The Travel Path of the Neighborhood Unit: from the US and Europe to Latin America

The travel path of the Neighborhood Unit: From the US and Europe to Latin America. The transfer of the model to Venezuela planning Nelliana Villoria Siegert Universidad Simon Bolivar, Caracas, Venezuela The transfer of the Neighborhood Unit (NU) model to the Caracas of the 1950s offers a useful opportunity to trace the adoption of modern planning concepts in Latin America, and it sheds useful light on the little known but important history of Caracas’s urban development. It could be easily assumed that the NU model was transferred to Venezuela directly from the US, where it was created in the 1920s. But this research shows that in fact, it reached Venezuela through European and American cultural channels. By the time the American NU concept appeared in Caracas, it had already been informed by European planning ideas discussed in the CIAM meetings (Villoria, 1998; Mumford, 2000). Walter Gropius, Richard Neutra, and Le Corbusier were among the notable and influential practitioners who espoused and supported the NU model at that meeting (Mumford, 2000). This flow of information from Europe and the U.S. provided young and older Venezuelan professionals with an opportunity to absorb the state-of- the-art planning concepts of the time. The growing influence of North American theories and European modernism in Caracas were evident –at least rhetorically— in the Regulatory Plan of Caracas (Plano Regulador de la Ciudad de Caracas 1951). In practice, NUs built by private developers were for the most part, loyal to the original elements of the model, characterized by low-density suburban neighborhood filled with single-family houses. Progressively, Caracas was extended over the virgin landscape of the east and southeast filled with new NUs designed and built by private developers. When the NU model was applied to public housing in Venezuela, changes were made. In order to shelter Caracas’s booming population, planners clearly merged the NU idea with CIAM proposals for dense housing—seen in Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in Marseilles. Le Corbusier’s plan—high rise housing complexes and community facilities scattered over vast green areas— informed the design of most of these NUs. The application of the NU concept in Caracas shows the results of the merging of planning models, demonstrating how ideas are carried out to radically different regions and adapt to different contexts. It shows American and European influences on Venezuelan planning, and also how these different paradigms and practices helped to transform the Venezuelan landscape in ways that today reflect its particular culture and past. [email protected] 1 The importing of American and European planning models to Latin America, and particularly Venezuela, is a subject that remains largely unexplored in the literature (notable exceptions include the work of Holston 1989). The transfer of the Neighborhood Unit (NU) model to the Caracas of the 1950s offers a useful opportunity to trace the adoption of modern planning concepts in Venezuela, and it sheds light on the little known but important history of Caracas’s urban development. It could be easily assumed that the NU model was transferred to Venezuela directly from the US, where it was created in the 1920s. But this research will show that in fact, it reached Venezuela through European and American cultural channels. By the time this model was brought to the continent it was the product of the merging of European ideas from the CIAM and North American planning proposals. More importantly, it was a trend that took place in several countries of South America. In order to fully understand the NU model we need to go back to the Europe’s indrustialists’ attempts to create self-contained sub-centers in the periphery of cities. As early as the beginning of the 19th century, a few industrialists realized that a feasible way to locate their industries in order to have access to labor and cut down land development costs it was building new industrial towns in the outskirts of the city where land was cheaper and where they could develop residential areas around their factories. We could say the NU concept dates back to these experiences. According to them this was going to reduce the social chaos created by industries in the overcrowded urban centers, which was a position that was considered philanthropic by some because it showed some preoccupation for the welfare of the workers. Some examples of these initiatives are: New Lanark in Scotland, built by Robert Owen (1810); Saltaire (1863); Bournville for Cadbury’s chocolate factory (1895), and in Germany, Margarethenhohe (1906) for Krupp’s employees. In the US, very similar solutions took place in the outside of Chicago, as you may remember, George Pullman, developed an industrial town that he named after himself. In the late 1880s, Ebenezer Howard would have the vision to put these practical solutions in the form of a more complex planning concept that would influence planning worldwide. Two basic elements of the Garden City idea were planned dispersion —decentralized industries surrounded by a residential town, which combined work and housing in a healthy environment—, and the concept of unity. The latter interests us the most in regards to the NU model. The unity concept would guarantee self-sufficiency and independency of each of these cells that gravitated around the city and were connected to it by collective transportation means. Howard was not proposing isolated units, instead, once these nucleus around the city reached a certain size and complexity, they would give birth to a new town where that population should be accommodated. In this way, settlements would grow by the addition of several cells in a multi-centric organization of towns, surrounded by open space. Later, in the early 1920s, Clarence Perry, a sociologist-planner and member of the New York Regional Plan working group, created a model for the design of residential areas as part of the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs (1929). The NU would offer city residents more open space, recreational opportunities, educational, and commercial facilities; it would also create self-contained, self sufficient neighborhoods in which residents need not travel long distances in order to satisfy basic needs. The NU model was based on the assumption that with the provision of appropriate spaces and functions, residents would naturally associate in order to pursue collective ends; this, in turn, would elicit a strong sense of community. It was informed by several antecedents: the English settlement house and Garden City movements; segregated use zoning; and the community center movement (Rohe and Gates 1985). The NU had six important aspects: appropriate size, identifiable boundaries, provision and critical sitting of open spaces, institutional sites and local shops, and an internal street system. A NU would have a population no larger than that, which could be served by one elementary 2 school, while being large enough in area to allow low residential density. The NU was to be bounded by arterial streets to discourage through traffic. Internally, the residential unit was to be organized around a system of open spaces, parks and recreation areas. The local school were to be centrally located, at a place of roughly equal distance from all residential areas. Shopping districts were to be located at the circumference of the unit in such a way to serve abutting NUs. In addition, the internal street system was to employ cul-de-sacs, to secure residential privacy (Regional plan of New York and its environs 1929). Just like the case with Ebenezer Howard, most of Perry’s ideas were not new, they were mentioned by his predecessors, but his value was to put the idea into a workable solution, a planning model. Perry himself had lived since 1912 in a residential area designed by Frederick law Olmsted Jr. (Forest Hills Gardens, Queens, NY), who based his design concept on Letchworth, the first Garden City (Hall, 1974, p. 53). In 1923, the same year in which Perry presented for the first time his proposal of the NU, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright and the real estate developer Alexander M. Bing traveled to England to meet with Ebenezer Howard and visit the English garden cities. From these, they went back to the US with the intention of developing Sunnyside Gardens. Sunnyside Gardens was developed under the sponsorship of the City Housing Corporation (CHC), an entity created by the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA) in 1924. Later in the 1920s, it was the CHC that acquired the land in New Jersey where what it is considered the first NU was to be developed –Radburn. The designers were again, Stein and Wright. In 1929, when Perry published its work The Neighborhood Unit, a Scheme of Arrangement for the Family-Life Community, Gordon Stephenson, a former official of the English Ministry of Town and Country Planning, visited Radburn and returned to England disseminating the NU model (Schubert, 1998). According to Peter Hall, Barry Parker also helped disseminate the NU model in England, but it would be H. Alker Tripp the one who lead the transfer of the model to England. The adoption of the model was reflected in the Greater London Plan and the creation of New Towns. The NU was also promoted in public and private housing developments in several cities of Asia, Africa, Australia and Latin America. Other planners who helped spread the NU model in Europe were Thomas Sharps, Frederick Gibbard, Peter Mann (Schubert, 1998), and Anatole Solow, to name a few. Anatole Sollow also participated in the design of Hill, a NU in New Hampshire, and later, was part of the group of foreign professionals who traveled to Venezuela during the 1950s to assist the government in the pursuit of its housing development goals.

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