Craft an analytical reading response that draws on your experience to lay out the problems/ ideas/thesis addressed in that week and substantiate why that idea/ thesis excites you or troubles you.

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4 The High-Modernist City: An Experiment and a Critique

No one, wise Kuublai, knows better than you that the city must never be con- fused with the words that describe it. -1talo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Time is a fatal handicap to the baroque conception of the world: its mechani- cal order makes no allowances for growth, change, adaptation, and creative renewal. In short, a baroque plan was a block achievement. It must be laid out at a stroke, fixed and frozen forever, as if done overnight by Arabian nights genii. Such a plan demands a n architectural despot, working for an absolute ruler, who will live long enough to complete their own conceptions. To alter this type of plan, to introduce fresh elements of another style, is to break its es- thetic backbone. -Lewis Mumford, The City i n History

In Mumford's epigraph to this chapter, his criticism is directed a t Pierre-Charles L'Enfant's Washington in particular and at baroque urban planning in general.' Greatly amplified, Mumford's criticism could be applied to the work and thought of the Swiss-born French es- sayist, painter, architect, and planner Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who is better known by his professional name, Le Corbusier. Jeanneret was the embodiment of high-modernist urban design. Active roughly between 1920 and 1960, he was less an architect than a visionary plan- ner of planetary ambitions. The great majority of his gargantuan schemes were never built; they typically required a political resolve and financial wherewithal that few political authorities could muster. Some monuments to his expansive genius do exist, the most notable of which are perhaps Chandigarh, the austere capital of India's Punjab, and L'Unitk d'Habitation, a large apartment complex in Marseilles, but his legacy is most apparent in the logic of his unbuilt megaprojects. At one time or another he proposed city-planning schemes for Paris, Algiers, S5o Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Stockholm, Geneva, and B a r ~ e l o n a . ~ His early politics was a bizarre combination of Sorel's revolutionary syndicalism and Saint-Simon's utopian modernism, and he designed both in Soviet Russia (1928-36)3 and in Vichy for Mar- shal Philippe Pktain. The key manifesto of modern urban planning, the Athens charter of the Congrks Internationaux dlArchitecture Mod- erne (CIAM), faithfully reflected his doctrines.

Scott, J. C. (1999). Seeing like a state : How certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed. ProQuest Ebook Central <a onclick=window.open('http://ebookcentral.proquest.com','_blank') href='http://ebookcentral.proquest.com' target='_blank' style='cursor: pointer;'>http://ebookcentral.proquest.com</a> Created from utoronto on 2020-11-05 09:45:38.

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Le Corbusier embraced the huge, machine-age, hierarchical, cen- tralized city with a vengeance. If one were looking for a caricature- a Colonel Blimp, as it were, of modernist urbanism-one could hardly do better than to invent Le Corbusier. His views were extreme but in- fluential, and they were representative in the sense that they cele- brated the logic implicit in high modernism. In his daring, his bril- liance, and his consistency, Le Corbusier casts the high-modernist faith in sharp relief.4

Total City Planning

In The R a d i a n t City ( L a ville radieuse), published in 1933 and repub- lished with few changes in 1964, Le Corbusier offers the most complete exposition of his views.5 Here as elsewhere, Le Corbusier's plans were self-consciously immodest. If E. F. Schumacher made the case for the virtue of smallness, Le Corbusier asserted, in effect, "Big is beautiful." The best way to appreciate the sheer extravagance of his reach is to look briefly at three of his designs. The first is the core idea behind his Plan Voisin for central Paris (figure 14); the second, a new "business city" for Buenos Aires (figure 15); and the last, a vast housing scheme for about ninety thousand residents in Rio de Janeiro (figure 16).

In their magnitude, these plans speak for themselves. No compro- mise is made with the preexisting city; the new cityscape completely supplants its predecessor. In each case, the new city has striking sculp- tural properties; it is designed to make a powerful visual impact as a form. That impact, it is worth noting, can be had only from a great dis- tance. Buenos Aires is pictured as if seen from many miles out to sea: a view of the New World "after a two-week crossing," writes Le Corbu- sier, adopting the perspective of a modern-day Christopher C o l ~ m b u s . ~ Rio is seen at several miles remove, as if from an airplane. What we be- hold is a six-kilometer-long highway elevated one hundred meters and enclosing a continuous ribbon of fifteen-story apartments. The new city literally towers over the old. The plan for a city of 3 million in Paris is seen from far above and outside, the distance emphasized by dots rep- resenting vehicles on the major avenue as well as by a small airplane and what appears to be a helicopter. None of the plans makes any ref- erence to the urban history, traditions, or aesthetic tastes of the place in which it is to be located. The cities depicted, however striking, be- tray no context; in their neutrality, they could be anywhere at all. While astoundingly high construction costs may explain why none of these projects was ever adopted, Le Corbusier's refusal to make any appeal to local pride in a n existing city cannot have helped his case.

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14. Le Corbusier's Plan Voisin for Paris, a city of 3 million people

15. Le Corbusier's plan for the "business city" of Buenos Aires, as if seen from an approaching ship

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16. Le Corbusier's plan for roads and housing in Rio de Janeiro

Le Corbusier had no patience for the physical environment that centuries of urban living had created. He heaped scorn on the tangle, darkness, and disorder, the crowded and pestilential conditions, of Paris and other European cities at the turn of the century. Part of his scorn was, as we shall see, on functional and scientific grounds; a city that was to become efficient and healthful would indeed have had to demolish much of what it had inherited. But another source of his scorn was aesthetic. He was visually offended by disarray and confu- sion. And the disorder he wished to correct was not so much a disorder at ground level but a disorder that was a function of distance, a bird's- eye view.7 His mixed motives are nicely captured in his judgment on small rural properties as seen from the air (figure 17). "From air- planes, a look down on infinitely subdivided, incongruously shaped plots of land. The more modern machinery develops, the more land is chopped up into tiny holdings that render the miraculous promise of machinery useless. The result is waste: inefficient, individual scrab- bling."8 The purely formal order was at least as important as the accom- modation with the machine age. "Architecture," he insisted, "is the art above all others which achieves a state of platonic grandeur, mathe- matical order, speculation, the perception of harmony that lies in emotional relation~hips."~

Formal, geometric simplicity and functional efficiency were not two distinct goals to be balanced; on the contrary, formal order was a pre- condition of efficiency. Le Corbusier set himself the task of inventing the ideal industrial city, in which the "general truths" behind the ma- chine age would be expressed with graphic simplicity. The rigor and unity of this ideal city required that it make as few concessions as pos- sible to the history of existing cities. "We must refuse to afford even the slightest concession to what is: to the mess we are in now," he wrote. "There is no solution to be found there." Instead, his new city would preferably rise on a cleared site as a single, integrated urban composi-

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The High-Modernist City 107

17. Aerial view of Alsace, circa 1930, from Le Corbusier's La ville radieuse

tion. Le Corbusier's new urban order was to be a lyrical marriage be- tween Cartesian pure forms and the implacable requirements of the ma- chine. In characteristically bombastic terms, he declared, "We claim, in the name of the steamship, the airplane, and the automobile, the right to health, logic, daring, harmony, perfection."1Â Unlike the exist- ing city of Paris, which to him resembled a "porcupine" and a "vision of Dante's Inferno," his city would be an "organized, serene, forceful, airy, ordered entity."l

Geometry and Standardization

It is impossible to read much of Le Corbusier or to see many of his architectural drawings without noticing his love (mania?) for simple, repetitive lines and his horror of complexity. He makes a personal commitment to austere lines and represents that commitment as an es- sential characteristic of human nature. In his own words, "an infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and becomes fa- tigued by such a labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is disheartening. . . . Reason. . . is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in order to save himself from this

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chaos, in order to provide himself with a bearable, acceptable frame- work for his existence, one productive of human well-being and con- trol, man has projected the laws of nature into a system that is a man- ifestation of the human spirit itself: geometry."12

When Le Corbusier visited New York City, he was utterly taken by the geometric logic of midtown Manhattan. The clarity of what he called the "skyscraper machines" and the street plan pleased him: "The streets are a t right angles to each other and the mind is liberated."I3 Elsewhere Le Corbusier answered what he saw as the criticism of those who were nostalgic for the variety of the existing city-in this case, Paris. People may complain, he noted, that in reality streets intersect at all sorts of angles and that the variations are infinite. "But," he replied, "that's precisely the point. Z eliminate all those things. That's my start- ingpoint. . . . I insist on right-angled inter~ections."~~

Le Corbusier would have liked to endow his love of straight lines and right angles with the authority of the machine, of science, and of nature. Neither the brilliance of his designs nor the heat of his po- lemic, however, could succeed in justifying this move. The machines to which he most adoringly referred-the locomotive, the airplane, and the automobile-embody rounder or more elliptical shapes than right angles (the teardrop being the most streamlined of shapes). As for sci- ence, any shape is geometrical: the trapezoid, the triangle, the circle. If sheer simplicity or efficiency was the criterion, why not prefer the circle or sphere-as the minimum surface enclosing the maximum space-to the square or the rectangle? Nature, as Le Corbusier claimed, might be mathematical, but the complex, intricate, "chaotic" logic of living forms has only recently been understood with the aid of computer^.^^ No, the great architect was expressing no more, and no less, than an aesthetic ideology-a strong taste for classic lines, which he also considered to be "Gallic" lines: "sublime straight lines, and oh, sublime French rigor."16 It was one powerful way of mastering space. What's more, it provided a legible grid that could be easily grasped at a glance and that could be repeated in every direction, ad infinitum. As a practical matter, of course, a straight line was often impractical and ruinously expensive. Where the topography was irregular, building a straight, flat avenue without daunting climbs and descents would re- quire great feats of digging and leveling. Le Corbusier's kind of geom- etry was rarely cost effective.

He took his utopian scheme for an abstract, linear city to impres- sive lengths. He foresaw that the industrialization of the construction trades would lead to a welcome standardization. He foresaw, too, the prefabrication of houses and office blocks, whose parts were built at

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The High-Modernist City 109

factories and then assembled at the building sites. The sizes of all ele- ments would be standardized, with multiples of standard sizes allow- ing for unique combinations determined by the architect. Door frames, windows, bricks, roof tiles, and even screws would all conform to a uni- form code. The first manifesto of CIAM in 1928 called for the new stan- dards to be legislated by the League of Nations, which would develop a universal technical language to be compulsorily taught throughout the world. An international convention would "normalize" the various standard measurements for domestic equipment and appliances.17 Le Corbusier made efforts to practice what he preached. His design for the mammoth Palace of Soviets (never built) was intended to appeal to Soviet high modernism. The building, he claimed, would establish pre- cise and universal new standards for all buildings-standards that would cover lighting, heating, ventilation, structure, and aesthetics and that would be valid in all latitudes for all needs.18

The straight line, the right angle, and the imposition of interna- tional building standards were all determined steps in the direction of simplification. Perhaps the most decisive step, however, was Le Cor- busier's lifelong insistence on strict functional separation. Indicative of this doctrine was the second of fourteen principles he enunciated at the beginning of La ville radieuse, namely, "the death of the street." What he meant by this was simply the complete separation of pedestrian traffic from vehicle traffic and, beyond that, the segregation of slow- from fast-moving vehicles. He abhorred the mingling of pedestrians and vehicles, which made walking unpleasant and impeded the circu- lation of traffic.

The principle of functional segregation was applied across the board. Written by Le Corbusier and his brother Pierre, the final report for the second meeting of CIAM, in 1929, began with an assault on tra- ditional housing construction: "The poverty, the inadequacy of tradi- tional techniques have brought in their wake a confusion of powers, an artificial mingling of functions, only indifferently related to one an- other. . . . We must find and apply new methods . . . lending themselves naturally to standardization, industrialization, Taylorization. . . . If we persist in the present methods by which the two functions [arrange- ment and furnishing versus construction; circulation versus structure] are mingled and interdependent, then we will remain petrified in the same immobility."19

Outside the apartment block, the city itself was an exercise in planned functional segregation-an exercise that became standard urban-planning doctrine until the late 1960s. There would be separate zones for workplaces, residences, shopping and entertainment centers,

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110 T R A N S F O R M I N G V I S I O N S

and monuments and government buildings. Where possible, work zones were to be further subdivided into office buildings and facto- ries. Le Corbusier's insistence on a n urban plan in which each district had one and only one function was evident in his first act after taking over the planning of Chandigarh, his only built city. He replaced the housing that had been planned for the city center with an "acropolis of monuments" on a 220-acre site at a great distance from the nearest r e ~ i d e n c e s . ~ ~ In his Plan Voisin for Paris, he separated what he called la ville, which was for dwelling, and the business center, which was for working. "These are two distinct functions, consecutive and not si- multaneous, representative of two distinct and categorically separate areas."21

The logic of this rigid segregation of functions is perfectly clear. It is far easier to plan an urban zone if it has just one purpose. It is far eas- ier to plan the circulation of pedestrians if they do not have to compete with automobiles and trains. It is far easier to plan a forest if its sole purpose is to maximize the yield of furniture-grade timber. When two purposes must be served by a single facility or plan, the trade-offs be- come nettlesome. When several or many purposes must be considered, the variables that the planner must juggle begin to boggle the mind. Faced with such a labyrinth of possibilities, as Le Corbusier noted, "the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued."

The segregation of functions thus allowed the planner to think with greater clarity about efficiency. If the only function of roads is to get automobiles from A to B quickly and economically, then one can com- pare two road plans in terms of relative efficiency. This logic is emi- nently reasonable inasmuch as this is precisely what we have in mind when we build a road from A to B. Notice, however, that the clarity is achieved by bracketing the many other purposes that we may want roads to serve, such as affording the leisure of a touristic drive, pro- viding aesthetic beauty or visual interest, or enabling the transfer of heavy goods. Even in the case of roads, narrow criteria of efficiency ignore other ends that are not trivial. In the case of the places that peo- ple call home, narrow criteria of efficiency do considerably greater vio- lence to human practice. Le Corbusier calculates the air (la respiration exacte), heat, light, and space people need as a matter of public health. Starting with a figure of fourteen square meters per person, he reckons that this could be reduced to ten square meters if such activities as food preparation and laundering were communal. But here the crite- ria of efficiency that may apply to a road can hardly do justice to a home, which is variously used as a place for work, recreation, privacy, sociability, education, cooking, gossip, politics, and so on. Each of

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The High-Modernist City 1 1 1

these activities, moreover, resists being reduced to criteria of effi- ciency; what is going on in the kitchen when someone is cooking for friends who have gathered there is not merely "food preparation." But the logic of efficient planning from above for large populations re- quires that each of the values being maximized be sharply specified and that the number of values being maximized simultaneously be sharply restricted-preferably to a single value.12 The logic of Le Cor- busier's doctrine was to carefully delineate urban space by use and function so that single-purpose planning and standardization were possible.23

Rule by the Plan, the Planner, and the State

The first of Le Corbusier's "principles of urbanism," before even "the death of the street," was the dictum "The Plan: D i c t a t ~ r . " ~ ~ It would be difficult to exaggerate the emphasis that, like Descartes, Le Cor- busier placed on making the city the reflection of a single, rational plan. He greatly admired Roman camps and imperial cities for the overall logic of their layouts. He returned repeatedly to the contrast between the existing city, which is the product of historical chance, and the city of the future, which would be consciously designed from start to finish following scientific principles.

The centralization required by Le Corbusier's doctrine of the Plan (always capitalized in his usage) is replicated by the centralization of the city itself. Functional segregation was joined to hierarchy. His city was a "monocephalic" city, its centrally located core performing the "higher" functions of the metropolitan area. This is how he described the business center of his Plan Voisin for Paris: "From its offices come the commands that put the world in order. In fact, the skyscrapers are the brain of the city, the brain of the whole country. They embody the work of elaboration and command on which all activities depend. Everything is concentrated there: the tools that conquer time and space-telephones, telegraphs, radios, the banks, trading houses, the organs of decision for the factories: finance, technology, commerce."25

The business center issues commands; it does not suggest, much less consult. The program of high-modernist authoritarianism at work here stems in part from Le Corbusier's love of the order of the factory. In condemning the "rot" (la pourriture) of the contemporary city, its houses, and its streets, he singles out the factory as the sole exception. There, a single rational purpose structures both the physical layout and the coordinated movements of hundreds. The Van Nelle tobacco factory in Rotterdam is praised in particular. Le Corbusier admires its auster-

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ity, its floor-to-ceiling windows on each floor, the order in the work, and the apparent contentment of the workers. He finishes with a hymn to the authoritarian order of the production line. "There is a hierarchical scale, famously established and respected," he admiringly observes of the workers. "They accept it so as to manage themselves like a colony of worker-bees: order, regularity, punctuality, justice and ~ a t e r n a l i s m . " ~ ~

The scientific urban planner is to the design and construction of the city as the entrepreneur-engineer is to the design and construction of the factory. Just as a single brain plans the city and the factory, so a sin- gle brain directs its activity-from the factory's office and from the city's business center. The hierarchy doesn't stop there. The city is the brain of the whole society. "The great city commands everything: peace, war, work."27 Whether it is a matter of clothing, philosophy, technol- ogy, or taste, the great city dominates and colonizes the provinces: the lines of influence and command are exclusively from the center to the periphery.28

There is no ambiguity to Le Corbusier's view of how authority rela- tions should be ordered: hierarchy prevails in every direction. At the apex of the pyramid, however, is not a capricious autocrat but rather a modern philosopher-king who applies the truths of scientific under- standing for the well-being of all.29 It is true, naturally, that the master planner, in his not infrequent bouts of megalomania, imagines that he alone has a monopoly on the truth. In a moment of personal reflection in T h e Radiant City, for example, Le Corbusier declares: "I drew up plans [for Algiers], after analyses, after calculations, with imagination, with poetry. The plans were prodigiously true. They were incontro- vertible. They were breathtaking. They expressed all the splendor of modern times."30 It is not, however, the excess of pride that concerns us here but the sort of implacable authority Le Corbusier feels entitled to claim on behalf of universal scientific truths. His high-modernist faith is nowhere so starkly-or so ominously-expressed as in the follow- ing, which I quote at length:

The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn u p well away from the frenzy i n the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's vic- tims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken ac- count of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regula- tions, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realiza- tion by modern techniques.31

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The High-Modernist City 1 13

The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected au- thorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminis- cent of fascist imagery.32 Despite the imagery, Le Corbusier sees himself as a technical genius and demands power in the name of his truths. Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modem city, no compromises are possible.33

Throughout his career, Le Corbusier is clearly aware that his kind of root-and-branch urban planning requires authoritarian measures. ' A Colbert is required," he declares to his French reading public in an early article entitled "Toward a Machine Age Paris."34 On the title page of his major work, one finds the words, "This work is Dedicated to Au- thority." Much of Le Corbusier's career as a would-be public architect can be read as a quest for a "Prince" (preferably an authoritarian one) who would anoint him as the court's Colbert. He exhibited designs for the League of Nations, lobbied the Soviet elite to accept his new plan for Moscow, and did what he could to get himself appointed as regula- tor of planning and zoning for the whole of France and to win the adoption of his plan for the new Algiers. Finally, under the patronage of Jawaharlal Nehru, he built a provincial capital at Chandigarh in India. Although Le Corbusier's own political affiliations in France were firmly anchored on the right,35 he would clearly have settled for any state authority that would give him a free hand. He was appealing to logic rather than politics when he wrote, "Once his [the scientific planner's] calculations are finished, he is in a position to say-and he does say: I t shall be thus!"36

What captivated Le Corbusier about the Soviet Union was not so much its ideology as the prospect that a revolutionary, high-modernist state might prove hospitable to a visionary planner. After building the headquarters of the Central Union of Consumer Cooperatives (Cen- t r o s o y ~ z ) , ~ ' he proposed, in plans prepared in only six weeks, a vast design for the rebuilding of Moscow in line with what he thought were Soviet aspirations to create an entirely new mode of living in a class- less society. Having seen Sergey Eisenstein's film about the peasantry and technology, The General Line, Le Corbusier was utterly taken with its celebration of tractors, centrifuge creamers, and huge farms. He re- ferred to it often in his plan to work a comparable transformation of Russia's urban landscape.

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114 TRANSFORMING VISIONS

Stalin's commissars found his plans for Moscow as well as his proj- ect for the Palace of Soviets too radical.38 The Soviet modernist El Lis- sitzky attacked Le Corbusier's Moscow as a "city of nowhere, . . . [a city] that is neither capitalist, nor proletarian, nor socialist, . . . a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contra- dict the style)."39 As if to confirm El Lissitzky's charge that he had de- signed a "city of nowhere," Le Corbusier recycled his design virtually intact-aside from removing all references to Moscow-and presented it as L a ville radieuse, suitable for central Paris.

The City as a Utopian Project

Believing that his revolutionary urban planning expressed univer- sal scientific truths, Le Corbusier naturally assumed that the public, once they understood this logic, would embrace his plan. The original manifesto of CIAM called for primary school students to be taught the elementary principles of scientific housing: the importance of sunlight and fresh air to health; the rudiments of electricity, heat, lighting, and sound; the right principles of furniture design; and so on. These were matters of science, not of taste; instruction would create, in time, a cli- entele worthy of the scientific architect. Whereas the scientific forester could, as it were, go right to work on the forest and shape it to his plan, the scientific architect was obliged to first train a new clientele that would "freely" choose the urban life that Le Corbusier had planned for them.

Any architect, I imagine, supposes that the dwellings she designs will contribute to her clients' happiness rather than to their misery. The difference lies in how the architect understands happiness. For Le Corbusier, " h u m a n happiness already exists expressed in terms of num- bers, of mathematics, of properly calculated designs, plans in which the cities can already be seen.'I4O He was certain, at least rhetorically, that since his city was the rational expression of a machine-age con- sciousness, modern man would embrace it ~ h o l e h e a r t e d l y . ~ ~

The kinds of satisfactions that the citizen-subject of Le Corbusier's city would experience, however, were not the pleasures of personal freedom and autonomy. They were the pleasures of fitting logically into a rational plan: "Authority must now step in, patriarchal authority, the authority of a father concerned for his children. . . . We must build places where mankind will be reborn. When the collective functions of the urban community have been organized, then there will be individ- ual liberty for all. Each man will live in an ordered relation to the

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The High-Modemist City I I S

whole."42 In the Plan Voisin for Paris, the place of each individual in the great urban hierarchy is spatially coded. The business elite ( i n d u s - trials) will live in high-rise apartments at the core, while the subaltern classes will have small garden apartments at the periphery. One's sta- tus can be directly read from one's distance from the center. But, like everyone in a well-run factory, everyone in the city will have the "col- lective pride" of a team of workers producing a perfect product. "The worker who does only a part of the job understands the role of his labor; the machines that cover the floor of the factory are examples to him of power and clarity, and m a k e h i m part o f a work ofpe$ection t o w h i c h h i s s i m p l e spirit never dared t o aspire."43 Just as Le Corbusier was perhaps most famous for asserting that "the home is a machine for living," so he thought of the planned city as a large, efficient machine with many closely calibrated parts. He assumed, therefore, that the cit- izens of his city would accept, with pride, their own modest role in a noble, scientifically planned urban machine.

By his own lights Le Corbusier was planning for the basic needs of his fellow men-needs that were ignored o r traduced in the existing city. Essentially, he established them by stipulating an abstract, simpli- fied human subject with certain material and physical requirements. This schematic subject needed so many square meters of living space, so much fresh air, so much sunlight, so much open space, so many es- sential services. At this level, he designed a city that was indeed far more healthful and functional than the crowded, dark slums against which he railed. Thus he spoke of "punctual and exact respiration," of various formulas for determining optimal sizes for apartments; he in- sisted on apartment skyscrapers to allow for park space and, above all, for efficient traffic circulation.

The Le Corbusian city was designed, first and foremost, as a work- shop for production. Human needs, in this context, were scientifically stipulated by the planner. Nowhere did he admit that the subjects for whom he was planning might have something valuable to say on this matter or that their needs might be plural rather than singular. Such was his concern with efficiency that he treated shopping and meal preparation as nuisances that would be discharged by central services like those offered by well-run hotels.44 Although floor space was pro- vided for social activities, he said almost nothing about the actual so- cial and cultural needs of the citizenry.

High modernism implies, as we have seen, a rejection of the past as a model to improve upon and a desire to make a completely fresh start. The more utopian the high modernism, the more thoroughgoing its implied critique of the existing society. Some of the most vituperative

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prose of The Radiant City was directed at the misery, confusion, "rot," "decay," "scum," and "refuse" of the cities that Le Corbusier wanted to transcend. The slums he showed in pictures were labeled "shabby" or, in the case of the French capital, "history, historic and tubercular Paris." He deplored both the conditions of the slums and the people they had created. "How many of those five million [those who came from the countryside to make their fortune] are simply a dead weight on the city, an obstacle, a black clot of misery, of failure, of human garbage?"45

His objection to the slums was twofold. First, they failed aestheti- cally to meet his standards of discipline, purpose, and order. "Is there anything," he asked rhetorically, "more pitiful than an undisciplined crowd?" Nature, he added, is "all discipline" and will "sweep them away" even if nature operates by a logic "contrary to the interests of mankind."46 Here he signals that the founders of the modern city must be prepared to act ruthlessly. The second danger of the slums was that, besides being noisy, dangerous, dusty, dark, and disease-ridden, they harbored a potential revolutionary menace to the authorities. He un- derstood, as Haussmann had, that crowded slums were and had always been an obstacle to efficient police work. Switching back and forth be- tween Louis XIV's Paris and imperial Rome, Le Corbusier wrote: "From the huddle of hovels, from the depths of grimy lairs (in Rome-the Rome of the Caesars-the plebes lived in a n inextricable chaos of abutting and warren-like skyscrapers), there sometimes came the hot gust of rebellion; the plot would be hatched in the dark recesses o f a n accumulated chaos i n w h i c h a n y kind of police activity w a s extremely d i f i c u l t . . . . St. Paul of Tarsus was impossible to arrest while he stayed in the slums, and the words of his Sermons were passed like wildfire from mouth to mouth."47

In case they were wondering, Le Corbusier's potential bourgeois backers and their representatives could rest assured that his legible, geometric city would facilitate police work. Where Haussmann man- aged to retrofit the baroque city of absolutism, Le Corbusier proposed to clear the decks completely and replace the center of Haussmann's city with one built with control and hierarchy in mind.48

A Textbook Case of High-Modernist Architecture

Le Corbusier's intellectual influence on architecture was out of all proportion to the actual structures he built. Not even the Soviet Union was quite up to his sweeping ambition. It is as an exemplar, a textbook case, of the key elements of high-modernist planning-often exagger- ated-that he belongs in this analysis. His commitment to what he

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called the "total efficiency and total rationalization" of a new machine- age civilization was u n c o m p r ~ m i s i n g . ~ ~ Although he was obliged to deal with nation-states, his vision was universal. As he put it, "city plan- ning everywhere, universal city planning, total city ~ l a n n i n g . " ~ ~ His ac- tual plans for Algiers, Paris, and Rio were, as we have seen, on a scale that was virtually without precedent. Le Corbusier was influenced, as were others of his generation, by the spectacle of total military mobi- lization in World War I. "Let's make our plans," he urged, "plans on a scale with twentieth century events, plans equally as big as Satan's [war]. . . . Big! Big!'I5'

The visual, aesthetic component of his bold plans was central. Clean, smooth lines were something he associated with the "all-business'' leanness of the machine. He was positively lyrical about the beauty of the machine and its products. And houses, cities, and agrovilles could also "emerge properly equipped, glitteringly new, from the factory, from the workshop, faultless products of smoothly humming machines."52

Integral, finally, to Le Corbusier's ultramodernism was his repudi- ation of tradition, history, and received taste. After explaining the ori- gin of the traffic congestion in contemporary Paris, he warned against temptations to reform. "We must refuse even the slightest considera- tion to what is: to the mess we are in now." He emphasized, "There is no solution to be found here."53 Instead, he insisted, we must take a "blank piece of paper," a "clean tablecloth," and start new calculations from zero. It was in this context that he was drawn to the USSR and to the ambitious rulers of developing countries. There, he hoped, he would not be cramped by the "grotesquely inadequate sites" available in the West, where it was possible to practice only what he called a n "orthopedic architect~ire."~~ The long-established cities of the West, their traditions, their interest groups, their slow-moving institutions, and their complex legal and regulatory structures could only shackle the dreams of a high-modernist Gulliver.

Brasilia: The High-Modernist City Built-Almost

Cities also believe they are the work of the mind o r of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. -1talo Calvino, Invisible Cities

No utopian city gets built precisely as designed by its prophet-architect. Just as the scientific forester is foiled by the vagaries of unpredictable nature and by the divergent purposes of both his employers and those who have access to the forest, so the urban planner must contend with

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the tastes and financial means of his patrons as well as the resistance of builders, workers, and residents. Even so, Brasilia is about the clos- est thing we have to a high-modernist city, having been built more or less along the lines set out by Le Corbusier and CIAM. Thanks to an ex- cellent book by James Holston, The Modernist City: A n Anthropologi- cal Critique o f Brasilia,55 it is possible to analyze both the logic of the plan for Brasilia and the extent of its realization. An appreciation of the slippage between what Brasilia meant for its originators on one hand and for its residents on the other will in turn pave the way (no pun intended) for Jane Jacob's thoroughgoing critique of modern ur- ban planning.

The idea of a new capital in the interior predates even the indepen- dence of BraziLS6 Its realization, however, was the pet project of Jus- celino Kubitschek, the populist president from 1956 to 1961, who promised Brazilians "fifty years of progress in five" and a future of self- sustaining economic growth. In 1957 Oscar Niemeyer, who had al- ready been named the chief architect for public buildings and housing prototypes, organized a design competition that was won, on the basis of very rough sketches, by Lucio Costa. Costa's idea-for it was no more than that-was of a "monumental axis" to define the center of the city, which consisted of terraced embankments describing an arc inter- sected in its center by a straight avenue, and of a triangle to define the city's limits (figure 18).

Both architects were working within the doctrines of CIAM and Le Corbusier. Niemeyer, a longtime member of the Brazilian Communist Party, was also influenced by the Soviet version of architectural mod- ernism. After the design competition, construction began almost im- mediately on an empty site on the Central Plateau in the state of Goiiis, nearly 1000 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro and the coast and 1620 kilometers from the Pacific Ocean in the northeast. It was indeed a new city in the wilderness. No "orthopedic" compromises were necessary now that the planners had, thanks to Kubitschek, who made Brasilia his top priority, a "clean tablecloth." The state planning agency con- trolled all the land at the site, so there were no private-property own- ers with whom to negotiate. The city was then designed from the ground up, according to an elaborate and unified plan. Housing, work, recreation, traffic, and public administration were each spatially seg- regated as Le Corbusier would have insisted. Inasmuch as Brasilia was itself a single-function, strictly administrative capital, the plan- ning itself was greatly simplified.

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18. The Costa plan of 1957, showing A , the Plaza of the Three Powers; B, the ministries; C, superquadra residential zones; D, the president's residence; and E , single-family housing

Brasflia as the Negation (or Transcendence) o f Brazil

Brasilia was conceived of by Kubitschek and by Costa and Niemeyer as a city of the future, a city of development, a realizable utopia. It made no reference to the habits, traditions, and practices of Brazil's past or of its great cities, S5o Paulo, S5o Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro. As if to em- phasize the point, Kubitschek called his own residence in Brasilia the Dawn Palace. "What else will Brasilia be," he asked, "if not the dawn of a new day for B r a ~ i l ? " ~ ~ Like the Saint Petersburg of Peter the Great, Brasilia was to be an exemplary city, a center that would transform the lives of the Brazilians who lived there-from their personal habits and household organization to their social lives, leisure, and work. The goal of making over Brazil and Brazilians necessarily implied a disdain for what Brazil had been. In this sense, the whole point of the new capital was to be a manifest contrast to the corruption, backwardness, and ig- norance of the old Brazil.

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The great crossroads that was the plan's point of departure has been variously interpreted as a symbol of Christ's cross or an Amazon- ian bow. Costa, however, referred to it as a "monumental axis," the same term that Le Corbusier used to describe the center of many of his urban plans. Even if the axis represented a small attempt to assim- ilate Brasilia in some way to its national tradition, it remained a city that could have been anywhere, that provided no clue to its own his- tory, unless that history was the modernist doctrine of CIAM. It was a state-imposed city invented to project a new Brazil to Brazilians and to the world at large. And it was a state-imposed city in at least one other sense: inasmuch as it was created to be a city for civil servants, many aspects of life that might otherwise have been left to the private sphere were minutely organized, from domestic and residential matters to health services, education, child care, recreation, commercial outlets, and so forth.

If Brasilia was to be Brazil's urban future, what was Brazil's urban past and present? What, precisely, was the new capital intended to negate? A large part of the answer can be inferred from Le Corbusier's second principle of the new urbanism: "the death of the street." Brasilia was designed to eliminate the street and the square as places for public life. Although the elimination of local barrio loyalties and rivalries may not have been planned, they were also a casualty of the new city.

The public square and the crowded "corridor" street had been venues of civic life in urban Brazil since colonial days. As Holston ex- plains, this civic life took two forms. In the first, which had been spon- sored by the church or state, ceremonial or patriotic processions and rituals were typically held in the principal square of the town.58 The sec- ond form encompassed a nearly inexhaustible range of popular uses of all the town squares. Children might play there; adults might simply shop, stroll and run into acquaintances, meet friends for a meal or cof- fee, play cards or chess, enjoy the social diversions of seeing and being seen. The point is that the square, as a confluence of streets and a sharply enclosed, framed space, become what Holston aptly calls a "public visiting room."59 As a public room, the square is distinguished by its accessibility to all social classes and the great variety of activities it accommodates. Barring state proscriptions, it is a flexible space that enables those who use it to use it for their mutual purposes. The square or the busy street attracts a crowd precisely because it provides an an- imated scene-a scene in which thousands of unplanned, informal, improvised encounters can take place simultaneously. The street was the spatial focus for public life outside the usually cramped family dwelling.60 The colloquialism for "I'm going downtown" was "I'm going

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to the street." As the focus for sociability, these spaces were also crucial sites for the development of public opinion as well as for "barrio na- tionalism," which could take institutional form in sports teams, bands, patron-saint celebrations, festival groups, and so on. It goes without saying that the street or the public square, under the right circum- stances, could also become the site of public demonstrations and riots directed against the state.

A mere glance at the scenes of Brasilia, juxtaposed to the urban Brazil that we have been describing, shows at once how radical is the transformation. There are no streets in the sense of public gathering places; there are only roads and highways to be used exclusively by motorized traffic (compare figures 19 and 20).

There is a square. But what a square! The vast, monumental Plaza of the Three Powers, flanked by the Esplanade of the Ministries, is of such a scale as to dwarf even a military parade (compare figures 21 and 22, and figures 23 and 24). In comparison, Tiananmen Square and the Red Square are positively cozy and intimate. The plaza is best seen, as are many of Le Corbusier's plans, from the air (as in figure 24). If one were to arrange to meet a friend there, it would be rather like try- ing to meet someone in the middle of the Gobi desert. And if one did meet up with one's friend, there would be nothing to do. Functional simplification demands that the rationale for the square as a public vis- iting room be designed out of Brasilia. This plaza is a symbolic center for the state; the only activity that goes on around it is the work of the ministries. Whereas the vitality of the older square depended on the mix of residence, commerce, and administration in its catchment area, those who work in the ministries must drive to their residences and then again to the separate commercial centers of each residential area.

One striking result of Brasilia's cityscape is that virtually all the pub- lic spaces in the city are officially designated public spaces: the sta- dium, the theater, the concert hall, the planned restaurants. The smaller, unstructured, informal public spaces-sidewalk cafes, street corners, small parks, neighborhood squares-do not exist. Paradoxically, a great deal of nominally open space characterizes this city, as it does Le Corbusier's city plans. But that space tends to be "dead" space, as in the Plaza of the Three Powers. Holston explains this by showing how CIAM doctrines create sculptural masses widely separated by large voids, an inversion of the "figure-ground" relations in older cities. Given our perceptual habits, these voids in the modernist city seem to be not inviting public spaces but boundless, empty spaces that are avoided.61 One could fairly say that the effect of the plan was to design out all those unauthorized locations where casual encounters could

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19. Residential street in the neighborhood Barra Funda, S5o Paulo, 1988

20. Residential access way L l in Brasilia, 1980

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2 1 . Largo do Pelourinho, with the museum of the city and the former slave market, S5o Salvador, 1980

22. The Plaza of the Three Powers, with the museum of the city and Planalto Palace, Brasilia, 1980

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23. The Praca de S 6 , S2o Paulo, 1984

24. The Plaza of the Three Powers and the Esplanade of the Ministries, Brasilia, 1981

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occur and crowds could gather spontaneously. The dispersal and func- tional segregation meant that meeting someone virtually required a plan.

Costa and Niemeyer were not only banishing the street and the square from their utopian city. They believed that they were also ban- ishing crowded slums, with their darkness, disease, crime, pollution, traffic jams and noise, and lack of public services. There were definite advantages to beginning with an empty, bulldozed site belonging to the state. At least the problems of land speculation, rent gouging, and property-based inequalities that beset most planners could be circum- vented. As with Le Corbusier and Haussmann, there was an emanci- pating vision here. The best and most current architectural knowledge about sanitation, education, health, and recreation could be made part of the design. Twenty-five square meters of green space per resident reached the UNESCO-designed ideal. And as with any utopian plan, the design of Brasilia reflected the social and political commitments of the builders and their patron, Kubitschek. All residents would have similar housing; the sole difference would be the number of units they were al- lotted. Following the plans of progressive European and Soviet archi- tects, the planners of Brasilia grouped the apartment buildings into what were called superquadra in order to facilitate the development of a collective life. Each superquadra (roughly 360 apartments housing 1,500-2,500 residents) had its own nursery and elementary school; each grouping of four superquadra had a secondary school, a cinema, a social club, sports facilities, and a retail sector.

Virtually all the needs of Brasilia's future residents were reflected in the plan. It is just that these needs were the same abstract, schematic needs that produced the formulas for Le Corbusier's plans. Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents. In some important respects, Brasilia is to Siio Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest. Both plans are highly legible, planned simplifications devised to create an efficient order that can be monitored and directed from above. Both plans, as we shall see, miscarry in comparable respects. Finally, both plans change the city and the woods to conform to the simple grid of the planner.

Living in Brasilia

Most of those who have moved to Brasilia from other cities are amazed to discover "that it is a city without crowds." People complain

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that Brasilia lacks the bustle of street life, that it has none of the busy street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a sidewalk for pedestrians. For them, it is almost as if the founders of Brasilia, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. The most common way they put it is to say that Brasilia "lacks street corners," by which they mean that it lacks the complex in- tersections of dense neighborhoods comprising residences and public cafes and restaurants with places for leisure, work, and shopping. While Brasilia provides well for some human needs, the functional separation of work from residence and of both from commerce and en- tertainment, the great voids between superquadra, and a road system devoted exclusively to motorized traffic make the disappearance of the street corner a foregone conclusion. The plan did eliminate traffic jams; it also eliminated the welcome and familiar pedestrian jams that one of Holston's informants called "the point of social c~nviviality."~~

The term brasilite, meaning roughly Brasil(ia)-itis, which was coined by the first-generation residents, nicely captures the trauma they expe- r i e n ~ e d . ~ ~ As a mock clinical condition, it connotes a rejection of the standardization and anonymity of life in Brasilia. "They use the term brasilite to refer to their feelings about a daily life without the plea- sures-the distractions, conversations, flirtations, and little rituals- of outdoor life in other Brazilian cities."64 Meeting someone normally requires seeing them either at their apartment or at work. Even if we allow for the initial simplifying premise of Brasilia's being an adminis- trative city, there is nonetheless a bland anonymity built into the very structure of the capital. The population simply lacks the small accessi- ble spaces that they could colonize and stamp with the character of their activity, as they have done historically in Rio and S5o Paulo. To be sure, the inhabitants of Brasilia haven't had much time to modify the city through their practices, but the city is designed to be fairly re- calcitrant to their efforts.65

"Brasilite," as a term, also underscores how the built environment affects those who dwell in it. Compared to life in Rio and S5o Paulo, with their color and variety, the daily round in bland, repetitive, aus- tere Brasilia must have resembled life in a sensory deprivation tank. The recipe for high-modernist urban planning, while it may have cre- ated formal order and functional segregation, did so at the cost of a sensorily impoverished and monotonous environment-an environ- ment that inevitably took its toll on the spirits of its residents.

The anonymity induced by Brasilia is evident from the scale and ex- terior of the apartments that typically make up each residential su- perquadra (compare figures 25 and 26). For superquadra residents,

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the two most frequent complaints are the sameness of the apartment blocks and the isolation of the residences ("In Brasilia, there is only house and work").66 The facade of each block is strictly geometric and egalitarian. Nothing distinguishes the exterior of one apartment from another; there are not even balconies that would allow residents to add distinctive touches and create semipublic spaces. Part of the dis- orientation arises from the fact that apartment dwelling-especially, perhaps, this form of apartment dwelling-fails to accord with deeply embedded conceptions of home. Holston asked a class of nine-year- old children, most of whom lived in superquadra, to draw a picture of "home." Not one drew an apartment building of any kind. All drew, in- stead, a traditional freestanding house with windows, a central door, and a pitched roof.67 The superquadra blocks, by contrast, resist the stamp of individuality, while the glass walls on their exteriors infringe on the sense of private space in the home.68 Concerned with the over- all aesthetic of the plan, the architects erased not only the external display of status distinctions but also much of the visual play of differ- ence. Just as the general design of the city militates against an au- tonomous public life, so the design of the residential city militates against individuality.

The disorienting quality of Brasilia is exacerbated by architectural repetition and uniformity. Here is a case where what seems like ration- ality and legibility to those working in administration and urban ser- vices seems like mystifying disorder for the ordinary residents who must navigate the city. Brasilia has few landmarks. Each commercial quarter or superquadra cluster looks roughly like any other. The sec- tors of the city are designated by an elaborate set of acronyms and ab- breviations that are nearly impossible to master, except from the global logic of the center. Holston notes the irony between macro-order and micro-confusion: "Thus, while the topologies of total order produce an unusual, abstract awareness of the plan, practical knowledge of the city actually decreases with the imposition of systematic r a t i ~ n a l i t y . " ~ ~ From the perspective of the planners of a utopian city, whose goal is more to change the world than to accommodate it, however, the shock and disorientation occasioned by life in Brasilia may be part of its di- dactic purpose. A city that merely pandered to existing tastes and habits would not be doing its utopian job.

U n p l a n n e d Brasilia

From the beginning, Brasilia failed to go precisely as planned. Its master builders were designing for a new Brazil and for new Brazil-

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25. Residential area along Rua Tiradentes in Ouro Preto, 1980

26. A superquadra apartment block in Brasilia, 1980

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ians-orderly, modern, efficient, and under their discipline. They were thwarted by contemporary Brazilians with different interests and the determination to have them heard. Somehow, it was assumed that the huge workforce (more than sixty thousand strong) would respond to the call to build the city and then quietly leave it to the administrators for whom it was intended. The construction workers, moreover, had not been adequately planned for. Kubitschek accorded top priority to finishing Brasilia as quickly as possible. Although most construction laborers routinely worked overtime, the population at the building site quickly outstripped the temporary housing allotted to them in what was called the Free City. They soon squatted on additional land on which they built makeshift houses; in cases where whole families mi- grated to Brasilia (or farmed there), the houses they erected were sometimes quite substantial.

The "pioneers" of Brasilia were collectively called "bandeirantes of the twentieth century," after the adventurers who had first penetrated the interior. The label was intended as a compliment, inasmuch as Ku- bitschek's Brasilia was also a symbolic conquest of the interior in a na- tion that had historically clung to the shoreline. At the outset, however, the manual laborers attracted to Brasilia were derogatorily called can- dangos. A candango was "a man without qualities, without culture, a vagabond, lower-class, 10wbrow."~O Kubitschek changed that. He used the building of Brasilia, which was, after all, devised to transform Brazil, in order to transform the candangos into the proletarian heroes of the new nation. "Future interpreters of Brazilian Civilization," he declared, "must dwell with astonishment before the bronzed rigors of this anonymous titan, who is the candango, the obscure and formida- ble hero of the construction of Brasilia. . . . While the skeptics laughed at the intended utopia of the new city that I prepared to build, the can- dangos shouldered the re~ponsibility."~~ Taking full advantage of the rhetorical space thus provided them, the candangos insisted on having their own patch of the utopian city. They organized to defend their land, to demand urban services, and to be given secure title. In the end, by 1980, 75 percent of the population of Brasilia lived in settle- ments that had never been anticipated, while the planned city had reached less than half of its projected population of 557,000. The foot- hold the poor gained in Brasilia was not just a result of the beneficence of Kubitschek and his wife, Dona Sara. Political structure played a key role as well. Squatters were able to mobilize, protest, and be heard by virtue of a reasonably competitive political system. Neither Kubitschek nor other politicians could possibly ignore the opportunity to cultivate a political clientele who might vote as a bloc.

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The unplanned Brasilia-that is, the real, existing Brasilia-was quite different from the original vision. Instead of a classless adminis- trative city, it was a city marked by stark spatial segregation according to social class. The poor lived on the periphery and commuted long dis- tances to the center, where much of the elite lived and worked. Many of the rich also created their own settlements with individual houses and private clubs, thereby replicating the affluent lifestyles found else- where in Brazil. The unplanned Brasilias-that of the rich and that of the poor-were not merely a footnote or an accident; one could say that the cost of this kind of order and legibility at the center of the plan virtually required that it be sustained by an unplanned Brasilia at the margins. The two Brasilias were not just different; they were symbiotic.

Radically transforming an entire nation of Brazil's size and diver- sity-let alone in only five years-was all but inconceivable. One senses that Kubitschek, like many rulers with great ambitions for their countries, despaired of a direct assault on a11 Brazil and all Brazilians and turned to the more plausible task of creating from zero a utopian model. Raised on a new site, in a new place, the city would provide a transforming physical environment for its new residents-an envi- ronment minutely tailored to the latest dictates regarding health, effi- ciency, and rational order. As the progressive city would evolve from a unitary, integrated plan on land owned entirely by the state, with all contracts, commercial licenses, and zoning in the hands of the plan- ning agency (Novacap), the conditions seemed favorable for a success- ful "utopian miniaturization."

How successful was Brasilia as a high-modernist, utopian space? If we judge it by the degree to which it departs from cities in older, urban Brazil, then its success was considerable. If we judge it by its capacity either to transform the rest of Brazil or to inspire a love of the new way of life, then its success was minimal. The real Brasilia, as opposed to the hypothetical Brasilia in the planning documents, was greatly marked by resistance, subversion, and political calculation.

Le Corbusier at Chandigarh

Since Le Corbusier did not design Brasilia, it may seem like guilt by association to blame him for its manifest failings. Two considerations, however, justify the connection. The first is that Brasilia was faithfully built according to CIAM doctrines elaborated mostly by Le Corbusier. Second, Le Corbusier did in fact play a major role in designing an- other capital city that reflected precisely the human problems encoun- tered in Brasilia.

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27. The chowk, or piazza, that Le Corbusier designed for Chandigarh's city center

Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab, was half planned when the architect in charge, Matthew Nowicki, suddenly died.72 Nehru, in search of a successor, invited Le Corbusier to finish the design and su- pervise the construction. The choice was in keeping with Nehru's own high-modernist purpose: namely, the promotion of modern technology in a new capital that would dramatize the values that the new Indian elite wished to convey.73 Le Corbusier's modifications of Nowicki's and Albert Mayer's original plan were all in the direction of monumental- ism and linearity. In place of large curves, Le Corbusier substituted rectilinear axes. At the center of the capital, he inserted a huge monu- mental axis not unlike those in Brasilia and in his plan for Paris.74 In place of crowded bazaars cramming as many goods and people as pos- sible into small spaces, he substituted huge squares that today stand largely empty (figure 27).

Whereas road crossings in India had typically served as public gathering places, Le Corbusier shifted the scale and arranged the zon- ing in order to prevent animated street scenes from developing. Notes one recent observer: "On the ground, the scale is so large and the width between meeting streets so great that one sees nothing but vast stretches of concrete paving with a few lone figures here and there. The small-scale street trader, the hawker or the rehris (barrows) have

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been banned from the city center, so that even where sources of inter- est and activity could be included, if only to reduce the concreted bar- renness and authority of the chowk, these are not ~tilized."~5

As in Brasilia, the effort was to transcend India as it existed and to present Chandigarh's citizens-largely administrators-with an image of their own future. As in Brasilia, the upshot was another unplanned city at the periphery and the margins, one that contradicted the aus- tere order at the center.

The Case Against High-Modernist Urbanism: Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs's book The Death and Life of Great American Cities was written in 1961 against a high tide of modernist, functional urban planning. Hers was by no means the first criticism of high-modernist urbanism, but it was, I believe, the most carefully observed and intel- lectually grounded critique.76 As the most comprehensive challenge to contemporary doctrines of urban planning, it sparked a debate, the reverberations of which are still being felt. The result, some three decades later, has been that many of Jacobs's views have been incorpo- rated into the working assumptions of today's urban planners. Al- though what she called her "attack on current city planning and re- building" was concerned primarily with American cities, she located Le Corbusier's doctrines, as applied abroad and at home, at the center of her field of fire.

What is remarkable and telling about Jacobs's critique is its unique perspective. She begins at street level, with an ethnography of micro- order in neighborhoods, sidewalks, and intersections. Where Le Cor- busier "sees" his city initially from the air, Jacobs sees her city as a pedestrian on her daily rounds would. Jacobs was also a political acti- vist involved in many campaigns against proposals for zoning changes, road building, and housing development that she thought ill-advised.77 It was all but inconceivable that a radical critique, grounded in this fashion, could ever have originated from within the intellectual circle of urban planners.78 Her novel brand of everyday urban sociology ap- plied to the design of cities was simply too far removed from the or- thodox educational routines of urban planning schools at the time.79 An examination of her critique from the margins serves to underline many of the failings of high modernism.

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Visual Order Versus Experienced Order

A formative insight in Jacobs's argument is that there is no neces- sary correspondence between the tidy look of geometric order on one hand and systems that effectively meet daily needs on the other. Why should we expect, she asks, that well-functioning built environments or social arrangements will satisfy purely visual notions of order and regularity? To illustrate the conundrum, she refers to a new housing project in East Harlem that sported, conspicuously, a rectangular lawn. The lawn was the object of general contempt by the residents. It was even taken as an insult by those who had been forcibly relocated and now lived in a project among strangers where it was impossible to get a newspaper or a cup of coffee or to borrow fifty cents.80 The apparent order of the lawn seemed cruelly emblematic of a more keenly felt dis- order.

A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex sys- tems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level. "To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves drop- ping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are seen as systems of order, they actually look different." At this level one could say that Jacobs was a "functionalist," a word whose use was banned in Le Corbusier's studio. She asked, What function does this structure serve, and how well does it serve it? The "order" of a thing is deter- mined by the purpose it serves, not by a purely aesthetic view of its sur- face order.81 Le Corbusier, by contrast, seemed to have firmly believed that the most efficient forms would a l w a y s have a classical clarity and order. The physical environments Le Corbusier designed and built had, as did Brasilia, an overall harmony and simplicity of form. For the most part, however, they failed in important ways as places where peo- ple would want to live and work.

It was this failure of the general urban planning models that so preoccupied Jacobs. The planners' conception of a city accorded nei- ther with the actual economic and social functions of an urban area nor with the (not unrelated) individual needs of its inhabitants. Their most fundamental error was their entirely aesthetic view of order. This error drove them to the further error of rigidly segregating func-

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tions. In their eyes, mixed uses of real estate-say, stores intermingled with apartments, small workshops, restaurants, and public build- ings-created a kind of visual disorder and confusion. The great ad- vantage of single uses-one shopping area, one residential area- was that it made possible the monofunctional uniformity and visual regimentation that they sought. As a planning exercise, it was of course vastly easier to plan a n area zoned for a single use than one zoned for several. Minimizing the number of uses and hence the num- ber of variables to be juggled thus combined with a n aesthetic of vi- sual order to argue for a single-use doctrineea2 The metaphor that comes to mind in this connection is that of a n army drawn up on the parade ground as opposed to a n army engaged in combat with the enemy. In the first case is a tidy visual order created by units and ranks drawn up in straight lines. But it is a n army doing nothing, an army on display. An army at war will not display the same orderly arrangement, but it will be, in Jacobs's terms, an army doing what it was trained to do. Jacobs thinks she knows the roots of this penchant for abstract, geometric order from above: "Indirectly through the utopian tradition, and directly through the more realistic doctrine of art by imposition, modern city planning has been burdened from its beginnings with the unsuitable aim of converting cities into disci- plined works of art.''83

Recently, Jacobs notes, the statistical techniques and input-output models available to planners had become far more sophisticated. They were encouraged to attempt such ambitious feats of planning as mas- sive slum clearance now that they could closely calculate the budget, materials, space, energy, and transportation needs of a rebuilt area. These plans continued to ignore the social costs of moving families "like grains of sand, or electrons, or billiard balls.''84 The plans were also based on notoriously shaky assumptions, and they treated systems of complex order as if they could be simplified by numerical tech- niques, regarding shopping, for example, as a purely mathematical issue involving square footage for shopping space and traffic manage- ment as an issue of moving a certain number of vehicles in a given time along a certain number of streets of a given width. These were in- deed formidable technical problems, but, as we shall see, the real is- sues involved much more besides.

The Functional Superiority o f Cross-Use and Complexity

The establishment and maintenance of social order in large cities are, as we have increasingly learned, fragile achievements. Jacobs's

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view of social order is both subtle and instructive. Social order is not the result of the architectural order created by T squares and slide rules. Nor is social order brought about by such professionals as po- licemen, nightwatchmen, and public officials. Instead, says Jacobs, "the public peace-the sidewalk and street peace-of cities . . . is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the peo- ple themselves." The necessary conditions for a safe street are a clear demarcation between public space and private space, a substantial number of people who are watching the street on and off ("eyes on the street"), and fairly continual, heavy use, which adds to the quantity of eyes on the street.85 Her example of an area where these conditions were met is Boston's North End. Its streets were thronged with pedes- trians throughout the day owing to the density of convenience and gro- cery stores, bars, restaurants, bakeries, and other shops. It was a place where people came to shop and stroll and to watch others shop and stroll. The shopkeepers had the most direct interest in watching the sidewalk: they knew many people by name, they were there all day, and their businesses depended on the neighborhood traffic. Those who came and went on errands or to eat or drink also provided eyes on the street, as did the elderly who watched the passing scene from their apartment windows. Few of these people were friends, but a good many were acquaintances who did recognize one another. The process is powerfully cumulative. The more animated and busier the street, the more interesting it is to watch and observe; all these unpaid observers who have some familiarity with the neighborhood provide willing, in- formed surveillance.

Jacobs recounts a revealing incident that occurred on her mixed- use street in Manhattan when an older man seemed to be trying to ca- jole an eight- or nine-year-old girl to go with him. As Jacobs watched this from her second-floor window, wondering if she should intervene, the butcher's wife appeared on the sidewalk, as did the owner of the deli, two patrons of a bar, a fruit vendor, and a laundryman, and sev- eral other people watched openly from their tenement windows, ready to frustrate a possible abduction. No "peace officer" appeared or was necessarya6

Another instance of informal urban order and services is instruc- tive. Jacobs explains that when a friend used their apartment while she and her husband were away or when they didn't want to wait up for a late-arriving visitor, they would leave the key to their apartment with the deli owner, who had a special drawer for such keys and who held them for the friends.87 She noted that every nearby mixed-use street had

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someone who played the same role: a grocer, candy-store owner, bar- ber, butcher, dry cleaner, or bookshop owner. This is one of the many public functions of private business.88 These services, Jacobs notes, are not the outgrowth of any deep friendship; they are the result of people being on what she calls "sidewalk terms" with others. And these are services that could not plausibly be provided by a public institution. Having no recourse to the face-to-face politics of personal reputation that underwrites social order in small rural communities, the city re- lies on the density of people who are on sidewalk terms with one an- other to maintain a modicum of public order. The web of familiarity and acquaintanceship enabled a host of crucial but often invisible pub- lic amenities. A person didn't think twice about asking someone to hold one's seat at the theater, to watch a child while one goes to the rest- room, or to keep a n eye on a bike while one ducks into a deli to buy a sandwich.

Jacobs's analysis is notable for its attention to the microsociology of public order. The agents of this order are all nonspecialists whose main business is something else. There are no formal public or voluntary or- ganizations of urban order here-no police, no private guards or neighborhood watch, no formal meetings or officeholders. Instead, the order is embedded in the logic of daily practice. What's more, Jacobs argues, the formal public institutions of order function successfully only when they are undergirded by this rich, informal public life. An urban space where the police are the sole agents of order is a very dangerous place. Jacobs admits that each of the small exchanges of informal public life-nodding hello, admiring a newborn baby, asking where someone's nice pears come from-can be seen as trivial. "But the sum is not trivial at all," she insists. "The sum of each casual, pub- lic contact at a local level-most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone-is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. And above all, it i m - plies no private commitment^."^^ Where Le Corbusier began with for- mal, architectural order from above, Jacobs begins with informal, so- cial order from below.

Diversity, cross-use, and complexity (both social and architectural) are Jacobs's watchwords. The mingling of residences with shopping areas and workplaces makes a neighborhood more interesting, more convenient, and more desirable-qualities that draw the foot traffic

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that in turn makes the streets relatively safe. The whole logic of her case depends on the creation of the crowds, diversity, and conveniences that define a setting where people will want to be. In addition, a high vol- ume of foot traffic stimulated by an animated and colorful neighbor- hood has economic effects on commerce and property values, which are hardly trivial. The popularity of a district and its economic success go hand in hand. Once created, such places will attract activities that most planners would have specially sequestered elsewhere. Rather than play in the large parks created for that purpose, many children prefer the sidewalks, which are safer, more eventful, and more conve- nient to the comforts available in stores and at home.90 Understanding the magnetic effect of the busy street over more specialized settings is no more difficult than understanding why the kitchen is typically the busiest room in a house. It is the most versatile setting-a place of food and drink, of cooking and eating, and hence of socialization and exchange.91

What are the conditions of this diversity? That a district have mixed primary uses, Jacobs suggests, is the most vital factor. Streets and blocks should be short in order to avoid creating long barriers to pedes- trians and commerce.92 Buildings should ideally be of greatly varying age and condition, thereby making possible different rental terms and the varied uses that accompany them. Each of these conditions, not sur- prisingly, violates one or more of the working assumptions of orthodox urban planners of the day: single-use districts, long streets, and archi- tectural uniformity. Mixed primary uses, Jacobs explains, are synergis- tic with diversity and density.

Take, for example, a small restaurant in a single-use district-say, the financial district of Wall Street. Such a restaurant must make vir- tually all its profit between 10 A.M. and 3 P.M., the hours when office workers take their midmorning coffee breaks and lunch breaks before commuting home at the end of the day, leaving the street silent. The restaurant in a mixed-use district, on the other hand, has potential clients passing by throughout the day and into the night. It may there- fore stay open for more hours, benefiting not only its own business but also that of nearby specialized shops, which might be economically marginal in a single-use district but which become going concerns in a lively mixed-use area. The very jumble of activities, buildings, and people-the apparent disorder that offended the aesthetic eye of the planner-was for Jacobs the sign of dynamic vitality: "Intricate min- g l i n g ~ of different uses are not a form of chaos. On the contrary they represent a complex and highly developed form of order."93

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While Jacobs makes a convincing case for mixed use and complex- ity by examining the micro-origins of public safety, civic trust, visual interest, and convenience, there is a larger argument to be made for cross-use and diversity. Like the diverse old-growth forest, a richly dif- ferentiated neighborhood with many kinds of shops, entertainment centers, services, housing options, and public spaces is, virtually by definition, a more resilient and durable neighborhood. Economically, the diversity of its commercial "bets" (everything from funeral parlors and public services to grocery stores and bars) makes it less vulnerable to economic downturns. At the same time its diversity provides many opportunities for economic growth in upturns. Like monocropped forests, single-purpose districts, although they may initially catch a boom, are especially susceptible to stress. The diverse neighborhood is more sustainable.

I think that a "woman's eye," for lack of a better term, was essential to Jacobs's frame of reference. A good many men, to be sure, were in- sightful critics of high-modernist urban planning, and Jacobs refers to many of their writings. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine her ar- gument being made in quite the same way by a man. Several elements of her critique reinforce this impression. First, she experiences the city as far more than a setting for the daily trek to and from work and the acquisition of goods and services. The eyes with which she sees the street are, by turns, those of shoppers running errands, mothers push- ing baby carriages, children playing, friends having coffee or a bite to eat, lovers strolling, people looking from their windows, shopkeepers dealing with customers, old people sitting on park benches.94 Work is not absent from her account, but her attention is riveted on the quo- tidian in the street as it appears around work and outside of work. A concern with public space puts both the interior of the home and the office as factory outside her purview. The activities that she observes so carefully, from taking a walk to window-shopping, are largely activi- ties that do not have a single purpose o r that have no conscious pur- pose in the narrow sense.

Compare this perspective with most of the key elements in high- modernist urban planning. Such plans all but require forms of sim- plification that strip human activity to a sharply defined single pur- pose. In orthodox planning, such simplifications underlie the strict functional segregation of work from domicile and both from com- merce. The matter of transportation becomes, for Le Corbusier and others, the single problem of how to transport people (usually in auto- mobiles) as quickly and economically as possible. The activity of shop- ping becomes a question of providing adequate floor space and access

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for a certain quantity of shoppers and goods. Even the category of en- tertainment was split up into specified activities and segregated into playgrounds, athletic fields, theaters, and so on.

Thus, the second result of Jacobs's having a woman's eye is her re- alization that a great deal of human activity (including, by all means, work) is pursued for a wide range of goals and satisfactions. An ami- able lunch with co-workers may be the most significant part of the day for a jobholder. Mothers pushing baby carriages may also be talking to friends, doing errands, getting a bite to eat, and looking for a book at the local bookstore or library. In the course of these activities, still an- other "purpose" might arise, unbidden. The man or woman driving to work may not just be driving to work. He or she may care about the scenery or companionship along the way and the availability of coffee near the parking lot. Jacobs herself was an enormously gifted "eye on the street," and she wrote in full recognition of the great variety of human purposes embedded in any activity. The purpose of the city is to accommodate and abet this rich diversity and not to thwart it. And the persistent failure of urban-planning doctrines to do so, she suggested, had something to do with gender.95

Authoritarian Planning as Urban Taxidermy

For Jacobs, the city as a social organism is a living structure that is constantly changing and springing surprises. Its interconnections are so complex and dimly understood that planning always risks unknow- ingly cutting into its living tissue, thereby damaging or killing vital so- cial processes. She contrasts the "art" of the planner to the practical conduct of daily life: "A c i t y c a n n o t be a w o r k o f a r t . . . . In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic, and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence. . . . The results of such profound confu- sion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy. In its place, taxidermy can be a useful and decent craft. However, it goes too far when the specimens put on display are exhibitions of dead, stuffed cities."96 The core of Jacobs's case against modern city planning was that it placed a static grid over this profusion of unknowable pos- sibilities. She condemned Ebenezer Howard's vision of the garden city because its planned segregation presumed that farmers, factory workers, and businessmen would remain fixed and distinct castes. Such a presumption failed to respect or provide for the "spontaneous self-diversification" and fluidity that were the main features of the nineteenth-century city.97

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Urban planners' great penchant for massive schemes of slum clear- ance was attacked on the same grounds. Slums were the first foothold of poor migrants to the city. As long as these areas were reasonably sta- ble, the economy relatively strong, and people and businesses not starved for credit, the slums could, given time, manage to "unslum" themselves. Many already had. Planners frequently destroyed "unslum- ming slums" because these areas violated their doctrines of "layout, use, ground coverage, mixture and a ~ t i v i t i e s " ~ ~ - n o t to mention the land speculation and security concerns behind much "urban renewal."

From time to time Jacobs stands back from the infinite and chang- ing variety of American cities to express a certain awe and humility: "Their intricate order-a manifestation of the freedom of countless numbers of people to make and carry out countless plans-is in many ways a great wonder. We ought not to be reluctant to make this living collection of interdependent uses, this freedom, this life, more un- derstandable for what it is, nor so unaware that we do not know what it is."99 The magisterial assumption behind the doctrines of many urban planners-that they know what people want and how people should spend their time-seems to Jacobs shortsighted and arrogant. They assumed, or at least their plans assumed, that people preferred open spaces, visual (zoned) order, and quiet. They assumed that people wanted to live in one place and work in another. Jacobs believes they were mistaken, and most important, she is prepared to argue from close daily observation at street level rather than stipulating human wishes from above.

The logic behind the spatial segregation and single-use zoning of the urban planners that Jacobs criticized was at once aesthetic, scientific, and practical. As an aesthetic matter, it led to the visual regularity- even regimentation-that a sculptural view of the ensemble required. As a scientific matter it reduced the number of unknowns for which the planner had to find a solution. Like simultaneous equations in algebra, too many unknowns in urban planning rendered any solution problem- atic or else required heroic assumptions. The problem the planner faced was analogous to that of the forester. One modern solution to the forester's dilemma was to borrow a management technique called op- timum control theory, whereby the sustained timber yield could be successfully predicted by few observations and a parsimonious for- mula. It goes without saying that optimum control theory was simplest where more variables could be turned into constants. Thus a single- species, same-age forest planted in straight lines on a flat plain with consistent soil and moisture profiles yielded simpler and more accu-

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rate optimum control formulas. Compared to uniformity, diversity is always more difficult to design, build, and control. When Ebenezer Howard approached town planning as a simple, two-variable problem of relating housing needs to the quantity of jobs in a closed system, he was both temporally and functionally operating "scientifically" within those self-imposed limits. Formulas for green space, light, schools, and square meters per capita did the rest.

In urban planning as in forestry, it is a short step from parsimo- nious assumptions to the practice of shaping the environment so that it satisfies the simplifications required by the formula. The logic of plan- ning for the shopping needs of a given population serves as an exam- ple. Once planners applied the formula for a certain number of square feet of commercial space, parceled out among such categories as food and clothing, they realized that they would then have to make these shopping centers monopolistic within their areas, lest nearby competi- tors draw away their clientele. The whole point was to legislate the for- mula, thereby guaranteeing the shopping center a monopoly of its catchment area.loO Rigid, single-use zoning is, then, not just an aes- thetic measure. It is an indispensable aid to scientific planning, and it can also be used to transform formulas posing as observations into self-fulfilling prophesies.

The radically simplified city, provided it is viewed from above, is also practical and efficient. The organization of services-electricity, water, sewage, mail-is simplified both below and above ground. Sin- gle-use districts, by virtue of the repetition of functionally similar apartments o r offices, are simpler to produce and build. Le Corbusier looked forward to a future when all the components of such buildings would be industrially prefabricated.lol Zoning along these lines also produces a city that is, district by district, both more uniform aesthet- ically and more "orderly" functionally. A single activity or narrow band of activities is appropriate to each district: work in the business dis- trict, family life in the residential quarter, shopping and entertainment in the commercial district. As a police matter, this functional segrega- tion minimizes unruly crowds and introduces as much regimentation into the movement and conduct of the population as physical planning alone can encourage.

Once the desire for comprehensive urban planning is established, the logic of uniformity and regimentation is well-nigh inexorable. Cost effectiveness contributes to this tendency. Just as it saves a prison trou- ble and money if all prisoners wear uniforms of the same material, color, and size, every concession to diversity is likely to entail a corre-

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spending increase in administrative time and budgetary cost. If the planning authority does not need to make concessions to popular de- sires, the one-size-fits-all solution is likely to prevail.Io2

Against the planners' eye and formulas, Jacobs juxtaposes her own. Her aesthetic, she would claim, is pragmatic and street level, an aes- thetic that has as its reference the experienced working order of the city for the people who live there. She asks, What physical environ- ments draw people, facilitate circulation, promote social exchange and contact, and satisfy both utilitarian and nonutilitarian needs? This per- spective leads her to many judgments. Short blocks are preferable to long blocks because they knit together more activities. Large truck de- pots or filling stations that break the continuity of pedestrian interest are to be avoided. To be kept to a minimum are huge roads and vast, forbidding open spaces that operate as visual and physical barriers. There is a logic here, but it is not an a priori visual logic, nor is it a purely utilitarian logic narrowly conceived. Rather, it is a standard of evaluation that springs from how satisfactorily a given arrangement meets the social and practical desires of urban dwellers as those needs are revealed in their actual activity.

P l a n n i n g for t h e U n p l a n n e d

The historic diversity of the city-the source of its value and mag- netism-is an unplanned creation of many hands and long historical practice. Most cities are the outcome, the vector sum, of innumerable small acts bearing no discernible overall intention. Despite the best ef- forts of monarchs, planning bodies, and capitalist speculators, "most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly different ideas and pur- poses, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action."Io3 Le Corbusier would have agreed with this description of the existing city, and it was precisely what appalled him. It was just this cacophony of intentions that was responsible for the clutter, ugliness, disorder, and inefficiencies of the unplanned city. Looking at the same social and historical facts, Jacobs sees reason to praise them: "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only be- cause, and only when, they are created by everybody."104 She is no free- market libertarian, however; she understands clearly that capitalists and speculators are, willy-nilly, transforming the city with their com- mercial muscle and political influence. But when it comes to urban public policy, she thinks planning ought not to usurp this unplanned city: "The main responsibility of city planning and design should be to

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develop, insofar as public policy and action can do so, cities that are congenial places for this great range of unofficial plans, ideas, and opportunities to fl0urish."~05 Whereas Le Corbusier's planner is con- cerned with the overall form of the cityscape and its efficiency in mov- ing people from point to point, Jacobs's planner consciously makes room for the unexpected, small, informal, and even nonproductive human activities that constitute the vitality of the "lived city."

Jacobs is more aware than most urban planners of the ecological and market forces continually transforming the city. The succession of harbors, railroads, and highways as means of moving people and goods had already marked the rise and decline of sections of the city. Even the successful, animated neighborhoods that Jacobs so prizes were, she recognizes, becoming victims of their own success. Areas were "colo- nized" by urban migrants because land values, and hence rents, were cheap. As an area became more desirable to live in, its rents rose and its local commerce changed, the new businesses often driving out the orig- inal pioneers who had helped transform it. The nature of the city was flux and change; a successful neighborhood could not be frozen and preserved by the planners. A city that was extensively planned would inevitably diminish much of the diversity that is the hallmark of great towns. The best a planner can hope for is to modestly enhance rather than impede the development of urban complexity.

For Jacobs, how a city develops is something like how a language evolves. A language is the joint historical creation of millions of speak- ers. Although all speakers have some effect on the trajectory of a lan- guage, the process is not particularly egalitarian. Linguists, grammar- ians, and educators, some of them backed by the power of the state, weigh in heavily. But the process is not particularly amenable to a dicta- torship, either. Despite the efforts toward "central planning," language (especially its everyday spoken form) stubbornly tends to go on its own rich, multivalent, colorful way. Similarly, despite the attempts by urban planners toward designing and stablizing the city, it escapes their grasp; it is always being reinvented and inflected by its inhabitants.lo6 For both a large city and a rich language, this openness, plasticity, and diversity allow them to serve an endless variety of purposes-many of which have yet to be conceived.

he analogy can be pressed further. Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example; technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two pur- poses. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of

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its adaptability and flexibility. The very history of a n inherited lan- guage helps to provide the range of associations and meanings that sustain its plasticity. In much the same way, one could plan a city from zero. But since no individual or committee could ever completely en- compass the purposes and lifeways, both present and future, that ani- mate its residents, it would necessarily be a thin and pale version of a complex city with its own history. It will be a Brasilia, Saint Petersburg, or Chandigarh rather than a Rio de Janeiro, Moscow, or Calcutta. Only time and the work of millions of its residents can turn these thin cities into thick cities. The grave shortcoming of a planned city is that it not only fails to respect the autonomous purposes and subjectivity of those who live in it but also fails to allow sufficiently for the contingency of the interaction between its inhabitants and what that produces.

Jacobs has a kind of informed respect for the novel forms of social order that emerge in many city neighborhoods. This respect is re- flected in her attention to the mundane but meaningful human con- nections in a functioning neighborhood. While recognizing that no urban neighborhood can ever be, or should be, static, she stresses the minimal degree of continuity, social networks, and "street-terms" ac- quaintanceship required to knit together an urban locality. "If self- government in the place is to work," she muses, "underlying any float of population must be a continuity of people who have forged neigh- borhood networks. These networks are a city's irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the [social] income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capi- tal is slowly and chancily accumulated."107 It follows from this vantage point that even in the case of slums, Jacobs was implacably opposed to the wholesale slum-clearance projects that were so much in vogue when she was writing. The slum might not have much social capital, but what it did have was something to build on, not destroy.lo8 What keeps Jacobs from becoming a Burkean conservative, celebrating what- ever history has thrown up, is her emphasis on change, renewal, and invention. To try to arrest this change (although one might try to mod- estly influence it) would be not only unwise but futile.

Strong neighborhoods, like strong cities, are the product of com- plex processes that cannot be replicated from above. Jacobs quotes with approval Stanley Tankel, a planner who made the rarely heard case against large-scale slum clearance in these terms: "The next step will require great humility, since we are now so prone to confuse great building projects with great social achievements. We will have to admit that it is beyond the scope of anyone's imagination to create a commu- nity. We must learn to cherish the communities we have, they are hard

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The High-Modernist City 145

to come by. 'Fix the buildings, but leave the people.' 'No relocation out- side the neighborhood.' These must be the slogans if public housing is to be popular."lo9 In fact, the political logic of Jacobs's case is that while the planner cannot create a functioning community, a functioning community can, within limits, improve its own condition. Standing the planning logic on its head, she explains how a reasonably strong neigh- borhood can, in a democratic setting, fight to create and maintain good schools, useful parks, vital urban services, and decent housing.

Jane Jacobs was writing against the major figures still dominating the urban planning landscape of her day: Ebenezer Howard and Le Corbusier. To some of her critics she has seemed a rather conservative figure, extolling the virtues of community in poor neighborhoods that many were anxious to leave and ignoring the degree to which the city was already being "planned," not by popular initiative or by the state but by developers and financiers with political connections. There is some justice to these points of view. For our purposes, however, there is little doubt that she has put her finger on the central flaws of hubris in high-modernist urban planning. The first flaw is the presumption that planners can safely make most of the predictions about the future that their schemes require. We know enough by now to be exception- ally skeptical about forecasting from current trends in fertility rates, urban migration, or the structure of employment and income. Such predictions have often been wildly wrong. As for wars, oil embargoes, weather, consumer tastes, and political eruptions, our capacity for pre- diction is practically nil. Second, thanks in part to Jacobs, we now know more about what constitutes a satisfactory neighborhood for the people who live in it, but we still know precious little about how such communities can be fostered and maintained. Working from formulas about density, green space, and transportation may produce narrowly efficient outcomes, but it is unlikely to result in a desirable place to live. Brasilia and Chandigarh, at a minimum, demonstrate this.

It is not a coincidence that many of the high-modernist cities actu- ally built-Brasilia, Canberra, Saint Petersburg, Islamabad, Chandi- garh, Abuja, Dodoma, Ciudad G~ayana~~O-have been administrative capitals. Here at the center of state power, in a completely new setting, with a population consisting largely of state employees who have to re- side there, the state can virtually stipulate the success of its planning grid. The fact that the business of the city is state administration al- ready vastly simplifies the task of planning. Authorities do not have to contend, as did Haussmann, with preexisting commercial and cultural centers. And because the authorities control the instruments of zoning, employment, housing, wage levels, and physical layout, they can bend

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the environment to the city. These urban planners backed by state power are rather like tailors who are not only free to invent whatever suit of clothes they wish but also free to trim the customer so that he fits the measure.

Urban planners who reject "taxidermy," Jacobs claims, must never- theless invent a kind of planning that encourages novel initiatives and contingencies, foreclosing as few options as possible, and that fosters the circulation and contact out of which such initiatives arise. To illus- trate the diversity of urban life, Jacobs lists more than a dozen uses which have been served over the years by the center for the arts in Louisville: stable, school, theater, bar, athletic club, blacksmith's forge, factory, warehouse, artists' studio. She then asks, rhetorically, "Who could anticipate or provide for such a succession of hopes and ser- vices?" Her answer is simple: "Only an unimaginative man would think he could; only an arrogant man would want to."111

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