Biology of Cities

"Cities [are] living organisms; [they] are born and . . . develop, disintegrate and die. . . . The cities of today . . . universally exhibit the same alarming symptoms. These endanger their very existence."

The author of this diagnosis is Architect Jose Luis Sert (nephew of famed Spanish muralist Jose Maria Sert), who speaks the view of the International Congresses for Modern Architecture (C.I.A.M.*). To their title question, Can Our Cities Survive? (Harvard University Press; $5), Mr. Sert and his group answer: Not unless they are replanned; considering the shape modern cities are in, the only moot point is whether they will die lingeringly of internal maladies or violently by bombing.

Says Planner Sert: "In its academic and traditional sense, city planning has become obsolete. In its place must be substituted urban biology."

Functional city planning--based on a city's dwelling, industrial, traffic and social needs--is an old idea, but Author Sert illuminates it by exploding some recent popular fallacies about it:

Suburbs. Suburban living does not solve city overcrowding. As cities thrust out their suburban arms, overcrowding, smoke and destruction of the landscape move with them.

Decentralization is "a beautifully romantic 'back to nature' idea!" But Sert points to the ghost towns of the Depression as examples of what might happen to great cities if they became "the victims of a complete and unplanned decentralization."

Slum Clearance, usually an unplanned, piecemeal job, results merely in replacing old buildings with shiny new ones on too-expensive, too-crowded land.

But Mr. Sert and his colleagues do not propose to leave the city to its apparently inevitable fate. Instead of dispersing the city or making it smaller, they would quicken its blood stream by means of express highways; give it air to breathe by surrounding each business and industrial district with a green belt; make it self-contained by providing facilities for recreation and fuller living within the city itself.

The key to their plan is more intelligent use of a city's third dimension--height. The Sert group propose to house the city's people in skyscrapers, surrounded by wide open spaces, and by doing so to provide a single solution for a modern city's two greatest dangers, congestion and bombing.

Of the two prevailing present types of city housing--tenements and single-family houses--both are vulnerable to bombing: tenements because they make an unmissable target; small houses, because it is too costly to build strong shelters for them. The C.I.A.M.'s skyscraper houses would at once offer smaller horizontal areas as targets and provide impregnable, easily accessible shelters.

*Congres Internationaux d'Architecture Moderne.

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