Cities and City Planning

318 Pages·1981·7.56 MB·English

by  Lloyd Rodwin, Hugh Evans, Robert Hollister, Kevin Lynch, Michael Southworth, Lawrence Susskind (auth.)

Cities and
City Planning
ENVIRONMENT, DEVELOPMENT, AND
PUBLIC POLICY
A series of volumes under the general editorship of
Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
CITIES AND DEVELOPMENT
Series Editor: Lloyd Rodwin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
CITIES AND CITY PLANNING
Lloyd Rodwin
THINKING ABOUT DEVELOPMENT
Lisa Peattie
CONSERVING AMERICA'S NEIGHBORHOODS
Robert K. Yin
Other subseries:
ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND PLANNING
Series Editor: Lawrence Susskind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
PUBLIC POLICY AND SOCIAL SERVICES
Series Editor: Gary Marx, Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Cities and
City Planning
Lloyd Rodwin
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
With
Hugh Evans, Robert Hollister, Kevin Lynch,
Michael Southworth, and Lawrence Susskind
Springer Science+ Business Media, LLC
Library ofCongress Cataloging in Publication Data
Rodwin, Lloyd.
Cities and city planning.
(Environment, development, and public policy. Cities and development.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. New towns-Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Metropolitan areas-Addresses,
essays, lectures. 3. Underdeveloped areas-Regional planning-Addresses, essays,
lectures. 4. City planning-Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Cities and towns-Ad
dresses, essays, lectures. 1. Title. II. Series.
HT169.55.R62 307.7'6 81-13956
AACR2
ISBN 978-1-4684-1091-4 ISBN 978-1-4684-1089-1 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-4684-1089-1
© 1981 Springer Science+Business Media New York
Originally pub1ished by P1enum Press, New York in 1981
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1s t edition 1981
AII rights reserved
No part ofthis book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording, ar otherwise, without written permission from the publisher
To Vic, Marc, and Julie
Contents
PART ONE
IMAGES OF THE CITY
1. The Future Metropolis: Can It Be Made More Humane? 3
2. Great and Terrible Cities 8
3. The Educative City (with Michael Southworth) 19
4. The Form of the City (with Kevin Lynch) 30
5. Images of the City in the Social Sciences
(with Robert Hollister) 61
PART TWO
THE METROPOLIS AND NEW
COMMUNITIES IN THE UNITED STATES
6. Problems of the Metropolis: Changing Images and
Realities 81
7. Conditions for a Successful New Communities Program
(with Lawrence Susskind) 102
8. The New Communities Program and Why It Failed
(with Hugh Evans) 115
vii
viii CONTENTS
PART THREE
THE METROPOLIS AND CITY
PLANNING IN THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES
9. Realism and Utopianism in City Planning: A Retrospective
View 139
10. Changing Perspectives on Area Development Strategies 160
PART FOUR
EDUCATIONAL DILEMMAS IN CITY PLANNING
11. Four Approaches to Urban Studies 189
12. Training City Planners in Third World Countries 210
PART FIVE
CITY PLANNING: PROMISE AND REALITY
13. On the Illusions of City Planners 229
14. The Profession of City Planning 256
Acknowledgments 273
Notes 277
Index 303
PART ONE
Images of the City
CHAYfER ONE
The Future Metropolis
Can It Be Made More Humane?
INTRODUCTION
Some 20 years ago, a group of colleagues and I, under the aus
pices of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, jointly
contemplated the future metropolis. We assumed that within as
short a time as 50 years, most people would live in vast met
ropolitan areas, loosely linked together by facilities for communi
cation and services, but increasingly interdependent for supplies,
information, and transportation to and from work.
Given that prospect, we sought ways to enhance the positive
features of metropolitan life. We were on the whole cautiously
optimistic. We agreed that the metropolis created opportunities
for higher income and varied modes of living-in general, a way
of life potentially healthier, more stimulating, better informed,
more creative. Our papers (published in Daedalus and then as a
book under the title The Future Metropolis) indicated that the
present city had not achieved "anything near an optimum variety
of styles of living, including an adequate range of environments
with varying physical settings, activities and social groups. "1 But
very few of us expressed serious doubts that we could move
steadily in that direction. We were persuaded that the met
ropolis, combined with the national government, had the re
sources to confront problems, and would eventually develop the
policies to cope with them. We agreed with the physical planners
and urbanists of the last generation, who felt that we should be
concerned with the socioeconomic environment as well as the
physical, with what happens within cities as well as to them. We
3