Benz Motor-Wagen 1886
A century later
The city 19th century
A century later
How did this happen?
Benz Motor-Wagen 1886
A century later
The city 19th century
A century later
How did this happen?
The menace -- the private automobile took over -- our cities, lives... wiped out all memories of how things used to be... We're all doomed... but cheap nostalgia akin to a cheap shot of whiskey on a Monday morning will not save us...
But seriously, how "did it happen"? It's called progress, my friend, progress!
How did it happen?
Watch Roger Rabbit (bet you didn't realize there was planning history in the movie)
Firestone and other oil, tire and auto interests colluded to close down trolly and bus lines so Americans would be more dependant on autos. It was not consumer choice, but the massive closing of trolly lines. The companies WERE charged with collusion under anti-trust laws, but the damage was already done.
I liked the movie, and I share your suspsicion of big business, but I think there is another very important lesson in what happened with GM and all those companies buying up trolley lines. They bought PRIVATE companies. The publicly owned transportation systems survived (though a few public systems sold out too). This is a big argument against private ownership of mass transit - they are vulnerable to nasty take overs not in the public interest.Originally posted by CosmicMojo
“One great mistake of the modernist era is to think that, because we were able to use internal combustion engine, we were remade as a new species. But humans still walk the same distance in 10 minutes, look out windows, and open doors. Tradition is about understanding how human scale works with a particular culture and ecology. Tradition is a starting place, and you want to evolve from there.”
- Hank Dittmar, in an interview Carolyn Kelly (1/06)
How did it happen?
The massive increases in industrialization around 1900, led to a spreading of middle class wealth across a wider segment of the population (those large corporations became defacto bureaucracies, so you need a lot of middle income workers to push paper). Those middle income workers had been fed the, let’s say, myth that owning your own single family (or two family) house with a little bit of yard was the American ideal. Luckily, some ingenious land developers on the periphery of the central cities created the electrified streetcar which would allow workers to live in the developers’ new bungalow neighborhoods and still be able to get to their jobs in the factory or office building in the same time it used to take them to walk to work from their closer-in tenement apartment house.
We hit the post-WWI period and North America goes crazy producing and supply products to ourselves and around the world. Well, the factories and office buildings expanded almost exponentially requiring more workers and sending more money in the pockets of the middle income workers. Couple this with the investing frenzy of the stock market, where investors and those providing the investments were making large sums of paper money. This fits nicely with credit/installment payments for products becoming widespread throughout the retailing industry. People could now buy the new ringer washer and Model T on an installment basis, thereby allowing middle income workers (whose absolute numbers increase steadily) to attain a level of affluence not seen a generation earlier.
All these shoppers and workers owning cars and ringer washers still shopped in the central downtown, but since that area was originally built on a pedestrian/horse and buggy scale, the cars were an ill fit. Since many business/property owners had loads of money due to the rip roaring economy, some started buying the smaller/in-between buildings, demolishing them, and building either the new fangled parking garage, or simply a surface parking lot. This created a market for cars and showed the office workers/shoppers that the business/property owners cared.
So that occurred until 1929, then a minor hiccup in stock market trading that October sent the market and consequently the economy into a tail spin. All that paper wealth vanished and banks closed, and people lost their homes and cars. It’s hard going for a coupe years, until a recently elected President gets legislation approved that would prop the economy and start kicking it into gear again. People start working (though at less than before, but some money is better than none), and the economy starts crawling again.
Well, during this period, some well meaning elected officials in Euclid, Ohio decided they weren’t pleased with the history of industrial/commercial development encroaching into existing residential areas. So, they devise a method of separating different types of “uses” from each other in order to control and preserve their way of life. Understandably, the business owners and property owners weren’t happy with this so they sue. It goes to the US Supreme Court and the justices determine that “zoning” is a legitimate use of municipal police power. Government officials across the country go ‘yeah’ and start enacting their own forms of this new government tool ‘zoning’.
Everything is going ok in the country, thought he economy is still slowly reviving. Then a bunch of crazies in Europe and Asia start invading their neighborhoods and starting another world war. The US gets drawn into this one too (they didn’t realize our country was a sleeping lion) and we send millions of our citizens to Europe, Africa, Asia, and Pacific. Well, we need to supply all those citizen-soldiers and allies, so we turn the entire economy into one giant production factory, at the same time also severely limiting what people could spend their newly earned incomes on. The war lasts four years and since all the battling occurs at least half a world away, our cities are not bombed into oblivion.
We win the war and half the world is in tatters. We are perfectly intact and the only competitors in the world marketplace (Europe) have been severely crippled. Since we are gracious winners, we work with the damaged former enemies to rebuild themselves. Well, for at least 20 years, we are the number one economy in the world and our factories and railroads and ports are going crazy to supply the world and ourselves with everything we were deprived during the preceding 20 years.
With a giant under-supply of housing for everyone in the central cities and existing streetcar suburbs (those streetcars are soon to go), we need to build houses and (if we have to) apartments. But the existing financing mechanisms are not designed to finance this, they are too risk averse. So the Federal Government decides to create some government sponsored organizations to hedge the financier’s risks. First you have federally insured loans for veterans, then we create a whole corporation that will relieve that financier’s of the burden of holding loans for 30 years and at the same time turn the large number of acquired loans into a marketable commodity for investment.
This financing occurs unabated for years. In addition to the federally insured loans, the government also changed the deprecation time frames for taxing purposes to encourage development. This allowed developers to create larger and larger commercial developments that could be depreciated almost instantaneously. Creating a desirable method for investing and creating wealth from questionably solvent developments.
Due to a specific quirk in the cultural mentality of North Americans, most of the new development allowed consumers to happily regain their single family house they had before 1929. In addition, even more people then pre-1929 numbers were able to attain that single-family house because the scale and method of house production had been refined to such a degree that in some developments a house was being complete a day, and production costs were dropping steadily, which allowed developers to sell more for less money, but still make their desire profit margins.
Since a preponderance of this new housing units were single family detached houses, and also the automobile was prevalent, people didn’t worry that their house wasn’t within walking distance to shopping or work, because the car got them there in approximately the same amount of time. Also, the ever present zoning codes even prevented the stores and offices from being within close proximity to their houses. And people didn't really have a problem with it.
Then the social upheavals and steady out-migration of jobs from the central cities had even more people moving to places that had not existed or barely existed prior to 1950. These places loved the single family house, tolerated apartments (as long as they were within their own ‘zone’), and adored the shopping center with its ample surface parking and quickly tax depreciable commercial buildings.
Now the majority of middle income worker enclaves (where they live, work, and/or play) are developed and easily financed with the implicit concept that easy auto access is necessary, which is preceieved as immutable today.
Or more succinctly, auto use has become an end, rather than a means.
Plus, walking is still the most versatile form of human transport. When was the last time you saw someone get to the peak of Mount Everest using a car?
Last edited by mendelman; 03 Mar 2006 at 10:46 AM.
I'm sorry. Is my bias showing?
^ Thanks, mendelman. It was well worth the read. I learned more than a thing or two. It was in depth and yet concise.
Zoning began in Euclid, Ohio. Who knew?
The decline of transit, the interstate highway system, blockbusting and racial segregation are important factors of the story too, but they would easily have doubled the post length and taken a lot more time to write about.
"The current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism." -Lewis Mumford
Thank you.
Hence the reason typical zoning is often referred to as "Euclidean Zoning".Zoning began in Euclid, Ohio. Who knew?
I only alluded to "the decline of transit, the interstate highway system, blockbusting and racial segregation", because I think they are lesser actors than changing financial mechanisms, cultural biases, and a strong, growing economy.The decline of transit, the interstate highway system, blockbusting and racial segregation are important factors of the story too, but they would easily have doubled the post length and taken a lot more time to write about.
I'm sorry. Is my bias showing?
Off-topic:
Didn't start there, but was the first US Supreme Court case upholding the right of communities to use zoning as part of the "police power" of government. NYC's "zoning code" goes back to around 1916 if I recall correctly.
"Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how." -- Edward T. McMahon, The Conservation Fund
Oh, ok. But, being able to call it: "Euclidean Zoning", is so cheeky.
"The current American way of life is founded not just on motor transportation but on the religion of the motorcar, and the sacrifices that people are prepared to make for this religion stand outside the realm of rational criticism." -Lewis Mumford
I don't see progress. I see extreme retrogression, the kind that requires we challenge everything we assume about the way urbanism is done.
So far in this thread the blame has been passed to:
-The oil and car companies
-The trolley lines who sold themselves to the oil and car companies
-Capitalism in general
-Zoning
-Home ownership subsidies
-The interstate
-Racism
Yet no one has placed the blame on the people whose job it actually is to build these cities, the urban planners.
You really do not have a grasp on how things work in the real world, do you. If the planners had ultimate power, the city would look like you think it should. There are many real world forces that drive the way things develop, and to ignore them and blame planners is naive.
“As soon as public service ceases to be the chief business of the citizens, and they would rather serve with their money than with their persons, the State is not far from its fall”
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Planners collect data, perform research and analysis, reach conclusions, and make recommendations. They are not policy- or decision-makers and they don't build anything.
A nuisance may be merely a right thing in the wrong place — like a pig in the parlor instead of the barnyard.
Geez man, back the hell off.
Urban planners, until about the 1970s, were all engineers, or architects, or politicians. You're an urban planner the moment you buy a house/condo/vacant land. Just like the nimbys are urban planners because they wanted to prevent that office complex being within 1 mile of their house, and the farmer is an urban planner when he sold his 400 acres (10 miles from the central city) to a developer to build an auto-oriented shopping center and 300 house subudivision, and the local highway commission that wanted the cars to get the subdivisions and shopping centers as easily as possible, and the school districts that decided it was more cost-effective to consolidate the 3 district middle and high schools into one giant school on the edge of town, and so on, and so on.
There is no such thing as the Urban Planner that oversees and grants the development of everything.
In many places, zoning codes and development patterns get instituted prior to a locality actually having professional staff planners.
Did an urban planner kill your puppy when you were little?
I'm sorry. Is my bias showing?
Maybe that's the problem then. That 19th century city wasn't an accident. Nobody performed research and analysis to arrive at the conclusion that it should be built that way. They just came up with a plan they thought would work, and built it. They were urban planners.
It's very obvious then why the city fell apart in the last century. No one is planning it anymore.
Now, I'm not a big fan of suburbanism, the automobile-oriented City, or heck the ridiculous lengths to which zoning codes go. I prefer cities-and especialyl neighborhoods that probably wouldn't be built today.
BUT.....
I think its all well and good to show idyllic scenes of Parisian boulevards and contrast them with modern auto moonscapes. This is inaccurate and unfair. As Mendlemen implies, there was a degree of "progress" involved over the last few years. We shouldn;t dismiss that, even as it becomes increasingly evident that it will be ecologically and economically unsustainable.
The fact is, few people promenaded in top hats along elegant boulevards. The vast majority of people either lived in rural isolation along muddy lanes, or were jammed in tiny, often squalid urban apartments. We can romanticize the density and swirling humanity of New York tenement life, but that's because most of us are not constantly awaken by squalling babies and the smell of frying onions seeping into our tiny flat. Few of us have to walk two hours in all weather to our factory jobs.
So, when the wealth was created, the private car arrived, and the "wonders" of standardized construction came to create affordable working class suburbia, of course everyone jumped at the chance to live in the new manner.
As wilth all new paradigms, it is only later that we realize the often Faustian bargains made to expedite any big change. .
What are you smoking there, mendleman?
"Euclidean" refers to the Greek mathemetician Euclid, who invented geometry. (Actually he invented Euclidean Geometry, but that got the ball rolling).
I have a hard time believing that Euclid OH was the first town to enact use-based zones, rather than just the first to answer a challenge in the supreme court.
Reality does not conform to your ideology.
http://neighborhoods.chicago.il.us Photographs of Life in the Neighborhoods of Chicago
http://hafd.org/~jordanb/ Pretentious Weblog.
The car isn't so much the enemy of urbanism-after all, most European cities still retain the same vitality as they did a hundred years ago, regardless of the cars. Our planning laws and the American approach to the rights of land ownership as well as *personal preferences* are what killed off the American cities.
I'm more concerned with the disappearance of the American countryside due to sprawl that the car allows. A devastated urban area can always be rebuilt, but a paved over countryside isn't going back to pristine wilderness.
As for planners: planners were largely responsible for the social theories that drove urban planning in the 1950s-1970s, when large sections of traditional urban neighborhoods were torn down to be replaced with superblock highrise public housing. Interestingly enough, in a planning studio in Philadelphia that was in a poor urban neighborhood, we were warned to tell any questioning residents that we were architects, and planners.
Euclid was not the first zoning, but "Euclidian Zoning" is indeed a reference to the style of zoning upheld in the landmark Supreme Court Case.
"Growth is inevitable and desirable, but destruction of community character is not. The question is not whether your part of the world is going to change. The question is how." -- Edward T. McMahon, The Conservation Fund
"It's very obvious then why the city fell apart in the last century. No one is planning it anymore."[/QUOTE]
When did the city fall apart? Did I miss something. Last time I looked we were all living in cities that worked pretty well. If you're looking for a master-planned city where everything is taken into account before a single backhoe digs a hole then maybe China would be a good place to live. Entire cities are designed in foreign countries by consulting firms from scratch (I had a friend who did this last summer in Canada, for example). Then again, there are trade-offs...
"Democracy is the worst possible form of government, except for all the rest" Chamberlin.
CanCon
I've yet to see any progress that so much as lives up to what was accomplished in Belle-Époque Paris. What I've seen has been attempts at preventing the destruction of the remaining capital from the era, and some baby-steps towards reviving the system facing immense bureaucratic inertia. Compared to the technical progress cars have made, it's not even worth mentioning.
Rich folks always get the new stuff first. That benz motor-wagen wasn't exactly cheap in its time. Today you can get a 5000$ Chinese-made Geely car that has almost all of the technical improvements that new model Benz does. Why couldn't we bring boulevard Paris to the poor?The fact is, few people promenaded in top hats along elegant boulevards. The vast majority of people either lived in rural isolation along muddy lanes, or were jammed in tiny, often squalid urban apartments. We can romanticize the density and swirling humanity of New York tenement life, but that's because most of us are not constantly awaken by squalling babies and the smell of frying onions seeping into our tiny flat. Few of us have to walk two hours in all weather to our factory jobs.
And that's where the hole in the theory shows up. Affordable working class suburbia was completely artificial. There was never any such thing. It was a government program from the begginning. And it wasn't later that we knew it was bad. Lewis Mumford was ranting about it back in the 1950s when it was just getting started. Jane Jacobs was ranting about it in the 1960s. We're still ranting about it, and it's still being built.So, when the wealth was created, the private car arrived, and the "wonders" of standardized construction came to create affordable working class suburbia, of course everyone jumped at the chance to live in the new manner.
As wilth all new paradigms, it is only later that we realize the often Faustian bargains made to expedite any big change. .
Why were they allowed to do that? To destroy a city that people loved and replace it with a city that people hated? Who allowed such a thing?
The reality is that there is no such thing as an unplanned city. Cities and their infrastructure don't occur by natural accident. They are purposefully built by people. Someone is planning them, even if they are doing it with absolutely no thought and completely random purposes. We have chaos on our hands because no one knows what objectives should be followed.
The economist Ludwig von Mises published a paradigm-shattering paper in 1920 called "economic calculation in the socialist commonwealth." In it he demonstrated that without the notion of profit and loss it was impossible for a government to determine the value of any project, thus it would make socialist planning impossible and a socialist society would retrogress into chaos. The chaos that the modern city has become is yet another empirical validation of this theory.
... and wouldn't you know, a thread comes up on this forum that completely validates the claim that chaos reigns in urban planning: http://www.cyburbia.org/forums/showthread.php?t=23720
Last edited by jaws; 04 Mar 2006 at 4:09 PM.
That is the antithesis of planning. I'll second NHPlanner's motion. You really don't get it.
I do get it. What you do isn't planning. "Up here, he pull them out of our butts" is just bureaucratic obstruction. Whatever the antithesis of what you do is, it is much closer to actual planning.
I thought the free market was your mantra, Jaws. The car triumphed because people wanted it. Boulevard-life Paris is incompatible with cars (just look to recent efforts at making central Paris car-free, and barring that it is very clear that such a place has little need for mass use of the automobile). To blame urban planners now is very interesting, and especially so when arguing about just what an urban planner is.
Jaws please stop attacking the messenger. Planners are not the one you should be directing your obvious distaste to, we are products of a very complicated system. Planners to provide an essential service in cutting through red tape and apathy (at least I do). We would like nothing more than to see the red tape go away so we can focus on doing the stuff we all went into public service for.
A planner is there to provide information and focus their clients on options that make a good solution. We reccomend, but we do not approve.
We hope for better things; it will arise from the ashes - Fr Gabriel Richard 1805
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