"Communitas" and Its Impact on City Planning
Gans, Herbert J.
I The city planner's approach to the improvement of society differs sharply from that of the intellectual. The planner seeks improvement by manipulating spatial relationships, that is, through...
...Their methodology is simple: begin with explicit goals, and then search for the most sensible and creative means to achieve them...
...As a result, there is a growing recognition that the problems of the city are economic, social and political...
...I1 The reissue of Percival and Paul Goodman's Communitas* could not have come at a more opportune moment...
...Thus, the innovator can say with some justification that his central assumption cannot be rejected a priori...
...The only real test of the Goodmans' schemes is to try them out...
...During the 1950s it became increasingly clear that the old and new ailments of the city could not be healed by such physical solutions as project planning, zoning, master planning and urban renewal...
...The Goodmans' three schemes share this limitation...
...New schemes of living which involve not only behavior changes but also the acceptance of intellectuals' values are likely to arouse little sympathy...
...In this scheme, the government organizes the subsistence economy, since it can provide food, clothing, shelter and other necessities more cheaply and efficiently than private enterprise...
...DEBATES between innovators and empiricists must remain inconclusive, since it is impossible to predict the results of untried innovation...
...The citizens are conscripted into these industries for a part—the Goodmans estimate a tenth—of their lives, doing work which is not necessarily pleasant, but which is accepted because it is brief, and assures their subsistence for the rest of their lives...
...Intellectuals have traditionally written utopias to depict societies in which their goals and values have the priority not granted them in the real world...
...Is the function good...
...that rearranging land uses and replacing buildings does not solve these...
...Residences, workplaces, shops, artists' studios and other institutions front on piazzas, modern forms of the closed squares which can still be found in the oldest sections of European towns...
...The workers' frustration is assuaged by a senseless and unrewarding consumption of goods but the processes continue in order to keep the economic system in operation...
...But a new approach is not enough...
...Their second scheme expresses the intellectual's own dedication to work and craftsmanship...
...Industrial workers help out on the farms in peak season, and the farmers work in factories in the winter...
...In fact, they argue that their seemingly impractical proposals are in the long run more practical than those which are called practical today yet lead to dire consequences in the future...
...In essence, he believes that the well-planned and esthetically pleasing community will assure a good life for its citizens...
...Projects such as New York's Lincoln Square and Philadelphia's Penn Center are still being proposed and built, but it is doubtful that they can revitalize downtown or stem the flow of middle-class residents out of the city...
...Progress is being made with zoning ordinances and master plans, but so far, neither the new concepts drafted by the planners nor the watered-down versions that are finally adopted have solved downtown congestion or halted the spread of slums...
...Consequently, another step must be added to the Goodmans' approach: an analysis of each scheme from the perspective of those who will live in it, and perhaps some revisions to make sure that the scheme will satisfy them, as well as the innovator...
...The anti-utopian city of efficient consumption reflects the intellectual's narrow concept of consumption as either an end-in-itself or a status-seeking device, and overestimates the importance of consumption in people's lives...
...The workers pile themselves into cities and suburbs that are ugly, inefficient, isolated from the countryside, and lacking the amenities and the sense of community that would make them fit the human scale...
...The polis of craftsmen which the Goodmans describe in loving terms is a community of intellectuals in blue collars, where there is no place for the kind of white collar and service occupations intellectuals consider parasitic...
...This shortcoming follows from the Goodmans' critique of American society, which frequently falls into the trap that unites conservatism and socialism...
...The Goodmans criticize industrial community plans for their lack of attention to community life, and so-called integrated plans, such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City, for their rural nostalgia and failure to make use of the potentialities of modern technology...
...The Goodmans treat planning as both a rational process and a form of social creativity...
...The final model is based on the assumption that modern industrial organization and productivity make it possible to eliminate work as the central occupation and grinding routine of life...
...Where traditional planners have emphasized the relation between form and function, the Goodmans argue that the significant variable is the function itself: Form follows function, but let us subject the function itself to a formal critique...
...However, the Goodmans do not write only as utopians...
...Those who wish to travel can get mobile homes, while those who want urban conveniences and amenities are free to settle in the city, and can work to pay the costs of urban living...
...In their free time, people can choose alternative arrangements...
...Moreover, people are inherently conservative, particularly when confronted by plans requiring behavior change...
...The subsistence factories are located in decentralized industrial communities...
...Then an economy is out of human scale...
...and in the planning schemes put forward in the past...
...Is it worthwhile...
...However, the social scientists' skepticism is in part a result of the fact that their research has dealt mainly with current behavior, and not with how people perceive and make choices between alternatives...
...They argue that we have allowed our industrial organization to develop a degree of centralization and gigantism which is neither desirable nor necessary...
...Hopefully, planners who must attend to the former because of necessity will not ignore the latter...
...Once a year, the city fathers stage a carnival in which the everyday consumption level is brought to a climax through a potlatch-like orgy...
...Admittedly, this is no easy task...
...The second scheme, which lends itself to a local or regional experiment, could be tried out in one of the many suburban subdivisions-with-industry which will probably be typical of communities to be built in the next American housing boom...
...There may come a day when alternative outlets must be found for the billions now spent on defense, and it would be good to have a few plans ready, just in case...
...They argue persuasively that the third scheme might in fact allow these nations to develop their own urban-industrial culture, and thus prevent the miseries inherent in copying Western institutions...
...This automatically clears the shelves for inventory, frees the residents from ennui, and prepares buyers and sellers alike for another year of systematic con sumption...
...They argue that America today possesses "a technology of choice and an economy of abundance" which permits us to control our destiny...
...When the system depends on all the machines running, unless every kind of goods is produced and sold it is also impossible to produce bread...
...Their third scheme, however, is geared to an opposite yet related intellectual dream: to escape from society and its routine...
...The day when planners will go about their job in this way is probably far off, although the time may be ripe for a consideration of that phase of the Goodman approach which they describe as the awareness and proportioning of means and ends...
...The first is for a "city of efficient consumption" which is geared to achieve what they see as the American goal of producing sufficient waste to keep the economic system in operation...
...1.25...
...Physical plans and architectural solutions are one of the instruments for achieving societal goals (as well as for expressing them symbolically), and act as the bridge between the man-made and natural environment...
...Consequently, planning ought to begin with "means of livelihood and ways of life...
...Unfortunately, opportunities for experimentation are infrequent and when they occur, the innovator must usually be able to guarantee his sponsors a reasonable chance of success...
...a lack of empathy for the ways of life and preferences of the working class and the lower middle class...
...This added step should help to make the experiment more successful than past utopian communities...
...There is no real evidence for this assumption, as social scientists are quick to point out when they analyze planning schemes...
...iii Communitas is a sermon on the future of planning, preached with fervor, but with considerable awareness of the obstacles to salvation...
...the workers live in efficient subsistence-level housing...
...The Goodmans write (and draw) with a mixture of passionate attachment and gentle irony...
...But nothing less will give us an esthetics for community planning, the proportioning of means and ends...
...The Goodmans' description of the difference is best illustrated by their manifesto on neo-functionalism...
...Many of the residents' non-work hours are spent in the piazza, in social relationships, civic activities, at the open-air art exhibits which have replaced museums, and in an adult form of the casual "hanging out" behavior for which only teenagers find time in our era...
...We have grown unused to asking such ethical questions of our streets, our cars, our towns...
...While the Goodmans say that at present, any plan will win our praise so long as it is really functional according to the criterion we have proposed: so long as it is aware of means and ends," they add the qualification, "and is not as a way of life absurd...
...I The city planner's approach to the improvement of society differs sharply from that of the intellectual...
...and that the solutions must be economic, social and political...
...This makes for rotation between different kinds of work, and a meaningful relationship between town and country...
...The book provides planning with one formulation of the new approach, albeit a more radical and visionary one than that currently favored by planners in some universities and local agencies...
...The Goodmans then present three planning schemes of their own to illustrate the wide range of social arrangements that could be planned for...
...The community of minimum regulation makes it possible to discharge social responsibilities quickly and painlessly, so that one can spend the rest of one's life in study, contemplation or travel...
...they do not wish to be dismissed as dreamers...
...Like all innovators, the Goodmans tend to assume that there are no value differences between themselves and the populations for which they are planning, and that current differences of behavior would be abandoned in behalf of their schemes if people had the opportunity to make choices...
...Each small community and its hinterland is part of a large industrial region which in turn competes and cooperates with others in a federal system...
...Ebenezer Howard's Garden City plan, parts of which have influenced much contemporary suburban planning, decentralizes work and residence, but does nothing to reconstruct the nature of work or to give it a meaningful role in the community...
...The other two models are based on positive goals...
...This approach, which I call goal-oriented, determines the public and private goals of the community, ranks them in priority, and finds the best means for their achievement from among all available resources, human as well as physical...
...Written by an architect and a novelistpoet-critic, Communitas is both a critique of contemporary planning and an exciting revival of utopian thinking...
...This claim may be valid, but it would have been more persuasive if the Goodmans had discussed how their schemes could be adopted and implemented by contemporary planners...
...they are part of a total vision of a better society...
...Is it worthy ofman to do that...
...The goals to be sought are societal in scope...
...The Goodmans suggest that they are describing New York in the 1960's, although their satire resembles that city less than the suburban subdivisions built around giant shopping centers, as well as some recent proposals for central business district renewal...
...The remaining time is their own in a society geared to minimum regulation and maximum choice...
...The Goodmans seek explicit goals, instead of applying time-honored "solutions" or quantitative "standards...
...The skyscrapers create open space, order, and efficiency of movement, but Corbusier's lack of interest in livelihood and life leads to a community which is likely to become a prison for its residents...
...Nevertheless, the impact of the Goodmans' schemes on future planning is limited by their failure to consider two problems: to what extent current work, leisure, family life and residential arrangements coincide with the values of the non-intellectual strata, and to what extent these arrangements— or functional alternatives for them—must be included in the schemes...
...Therefore, it is especially important that such schemes respect the goals of the people for whom they are intended, and do so better than their present communities and institutions...
...The center of this city is a huge department store, in which shops are transformed into giant counters and streets become corridors between them...
...As a result, work is no longer attractive or meaningful, and becomes mere production...
...The three community paradigms are not only illustrations of the Goodmans' approach to planning, but also utopian visions of society...
...The outcome of these tendencies has been the gradual development of a new approach to city planning, which rejects the idea of social betterment through physical re-arrangements alone...
...But for most people shopping is a less significant and certainly less Dionysian act than the Goodmans imply, and the things they buy are for the most part sensible aids to the pursuit of family life and leisure...
...Elements like the intense social integration, the priority of community life over home life, and a universal dedication to the common good have attracted intellectuals to this type of community from time immemorial...
...The community itself contains some features of the medieval guild system and the Greek polis...
...Work, leisure, art, and community are as one...
...and they place physical planning towards the end, rather than the beginning of the planning process...
...The Goodmans argue that modern technology makes it possible to decentralize production, and to locate it in small factories and even home workshops...
...The application of that approach will undoubtedly be less radical than the Goodmans intend, The virtue of Communitas is that it can serve as a model for mundane planning, yet hold up to constant view a visionary approach...
...everyone has time off for study, and at least one free month a year...
...This new awareness has been stimulated by the entry of social scientists into city planning, and by the critical comments of other intellectuals, especially those who see that their way of life, which is dependent on the city, is being threatened by the continued expansion of the slums, the destruction of the traditional urban texture by large-scale renewal projects, and by the departure of their middle-class audience to the suburbs...
...Corbusier's Ville Radieuse, the scheme for a city of skyscrapers which in watered down form may be seen in many urban renewal projects, has the same failing...
...The time clock is abolished...
...People are free to work further to obtain luxury goods, or to spend their time in travel, study, the pursuit of avocations, or even small-scale entrepreneurial activity, "for the risks of the fundamental insecurity of life having been removed, why should not one work to amass a little capital and then risk it in an enterprise that was always sneakingly attractive...
...It would be intellectual gamesmanship to suggest that visionary schemes ought to incorporate the positive elements of the status quo, for this would probably inhibit the urge to innovate...
...They have kind words only for some of the intentional communities, e.g., the kibbutzim, which have achieved an integration of work and community, city and country, modern technology and human scale, and which "even in failure irradiate society with people who have been profoundly touched by the excitement of life...
...The workers thus have actual and direct control over their labor and product...
...Except for a quite recent concern with the economic base, the planner has paid little attention to the social structure or economy of the city...
...The Goodmans recognize this, and unlike most innovators, do so sympathetically...
...For some time now, this approach—called physical planning in the professional jargon—has been under attack from various quarters...
...its chief part is always people...
...THE INTELLECTUAL "bias" of the schemes does not detract from their usefulness for utopian thinking...
...They see, however, many absurdities in contemporary America, * Vintage Books, N. Y., 1960, 248 pp...
...The Goodmans suggest this, and propose that the second and third schemes be tested in underdeveloped nations...
...Urban renewal has resulted primarily in subsidized luxury housing, and the transfer of slum dwellers from one blighted area to another...
...The second, the Goodmans' own favorite, attempts to create a community in which work is restored to human scale, and integrated with the rest of life...
...The ancillary institutions of the community exist only to spur buying, and the residents live in neighborhoods which encourage conspicuous consumption through a discreet mixing of income levels...
...For a community is not a construction, a bold Utopian model...
...The planner seeks improvement by manipulating spatial relationships, that is, through the coordination of the natural environment, space, and man-made land uses such as buildings, neighborhoods and highways...
...Is it a forthright or at least ingenious part of life...
...Although this approach may seem self-evident to the socialist, it turns traditional city planning on its head...
...There are, to be sure, women who shop to consume, or to overcome feelings of boredom and uselessness, and there are conspicuous consumers, especially among adolescents and in the upper middle class...
...From the point of view of planning, this is a shortcoming, for such utopias tend to neglect the values of the rest of the population, and are thus culture-bound visions of the future...
...there is none of the pompousness and dogmatism that so often impairs the "grand schemes" of the past...
...THE GOODMANS then examine some of the "grand schemes" which planners have proposed as alternatives and find most of these wanting...
...Is it compatible with other, basic, human functions...
Vol. 8 • July 1961 • No. 3
