THE CITY: STARTING FROM SCRATCH

BY the end of this century the population of the U.S. will swell by 100 million people. Most of them will crowd into the nation's urban areas, which already house 70% of all Americans on a minuscule 10% of the land. The implications of such an enormous spurt, in terms of urban sprawl, congestion and the very quality of life are obvious--and appalling.

To an increasing number of urbanologists, a partial solution is to start from scratch, wherever possible, by building "new towns"--completely planned communities that could support as many as 1,000,000 people apiece. Such new towns, says Architecture Critic Wolf Von Eckardt, are "our best hope of coming to grips with the problems of megalopolis." Ed Logue, the city planner who rebuilt Boston's downtown area and recently became president of New York State's Urban Development Corporation, advocates tax incentives that would entice developers to build towns ranging in size from 100,000 to 250,000. "At that size you have a civilized community, one without a commuter problem and still small enough that you can fight city hall," he says. In Manhattan last week, the newly formed Committee for National Land Development Policy, a group of builders, bankers and sociologists, called for "an industrial homestead act," under which the Federal Government would provide free land to newtown developers, just as it once gave land to farmers and railroads.

Urban Shangrila. Basically, a new town is a self-contained community that includes not only shopping and recreational facilities but sufficient business and industry to provide jobs for everybody--thus preventing it from becoming a mere bedroom for an existing city. A new town can be a satellite city, close to an already developed metropolitan area, or a wholly new urban center erected on virgin land in much the same way that Chandigarh, Canberra and Brasilia were built. For social and economic as well as political reasons, U.S. planners say that the towns should provide a population mix of wealthy, middle class and poor, of black and white and of commuters and resident workers.

The concept is not unique to the U.S. There are now more than two dozen "garden cities" in Britain, housing 1,250,000 people. The French plan to build six new towns near Paris before the 21st century. The Netherlands, Sweden and Russia have already built a number of new towns. Tapiola, Finland, an urban Shangri-la six miles from Helsinki, is the new town that comes closest to meeting the ideal. Tapiola's main shopping center is a magnificent paved plaza. Nearby are a movie house, theater, hotel and swimming pool. Since no house is more than 250 yards from a shopping and amusement center, residents do most of their traveling on foot.

Few Jobs for Residents. Though roughly 100 communities that are described by their developers as new towns have been constructed or are now abuilding in the U.S., few even approach Tapiola--or Scotland's Cumbernauld and England's Welwyn, for that matter. Too often, the U.S. new towns have proved to be little more than well-planned upper-and middle-class suburbs that provide few jobs for residents and no homes for lower-income workers.

At Westlake, Calif., a new community developed by the American-Hawaiian Steamship Co. 38 miles northwest of Los Angeles, home prices stretch from $28,000 to $75,000, and fewer than 20% of the people who work in Westlake's industrial park, mostly at skilled or white-collar jobs, live in town. Columbia, Md., a new town developed by the Rouse Co. midway between Bal timore and Washington, has succeeded in attracting blacks, who constitute 15% of the city's current population of 4,000; but its architecture tends to be pedestrian, and most residents still work elsewhere. Reston, Va., 18 miles west of Washington, is probably the most esthetically appealing of America's new towns, but it has had serious financial troubles; last autumn, Gulf Oil took the 7,400-acre community over from its developer, Robert E. Simon.

Most of the new towns that have gone up so far have been purely private efforts, often backed by insurance firms or big industrial corporations that can afford the enormous outlays required to assemble large land parcels and install the roads, sewers, power lines and other unprofitable facilities that must be built before residents can begin moving in.

Under the new-communities clause of the 1968 Housing Act, the Department of Housing and Urban Development can guarantee $250 million in loans for land acquisition and development to those builders whose newtown plans meet standards prescribed by HUD. The department has already received 17 formal applications and has tentatively committed $30 million to Park Forest South, 28 miles south of Chicago. If the U.S. is to build similar new towns on a large scale, however, HUD officials think that broader legislation and a vastly larger federal role will be necessary.

Easing the Pressure. Most residents of the U.S.'s new towns find the environment congenial and become word-of-mouth community advertisers. Particularly attractive to the residents is the fact that property taxes tend to stav relatively stable because the cost of infrastructure has already been calculated. New towns, of course, are by no means free from the problems that afflict urban areas everywhere. Some of Reston's teen-agers have taken to drugs and gone on sprees of vandalism. Residents of new towns outside of Stockholm refer to them as "sleeping cemeteries." Though Britons find that the new towns give them a greater sense of community, some inhabitants complain that living in them is often dull. Nonetheless, a well-planned new town seems infinitely preferable to the typical American "slurb," with its dreary tracts, its jumbled community facilities and its tangle of roadways.

The new towns can hardly solve the overwhelming problems of the central cities--problems whose gravity was underscored last week by Urban America and the Urban Coalition in a report that warned of increasing violence and racial polarization. But by accommodating a dizzyingly expanding population, they can at least ease the pressure on America's beleaguered metropolitan areas. Von Eckardt, for one, urges the building of 350 new towns for a total of 35 million people in the next few decades. That would account for more than one-third of the nation's anticipated population growth. What is more, the new towns would occupy only 3,500,000 acres--a mere one-sixth of 1% of the total land area of the U.S.

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