“Build Your Home the Skyscraper Way“: The Growth of the Suburbs/Criticism of Suburban Life

Excerpt from the WBA? CD-Rom

The 1920s saw major increases in both home ownership and suburbanization, as a chart of new housing starts for the years 1914–1944 shows. The dramatic increase between 1922 and 1929 reflects the middle-class prosperity of the 1920s as well as banks’ increased willingness to grant mortgages on longer terms and for less money down. Most of the housing starts came in “single-unit” (single-family) homes, generally presented as the “proper” or ideal model for American living.

The . . . 1927 Sears catalog demonstrates this preference for single-family, traditionally styled homes. Sears, Roebuck sold virtually every imaginable product by mail order. The company’s famous catalog included precut, ready-to-assemble houses that would be shipped by rail. Trucked to the home site, the precut houses could then be readily assembled according to the included plans by local carpenters or the owners themselves. Sears offered more than one hundred different houses to customers willing to pay in monthly installments.

The Sears catalog compared these houses, precut at the mill, to urban skyscrapers. “Build Your Home the Skyscraper Way, " the cattalog urged. The catalog reflects the fascination with urban, technological modernism. The 1920s might be considered the golden age of America’s cities. New construction technologies“pushed buildings ever higher. “Austere towers of cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods,” the novelist Sinclair Lewis called them in Babbitt, “built—it seemed—for a race of giants.” A thriving urban culture, glamorized in movies and print media, captured the excitement of modernity. The 1920 census officially declared the United States an urban nation, with more people now living in cities and towns than on farms.

But despite its thriving urban culture, American population growth increasingly occurred in the suburbs. As the chart on suburban growth in four American cities shows, between 1920 and 1940 Boston’s population, for example, increased slightly, while the population of “metropolitan Boston,” meaning the outlying suburbs, grew by nearly half a million people. Like Boston, Cincinnati added 55,000 people in the same period while its suburbs gained nearly 200,000. Milwaukee proper gained 127,000 people in those twenty years; its suburbs swelled by nearly 300,000. While population in Los Angeles proper increased by slightly under 1 million people, more than 2 million people moved to the greater Los Angeles metropolitan region. Later in the century, thanks to subsidized highway construction, this trend would intensify.

The growth of suburban life alarmed some American intellectuals. They saw in modern technology the potential to transform human societies, to begin a new era of artistic and intellectual achievement “on a mass scale. And they celebrated the new forms of art and culture, like cubism, or the skyscraper, or movies, as what we now often call “modernism.” Enthused by modernism’s bold potential, artists and intellectuals in the 1920s tended to celebrate the city and denigrate the suburbs. America’s dynamic cities represented the future. Why should a modern society simply copy its old ways of doing things, and retreat into the past? The Sears catalog trumpeted the use of modern, urban technology. But though the ideal Sears home bears a relation to the downtown office tower, it looks “traditional” and sits squarely on a small suburban plot. How was a “colonial” tract house relevant to life in the 1920s? What business did a “Cape Cod” “cottage have springing up in Illinois, more than a thousand miles from the Atlantic Ocean? In the suburbs, modernist critics thought, an unthinking fondness for imaginary “tradition” sapped modern life’s vitality.

One such modernist, Lewis Mumford, remains a pioneer in the history of technology, and his celebration of America’s cities still influences contemporary architects and planners. Eccentric in his interests, broadly original in his approach, Mumford’s work also reflected his enthusiasm for the role intellectuals and professional experts would play in modern America. Mumford’s 1926 essay “The Intolerable City” called for urban growth, technological innovation, and “common green spaces judiciously mapped by educated planners.” Uncontrolled, unplanned growth, he thought, had put urban technology to antidemocratic, inhumane uses. People fled to the suburbs, and thereby impoverished their lives. Only planned communities and sensible growth could stem this cultural decline.

Contrasting Mumford’s essay with the Sears catalog advertisement, we can see two distinct and competing visions of what modernity meant, and how modern life should be lived.

For more reading on suburbanization and its critics see Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier (1985); John Stilgoe,“Borderland (1988).”““

The Intolerable City”“Lewis Mumford Attacks Unplanned Growth

As one of America’s most distinctive twentieth-century intellectuals, Lewis Mumford helped form an artistic and literary sensibility that could appreciate urban life and modern technology. Mumford suspected, as he suggests in this February 1926 article in Harper’s Magazine, that unchecked market forces could produce sterility and conformity as well as congestion, disorder, and a reduced quality of life.

The mouths of our great cities are gigantic hoppers. Into them pour the foods we coax from the earth, the energy we snare from the sun, the metals we disembowel, the men and women we draw from the sampler communities. What comes out of these hoppers? Ordinarily, people think that wealth is increased and life is far more attractive and thrilling; for if this were not so, who would be drawn into New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Philadelphia, and why should any other city boast about its increases in population and attempt to put itself in the same census tables? Surely, this is the best that modern civilization can offer, this New York with its dazzle of pointed towers, this Chicago with its sweep of avenues, this Detroit with its thick pageant of motors?“But let us look at the hopper more closely and see what is actually coming out of it. Census reports, mortality statistics, and income-tax returns do not tell the whole story: there is something beneath all that, the life of the ordinary man and woman. In the long run the things that tip the balance are those that cannot be weighed: they must be seen, felt, handled, endured. Recently, the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission confessed that only one-third the population of New York City had an income sufficient to enable the family to live in decent modern quarters. Let us single out Mr. Brown, who is one of this fortunate minority, and follow him through the routine of his day.

As an inhabitant of a vigilant city, Mr. Brown is proud of the low death rate his health department boasts; unfortunately, the statistician keeps no account of the living rate, so we must make a first-hand appraisal. Mr. Brown usually comes home at the end of a day with that tired feeling, and all the quack medicines in the drugstore do not quite relieve him of it. He is proud of the fact that he keeps books or sells insurance on the eighteenth story of a skyscraper; but so much of the ground was used to build those splendid offices that Mr. Brown works most of the day under artificial light; and in spite of the slick system of ventilation, the“middle of the afternoon finds him dull.

The journey home undoubtedly calls forth physical effort; unhappily it is not invigorating. The Swedish massage he receives at the hand of the subway guard does not improve his appetite; nor is it helped by the thick fumes of gasoline when he walks out upon the street. Eventually Mr. Brown sits down at his dinner table and looks out on an airshaft or a court where a dozen other kitchens have been busily preparing a dozen other meals; it never varies. No change in color, no hint of sunset or moonlight, no variation from season to season as the vegetation flourishes or shrivels: only the smells that creep through the windows tell the difference between Thursday and Friday.

Once upon a time Mr. Brown used to stretch his legs and play with the children; the six-room flat was common in Boston and New York; the seven-room house flourished in Philadelphia and Chicago and St. Louis. Now the walls of the rooms have contracted: Mr. Brown pays so much for his four cubicles he is perhaps forced to harbor an ancient aunt or his wife’s parents in the same narrow quarters; and, as likely as not, there are no children. When the Browns have put by a little they will have either a baby or a cheap car: it is hard to decide which, for the upkeep is high in both“cases; but the car has this advantage—it would enable the whole family to get out into God’s own country on Sundays.

This pursuit of God’s own country would make the angels themselves weep: it means a ride through endless dusty streets, and along an equally straight and endless concrete road, breathing the dust and exhaust of the car ahead, and furnishing an equal quantum of exhaust and dust to the car behind; a ride with intervals spent at hot-dog stands, and long hours wasted at ferry houses and bridges and main junctions and similar bottlenecks, where the honking of impatient horns reminds Mr. Brown in the spring of the frog ponds he was not quite able to reach. As the main city grows, the country around becomes more suburban and the fields and hills and lakes are more difficult to reach. A generation ago Mr. Brown’s father used to catch shad in the Hudson, or he might have spent the Sunday rambling with his youngsters along the bays and inlets of Long Island Sound. To-day a vast load of sewage has driven away the fish; and the expansion of great country estates for the lords of the metropolis has blocked and fenced off the rambler. Nor does New York alone suffer. Buffalo was forced to jump sixteen miles from the city line the other day to recover a paltry thousand feet of lake front for its citizens. By the time open spaces are set aside, ”“however, the population has multiplied so furiously that, on a summer Sunday, the great parks are as congested as the city’s streets—so much for solitude and natural beauty!

When dinner is over neither Mr. Brown nor his wife is in condition to listen to great music or to attend the theater. First of all, they are not in financial condition to do this because ground rents are high in the amusement district, and the price of seats has risen steadily to meet the increase in rents. Unless the occasion is important or Mr. Brown is willing to scrimp on the week’s lunches, he cannot afford to go. Again, he is in no mental condition to participate in play that demands mental activity or emotional response above the spinal cord; and if this were not enough, the prospect of another hour in the subway kills most of the impinging joys. The seventy theaters that exist in sophisticated New York are, really, only one to a hundred thousand people; there are a score of little towns in continental Europe that are far better provided with drama and music. The fact is that, with all New York’s wealth, its cultural facilities are relatively limited: they would be insufficient were it not for the fact that only a minority can afford to enjoy them regularly.

But Mr. and Mrs. Brown have their amusements? Oh yes, they”“have the movies, that is to say, the same entertainment, served in almost the same form, as it comes in Peoria or Tuscaloosa or Danbury—no more and no less. If they are too tired to “drop around the corner” they have another consolation, the radio: this, too, works no better than it does in the despised, backward villages of the hinterland, and if the Browns happen to be situated in one of the mysterious “dead areas” it does not work nearly so well! In short, Mr. Brown travels through the pulping mill of the subway, endures the tawdry monotony of his flat, divorces himself from the natural environments he can never quite recover on Sunday—for what? For an occasional visit to the museum or the opera? He could have as much if he lived a hundred miles away. His sacrifices are in reality made for a much more mystical purpose: his presence increases the “greatness” of his city. By adding to its population, he raises the capitalizable value of its real estate; and so he increases rents; and so he makes parks and playgrounds and decent homes more difficult to obtain; and so he increases his own difficulties and burdens; and his flat gets smaller, his streets bleaker, and his annual tribute to the deities who build roads and subways and bridges and tunnels becomes more immense.

Mr. Brown grumbles; sometimes he complains; but he is only ”“just beginning to doubt. His newspaper tells him that he is fortunate; and he believes it. He fancies that when another subway is built he will find room for his feet—if he leaves the office promptly. I shall deal briefly with this fond hope a little later.

II

What is true of Mr. Brown is true also of the people who live on the East Side, the South Side, the Hump, the Stockyards District, or “the other side of the railroad track.” Since, however, they lack Mr. Brown’s snobbishness, they have a touch of neighborliness for consolation, and may occasionally manufacture a little special amusement for themselves in wild dances and hearty weddings and funerals full of pomp and dignity and excellent wine. If these groups, through advances in wages, could be raised to the level of Mr. Brown’s station, they would not exactly be in Paradise; but suppose Mr. Brown stood at the apex of the pyramid—perhaps that would be Paradise? Perhaps that would justify Mosshunk’s trying to become Boomtown, Boomtown’s trying to become Zenith, Zenith’s trying to become Chicago, Chicago’s trying to become New York, and New York trying to become like Mr. Hugh Ferriss’s picture, The Future?

Well, let us consider what Mr. Smith-Robinson, the millionaire”“widget manufacturer, gets out of the great city, with its increasing population, its multiplying turnover, its skyscrapers, its subways—in short, all the symbols of its dominant religion of material expansion.

Mr. Smith-Robinson lives in a twenty story apartment house on Park Avenue. It is like Mr. Brown’s plain apartment, but it ascended the ladder of evolution: the blastula has become a gastrula, or to speak more plainly, the four-celled unit has multiplied to sixteen units, six of them being sacred chambers devoted to illustration and baptism. To overcome the base efficiencies of the building, we shall call in the services of a fashionable architect; he will arrange the scenery to persuade his client that he is a Spanish ambassador, an Italian prince, or a medieval English baron—but woe to the poor client if he take it into his head to draw back the hangings and look out the window. The chances are that he will find himself facing directly a blank honeycomb of windows, exactly like Mr. Brown’s exhilarating view—only there are more of them. After all, the company that built the apartment was not in business for its health: they covered every square foot that the building laws and zoning ordinances would permit. Though they may call the few tubs of trees and shrubs at the bottom of the court a Persian garden, it is a “feeble attempt to confuse the mind: the virtues of a Park Avenue apartment are those of an honest barracks.

So numerous are the lofty palaces and cloud-capped pinnacles where the “emergent minority” live, that the streets are vastly overtaxed by the traffic of their automobiles. When Mr. Smith-Robinson comes down from the country estate he sooner or later acquires, he finds that it pays to leave the car at the outskirts and take the rapid transit into town. The theaters, the clubs, the teas, the dances, the dinners, the concerts, the opera, and all the other devices for “performing leisure” which Mr. Thorstein Veblen has catalogued have, perhaps, a strong appeal to Mr. Smith-Robinson; but more and more, for all that, he is tempted to adopt the Friday-to-Tuesday week-end in the country. He finds, curiously, that as his income increases, the devices for reducing it become more and more effective. He bequeaths a young fortune to his fellow citizens to buy them a park; his executors are able to get hold of only a small wedge of land. Or he adds a wing to a hospital, and finds that it is overcrowded before the first year is over. As the avenues become clogged, as crimes increase, as he becomes conscious of the danger of merely walking abroad on the streets, our fortunate citizen perhaps grows a little thoughtful; at the least, he reads with“great interest the weekly bulletin of plans for doing away with traffic congestion by sinking endless millions into ingenious feats of engineering. These plans are to Mr. Smith-Robinson what new subways are to Mr. Brown; and with the fond hopes that they too embalm I shall deal shortly.

III

In the meanwhile, neither Mrs. Brown nor Mrs. Smith-Robinson is an altogether happy woman: the city they live in was at best designed for adults, and there is no place in it for the coming generation. So much money is spent in the detection of criminals, in the treatment of preventable disease, in the building of refuges for the mentally unstable and above all, in the more fruitful processes of living and learning. The schools are driven, by mere weight of numbers, to offer an education which caricatures our democratic technic of living; and no pabulum that may be added to the curriculum quite makes up for the impoverishment of educational opportunity in the city itself.

As for play, it is almost out of the question; even generous Chicago cannot keep up with its necessities. The acreage of parks and playgrounds in our metropolitan hives bears no relation at all to the density of population; for although by crowding people “ and piling story on story we may almost indefinitely multiply the normal density, Nature does not permit us to pile one lawn upon another, or one tree upon another; and even if the rooftops were used for playgrounds, too, there would not be an adequate amount of open spaces. Indeed, as our cities continue to grow, and become more deeply in need of parks, the difficulties of holding open the land they do possess become greater: art galleries, museums, universities, art centers, and similar institutions run without commercial profit naturally covet land that need not be bought—and as ground rents rise their demands become more importunate.

So note the paradox. As a city increases in “population and wealth” it becomes less able to afford the things that make life gracious, interesting, and amusing. The difficulties of carrying on mere physical existence are so terrific that a major part of a city’s money and energy, which should be spent on making life itself better, is devoted to the disheartening task of keeping “things” from getting worse. For a fortunate and able minority the city provides power and riches—much power and much riches. But the chief benefit of a big income is that it enables the possessor to escape from the big city. Hence the estates that are being planted“from Chestnut Hill to Santa Barbara; hence the great drift of the middle classes into suburbia. If metropolitan life were the best civilization can now offer, it would be impossible to explain the fact that the suburbs are increasing in size, number, and population. The smaller cities that copy the defects of New York and Chicago, towns that ache for skyscrapers and apartment houses and pray to heaven for a little traffic congestion—even these cities are in the same boat; for many of them are being engulfed by suburbs which take advantage of the city’s business facilities and escape the increasing burden of taxes.

IV

Manifestly, the suburb is a public acknowledgment of the fact that congestion and bad housing and blank vistas and lack of recreational opportunity and endless subway rides are not humanly endurable. The suburbanite is merely an intelligent heretic who has discovered that the mass of New York or Chicago or Zenith is a mean environment. Is the suburb, then, a “solution”? Will the metropolis of the future cover a radius of at least fifty miles from the central district; will Boston, New York, Philadelphia be merely high points of congestion in a vast belt of suburbs and industrial districts stretching along the coast? That is the assumption upon “which many of our city surveys and regional plans, to say nothing of real estate speculations, are being tacitly made. Let us examine this beautiful prospect.

The suburb is an attempt to recapture the environment which the big city, in its blind and heedless growth, has wiped out within its own borders. With the aid of the suburb, business and living are divided into two compartments, intermittently connected by a strip of railroad. For the sake of clearness, let us isolate the case of Mr. Jones, the typical suburbanite, the perennial theme of the cockney cartoonist. Twenty years ago Mr. Jones built a house in Grassmere. It contained some of the closets, rooms, niches, fixtures, furniture which had been oddly missing in his city apartment, and it was surrounded by a garden which, until the garage began to demand space, and the car itself most of the family’s time, was well-cultivated. The streets were embowered with trees, the school was small and surrounded by a playing field; within ten minutes walk was Chestnut Woods, a great place for picnicking.

When Mr. Jones moved to Grassmere it was Eden; almost it was. All the suburbs along the line were small, the railroad company was obsequious and kept the fares low; and if the journey to the office was a little tiresome, the newspaper presently “increased in size and reduced the mental distance. The sacrifice of the climax of the third act was a small price to pay, in fact, nothing at all to set over against the children’s gain. As long as Mr. Jones had “business in the city: this was perhaps the best possible arrangement for the life of his family.

In establishing himself in Grassmere Mr. Jones forgot only one thing: he forgot that he had not really escaped the city. The very forces that created the suburb moved out, inexorably, with icy relentlessness, and began to smear away this idyllic environment, which had the neighborliness of a small community and the beauty of gardens and parks and easy access to nature. Inevitably, the suburb grew and, growing, it became more like the city it had only apparently broken away from: the market street lengthened into a garish main street, ungainly offices and lunchrooms sprang up, an apartment house was built near the railroad tracks. Land values boomed; but taxes, alas! rose too. Potentially, Mr. Jones was more prosperous; but if he wanted to keep his house as a permanent home every increase in land values and taxes had the effect of making him poorer. If he had a little extra land he was forced to sell it as building lots; that brought neighbors uncomfortably near. The simple dirt road, which had cost little, was replaced by asphalt; ” “traffic increased and it was necessary to widen Main Street: both improvements cost money. The old method of sewage disposal and the old water mains were no longer adequate for the doubled population; Grassmere enlarged them—and that cost money. New streets were opened at the behest of the leading real estate man, who happened to be Mayor during the boom period; while these streets waited for new owners and housebuilders, they “ate their head off.”

All the costs of sewers, paving, unnecessarily wide residential streets, street lighting, gas, electricity, and police went up so rapidly that presently the newcomers could no longer afford a roomy, comfortable house like that which the Joneses had built: they put up monotonous semi-detached rows or plumped into apartments. Mr. Henry Wright has pointed out that the cost of these little accessories has been steadily mounting during the last century, and now comes to about forty-five per cent of the total cost of a house. When all the land is covered with asphalt, when all the streets are designed indiscriminately for through loads of traffic, when the land itself is sold by the front foot, the single family house becomes a forbidding luxury, and there is no choice at all for the greater part of the population but to build multi-family houses. The “own-your-”“own-home movement” does not recognize that the real difficulty under these conditions consists in keeping your own home.

When his suburb became choked with new buildings, Mr. Jones began to wonder if he might not endure an extra hour’s travel each day for the sake of quiet, lower tax rates, a tennis court, and a more congenial community.

Unhappy Mr. Jones! If he moves farther into the country the improvement is only temporary. So long as the office buildings and the lofts crowd higher into the sky, so long as the factories are planted more thickly along the railroad sidings that line the entrance to the great city, so long will the blessings of suburbia be little more than a momentary illusion. The sort of life the suburb aims at is of course only partial: inevitably the suburbanite loses many of the cultural advantages and contacts of a complete city; but even its limited effort to obtain two essential things a decent home for children and a comely setting for life—is thin and ephemeral in its results. The suburb is not a solution. It is merely a halting place. So long as the big city continues to grow, the suburb cannot remain suburban. Its gardens are doomed, its quiet streets are doomed, the countryside around it is doomed, a doom hangs over every aspect of its life—sooner or later it will be swallowed up and lost ”“in the maw of the great city. Spring Gardens was anciently a suburb of Philadelphia; Cambridgeport, of Boston; Flushing, of New York—and where are the snows of yesteryear?

V

The conditions that we have been examining are those that attend uncontrolled and unregulated urban growth. They are not evils which are inherent in the constitution of cities; but neither are they accidental defects which will be wiped out by a little adroit street widening or municipal regulation. It is true that during the last forty years a great corps of technicians has arisen, city planners, engineers, transit experts, and municipal administrators who devote themselves to easing the burdens of congestion and repairing the more obvious damages. Unfortunately, however, the hopes that these excellent minds awaken, none of their remedies permanently remedies anything—and they themselves are the first to confess it! Our technicians usually accept the fact of unregulated and unbounded urban growth as “given.” So instead of attempting to remove the causes that create our mangled urban environments, they attempt only to relive a few of the intolerable effects. They exhaust the devices of mechanical engineering and finance to provide palliative for expanding cities and expanding populations, “and they flinch, most of them, from asking the one question which promises any permanent and effectual answer—how can we provide a stable environment for a stable population?

It is quite fatuous to ask what promise there is of reconstructing New York and Chicago internally, to make them fit for permanent human habitation. Our efforts to combat the evils of congestion never get within miles of that: the most Mr. Brown hopes for is that the next subway will give him more standing room, in New York; or that a series of double-decked streets will give more clearance to his automobile, in Detroit. As urban growth takes place now, Mr. Brown might as well dream of free airplane excursions to the North Pole. Each new transit line opens up new tracts of land, or increases the capacity of the existing areas to bear a heavier load of people. Thus the remedy increases the population in the Central District and at the outskirts; with this increase, land values rise again and, in turn, a still heavier load falls upon the land.

The same principle applies to those marvelous double-decked avenues and underground ways that modern engineering so eagerly threatens us with. As exhibitions in constructive audacity, these schemes are highly admirable; as instruments of business enterprise they are also, perhaps, admirable; in fact, they are “altogether delightful for any purpose except for that for which they re intended—namely, the relief of congestion. The reason is plain: the cost of each new bank of streets or each new boring of tunnel must fall back, eventually, upon the land; and in order to meet the taxes and carrying charges of our monster skyscrapers, still greater monsters must be erected. In short, the remedy just adds a little more of the disease. To build streets in anything like the initial ratio to the original density of population would throw an intolerable charge upon the buildings—unless it were possible to increase the height, and so destroy the ratio! None of our current plans for city improvement break out of this vicious circle; for the only way of breaking out is by limiting the increase of population within a single congested area, whereas none of our present improvements would be tolerated, on business principles, if they did not promise just the opposite of this.

Since all this holds for the present metropolis, we might as well put down in the cellar those purely fanciful solutions of our urban problems upon which Mr. Hugh Ferriss exerts his able and masculine draughtsmanship. Physically, there is perhaps no limit to the heightening and extension of New York and Chicago; the real limitations on city development are not physical but social. They lie“in the very nature of a humane life, in the fact that the city is not essentially an agglomeration of houses, but an association of human beings. “Men come together in order to live; they remain together in order to live the good life.” Only a megalomaniac imagines that life in a two-hundred story building is in any way better or greater than life in a two-story building, or that air pumped into the city from stations leagues away is superior to air breathed directly, without going through an elaborate mechanical apparatus. The capital objection to immuring oneself in the canyons of the existing metropolis, or the far more colossal canyons that exist in the real-estate speculator’s imagination, is that the things that make life tolerable are not a single whit furthered by all this mechanical apparatus. And after all, someone must live at the bottom of these eyries that our bold architects project from Cloudcuckooland; and, unless I am greatly mistaken, life below the fortieth story would be as precarious and dull as it is to-day in those parts of the city that are not on show.

So we come back to the problem; How are we to obtain the physical foundations of a good life in our cities?

VI

The problem would be utterly discouraging were it not for two“conditions. One is that the growth of modern invention has diminished the necessity for urban concentration. The other is that human beings are still, after all, human; and though they would doubtless stand for even worse conditions if they thought their sacrifices and discomforts could not be helped, they are not likely to stay in the same posture once they find that an avenue of escape is open. Without any great optimism, I think it is now becoming plain that the more intelligent and sensitive part of the population is becoming a little bored by “greatness,” and they are beginning to feel towards their skyscrapers the way an Egyptian slave perhaps felt towards the Pyramids. Also, perhaps for the first time, there is the promise of conditions which would favor and encourage a fundamental social and economic change.

All our plans for city improvement have hitherto been based on conditions which existed in the past; the city planner genially assumes that these forces will operate equally in the future. There is this fatality about such plans: they rarely catch up even with the past. Against this school of thought stands another group that has grown up slowly in the last generation: it first centered about Mr. Ebenezer Howard and his garden-city group, and it now has distinguished adherents in every country. These planners believe “that we can effectually take care of the past only by preparing for a more desirable future. For them, the congested metropolis is not primarily bad or miserable: it is merely wasteful, inefficient, technologically obsolete. That is to say, it arose out of industrial and commercial conditions which have ceased to operate in full force to-day, and may not operate at all tomorrow.

Let me explain. During the railroad era the favored urban spots were at the terminals of trunk lines: urban growth took place linearly, along the tracks. The result was vast urban agglomerations—it is impossible to call them “cities”—at points where the traffic ended, coalesced, or crossed. Modern motor transportation and modern airplane traffic do not abet this tendency: They favor a more even distribution of population, like that which characterized the wagon and canal period; for the net of motor roads makes it possible to serve any point in a whole area by car or truck, instead of simply those points “ on the line.” Economically, this works towards regional rather than metropolitan development; towards industrial decentralization rather than toward further congestion.

Now, the first outcome of motor transport has been in the domain of living rather than in industry. All over the land a great “body of people, fed up with the life they have been forced to live in the old centers, have taken to wheels: they drive around the country, more or less consciously seeking a better environment. They are no longer content to live where they can work; they want work, rather, where they may have a little opportunity for truly living. They do not make the search, generally, with either imagination or intelligence—for the moment a large number of them think Florida is the paradise of the heart and the end of human aspiration; but at worst, they manage to plant a bungalow in the middle of some deserted field beyond the city’s limits—mean and pathetic, perhaps, but a symbol of the desire to recover freedom and a sense of the human scale.

At present this going and coming of motors is as anarchic as the buying and selling of urban lots. Giant power and industry planning are the two positive forces which are capable of turning this loose human desire into socially constructive ends. Giant power, as distinguished from superpower—the mere commercial linkage of generating stations—carries with it the notion of distributing electricity in districts where a balanced day and night load may be carried along the same mains: this requires a community devoted to both domesticity and industry, not a community in which these“things are separated, as they are in the big city and its suburbs. Such a development has been engineered through public ownership in Ontario with a deliberate social purpose; but in certain regions it is likewise being fostered and stimulated by the commercial companies. In outlining their policies on power, Governors Smith and Pinchot have emphasized the opportunities Giant Power offers for building up the rural community, and restoring life to the whole countryside; and in the preliminary report of the New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission the writers showed how a whole belt of the State, now poorly developed and cultivated, might be opened up, through motor transportation and electric power, for the creation of new communities. Mr. Henry Ford’s attempt to lower the vast overhead of metropolitan industry and to restore a smaller factory unit to the old mill sites in the open country is a significant industrial departure in the same direction—and it is a departure, too, in this special sense, that it leaves the great and growing city of Detroit behind it.

The benefits of motor transportation and electric power are, I hasten to add, potential; against their free operation is the drag of habit and routine and business enterprise, which keeps industry fettered to the sites where high land values can be maintained and “charged back to the consumer, and where vast private fortunes may be built up through the congestion of population. These new tendencies, however show that the continued growth of the great city is not merely vicious—it is technologically futile. As industrial processes become more refined, as electricity supplants raw coal, as industrial production becomes planned and socially regulated, as the working population achieves even such relative stability as it has now attained for example in the garment trades, as all these things happen, industry has less and less to gain by haphazard overcrowding. Whereas for a century we have lived where industrial and commercial opportunities seemed greatest, we can now reverse the process, and deliberately plant our industries and our communities in regions where the human opportunities for living are best. In the light of this, our ingenious plans for super-cities, with super-congestion, super-subways, super-tenements, and super-skyscrapers are, if I may be allowed a pun, a little superficial.

T he alternative to super-congestion is not “back to the farm” or “let things go.” The real alternative to unlimited metropolitan growth is limited growth and, along with it, the deliberate planning and building of new communities. Once we abandon our naive belief in the quackeries of engineer“to face the wholesale change that this implies; for it breaks entirely with the notion that congestion is a boon, that city growth beyond a certain limit is desirable, and that we can solve our human and social problems by placing them all on the plane of mechanics.

But how can the growth of cities be controlled? Is the flood of population not inevitable as a river flood? It is indeed; but river floods are not inevitable. The comparison serves very neatly; and it was well put recently by Mr. Benton Mackaye. There was a time when the cities along the Ohio used to protect themselves from spring floods by raising dykes; presently, a great tide of water would rush down the valley and flow over the dykes; and then more elaborate ones would be built. As long as cities attempted river control by this sort of patchwork they were perpetually defeated. Genuine flood-prevention dates from the time that the flood-engineers planted forests in the hills to retain the moisture and hold back the waters; when they dealt with causes, rather than effects.

Need I point the parallel. Effective community planning cannot go on so long as each new flood of population can break down the dykes. Any effective effort to provide good living conditions within our existing cities rests upon achieving a fairly stable population: we shall perhaps be willing “this can be accomplished only by building up new communities in the hinterland, which will hold back the flood, or, to make the metaphor more exact, will not merely hold it back but also drain off some of the surplus from existing centers. What we need is a policy of “community afforestation.” Our present small towns and villages are unable to retain their young people because so many of them are scrub communities; neither can they, in their present state, attract new industries or foster new homes. If we are to prevent congestion, we must deliberately create communities which will be fully equipped for work, play, study, and “living.” Our new communities must be at least as well designed as a Gary school; in other words, they must be, in English usage, complete garden cities.

How would these new communities differ from existing cities? First, in placement; they would be established in relation to the best remaining water and power resources, and in country districts where land values were still low. They would be surrounded by a permanent belt of agricultural land, to provide continuous local food, supply of green vegetables, and to preserve open spaces without taking them altogether out of productive use. Second, “provisions for all the institutions necessary for a community of a given size, say ten thousand or fifty thousand, would be made from the beginning. That is, the land needed for schools, churches, libraries, theaters, hospitals, municipal buildings, associations, playgrounds, and parks would be calculated, platted and reserved; at the same time, the land needed for shops, factories, and offices would be allocated, with due respect to convenient access, to amenity, and—in factory district—to prevailing winds and outlooks. The residential parts of the city, instead of being intersected by innumerable streets, would be planned for quiet, safety, and beauty; so that while traffic roads would doubtless be much wider than our present roads, the homeways would be much narrower and more lightly paved. In general, no houses higher than three stories, and no office higher than five, would be permitted; but that would not prevent the erection of a single tall building, or a small group, as high as, say, ten stories if the height served some direct purpose, such as the grouping of municipal departments, or medical services. The high building would not, however, be permitted as a mere rent-barracks—any more than it is to-day in most European cities.

The provision of gardens and playgrounds would likewise be made on the initial plan; and since the population would be “definitely limited, their adequacy would be permanently insured. The time now wasted in subway travel would, since the area of the city is limited, be available for spot, rest, education, or entertainment. Land values increase in the business district of such a city; but the increase is kept for communal purposes. Hence the stimulation of land values becomes no ordinary part of the processes of business or industry. If some potent institution, like an expanding industry or a great center of learning, caused such a city to attract more people than originally provided for, the further extension of the city, once it had filled its sites, would be taken care of by founding another city, similarly restricted in area and population, similarly surrounded by a rural belt. Mr. Waldo Browne, in an excellent discussion of our overgrown universities, has suggested that institutions like Harvard, instead of automatically getting bigger, should “swarm,” and create new Harvards in Indiana or California. It is an excellent principle; in precisely this manner growth would take place in the garden city.

I have painted only a partial picture of the new community; but I trust no one will think I have been dealing with an imaginary town. On the contrary, I am just translating into general terms the realities of Letchworth and Welwyn, with a touch now and then of“other communities—including an interesting housing development where I happen to live, unique among all the urban dormitories of New York in the fact that, promoted by a limited dividend corporation, it carries with it an adequate amount of garden and playground from the beginning, as part of the normal cost of housing. There is nothing “ideal” in Letchworth or Welwyn or Sunnyside in the sense that the men and women who live there have suddenly become beatified, marvelously intelligent, feverishly public spirited. Let me emphasize, on the contrary, that this sort of community is merely human. What makes it desirable, against the congested metropolis, is that our New Yorks and Chicagos are a little less than human—admirably fitted for the habitation of robots. The planning of a merely human community is a prodigious advance upon our current metropolitan plans to “decrease (i.e. further) congestion.” It will be time enough when we have provided humane conditions to conceive of habitations fit for Men Like Gods. At any rate, garden cities call neither for super human powers, nor for a religious conversion—unless the subordination of speculation and profiteering to the welfare of the community implies, in fact, a religious conversion.

Once the desire for better living conditions is effectively .“expressed, there is nothing in modern industry itself to hinder its being worked out; for the building of new garden cities calls for no violent departure from normal American practices. For three hundred years we have been planting new cities: it would be strange if, at the height of our mechanical powers, we had suddenly become paralyzed. Every day new factories are founded, or old ones forced to expand and to move: outside of highly localized industries, such as those connected specifically with mines or ports, there is no reason why a fresh start should not be made in the new centers, instead of adding to the clutter and confusion of existing ones. Finally, every day new houses are built: it needs only social foresight, and financial co-ordination to connect the erection of houses with the spotting of new industries.

Here then is the choice—between growth by the “mechanical extension” of existing urban areas, and growth by the foundation of new communities, fully equipped for working, learning, and living. In the growth by mechanical extension we move inertly towards the intolerable city whose various phases I have described. With a tithe of the constructive power we now spend on palliative, we might found a hundred fresh centers in which life would really be enjoyable, in which the full benefit of modern civilization and “culture might be had. It is not easy, I confess, to translate this alternative into stunning sky-pictures; hurtling masses of steel would perhaps seem far more attractive on paper, especially for minds that are starved for something to worship, and will worship a skyscraper, provided it be big enough. Nevertheless, the alternative is real. Shall we make the attempt? Perhaps not. The likelihood is that we shall go a little farther along the road of super-congestion, before our disillusion becomes complete, and our physical state odious. Sooner or later, however, we shall find out that, in Professor Patrick Geddes’s tart phrase, metropolitan growth means “more and more of worse and worse.” When the super-city crumbles in our imagination, I do not think anything will keep us from achieving solid human communities, in fact. They existed once. They will exist again; and by promoting them we should make life in our present centers more tolerable.

Lewis Mumford, “The Intolerable City: Must It Keep Growing?” Harper’s Monthly Magazine, February 1926, 283–293. Copyright (c) 1926 by Harper’s Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduced from the February issue by special permission.