Today, people thinking about the future of the city worry about
sprawl. In the early 20th century the city seemed headed in
a different direction, towards giant cities of skyscrapers
remember that skyscrapers were not cheaper,
they caught on because they had the added benefit of
advertising
and they "looked the part": new and shiny
the key concern about safety for skyscrapers
was elevator safety
skyscrapers were initially built for offices,
though more recently more have been residential (graph to the
right is skyscrapers built in the United States)
This is a case of a technological trend that
changed direction. Why?
Two competing visions of the future of the
city--the titan city or sprawl
Titan city=cities would get taller and denser and this would
become the way the majority of
people lived
Between 1870 and 1920 New York City expanded from less than a
million to 5 1/2 million population and from 22 to almost 300
square miles. Density also increased in the center city with
the invention of the elevator and steel frame construction.
People began to imagine how far the skyscraper might go King
Gillette, who started the first company to make disposable
razor blades, also wrote a book
published in 1894 about how the United States should be
organized. His ideas:
forget capitalism, which is full of wasteful competition,
and plan everything out rationally
then people can focus on research and invention and
progress can speed up
cooperation should be the basis of society, selfishness
would be eliminated
everyone would live in one gigantic city and eat in
common dining halls--think how inefficient single family homes
are
located near Niagara Falls for plentiful electricity
this is just one little-known wild idea, but it is a good
example of how people were thinking about cities
If this seems ridiculous consider the proposal that the best thing
we could do for the environment would be to all live in cities,
and let the rest of the land go back to wilderness (see the island
civilization scenario of Roderick
Nash)
The vision of the future in which we would live in giant cities
interconnected by skyways was common in the early 20th
century, longer in science fiction: it became the focus of utopian
dreams but it was also what you would predict if trends of the
time continued
pictures of future cities usually showed many levels of
highways or walkways connecting the buildings
an architectural movement called futurism
starting in 1909 sought to reject the ideas of the past and
embrace technology
predictions of the future were for denser and denser
cities, but then expectations for the future changed
either H. G. Wells, "Things to Come," or Fritz Lang's
"Metropolis" express modernist ideas. Things
to Come ending
the city in the 1927 film Metropolis
Why didn't we get the titan city future?
the 1927 movie "Metropolis,"
set
in
the
year
2026,
showed
that
the
dream of the future was ignoring the lower depths--the
machines and workers making the city possible
the luxurious city in the air is made possible by people
working in horrible conditions below it
However, in Gillette's metropolis the sidewalks are to be
transparent so the workers below are visible, not forgotten
the giant city became a threatening image--think Blade
Runner
People came to see the giant
city as threatening, cities looked for ways to change that
image
tall buildings needed a new architectural style to make
them less threatening
early ones were gothic, but that became associated with
the threatening city
art deco provided a lighter, friendlier style, as in
the Chrysler building to the right
New York and other cities passed laws requiring
skyscrapers to be set
back so they didn't shade the street too much
last 20 or 30 years cities have tried to make the city
less threatening by policing
but we are slowly getting cities
interconnected with skyways, for example in Houston and Minneapolis
these do result in less threatening cities because they
are clean and low crime
Some architects and dreamers continued to propose unified
cities
The Jetsons
cartoon is a classic example of visions of a city of the
future
In 1984 Walt Disney proposed a giant
city with floating farms
Victory
City proposal: "Boasting no crime, no pollution, and no
over-crowding, Victory City is a veritable utopia for those
who've grown weary of trying to find solutions to today's
urban problems."
disadvantages of cities: crime, pollution, cramped, busy,
crowded, too many people, dirty, expensive
some of these can be fixed by better design
but we also resist living in closer proximity, less
space, less individuality
would you trade closer proximity for being able to walk
to work/school/etc.?
would you want to live in
smaller houses/apartments?
Buckminster Fuller's 1960's
proposal for a floating Triton
City:
Most fundamentally, what happened to the titan city idea
is that the automobile led us in the opposite direction
the great depression made skyscrapers
less practical--skyscrapers are a more expensive way of
building even when land is expensive (the idea that they
became economical when city land became expensive enough is a
myth--they are more expensive but companies build them anyway
as a form of advertising)
Great Depression:
slogan of dept of agriculture: "To make two blades of
grass grow where one had grown before." But the
problem of the Great Depression was overproduction
this led to fears that technology would take away jobs
(or make us slaves to machines) and lead to overproduction
attitudes towards technology were gradually becoming
more fearful
particularly after World War II, Americans moved out of
cities into suburbs, taking advantage of the mobility made
possible by the automobile
the parents of what became the baby boom wanted a safe
place to raise children, not the excitement of urban life
suburbs
Between 1870 and 1920 New York City expanded
from less than a million to 5 1/2 million population and from
22 to almost 300 square miles. Density also increased in
the center city with the invention of the elevator and steel
frame construction.
Urban services--particularly handling garbage
and sewage and providing water--had a hard time keeping
up. The first suburban explosion resulted from
streetcars.
This let to a major reform movement around the
turn of the century--the Progressives invented urban
planning. By about 1910 they had the ideas of a central
business district, zoning, a system of parks and parkways, and
planning roads to allow circulation--including the first
limited access highways. These plans were very
successful--the value of central property went up and
therefore the tax base.
What did middle class people want?--safety,
uniformity, yards, etc.
The automobile corresponded with American
values on independence and privacy.
To get this people were willing to move
further and further out. In the 1920s Los Angeles
opened 3200 subdivisions.
After WWII suburbs were built in very
large numbers
automobiles were more widespread
reaction to war
new construction methods allowed houses
to be built more cheaply
Planned towns--
Levittowns (first in 1949). Only in 1960s were
proposals for cluster zoning to leave open space
successful.
The attached garage replaced the front
porch, and large lots allowed space-wasting one story
ranch houses.
Suburbs
were very segregated, not just by race but by income level
and often ethnicity (red-lining), also further separated
the world of men and women.
"The project of suburbia is the
greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.
America has squandered its wealth in a living arrangement that
has no future." -James Howard Kunstler, The End of Suburbia
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would you want to live in
smaller houses/apartments?
