The City As Target by Phillips John Clancey Gregory K. Bishop Ryan

Author:Phillips, John,Clancey, Gregory K.,Bishop, Ryan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2012-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

9 Vast clearings

Emergency, technology, and American de-urbanization, 1930–45

Gregory Clancey

The house as emergency response

The Federal government’s concern for housing developed through a series of emergencies … but piecemeal emergency measures have not solved the problem.

(Catherine Bauer, 1951)1

The automobile’s role in American urban change is obvious and well studied. Ford’s Model T emerged as a mechanical bull in the china shop of the early twentieth-century pedestrian and street-car city, a rampage that never really abated. There were less direct ways in which the mass-production automobile destabilized American cityscapes, however, which have gone largely unremarked. Beginning in the late 1920s, as the automobile became a metaphor for the dwelling, and the assembly line for the building process, increasing numbers of people began to imagine the house (a new keyword of that era) as a mass-producable commodity abstracted from community and even space. This was not a fantasy sprung from the mind of Le Corbusier. New Deal housing policies were actually crafted amid widespread and serious discussion of the house of tomorrow as a secret economic weapon, and one that would not necessarily be deployed by government. At the very moment when American cities were plunged into new categories of crisis by the failure of industrial capitalism, the machine-made house promised to set things right as the successor industry to automobiles; the next new technology for cities to absorb, if they could. Here is another, less-explored origin point for the post-war hollowing out of American civic life.

The large-scale deconstruction of American cities that began with the New Deal (and gathered speed with its Fair Deal extension under Truman) is most often portrayed as a well-meaning but ultimately misguided welfare policy for the poor, coupled with a far more successful extension of welfare and infrastructure to a newly mobilized middle class. Another way to approach it, I’ll argue, is as a strategic targeting of cities, under the guise of emergency, by groups previously external to the practices of city-building, and intent on using urban concentrations to leverage other goals. These “external groups” include not only the vastly expanded federal bureaucracy, but also mass-production industries, universities, and coalitions of reformers and design professionals, most of whom already lived in the suburbs. Beginning in the early years of the Depression (or the Emergency, as it was just as frequently called by contemporaries), the house far more than the city drew these disparate groups around itself and provided a common language – a pidgin – as well as an object-world and set of vaguely convergent goals.

The house and housing as American utterances of power date to the 1930s, a full decade after they had entered the political language of Europe. Only with the seeming collapse of capitalism did they begin to appear in state pronouncements, professionalizing projects, business plans, and research agendas, and become keywords in political, journalistic, and advertising accounts of the future. As factors and processes, inscribed with the charisma of technology, science, and economics, they were constructed against the local, casual, unquantifiable, and feminine – against houses and homes.

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