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Planners remade cities to fit models
Planners and their models
Jane Jacobs chronicled this in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The planners she wrote about came up with their models without paying any attention to how cities actually work. Then they tried to fit the cities into the model.
Maps and reality
A model on paper makes a tidy master plan possible, even for what Jacobs called the statistical city, and people take such plans seriously. Jacobs observed that we are accustomed to believing that maps and reality are not necessarily related, or that if they are not, we can make them so by altering reality.
Faith in the model
That is the problem with maps influencing territories: faith in the model starts to drive the decisions made in the territory. The book is, in part, a cautionary tale about what happens when people try to fit complexity into the simplification.
Why did planners favor tidy master plans?
Early twentieth-century modernist planners wanted cities organized by function, with housing, work, and traffic kept in separate zones. The Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier gave the idea its most famous form in his proposals for towers set in open parkland. In the United States, the Housing Act of 1949 paid for cities to clear neighborhoods officially labeled slums and rebuild them to plan. That program became known as urban renewal.
What did Jacobs see on real sidewalks?
Jacobs lived in Greenwich Village in New York and wrote from watching her own street. She argued that busy sidewalks, short blocks, and a mix of homes, shops, and offices keep a neighborhood safe and alive. She described the constant watching by residents and shopkeepers as eyes on the street. The book was published in 1961.
How did urban renewal change American neighborhoods?
Cities cleared whole districts under the program and replaced them with highways, office blocks, and public housing towers. The Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis, which opened in the mid-1950s, was demolished starting in 1972. Its demolition is often cited as a turning point in how planners viewed large modernist projects.
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