New Towns Intown

Many of the things we are trying to do in our cities—the modernization of the city plant, the provision of better housing and facilities, the elimination of poverty and disadvantage—can be greatly advanced by an overall integrating concept. The New Town Intown is such an idea.

The core of the New Town idea is the creation of an urban community conceived as an integrated and harmonious whole. Starting from scratch in an open area, the New Town can provide the most modern facilities, whether school, shopping, or parking. The ability to develop through an overall plan makes possible community amenities and aesthetic qualities normally not realized.

This concept can help transform the physical environment of the city. While it cannot solve the human problems or even all the physical problems of the city, it can provide a valuable lever for both. Most urban renewal programs today merely substitute new buildings for old. This is not sufficient. It is important to transform the total environment of poverty, physical as well as social, economic, and political. It is important to create an environment in which the community as well as the family matters.

The question of the size of the community to be encompassed in a new town development is important. While it is evident that the question would have to the studied in each specific instance, the main principle is that the community should be large enough to provide a balance between workplaces and homes. It should have a distinctive center with important functional and visual purposes. High-rise apartments as well as low-lying buildings and individual homes help to provide variety as well as a superior design for living. It should be large enough to support major shopping areas, major recreation facilities, and the like. As an initial hypothesis, I would propose that New Towns Intown could be expected to range from 25,000 to 100,000 people.

Let me outline what I believe to be the major ingredients for the creation of a New Town In town.

1. Workplaces intown. Under the traditional principle of the separation of workplaces and homes, initiated at a time when almost all factories and other places of work were unpleasant neighbors, there has been a continuing drive to remove intown plants and even shops and thus to isolate home from job. This situation has now begun to change. It has become increasingly evident that it is important to the poor and disadvantaged groups to work near their homes. In fact, when they cannot, many are actually excluded from the labor market. Under the new Town Intown program, experimentation should take place with high-rise plants. These could rent space to small businesses and non-noxious industries.
2. Community facilities and services. The most modern schools, hospitals, libraries, cultural centers, and community centers must be built where incomes are low and density is high. There is nothing like a modern school and an attractive playground to give a New Town feel to the community. In addition, there should be a place for the little theater, the high school play, the periodic performance of the symphony orchestra to be held.
3. The lighted center. Nighttime activity forms the core of urbanity. Night is the time when the family can be together and the community can interact. The lighted center would provide a place of fun and interchange. Here would be shops, restaurants, movie theaters and nightclubs, a community center with sections for teenagers and older people. The small shop, the artisan, the music school, the children's dance school can survive today only in the most rundown sections and buildings. These should be put at the very center of things where they can give diversity and color to urban life.
4. A variety of living patterns. With proper planning, high-rise apartments can be mixed with individual homes. As Chicago's Marina City clearly demonstrates, even in a rundown section of the city an attractive apartment tower can provide a lift to the whole community.
5. Neighborhood improvement. Lively community groups must be organized to work closely with city planning and welfare agencies and anti-poverty groups to evolve joint programs of physical and social improvement. Only in this way can individual families be recruited for the vast job of rehabilitation in our cities. This will require a major overhauling of the city planning process to provide the technical assistance.
6. Government tools. Thought should be given to the possibilities of providing federal technical and financial assistance to community development corporations, through the new federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. These could organize and perhaps manage the lighted centers and develop the intown industrial estates. In addition, the whole public housing activity needs to be strengthened far beyond rent subsidies and the purchases of private homes for public housing purposes. In this way full use can be made of the evolving partnership between government and private enterprise in urban affairs, providing truly beautiful cities where humanistic values dominate.

For major urban renewal projects, in areas too rundown for rehabilitation and where large-scale renewal is called for, the New Town Intown concept should be essential. Thus, the New Town Intown idea can provide an effective framework for the creation of really satisfying communities in both renewed and rehabilitated areas.