How to Cure the City

The world's most active laboratory of city planning is an orderly, well-lighted studio in the little town of Bloomfield Hills, Mich., 15 miles from Detroit. Here advanced students of the famed Cranbrook Academy of Art work over maps, diagrams and statistics, rearranging the streets and buildings of such gigantic U.S. cities as Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. In several smaller midwest cities, like Flint and Saginaw, their plans have actually been tried out.

Chief of this laboratory is a quiet little apple-cheeked Finn named Eliel Saarinen, who in the past 40 years has also redesigned European towns from Budapest to Tallinn, Estonia, and who is widely regarded as the greatest living authority on city planning.

An architect, 68-year-old Saarinen believes the building of towns is an architect's job. Because he is an artist rather than a theoretician, his town planning has. followed no rigid formula. Aside from his own students, who were able to watch his deft civic surgery at first hand, few contemporaries have fully understood his method of work. To explain that method, Planner Saarinen has been writing a monumental treatise called The City. Last week the manuscript of The City was completed.

Cities & Cells. To Planner Saarinen a city is an organism which grows and flourishes or sickens and withers like a plant, according to profound natural laws and the conditions of its environment. Healthiest and most perfectly formed cities, Saarinen believes, were those of the Middle Ages, when the relative simplicity of social life made it possible for architects to build them as complete units. The medieval town, like France's Carcassonne and Holland's Naarden (see cut), resembled the organic cell of animal and plant life, its spired cathedral forming a spiritual nucleus for its web of radiating, labyrinthine streets, its outer battlements and surrounding "greenbelt" of farms and forests providing a protective cellular wall.

Since the Middle Ages, the urban cell has grown out of all recognition. Its neat structure has become disorganized, its central nucleus diseased with slums, its circulation impeded by industrial growths and clotted traffic. "When a city grows compact, as when a forest grows compact," says Saarinen, "it withers."

Main problem of the modern city planner, according to Planner Saarinen's philosophy, is to restore to the modern city some of that ease, convenience and organic unity that it lost when the whims of Renaissance architecture and the chaotic growth of industrialism destroyed its cellular form. But the solution of that problem is complicated. The widening of streets, laying out of parks and recreation centers, construction of parkways are merely temporary reliefs. The modern city soon outgrows them, devouring its suburban areas in a chaotic and vicious cycle. Suburban speculation leads to increased land values, increased value to compactness, compactness to confusion, confusion to decline, decline to cancerous slums.

New Approach. Nearly any competent city planner can lay out a perfectly planned city on paper. But how to reorganize gradually cities that already exist? Planner Saarinen calls his scheme organic decentralization.

Recognizing growth and change as permanent features of the modern metropolis, Planner Saarinen proposes to channel that growth as a gardener might gradually control the growth of a lusty plant. Instead of permitting the city's outward edges to encroach on and devour the countryside like the rim of a spreading fungus, he would have the city anticipate its own expansion by constructing well-organized satellite towns, into which the overflow of the central metropolis can be diverted in an orderly, practical and convenient manner.

Here is how Saarinen's scheme would work: freed from the instability of land values created by the private suburban speculator, the Saarinen advised city can offer the slum owner, for example, an attractive swap in well-designed suburban community property. Meanwhile it can convert his former slum into a park, a business district, or whatever else fits in best with the city's long-term master plan. By a continuous series of such swaps and suburban resettlements, followed by appropriate remodeling of the city's internal structure, the city as a whole can be brought closer & closer to the city planner's ideal. The process, Planner Saarinen thinks, would cost little more than is spent today in any big city on routine and palliative jobs of "civic improvement."

Architecture's Chance. The eventual city plan, toward which all this reorganization would continuously move, Planner Saarinen would leave, not to matter-of-fact materialists, but to inspired architects who would be responsible for the city's cultural and spiritual life as well as its efficiency and prosperity. Saarinen believes, against all mean-spirited defeatists, that a city should be a beautiful and inspiring work of art as well as an efficient machine. He regards most contemporary efforts at low-cost housing as human filing cabinets destined inevitably to become the slums of the future.

To Planner Saarinen the well-planned modern city must be conceived not only on maps, but in three dimensions as well, its towering masses, tree-lined boulevards, stretches of greenbelt, public squares and modest homes and shops all fitting neatly into place as parts of a beautiful and closely interwoven pattern. The future of architecture, he believes, will lie in the organization and integration of that pattern, in recapturing architecture's medieval role as the art of building cities rather than isolated buildings.

Says Eliel Saarinen: "[The modern city's] fundamental objective must be to provide a healthy environment for man, so that the best within him can grow in strength. In concert with this objective the art of town building must strive to build its manifold problems into a workable organism. According to this workable organism the [city] can grow, no matter how great the growth ultimately may be, and even if the city were to become the greatest of all the metropolises, its significance must not be measured by the quantity of its masses and the intensity of its traffic, but by the quality of its physical and spiritual order."

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