Howard Gillette Jr.

In a nutshell

For more than a century city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today’s New Urbanists, these visionaries have sought to deepen civitas, the shared community of citizens.

Civitas by Design takes a critical look at this planning tradition, examining a range of environmental interventions and their consequences over the course of the twentieth century. As American reform efforts moved from progressive idealism through the era of federally funded urban renewal programs to the rise of faith in free markets, planners attempted to cultivate community in places such as Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York, Celebration in Florida, and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast.

Key figures—including critics Lewis Mumford and Oscar Newman, entrepreneur James Rouse, and housing reformer Catherine Bauer—introduced concepts such as planned neighborhood units, regional shopping malls, and greenbelt towns that were implemented on a national scale. And many of the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that these planners envisioned still remain. But frequently the physical designs have proven insufficient to sustain the ideals they represented.

The wide angle

This book represents the evolution of my thinking as a writer over the past 40 years, extending back to my graduate education at Yale.

While the university offered no formal training in urban history or planning, New Haven at the time was being treated as an advanced laboratory for urban policy. Mayor Richard C. Lee was highly successful in securing federal funding for “urban renewal”—at a cost, however, of growing protests from victims of displacement and ultimately from critics who discerned the class and race bias of prevailing policies.

Lee attempted to repair the damage by securing funding from the Ford Foundation to address the social problems of the city’s poorer residents. That effort attracted considerable interest and presaged to some degree Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, but it did not prevent riots which roiled the city in 1967.

Since that time, I have been absorbed with the detrimental effects of separating social from physical design considerations in urban planning and allied fields. Inspired in part by an exposure and exchange with Lewis Mumford (incorporated in this book in the essay on the 1939 film “The City”), I found additional guidance for addressing this divide in the work of the University of Pittsburgh’s Roy Lubove.

It is Lubove’s concept of environmental intervention that led me to review efforts to use physical design to promote civic well-being. This process had precedents in Frederic Law Olmsted’s nineteenth century designs for parks and suburbs. But it really took hold in reactions to the excesses of unbridled urban industrialism on both sides of the Atlantic in the early 20th century.

Ebenezer Howard’s utopian vision for garden cities that would combine the best elements of urban with country life did not immediately take hold in America. It was Mumford and his colleagues who embraced the concept and applied it to community building efforts in the Northeast after World War I. Mumford’s associate Catherine Bauer extended the effort in support of the nation’s earliest public housing programs, which included prime examples of living environments that enhanced social interaction and even solidarity among residents.

My explorations took me further into unlikely territory, including plans for the earliest regional shopping malls. Here, architect Victor Gruen and developer James Rouse claimed, new centers for sociability would be created to anchor the civic life of otherwise anonymous suburbs.

More recently, New Urbanist critics have rediscovered some of the principles advanced by Mumford and his colleagues. While initially applying their design solutions to suburban sprawl, they ultimately extended their theories to the reconstruction of public housing gone bad as well as to disaster areas along the Gulf Coast following Katrina’s devastating impact.

The results of all these efforts have been mixed. Too often, even the best intentioned reforms had unintended consequences. The legacy of civic design thus remains uneven at best.

A close-up

I am particularly intrigued with the story of public housing, where one would least expect to encounter “communities of citizens.”

The early history of the movement to provide decent shelter at affordable prices reveals, however, the same high intention of creating physical means for enhancing social ties among residents, such as common recreational and use facilities. The hostility to such amenities and their presumed costs led to their elimination, and public housing became over time the last refuge of those who could least afford better options in the private market.

When the Department of Housing and Urban Development adopted New Urbanist design guidelines under its Hope VI program in the 1990s, the gap between public and private housing narrowed. Despite this apparently successful marriage between social uplift and good design, however, such successes have been infrequent in the private sector.

One example, pictured on the book’s cover, in calculated relationship to the best example of garden city design in America (Radburn, New Jersey), is the Ethel Lawrence Homes in Mount Laurel, New Jersey. Open to residents whose incomes fall between 20 and 80% of median income, the Lawrence facility is every bit as inviting physically as the best private developments in the region. Such examples remain the exception, however.

Lastly

Civitas by Design went to press as the country entered one of its worst recessions. It was obvious that, even with a new president steeped in progressive values and associated with community work, the persistent problems of our most devastated post-industrial cities were not going to receive immediate priority. Crisis management rather than long-term reform has been the primary concern of the early Obama administration.

That being said, I still have hope that design precedents that fully incorporate a commitment to social justice can once again be utilized in a variety of circumstances. The history of interventions to upgrade physical conditions with hopes of strengthening our civic life offer both precedents and lessons for improvement. We have the information to extend these efforts. We need only the will to act.