Urban Utopiasm
It was considered a great tragedy when the center of England‘s Coventry was bombed out by the Nazi luftwaffe in the early days of World War II. But when the center of New Haven, Connecticut, which happens to be the small metropolis of the area in which I live, is demolished by federal grants from Washington, it is considered a triumph for “planning” even when the void refuses to be refilled.
Having looked at Coventry in 1946 and New Haven in 1961, I remain quite unable to grasp the distinction between war and politically directed “urban renewal” in their physical effects on the city. In either case useful buildings are demolished along with some which have undoubtedly seen their best days. In either case the possibility of voluntary renewal on the human scale that results from spontaneity and meaningful individual or small group calculation is rudely set aside.
The school of thought that is represented by Lewis Mumford’s The City in History (Harcourt, Brace and World, $11.50) and by Lorin Peterson’s The Day of the Mugwump (Random House, $6.00) doesn’t mind very much when area “planners” who have no stake in the ownership of a region gain an opportunity to remake its contours. The Mumford-Peterson argument is that the “planner,” unimpeded by fractious individuals, may endow a new city center with esthetic harmony. He may also forget crass considerations of profitability. But this is to assume that the planner has some decent esthetic standards in the first place. It also assumes that the test of profitability is wrong, which is not necessarily true.
The late Mayor La Guardia of New York once said that “When I make a mistake, it’s a beaut.” When politically empowered city planners make mistakes, they beat La Guardia all hollow. Just why this should be so is the concern of Jane Jacobs’ remarkable attack on the conventional city planning, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, $5.95). Mrs. Jacobs, who lives in the Greenwich Village section of New York, likes big city life, for it gives her the benefit of other people’s diversity and it allows her to live for herself and her family without being subjected to prying eyes.
The Reasons for a City
Knowing what a big city is for, Mrs. Jacobs has devoted her book to isolating the sources of diversity and privacy. It is her conviction that a city, to be vital, must be the sum of thousands of individual and small-group plans and that, as such, it cannot in itself be a work of art—i.e., a conscious selection from life by a single organizing intelligence. If and when a city achieves beauty (which is sometimes the case), it is because the standards of taste of its dwellers are individually high. The eighteenth century town that looks so neat (see Williamsburg in Virginia, or any New Hampshire village) resulted from a shared consciousness of style, not from architectural fiat. Even cities whose sites were planned (as in Washington, D. C.) have not been able to escape the necessity for spontaneity on the part of the inhabitants. Where spontaneity has resulted in ordered beauty, it is because of consensus in taste, which is something different from “planning.”
Diversity is necessary to a city for a thousand-and-one reasons.
There must be markets for many talents. There must be room for many recreations. Moreover, the markets and the opportunities for recreation must be close together. The economics of the situation demands a mingling of new and old buildings for the obvious reason that there are many desirable careers which are only compatible with cheap rents. The impecunious artist looking for a good north light may need an abandoned loft at a low price. The maker of keys will need a hole-in-the-wall, as will the seller of sheet music or old prints. Such people must for obvious economic reasons be excluded from the planned “redevelopment”—and when they are pushed away, one big reason for preferring city life to suburban or village life simply evaporates.
Projects and Problems
Mrs. Jacobs dislikes “project” building for many reasons. As a true democrat (small “d”) she resents the fact that “newness,” imposed by the planner’s ruthless impartiality, requires extreme income-grouping. Like is herded together with like. A “development” must be financed according to across-the-board standards: one must be able to “pay the freight” to live or work in a “planned” area. True, the freight can be subsidized, or partially subsidized. But when low-income housing is donated to people by political Merlins, the “development” is promptly filled up by the hopeless and the apathetic—by people, in short, who have no “plans” of their own. They promptly proceed, by their attitudes, to turn the low-income development into a slum that has all the disadvantages of the old slum and none of the possibilities for random renewal at a few points that might create a contagion for a wider upgrading.
One big trouble with the impartial imposition of “newness” on any large area of a city is that it insures a uniform rate of decay. The fashionable development of today is the frowsy lower middle class haven of tomorrow. And, inevitably, it is the slum of the day after-tomorrow. On the other hand, a region that consists of a mingling of the new and the old will make for individual challenge at all times. In the Rittenhouse Square region of Philadelphia, or the Washington Square region of New York, the older buildings are either reconditioned or weeded out as the inhabitants and owners strive to keep pace with the best that is around them.
The conventional “planner” has a passion for open spaces that runs to mania. For her part, Mrs. Jacobs is not against parks or strips of greenery, but she contends that the uses of the open space in a city must be understood. When an open space is divorced from overlapping uses, it quickly becomes a source of evil. The worst gang rumbles in New York take place in parks that have gone “dead.” A park, to be safe and useful, must be part of a region that remains active almost around the clock. When people are appearing on the streets at all times, there is self-policing. But when everybody deserts the streets at once to go inside (as happens in a “developed” area save during rush hours in the morning and the late afternoon), there will be deadness wherever there is an isolated stretch of green. In consequence, those who try to cross a green belt or to enjoy a big park at night will be easy prey for the footpad or the degenerate.
Pittsburgh in a Hurry
In The Day of the Mugwump Mr. Lorin Peterson praises what city planners, sparked by political mugwumps, have been able to do for downtown Pittsburgh, for example. But downtown Pittsburgh was “saved” largely because Richard K. Mellon had the money to carry through big-scale change without begging from Washington. Even so, Mrs. Jacobs thinks the remade Pittsburgh has its drawbacks.
For example, the Pittsburgh Parking Authority’s downtown garages are operating only at 10 to 20 per cent of capacity at eight in the evening. But three miles from downtown, in the Oakland section which contains the Pittsburgh symphony, the civic light opera, the little-theatre group, the most fashionable restaurant, two major clubs, and the Pittsburgh Athletic Association, the parking problem at night is terrific. Good “planning,” so Mrs. Jacobs implies, would have distributed the functions of the Oakland and the downtown Golden Triangle sections of Pittsburgh in a different pattern, providing for overlapping use as between night and day.
But even with Mr. Mellon’s money could there have been “good” planning in such a cataclysmic burst? On Mrs. Jacobs’ own showing, the official planning mind is a “witless” murderer of diversity; it proceeds “by deliberate policies” to sort out “leisure uses from work uses, under the misapprehension that this is orderly city planning.” Mr. Mellon might have done better for Pittsburgh if he had made haste more slowly, without depending too greatly on political alliances. The most tasteful—and diversified—planning on New York‘s Manhattan Island, for example, has been done by the Rockefellers at Rockefeller Center, without political compulsion or reliance on the official planning mind.
In her introduction Mrs. Jacobs notes her dissent from the planning ideas that are uppermost in Lewis Mumford’s gigantic The City in History. The dissent is well taken, for Mr. Mumford, though he is a man of generous emotions, has never succeeded in analyzing state power for what it is, a killer of spontaneity in the citizen. Nevertheless, Mr. Mumford’s huge book has many virtues as well as a few transcendent defects. Taken purely as a chronological unfolding of its subject, The City in History is masterly. Its shortcomings derive from Mr. Mumford’s feeling that the city should be a “work of art” in the true sense—i.e., it should be a selection from life shaped and imposed by a master mind.
But, to return to Mrs. Jacobs, a city is not a canvas, to be filled by a Renoir; it is a collection of people who have their own individual canvases to fill. In applying the artist’s test to city planning as a whole, Mr. Mumford is an unwitting advocate of political tyranny. Mrs. Jacobs is quite correct in preferring “chaos” to the central planning that does not allow for the spontaneous eruptions of men with plans of their own.
Freedom And The Law by Bruno Leoni
. (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc. 204 pp. $6.00.)
Reviewed by William H. Peterson
Ever since the Pharaohs of Egypt and the theocracies of the Greek city-states, Everyman has had a pronounced tendency to view the law as a mystique, a magnificent fount of splendor and power and justice and wisdom, practically a divine spark—as is seen in the theory of the divine right of kings and the deistic charisma of Der Fuhrer, Il Duce, and “Comrades” Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev.
The aura of greatness surrounding the law—and certainly the respect for it—have doubtlessly been enhanced by the implementation techniques of law, techniques imbued with persuasiveness—the armed sheriff, the constabulary, the black-robed and sometimes be-wigged judges, the jail, the destructive might of armed forces from the age of the battering ram to the age of the nuclear war head. And whenever this power is invoked, the law is invoked, much in the way that two opposing armies enter a battle after invoking the help of the same God. At any rate, legal might is sometimes mistaken for legal right. Who is not awed by the “majesty of law”?
But not all men have been overawed. Mr. Bumble in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, for example, referred to the law as an “ass” and an “idiot.” Frederic Bastiat, a contemporary of Dickens, saw that the law oftentimes descended into what he called “legalized plunder.” H. L. Mencken, the caustic soda of the twentieth century, was outspokenly unawed by the law, lawyers, or lawmakers. Scholars of the mark of a Friedrich Hayek and a Roscoe Pound, seeking the reinstitution of the Rule of Law, have called attention to the dangers in the rise of administrative law. And now comes another hard look at the law by the eminent scholar, Bruno Leoni, Professor of Legal Theory and the Theory of the State at the University of Pavia, Italy, and European Secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society. Freedom and the Law is an outgrowth of a series of lectures delivered by Professor Leoni at the Fifth Institute on Freedom and Competitive Enterprise at Claremont Men’s College, California, in June of 1958.
Professor Leoni sees the bloated lawbooks as a threat to individual freedom. He sees the proliferation of the law into virtually every field of human endeavor as an invasion of human freedom. Inflated legislation and voluminous administrative rulings, he argues, are overriding common law, custom, convention, the tacit rules of society, private arbitration, and the spontaneous adjustments of individuals and groups. The area of individual choice is being narrowed; the area of legalized coercion expanded.
The law, in other words, has been perverted into a weapon in the hands of victorious parties and interests, a weapon of the majority against the minority, and of a coalition of minorities against the majority. It has become a manipulative pawn in the parliamentary maneuvers of logrolling and vote trading. It has departed from the Golden Rule of doing unto others what you would have others do unto you, and the consequence is what Mises calls omnipotent government. The law now undertakes all sorts of unprincipled schemata, progressive income taxation, “land reform,” managed currency, and economic planning. The law now offers special privileges and dispensations to unions, veterans, farmers, underdeveloped peoples, and other selected minorities and pressure groups—the idea of one law common to all being passe.
So bad law, in the Leonian sense, feeds on itself and grows and grows and grows. One only has to look at the yards of casebooks and other necessary materials lining the shelves in the offices of tax attorneys and accountants to realize the legalistic mazecreated by the Sixteenth Amendment. And the income tax is but one phase of modern law: One has only to dwell on the fact that Congress in a typical session passes not dozens, not scores, but literally hundreds of laws to realize that through the multiplication of statutes the state is expanding and the individual shrinking.
That this inflation of legislation is producing not order but chaos is the conclusion of Professor Leoni. To document his case he calls as expert witnesses such legal authorities, living and dead, as Coke, Dicey, Montesquieu, and the afore-mentioned Roscoe Pound, and such economic authorities, past and present, as Pareto, Marshall, Kelf-Cohen, and the afore-mentioned Ludwig von Mises. He marshals historical evidence from the Greek, Roman, English, Continental, and American legal systems, correlating the laws of different nations and different times as movements toward or away from freedom.
For example, he spots the connection between the Norris-LaGuardia Act of 1932 in America and its counterpart in England, the Trade Union Act of 1906. Both laws restrict the power of the courts to issue injunctions against unions in labor disputes. The extension of this privilege broke with the important legal theory of “equality before the law.” To this extent the law injected a degree of chaos into the labor relations of Britain and America. In sum, what the world needs is not more law but less law, more quality and less quantity. Everyman should praise his legislators, not for the laws they pass but for the laws they repeal.
This book is an important contribution of the literature on human freedom. It merits the attention of all those concerned with the proper relationship of men to the State. As Bruno Leoni puts it: “My earnest suggestion is that those who value individual freedom should reassess the place of the individual within the legal system as a whole.”
A Handbook For Independent School Operation edited by William Johnson.
(Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc. $5.85.)
Reviewed by Frank B. Keith
Mr. Keith teaches at Keith Country Day School, Rockford, Illinois.
Most people have a definite idea about how children should be educated. Private schools offer parents who disagree with the policies and procedures of the public schools an alternate choice for the education of their children—and almost three quarters of a million American parents so choose today.
Freedom to select the children most likely to respond to its program, opportunity to choose its faculty with regard to competence rather than state regulation, and small classes with individual attention are only a few of the advantages offered by a private school.
If interest leads you and your friends to think about starting a school, A Handbook for Independent School Operation edited by William Johnson will get you off to a good start. Leaders in private and independent school work have written pertinent sections on administration, curriculum, faculty, business management, public relations, financing, and related topics. Successful procedures and minimum standards necessary for a superior educational environment are carefully outlined by the authors. This book is a valuable guide and an excellent source of information.
