The New Urban Science

...Several writers discuss the measures which could be adopted to enable the variety of the central city to diminish the uniformity of the suburbs...

...Aaron Fleischer, for instance, considers the forms of transportation and communication which would permit a population of 50 million in and around New York to keep in constant touch with Wall Street, Fifth Avenue and Times Square...

...Since the contributors represent a variety of social science disciplines, however, their discussion of the causes of contemporary metropolitan problems focuses on a number of factors besides the decline in adequate rental housing...

...The authors of The Future Metropolis, by contrast, seem unaware of the limits the present occupational environment imposes on the contribution urban redevelopment can make to the good society...

...For this reason they often combined their recommendations for urban planning with proposals for changes in the nature of work, in the manner in which industry is governed and in the types of economic and social relations involved in the job...

...According to such logic, if only there were more good rental housing available in Boston and middleincome families returned to the city, the corporations on whose survival Boston's economy is founded would wither away...

...They flee the cities hoping to find greater warmth and sociability in the supposedly more pastoral milieu on the fringes...

...Karl Deutsch, for example, argues that the density of population in cities often imposes an almost intolerable psychological burden on the people who live there...

...This is residential determinism—socialism in reverse —one of the chief intellectual conceits of the new urban science...

...Reviewed by ROBERT GUTMAN Professor of Sociology, Rutgers University The exodus of middle-income depressing impact on the economic, depressing impact on the economic, cultural and educational life of central metropolitan areas is a wellknown feature of contemporary urban life...

...He believes that the present division of metropolitan regions into central cities, gray areas, suburban cities and different kinds of suburbs is well suited to support a service-oriented economy which requires a large supply of white-collar workers...

...But they imply that when the metropolis is transformed, the nature of work will automatically change along with it...

...Until recently, even professional students of the city, including planners and sociologists, were convinced that the physical form and social organization of the metropolis were essentially incompatible with the achievement of human excellence...

...As an economist and housing expert, Rodwin is principally concerned with the decline in the availability of middle-class rental housing as a factor which led Boston's population to spill over the political boundaries of the city...

...This, of course, frees him from the pressure to conform to the corporate image, and unlike the majority of his employees he enjoys relative autonomy in exercising authority and allocating his own use of time...

...Our nostalgia for the urban life of the past, Raymond Vernon suggests, ignores profound shifts in the nature of modern industry and the characteristics of the labor force necessary to sustain it...

...Although they are hopeful that the neighborhoods of the central city can be renewed, they expect that financial and administrative power and advanced cultural activities will continue to concentrate at the center while the majority of the people who use its faculties will reside in the suburbs...

...These earlier planners and sociologists recognized that the transformation of the residential environment could not by itself alleivate the numerous tensions produced by modern industrial society...

...Not only do the contributors to The Future Metropolis tend to overemphasize the independent effect of the residential and physical environment...

...Like many of the contributors to this volume, I grew up in a metropolitan region and fondly remember the romance and excitement of trips "downtown...

...Some of them know that lack of personal satisfaction, confusion about how to use leisure and a sense of alienation—problems typical of American life—have their source in the organization of work...

...In Housing and Economic Progress, Professor Lloyd Rodwin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrates that, in Boston at least, urban decay has been going on for almost a century...

...In one of the most original and informative essays in the collection, Morton and Lucia White note that American intellectuals have traditionally been scornful and suspicious of urban life...

...Yet surely there is no reason to assume organizational life is so closely tied to the nature of the urban environment that it could not endure intact even if all the planners' hopes for the revival of the great cities were fulfilled...

...They seem unaware that what might give such a person's existence significance is not the amenities of the physical environment but rather, say, the superordinate position he holds in his company...

...The desire to preserve and revive the great city appears eminently sensible and appealing to me...

...The conversion of more and more of Boston's land to business and industrial use, he explains, has so skyrocketed the cost of new residential construction that since 1850 housing prices have risen twice as much as the increase in middleclass disposable income during the same period...

...But I wonder whether there is not one respect at least in which the new urban science is less valid than the ideas of Frank Lloyd Wright, Lewis Mumford and others of the previous generation of critics who wanted to replace the great city with garden communities...

...This ratio of rent to income, together with shifts in architectural preferences, the development of urban transportation facilities and the liberal mortgage policies of Federally insured lending institutions, has made it both easier and cheaper to own a home in the suburbs than to rent an apartment in Boston...

...Against these contemporary urban problems, they seem to say, must be weighed the experience of the metropolis in history, which indicates that only in the company of high population densities and a modicum of physical chaos and social disorder is it possible for the urban virtues of intelligence, vitality and imagination to flourish...

...Urban deterioration is also the subject of the 12 essays comprising The Future Metropolis, a volume edited by Rodwin...

...During the 19th century, the tremendous increase in Boston's foreign-born population obscured the process of decay: Great numbers of new middle-income families occupied the inadequate quarters which families of the older stock abandoned in their rush to the suburbs...

...They often write as if they believed that the life of an executive or professional man who lives in a town house in the East 'Sixties and walks to his office on Park Avenue is potentially productive and interesting because his house has a garden, he is spared the crush of vehicular traffic and Mies Van der Rohe has incorporated fine detailing in the fixtures of his office bathroom...

...The resulting absence of a sense of municipal responsibility, he notes, is only another symptom of the emergence of mass society...

...In another essay, lohn Dyckman speculates on the ways in which the life of the central city itself could be made to have more meaning for the denizens of the suburbs...

...And Oscar Handlin shows that the decline of the cities as attractive, residential environments is directly associated with the disappearance of true "communities" within most city neighborhoods...

...In the light of this, it is especially striking that Rodwin and most of his collaborators believe the great American cities, with all their sprawl, pollution, traffic, vice and neurosis, are worth preserving and rebuilding...

...Instead of wishing to break up metropolitan regions and replace them with relatively small and autonomous garden cities dispersed through the same geographical expanse, the contributors welcome the division of function among urban environments...