A while back, I edited and wrote chapter introductions to a
collection of essays on the influence of Daniel Burnham, the
architect-turned-city planner whose 1909 Plan of Chicago gave Chicago its
famous downtown lakefront and gave several generations of Springfieldians a
reason to visit Illinois’ best and worst city. In that work I quoted from Cities
of Tomorrow, Sir Peter Hall’s superb history
of the ideology and practice of city planning. I’d traded notes with him about it when it came out
in 1988. It became a classic instantly, if only because it is a both readable
and wise, and remains
in print. Yet in the Burnham book I embarrassingly muddled him with the
well-known anthropologist of space and credited the quote to Edward Hall, not
Peter.
An apologetic email brought a response from his office in
London. Not to worry. These things happen. “They say the only perfect book is
the King James Bible.”
Hall was a former Fabian but not a doctrinaire leftist,
being a fan of public-private partnerships. He was capable of changing his mind
in the face of contrary facts – he started out a believer in what we call urban
renewal until he saw the results. (The original campus of UIC was a miniature
version of what Hall had in mind for London in the 1960s; had it be rebuilt
along those lines, there would have a second Blitz, only this time the bombs
would be delivered by disgruntled Londoners.)
Hall was one of a vanishing breed – the independent
intellectual. This except from his preface to Cities of Tomorrow suggests what that species sounds like:
Unfashionably, I had no grant, hence no benefactor
to thank, nor an assistant, hence no one to blame but me. And, since I also
typed it, I should first thank the anonymous authors of WordStar and
WordPerfect; Chuck Peddle for his legendary Sirius I; and the unknown
cottage-fabricators of the Taiwanese clone that — following the iron laws of
peripheral Fordism — latterly replaced it in my study. Rosa Husain deftly
typed the references and turned them into footnotes, thereby initiating herself
into the pleasures and the terrors of WordPerfect’s macros. But, as ever, I
want to thank the librarians. Those who argue for the law of declining public
services, and we are all occasionally goaded into joining them, must never use
the great reference libraries of the world…
Peter Hall died July 30. Readers who are wondering why they
should care about an English urbanist should know that Cities of Tomorrow deals at length with Illinois and Illinois figures to an extent that might
surprise them. Chicago likes to call itself a capital of architecture, but in
the early 20th century it is also a center of thinking about cities, or rather
about people and the ways they do and might live in cities.
Hall is astute about that odd band of missionaries gathered
around Jane Addams, who, rather than press to make immigrants safe from the
city, worked to make the city safe from the immigrants. He gives credit to the
designs of Lake Forest (1856) and Riverside (by Frederick Law Olmsted, in 1869)
as models for the more famous English Garden City. In those cases, capitalism
built superbly for the upper-middle classes; the poor got cut-rate Corbusier in
the form of hells like the Robert Taylor Homes. Burnham of course figures
centrally in the chapter “The City of Monuments,” which is a good a quick
introduction as you will find to the City Beautiful movement, which gave
Chicago its tourist lakefront and gave Springfield a handsome book describing a
similar for the capital that was never implemented. And Hall reminds us that Chicago
also was where the development of the
“first true school of urban sociology” developed at the University of Chicago
in the 1920s.
All these movements were different responses to
the same problem – containing or at least rendering harmless the poor, the
immigrant, the criminal. None of them worked very well; life in Chicago’s bad
neighbothoods is incalculably more violent that was 100 years ago but otherwise
little changed. And the fear of such people – much of it perfectly legitimate –
still shapes how and where cities develop, including Springfield. So read Hall
today not as history but as current events.
This article appears in Aug 14-20, 2014.
