Better by Design? Also by Paul L. Knox Atlas of Cities Palimpsests: Biographies of 50 City Districts Cities and Design Metroburbia: The Anatomy of Greater London London: Architecture, Building, and Social Change Strong Island: Portsmouth’s History in Brick and Stone Metroburbia USA Small Town Sustainability (with Heike Mayer) World Cities in a World-System (with Peter Taylor) Design Professionals and the Built Environment (with Peter Ozolins) The Restless Urban Landscape The Geography of Western Europe Public Service Provision and Urban Development (with Andrew Kirby and Steven Pinch) Geography and Inequality (with Bryan Coates and Ron Johnston) Social Well-Being: A Spatial Perspective World Regional Geography: Peoples, Places, and Environments (with Sallie Marston, Diana Liverman, Paul Robbins and Vincent Del Casino) Urbanization (with Linda McCarthy) Human Geography: Places and Regions in Global Context (with Sallie Marston) Urban Social Geography (with Steven Pinch) The Geography of the World-Economy (with John Agnew and Linda McCarthy) The United States: A Contemporary Human Geography (with Jim Bohland, Briavel Holcomb and Ron Johnston) i Better by Design? Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Good City Paul L. Knox Blacksburg, Virginia ii Text, design, and layout copyright © 2020 Paul L. Knox Photographs copyright © 2020 Paul L. Knox, except as noted on page 302 First published 2020 by Virginia Tech Publishing Virginia Tech Publishing University Libraries at Virginia Tech 560 Drillfield Drive Blacksburg, VA 24061 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Note to users: This work may contain components (e.g., photographs, illustrations, or quotations) not covered by the license. Every effort has been made to identify these components but ultimately it is your responsibility to independently evaluate the copyright status of any work or component part of a work you use, in light of your intended use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, California, 94042, USA. This book was peer-reviewed (2 single-blind reviews) prior to publication by Virginia Tech Pub- lishing. Publication Cataloging Information Knox, Paul L., author Better by Design? Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Good City / Paul L. Knox Pages cm ISBN: 978-1-949373-33-2 (epub) ISBN: 978-1-949373-31-8 (paperback) ISBN: 978-1-949373-32-5 (pdf) DOI: https://doi.org/10.21061/better-by-design 1. Architecture. 2. Architecture and society NA9000.K74 2020 720 Every effort has been made to contact and acknowledge copyright owners, but the editors would be pleased to have any errors or omissions brought to their attention, so that corrections may be published in future editions. Front Cover image: Aardvark/Alamy Stock Photo Back cover: Royal Institute of British Architects archive iii Contents Preface v Part I: Introduction 1. Good Cities, Bad Cities 2 2. Design Practitioners and Their Fields 10 Part II: The Intentional City 3. Foundational Ideas and Legacy Frameworks 20 4. Careers Open to Talent and Taste 38 5. The Ideology of Progress 53 6. The First Modernity: Paths Taken 92 7. Windows of Change 130 8. The Golden Age 165 Part III: The Continuing Struggle 9. The Neoliberal City 208 10. The Aestheticized City 233 11. A New Realism 254 12. Coda: Telos and Techne 277 Selected Reading 285 Notes 287 Photo Credits 302 Index 304 iv Preface This book is the culmination of a career of writing on urbanization, the design professions, and the social production of the built environment. In broader terms it is the outcome of a combination of academic interest, teach- ing experience, and personal experience. Having long pursued an interest in urbanization and the built environment from a social science perspective, I found myself in the privileged position of dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies at Virginia Tech for almost a decade. During that time my involvement with design professionals and access to planners, builders, developers, community groups, and professional accrediting bodies gave me additional insight and somewhat different perspectives on the production and meaning of the built environment. Office visits, site visits, and infor- mal conversations gave depth and texture to issues that had hitherto been, for me, mainly empirical or theoretical in tenor. They also taught me that a summative view is neither possible nor desirable and that a purity of critique is illusory. Teaching courses in architecture and planning meanwhile provid- ed strong evidence of the passion and commitment of design students and the power, in pedagogical terms, of the studio. But these experiences also revealed the insularity of solipsistic academic disciplines and, in stark con- trast, the dependence of practitioners on external relations and the shifting interdependencies inherent to urban political economies. This book seeks to bring these perspectives together within an overall framework that is informed by social theory. It offers a reinterpretation of the history of the design professions, tracing their intellectual roots, iden- tifying foundational ideas, key innovations, and path-dependent historical processes, and presents a critical appraisal of the effectiveness of the design professions in the perpetual urge to create and sustain “good cities.” I have made no attempt to offer my own definition of a good city. The point here is that context is everything. Although there are recurring dimensions of soci- etal conceptions of the good city, priorities change in response to the exigen- cies and opportunities of successive phases of urban development and their interpretation by different groups. The achievements of professional fields involved in the production of the built environment must be understood in relation to these changing priorities and interpretations. I have been helped enormously by my colleagues, friends, and students. Their thoughts, comments, and skills have been invaluable. I would especially like to recognize the contributions of Professor Robert Freestone, my new colleague Professor Aaron Betsky, and anonymous reviewers of the draft manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the encouragement and advice of Peter Potter and the generous support of Virginia Tech in the preparation and publication of this book. Unless indicated otherwise, the photographs in the book are my own. In several cases I am indebted to the contributors of images to the Wikimedia Commons. Longleaf Services provided wonderfully effective editing. Any remaining errors are of course my own responsibility. Blacksburg, Virginia June 2020 v Part I Introduction 1 Good Cities, Bad Cities he design professions—architecture, urban planning, landscape Tarchitecture, and urban design—share a great deal in terms of intel- lectual antecedents, professional ideals, and praxis. They rightly claim a crucial link between the built environment and human flourishing, and share a commitment to creating better cities, whether at the scale of buildings, neighborhoods, or city-regions. They have overlapping philosophical and theoretical discourses as well as intersecting creative practices. Their telos encompasses the material realization of socially accepted conceptions of the good and what it means to live well: shap- ing environments in ways that contribute to social well-being and liv- ability and proposing new possibilities for living. Like all other professions, the design professions rely on their knowledgeability and expertise for their fundamental professional and intellectual authority. For architecture and its derivative offspring— urban planning, landscape architecture, and urban design—this exper- tise is in designing and implementing blueprints for built environments that are effective, beneficial, resilient, and agreeable. Their legitimacy rests, in other words, on their ability to create the physical fabric and spatial organization necessary for “good cities,” broadly conceived. The staple interpretation of the history of the design professions pivots around the influence of inspirational figures and the successive responses of the avant-garde to changes in historical circumstances. This kind of narrative—emphasizing the way that the idealizations of visionaries have found their way into practice and been condensed out into the built environment—has been followed in relation to all of the design professions.1 Such narratives often fail to fully recognize the way that the key themes and concepts have been unearthed, borrowed, retranslated, adapted, hybridized, and applied to new contexts from one historical period to another. But what is often entirely discounted are the additional complexities resulting from interdependencies with actors and agents from other fields. “The design of cities,” Barnett points out, “has been determined by engineers, surveyors, lawyers, and investors, each making individual, rational decisions for rational rea- sons.”2 Well, perhaps not always for rational reasons, but certainly with a variety of motivations, and not all of them concerned so much with creating better cities. 2 Good Cities, Bad Cities The production of the built environment must therefore be seen as a function of time- and place-specific social relations that involve not only design professionals but also a web of other actors and institu- tions, including landowners, investors, financiers, developers,