FISHMAN, ROBERT

Space, time and sprawl

Architectural Design. Vol.64 - 3/4, Nº108, Londres, 1994. p.45-7

The overwhelming fact o 20th-century world urbanism has been the creation of a new kind of decentralised city; but we do not see this city clearly because, unlike all cities of the past, the new city has no defined centre or periphery, no core, no manufacturing or commercial districts, and no hinterland. Instead, urban functions spread out along highway growth corridors in low-density settlements that combine urban, suburban and rural elements in a seemingly random and endless collage. This new city exists in its most advanced form in the United States but the economic, social and technological forces which have created it can be seen worldwide.

The developers of a massive retail and office centre outside Atlanta, Georgia have called their development Perimeter Center. This seeming self -contradiction points to a revolution in urban form and a radical new sense of space. Since the first cities of the ancient Near East, cities have existed to define a centre. The Egyptian hieroglyph for city was a cross inscribed in a circle - the idea of a crossroads or centre combined with that of a defined border. In Hellenistic and Roman times the very form of the classical city expressed the idea of a centre around which the hinterland was organised; later, the Renaissance used the techniques of linear perspective along great boulevards to reinforce the meaning and dominance of the core. Piranesi's classic engraving of Bernini's colonnade and piazza for St Peter's Basilica with the obelisk at its centre makes especially vivid the idea of urban space and world power organised around a great centre.

The coming of the global trading city and the 19th-century industrial city did not contradict but reinforced the desire to create classical urban space at least at the city's core. This is perhaps best demonstrated by Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris and by Daniel Burnharn's monumental Plan of Chicago (1909), Burnharn's plan is especially interesting in this context, for he started from the functional integration of the region around a unified transportation network which converged in the core, the Chicago downtown or Loop. This functional integration was then combined with and expressed by the creation of a consciously classical urban space organised around a monumental government plaza. This, for Burnham, was the modern city.

Yet precisely in the years 1905-15 when Burnham was laying out his plans for a monumental and classical modern city, new technologies and a new concept of urban time and space were being created which would fundamentally challenge not only Burnharn's city but every other concept of the city since classical times, 1 have borrowed the title of this piece from Sigfried Giedion's Space, Time and Architecture (originally published 1941) because I follow his basic thesis that cubism brought to consciousness a new space time continuum that stands in sharp distinction to classical space. Combined with new technologies - especially the automobile which was in the course of rapid development during this very decade - a new city was born.

Giedion defined cubism as'the new space conception: space-time', and this in turn meant the essence of space as it is conceived today is its many-sidedness, the infinite potential for relations within it. Exhaustive description of an area from one point of reference is, accordingly, impossible; its character changes with the point from which it is viewed. In order to grasp the true nature of space the observer must project himself through it. Giedion was referring to Picasso and Braque's paintings in the years 1909-14; yet I believe he has given us an excellent description of post urban space in the late 20th century.

But, as Space, Time and Architecture reveals, Giedion himself never grasped the radical implications of his ideas for city planning. As secretary of CIAM, Giedion was closely allied to the great generation of European modernists, especially Le Corbusier. And, however radical his architecture and town-planning were in many other respects, Le Corbusier was a severe classicist in his basic conception of the city. In his Contemporary City for Three Million People (1922), Le Corbusier conceives his city from one point of reference, the perfect zero-zero point formed by the intersection of the east-west and north-south axes. Like Burnham, Le Corbusier centralises the city's transportation network around the single centre. Indeed, in the relentless symmetry of his artificial city, Le Corbusier out Burnhams Burnham.

I believe there was a great architect-planner of the early 20th century whose city-concepts exactly embody'the new s pace-conception' that Giedion announced. This was the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright with his Broadacre City design, which dates from the 1920s. More than any other urban design concept, it speaks directly to the most radical elements in the late 20th-century city. Giedion knew Wright's work well. including Broadacre city, which is referred to specifically in Space, Time and Architecture. Indeed, the book contains a description of the author's visit with Wright in 1940 at Wright's home and masterpiece, Taliesin in Wisconsin. But Giedion was also committed to an interpretation of modern architecture that relegated Wright to the status of an honoured precursor. Moreover, the Broadacre City design as Wright presented it was deeply enmeshed in a very American utopianism that owed far more to Thomas Jefferson and Henry George than to Karl Marx, making it difficult for a sophisticated European modernist to see its radical implications.

As early as the 1890s, Wright was in opposition to Daniel Burnham and Burnharn's movement to bring classical form to the American city. Where Burnham had attempted to re-orient the city around a single dominant centre - the Chicago downtown or Loop - Wright envisioned a city that would have no downtown or centre at all. He attacked what he called the undemocratic and pseudo monarchical centralisation of cities around a dominant set of intersecting axes. This opposition was political, economic and aesthetic; Wright saw the large city and especially its downtown core as the locus of royalist power that threatened democracy. Decentralisation meant the return of the United States to a society of universal landowners whose economic independence would result in cultural individualism and whose direct contact with the land would mean a resurgence of democratic culture. Wright asserted that his new city was not only a return to the basic Jeffersonian values of the country; it also embodied advanced technology and a new way of experiencing time and space. It is significant (he writes):

That not only have space values entirely changed to time values, now ready to form new standards of movement measurement, but a new sense of spacing based upon speed is here ... And, too, the impact of this sense of space has already engendered fresh spiritual as well as physical values.

Where Burnham and Le Corbusier had built their ideal cities around a single transportation hub (a virtual necessity for rail based cities), Wright organised Broadacre City on a grid system of automobile highways. Derived ultimately from Jefferson's 1787 gridplan for mapping the Northwest Territory, this highway grid, like Broadacre City itself, extends indefinitely in all directions. The city had no centre, or rather, as Wright put it, "The only centre (the only centralisation allowable) in Broadacre City is the individual family home."

By this he meant that in Broadacre City each household would now be free to create its own city. That city would consist of all the destinations they chose to reach, moving along the grid system of highways at speeds of 60 miles per hour. Scattered within the open landscape would be industries, offices, schools, shops, churches and all the other facilities for an advanced industrial society. Each household, living on a generous plot of an acre or more, would create a diverse city out of its multitude of destinations.

Broadacre City thus had no downtown, no industrial or worker's quarter, no slum areas or upper class suburbs. It could not be comprehended from a single point of view, only from the multiple centres or points of view of each household in its cars moving at great speeds over the landscape. As 1 hope to show, this utopian city based on what Giedion called the new space conception: space time describes better the way the majority of Americans now live than any other design model. But this new American city did not arise from a mystical appreciation of cubist space concepts, nor from an adherence to Frank Lloyd Wright and his particular combination of modernism and Jeffersonian individualism. It arose as the unplanned and unanticipated convergence of many uncoordinated initiatives which converged spontaneously on a new urban form.

I can only sketch out the many forces which gave rise to the new American city. Firstly, there were the many new technological networks that all had in common the displacement of the hub and spoke network that had sustained the great city at its core and replaced it with a grid network that gave the same advantage to those at the periphery as to those at the core. I have already mentioned how Wright seized on the most important of these new networks: the highway system as opposed to the rail system. But there were other systems of decentralisation: the telephone, the electrical grid, and the peripheral factory that left the crowded urban factory districts for open space at the edge. At the same time new networks of retail distribution made it possible to bypass the urban core and go directly to the neighbourhoods, and these retailing outlets were supported by parallel networks of cultural distribution that went directly to the home: radio and television.

As important as the technology that all advanced industrial countries shared were the particular social and economic factors unique to the United States. America shared with Britain a strong cultural attachment to the single-family suburban home and to the residential suburb: middle class, low-density neighbourhoods, at the periphery of the great city from which both industry and the working class had been excluded. But only the United States made suburbanisation a goal of government policy.

This home building industrial policy was strongly seconded by two others which also date from the 1930s and 40s. These were the automobile policy that supported road building to the exclusion of rail and other forms of mass transit, and the defence policy that encouraged defence contractors to build new plants on the suburban periphery.

Finally, the massive migration of poor blacks from the rural American South to large Northern cities during and after World War II made those cities the sites of intense racial conflict. At the same time, government policies designed to aid suburban house building created an ample supply of new suburban houses to which the white urban population could flee. In the years 1950 to 1975 land and building costs were so low that not only the middle class but much of the white working class could also become suburbanites. Because most American suburbs are independent cities supported by local property taxes, these suburbs could set up their own well financed public school systems and other services limited to their own residents. Meanwhile the central cities were forced to provide increasingly expensive services to an increasingly impoverished population but with an ever shrinking tax base to support those services.

The result was a massive shift in the American population, which was less than 25 per cent suburban in 1950 and is now more than 50 per cent suburban, ie living in a metropolitan area outside the central city. This new city has not, as Wright predicted, completely replaced the old urban cores, but these post-urban, post-suburban regions have become the real centres of American society.

Ironically, the very success of the new decentralised city has revealed the limitations and contradictions at the heart of Frank Lloyd Wright's utopia. A city based on the infinite multiplication of single family houses on larger lots necessarily destroys the very landscape it was designed to enhance. A city whose survival requires a multitude of individual automobile journeys necessarily creates 'low density congestion'. Where the congestion of older cities reflected the intensity of downtown life, the congestion of the new Edge Cities reflects a single mode transportation system too simple for the needs of a real city. As Le Corbusier observed. 'The city that achieves speed achieves success', and the new decentralised city is failing as congestion slows it down.

Finally, a city that exalts the individual and the isolated household cannot create these forms of community every true city requires. Wright struggled with this problem both in his architecture and in his personal life throughout his career, and now the new city that represents his principles has inherited his struggle. The challenge is to impose effective boundaries and limits to growth on a city whose very nature, Wright recognised, is to be everywhere or nowhere; to create or to redevelop genuine cores for a decentralised city that has grown by ignoring centres; to build new transportation systems that provide alternatives to the automobile and feed pedestrian; policies that connect that the people in Edge Cities and the people in inner cities indeed belong to the same society.

As this special issue of Architectural Design shows, our most creative architects and planners are already responding to this challenge. The real question for American society is whether the habits and expectations formed during the era of unlimited suburban growth are still too strong to permit meaningful change.