Communitas Means Of Livelihood And Ways Of Life

Second Edition, Revised

Paul and Percival

710
Goodman

62-08964

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JUN23M.-

COMMUNITAS

Means of Livelihood
and Ways of Life

Percival and Paul
Goodman

VINTAGE BOOKS

A DIVISION OF KANDOM HOUSE

New York

Copyright, 1947, I960, by Percival and Paul Goodman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy-
right Conventions. Published in New York by Random House, Inc.,
and in Toronto, Canada, by Random House of Canada, Limited.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 60-6381

VINTAGE BOOKS
are published by ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

and RANDOM HOUSE, INC.
Manufactured in the United States of America

CONTENTS

1 Introduction 3

PART I

A Manual of Modern Plans

2 The Green Belt 25

3 Industrial Plans 57

4 Integrated Plans 86

PART II

Three Community Paradigms

Introduction 119

5 A City of Efficient Consumption 125

6 A New Community: the Elimination of
the Difference between Production and
Consumption 153

7 Planned Security with Minimum
Regulation 188

8 Conclusion 18
APPENDICES 227

COMMUNITAS
Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life

Poverty, plenty and luxury

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Background and Foreground

Of the man-made things, the works of engineering and
architecture and town plan are the heaviest and biggest
part of what we experience. They lie underneath, they loom
around, as the prepared place of our activity. Economically,
they have the greatest amount of past human labor frozen
into them, as streets and highways, houses and bridges, and
physical plant. Against this background we do our work
and strive toward our ideals, or just live out our habits;
yet because it is background, it tends to become taken for
granted and to be unnoticed. A child accepts the man-made
background itself as the inevitable nature of things; he does
not realize that somebody once drew some lines on a piece
of paper who might have drawn otherwise. But now, as
engineer and architect once drew, people have to walk and
live.

The background of the physical plant and the foreground
of human activity are profoundly and intimately dependent
on one another. Laymen do not realize how deep and subtle
this connection is. Let us immediately give a strong archi-
tectural example to illustrate it. In Christian history, there
is a relation between the theology and the architecture of
churches. The dimly-lit vast auditorium of a Gothic Catholic
cathedral, bathed in colors and symbols, faces a bright
candle-lit stage and its richly costumed celebrant: this is
the necessary background for the mysterious sacrament of
the mass for the newly growing Medieval town and its
representative actor. But the daylit, small, and unadorned
meeting hall of the Congregationalist, facing its central
pulpit, fits the belief that the chief mystery is preaching the

4 COMMUNITAS

Word to a group that religiously governs itself. And the little
square seating arrangement of the Quakers confronting one
another is an environment where it is hoped that, when
people are gathered in meditation, the Spirit itself will
descend anew. In this sequence of three plans, there is a
whole history of dogma and society. Men have fought wars
and shed their blood for these details of plan and decoration.

Just so, if we look at the town plan of New Delhi we can
immediately read off much of the history and social values
of a late, date of British imperialism, And if we look at the
Garden City plan of Greenbelt, Md., we can understand
something very important about our present American era
of the "organization man."

We can read immediately from the industrial map of the
United States in 1850 that there were sectional political
interests. Given a certain kind of agricultural or mining plan,
we know that, whatever the formal schooling of the society

Reading the social values from the plan: 1. New Delhi: British
imperialism in India 2. Greenbelt, Md.: the disconnection of
domestic and productive life

Introduction 5

may be, a large part of the environmental education of the
children will be technological; whereas a child brought up
in a modern suburb or city may not even know what work it
is that papa does "at the office."

Contemporary Criticism

of Our American Way of Life

For thirty years now, our American way of life as a whole
has been subjected to sweeping condemnation by thoughtful
social and cultural critics. From the great Depression to
World War II, this criticism was aimed mostly at our eco-
nomic and political institutions; since the war, it has been
aimed, less trenchantly but more broadly, at the Standard
of Living, the popular culture, the ways of work and leisure.
The critics have shown with pretty plain evidence that
we spend our money for follies, that our leisure does not
revive us, that our conditions of work are unmanly and our
beautiful American classlessness is degenerating into a static
bureaucracy; our mass arts are beneath contempt; our pros-
perity breeds insecurity; our system of distribution has be-
come huckstering and our system of production discourages
enterprise and sabotages invention.

In this book we must add, alas, to the subjects of this
cultural criticism the physical plant and the town and
regional plans in which we have been living so unsatisfac-
torily. We will criticize not merely the foolish shape and
power of the cars but the cars themselves, and not merely
the cars but the factories where they are made, the highways
on which they run, and the plan of livelihood that makes
those highways necessary. In appraising these things, we
employ both the economic analysis that marked the books
of the 30's and the socio-psychological approach prevalent
since the war. This is indicated by our sub-title: "The Means
of Livelihood and the Ways of Life/' (In social theory, this
kind of analysis provides one necessary middle term in
the recent literature of criticism, between the economic and

6 COMMUNITAS

the cultural analyses, which have usually run strangely
parallel to one another without touching.)

Nevertheless, except for this introductory chapter, this
present book is not an indictment of the American way of
life, but rather an attempt to clarify it and find what its
possibilities are. For it is confused, it is a mixture of conflict-
ing motives not ungenerous in themselves. Confronted with
the spectacular folly of our people, one is struck not by their
incurable stupidity but by their bafflement about what to do
with themselves and their productivity. They seem to be
trapped in their present pattern, with no recourse but to
complicate present evils by more of the same. Especially in
the field of big physical planning, there has been almost a
total drying-up of invention, of new solutions. Most of the
ideas discussed in this book come from the 20's or before, a
few from the early 30's. Since World War II, with all the
need for housing, with all the productive plant to be put to
new work and capital to invest, the major innovation in com-
munity planning in the United States has been the out-of-
town so-called "community center" whose chief structure
is a supermarket where Sunday shoppers can avoid blue
laws.

Typical American behavior is to solve a problem of
transit congestion by creating a parallel system that builds
up new neighborhoods and redoubles the transit congestion;
but no effort is made to analyze the kinds and conditions of
work so that people commute less. With generous intent,
Americans clear a slum area and rebuild with large projects
that re-create the slum more densely and, on the whole, soci-
ologically worse, for now class stratification is built organic-
ally into the plan; but rarely is an effort made to get people
to improve what they have, or to find out where they ought
to move. (The exceptions of the Hudson Guild in New
York teaching six Puerto Rican families to make furniture
and paint the premises, or of a block getting together to
plant nine treesare so exceptional that they warrant medals
from the American Institute of Architects.) A classical ex-

Introduction 7

ample of our present genius in planning is solving the traffic
jam on the streets of a great city in the West by making a
system of freeways so fast and efficient with its cloverleaves
as to occupy 40% of the real estate, whose previous occu-
pants then move to distant places and drive back bumper-
to-bumper on the freeways.

If, however, someone plans in a physicianly way to rem-
edy the causes of an ill rather than concentrate on the
symptoms, if he proposes a Master Plan to provide for
orderly future development, if he suggests an inventive new
solution altogether, then he is sure to be called impractical,
irresponsible, and perhaps a subversive alien. Indeed, in the
elegant phrase of the famous Park Commissioner of an
Eastern metropolis, a guardian of the public welfare and
morals in the field, such people are Bei-unskis, that is, Rus-
sian or German refugees who say, "Bei uns we did it this
way."

Inherent Difficulties of Planning

Yet even apart from public foolishness and public officials,
big physical planning is confusing and difficult. Every com-
munity plan is based on some:

Technology

Standard of Living

Political and Economic Decision

Geography and History of a Place.

Every part of this is thorny and the interrelation is thorny.
There may be historical miscalculationwrong predic-
tions in the most expensive matters. Consider, for instance,
a most celebrated example of American planning, the laying-
out of the District of Columbia and the city of Washington.
When the site on the Potomac was chosen, as central in an
era of slow transportation, the plan was at the same time
to connect the Potomac waterway with the Ohio, and the
new city was then to become the emporium of die West.

8 COMMUNITAS

But the system of canals which would have realized this
ambitious scheme did not materialize, and therefore, a
hundred years later, Washington was still a small political
center, pompously overplanned, without economic signifi-
cance, while the commerce of the West flowed through the
Erie Canal to New York. Yet now, ironically enough, the
political change to a highly centralized bureaucracy has
made Washington a great city far beyond its once exag-
gerated size.

Planners tend to put a misplaced faith in some one im-
portant factor in isolation, usually a technological innova-
tion. In 1915, Patrick Geddes argued that, with the change
from coal to electricity, the new engineering would, or
could, bring into being Garden Cities everywhere to replace
the slums; for the new power could be decentralized and
was not in itself offensive. Yet the old slum towns have
largely passed away to be replaced by endless conurbations
of suburbs smothered in new feats of the new engineering
and the automobile exhaust is more of a menace than the
coal smoke. Our guess is that these days nucleonics as such
will not accomplish miracles for us, nor even automation.

The Garden City idea itself, as we shall see in the next
chapter, has had apathetic history. When Ebenezer Howard
thought it up to remedy the coal slums, he did not contem-
plate Garden Cities without industry; he wanted to make
it possible for people to live decently with the industry. Yet,
just when the conditions of manufacture have become less
noisome, it has worked out that the Green Belt and Garden
Cities have become mere dormitories for commuters, who
are also generally not the factory workers whom Howard
had in mind.

Political Difficulties

The big, heavy, and expensive physical environment has
always been the chief locus of vested rights stubbornly op-
posing planning innovations that are merely for the general

's proposal to connect the Potomac and Ohio rivers

welfare and do not yield quick profits. A small zoning or-
dinance is difficult to enact, not to speak of a master plan for
progressive realization over twenty or thirty years, for zon-
ing nullifies speculation in real estate. Every advertiser in
American City and Architectural Forum has costly wares to
peddle, and it is hard to see through their smokescreen what
services and gadgets are really useful, and whether or not
some simpler, more inexpensive arrangement is feasible.
Since streets and subways are too bulky for the profits of
capricious fads, the tendency of business in these lines is to
repeat the tried and true, in a bigger way. And it happens
to be just the real estate interests and great financiers like
insurance companies who have influence on city councils
and park commissioners.

But also, apart from business interests and vested rights,
common people are rightly very conservative about changes
in the land, for they are very powerfully affected by such

10 COMMUNITAS

changes in very many habits and sentiments. Any com-
munity plan involves a formidable choice and fixing of living
standards and attitudes, of schedule, of personal and cul-
tural tone. Generally people move in the existing plan un-
consciously, as if it were nature (and they will continue
to do so, until suddenly the automobiles don't move at all) .
But let a new proposal be made and it is astonishing how
people rally to the old arrangement. Even a powerful park
commissioner found the housewives and their perambu-
lators blocking his way when he tried to rent out a bit of
the green as a parking lot for a private restaurant he favored;
and wild painters and cat-keeping spinsters united to keep
him from forcing a driveway through lovely Washington
Square. These many years now since 1945, the citizens of
New York City have refused to say "Avenue of the Ameri-
cas" when they plainly mean Sixth Avenue.

The trouble with this good instinct not to be regimented
in one's intimate affairs by architects, engineers, and inter-
national public-relations experts is that "no plan" always
means in fact some inherited and frequently bad plan. For
our cities are far from nature, that has a most excellent plan,
and the "unplanned" tends to mean a gridiron laid out for
speculation a century ago, or a dilapidated downtown when
the actual downtown has moved uptown. People are right
to be conservative, but what is conservative? In planning,
as elsewhere in our society, we can observe the paradox that
the wildest anarchists are generally affirming the most
ancient values, of space, sun, and trees, and beauty, human
dignity, and forthright means, as if they lived in neolithic
times or the Middle Ages, whereas the so-called conserva-
tives are generally arguing for policies and prejudices that
date back only four administrations.

The best defense against planning and people do need
a defense against planners is to become informed about the
plan that is indeed existent and operating in our lives; and
to learn to take the initiative in proposing or supporting
reasoned changes. Such action is not only a defense but

Introduction 1 1

good in itself, for to make positive decisions for one's com-
munity, rather than being regimented by others' decisions,
is one of the noble acts of man.

Technology of Choice

and Economy of Abundance

The most curious anomaly, however, is that modern tech-
nology baffles people and makes them timid of innovations
in community planning. It is an anomaly because for the first
time in history we have, spectacularly in the United States,
a surplus technology, a technology of free choice, that allows
for the most widely various community-arrangements and
ways of life. Later in this book we will suggest some of the
extreme varieties that are technically feasible. And with
this technology of choice, we have an economy of abun-
dance, a standard of living that is in many ways too high-
goods and money that are literally thrown away or given
away that could underwrite sweeping reforms and pilot ex-
periments. Yet our cultural climate and the state of ideas
are such that our surplus, of means and wealth, leads only
to extravagant repetitions of the "air-conditioned night-
mare," as Henry Miller called it, a pattern of life that used
to be unsatisfactory and now, by the extravagance, becomes
absurd.

Think about a scarcity economy and a technology of
necessity. A cursory glance at the big map will show what
we have inherited from history. Of the seven urban areas
of the United Kingdom, six coincide with the coal beds;
the seventh, London, was the port open to the Lowlands
and Europe. When as children we used to learn the capitals
and chief cities of the United States, we learned the rivers
and lakes that they were located on, and then, if we knew
which rivers were navigable and which furnished water-
power, we had in a nutshell the history of American econ-
omy. Not long ago in this country many manufacturers
moved south to get cheaper labor, until the labor unions

12 COMMUNITAS

followed them. In general, if we look at the big historical
map, we see that the location of towns has depended on
bringing together the raw material and the power, on mini-
mizing transportation, on having a reserve of part-time and
seasonal labor and a concentration of skills, and sometimes
(depending on the bulk or perishability of the finished
product) on the location of the market. These are the kinds
of technical and economic factors that have historically de-
termined, with an iron necessity, the big physical plan of
industrial nations and continents.

They will continue to determine them, but the iron neces-
sity is relaxed. For almost every item that men have in-
vented or nature has bestowed, there are alternative choices.
What used to be made of steel (iron ore and coal) may now
often be made of aluminum (bauxite and waterpower) or
even of plastic (soybeans and sunlight). Raw materials
have proliferated, sources of power have become more ubiq-
uitous, and there are more means of transportation and
lighter loads to carry. With the machine-analysis of manu-
facture, the tasks of labor become simpler, and as the ma-
chines have become automatic our problem has become,
astoundingly, not where to get labor but how to use leisure.
Skill is no longer the arduously learned craftsmanship of
hundreds of trades and crafts for its chief habits (styling,
accuracy, speed) are built into the machine; skill has come
to mean skill in a few operations, like turning, grinding,
stamping, welding, spraying and half a dozen others, that
intelligent people can learn in a short time. Even inspection
is progressively mechanized. The old craft-operations of
building could be revolutionized overnight if there were
worthwhile enterprises to warrant the change, that is, if there
were a social impetus and enthusiasm to build what every-
body agrees is useful and necessaiy.

Consider what this means for community planning on any
scale. We could centralize or decentralize, concentrate
population or scatter it. If we want to continue the trend
away from the country, we can do that; but if we want to

Introduction 13

combine town and country values in an agrindustrial way of
life, we can do that. In large areas of our operation, we
could go back to old-fashioned domestic industry with per-
haps even a gain in efficiency, for small power is everywhere
available, small machines are cheap and ingenious, and
there are easy means to collect machined parts and centrally
assemble them. If we want to lay our emphasis on providing
still more mass-produced goods, and raising the standard of
living still higher, we can do that; or if we want to increase
leisure and the artistic culture of the individual, we can do
that. We can have solar machines for hermits in the desert
like Aldous Huxley or central heating provided for millions
by New York Steam. All this is commonplace; everybody
knows it.

It is just this relaxing of necessity, this extraordinary flexi-
bility and freedom of choice of our techniques, that is baf-
fling and frightening to people. We say, "If we want, we
can," but offered such wildly possible alternatives, how the
devil would people know what they want? And if you ask
them as it was customary after the war to take polls and
ask, "What kind of town do you want to live in? What do
you want in your post-war home?" the answers reveal a
banality of ideas that is hair-raising, with neither rational
thought nor real sentiment, the conceptions of routine and
inertia rather than local patriotism or personal desire, of
prejudice and advertising rather than practical experience
and dream.

Technology is a sacred cow left strictly to (unknown) ex-
perts, as if the form of the industrial machine did not pro-
foundly affect every person; and people are remarkably
superstitious about it. They think that it is more efficient to
centralize, whereas it is usually more inefficient. (When this
same technological superstition invades such a sphere as the
school system, it is no joke. ) They imagine, as an article of
faith, that big factories must be more efficient than small
ones; it does not occur to them, for instance, that it is
cheaper to haul machined parts than to transport workmen,

14 COMMUNITAS

Indeed, they are outraged by the good-humored demonstra-
tions of Borsodi that, in hours and minutes of labor, it is
probably cheaper to grow and can your own tomatoes than
to buy them at the supermarket, not to speak of the quality.
Here once again we have the inevitable irony of history:
industry, invention, scientific method have opened new
opportunities, but just at the moment of opportunity, people
have become ignorant by specialization and superstitious of
science and technology, so that they no longer know what
they want, nor do they dare to command it. The facts are
exactly like the world of Kafka: a person has every kind of
electrical appliance in his home, but he is balked, cold-fed,
and even plunged into darkness because he no longer knows
how to fix a faulty connection.

Certainly this abdication of practical competence is one
important reason for the absurdity of the American Standard
of Living. Where the user understands nothing and cannot
evaluate his tools, you can sell him anything, It is the user,
said Plato, who ought to be the judge of the chariot. Since
he is not, he must abdicate to the values of engineers, who
are craft-idiots, or God save us! to the values of sales-
men. Insecure as to use and value, the buyer clings to the
autistic security of conformity and emulation, and he can
no longer dare to ask whether there is a relation between
his Standard of Living and the satisfactoriness of life. Yet
in a reasonable mood, nobody, but nobody, in America takes
the American standard seriously. (This, by the way, is what
Europeans don't understand; we are not such fools as they
imagine we are far more at a loss than they think. )

Still Another Obstacle

We must mention still another obstacle to community
planning in our times and a cause of the dull and unadven-
turous thinking about it: the threat of war, especially atomic
war. People feel and they are bang right that there is

Introduction

15

TOWNSCAPE 196-?

1. Abandoned city, could serve as decoy 2. Factory S. Rocket
Launching Platform 4. Entrances to Factory 5. Road under
6. Dwellings 7. Landing field 8. Trojan horses 9. Staff meeting
10. G.H.Q.

not much point in initiating large-scale and long-range im-
provements in the physical environment, when we are
uncertain about the existence of a physical environment the
day after tomorrow. A sensible policy for highways must be
sacrificed to the needs of moving defense, Nor is this de-
feated attitude toward planning relieved when military ex-
perts come forth with spine-tingling plans that propose the
total disruption of our present arrangements solely in the
interest of minimizing the damage of the bombs. Such
schemes do not awaken enthusiasm for a new way of life.
But even worse than this actual doubt, grounded in
objective danger, is the world-wide anxiety that everywhere
produces conformity and brain washed citizens. For it takes

16 COMMUNITAS

a certain basic confidence and hope to be able to be rebel-
lious and hanker after radical innovations, As the historians
point out, it is not when the affairs of society are at low ebb,
but on the upturn and in the burst of revival that great
revolutions occur. Now compare our decade since World
War II with the decade after World War I. In both there
was unheard of productivity and prosperity, a vast expan-
sion in science and technique, a flood of international ex-
change. But the decade of the 20's had also one supreme
confidence, that there was never going to be another war;
the victors sank their warships in the sea and every nation
signed the Kellogg-Briand pact; and it was in that confi-
dence that there flowered the Golden Age of avant-garde
art, and many of the elegant and audacious community
plans that we shall discuss in the following pages. Our
decade, alas, has had the contrary confidence God grant
that we are equally deluded and our avant-garde art and
thought have been pretty desperate.

The future is gloomy, and we offer you a book about the
bright face of the future! It is because we have a stubborn
faith in the following proposition: the chief, the underlying
reason that people wage war is that they do not wage peace.
How to wage peace?

The Importance of

Planning in Modem Thinking

There is an important sense in which physical community
planning as a major branch of thought belongs to modern
times, to the past hundred years. In eveiy age there have
been moral and cultural crises and social plans like the
Republic and also physical plans to meet economic, eco-
logical, or strategic needs. But formerly the physical plans
were simply technical solutions: the physical motions and
tangible objects of people were ready means to express
whatever values they had; moral and cultural integration
did not importantly depend on physical integration. In our

Introduction 17

times, however, every student of the subject complains, one
way or another, that the existing physical plant is not ex-
pressive of people's real values: it is "out of Human_ scale/'
it is existentially "absurd," it is "paleo^technological." Put
philosophically, there is a wrong relation between means
and ends. The means~are too unwieldy for us, so our ends
are confused, for impracticable ends are confused dreams.
Whatever the causes, from the earliest plans of the modern
kind, seeking to remedy the evils of nuisance factories and
urban congestion, and up to the most recent plans for
regional development and physical science fiction, we find
always the insistence that reintegration of the physical plan
is an essential part of political, cultural, and moral reintegra-
tion. Most physical planners vastly overrate the importance
of their subject; in social change it is not a primary motive.
When people are personally happy it is astonishing how
they make do with improbable means and when they are
miserable the shiniest plant does not work for them. Never-
theless, the plans discussed in this book will show, we think,
that the subject is more important than urban renewal, or
even than solving traffic jams.

Neo-Functionalism

Finally, let us say something about the esthetic standpoint
of this book. The authors are both artists and, in the end,
beauty is our criterion, even for community planning, which
is pretty close to the art of life itself. Our standpoint is given
by the historical situation we have just discussed: the prob-
lem for modem planners has been the disproportion of
means and ends, and the beauty of community plan is the
proportion of means and ends.

Most of modern architecture and engineering has ad-
vanced under the banner of functionalism, "form follows
function." This formula of Louis Sullivan has been subject
to two rather contrary interpretations. In Sullivan's original
statement he seemed to mean not that the form grows from

18 GOMMUNITAS

Constructiv-ist functionalism

the function, but that it is appropriate to it, it is an interpre-
tation of it; he says, "a store must look like a store, a bank
must look like a bank." The formula aims at removing the
ugliness of cultural dishonesty, snobbery, the shame of
physical function. It is directly in the line of Ibsen, Zola,
Dreiser. But it also affirms ideal forms, given by the sensi-
bility of the culture or the imagination of the artist; and this
is certainly how it was spectacularly applied by Sullivan's
disciple, Frank Lloyd Wright, who found his shapes in
America, in the prairie, and in his personal poetry.

In a more radical interpretation e.g., of the Bauhaus
the formula means that the form is given by the function:
there is to be no addition to the arrangement of the utility,
the thing is presented just as it works. In a sense, this is not
an esthetic principle at all, for a machine simply working
perfectly would not be noticed at all and therefore would
not have beauty nor any other sensible satisfaction. But
these theorists were convinced that the natural handling
of materials and the rationalization of design for mass pro-
duction must necessarily result in strong elementary and
intellectual satisfactions^ simplicity, cleanliness, good sense,
richness of texture. The bread-and-butter values of poor

Introduction 19

people who have been deprived, but know now what they
want.

Along this path of interpretation, the final step seemed to
be constructivism, the theory that since the greatest and
most striking impression of any structure is made by its basic
materials and -the way they are put together, so the greatest
formal effect is in the construction itself, in its clarity, inge-
nuity, rationality, and proportion. This is a doctrine of pure
esthetics, directly in the line of post-impressionism, cubism,
and abstract art. In architecture and engineering it devel-
oped from functionalism, but in theory and sometimes in
practice it leaped to the opposite extreme of having no
concern with utility whatever. Much constructivist architec-
ture is best regarded primarily as vast abstract sculpture;
the search of the artist is for new structural forms, arbitrarily,
whatever the function. Often it wonderfully expresses the
intoxication with new technology, how we can freely canti-
lever anything, span any space. On the other hand, losing
the use, it loses the intimate sensibility of daily life, it loses
the human scale.

We therefore, going back to Greek antiquity, propose a
different line of interpretation altogether: form follows func-
tion, but let us subject the function itself to a formal critique.
Is the function good? Bona fide? Is it worthwhile? Is it
worthy of a man to do that? What are the consequences?
Is it compatible with other, basic, human functions? Is it
a forthright or at least ingenious part of life? Does it make
sense? Is it a beautiful function of a beautiful power? We
have grown unused to asking such ethical questions of our
machines, our streets, our cars, our towns. But nothing less
will give us an esthetics for community planning, the pro-
portioning of means and ends. For a community is not a
construction, a bold Utopian model; its chief part is always
people, busy or idle, en masse or a few at a time. And the
problem of community planning is not like arranging people
for a play or a ballet, for there are no outside spectators,
there are only actors; nor are they actors of a scenario but

20 COMMUNITAS

agents of their own needs though it's a grand thing for us
to be not altogether unconscious of forming a beautiful and
elaborate city, by how we look and move. That's a proud
feeling.

What we want is style. Style, power and grace. These
come only, burning, from need and flowing feeling; and
that fire brought to focus by viable character and habits.

This, then, is a book about the issues important in com-
munity planning and the ideas suggested by the planners.
Our aim is to clarify a confused subject, to heighten the
present low level of thinking; it is not to propose concrete
plans for construction in particular places. We are going to
discuss many big schemes, including a few of our own
invention; but our purpose is a philosophical one: to ask
what is socially implied in any such scheme as a way of
life, and how each plan expresses some tendency of modern

The planner's ideal:
fitting the man to the plan

Introduction 21

mankind. Naturally we too have an idea as to how we should
like to live, but we are not going to try to sell it here. On
the contrary! At present any plan will win our praise so long
as it is really functional according to the criterion we have
proposed: so long as it is aware of means and ends and is
not, as a way of life, absurd.

A great plan maintains an independent attitude toward
both the means of production and the standard of living. It
is selective of current technology because how men work
and make things is crucial to how they live. And it is
selective of the available goods and services, in quantity and
quality, and in deciding which ones are plain foolishness.

From the vast and curious literature of this subject during
the past century, we have chosen a manual of great modern
plans, and arranged them according to the following prin-
ciple: What is the relationship between the arrangements
for working and the arrangements for "living" (animal,
domestic, avocational, and recreational) ? What is the rela-
tion in the plan between production and consumption? This
gives us a division into three classes:

A. The Green Belt-Garden Cities and Satellite Towns;
City neighborhoods and the Ville Radieuse;

B. Industrial Plans the Plan for Moscow; the Lineal
City; Dymaxion;

C. Integrated Plans Broadacres and the Homestead;
the Marxist regional plan and collective farming;
the T.V.A.

The first class, controlling the technology, concentrates
on amenity of living; the second starts from arrangements
for production and the use of technology; the third looks for
some principle of symbiosis. It does not much matter
whether we have chosen the most exciting or influential
examplesthough we have chosen good ones for our aim
is to bring out the principle of interrelation. Certainly we do
not treat the plans in a way adequate to their merit, for they
were put forth as practical or ideally practical schemes

22 COMMUNITAS

some of them were put into effect-whereas we are using
them as examples for analysis.

The questions we shall be asking are: What do these
plans envisage about:

Kind of technology?

Attitude toward the technology?

Relation of work and leisure?

Domestic life?

Education of children and adults?

Esthetics?

Political initiative?

Economic institutions?

Practical realization?

By asking these questions of these modern plans, we can
collect a large body of important issues and ideas for the
inductions that we then draw in the second part of this
book.

PART I

A Manual of Modern Plans

Difficulty of quarantining technology

CHAPTER 2

The Green Belt

The original impulse to Garden City planning was the reac-
tion against the ugly technology and depressed humanity
of the old English factory areas. On the one hand, the fac-
tory poured forth its smoke, blighted the countryside with
its refuse, and sucked in labor at an early age. On the other,
the homes were crowded among the chimneys as identical
hives of labor power, and the people were parts of the
machine, losing their dignity and sense of beauty. Some
moralists, like Ruskin, Morris, and Wilde reacted so vio-
lently against the causes that they were willing to scrap both
the technology and the profit system; they laid their empha-
sis on the beauty of domestic and social life, making for the
most part a selection of pre-industrial values. Ruskin praised

25

26 COMMUNITAS

the handsome architecture of the Middle Ages, said things
should not be made of iron, and campaigned for handsome
tea cannisters. Morris designed furniture and textiles,
improved typography, and dreamed of society without
coercive law. Wilde (inspired also by Pater) tried to do
something about clothing and politics and embarked on
the so-called "esthetic adventure." What is significant is the
effort to combine large-scale social protest with a new
attitude toward small things.

Less radically, Ebenezer Howard, the pioneer of the
Garden City, thought of the alternative of quarantining the
technology, but preserving both the profit system and the
copiousness of mass products: he protected the homes and
the non-technical culture behind a belt of green. This idea
caught on and has been continually influential ever since.
In all Garden City planning one can detect the purpose of
safeguard, of defense; but by the same token, this is the
school that has made valuable studies of minimum living
standards, optimum density, right orientation for sunlight,
space for playgrounds, the correct designing of primary
schools.

Plans which in principle quarantine the technology start
with the consumption products of industry and plan for
the amenity and convenience of domestic life. Then, how-
ever, by a reflex of their definition of what is intolerable
and substandard, in domestic life, they plan for the conven-
ience and amenity also of working conditions, and so they
meet up with the stream of the labor movement.

With the coming of the automobiles there was a second
impulse to Garden City planning. To the original ugliness
of coal was added the chaos of traffic congestion and traffic
hazard. But there was offered also the opportunity to get
away faster and farther. The result has been that, whereas
for Howard the protected homes were near the factories
and planned in conjunction with them, the entities that are
now called Garden Cities are physically isolated from their
industry and planned quite independently. We have the

A Manual of Modern Plans 27

interesting phenomena of commutation, highway culture,
suburbanism, and exurbanism.

The chief property of these plans, then, is the setting-up
of a protective green belt, and the chief difference among
the plans depends on how complex a unity of life is pro-
vided off the main roads leading to the industrial or business
center.

We are now entering a stage of reflex also to this sec-
ond impulse of suburbanism: not to flee from the center
but to open it out, relieve its congestion, and bring the
green belt into the city itself. This, considered on a grand
scale, is the proposal of the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier.
Considered more piecemeal, it employs the principle of
enclosed traffic-free blocks and the revival of neighborhoods,
as proposed by disciples of Le Corbusier, like Paul Wiener,
or housers like Henry Wright.

Suburban view

From Suburbs to Garden Cities

From the countryside, the scattered people crowd into
cities and overcrowd them. There then begins a contrary
motion.

Consider first the existing suburbs. These are unorganized
settlements springing up on the main highway and parallel
railway to the city. They take advantage of the cheaper land
far from the center to build chiefly one-family houses with
private yards. The productive and cultural activity of the

adults and even adolescents is centered in the metropolis; it
is only the children who belong strictly to the suburb as
such. The principal civic services paving, light, water are
directed by the city; and the land is surveyed according to
the prevailing city plan, probably in a grid. The highway
to the city is the largest street and contains the shops.

Spaced throughout the grid are likely to be small develop-
ments of private real estate men, attempting a more pic-
turesque arrangement of the plots. But on the whole the
pressure for profit is such that the plots become minimal
and the endless rows of little boxes, or of larger boxes with
picture windows, are pretty near the landscape of Dante's
first volume.

Such development is originally unplanned. It is best de-
scribed in the phrase of Mackaye as "urban baekflow." The
effect of it is, within a short time, to reach out toward the
next small or large town and to create a still greater and
more planless metropolitan area. This is tbe ameboid
spreading that Patrick Geddes called conurbation.

Culturally, the suburb is too city-bound to have any defi-
nite character, but certain tendencies are fairly apparent
caused partly by the physical facts and partly, no doubt,
by the kind of persons who choose to be suburbanites.
Families are isolated from the more diverse contacts of city
culture, and they are atomized internally by the more fre-
quent absence of the wage earner. On the otiher hand, there
is a growth of neighborly contacts. Surburbanites are known

29

Conurbation (after Geddes):

1. Flow into the city

2. Inflow continues,
backflow to suburbs begins,
slums grow in the center

3. Backflow in full flood,
slums turn to blight

4. A sprawling mass with

a great central blighted area

as petty bourgeois in status and prejudice, and they have
the petty bourgeois virtue of making a small private effort,
with its responsibilities. There is increased dependency on
the timetable and an organization of daily life probably
tighter than in the city, but there is also the increased dig-
nity of puttering in one's own house and maybe garden.
(It has been said, however, that the majority dislike the
gardening and keep up the lawn just to avoid unfavorable
gossip.) There is no local political initiative, and in general
politics there is a tendency to stand pat or retreat.

When this suburban backflow is subjected to conscious
planning, however, a definite character promptly emerges.
Accepting such a tendency as desirable, the city makes po-
litical and economic decisions to facilitate it by opening
fast highways or rapid-transit systems from the center to the
outskirts. An example is the way the New York region has
been developed. The effect is to create blighted areas in
the depopulated center, to accelerate conurbation at the
periphery and rapidly depress the older suburbs, choking
their traffic and destroying their green; but also to open out
much further distances (an hour away on the new high-
ways) where there is more space and more pretentious
housing. This is quite strictly a middle-class development;
for the highways draw heavily on the social wealth of every-
body for the benefit of those who are better off, since the
poor can afford neither the houses nor the automobiles.

This matter is important and let us dwell on it a moment.

30 COMMUNITAS

A powerful Park Commissioner has made himself a vast
national reputation by constructing many such escape-high-
ways: they are landscaped and have gas-stations in quaint
styles; this is "a man who gets things done." He has done
our city of New York a disastrous disservice, in the inter-
ests of a special class. Imagine if this expenditure had been
more equitably divided to improve the center and make
liveable neighborhoods, as was often suggested. The situa-
tion in the New York region is especially unjust. Those who
can afford to live in Nassau or Westchester Counties are able
to avoid also the city sales and other taxes, although para-
sitically they enjoy the city's culture; yet, having set up a
good swimming pool across the city's northern border, the
people of Westchester have indignantly banned its use to
Negroes, Puerto Ricans, and other poor boys, since they
made it "for their own people." The general outlook of these
rich parkway-served counties is that of ignorant, smug
parasites.

A more rational inference from the suburban impulse is
the idea of the Ciudad Lineal (after Soria y Mata), pro-
posed as long ago as 1882 for the development of the out-
skirts of Madrid. The Lineal City, continuous roadside
development, is the planned adaptation of existing "ribbon
development," the continuous dotting of habitations along
any road. It avoids the high rent and congestion of the city,
has easy access to the city, and it minimizes the invasion of
the forest and countryside, which begin immediately be-
yond the street off the highway. It is essentially a European
invention, for this is in fact the form of the villages of Italy,
France, Spain, or Ireland: row-housing on both sides of
the highroad, and the peasants* fields out the back door
(whereas the English and Americans have historically
spread over the fields with detached houses). The chief
importance of the Lineal City, however, is not residential
but industrial; it is the simplest analysis of the always pres-
ent and always major factor of transportation (see later,
plan of the disurbanists, p. 71) a remarkable invention to
have been made before the coming of the automobile.

31

Street and lineal plan of Ciudad Lineal
(after Soria y Mata)

32

A modern proposal for a lineal city: Algiers, 1931 (Le Corbusier)

The climactic development of the suburban impulse in
the English or American style is the Garden City in the
form in which it is now laid out. This is a unified residential
community of a size "sufficient for a complete social life,"
with row as well as detached houses, but mainly detached
houses with small gardens, and with its center off the high-
way.

Garden Cities

The classic Garden City, Letch worth (architects: Parker
and Unwin, after Howard) , is a place of light industry. But
let us here speak rather of places completely dependent on
commuting, e.g., Radburn (Stein), Welwyn (Unwin), or
the New Deal Greenbelt, Greendale, etc. Radburn aims at
a population of 25,000. After 35 years, Letchworth num-
bered 17,000.

A Manual of Modem Plans

33

The following exposition is taken from the well-known
book of Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice ( 1907;
rev. ed. 1932) . He is concerned throughout with residential
convenience and amenity. On industry his first and last
word is, "We shall need power to reserve suitable areas for
factories, where they will have every convenience for their
work and cause the minimum of nuisance/' One is struck
by the expression "their work" rather than "our work."

Amenity. It is by adding amenity to physical convenience,
says Unwin, that we get a Garden City, This curious British
term, variously applied by every English planner, and imi-
tated by the Americans, means decency, charm of appear-
ance and privacy. To Unwin its first implication is zoning:
segregation from industry and business, and the restriction
of density to "twelve families to the acre"; further, it im-
plies planning with an esthetic purpose.

Letchworth: the original Garden City

34 COMMUNITAS

He proceeds to formal and informal plans, a distinction
borrowed from English gardening. He himself prefers the
formal or T-square and compass plan, obviously thinking
of the delightful squares and crescents of London. (Ameri-
can designers, reacting to our undelightful gridirons, prefer
ameboid shapes.) Next he speaks of problems of street-
layout and the arrangement of public plazas. (American
designers, faced with a heavy volume of through traffic,
employ the cul-de-sac.) Next, the uniformity of materials
for general effect. On this point, one is struck with the
remembrance of the lovely uniformity of old French or Irish
villages, a natural uniformity created by having to use
local building materials; but in the Garden City we come
to a situation of surplus means and planned uniformity to
avoid chaos of the surplus. Next, Unwin cites the unity of
design of the separate blocks of houses.

Unwin devotes his last chapter to an idea of great value:
neighborly cooperation. Planning, he says, is cooperative in
its essence. It starts with the location of the necessities of
the community as a whole its schools, shops, institutes. It
modifies the individual or suburbanite taste to its plazas
and prospects. It proposes the orientation and construction
of houses. It suggests the summation of private gardens into
orchards, and perhaps a common. By cooperation all can
have "a share of the convenience of the rich ... if we can
overcome the excessive prejudice which shuts up each
family and all its domestic activities within the precincts of
its own cottage." He asks for the common laundry and nur-
sery, common library, common services. "More difficult is
the question of the. common kitchen and dining hall." Indeed
more difficult! For along this line of community commitment
there opens up a new way of life altogether, with strong
political consequences.

Unwin's book is admirably reasoned and well written; but
how are the suburbanites of the beginning to become the
fellowship of the end? Given the usual private or govern-
mental projectors, unity of planning means sameness, and

A Manual of Modern Plans

35

social landscaping means the restriction of children from
climbing the trees like bad citizens. From the start he has
isolated his community from the productive work of society.
The initiative to cooperation does not rise from, nor reach
toward, political initiative that always resides in the man-
agement of production and distribution. How far would
that cooperation get?

What is the culture of Garden Cities? The community
spirit belongs, evidently, to those who stay at home. As the
suburb belongs to the children, here the community belongs
to the children and some of the women. The women are
neighborly; according to recent statistics, they spend ten
hours a week playing cards and are active on committees.
The men spend a good deal of the time on the prefabricated
craftsmanship that we call "Do It Yourself." There is golf,
for talking business or civil service. These are the topics of
conversation because a lustier workman is not likely to
divert so much of his time and income from the more
thrilling excitements of the city, such as they are; and rather
than live in a Garden City, an intellectual would rather
meet a bear in the woods.

-caesio veniam
obvius leoni!

A culture citij. Above: Munster Square, London, a town style.
Below: regional plan according to Sharp's analysis

Satellite Towns

To meet some of these objections the English planners
have invented Satellite Towns, in a serious effort to plan
for a culture full-blown rather than a week-end somnoles-
cence. To recover a true urbanism from the man-eating
megalopolis; and also to rescue from suburbia the country-
side and the woods.

A Manual of Modern Plans 37

It seems to have been this latter purpose the reaction
to the fact that the spread-out Garden Cities encroach on
the rural land that has led the more recent generation of
English planners, for example Thomas Sharp, to dissent
from Howard. Whereas neither Howard nor Unwin has
anything to say about the country as such, Sharp in his
Town Planning devotes as much space to the amenity of the
country as to the amenity of the town. Perhaps this reflects
the great problem of an England stripped of its empire and
needing to become more agriculturally self-sufficient.

(In America we have had the fine work of Mackaye, the
creator of the Appalachian Trail. He is concerned to pre-
serve the aboriginal woods as the vivifier of city life. Sharp
too has a chapter on national parks for hikers and campers. )

Satellite towns are thought of as having a population of
100,000, where even Letchworth with its mills has less
than 20,000. The "complete social life" of the Garden City
is not a cultural life at all, for high culture is a defining
property of cities. (A vast industrial concentration is not
a city either, of course. )

More than any other plan the Satellite Town depends on
belts of green, for the green must hem in not only the
industrial center but also town from town, to protect the
urban unity of each; and finally it must protect even the
unity of the countryside.

A satellite town, then, is a true city economically depend-
ent on a center and therefore on its highway, but laid out
as if integral and self-sufficient. The ideal of the layout is
taken directly from the squares and crescents of Christopher
Wren and the Brothers Adam. The style proposed by Sharp
is the "various monotony" of an eighteenth-century block,
each of whose doorways and fan-windows is studied, the
symbol that a man's home, not his house, is his castle.
Country houses, too, have urban dignity, and the fields have
humane hedgerows.

38 COMMUNITAS

At its worst the culture of such a place would be exclusive
and genteel, but at its best it would be the culture of little
theaters. Now little theater is not amateurish, not the lawn
pageant that belongs to the complete social life of Garden
Cities; nor is it prefabricated "Do It Yourself"; nor again,
of course, is it professional (and standardized) entertain-
ment for broad masses. It is devoted to objective art, the
use of the best modern means, and it cultivates its partici-
pants. Primary education would be progressive and inde-
pendent, and higher education would teach the best that
has been thought and said and study "monuments of its
own magnificence," The countryside demonstrates how man
can humanize nature and is a source of decent, not canned,
food; and the national park revives us with the forthright
causality of the woods. All conspires to the spiritual unity
of the soul and the cultural unity of mankind (it is essential
to the idea to mingle the economic classes) all except the
underlying work and techniques of society on which every-
thing depends not only economically but in every big
political decision and in the style of every object of use:
these have no representation.

We are here in the full tide of cultural schizophrenia.
When the suburbanite or Garden Citizen returns from the
industrial center, it is with a physical release and a reawak-
ening of cowering sensibilities. But the culture-townsman
has raised his alienation to the level of a principle. What
reintegration does he offer? The culture-townsman declares
that we must distinguish ends and means, where industry
is the means but town life is the end. Trained in his town
to know what he is about, the young man can then turn
to the proper ordering of society. In America this was fairly
explicitly the program of Robert Hutchins. The only bother
is that one cannot distinguish ends and means in this way
and the attempt to do so emasculates the ends. Under these
conditions, art is cultivated but no works of art can be made;
science is studied but no new propositions are advanced;
and living is central but there is no social invention. (But to

A Manual of Modern Plans 39

be just, do we see any other communities that guarantee
these excellent things?)

The form in which, at present, this plan is partly realized
is the college campus and its neighborhood. It is a plan not
for the children and women, but for the ephebes of both
sexes and all ages. For the adults it is a conception appro-
priate to endowed rather than current wealth, and suspi-
cious of change.

The Evolution of Streets from Village to City

We can tell the story of the inflow and backflow of a
metropolitan population simply as a history of streets.

Starting new on Manhattan, in a territory from their point
of view undeveloped, the Dutch first built a little town

New Amsterdam,
1664

40 COMMUNITAS

dependent on its own agriculture and on the commerce in
furs. Their square faced on the dock, it was the place of the
overseas market, of the imported government, and soon of
the community church and school. People lived on small
farms.

As the commerce grew and attracted greater numbers, the
original farms were subdivided for simple residence, and
the farmers, more ambitious because their products were
in demand both abroad and at home, took possession of
great domains throughout the island and northward. They
now found that the territory had already been somewhat
laid out by the aborigines, and they made use of the main
Indian trail, which to the Indians had run in the opposite
direction toward their capital at Dobbs Ferry. (The way
facing toward Europe was not so obviously downtown for
the Indians.) And it is striking how many features of the
aboriginal layout, topologically determined, persist in the
modern city, though the topology itself has been much
changed. The original lanes and highways of the Indians
and the patroon proprietors formed the basis of some of
the avenues of later days.

Very early some of the larger domains were subdivided
and occupied as villages of the growing town. The first
such was New Haarlem.

Finally, after the vicissitudes of the English occupation
and the American Revolution, it was clear that none of the
thriving commercial island would remain farm land, it
would all be subdivided for commerce, manufacture, and
residence. In 1807 almost the whole area was surveyed as
a gridiron, that lay across the aboriginal paths and the
early lanes and roads, unable to alter either the stronger
topological features or the areas already built up, but
dominating the future.

The rectangles of 1807 were subdivided by real estate
speculators into the lots and back alleys of 1907.

But when the subdivision was complete, began the back-
flow to the outskirts. Under the domination of the center,
these outskirts were surveyed in large rectangles and sold

>\

Village of New Haarlem, 1670,, overbid by 1811 gridiron

in small lots, for instance on Long Island. But since the
impulse to suburban settlement is partly to escape the fea-
tureless and anonymous network, at least some of the rec-
tangles have been arranged into "developments" with an
artificial topology. This brings us back to the composite plan
of 1807.

Let the impulse to escape continue, and a Garden City is
laid out, off the main highway, deliberately demolishing the
gridiron. It is a place of small gardens; the features of the
topology again begin to appear; we are back to New Haar-
lem, except that the small gardens are not really small
farms.

Lastly, in the ideal of a culture town, perhaps somewhere
in Westchester or in Madison Avenue Connecticut, we re-
turn to the integrated town of 1640, built around its plaza.
This plaza has perhaps a church, and perhaps a school, but
no overseas market and no provincial governor. No farmers.
No Indians.

And the plan after the last-is the city without streets.
With the advent of the helicopter, this apparently anomal-
ous conception will no doubt come to exist it has already
been suggested by Fuller and others.

Tfee Weckquaesgeck Trail in Manhattan (Broadway)

Another Version of the Same

Another way of looking at the same history of streets is
to consider the steady growth of the old Weckquaesgeck
Trail to become the Albany Post Road, then Broadway,
then Route 9, and then the great Thruway.

The change to the Thruway is remarkable. For the first
time the topological features are disregarded, and so, for
the most part, are the settlements of population that are
apparently served by the road. Instead, on these great
superhighways we see developed a unique culture, with its
own colors and eating habits, and a kind of extraterritorial
law. Citizens of the Thruway, that stretches from coast to
coast, must Go! Go! Not too fast and not too slow. Above all
they must not stop. There are also new entities in pathology,
such as driver's instep and falling asleep at the wheel.

Ville Radieuse

Let us now consider the contrary direction of green belt
planning: to invade the center with green and set up Gar-
den Cities in the megalopolis itself. Such a conception
involves, of course, immense demolition, it is a surgical
operation. And naturally, for such a "cartesian" solution,
we must turn to the Ville Radieuse of Le Corbusier, a

A Manual of Modern Plans 43

Frenchman (he is even a Swiss!) . For Paris is the only vast
city with beauty imposed on her; and Baron Hausmann
long ago showed that you must knock down a great deal to
get a great result.

"To de-congest the centers-to augment their density-
to increase the means of getting about-to increase the parks
and open spaces": these are the principles of the Ville
Radieuse. The plan is extremely simple and elegant: either
demolish the existing chaos or start afresh on a new site;
lay out in levels highways and tramways radiating from
the center; on these erect a few towering skyscrapers every
400 meters at the subway stations; and ring this new
opened-out center with large apartment houses for resi-
dences, a Cite Jardin, the French kind of Garden City. In-
dustry will be quarantined somewhere "on the outskirts."
(To Paris, Le Corbusier applied this scheme as the Voisin
Plan; in the plan for Algiers, he replaced the residential
rings by lineal cities.)

Similar solutions, one fudged practical, one impractical: 1. Radio
City in New York 2. Le Corbusier's Voisin project for Paris

44 COMMUNITAS

This is a prince of plans. It is a typical flower of the
twenties, of the Paris International Style. Its daring prac-
ticality seems to rejoice in the high capitalism of the "cap-
tains of industry," as Le Corbusier calls them, whose
technology and financial resources can accomplish anything.
We can see its shapes in Rio and Caracas and, grotesquely
misapplied, in New York's Radio City.

In the central skyscrapers, says the author, are housed
the brains and eyes of society. Wherever industry may be
located "on the outskirts," its financial, technical, and po-
litical control is in these few towers. Ville Radieuse is a
paper city; its activity is the motion of draftsmen, typists,
accountants, and meetings of the board. Carried on in an
atmosphere of conditioned air, corrected light, and bright
decor, by electrical communications, with efficiency and
speed. "The city that can achieve speed will achieve success.
Work is today more intense and earned on at a quicker
rate. The whole question becomes one of daily intercom-
munication with a view to settling the state of the market
laid the condition of labor. The more rapid the intercom-
munication, the more will business be expedited." Had
this ever before been so succinctly stated? The passage was
written by an architect before the coming of the giant
computers and before we had learned to use the magic
words "cybernetics" and "feedback."

Leaving the diffused center, we come to the rings of
residence. The inner rings are commodious apartments for
the wealthy, innermost like the first tiers at the opera. The
outer rings are super-blocks of housing for the average, who
travel either inward to the skyscrapers or outward, past the
agricultural belt, to the factories.

The residences, great or small, are machines a vivre, ma-
chines for living, just as the skyscrapers are machines for
communications and exchange, and the streets are machines
for traffic. The plan extends inside the walls of the houses
to the fittings and furniture. (Contrast this with the English
Garden City planners who do not invade these private pre-

Residential zone, business center at left (after Le Corbusier)

cincts.) The unit of living is the cell (cellule), standard in
construction and layout and arranged for mass servicing.
Its furniture, too, is standardized, so that it doesn't matter
in which cell a person lives, "for labor will shift about as
needed and must be ready to move, bag and baggage." The
standards are analyzed, however, not only for efficiency but
for beauty and amenity-though, in this gipsy economy,
domestic amenity is not the fundamental consideration. An
outside room or "hanging garden" is provided in the smallest
flat. It is a Cite Jar din: the ratio of empty space is large,
and there are fields for outdoor sports right at the doorstep,
if one had a doorstep.

"There must never come a time," says our author omi-
nously, "when people can be bored in our city ... In general
we feel free in our own cell, and reality teaches us that the
grouping of cells attacks our freedom, so we dream of a
detached house. But it is possible, by a logical ordering of
these cells, to attain freedom through order/'

Being standard, every part is capable of mass production.
In the English plans, even where the aim was urban uni-
formity, this was not thought of as mass produced. The
manner of construction, like the ideal of small cooperatives,
was proper to craft unions. But Le Corbusier, planning for

46 GOMMUNITAS

the captains of industry, has only contempt for the mason
who "bangs away with feet and hammer."

Esthetic interest is given by the variety of the grand
divisions, seen at large and in long views, the skyscrapers
towering on the horizon above the dwellings. "The de-
termining factor in our feelings is the silhouette against the
sky." And we can take advantage of the grand social divi-
sions of rich and poor to give the variety of the sumptuous
apartments with their set-back teeth ( ! the word is redents)
as against the rectangles of the workers' blocks.

The esthetic ideal is the geometric ordering of space, in
prisms, straight lines, circles. It is the Beaux Arts' ideal of
the symmetrical plan. The basis of beautiful order is the
modulus, whose combinations are countable, so that we
should have to simulate mass production even if technical
efficiency did not demand it. Space is treated as an undif-
ferentiated whole to be structured: we must avoid topologi-
cal particularity and build always on a level. (If the site is
not level, make a platform on pilotis.) The profile against
the sky is the chief ordering of space and the prime deter-
minant of feeling. Space flows inside and outside the build-
ings; we must use a lot of glass and lay the construction
bare. And to insure the clarity and salience of the construc-
tion it is best to emphasize a single material, reinforced
concrete, and it is even advisable to paint over the surfaces
in a single color.

What shall we make of this? In this International Style
of Le Corbusier, Gropius, Oud, Neutra, Mies van der
Rohe there are principles that are imperishable: the anal-
ysis of functions, clarity of construction, emphasis on the
plan, simplicity of surfaces, reliance on proportion, broad
social outlook (whatever the kind of social outlook). It is
the best of the Beaux Arts* tradition revivified and made
profound by the politics and sociology of all the years since
the fall of Louis XVI.

Yet in this version of Le Corbusier, the Ville Radieuse was
the perfecting of a status quo, 1925, that as an ideal has al-

School (Gwpius)

Home (Le Corlmsier]

Exhibition Building (Mies van der Robe)

48 COMMUNITAS

ready perished it died with the great Depression though
as a boring and cumbersome fact it is still coming into be-
ing: society as an Organization. Le Corbusier was a poor
social critic and a bad prophet. He gets an esthetic effect
from a distinction of classes and a spectacular expression of
this distinction just when the wealthy class was about to
assume a protective camouflage, and indeed just when it
was plunging into the same popular movie-culture as every-
body else and ceased to stand for anything at all. The brains
and eyes of society he calls "captains of industry/' but their
function was to study the market and exploit labor; they
were financiers. It was to these captains that he patheti-
cally turned for the realization of his plan; he proposed that
international capital invest in the rebuilding of Paris the
increase in land values would give them a quick profit
"and," he exclaimed, "this will stave off the war, because
who would bomb the property in which he has an invest-
ment?" As it turned out, the unreconstructed Paris was not
bombed.

His attitude toward technology is profoundly contradic-
tory. Superficially, the Ville Radieuse makes use of the most
advanced means; even the home is a machine. But he sug-
gests nothing but the rationalization of existing means for
greater profits in an arena of competition, saying, "The city
that can achieve speed will achieve success." His aim is
neither to increase productivity as an economist, nor, by
studying the machines and their processes as a technologist,
to improve them. Contrast his attitude with that of a
technological planner like Buckminster Fuller, who finds in
the machinery, for better or worse, a new code of values.
Fuller is looking ahead of the technology to new inventions
and new patterns of life; Le Corbusier is committed, by
perfecting a status quo, to a maximum of inflexibility.

Caught in this Organization, what is the plight of the
average man in the Ville Radieuse? The Garden Cities, we
saw, were based on the humane intuition that work in which
people have the satisfaction neither of direction nor crafts-

A Manual of Modern Plans 49

manship, but merely of wages, is essentially unbearable;
the worker is eager to be let loose and go far away, he must
be protected by a green belt. (There are surveys that show
that people do not want to live conveniently near their
jobs! ) Le Corbusier imagines, on the contrary, that by the
negative device of removing bad physical conditions, peo-
ple can be brought to a positive enthusiasm for their jobs.
He is haunted by the thought of the likelihood of boredom,
but he puts his faith in freedom through order. The order
is apparent; what is the content of the freedom? Apart
from a pecular emphasis on athletic sports and their superi-
ority to calisthenics ( ! ) , this planner has nothing, but noth-
ing, to say about education, sexuality, entertainment, festi-
vals, politics. Meantime, his citizens are to behold every-
where, in the hugest and clearest expression in reinforced
concrete and glass, the fact that their orderly freedom will
last forever. It has 500 foot prisms in profile against the sky.
Le Corbusier wages a furious polemic against Camillo
Sitte, author of Der Stadtebau, who is obviously his bad
conscience. He makes Sitte appear as the champion of pic-
turesque scenery and winding roads. But in fact the noble
little book of the scholarly Austrian is a theory of plazas, of
city-squares; it attempts to answer the question, What is an
urban esthetic? For in the end, the great machine of the
Ville Radieuse, with all its construct! vist beauty, is not a
city at all.

City Squares

A city is made by the social congregation of people, for
business and pleasure and ceremony, different from shop
or office or private affairs at home. A person is a citizen in
the street. A city street is not, as Le Corbusier thinks, a
machine for traffic to pass through but a square for people
to remain within. Without such squares markets, cathedral
places, political forums planned more or less as inclosures,
there is no city. This is what Sitte is saying. The city esthetic

50

POST OPFICE

Center of town,
Cuernavaca, Mexico

is the beauty proper to being in or entering such a square;
it consists in the right choice and disposition of structures
in and around the square, and in the relation of the squares
to one another. This was the Greek, medieval, or Renais-
sance fact of city lif e. A Greek, if free and male, was a city
man, not a family man or an Organization man; he spent
his time on the street, in the law court, at the market.

It is possible that this urban beauty is a thing of the past.
Perhaps there are no longer real occasions for social congre-
gation in the square. The larger transactions of business
occur at a distance by "communication," not face to face.
Politics is by press, radio, and ballot. Social pleasure is
housed in theaters and dance halls. If this is so, it is a
grievous and irreparable loss. There is no substitute for
the spontaneous social conflux whose atoms unite, precisely,
as citizens of the city. If it is so, our city crowds are doomed
to be lonely crowds, bored crowds, humanly uncultured
crowds.

Urban beauty does not require trees and parks. Classically,
as Christopher Tunnard has pointed out, if the cities were
small there were no trees. The urban use of trees is formal,
like the use of water in fountains; it is to line a street or

A Manual of Modern Plans

51

square, to make a cool spot, or a promenade like the mi-
raculous Stephen's Green in Dublin. The Bois in Paris is a
kind of picnic-ground for the Parisians, it is not a green
belt. But when we come to the park systems of London,
New York, or Chicago we already have proper green belts
whose aim is to prevent a conurbation that would be stifling.
(The effect in London and Chicago, of course, is that those
cities stretch on and on and it is hard to get from one district
to another.) And when finally, as in the Ville Radieuse,
the aim is to make a city in the park, a Garden City, one
has despaired of city life altogether.

Again, the urban beauty is a beauty of walking; and per-
haps it has no place in the age of automobiles and airplanes.
This raises the crucial question of standpoint, the point of
view, in modern architectural esthetics. Again and again
Le Corbusier proves that a place is ugly by showing us the
view of the worm-heap from an airplane. Yet then, even the
Piazza San Marco or the Piazza dei Signori, in Florence,
which he cannot help but admire, merge indistinguishably

The Piazzetta, Venice

52 COMMUNITAS

into the worm-heap. Indeed, from a moving airplane even
the Ville Radieuse or New York aflame in the night lasts
only a few minutes.

If the means of locomotion is walking, the devices de-
scribed by Sitte inclosure of streets, placing of a statue-
can have a powerful architectural effect. If the means is
the automobile, there is still place for architectural beauty,
but it will reside mainly in the banking of roads, the land-
scaping, and the profile on the horizon. When our point of
view -is the airplane, however, the resources of architecture
are helpless; nothing can impress us but the towering Alps,
the towering clouds, or the shoreline of the sea.

The problem, the choice of the means of locomotion, is
an important one. For not only Le Corbusier, who has a
penchant for the grandiose, but also his opposite number
in so many respects, Frank Lloyd Wright, who stays with
the human scale both plan fundamentally for the automo-
bile. Wright's Broadacres, we shall see, is no more a city
than the Ville Radieuse. On the other hand, there are those
who cannot forget the vision of Sitte and want to revive the
city. Their ideal for the vast metropolis is not a grand profile
against the sky but the reconstitution of neighborhoods, of
real cities in the metropolis where people go on their own
feet and meet face to face in a square.

Housing

With the city squares of Sitte and the conception of
neighborhoods as sub-cities, we return full circle from the
suburban flight. Seduced by the monumental capitals of
Europe, Sitte himself loses his vision and begins to talk
about ornamental plazas at the ends of driveways; but the
natural development of his thought would be community
centers of unified neighborhoods within the urban mass,
squares on which open industry, residence, politics, and
humanities. (We attempt such an idea in Scheme II below,
p. 162.)

Point of view: in the piazza, on the highway, from the air

An existing tendency in this direction is the community
block, planned first as a super-block protected from arterial
traffic, as in the Cite Jardin, but soon assuming also neigh-
borly and community functions, analogous to the neighborly
cooperation described by Unwin as the essence of the Gar-
den City. Sometimes this development has led in America
(as famously in Vienna) to a political banding together of
the block residents, making them a thorn in the side of the
authorities.

The community-block is now standard practice for all
modern urban planners in all countries; but unfortunately,
in this planning the emphasis is entirely on housing, and
there are experts in applied sociology called "housers."
"Housing" is the reductio ad absurdum of isolated planning.
There have been cases of "housing" for workers in new fac-
tories where no provision was made for stores in which to
buy food. There was a case where there was no road to the
industry they worked at. Stuyvesant Town, in New York
City, was built to house 8500 families without provision

54 COMMUNITAS

for a primary school. (This wretched plan, financed by a big
insurance company with handsome tax relief from the city,
was foisted on the city by the Commissioner against the
indignant protests of a crashing majority of the city's archi-
tects. There it stands. ) In better cases, the block is planned
with a school and shops but not in connection with the trade
or industry. The cooperative housing just now being con-
structed by the clothing workers* union in New York, how-
ever, is adjacent to the garment center.

The planning of housing in isolation from the total plan
has, of course, been caused by scarcity, slums, war-emer-
gency; and such reform housing has had the good side of
setting minimal standards of cubic footage, density of cover-
age, orientation, fireproofing, plumbing, privacy, controlled
rental. The bad side is that the standards are often petty
bourgeois. They pretend to be sociologically or even medi-
cally scientific, but they are drawn rather closely from the
American Standard of Living. The available money is al-
ways spent on central heating, elaborate plumbing, and
refrigerators rather than on more space or variety of plan
or balconies. And the standards are sociological abstractions
without any great imaginative sympathy as to what makes
a good place to live in for the people who actually live
there. They are hopelessly uniform. But where is the uni-
formity of social valuation that is expressed in the astonish-
ing uniformity of the plans of Housing Authorities? They
are not the values of the tenants who come from substandard
dwellings from which they resent being moved; they are
not the values of the housers, whose homes, e.g., in Green-
wich Village, are also usually technically substandard (save
when they live in Larchmont). Housers do not inhabit
"housing." Nor is it the case that these uniform projects are
cheaper to build. The explanation is simply laziness, dull-
ness of invention, timidity of doing something different.

To connect Housing and slum clearance is also a dubious
social policy. Cleared areas might be better zoned for non-
family housing or not for housing altogether; to decide,

A Manual of Modern Plans

55

it is necessary to have a Master Plan. More important, it
is disastrous to set up as a principle the concentration of
distinct income-groups in great community-blocks. Suppose,
for example, the entire emergency need of New York City
after World War II, 500,000 units, had been met in this
way; then every fifth block in the city would be marked as
a tight class ghetto. To be sure such concentration presently
exists, whether in slum areas or in fashionable neighbor-
hoods; but it is worse to fix it as an official policy.

Ideally, the community block is a powerful social force.
Starting from being neighbors, meeting on the street, and
sharing community domestic services (laundry, nursery
school), the residents become conscious of their common
interests. In Scandinavia they start further along, with
cooperative stores and cooperative management. Where
there is a sense of neighborhood, proposals are initiated for
the local good; and this can come to the immensely desirable
result of a political unit intermediary between the families

The "Project"

56 COMMUNITAS

and the faceless civic authority, a neighborhood perhaps the
size of an election district. (This is what the PTA should
be, and is not) Such face-to-face agencies, exerting their
influence for schools, zoning, play-streets, a sensible solution
for problems of transit and traffic, would soon make an end
of isolated plans for "housing."

But if the consciousness of a housing plan remains in
the civic authority alone, then the super-block may achieve
minimal standards and keep out through traffic, but more
importantly it will serve, as we saw in the Cite Jardin of Le
Corbusier, as a means of imposing even more strongly the
undesirable values of the megalopolis.

CHAPTER 3

Industrial Plans

These are plans for the efficiency of production, treating
domestic amenity and personal values as useful for that
end, either technically or socially. They are first proposed
for underdeveloped regions, whereas green belt planning
is aimed to remedy the conditions of overcapitalization.
Most simply we can think of a new industry in a virgin
territory Venezuela, Alaska where a community can be
laid out centering in a technical plant, an oilfield, a mine,
or a factory, with housing and civic services for those who
man the works.

Yet every use of men is also a moral plan; if it seems not
to" be, that itself is morally problematic. So we choose for
an example the early nineteenth century New England
mill town of Lowell, as a beautiful case of industrial com-
munity planning under ideal conditions in the first flush
of capitalism, self-conscious as a moral enterprise. And it
is the more interesting because it tries to avoid the very
abuses of English capitalism that led to Garden Cities.

Another kind of underdevopment that leads to emphasis
on production belongs to old but industrially backward
countries that want to overtake the advanced, either to vie
with them as world powers or to avoid colonial exploitation.
Such was Russia, such are India and China. In these cases
the emphasis is likely to be on heavy industry and the pro-
duction of machine-tools, rather than on manufacture of
goods for a market or the extraction of raw material for
export. The product is poured back into the industry and
the machinery, maintaining consumption goods and ameni-
ties near the lowest bearable point. Such a program can-
not help but produce grave political and moral problems,

57

58 GOMMUNITAS

especially among those (for instance the peasants with their
traditional ways) who do not immediately appreciate the
results for which they are obliged to make sacrifices. There-
fore, very striking features of the program will have political
rather than merely technical purposes. We have chosen to
discuss here three plans of the U.S.S.R. because of the dra-
matic and classical conflict of the technological and political
factors in Russia from 1925 to 1935. The recent spectacular
effort of China follows in logical order.

But the moral-technical motivation for a kind of industrial
planning springs up in a different context altogether, pre-
cisely in the most advanced and overdeveloped technologies
with a vast economic and technological surplus. This is
technocracy. It is the cultural emergence of engineers' val-
ues against traditional humanist or business values, as so
ably championed by Veblen. In contrast to the achieve-
ments of science and engineering, the ordinary standards,
expressed in the system of consumption and especially of
amenity, seem irrational, a mere cultural lag. Then it is felt
that by social devotion to efficiency we can liquidate the
cultural lag. But the only thing that can be efficiently
planned is production and the physical parts of life most
like machine products. This emphasis on efficiency is apart
from profit, which is seen to be systematically inefficient,
and also apart from reinvestment, for there is no need for
more capital; nor is it to increase the supply of goods and
raise the standard of living, but to change the standard of
living. The primary cultural satisfaction becomes invention;
and the social virtues are, even more than efficiency, in-
ventiveness and adaptability. Society is in process, it looks
ever to the future. Ideally, there is a permanent transition.

But most people would say that the final use of any in-
vention is consumption; to them the ideals of a technological
planner like Buckminster Fuller (Dymaxion) seem even
comically spiritual and austere. Yet this is a social, not
necessarily a moral, contradiction of Veblen's theory, when
once there is a surplus: efficient technology generates more

A Manual of Modern Plans

59

goods and leisure and, at the same time, discourages the
attitudes of consumption and waste. Some people then be-
gin to take satisfaction in the organization of production
itself; but others, we see, when they feel that nothing is
necessary to be done, begin to kill time and decline to do
anything.

A Capitalist Mill Town

The idea of a paternalistic company town, an industry
and its entrepreneur providing the housing and community
of its workers, goes back at least to Robert Owen's New
Lanark (c. 1800), and is as contemporary as Olivetti's
Ivrea in Italy. Owen's aim was to remedy a sick society and
restore morale, and he looked forward, as Olivetti also seems

Part of Lowell, Mass., circa 1852 (after J. Coolidge)

60 COMMUNITAS

to, to a kind of cooperative socialism. The expanding capi-
talism and individualism of the nineteenth century exploded
Owen's rectangles; the Owenite communist experiment at
New Harmony lasted only three years (1825-1828). But
it is against this background of idealism that we must under-
stand Francis Cabot Lowell's capitalist project for a textile
town that eventuated, after his death, in the town of Lowell,
Massachusetts (1823). Power-spinning had been intro-
duced in the previous decades, and in 1814 Lowell had
set up the first successful power-loom in Waltham. It was
the industry of these machines, protected by the first tariff in
1816, that supported the immensely profitable new com-
munity on the Merrimack River.

The story of the founding, the two successful decades,
and the decline of the ideal community at Lowell is told
in J. P. Coolidge's Mill and Mansion. This book is beyond
praise as a social study, a critique of achitecture, and anal-
ysis of community planning, so that it is here our grateful
task simply to summarize some of its contents.

Francis Lowell's plan was as follows: to find a river with
a rapids and dig a canal leading around it; on this island
to build the mills of the associated entrepreneurs, and
across the canal the housing for the several classes of opera-
tives and management; then a main road, with shops, public
buildings, and parks; and beyond the road, unplanned land
for the bourgeoisie investors, traders, non-industrial towns-
people. Lowell, Massachusetts, is in fact zoned in this way
(though the symmetry had to be sacrificed to the topog-
raphy).

The housing proved to require five classes, distinct in
location and style, and from these we can at once read off
the social plan:

1. Corporation executives: a tight little oligarchy in
their private mansions.

2. Skilled workers: junior executives, foremen, English
craftsmen to do the printing of the textiles. Housing
for families in row tenements.

A Manual of Modern Plans 61

3. Unskilled operatives of the mill: these are the heart
of the scheme; they are farm girls from the sur-
rounding regions, housed in small dormitories in
large boarding houses under strict moral and reli-
gious supervision. (As a French observer said, "Low-
ell resembles a Spanish town with its convents, but
in Lowell you meet no rags or Madonnas, and the
nuns of Lowell, instead of working sacred hearts,
spin and weave cotton.")

4. Day-laborers, mainly Irish, to dig the canals and lay
the bricks. Housed in makeshift huts.

5. Across the road, hotels and miscellaneous dwellings
for the watchful investors, commercial travelers,
lawyers, ministers, speculators, and shopkeepers.

This was in the heyday of expanding capitalism. The
paternalism resided in an impersonal corporation and the
laws of the market, not in a man like Owen; yet the investors
were not rentiers, for they were watchful and sometimes
intervened. Nor were the young women operatives merely a
proletariat, trapped from the cradle to the grave, for they
had independent purposes: they were saving for marriage,
supporting parents, keeping a brother or fiance in school;
savings accounts were considerable; most of the women
remained only three or four years, yet there were always
replacements, for the conditions were satisfactory. Work was
sunrise to sunset, but the food and social environment were
good. ( In his American Notes the astonished Dickens saw
that the girls had joint-stock pianos in their boarding houses,
and that they put out a literary magazine! They also wore
attractive clothes.) Also, this manufacture was in the total
framework of an expanding capitalist technology and econ-
omy: one of the first railroads in the county was run to
Lowell and the legislators in Washington, had laid a protec-
tive tariff against European cloth. Many new processes and
machines were first invented at these New England mills.
Some, e.g., Amoskeag, made their own bricks (and still in
New England those red or orange factories stand there,
severe but not unlovely).

62 COMMUNITAS

It was the theory of Adam Smith: many individual wills,
great and small, freely cooperating in a vast plan, because
it is the nature of economic man. (It is just such a situation
that Prince Kropotkin shrewdly points to as an argument
for anarchismthe example he uses is the railroad-network
of Europe laid down and run to perfection with no plan
imposed from above.)

In reading about Lowell, one is profoundly struck by the
importance of ideological pressure to keep people moving
in the plan, not otherwise than now in China. Strict morality
and religion kept things on schedule. The girls were scrupu-
lously honest, no need to check up on their accounts. Sexu-
ality was taboo, family life at a distance back on the farm
or in Ireland a goal to work for. The girls were literary,
were lectured by Ralph Waldo Emerson, and wrote inspira-
tional or romantic nature poetry; but theater was discour-
aged, architecture plain indeed, and we can be sure those
pianos played few dance tunes. Indeed, the ideology some-
times wins out over the economy, as when the Corporation
vetoed the expense for schools, but the church won out and
built them. The democratic and puritanic mass agitated for
Temperance, Anti-Slavery, and even, though the companies
forbid, the Ten-Hour Day. There was rudimentary organiza-
tion of labor and, in 1836, a strike. The architecture too
everywhere proved the integration of the ideological and
industrial plan: buildings were "functional" in the sense that
they were what people of the time considered "appropriate"
(we are reminded of Sullivan's "a church must look like a
church"); we must not then hope for new style or beauty,
but the excellence consists in the communal integrity.

So Lowell existed for twenty years as planned. (Dickens
visited in 1842.) But it is not necessary to ask critical ques-
tions about this Utopian capitalist plan, for history asked
and answered the questions. When steam power became
readily available because the railroads could haul coal, the
water-mills had to compete. They then cut wages and the
fringe benefits that made Lowell plausible as a community.

A Manual of Modern Plans 63

They could not compete, there was unemployment; and add
the business cycle endemic in the system. Boarding houses
ceased to get their subventions, the standard of living fell.
Corporation land was speculated away and the zoning was
broken. Meantime, as conditions deteriorated and the grow-
ing town offered other possibilities, the skilled workers,
restive at the restrictions, moved away on their own. The
huts of the Irish and the French-Canadians degenerated into
slums. New England farmers were going west; the girls be-
gan to be foreign-born, and the boarding house system, that
had been cheerful and harmonious when the girls came
from like background and culture, now became untenable.
Top management itself, which in the first generation con-
sisted of entrepreneurs, succumbed to nepotism and petty
tyranny. These causes exacerbated one another, and, in
brief, the New England capitalist idealism that had started
with the resolve not to repeat the conditions of the English
factory-system, succumbed to the chaos of mature nine-
teenth-century capitalism. Lowell became a third-rate com-
pany town.

Moscow, 1935

Let us leap forward a century, and to a country where the
old capitalism had never matured, but a kind of socialist
system was struggling to find its forms.

The debates prior to the Russian Second Five-Year Plan
brought forth four important community proposals, ac-
cepted or rejected:

1. The political-industrial concentration at Moscow;

2. The "left deviation" of the functionalists;

3. The plan of the Disurbanists;

4. The "elimination of the difference between city and
village."

Of these, the first three are essentially transitional indus-
trial plans aimed at increasing productivity, and belong in

Proposal for Red Square: proletarian "modern" (I930's)

this chapter. The fourth plan is more integral; it was a com-
munity idea proposed by Marx and Engels for advanced
countries, and we shall discuss it later (p. 96 ) .

The planning of Moscow became a problem of the Rus-
sian economic program after the first Five-Year Plan. By
this time a major change had occurred in the city. In 1914
it had been a place of predominantly light industry (75%);
by 1932 it had become a place of heavy industry (53%).
These industries, metallurgy and electricity, were increas-
ingly concentrated and vast. Population had increased by
73% and the total industry by 200%. Yet community serv-
ices had increased only 50%. (In America, too, of course,
"public services" have fallen far behind the expanding econ-
omy; but the increase of "services" in general has out-
stripped the increase in production and consumption
goods.)

This development naturally caused an outcry on the part
of consumers and residents. This was the so-called "right
deviation" and was soon stifled, for "otherwise," in the
words of Kaganovich, the commissar of transport, "it would
be useless to hope for the consolidation of the dictatorship
of the proletariat and the up-building of socialism." Equat-
ing, that is, the emphasis on heavy industry, the upbuilding
of socialism, and the First Five-Year Plan.

A Manual of Modern Plans 65

With the Second Plan, however, the country was "enter-
ing into socialism/* and this was the time to plan, on the
basis of heavy industry, for communities of work and resi-
dence. The "left deviation," we shall see, denied that the
first period had yet passed, and planned accordingly. In
general, the right held that socialism was established in
1917-22, the center in 1927-32, the left that it was not
yet begun. The factual political question, as to who is right
and what kind of socialism is implied, is, fortunately, beyond
the scope of this book.

We may compare the plan for Moscow with the New York
Regional Plan of nearly the same time. Both develop an
existing concentration of industry and residence, attempt
to relieve congestion, and to limit future expansion: Moscow
from 3% to 5 million, the New York metropolitan area from
12 to 21 million. But the differences are salient. One is
struck by the initial willingness of the Russians to debate
quite fundamental changes, and their decision to make a
city of a definite kind; whereas New York still does not
have a Master Plan, though it has a Planning Commission.
Moscow was to be a place of heavy industry and proletarian
politics and culture, a symbolic capital of the Union. This
political industrial amalgam is the key to understanding
the plan.

The following main proposals were rejected: To extend
the Moscow area enormously, to surround the center with
a green belt and construct residential satellites (plan de-
vised by May). This was called, in their rhetoric, a rightist
counter-revolutionary attempt to weaken the city by sep-
arating the proletariat from the technology both physically
and ideologically. Its affiliation with the rightism of light
industry and consumption goods is plain, for it is really a
* Garden City plan aimed at amenity.

On the other hand, they rejected the contention of dis-
urbanists and functionalists that all large cities were a
bourgeois hangover, not socialist but state-capitalist; that
the period of transition to socialism required, not improving

66 COMMUNITAS

old Moscow, but every sacrifice for industrial efficiency,
even ribbon-development and residential barracks; and that
the future socialist culture belonged ultimately to commun-
ity blocks and their communes, without metropolitan fea-
tures. (We shall consider these points on their merits in the
next section.) These arguments were branded as subtly
counter-revolutionary: either petty bourgeois or an attempt
to damage the morale of worker and peasant. Large cities
were, it was said, technologically necessary for the "con-
centration of capital," and, to quote a curious enthymeme
of Kaganovich, "Since Moscow and Leningrad played a
major part in the revolution and have won the adherence of
the peasant masses, any effort to reduce the large cities is
nonsense not worth serious attention."

This last argument is political, but the apparently eco-
nomic argument about the concentration of capital is also
really political, for the technological accumulation of capital
rarely requires concentration in one area. The meaning is
rather what Marx calls the "centralization of capital" in a
few hands for ownership and control (Capital, i, xxv) .

Still another rejected proposal was the Ville Radieuse of
Le Corbusier: to leave old Moscow as a museum city and
build on a new site. This was (mildly) called unhistorical;
it disrupted community feeling, and was anyway Utopian,
beyond their means. A more moderate proposal, to relocate
the existent scattered factories, was also called impossible,
though under stress of the war far greater changes were
soon made.

Instead of all these we have a plan for Moscow ( 1 ) As a
capital of the dictatorship of the proletariat as a regime of
heavy industry passing ideally, not yet actually, into social-
ism; and (2) To be a political and cultural symbol for the
nation, especially the peasants. Let us see what this means
in various aspects.

The subway. With the enormous expansion of population
and industry, there was a fabulous shortage of transporta-
tion and housing. The radical remedy proposed for transit

A Manual of Modern Plans 67

was the subway, though this was opposed by both leftists
and disurbanists as "an anti-social form of transportation."
But the government made of its construction a remarkable
labor of social devotion and solidarity; masses took part in
the unskilled labor; the stations were elaborately decorated
as a source of social pride; and the finished product became
a byword among the peasants who cherished the opinion
that it was the only subway in the world. To be sure it can-
not solve the transit problem; the population limit of 5 mil-
lion does not hold; there will be flight from the center and
perhaps blight, as everywhere else. The technically work-
able solution would be to break up the industrial concentra-
tion and to separate at least the political and industrial con-
centrations; but these were just what was to be avoided.

Palace and Housing. Instead of at once pouring all avail-
able nonindustrial energy into the relief of the housing
shortage (4^ sq. meters per person in 1935), the plan
marked immense sums for enlarging and ennobling the
government buildings, climaxing in the Palace of the Soviets,
the most ambitious political structure in the world. (Luckily
for the history of esthetics, this expression of the withering
away of the State has not eventuated. ) And even the future
housing envisaged for the end of the ten-year period was
below American minimum standards, but identical with
British standards. The kind of housing is urban-industrial,
large apartment houses. The country beyond the green belt
is for vacationists.

The method of building is neither the mass-production
proposed for the Ville Radieuse, nor yet the meticulous
trade-union building of the Garden City; but it is the ration-
alized labor of Stakhanovism, drawing on the social enthusi-
asm and personal concern of each worker competing, the
combination of transitional technology with symbolic so-
cialism.

Co-operatives and Democratic Centralism. In the residen-
tial districts, existent and proposed, it was decided to dis-
band the larger unities of 15 to 20 apartment houses, on the

68

Proposed Palace
of the Soviets (1930's)

grounds that they were inefficient and bureaucratic. Instead,
each house, managed by its tenants, is responsible to the city
administration, the Moscow Soviet, through a system of
sectional units, determined from above, with which to lodge
complaints and suggestions. This is the end of the relatively
autonomous community -block of which we spoke above.
Correspondingly, the important social services of restau-
rants and schools would be developed by Mossoviet, though
the nurseries remain, apparently, under the unit houses.
That is, in general responsible control comes from above,
but facility for discussion is provided below. This is the pol-
icy of the Democratic Centralism of the dictatorship of the
proletariat.

Consider a case. It is hardly likely that the free, organized
consumer, the autonomous community -block, would unani-
mously propose the construction of the Palace (or the sub-
way) in lieu of new housing; yet with the patriotism sprung
from the fact that it is his own socialism he is building, a
man might readily approve the plan handed down. This is
the neat and awkward adjustment on which the Moscow
plan is based.

"Capitalist" architecture:
N. y. (1925)

University of Moscow
(circa 19S9)

70 COMMUNITAS

Small industry and local control. On the other hand, a
valid distinction of wide applicability now first appeared in
the plan: heavy industry is controlled by the central com-
missariats; but small industries, especially of consumption
goods and local town services (except for Moscow) are bid-
den to operate on their own initiative through local Sovi-
ets. "The Supreme Council of National Economy cannot
occupy itself with door-catches."

Obviously, during the technical transition, the small in-
dustries would find it hard to get labor and material; by
1935 local industry accounted for only 10% of the total
production (J. Jewkes). But conceive this principle oper-
ating in an advanced surplus technology. Then, precisely
those goods and amenities which are most subject to per-
sonal choice would be freed from the vast economy of pro-
duction and distributionthey could be locally styled and
even hand-made; whereas the production goods, which are
more like means and less like ends, could be nationally
planned and machine-analyzed.

Esthetics, The analysis we have been advancing explains
the style of the Palace and the general cultural tone of the
second Five-Year Plan. It is a political rather than an inte-
grated social esthetics. The style is half baroque dreams
remembered from czarism and half imitations of American
capitalist cities. It is an attempt to evoke social solidarity
through pride and grandeur; while the fundamental indus-
trialization is expressed only by showing workers in over-
alls, it has no esthetic expression. Yet many of the designs
are as ugly as can be, and it is hard to believe that they
are the only possible popular appeal no taste is that vulgar-
ized. (To give a fair analogy: it is hard to believe that our
TV programs are the only possible popular ones for no-
body is that idiotic. )

During the Ws, the U.S.S.R. had welcomed the van-
guard of art, for instance the International Style in architec-
ture (imported often without a just analysis of different
technical resources, so that materials and construction were

A Manual of Modern Plans

71

specified which the Russians could not provide, and fine
plans made bad buildings) . In cinema, Russia led the world.
Then came a calamitous regression, in architecture, in
cinema, in literature, in music. And the same in every social
field. The sexual revolution came to an ignominous end.
Progressive education was dropped. There followed (cer-
tainly partly in anticipation of the war) a solidifying of
forces around national symbols, the reemergence of ancient
patriotic themes and reactionary sentiments.

Since the war, the Russian art that we have experienced
the musicians, the theater, the dancing, the paintinghas
been academic enough to chill your bones. It is puzzling
how so much skill can be so abused.

Disurbanists and Functionalists

The scheme of the disurbanists, rejected in the Moscow
debates, is an excellent adaptation of Garden City planning
to the situation of a technological transition for increased
productivity. "The urban concentration," they said, "is state-
capitalist," and they proposed instead a lineal city laid out

Diagram of Soviet lineal city: 5-6 km. long btj 2-3 km. wide;
50,000 inhabitants

RECREATION

. AOMfWSTRATJvfS SOCIAL 6L'(lDlwC5.
CLUft CONCERT &Uttt>JrtGS. LABOR fi SPORT &IULDJHCS

RESiOEnCE

PWEIUMGS. SCUOQLS. CRECMES

IHDUSTRY

FACTORIES. TECUHiCAL SCHOOLS

INDUSTRY
AGRICULTURE

RAILROAD

PARK

Stalingrad, 1940 a. Wood industry;
b. Metallurgy- c. Machine building;

d. Airfield 6- park of culture and rest;

e. Rest homes; f. Lumber mills;

g. Lumber mills; h. Chemical plant,
power station; i. Ship building

along the routes of transportation of heavy industry. Indus-
try and residence spread in strips along highways, railroads,
and rivers, in immediate contact with the countryside, A
green belt separates industry and residence. There is then
an enormous economy in services, such as roads or local
transit; and also an interpenetration of the rural and indus-
trial. What is sacrificed of the classical Garden City, of
course, is the attempt to make a unified center of culture
and residence.

This plan was rejected as petty bourgeois: that is, it was
taken as an offshoot of the separatist suburban tendency. In
some ways, however, it seems to be the plan of Stalingrad
(1940).

The "leftist" functionalists, on the other hand, empha-
sized the emergency of the transition period, claiming as
was indeed generally admitted and proved to be the case-
that the technical emergency was the prelude to a military
emergency. They accordingly planned for a military com-
munity, camp and barracks. This took the form (as devised

A Manual of Modern Plans

73

by Sabsovich) of huge barracks for residence, each house ac-
commodating two to three thousand, without private kitch-
ens, laundries, or apartments. There were no family rooms
and no general rooms, but every worker had a small separate
room, as at a Y.M.C.A. Likewise, the public appearance
of the community was strictly functional; the streets were
machines for traffic; the houses turned inward away from
them. (Notice that under other circumstances, these same
devices would be considered amenities.) Obviously this pro-
posal was exactly contrary to the sentimental strengthening
of morale that was essential in the plan for Moscow.

Both disurbanists and functionalists advanced ideas also
looking toward the socialist society, after the transition. The
disurbanists argued that in socialism there would be an even
spread of population throughout the country, bringing the
city to the peasants. The leftists argued that in socialism
the manner of residence would be in democratic centers not
subordinate to the city gridiron, that is, in community-
blocks.

China

Twenty years later, in the effort to industrialize China,
we find that it is precisely the two rejected plans of disurban-
ists and functionalists that have become the guiding prin-

Calligraphs (reading from left):
Small tackle only things
within your ability.
Earthnative land, use native
ingenuity. Group community
action as opposed to individual

74 COMMUNITAS

ciples. As happened in Moscow, the Chinese Communists
first built up several vast urban concentrations of heavy
industry; but now it is held that the right method is (1)
To industrialize without urbanizing: that is, to decentralize
as much as possible, spreading small-scale modern technol-
ogy among the peasants; and (2) To organize all the mil-
lions of China along military lines, with barracks-life and
canteen meals, to "work as if fighting a battle, live the col-
lective way."

The official analysis of the situation is somewhat as fol-
lows: China, unlike Russia, was hardly industrialized to be-
gin with. She must start from scratch but therefore, also,
need not repeat the urban forms that are outmoded. What
China does have, however, is man power, and this, used in
socially cooperative units, can transform the country in
short order. (The optimum size of a commune is considered
to be 5000, which happens to be also a common American
optimum figure for a neighborhood.) Great reliance is
placed on social enthusiasm the Chinese, it is said, are
governed not by men and not by laws, but by movements.
They hope to wipe out illiteracy in a year and change to
the commune system in five days! But even if this program
were not inherently desirable, it would be necessary, be-
cause there is a war-emergency, the threat of returning
colonialism. The general slogan is, "A few years of hard life,
a thousand years of happiness."

The scheme proposes a maximum of regimentation and
absorption into the social effort, destroying family and indi-
viduality. In Shanghai, we are told, no one may have a
private teakettle, he must take his tea with the others. And
the odd insistence on twice-daily public calisthenics for
everybody certainly sounds like the morale-building (or
morale-breaking) techniques of the American armed forces.
We must remember, though, that Chinese farmers, in their
old "extended families" of 50 to 100, were not individual-
istic to start with. And it is salutary for us to think of the
startling comparison between the puritanical total regula-

A Manual of Modern Plans 75

tion of these communes and Lowell, Massachusetts, 1823.
(The difference, of course, is that, blackballed at Lowell,
one could go elsewhere; whereas ostracized from a com-
mune one might as well commit suicide. )

Positively valuable is the store set on small enterprise in
'advanced technology, making do with local resources, na-
tive ingenuity. For whether or not such effort is more effi-
cient in the long run (and that is by no means decided),
there is no doubt that it is more humanly satisfactory. The
pathos is that the "advanced technology" is probably al-
ready pretty outmoded.

Here again, as in the previous industrial plans of this
chapter, there is an astonishing emphasis on ideology
through slogans, symbolic pictures, and street parades with
drum and cymbals to announce a new high in production.
"We must conquer the Gobi desert, and be first of the oil
wells in China." "We hope that as pen-pushers we will be as
effective as you with your shovels/* People pledge to take
no vacation till the quota is attained. They are intensely
ashamed to be photographed by a Westerner in their age-
old poverty, which they are sure he is doing as counter-
propaganda (Cartier-Bresson). The motto of 1958, "Still
bigger, still better, more quickly, more frugally,** does not
quite square with the ideal of small local enterprises the
social optimum of 5000 is soon abandoned for reasons of
production; but consistency is not a necessary virtue of
rhetoric.

Yet even apart from rhetoric, they seem to have a religious
faith in education and science. Each commune must main-
tain a "university" (technology and Marxist classics are the
subjects) the money reserved for it may not be used to buy
a needed tractor. Continuing the movement of 1919, the
ancient writing, from right to left, up and down, is reformed
to the Western way in order to admit chemical and mathe-
matical formulae and the Arabic numerals. A farm coopera-
tive will have, as well as a happy home for the aged and
centers for agricultural machinery and transport, a "science

76

COMMUNITAS

research laboratory" and a laboratory for researching "the
transformation of body wastes into electrical power." "The
baptism of work and study will make a transformation of
the country culturally, and the individual's transformation
through work." The perfect great pilot commune is named
Sputnik after the man-made moon.

Dymaxions and Geodesies, 1929-1959

If we now turn to technological planning in an advanced
countiy, like the United States, we find that it implies a
radically new analysis of living standards and values. "The
designer," says Buckminster Fuller, "must provide new and
advanced standards of living for all people of the world . . .
Implicit is man's emancipation from indebtedness to all else
but intellect." It is noteworthy that for Fuller, unlike many

Marine Corps transports Geodesic dome (1950)

ll

A Manual of Modern Plans 77

so-called "technocrats" and of course unlike the planners
of backward countries we have been discussingthe prob-
lem transcends national boundaries and is worldwide. Ful-
ler also is the modern planner who lays most stress on air
travel, and modern man's extraordinary mobility. The key-
concept of planning turns out to be logistics, how to move
masses from place to place, and how to lighten the masses
to be moved.

In 1929 Fuller believed his Structural Study Associates
to be the appropriate organ for the new architecture.
Twenty years later, with increasing public success and ( one
presumes) increasing loneliness, he speaks of the Compre-
hensive Designer, a term, like Wright's Universal Architect,
that used to be attributed to the deity. "The Comprehensive
Designer is preoccupied with anticipation of all men's needs
by translation of the ever-latest inventory of their poten-
tials." The designer is the "integral of the sum of the product
of all specializations."

In general, Fuller's plans amalgamate technical, ethical,
and metaphysical principles. Thus, mass production is the
new phase of Christianity where all men are again brothers.
The obstacle to happiness is the clinging to material, espe-
cially landed, property; progress consists in "ephemeraliza-
tion," dematerializing, and impermanence or process of
experience and control. The handling of steel in tension, or
of geodesic struts, is our progress from the "darkness of
complete and awful weight to eternal light which has no
weight." Architectural service is a corporate and anonymous
devotion to scientific analysis "after the manner of the Ford
planning department"; or it is logistical analysis that could
be run on a computer, presumably like the Rand Corpora-
tion.

But the fundamental element of the plan, the invention on
which Fuller rests, is the individual isolated shelter, the
Dymaxion house. Fuller believes that it was only to diminish
drudgery by mass services that men congested in cities, but
such conveniences can be better built into a mass-produced

78

COMMUNITAS

house as into an automobile. Mankind will then disperse.
The house must be lightweight and without foundations, to
be picked up (in 1930 by dirigibles) and dropped any-
where. Or, in the style of Le Corbusier's thinking, it makes
no difference where the man moves, since the dwellings are
machines indifferently the same everywhere. The Dymaxion
house is "free as a ship of public utilities, sewerage, water,
and other systems of the political hangnail variety." It
achieves its independence, for instance from electric power,
partly by means of machines that have not yet been in-
vented.

The house is suspended from a central mast, using the
superior tensile strength of steel; it is hexagonal, so its mem-
bers can be triangulated. Its weight per cubic foot is one-
fifth that of the ordinary dwelling. It can be assembled from
its parts in 24 hours, as well as carried through the air en
bloc. It is designed for a specific longevity and is then to be
turned in for an improved model. It thus involves the mini-
mum of commitment to site and tradition. It is a machine
for realizing what Fuller calls the "Eternal Now." But al-
though it is a machine, it seems to be conceived on the model

First Dymaxion house (1929), proposed as a "minimum"

Geodesic dome at Trade Fair, Afghanistan (1956)

of a man, for its organic machinery sim-machine, Diesel
engine, septic tank, etc. is contained in the central mast,
since happy life is planned from inside out. (The "geodesic
dome" a shelter based on a system of tetrahedrons can
be used for "a theater, civic center, bank, tank-car repair
area.")

Conversely, the mechanics of the human body are
analyzed into automotive functions, "nerve shock-proofing,"
"fueling," "muscular nerve and cellular realignment"
(equals sleeping), "refusing" (equals elimination) . With
this analysis Fuller persistently attacks the kind of psycho-
analysis that gives to the organic functions a rather different
importance.

A "town plan"-e.g., for Grand Rapids, Mich. (1956)-
is a "geodesic environment control," and is grounded in the
proposition that "man's minor ecological pattern" (meaning
the immediate space he lives and moves in, as a tree in the
ground) "must now be made to serve his major ecological
patterning" (in an air-borne worldwide technology). "This
ecological concept abandons customary classification of
man's housing functions as 'urban/ 'suburban,* 'farm,* Vaca-
tion resort/ or 'camp/" So a typical town plan of Fuller
shows the land mass of the earth distributed around the
North Pole. Location is determined by the great circles, the
prevalent winds for transport and the isotherms of the tem-
perate zone for residence. Only the temperate zone, believes
Fuller, produces free civilization; subtropical peoples are
doomed to "semi-fascism." (It is remarkable how techno-
crats, unlearned in the humanities, gravitate to thinking of

80 COMMUNITAS

either this kind or of somatic morphology.) Topographical
features, like other landed property, are of little account. In
general, there is "centralization of mental activity, decen-
tralization of physical activity (personal, communal, indus-
trial)." A kind of industrial center exists at the cross of the
figure-eight of the world winds, at Chicago. The "tactical
center" is on the Spanish Riviera a lovely climate, but isn't
it a little lazy?

All this was to be financed, in the thirties which had a
good deal of talk of monetary reform, by "time-energy in-
dustrial credits. With automatic minimum existence credits
selectively contractable . . . based on foot-pounds per hour
of physical effort, with time-study credits for labor-saving
contributions of individual activity . . . plus sex-segregated
maintenance of antisocial laggards." This economy is "in-
tegrally germane to the successful establishment of the
Shelter Reproduction Industry: 7 * that is, a combination of
the specie of the technocrats (1932) with the credit system
of Social Credit Later, Fuller adds to these a system of
mass speculation in industrial securities, betting on ten-cent
shares in machines at the corner drug store, if there were
a comer.

Politics Fuller liquidates as a system of bullying in which
by monopoly control of city services and patents, a small
group has the whip hand over the rest. "Universal Archi-
tecture is the scientific antidote for war/*

There is also a Dymaxion esthetics and psychology. The
psychology is behaviorism, grounded in the primary aver-
sions to noise and falling. Values are analyzed as follows:
previous plastic art was bound to space and the past time of
tradition; the new essence of design is time-control. The
esthetic standard, mass-producible, is the group ideal, and
this ideal is the progression toward "material unselfcon-
sciousness/' The aim of life is to release the "residuary
mental or time-consciousness, eliminating the fallacial auto-
suggestive phenomena of past and future, to the infinity of
delight of the Eternal Now/' But isn't it pathetic how this

A Manual of Modern Plans 81

philosopher has to do such a song and dance to reach the
ideal that a Taoist or Zen Buddhist aims at by just the oppo-
site means, of sitting in your skin and breathing softly. Think
Western! there must be a harder way to do it.

The Christianity envisaged here is close to what Benjamin
Nelson has called the "Universal Otherhood," the brothers
are all equal by being equally isolated from one another
and from God. There is nothing said about the ordinary
communal activities of political initiative or non-scientific
communication; even sex seems to have no social side. (And
Fuller seems strangely unfamiliar with the actual psychol-
ogy of the great innovators in science and art.) But how
much of this is the climax of the solitude of commercial and
industrial captains and how much is the final cowering of
the little man from bullies who have disrupted his little
peace, it is not necessary to inquire.

What standards of personal and social satisfaction do in
fact spring from an advanced technical attitude?

The classical answer is Veblen's: a moral attitude com-
posed of craftsmanship and the knowledge of the causes of
things, without a taste for luxury consumption and gam-
bling. Neither Fuller nor any other major planner gives this
answer, which we therefore try to develop independently
below (Chapter 6).

Instead, Fuller makes a sharp distinction between three
groups: universal architects, common laborers, and con-
sumers. To the first group he assigns the Veblenesque vir-
tues: self-effacement, service, efficiency, openness to change.
The mass labor of industry does not have this unifying
spirit, its worth is measured in foot-pounds of effort, a
curious standard in modern technology where the energy
of human beings ranks far below coal, oil, waterfalls, and
beasts of burden we are suddenly back to China. The
exercise of labor is rationalized by experts into "therblig"
units of elementary muscular contractions.

Fuller's theory of consumption is introduced by the
following telling analysis: "In the early days of the motor

82 COMMUNITAS

car it was not only a common affair but a necessary one
that the owner be as familiar with the lingo of the carbu-
retor as the manufacturer . . . Since these days, industrial
progress has developed what may be termed 'consumer's
delight/ progressively less technical, and less self-conscious,
control of the mechanical composition produced by indus-
try ... There has developed an extraordinary multiplicity,
of selecting and refining details, behind the scenes." This
is a remarkable expression of the Hollywood paradise of
ease, all doors opening by photoelectricity. This is the "in-
finity of delight of the Eternal Now," the satisfaction of
life apart from work of the hands, nature of the place,
clash of opinion, continuity of the self with its past or the
ego with the id. Meantime, however, the "unselfconscious"
(equals progressively ignorant) consumer is in fact more
and more controlled by his environment. Its reason and di-
rection is no business of his. Yet Fuller protests that the
monopoly of the city \vater supply is a bond of slavery! It is
to be feared that the politics of this unpolitical scheme is
simply a wishful control of everybody else by the self-effac-
ing Universal Architects or Comprehensive Designers. To
the masses, however, is given the precisely Unveblenesque
mania of gambling on the financial future of one or another
set of Structural Study Associates.

The Size of Factories

We concluded the previous chapter with a critique of
housing planned in isolation from the total community. Let
us here say something about the other side of the medal,
the isolated planning of factories by industrial engineers
rather than community architects. Such planning is an out-
standing example of the social waste in neglecting the prin-
ciple of minimizing whatever is neither production nor
consumption.

Especially during the last war, the size of plants, sheds,
factory areas, and the number of workers at the plants grew
steadily. With the concentration of capital uniting under

A Manual of Modern Plans 83

one control not only the different producers of a com-
modity but also the production of allied parts, appliances,
and by-products there went on also the physical concentra-
tion of production in vast centers. At Willow Run a single
shed covered a span of two-thirds by one-fourth of a mile.
Glenn Martin Middle River had 3 million square feet of
floor space. A layout at Simonds Saw and Steel had eight
parallel assembly lines. Often, 50,000 workers were em-
ployed.

Now, apart from land costs, it is generally assumed that
such concentration is technically efficient. It unifies the
source of power, it brings together raw materials, parts, and
assembly, it saves on servicing the buildings. But this uni-
versal and obvious assumption is probably false; it fails to
consider the chief social expense in all large-scale produc-
tion, labor time.

It is almost always cheaper to transport material than
men.

If the plant is concentrated, the bulk of workers must live
away and commute. If the plant were scattered, the work-
ers could live near their jobs, and it is the processed ma-
terials that would have to be collected for assembly from
their several places of manufacture. (We are not here
speaking of primary metallurgy and refining.) The living
men must be transported twice daily; the material and
mechanical parts at much longer intervals.

Which transport is easier to schedule? The time of Me of
a piece of steel is not consumed while it waits for its truck:
a piece of steel has no feelings. Supply trucks move at a
convenient hour, but the fleet of trains and busses congest
traffic at 89 a.m. and at 45 p.m. If the men travel by auto,
there is mass parking, with one shift leaving while another
is arriving, and the factory area must be still larger to allow
for the parking space. After one gets to this area, he must
walk to the work station: it is not unusual for this round
trip to take three-quarters of an hour. During part of this
shirting, the machinery stands still.

To be sure, most of this consumption of time and nervous

84 COMMUNITAS

energy is not paid for, and the roads and franchises that
make commutation possible are part of the social inheri-
tance. But from the point of view of social wealth, the
expense must be counted in, even though it does not tech-
nically appear in the price. The worker's time is bound and
useless, even though unpaid. If parts of this expense, of time
and effort, were made to appear as an item on the payroll,
as in the portal-to-portal demands of the mine workers,
there would soon be better planning.

What is the alleged technical economy of concentration?
The first great reason for large factories was steam power-
to a lesser extent, water power the need to keep the fur-
naces going and to use the power to its fullest extent. When
manufacturing is increasingly powered by electricity, this
cause no longer exists. Second, belt-line assembly is a cause
of a certain amount of concentration; but this requires a
large area, not a huge area. On the contrary, the overall
effect of belt-line analysis should be to decrease rather than
increase the average total area, for the parts are not tailored
to the product as it takes shape, but are prefabricated and
therefore could be made elsewhere. What is the great ad-
vantage in parallel assembly lines? Except in the unusual
case of maximum production on three shifts a day, the heat-
ing and servicing of a huge single shed is less economical
than an arrangement of smaller sheds.

The fact is, of course, thatespecially during emergen-
ciesthe planning is far worse than anything so far indi-
cated. Not only is the large area planned without thought
of the domestic community, but the plan is regarded solely
as a problem in engineering, without thought of a labor
supply. The integration of the factory with society consists
in locating the area on a highway (built by town funds),
whether or not there are housing, schools, etc. at the other
end of the highway.

Such is the situation as of this writing, wherever labor
time is the chief factor in production: to plan the separation

A Manual of Modern flans 85

of the factory area and the domestic community is techni-
cally inefficient, and the huge factor) 7 area is socially un-
economical. (To the extent, and wherever, factories become
automatic, the conclusion does not follow, for the chief
expense is then in the automatic machines, which do not
commute. Nor does it follow in the extractive and metallur-
gical industries, where the raw materials and the parts are
very bulky, or the site is determined by nature.)

Regional plan
of human body

poor

CHAPTER 4

Integrated Plans

But let us now turn to some noble schemes that try to avoid
Isolated planning; they are plans for the "whole man". We
saw that green belt plans were a reaction to an ugly tech-
nology and industrial plans were a reaction to poverty and
colonialism; but integrated plans also are a reaction to the
loss of well-rounded humanity in modern civilized life, not
otherwise than Stoics and Epicureans reacted against the
follies of the city and Rousseau rebelled against the vices of
the court. By and large, in the last hundred years, it is the
loss of country life that bothers the planners. People begin
to speak of "farming as a way of life." In Sweden, it has long
been a social policy to preserve the urban-rural ratio as it
was in 1800, for social stability and many-sided human

86

A Manual of Modern Plans 7

development. Marx and Engels looked forward to a future,
after the maximum of concentration of capital, when there
would be an elimination of the difference between city and
village, liquidating both "rural idiocy" and the "craft idiocy"
of technicians. American regionalists often hark back to
ante-bellum conditions that allowed for manners and liter-
ature.

The integration of farm and industry is also an answer to
immediate scarcity and emergency. A simple example is the
spinning campaign of the Indian National Congress: to
ease the poverty of the peasants by the income of spinning-
wheels (incidentally getting rid of the British) . The Chinese,
we saw, aim at heavy industrialization without urbaniza-
tion. But let us quote also the following recommendations
of our National Resources Planning Board, published in
the depths of the depression (1934): "The integration of
agricultural and industrial employment by the establish-
ment of homes for workers employed in non-agricultural
occupations, where they may produce part of their living,
to become a permanent national policy; and that this policy
be broadened to include: Encouraging the location of in-
dustries in rural areas now seriously deficient in sources of
income . . . Encouraging the location of industries on the
peripheries of large cities in definite relation to rapid transit
facilities to the countryside."

In advanced technologies, one direction of integration-
bringing industry to the farm is now commonplace as co-
operative or collective farming and the application of ma-
chines to diversified farming (which can indeed go to the
extreme of assembly-line farming, hydroponics, incubations,
etc., that could just as well be carried on in the city). The
excess of this tendency, however, simply turns agriculture
into another industry without the cultural values of the city,
as in the vast Russian or Chinese state-farms, or in our own
one-crop agriculture, whether in the great fruit plantations
or in making plastics from soybeans.

The opposite direction of integration, bringing the farrn

88 COMMUNITAS

values to the city, is in advanced countries a profoundly
radical proposition. The values attached to "farming as a
way of life" are relative self-sufficiency, escape from the
cash nexus, direct control of necessities, practical attach-
ment to family, home, site, and natural conditions, as cele-
brated by Borsodi and others. Sentimentally, this tendency
leads to "exurbanism/* which we have discussed above as
a kind of social schizophrenia. But taken seriously, it leads
at once to the thorny path of founding Utopian communities.
Finally, with the bringing together of the country and
city we enter on regional planning, a complex in which
the layout of towns, or even their existence or non-existence,
is only one factor among many. It is usually agreed that
every integrated plan is a regional plan. The unity of a
region for integrated planning is found either in resources
of land and climate and raw materials and power apt for
technical development, or in concentrations of population
and skills, as in the "Greater New York Regional Plan/' The
combination of industrial satellites and collective farms ad-
vocated by the Russians makes up a typical regional plan.
And the remarkably many-sided plan of the TVA can
serve us as an example of integrated primary planning
unique in the United States.

Broadacres and the Homestead

The Broadacres plan of Frank Lloyd Wright could be
considered as an attempt to bring farm values to an indus-
trial town. "A human being from the time he is born," says
Wright, "is entitled to a piece of ground with which he can
identify himself by the use of it. If he can work on his
ground, he should do it. But, barring physical disability,
he should not eat if he does not work except when he can
fairly trade his right to work for some other actual contri-
bution to the welfare and happiness of those who do work.
Money is today [1937] his immunity from work, a false
privilege, and because of it there is insecurity, confusion,

Broadacres: pattern extending over the entire countryside (after
Wright)

and loss of quality in all life-values. The philosophy of every
form in Broadacres is just this 'out of die ground into the
light/ in circumstances that make a happy thing of man's
use and improvement of his own ground."

This sturdy individualism is admirable; it is the arche-
typal attitude of the American architect, a socially respected
artist who has a "profession." It does not promise much
excitement, much existential novelty, nor does it do much
for high culture. It sounds Jeffersonian; but Jefferson is
great because of his polarity with Paris, London, New York.

90 COMMUNITAS

The economic conception is partly from Henry George,
partly from (or agreeing with) Ralph Borsodi. The value
of land is given by its use; agricultural self-support is pri-
mary and the chief part of industrial culture; industrial and
professional division of labor and exchange is valid but
secondary-; finance and most of the political superstructure
are invalid and predatory. But Borsodi, planning a rural
life, drives these ideas to their logical conclusion and there-
fore is culturally radical, whereas Wright feels that his own
work is "transitional" and he is culturally tame. "We cannot
yet expect everyone to become a bona-fide tiller of the
soil, particularly not the citizens of such urbanized popula-
tion as we have at present. We must provide for people
whose education and way of life has unfitted them for the
more rounded life planned here."

It is sad that, as he got older, Wright quite lost the wild
vision of his youth, of flaming Chicago, its machines and
blast furnaces, that he shared with Dreiser, Sandburg,
Poetry magazine, all tending to age in the same way.

Broadacres is conceived as a kind of county seat, a rela-
tive concentration occurring occasionally in a less dense
population stretching indefinitely. Even so, it provides four
square miles for 1400 families, almost up to the formula
"An acre per person a maximum of, say, ten acres for a
farmer/' (The Garden City, we remember, has 12 families
to the acre.) It is not a city plan but a continuing region,
varying according to the topography. Broadacre City is
"everywhere and nowhere." It stretches in all directions. For
Wright the salient features of neo-technology are "automo-
bility" and electric communication. (Does he mean TV?)
Industry is decentralized to one or two moderately-sized
industries in each concentration he gives no plan of the
decentralization. In general, the industrial plants are scat-
tered among the farms. "Automobility" (car and helicopter)
is the means of combining the large areas of agricultural
residence with industrial work, for apparently most of the
farms are maintenance gardens. That is, the formula of inte-

A Manual of Modem Plans 91

gration is nearer to the National Resources Planning Board's
"industrial occupation plus subsistence farming" than to
Borsodi's "independence farming plus cash-crops or domes-
tic industry for the purchase of labor-saving machinery."
But Broadacres is conceived not as a subsistence but as a
surplus plan, it consciously selects rural values over urban
values.

The politics is very confused. What belongs to the individ-
ual acre and its improvement is private; what belongs to the
big machinery e.g., roads, gasoline, poweris controlled
by the democratic central government, this being the prin-
cipal justification of government altogether. But "industry"
as such does he distinguish manufacture from other indus-
try? is under corporate capitalism, which apparently will
relinquish its specific ownership of oil and power "without
revolution." There are, then, one-car houses and five-car
houses. Yet to avoid the dilemmas of capitalist finance, the
society has Social Credit but this, of course, would be
meaningful only in an expanding profit technology, the
very opposite of the Borsodian restricted non-cash economy
which also seems essential to Broadacres. (What Wright
could mean, and might have said if he ever thought it
through, is the strictly divided economy of maintenance and
surplus that we propose in Scheme III below, Chapter 7.)

"It follows from all this genuinely constructive way of
life that in the administration the county architect is im-
portant. He has a certain disciplinary as well as cultural
relationship to the whole, and since he maintains the har-
mony of the whole his must be one of the best minds the
city has, and it will inevitably become the best trained."
This speaks for itself.

The education of the young is agricultural "Each boy and
girl has to begin with a hoe in his hand. We begin at the
root of society with the culture of the children ... A *classi-
caF education would be worse than useless. Instead, man
studies man in relation to his birthright, the ground. He
starts his earthly career with his feet on the ground, but

92 COMMUNITAS

his head may be in the clouds at times." Lastly (1945):
"Conscription is the ultimate form of rent."

With this architect, of course, the chief value of Broad-
acres would not be in its model plan, but in the concrete
buildings, in the adaptations that he would make to the
varieties of sites and local materials, and the analysis of
actual living arrangements. This is where the live culture
would appear. The beauty of Wright's architecture begins
in the expression of the site, especially a peculiar site, and
in finding the form in natural materials, especially local
materials. It is a domestic architecture, for he sees the prob-
lem of architecture as enclosure of space to make a unique
place, a shelter. The uniqueness of the place is given by
the plan, which is made for an individual family. The
machined materials are plainly machined and handled as
if tailor-made, no two houses alike. There is as much design
in a single Wright unit as in the thousand units of a housing
project, and it is more relevant design.

The importance of Broadacres as a community plan lies
in Wright's willingness to select values, going with or against
current trends as suits his free intuition. But his intuition is
limited. He aims at the integration of urban and rural hfe,
but he seems, by the time of Broadacres, to have lost what
feeling he had for the city and the factory. He does not
tell us how to make industrial life humane and worthwhile;

A -flower plot,
Imperial Hotel, Tokyo

A Manual of Modern Plans 93

his presentation of industries, factories, industrial location,
transport, the division of labor, is extremely sketchy, often
inferior to existent facts. Yet, embarrassed to make a clean
break with the city, he missed the opportunity to plan a
genuinely Borsodian community 5 an enterprise for which
he was more fitted than any other man.

The Homestead

Borsodi himself plans for only rural America: his is a
plan for relative agricultural self-sufficiency and machine
domestic production. He says little about cities and big
industry except to advocate an even distribution of the
population-50%-50% instead of 80%~20%. The reduc-
tion in industrial crops would itself have this effect. Yet
much of what he says about domestic production with small
electrical machines is applicable to urban life.

He has two main theses. First, as the cost of production
falls, the cost of distribution rises. This is clearly true of
crop production, whose industrialization involves immense
areas with increasing bulk transportation, marketing, spoil-
ing, as well as the need for cash purchases at prices which,
unlike home transactions, include the wages of a host of
middlemen and functionaries. (In industrial farming the
land is also abused, as Kropotkin showed sixty years ago
in Fields, Factories, Workshops.) Borsodi concluded that
at least "two-thirds of the goods and services" required in
a home are more efficiently produced domestically with
the aid of electricity. That is, in a farm home where there
is raw material.

His second thesis is that social security and stability re-
quire a larger number of self-sufficient fanners, whereas
industrial cash farming has made the farmer even more in-
secure than his urban brother. There is an irreducible differ-
ence between diversified farming and all other work: the
farmer can ultimately subsist, even in some comfort, without
the industrial division of labor, but without the farmer the

94

COMMUNITAS

Broadacres: one-car house

Broadacres: five-car house

non-farmer cannot subsist at all. In principle this imrecip-
roeal relation should involve a different overall social plan
from that in which farming, regarded practically as an
extractive industry, is like other businesses, only more
risky. (In philosophical economic terms the unreciprocity
could be stated by saying that the capital of a diversified
symbiotic farm is largely naturalit was not social labor

A Manual of Modern Plans 95

that produced the physiology, the reproductive system, and
the balance of nature of plant, animal, and man. Therefore
one must not look to the same extent for the relations of
contract, wages, and prices.)

The farm has often provided an excellent all-around In-
tegration of work and culture. (Marx somewhere speaks of
the Elizabethan yeomanry as having had the highest hu-
manity yet reached! ) Yet it is equally true that, historically,
farm life and domestic life have never provided the grand
breadth of political and social culture that pertains to cities.
It is not only by external pressure that people have emi-
grated from the land when they could. The planner of
integration must take the city into account and find the
human scale there.

Perhaps this is a good place to mention, finally, the fact
that used to haunt every discussion of country-city relations;
"the primary consideration," says Lewis Mumford, "domi-
nating every other in city-planning." Namely, that the birth
rate in the country more than reproduces the population,
whereas the cities must be replenished by mass migration of
youth from the farm. And since taxes and so forth are de-
termined by city politicians, the farmers get the dirty end
of the stick.

In the last t\vo war decades, however, marriage and
family life have so increased in general and the farm popu-
lation has so decreased, that the relationship is less clear;
the suburbs seem to be the favored breeding grounds.

The Soviet Regional Plan

In a country predominantly rural, like the Soviet Union-
three rural to one urban as against one to four in the United
States the problem is the reverse: political and cultural
perfection is thought to depend on the diffusion of industrial
labor and industrial values. The scheme of integration is
not to reassert rural self-sufficiency but to bring the cities
to the land. The "elimination of the difference between the

PROPOSAL 1

two cities of 1 50,000-
200,000 population in
favorable sites. But workers
must travel up to 22 miles
to the oil fields.

PROPOSAL 2

1 2 to 15 settlements
of 15,000-20,000
population near the oil
fields. But some sites
are unfavorable and because
towns are small, municipal
and cultural services
would be limited.

BUT

PROPOSAL 3

Five cities each with
population of 60,000-
80,000, all located
favorably. Each large
enough for good culture
and municipal service. All
convenient to oil fields.

ACCEPTED

shortage of materials retarded construction the
increasing population crowded into Baku where
housing, schools and utilities were available
though overloaded.
CENSUS BAKU as proposed 1942
Equals 700,000 people

actual condition 1 939809,000

= Oil field

Inhabited place

A Manual of Modern Plans 97

city and the village*' has two aspects: the regional decentral-
ization of industry and the industrialization of agriculture.

At the time of the preparation of the Moscow plan, we
saw, it was counterproposed, in the interests of transporta-
tion, to decentralize heavy industry to the sources of raw
materials and power and thus to develop new, smaller cen-
ters in hitherto undeveloped regions, especially the Urals,
Siberia and the w r ater basins in the South. This counterpro-
posal was later modified and extended into a full-blown re-
gional plan, the "entry 7 into socialism," the principle being
cultural as well as technical (not to mention the military
necessity of decentralizing heavy industry away from the
then German frontier).

Ideally, the industrial plan consists of an even distribution
of centers throughout the country, each with several one-
industry Satellite Towns. The even spread brings the cities to
the land, an aim so important that it can in particular cases
outweigh strict technical efficiency: e.g., the Magnitogorsk-
Kuznetsk (Ural-Siberian) iron-coal combination was per-
haps less efficient than bringing the iron westward to the
coal, but it freed the heaviest industry from dependence on
Europe, gave it a mid-Union source of steel, and built up
the vast spaces of the east. (As it turned out, coal was later
found in the Urals and iron in Siberia.) The form of Satellite
Cities allows for specialization and yet regional concentra-
tion to insure a relative regional autonomy: it keeps sepa-
rate industries close to the source of their materials, it is
free of the excessive local transport of great metropoles, yet
it provides a sufficient aggregate population to support an
urban culture. A typical satellite cluster, the chemical com-
bination around Perm, is described by Hannes Meyer.

The ideal for the industrial satellite was felt to be 200,000;
compare this with the 100,000 of Sharp's culture satellite.
But in Russia, as elsewhere, the ideal often succumbs to

Proposal vs. disposal on the Baku Peninsula

98 CO M M U N I T A S

circumstances. Thus, despite a reasonable decision to de-
velop the Baku peninsula in a group of medium cities of
80,000, development centered in the city of Baku, which
by 1939 had grown to over 800,000, with an increasing
problem of transport to the oil wells.

To sum up the industrial plan, the aim is "To develop
industries close to the sources of raw materials and power
... To distribute industry evenly over the entire country, so
as to create nuclei of industrial and urban culture in the
backward peasant regions ... To specialize production in ac-
cordance with the natural and cultural resources of each
region ... But to provide a variety of production so that

yew city of Novosibirsk: 1. Civic center 2. Railroad station
and factory 3. Stores 4. Theater and museum 5. Parks and

schools 6. Homing 7. Warehousing

A Manual of Modern Plans 99

every region may achieve a relative completeness, not
autarchy, within its territory." (Hans Blumenfeld.)

Politically, such a decentralized plan on the basis of
industrial specialization involves two polar principles. On
the one hand there must be an authoritative national plan
to allot the specific production and distribute the products;
and in Soviet discussion this pole is always emphasized.
But we should also expect that each decentralized industrial
complex, made self-conscious by its specific work and having
a "certain regional completeness," would exert political
power: the regional specialization of industries should pro-
duce a kind of federal syndicalism; yet this eminently inter-
esting result has been severely unstressed by Soviet plan-
ners. On the contrary, although the revolution itself, and
the very idea of Soviets, sprang in great measure from
industrial units acting as political powers, the tendency has
always been toward political centralization.

But on the civic level, the local autonomy of towns and
regions has been encouraged (somewhat ike the system
of states and counties in the United States). City services,
housing, etc., are not determined by the national economic
plan, they must be decided closer to home provided ma-
terial and capital are allotted by the central government.
There is a resurgence of town Soviets. But no correlation is
made between town authority and the specific industrial
role that gives livelihood; the great chance of integration is
muffed.

The actual ideals can almost be read off from the typical
town plan itself. It is, again, a green belt plan, quarantining
the production from the social life; butthis is the novelty
in the center of the residential part, well removed from the
factories, is the square of the national and local adminis-
tration, connected by a broad avenue with the center of
culture, the theater, the museum. If only it were the union-
hall! As in some of our own country towns, on the square
there is the church and the Grange, as well as the post
office (and the jail).

The main avenues frequently follow the lineal plan of

100 GOMMUNITAS

the disurbanists, along railroad or waterway, for efficiency
of transport. But there is always the attempt to create a
political and cultural center, and to introduce the amenities
of Garden Cities. Residential quarters are community
blocks, for that is the working unit of domestic life; but the
principle of finding the working unit is not applied to the
integration of industry, politics, culture.

Thus, on the whole we see the signs of nineteenth-century
reform, but not a radical new way of life. There will be
shorter working hours, social sendees, and "parks of culture
and rest"; but initiative and administration, the grounds
of individual security and the culture of society, are related
onlv indirectly to the work and the potential power of the
people.

The Industrialization of Agriculture

The other side of the elimination of the difference be-
tween the city and the village is the industrialization of
agriculture. Because of circumstances, this has taken two
main forms, state farm and collective farm, the second
superseding the first about 1932.

In the state farm, agriculture is considered as an extrac-
tive industry on a par with other industries. Industrialization
consists in employing heavy machinery, maximum speciali-
zation of crop, and the indefinite increase in the size of the
field devoted to each speciality. The theory is that produc-
tivity is increased not only in absolute volume but economi-
cally with the increase of area devoted to a single crop.
(With Borsodi, or Kropotkin, we have seen reason to doubt
this. ) The agricultural plan then proceeds as follows. First,
a national program of crop requirements and the machinery
available. Next, division of the country as a whole, mainly
according to climate, into vast zones for specialized farming:
wheat, stock, fruit, citrus fruit, cotton. The zones for perish-
able vegetables are, perforce, laid around the cities but
with new methods of preservation and transport, this would
be obviated, as in America. Third, training in central agri-

A Manual of Modem Plans 101

cultural colleges of expert agronomists to be sent through-
out the country as directors of the peasantry, who now
become an unskilled proletariat.

If a crop useful in manufacture, such as cotton or soy-
bean, is combined with a regional industrial center, we
have a model agrindustrial complex.

On a typical state farm, 100,000 hectares, there will be
a center of administration, containing shops for major ma-
chine repairs and apartment houses for the winter residence
of the total farm population. Such a center might well be
in the city itself. The farm is divided into working sections
where the machinery for each is kept during the summer,
and where minor repairs are made on the spot by a traveling
shop summoned from the big administrative center by
telephone. The workers of each section remain in the field
through the summer, in summer cottages. The harvested
crop is taken by rail directly from stations in the fields. The
combination of crops is not the diversification of small-scale
intensive farming, but depends on the functional industrial
juxtaposition of different vast farms, e.g., providing feeding
stations for cattle on a neighboring com farm. The single
cash crop is marketed in Moscow and the workers are paid
money wages. (The factor of distribution, of course, is
enormously increased.)

Such a scheme is obviously the finish of agriculture as a
way of life and of the farmer as a relatively self-subsistent
craftsman with an important domestic economy. Corre-
spondingly, the transition is easy from rural to canned urban
values. The state farm is a remarkable pattern for getting
the worst of both worlds. In any case it failed in Russia
around 1930, because of political and especially technical
difficulties. Such farms survive in Russia mainly as stations
for experiment and breeding. (The increasing success of
such cash-crop estates in America is due to our immense
technology of transport and preservation, and because there
are towns and cities for the rural proletariat to escape to;
and add the ruthless exploitation of Mexican and Negro
migratory labor.)

102 C O M M U N I T A S

Collective Farms

Collective fanning is an adaptation to industrial tech-
nology less disruptive of the traditional ways, which it in-
deed perfects.

Enough individually worked farm land is pooled to be
technically and economically practicable for machine culti-
vation. (Average 80 farms, 1930.) Each farm family main-
tains for its own use a private plot, house, and animals.
Throughout the countryside, machine stations are estab-
lished by the state to serve the collectives. (One station to
40 collectives. ) The stations provide not only machines and
repairs, but agronomic and social services. The tax for the

Kolkhoz: one M.T.S. per forty collective farms

A Manual of Modern Plans 103

station, including insurance, comes to about 30% of the
produce, paid in kind; the rest is divided among the co-
operators. During the summer, a city day's work is done on
the collective by the men, about half a day's work by the
women; off-time can be devoted to the private holding. In
addition, winter industrial work is available at processing
plants located on the collectives or at the machine stations.
Further, the crop produced on the collective is most often
diversified; it may be sold locally, as well as consumed
privately.

This seems to be a good integration. Whatever the actual
practice may be, the ideal of industrialization here is not
necessarily to bring the farmer into the cash nexus of the
national economy, run from Moscow, but to give him in-
creased productivity and easier work in his locality. The
cost is a loss of individual independence, but the Russian
poor peasant was never an individualist. Culturally, the
scheme affirms the communalism of the peasants and allows
for more rational cooperation. In a backward region, it cer-
tainly means a general advance. It does not destroy the
agricultural way of life, but makes the farm a more equal
rival of the city.

Intentional Communities

Cooperative farming, pooling land for machine cultiva-
tion, reserving part for diversified gardening, with various
degrees of family ownership, all as a basis for a more inte-
grated community life: this exists in many places, in
cooperatives of the United States and Europe, in the impres-
sive collectives of Mexico and Russia, and the communes
of China. The driving motives may be economic, to get a
fair deal with the city, to raise the cultural level of the
peasants and rescue them from poverty, illiteracy, and dis-
ease, to industrialize without urbanizing, etc. Such motives
can be part of national policy.

It is a very different matter when the way of life itself,

104 COMMUNITAS

a well-rounded life in a free community, is the principal
motivation. Such an attitude belongs not to backward but
precisely to avant-garde groups, who are sensitive and
more thoughtful than the average, and who react against
the extant condition of society as fragmented, insecure,
lonely, superficial, or wicked. They are willing to sacrifice
social advantages to live in a community of the like-minded.
National policy and policy-makers are not up to these re-
finements; the communities are small, politically on the
fringe (though often intensely political as a function of life) ,
and they tend to be transitory; yet they are the vital engaged
experiments in which, alone perhaps, new social ideas can
emerge, so we must notice them here.

Such "intentional communities,'' as the sociologists call
them (modern examples are described by H. Infield), have
come into being throughout history in antiquity as philo-
sophic or mystical brotherhoods; then as Christian fellow-
ships; during the Reformation as part of the general dissent;
as ways of coping with early industrial capitalism (Owen-
ites, Fourierists). But our modern conditions, of super-
organized capital and one neo-technology after another,
have perhaps added a new chapter to the old story. To put
it paradoxically, there is today so much communication,
means of communication, and communication-theory, that
there isn't any community; so much socialism, social-agency,
and sociology that there isn't any society of work and living.
We have mentioned these absurdities in our introduction;
they induce "utopian" reactions, for instance our harping
here on "integration."

Consider our modern difference another way. Inten-
tional communities have generally disintegrated, or so their
members thought, because of outside pressures or outside
temptations, bankruptcy, hostility of the surroundings, loss
of religious faith among skeptics, attraction of big-city vices.
It is generally agreed that non-rational motives, like religion
or nationalism, wear better in this struggle than rational
motives like philosophy, pacifism, or economic good sense.

A Manual of Modern Plans 105

But today we also think that communities disintegrate es-
pecially because of interpersonal difficulties; these explain
the boredom, inefficiency, loss of faith; people are simply
not up to living and working together. So the experts in
community give sociometric tests (Moreno) to determine
who among modern men are fit to live closely with their
fellows, to bear the tensions and excitements of it. "Inte-
gration" is apparently no longer natural for all men. This
seems to cut down the possibilities enormously, for to live
well now requires, (1) To be disgusted with the common
way; (2) To have a burning ideal to share, and (3) To
have a cooperative character.

Given the paucity of candidates, such weeding-out tests
are a poor expedient. Would it not be better, instead of
regarding "non-cooperation" as a datum, to take the bull
by the horns and regard community life as a continuous
group-psychotherapy in our sick society, in which just the
anxieties and tensions of living together become the positive
occasions to change people and release new energy alto-
gether? This would in turn diminish the reliance on non-
rational ideals, since the excitement of contact is soon more
valuable than the attractions of the world.

Kvutzah

The most perfect viable intentional community of modern
times has been the kvutzah or kibbutz of the Zionists and
Israelis. Those who settled these little communities were
leaving not only anti-Semitism but also, imbued with the
most advanced organic and socialist philosophies of the
nineteenth century, the inorganic and competitive world
of the west As Jews, fanning seemed to them the return
to primary usefulness, independence, and dignity from
which they had been excluded; but many of them were
also professionals and craftsmen, used to science and ma-
chines. They had also a pioneering dedication to a neglected
and inhospitable soil, with the satisfaction of making it

i POULTRY

1 SHEDS

3. LAUNDRY 6

4. WATER TOWEft

5. STA6LES

6. WOftK SWOPS
1 FOOT
& SAftAGE
* CULTURE

K). DSNSNG WALL

IL CWILD&EN'S HOUSE

12. L1VIMC5
1% FIELDS

SCHOOL

Kibbutz

bloom. This was sharpened by nationalism, for the land
was foreign and became increasingly hostile, Pretty soon
they learned that this arduous community was not for every-
body, and their international organization coped with the
weeding-out by setting up long training periods for candi-
dates before the emigration.

In its heyday, unlike the Russian collective, the kvutzah
exercised almost complete autonomy of activity, and yet
could sell in a competitive market; it was a community-
anarchism that, apart from its nationalism, would have satis-
fied Kropotkin. Crops, methods, industrialization, education,
family relations, interpersqnal problems: all directly deter-
mined in town meeting. Unhampered by national planning
bureaucrats, each community can make use of the skills
and resources it happens to have, and manufacture shoes,

A Manual of Modem Plans 107

bricks, processed foods, citrus products whatever seems
convenient and profitable. Also, by entering into exchange
with other autonomous communities of the same kind for

they form an even international federation they partly
avoid the stranglehold of the cash nexus. There is at least
the nucleus of a sufficient technology initiated and governed
completely from below.

More remarkable than making the desert bloom, these
communities have invented, and somewhat proved, a new
idea about the upbringing of children. The parents have
private quarters, which provide home, love, and emotional
security also for the children; but the education and disci-
pline of the children belongs to the entire community, peers
and the productive life of the adults: more objective and
friendly than parents. (This requires, of course, a small
community where everybody knows everybody. When the
kvutzah grows beyond this it must split up.) The young
people of this training whom one meets "cactus-fruit," as
they call themselves are, as one would expect, character-
istically brash, good-looking, know-it-all but not disrespect-
ful, self-reliant but not really independent, sentimental, and
very provincial. The brand of an integrated community,
better than other brands.

Naturally, with the establishment of the national state,
these communities are under heavy pressure. Community
anarchism does not fit easily into national states especially
when the overseas aid that has greased the wheels of the
Zionist enterprise begins to dry up. Yet in the great present
crisis, the unexpected influx of hundreds of thousands of
refugee Jews from the surrounding Moslem countries, the
communities have been willing and able to receive and
train far more than their share: they are stable and adapta-
ble. In the long run, perhaps, the more dangerous threat
to their existence is die attraction of urban Me (pretty
clothes and lipstick for the women, crowds, privacy, bright
lights).

108 COMMUNITAS

Progressive Schools

A major problem of every intentional face-to-face com-
munity is its "cash-crop," its economic role in the great
society that has no integral way of life but has a most inte-
grated cash nexus. Usually the problem is not enough money
or credit to buy needed mass-produced machinery. But
let us mention a touching example of a contrary problem.
The Macedonia (pacifist) community made pedagogic toy-
blocks for cash, and distributed them, at cost of production,
to like-minded groups like progressive schools; but the
blocks became popular and big commercial outfits wanted a
large number. Macedonia was then faced with the following
dilemma: these commercial jobbers would resell at a vast
profit; yet if Macedonia itself charged them what the market
would bear, the community would itself be contaminated
by commercialism.

The cash-crop of the small intentional community that
has often served as its social role in the larger society is
education: the community is a progressive school. (One is
reminded of Plato's remark that training men is like tending
livestock, so that this too is a branch of agriculture. ) In the
theory of progressive education, integral community life is
of the essence: one learns by doing, one learns to live in a
contactful community. The buildings are built by the stu-
dents and teachers. Usually there is a farm. Emphasis is laid
on creative arts and crafts, as unblocking of deep energy and
as inventing the forms of better environment. Some pro-
gressive schools specialize in serving the surrounding region
as social-physicians and leaders of regional improvements.

In the educational community, the mores are in principle
permissive and experimental, and the persons form, almost
invariably, a spectrum of radical thought and life, from
highly moralistic religious-pacifists, through socialists and
La Follette or TVA liberals, to free-thinking anarchists. The
close contact of such persons, the democratic and convivial

A Manual of Modern Plans 109

intermingling of faculty and students, leads inevitably to
violent dissensions, sexual rivalries, threatened families. It
is at this point, as we have said, that the community could
become a psychotherapeutic group and try by its travails to
hammer out a new ideal for us all in these difficult areas
where obviously our modern society is in transition. Instead,
the community itself tends to break up.

Yet perhaps the very transitoriness of such intensely mo-
tivated intentional communities is part of their perfection.
Disintegrating, they irradiate society with people who have
been profoundly touched by the excitement of community
lif e, who do not forget the advantages but try to realize them
in new ways. People trained at defunct Black Mountain,
North Carolina, now make a remarkable little village of
craftsmen in Haverstraw, N. Y. (that houses some famous
names in contemporary art). Perhaps these communities
are like those 'little magazines" and "little theaters" that
do not outlive their first few performances, yet from them
comes all the vitality of the next generation of everybody's
literature.

Regionalism

Let us, finally, say something about regionalism and re-
gional-planning. Nearly all American planners would agree
that these are grand things, reacting, no doubt, not only
against isolated planning but against the sameness sinking
down on our country from coast to coast. But as Charles
Abrams said recently (Tokyo, 1958), it is hard to say
what they mean by regionalism, what is the unifying prin-
ciple of a region. (He himself tends to find it either in ad-
ministrative convenience or in some primary geophysical
development, like planning a watershed.)

The Russian regional plans of this chapter are industrial-
economic unities, and these regions may well, in the USSR,
coincide with regions of race, culture, and language. So
throughout the nineteenth century in Europe, nationalism

Blade Mountain College (after P. Williams) 1. Study buildings
2. Shops and Laboratories 3. Exhibits and Meetings 4. Dining
hall 5, Library 6. Living quarters 7. Quiet house

could be regarded as economic, cultural, and linguistic re-
gional planning. (In contrast, the Chinese Communists
seem to want to break down regional differences by trans-
planting whole populations.) In an advanced technology
like the American, however, economic regionalism is van-
ishing. Doorframes for a building in Denver were manufac-
tured on the East Coast, but people in New York eat garden
vegetables from Texas; this seems idiotic, but the tech-
nology and transport warrant it, and the economy appar-
ently demands it. We saw that Fuller refused to consider
any space-age region less than the continents of the world
around the North Pole. (And if we believe the writers of
science fiction, as how can we not, our region is the Milky
Way.) Of cultural regionalism we have little: our one dis-
tinctive region is the so-called "South," whose unity consists
in oppressing Negroes to the mutual disadvantage of Ne-
groes and whites. In fact, our striking cultural regions are
precisely the metropolitan centers, New York, the Bay Area,
perhaps Chicago; and vast cities do require a kind of re-
gional planning of traffic, taxation, and civic function.

A Manual of Modem flans 111

Geophysical regions do exist spectacularly in our country.
It is pathetic if the esthetic advantages of our unique land-
scapes, of our coasts, plains, sub tropics, mountains, river
valleys and deserts, cannot make us a more various America
than we are getting. In our history, the Americans have
thrown away one of our most precious heritages, the Fed-
eral system, a system of political differences of regions,
allowing for far-reaching economic, legal, cultural, and
moral experimentation-as the La Follettes experimented in
Wisconsin, the Longs in Louisiana, as Sinclair tried in Cali-
fornia. (Or as Alberta, Canada tried out Social Credit. ) This
was the original idea of our system. When the fathers gave
up the leaky Articles of Confederation for the excellent aims
of the Preamble, they were not thinking of a land with an
identical gas station, Wbolworth's, and diner at every cross-
roads; with culture canned for everybody in Hollywood and
on Madison Avenue; and with the wisdom of local law
dominated by the FBI.

TheTVA

The improvement of the Tennessee Valley by the Tennes-
see Valley Authority started with a single natural resource:
a flow of water with a head of as much as 5000 feet, caused
by precipitation of up to 80 inches over a region touching
half a dozen states. Previous to the Authority, part of this
flow was developed for electric power and the fixing of
nitrogen, for munitions and later for fertilizer. The Author-
ity was empowered to expand this into a multiple-use
handling of the waterway: a system of dams, locks, reser-
voirs and channels for power, navigation, and flood-control.
But this at once involved the improvement of the watershed
itself to assure steady flow and good volume of -storage; so
the Authority turned to forestation, prevention of erosion,
and improvement of cultivation.

At this point a profound change occurred in the idea.

112

COMMUNITAS

The concept of a multiple-use enterprise is familiar in busi-
ness; the sum of different lands of products, by-products,
and services make possible a capital investment which for
any one of them would be unprofitable; this is the case in
most extractive and refining industries. What was unique
in the TVA was the decision to spread the benefits of one
part of the enterprise, the waterway, to the farmers of the
whole region without specific evaluation of the cash outlay
and return, the principle being just "the general social bene-
fit." This decision, this principle, was possible because it is
the immediate products of the waterway, not their cash
equivalents, that the farmers need: electric power, water,
and fertilizer extracted or processed by industrial electricity.
That is, there was an absolutely new fund of wealth pro-
duced by the project and directly contributing, without
middlemen or a high cost of distribution, to the expanding
benefits of the project. It might seern that this direct contri-
bution and immediate specific value of the products was a

The Tennessee Valley
\

VA.

A Manual of Modern Plans 113

mere convenience of bookkeeping; but indeed, it was just
this that has made the whole a model of integrated regional
planning, naturally expanding and seizing useful opportuni-
ties, relatively free from the profit nexus of society as a
whole.

An enterprise in which the productive combinations of
nature play a major part we have cited the instance of the
symbiotic farm has a powerful and generous capitalist in-
deed! Nor is it easy to keep its books in double entry. That
here was something unique has been proved by the violent
subsequent lawsuits concerning the "yardstick" for setting
a competitively fair price for power that is being distributed,
(1) As a social benefit; and (2) As necessary for the perfec-
tion of the valley improvement.

The natural benefits of the regional improvement have
made themselves felt far outside the region, in controlling
flood and in moderating the effects of drought a thousand
miles away. How to price that? And without question, if the
industrial use of the region were exploited by the electro-
metallurgical and other electric industries, pursuing the
same social policy of free expansion, the economic effect
would be enormous throughout the nation. The necessity,
for efficiency, of setting up a power grid over a wide area
alters the economy of the private power companies adjacent.
Also, a picturesque region sensibly developed becomes by
definition a place for recreation.

But the most telling proof of the force of such a naturally
integrated plan is the continual emergency of ingenious
inventions, in an expanding activity supported by a steady
surplus of directly useful resource. Along with the invention
of a new fertilizer came an ingenious machine for depositing
seed and fertilizer in one operation; along with the conse-
quent introduction of diversified crops and dairying, came
electric processes for both quick-freezing and dehydration.

An architectural invention developed by the Authority
deserves special mention: the section trailer-houses, a kind
of moving town, adapted to the migration of thousands of
skilled workers from one construction site to another. These

TVA: "severely decorative functionalism"

E

\MMJUA Coe*u l**"4 a II . i

dLS

-4

TVA; a portable house

A Manual of Modern Plans 115

had a meaning and beauty superior to the design of the main

structures themselves, in which the planners of the Author-
ity take inordinate pride but which, as Fritz Gutheim
naively boasts, are "the architecture of public relations."
(The style of severely decorative functionalism. )

To sum up, let us quote from the description of the TV A
in the final report (1934) of the National Resources Plan-
ning Board: "There is a broad technical integration of the
specific tasks assigned to T.V.A., which have raised funda-
mental issues of social policy and have involved planning on
a scale unusual in the United States. To begin with, the ef-
fort to set up a well-managed, low-cost, self-supporting sys-
tem of power production necessitates the integrated devel-
opment of the Tennessee River. The prevention of soil-ero-
sion is necessary to prevent the dams from silting up within
a century. But erosion is a prblem in its own right. To pre-
vent it, a program of afforestation and public works must be
undertaken, and large areas turned from plow crops to
grass. This cannot be done without experimental work in
die development of phosphate fertilizers. To further this
transformation and to develop the agricultural potential of
the region, provision has been made for encouraging the
cooperative movement. To find a market for the potential
power has involved lowering the selling price of power for
domestic use and the lowering of the price of electric appli-
ances through the Electric Home and Farm Authority.

"The work of the T.V.A. has dealt with large social issues,
some of which involve substantial modifications of the exist-
ing institutional structure of the country. Most fundamental
of all is a decision of Congress to establish public ownership
and operation of hydroelectric works in the Valley; the
demonstration of the economy of social service in this field
may foreshadow a broad change from private to public
operation of utilities in the United States. The elimination
of private enterprise by the T.V.A. and the extension of
rural electrification carries with it a reconsideration of the
criterion of profitability. There is a difficult decision, involv-
ing social policy, that must be made with regard to the

116

COMMUNITAS

purchase price of privately owned distributing systems. In
connection with the program to prevent soil-erosion it is
deemed necessary to redefine property rights. These and
other examples may be cited as large social changes implicit
in the execution of the technical tasks assigned to the

T.V.A:*

This necessity of overriding political and economic boun-
daries, and of following the functional relationships within
the region, comes from the original decision to exploit nature
directly rather than after it has been more or less fixed in
commodities and capital, whether in a profit system or in
the framework of a national plan determined from some
political center. Nature proves to have novel potentialities;
new problems arise, and new solutions are found in hardly
suspected natural resources. Following natural subject mat-
ter, human inventiveness.

But of course this process soon comes to its limits; the
institutions of society reassert themselves. It is after all only
a natural region.

Norris Dam

PART II

Three Community Paradigms

Introduction
Values and Choices

Such are some great plans of the past century that variously
emphasize the relation between the means of livelihood and
the ways of life. Now let us make a new beginning and col-
lect our conclusions for our own problems in this book : How
to make a selection of modern technology? How to use our
surplus? How to find the right relation between means and
ends?

We have chosen to present our thoughts in the form of
three community models of our own. Given the complex
and incommensurable factors of the subject^ this seems to us
the simplest as well as the liveliest method of presentation;
to give typical important value-choices as if they were
alternative programs and plans. None of these is presented
as our own point of view. In fact, we should probably pre-
fer to live in the second or middle scheme, and we don't
make much effort to conceal our bemusement about the
first, which is similar to New York in I960. Nevertheless,
these three models are not plans, they are analyses; they
refer to no site; they have no style, which comes only in
building something concrete; and most important, there is
no population that purely makes these alternative choices
as we present them. People in fact want a mixture of the
three, in varying proportions depending on their traditions
and circumstances.

Gunnar Myrdal, a great sociologist and a philosophic
man, has said:

Value premises must be explicitly stated and not hid-
den as tacit assumptions . . . Since incompatible
valuations are held in society, the value premises
should ideally be given as a number of sets of alterna-
tive hypotheses.

119

111
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TZ ssKKSsa &358gS. 5 ? ^ -

tf* V) fc^:

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Bibliography for three ways of life today

Three Community Paradigms 121

This is exactly what we try to do. We present three alterna-
tive models of choices with regard to technology, surplus,
and the relation of means and ends, and we ask what each
formula gives us in economics, politics, education, domestic
standards, popular and high culture, and other functions of
the community. These are regional schemes for:

A. Efficient Consumption.

B. Elimination of the Difference between Produc-
tion and Consumption.

C. Planned Security with Minimum Regulation.

The Need for Planned Luxury Consumption

American production requires a vast tribe of advertisers
to boost the standard of living: this buys up the goods on
the home market and allows for profitable reinvestment.
The standard is very high but even so it often fails in im-
portant areas, sometimes in automobiles, sometimes in eggs.
No doubt we ought to give away more of our goods abroad
and so increase the world standard. But it is an era when
other lands are, or are hastening to become, advanced tech-
nologies, and given the speed with which machine tools
are multiplied and machine skills are learned, we can easily
envisage the day when we won't be able to give anything
away, we will have to use it ourselves.

Our productivity is of course, immensely higher than the
actual production. During the 30's, it is figured, we ran at
much less than 50%, yet supported a luxury leisure class of
a million and ten million unemployed of whom none starved
except by the error of a social agency. During the war, pro-
duction was nearer 90% of capacity (though inefficient, as
emergency production must be), and many millions of the
economically unemployed, in the armed services, enjoyed
the use of such luxury commodities as tanks, bombers, heavy
artillery, and warships. Since the war, though the standard
has leaped higher, the productivity is again tightly checked.

View from the University zone: the means of livelihood in the

center

J. K. Galbraith has beautifully shown that, for all the ideol-
ogy, no real attempt is made to improve production but only
to maintain employment and protect present investment, A
solution would be to slacken off the whole enterprise and cut
down the hours of labor, but most of the workers (if we may
judge by their union demands) do not want the leisure,
they want the goods and the "fringe benefits."

How to run nearer to capacity and also use up the goods?
There has to be a planned production and a planned con-
sumption to match it. The first is an economic problem,
and government economists sometimes work at it for us it
is not pressing except in emergencies of war or depression.
"But the second, predominantly psychological, problem is
always with us; it is left to the free lances of Madison
Avenue. The results are never noble or gorgeous, often
absurd, and sometimes immoral (For instance, a typical
expedient that the advertisers have hit on in despair is to
give away $64,000 to bright children and truckloads of
electrical appliances to suburban ladies. But this creates in
everybody's mind an incompatible clash of values, between
the hard money that you work for and the soft money that
is given away~as prizes or stipends for TV appearances

Three Community Paradigms 123

down to fringe benefits and social insurance. Eric Larrabee
has stated it as a rule that the less hard you work for it, the
more you are paid.)

Adam Smith said: "Consumption is the sole end and
purpose of production; and the interest of the producer
ought to be attended to cnly so far as may be necessary for
promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly
self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it/'
As a general moral maxim,, it is certainly false: in this
book we shall demonstrate two contrary purposes of pro-
duction, as a way of life (Chapter 6) and as a means of
freedom (Chapter 7). But for a market capitalism or a
planned production expanding by the reinvestment of
profits and this is what Smith was thinking of his maxim
is still axiomatic, if the economy is to be good for anything
at all. For such an economy, matching the planning of pro-
duction and the efficient use of labor, we have to turn a
concept of Veblen's upside down and speak of "Efficient
Consumption."

Efficient consumption, early style (after Daumier)

124 COMMUNITAS

When Veblen set up as the opposite poles of economic
morality the "instinct of workmanship" and "conspicuous
waste,** he was thinking of an economy of scarcity. Labori-
ousness, interest in technique, absence of superstition, and
the other virtues of engineers seemed to him necessary to
produce plenty, equality, and freedom; whereas combative-
ness, classical education, and gambling guaranteed inse-
curity and kept the masses in their place. But the fact is that
now for at least three decades it has been not scarcity of
production, but the weakness of the consumption attitudes
of emulation, ostentation, and sheer wastefulness, that has
depressed the productivity which is the economist's ideal.
Only the instincts unleased by war have sufficed, under
modern conditions, to bring economic salvation.

So our first model is an analysis of how men can be as
efficiently wasteful as possible. It is a city founded on the
premises of the official economics, whether of Adam Smith
or Keynes; yet it seems also to meet the moral demands of
the New Yorkers,

CHAPTER 5

A City of Efficient Consumption

The Metropolis as a Department Store

We must have a big community. For it is mass production
that provides the maximum quantity of goods. Yet, for a
productivity expanding by the reinvestment of capital, the
most efficient technical use of machinery is self-defeating:
the product is standard and once it has been universally
distributed, there is no more demand. (For instance, a great
watch manufacturer has said, in a private remark, that in a
year he could give everybody in the world a cheap durable
watch and shut up shop.) One solution is to build obsoles-
cence into the product; this, it is alleged, is being done in
some industries, but it is morally repugnant. More morally
tolerable, and psychologically exciting, is to have a variety
of styles and changing fads. So we require a combination of
mass production, variety of style, and changing fads. This
means a big population: let us say, to mass-produce requires
a large market ( 100,000) , and if there are 50 styles o each
kind, we come to 5 million.

But why must the big population be concentrated in
metropoles? First, of course, on purely technical grounds,
for efficient distribution and servicing under conditions of
mass production. (Under conditions of a quasi-domestic
industry, the situation is otherwise. ) We must refer here to
the well-known fact that, during the last 70 years, although
the percentage of farmers has steadily dwindled, the per-
centage of workers in manufacturing has hardly increased;
the great gain has been in the workers in "services." A part

125

126 COMMUNITAS

of these are teachers, doctors, social workers-groups playing
a major role in any consumption economy; but the greater
part are in transport, city services, etc. These have only an
indirect role in production, and therefore countervene our
principle of the simplest relation of means and ends.

OCCUPATIONS-July 1956
(U. S. Bureau of Census) (figures in millions)

Factory Operatives

Craftsmen

Common Labor

Clerical

Administrative * I 11

Sales J " ~~

Farm

Professional and Semi-Professional

K-1 / $ i __ "I Q

Service o '72 f Ic *

Domestic

Everyone agrees there is a great increase in serv-
ices. Are the starred items "services'?

Another figure from the Dept. of Labor: In
1919 there were 25 million "goods-producing
workers." Today the figure is about the same. But
"service employees" have increased from 15 mil-
lions in 1919 to over 30 millions in 1958.

To minimize non-productive and non-consumptive serv-
ices we must have (1) Concentration of production and
market, and (2) Planning of the city to minimize services.

We can come to the same conclusion of big cities by
moral and psychological considerations. There is the possi-
bility, as we shall presently show, of making machine pro-
duction a way of life and immediate satisfaction; but when,
as in the case we are now discussing, the tendency of pro-
duction is toward quantity and sale on a profitable market,
the possibility of satisfaction in the work vanishes. The ideal
of work then becomes, as we see in the current demands of

Three Community Paradigms 127

labor unions, pleasant and hygienic working conditions,
short hours at the task, and high wages to spend away
from it. The workman wants to hasten away wealthy, un-
impaired in health and spirits, from the job that means
nothing to the home, the market, the city, where are all
good things. This tendency is universal; it does not depend
on machine industry; for we see that the farm youth, once it
is acquainted with the allures of city life and city money,
flocks to the city year after year in 50% of its strength.

(It is also true that the colorless routine of machine pro-
duction produces an opposite flight impulse: to escape the
artificial framework of society altogether. This appears as an
impulse toward suburbs and Garden Cities, but it is really
an impulse toward the open country and the woods. So in
our city we must plan for the polar opposites: the pleasures
of the metropolis and the escape to the open country.)

The goods must be on display; this is possible only in a
big city. And the chief motivation to get those goods for
oneself is not individual, the satisfaction of instinct and
need; it is social. It is imitation and emulation, and these
produce a lively demand. At first, perhaps, it is "mass com-
forts" that satisfy city folk these show that one belongs;
but then it is luxuries, for these give what Vebien used to
call the "imputation of superiority/* by which a man who
is not in close touch with his own easygoing nature can
affirm himself as an individual, show he has style and taste,
and is better. All this can take place only in a big city.

Aristotle said long ago, "The appetite of man is infinite"
it is infinitely suggestible.

The heart of the city of expanding effective demand is
the department store. This has been seen by many social
critics, such as Charlie Chaplin, Lewis Mumford, and Lee
Simonson.

Here all things are available according to desire, and are
on display in order to suggest the desire.

The streets are the corridors of the department store.

Even/ worker today produces five times more than his grand-
father did in 1880 (National Bureau of Economic Research).

Then let us sum up this preliminary program for the city:

1. A population of several million as the least economic
(regional) unit.

2. Production and market concentrated to minimize
distribution services.

3. The city concentrated to minimize city services.

4. Work and life to center around the market.

5. Morality of imitation and emulation.

6. Decoration is display.

7. Close by the open country, for full flight.

On the Relation of Production and Consumption

The community is zoned according to the acts of buying
and using up. Now there are four classes of goods.

First are the goods which have been produced and are
consumed in the enjoyment of them. These are all the things
to be bought in a great department store, creature com-
forts of the body and spirit. Creaturely necessities styled to
be comforts and luxuries, so they are desired as well as

Three Community Paradigms 129

needed, by the addition of titillation, form and color, nov-
elty, and social imputation-the necessities that are perpetu-
ally necessary again and whose satisfaction wears out and
must be renewed. And such, for the spirit, are the popular
arts; they serve for entertainment and distraction, and to
communicate current news, feelings, and fads. These spiri-
tual demands are perpetually renewed; for instance, an
illustrated magazine a week old is worthless. Such, nega-
tively, are the running repairs of medicine and social work.
These products, physical comforts, popular arts, and medi-
cine, that are periodically necessary and wear out, are the
most marketable goods. (It is only in a vicious society that
the more habitual needs, of form and truth, passion and
sociality, and virtue, seem to be equally marketable.)

Morleys theorem: the
trisections of the angles
of a triangle intersect in
an equilateral triangle.

Then the second class of goods are those which have been
produced but are not consumed in the enjoyment. These
are all the monuments of form and truth in the arts and sci-
ences. Essentially not marketable at all, but their current
presentation according to the prevailing fashion is market-
able. Such goods are often wrongly called the culture of
society, but it is rather the popular arts and journalism
which are the culture, the principle of social cohesion. The
great arts are humane, nearer to nature than culture: their
social dress their popularity in their day soon becomes
dated and "period." To signalize this difference, just as their
enjoyment does not consume them, so their production is
often distinguished by the name of creation.

130

The third class of goods, those which are consumed in the
enjoyment but are not produced by men, belong** nature
immediately; they are the underlying and indispensable
factors in any community: social and sexual intercourse,
domestic life, ultimately everything pertaining to the pri-
mary environment of parents, children, friends. It is daily
life that is consumed but not produced; people draw on their
own resources, to wear them out and to renew them for a
while. It is here that the things bought at the market are
used, for self-assurance and prestige, and because of lack of
individual initiative; yet in the end the principle of the
community in this zone must be spontaneous demand and
naturally given resources, as in the family and the elemen-
tary schools, relatively free from the suggestion and display
which is the whole culture of the market itself. ( Thus, small
boys must play sandlot ball; it is only in a vicious society
that they are tricked, by unscrupulous clothiers and pub-
licity-mad parents, into putting on the uniforms of the
Little League. ) Apart from this freedom, the internal springs
of demand dry up.

Three Community Paradigms 131

Lastly, there are the goods which are neither produced
nor consumed: the stream of life itself and the permanent
things of nature, recurring not by conscious reaching out but
by unchanging laws of reproduction, growth, and death.
They are created literally, and are not consumed but grow
and die. For these, the standard of living is not comfort and
luxury, but subsistence. Rural life, in relative poverty, repro-
duces itself the most. In the community, this zone belongs
essentially to the children and adolescents, and to those
adults who are temporarily spent. The adults in their vigor
are concerned mainly with culture, status, and pleasure.

The four kinds of goods give us the four zones of the city.

A Metropolitan Region

We turn to the selection of industries. Now in general
every external activity is planned on the principle of effi-
ciency, the efficiency of means to achieve ends, where the
means are somewhat external arrangements and the ends
are more internal satisfactions.

Bird's-eye view

We shall see in our next chapter that if we consider the
means of life also part of a man's internal time of life, the
principle of efficiency becomes blurry; industries are se-
lected on moral and psychological grounds. And in the 7th
chapter, where we are concerned with freedom from control,
we shall not ask much about the ends at all, but simply re-
duce the means (of subsistence) to a minimum. But in this
present discussion, a metropolitan region of efficient luxury,
we can concentrate on quite definite ends: how the wealth
of the external scene can by suggestion and gratification fill
life and then efficiency is strictly a technical problem; how
to produce the most with the least waste in non-productive
services, transport, middlemen between producer and con-
sumer. The principle of selection of industries is therefore
the most possible light and heavy manufacture and agri-
cultureup to the point where concentration is threatened
by wasteful intermediaries.

Taking an average of five major cities (1957) as our
figure, we find that by the scientific use of existing tech-
niques, the work of 4% million in light and heavy manu-
facture, trade, and administration, and their residence,
entertainment, education, and culture and all this with a
spaciousness, where it is relevant, that is twice that of the
best American standard can be concentrated in a circle five

Three Community Paradigms 133

miles in radius: a New York City that could He on Staten
Island. And around this inner circle, a zone for the garden-
ing of vegetables sufficient for the entire population and
worked by the citizens themselves, spreads less than twenty
miles additional. The beginning of open forest can be some-
times 5, and never more than 25, miles from the center
of the city.

For the sake of exposition, let us choose an economy some-
what Mice New York but with a greater proportion of heavy
industry. Then we select the following livelihoods;

Light manufactures, such as clothing and electrical

appliances

Heavy manufacturing, such as motor cars or ships
Business administration and advertising
A market, for the region and the nation
Entertainment, for the nation
Agriculture, for the region

The location of these businesses and industries is as fol-
lows. All merchandising, both regional and national, is in
the center where the buyers gather near the terminals and
elevators. Administration is centralized for convenience of
communication. Light manufacture is in the center, where

Size of cities

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cktca^o

134 COMMUNITAS

its parts, already processed, can arrive and its exports leave
from the central terminal. Heavy manufacture is on the out-
skirts, shipping by rail or truck. Truck gardening is included
because its farmers can live in the city, on the basis of the
conservative figure of one acre to feed twenty-five; but dairy
farming is excluded; requiring one acre for five, it spreads
too far for convenient working by the city folk. The local
airport, passenger and freight, is in the center. (Long dis-
tance airport is at the outskirts.)

The zoning of the community functions of the metropolis,
however, is according to the fourfold relation of production
and consumption, as analyzed above: (1) The market,
populated by workers, traders, and transients, and including
hotels, restaurants, popular arts, and terminals; (2) Arts,
sciences, and the university; (3) Domestic life, consisting
of neighborhoods, with their residences, elementary schools,
hospitals, shops, and garages; and (4) Open country: a
vacationland for all, with camps for children and junior col-
leges for adolescents, among the forest preserves.

The Center;
Theory of Metropolitan Streets and Houses

Our proposal to place the entire work and market center
under one roof, as one immense container, once seemed
extreme and sensational; today it is not unusual and reflec-
tion will show that it is logical.

In existing great cities, which have large buildings and
congested downtown centers, there are always three simul-
taneous systems of streets; the through highways (skyways,
freeways, etc.); the old city-streets (avenues and side-
streets); and the corridors of the large buildings. The
through highways, coming more and more to be elevated
or tunneled, carry the main stream of traffic uptown and
to places outside the city. It is wrongly thought that by in-
creasing these highways and so facilitating approach to the
center, the traffic congestion can be thinned out; but in the

'-

Regional plan: 1. Market, light industry, offices, entertainment,
hotels, and terminals 2. Culture,, universities, museums, zao S.
Residences, schools, hospitals 4. Heavy industry, terminals, long
distance airports 5. Forest preserves, vacationland 6. Agriculture.

Log cabin to air-conditioned cylinder

1S6 COMMUNITAS

end all the highways must pour their cars into the city
streets, for it is these streets that join building to building,
and it is at a particular building, and not at downtown as
a whole, that the motorist wants to arrive. Once he has
arrived at the building, however, he is quite willing to leave
his car (if there were a place to leave it) and go indoors and
use the corridors and elevators of the building to bring him
to the office or department where he has business.

Under these conditions, of motor traffic and increasingly
large buildings, the city-streets become pointless: they are
useless for traveling and unfit for walking and window
shopping. At the same time they cover 35% of the ground
space and require the most costly and elaborate of the city
services: paving, traffic control, cleaning, snow removal,
etc. For servicing, they are neither properly in the open
(so that snow, e.g., could be simply pushed aside) nor yet
are they indoors (protected). These streets, then, serve as
the perfect example of the intermediaries that waste away
the social wealth and health.

So we make of the many krge buildings one immense
container. The intermediary streets vanish. They have
merged with the internal corridors, which are now trans-
figured and assume the functions of promenade and display
which the street performed so badlyin summer too hot, in
winter too cold. (What we propose is no different from the
arcades or souks of hot North African countries.) And the
through driveways now carry out their function to the end,
bringing passengers and goods directly to stations in the
container, without two speeds and without double loading
for tracks and trains. This makes simple sense.

Let us look at it from the opposite term of the relation,
the building arrived at. The concept of a self-contained
'liouse" has two extremes: at the one extreme is the private
house on its land, with which it maintains a productive
relation; at the other is the large building, containing many
activities within its walls. In between we can trace a con-
tinuous series from the allotment garden to the two-family

Three Community Paradigms 137

and semi-detached house to the tenement and the sky-
scraper. Each point of this series answers best to particular
conditions. But the pell-mell of buildings, large and smal,
in a congested downtown district loses every function what-
soever: the streets are no longer an environment; the build-
ings must be lighted and ventilated in disregard of them;
the real environment is increasingly distant; yet because of
the crowding and competition for street space, and the need
to have a dim illumination left for the streets, the interiors
cannot expand to their proper spaciousness. Therefore we
proceed to the extreme of merging the buildings.

The gain in concentration is enormous, amounting to
several hundred per cent. Even more remarkable is the
saving in construction and servicing: in the entire down-
town district there is now only one exterior wall and rigid

A street floor in the air-conditioned cylinder; one mile in diam-
eter, air-conditioned > brightly lit > -flexible space; transportation
vertical, horizontal and diagonal; continuous interior show win-
dow. The perimeter is for hotels and restaurants, air-conditioned
but naturally lighted.

138 COMMUNITAS

roof to lose heat and cold. Lighting, ventilation, cleaning,
and so forth can be handled on a uniform system.

In a market economy, the concentration of display and
convenience creates social wealth. We have the spaciousness
and brilliance of a great department store.

The center, then, is the container of the work, the public
pleasures, and the market. Its population, at the busy hours,
is about two and a half million. It is zoned as follows. The
materials and products of light manufacturing go via the
freight routes in the basement or the cargo planes that
alight on the roof: the heart of industry is about in the
middle. Business and administrative offices are in the upper
and outer regions. The lower storiesmost immediately
available to the citizens who come by bus or carhouse the
stores and popular entertainments. In the outer envelope
and in projecting spokes, with natural light and a good
natural view, are the hotels and restaurants, opening out,
on the ground floor, into the park of the university. Con-
venient to all is the roof airport and the basement levels of
parking and transit.

Advertising

In planning and decoration the center is a department
store. Everywhere, in every corridor, as at a permanent
fair, are on display the products that make it worthwhile to
get up in the morning to go to work, and to work efficiently
in order to have at the same time the most money and the
most leisure.

The genius of this fair is advertising. Advertising has
learned to associate with the idea of commodities the deep-
est and most various instincts of the soul. Poetry and paint-
ing are advantageous to sales; the songs of musicians are
bound inextricably to soaps and wines. The scientific curi-
osity of men is piqued by industrial exhibits. The sentiments
of brotherhood and ambition both make it imperative to
buy something; sexual desire even more so. Also, the fear

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A section through the air-conditioned cylinder: twenty stories of
continuous rentable area without courts or yards; four stories of
passenger terminals for air, railroad, and bus; one story for ter-
minals for light manufacture, with deliveries direct to vertical
transportation; the lowest level contains the ct/linder service
(heat y cold, etc.)

of loneliness or sexual failure make it impossible to omit to
buy something. Mother love is a great promoter of sales. In
this manner the integral man is involved in the economy.
Once upon a time advertising was a means of informing
the public that such and such a commodity was for sale
and where it could be got. Later, advertising became com-
petitive, persuasion to buy such and such a brand rather
than any other brand. But in our time, among the largest
companies and especially among those who have some-
thing to sell, that is, perhaps, not absolutely necessary the
competitive use of advertising is no longer the chief use;
indeed these companies ("partial monopolies") confine
themselves to the same amount and type of advertising in
order not to compete to the death. But the chief use of
advertising, in which the rivals cooperate, is to suggest to
a wider public the need for the product which is not, per-

Street scene in the cylinder: always perfect shopping weather

haps, absolutely necessary. It is this new departure in adver-
tising that gives one confidence in the economic feasibility
of an expanding productivity. But such advertising must be
given the right atmosphere in which to breathe.

The University

The next zone is the university, extending in a mile-wide
ring around the center; this consists of theaters, opera
houses, museums, libraries, lecture halls and laboratories
of liberal arts and sciences, and everything that belongs to
these. It is the region of the things created by man or dis-
covered in nature, and not consumed in the enjoyment.

This region, as we witness in our great cities and their
universities, is the field of a deadly internecine strife: be-
tween those who would integrate these classical creations
and discoveries very closely into the culture of the center,
and those who fear that this integration corrupts everything
into hogwash. Thus, there is a great museum in New York
City which alternates the exhibition of severe modern clas-
sics of painting with the exhibition of advertising posters.
The problem comes up as a problem of location: whether,

Three Community Paradigms 141

for instance, to locate among the humanities of the uni-
versity such popular humanities as higher merchandising,
or to locate these in the center as trade schools. There is no
question, also, that the classics of art and science do enter
into the nexus of exchange (e.g., paperbound books), and
could be made to do so even more. On the other hand, such
books are not consumed in the enjoyment, they do not have
an expanding production, and to exploit them is penny-
wise, pound-foolish. Careless popularization of the classics
injures the solid economic value of illustrated weeklies.
Humane education is necessary to keep things going at all,
but too much of it makes people too simple.

Provision is made in the park for thrashing out these and
similar problems. There are outdoor cafes and places for

Plan of the university: C, The Center 1. Natural history, zoos,
aquariums, planetarium 2. Science, laboratories 3. Plastic arts
4, Music and drama

142

COMMUNITAS

dancing, accessible to the transients from the hotels as they
emerge from the center.

Within the center, style and decoration present no diffi-
culty. They are whatever is fashionable this season. To
illustrate them for our purposes we need merely imitate
what is highly correct in the spring of 1960 (taken from
The New Yorker magazine). Such imitation would not be
good decoration, for decoration requires an intuitive popu-
lar sympathy, hard to keep up year after year unless one is
in the business, but it would be like good decoration.

But the style of the university is a different matter, and
a thorny problem. What is the "future" style of something
that is only an analytic model? Therefore we cannot show
any illustration of the elevation.

Neighborhoods

In modern community plans that take any account at all
of amenity, there is always an idea of neighborhood, neigh-
borhood blocks, as opposed to the endless addition of the
city gridiron or of isolated dwellings in the suburbs. This
is because it returns to the human scale and face-to-face
acquaintance. And in the city of efficient consumption, too,

Along a radial highway in a residential zone

Three Community Paradigms 143

the neighborhood is the primary unit of emulation and in-
vidious imputation.

We demonstrate this as follows. It is in the end unsatisfac-
tory and indelicate to emulate, or to impute economic in-
feriority to, one's family and friends; on the other hand, to
do so with total strangers is pointless. Therefore, at least
for domestic display, the unit of emulation and so forth must
be the neighborhood. Residents of one's neighborhood take
notice, judge one's clothes, see that the lawn is clipped;
they are not so well known that one is embarrassed to show
off to them; they do not know us well enough to see through
us.

The neighborhood must be a mixture of classes. Each
class must be well enough represented to fortify each fam-
ily *s security and to allow for the more subtle forms of impu-
tation that are practiced among persons invited to one
another's homes. But the juxtaposition of different classes is
necessary in order to practice the grosser forms of emula-
tion, which keep people on their toes. (For intraclass emula-
tion is more likely to keep people on each other's toes, con-
sidering that we make a personal as well as economic judg-
ment of our friends.) In our fortunate city, there is no
danger to the juxtaposition of even extreme classes, since all
have goods and need not despair of getting more.

We need, then, a neighborhood of a certain size, perhaps
a few thousand. So we typically arrange the residences in
neighborhood blocks of about 4000 population, in a con-
tinuous apartment house around an open space of up to
ten acres. Each block has its shops, tennis courts, nurseries,
elementary schools, where the neighbors may commune and
vie. It is not desirable for these neighborhoods to generate
important local differences, for all must take their standards
from the mass-produced peculiarities on sale at the center.

This residential population is composed largely, up to
40%, of older persons. This is the inevitable result of two
trends increased longevity under improved medicine and
the flight of young families to the suburbs. Our city has the

Residences: the style of the whole is anonymous; the cell in-
dividualized.

maximum of medicine, urbanism and wealth. Correspond-
ingly, we have the perfection of a valetudinarian environ-
ment: protected from the elements, air-conditioned, with
smooth transportation, rapid service, all arranged not to
excite the weak heart or demand agility from unsteady feet.
The neighborhoods contain clinics, hospitals, and nursing
homes.

It is an environment of space, food, sunlight, games, and
quiet entertainment, whose standard requirements, largely
biological and psychological, are agreed on by everybody,

Apartments

The idea of feudal Anglo-Saxon law that "a man's home
is his castle" came to refer to the situation of the gentry, in
which the house and its land maintained a productive rela-
tion of comparative self-sufficiency. Take away the land
and the idea is seriously weakened. And as community
domestic services-light, gas, water-invade the house, its
architectural meaning vanishes. Finally, such services can
be provided efficiently only in an apartment house. The
apartments are increasingly mass-produced and the houses
become larger.

Three Community Paradigms 145

The problem is how to establish a contrary movement,
to restore family choice and freedom in the new architec-
tural conditions. The reality of a house is the space within
(Bruno Zevi) . Let us restrict the imposition of the architect
to its minimum function, the provision of efficient shelter
and services. We then provide for each family an empty
shell without partitions and (for the rich) two stories high,
completely serviced with light, conditioned air, water, and
so forth, through the columns of the building as in an office
building. Hitherto architectural practice has provided not
only such a serviced shell but also the imitation of a house,
with plan and fundamental decoration complete, partitions,
paneling, balcony, etc. But these parts have no structural
nor technical necessity and belong to private taste, need, or
caprice; they need not be standard.

Street plan in a residential district

I- .r. ......._ . .....<! .:>> C-----VU:

ARCADE STRCKTS

Residential space: at the kft, a comer of a residential block
showing an arcade and its local shops; above it a pneumatic de-
livery system operating from the City-Center (for packages up
to a yard in diameter). The rest shows a typical apartment space,
rented as a bare loft and made livable and/or expensive accord-
ing to individual taste and/or fancy.

Open Country

The last zone is the open country. This appears suddenly,
not straggling into being amid outlying homes, factories,
and cultivated fields, as if marking the exhaustion of the
energies of the city, but full of the ambivalent energy of
society, as nightmare and waking are parts of the same life.
For a dream (but which is the dream, the city or the
woods?) is not a temperate expression of the repressed de-
sires of the day, but a strange flowering of them, often too
rich to bear. In this vacationland there is exchanged for the
existence where everything is done for you, the existence
where nothing is done for you. You have, who venture there,
the causality of your own hands, and the gifts of nature.

These conditions are hard for city folk and they are finally
moderated-after, say, 50 miles, three-quarters of an hour

Three Community Paradigms 147

by car or 15 minutes by helicopter into the imitation wild-
ness of state parks and the bathos of adult camps.

Perhaps in this moderate and forgetful forest can be in-
itiated the procreation which is impossible to initiate by
urban standards.

Children are here conveniently disposed of in camps dur-
ing the summer season.

It seems wise to locate in the open region the age of
adolescence, and its junior colleges. Here is space for its
unconventional moods and violent play. This group, more
than any other, wants to be alone with its contemporaries in
small communities; it is impatient of the old and young,
meaning anybody five years older or two years younger.

As civilization becomes more complex and demanding,
the problem of psychological initiation into culture becomes
more pressing. Now the small child, brought up in the
metropolis, remembers, rather unconsciously than conscious-
ly, the elegance of his mother at home still elegance to
him, even when it is contrived of cheap cosmetics. But
the adolescent, given to rebellion, is encouraged, by a more
animal existence in the open country. And we know that
as his longings settle into habitual desires, it is the environ-
ment of adult achievement that seems attractive to him;
he has been away from it ? and "nothing increases relish
like a fast." In hundredfold strength the impressions of
childhood have him in grip. Then the university, the school
of adults both young and old, glorifies the values of the
city in its popular humanities, and in its pure humanities it
provides the symbols of reasonable sublimation for those
who come by destiny to see through the machinery.

Such then are the four zones of the city.

Politics

There is no direct political initiative to make either cen-
tral or neighborhood policy. For the expanding economy
exists more and more in its nice interrelationships and is

148 COMMUNITAS

ran by a corporation of technologists, merchandisers, and
semi-economists as directors. Periodic elections are like
other sales campaigns, to choose one or another brand
name of a basically identical commodity.

An existence of this kind, apparently so repugnant to
craftsmen, farmers, artists, or any others who want a say in
what they lend their hands to, is nevertheless satisfactory
to the mass of our countrymen, so it must express deep and
universal impulses. These probably center around what
Morris Cohen used to call the first principle of politics,
inertia; that is, that people do not want to take the trouble
to decide political issues because, presumably, they have
more important things on their minds.

But in fact the most powerful influence that people exer-
cise, and would exert even more powerfully in a city of
efficient consumption, is the economic choice to buy or not
to buy a product and to be employed in this or that factory
or office. We are not speaking of such strenuous efforts as
boycotts or strikes, but of the delicate pressures of the
market, which in a market of luxuries and a production of
full employment profoundly effect particular brands, with-
out disturbing the system as a whole. In our society even
great captains of industry and princes of merchandise who,
one would have thought, would have freedom to do it
their own way, cannot step out of line. A famous manu-
facturer, for instance, is said to have believed in the trans-
migration of souls, but he was not allowed by his public
relations department to proselytize to this belief because it
might seem odd to potential customers. Everybody who has
a penny can influence society by his choice, and everybody
has, in principle, a penny.

Thus, there is direct social initiative neither from above
nor below. This explains the simply unbearable quality of
facade or "front" in American public thought: nobody
speaks for himself, it is always an Organization (limited
liability) that speaks.

Wish fulfillment of an efficient consumer

Carnival

But now comes what is proper to great cities a season
of carnival, when the boundaries are overridden between
zone and zone, and the social order is loosed to the equalities
and inequalities of nature. "A holiday," said Freud, "is a
permitted, rather than a proscribed, excess; it is the solemn
violation of a prohibition/'

Yet it is not necessary to imagine any astonishing antics
and ceremonies of carnival; for as society becomes more
extensively and intensively organized in its means of liveli-
hood, any simple gesture occurring in the ways of life is
already astounding, just as in Imperial Germany to walk
across the grass was a revolutionary act. By day-to-day ac-
quiescence and cooperation, people put on die habit of some
society or other whether a society of consuming goods or
some other makes no difference, so long as there are real
satisfactions. Meantime, submerged impulses of excess and
destruction gather force and periodically explode in wild

150 COM M U N I T A S

public holidays or gigantic wars. (There is also occasional
private collapse.)

The carnival, to describe it systematically, would be
simply the negation of all the schedules and careful zoning
that are full of satisfaction in their affirmation. No one can
resist a thrill when a blizzard piles up in the streets and the
traffic stops dead. The rumor of a hurricane brings out our
child souls and much community spirit.

Describing the Saturnalia of the Roman Empire, an old
writer gives the following particulars: "During its continu-
ance, the utmost liberty prevailed: all was mirth and fes-
tivity; friends made presents to each other; schools were
closed; the Senate did not sit; no war was proclaimed, no
criminal executed; slaves were permitted to jest with their
masters, and were even waited on at table by them. This
last circumstance was probably founded on the original
equality between master and slave, the latter having been,
in the early times of Rome, usually a captive taken in the
war or an insolvent debtor 9 and consequently originally the
equal of his master . . . According to some, the Saturnalia
was emblematic of the freedom enjoyed in the golden age,
when Saturn ruled over Italy."

During the carnival in the city of efficient consumption
a peculiar incident sometimes occurs. At one of the auto-
matic cafeterias in the center where, on the insertion of a
coin, coffee and cream pour from twin faucets and neatly
fill a cup to the brim, this machine breaks downall nature
conspiring in the season of joy and the coffee and cream
keep flowing and do not stop, superabounding, overflowing
the cup, splashing onto the floor; many cups can be filled
from the same source. (This is not so absurd, it happened
to our mother once in Minneapolis.) Then gathers a crowd
and a cheer goes up as they indulge in inefficient con-
sumption.

Installment debts are forgiven. And with the pressure of
instalment-payments removed, people swing to the opposite
extreme and don't work at all: they fail to provide even for

Three Community Paradigms 151

the day's necessities and begin to eat up the capita! invest-
ment. They consume the reserve piled up on the market.
The economy apparently ceases to expand (but its shelves
are merely being cleared for new fashions).

In the factories, basketball courts are rigged up, emblem-
atic of the sit-down strikes that occurred in America in 1935.

The people are not really idle, but only economically so.
They are feverishly preparing and launching immense
floats; works of imperishable form there is a classic tradi-
tion of the forms but made of the most perishable materials
possible, papier mache, soap, ice. These floats, after pa-
rading through the streets, are destroyed without residue:
the paper is pushed into bonfires, toasts a moment, and
leaps up in a puff of flame, through which the deathless
form seems to shine one last moment after its matter has
vanished. The soap is deluged by hoses and dissolves in
lather and iridescent bubbles; and the forms of ice are left
to melt slowly away in the brilliant darts of the sun.

At home people engage in rudimentary domestic industry
and in the imitation of self-sufficient family economy. It is
customary for each family to engage in a little agriculture
in the closet and grow mushrooms, the fungus impudicus
that springs up in the night like the phallus. Women devote
themselves to the home-manufacture of a kind of spaghetti
or noodles, and from all the windows in the residential
neighborhoods can be seen, hanging from poles and drying
in the sun, such fringes of spaghetti or noodles. Wood ires
are lit from sticks of furniture going out of fashion, and
meals are prepared of noodles or spaghetti with mushroom
sauce.

It is during this week that there is the highest hope of
engendering children, not to have to rely exclusively on
the immigration of the tribes beyond the forest.

From the forest invade mummers in the guise of wolves
and bears. These wolves and bears (students from the
junior colleges) prowl and dance among the monuments
of urbanism. They sniff along the superhighways by moon-

152

COMMUNITAS

light, and they browse among the deserted rows of seats in
cinemas, where candv is left for them to eat. By their antics,
they express astonishment at these places.

Thus, finally, can be observed the dread sight that poets,
ancient and modem, have seen in visions: of wolves prowl-
ing by moonlight in the deserted streets of cities. So now
when the coffee and cream have soured among the legs of
the tables, and the shelves are bare; when only the smoke
is arising from the pyres and the bubbles have collapsed,
and there are puddles where stood the statues of ice; and
when the city folk are asleep, gorged with their meal and
with love; the streets are deserted; now by moonlight come
these wolves, rapidly up the wrong side of the streets and
prowling in empty theaters where perhaps the picture ( that
the operator neglected to turn off) is still flickering on the
screen, to no audience.

Next day, however, when the carnival is over and the
rubbish is efficiently cleared away by the post-carnival
squad, it can be seen that our city has suffered no loss.
The shelves have been cleared for the springtime fashions;
debtors have been given new heart to borrow again; and
plenty of worn-out chattels have been cleaned out of the
closets and burnt

Carnival

CHAPTER 6

A New Community;

The Elimination of the Difference between
Production and Consumption

Quarantining the Work,
Quarantining the Homes

Men like to make things, to handle the materials and see
them take shape and come out as desired, and they are
proud of the products. And men like to work and be useful,
for work has a rhythm and springs from spontaneous feel-
ings jest like play, and to be useful makes people feel right.
Productive work is a kind of creation, it is an extension
of human personality into nature. But it is also true that the
private or state capitalist relations of production, and ma-
chine industry as it now exists under whatever system, have
so far destroyed the instinctive pleasures of work that
economic work is what all ordinary men dislike. (Yet un-
employment is dreaded, and people who don't like their
work don't know what to do with their leisure. ) In capitalist
or state-socialist economies, efficiency is measured by profits
and expansion rather than by handling the means. Mass
production, analyzing the acts of kbor into small steps and
distributing the products far from home, destroys the sense
of creating anything. Rhythm, neatness, style belong to the
machine rather than to the man.

The division of economy into production and consumption
as two opposite poles means that we are far from the condi-
tions in which work could be a way of life. A way of life
requires merging the means in the end, and work would

153

154 C O M M U N I T A S

have to be thought of as a continuous process of satisfying
activity, satisfying in itself and satisfying in its useful end.
Such considerations have led many moralist-economists to
want to turn back the clock to conditions of handicraft in
a limited society, where the relations of guilds and small
markets allow the master craftsmen a say and a hand in
every phase of production, distribution, and consumption.
Can we achieve the same values with modern technology,
a national economy, and a democratic society? With this
aim, let us reanalyze efficiency and machine production.

Characteristic of American offices and factories is the
severe discipline with regard to punctuality. ( In some states
the law requires time clocks, to protect labor and calculate
the insurance.) Xow no doubt in many cases where workers
cooperate in teams, where business is timed by the mails,
where machines use a temporary source of power, being on
time and on the same time as everybody else is essential
to efficiency. But by and large it would make little difference
at what hour each man's work began and ended, so long as
the job itself was done. Often the work could be done at
home or on the premises indifferently, or part here part
there. Yet this laxity is never allowed, except in the typical
instances of hack-writing or commercial art typical because
these workers have an uneasy relation to the economy in
any case. (There is a lovely story of how William Faulkner
asked M-G-M if he could work at home, and when they
said, "Of course," he went back to Oxford, Mississippi.)

Punctuality is demanded not primarily for efficiency but
for the discipline itself. Discipline is necessary because the
work is onerous; perhaps it makes the idea of working even
more onerous, but it makes the work itself much more
tolerable, for it is a structure, a decision. Discipline estab-
lishes the work in an impersonal secondary environment
where, once one has gotten out of bed early in the morning,
the rest easily follows. Regulation of time, separation from
the personal environment: these are signs that work is not
a way of life; they are the methods by which, for better or

Three Community Paradigms 155

worse, work that cannot be energized directly by persona!
concern can get done, unconfused by personal concern.

In the Garden City plans, they "quarantined the tech-
nology" from the homes; more generally, we quarantine the
work from the homes. But it is even truer to say that we
quarantine the homes from the work. For instance, it is
calamitous for a man's wife or children to visit him at work;
this privilege is reserved for the highest bosses.

Reanalyzing Production

In planning a region of satisfying industrial work, we
therefore take account of four main principles:

1. A closer relation of the personal and productive en-
vironments, making punctuality reasonable instead of dis-
ciplinary, and introducing phases of home and small-shop
production; and vice versa, finding appropriate technical
uses for personal relations that have come to be considered
unproductive.

2. A role for all workers in all stages of the production
of the product; for experienced workers a voice and hand
in the design of the product and the design and operation
of the machines; and for al a political voice on the basis
of what they know best, their specific industry, in the
national economy.

3. A schedule of work designed on psychological and
moral as well as technical grounds, to give the most well-
rounded employment to each person^ in a diversified en-
vironment. Even in technology and economics, the men are
ends as well as means.

4. Relatively small units with relative self-sufficiency, so
that each community can enter into a larger whole with
solidarity and independence of viewpoint.

These principles are mutually interdependent.

1. To undo the present separation of work and home
environments, we can proceed both ways: (a) Return cer-
tain parts of production to home-shops or near home; and

156 COMMUNITAS

(b) Introduce domestic work and certain productive family-
relations, which are now not considered part of the economy
at all, into the style and relations of the larger economy.

(a) Think of the present proliferation of machine-tools.
It could once be said that the sewing machine was the only
widely distributed productive machine; but now, especially
because of the last war, the idea of thousands of small ma-
chine shops, powered by electricity, has became familiar;
and small power-tools are a best-selling commodity. In
general, the change from coal and steam to electricity and
oil has relaxed one of the greatest causes for concentration
of machinery around a single driving-shaft.

(b) Borsodi, going back to the economics of Aristotle,
has proved, often with hilarious realism, that home produc-
tion, such as cooking, cleaning, mending, and entertaining
has a formidable economic, though not cash, value. The
problem is to lighten and enrich home production by the
technical means and some of the expert attitudes of public
production, but without destroying its individuality.

But the chief part of finding a satisfactory productive life
in homes and families consists in the analysis of personal
relations and conditions: e.g., the productive cooperation of
man and wife as it exists on farms, or the productive capa-
bilities of children and old folk, now economically excluded.
This involves sentimental and moral problems of extreme
depth and delicacy that could only be solved by the experi-
ments of integrated communities.

2. A chief cause of the absurdity of industrial work is
that each machine worker is acquainted with only a few
processes, not the whole order of production. And the
thousands of products are distributed he knows not how or
where. Efficiency is organized from above by expert man-
agers who first analyze production into its simple processes,
then synthesize these into combinations built into the ma-
chines, then arrange the logistics of supplies, etc., and then
assign the jobs.

As against this efficiency organized from above, we must

Three Community Paradigms 157

try to give this function to the workers. This is feasible only
if the workers have a total grasp of all the operations. There
must be a school of industry, academic and not immediately
productive, connected with the factory. Now let us distin-
guish apprentices and graduates. To the apprentices, along
with their schooling, is assigned the more monotonous work;
to the graduates, the executive and coordinating work, the
fine work, the finishing touches. The masterpiece that gradu-
ates an apprentice is a new invention, method, or other
practical contribution advancing the industry. The masters
are teachers, and as part of their job hold free discussions
looking to basic changes.

Such a setup detracts greatly from the schedule of con-
tinuous production; but it is a question whether it would
not prove more efficient in the long run to have the men
working for themselves and having a say in the distribution.
By this we do not mean merely economic democracy or
socialist ownership. These are necessary checks but are not
the political meaning of industrialism as such. What is
needed is the organization of economic democracy on the
basis of the productive units, where each unit, relying on its
own expertness and the bargaining power of what it has to
offer, cooperates with the whole of society. This is syndi-
calism, simply an industrial town meeting. To guarantee the
independent power of each productive unit, it must have
a relative regional self-sufficiency; this is the union of farm
and factory.

3. Machine work in its present form is often stultifying,
not a "way of life." The remedy is to assign work on psycho-
logical and moral as well as technical and economic grounds.
The object is to provide a well-rounded employment. Work
can be divided as team work and individual work, or physi-
cal work and intellectual work. And industries can be com-
bined in a neighborhood to give the right variety. For
instance, cast glass, blown glass, and optical instruments;
or more generally, industry and agriculture, and factory and
domestic work. Probably most important, but difficult to

158

C O M M U N I T A S

conjure with, Is the division in terms of faculties and powers,
routine and initiation, obeying and commanding.

The problem is to envisage a well-rounded schedule of
Jobs for each man, and to arrange the buildings and the
farms so that the schedule Is feasible.

4. The Integration of factory and farm brings us to the
idea of -regionalism and regional relative autonomy. These
are the following main parts:

(a) Diversified farming as the basis of self -subsistence
and, therefore, small urban centers (200,000).

(b) A number of mutually dependent industrial centers,
so that an important part of the national economy Is firmly

The town and its environs: 1. City squares. 2. and S. Diversified

farms accommodating all the children and their schools (the
parents who work in the squares will generally live in the inner
belt) 4. Industrialized agriculture and dairying 5. Open country,
grazing, etc.

The city squares and farms within bicycle dMance; the principle
of the plan is that, except for the numnce fact@ : rie$ on the out-

sJcirfe, none of the community or domestic functions is zoned in
isolation. Thus the squares toil! be formed by libraries, factories,
dweflfags, storey schools, restaurants, etc., as function, appear-
ance, and community sentiment dictate (cf. Printing Square,
p. IBS). 1, Airport and interregional market 2. Express highways,
green beti, md nuisance factories 3. Four-acre farms, urban
parents dwellings and elementary schools. The peripheral roads,
bordering the "hexagon of city squares and arcing the local
automobile and truck traffic, pass under or over the express roads
or conned with them by ramp.

160 C O M M U N I T A S

controlled. (Hie thought is always to have freedom secured
by real power.)

( c) These industries developed around regional resources
of field, mine, and power.

Diversified farmers can be independent, and small farms
have therefore always been a basis of social stability, though
not necessarily of peasant conservatism. On the other hand,
for the machines now desirable, the farmer needs cash and
links himself with the larger economy of the town.

The political problem of the industrial worker is the re-
verse, since every industry is completely dependent on the
national economy, for both materials and distribution. But
by regional interdependence of industries and the close in-
tegration of factory and farm work factory workers taking
over in the fields at peak seasons, farmers doing factory
work in the winter; town people, especially children, living
in the country; farmers domestically making small parts
for the factories the industrial region as a whole can secure
for itself independent bargaining power in the national
whole.

The general sign of this federal system is the distinction
of the local regional market from the national market. In
transport, the local market is served by foot, bicycle, cart,
and car; the national market by plane and trailer-truck.

(Now all of this decentralized units, double markets,
the selection of industries on political and psychological as
well as economic and technical grounds all this seems a
strange and roundabout way of achieving an integrated na-
tional economy, when at present this unity already exists
with a tightness that leaves nothing to be desired, and an
efficiency that is even excessive. But we are aiming at a
different standard of efficiency, one in which invention will
flourish and the job will be its own incentive; and most
important, at the highest and nearest ideals of external life:
liberty, responsibility, self-esteem as a workman, and initi-
ative. Compared with these aims the present system has
nothing to offer us. )

Three Community Paradigms 161

A Schedule and Its Model

TYPICAL SCHEDULE OF ACTIVITIES FOR

MEMBERS OF A COMMUNE

(numerals equal months}

Basic Work t ^ 2j

I g c a

t

Factory 8(a) 6 1

Industrial Agriculture 3(d) 2(d) V 1

Diversified Agriculture (8 V V

Domestic Industry- 18 V(e) 1

Formal and Teclmical

Learning 2(b) l(b)

Teclrnieal Teaching l(b) l(b)

General Education V 5

Study and Travel 2(f)

Individual Work (c) 2

Unscheduled (g) 1 1 1 1 V 1

Notes on the Schedule

( a ) The factory* work of the master workman and workwoman

includes executive and fine work.

{ b ) The time of technical education runs concurrently with the

working period.

( c ) Graduate work at one's own time and place could be in a

traveling trailer 0r country cottage; could comprise designing,

162 C O M M U X I T A S

drafting, assemblage of hand-assembled wholes (e.g., radios or
clocks), finishing operations (lens- grinding), etc.

(d) Master fanmvork in industrial agriculture includes super-
vision and maintenance and is divided cooperatively to spread
over the year. The more mechanical work at peak seasons is done
bv the factory apprentices.

(e) Farm-family industry includes the making of parts for the
factories, cooperation with industrial agriculture (e.g., field
kitchens), educational care of boarding city children.

{) The spread of activity of the youth over many categories,

i icluding two months of travel, gives them an acquaintance with

the different possibilities.

(g) Activity at one's own fancy or imagination vocational,

avocatkmal, recreational, etc.

(V) Activities engaged in as occasion arises.

A Piazza in the Town

With us at present in America, a man who is fortunate
enough to have useful and important work to do that is
caled for and socially accepted, work that has initiative and
exercises his best energies such a man (he is one in a
thousand among us) is likely to work not only very hard
but too hard; he finds himself, as if compulsively, always
going back to his meaningful job, as if the leisurely pursuits
of society were not attractive. But we would hope that where
every man has such work, where society is organized only
to guarantee that he has, that people will have a more good-
humored and easygoing attitude. Not desiring to get away
from their work to a leisure that amounts to very little (for
where there is no man's work there is no man's play) , people
will be leisurely about their work it is all, one way or an-
other, making use of the time.

Now, the new community has dosed squares like those
described by Camilo Sitte. Such squares are the definition
of a city.

Squares are not avenues of motor or pedestrian traffic,
but are places where people remain. Place of work and

4-SH3-

A square in the town: integration of work,, love and knowledge

home are close at hand, but in the city square is what is still

more interesting the other people.

The easygoing leisure of piazzas is a long simple interim,
just as easygoing people nowadays are often happiest on
train trips or driving to work, the time in-between. Con-
science is clear because a useful task will begin at a set time
(not soon) . The workers of the new community give them-
selves long lunchtimes indeed. For, supposing ten men are
needed on a machine or a line for four hours' work: they
arrange to start sometime in midaftemoon, and where
should they ind each other, to begin, but in the piazza.

164

COMMUNITAS

On one side of the piazza opens the factory; another en-
trance is a smaE library, provided with ashtrays. As in all
other squares, there is a clock with bells; it's a reminder,
riot a tyrant.

The leisure of piazzas is made of repetitive small pleas-
ures like feeding pigeons and watching a fountain. These
are ways of being with the other people and striking up
conversations. It is essential to have outdoor and indoor
tables with drinks and small food.

There is the noise of hammering, and the explosions of
tuning a motor, from small shops a little way off. But if it's
a quieter square, there may be musicians. Colored linen
and silk are blowing on a line not flags but washing! For
everything is mixed up here. At the same time, there is
something of the formality of a college campus.

A busy square

A quiet square

Another face of the piazza is an apartment house, where
an. urban family is making a meal They go about this as
follows. The ground floor of the building is not only a
restaurant but a f oodstore; the farmers deliver their produce
here. The family cooks upstairs, phones down for their
uncooked meat, vegetables, salad, and fixings, and these
are delivered by dumbwaiter, cleaned and peeled the pota-
toes peeled and spinach washed by machine. They 'dress
and season the roast to taste and send it back with the
message; "Medium rare about 1845, w The husband ob-
serves, unfortunately for the twentieth time, that when he
was a student in Paris a baker on the comer used to roast
their chickens in Ms oven. Simpler folk, who live in smaller
row houses up the block, consider this procedure a lot of
foolishness; they just shop for their food, prepare it them-
selves, cook it, and eat it. But they don't have factory jobs:
they ran a lathe in the basement.

The main exit from the square is almost cut off by a
monument with an inscription,. But we cannot decipher the
future inscription. Trie square seems enclosed.

In the famous piazzas described and measured in all their

166 C O M M U N I T A S

asymmetry by Camilla Sitte, the principal building, the
building that gives its name to the place, as the Piazza San
Marco or the Piazza dei Signori, is a church, town hall or
guild hall. What are such principal buildings in the squares
we are here describing? We don't know.

The windmill and water tower here, that work the foun-
tain and make the pool, were put up gratuitously simply
because such an ingenious machine is beautiful.

A Farm and Its Children

Let us rear all the children in the natural environment
where they are many and furnish a society for one another.
This has an immense pedagogic advantage, for the business
of the country environment is plain to the eyes, it is not
concealed in accounts and factories. The mechanism of
urban production is clear to adult minds; the nature of farm
production is not much clearer to the adults than to the
children of ten or eleven.

Integrating town and country, we are able to remedy the
present injustice whereby the country bears the burden of
rearing and educating more than its share of the population,
then loses 50% of the investment at maturity. (And then
the cities complain that the youth have been educated on
rural standards!) If the city children go to the country
schools, the city bears its pro rata share of the cost and has
the right to a say in the policy.

The parents who work in the city live in small houses
on nearby farms: that is home for the children. But when
they leave for work, the children are not alone but are still
at home on the farm. Some such arrangement is necessary,
for it is obvious that we cannot, as the urban home continues
to break down, be satisied with the pathos of creches,
nursery-schools, and kindergartens.

To the farmers, the city families are the most valuable
source of money income.

The best society for growing children, past the age of

LATE PC T ATCLS

GSSi&y v \e?^-rCs^^sN/ 1> \ /\
K4-,

Disposition of farm production. The principle of the diversified
farm is symbiosis, with a minimum of artificial fertilizer; city
sewage, enriched by the products of the farm, is piped back to
fertilize the hnd.

total dependency, is other children, older and younger by
easy grades. It is a rough society but characterized at worst
by conflict rather than by loving, absolute authority. These
children, then, no longer sleep with their parents, but in a
dormitory.

From quite early, children are set to work feeding the
animals and doing chores that are occasionally too hard for
them. Perhaps urban sentiment can here alleviate the condi-
tion of farm and city children botk

Everybody praises diversified, farming as a way of life.
Yet the farm youth migrate to the city when they can. (Just
as everybody praises lovely Ireland, but the young Irish
leave in droves.) This: is inevitable when al the advertised

168

COMMUNITAS

social values, broadcast by radio and cinema, are urban
values. It is universally admitted that these values are clap-
trap; but they are more attractive than nothing. To counter-
act this propaganda, the farm-sociologists try to establish a
social opinion specifically rural, they revive square dances
and have 4-H clubs and contests, organized by the farmers'
collectives and cooperatives.

But is it necessary for "farm" and "city" to compete? All
values are human values.

The yard; the house is bulk of prefabricated and bed materials.

First floor: large space for gathering and food, a room for do-
mestic industry, a room for the children's play and study near
the work room and the farmyard. Second floor: skepiag

2* FLOOR

1" FLOOR

Three Community Paradigms

169

Interior of the gathering-space and view from the road. A com-
bination of handwork and prefabrication. The painting (after
Uondrian) is not -placed against a -painted wall

170 C O M M U N I T A S

Regional and National Economy

The large number of diversified farms means, on the one
hand, that the region is self-subsistent, but on the other
that the farmers have little crop to export outside the region.
Their cash comes, however, from the city market, from
domestic industry, from some industrial agriculture, and
from housing the city folk. If farmers have a specialized
crop, such as grapes or cotton, it is processed in the town.
All this guarantees a tight local economy.

Now, even apart from political freedom, such a tight
local economy is essential if there is to be a close relation
between production and consumption, for it means that
prices and the value of labor will not be so subject to the
fluctuations of the vast general market. A man's work, mean-
ingful during production, will somewhat carry through the
distribution and what he gets in return. That is, within
limits, the nearer a system gets to simple household econ-
omy, the more it is an economy of specific things and serv-
ices that are bartered, rather than an economy of generalized
money.

"Economy of things rather than money" this formula
is the essence of regionalism. The persons of a region draw
on their local resources and cooperate directly, without the
intermediary of national bookkeeping with its millions of
clashing motives never resoluble face-to-face. The regional
development of the TVA, brought together power and fer-
tilizer for farms, navigation and the prevention of erosion,
the control of floods and the processing of foods, national
recreation, and in this natural cooperation it produced a
host of ingenious inventions. All of this (in its inception)
was carried on in relative autonomy, under the loose head-
ing of "general welfare."

The kind of life looked for in this new community de-
pends on the awareness of local distinctness, and this is
also the condition of political freedom as a group of indus-

Three Communitij Paradigms 171

tries and farm cooperatives, rather than as a multitude of
abstract votes and consumers with cash.

Yet every machine economy is a national and interna-
tional economy. The fraction of necessary goods that can
be produced in a planned region is very substantial, but it
is still a fraction. And this fact is the salvation of regionalism!
For otherwise regionalism succumbs to provincialism
whether we consider art or literature, or the characters of
the people, or the fashions in technology. The regional in-
dustrialists in their meeting find that, just because their
region is strong and productive, they are subject to wide
circles of influence, they have to keep up.

Refinement

Let us try to envisage the moral ideal of such a com-
munity as we are describing.

In tiie luxury city of consumers' goods, society was geared
to an expanding economy capital investment and consurop-

SOME ELEMENTARY PRINCIPLES

FOR THE
MORAL SELECTION OF MACHINES

1. Utility (Functionalist B. Constructlvisf beauty
beauty]

3. Relative independence

2. Transparency of of machine from non-
Operation ubiquitous power

A. Repasrabilify by the 4. Proportion between

average well-edu- total effort and utility

cated person (Neo-Funciionalist

(Freedom) beauty)

172 COMMUNITAS

tion had to expand at all costs, or even especially at all
costs. In the third community that we shall describe in this
book, "maximum security, minimum regulation," we shall
find that, in order to achieve the aim of social security and
human liberty, a part of the economy must never be allowed
to expand at all.

But in this present, middle-of-the-road, plan there is
no reason why the economy either must expand or must not
expand. Every issue is particular and comes down to the
particular question: "Is it worthwhile to expand along this
new line? Is it worth the trouble to continue along that old
line?"

This attitude is a delicate one, hard for us Americans to
grasp clearly: we always like to do it bigger and better, or
we jump to something new, or we cling. But when people
are accustomed to knowing what they are lending their
hands to, when they know the operations and the returns,
when they don't have to prove something competitively,
then they are just in the business, so to speak, of judging the
relation o means and ends. They are all efficiency experts.
And then, curiously, they may soon hit on a new conception
of efficiency itself, very unlike that of the engineers of
Veblen. When they can say, "It would be more efficient to
make it this way," they may go on to say, "And it would
be even more efficient to forget it altogether/*

Efficient for what? For the way of life as a wiiole. Now
in all times honorable people have used this criterion as a
negative check: "We don't do that kind of thing, even if it's
convenient or profitable." But envisage doing it positively
and inventively: "Let's do it, it becomes us. Or let's omit it
and simplify, it's a lag and a drag."

Suppose that one of the masters, away on his two months
of individual work, drafting designs for furniture, should,
having studied the furniture of the Japanese, decide to dis-
pense with chairs. Such a problem might create a bitter
struggle in the national economy, one thing leading to
another.

The economy, like any machine economy, would expand,

Chairs kept us off the drafty, muddy floor but if we dont hate
mud floors and do hate radiant heating why chairs?

for It creates a surplus. It would expand into refinement.
The Japanese way is a powerful example. They cover the
loor with deep washable mats and dispense with chairs
and dispense with the floor. It is too much trouble to clutter
the room with furniture. It is not too much trouble to lavish
many days* work on the minute carving on the inside of a
finger pull of a shoji. They dispense 'with the upholstery but
take pains in arranging the lowers. They do not build
permanent partitions in a room because the activities of
life are always varying.

When production becomes an integral part of life, the
workman becomes an artist. It is the definition of an artist
that he follows the medium., and finds new possibilities of
expression in it. He is not bound by the fact that things
have always been made in a certain way, nor even by the
fact that it is these things that have been made. Our indus-
trialistseven International Business Machines are very

174 C O M M U N I T A S

much concerned these days to get "creative" people, and
they make psychological studies on how to foster an "atmos-
phere of creativity"; but they don't sufficiently conjure with
the awful possibility that truly creative people might tell
them to shut up shop. They wash to use creativity in just
the way that it cannot be used, for it is a process that also
generates its own ends.

Notes on Neo-Functionalism:
the Ailanthus and the Morning-Glory

In the Introduction to this book, we called this attitude
neo-functionaiism, a functionalism that subjects the function
to a formal critique. The neo-functionalist asks: Is the use
as simple, ingenious, or clear as the efficient means that
produce it? Is the using a good experience? For instance,
these days they sell us machines whose operation is not
transparent and that an intelligent layman cannot repair.
Such a thing is ugly in itself, and it enslaves us to repairmen.

There is one abuse of present-day production, however,
that is not only ugly and foolish but morally outrageous,
and the perpetrators should be ostracized from decent so-
ciety. This is building obsolescence into a machine, so it
will wear out, be discarded, and replaced. For instance,
automobile-repair parts are now stocked for only five years,
whereas previously they w r ere stocked for ten. Does this
mean that the new cars, meant to last a shorter time, are
cheaper? On the contrary, they are more expensive. Does it
mean that there are so many new improvements that there
is no point in keeping the older, less efficient models run-
ning? There are no such improvements; the new models are
characterized merely by novel gimmicks to induce sales-
just as the difficulty of repair and the obsolescence are built
in to enforce sales.

Neo-functionalists are crotchety people, for they are in
love with the goddess of common sense, and the way we
do things catches them by the throat. They take exception

MEANS AND ENDS

31

interpenetratson

of pliysscci
and moral ends

Maximum
exploitation of
physical means

A neo-functionall&l analysis of the three paradigms

to much that is universally accepted, because it doesn't add
up; they stop to praise many things universally disregarded,
such as the custom of sitting on slum stoops and sidewalks,
with or without chairs: Park Avenue does not provide this
amenity. To a neo-functionalist, much that is insisted on
seems not worth all that bother, and he is often easygoing;
Ms attitude is interpreted as laziness, but he sees no reason
to be busy if he is not bored. He praises the ailanthus.

Of all trees and shrubs it seems to be only the locust and
especially the ailanthus that flourish of themselves in the
back alleys and yard-square plots of dirt that are the gar-
dens of Manhattan Island. They bloom from the mouths
of basements. But the maple saplings and the elms that are
transplanted there at large expense and are protected from
pests with doses of a nauseating juice, languish and die in
that environment of motor fumes and pavements.

Should our native city not, out of simple respect and
piety., exalt the ailanthus to be our chief ornamental scenery,
and make places for it everywhere? For the ailanthus loves
5 and thrives in our balance of nature. Our city is rich
enough, it could become elegant enough, to flaunt a garden

Backyard^ New York City

of native weeds. There is everywhere a prejudice against
the luxuriating plantain weed, which as abstract design is as
lovely as can be. Why should not this weed be raised to the
dignity of a grass it is only a matter of a name and then
carefully be weeded in, in rows and stars, to decorate the
little sidewalk plots?

The Rivers of New York

Trained in the New Commune, the neo-functionalist men-
tions also the ludicrous anomaly of New York's bathing-
places. During the heat of summer tens of thousands of
Manhattanites daily travel from two to three hours to go
swimming and boating on far-off shores. Many millions of
dolars were spent in developing a bathing place no less

Three Community Paradigms 177

than 40 miles from midtown Manhattan, and this place it
is the darling of our notorious Park Commissioner has been
connected with the city by remarkable highways on which
at peak hours the traffic creeps at four miles an hour, while
the engines boil.

Meantime the venturesome poor boys of the city swim
daily, as they always have, in the Hudson River and the
East River under the sidelong surveillance of usually reas-
onable police; it is quite illegal. It is illegal because the
water is polluted. No strenuous effort is made by the Park
Commissioner to make it unpolluted; and the shore is not
developed for bathing. Yet to the boys it seems the obvious
thing to do on a hot day, to dive into the nearest water,
down the hill at the end of the street, into

Our lordly Hudson hardly flowing

under the green-grown cliffs

and has no peer in Europe or the East.

A typical view of Manhattan, reorganized as proposed here. This
is a scene along the East River, with facilities for boating, bath-
ing and other types of recreation. Business buildings would be
confined to a narrow spine running north and south up the center
of the island, near two great arterial highways.

178 COMMUNITAS

The Museum of Art

Suppose again, says our aeo-functionaUst friend, that a
number of mighty masterpieces of painting and statuary
were decentralized from the big museum and placed, one in
this neighborhood church (as in Rome one encounters as-
tounded, M oses) , and one on this fountain in a local square.
wherever there is a quiet place to pause. A few of the neigh-
bors would come to have a friendly and perhaps somewhat
proprietary acquaintance with their masterpiece. Are they
not to be trusted so close to the treasure?

One cannot help but think of Florence that has come
down to us not as a museum city (like Venice), but as a
bustling modem town, yet still a continuous home for those
strange marble and bronze monsters of the Renaissance, in
the squares. It would be very interesting for a sociologist
to study, with his questionnaires, the effect of those things
on the Florentines. They have had an effect.

When there is such a work in a neighborhood, a stranger,
who from afar has heard of its fame, will come to visit the
local square where he would otherwise never have ventured.
Then the children notice how carefully and reverently he is
looking at the statue they climb on.

Nurses' Uniforms

The washing and ironing of all New York's city hospitals
is to be done at a great municipal laundry. And it comes out
on investigation that the great part of the work can be done
by a small fraction of the labor and machinery, but the small
remainder of the work requires all the rest of the labor. It
is the kind of situation that puts a neo-functionalist on the
alert. It is that most of the labor goes into ironing the uni-
forms of doctors and nurses, but especially into ironing the
frilly bonnets and aprons. The washing and the flatwork is

Three Community Paradigms 179

done by machine and mangle, but the frills require hand-
finishing.

It's not worth it. Make the uniforms of seersucker or any-
thing else that doesn't need ironing. Make the hats in the
form of colored kerchiefs that could equally well indicate
the schools from which the nurses have come.

These conclusions are offered to the city fathers who have
ordered a functional laundry to be designed; but they de-
cide that they're not practical.

The Morning-Glory

Yet our neo-functionalist friend, who is a great lover of
oriental anecdotes, also approvingly tells the following
story.

"In the sixteenth century, the morning-glory was as yet
a rare plant in Japan. Rikiu had an entire garden planted
with it, which he cultivated with assiduous care. The fame
of his convolvuli reached the ear of the Taiko, and he ex-
pressed a desire to see them; in consequence Rikiu invited
him to a morning tea at his house. On the appointed day

Morning-glory

180 COMMUNITAS

the Taiko walked through the garden, but nowhere could
he see any evidence of the flower. The ground had been
leveled and strewn with fine pebbles and sand. With sullen

anger the despot entered the tearoom, but a sight restored
his humor. In the tokonoma, in a rare bronze of Sung work-
manship, lay a single morning-glory the queen of the whole
garden/' (Kakuzo Okakura)

The Theory of Packages

In general, when the consumption of a product is re-
moved from its production, by the geographical distance
between factory and home, by the economic distance of
sale and resale up to retail, and the temporal distance be-
tween making and use, the product is encased in a series of
packages. There are the shipper's crate and the whole-
saler's case and the middleman's carton and the retailer's
box and the waterproof, airtight cellophane wrapper that
must be kept inviolate and untouched except by the ultimate
eater.

These packages are the career of physical goods as a com-
modity, and once the last wrapper is broken, the commodity
is destroyed, it is unsaleable. It has been corrupted by the
moisture and air and germs of life, by the passionate fact
that someone wants the thing enough to touch it rather
than sell it. Economically, then, this is a sacramental mo-
ment, when a man or woman brutally breaks the wrapper
and takes the bread out of circulation. (From any point of
view, the insipid taste is less interesting.)

The principle of packages is a corollary of Ralph Bor-
sodi's blanket principle that as the cost of production per
unit decreases by mass production, the cost of distribution
increases because of the intermediaries involved in mass dis-
tribution. From this principle he derives the paradox of
prosperity and insecurity: the copiousness of commodities
entails the subordination of the consumer to a vast econ-
omic machine which can become deranged in different

Three Community Paradigms 181

parts and leave him without elementary necessities. Bor-
sodf s principle does not mean that machine production
and labor-saving devices are humanly inefficient, but only
when they become too geographically and economically
centralized. Borsodi himself is an enthusiast for domestic
machines and home industries, but there is also the possi-
bility of a reasonably large community of integrated indus-
trial, agricultural, domestic and cultured life, where the
efficiency of machines can be exploited without insecurity.

Time

At present, a man's time of life is also put into packages.
We speak, as the British anarchist Woodcock has pointed
out, of "lengths of time as if they were length of calico." He
concludes that the clock, the time clock that the worker
aggressively "punches," is the chief machine of industrial
exploitation, for it enables human labor to be quantified
and priced as a commodity.

This commodity-time is the time of not-life that people
step into when they take leave of their hearts, their homes,
and even their heads, early in the morning. It is the time
of a secondary environment which is, however, still loud
with the authoritative but inner and forgotten voice of

182 COMMUNITAS

parents who seemed to wish (so children get to think) to

deprive one of pleasure and ease. Especially in the morning
at twenty to eight, and late in the afternoon at twenty after
four, the fatherly face of the clock is frowning, deeper first

on the left side, then on the right.

Advertising

Every one of the packages is printed with is own mumbo-
jumbo of \vords.

In the nature of the case, when the consumer is far from
the producer; has not ordered the production nor handled
the means of it; nor estimated the cost of the means in pro-
portion to the satisfaction enjoyed; it is necessary to interest
him in the product, to create a want for it that has not been
fired by any previous activity. (When we make or command
something to be made, there are goal gradients toward the
use. ) Also, he must be persuaded to buy it if it is something
that is, perhaps, not absolutely indispensable. All these
functions are fulfilled by advertising, which draws less and
less on the direct relation between the excellence of the
product and the cost of its making the word "cheap" is
never used but more and more on the comparative esti-
mates of social opinion, emulation, fear of inferiority or
not belonging. These drives require a handsome fund of
insecurity to begin with.

Pictures and slogans are repeated again and again, and
it is now classical theory, and perhaps even somewhat true,
that repetition leads to belief and even overt action. This
theory is true under certain conditions, namely that the
use of words is reflex behavior, rather than an action of
need, passion, invention, observation, and reflection. It is a
poor use of speech, and unfortunately it does damage to
English, for free poets must now take pains to use out-
landish ways of speech to make sure that their words will
not be taken in the meanings to which people have become
accustomed, instead of relying on, and striving to reach, the
meanings to which people are accustomed.

Three Community Paradigms 183

The Theory of Home Furnishings

The furniture of a home expresses, in its quantity and
kind, the division of the concerns of the soul; in different
community arrangements this division falls in different
places.

On the principle of neo-functionaiism, the place where
the chief material outlay is made should give the chief
satisfaction, otherwise why bother? If this rule is neglected,
the material outlay becomes a dead weight, discouraging by
its initial cost and even more by its continuing presence.

Now except in the woods, the chief material OP day we
see about us is the public city with its services. But in
America these streets, squares, and highways do not pretend
to compete in satisfaction with the private homes or the
theaters of fantasy. They are a dead weight on these other
satisfactions. One emerges from the theater into an environ-
ment that is less exciting, and one emerges from home into
an environment that is quite impersonal and uninteresting.
In late medieval times, they spent no effort on the streets,
but burgher and baron adorned their homes.

Let us rather take a lesson from the Greeks who were
often practical in what concerned the chief end and did not
complicate their means. An Athenian, if free and male, ex-
perienced in the public places, the market, the law court,
the porticoes, the gymnasia, most of the feelings of ease,
intimacy, and personal excitement that we reserve for home
and private clubs. He lived in the city more than at home.
He had for his public objects the affairs of empire, civic
duties, and passions of friendship. There was no sharp dis-
tinction between public and private affairs.

On the civic places and public institutions, then, they
lavished an expense of architecture, mulcted from an empire
and slaves in the silver mines, that with us would be quite
deadening in its pretentiousness. But the thousands of free
men were at home there.

An Athenian's domestic home was very simple; it was not

184 COMMUNITAS

an asylum for his personality. It did not have to be filled with
furniture, mirrors, keepsakes, ciniosa, and games.

But a bourgeois gentleman, when he is about to leave
his home in the morning, kisses his wife and daughter, steps
before a mirror and adjusts his tie, and then, the last thing
before emerging, puts on a public face.

The most curious examples of heavily furnished homes
that are the insane asylums of the spirit frozen and re-
jected in the city square can be found among the middle
classes at the beginning of the twentieth century. And the
most curious room of this most curious home was not the
bedroom, the dining room, or the parlor, where after all
there existed natural and social satisfactions, but the master's
den, the jungle and the cavern of his reveries. In our decade,
this den of nostalgic revery is in print in the stories of The
New Yorker magazine.

Public Faces in Private Places

It is always a question whether the bourgeois den is
worse or better than no private home at all, the norm of the
states ancient and modern which consider men as public
animals, and homes as army barracks.

But it has remained for our own generation to perfect the
worst possible community arrangement, the home of the
average American. This home is liberally supplied with fur-
niture and the comforts of private life, but these private
things are neither made nor chosen by personal creation or
idiosyncratic taste, but are made in a distant factory and
distributed by unresisted advertising. At home they exhaust
by their presence a bare cell would give more peace or
arouse restlessness. They print private life with a public
meaning. But if we turn to read this public meaning, we
find that the only moral aim of society is to provide private
satisfactions called the Standard of Living. This is remark-
able. The private places have public faces, as Auden said,
but the public faces are supposed to imitate private faces.
What a booby trap!

Public place,
Athens

Private place,
Victorian England

186 COMMUNITAS

A Japanese Home

"One of the surprising features that strikes a foreigner as
he becomes acquainted with the Japanese house is the entire
absence of so many things that with us clutter the closets
and make squirrels* nests of the attic. The reason for this is
that the people have never developed the miserly spirit of
hoarding truck and rubbish with the idea that some day it
will come into use." (Edward Morse)

"Swallows are often encouraged to build nests in the
home, in the room most often used by the family. A shelf is
built below the nest. The children watch the construction of
the nest and the final rearing of the young birds." (Ibid.)

"One comes to realize how few are the essentials neces-
sary for personal comfort . . . and that personal comfort is
enhanced by the absence of many things deemed indispens-
able. In regard to the bed and its arrangement, the Japanese
have reduced the affair to its simplest expression. The whole
floor, the whole house indeed, is a bed, and one can fling
oneself down on the soft mats, in the draft or out of it,
upstairs or down and find a smooth, firm and level surface
upon which to sleep." (Ibid.)

"When a tea master has arranged a flower to his satisfac-
tion, he will place it in the tokonoma, the place of honor in
a Japanese room. Nothing else will be placed near it which
might interfere with its effect, not even a plant; unless there
be some special esthetic reason for the combination. It rests
there Eke an enthroned prince, and the guests or disciples
on entering the room will salute it with profound bows/ 5
(Okakura)

A Japanese house is essentially one big room, divided by
sliding screens as desired, for the activity of life is ever
varying. Outside and inside are also open to one another.

Tokonoma in guestroom, Hachi-ishi. (after Morse)

p-
UL

=(

ton

L/V1NG

S1TTIK16

EMTRY

PAftLOft

STUDY

Pfon o/ dwelling house in Tokyo; sliding screens indicated bij
arrows, tree trunk hj T. (after Morse)

CHAPTER 7

Planned Security

With Minimum Regulation

The Sense in Which

Our Economy Is Out of Human Scale

Our economy is gigantic by the quantity and number of
kinds of goods and services, but as such it is not out of
human scale, for to the immense civilized population the
immense quantity of goods is appropriate. The increase of
useless wealth of individuals, in the form of gadgets sold
by advertising, may not add to human virtue, but then it
adds to folly which is equally human. The inequitable dis-
tribution of wealth, especially considered internationally,
is a subject of resentment, and this is an intensely human
proposition.

But we have grown out of human scale in the following
way: Starting from the human goods of subsistence and
luxury, the increment of profit was reinvested in capital
goods in order to earn more profits, to win for the enter-
prisers more luxury and power; this is still human motiva-
tion. But in recent decades the result has been that the
center of economic concern has gradually shifted from either
providing goods for the consumer or gaining wealth for the
enterpriser, to keeping the capital machines at work and
running at full capacity; for the social arrangements have
become so complicated that, unless the machines are run-
ning at nearly full capacity, all wealth and subsistence are
jeopardized, investment is withdrawn, men are unemployed.
That is, when the system depends on all the machines run-
ning, unless ever y kind of goods is produced and sold, it is

188

Three Community Paradigms 189

also impossible to produce bread. Then an economy is out
of human scale.

Social Insurance vs. the Direct Method

But elementary subsistence and security cannot be ne-
glected by any social order; they are political needs, prior
to economic needs. So the governments of the most highly
capitalized states intervene to assure elementary security
which is no longer the first business of the economy. And
the tack they take is the following: to guarantee social secur-
ity by subsidizing the full productivity of the economy.
Security is provided by insurance paid in the money that
comes from the operation of the whole economy. The amaz-
ing indirectness of this procedure is brilliantly exposed by
the discovery of a new human "right" as if the rights of
man could be so easily amended. This is the "right to em-
ployment/* failing which one gets the insurance. Full em-
ployment is the device by which we flourish; and so the old
curse of Adam, that he must work in order to live, now
becomes a goal to be struggled for, just because we have
the means to produce a surplus, cause of all our woes. This
is certainly out of human scale, yet the statesmen of America
and England talk this way with absolute conviction; and
anyone who spoke otherwise would be voted out of office.

The immediate result of such a solution, of insurance,
social credit, or any other kind of give-away money, is to
tighten even closer the economic trap. Whatever freedom
used to come from free enterprise and free market and they
are freedoms which were indeed fought for with blood is
now trapped in regulation and taxes. The union of govern-
ment and economy becomes more and more total; we are in
the full tide toward statism. This is not a question of any-
body's bad intentions, but follows from the connection of
the basic political need of subsistence with the totality of
an industrial economy.

So much for the indirect solution.

190

C M M U N I T A S

TOTAL P20PUCT

TOTAL f*a.OOOT

suefcsreMCff

PttOPVCT

Goods

^vS 80

Three Community Paradigms 191

The direct solution, of course, would be to divide the
economy and provide the subsistence directly, letting the
rest complicate and fluctuate as it will. Let whatever is
essential for life and security be considered by itself, and
since this is a political need in an elementary sense, let
political means be used to guarantee it. But the rest of the
economy, providing wealth, power, luxury, emulation, con-
venience, interest and variety, has to do with varying human
wishes and satisfactions, and there is no reason for govern-
ment to intervene in it in any way. The divided economy
has, therefore, the twofold advantage that it directly pro-
vides the essential thing that is in jeopardy, without having
to underwrite something else; and it restricts the interven-
tion of government to this limited sphere.

Up to, say, sixty years ago, more than half of the pro-
ductive capacity of our economy was devoted to subsistence;
subsistence could be regarded as the chief end of the econ-
omy; and whatever their own motives, most enterprisers
served the subsistence market. Now, however, in the United
States less than a tenth of the economy is concerned with
subsistence goods. (Probably nearer a fifteenth; the exact
figure would depend on what one considers an adequate
minimum.) Except for the biological and political factors
involved, the economic machinery could roll almost as usual
though everybody were dead of starvation, exposure, and
disease. When the situation is viewed in this way, one of
the causes is at once clear why prosperity and surplus lead
precisely to insecurity: namely, that too few people are
busy about subsistence, and as we know from recent farm-
ing history, those who are busy about it try to get out of it;
there's no real money in meat and potatoes.

But once the economy would be divided as we are sug-
gesting, the very techniques of industry that, when applied
incidentally to subsistence, lead to insecurity, would, applied
directly to subsistence, produce it with an even smaller
fraction of the social labor than at present.

Probably there are various political means by which this

192 COMMUNITAS

small fraction of production could be effectuated, and we
will soon develop an obvious one, direct state production of
subsistence by universally conscripted labor, run as a state
monopoly like the post office or the army, but paying not
money but its own scrip, exchangeable only for subsistence
goods made by this same enterprise.

(This is a vast undertaking. It would be apparently
simpler to effect approximately the same end by using pri-
vate semi-monopolistic concessionaires in the state non-
profit subsistence-business. But if indeed the production
cost is absolutely minimum and the types absolutely
standard and non-competitive, how could a private firm
profit? Further, it is intolerable, and unconstitutional, to
have to work for a private concessionaire. Therefore we pre-
fer the state production taking over relevant private plant
and building its own plant because of its purity of method.
It takes subsistence out of the economy. Subsistence is not
something to profit by, to invest in, to buy or sell. On the
part of the consumer, it is not something to choose or reject
or contract for or exchange his labor for, but simply to
work for.)

On whatever method and there are no doubt possibili-
ties we have not thought of there is one principle: to assure
subsistence by specific production of subsistence goods and
services rather than by insurance taxed from the general
economy. This involves a system of double money: the
"money" of the subsistence production and consumption
and the money of the general market. The subsistence-cer-
tificates are not money at all, for by definition a man's sub-
sistence leaves nothing to exchange; this "money" is like
wartime ration stamps, which are likewise not legally nego-
tiable. A man's right to life is not subject to trade.

A major moral advantage of this proposal is that every
person can know that the work he does for a living is un-
questionably useful and necessary, and unexploited. It is
life itself for himself and everybody else. In our times of so
much frivolous production and synthetic demand, and the

Three Community Paradigms 193

accompanying cynicism of the producers, the importance of
such a moral cannot be overestimated.

Another consequence: To everyone, but especially to the
small wage earner, the separation of his subsistence, employ-
ing a small fraction of his labor time, from the demands and
values of the general economy employing most of his labor
time, would give a new security, a breath of freedom, and
the possibility of choice. He is independent. He has worked
directly for what he absolutely needs; he does not feel the
pressure of being a drain on society; he does not fear that
his insurance payments will cease. By the same token, peo-
ple in general, including the small enterpriser, would be
more fearless, for their risks are less fatal. But indeed, these
things imply a change of social attitude so profound that
we must think deeply about both the dangers and the
opportunities.

The retrenchment of government from economic inter-
ference in the general part, again, might go very far, relax-
ing kinds of regulation that are now indispensable protec-
tion of women and children, protection of unions, and so
forth. For where the prospective wage earner has a sub-
sistence independently earned, the conditions under which
he agrees to work can be allowed to depend on his own
education rather than on the government's coercion of the
employer.

Let us sum up by contrasting the actual plans offered by
present-day governments with the plan here suggested.
They propose:

Security of subsistence.

A tax on the general economy.

Necessity to maintain the economy at full production
to pay the tax: therefore, governmental planning,
pump-priming, subsidies, and made work; a still
further tax, and possibly a falling rate of profit.

Insistence on the unemployed worker's accepting the
third or fourth job available, in order to prevent
a continuing drain on the insurance fund.

194 C O M M U N I T A S

Protection of the workers thus coerced by regulating
the conditions of industry and investment.

Against this we propose:

Security of subsistence.

Loss to the industrialist and merchant of the sub-
sistence market and a small fraction of the social
labor.

Coercion of a small fraction of the social labor to
produce the subsistence goods and services.

Economic freedom in all other respects.

Now financially, the choice between these two plans
would depend on the comparison between the insurance
and subsidies tax and the loss of labor time and market. ( Un-
fortunately, for reasons explained below, this comparison is
hard to make accurately at least by us.) Socially and
morally, however, there seems to be no comparison at all:
our way is direct, simple, liberating, and allows people a
quiet interim to make up their minds about things.

A History

The idea of guaranteeing subsistence by dividing the
economy rather than insurance is very old and we might
clarify the proposal here suggested by comparing and con-
trasting it with two or three of its predecessors just as the
scheme of social insurance is the heir of clerical and private
charity and of the state dole. What is crucial is the relation
between the subsistence economy and the general economy.

One of the earliest such ideas of modern industrial times
was the communities of Robert Owen, those well-regulated
squares that, starting anew in isolation, were to engage in
well-rounded agriculture and machine industry, but whether
with the aim of rising in the world or prospering and con-
tinuing in isolation is not really clear. For originally there
seem to have been three different motives for the communi-

Three Community Paradigms 195

ties, and three distinct classes of members. First, the motive
of an enlightened industrialist, ahead of both his time and
ours, to make the new machine industry a humane way of
life by organizing it into an all-around community, rather
than by tearing labor from the countryside into wage slavery
in a money economy; certain members came for this pur-
pose, to live better. Second, the motive of a philanthropist
on the poor board to provide relief for paupers by a method
of self-help by which they could rehabilitate themselves at
little cost to society; but in such a case, if the community
succeeded, was it to continue in competition with society,
or were its now capable members to filter back into the
general economy? Third, the motive of a Utopian pioneer to
start afresh in a virgin country, away from the world of
status and privilege, to establish a new society of socialism
and democracy; but if that had succeeded, it would have
undone the general economy.

The workshops of Louis Blanc had a more definite aim.
The personnel are the unemployed who have a "right to
work"; they work with capital provided by the state; and
they produce goods for the general market in competition
with the products of private capital. Here there is no limita-
tion on the new economy, either of restriction to subsistence
goods or of isolation, as in the Owenite communities. The
scheme is, and was probably meant to be, frankly revolution-
ary, for how could private economy compete with a state
economy that it was subsidizing by taxes on its own wealth?
(Although there is evidence that the spreading of new
money among the poor indeed benefited the middle class,
as a modern economist would have predicted.) The fact
that such an apparently explosive innovation could force its
way into political acceptance proves how right Marx was
when he wrote, in those years, that the specter of com-
munism was haunting Europe. And the way in which its fires
were quenched by legitimacy, by relying on the inefficiency
of bureaucrats and demoralized workers, and by sabotage-
so that in a moment of disillusionment the counter-revolu-

196 COMMUNITAS

tion could strike is a classic in political tactics and economic
error.

We may also mention in this series the Homestead Act
and similar plans, appropriate to societies that have large
undeveloped outskirts and frontiers: free land is given to
families that have failed in the general economy. The theory
is that in such an open economy especially when it is still
an economy of scarcitythe increase of farmers and the
development of new regions provide new markets. This is
the rational notion that new wealth is to the advantage of
everybody. However, when a somewhat similar farm sub-
sidy is advanced in our own times for instance, the loan of
farm animals and machines by a government agency the
general economy is not so receptive; for the land and people
rehabilitated are precisely those for which there was proved
to be no use, and their products are not needed in the sur-
plus and are not welcome as competition.

It remained for our own times, however, to hit on the
ultimate possible maladjustment between public production
and private production, the theory of the Works Progress
Administration, as set up to combat the Depression of '29.
The personnel were the unemployed, and they engaged in
productive work capitalized by the state; but the New Deal
had learned from the adventures of Louis Blanc not to set
class against class in economic competition; therefore the
products of the WPA were non-saleable. Not not-saleable
in the sense that they were consumed by their producers
(and that would have competed with the subsistence
market), but non-saleable in kind. What products? In a
state of advanced capitalism there are no such products, for
everything useful is preempted as a business. Thus if, on
the one hand, the WPA happened to generate something
useful, like the WPA theater, it at once met the outcry
of unfair competition from private enterprisers; if, on the
other hand, it kept nicely within the limits of futility, it met
with the charge of boondoggling. Fortunately the war

Three Community Paradigms 197

turned up In different parts of the world to provide a useful
non-competitive industry for everybody.

The most important variant of the WPA is the idea of
using the unemployed for public works. This is a form of
pump-priming. This use makes sense, but the following
possibilities occur: ( 1 ) The works expand and run into com-
petition with private enterprise, the fate of the TVA; (2)
When they are social services of real value, the works'
tempo and continuance ought not to depend on the supply
of idle labor, but should be expertly staffed on their own; or
(3) If they are made work pure and simple, then the most
imposing and costly structure of society's greatest employer
are restricted to the class of objects that make little differ-
ence whether or not they exist.

Conclusions from the History

As against the above, our proposal covers everybody in
the society rather than a special group, the unemployed. In
this it follows the plan of social insurance, which insures
everyone, regardless of prospective need. Everyone is liable
to a period of labor, or its equivalent, for the direct produc-
tion of subsistence goods, and all are entitled to the goods.

And instead of limiting the class of persons, the limitation
is set on the class of goods, subsistence goods. This kind is
the most universally essential, so it is reasonable to require
a universal service; nevertheless this part of the economy
is not allowed to expand or raise its standards, therefore it
cannot compete economically or dominate politically.

It is reasonable to speak in this way of a subsistence mini-
mum only when there is, in fact, a vast potential surplus,
when the minimum can be produced with a small fraction
of the social labor and there is opportunity for wide satis-
faction at a higher standard. Otherwise one is indirectly
flirting with the iron law of w r ages as a general policy.

Now, as we have suggested, the political execution of

198 COMMUNITAS

such a divided economy can have the form of a universal
labor service similar to periods of military conscription. As-
sume conservatively that a tenth of the social labor is re-
quired: then a man would serve in the national economy for
six or seven years of his life, spaced out as convenient
with a certain choice as to the years in which to serve. There
seems to be no reason why a wealthy man could not buy a
substitute to serve his time for him, but this would be at the
prevailing rate of wages in private industry, for why else
should the substitute sell his time? More democratic would
be an arrangement \vhereby the first period, say 18 to 20,
must be served in person; but later periods, when people
have settled into private affairs, could be served by paid
substitutes. Further details would be the adaptation of dif-
ferent age groups and skills to different kinds of work, the
problems being the same as in any general conscription.

This plan is coercive. In fact, if not in law, however, it is
less coercive than the situation most people are used to.
For the great mass of wage earners, it fixes a limit to the
necessities that, between capital and trade union, they are
subject to; and for the wealthy enterpriser, who would buy
substitutes, it is no more coercive than any other tax. On
constitutional grounds, the crucial objections to forced
labor have always been either that it subjects the individual
to a private enterpriser without contract (a form of slavery) ;
or it is unfairly competitive; or it broadens the power of the
state. None of these objections holds.

But an important political and economic difficulty of any
such plan is the following: In any divided economy with
double money there are relations between the two econo-
mies in which both are directly concerned. On the one hand,
the government can extend its coercion, without the freedom
of the market; this would come up in the exercise of the
right of eminent domain in order to provide the government
with what it must have. On the other hand, the private
economy uses its pressures of monopoly and speculation to
force the government's hand at opportune moments. These

Three Community Paradigms 199

dangers may be mitigated by making the government's busi-
ness as minimal and as independent of exchange as possible.
Yet in some sphere there must be cooperation. These are
where the same object is used for minimal and other uses, for
instance transportation. For one cannot have two parallel
systems of roads, railroads, and airlines. Perhaps, itself
moneyless, the government can contribute its share in the
form of labor service; and sometimes it can collect credit for
its running expenses from the private economy. We are
touching on a political principle beyond our scope here,
the principle of purity of means in the exercise of the differ-
ent powers of society. Government, founded on authority,
uses mainly the means of personal service; economy,
founded on exchange, uses mainly the means of money.

The Standard of Minimum Subsistence

What is the minimum standard on which a person will
feel himself secure and free, not struggling to get more in
the private economy, unless he chooses? The problem is
subtle and difficult, for although as a medical problem it
has a definite solution, as a psychological and moral problem
it depends on emulation, and who is emulated, and these
things themselves are subject to alteration good or bad.
What is minimum for even a poor Southern sharecropper
might be spendthrifty to an indio of Yucatan (who, how-
ever, has other satisfactions).

We are speaking always of a going surplus technology.
This technology which can provide all manner of things for
everybody can also, in a different way, produce a few things
of a very few kinds accompanied by a minimum regulation
of time, living arrangements, and habits of Me. How seri-
ously are people willing to dispense with many things in
order to have the freedom which they also think they want?

When combined with freedom, a minimum standard
would be far less than what is estimated minimum in our
present society. Let us give a single example. In estimating

200 COMMUNITAS

minimum standards of decency and safety, Stuart Chase
finds it indispensable for every home to have a radio, be-
cause in an integrated society especially during a total war
a person must have instant communications (and how
desirable to have it one way!) . But if the very point of our
minimum standard is to free people from "integration/* a
radio is a convenience which a person might think twice
about

Other examples of reducing, the "necessary" minimum
could be found by considering how much of decency of
appearance and how many contacts are required solely by
the fact that we live in a society competitive through and
through.

On the other hand, when combined with freedom, our
minimum is far higher than exists in a scarcity economy, for
instance China, where a person subsists in time-bound
service to field or commune (and that standard too, since
inevitable, is socially acceptable) . But if the very point of
our minimum is to free people for a selective choice of how
they will regulate their time, mobility and independence of
location are indispensable.

The minimum is based on a physiological standard,
heightened by the addition of whatever is necessary to give
a person a true possible freedom of social choice, and not
violating our usual mores.

If freedom is the aim, everything beyond the minimum
must be rigorously excluded, even if it should be extremely
cheap to provide; for it is more important to limit political
intervention than to raise the standard of living.

Then, the minimum economy must produce and dis-
tribute:

1. Food sufficient in quantity and kind for health,
palatable but without variety.

2. Uniform clothing adequate for all seasons.

3. Shelter on an individual, family, and group basis,
with adequate conveniences for different environ-
ments.

Three Community Paradigms 201

4. Medical service.

5. Transportation.

but not primary education which is a public good taxed
from the general economy.

Of these, food, clothing, and shelter are produced by ab-
solute mass production in enormous quantities, without vari-
ation of style. Medicine and transportation are better pro-
vided by some arrangement between the subsistence and
general economies.

The Cost of Subsistence

The extent and cost of the proposed subsistence system,
measured in current money, is very hard to determine and
therefore it is hard to name, except by guesswork, the num-
ber of years of labor service that are bartered away for eco-
nomic freedom.

In the first place, although the number of laborers is fixed
for even those who would buy off must furnish a laborer
as a substitutethe amount of goods to be produced is
fluctuating. For, obviously, though all are entitled to the
minimal goods, many, and perhaps most, of the people who
are used to better and can afford better, will not take them.
There is no advantage in taking and wasting, for the less
that needs to be produced, the less the exaction of universal
service. Different kinds of goods will differ in demand:
fewer will use the minimal housing and clothing; most per-
haps can use some of the minimum food; very many will use
the transportation and medical service. After a sufficient
reserve is built up, production is geared to the prospective
use of the next year. But further, this demand will fluctuate
with the fluctuation of the general economy, though less
sharply: in times of general economic crisis, the demand for
subsistence goods increases; in times of prosperity, it dimin-
ishes. (The fluctuation is less sharp because of the ratio of
minimum goods to substitutes of a higher standard, because
of the ratio of the number of unemployed to the universal

S08S1STEHCE (U.S.)

1932 product created by 35 million peo-
ple during 70 billion work hours

Assumption: one-half of total production
time spent creating capital, luxury,
and comfort goods; includes loss by
reason of inefficiency and waste

Work hours for production of subsistence
in 1932: 35 billion hours

Reduction in hours by reason of techno-
logical improvement at 2.5 per cent
per year, 1932-44: 24 billion hours
required

Production of approximately 25 billion
hours of work at rate of 2,500 hours
per worker

Reduction of 25 per cent for product not
consumed

Labor time reduced to 19 billion hours or
7,600,000 workers

Total labor force equals 80,000,000
workers

Labor force required per annum equals
7,600,000

Therefore:

Required of each worker is that he spend

one year of each ten in the labor service

(All FIGURES IH TERMS OF 1934 PRICES)

Civilian production
1932

1939
1944

War production

AN EXCERPT

From an exhaustive iist of

subsistence goods

(Figures in parentheses indicate amount
used per year)

SHELTER SHIPMENT

Table (1/5)

Chair (1/5)

Cot and mattress (1/5)

Stove-for cooking and heating (1/10)

Fuel (type and quantity dependent on

location)
Lamps or other lights (dependent on

location)
Pint pot (1/3)
Quart pot (1/3)
12-inch pan (1/3)
Hunting knife, table knife, 2 forks,

large and small spoon (1/4)
Corkscrew, can opener (1/4)
Cup, plate, bowl (1/2)
2-gaIlon pail (1/4)
10-gallon tub for laundry and bathing

(1/4)

Mop and broom (1)
Small ax (1/5)
Shovel (1/5)
Household repair kit-hammer, nails,

screw driver, etc. (1/2)
10 yards of clothesline, 1 dozen

clothespins (1/2)
Dish towels (4)
Cleaning cloths (4 yds.)
Pencils (10)
Writing paper (1 rm.)
Matches (12 boxes of 400)
Flashlight (1/2)
Batteries for flashlight (4)
Kitchen and grease-solvent soaps

(25 cakes)

HOW MUCH WOULD THESE THINGS COST
UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE MASS
PRODUCTION WITHOUT STYLING, FLUCTU-
ATION, PROFITS, MERCHANDISING, ETC.?

Postwar
Goal No. 2

$200 Billion

Conclusion:

To produce the standard of 1932-well
above subsistence as here defined -
would require

39 39

or one year of work in four or five

Three Community Paradigms 203

labor service, and because the reserve functions as an ever-
normal granary.)

But secondly, and most importantly, the price of goods
under such a system of absolute mass production is impos-
sible to estimate. It would be unbelievably cheap. For
clothing, a possible estimate could be gotten from army
uniforms, but these are of course produced for profit all
along the line; a better figure would be given by the English
utility clothing of World War II, which was remarkably
cheap compared to the free market. The figure for farm
produce is especially difficult; given a system of extensive
agriculture like the Soviet state farms, with the problem of
distribution simplified by processing on the spot into non-
perishable and dehydrated forms, the cost would fall to
very little; yet this might not be the most absolutely efficient
procedure. Prefabrication in housing has simply not been
tried on a large scale; yet small attempts e.g., TVA 3-
rooms-and-bath at $1,900 (1934) show astounding reduc-
tions in price. It would be only for medical service and
transportation that one could make reasonable estimates.
The rest is guesswork.

Then we guess that to produce subsistence for all Ameri-
cans would require not more than one-seventh of the avail-
able labor time (normal working day) and money. This
guess is as of 1945. In 1959 we would guess one-tenth.

Architecture of the Production Centers

In the subsistence economy, there is the architecture of
the production centers and of the minimum housing.
The centers are factories and housing for basic manufac-

ways of guessing the fraction of the economy needed to
provide subsistence. But productivity is increasing at an aston-
'shing rate: for 12-year period 1945-57, rate was 3.3% per year,
compared to 2.4% annually for the past 60 years. (Nat Bur. of
Economic Research)

A production center for 5000 workers, within a city

hires, clothing, prefabricated houses, processing of foods;
and for industrial farms and fisheries, and such mines as it
is wise to run separately rather than jointly with the gen-
eral economy.

The single principle of these centers of labor service is
efficiency. The purely functional approach described in the
Soviet functionalist plans (p. 71 and p. 72) is sufficient.
If there are idle convertible plants, they would be used. If
the centers are located in isolated parts, more elaborate
social centers must be provided; but if they are near cities,
that is not necessary. Efficiency and cheapness are the only
determinants.

Since the quantity of production of certain items may
vary from year to year, such plants may be designed to run

Three Community Paradigms 205

on two shifts or three shifts. Ordinarily everything runs on
maximum capacity.

Centers should be decentralized to the point of maximum
efficiency of distribution. The location of industrial farms
depends on soil and climate.

Provision is here being made for several million workers
-perhaps as many as 12 million. But in the depths of the
great Depression there were that many unemployed; and
during the war, provision was made for 10 million in the
services, luxuriously equipped, without catastrophic dislo-
cation.

A production center for 50,000 workers: 1. Airport 2. Heavy
manufacture 3. Light manufacture 4. Industrialized agriculture
5. Housing 6. Sports and social center

A production center for 75,000 workers in an isolated place:
1. Harbor 2. Docks S. Airport and factory 4. Housing 5. Com-
munity buildings 6. Sports

Three Community Paradigms 207

Minimum Housing

The housing to be produced falls into several classes. The
over-all principles are: (1) Good functioning at a minimum
standard; (2) Considerable mobility, combined with ex-
changeability, to allow freedom of location; (3) Mass pro-
duction of the fewest possible types consistent with freedom
of selection on crucial basic issues; (4) Longevity of 10 to
20 years; (5) Adaptation of the types to various communal
environments, e.g., those in which public utilities are avail-
able, those where they are not available, etc.

The trailers are a restudy of similar houses found prac-
tical by the TVA. Another type is the Geodesic structure of
Fuller. A third is air inflated. There are other possibilities.
One class is adapted to a complete absence of public utili-
ties, therefore has kerosene light, septic tank, etc. These
are superior to the actual housing of millions of farm fami-
lies and they could be used by city families on vacation.
Another class is adapted to trailer camps equipped with gov-
ernment utilities, electricity, running water, commiinity
kitchens. A somew r hat similar community framework for
migratory farm workers with tents has been analyzed by the
Farm Security Administration. By good planning, larger
houses for families can be combined from the units to which
members are entitled as individuals.

The plot of land on which the trailer or house is located
presents little problem where there are no public utilities,
where the population is sparse, and the value of the land
submarginal. The difficulty increases where utilities, popula-
tion, and value increase; up to the point of metropolitan
concentration, where the problem is insuperable.

This means that, quite apart from public or private own-
ership of land, to live in one place rather than another
involves a fundamental difference in living standards. This
is one of the choices put up to the individual, whether or not
he will work for the extra money to pay (in the general
economy) the increment above the minimum.

Shelter in a small town

Shelter in the woods

Three Community Paradigms 209

This is an extremely interesting question; viewing the
matter from the point of view of our problem, we learn a
good deal about urban life. Metropolitan living, even under
slum conditions, is in the class of luxuries. This is the con-
verse to the well-known proposition that metropolitan liv-
ing, even on Park Avenue, often has physiologically and
sociologically the standard of a slum. (By "metropolis" we
mean places over a million; urban environments up to
several hundred thousand need not present these difficulties
for subsistence housing. )

If we break down the elements of metropolitan rent, we
see the causes. First is the extraordinary multiplication of
city services pavements, street lighting and cleaning, water.,
sewage, etc., biologically necessary because of the concen-
tration, sociologically necessary for policing, etc. Then there
are items like parks and museums, ranging from psychologi-
cal necessity to cultural convenience. These appear as city
taxes. Again, the value of land intensively occupied and
intensively used by juxtaposition, as by the number of per-
sons passing a particular spot per hour. And the fact that
land scarcity is of the essence of concentration, and there-
fore land is preempted as a business. These factors appear
as interest on investment and payment for risk. And then
there is the cost of building, which cannot be mass produced
because it is sporadic and has peculiar conditions; this ap-
pears as wages and profit.

We must conclude that minimal subsistence as such jibes
with decentralization but not with metropolitan concentra-
tion.

The houses can be pitched only on the outskirts of cities
as in Swedish plans for subsistence housing. In places of a
hundred thousand, this is perfectly adequate; but in metrop-
olises it is precisely not being a member of the community.
On the other hand, housing of a metropolitan type cannot
be provided at a minimal standard. Public housing, heavily
subsidized and built on condemned land, still rents at a

210

C M M U N I T A S

figure that eats up a fifth or a quarter of a man's income in
the general economy.

The metropolis exists by the intricacy of its social inter-
dependencies, and it is to maintain these that each one
must sacrifice his time and wealth.

What is likely, however, is that one result of the sub-
sistence system would be a shortage of common labor in
the metropolises, and therefore the employers would have
to make efforts to attract such labor.

Away from these big cities, however, millions would live
in mobile and exchangeable units, making use of scattered
stations. And they would certainly desire, just set free from
social necessity, not to settle down to a new job for a time,
but to entertain themselves on the free goods of travel, to
see like Ulysses, "the places and many minds of men."
These are the elements of a radically new kind of com-
munity, fluid rather than fixed. Such a profound difference
would involve other profound changes, for instance in law.

Mon Repos

A minimal economy settlement: 1. Shelter 2. Mess hall, kitchen
and wash house

212 COMMUNITAS

Teacher! Today Again

Do We Have to Do What We Want to Do?

Now supposing such a system of assured subsistence with
almost complete freedom of economic ties were put into
effect. No doubt for millions of people, no matter how much
they might resist the idea in prospect, the first effect would
be immense relief, relief from responsibility, from the pres-
sure of the daily grind, from the anxiety of failure.

But after this first commonplace effect had worn off, the
moral attitude of a people like the Americans would be
profoundly deranged. They would be afraid not only of
freedom and leisure, which release both creative and
destructive drives nicely repressed by routine, but especially
of boredom, for they would find, or imagine, themselves
quite without cultural or creative resources. For in our times
all entertainments and even the personal excitement of
romance seem to be bound up with having ready money to
spend. Emotional satisfaction, too, has been intricated into
the motion of the entire productive machine, it is bound up
with the Standard of Living. Movies cost money, bars cost
money, and having a date costs money. Certainly a car costs
money. Apart from these, as everybody knows, there is
nothing to do but hang around. (Sports do not cost money,
sex does not cost money, art does not cost money, nature
does not cost money, intercourse with people does not cost
money, science and God do not cost money. )

The Americans would suddenly find themselves "rescued"
from the physical necessity and social pressure which alone,
perhaps, had been driving them to their habitual satisfac-
tions. They might soon come to regard commercial pleasures
as flat and unpalatable, but they would not suddenly
thereby find any others. They would be like the little girl
in the progressive school, longing for the security of having
her decisions made by the grown-ups, who asks, "Teacher,
today again do we have to do what we want to do?"

Three Community Paradigms 213

Would it be a salutary boredom to make these persons do
what they want to do with their time, to discover what they
want to do with their lives, rather than following widely
advertised suggestions? And not for a couple of weeks of
vacation likewise organized into profit-bearing routines
but year after year. Or would the effect be like the unem-
ployed adolescents on the comer who hang around, appar-
ently unable to think up anything?

We are asking, in the framework of this model proposal,
an intensely realistic question about the actual situation in
our country. For indeed, in our surplus economy, millions
really are technically unemployable there is no necessary
work for them to do, no man's work. If automation were
allowed its full headway, these millions would become many
many millions. Because they are really economically unpro-
ductive, they have no culture and no resources of leisure,
since culture grows from productive life. At the same time,
each one of these people, no matter how he hangs around
or perhaps spends his time in getting quasi- visceral "kicks'*
or being "cool," must also feed his face and come in out of
the rain. It is this actuality that our scheme of a divided
economy addresses and draws in black and white: we pro-
vide the subsistence part in an efficient, honorable, and
compulsory way; and we leave open the horrendous ques-
tion: then what?

The moment when large numbers of people first discover
clearly and distinctly that they do not know what they want
to do with their time, is fraught with danger. Some no doubt
will at once follow any demagogic or fanatical leader who
happens along with a time-consuming and speciously thrill-
ing program. (Street-gangs on a mass scale.) How to protect
the commonwealth against these bands of bored prejudice?
Others, having lost the thread of compulsory mental ac-
tivity, will wander in the maze of idle idiocy that we asso-
ciate with degenerate rural classes, except that the food
would be even w ? orse, across the counter in a government
store.

214 COMMUNITAS

Jobs, Avocations, and Vocations

The brighter hope is that alongside the leaders teachers
would also appear.

The psychoanalysts who deal with the "nervous break-
downs" of men of affairs sometimes urge the patient to have
the courage to leave his job and embrace his avocation. The
job was not freely chosen; it symbolizes and reinforces the
very pressures of social and parental authority that have
led to disaster. The avocation, presumably, is spontaneous
and can draw on deep energy and therefore, by its daily
practice, reintegrate the personality.

The system here proposed facilitates such a decision be-
fore the stage of modern nervous breakdown. Economically,
there would be a recrudescence of small enterprises and the
outlay of small venture capital; for the risk of fundamental
insecurity of life having been removed, why should not one
work to amass a little capital and then risk it in an enterprise
that was always sneakingly attractive?

Vocation and "Vocational Guidance"

What now passes for "vocational guidance" and "aptitude
testing" is the exact contrary of vocation in the old sense, a
man's natural or God-ordained work. The guidance test
proceeds from the premise that there is an enormous social-
economic machine continually producing society's goods
and that this machine must be manned by capable workmen
who are cogs in the mechanism. A potential workman is
then tested for his physical, emotional, and intellectual apti-
tudes to find if some part of the man is adapted to perform-
ing some role in the machine, most often the role of making
a part of a part of a product sold in a distant market.

We have become so accustomed to this picture that it
requires a strain of attention to see how simply fantastic it
is. The working of the economic society is put first, the life-

Three Community Paradigms 215

work of every individual member of society is not thought of
at all

In general, a job takes on the nature of a vocation in
the following stages: (a) It satisfies the pressures of a
money-centered society; (b) It is an available means of
making a living; (c) It is personally interesting has some
relation to friend and family traditions to childhood ambi-
tion; (d) It is a phase of a strong avocation and draws on
free creative energies; (e) It is the land of experience the
man seeks out. The first, merely economic jobs, are what
most men now have. Family and group jobs were common in
older times. Avocational occupations are a legitimate goal
for society for great numbers of its members; but it demands
more freedom of opportunity and more mature personality
than present circumstances permit. True vocation, however,
is probably not within social means to further (nor even, in
many cases, to prevent).

The Sociological Zoo

A man suddenly withdrawn in will and schedule from

the general economy, and with a lot of time on his hands,
might begin to look at the immense activity of others as at
the objects in a great zoo or museum: a sociological garden

abounding in its tame and savage ways, many of them very
near to humane social behavior and, as monkeys are to men,
all the more curious on that account. This makes a vast
difference in one's joy of life.

Thus, a man may have nothing but pleasant memories of
New York or Paris, even during the summer season. He
speaks of the variety of the city, its easy gait, its shops, parks,
markets and animated streets. And the fact is that he stayed
in these places during the years that he did not have to work
for a living, he was perhaps a student on a scholarship.
Therefore he saw the variety and the out-of-the-way places
that busy people do not stumble on. Projecting his own ease
into the gait of the others, he cannot understand why other

^<fcWfeA^@4

SCWZRESEHT

WE^ECTED

\ V V v

The so

critics-for instance, transient visitors who rather project
their own hurrying about judge these people to be nervous
or self -centered. Why should not the hot summer be pleas-
ant to a person who can stroll out or not, or go on an ex-
cursion? But the rest of the people are hot, indignant, tired,
nervous, and bored with their beautiful city, where they
are working without much security at tasteless jobs.

To beautify cities, the first step is to change the attitude
with which people take their cities.

A small boy, who would reflect the new security of his
parents and never feel economic pressure at home, could
not fail to find the sociological garden his best school. He
would not resent it or distrust it. He would grow up pretty
independent, ironical without fierceness, quite amiable, for
nothing threatens; a srnart-aleck through and through who
knows his way around.

The Standard of Living

It would be no small thing for people to understand
clearly what poverty consists ofto understand it not in

Three Community Paradigms 217

terms of misery or unfortunate cases, but by a universal
social standard.
The subsistence standard that we have been describing

is, of course, far above that which the majority of the human
species in fact subsists on; but it is at least based on physio-
logical, hygienic, climatic, and moral conditions and is not
altogether a parochial cultural illusion, fostered by sales-
manship, like the Standard of Living of the Americans. The
intimate awareness of it would help dispel the attitude of
the Americans toward those other peoples as not quite
being human beings at all.

CHAPTER 8

Conclusion

These three paradigms are, to repeat it, not plans; they
are models for thinking about the possible relations of pro-
duction and way of life. Let us now say a few words about
the relevance of these different modes of thought to different
real situations in the world today.

Scheme I

Scheme I is drawn from the tastes and drives of America
that are most obvious on the surface its high production,
high Standard of Living and artificially-induced demand, its
busy full employment. Much of this is now characterized
by our moralists as useless and unstable. There is sharp
criticism of the skimping on public goods when the produc-
tion of frivolous private goods is so unbridled. Even worse,
it is pointed out that the superabundance of private goods
without the leavening of public goods (education, social
services, wiser use of land) is destructive of the satisfactions
of even the private goods. It is the aim of Scheme I to answer
these complaints, to show how both public and private
goods in full quantity can cooperate, assuming that we have
the productivity for everything, which we have.

To put it another way, our thought is to make a useless
economy useful for something great, namely magnificence.
The ideal of commercial grandeur is Venice, and we can
aspire to it, to assume again the magnificence that human
beings wear well. We have to think up some style or other
to match the glamour of our coming interplanetary fleets.

More particularly, we as New Yorkers have had in mind

218

Three Community Paradigms 219

our native city, and we have set down some suggestions for
the public improvement of New York (Appendices A to D) .

Scheme III

Scheme III, for the direct production of subsistence
goods, has obvious applications to regions that are poorly
industrialized but densely populated. Shaking off colonial-
ism and aspiring to industrialism, these regions have tended
to adopt just the opposite policy, to industrialize totally as
rapidly as possible and "catch up." The emphasis is on heavy
industry, involving unaccustomed hard work now and ab-
staining from consumers' goods till the future. Also, so far
as the Americans have given or lent capital to these regions,
we have had no policy and so our tendency is to repeat our
own economic pattern.

The policy of heavy industry has great disadvantages. It
involves stringent dictatorship to plan huge goals and to
enforce completely new work habits. There are no skills. It
involves the breaking-up of age-old community forms with
almost certain moral and youth problems coming in the
wake. It guarantees much over-investment in disastrous mis-
takes, with waste of wealth and human suffering.

Just the opposite policy makes more sense: to start off
by using the most advanced techniques to provide universal
subsistence, and for the rich countries to give or lend the
capital specific for this purpose. People are at once better
off; they have more time. They then have the freedom to
make their own community adjustments. Political pressure
is low and state regulation is minimized. In the production
of subsistence goods, there cannot be great mistakes, nothing
is totally wasted. But further, the plan has the advantage of
rapidly generating a more complicated economy and heavy
industry under its own steam. For when people have once
been raised above utter misery and given a tolerable secur-
ity, they begin to have other wants and have the spirit and
energy and a little money to try and satisfy them. Also, hav-

220 COMMUNITAS

ing used the machines for subsistence, they now have skills
and work-habits. It is at this point that the production and
import of other capital goods will come by popular demand,
in the people's own style. Finally, such a plan would involve
less suffering.

But in advanced countries too this scheme is not irrele-
vant. (Something like it, we think, was first proposed in
the Weimar Republic.) For surplus productivity can lead
to widespread unemployment as a desirable possibility; and
this is a simple, honorable, and stabilizing way of coping
with the problem.

Scheme II

Being artists, the authors of this book are naturally partial
to the middle mode of thinking, Scheme II, where the pro-
ducing and the product are of a piece and every part of life
has value in itself as both means and end; where there is a
community tradition of style that allows for great and re-
fined work, and each man has a chance to enhance the com-
munity style and transform it.

Such a commune is Utopian, it is in the child-heart of man,
and therefore it is easiest to think of it as growing in virgin
territory with new people.

If we think of the underdeveloped regions that are
sparsely settled and rich in resources, parts of Siberia,
Alaska or Africa, the Columbia River Basin or parts of South
America, self-sufficient regionalism on a quality standard
makes sense. Such regions could be most harmoniously de-
veloped not by importing into them the total pattern of
advanced technology (as is being done), but by the kind
of industrial-agricultural symbiosis we have described,
drawing always on their own resources and working them
up themselves. If the old total pattern is simply reproduced
in the new place, the first stage of a virgin area will be a
colonial dependency, exporting raw materials; the final
stage will be a merging into the national whole with no new

Three Community Paradigms 221

cultural contribution. But we need the new contribution. On
the other hand, the quicker and more harmoniously the
new place achieves a regional self-sufficiency, the more inde-
pendently and selectively it can cope with the complex na-
tional culture on its own terms, and the more characteristic
its own contribution can be. A fresh region represents nature
full of the possibilities of invention; an established economy
is necessarily in the strait jacket of bad habits.

Scheme IV: A Substitute for Everything

There is, of course, still a fourth attitude toward the
economy of abundance that is socially viable and implies a

fourth community scheme. This is to put the surplus into
combustibles and, igniting these, to destroy a more or less
(it is hard to be sure) regulated part of the production and
consumption goods, and the producers and the consumers.
Recent studies in this mode of thinking have hit on tech-
niques for the dislocation of industry into mountain-fast-
nesses, the non-illumination of streets, the quickest way to
hasten to the most deadly spot, the esthetics of invisibility,
the enlivening of the atmosphere with radioactivity, and, in
general, an efficient schedule for returning from the Sixth
to before the First Day,

The Need for Philosophy

Mostly, however, the thousand places that one plans for
have mixed conditions and mixed values. The site and his-
tory of a place are always particular, and these make the
beauty of a plan. Different people in a place want different
things, and the same people want different things. Some
of these conditions and aims are compatible and some are
incompatible the musician, says Plato, knows which tones
will combine and which will not combine. It's a difficult art
that we have to learn. Other nations have had long experi-
ence in developing their cities and villages. We can learn a

222 COMMUNITAS

sl INTiM10tf, EDUCATION, 60VERHMENTI

are three synonymous words 81

HICHELET _ I

lot from them, but we cannot learn the essential things, how
to cope with the modern plight.

For in the present period of history, we Americans are
the oldest and most experienced people in the world. We
were the first to have the modem political revolution and
the maturity of the industrial revolution. These, combined
with our fortunate natural resources and geography, have
made us the first to experience the full impact of the high
Standard of Living and a productivity that improves, tech-
nically, nearly 4% a year. As the first to experience it,
we are deeply disappointed in progress, confused, afraid
of serious decisions, and therefore reactionary and con-
formist in important matters. Yet as the oldest and most
experienced, we have the responsibility to be wise.

One way or another, there is no doubt that the Americans
are going to be spending a lot more on public goods. The
so-called Urban Renewal program is at present important
and will be more so. It is essential that these new efforts
make sense, not only to avoid misusing the money but be-
cause it is the nature of a physical plant that once built it
stays and stays. Ignorant and philistine planning long ago
saddled us with many of our present problems. It continues
to do so. Ameliorative plans are then proposed a new sub-
way, a new highway, slum-clearance which soon reproduce
the evil in a worse degree. We then have the familiar pro-
liferation of means, of feats of engineering and architecture,
public goods, when what is needed is human scale. People
are rightly suspicious of planning, and they end up with
everything being overplanned, no freedom from the plan,
and the purpose lost. This is because nobody has dared to

Three Community Paradigms 223

be philosophical, to raise the question of the end in view,
rather than merely trying to get out of a box.

It is understood by sociologists, anthropologists, and psy-
chologists that the different functions of men and groups
cohere in whole patterns of culture. But our physical plan-
ning in the most sensitive areas, like housing or schools, is
carried on with eyes shut to the whole pattern. For instance,
housing is discussed in terms of bio-sociological standards
of decency and cost problems of land and construction, but
not much attention is paid to the land of community result-
ing. The community has increasing class stratification and
increasing juvenile delinquency, effects that were not aimed
at. But of course, to avoid pressing community problems and
to concentrate on "practical" solutions and to exclude mi-
norities and increase delinquency is now the pattern of our
culture. Is this inevitable?

Bosanquet said somewhere that the characteristic of phi-
losophy is to be concrete and central. By concrete and cen-
tral he would mean, in our present subject, directly attend-
ing to the human beings, the citizens of the city, their
concrete behavior and their indispensable concerns, rather
than getting lost in traffic problems, housing problems, tax
problems, and problems of law enforcement. It is concrete
to plan work, residence, and transit as one problem. It is

MEANS-

224 COMMUNITAS

central to keep one's eyes on the center of the target, the
community and its way of life, not exaggerating production,
the Standard of Living, or special interests out of all pro-
portion.

In this difficult art, the people are not philosophical, they
do not know the concrete and central facts. Yet only the
people can know them. The answer is in the remarkable
and thought-provoking sentence of Michelet: "Initiation,
education, and governmentthese are three synonomous
words."

Appendices

Manhattan Isknd, as we here propose to alter it. Up the center
of the ishnd runs a narrow strip of business and industrial
buildings, shown here by cross-hatching. On either side of it
are north-and-south arterial highways. Toward both rivers are
residential areas and parks, and the river banks themselves, in
most parts of town, would be given over to recreation. (A) shows
heliport location.

ffff . BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY

ES3 RESIDENCES IN THE PARKS

MAJOR LOCAL STREETS

MULTIPLE ARTERIAL HIGHVW

APPENDIX A 1

A Master Plan for New York

Make no little plans; they hate no magic to stir men's
blood, and probably themselves will not be realized.
Make big plans: aim high in hope and work, remem-
bering that a noble, logical diagram, once recorded,
will never die, but long after we are gone will be a
living thing, asserting itself with ever growing in-
sistency.' Daniel Burnham.

A Master Plan is a directive for the progressive development
of a region toward its ideal form. Such a plan is possible
when, without sudden and \iolent changes of the whole, the
buildings and community functions may be gradually but
systematically replaced correctly if they were not correctly
placed to begin with or if their places have become out-
moded. Such a plan may take two or three decades to ma-
ture, while the old structures obsolesce and the new ones
are laid down in convenient order. It is worth while for such
a long-range plan to aim at a high excellence.

Now the island of Manhattan can aim to be, for the next
fifty years, the cultural, business, style and entertainment
capital of the world. And by taking advantage, for the first
time, of its rivers hitherto almost preempted by commerce
and industry it can become a city of neighborhoods won-
derful to live in, as leisurely and comfortable as it is busy and
exciting. What is needed for this is a Master Plan. The ma-
jority of apartment and commercial buildings in Manhattan
are now obsolescent. Therefore any proposed transformation
which follows the site and which, without violence, follows
the historical trends, can begin at once and be carried
through in our generation. "Following historical trends"
means emphasizing the location of commercial and residen-
* New Republic, Nov. 20, 1944, pp. 656-59.

227

228 C O M M U N I T A S

tial regions as they have in fact been developing for strong
natural reasons, and to regularize these trends by weeding
out and zoning.

Our plan is, simply:

1. To extend the business and light industry and all
through traffic of Manhattan in a continuous axis up the
middle of the island.

2. To remove the through avenues on the sides and
develop the land on either side of the axis in park-residential
neighborhoods right down to the rivers.

3. And to develop the shores (north of, say, Twenty-
third Street) as beaches for bathing, boating and promen-
ade.

This would extend the zone of work and all through
traffic in a continuous axis up the narrow island, with neigh-
borhoods adjacent on either side, and put a stop to the
tremendous twice-daily flow of uptown-downtown traffic
by giving to the majority of Manhattan residents the chance
of a home within walking distance of their work.

It would also clear the shores for the greater part of
their 29-mile length and develop them for sport and resi-
dence, recognizing that the riverfront in Manhattan proper
has diminished in commercial importance and may now
be put to another use.

By making the neighborhoods more livable and using the
amenities that naturally exist in this wonderful location, we
can do away with the necessity of fleeing great distances for
recreation, and restore leisure to a place that is notorious for
its nervousness.

Historically, we may say that the first general plan of
New York was the layout of the gridiron of avenues and
streets around 1800, an expedient for land sale. This grid-
iron, with its long north-south avenues, gave to Manhattan
its famous accessibility and clarity; but there is no doubt
that, especially uptown, it did violence to the hillier con-
tours; and of course it has failed to be adequate to the
necessities of modem traffic.

The second plan could be considered to be the layout of
the parks up the middle of the island, especially Central,
Morningside and St. Nicholas Parks. This great scheme of

Appendices 229

Randall, Vaux, Olmstead and others in the middle of the
last century, and so vigilantly defended by public spirit ever
since, gave the spreading city a real form; it prevented it
from becoming an endless jungle of street after street. Since
the rivers were given over to industry, shipping and the
railroads, it at least guaranteed that some neighborhoods
could face inward on a green belt. We should not for a
moment venture to destroy this wonderful stratagem of
the central parks, were it not the case that more and more
the river-parks have proved their value and more and more
the smaller parks have become the most desired neighbor-
hoods for people who can afford them.

The third major plan, and the first Master Plan so-called,
was the proposal of the City Planning Commission under
Rexford Tugwell (1941), following after the unofficial
Xew York Regional Plan of the twenties. This plan con-
tained many subplans (for highways, sewers, health facili-
ties, etc. ) , all based on the key plan showing land use. The
proposed use of the land in Manhattan was a reformatory
attempt to locate the industries of the island within more
limited boundaries downtown and to develop them in sev-
eral new belts uptown. The subplans were accepted, the
key plan was rejected, and the result is that, contrary to
its' charter, the greatest city in the world has no Master
Plan.

Manhattan Island, viewed as a whole, now exhibits the
following anomalies. Ordinarily we should expect a town
on an important body of water to open out toward the water
for both industry and amenity; perhaps to be terraced to-
ward it. In Manhattan, for unfortunate reasons, the people
face inward, except that around much of the island there
is an apartment-house cliff, so that the form of the whole is
more like a bowl than a terrace. The apartments overlooking
the Hudson and the East Rivers are tall because the view
is desirable and the rents are high; but all others are cut
off from the same amenity. Yet even the riverview dwellers
have only a view but no close contact, for they are separated
from the water by an obsolete railroad and an increasing
number of elaborate highways.

In a deeper sense, these peripheral highways were not
designed primarily for the residents of the city itself, but,

230 COMMUNITAS

like several other works of engineering of the past decade,
for commuters outside the city, who choose, and can afford,
to live in Westchester or on Long Island. Such means can-
not solve the traffic problems of a great city! So long as 3
million people enter downtown Manhattan every day and
swell the downtown population from 360,000 to nearly 4
million, and retreat again as evening falls, there will be
traffic congestion and sardine-tin subways.

To build more escape-highways or new subways only
invites still more people away from the center to crowd
back into it during the hours of business. And vice versa, so
long as the chief facilities for recreation are thrown into the
periphery, at Coney Island, Van Cortland Park, Jones Beach,
etc., the" majority are forced to commute in the other di-
rection and pay for a few hours of recreation with two long
hours of travel.

In general, the proper solution for problems of transit is
to cut down the number of trips. And this can be done only
by bringing work, residence and recreation closer together.
In a place like Manhattan this cannot be done by piecemeal
planning; but fortunately, as we have shown, the natural
site and many important historical trends, and the rapid
rate of replacement, make major planning entirely feasible.

The Parts of the Physical Plan

Acreage and density. Manhattan Island is not crowded.
At present it has a theoretical residential density of 200 to
the acre (about 9,000 residential acres to 1,900,000 per-
sons) . And if this density fails to allow for spacious, green,
livable neighborhoods, the fault lies not in the numbers
but in the layout.

In the first place, correct layout would enormously in-
crease the available residential acreage. For instance, the
gridiron of streets and avenues at present uses up 27.4%
of the total area of the island. By rationalizing the system of
avenues into two multi-level through highways up the axis,
and by closing off at least every other one of the neighbor-
hood streets and providing for merely local neighborhood
traffic, this figure could be cut in half. And if we look at the

Appendices 231

present blocks of buildings themselves small, helter-skelter,
honeycombed with vent shafts outside and with repeating
stairwells inside we can see that for the same density, a
weeding out and more rational new construction would add
a tremendous increment of available open space.

Let us maintain the existing density of 200 to the acre.
What does this figure mean in terms of living? It is certainly
not a place of private houses and little gardens (45 to the
acre); but Manhattanites do not require these in any case;
for those who choose the cosmopolitan way of life are man-
ning, and supporting by their rent, a center of world culture
and world affairs, and they enjoy the advantages and monu-
ments of such a center. Yet it is a place where, if people lived
in tall buildings (15 stories), every room would face on a
Madison or Washington Square; and where, if they lived in
a combination of tall and low buildings (three stories) on
every other street, there would be room for a football field!

The zone of industry and commerce. The economy of
Manhattan comprises: the light manufacture of consumers'
goods and small machined parts; shipping and moderately
heavy warehousing; business management and finance; re-
tailing and display; ideas, styles, entertainment. It is an
economy of relatively small shops whose materials are
brought and whose products are carted away by truck.
There is no heavy industry to speak of. During peacetime
the volume of heavy shipping was sharply falling off, and
the war has shown that the present docks are three or four
times too large for peacetime demands.

Nothing therefore stands in the way of extending this
economy up the entire island. Already in the Tugwell plan,
following the actual trends, isolated new commercial dis-
tricts were recommended uptown. We propose simply to
unite these in a continuous belt served by continuous high-
ways and to relocate uptown not only business but places
of light manufacture (e.g., the garment industry). But the
advantages of doing this are extraordinary; for it means that
many hundreds of thousands of workers, instead of traveling
the whole length of the island twice a day, could now live
in the neighborhoods next to their work.

Up and down this great Main Street, the different kinds

232 COMMUNITAS

of industry would find their own zones. It is reasonable to
assume that Midtown, the site of the great terminals and
therefore of the great hotels, would continue to be the enter-
tainment, style and idea center; and that business and
finance would cluster in its cliffs around Wall Street. The
ships and warehouses must occupy the downtown shores.
(Therefore we provide in Greenwich Village a downtown
residential neighborhood in the center rather than on the
shore.) But the great mass of business and manufacture that
now sporadically mars the whole breadth of Manhattan
could find its place anywhere from north to south between
the highways.

Airport. To provide for air transport, of persons and com-
modities, is perhaps the thorniest problem in all cosmopoli-
tan planning. No existent city is adapted for the large
landing fields and the noise of an airport. The expedient up
to now has been to locate the airport on the outskirts-
requiring an hour's travel for a trip that itself may last only
an hour. The airport must somehow be brought near the
center. But the rapid evolution of air technique makes it
again difficult to know what kind and how large a space can
be allotted. A number of modern plans provide for heli-
copter landings on the roofs of large buildings.

As a tentative proposal, we have chosen an area on the
Hudson River from Forty-second to Twenty-third Streets.
The river provides an open space for maneuvering. Im-
mediately accessible on one side is the midtown section of
the terminals and hotels; and on the other side the zone of
shipping and warehousing. The airport itself is conceived as
the roof of an enormous warehouse shed.

Residential neighborhoods and the use of the rivers. We
come now to the residential neighborhoods themselves, ex-
tending on either side of the axis right down to the Hudson,
East and Harlem Rivers; served by regular cross highways to
the main highways, but without any through traffic.

These neighborhoods must be thought of not as places
accessible to parks, but as parks in themselves for the
formal parks of Manhattan are being sacrificed to them. As
our discussion of density has shown, it is not important
whether the houses are high or low; obviously there should

Appendices 233

be a combination of both. But their layout must be such as
to be in a park, and, where possible, to face toward the
water, to be terraced toward the water. The rivers, the
park and the habitations must be a continuous visual and
ambulatory experience. The urban park must not be a place
of escape but a place in which to live.

It is to be hoped that such neighborhoods, where people
feel they live rather than merely sleep, would develop sharp
local peculiarities. For instance (if we may propose some-
thing that will make many people's hair stand on end) , let
certain great masterpieces of art be decentralized from the
Metropolitan Museum of Art and placed in neighborhood
post offices and churches, or a world-famous statue on a
fountain; then the neighbors might get to live with these in
a rather closer way, and art lovers have to seek them out in
parts of our city that they would otherwise never visit.

Except for a few spots where the currents are dangerous,
Manhattan's rivers are ideal for swimming and boating.
( The job of cleaning them up has already begun and is on
the postwar agenda.) Let them finally be used by every-
body, as they are now by the venturesome boys. Visitors to
Chicago or Rio, for instance, know what it means to have
a great sweep of water for bathing at the foot of every
street, and Manhattan has twice and three times as much
shorefront per person.

To make a bathing resort of residential Manhattan Island
is a grandiose project; but it is not nearly so grandiose as for
tens of thousands to go off on every hot day to places 10 to
50 miles away from their homes.

The idea of Manhattan. This plan for Manhattan Island
is not a plan for the New York region. Most often, to make
such an isolated plan is ruinous; but Manhattan has a pe-
culiar role not only in the New York region but in the world
(which is the true region of our cosmopolis) . Its problems,
and its advantages, are not those of its surroundings.

In general, the great urban communities of America
would be better if they were smaller in size; if they had a
closer and less parasitic dependence on the surrounding
agriculture; if their manufacturers sprang more directly
from their regional resources. This rule, we say, applies to

234 COMMUNITAS

other cities. Yet there is no need to defend Manhattan
Island; she has her own rule; there is no need to praise her,
though we who are her sons are often betrayed into doing
so. She has long been the capital not of a region but of a
nation; and it is curious that this came about. For it was as
a center through which produce passed and was processed
that New York first became great. Y 7 et now the material
shipments more and more go elsewhere, and the manufac-
turers are only light manufacturers; but Manhattan is
greater still. Within ten years she has become the intellectual
and artistic capital of the world for all Europe has come
here. She is the foster-parent of lasting ideas and temporary
fashions; of entertainments and of industrial plans that often
go elsewhere to get their tangible body, but their spirit has
something in it of Manhattan. That is, of the seaport and
its mixed races, and the politically subtle workers in light
industry, the mass-entertainers and the free artists.

Surely we people of Manhattan do not set as our ideal
(if we could afford it) to live in a suburb. But to live as
a matter of course in our own place, the most elegant and
unhurried on earth.

Feasibility

This plan is physically, economically and socially feasible
and advantageous.

1. In the interest of the shore neighborhoods, we diminish
the waterfront available for shipping and remove the Hud-
son River tracks. But the tracks have long been moribund,
and peacetime shipping is progressively being reduced.

2. Important progress toward the completion of the plan
could begin immediately after the war (as part of the
billion-dollar six-year budget) . It is estimated that from 75
to 80% of the buildings in Manhattan are overage and there
will be vast reconstruction on any plan whatsoever. But the
city's largest and newest buildings do fall in the zones here
proposed (e.g., Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Build-
ing, the downtown skyscrapers, the great hotels, etc.).

3. The giving up of the parks in the central axis provides
an enormous reservoir of land to exchange for the commer-

Appendices 235

cial and industrial property now located along the rivers, trie
sites of the future residential parks. As these business sites
progressively obsolesce and are condemned, space can be
allotted to them in the large buildings in the main axis;
therefore the transition can be made with a minimum of
hardship. Further, the money value of a square foot of land
along the central Main Street would be at least five times
that in the scattered sites to be condemned; and this would
provide a great fund to carry out the plan. The amount of
land available for exchange in the new Main Street zone
comes close to 1500 acres, valued at business center prices.

4. "If it were possible to translate into dollars the time
consumed by workers in excess travel, the result would be
startling. At least one million persons spend two hours a day
going to and from work in New York. At 50 cents an hour,
this becomes a million dollars a day or 312 million a year.
This is three percent of $10 billion, which would pay for
rebuilding large sections of New York City without calcu-
lating revenues from rents." Cleveland Rogers.

5. The political and legal opposition to this plan is the
same as that to any other Master Plan. Long-range and
large-scale zoning involves the destruction of speculation
in land values. Those who rely for their profits not on rents
but on speculation, have contrived to veto even the modest
proposals of the Tugwell plan. But it seems to us that the
proposal here made is at once so arresting and so simple, so
grounded in the site and the history of the city and in the
experience of its citizens, that it can arouse the public en-
thusiasm necessary to overcome this opposition, and end
the anomaly of the greatest city in the world having no
Master Plan at all.

APPENDIX B

Improvement o Fifth Avenue

As early as 1870, it was proposed, by Egbert L. Viele and
others, to double-deck Lower Broadway and Wai Street
because of "excessive and dangerous congestion." We here

236

COM M UNITAS

make a similar proposal to revive the amenity of New York's
great shopping and promenade street, Fifth Avenue.

The present ground level is widened by the elimination
of the sidewalks and all pedestrian use.

Sixteen feet above it we would construct a continuous
promenade from 34th Street to 59th Street. This mall is
accessible by ramps and stairways from the side streets, and
provided with a slow moving shoppers' trolley of its own.

The new Fifth Avenue is treated as a street of fountains,
arcades, sidewalk cafes, elegant shops, and interesting vis-
tas; the place, as at present, for public ceremonies, parades,
and celebrations, that can now be unhurried and not disrupt
the city's traffic.

As a further proposal, the entire area from 8th Avenue
to 3rd Avenue could be similarly double-decked.

Pkn for doubk decking 5th Avenue from 34ih St. to 59th St.
1. Ramp with new office buildings over 2. Public library 3.
Rockefeller Center 4. St. Patrick's Cathedral 5. Grand Army
Pkza. Bekw is shuttk to East and West Side subways.

Grand Army Pkza
at 60th St. fooking south

On St, Patrick's Day

Looteig north from 47th St.

The pook in the foreground are on wheek.

The public library

APPENDIX C

Housing in New York City

In New York City the housing problem is more difficult than
elsewhere. There is too much substandard housing, not
enough housing altogether, standard or substandard, and
not enough space to build new housing before demolishing
old, so there is the headache of relocation during the inter-
ims. (There are 280,000 substandard units. The estimated
need for total housing is 65,000 a year, the net new building
is 16,000.)

Now in charge of building and financing such housing
are many agencies, some designed for housing the poor,
some for housing generally, some agents of the city, but
others agents of the State and Federal governments. They
are, in part, the Housing Authority, the Mayor's Commission
on Slum Clearance and Urban Renewal, the Comptroller's
Office, the Board of Estimate, the Bureau of Real Estate, the
Department of Buildings, and various State and Federal

240

Appendices 241

Housing Agencies. Meantime, uncoordinated with these,
there are agencies in charge of location of schools (Board

of Education), and playgrounds and parks (Parks). Trans-
portation by rail falls to the Transit Authority, but if it is
automotive it may fall to the Port Authority (for certain
highways, tunnels, and bridges) or the Triborough Bridge
and Tunnel Authority (for other highways, etc.). When
cars are moving or parked in the streets, they belong to the
Traffic Department; and safety in general belongs to the
Police. Nobody as such attends to the specific relation of
workers and their particular industries, the cause of all this
commutation, but there are zoning Iaw r s for broad kinds of
occupancy, under the City Planning Commission. Neighbor-
hood quarrels, family disruption, etc., might be handled by
the Police and various Social agencies. Other departments,
too, have a hand in the community planning of New York,
e.g., Public Works, Gas, Water and Electricity, etc.

This is not very promising. Further, it is generally agreed
that unaided private enterprise cannot fill three-fourths
of the housing need. It is agreed that income-segregation
has undesirable effects, is a condition of juvenile delin-
quency, unsafe streets. Racial segregation is a problem not
beginning to be solved. The traffic congestion is intolerable.

Under the circumstances it seems reasonable to ask if
the integration of all these various functions is not relevant?
To give a partial list: housing, slum-clearance, location of
industries, transportation, adequate schools and teachers,
clean streets, traffic control, social work, racial harmony,
master planning, recreation. The list could be long extended,
not to speak of a convenient and beautiful city and local
patriotism. It is not to be hoped that in the near future we
can have an efficient, viable a peaceful city. But we do have
the right to demand that the manifold functions (and their
problems) be regarded in an overall view as functions of one
community. Apart from such a unified view, the apparent
solution of this or that isolated problem inevitably leads to
disruption elsewhere. Escape thoroughfares must aggravate
central traffic. Slum-clearance as an isolated policy must
aggravate class stratification. New subways aggravate con-
urbation. "Housing" makes for double shift and over-
crowded classrooms. No Master Plan guarantees foolishness

242 COMMUNITAS

like the Lincoln Square project. These consequent evils then
produce new evils among them. Isolated planning cannot
make sense. Therefore we propose a Community Planning
Agency.

Such a body would at least coordinate. But it should also
know how to draw out and explain the bearings and the
effects of isolated actions and proposals, for even the best-
intentioned actions in such a social area as physical plan-
ning often have far-reaching disastrous effects that the
planners never thought of. (At present, the likely undesir-
able social effects of physical proposals come to light, if
at all, only by the clamor of ad hoc pressure groups of citi-
zens who foresee where the shoe will pinch. The protest
is bound to be weak, and it has no competent body to
appeal to. Usually it is disregarded, and once a thing is
built it's built and stays.) On the other hand, there are
plans of multi-valued community benefit which require
the cooperation of several departments, but which are not
immediately relevant enough to any one to get sponsorship.
These would be precisely appropriate to a Community Plan-
ning Agency. It would have community suggestions, ideals,
and proposals of its own. It could set before the citizens
reasonably integrated pictures of what various plans and
policies concretely mean in each one's way of life, so that
choices e.g., referenda on financing public works can be
made not completely in the dark. And the Agency would
propose its own programs.

Isolated approaches can always have routine plans to fit
narrow programs. Broadly conceived approaches, that try
to cope with the complex reality, have no such wisdom.
They must proceed variously and experimentally and find
which hypotheses confirm themselves in action. It is not
even sufficient to find out what people want and give them
that, for, as Catherine Bauer put it, "We can only want
what we know. Deeper analysis may suggest some entirely
novel arrangement. The only way such an arrangement can

Appendices 248

be tested is by experimentation with its actual use, not by
asking opinions in advance." So the community approach
must be not only varied and experimental but inventive.

What warrants the uniformity of plans of the Housing
Authority? As we pointed out in the text above (p. 53) the
standards fit the customs of neither the tenants nor the
designers. They are sociological abstractions of an "Ameri-
can Standard" with little imagination of the actual residents.
Space is sacrificed for building services and domestic appli-
ances. Poor tenants arrive and do not find room for the little
furniture they have. Are the larger cold-water railroad lats
in the same neighborhood, at a cheaper rental, necessarily
less desirable? Not much use is made of sharing appliances
as a way to save expense. Spaces are uniformly partitioned
in a very few categories, though specific occupants might
have quite different needs. (E.g., in Sweden a spacious com-
mon room is much wanted.) Given a minimum budget, is
the standard bathroom a minimum? In certain Swedish
plans-we cite them because the Swedes are thought to have
a quality standard higher than ours the bathroom is a toilet
seat with a shower directly above It; hands are washed in
the kitchen sink. In a development in Leipzig, tenants
wanted balconies, and central heating was not considered an
equal value.

(If the reader will thumb through such a volume as
Elizabeth Denby's Europe Rehoused, he will get no uniform
impression of what people consider fundamentally es-
sential.)

Plaster and paint are considered a minimum amenitv,
despite the cost of upkeep; tile would not do. Yet a few
years ago in this same city, wall-paper was an indispensable
amenity. Is it always wise to spend money to landscape an
insufficient space?

We need not mention the pointlessness of repeating the
same elevation in a dozen buildings, because this is not
policy but timidity and laziness. Though indeed, as came out
in the recent public attacks on some small attempts to
beautify new school buildings, there is a widespread feeling
that variety and unconventional shapes and colors must be
wasteful and are certainly wicked.

244 COMMUNITAS

On the other hand, if we take a community approach
instead of a "houser's" approach, we might have thoughts
like the following. Perhaps variety of occupancy makes for
the best neighborhood. Certainly income-segregation is
unfortunate. How can we get more types together? Might
not the exclusive barrier between public and private financ-
ing be broken down and various other arrangements be
tried?

Hudson Guild conducted a brilliant project in the Chelsea
district, getting a few Puerto Rican families to take pride in
their flats by building furniture, repairing, and decorating,
under expert guidance. There is a lesson here. Use the
people of the community-block instead of other paid labor.
Youth for janitoring, grounds, and landscaping, as collegians
work for their keep. Perhaps the very apartment spaces
could be left more open, for the tenants to decide on their
own partitioning and help build it. Artistic effects are pos-
sible; the modern Mexicans have paved their walks with
mosaics of colored stones and broken bath-tiles, rather than
black asphalt, because they have had willing labor.

True, if you give people the sense that they can make and
change things, there might be a little constructive demoli-
tion to remedy what the architect did wrong. These are the
risks one takes.

Such activities require leadership. Have efforts been
made to get community leadership right into the neighbor-
hood block? For there is plenty of leadership, paid and
voluntary, in the social agencies and settlement houses.
Might not leaders, ministers, teachers, even politicians, be
encouraged by better quarters to live in the place and take
some responsibility for it? Consider racial integration: has
enough attempt been made at invited racial integration?

There are always too many applicants. ("More than 250,-
000 families applied for admission to the 17,040 apartments
made available by the Authority during 1943-44") Perhaps
mutual community utility could be a major principle of
selection. We recall the arrangement common in Paris after

Appendices 245

Hausmann rebuilt it: there was a shop on the first floor, the
poor family inhabited the mansard, and the rich and middle
class occupied the remainder.

APPENDIX D 1

A Plan for the Rejuvenation
of a Blighted Industrial Area
in New York City (1944-45)

The present plight of Long Island City is by no means ex-
clusive to New York. Most of America's metropolitan centers
have one or more sections suffering from similar obolescence
and blight. Flanked by the East River and Manhattan Island
on the west and the borough of Queens on the east, Long
Island City was nevertheless completely overlooked during
the flagrant exploitation of Queens during the early part
of the century and has been ever since. It was already par-
tially built up when suburban development reached its hey-
day and eager speculators passed it up for fresh, unimproved
land beyond. Even by 1910, it had a clearcut industrial
character and was later zoned for such use a measure which
unfortunately discouraged residential building and left a
myriad of small parcels of vacant land spotted at random
between existing factories. Since 1915 three subways and
numerous surface transportation lines have been built
through the area to make connections between Manhattan
and Queens, but still it has reaped little or no improvement
from its new-found strategic location. Further in its favor
as a convenient residential section is the Queensboro Bridge
approach located at its very core and the Queens-Midtown
tunnel at its low extremity.

1 Description of project by the editors of the Architectural
Forum, February, 1946.

Showing proximity to the city center, convenience of transporta-
tion, and riverside location. To the south is the "Riverview"
residential community (A); to the north, the "work residence"
community (B).

Despite its location (fifteen minutes of easy travel to
Times Square), and good transportation facilities, Long
Island City's present condition is one of advanced decay.
Though the huge Sunnyside freight and the passenger yards
belonging to the Pennsylvania Railroad inject some lif e and
small commerce, their inland site has tended to draw build-
ing and development away from the waterfront, while the
existence of two car-float terminals from Staten Island and
New Jersey has rendered the riverfront anything but desir-
able for residence. As a result vacant land abounds; values

Appendices 247

are low, ranging from 50 cents to $2.25 per sq. ft. and low-
est near the shoreline. According to the 1930 census, Long

Island City's population was only 40,800, representing a
density of about 23 persons per acre. What dwellings exist,
are, for the most part, slums or near-slums, having been
built prior to 1899.

Because of its size and proximity to midtown New York, it
is only logical that such an area should be a healthy, active
and important part of greater New York and not the liability
that its delinquent taxes and low values represent today.
With this in mind two schemes of redevelopment are pro-
posed, 1. A community, zoning existing light manufacturing
and residence extending from Hallets Cove to the Queens-
bridge Houses north of Queensboro Bridge. This project
was designed by the City Planning Group of Columbia Uni-
versity under the direction of Percival Goodman. 2. South
of the bridge extending to 35th Street is the proposed 114
acre Riverview Community designed by Pomerance and
Breines, Andrew J. Thomas and Percival Goodman, Associ-
ated Architects. This project takes full advantage of a water-
front location and the striking skyline view offered by Man-
hattan's tall buildings across the river. It is intended to
house some 50,000 persons (because of present low density,
this would call for rehousing only about 5,000). Privately
financed and paying full taxes, it is estimated that rents
would run between 11.50 and $25.00 per room per month.
The project, which encompasses about one-quarter of the
total area, is bounded to the North by the Queensboro
Bridge approach and the existing Queensbridge housing
project. Further north, and also on the river, is planned
another residential section with a density of about 200 per-
sons per acre. Between the latter and the Surmyside yards
to the east would be located a third neighborhood zoned
for housing and restricted industry. The planners foresee
that many existing non-nuisance factories could be retained
in this area and converted into local assets rather than lia-
bilities. They feel that the existing street pattern should
not be altered but merely blocked at given points to increase
land values and improve the appearance of the community
as a whole.

248 COMMUNITAS

Naturally, such a plan calls for rezoning of the "work-
residence" type with its obvious advantages: lower trans-
portation costs for the worker who can live near his place
of employment, a rise in land values in the sections now
overzoned for industry, replacement of industrial slums with
parks, playgrounds and other public conveniences. Also in-
cluded in the plan is provision for the improvement of exist-
ing overhead transportation structures and replanning of
through traffic at Queens Plaza, a nearby intersection and
passenger transfer point of intense congestion.

120093