Ye towers of Julius, London’s lasting shame,

With many a foul and midnight murther fed.

Thomas Grey, The Bard (1757)

The simplest solution is flats. If people are going to live in large towns at all they must learn to live on top of one another. But the northern working people do not take kindly to flats; even when flats exist they are contemptuously named “tenements”. Almost everyone will tell you that he wants “a house of his own”, and apparently a house in the middle of an unbroken block of houses a hundred yards long seems to them more “their own” than a flat situated in mid-air.

George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)

… the solution of the housing problem in any great English city does not lie in the provision of High Barbicans or High Paddingtons. They may be physically and theoretically possible but they are completely alien to the habits and tastes of the people who would be expected to live in them.

Harold Macmillan, Internal Memorandum as Minister of Housing and Local Government (1954)

The evil that Le Corbusier did lives after him; the good is perhaps interred with his books, which are seldom read for the simple reason that most are almost unreadable. (The pictures, it should be said, are sometimes interesting for what they reveal of their draughtsman.) But the effort should be made, because their impact on twentieth-century city planning has been almost incalculably great: obscurity is no barrier to communication, at least of a sort. Ideas, forged in the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s, came to be applied to the planning of working-class housing in Sheffield and St Louis, and hundreds of other cities too, in the 1950s and 1960s; the results were at best questionable, at worst catastrophic. How and why this should happen is one of the most intriguing, but also one of the most chastening, stories in the intellectual history of modern planning.

Perhaps the most important facts about Le Corbusier were that he was not French but Swiss; and that this was not his real name. He was born Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at La Chaux-de-Fonds near Neuchâtel in 1885, and lived regularly in Paris only from the age of 31. The Swiss, as the least perceptive visitor has noticed, are an obsessionally well-ordered people: their cities are models of neat self-control, with not a blade of grass or a stray hair out of place. All Corbusier’s cities would be like that. The chaos of the old Paris, that Haussmann’s reconstruction left intact behind the new facades, must have been anathema to the Calvinist mores of the rising young architect. He devoted his professional life to Genevaizing it, and any other city that had the impertinence to be unruly.

The third significant fact about him is that he came from a family of watchmakers. (The name Le Corbusier was a pseudonym adopted from a maternal grandfather when he began to write, in 1920.) He was to achieve greatest fame for his statement, first made at that time, that a house is a machine to live in.¹ In one book, Vers une architecture, he insists that architecture must be totally machine-like and functional, indeed produced by industrial mass-produced methods.² (The later excesses of industrialized housing in the 1960s, it becomes clear, were not merely consequences of political pressures and inadequate preparation; they represented a consistent policy, and their failures need to be judged in that light.) And so it comes as no surprise that, in another work, Urbanisme, triumphs of engineering are hailed as great architecture.

That was natural: the tradition, of crowding thousands of minute components into a planned harmony, came out of a long heritage. But people are not escapements, and society cannot be reduced to clockwork order; the attempt was an unhappy one for humanity. There is an anomaly, though: the Jura watchmakers were sturdy guardians of their local liberties, and for this were admired both by Proudhon and Kropotkin. Corbusier soon put that behind him.

If Switzerland gave him his view of the world, Paris provided both his raw material and his vision of an ideal order. Just as Howard cannot be understood save in the context of late nineteenth-century London, or Mumford save in that of the New York of the 1920s, so all Corbusier’s ideas need to be seen as a reaction to the city in which he lived and worked from 1916 until shortly before his death in 1965.³ The history of Paris has been one of constant struggle between the forces of exuberant, chaotic, often sordid everyday life and the forces of centralized, despotic order. In the 1920s and 1930s, it was clear that the former were winning and the latter had been in long retreat. Behind the facades, the city was racked by slums and disease. The city authorities of the Third Republic had all but given up the attempt even to complete the last of Haussmann’s improvements, let alone take new initiatives like clearing the worst of the slums.⁴

Paris, the young Corbusier concluded, could be saved only by the intervention of grands seigneurs, men “without remorse”: Louis XIV, Napoleon, Haussmann.⁵ Their “grand openings” were for him “a signal example of creation, of that spirit which is able to dominate and compel the mob.”⁶ He concluded his early book Urbanisme with a picture of Louis XIV personally directing the construction of the Invalides, which he captioned

Homage to a great town planner – This despot conceived immense projects and realized them. Over all the country his noble works still fill us with admiration. He was capable of saying, “We wish it”, or “Such is our pleasure.”⁷

He searched all his life for a latter-day Roi Soleil, but never found him.

The Corbusian Ideal City

Meanwhile he had to make do with bourgeois patrons. His Plan Voisin of 1925 had nothing to do with neighborhood units, but was the name of an aircraft manufacturer who sponsored it.⁸ (This helps explain the planes that fly, with such insouciant disregard of air traffic control, in between these and other Corbusian skyscrapers.) Its 18 uniform 700-foot-high towers would have entailed the demolition of most of historic Paris north of the Seine save for a few monuments, some of which would be moved; the Place Vendôme, which he liked as a symbol of order, would be kept.⁹ He was apparently quite unable to understand why the plan aroused such an outcry in the city council, where he was called a barbarian.¹⁰ He always thought that the Gothic cathedral-builders of thirteenth-century Europe, through whose efforts over a mere 100 years “The new world opened up as a flower on the ruins,” must likewise have been misunderstood in those first years “when the cathedrals were white.”¹¹

He was not deterred: “The design of cities was too important to be left to the citizens.”¹² He developed his principles of planning most fully in La Ville Contemporaine (1922) and La Ville Radieuse (1933). The key was the famous paradox: we must decongest the centers of our cities by increasing their density. In addition, we must improve circulation and increase the amount of open space. The paradox could be resolved by building high on a small part of the total ground area.¹³ This demanded, as Corbusier put it in characteristic capital letters: “WE MUST BUILD ON A CLEAR SITE! The city of today is dying because it is not constructed geometrically.”¹⁴ The needs of traffic also demanded total demolition: “Statistics show us that business is conducted in the centre. This means that wide avenues must be driven through the centres of our towns. Therefore the existing centres must come down. To save itself, every great city must rebuild its centre.”¹⁵ This was the first suggestion of its kind; 30 years later, it was to be taken up with a vengeance. But, as Harry A. Anthony has pointed out, there is no recognition anywhere in it of the problem of garaging all these cars, or of the environmental problems that would result from their noise and emissions; they are simply ignored.¹⁶

The way in which the new structure was to be achieved was, however, not uniform across the entire city: the Contemporary City was to have a clearly differentiated spatial structure. And this was to correspond to a specific, segregated social structure: one’s dwelling depended on one’s job.¹⁷ At the center were the skyscrapers of the Plan Voisin which, Corbusier emphasized, were intended as offices for the elite cadres: industrialists, scientists, and artists (including, presumably, architects and planners); 24 of these towers would provide for between 400,000 and 600,000 top people’s jobs at 1,200 to the acre, with 95% of the ground area left open.¹⁸ Outside this zone, the residential areas would be of two types: six-story luxury apartments for these same cadres, designed on the so-called step-back principle (in rows) with 85% of ground space left open, and more modest accommodation for the workers, built around courtyards (on a uniform gridiron of streets), with 48% left open.¹⁹

These apartments would be mass-produced for mass-living. Corbusier had no time for any kind of individual idiosyncrasy; well did he call them “cells”:

We must never, in our studies, lose sight of the perfect human “Cell”, the cell which corresponds most perfectly to our physiological and sentimental needs. We must arrive at the “house-machine”, which must be both practical and emotionally satisfying and designed for a succession of tenants. The idea of the “old home” disappearing and with it local architecture, etc., for labour will shift about as needed, and must be ready to move, bag and baggage.²⁰

Not only would the units all be uniform; they would all contain the same standard furniture. Possibly, he admits, “my scheme … at first might seem to warrant a certain fear and dislike.” But variations in layout, and generous tree-planting, would soon overcome this.²¹ And not only would the units be mass-produced; for the bourgeois elite, they would also be collectively serviced: “though it will still always be possible to have a maid or a children’s nurse of your own, a family servant if you wish,” in the Radiant City “the servant problem would be solved”:

If you desired to bring some friend back to supper round about midnight, say after the theatre, a mere telephone call is all that is needed for you to find the table laid and waiting for you – with a servant who is not sulking.²²

The core of the Contemporary City, clearly, was a middle-class sort of place. And, in the midst of the office center, he created an entertainment and cultural complex to minister to their needs, where the elite would talk and dance in “profound calm 600 feet above the ground.”²³

The blue-collar workers and the clerks would not live like this, of course. Corbusier provided for them in garden apartments within satellite units. Here, too, there would be plenty of green space, sports facilities, and entertainments – but of a different sort, appropriate for those who worked hard for eight hours a day. Unlike the Paris of the 1920s, where rich and poor tended to live in close juxtaposition, La Ville Contemporaine would have been a completely class-segregated city.

By the time of the Radiant City, though the tenets of the Corbusian religion remained unchanged, there were important theological variations. Corbusier had lost his faith in capitalists, probably because in the middle of the Great Depression they had lost the capacity to fund him. Now, he came to believe in the virtue of centralized planning, which would cover not merely city-building but every aspect of life. The way to this would come through syndicalism, but not of the anarchist kind: this would be an ordered, hierarchical system, having some close affinities to the left-wing variety of Italian fascism. Many French syndicalists indeed joined the Vichy regime in 1940; Corbusier himself believed that “France needs a Father. It doesn’t matter who.”²⁴ In this system, everything would be determined by the plan, and the plan would be produced “objectively” by experts; the people would have a say only in who was to administer it.

The harmonious city must first be planned by experts who understand the science of urbanism. They work out their plans in total freedom from partisan pressures and special interests; once their plans are formulated, they must be implemented without opposition.²⁵

In 1938 he designed a “National Centre of Collective Festivals for 100,000 People,” where the leader could address his people; it is like an open-air version of Hitler’s Domed Hall.²⁶

But the new syndicalist city is different in one vital respect: now, everyone will be equally collectivized. Now, everyone will live in giant collective apartments called Units; every family will be given an apartment not according to the breadwinner’s job, but according to rigid space norms; no one will be given anything more or less than the minimum necessary for efficient existence. And now, everyone – not just the lucky elite – will enjoy collective services. Cooking, cleaning, and child care are all taken away from the family.

In the meantime, significantly, Corbusier had been to the Soviet Union. And, in the 1920s, an important group of Soviet architects – the urbanists – had developed ideas very close to his. They wanted to build new cities in open countryside, in which everyone would live in gigantic collective apartment blocks, with individual space reduced to the absolute minimum needed for a bed; there would be no individual or family kitchens and bathrooms. In one version, life would be regulated by the minute, from a 6 a.m. reveille to departure for the mine at 7; another urbanist envisaged a unit in which huge orchestras would induce sleep for insomniacs, drowning the snores of the others.²⁷ The plans by some members of this group – Ivanov, Terekhin, and Smolin in Leningrad, Barshch, Vladimirov, Alexander, and Vesnin in Moscow – are almost identical, down to details, to the Unité as developed in the Radiant City and as actually built at Marseille in 1946.²⁸ But, after 1931, the Soviet regime – like the fascist regime in Italy a few years later – rejected Corbusier’s advice.

And, by the 1940s, he had modified his views again – though as usual, only in the details. His ASCORAL (Assemblé de Constructeurs pour une Rénovation Architecturale), founded during the war, argued that Les Cités radio-concentriques des échanges, the centers of education and entertainment, still designed in the old Corbusian way, should be joined together by Les Cités linéaires industrielles, which would be continuous lines of industrialization along transportation corridors.²⁹ He had ceased to be optimistic about the big city, believing that the population of Paris should shrink from three to one million.³⁰ These notions had curious echoes of the Soviet deurbanists of the 1920s, whom Corbusier had so bitterly derided. But there was a crucial difference: his were to be concentrated “green factories” with workers living segregated, immobile lives in vertical garden cities, each having between 1,500 and 2,500 workers, of course with the inevitable collective catering.³¹ He remained implacably opposed to the idea of cités jardins, which he consistently confused, like most of his fellow French planners, with garden suburbs.³²

None of this was ever built. The remarkable fact about Corbusier is just how phenomenally unsuccessful he was in practice. He traveled all over Europe, and outside it, producing his grandiose urban visions; page after page of his book The Radiant City is filled with them: Algiers, Antwerp, Stockholm, Barcelona, Nemours in North Africa. All remained on paper. In World War Two, with the establishment of the puppet Pétain regime in Vichy, he thought his time at last had come. Invited to head a study commission on housing and planning, he predictably produced a scheme for an elite of town planners heading huge architectural and engineering offices, able to override all interference. At their head was to be a “regulator,” an architect-administrator who formulated the entire national plan for building. Modesty for once overcame him; he failed to name his candidate for the post.³³ In fact, he got nowhere with Vichy either. His simple-minded egomania and his total political naiveté made it difficult for him to understand his failure; at the end of the war he was a deeply disillusioned man.

The Planning of Chandigarh

Ironically, his only real planning achievement on the ground – apart from the Marseille Unité, a single block that was supposed to be the start of a complex but was never completed, plus two reverential copies in France and another in Berlin – came posthumously.

The government of India had decided for political reasons to build a new capital for the Punjab at Chandigarh. They hired a planner, Albert Mayer, who produced a worthy plan in the Unwin–Parker–Stein–Wright tradition.³⁴ They approved the plan, but decided to bring in a team of the most prestigious modern architects – Corbusier, his own cousin Jeanneret, Maxwell Fry, and Jane Drew – to give expression to it. Fry describes the traumatic first meeting, for which Mayer was late:

Corbusier held the crayon and was in his element.

“Voilà la gare” he said “et voici la rue commercial”, and he drew the first road on the new plan of Chandigarh. “Voici la tête”, he went on, indicating with a smudge the higher ground to the left of Mayer’s location, the ill effects of which I had already pointed out to him. “Et voilà l’estomac, le cité-centre”. Then he delineated the massive sectors measuring each half by three quarters of a mile and filling out the extent of the plain between the river valleys, with extension to the south.

The plan was well advanced by the time the anxious Albert Mayer joined the group … not in any way was he a match for the enigmatic but determined figure of the prophet.

We sat around after lunch in a deadly silence broken by Jeanneret’s saying to Mayer, “Vous parlez français, monsieur?” To which Mayer responded, “Oui, musheer, je parle”, a polite but ill-fated rejoinder that cut him out of all discussion that followed.

And so we continued, with minor and marginal suggestions from us and a steady flow of exposition from Corbusier, until the plan as we now know it was completed and never again departed from.³⁵

There followed arguments between the architects and the planners, followed by arguments between the architects, with Fry and Jeanneret complaining at the way Corbusier had taken complete charge, including detailed layouts and designs. Rather naively, they said they wanted to work within the spirit of the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), that is, collaboratively. The outcome was significant: a division of labor, in which Corbusier was given the brief for the central administrative complex.³⁶ But what had happened was more fundamental: a shift from a planning style to an architectural style, meaning “a shift towards a preoccupation with visual form, symbolism, imagery and aesthetics rather than the basic problems of the Indian population. By concentrating on providing Indian architecture with forms suited to the Second Machine Age, the existing Indian situation could be more or less totally ignored.”³⁷

The result was a set of rich multiple ironies. Corbusier found his patron in a post-colonial government steeped in the autocratic traditions of the British Raj. He produced for them an exercise in the City Beautiful decked in the trappings of modern architecture; a latter-day New Delhi. There was a grid of fast traffic roads, already used in plans for Marseille and Bogotá, to cater for a level of car ownership even lower than the Paris of 1925, which was low enough. The relationship between streets and buildings is totally European, and is laid down without regard for the fierce North Indian climate or for Indian ways of life.³⁸ There is a total failure to produce built forms that could aid social organization or social integration; the sections fail to function as neighborhoods.³⁹ The city is heavily segregated by income and civil service rank, recalling La Ville Contemporaine; there are different densities for different social groups, resulting in a planned class segregation.⁴⁰ So the contrasts are stark:

As one walks around the magnificent campus of the Punjab University … (where most of the classrooms and offices are used for only three hours a day), one can see over the high campus walls thousands of people living in slums, without any electricity or running water.⁴¹

By the 1970s, 15% of the population were living in squatter or semi-squatter settlements; more than half the traders were operating informally from barrows or stalls.⁴² Since they conflicted with the Master Plan’s vision of urban order, the authorities made repeated attempts to harass and break them up. The traders responded by a series of public events worthy of an Indian version of an old Ealing comedy. To commemorate the inauguration of a new illegal market at a time when Sikh separatism was very sensitive, they arranged a whole series of sacred Sikh religious events; when the enforcement staff arrived, the Sikh traders announced that they would let themselves be cut to pieces before these would be stopped. Later on the traders stage-managed elaborate funeral ceremonies for the Prime Minister who had just died, thus attracting huge publicity.⁴³

All of which is part of the rich pageant of Indian life, and nothing to do with Corbusier. True, most of the problems were only indirectly to be laid at his door; he was by then dead, and in his last years he had been concentrating on the central monumental complex and on the general visual symbolism, the part of the plan that works best.⁴⁴ But that was just the point: at the end of the day, like Hitler dreaming his futile dreams in Berlin, what he really cared about was the monumental part. He was the last of the City Beautiful planners. The rest does not work, but in a sense that is beside the point. At least, in Chandigarh the housing was much better than what the people had known before, and probably better than they could ever have hoped for if the city had never been built. But when Corbusier’s disciples finally came to apply their master’s precepts in the cities of the West, it was a rather different matter.

Brasília: The Quasi-Corbusian City

There was one other completely new Corbusian city, though he did not design it. Brazil, like many another developing country, had grown around its port city which had willy-nilly become its capital. But by the 1940s, despite partial attempts at reconstruction, Rio de Janeiro was bursting at the seams. There had long been a plan for a new Federal capital in the interior; in 1823 José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva, “father of his country,” had suggested and named it; in 1892 a Commission had already found the site; in 1946 a new democratic commission provided for it; in 1955 another commission rediscovered the site. The same year, Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, a charismatic politician, committed himself to build it during his presidential election campaign, and narrowly won.⁴⁵ There was a long Brazilian political tradition of building grandiose public works within impossibly short times; Brasília became its apotheosis.⁴⁶ The Rio press were predictably critical: “The limit of insanity! a dictatorship in the desert.” Kubitschek was undeterred.⁴⁷

He went to his old friend, the architect Oscar Niemeyer. The Institute of Brazilian Architects protested; there must be a competition. Niemeyer was of course on the jury; it reached its decision after a mere three days’ deliberation, awarding one of the biggest city planning exercises of the twentieth century to Lúcio Costa, another pioneer of the modern architectural movement in Brazil. His entry consisted of freehand drawings on five medium-sized cards: not a single population projection, economic analysis, land-use schedule, model, or mechanical drawing.⁴⁸ The jury liked its “grandeur”; “It was apparent from the beginning that Brasília was to be an architect’s, rather than a planner’s, city.”⁴⁹

The plan was variously described as an airplane, bird, or dragonfly: the body, or fuselage, was a monumental axis for the principal public buildings and offices, the wings were the residential and other areas. In the first, uniform office blocks were to line a wide central mall leading to the complex of governmental buildings. In the second, uniform apartments were to be built in Corbusian superblocks fronting a huge central traffic spine; precisely following the prescription of La Ville Radieuse, everyone, from Permanent Secretary to janitor, was to live in the same blocks in the same kind of apartment.

But, as James Holston argues, Brasília demonstrates that modernism had a very radical social and political intent: to replace capitalism by a new collectivist social order. Though Kubitschek was a Latin American populist, Niemeyer was an avowed communist. The plan, according to Holston, was the ultimate political achievement of the modern movement, “a CIAM city … the most complete example ever constructed of the architectural and planning tenets put forward in CIAM manifestos”;⁵⁰ it would achieve the objective for which the pioneers had struggled in vain. Its hidden agenda was to create a totally new built form as a shell for a new society, without reference to history: the past was simply to be abolished. “Brasília,” he writes, “was built to be more than the symbol of this new age. Rather, its design and construction were intended as means to create it by transforming Brazilian society.”⁵¹ It embodies perfectly a key premise of the modern movement, “total decontextualization,” in which a utopian future becomes the means to measure the present, without any sense of historical context: a city created on a clean slate, without reference to the past.⁵² In this new city the traditional Brazilian society, heavily stratified, would be replaced by a totally egalitarian one: in the uniform apartment blocks, governors and ambassadors would live as neighbors with janitors and laborers. Traditional divisions between public and private space would be abolished; these blocks would be machines for collective public living. And even the traditional street – the age-old essence of the division between public and private life – must disappear; hence Brasília’s eight-lane expressways, which act as social divisors rather than social integrators.

The construction of Brasília became a legend even in Brazil, that country of bizarre fable. An American wrote that “It was as if the opening of the west had been delayed a hundred years and then done with bulldozers.”⁵³ Since at all costs the capital must be dedicated on April 24, 1960, at the end of Kubitschek’s four-year term, it was decreed that there should be non-stop 24-hour construction for one year. It all “represented a triumph of administration in a country never noted for efficient administration; it represented adherence to a time schedule in a society where schedules are seldom met; and it represented continuous hard work for a people reputedly reluctant to work either hard or continuously.”⁵⁴ Legends abounded, all doubtless true: the truck drivers who delivered the same load of sand several times a day; typographers hired as topographers, brick-counters as accountants.⁵⁵ The last thing anyone considered was the cost. William Holford, a jury member, said that no one knew the size of the bill; the President of NOVACAP (Companhia Urbanizadora da Nova Capital do Brasil), the New Town Corporation, said that he was not bothered by accounts; Niemeyer told the British architect Max Lock that he had no idea what the Presidential Palace had cost: “How should I know?” he disarmingly asked.⁵⁶ Well did Epstein, author of one of the two standard histories of the city, dedicate his book:

Aos trabalhadores de Brasília, que construíram a nova capital;

Aos trabalhadores de Brasil, que pagaram.⁵⁷

(To the workers of Brasília, who built the new capital;

To the workers of Brazil, who paid for it.)

Unbelievably, 60,000 workers managed to finish it. In one day 2,000 light poles were erected; overnight 722 houses were painted white. On the appointed day, the Presidential Palace, the Executive Palace, the National Congress, the Supreme Court, 11 ministries, a hotel, and 94 apartment blocks were gleaming in the sunlight on the open campo of central Brazil. It was of course all a shell; the buildings were unfinished inside; after the ceremony, many of the officials took planes back to Rio. But even after Kubitschek, too much had been invested in the city to turn back; over the following decade, the whole machinery of government did move there.

And it came to work, after a fashion. As car ownership rose, the vast expressways and cloverleaves filled with traffic; since the plan did not attempt to resolve pedestrian–vehicle conflicts, streams of pedestrians cheat death daily as they weave between speeding cars on the central mall. This is a detail; the real failure was that, just as in Chandigarh, an unplanned city grew up beside the planned one. The difference was that here, it was far larger.

The Brazilian favela, like its equivalent in every other developing country, is a familiar feature of the urban landscape; one of the best-known swarms very visibly up the hillside behind Rio’s famous Copacabana beach. But Brasília, symbol of modernity, was to have none of this; squatting was simply to be abolished there.⁵⁸ And so it was, in a sense: it was just pushed out of sight and out of mind. In the construction period, a so-called Free Town had to be created; soon, squatting created the nearby settlement of Taguatinga. After dedication, the authorities tried to destroy it, provoking an agitation; in 1961, to the dismay of the architectural profession, a law was passed permitting it to remain. By the mid-1960s, it was officially estimated that one-third of the population of the Federal District, 100,000 people, lived in “sub-habitations”; soon, the figure was more than one-half.⁵⁹ The authorities responded to invasions by trying to lay out minimal site-and-service plots; Epstein’s account of the process has a special irony.

Actual assignment of the lots and the laying out of new streets were in the hands of two men, one of them illiterate, under the supervision of a NOVACAP foreman. None of these was formally trained in urban planning, social work or in surveying. They laid out a gridwork of streets crossing each other at right angles.⁶⁰

Such was the end of the dream of creating a classless urban society in a country where rich and poor had always been segregated. The difference, if anything, was that in Brasília they were more ruthlessly separated than in any of the older cities: a cordon sanitaire was placed between them and the monumental, symbolic city, so that they might never spoil the view or disturb the image. The servants who remained in the superblocks, ironically, were cooped up in closet spaces far worse than they had enjoyed in traditional apartments. The deep class structures of Brazil, subtly racial in origin, reasserted themselves. Niemeyer himself, by this time, was saying that the plan had been distorted and traduced; only a socialist regime, he felt, could have implemented it.⁶¹ Corbusier suffered from the same feelings much of his life: it is hard to build a City Beautiful amidst the confusion of democracy and the market.

The Corbusians Come to Britain

They did little better in the developed world; though they tried. The means to the end was the influence of CIAM, “the Jesuits of the new faith” founded in 1928 “at the invitation of the Swiss animateur Siegfried Giedion”:⁶² the Swiss connection, again, visible also five years later when Giedion took the initiative in starting the Modern Architecture Research group (MARS) in London.⁶³ By 1938 Corbusier was haranguing the British faithful:

The benefits of the new architecture must not be confined to the homes of the few who enjoy the privilege of taste or money. They must be widely diffused so as to brighten the homes, and thus the lives, of millions upon millions of workers … It naturally postulates the most crucial issue of our age: a great campaign for the rational re-equipment of whole countries regarded as indivisible units.⁶⁴

He was preaching to the converted, but there were as yet not many of them. A few, notably those who had attended CIAM II in Frankfurt in 1929, were aware of the work of Ernst May in Frankfurt and his modernistic interpretations of the garden-city idea,⁶⁵ but in the 1930s, despite trips abroad, most local authorities regarded flats as an unfortunate necessity, and only two schemes – one in London, one the famous Quarry Hill flats in Leeds, which originated from a visit of two councilors to Vienna – even broke the five-story barrier.⁶⁶ Overseas émigrés – Serge Chermayeff, Ernö Goldfinger, Bernard Lubetkin, Peter Moro, and Nikolaus Pevsner – played key roles in spreading the new gospel from mainland Europe.⁶⁷ At the MARS group’s exhibition in London in 1938, originally planned in 1935 but repeatedly postponed, suburbia appeared as a bête noire: the flat roof represented the way forward.⁶⁸

Seven years later, all was changed. There was a huge, pent-up political force. By the end of the war, a real revolution had already occurred: government in Britain had assumed responsibility for the welfare of the people in a way that would have been unthinkable in the 1930s.⁶⁹ Associated with this was an extraordinary sense that Britain must be rebuilt, that the slums must be swept away. At Plymouth, one of the worst-bombed cities, Lord Astor, the lord mayor, and a group of councilors received John Reith, Minister of Works; that evening, Reith witnessed an extraordinary sight:

Two thousand people were dancing in the open air – an idea of Waldorf Astor’s. Below them was spread the awful havoc lately wrought on their city; not far away across the sea the enemy. As they danced the summer evening into night I saw a coastal forces flotilla steam out from their Davenport anchorage in single line ahead; there was business for them to do, and they would probably do it all the better for what they could see on the Hoe.⁷⁰

Astor told him that, as a result of their meeting, all opposition to the idea of planning had disappeared. And with this went a swing of the pendulum, away from traditionalism and in favor of modernism. As John Gold comments, “the task of rebuilding took on something of a mystic aura, a Phoenix-like process in which the very fabric of society would be renewed. Dirty Victorian buildings and mean streets came to characterize the past and … the future could be portrayed in the clean lines and steel, glass and concrete of modernist architecture.”⁷¹

After the war, the CIAM-MARS architects soon found themselves in conflict with the garden-city tradition in the new towns, though modernist architects were appointed to plan many of them: Gibberd at Harlow, Gordon Stephenson and Peter Shepheard at Stevenage, William Holford at Corby, Lubetkin at Peterlee, Lionel Brett (Lord Esher) at Hatfield and later Basildon.⁷² But, Maxwell Fry asserted,

At the beginning of the New Towns we were very much at one with government, as witness the fact that most New Towns were built by MARS group architects. It was not until we realized that they were extended Garden Cities that our enthusiasm waned a little.⁷³

In fact, the terms of reference of the program, set by the Reith Committee, made this inevitable;⁷⁴ “the idea that New Towns could have escaped from their Garden City origins was probably wishful thinking.”⁷⁵ At Peterlee, Lubetkin engaged in repeated battles with the National Coal Board over his concentrated high-density design, and when his tenure ended in March 1950 it was not renewed.⁷⁶

Underlying this was an exceedingly strange story: the ideological associations of British modernism with communism. In 1935, the Architectural Association (AA) under its new principal, Eric Rowse, became Britain’s first avowedly modernist architecture school. The uncompromising Rowse soon fell foul of the AA governors, but the modernist program survived, providing a home for communist sympathies amongst teachers and students. Many prominent architects and planners who worked or were trained there, including Richard Llewelyn-Davies, Max Lock, Ann MacEwen, and Graeme Shankland, were then communists.⁷⁷ A young communist architect-planner, Arthur Ling, visited the Soviet Union in 1939 and became central to British planning’s links with it over many years. He was also Secretary of the MARS Group’s Town Planning Committee and in 1941 joined the London County Council (LCC) Architect’s Department led by John Forshaw. This became an important hub of communist activism in architecture and planning during the 1940s. Ling (with other prominent LCC communists including Kenneth Campbell) played an important role in the 1943 County of London Plan, and appears prominently in the official film of the plan, Proud City. In 1945, he became leader of the Town Planning Division of the Architect’s Department.⁷⁸ At the same time, a new Architecture and Planning section of the Anglo-Soviet Friendship Society was created with Ling as Chairman⁷⁹ and a host of significant members including William Holford, Charles Holden, Coventry’s Donald Gibson, Graeme Shankland and Ted Hollamby.⁸⁰

Despite these links the communist influence waned, often for overt political reasons as the Cold War intensified. In Peterlee, Lubetkin, encouraged by the prominent LCC communist Monica Felton, who was Chair of the Development Corporation, formulated an essentially Marxist plan to reflect the class solidarity of the Durham miners. Despite moral qualms, Felton used her personal intimacy with Lewis Silkin to gain his support, though this was far from wholehearted. During 1949, Lubetkin’s proposed high-density urban core was deemed inconsistent with exploiting the underlying coal. When Silkin moved Felton to Stevenage in autumn 1949, Lubetkin was left completely isolated. In 1950, his plan was finally jettisoned for a more conventional low-density layout.⁸¹ Finally, in June 1951, during the Korean War, Silkin’s successor Hugh Dalton dismissed Felton as Chairman of Stevenage Development Corporation. Stephen Ward comments that she has been almost completely airbrushed from British planning history.⁸²

During 1955, a security service investigation identified six planners involved in planning an international conference (including Ling, Lock, Johnson-Marshall, and Leslie Ginsburg) as current or recent communists or active in friendship organizations. Amid accusations of McCarthyism, the government discouraged civil servant participation.⁸³ Some “more specific Soviet impacts on British planning,” Stephen Ward comments, “were subtle almost to the point of invisibility.” Within the LCC architects, the Soviet admirers favored a relatively traditional, softer Swedish form of modernism, rejecting the Corbusian path. Other communists, particularly Shankland and Hollamby, went further, rediscovering the father of British revolutionary socialist design, William Morris.⁸⁴ Ironically, as time went on, ardent Soviet admirers became leaders of the profession, joining the mainstream of the British planning establishment, and producing some of its most innovative schemes of the later 1950s: the unbuilt but seminal plan for Hook (Shankland), the “figure of eight” plan for Runcorn (Ling) and the extensible grid plans for Washington and Milton Keynes (Llewelyn-Davies and Bor). They also served an increasingly market-led mixed economy. The ultimate irony came in 1981 when Hollamby’s long career culminated as Chief Architect and Planner of the London Docklands Development Corporation, the apotheosis of Thatcherite neoliberal urbanism.⁸⁵

Meanwhile, as postwar reconstruction gained momentum, the original modernist consensus began to wane. Research by planning historians in major cities shows that the original wartime enthusiasm for the plans, the work of a relatively small elite network, began to wane as the job of implementation drew in other much larger groups of actors and interests. In Plymouth, Stephen Essex and Mark Brayshay find that the interactions and tensions among the players in these bigger networks led to significant compromises and, ultimately, there was a mismatch between the original vision and the reality that was delivered.⁸⁶ Waldorf Astor, a veteran politician who acted as Plymouth’s lord mayor for the duration of the war, knew Lord Reith, the Minister of Works and Planning from 1940 to 1942, George Pepler, the town planning adviser at the Ministry of Health, and Patrick Abercrombie, who he was instrumental in hiring to produce the highly radical Plan for Plymouth in 1943.⁸⁷ Abercrombie’s appointment was virtually signed and sealed before anyone else had fully considered the matter.⁸⁸ The key feature of the plan, a broad avenue from the railway station on the northern edge of the city center to the Hoe in the south (Armada Way), emerged equally instantaneously during the weekend of October 18–19, 1941, later recalled by Astor:

I well recollect how my wife took him [Abercrombie] for a walk … They had the vision of a view … which for generations had been blotted out by promiscuous buildings. That is how we got the conception of a broad open way from the high ground at North Road station down through the heart of Plymouth and up to the old Eddystone Lighthouse, which has been re-erected as a monument on the Hoe.⁸⁹

Essex and Brayshay comment that for such a tiny group to have made such sweeping – and ultimately irrevocable – decisions, without public consultation or participation, is remarkable. But “Even more remarkable is the skilful manner in which the core network managed to implant the idea of these central elements into the consciousness of the city to a point where they became a ‘magna carta’ that even the ministry felt obliged to acknowledge as non-negotiable.”⁹⁰ But the influence of both Astor and Abercrombie waned, particularly after 1944, and, at the implementation stage, powerful new actors began to play an increasingly important role. A dilution of the original blueprint began to occur: city officials, councilors, and retailers sought modifications and the civil servants of the new Ministry of Town and Country Planning exercised their overriding influence, introducing what were seen as more realistic and practicable interpretations, driven by functionalism, economics, and different viewpoints.⁹¹

Likewise, Phil Hubbard and Lucy Faire show that Donald Gibson’s celebrated plan for Coventry, product of the first local authority architect’s department in Britain, was marked by endless disputes with the City Engineers, headed by Ernest Ford.⁹² Encouraged by Lord Reith, the Town Clerk commissioned them to collaborate on a redevelopment plan for the square mile of the city center, but they were still unable to agree. Two plans were submitted; Gibson’s prevailed. It deliberately disregarded existing property ownership in order to create “a shopping centre envisaged as two main blocks flanking a shopping avenue from which only pedestrians would have access to recessed arcades,” and a recreation center where “cinemas and theatres would take their place in and contribute to the design as a whole.” It also stressed planning for the car and car parking, with suggestions for a system of radial and ring roads intended to decongest the city center, so that “through traffic would remain unhampered by local traffic.”⁹³ Although Gibson and his team did their utmost to persuade the public, as well as councilors, of the merits of their clean-sweep approach, concerns were raised by both insiders (notably, Ernest Ford) and outsiders (including William Holford, who was concerned about the practicalities). The remaining war years, therefore, witnessed Gibson appeasing opponents of this radical urban vision by tempering the excesses of his scheme – to the extent that he took on board many of Ford’s suggestions.⁹⁴ An exhibition of the resultant plan, in October 1945, attracted 48,808 visitors over 13 days, but they were, in fact, profoundly ambivalent about the proposals – possibly because they had more important priorities to worry about.⁹⁵

Next door, in Birmingham, David Adams argues that the creation of “Modern” Birmingham, Britain’s largest provincial city, in the years immediately following World War Two, involved attempts by planners to impose a particular vision of the city:⁹⁶ the vision of Herbert Manzoni, who had joined the City in 1927 and became Chief Surveyor and Engineer in 1935, largely due to his personal determination and the high regard in which he was held by local politicians. It had two elements: a network of ring roads around the city core, early plans for which had been drawn up as long before as 1917–18, and five giant slum-clearance areas, identified by 1941, which were to be systematically demolished and rebuilt in a modernist style.⁹⁷ This was no long-term, all-enveloping utopian blueprint for a perfect city, as in so many bombed and un-bombed cities; indeed, no overall official “plan” was ever produced for the city or even the city center. But, as in Plymouth and Coventry, it represented an expert-driven, paternalist approach to planning which has become the only official story.⁹⁸ During the 1950s, idealized representations, depicting a seemingly rational allocation of land uses, communicated the idea of a forward-thinking “Modern” Birmingham liberated from the vicissitudes of physical congestion that appeared to characterize some parts of the prewar city. Even in the “unplanned” central core, where the council felt that a reconstruction plan would be restrictive to prospective commercial businesses, “official” visions were based on the creation of spaces for rapid motorized transit, through the construction of the inner ring road, which generally took precedence over pedestrian flow in an attempt to mold pedestrian and motorist behavior rather than to respect existing patterns of circulation.⁹⁹

Over the water in Rotterdam, Cordula Rooijendijk shows that even there, the idea of urban planning as modernist was an oversimplification.¹⁰⁰ In the years immediately after 1945, a conflict developed between traditional urban repairers who tried to rebuild inner cities according to an improved version of their historical form, and modernist urban developers who wanted to build brand new inner cities.¹⁰¹ The outcome was two plans: the conservative Witteveen plan aimed at rebuilding the old form, and the utopian 1946 Basisplan,¹⁰² which won out because of a new desire to create totally new cities to provide the foundation for a new society. It was one of those comparatively few postwar reconstruction plans that really did break with the past.¹⁰³ But, Rooijendijk finds, there is clear evidence that not everyone approved of the Basisplan.¹⁰⁴ The authorities tried to limit public debate by giving the public hardly any chance to react. They repeatedly stressed that there was no time to lose; the final plan was approved just three months after publication. It marked a triumph for the modernist ideal urban image, an image of a highly functional and spatially ordered city with an efficient central business district at its heart. It became an inspirational example for urban planners all over the world; from America, Edmund Bacon and Lewis Mumford both commended it as an ideal example of the modern, future city: “For at least two decades, Rotterdam was regarded as the city of tomorrow.”¹⁰⁵ But, as the years passed, the modernistic city, which was to replace the inflexible old one, became just as inflexible. And the public spaces, squares, and streets did prove inappropriate for public interaction, exactly as opponents had warned.¹⁰⁶

In London, Abercrombie and Forshaw opened their County of London Plan with a picture that, decades later, leaps out of the page and sears the eyes: it shows a poor East End street, totally devastated, the pathetic belongings of the people loaded on to a truck. In the foreground, the children stare at the camera, as in mute accusation. Under it is a quotation from Winston Churchill.

Most painful is the number of small houses inhabited by working folk which has been destroyed … We will rebuild them, more to our credit than some of them were before. London, Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham may have much more to suffer, but they will rise from their ruins, more healthy, and, I hope, more beautiful … In all my life I have never been treated with so much kindness as by the people who suffered most.¹⁰⁷

In the City of London, where one-third of the built area had been destroyed, including 20 of the City’s ancient churches, 16 of the livery halls, and a large part of Guildhall,¹⁰⁸ Junichi Hasegawa has shown that the wartime Coalition government and its Labour successor forced the City Fathers to abandon their original plan in favor of a new plan from outside consultants, William Holden and Charles Holford, which won wide praise from the media.¹⁰⁹ But, long after that, the first new buildings were severely criticized for their poor aesthetic quality and siting. In 1955, Duncan Sandys, the planning minister,¹¹⁰ specified that a new plan should be prepared for the area around St Paul’s, where new buildings of poor architectural quality were going up. The Corporation again called Holford in, and his vision of the area was completed in 1967.¹¹¹ But, meanwhile, because of excessive caution, the planning ministry effectively let development proceed, losing a unique chance to provide an ideal environment for the City. This, Hasegawa suggests, was sadly illustrative of the general run of postwar reconstruction in Britain.¹¹²

The other big problem was the East End. Here plans had been developed, as early as 1935, to sweep away and rebuild a huge area: 700 acres in Stepney, Shoreditch, and Bethnal Green, forming a corridor some one and three-quarter miles long and three quarters of a mile wide between the London Docks and the Regents Canal.¹¹³ On top of the huge slum problem here, bombing of the Docks meant that the East End was very badly damaged: in Stepney 40% of all dwellings were destroyed or severely damaged by November 1940, in Bermondsey 75% were damaged. More went in the raids of 1944–5, and as people began to straggle back the housing problem began to seem less tractable than ever.¹¹⁴

Abercrombie and Forshaw showed just how huge the task would be. They recognized that “There is abundant evidence … that for families with children, houses are preferred to flats. They provide a private garden and yard at the same level as the main rooms of the dwelling, and fit the English temperament.”¹¹⁵ But to put everyone in houses would mean that two-thirds or three-quarters of the people would have to move elsewhere. Their preference was for half houses, half flats, at 100 to the net residential acre, but even this would mean too big an overspill problem – too big, they felt, to be balanced by equivalent out-movement of jobs. So they settled on their famous inner-London density of 136 per acre, which – on the basis of the research they did – put one-third of the people in houses, and some 60% in eight- and ten-story flats; about a half of the families with two children would have to go into flats, but even this density meant an overspill of close to four in ten of all the people living in this zone in 1939. To obtain it, the old rigid 80-foot height limit on residential blocks should be replaced by a more flexible system.¹¹⁶ All this, in due course, was embodied into the statutory development plan of 1951.

A critical role was played by the 1951 Festival of Britain, run by a very tight group of designers, architects, and engineers who all knew each other: Herbert Morrison, “Lord Festival,” used his under-secretary, Max Nicholson, who selected most of the committee, including the director Gerald Barry; the two together chose the others to represent art, science, architecture, industrial design, and film. Hugh Casson himself said that the organization was inbred; it had to be, for speed. “The planners were overwhelmingly middle-class men of the sort Michael Frayn has described as ‘do-gooders: the readers of the News Chronicle, the Guardian, and the Observer; the signers of petitions; the backbone of the BBC.”¹¹⁷ The Festival was a showpiece of modern architecture and design,¹¹⁸ together with the Lansbury Estate which, with the Festival Hall, was the LCC’s contribution.¹¹⁹ On the other hand, when Percy Johnson-Marshall was appointed to head the LCC planning team in 1949, he fought to have the 136-per-acre density at Lansbury reduced, but failed.¹²⁰

A whole generation was waiting for the call: the generation that had flooded from the forces into the British architectural schools, determined at last to create the brave new world. Frederic Osborn wrote to Lewis Mumford in 1952 about the cult of Corbusier at the Architectural Association school, “the young men under his influence are completely impervious to economic or human considerations … it was just as if I had, in my youth, questioned the divinity of Christ. I had the same impression of animal unreason.”¹²¹ There was, as one chronicler wrote, “the tradition of Newness … a special blend of avant-garde eccentricity” which “can be continually traced through the AA. It owes something to its being an international organism just resting on English soul … The AA has always been open to the incoherent, uncompromising, culturally-lateral musings of foreigners who turn up in London.”¹²² Into this cultural hothouse,

Rushing back to qualify as architects, the first post-war generation were full of enthusiasm for technology … To suggest a better and special world was no arrogance – merely their inheritance … Soon there were two essential sources of inspiration – Corb and Mies … the Ville Radieuse and the Unité d’Habitation suggested a model to be applied by good hard socialist principles in good hard modernist materials.¹²³

Soon, as perhaps only it could, the AA was out-Corbuing Corbu. By 1954 there was Ronald Jones’s Life Structure: a land-ship 2,360 meters long, 560 meters high, and 200 meters wide:

… thermal energy tapped from a mantle of molten rock 2900 km deep will release man through an energy spiral to gear him on a fantastic journey on a nuclear earth-ship … Unit cities will have core, administration, elected government, arts and creative centres, universities, specialist colleges, institutes, sports and recreation stadia, stereo cinemas, hospitals, hypermarkets, civic shopping centres. Core areas will be linked by horizontal, vertical and diagonal travelators … each metropolitan city and town will be planned to grow to first, second, third and fourth dimensions in response to human ecological need.¹²⁴

Like so much that followed from the basement at Bedford Square, it was good clean juvenile fantasy. The problem – as Cook details, and as the AA’s own retrospective catalogue shows – was that before many years passed, as successive waves of students passed out into the real world, the fantasies were turned into reality. Jones’s own creation became the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (though its architect did not study at the AA); a high-density housing scheme for Paddington (1956) became Parkhill in Sheffield (1961) and Western Rise in Islington (1969); a warehouse (1957) became the Leicester University Engineering Department (1963); housing of 1961 turned up in Milton Keynes in 1975. By that time, further flights of fantasy were still lined up on the Bloomsbury runway: a house built of Sugar Puffs packets, or the 1971 scheme for a “Sand Castle. A brothel for oil miners in the Sahara … constructed from continuous plastic tube, filled with sand in situ, and wound up into a series of interconnecting vaults.”¹²⁵ By then, “comprehensive urbanism” had ceased to be an acceptable subject of conversation – the winds from Europe had changed.¹²⁶ But its monuments, from generations of AA graduates, were scattered across the face of urban England.

The Architectural Review led the attack as early as 1953 with an editorial from J. M. Richards lambasting the early new towns for their lack of urbanity, which was blamed on too low densities and the evil influence of the Town and Country Planning Association (TCPA).¹²⁷ In 1955 it published Outrage, the celebrated onslaught by Ian Nairn on the quality of British urban design, which was uniquely influential in the general British intelligentsia; it announced

… a prophecy of doom: the prophecy that if what is called development is allowed to multiply at the present rate, then by the end of the century Great Britain will consist of isolated oases of preserved monuments in a desert of wire, concrete roads, cosy plots and bungalows. There will be no real distinction between town and country … Upon this new Britain the REVIEW bestows a name in the hope that it will stick: SUBTOPIA.¹²⁸

The conclusion followed inexorably: “The more complicated our industrial system, and the greater our population, the bigger and greener should be our countryside, the more compact and neater should be our towns.”¹²⁹ Accordingly, two years later the editors launched Counter-Attack against Subtopia.¹³⁰ Meanwhile, in 1955 the Royal Institute of British Architects had run an influential symposium on high flats, opened by Dame Evelyn Sharp, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, who had quoted a poem on their beauty.¹³¹

There were plenty of allies. The farm lobby went back to the fundamentalism of the Scott Report on Rural Land Use of 1942¹³² with its insistence on trying to save every possible last acre for agriculture. The sociologists weighed in with Michael Young and Peter Willmott’s enormously influential Family and Kinship in East London, which argued that by exporting people from London to overspill estates the planners were destroying a uniquely rich pattern of working-class folk-life.¹³³ (Surveys showed that the great majority wanted to leave, especially among young families. The only exceptions were poor owner-occupiers.¹³⁴) In vain did the agricultural economist Gerald Wibberley show that the farmland was surplus to national needs, or Peter Stone calculate the true costs of building high;¹³⁵ to no avail did F. J. Osborn tirelessly campaign against subsidies for high flats.¹³⁶ The politics were against them; the government wanted urban containment, and an end to the new-towns program, at any cost.

So the crucial question for planning historians has to be, how far was this a commitment of the modernist architects, how far did it arise from other influences? A revisionist school suggests that the answer is complicated. In 1943, at work on the County of London Plan, Abercrombie, the greatest architect-planner of them all, was walking a tightrope, and Osborn certainly thought that he had been completely coopted by the LCC forces (Chapter 5). His 1943 plan solution

… cleverly combined and modified two existing influences, both of continental origin, and subsequently reformulated as a British “tradition”. The first was a combination of German ideas of three-dimensional compositions in space, including Mendelsohnian “dynamism” and International Modern’s rectilinear layouts of differently-dimensioned Zeilenbauten, mixed with Swedish point blocks in wilderness landscaping; on the other, the apparent opposite – a spatial appreciation of towns and streets, of enclosed or interrupted rather than open space, derived from Sitte via Unwin; after the war, these were synthesised under the label of “townscapes.”¹³⁷

He may have been walking a tightrope, but he was massively helped by the unusual, even unique, conditions of the time. Wartime emergencies and the suspension of normal democratic processes, including elections, meant that the LCC was able to operate much more independently than ever before. An elaborate structure of consultation on planning proposals, established during the 1930s – the 28 metropolitan borough councils, property, industrial, and commercial bodies, amenity groups – was set aside: Abercrombie was left free, drawing his own academically derived information about London’s “inherent” social and community structure.¹³⁸ But things did not remain that way for long. The stress on decentralization raised alarm bells among members and officers concerned for electoral strength – the main losses would be felt in inner boroughs with Labour majorities – and financial resources: these areas offered the best potential for commercial development, boosting the LCC’s tax base. This financial risk forged an alliance between Labour leaders and LCC officers, especially the Valuer and Comptroller, the chief financial officer. This central dilemma already surfaced in the production of the plan. It accepted the need to reduce densities, but, because of the difficulties of achieving decentralization, reluctantly accepted that high densities as high as 136 persons per acre were inevitable in Stepney: “While we should like to see the lowest density of 100 adopted (which would allow two-thirds houses to one-third flats), we feel that the actual numbers to be decentralised would be difficult to equate with the amount of industry that could be expected to migrate.”¹³⁹ “The LCC,” Osborn bitterly commented, “is led by middle-class Labour councillors, right out of touch with popular opinion but … terrified of a drop in rateable value or the loss of their slum electorate.”¹⁴⁰ In both the selection of large-scale redevelopment areas in London and in the detailed planning proposals drawn up for them, the emphasis was on maximizing government subsidies, minimizing immediate losses of rateable values, and maximizing prospects for future income. In all three objectives the claims of industry were weak and the effect was to promote commercial and high-density residential building in redevelopment at the expense of industry.¹⁴¹

There is yet another suspect here: the Dudley Committee, set up under the eponymous peer in 1942. The evidence of people’s preferences was clear: overwhelmingly, they wanted houses, not flats. But the committee recommended a range of densities ranging from 30 persons per acre for open developments outside towns, to 100 and even 120 per acre in large concentrated urban areas. They were undoubtedly influenced by the then-emerging Abercrombie–Forshaw analysis; here, the 136-per-acre standard meant over 60% of all dwellings would have to be in tall blocks.¹⁴² But in turn, Bullock argues that the key evidence seems to have come from the National Council of Social Service (NCSS), whose studies on neighborhoods influenced Abercrombie and Forshaw; Wesley Dougill worked on the NCSS team in 1942. A key role was also played by housing reformer Elizabeth Denby, who had visited and admired continental schemes.¹⁴³

As Stephen Ward has shown, there was a battle inside government.¹⁴⁴ Gordon Stephenson, appointed to the research section of the Planning Division in the newly formed Ministry of Town and Country Planning in 1942, reluctantly accepted LCC’s arguments but firmly opposed the proposals in the Merseyside Plan for 136 persons per acre in the inner zone and 184 near the riverside. He reiterated the Dudley standard that 100 persons per acre should be the maximum inner density with a few riverside areas at 120. Yet the Ministry of Health controlled housing subsidies, so the matter was not easily settled. Stephenson also doubted the extent of administrative support in his own department. Its formidable Deputy Secretary, Evelyn Sharp, lately transferred from Health, had brought with her that Ministry’s thinking about “vertical density.” Stephenson directly challenged her in a tetchy three-page memorandum, pointing out what high “vertical densities” actually meant, and citing the poor family living conditions in the five-story-flat schemes recently built in Liverpool. Disputing the common view that they allowed dockers to live close to their work, he argued that the real reasons were political and religious, with density policies a way of excluding Irish Catholics from suburban council estates. Stephenson also criticized the City Architect, Lancelot Keay, another important voice in the Ministry of Health. The latter’s lately acquired professional preference for high-rise flats Stephenson thought too conveniently consistent with his political paymasters’ sectarianism. Stephenson felt that flats would become “the new slums, financial and social white elephants.” Instead the answer lay in managing outward expansion and embracing more varied but essentially medium densities throughout the city. His fears were justified. In the 1950s, inner city housing policies reverted to the Ministry of Housing line, implemented by a merged successor Ministry of Housing and Local Government, led by Dame Evelyn Sharp.¹⁴⁵

Inside the LCC the most influential figure was the Valuer and Comptroller. For him, any commitment to ideal densities, as recommended by garden-city advocates, was anathema because of capital costs and the loss of residential rateable values.¹⁴⁶ The key in choosing areas for comprehensive redevelopment was, above all, to rebuild rateable values by limiting population decentralization and introducing commerce into areas previously dominated by residential or industrial uses.¹⁴⁷ Even heavy industry was to be kept as far as possible, so that, as Osborn inimitably put it, the choice would still be between being “a squirrel in a cage or a rat in a drain.”¹⁴⁸ The problem is that though the 1947 Act had dealt with the compensation and betterment problem, it could not deal with the rateable value problem;¹⁴⁹ the opportunity was lost to grapple with existing land values, though the Uthwatt report had tried to address it.¹⁵⁰ And there was no central mechanism whereby losses in the cities could be offset by gains in the relocated areas.¹⁵¹

The planners in the Architect’s Department tended to defend the sanctity of the Plan against the Comptroller and the Valuer, who wanted ever more flats;¹⁵² the architects eventually won.¹⁵³ The Treasury subsidy for expensive land was paid only for flats, and the calculations assumed a break-even level at 35 dwellings per acre; only a small exception was made to allow houses on sufficiently developed areas.¹⁵⁴ In practice the Valuer won:¹⁵⁵ between 1945 and October 1951 the LCC built 13,072 flats and only 81 houses, the boroughs 13,374 against 2,630, and 15 of the 24 built only flats.¹⁵⁶ The Valuer continued to argue for higher densities, and he was given responsibility for housing because this was a priority and there were too few out-County opportunities.¹⁵⁷ Roehampton was planned at 30 dwellings per acre instead of the 20 originally envisaged, though opposed by the Town Planning chairman.¹⁵⁸

The Great Rebuild

Thus everything seemed to come together: a private movement among the architects had great significance, because it tweaked sympathetic political chords. In 1955, the Conservative government, in the form of Housing Minister Duncan Sandys, launched a major slum-clearance program that was to run for nearly two decades, and simultaneously encouraged local authorities around the major cities to designate green belts in order to contain urban growth; coupled with a birth rate which started unexpectedly to rise that very year, this soon produced an impossible land-budget arithmetic.¹⁵⁹ Land acquisition costs rose, especially after changes in the law in 1959. The big cities, many of which were not averse to keeping their own people rather than exporting them to new and expanded towns, read all this as a signal to build dense and build high.¹⁶⁰ The big builders were ready to move in, and sold their ability to solve the cities’ housing problems fast through package deals.¹⁶¹ And the government, despite a barrage of protest from Osborn at the TCPA, obligingly gave them the special subsidies they needed for the job: from 1956, three times as much for a flat in a 15-story block as for a house.¹⁶² Dutifully, the proportion of high-rise in the total public housing program rose year by year: units in five-story and more blocks were about 7% of the total in the late 1950s, as much as 26% in the mid-1960s.¹⁶³

In all this, there was considerable schizophrenia, even in individuals. Richard Crossman, who as Sandys’s successor nearly a decade later spearheaded the Labour government’s accelerated slum-clearance and housing drive, could record in his diary that he did not like the idea of people living in huge blocks of high-rise housing, yet almost simultaneously encourage even bigger programs of destruction and industrialized building:

In conversation I asked why it was only 750 houses they were building at Oldham; why not rebuild the whole thing? Wouldn’t that help Laing, the builders? “Of course it would”, said Oliver [Cox], “and it would help Oldham too” … I drove back to the Ministry … warmed and excited.¹⁶⁴

The LCC’s immensely prestigious Architect’s Department, under first Robert Matthew, then Leslie Martin, provided a model in the early years; it had an unusually free hand, because the Ministry’s ordinary cost sanctions did not apply to it.¹⁶⁵ It first produced “the great Corbusian slabs” which culminated at the end of the 1950s in Alton West, Roehampton, the most complete homage to – and only true realization of – La Ville Radieuse in the world; then began “the era of the high towers, slimmer, less oppressive, and of course more highly subsidized”:¹⁶⁶ 384 of them, in all, completed between 1964 and 1974. After the reorganization of 1965, the new boroughs made their own distinctive contributions, like Southwark’s huge megastructures in North Peckham, later to become some of London’s most problematic blocks. The architects were not completely agreed, even inside the LCC:¹⁶⁷ from the early 1950s, there then emerged a division between self-styled Humanist and Formalist factions, symbolized by the distinction between the Scandinavian New Empiricism of Alton East and the Corbusian Alton West; the Corbusians gradually gained the upper hand during the 1950s, as seen by the rectilinear-plan, Zeilenbau mid-1950s landscapes of Loughborough Road and Bentham Road.¹⁶⁸

Some few among the great British provincial cities tried to compete in prestige. Two AA graduates headed the team that developed Park Hill, the great wall of deck-access flats that juts like a fortress above the center of Sheffield and that, it must in fairness be said, is still highly successful with its tenants. Glasgow hired Basil Spence for the Gorbals and then built huge towers up to the city’s edge; here, where the tenants all had a totally un-English tradition of high-density tenement living, there were few consistent problems with the design except for those with children, unsurprising since four in five children lived above the fourth floor.¹⁶⁹ But there were many other places where the architect was uninspired or non-existent, and where tenants found themselves uprooted into hurriedly constructed system-built flats that lacked amenities, environment, community – that lacked, in fact, almost anything except a roof and four walls.

But basically, as Glendinning and Muthesius show in their monumental account, London was quite different from the other cities of England and Scotland. (Wales, oddly, never got the high-rise bug at all.) In London, top architects dominated everything, first in the heyday of the LCC Architect’s Department and in some of the smaller LCC-era Metropolitan Boroughs (Finsbury, for instance, where Lubetkin and Tecton followed the trail they had blazed prewar in Highgate’s Highpoint), then in a few of the post-1965 boroughs to which some LCC stalwarts decanted themselves. High- rise in London was thus an immensely exciting architectural campaign: to import into Britain the essence of the modern movement, thus turning the country from a backwater to a pacesetter.

From the mid-1950s, there was also something new. Commercial and speculative development, driven by an alliance of financiers, property developers, accountants, and a group of commercially minded architects, became the major force behind the rebuilding of London, especially in the West End and the City, for much of the 1950s and early 1960s. The lifting of building controls by the Conservative government in November 1954 was the starting gun for the most intense phase of a property boom that continued unabated until 1964, when Labour again instituted strict regulations on development throughout the Greater London area. Property millionaires, such as Charles Clore, Jack Cotton, Harry Hyams, and Harold Samuel, loomed large, along with their dedicated architect, Richard Seifert. Around 24 million square feet of new office space was built in central London during the 1950s.¹⁷⁰

Its symbol, and a battle ground for much of this time, was Piccadilly Circus. “Piazzadilly!” read the headline on the front page of the London Evening Standard, on April 12, 1962, celebrating yet another proposal for Piccadilly Circus that promised “comprehensive redevelopment” of the area. Almost all of the familiar Victorian and Edwardian buildings would go, replaced by a new theater and concert hall, roof gardens, tall office blocks, and a “vertical feature,” a floodlit steeple, in the words of its planner – the ever-present William Holford – “visible from a distance and marking the Circus as the hub of the West End.” Below, the familiar statue of Eros was retained as the centerpiece of a new pedestrian piazza. It never happened: Holford’s proposal of 1962 was just one in a series of comprehensive plans for the area between the late 1950s and the early 1970s.¹⁷¹

The oddity is what, while all this was not happening, was actually happening: “the spaces of the new youth culture of the period, the boutiques and clubs that transformed London’s international reputation were quite precisely not those of modern planning and architecture.” They happened in the back streets, in hasty and improvised refurbishments of old Victorian buildings. The cityscape imagined by Holford and his generation was castigated by conservatives as a brutalist betrayal of London’s heritage, but it could as easily be condemned by a younger generation as the dreary, pleasure-free territory of old-guard modernists. It ended with the campaign against the comprehensive redevelopment of Covent Garden.¹⁷²

But in the provinces and in Scotland, it was all much more prosaic: there, the architects counted for little against the massive accumulated strength of the housing departments, and the aim was to obtain the maximum number of dwelling units (telling phrase) in the minimum possible time.¹⁷³ And it was difficult to deny them. For in those cities, housing conditions in the 1950s were unimaginably, primevally awful. In Glasgow, as seen in one macabre diagram, a family of nine could live in a one-room Gorbals slum, 11 feet by 8.¹⁷⁴ When you see that, you know why the politicians and the professionals were engaged in a holy crusade to get rid of the slums, and why a new high-rise apartment represented a one-step jump from the nineteenth century into the twenty-first. That is why Basil Spence’s high-rise Gorbals block, spectacularly demolished on TV in 1993, seemed like a new world.

Commercial considerations also entered on a massive scale. After a decade in which the pace of redevelopment outside the South East was glacial, by the early 1960s there was sudden enthusiasm for “comprehensive redevelopment.”¹⁷⁵ This was a new model of planning, aimed not at substituting for private developers’ schemes, but at inviting and facilitating them. The great midland and northern cities – Liverpool, Newcastle, Leicester – set up planning offices separate from the engineer’s department.¹⁷⁶ Planners and architects were no longer leading events; they were responding to them.¹⁷⁷ The “modernist” ambitions of planners eroded in the face of the conservative onslaught, giving way to a “market-driven version” which “meant handing town centres over to developers.”¹⁷⁸

What then went wrong? Glendinning and Muthesius argue that, just like the high-rise enthusiasm itself, the attack on the genre was driven by intellectual fashion: there was as little substance in the counter-attack as in the original myth. More specifically, both were driven and supported by fairly unspecific pop sociology. So we still do not know, for certain, exactly why so many high-rise developments came to be seen as failures. The authors suggest that there was a disastrous self-destructive, self-justifying dynamic: after 1968 there was a sudden housing surplus, problem families were moved in, others moved out, in no time some developments acquired the label of problem estates. Perhaps the most telling passage in the entire book is an account by an Edinburgh tenant of just this process, starting with nice people in nice flats, ending in Clockwork Orange horror. Andrew Balderstone, a sheet-metal worker, lived for 20 years in a maisonette in John Russell Court, a 20-story point block in Edinburgh, from 1964, when it was opened, to 1984, when it was emptied and rehabilitated:

It wasn’t anything to do with the block itself, really, it was a change in the kind of people who lived there, and how people behaved. When we first went in, we were introduced to the Caretaker, a retired seaman. He was very enthusiastic about his job. And for the first five or ten years, things were really great, everybody kept the block spotless, you were really proud of having such a nice new house …

The problems only started after about five or ten years, when they started putting a different kind of tenant in … This was the idea of the Corporation housing management. “Management” – what a sick joke! They had this crazy idea that by spreading the bad ones out among the normal tenants, you’d bring them up to your level – but what happened, especially in a big block like that, it was the opposite – they brought us down!

It was like a kind of cancer. At first you tried to keep your standards up, but you soon learnt it was a waste of time …

Well, the Caretaker couldn’t cope with all this, so he left, then more and more of the neighbours got fed up and got out – and all the Housing department could do was fill the vacant flats with single parent families, faster and faster. After they started putting the druggies in, about the late seventies, the vandalism and the break-ins really got going, all-night parties with idiots using the rubbish chutes at 3 a.m., masses of bottles crashing down. That was the time when the craze for throwing things out suddenly started …

… It all seems such a terrible waste – they were perfectly good houses, if the Council had only bothered to look after them, rather than using them as a dumping ground!¹⁷⁹

So, the book concludes, do not accept the journalistic stereotype: with good management, the great majority of high-rise blocks are great places to live, well liked by those who live in them.

Glasgow was a very special case. It always had an extraordinarily high proportion of households in rented tenements.¹⁸⁰ Abercrombie’s Clyde Valley Plan of 1946 recommended four new towns: two – East Kilbride and Cumbernauld – that would eventually be built, two that would not; even so, they would take only one-third of the half-million to be decentralized from Glasgow, while at least half the remaining population would be resettled on the City periphery. But many in the Glasgow Corporation accepted spillover late and reluctantly;¹⁸¹ they wanted to “do it all in Glasgow, keep the rateable value, and keep yourself as the second city of the Empire”; in the late 1950s, aided by changes in the subsidy regime they won, forcing through a program of unremitting high-rise tenement construction.¹⁸²

The remarkable fact was how long it took for anyone to see that it was wrong. In order to appreciate why, it is necessary to do something that for anyone born after 1960 requires an effort of imagination: to appreciate just how bad were the dense rows of smoke-blackened slums that the towers replaced. The fact that later on the bulldozers started to remove sound and saveable houses may obscure the fact that most were neither. As Lionel Esher says, “even the preservationists saw the great mass of our Victorian ‘twilight areas’ as expendable. Six years of war had reduced those parts of London and the great provincial cities to a sinister squalor that recalled the darkest passages of Bleak House.”¹⁸³ In Ravetz’s words, “For two full decades … any social disbenefits of clean-sweep planning and its transformation of the town passed unremarked other than by cranks, a few people with residual ideals from the 1940s, or those who lamented the passing of the old on artistic grounds.”¹⁸⁴ It was not the fact of clean-sweep planning that began to be criticized, but the form that it took.

Accentuated by the media after the disastrous collapse of Ronan Point, an East London system-built tower block, in a gas explosion of 1968, the criticism soon became deafening. In fact, the subsidy system had been recast the previous year, and local authorities were already phasing out their high-rise blocks. Now, everything was suddenly wrong with them: they leaked, they condensed, they blew up, the lifts did not work, the children vandalized them, old ladies lived in fear. All of this had some basis. Kenneth Campbell, in charge of housing design at the LCC and the Greater London Council from 1959 to 1974, listed three failures: the lifts (too few, too small, too slow), the children (too many), the management (too little).¹⁸⁵ Anthony Greenwood’s 1968 White Paper Old Houses into New Homes marked the big anti-reaction.¹⁸⁶ The resultant 1969 Housing Act effectively moved away from rebuilding to improvement – so much so, that a decade later, when the economics did not add up, it proved impossible ever to return to the bulldozer age.¹⁸⁷

Even in the modernist heyday of reconstruction, the bulldozer never reigned completely supreme. Peter Larkham has studied several hundred reconstruction plans for cities, both those suffering bomb damage, and those relatively or completely unscathed, and questions the conventional view that they were overtly modernist. True, few were sensitive to the context of areas and groups of buildings. Yet there is clear evidence in some plans for a broader concept of conservation, two decades before Duncan Sandys’s Civic Amenities Act permitted the designation of “conservation areas.”¹⁸⁸ Early plans – such as those for Plymouth and Bath, both heavily damaged – were radical. Yet, even there, radical reshaping was largely limited to the areas suffering the most severe damage. Thomas Sharp’s early plans – as for Durham, in 1944 – include a very small number of new roads aimed at diverting traffic and thus protecting the town.¹⁸⁹ True, conservation was a very small element, often limited to a small number of key buildings.¹⁹⁰ But, as early as the 1943 Plymouth plan, there is evident concern for area-based conservation – particularly by the most prolific consultants, Abercrombie and Sharp.¹⁹¹

But what had happened, in this brief passage of time during the late 1960s, was an intellectual seismic shift. Twenty years earlier, in the historic 1947 Act, a requirement to compile lists of buildings for preservation was injected at the last minute. But the Ministry of Housing and Local Government did not begin to see a relation between conservation and planning until the mid-1960s, when Wayland Kennet became Junior Minister with responsibility for conservation, and established rapport with Crossman. Duncan Sandys, who as Minister had set up the Civic Trust, drew first place in the ballot for Private Members’ Bills. Crossman persuaded him to adopt a bill to strengthen powers to prevent demolition of listed buildings, and offered his Department’s help.¹⁹² Crossman wrote,

Kennet is really splendidly energetic. Though he peeves me a little by his desire to take everything over, I am delighted that he is that sort of person. He is going to run the historic buildings as hard as he possibly can and he is going to be helped by Duncan Sandys’ Bill as well as by the decision to get working parties going on my five selected towns.¹⁹³

Later he revealed that he had had to battle with his top civil servant, the redoubtable Dame Evelyn Sharp: “She, who counted herself a modern iconoclast, took the extremely – yes, I will say it, – illiterate view that there was a clear-cut conflict between ‘modern’ planning and ‘reactionary’ conservation. During my time as Minister, in speech after speech, I tried to break down this false dichotomy and to establish a new and sensible relationship between planning and preservation.”¹⁹⁴ He was succeeded in 1966 by Anthony Greenwood, “a weak Minister who some felt took little interest in anything except his personal appearance”;¹⁹⁵ he was content to leave most work to junior ministers, and this opened the door to Kennet, who stayed on until the 1970 election and made a very positive contribution. Kennet later recorded that in those years public opinion was shifting after “an age of blindness”;¹⁹⁶ the Historic Buildings Council had one-seventh of the budget for military bands.¹⁹⁷ But Sandys’s bill passed with bipartisan support, and Kennet drove the work energetically forward through a vigorously written circular that encouraged local authorities “to designate first and think later, and this, broadly speaking, is what they did.”¹⁹⁸ John Delafons, a planning official who later became a planning historian, commented, “Those who wonder when the floodgates of conservation were opened, need look no further than Circular 53/67.”¹⁹⁹ By 1972, Kennet was able to record that some 1,350 conservation areas had been designated by about 130 local authorities; 20 years later that total had risen to over 6,500.²⁰⁰

So the great Corbusian rebuild was over. But, in fairness to the Corbusians, some things should be said. First, though some London estates were directly inspired by the master, and some of these proved design disasters, many others up and down Britain were bought off the peg by local authorities too lazy or unimaginative to hire architects and planners of their own. It was Crossman, visiting Wigan as early as 1965, who commented that its “enormous building programme” was of “an appalling dimness and dullness, and I am afraid that they have built a Wigan that in 2000 will look just as bad as the old 1880 Wigan looks in the eyes of the 1960s.”²⁰¹ Secondly, Corbusier never advocated putting people (as distinct from jobs) in high towers; his proletarian housing would have looked more like Manchester’s huge Hulme Estate, the biggest urban renewal project ever carried out in Europe, which consisted of medium-rise blocks but also proved a design disaster. In fact, the architectural fashion that followed the high-rise era, high-density low-rise, had proved a failure in Glasgow immediately after World War Two²⁰² and would later be criticized just as severely:

High-density low-rise in practice meant mobs of children in echoing bricky courtyards, and mobs meant vandalism … They became “hard-to-let”, i.e. lettable only to the poorest and most disorderly families, who seldom had cars to occupy the now mandatory basement garages, and whose children wrecked the few they had.²⁰³

Ironically, this too was a Corbusian solution. All of it missed the real criticism, which was of design solutions laid down on people without regard to their preferences, ways of life, or plain idiosyncrasies; laid down, further, by architects who – as the media delighted to discover – themselves invariably lived in charming Victorian villas. When later some actually lived in the places they were designing, as did Ralph Erskine’s site architect, Vernon Gracie, in the famous Byker Wall at Newcastle, it was a matter for comment. The main result of this failure, of which Corbusier is as fully culpable as any of his followers, was that the middle-class designers had no real feeling for the way a working-class family lived. In their world,

Mum isn’t isolated at home with the babies, she is out shopping at Harrods. The children, when small, are taken to Kensington Gardens by Nannie. At the age of eight they go to a preparatory school and at thirteen to a public school, both residential. And during the holidays they are either away in the country, or winter-sporting, sailing and so on: golden and brown in the playful wind and summer sun. At any rate they are not hanging around on the landing or playing with the dustbin lids.²⁰⁴

There is a striking fact about Le Corbusier’s celebrated first Unité, in Marseilles: it is quite different from its many faithful imitations, less because it was designed by the Master himself, than because it is occupied by a quite different clientele. It is a middle-class professional enclave of people who clearly relish living in one of France’s greatest architectural monuments (and who have, in consequence of that fact, received unprecedented sums of public money for its restoration). From elegant foyer to delightful rooftop swimming pool, it more resembles a medium-quality hotel than a British council block of the 1960s (or, if one should seek the explanation in the unique awfulness of the British, a grand ensemble in the Paris suburbs). The fact is that from first to last, Corbusier had no understanding of people who were unlike himself.

The rich, then, could always live well at high densities, because they had services; that is why those quotations of Corbusier were so telling. But for ordinary people, as Ward says, the suburbs have great advantages: privacy, freedom from noise, greater freedom to make a noise yourself. To have this at a high density requires expensive treatment, generally not possible in public housing. Above all, the problem is one of children, for “unless they get a chance to play out their childhood, they are certainly going to make a nuisance of themselves when they are older.”²⁰⁵ And this is especially true, as Jephcott concluded in 1971, for families with children that are less well-equipped educationally, living in high-density high-rise: “local authorities should discontinue this form of housing except for a limited range of carefully selected tenants or in cases of extreme pressure.”²⁰⁶ Corbusier, of course, was blissfully unconscious of all this, because he was both middle-class and childless.²⁰⁷

Urban Renewal in America

The Americans discovered some of all this even before the British, and it is interesting to ask why. One reason is that they started earlier. Their urban renewal program began with the Housing Act of 1949 and the amending Act of 1954, and stems from even earlier origins: the 1937 report of the Urbanism Committee of the National Resources Planning Board, Our Cities: Their Role in the National Economy, with its stress on urban decay caused by obsolescent land uses, and the very influential short pamphlet of 1941 by Alvin Hansen and Guy Greer, which developed this argument and argued that federal aid would be needed to buy blighted property, the cities in return being required to draw up plans for redevelopment.²⁰⁸ The resulting 1949 Act represented a strange but successful coalition of conservative and radical interests: federal money could be applied to renewing outworn parts of cities, but principally residential parts; yet adequate housing tools were not provided.²⁰⁹

To understand why, it is necessary to penetrate this unlikely coalition a little deeper. Congress had passed a landmark public housing measure, the Wagner Act, as long ago as 1937. This had been the outcome of a bitter and protracted struggle between powerful interest groups. On one side were liberal housing experts like Catherine Bauer, lining up with the construction unions. On the other were the National Association of Real Estate Boards (NAREB) and its research arm, the Urban Land Institute (ULI). NAREB and ULI were all for federal mortgage insurance, a principle they had won when the Federal Housing Association was established in 1934. They were all against public housing. The resulting compromise established public housing as a temporary expedient for the deserving poor, the newly unemployed, who could be expected to buy their own houses as soon as the economy lifted off again. It would exclude the old poor: the predominantly black, really poor underclass. The means to discriminate lay in the finances of the act: federal funds would pay for land acquisition and development, not for running costs, which must be met from the rent. Really poor families would thus never be able to get in.²¹⁰ At the end of the 1940s, that barrier fell: welfare families began to enter the projects. But, since the financial arrangements stayed unchanged, the resulting contradictions soon after produced catastrophic consequences.²¹¹

The 1949 and 1954 Acts represented another triumph of the NAREB–ULI lobby. Their aim was not cheap housing, but commercial redevelopment of blighted areas at the edge of downtown, on the model successfully used by Pittsburgh in its Golden Triangle redevelopment. Though bitterly opposed to NAREB, the public housing movement went along with the idea of urban renewal in the hope that it too could achieve its objectives.²¹² In fact, though presented as a measure to secure “the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and a suitable living environment for every American family,” urban renewal was kept separate from public housing and put in the hands of the Housing and Home Finance Agency, which promptly worked to discourage low-rent housing and to encourage commercial redevelopment; the clause in the 1949 Act, stipulating that the area should be “predominantly redeveloped,” was progressively eroded.²¹³ Using the powers to tear down slums and offer prime land to private developers with government subsidy, cities sought “the blight that’s right,” as Charles Abrams inimitably put it.²¹⁴ In city after city – Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Hartford, Boston, San Francisco – the areas that were cleared were the low-income, black sections next to the central business district; and the promised alternative housing did not materialize because “Public housing, like the Moor in Othello, had done its reverence in justifying urban renewal and could now go.”²¹⁵

The agents were “growth coalitions,” often consisting of younger businessmen – bankers, developers, construction corporations, realtors, retailers. But they were not just that, because if they had been they probably would have failed; they also included liberal-technocratic mayors (Lee in New Haven, Daley in Chicago) and they were supported by labor councils, construction trade councils, good government groups, professional planners, and others, even the public housing lobby.²¹⁶ And they also involved a small but powerful new group of professional urban renewal executives: Robert Moses in New York, Ed Logue in New Haven, Boston, and New York, Justin Herman in San Francisco.²¹⁷ As Catherine Bauer Wurster said, “seldom had such a diverse group of would-be angels tried to dance on the same small pin.”²¹⁸

As a result, of course, the coalition pulled different ways; and as it did, it often pulled apart. One group, the developers and their allies, wanted large-scale redevelopment in the interests of established downtown firms – but also to attract outside business, which could bring them into conflict with local interests. They also wanted to do so, if possible, through administrative arrangements that bypassed local interests. But increasingly, through the 1950s and especially the 1960s, they fell foul of other groups: local residents conserving and defending their neighborhoods, small businesses threatened by clearance, who could form anti-renewal coalitions.²¹⁹ That story replicated itself in city after American city.

New York was special; but, under Robert Moses, New York always was. In his nearly 50 years of multiple office, he became indisputably “America’s greatest builder,” responsible for public works which, in terms of 1968 dollars, totalled $27 billion.²²⁰ He built parkways, bridges, tunnels, expressways. And, when the urban renewal spigot began to flow, he built public housing. From 1949 to 1957, New York City spent $267 million on urban renewal; all other cities in the United States spent $133 million. When he resigned from the urban-renewal post, in 1960, he had built more, in terms of completed apartments, than all the rest put together.²²¹ He did it, as he had done all the others before, by a unique combination of two qualities which he had learned in very early professional life: his rooted belief in top-down planning by the incorruptible, public-spirited civil servant, as most finely represented by the British system which he so much admired; and his bitter early discovery that, in the American urban jungle at least, political connections also mattered.²²² From these two foundations he built a system of power, influence, and patronage that made him almost impregnable – finally to mayors, to governors, even to presidents:²²³ “Honest graft, endorsements, campaign contributions, Robert Moses provided the machine with everything it needed. And as a result, he bent the machine to his ends, mobilized its power and influence behind his plans.”²²⁴

During World War Two Moses effectively planned Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life’s mammoth East Side project which cleared 11,000 working-class tenants to house 8,756 middle-class families; he could not have succeeded without left-wing support in wartime conditions.²²⁵ Predictably, in 1946, new mayor William O’Dwyer named Moses New York City Construction Coordinator.²²⁶ By January 1945, Moses had already drawn up a huge program of state-funded housing projects, almost all based on a refusal to build public housing on vacant land, but instead to concentrate it on the Lower East Side, in East Harlem, and in Brooklyn near the Navy Yard and in Brownsville. In his mind, these were already classified by race: he spoke of “the Bronx colored project.”²²⁷

Title I of the 1949 Housing Act gave him his chance, and the amazing fact was that “the city that led the nation in racial decency would lead it in the final art of ‘Negro removal’”:²²⁸ within a decade, the city leveled huge areas of Manhattan and the Bronx to build 17 Title I projects, replaced 100,000 low-income people, nearly 40% of them black and Hispanic, replacing them by middle-income professionals, as well as displacing at least 5,000 businesses, mainly mom-and-pop affairs.²²⁹ But Moses was only following a city tradition of abandoning municipal responsibility for tenant relocation, as Title I had stipulated, for in New York even liberals vied for public subsidies for private developers: they agreed that the working classes had no special place in the inner city. Everyone backed him – even Tugwell, who called him “the second or third best thing that ever happened to it (New York).”²³⁰

Ironically, he finally went too far, and that proved his undoing: “Democracy had not solved the problem of building large-scale public works, so Moses solved it by ignoring democracy.”²³¹ True, as throughout his life he took care to build a broad and diverse coalition of interest groups: hospitals and universities in search of land, cultural and business promotion groups, even trade unions interested in cooperative housing, and the always-supportive New York Times.²³² He scorned rehabilitation: “They think we should … fix up with rubber bands, Scotch tape and violins.”²³³

But finally, small groups of citizens began to protest; Moses tried to ride roughshod over them but found that he could not. Among them was a housewife and architectural journalist in West Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs, who mobilized local opinion after she found that he planned to tear her neighborhood down.²³⁴ She won, and the experience proved the trigger for one of the most influential books in twentieth-century planning history: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. By then, Moses was no longer in charge of renewal; and in 1968, stripped of the last of his offices at the age of 79, Robert Moses was the Master Builder no more.²³⁵

New Haven, the other city that first and most brilliantly exploited the new powers, provides another classic illustration: its mayor, Richard Lee, came from the Catholic working class of the city, but could move easily at different levels of society including the Yale establishment; he was extremely sensitive to shifts in opinion, and was a master of public relations.²³⁶ He formed a close team with Edward C. Logue, his Development Administrator, and Maurice Rotival, his Redevelopment Director, in which it was “only a slight oversimplification to say that it was the mayor’s task to get the support of the major political interests in the city, the Development Administrator’s to insure the participation of developers, and the Redevelopment Director’s to win the consent of the Federal agencies”:²³⁷ Lee’s coalition embraced Democrat leaders, Republican business, Yale administration and faculty, ethnic groups, and trade unions; the Citizens’ Action Committee, a deliberate creation by Lee, “virtually decapitated the opposition.”²³⁸ The result was the demolition of a major – an increasingly black – slum area to build downtown offices, aided by the use of federal highway funds to build a downtown distributor.²³⁹

Pittsburgh, another pioneer – even before 1949, in fact – is the same kind of story. After decades of moribund local leadership, a new business elite determined that the city must take action to prevent economic collapse. As early as 1943 it set up an Allegheny Conference on Regional Development to build a coalition to revitalize the downtown area. The result was an unlikely alliance between a Republican group of corporate leaders and a Democratic political boss. An Urban Renewal Authority was set up in 1946. It was given unprecedented powers – challenged but established as constitutional – to condemn property for city-planning purposes. Renaissance I, as it came to be called, was fundamentally a private development operation, with the public sector playing a facilitatory role, and with close, overlapping membership of the main agencies: the Allegheny Conference, the Urban Renewal Authority, the Planning Commission. Over the next two decades the plans rebuilt more than a quarter of the so-called Golden Triangle, displacing at least 5,400 low-income, principally black, families, and replacing them principally by offices which have made the whole area a 9-to-5 commuter zone.²⁴⁰

San Francisco was yet another classic case. The argument for urban renewal came from organized business through the Bay Area Council, “a private regional government,” of 1944, and the Blyth–Zellerbach Committee of 1956. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency of 1948, a year before the 1949 Act, neatly anticipated its powers; in 1958, it was reshaped under Blyth–Zellerbach impetus. Justin Herman, “St Justin” to the downtown business group, the “White Devil” to the low-income residents of the Western Addition and the South of Market areas next door, became its director in 1959. He stood for the sanitation of these areas, meaning the removal of their inhabitants. As one business supporter eloquently put it, “You certainly can’t expect us to erect a 50 million dollar building in an area where dirty old men will be going around exposing themselves to our secretaries.”²⁴¹

In fact, Chester Hartman argues, the “skid row” label was a carefully cultivated image to justify renewal. Though the area south of Market Street was a zone of residential hotels overwhelmingly occupied by men, most were simply retired or disabled. They organized, and found a leader in an 80-year-old trade unionist, George Woolf. In an epic legal fight he forced the Renewal Agency in 1970 to agree to build low-rent units. Herman, incensed, called the tenants’ lawyer “a clever, well-financed, able, ambulance-chasing lawyer.” A year later, he died of a heart attack.

Further lawsuits came and went during the following decade. While that happened, Urban Renewal funds were replaced by Community Development Block Grants, which spread funding across the city; the Renewal Agency lost its independent funding, and the Mayor’s Office took greater control. But meanwhile, the office-building boom boomed ever more loudly. By the late 1980s, after three decades of confrontation, the South of Market redevelopment was nearing completion. The citizens of San Francisco, by now highly organized to protect their neighborhoods, belatedly passed a stringent measure to restrict further office growth anywhere in their city.²⁴²

The astonishing feature of these coalitions in those years, in fact, is just how successful they were in pushing through policies that were clearly against the interests of voters. Boston’s West End, an old-established and extremely well-knit Italian community – an urban village, in Herbert Gans’s words – was a classic instance. On the advice of mortgage bankers, the clearance plans were extended to include non-blighted areas. The general population thought the whole area was a slum because the press told it so. The locals believed that it would never happen. The developers wanted the land for high-income housing, and the city went along.²⁴³ Later, Fried found that the West Enders, particularly the traditional working class among them, had been profoundly affected by the experience, rather as if a loved one had died.²⁴⁴

But all good things come to an end. By the mid-1960s, the criticism of urban renewal had become deafening. Charles Abrams pointed out that many of the cleared areas – Washington Square South in New York City, Bunker Hill in Los Angeles, Diamond Heights in San Francisco – were, like the West End, “no slum at all in the real estate sense”: they were so because officials said so.²⁴⁵ Martin Anderson calculated that to the end of 1965 renewal would evict one million people, most of whom paid very low rents; three-quarters of these had relocated themselves, nine in ten of them to substandard dwellings at higher rents. Overall, to March 1961 the program had destroyed four times as many units as had been built; typically, land was left vacant, since the average scheme took 12 years to complete. Nearly 40% of the new construction was not for housing; and of the replacement housing units, most were privately built high-rise apartments commanding high rents.²⁴⁶ Thus, though 85% of all areas certified for assistance in the Act’s first 10 years were residential before redevelopment, only 50% were so afterwards.²⁴⁷ Or, as Scott Greer put it, “At a cost of more than three million dollars the Urban Renewal Agency (URA) has succeeded in materially reducing the supply of low-cost housing in American cities.”²⁴⁸ Chester Hartman concluded that, perversely, the effect of the program had been to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.²⁴⁹ Gans neatly spelt out the absurdity of it all:

Suppose that the government decided that jalopies were a menace to public safety and a blight on the beauty of the highways, and therefore took them away from their drivers. Suppose, then, that to replenish the supply of automobiles, it gave these drivers a hundred dollars each to buy a good used car and also made special grants to General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to lower the cost – though not necessarily the price – of Cadillacs, Lincolns and Imperials by a few hundred dollars. Absurd as this may sound, change the jalopies to slum housing, and I have described, with only slight poetic license, the first fifteen years of a federal program called urban renewal.²⁵⁰

How could this have happened? Several critics underlined the fact that the cynical explanation was not necessarily the right one; though some had profited hugely, “There is something that one can only call civic patriotism” which “blends nicely with financial interests.” In the growth coalition, many members had pure motives: “mayors concerned with the central city tax base, civic leaders with a patriotic desire to ‘make our city center beautiful’, businessmen with deep commitments to downtown real estate, and those who believe that government should innovate in the public interest” had together produced “a program that rewards the strong and punishes the weak.”²⁵¹ The program could only be implemented locally; and locally, most cities wanted the revival of downtown and the return of the middle class from the suburbs.²⁵²

Some of the worst excesses of urban renewal were later avoided, true: more areas were rebuilt for housing, there was more low-rent housing, more blacks were rehoused.²⁵³ And clearly, since rehousing was one of the last things that the program actually achieved in its first 15 years of life, most of the ills of American urban renewal could not be laid at Corbusier’s door. But the Corbusian and the urban renewal prescriptions did share what Martin Anderson graphically called the Federal Bulldozer approach. What emerges from the American critiques is that it might actually have been better to leave the poor alone. Greer quotes a local official: “So what are we saying? The widow either has to live on $2 a month or she has to have substandard housing by those standards. There’s real need for what we call secondary housing, and if we condemned it we’d wipe out the housing the people could afford.”²⁵⁴ Add to this the psychic costs of breaking up old-established neighborhoods, and the case becomes even stronger.

Counter-Attack: Jacobs and Newman

The failure of American urban renewal, and the increasing doubts about its British equivalent, help explain the colossal impact in both countries of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in America in 1961, which rapidly became one of the most influential books in the short history of city planning. It was one of those classic cases of the right message at the right time. Jacobs hit out at both the great orthodoxies on which city planning had based itself in its first half-century of life. The garden-city movement was attacked on the ground that its “prescription for saving the city was to do the city in,” by defining “wholesome housing in terms only of suburban physical qualities and small-town social qualities”; for good measure, it “conceived of planning also as essentially paternalistic, if not authoritarian.”²⁵⁵ The Corbusians were vilified for egotism: “No matter how vulgarized or clumsy the design, how dreary and useless the open space, how dull the close-up view, an imitation of Le Corbusier shouts ‘Look what I made!’ Like a great, visible ego it tells of someone’s achievement.”²⁵⁶

The point, she argued, was that there was nothing wrong with high urban densities of people so long as they did not entail overcrowding in buildings: traditional inner-city neighborhoods like New York’s Brooklyn Heights, Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, and San Francisco’s North Beach were all good areas, though densely populated.²⁵⁷ A good urban neighborhood, she argued, actually needed 100 dwellings, equivalent perhaps to 200–300 people, per acre – a high density even for New York, and higher than almost anything in post-1945 London. But it could be achieved by cutting out open space:

To say that cities need high dwelling densities and high net ground coverage, and I am saying they do, is conventionally regarded as lower than taking sides with a man-eating shark.

But things have changed since the days when Ebenezer Howard looked at the slums of London and concluded that to save the people, city life must be abandoned.²⁵⁸

The Jacobs prescription amounted to keeping the inner-city neighborhood more or less as it was before the planners had got their hands on it. It should have mixed functions and therefore land uses, to ensure that people were there for different purposes, on different time-schedules, but using many facilities in common. It must have conventional streets on short blocks. It must mix blocks of different age and condition, including a significant share of old ones. And it must have a dense concentration of people, for whatever purpose they are there, including a dense concentration of residents.²⁵⁹

It sounded good to her overwhelmingly middle-class readers. The irony, as was pointed out 20 years later, was that the result was the yuppification of the city:

Urbanism proved as susceptible as modernism to having its egalitarian impulses subordinated to the consumer interests of the upper middle class … It took over forty years to go from the first Bauhaus manifesto to the Four Seasons; it took only half that time to go from Jane Jacobs’s apotheosis of her humble corner grocer to his replacement by Bonjour, Croissant and all that implies.²⁶⁰

One middle-class reviewer who was less impressed was Lewis Mumford. He confessed to Osborn that he had held his fire for a year, “But I can’t pretend that I didn’t enjoy giving her an awful walloping on the soft part of her carcass that she had so carelessly exposed.”²⁶¹ This, as Leonard Fishman argues, is odd: both shared a vision of freedom, both hated suburban sprawl, but for Jacobs the huge city was the seat of liberation, for him the opposite.²⁶² By this time, Mumford was an old and deeply disillusioned man; he believed that huge corporate forces had captured America and would destroy the urban texture she sought to preserve. He proved wrong, of course, and the gentrification of Greenwich Village was merely the precursor of a process that has subsequently affected every American city. But, oddly, it has happened in parallel with its precise opposite: a process of white middle-class flight and abandonment.²⁶³ And therein lies the paradox of almost every American city at the beginning of the twenty-first century: vibrant downtowns and gracious middle-class enclaves sit next door to war zones, as if occupying two entirely different cities in different countries, almost different planets. Which, in a terrible sense, they do.

This says something important about Jacobs’s thinking. Opposed to any kind of preconceived planning, it was based on a core belief that cities like New York were

self-organizing. The most properly designed place cannot compete. Everything is provided which is the worst thing we can provide. There’s a joke that the father of an old friend used to tell, about a teacher who warns children, “In Hell there will be wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth”. “What if you don’t have teeth?” one of the children asks. “Then teeth will be provided”, he says sternly. That’s it – the spirit of the designed city. Teeth Will Be Provided for You.²⁶⁴

The problem with this is that it cannot guarantee the development of good neighborhoods. In fact, it is likely that they would never happen, because citizen opposition would stop them; they prefer things to stay as they are.²⁶⁵ “Were someone to propose a Beacon Hill, a Georgetown, a South End in Boston, or a Nob Hill in San Francisco it would never get off the ground.”²⁶⁶ So the good places will remain unchangeably good, and likewise with the bad ones. The Jacobs philosophy is ultimately the quintessence of laissez-faire.

The Dynamiting of Pruitt–Igoe

Yet, whatever the later implications, urbanism spelt doom for the Federal Bulldozer. But it took more than just that. Though by British standards America had built all-too-little public housing, still it had built some. And some of the biggest and most influential cities had followed a Corbusian model: St Louis, Chicago, Newark, among others. By the end of the 1970s, they were contemplating their abandonment. Many were 30 or 40% vacant. The classic case was Pruitt–Igoe, an award-winning 1955 project in St Louis, which achieved notoriety by being blown up 17 years after it was built. That day, the demolition preserved for posterity on film, it became an instant symbol of all that was perceived as wrong with urban renewal, not merely in the United States but in the world at large.

When the Captain W. O. Pruitt Homes and the William L. Igoe Apartments were unveiled in 1950, the experimental high-rise design by the distinguished architect Minoru Yamasaki brought together a cluster of design features advocated by modern architects: slab and rowhouse buildings of various heights; wide access-gallery corridors in the apartment slabs meant to function as play areas, porches, laundry drying areas, duplex units with skip-stop elevators, and a river of open space winding through the site, a concept proposed by Harland Bartholomew. The Architectural Forum lauded it as the “best high apartment” of 1951. But then, under the 1949 Federal Housing Act, the minimum standards were made maximum, and federal officials insisted all buildings were made a uniform 11 stories.²⁶⁷ The 33 identical blocks, containing over 2,800 apartments, were completed in 1955–6. They were on a bare site open to transient traffic. To keep within cost limits, huge and arbitrary cuts were made during construction. Space inside the apartments, especially for the large families that came to occupy many of them, “was pared to the bone and beyond to the marrow.”²⁶⁸ Locks and doorknobs broke on first use, sometimes before occupancy. Window panes blew out. One lift failed on opening day. “On the day they were completed, the buildings in Pruitt and Igoe were little more than steel and concrete warrens, poorly designed, badly equipped, inadequate in size, badly located, unventilated, and virtually impossible to maintain.”²⁶⁹ That would have been bad enough. But in addition, the tenants who came were not the ones for whom the blocks had been designed. The design, like that of most public housing down to the 1950s, was for the deserving poor. Most heads of households were employed males. St Louis in 1951 was a segregated city: Pruitt was all-black, but after public housing was desegregated by decision of the Supreme Court, the authority tried to integrate Igoe. To no avail: whites left, and blacks – including many welfare-dependent, female-headed families – moved in. By 1965, more than two-thirds of the inhabitants were minors, 70% of them under 12; there were two and a half times as many women as men; women headed 62% of the families; 38% contained no employed person, and in only 45% was employment the sole source of income.²⁷⁰

Rapidly, the development became a byword for disaster. Occupancy rates in Pruitt, 95% in 1956, fell to 81% six years later and to 72% in 1965; Igoe started at less than 70% and stayed at that level. The development began to deteriorate: pipes burst, there was a gas explosion. By 1966, resident poverty-program workers recorded the scene:

Glass, rubble and debris litter the streets, the accumulation is astonishing … abandoned automobiles have been left in parking areas; glass is omnipresent; tin cans are strewn throughout, paper has been rained on and stuck in the cracked, hardened mud. Pruitt–Igoe from without looks like a disaster area. Broken windows are apparent in every building. Street lights are inoperative … As the visitor nears the entrance to a building, the filth and debris intensify. Abandoned rooms under the building are receptacles for all matter of waste. Mice, roaches, and other vermin thrive in these open areas …

The infamous skip-stop elevator is a revelation even for those considering themselves prepared for anything. Paint has peeled from the elevator walls. The stench of urine is overwhelming; ventilation in the elevators is nonexistent … When the visitor emerges from the dark, stench-filled elevator on to one of the building’s gallery floors, he enters a grey concrete caricature of an insane asylum. Institutional grey walls give way to institutional grey floors. Rusty institutional-type screens cover windows in which no glass exists. Radiators once used to heat these public galleries have been, in many buildings, stripped from the walls. Incinerators, too small to accommodate the quantity to [sic] refuse placed into them, have spilled over – trash and garbage are heaped on the floors. Lightbulbs and fixtures are out; bare hot wire often dangles from malfunctioning light sockets.²⁷¹

In 1969, there was a nine-month rent strike, the longest in the history of American public housing. At one point, 28 of the 34 elevators were inoperative. By 1970, the project was 65% unoccupied. In 1972, accepting the inevitable, the authority blew it up.

The question, asked by a whole series of academic observers, is how it happened: in just a decade, a design showpiece had become one of the worst urban slums in the United States. And there were as many explanations as observers.

The first culprit, clearly, was the design. As Oscar Newman put it in a celebrated analysis,

the architect was concerned with each building as a complete, separate, and formal entity, exclusive of any consideration of the functional use of grounds or the relationship of a building to the ground area it might share with other buildings. It is almost as if the architect assumed the role of a sculptor and saw the grounds of the project as nothing more than a surface on which he was endeavoring to arrange a whole series of vertical elements into a compositionally pleasing whole.²⁷²

Or, as Jacobs would have said, it represented an architect’s ego-trip. Specifically, Pruitt–Igoe was designed – as were many similar Corbusian layouts in American public housing of the early 1950s – on the basis of a superblock of between four and twelve ordinary street blocks of the kind Jane Jacobs commended, within which the high-rise blocks – in the Pruitt–Igoe case, 11-story slabs at an average 50 units to the acre – were freely positioned in the landscape, invariably with entry from the grounds, not from the street.²⁷³ This feature, plus the long high-level access decks, created the maximum possible area of what Newman, in a memorable phrase, called indefensible space: the decks, shown by the architect in his 1951 drawing as full of children, toys, and (white) mothers, soon became vandalized and feared.²⁷⁴

The problem, as other observers found, was compounded by the rules of financial management imposed by Washington. Since rents must cover maintenance, and tenants could not pay the rents, the city cut maintenance. And even then tenants could not pay. In 1969, when a quarter of families were paying more than 50% of their incomes for rent, they went on strike.²⁷⁵ And the irony was that this non-policy of non-maintenance was being applied to apartments that had been extremely expensive to build: at $20,000 each in 1967 values, they were only a little cheaper to build than top-grade luxury apartments.²⁷⁶

The root of the problem, Newman found on deeper analysis, was the failure in architectural education to stress the need to learn how well or badly existing buildings worked, and then to improve the designs; “the full extent of this tragedy is best appreciated when we realize that the most recognized of architects are often those who turn out the most dramatic failures.”²⁷⁷ And this, in turn, was because there had been two camps in modern architecture, the “social methodologists” and the “style metaphysicians,” but the United States had imported only the second, Corbusian, tradition.²⁷⁸ This conclusion is supported by the finding that conventional low-rise developments, with similar mixes of tenants, had no such problems.²⁷⁹

But Newman was at pains to point out that design was not the only, or even the necessary, culprit. The worst deterioration occurred only after the Department of Housing and Urban Development changed its rules to admit problem families, many from rural backgrounds, into public housing, in 1965: “In the intervening seven years, the high-rise buildings to which they were admitted have been undergoing systematic decimation”;²⁸⁰ not only Pruitt–Igoe, but other similar blocks (Rosen Apartments in Philadelphia, Columbus Homes in Newark) were likewise abandoned. The root cause was that very poor welfare families, with large numbers of children, with a deep fatalism about the power to influence their environment, could not cope with this kind of building, nor it with them. As one sociologist-observer, Lee Rainwater, observed, the ideals and aspirations of Pruitt–Igoeans were similar to those of other people, but they could not realize them:

The realization of these Pruitt–Igoe ideals would produce a life hardly distinguishable from other working-class life, white or black. And it seems likely that the resources necessary to maintain such a family life would require the stability and level of income characteristic of the upper working class, a level of income anywhere from 50 to more than 100 per cent higher than is available to most families in Pruitt–Igoe.²⁸¹

Middle- and upper-income families, with a proportion of families with children that did not exceed 50%, and with superintendents and at least one parent supervising, could live comfortably in such environments, but “while a middle-class family will not perform too differently in one building type versus another, the performance of a welfare family proves to be greatly influenced by the physical environment”; for them, “the high-rise apartment building is to be strictly avoided.”²⁸² Colin Ward’s statement, exactly.

There were two places in the world, from the 1960s onward, where the city of towers was realized in its ultimate purity. Both Singapore and Hong Kong had good reason: they were island or peninsular city states, with rapidly growing populations and an acute shortage of available land. But there was another odd similarity, noticed by Manuel Castells, that “one of the most striking paradoxes of urban policy in the world, the two market economies with the highest rates of growth in the last twenty-five years are also those with the largest public housing programs in the capitalist world, in terms of the proportion of the population directly housed by the government.”²⁸³ Between 1945 and 1969, Hong Kong built 1.4 million public housing units;²⁸⁴ Singapore built 15 new towns and 86% of the population live in public-sector housing.²⁸⁵ In this process, as Robert Home has shown, the public were not involved. Oddly, in Singapore a post-colonial state continued the paternalist policies of the colonial state it replaced. The lively public spaces of the old colonial city were replaced by public housing and planned public spaces; hawkers and market-stall traders were relocated to purpose-built structures.²⁸⁶ Within one generation, Singaporeans found themselves living in a perfect realization of CIAM mass housing,²⁸⁷ produced according to an abstract and hugely rational design process, but one lacking any data on the way people had behaved in the old Singapore. The new planned public spaces tended to be hierarchical by size and evenly distributed in location.²⁸⁸

The Corbusian Legacy

The irony then was that the Corbusian city of towers was perfectly satisfactory for the middle-class inhabitants whom he had imagined living their gracious, elegant, cosmopolitan lives in La Ville Contemporaine. It might even work for the solid, tough, traditional tenement-dwellers of Glasgow, for whom the transition from a Gorbals rear-end slum to the twentieth floor seemed like the ascent to paradise. But, for a welfare mother born in a Georgia shack and dumped in St Louis or Detroit with a brood of uncontrollable children, it proved an urban disaster of the first magnitude. The sin of Corbusier and the Corbusians thus lay not in their designs, but in the mindless arrogance whereby they were imposed on people who could not take them and could never, given a modicum of thought, ever have been expected to take them.

The final irony is that, in cities all over the world, this was condemned as the failure of “planning.” Planning, in the common-or-garden sense, means an orderly scheme of action to achieve stated objectives in the light of known constraints. Planning is just what this was not. But, as Jon Lang has pointed out, it does belong to a genre of urban design: as opposed to an empiricist paradigm, which seeks to work from experience of precedents that have worked well, this is a rationalist paradigm, built on abstract ideas.²⁸⁹ Unfortunately, these ideas were tested on human guinea-pigs; and therein lies a terrible object lesson for future generations of planners.