Democratic Renewal

...I have some trouble with Gans' adherence to a policy of nonintervention (and I think ultimately Gans does too...

...The publication of People and Plans, a collection of essays and occasional papers on urban problems and solutions produced over a period of approximately 12 years by Herbert J. Gans, provides an opportunity to express a word of gratitude for this author's work...

...Gans refreshingly reminds his readers that significant human relationships require a common bond that overrides the differences between the parties...

...The issue is, as he tells us, serious...

...It is a tribute to Gans that by the use of his intellect and his analytical method, and above all by his characteristic seriousness, the existence of this final gap in democratic theory does not become an excuse to throw democratic notions out of the window altogether...

...Perhaps more important, such an etiology of poverty would require the anti-poverty policy-maker to interfere with the culture of those whom he tries to help, in itself a violation of one of the elements of the humanitarian value system Gans believes in...

...Executive Director, Citizens' Housing and Planning Council of New York, Inc...

...as a tool in increasingly complex analyses, from library use and zoning, to urban renewal, to the elaboration of national housing policy, and a discussion of the problems of poverty and race...

...The same set of values, and the same method of investigation employed earlier characterize these more urgent papers...

...It has been "useful" in the best sense of the word, and the perhaps peculiarly American tradition of sociological pragmatism makes usefulness a term of high honor...

...The last part of this book contains essays concerned primarily with current problems in race and poverty...

...In 1956 we find him writing these words on the subject of the Community: "The Community is an entity hard to define...

...who is benefited...

...Those last four words are still generally forgotten in the popular press, which would define the Community only as the opinions, sometimes solipsistic, of the loudest residents of an area...

...What determines, he asks, the kinds of books stocked by public libraries: Does the selection process enshrine an unconscious class bias...

...he attacks the popular notion that mass industry and population growth have imposed uniformity on the American people...

...it includes the citizens, their interest groups, decision makers, and the public interest...

...Although careful analysis might, like the differential calcuius, narrow the area in which such intervention can take place, there remains a space where the policy-maker must become, by his own lights, undemocratic...

...He concludes that the public library should not try to duplicate the bookselling industry, particularly since the development of paperbacks...

...Gans relies on his primary question—cui bono...

...and that it is undemocratic, and hence wrong, to impose a new life style on the weaker members, even as a price for granting them the larger share of the material riches and power they seek...

...This phrase simply means that the planner must consciously determine whose interests are to be the primary beneficiaries of his work: The traditional goals of the City Efficient or the City Beautiful are not to be accepted without examining their effect on the people of the city...

...This is hardly to say that he would ride roughshod over the particular preferences of the residents of a specific area...

...Gans tells us that the truth lies somewhere in between, and admits that only painstaking research into the life patterns of the poor will reveal, for example, whether the Negro matriarchal family is actually an unwilled source of individual weakness, or a deliberately sought source of strength...

...Italics mine...

...Gans stresses what he and Martin Meyerson have called a "goaloriented" approach to urban planning...

...that in the normal course of events, the members who are weaker economically tend to be increasingly at a disadvantage in augmenting their own share...

...Baldly put, the question is whether the poor man behaves as he does because he is poor, or whether he is poor because he behaves the way he does...

...Although Gans stresses that a wide divergence of aspiration characterizes the members of each of the several social classes he identifies, it is clear that some of them must modify important parts of their lives in order to attain higher earning levels...

...Gans, of course, would demand that his own analyses be measured by the hardship and injustice they tend to correct...

...His aim is simply to bring careful observation and lucid analysis to the assistance of political action by sharpening the techniques of the urban planner so that he can understand with more precision the effect of his work...

...He defends not only the Italians of Boston's West End against misdirected urban renewal, but as vigorously stands up for the residents of Levittown against the popular writers who accuse them of too ready an acceptance of conformity...

...Gans emphasizes his view that the local area cannot establish values apart from the essential values he searches for in American life...

...Or does it merely protect the prestige and financial interests of those who already own such houses, at the expense of those who would build a less expensive home...

...He never accepts conventional wisdom without subjecting it to his own careful scrutiny, and usually comes up with a valuable corrective of a generally misleading popular position...

...In summary, Gans believes that a social order should provide a fair share of its goods for all of its members...

...As the years represented in these essays pass, and the United States becomes involved in a war to which Gans is unsympathetic, he finds that the gap between the desires of low-income Americans, particularly blacks, and their share of the nation's bounty does not narrow...

...In hammy hands, it would produce only crude carpentry, little precision, and less ultimate illumination...

...If it is the culture of poor people that keeps them poor, Gans suggests that reactionary influences will be able to blame their "unworthi-ness" for refusing to help them...

...The secret of his success is the seriousness and subtlety with which he analyzes, and the clarity of his own values...

...One wonders whether any similar test can be applied to the propositions put forward by those now telling us that democratic values recently died along with God...

...Gans uses a similar approach in analyzing other planning and public policy decisions, including those that seem to be the least susceptible to dispute—the significance of public libraries, for example...

...The problem comes up in his analysis of the culture of poverty...

...An urban planner and sociologist, Gans is no ideological Fancy Dan, intent on impressing the reader with dizzying conceptual leaps and gaudy generalizations...

...He contends that the old heterogeneity of American life—that of region and national origin—has been replaced by a heterogeneity of social class and age group...

...He defends the suburbs for providing the living environment that most of their residents want, and directs his attention to the strategies for enabling poor and race-victimized Americans to live in their own equivalent of the suburbs...

...For instance, does zoning one-acre lots as a minimum really provide a necessary precaution against a tragic deterioration in the general environment...

...Those followers of intellectual fashions who are tossing out all of democratic theory must surely find hopelessly old-fashioned Gans' very care, his effort at precision, and his singlemindedness (which sometimes leads him into judgments I would disagree with...