Abstract
Planning ideas after World War II were based on similar visions worldwide. Many of them were developed half a century before, and the war offered a unique chance to put them into practice. Although there were different political systems and a diversity of urban situations, the planning models seem to have been similar in this period. There was an almost universal agreement that reconstruction combined with slum clearances would be necessary and would need to be planned rather than be left to the free play of the market. Planning was seen as the key to postwar rebuilding—for slum clearance, optimized land use, new housing production, and restructuring dense urban area based on the neighborhood principle.
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Notes
The multitude of examples completed according to the neighborhood concept in the immediate postwar years cannot be examined here. See James Dahir, The Neighborhood Unit Plan, Its Spread and Acceptance. A Selective Bibliography with Interpretative Comments (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1947).
Robert Freestone, Model Communities. The Garden City Movement in Australia (Melbourne, Australia: Nelson, 1989);
Abdallah Abd El Aziz Attia, The Neighbourhood as a Basic Unit in Planning New Towns and Town Extensions (Dielsdorf: Akarets Erben, 1963);
Spencer E. Sanders and Arthur J. Rabuck, Städtebau der Zukunft. Städtewiederaufbau, seine Durchforschung und Technik (Vienna: Phönix-Verlag, 1948); Steen Eiler Rasmussen, “Neighborhood Planning,” Town Planning Review (January 1956/57): 197–218;
Paul Ritter, “Radburn Planning: Foreign Examples,” The Architects’ Journal 10 and 2 (1960/61): 680–684 and 176–182; Eugen C. Kaufmann, “Neighbourhood Units as New Elements of Town Planning,” Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects (December 1936): 165–175;
A. I. Tarantul, “A Neighbourhood in the USSR,” Town and Country Planning 30 (1962): 264–267.
Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft: Grundbegriffe der reinen Soziologie, orig. 1887 (Berlin: K. Curtius, 1922), 242, 244, 246. All translations are my own.
Andrew Blowers, “The Neighbourhood: Exploration of a Concept,” in Urban Development: The City as a Social System, ed. Philip Sarre, Hedy Brown, Andrew Blowers, Chris Hamnett, and David M. Boswell (Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, UK: Open University Press, 1973), 58.
Stanton Coit, Neighborhood Guilds: An Instrument of Social Reform (London, UK: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1891).
William D. P. Bliss, ed., The New Encyclopedia of Social Reform (New York and London, UK: Funk & Wagnalls, 1909), 821.
“A feature of Howard’s town plan was its division into neighbourhoods, each based on the population required for one school, and having its community sub-centre.” Frederic James Osborn, Green Belt Cities: The British Contribution (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), 30.
Henry Wright wrote: “There was still the desire to see what might be done in the United States, comparable to Letchworth and Welwyn, given a free hand.” Wright, Rehousing Urban America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), 45.
See Stanley Buder, Visionaries and Planners: The Garden City Movement and the Modern Community (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1990), 157.
Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London, UK: University of California Press, 1969), 170.
See Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963);
Carl Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976); and
Daniel Schaffer, “The American Garden City: Lost Ideals,” in The Garden City: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Stephen Victor Ward (New York and London, UK: Spon, 1992), 127–45, 128.
Some members of the RPAA found proof in the German apocalyptic bestseller by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West (1918), for the process of cultural disintegration in the Western world. See Sussman, Planning the Fourth Migration, 228.
“That path led him from the neighborhood to the neighborhood unit: from a mere cohabition to the creation of a new form and new institutions for a modern urban community.” Lewis Mumford, “The Neighborhood and the Neighborhood Unit,” Town Planning Review 24 (1953/1954): 256–270, 260. See also
Christopher Silver, “Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective,” Journal of the American Planning Association 51, no. 2 (1985): 161–174, 162.
Clarence A. Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit: A Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community,” in Regional Survey of New York and its Environs, vol. 7: Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York, 1929), 22–140, 34.
See Larry Lloyd Lawhorn, “The Neighborhood Unit: Physical Design or Physical Determinism?” Journal of Planning History 8, no. 2 (2009): 111–132, 122.
“‘The Radburn Idea’ remains one of the strongest and most enduring intellectual streams in urban planning.” Carol A. Christensen, The American Garden City and the New Towns Movement (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1986), 55. See also
Eugenie Ladner Birch, “Radburn and the American Planning Movement,” in Introduction to Planning History in the United States, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New Brunswick, NJ: Center Urban Policy Research, 1983), 122–151, 122.
Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1975), 51.
There were two building programs under the Emergency Relief Appropriation (ERAA) of 1935: “(1) the Rural Resettlement Programme, which attempted to stem rural migration by building economically viable rural communities; and (2) the Suburban Resettlement Programme, which was designed to create alternatives to the urban slum.” Carol Corden, Planned Cities: New Towns in Britain and America (Beverly Hills, CA and London, UK: Sage Publications, 1977), 52.
See Evan McKenzie, Privatopia: Homeowner Associations and the Rise of Residential Private Government (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), 64.
Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890: A History Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Institute of Planners (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1969), 336.
These initial aims regarding proliferation were why right-wing critics saw the program as “socialist regimentation disguised as co-operative planning.” McKenzie, Privatopia, 101. See also, Dirk Schubert, “‘City of the Future’: Modellstadt Greenbelt—Maryland,” Die alte Stadt 36, no. 2 (2009): 215–234, 215
Thomas Adams, The Design of Residential Areas: Basic Considerations, Principles, and Methods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 265.
Andrzej Olechnowicz. Working-Class Housing in England between the Wars: The Becontree Estate (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1997), 219.
W. R. Tyler, “The Neighbourhood Unit Principle in Town Planning,” Town Planning Review 18 (July, 1939): 174–186.
J. H. Jones, “The Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 103, no. 3 (1940): 323–343.
Arthur Korn and Felix J. Samuely, “A Master Plan for London Based on Research Carried Out by the Town Planning Committee of the MARS Group,” Architectural Review 91 (June 1942): 143–150, 143.
John Henry Forshaw and Sir Patrick Abercrombie, County of London Plan. Prepared for the London County Council (London, UK: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1944), 9.
Patrick Abercrombie, Greater London Plan 1944 (London, UK: H. M. Stationery Off., 1945), 112–113.
Gottfried Feder, Die neue Stadt. Versuch der Begründung einer neuen Stadtplanungskunst aus der sozialen Struktur der Bevölkerung (Berlin: J. Springer, 1939), 19.
See Cornelius Gurlitt, “New Yorker neue Siedlungen,” Stadtbaukunst 2 (1929): 27–31; and
Robert Lederer, “Die Stadt Radburn,” Der Städtebau 25 (1930): 529–530.
See Carmen Hass-Klau, The Pedestrian and City Traffic (London, UK: Belhaven Press, 1990), 118.
See Elke Pahl-Weber and Dirk Schubert, “Myth and Reality in National Socialist Town Planning and Architecture: Housing and Urban Development in Hamburg, 1933–45,” Planning Perspectives 6 (1991): 161–88, 184.
Regarding the newly conquered areas of Eastern Europe, Himmler announced: “In the design of housing areas, schemes on a massive scale should not be allowed to take over. Instead, homely settlements for the promotion of the common good should be created in the interest of urban design.... The criteria for the structure of housing areas, with a view towards developing the community, can be drawn from the same source that guides the political structure of the Volksgemeinschaft (the community of all Germans in the National Socialist sense). The structure of housing areas must thus, as far as possible, confirm with the political organizational structure of the Volksgemeinschaft, organised in cells, local groups, and districts. The urban form appropriate to the local group would, in this sense, consist of small cells and ultimately in small scale streets, as well as the clear arrangement of squares, residential courtyards and neighborhood groups.” Ernst Lehmann, Volksgemeinschaft aus Nachbarschaften. Eine Volkskunde des deutschen Nachbarschaftswesens (Prague, Berlin, and Leipzig: Noebe, 1944), 13–14.
See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, In the Wake of War: The Reconstruction of German Cities after World War II (New York and Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1993), 181.
Gutschow, quoted in Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten. Biographische Verflechtungen 1900–1970 (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986), 257.
Hans Bernhard Reichow, Organische Stadtbaukunst. Von der Großstadt zur Stadtlandschaft (Braunschweig: G. Westermann, 1948); and
Reichow, Die autogerechte Stadt—Ein Weg aus dem Verkehrs-Chaos (Ravensburg: Otto Maier Verlag, 1959).
Johannes Göderitz, Roland Rainer, and Hubert Hoffmann, Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt (Tübingen: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1957).
Thomas Sharp’s Town Planning (New York and Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin, 1945) was translated by
Nicholas Bullock, Building the Post-War World: Modern Architecture and Reconstruction in Britain (New York and London, UK: Routledge, 2002), xi.
See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, “Reconstruction Law and Building Law in Post-War Germany,” Planning Perspectives 1 (1986): 107–129, 110.
Quoted in Percy Johnson-Marshall, Rebuilding Cities (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 1966), 4.
J. N. Tarn, Working-Class Housing in 19th-Century Britain (London, UK: Lund Humphries, 1971). See also
John Westergaard and Ruth Glass, “A Profile of Lansbury,” The Town Planning Review 25, no. 1 (1954): 33–58, 33.
See Walter Gropius, Architektur. Wege zu einer optischen Kultur (Frankfurt am Main and Hamburg: Fischer Bücherei, 1956), 107.
When the (German-born, American) planner Hans Blumenfeld was invited to Germany in 1949 he reported a lack of coherent, centrally directed long-range planning. See Jeffry M. Diefendorf, Axel Frohn, and Hermann-Josef Rupieper, eds., American Policy and the Reconstruction of West Germany, 1945–1955 (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 338.
See Stephen V. Ward, Planning the Twentieth-Century City: The Advanced Capitalist World (Chichester, UK: Wiley, 2002), 155.
See Michael S. Gibson and Michael J. Langstaff, An Introduction to Urban Renewal (London, UK: Hutchison, 1982), 12.
Nicholas N. Patricios, “The Neighborhood Concept: A Retrospective of Physical Design and Social Interaction,” Journal of Architecture and Planning Research 19, no. 1 (2002): 70–90, 71.
Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Jeff Speck, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (New York: North Point Press, 2000), 18.
See Herbert J. Gans, People and Plans: Essays on Urban Problems and Solutions (New York: Basic Books, 1968), 33.
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Schubert, D. (2014). Transatlantic Crossings of Planning Ideas: The Neighborhood Unit in the USA, UK, and Germany. In: Diefendorf, J.M., Ward, J. (eds) Transnationalism and the German City. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137390172_9
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