional plans based on the new systems-planning methods imported from American planners like West Churchman. Brian McLoughlin was working on the Leicester–Leicestershire study while writing a textbook of the new planning approach in his spare time. The Redcliffe–Maud Commission was commissioning research on city regions as the basis for reorganizing English local government. The Roskill Commission was using a similar evidence-based approach to find a location for the third London airport. The government had a vast phalanx of professional planners embedded in the Ministry of Housing and Local Government (MHLG), the precursor of today’s Department for Communities and Local Government; the legendary Jimmy James was succeeded as Chief Planner by the legendary Wilfred Burns. A high-level Planning Advisory Group (PAG), including leading professionals from local government, the private sector, and officials from MHLG, the Ministry of Transport, and the Scottish Development Department, had published its report on the design of a Mark II development plan system.^279,280 John Delafons, who was the Group’s Secretary, commented long after that “perhaps the most significant effect of the PAG report was the fillip that it gave to planning and to planners at a time when the statutory planning system had run slowly into an impasse … By expressing such positive confidence in the potential of planning, PAG released a lot of pent-up energy in the planning profession and provided the stimulus that was needed.”²⁸¹

Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.²⁸² It was, in retrospect, the high-water mark of a belief in such a total, centralized, top-down, expertly based but also benign planning. The inspirations were many: our own garden-city/new-town movement, so successfully pursued by the Town and Country Planning Association; ideas from Stockholm and Copenhagen; the French style of indicative planning, then enjoying a huge vogue. And one can precisely date the point of its reversal: the collapse in 1967 of the National Plan, center of the Wilson government’s policy package, in a classic balance-of-payments crisis; the huge weakening of the Department of Economic Affairs, created by Wilson to replace the Treasury as manager of macro-economic policy, and its subsequent rapid disappearance. Then came the Heath government of 1970 and the abandonment of the Redcliffe–Maud recommendations for city-region government across England, which fatally compromised the implementation of the new structure-plan/local-plan system of planning proposed in the PAG Report and embodied into legislation in the dying days of the Wilson government. The vision imploded from within, because the critical implementation mechanisms were lacking.

Planning, it can be seen in retrospect, then went on a long downward slide. And it was much criticized even at the time, for being too prescriptive and too restrictive; even then, a group of us concluded in a study in 1973, it was failing to generate enough development of the right kinds in the right places; even then, local politics were intervening to paralyze the process.²⁸³ And in the 1970s, as deindustrialization gripped the economies of the great cities, the energies of planners and other urban professionals were massively diverted into the task of urban regeneration. That continued into the 1980s; though the means – urban development corporations, enterprise zones – were radically different, the underlying objectives were the same as under the previous Labour administration.

But then and subsequently, the wider task of planning the overall pattern of town and country development remained. And, because demographic growth has continued to be strong, the underlying pressures and the tensions have never gone away. In the early years of the Blair government, there was a fitful return to the grand strategic planning visions of the 1960s, in John Prescott’s Sustainable Communities Strategy of 2003. And there was a determined attempt again to develop regional plans with regional and sub-regional development targets, above all for new housing. But again there was a tragic failure, comparable to the abandonment of city regional government in 1974: the rejection by voters in the North East, in a sample referendum intended to unleash a process across England, of a democratically elected regional assembly. This idea, which echoed a similar proposal in the Redcliffe–Maud report 40 years earlier, was vital to give democratic legitimacy to the whole planning process. Without it, it became all too easy for the Coalition to consign the entire regional structure to the waste bin, bringing us back full circle to the 1980s.²⁸⁴

The concluding verdict is a very paradoxical one. The Abercrombie plan showed no sign of challenging the autonomy of one of the most centralized and monolithic bureaucracies to be found in any western democracy; on the contrary, the processes of implementation actually strengthened it, and the quality of civilization in Basildon or Crawley does not yet recall the glories of fifth-century Athens or thirteenth-century Florence. Nor, though the planning system did preserve the countryside, did it produce anything like the integrated regional development of which Chase and MacKaye dreamed; the people of the Berkshire and Hertfordshire countryside eat vegetables flown in the holds of 747s from all over the world and brought to them via London wholesale markets, and the grubbed-up hedgerows and industrialized farm buildings bear witness to the fact that for the British farmer it is the account-book that rules.

Of course, much does remain of the vision of the pioneers: the new towns are self-evidently good places to live in and above all to grow up in, they do exist in harmony with their surrounding countryside; the sheer mindless ugliness of the worst of the old sprawl has been eliminated. But it is not quite as rich, worthy, and high-minded as they hoped: a good life, but not a new civilization. Perhaps the place was wrong; the English, those archetypally cozy people of low expectations, were the last people to achieve it. Or, as with Gatsby’s dream, it was already out there behind them, never to be realized.