After the Planners Robert Goodman

a Pelican Original After the Planners Robert Goodman Pelican Books After the Planners Architecture Environment and Planning Robert Goodman is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been involved for some considerable time in planning environments for those in the lower income brackets. He is a founder of Urban Planning Aid, and helped to organize The Architect’s Resistance. He has been the critic on architecture for the Boston Globe and his designs and articles have been widely exhibited and published. He is currently researching a project under the patronage of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. John A. D. Palmer is a Town Planner who, after experience in London and Hampshire, left local government to join a small group of professionals forming the Notting Hill Housing Service which works in close association with a number of community groups. He is now a lecturer in the Department of Planning, Polytechnic of Central London, where he is attempting to link the education of planners with the creation of a pool of expertise and information for community groups to draw on. AFTER THE PLANNERS ROBERT GOODMAN PENGUIN BOOKS To Sarah and Julia AND ALL THOSE BRAVE PEOPLE WHO WON’T PUT UP WITH IT Penguin Books Ltd, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia First published in the U.S.A. by Simon & Schuster and in Great Britain by Pelican Books 1972 Copyright © Robert Goodman, 1972 Made and printed in Great Britain by Compton Printing Ltd, Aylesbury This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction to the British edition Introduction c h a pter i • W it h a L ittle H elp from t h e E xperts The promise and failure of advocacy planning—a per sonal search. The “urban crisis”: watching an old movie. Liberal and conservative reforms for the "dis eases” of the poor. ch a pter ii • T h e U rban-In dustrial Com plex : PART ONE Converting the military-industrial corporations, the current vision of urban reform. Record of the urban- industrial complex in the cities. Law and order, educa tion, and job training. ch a pter h i • T h e U rban-I ndustrial Com plex : PART TWO Muscle from Washington—housing, urban renewal, and the highway gravy train. The corporate crystal ball—models for the future. ch a pter iv • T h e Architecture of R epressio n Architecture as cultural coating for exploitation—cur rent examples and the nineteenth-century “factory camp city.” Daniel Burnham, the "White City” and the origins of city design. The metaphors of fascism. ch a pter v • E xcess B aggage : P rofessionalism and A lien a tio n The expert and the people—the professional self- image. An architecture for architects. The architecture CONTENTS of counter-revolution—concepts of Robert Venturi and Edward T. Hall. ch a pter vi • T h e S c ie n t ific M ethod : S alvation from P olitics 183 The conservative bias of city-planning reforms. Mak ing it legal—zoning and city-planning commissions. Liberal programs for integration through zoning and education foster racism. Enter the technocrats and pseudo-science—Rexford Tugwell makes a classic case. Daniel P. Moynihan and the urban medicine men. c h a pter vii • T oward L iberation 211 Advocacy planning, pluralism and capitalism—the con tradictions. Community-socialism, "just outputs” and cultural revolution. Revolutionary demands and guer rilla architecture. Some lessons from “primitive" cul tures. New forms and a new commitment. Notes 252 Photo Credits 262 Index 264 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Often agreeing with the content of my arguments, some readers of the manuscript of this book have been concerned about the style of my presentation. They would have hoped for a less “bitter” analysis. Perhaps for another subject and another time in history, a gentler form would have been in order. But if this book reveals my contempt for the inequity and injustice that traditional planning helps promote in this country, then let that rage stand at least to symbolize that some of us will not be content to allow it to continue. If some part of why that contempt exists and what we can do about it can be felt by the reader, then perhaps in some way this writing will move us closer to a time when our acts turn from anger and frustration to a life of living in peace with one another. In writing this book I have had help from many people. Most especially for reviewing the critical ideas, providing new insights and suggesting material, I thank my good friend Yanni Pyriotis. To make possible the ponderous task of gathering material on numerous planning proposals, projects and theories of urban experts, I had the intelligent help of Joan Fleischnick, Hannah Kaltman, Nathan Rome and Suzanne Weinberg. For their ideas, editorial help and encouragement I owe more than gratitude to Diane Berman, Rosalind Krauss, Anita Landa, Rhea Wilson, and Gillie Terry. Pamela Bedrosian, Nancy Jones and Ellen Berman I really don’t know how to thank—they’ve put up with a multi tude of changes and rewrites in their typing work; I ask ACKNOWLEDGMENTS their forgiveness. For their assistance in financing part of this study I express my gratitude to the Community Proj ects Laboratory of the Architecture Department at the Mas sachusetts Institute of Technology. Thanks, if any, to my father and mother, without whose help the world would have been spared one more book, will have to be accorded by the reader. My apologies and gratitude to all those people whose help was crucial and whose names I haven’t mentioned. Finally, like everyone else, I thank you all, but I take re sponsibility for what follows. R obert Goodman Cambridge, Massachusetts INTRODUCTION TO THE BRITISH EDITION The publication of After the Planners in the United Kingdom is timely when planning plays an increasingly important role in government and business. This book is the result of Robert Goodman’s experience as an 'advo cate planner’ attempting to compensate for the lack of expertise of poor urban communities countering insensi tive and often unjust 'planned’ change in American cities. Through his experience as an advocate for the poor, Goodman came to realize that it was not merely lack of expertise which lay at the roots of such com munities’ problems, but the political, economic and cultural context of American society. Since many of the tendencies, inconsistencies and contradictions which Goodman analyses are also apparent in our own society, and in our planning apparatus, his arguments give us many insights into our own situation. As Goodman himself points out in his Introduction, he was never a part of either the hippy underground culture nor a radical in the sense that he had a political analysis of his situation to fall back on. His experience as a 'counter-professional’ and his analysis of the reasons why expertise, science and objective analysis have failed to come to grips with the explosion of urban problems in post-war America arose from his personal idealism. He reacted against what he calls 'an insistent 9 INTRODUCTION TO THE BRITISH EDITION pattern of arrogant and repressive programmes’ carried out by planners, politicians and corporate interests. Like many other young people brought up in the over developed society, his original stand has led him farther into a rejection of the life-styles of consumption and bureaucratic control that Herbert Marcuse has defined as the 'one-dimensional society’. Above all, he is one of those seeking a new politics, a new ideology for a mor ally acceptable social change. Goodman speaks not only in the voice of young Americans, but what he has to say describes the contra dictions and dilemmas of the developed western world. His position can be compared with that put forward in the manifesto of a group of planners and architects from Europe and Latin America, who came together in a planning school in London in 1970. They too quote from an American in describing their own intellectual development. My own social and intellectual background is that of middle-class North America ... I was ... 'on the Left, where the heart is’. However I was fundamentally irresponsible; I was an intellectual schizophrenic; I kept my political opinion and my intellectual and professional work apart, accepting scientific theories more or less as they were handed to me and forming my political opinions largely in response to feeling and isolated facts. Like many of my colleagues I was a liberal. To learn to do research in the social sciences worthy of the name, to become socially and politically more responsible, and to dare to tell people . what political economy of growth might serve them, I had to free myself from the liberal maxim, according to which only political neutrality permits scientific objectivity, pseudo-scientific scientism and political reaction. I had to learn that social science must be political science.* *Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America, A. G. Franka, quoted in An Alternative Programme for Study, Arias. Diaz, von Gavel, Saccheri; Architectural Association. 1970. 10 INTRODUCTION TO THE BRITISH EDITION For these students too, radicalism grew out of direct experience of planning and architectural practice in their own countries. What unites each of these small groups of disaffected professionals and students is an understanding that the result of planning at national, regional or city-wide levels is the support or rationaliza tion of the status quo, in situations where fundamental changes are necessary.

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