Civitas by Design

Building Better Communities, from the Garden City to the New Urbanism

Howard Gillette

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812205282
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civics & Citizenship
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Since the end of the nineteenth century, city planners have aspired not only to improve the physical living conditions of urban residents but also to strengthen civic ties through better design of built environments. From Ebenezer Howard and his vision for garden cities to today's New Urbanists, these visionaries have sought to deepen civitas, or the shared community of citizens.In Civitas by Design, historian Howard Gillette, Jr., takes a critical look at this planning tradition, examining a wide range of environmental interventions and their consequences over the course of the twentieth century. As American reform efforts moved from progressive idealism through the era of government urban renewal programs to the rise of faith in markets, planners attempted to cultivate community in places such as Forest Hills Gardens in Queens, New York; Celebration, Florida; and the post-Katrina Gulf Coast. Key figures—including critics Lewis Mumford and Oscar Newman, entrepreneur James Rouse, and housing reformer Catherine Bauer—introduced concepts such as neighborhood units, pedestrian shopping malls, and planned communities that were implemented on a national scale. Many of the buildings, landscapes, and infrastructures that planners envisioned still remain, but frequently these physical designs have proven insufficient to sustain the ideals they represented. Will contemporary urbanists' efforts to join social justice with environmentalism generate better results? Gillette places the work of reformers and designers in the context of their times, providing a careful analysis of the major ideas and trends in urban planning for current and future policy makers.

Chapter 1

Progressive Reform Through
Environmental Intervention

In its attempt to grapple with the harsh conditions brought about by urban industrialism, the Progressive Era set the stage for many of the twentieth-century reforms that followed. Seen in historical perspective, this movement appears sharply limited by a middle-class bias that sought less to eliminate injustice than it did to restore an idealized vision of established republican principles. If it failed to challenge racial or gender bias and left unchallenged the basic tenets of modern capitalism, it nonetheless sought through active government intervention to assure that the democratic system offered its citizens the chance of a decent life. In seeking to mediate the ill effects of unbridled development, Progressives became the first generation to embrace environmental intervention as a means of improving both the social and the physical attributes of cities. Whether the object of their attention was in the home, in public spaces, or in the means though which urban development might be directed through planning, they sought to assure acceptable conditions for living, work, and recreation.¹ That reform groups counted on an active and engaged citizenry to achieve their goals made them the first generation to actively pursue civitas through design.

Because activists committed to social and physical aspects of urban reform diverged in the second decade of the twentieth century, it is often been assumed that their goals were incompatible. The chief publicist of the City Beautiful movement, Charles Mulford Robinson, suggested as much in 1904: “We may reasonably assert…that civic art need concern itself only with the outward aspects of the houses, and therefore that for such details—sociologically pressing though they are—as sunless bedrooms, dark halls and stairs, foul cellars, dangerous employments, and an absence of bathrooms, civic art has no responsibility, however earnestly it deplores them.”² Robinson may have intuited the ultimate divisions that specialization ultimately advanced, but at the outset reformers of all persuasions looked to environmental improvements as a primary means for social uplift. Whether it was a City Beautiful plan to reshape downtowns as monumental civic cores capable of inspiring resident loyalty and respect or the actions of housing activists and settlement workers to improve the lives of immigrants, reformers agreed: a strong democracy required a decent environment.

Progressivism had many antecedents, but without doubt the crusading journalist Jacob Riis played a major role in sparking public interest in environmental reform. For more than a quarter century, as far back as the aftermath of the 1863 draft riots, critics had sought to curb building practices in New York City that crowded residents into densely overcrowded and highly unsanitary tenements. Efforts to eliminate the most atrocious conditions secured modest results without, however, attracting the lasting concern or interest of the general public.³ Riis's provocative exposé How the Other Half Lives, published in 1890, reflected earlier criticisms but had the advantage in its graphic imagery of bringing home to a middle-class audience conditions that were not just alien but threatening. Here, he demonstrated, were conditions infecting not just individuals but civic health as a whole, for such poor home conditions, it seemed beyond argument, produced bad citizens. Alienated from nature, removed from any trace of healthy village life, and thus lacking natural ties of friendship and moral support, poor urban dwellers appeared susceptible to every variety of social, physical, and spatial disorder: crime, saloons, and a steady deterioration of mind and body. Crammed by necessity into living quarters in which they remained defenseless, these victims threatened to spread the ill effects of their own disorderly lives, thus contaminating whole cities. Riis made just this point in a 1903 visit to Washington, D.C., where a quick survey of that city's notorious living conditions in back alleys had stirred reform efforts at the turn of the century. Describing the inside of these dwellings to the Senate District Committee as worse than those in New York and “too dreadful to conceive,” he subsequently warned a meeting of the city's Associated Charities, “You cannot suffer these places to continue in existence and do your duty to your city or to yourselves. The influences they exert threaten you, for the handsome block in whose center lies the festering mass of corruption is rotten to the core. The corruption spreads, my friends, and you will pay the bill.”⁴ Riis's friend Theodore Roosevelt shared his view of the dire civic consequences that followed slum conditions. Speaking at an exhibit on New York tenements about the same time, Roosevelt advised his audience to “go look through the charts downstairs, which show the centers of disease and poverty, and remember that it is there that the greatest number of votes are cast.”⁵ Such efforts to tie the social welfare of those living in slum conditions to the self-interest of the middle class helped Progressives generate support for their cause.⁶

In what would prove an understatement in a period when graphic depiction was becoming the rule, political scientist Elgin Gould concluded in his influential 1895 volume, The Housing of the Working People, “bad housing is a terribly expensive thing to any community.” According to Christine Boyer, the obvious response was to impose an orderly environment to “discipline and turn to social advantage the base instincts of the individual.”⁷ This intervention necessarily started in the home according to early housing critics. Alice Lincoln, for instance, declared in 1899 that “a good, clean, wholesome home ought to be within the reach of every honest, temperate, and respectable man and woman; only from such homes can the best children and the best citizens come forth to help forward the progress of the nation.”⁸ Riis shared this outlook, complaining about the “murder of the home” and describing the tenement as “the enemy of the commonwealth.”⁹ Roy Lubove reports, “He observed that tenement neighborhoods, populated often by foreigners and their children, seemed to abound in vice, crime, and pauperism. He assumed, therefore, that the physical environment was at fault. The tenement must cause a deterioration of character, making the individual more susceptible to vice than he would have been in a different environment. Improve his housing, it followed, and you would influence his character for the better.” Riis was not entirely captive to such determinism, however. “More than previous housing reformers, he sensed that the tenement, the slum, was a way of life and not simply a problem of sub-standard housing. Thus socially effective housing reform would involve a reconstruction of the whole environment and the customary life-organization of the inhabitants,”¹⁰ Lubove concludes.

Reconstructing a broader environment necessarily led Riis and other Progressives to campaigns to curb, if not eliminate, the influence of institutions considered morally suspect, such as saloons and dance halls, even if such places may have satisfied deep needs for recreation and release from the vicissitudes of daily living, at work as well as at home. Again, such efforts may have been more intense in the Progressive Era, but they were not new. What Riis pointed to as well were changes in the urban environment that could be relied on to counter the bad effects of conditions that could not be eliminated entirely. Here he looked especially to youth, seeing the school and its associated recreational activities as necessary means for creating the next generation of what he called “useful citizens.” Anticipating the community school movement described in Chapter 4 in conjunction with Clarence Arthur Perry's neighborhood planning concept, Riis argued, “When the fathers and mothers meet under the school roof as in their neighborhood house, and the children have their games, their clubs, and their dances there, there will no longer be a saloon question in politics; and that day the slum is beaten.”¹¹ Closely associated was Riis's interest in planting small parks in tenement districts as wholesome diversions and, ultimately, as places of socialization as well as recreation.

Figure 1. Work invades the home: a New York City tenement apartment. Photograph by Lewis Hine, 1913. Library of Congress.

Each element in Riis's range of reform efforts would grow in importance as the Progressive movement matured. In the years when Riis first become widely known, housing reform remained largely a philanthropic endeavor, a position he promoted himself.¹² Among the most visible efforts in New York City was Alfred T. White's construction of tenements between 1877 and 1890 for “thrifty and socially ambitious” artisans in Brooklyn. White described his effort as driven by “fair return for fair rents, simple justice, and not that which is falsely called charity.” To his first efforts in the late 1870s he introduced the innovation of locating a central courtyard within several blocks of tenements, a clear effort to insulate residents from the temptations of the street even as it assured residents greater access to light and air.¹³ Suburban Homes, which he formed in 1896, became the most prolific “limited dividend” company in America, so named because with returns limited at between 3 and 7 percent, they were well below expected market returns which could reach 20 percent. Costs were kept down as investors combined modest profits with a sense of charitable giving.¹⁴ The critic Elgin Gould formed a limited-dividend company himself, building properties both in Manhattan and Brooklyn to provide amenities lacking in the city's worst tenements—broad central courts, apartments two rooms deep to guarantee light and ventilation, private water closets, and gas appliances—but at a cost that made such structures unaffordable to the mass of workers whose housing conditions remained intolerable.¹⁵

The alternative approach embraced more widely by mainstream reformers at the turn of the century was regulation, a movement that assumed prominence first in New York City under the leadership of Lawrence Veiller. As head of the New York Charity Organization Society, Veiller used information gathered from a survey of sanitary and physical conditions in tenement houses to mount an exhibit whose shocking details helped build support for new legislation. As approved in 1901, the new state tenement law marked a shift from regulating building materials to regulating building conditions by mandating minimum standards for light and air and requiring running water and water closets in every apartment. That success sparked other regulatory efforts, in Chicago, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Cincinnati, among other cities. Veiller's massive two-volume report, issued in 1903 with fellow housing reformer Robert DeForest, charted those efforts even as it further documented unsuitable housing conditions around the country.¹⁶ Throughout the volume, the authors expressed confidence, now common among Progressives, in the power of the environment to make new citizens: “It is only by providing homes for the working people, that is, by providing for them not only shelter, but shelter of such a kind as to protect life and health and to make family life possible, free from surroundings which tend to immorality, that the evils of crowded city life can be mitigated and overcome.…Homes are quite as much needed to make good citizens as to make good men. According as the working people are provided with better or poorer homes will the government, morals, and health of a city be better or worse.”¹⁷

The 1903 report marked a shift that became characteristic in the Progressive Era, from the sensationalist reporting typified by Riis to the systematic gathering of information and more concerted organization to act upon findings. Its success prompted other efforts to effect environmental change, the most important of which was the Pittsburgh Survey of 1907-8, generously funded by the newly formed Russell Sage Foundation. Published initially in the journal Charities and the Commons beginning in January 1909, the survey appeared in six volumes between 1909 and 1914. Describing “entire families living in one room,…courts and alleys fouled by bad drainage and piles of rubbish,” and “playgrounds for rickety, pale-faced grimy children,” the Survey coupled emotion with fact-finding to secure new regulatory reforms. In attempting to remake man-made environments by identifying problems in the community machinery and recommending specific solutions, the Survey sustained as an article of faith the belief that civic action and a revitalized democracy would inevitably follow such investigations.¹⁸ Pointing especially to environmental reforms—to reduce smoke, improve sanitation, and increase access to natural resources—Joel Tarr characterizes the investigators' motivation as rooted in a “new science and art of social up building” with the goal of producing “a self-reliant, self-directing community.”¹⁹

Closely associated with housing reform was a settlement movement that built on Riis's emphasis on the neighborhood context for social reform. Dominated by the first generation of college-educated women seeking an outlet for their idealism as well as their advanced training, settlements sought through a range of programs and activities to draw workers and their families into their sphere of influence and, in the process, to educate them to the habits of good citizenship. Linked to earlier uplift efforts confined to home improvement, settlement work nonetheless embraced a wider environmental sphere. Settlement workers fought for better schools and sanitation, supported union organizing, and agitated for accessible recreational opportunities. New York settlement worker Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch unveiled a typically ambitious agenda by seeking to reduce neighborhood congestion, establish social centers at schools, and create “a community spirit.”²⁰

As the premier representative of the settlement movement, Jane Addams made explicit the domesticating thrust of her work. She considered Hull House a model home for the immigrants who attended the programs there. High standards in art and furnishings were but part of the larger message of proper comportment that visitors were to take away. If they could never afford the particular emblems of civilization they were exposed to, they nonetheless were expected to absorb and appreciate standards of beauty that could be applied in their own homes. Further efforts extended directly into working-class homes, where the new helping professions provided advice on how to apply rules of cleanliness and order considered essential to the sustenance of the family in crowded apartments that often doubled as work as well as domestic spaces. Gwendolyn Wright asserts that “Housing reformers saw themselves as a moral police force, using environmental change to enforce propriety.”²¹

Some tensions existed between settlement and professional social workers. While the former grew increasingly convinced that poverty was the product of environmental conditions that could be overcome through humane intervention, the latter field clung still to the nineteenth-century belief that impoverishment was a product of poor character.²² As settlement workers made inroads into the programming for the national meetings of the National Conference of Charities and Corrections, however, the division narrowed in favor of an environmental view. With the election in 1906 of Edward T. Devine, a strong believer in shifting intervention from individual uplift to a broader program of environmental change, the agency began to swing to that view. By 1910, when Jane Addams delivered her presidential address by right of her election a year before, she could claim the two wings had been united, each with its own role, but marching together under the banner of environmental change.²³ By this point, Daniel Burnstein asserts, while Progressives agreed on the need to alter social behavior, unlike conservatives who demanded behavioral change in the poor, they “recognized a reciprocal obligation to help upgrade the urban environment and living standards of city residents. With adequate external resources, individuals could more readily change their attitudes and behaviors.”²⁴

As the network of settlement workers fanned out in the early years of the century, new alliances and new organizations formed, each operating on a similar conviction, that urban industrialism had badly degraded the human as well as the physical landscape and that organized responses were both necessary and possible. Among the organizations spurring new efforts beyond the neighborhood focus of the settlements themselves was the National Consumers League (ably directed by Addams's former colleague at Hull House, Florence Kelley), with its intent of rallying women to selective buying from employers as a means of pressuring them to improve working conditions of women and children,²⁵ and the National Child Labor Committee. Among the most committed environmentalist organizations which Addams, Riis, and other nationally recognized Progressives helped initiate, was the Playground Association of America.

The organized play effort dated back to 1885 with the establishment in Boston of a small sand garden under the influence of an organization of influential women, the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association. Within two years, the city had added ten more sand gardens and authorized the use of school property during summer months for children's recreation.²⁶ Riis's campaign to eliminate a notorious example of slum life, M...