Anthony M. Townsend - Smart Cities - Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia

The battle for Americas streets lasted less than fifteen years. By the second half of the 1930s, the automobile had clearly won. A massive public awareness campaign orchestrated by newspapers, community activists, and public officials had hammered home the safety risks of jaywalking and allowing children to play in streets. But it was car enthusiasts who dictated the future shape of American cities by enlisting the growing cadre of professional traffic engineers who advanced a new science of street design by appealing to two broad new ideals—efficiency and modernization. Before the widespread introduction of traffic signals, the influx of cars into American cities created the same kinds of hellish traffic jams we see today in Bangkok or Lagos. Applying scientific methods to understand and design systems to reduce congestion offered a quick solution to this new problem. As Norton describes, for the new traffic engineers “streets were public utilities to be regulated in efficiency’s name.”13 But when a broad coalition of interests from police to parents to downtown associations mobilized to preserve the status quo, traffic engineers shifted the debate to modernization, painting conventional arrangements around street use as quaint and outdated.16 They held up the automobile as the ultimate modern ideal—an enabler of freedom and key to the future—a masterstroke of human achievement. Streets would henceforth be reconfigured around the needs and capacities of motor vehicles.

Redesigning the American street quickly evolved into a more expansive project of rethinking the entire national landscape, fueling the transformation of the Garden City concept into modern suburbia. Ford invented the mass-produced car, but it was General Motors that introduced the vision of an entire society organized around the automobile. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, the streamlined entryway to the company’s pavilion (designed by Norman Bel Geddes, no relation to Patrick) transported visitors into a new kind of human settlement made possible by cars. Futurama was a miniature mock-up of a future American city that present-day observers would easily recognize as home. It was an accurate premonition of the cities we’ve built across the Sun Belt—its sweeping landscape of highways, shopping malls, and suburbs could easily be mistaken for modern Atlanta, Phoenix, or Dallas—a model that China now seems intent on copying en masse. The obvious and intended conclusion of Futurama: new cities must be designed not just to accommodate the automobile, but to exploit its full potential for personal mobility and freedom. In December 1941, with images of Futurama still dancing in their heads, Americans shipped off to war in Europe and the Pacific. When they returned home four years later, they were determined to rebuild their lives according to modern ideals, using every technology at their disposal. At GM’s invitation, an entire generation stepped into their cars and simply drove away from the city’s problems.

To accommodate the exodus from America’s cities, after World War II the focus of traffic engineering shifted to large-scale urban expressways. As Campanella writes, “By then, middle-class Americans were buying cars and moving to the suburbs in record numbers. The urban core was being depopulated. Cities were losing their tax base, buildings were being abandoned, neighborhoods were falling victim to blight.”

Urban expressways not only gave suburban refugees rapid access to employment in central cities; by allowing the car to take over city streets, traffic engineers’ earlier quest for efficiency had already robbed many cities of their once-rich street life. A self-sustaining pattern of decline ensued, as cities emptied out and the car took over.

By the end of the 1950s, organized resistance to urban highway projects had erupted in San Francisco, Boston, and other cities around the country. But it was in New York, where highway construction was displacing hundreds of thousands of residents, that the battle over highways would emasculate not only traffic engineering but the entirety of American urban planning. Robert Moses, the city’s planning czar, “was convinced that middle-class families would remain in New York if they could get around by car, and pushed ahead with plans for a comprehensive roadway network for the metropolitan area.” Once Moses set his mind to a project, there was almost no stopping him. According to his biographer Robert Caro, he was “unquestionably America’s most prolific physical creator.” In his long career, he personally conceived and completed public works worth $244 billion in 2012 dollars.19

Unstoppable by mayors and governors, Moses the power broker was finally thwarted by a group of Greenwich Village residents. When he proposed in 1952 to extend Fifth Avenue south through Greenwich Village’s cherished Washington Square Park, a groundswell of community opposition arose—led mostly by women, including Shirley Hayes, a mother of four, and Jane Jacobs. Throughout the 1950s, the battle waged on as Moses dragged his feet and attempted workarounds such as a depressed roadway with a pedestrian overpass. (A tunnel was deemed too costly.) But by 1958 the tide was turning, and instead of just killing the road, the activists succeeded even in closing the park’s existing through roads, a configuration that remains to this day. Moses fumed as he addressed the city’s budgetary authority, the Board of Estimate, in a last-ditch effort to save the project. “There is nobody against this. Nobody, nobody, nobody but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers.”

Moses resigned as parks commissioner soon after the Washington Square defeat. But the reprisal against Jacobs and company was soon to come. In February 1961, at the behest of James Felt, a Moses protege and the new head of the City Planning Commission, the city launched a blight study of the West Village, the first step in clearing the way for demolition and redevelopment. As Anthony Flint recounts in Wrestling with Moses, Jacobs was dumbstruck when she learned about the plans in the pages of the New York Times in February 1961, a month after submitting the manuscript for Death and Life of Great American Cities. “Her home and neighborhood, the very neighborhood she had identified as a model of city living in the book she had just written, were now targeted by the urban renewal machine that Robert Moses had set in motion.” The blight study was a trick she knew well. “It always began with a study to see if a neighborhood is a slum,” Jacobs had noted in her manuscript.

“Then they could bulldoze it and it would fall into the hands of developers who could make a lot of money.” In place of the funky nineteenth-century neighborhood of bohemians and ethnics would rise modern middle-class tower blocks. Moses envisioned a Garden City in the city. “It was a place to start over, from scratch,” Flint observes.23

The blight designation was emblematic of the engineering-driven, scientific approach to planning that Howard (and Geddes) had advocated but Moses had perfected and corrupted. As Caro describes, at the headquarters of the Triborough Bridge Authority (renamed the present Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority in 1946) on Randall’s Island—the most important seat of his power—Moses had assembled an army of draftsmen, engineers, and analysts to survey, document, and design. Moses always had plans at the ready long before legislatures got around to funding them. He was the first and greatest practitioner of the “shovel-ready” approach to public works—always have a big project ready to go when a politician needs to make a splash in a re-election campaign. With their superior ability to study the city, physical planners established their authority and defined debates about the city’s present and future.