A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: 1930-1939

April 5th, 2011

The 1930’s saw two distinct trends with long-term impacts of the future of urbanism in North America, and particularly the United States.  First were the unique, and diametrically opposed utopian visions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier.  Second was the advent of major government investment in urban infrastructure and housing to help stabilize the economy and end the Great Depression:

 

The Disappearing City 1932

A Brief History of Urbanism in North America: The Disappearing CityFrank Lloyd Wright’s book The Disappearing City, presented his vision of the landscape in which each home was situation on at least an acre of land and someone in each household owned a car. It was rewritten in 1945 as When Democracy Builds and again in 1958 as The Living City.

The central idea presented in the book was Broadacre City, a suburban development concept.  A few years after the book’s publication, Wright unveiled a detailed 12’x12’ scale model representing a hypothetical four square mile community. Wright would go on refining the concept in later books and articles until his death in 1959.

Broadacre City was the antithesis of a city and a shining example of the emerging concept of suburbia. All important transport is done by automobile and the pedestrian can exist safely only within the confines of their private plots of lands. Wright appears to have been influenced by the earlier garden city idea of Frederick Law Olmsted and Ebenezer Howard.

 

Public Works Administration 1933 and Works Progress Administration (WPA) 1935

PWA Construction Site in Washington, D.C., 1933
PWA Construction Site in Washington, D.C., 1933

The Public Works Administration (PWA) was part of the New Deal, President Roosevelt’s 100 hundred days plan to help fix the Great Depression. It concentrated on the construction of large-scale public works such as dams and bridges, with the goal of providing employment, stabilizing purchasing power, and contributing to a revival of American industry. Of specific interest to urbanists, the PWA provided 85 percent of the cost of public housing projects. This represented the first federally supported public housing program. The administration was abolished in 1941 during WWII.

The Works Progress Administration (WPA), a rival , and better known program was formed two years later and continued or extended relief programs. It offered work to the unemployed by spending money on a wide variety of programs including highway and building construction, slum clearance and rural rehabilitation. Almost every community in the United States had a park, bridge or school constructed by the agency, which especially benefited rural and western populations.

 

The Radiant City 1935

Images from The Radiant City, (from NYU.edu)
Images from The Radiant City, (from NYU.edu)

French architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret—better known as Le Corbusier—promoted the idea of the Dream City, or Radiant City, publishing a book on his ideas in 1935. His ideal city was composed mainly of skyscrapers for very high density development, surrounded by commonly owned parks.

Le Corbusier imagined large-scale grids of arterial street, supper blocks with high-rise towers and individual zones for different uses. He was a bitter critic of sprawling garden cities (suburbs) for the time wasted commuting. Because of its compact and separated nature, transportation in the Radiant City was to move quickly and efficiently.

 

Federation of Canadian Municipalities 1937

Federation of Canadian MunicipalitiesThe Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM) is a civic advocacy group representing many Canadian municipalities. It is an organization with no formal power but significant ability to influence debate and policy, as it is main national lobby group of mayors, councillors and other elected municipal officials. It negotiates with the Government of Canada‘s departments and agencies on behalf of municipalities, and administers a number of funds.

It was formed in 1937 with the merger of the Union of Canadian Municipalities, (created in 1901) and the Dominion Conference of Mayors (established in 1935). The federation was known as the Canadian Federation of Mayors and Municipalities until 1976 when it took it’s current name. FCM was instrumental in negotiating the federal government’s 2005 “New Deal for Cities” program under which Canadian federal gasoline taxes are remitted to municipalities.*

 

Fannie Mae 1938

Fannie Mae logoThe Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA) commonly known as Fannie Mae, was founded in 1938 during the Great Depression as part of the New Deal. It was set up as a government-sponsored enterprise, but it converted into a publicly traded company in 1968.The corporation purchases and securitizes mortgages in order to ensure that funds are consistently available to the institutions that lend money to home buyers.

Many urbanists are frustrated by Fannie Mae as it will not deal in mortgages for properties with
more than 20 percent of space set aside for non-residential use; plans for walkable, mixed-use developments do not qualify.  In this regard, Fannie Mae is said to be a continuing contributor to suburban sprawl.

 

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