La Tourette, originally uploaded by jmtp

As this is the first entry in my smogr book club: The Death and Life of Great American Cities I would be interested in responses from my reader on how useful this is, and if there are any changes to the format would help out. Most of my book notes are noted for posterity and contain many quick thoughts (not necessarily insights).
The introduction is divided up into two parts: Thesis statement and History of “Orthodox Planning.” In the first half, Jacobs marshals many different anecdotal examples of city life, both positive and negative. Jacobs instantly goes on the offensive in order to position The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a direct attack on the status quo.
Book Notes

• pg 9 – Morningside Heights and Slum Clearance
• pg 9 – Attacks Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City, City Beautiful, & Modernism not by name but alludes to it
• pg 10 – Not anti-car but car isn’t the main problem but a symptom
  I don’t know if I buy this, but I could take her word for it. I don’t know if she fully realized how much cheap personal transportation influenced and reinforced American culture
• pg 11 – Mentions the North End of Boston
• pg 16 – Mentions the West End of Boston and how the Northenders were afraid they would be wiped off the map and cleared of slums like what was done to the West End.
  By the way, the West End is completely horrible place to be, and whatever they did to that area is a crying shame. The giant hospital doesn’t help at all either.
• pg 16 – Bankers make bad planners
  side note: this is try today, cf: the housing bubble and the acceleration of the suburbs
• pg 19 – Thesis Statement
• pg 19 – City needs diversity
• pg 20 – Mentions Harlem Housing and the rectangular lawn _the man_ “gave” the people
• pg 22 – Yesterday’s suburbs are todays slums

Now onto a history of Orthodox Planning.
Two strains:

1. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Corbusier’s Radiant City – European theory and reaction to European slums (Howard) and the atrocities of World War I (Corbusier)
2. Burnham’s City Beautiful – American excess and optimism

Book Notes

• pg 23 – Orthodox Planning
• pg 24 – Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City
• pg 24 – Manifested in USA in model company towns
  aside: are there any modern company towns today??
• pg 26 – Howard’s planning – “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts.”
• pg 27 – Attacks “The Decentrists” – Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Catherine Bauer. This was Bauer’s term.
• pg 27 – design of the city not by the street but by the block and superblock
  I wonder if the effects of the “2nd Industrial Revolution” in the greater efficiencies and economies of scale which were becoming possible in the latter half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries is the root cause. Making capitalism more efficient was something which was a long time coming and there is no reason why building and the city wouldn’t see itself be unaffected.
• pg 28 – Planned communities fenced off by farmland or parks held in trust. Paternal, daddy knows best.
• pg 29 – Le Corbusier makes his entrance
• pg 30 – Radiant City as utopia much like Howard’s Garden City
• pg 31 – Radiant City acceptance due, in part, by his designing (for the first apparent time) for the automobile in the 1920’s.
• pg 32 – Urban Renewal as the love child between Garden City and Radiant City
• pg 32 – Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
  Burnham’s Paris on Lake Michigan
• pg 33 – City Beautiful
  Civic Center as a disparate element in the city, like fair
• pg 34 – List of failed Civic Centers
• pg 34 – Sorting of culture out from city; Lincoln Center

Further Research

• Bank lending leading to urban decay
  History, Redlining, Racism
• Historical Utopias
  Garden City, Radiant City, City Beautiful, Burnham’s Chicago Plan
• Frank Lloyd Wright’s agrarian city plan – Broadacre
  FLLW’s 1 acre per person utopia, and why don’t we hear about it at all?

A foundational work in urban theory is Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of To-Morrow (final version published in 1902), which for the first time outlined the separation of urban uses – residential, commercial and industrial – and strove to bring the unruly city into perfect Victorian order. Also note that instead of the antiquated streets London so famously developed over hundreds of years, the Garden City’s road network would be supreme; transportation, circulation and movement were the overriding parti governing the logic of the Garden City.
Excerpts from Ebenezer Howard’s seminal work can be found at Garden Cities of To-Morrow which also contains additional commentary:

The two chapters of his book reprinted below are those describing his vision of Garden City’s physical characteristics and how a cluster of them might be created as population increased. Howard was no designer, and he stated that the plan for a town on an actual site would doubtless depart from the one he described. He also labeled each of his drawings “Diagram only. Plan cannot be drawn until site selected.” Nevertheless, his verbal pictures and accompanying diagrams reflect his own beliefs about how a model garden city should be laid out. The ring and radial pattern of his imaginary Garden City was a plan that many other writers of the time also favored, because of its perceived superiority from both engineering and architectural viewpoints.

Howard’s emphasis on the importance of a permanent girdle of open and agricultural land around the town soon became part of British planning doctrine that eventually developed almost into dogma. Its most impressive application was the plan for Greater London (ed note – see London Plan) in 1944 and–following passage of the New Towns Act of 1946 (ed note – see New Towns Act 1946) – the creation of a ring of new towns beyond the London Greenbelt.

Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of To-Morrow (sic) Plan Overview
Ebenezer Howard Garden Cities of To-Morrow (sic) Plan Detail
See also:

• Garden Cities of To-Morrow
• Le Corbusier and La Ville radieuse

Detail of Torre Agbar, Barcelona, Spain, originally uploaded by Semi-detached

See also overview photo and Torre Agbar tag.

Torre Agbar, originally uploaded by NatashaP

10-11-07_1348.jpg, originally uploaded by cosentino

Rion & Mike get to go to all the cool places.

Home Owners’ Loan Corporation Redlining of Philadelphia
WikiPedia on Redlining:

Redlining is the practice of denying or increasing the cost of services, such as banking, insurance, access to jobs, access to health care, or even supermarkets to residents in certain, often racially determined, areas. The most devastating form of redlining, and the most common use of the term, refers to mortgage discrimination.

Read also the RACIAL REDLINING: A Study of Racial Discrimination by Banks and Mortgage Companies in the United States:

This study examines the issue of racial redlining by major mortgage lenders in the nation’s larger metro areas. Racial redlining is the practice whereby mortgage lenders figuratively draw a red line around minority neighborhoods and refuse to make mortgage loans available inside the red lined area. Broadly defined, racial redlining encompasses not only the direct refusal to lend in minority neighborhoods, but also procedures that discourage the submission of mortgage loan applications from minority areas, and marketing policies that exclude such areas.
In direct economic terms, racial redlining reduces housing finance options for borrowers in minority neighborhoods and weakens competition in the mortgage market. This often results in higher mortgage costs and less favorable mortgage loan terms. More subtly, racial redlining discourages minorities from pursuing home ownership opportunities and in the broadest sense further entrenches the debilitating sociological effects of racial discrimination.

Especially read the section, Worst case lending patterns to see what unregulated redlining produces.

Old St Pancras Church, originally uploaded by sbuliani

cob city, originally uploaded by twoeightnine

Marina Towers Condo Association is claiming copyright on the building image and name:

“Because of the architectural significance of our building, the Condominium Association holds a common law copyright on the use of the Association name and building image. This means that under Federal and Illinois law, advertisers, movie makers and others cannot use the Association name or image without first obtaining express written permission from the Association . .”

Read more: Stop Taking Pictures of Marina City and The bigger picture: Can the association control how images of Marina City are used?