The existence of cities today is threatened by the disappearance of their traditional reasons for being, which largely determined their historical forms. Far from offering a means of defense against enemies, cities are particularly vulnerable to attack. Cities have no monopoly on trade as they had when the medieval markets flourished. People are not obliged to live in cities because the only jobs are there, or because transportation is lacking to allow them to live elsewhere. No city has a cultural monopoly; these are the days of mass media ... Our cities are formed not by necessity and tradition like the design of a Navajo blanket, but by discipline, desire, and design.
If we are to have cities, I suggest it must be because they make men. To do this our cities must be more attractive, more socially agreeable, offer higher standards of comfort and convenience, better opportunities for exchanging ideas and experiences as well as goods, and hold more beauty than other possible ways of life. In ever-new ways, they must be strong magnets, vital centers. The reason for living in a city, or going there at all, as many since Aristotle have observed, is that it offers a better way to live.
The outstanding importance of the automobile in urban design has recently received more attention than any other single factor. The characteristic urban utopias, the modern ideal cities, all seem based on the automobile as the primary element, to be embraced or repelled as the case may be ... Radburn, the chief American residential design, is an auto-scaled superblock. Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City is essentially a prairie strewn with factories and other centers, linked by a web of superhighways.
The use of the automobile, commuting routine, the view from the road, the experience of arrival in the city, the design of parking facilities as civic art—these have been continuing themes in Philadelphia planning design for more than a dozen years ... Great Britain, whose struggle with the automobile in city design has just commenced, has produced three pedestrian islands in the new town of Stevenage, the redeveloped area of Coventry, and proposals for the Barbican area lying immediately north of the City of London. None will survive the full impact of automobilization ... Even such extravagantly admired urban designs as Vallingby, oriented to excellent rail commuter service to central Stockholm, failed to provide enough shopping center parking and are now menaced by the rise of the carpool and other familiar difficulties. Until new future mass transportation is assured, it must be acknowledged that we have today no solution to the design of central areas or even to their preservation.
As cities are now formed, only the dominant functional interests are usually expressed. The city as a commercial center is not much more than a decorated warehouse, empty except during shopping hours, where the main thing to see is goods and the main thing to do is buy them. Downtown is a sometime thing, plodding a treadmill of obsolescence as inevitable as the FHA Handbook version of residential neighborhood decline. This is the city that urban design must save from the city planners. —Frederick Gutheim, president, Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1963 issue of Resources magazine.
