s p a c e

organization
The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England
 organization

Keller Easterling
s p a c e
LANDSCAPES,
HIGHWAYS,
AND HOUSES
IN AMERICA
q 1999 Massachusetts Intitute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic
or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and
retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in Janson and Rotis Semi Sans by Graphic Composition, Inc.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Easterling, Keller, 1959–

Organization space : landscapes, highways, and houses in America / Keller
Easterling.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-262-05061-7 (hc : alk. paper)
1. Space (Architecture) I. Title.
NA9053.S6E18 1999
710—dc21 99-40790
CIP
Contents

Acknowledgments vi

Introduction 1

Part 1 12

1.0 Terrestrial Networks 13

1.1 Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail 25

1.2 Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment 39

1.3 Partition: Watershed and Wayside 54

1.4 Sites 67

Part 2 74

2.0 Differential Highways 75

2.1 Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks 85

2.2 Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle 98

2.3 Parallel Networks: Roadsides 112

2.4 Sites 122

Part 3 128

3.0 Subdivision Products 129

3.1 Function and Template: War-town Subdivision Science 136

3.2 Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects 161

3.3 Summation: Subdivision Merchandising 175

3.4 Sites 196

Afterword 200

Index 203
Acknowledgments

Many students at Columbia University, in seminars and studios, helped culti-

vate the ideas in this book. Colleagues and friends who read this manuscript,
particularly Richard Prelinger and Michael Sorkin, already have my thanks.
The Graham Foundation, The New York Foundation for the Arts, The National
Endowment for the Arts, The MacDowell Colony, and the John Nolen Research
Fund provided support for this book and for related projects. The following
libraries provided archival material: Benton MacKaye Papers, Dartmouth Col-
lege Library; Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Libraries; Avery Library, Columbia University; the National Archives and Re-
cords Administration; and the New York Public Library. Historians and histori-
cal societies at Greenbelt, Maryland; Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenhills, Ohio;
Kingsport, Tennessee; Levittown, New York; Mariemont, Ohio; and Norris, Ten-
nessee also provided archival material. I would like to thank my friends Jordan
Crandall, Susan Jonas, Andrea Kahn, Brian McGrath, and Ray Gastil for their
support. Melanie Kiihn, Elise Lau Carranza, Ashley Schaffer, Phu Hoang, and
William Taylor assisted me in various research efforts. I also thank Roger Con-
over, Melissa Vaughn, and Jean Wilcox at MIT Press for their careful attention
to the manuscript. This book was written for Monty Graham.
Introduction

Architects are accustomed to resolving spaces according to aesthetic or geo-

metric principles. This book, however, is interested in organizational expres-
sions of spatial arrangements as well as the sites or agents of change within
those organizations, and it argues that some of the most common and power-
ful means of altering space might be best described in this way.
The design professions have encyclopedias full of specific nomenclature
related to form and geometry; yet unlike geology, biology, music, or mathe-
matics, architecture has few common terms to describe spatial organizations
with active parts, temporal components, or differential change. For instance,
biological terminology must express relationship and duration or characterize
systems that evolve, “learn,” or adapt over time. Geologists study not only
artifacts, but processes like fluvial activity, glaciation, and erosion, developing
descriptions of watersheds or ice flows that incorporate temporal markers
and elastic boundary conditions. Military protocols describe changing group-
ings over time with a language that can accommodate such fluidity. In com-
munication and computational networks, timing and storage space are one
and the same thing and so cannot be expressed as absolute spaces or objects.
Rather, technologists who work with these environments use the term net-
work architecture to refer to the powerful protocols organizing interplay,
adjustment, and timing among ecologies of circuitry.
Architects are typically more fluent in descriptions of activity and rela-
tionship that result in artifacts or forms within conventions that favor the
designation of site as a single entity. We are most comfortable with nouns
rather than verbs, with artistic products that have representational currency,
and with organizations that can be optimized. In the early twentieth century,
architecture pursued a fascination with activity by equating it with motion
 2
|

or stylizing motion as speed within a bachelor’s world of fast cars, airplanes,

Introduction

and forms representative of dynamism. We have also traditionally codified

the activities of building within master plans and modular systems. When the
profession was intrigued with active organizations in the 1960s and 1970s,
these organizations were often seen holistically as ecologies for which a com-
prehensive pattern could be determined—returning a fascination with activ-
ity and relationship to a fascination with geometry. Though new electronic
infrastructures and computational equipment vividly model the operatives of
active organizations, the late twentieth-century interest in network interplay
often appears to be scripted by an unconscious revival of midcentury desires
for cybernetic or recursive organization. The architect with new computa-
tional tools is often more attracted to the visuals or behaviors of software
environments than to the invisible network architecture behind the screen.
Our work with these tools thus sometimes reinforces a rather conventional
notion of site surrounding the elaboration of an object representing organi-
zation. We rarely define sites in a way that will permit exploration of organi-
zational or network architecture, in part because we rarely define sites in
multiples. Even in urban sites we often simply reframe the boundaries to in-
clude a larger set of adjacent areas, returning the site to a single unit and
placing it under the purview of urban design or planning.
To truly exploit some of the intelligence related to network thinking, an
alternative position might operate from the premise that the real power of
many urban organizations lies within the relationships among multiple dis-
tributed sites that are both collectively and individually adjustable. This
discussion transfers intelligence from many different models of active organ-
ization to an understanding of spatial environments. It pursues a fascination
with simple components that gain complexity by their relative position to
each other. For instance, it is possible to understand sites as separate agents
that remotely affect each other—that is, the way one can affect point C by
affecting points A and B. It is also possible to describe the amplification of a
simple move across a group of separate agents, or to describe their parallel
or serial sequencing. This architecture is not about the house but rather about
housekeeping. It is not be about triangles and tauruses or motion trajectories,
but about timing and patterns of interactivity, about triplets and cycles, sub-
tractions and parallelism, switches and differentials. Architecture, as it is used
here, might describe the parameters or protocols for formatting space.
 3

|
Organizational expressions perhaps inform our understanding of some

Introduction
very familiar development formats that typically resist conventional architec-
tural analysis. For instance, the process of assembling residential formations
often resembles agricultural production in that large numbers of houses are
executed simultaneously in uniform fields, and the logistical format or proto-
col of that process is the chief determinant of spatial and material conse-
quences, not the appearance of the suburban house. Here organization does
not merely facilitate architecture. It is the architecture or the logistical soft-
ware for spatial production. Though ageographic, the generic specifications
for assembling offices, airports, highways, and many different kinds of fran-
chises are also explicitly calibrated according to protocols for timing and
interactivity. These protocols, whether generic or idiosyncratic are the domi-
nant architectures in our culture of development—architectures, privileging
not the formal, morphological attributes of building, but rather a repertoire
of operatives affected by time, patterns of connectivity, and changing popu-
lations of multiple components. These are the new inventions and gizmos—
the management styles, the production sequences, or networking protocols—
that make space in America and around the world.
Though spatial economies may be most complex when they are diverse,
circumstantial, and incomplete, architects, managers, and planners have of-
ten sought comprehensive control over even distributed spatial systems like
infrastructure networks. We have often fixed a complex ephemeral activity
within a particular kind of morphology, procedure, or aesthetic attempting
not to adjust but to determine the aesthetics and technics of the system as
a totality. The traffic-engineered interstate highway, for instance, was de-
signed as an inflexible and totalizing system segregated from interaction with
other transportation modalities and valued as a smooth system of neutralized
equivalence. Like mass-produced housing, the more neutral, uniform, and
quantifiable, the more bankable. Even the newest communication-informa-
tion networks are often discussed as smooth systems of integration and con-
nection with less emphasis on the differentiation of the network (e.g., the
“information highway”). Technocracy, traffic engineering, cybernetics, or en-
vironmentalism—a few of the twentieth-century persuasions that appear in
this discussion—have all toyed with unifying theories of complexity or ap-
peared to long for some kind of comprehensive understanding of the organi-
zations they studied. Just as the design professions have valued successive
 4
|

models of intelligence and geometric models of organization, so generic spa-

Introduction

tial formats, are usually introduced with enthusiastic claims of optimization—

claims that are always overturned within the comedies of the marketplace.
The ultimate generic product streamlined to travel unimpeded from manu-
facture to market becomes an unattainable goal since the generic can always
be made yet more generic through some new and, ironically idiosyncratic,
wrinkle in retail psychology or some new, supposedly more efficient distribu-
tion format.
In the same way that many organizations change or grow as a result of
their own eccentricities, the production of spatial commodities is fueled by
mistakes and risks within the inevitable anarchy and unpredictability of the
market place. These are the market’s jokes or implausible details that are ex-
treme if only to be real. Although we think of these eccentricities as tactical,
ephemeral, and untraceable, they are also caused by deliberate inventions
that find some way of tripping the lock and entering the marketplace, even
if only for a short period of time. They are also not necessarily small and
discrete like wild cards, since, they often have the power to shift the rules of
a larger game. Eccentricities are often amplified within an organization so
that an effective intervention may not involve comprehensive control but
partial or tactical adjustment. Tactical sites have larger powers. Generic spa-
tial production, for instance, amplifies small adjustments by way of its own
banality. When a small desire meets large volumes of consumers, or a dumb
component is multiplied within a banal or repetitive environment, it has the
power to gradually reconstitute an organization. Repetitive housing, for in-
stance, critiqued for its monotony, potentially amplifies a small fitting or de-
tail. Similarly, transportation redundancies might be valued since they present
opportunistic sites for installing intelligent switching between networks. This
material looks for sites that temporarily interface a wave of consumption to
recondition or overwrite a space. The discussion looks for elements that are
accident-prone or inventions born in eccentric conditions, with the assump-
tion that the world grows or learns by these accidents, and whatever remains
eccentric to a culture’s boundaries and brackets is more likely to cross-
reference its intelligence. These eccentricities or wild cards—which are con-
stantly creating volatility, difference, and conflict within development organ-
izations—are smart in their own way, and they are the subject of this book.
They produce space by adjusting organization. They are the sites of organiza-
tion space in America.
 5

|
Perhaps in these sites, architects return to find a previously obscured

Introduction
opportunity and an expanded repertoire for their formal skills and aesthetic
inclinations. If the most powerful sites are improvisational and responsive to
the circumstantial changes of anarchical organizations, they are also sugges-
tive of an active and inventive practice of architecture within some of the
most common development protocols in America.
The book’s three parts visit the organizational territory of landscapes,
highways, and houses in America. The material looks opportunistically for
eccentric episodes in the history of these development organizations that
prefigure our contemporary interests and confound the notion that cultural
intelligence is successive rather than coexistent. It looks for practitioners who
ventured into the architecture of organization and for alternative proposals
that would have arranged our most familiar environments in a different key.
The argument often uses these eccentric issues, events, or careers to interro-
gate a larger organization or to cross-reference and encapsulate historical
material.
Each of the three parts references a midcentury period when new infra-
structure technologies associated with electricity, automobiles, and electron-
ics were reformatting the country. Engineering was gaining power as a
political tool. Planning was a dangerous word, associated not with ineffectual
bureaucracy but with political and economic reorganization. The federal gov-
ernment was inventorying the country’s natural resources, industrial capabili-
ties, and population migrations, and practitioners from many disciplines
became government associates, conducting experiments to reengineer infra-
structure networks and redirect protocols for consumption, distribution,
transportation, and exurban development. These unusual practitioners, who
today might be too easily labeled “planners,” were often architects and de-
signers who were working in the organizational strata of American space.
The discussion is not designed to provide an architectural or planning
history. Nor does it intend to provide a general characterization of American
infrastructure organizations. Since the episodes are only considered for what
they offer to a discussion of organizational architecture, the research is in no
way part of a prescriptive program involving revival or reform. None of the
practitioners are heroes of the story, even though some appear in all three
parts of the book as members of a cast of characters involved in the devel-
opment of land, highways, and residential infrastructures during this cen-
tury. The material also references early the twentieth-century technocracy
 6
|

movement, midcentury systems analysis, and the sentimentalism associated

Introduction

with the postwar environmental movement, but these more positivistic ideol-
ogies only serve to critique our own persistent desires for comprehensive con-
trol and recursive structure in complex organizations.
The episodes are designed to defamiliarize familiar environments by
identifying those sites that have the power to divert or rearrange them, and
so they are chosen because, whatever their approach, they identify an unor-
thodox way of siting adjustment within a larger organization. The material is
continually drawn to inventions that pursue a simple fascination across sev-
eral disciplines to find a cultural loophole within the dominant development
formats. These sites of invention, the wild cards in the organization, remain
the object of the discussion. Echoes among the parts hopefully disrupt the
category distinctions of land, highway, and subdivision since the most inter-
esting practitioners were involved with all three, and each of these environ-
ments borrowed organizational protocols from the other. There are no
organizational typologies. Houses, cars, and their attending spaces were
treated as products; land was a utility; and highways were landscapes. The
material favors events that engage or critique our current fascinations and
form a resonant suite of articles in an ongoing discussion—one that necessar-
ily visits territory outside the contents of this book.

Part I looks at the infrastructure prototypes of Benton MacKaye (1879–

1975) to interrogate a number of prewar episodes that were critical
to the formatting of land and infrastructure in America. MacKaye’s
terrestrial, fluvial, and automobile infrastructures were specifically de-
signed to be utilities and to operate interdependently with existing
rail, highway, and electrical infrastructure. Though he made many
proposals about altering infrastructure space in America, he was not
trained within the design professions but rather in the earth sciences
and so expressed spatial attributes in organizational rather than formal
or geometric terms. At a time when new networks associated with
hydro-electricity and automobiles were being used as a means of gal-
vanizing politics around very deterministic or technocratic principles,
MacKaye expressed these technologies, for instance, as geological
models that registered space against time and activity. MacKaye’s prac-
tice lay outside of the prevailing career patterns and disciplinary
 7

|
boundaries. Perhaps as a consequence, his work contacted many dif-

Introduction
ferent players and events of the time, and so he is a useful touchstone.
In addition, his practice is important to this discussion because, while
he dealt with physical sites, he also constructed virtual sites or persua-
sions in his writings that positioned the practice itself as a tactical site
of spatial production and adjustment.
Part II looks at those rare moments in the history of national
highway systems when they were perceived as differential or inter-
modal networks. The interstate highway system was conceived as a
frozen shape that neutralized interplay among various species of net-
work and carrier. It was a dumb network with dumb switches. Both
before and after the interstate was legislated however, independent de-
signers, private interests, and municipalities proposed highway sys-
tems based on alternative organizational protocols. Some treated the
highway as another of America’s machines or gadgets that could be
tooled to handle more complex activities. In other proposals, the high-
way mimicked or borrowed an organizational repertoire from rail-
roads, airports, or the surrounding landscape. Still others designated
sites of intermodal exchange in the roadsides, intersections, or urban
terminals of the system. There were also persistent ambitions to
merge the highway with computers or other electronic technologies
that would shape it into an automated, self-regulating network. This
discussion looks at applied network technologies, but it also uses the
terms of network architecture to extend an understanding of inter-
changes, parallel transportation networks, and roadside rights-of-way
as sites for building intelligence into several transportation systems
simultaneously.
Part III looks at the power of small components and logistical
adjustments in large repetitive fields of residential fabric. It uses the
subdivision, to examine the commodification and distribution of space
according to a product model. Residential property has perhaps al-
ways been a commodity, but the discussion goes to a pivotal point just
prior to the most familiar midcentury wave of suburban growth when
the new technicians of “subdivision science” arrived in Washington to
lobby for their various approaches to organizing residential space. Just
when these earnest planners thought they could establish scientific
controls over the subdivision, the rules of the game shifted, and the
 8
|

government effortlessly appropriated their attempts to optimize sub-

Introduction

urban formats. The subdivision turned, while still in their hands, into
something entirely different and much more powerful as the govern-
ment systematized and mobilized home-building enterprises into the
nation’s flagship post-Depression industry under the guidance of the
Federal Housing Administration. The episodes look at a comparative
set of organizational expressions attending the subdivision at this junc-
ture. Residential fabric has typically been arranged in generic net-
works that achieve varying degrees of neutrality and differentiation as
a consequence of many logistical variables. Some subdivisions exam-
ined here were either differentiated by timing or by some intermediate
organizing agent. In other subdivisions, the critical sites of adjustment
were the repeated components or fittings of the house and lot within
their distributive markets of consumption.

The familiar environments discussed in these episodes were often viewed

through a cultural persuasion that partially obscured their organizational
constitution. Landscapes, highways, and houses have throughout their his-
tory been used as economic indicators and as instruments of employment,
banking, and commercial production. Yet their promotion was reduced to
simple slogans or broad cultural abstractions. These persuasions or coercions,
most of them loyal to the cults of aesthetics or technology, associated devel-
opment products with, for instance, freedom, technological positivism, psy-
chological well-being, or patriotism. Terrestrial landscapes have consistently
been associated with visual beauty, spiritual reverie, and environmentalism.
The suburban housing product was associated with patriotism and content-
ment, and the interstate highway with freedom or “elbow room.” Both the
campaigns of persuasion and their critics have referenced exhausted ideolo-
gies like the “American dream,” and the “open road.” Homogeneity, kitsch,
boredom, and mistreatment of women are required topics in critical discus-
sions of America’s generic space, but the critiques may be uninformative pre-
cisely because the persuasions that adhere to these environments often do
not correspond to the operatives controlling them. For instance, architects
have continually tried to administer aesthetic makeovers to the midcentury
“organization man.” Meanwhile, a new orgman, born into and heir to that
 9

|
logistical environment, writes the software for contemporary residential and

Introduction
commercial formations as well as for the new virtual organizations of the
office and factory.1 Some cultural scripts may neutralize the complexity of
the environments discussed; yet, ironically they also often reveal something
about the organizations they fail to control or describe. The spin or the cam-
paign as well as the logistics of these organizations may provide some of their
most powerful and pliable sites of adjustment.
Each of the book’s three parts also generates its own species of discus-
sion and merges architectural languages with other languages of process and
models of interplay. Both the text and the practitioners discussed here use
many different kinds of models from, for instance, geology, mathematics, and
electronics to conceive and articulate organizational protocols. Some ab-
stract terms are particularly durable in this discussion as a means of mapping
or recording interplay as well as articulating adjustable organizational proto-
cols. They enrich an existing language of site and are used artistically rather
than scientifically to highlight the activity and exchange within an environ-
ment. These terms include the following: remote, redundancy, parallel, differ-
ential, switch, governor, partition, function, summation, and subtraction.
There is no glossary, however, and no attempt to define the terms, but rather
to compound their meanings and to use them as markers of active process.
For instance, it might appear easy enough to apply geological terms to
discussions of landscape and network operatives to an overtly networked sys-
tem like the highway, but considered abstractly, “network” describes not only
something that is organized like a web, such as a grid of streets or highways,
but an organization of multiples that may act independently or in concert.
Electronic network intelligence relies on smart and flexible patterns of
switching between heterogeneous components and multiple scales of activ-
ity. Multiplicity, differentiation, and diversity are understood to strengthen a
network, and the smarter the system the more its operation runs counter
to conventional notions of efficiency. Redundancy and parallel networking
among computers multiply pathways and circuits, increasing the supply of
material for trial and error, thus increasing the speed of problem solving as
well. The amount of switching is one indication of the degree of that intelli-
gence. While a digital switch might model a binary, on-off arrangement, a
mechanical model might extend the understanding of switch to include
amore continuous process of translation or modulation like a mechanical
 10
|

differential or governor. A fluvial model may be useful in expressing flow or

Introduction

elastic boundary. A mathematical expression like function may be useful in

describing an organizing agent that establishes interdependence among vari-
ables or expresses one variable as a function of another. A repeated fitting
like a standardized detail may reconstitute an organization in batches as a
kind of summation across similar elements. That summation may generate
an influence greater than the sum of its parts. Even subtraction is a useful
organizational expression. In the design professions, subtraction is not gener-
ally regarded as a constructive tool and is often associated with the tabula
rasa, demolition, or the preparation of ground to receive an authorized de-
sign intervention. Subtraction in an environment of exchange, however, may
be a positive rather than a negative means of negotiating space or removing
obstruction. These terms circulate through the book so that an expression
of network architecture may be used to describe a landscape ecology, or a
geological term may be used to describe a highway network.
The book is organized as an assemblage of multiple texts of different
types that operate in parallel. It was written after publishing two research
efforts in new media formats and borrows some of its organizational struc-
ture from these formats. Some texts are critical. Some texts provide general
background information that will be very familiar to scholars and students in
the planning and design professions. Some text assumes a tighter focus to
present an anecdote, biography, or critical detail. There are several strategies
for reading this book. The first article in each part looks at dominant percep-
tions of landscapes, highways, and residential formations and introduces an
eccentric career, issue, or historical moment against which to reexamine these
formations. The final articles leave the historical examination to cross-
reference contemporary models of active organizations and to identify po-
tential sites of adjustment within generic development protocols. The articles
in between contain more detailed historical examples and are often accom-
panied by a layer of text that provides background, quotes, and other anec-
dotal information. The illustrations provide another layer of information
often featuring comparative proposals for national organizations and net-
works. The hope is that the parallel texts will allow readers for instance, to
read the first and last articles in each part as an essay or to read selectively
throughout, as deeply or as lightly as they wish.
 11

|
Notes

Introduction
1. In a chapter entitled “The Orgamerican Phantasy” from The Tradition of the New
(1959), Harold Rosenberg nicknamed Whyte’s organization man “The Orgman.”
David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd or A. C. Spectorsky’s The Exurbanites joined
Whyte, Rosenberg, and others in describing what was considered to be a character
type of the postwar period.
Part 1
1.0 T E R R E S T R I A L N E T W O R K S

Environmentalism and even the words “environment” or “ecology” are often

associated with a kind of piety about the conservation and protection of ani-
mals and plants as well as a holistic understanding of ecological terms. Amer-
ica’s endangered beauty is a kind of palliative, inspiring spiritual reverie and
aesthetic appreciation of landscape scenery. Bioenergetics is the privileged
ecology, and technology is a threat to nature. The environmental movement
recognizes turn-of-the-century conservationists as their true predecessors
and usually traces a continuous history between the ideologies of conserva-
tion and the emotional messages of the midcentury ecocrisis. This material,
however, looks at some instructive intervening episodes in which the design
of landscape was considered together with the design of technological net-
works—each borrowing attributes of the other.
The infrastructure prototypes of one practitioner, Benton MacKaye, are
exceptional artifacts of this intervening period. MacKaye articulated organi-
zational expressions for both technological and terrestrial networks and
looked for sites of adjustment in their combined protocols. He is best remem-
bered for his conception of the Appalachian Trail, which though typically re-
garded as an attractive nature preserve, was, as MacKaye originally conceived
it in 1921, a terrestrial infrastructure network that would reorganize the en-
tire eastern seaboard. Perhaps colored by the customary sentiments sur-
rounding the appreciation of landscape, MacKaye has often been rendered as
the solitary Thoreauvian thinker or the quintessentially rugged nature lover.
His career was much more unusual, however, and his personality much more
eccentric than these profiles would suggest. He considered himself to be an
engineer, an artist, and a special technician of what he called “geotechnics.”
For MacKaye, geotechnics, a hybrid discipline of his own making, fused into
 14
|
Part 1

1.0.1 Benton MacKaye, MacKaye papers, Special Collections,

Dartmouth College Library.

one the seven words “geography, forestry and conservation, engineering, col-
onization, regional planning, and economics.” 1 He was a self-proclaimed “re-
gional planner,” when planning was a new endeavor, and though it would
typically become the task of committees and official agencies, MacKaye fash-
ioned this “imaginative vocation” for a single practitioner.2 Throughout his
career, MacKaye designed national and international infrastructure proto-
types that, like the trail, were large linear land organizations, incorporating
political and economic instructions while also acting as transportation and
utility networks (figure 1.0.1).
MacKaye’s combination of artist and engineer distinguished his position
from that of many of his contemporaries in the technocracy, back-to-the-
 15

|
land, or environmental movements, yet he was associated with many of the

Terrestrial Networks
key players in those movements. In addition to being a member of the Techni-
cal Alliance, a group that spearheaded the technocracy movement of the
1920s and 1930s, he was also a member of the Regional Planning Association
of America (RPAA), another influential political group interested in using the
new infrastructures of hydroelectricity and automobiles to sponsor distrib-
uted networks of community. As a technician-planner for the Tennessee Val-
ley Authority (TVA), MacKaye was also part of federal efforts to organize
infrastructures, and he would later be among those who helped initiate the
environmental movement.
During the interwar period, new technologies, new materials, and their
effects on production and employment were causing enormous upheavals in
both urban and rural populations. As in any one of this century’s “techno-
crazes,” public policy privileged engineering expertise and quantifiable means
of problem solving even in response to social issues. For instance, leaders
of the technocracy movement proposed to replace the government-elected
officials with engineers who would rationalize the faltering economy by
managing resources, electrification, and commerce. The RPAA, though not as
extreme as the technocrats, stridently condemned metropolitan power cen-
ters, claiming that they dictated illogical patterns of settlement and industry.
President Hoover, himself an engineer, but one of a slightly different stripe,
valued some of the same methods of fact-finding and rationalizing the “eco-
nomic machine”; he believed these efforts would be best directed by tradi-
tional capitalist programs, however, with the federal government only serving
as a clearinghouse of expertise. Later, many public projects like the TVA in-
volved the regulation of both terrestrial and technological infrastructure such
as hydroelectric waterways and farmland networks. New Deal philosophy of-
ten paired traditional values and nostalgic social programs with new technol-
ogies and scientific expertise. Fueling the romance with both rationalism and
traditionalism, these new technologies, it was proposed, would organize the
planning macrostructure in such a way that the traditional microstructure of
small-scale work, craft, and family could return, accompanied by the value-
laden, romantic story of “the land” and its soulful methods of work and craft.
Though that might have been the story, these reform ideologies also served
as sentimental political promotion for conservative business motives.
MacKaye’s approach was also different from planning practices that
evolved within the design professions, since his training in forestry and earth
 16
|

sciences offered models for sites and spatial interventions that were ecologi-
Part 1

cal in nature, that is part of some interplay or exchange. He treated a site as

a set of interdependent parts within which small shifts in balance or orienta-
tion had enormous effect. He once wrote that with planning, “the final thing
planned is not mere area or land, but movement or activity,” and the most
unusual aspect of his practice was his method of identifying site in not only
the spatial, but the temporal and procedural protocols of development and
economic exchange.3
When MacKaye graduated from Harvard College in 1900, and from Har-
vard’s School of Forestry in 1905, the last frontiers of the West were being
settled, and among the important issues for his generation of young intellec-
tuals were the politics of land use as well as the new tools and advances of
modern technology. “Physiography,” which he described as the study of “land
forms in action,” was a new concentration within geological studies at the
time. It focused on the dynamic terms of geology through the study of fluvial
activity, erosion or glaciation, thus departing from a method of study that
previously focused on the classification of artifacts.4 Applying intelligence
from geological, particularly fluvial systems, MacKaye’s national and interna-
tional terrestrial networks proposed to revalue and redirect other infrastruc-
tures while also reconfiguring exurban development. Technology was another
nature, and the industrial landscape a kind of “wilderness,” or a fluvial system
that could be diverted or constrained. He used words like “levee,” “watershed,”
or “river system” to describe the behavior of his infrastructures and their
interactivity with patterns of migration and commerce in America.5 Levees
and watersheds were like special partitions that, not unlike partitions of digi-
tal space, were not about merely subdividing space, rather they often served
as radial or linear points of translation or regulation in an organization. As
organizational expressions, the fluvial models described activity rather than
form and they allowed him to consider a more elastic condition of boundary
as well as the continual activation of currents or flows of activity over long
durations.
While the design professions typically tried to frame the boundaries of
an organization and control the territory inside those boundaries, MacKaye
often adjusted organizations by indirect or remote activation of sites. Natural
ecologies often changed dramatically by way of some small intruder or for-
eign influence. The relative placement of the components, not the compo-
nents themselves defined the constitution of the organization. MacKaye also
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used subtraction within an organization to alter its constitution with the

Terrestrial Networks
awareness that, in a terrestrial ecology, subtraction was often part of some
reciprocal exchange or might even produce growth within connected sites.
Examining a site in ecological terms also often meant highlighting the
rules by which it operated, and MacKaye’s interventions often occupied the
rules and protocols governing the organization, as well as the spin or the vir-
tual frameworks that colored perceptions of it. He discovered that an organi-
zation could be reconstituted by inverting a single protocol within this imma-
terial strata of the site.
MacKaye was among the first to use the word environment, but for him,
environment was an expanded site with physical, temporal, and virtual strata.
He crafted a set of virtual sites within cultural paradigms and persuasions,
developing, primarily through his writing, a means of shifting or inverting Let us take the case of the
perceptions to introduce new values and protocols for development. The ap- civil engineer in “planning” an
proach involved a kind of noninvasive means of altering the landscape by efficient railroad grade across
a mountain range. His first job
changing attitudes about it, and MacKaye treated the practice as simply an-
is to record or map the topog-
other practical and resourceful means of cultivating the landscape. Designing raphy and thus to visualize
an adjustment to the landscape often involved the identification of a dor- the environment in question.
mant existing condition that might be shifted into a new more effective po- Somewhere in this there ex-
sition, so that the projects involved not holistic prescriptions, but partial ists already some particular
reversals or adjustments with radiating but not entirely predictable influence. line across the mountain range
that marks a grade more ef-
The practice involved what MacKaye called “visualizing,” and while it was
ficient than any other line
influenced by American pragmatist philosophers like Emerson and Thoreau, across said range. The engi-
it also strongly resembled Sir Patrick Geddes’ interpretations of Henri Bergson neer proceeds to find that line
in its reliance on the use of memory and eidetic perceptions. Theatrical craft, already fixed by nature; he
however, with its methods of storing experience in visual and corporeal mem- does not contrive or invent
ory may have been the chief influence. MacKaye was brought up in New York some line to suit his fancy.
Thus the engineer visualizes
City and New England within a family of free-thinking dramatists, inventors,
the potential railroad grade
and scientists. His father Steele MacKaye (1835–1894) was an actor, writer, there already within the ac-
producer, manager, and inventor of the theater who staged giant spectacles tual terrain. From this case we
and pageants with elaborate stage machinery. Many details of the MacKaye should say that planning is
family life verged on a kind of Yankee Dada, where eccentricities were treated discovery and not invention.
as completely serious, almost commonplace, and all in a day’s work. Perhaps It is a new type of exploration.
Its essence is visualization—a
as a consequence, MacKaye considered the merger of technical and artistic
charting of the potential now
practices to be second nature. Given the power of environmental sites to existing in the actual. . . . And
adjust cultural perceptions, the artist working alone could intervene. In the what is the thing that is
same way that a tiny antigen in a biological system could have extensive planned? Is it an area, or a line
 18
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merely, or is it something effects, so MacKaye’s “imaginative vocation” could be a tactical site of spatial
Part 1

else? It is something else. The production and adjustment. One could argue that both MacKaye’s practice
engineer plans for something and his infrastructure prototypes were wild cards within the prevailing organ-
more than a line across the
izations of development.
mountain; he plans for move-
ment of freight and passen- The following episodes begin in 1921 with MacKaye’s first article propos-
gers. And so with planning ing the Appalachian Trail. Together they examine infrastructure prototypes
generally: the final thing and proposals, including the trail, limited access highway networks, hydro-
planned is not mere area electric networks, and proposals for new national political partitions. The epi-
or land, but movement or sodes also look at the projects of two government agencies with which
activity.6
MacKaye was either directly or indirectly involved: the Natural Resources
—Benton Mackaye
Planning Board and the Tennessee Valley Authority.

[Steele MacKaye] was perhaps Steele MacKaye

a forerunner of what might Steele MacKaye fused into one giant, impossible vision the most am-
be called the ‘statesman- bitious manifestations of the engineer, entrepreneur, and dramatist.
dramatist.’ He was not inter-
His theatrical productions were overscaled historical pageants or epic
ested in writing a play which
did not image social forces. spectacles with gigantic moving stage tableaus, weather, fire, and
He made these forces stand changing atmospheric light. When not directing plays, he also de-
forth—as do wind and rain signed and patented a folding chair for the theater, worked on the in-
and sunlight. His Paul Kauvar vention of a new railroad coupling, and pursued an interest and
set forth the cyclone of the investment in photosculpture, a process by which a machine would
French Revolution. His Drama
make three dimensional objects from photographs. He was the first
of Civilisation set forth, in the
Indian brave and in the cow- American to play Hamlet in London and a founder of the Madison
puncher, the racial forces Square Garden, Lyceum, and St. James Theaters in New York City.7
contending for a continent. When Benton was a child in New York City, Steele MacKaye
His World Finder (with the su- produced the Drama of Civilization, an indoor version of Buffalo Bill’s
per-stage technique of his “Wild West Show” staged as a kind of time-line of American westward
Spectatorium) visualised the
expansion. One of Benton MacKaye’s biographers, Paul Bryant wrote
greatest of the Earth’s
migrations. that even in his 80s Benton could “still describe with a glowing eye,
the entrance of the wagon train and the sweep of the prairie fire across
Can prophecy be dramatised the Garden’s [Madison Square Garden] stage.” 8 But Steele MacKaye’s
as well as retrospect? That is ultimate invention was the “Spectatorium” that was planned for the
what interests the regional World’s Columbian Exposition. Its 70 by 100 foot stage was to house
planner, who is concerned
many of Steele MacKaye’s other devices for light and scenery. Light-
with equipping regions for
future human living. I believe ing devices like the “luxauleator,” the “nebulator,” the “illumiscope,”
that prophecy can be drama- and the “colourator,” were designed to simulate changing effects of
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the daytime sky and thus create a “mechanical duplication of nature.” tised. I believe that my father

Terrestrial Networks
Illuminated texts would pass across the stage. Even ocean battles could thought it could be; that he
be waged on floating stages. These electromechanical versions of the- was a pioneer in seeing the
theatre (and all dramatic ac-
atrical tools pushed the theatrical form toward a kind cinematic reality
tivity) as a sort of focusing
or one similar to virtual reality simulations of today’s computer era. lens—a telescope, whereby
Ironically, the financial failure of MacKaye’s theater occurred at the the public mind can look into
same time that motion picture film projection was becoming popular.9 perspective, and be enabled to
Steele MacKaye was the son of a prominent businessman, and vision, not alone the actuality
he recognized no obstacles to the simultaneous pursuit of business, of the past, but the
potentiality of the future.
engineering, and art, though he often struggled between the dueling
Such, to my mind, is the aim
habits of mind associated with these endeavors.10 While he had a sense of the visualiser—whether
of order that would sometimes lead him to regiment his life in peculiar statesman, regional planner,
ways, Steele MacKaye was also a grand thespian of flamboyant charac- or dramatist: to focus the
ter. His affectations were disciplined, even righteous. An actor, he be- people’s vision.14
lieved, was a responsible cultural practitioner. In the difficult position —Benton MacKaye

of being the initiator of new ideas on many fronts, he was never able
to enjoy any financial stability and was usually struggling against fail-
ure. In 1927, one of Benton’s brothers, Percy, wrote a two-volume
memoir of his father entitled Epoch. The book was written not as a
single text, but as an almost encyclopedic assemblage of his father’s
achievements, related in Percy’s own voice and interspersed with other
texts, lists, and illustrations related to events and personae that con-
tributed to the intellectual history at the turn of the century. Percy
managed to mention William James, Thomas Edison, Oscar Wilde,
Henry David Thoreau, David Belasco, Cecil B. de Mille, and scores
of others with whom Steele MacKaye associated.11 In a way the book
was a model of the catholic and inclusive epistemology that was shared
by all the children.
Benton MacKaye later recognized that his father’s theatrical pro-
ductions approached a scale of operation that could no longer be
contained by the stage but rather approached the scale of larger envi-
ronments outside the theater. Benton’s stage was the larger environ-
ment of the enveloping outdoors—the surrounding medium of
immaterial culture and material civilization.12 Later in his career he
would write of geotechnics, as his father had written of the theater,
“geotechnics consists of emulating nature.” 13
 20
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But already we may speak of Sir Patrick Geddes

Part 1

the body as an ever advancing Benton MacKaye and Sir Patrick Geddes have remained minor histor-
boundary between the future ical characters, perhaps more interesting for their failures to achieve
and the past, as a pointed end,
the kind of cultural power that, it could be argued, was achieved by
which our past is continually
driving forward. Whereas my Lewis Mumford. Coincidentally, Mumford often served as a kind of
body, taken at a single mo- public representative for the two. Both MacKaye and Geddes pro-
ment, is but a conductor in- posed eccentric schemes, often wrote in florid, romantic tones, and
terposed between the objects sometimes conceived of history and ecology in positivistic and nostal-
which influence it and those gic terms. Both maintained a mental state that was constantly cross-
on which it acts, it is on the
referencing a number of disciplines, paradigms, and associations. Both
other hand, when replaced in
the flux of time, always situ- were pragmatists who valued learning and experience over orthodoxy
ated at the very point where but were simultaneously straining under their own desires for a clear
my past expires in deed.20 epistemological framework.
—Henri Bergson As Geddes’ protégé, Mumford has usually been credited as the
conduit of a prescient philosophy that espoused the integration and
adjustment of new technologies like automobile and electrical net-
. . . in the outlook tower Ged-
des showed me a whole series works in relation to terrestrial ecologies. As Mumford was absorbing
of “time charts” he and his and disseminating Geddes’ teachings, however, MacKaye was devel-
colleagues had once worked oping, indepedently, a philosophy and practice of regional land plan-
on, attempting to represent ning that was distinctly American and strikingly similar to that of
the flow of historic events in Mumford’s mentor. Geddes, in fact, christened the term “geotech-
colored streams, widening,
nics” for MacKaye’s science.
thinning, sometimes blend-
ing. And he himself when MacKaye first met Geddes during Geddes’ visit to New York in
going over his graphic chess- the summer of 1923. Mumford had set up an itinerary that included
board with me once even appearances at the New School and meetings with his new RPAA col-
speculated on the possibility leagues at the Hudson Guild Farm in New Jersey. MacKaye later
of creating a kind of four- wrote:
dimensional chess in a box,
composed of graphs whose
movements through space I shall never forget my first walk with Patrick Geddes (later
would enable one to express Sir Patrick) the sandy bearded Scot of Edinburgh, Dundee,
changing relationships in Dunfermline, Dublin, Montpelier, Bombay, Indore, Jerusa-
time. lem, Tel Aviv—with the whole epic of civilization visioned
But how impossible it is from his famed Outlook tower at Edinburgh.
to express time in such spatial
terms! It is only in the symbols
of language and music, or—as This was springtime in 1923 at the Hudson Guild Farm in
Henri Bergson saw—in motion the New Jersey highland. Geddes, ‘Jack of all trades and
pictures that the flow of liv- master of city planning,’ proved a fast walker for a sexage-
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narian though his tongue outdid his legs. But first he had ing experiences through time

Terrestrial Networks
asked me about my work and so had to listen as I recounted can be symbolized.21
adventures in conservation under Gifford Pinchot and in re- —Lewis Mumford

gional planning (under nobody). I had delved back to geog-

raphy under professor Davis when Geddes rounded on me
in the path.

‘None of those!’ he caught me up—‘Not conservation, not

planning, not even geography. Your subject is geotechnics.’ 15

As evidenced by his expansive, nonlinear monologues, Geddes

valued the ephemeral qualities of thoughts born in speech, and he
privileged experience and conversation as the real time precipitant of
mental activity. Geddes said he was “like the cuckoo who lays its eggs
in other people’s nests,” because he effected much of his publishing
through conversation. His works ranged so broadly from botany to
city planning to experimental photography that they did not lend
themselves to compilation or publication within any customary for-
mat. Mumford wrote that Geddes’ books were like notes written “on
the margin of his thinking,” and that they were only a faint reflection
of, “his massive practical grasp, his astonishing breadth of scholarship,
his relentless confrontation of reality.” 16 These writings, chief among
them Cities in Evolution were in constant flux among any one of his
subjects and a thousand other paradigms and associations. Geddes’s
theories also cross-referenced the thinking of geographers, historians,
and philosophers including Marsh, Spengler, Nietzsche, Reclus, Le
Play, and Kropotkin.
Geddes and MacKaye shared the use of higher elevations as van-
tage points for surveying and planning. Geddes had his Outlook
tower, and MacKaye had his Appalachian mountain top. Both consid-
ered “seeing” to be more than simply the faculty of vision. “Survey
then plan” was Geddes watchword. From new French geographers
Elise Reclus and Paul Vidal la Bache and the French sociologist Fred-
eric Le Play, Geddes borrowed an instrumental technique for map-
ping the landscape—the valley section. The valley section indexed the
various strata of flora, fauna, and minerals present in the landscape,
and Geddes mixed a sectional and a panoramic view in his visual
 22
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surveys. But survey involved not only inventorying the components of

Part 1

a landscape but understanding the relationships among these compo-

nents over time. The landscape, as viewed from his “outlook tower”
on Edinburgh’s High Street was a kind of crystal ball for reading both
past and future. The view was overlain with history and imagination
in a vast “synoptic” implosion. Geddes’ view of the landscape ex-
panded upon repeated surveys and over the depth of time lent by his-
torical information. This perceptual practice reflected his admiration
of French philosopher Henri Bergson. For Bergson the mind was a
function of time and experience—an expanding whole within a tem-
poral continuum. The practice also referenced the work of American
pragmatists like William James and John Dewey.
Geddes was, however willing to declare a provisional unity in his
thinking sufficient to make prescriptive pronouncements about the
past, present, and future of the environment. By the middle of the
nineteenth century, geographical studies examined not only terrestrial
activity but also man’s manipulation in the environment. For Geddes,
the nineteenth century, or the “paleotechnic age” (a term he borrowed
from Kropotkin) was marked by land abuse and a pursuit of the
machine, and he hoped to nurture an evolution from the “gloom
of paleotechnic inferno” to the “neotechnic eutopia.” 17 Many of his
writings resembled Kropotkin’s with their claims that profit motives,
overproduction, and specialization created perverse patterns of distri-
bution that unfairly favored only one sector of society.
Some of Geddes’ inventions and gadgetry were telling accompa-
niment to his philosophy. In experimental photography, for instance,
he attempted to alter views with overlays, touch-ups, and erasures. His
“thinking machines” were another prop for exercising this thought.
Paper was folded into thirty-six squares and each square was assigned
some aspect of culture. Circulating across the folded paper generated
a cycling network of associations where adjacencies suggested new
pairings and triads. The machines were particularly interesting be-
cause he developed them at a time when he had temporarily lost his
eyesight and so devised a way to review his thinking through tactile
mnemonics. Geddes even talked about the possibility of a “four-
dimensional” thinking machine that would incorporate temporality
and animate the framework into a series of changing connections.18
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Geddes’ summer-long visit proved difficult for Mumford as he

Terrestrial Networks
discovered a paradox in his master’s behavior. Mumford appeared to
Geddes to be an eager protégé who could organize and disseminate
ideas, and during the visit Mumford sat for hours listening to Geddes
as he pontificated in muffled tones. Finally the young protégé found
it difficult to reconcile Geddes’ apparent intentions with his attraction
for unifying theories, or worse, his illusion that the structure of his
own mind reflected that unity. Equally distressing to Mumford was
that while Geddes shunned the existing authorities of knowledge,
those communicating through what he called “verbalistic empaper-
ment,” he was capable of positioning himself as a rather overbearing
authority whose monologues were suspiciously tautological. Although
the potential of Geddes’ methods was perhaps stunted by self-reflexive
or totalizing tendencies, the breadth of his conversation was so far
ranging that individual moments like the walk with MacKaye at Hud-
son Guild Farm proved to be extremely valuable.19

Notes
1. Benton MacKaye, From Geography to Geotechnics, ed. Paul T. Bryant (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 1968), 40.
2. Percy MacKaye, Epoch: The Life of Steele MacKaye, Genius of the Theatre in Relation to
His Time and Contemporaries, vol. 1 and 2 (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 474.
3. Benton MacKaye, “Regional Planning and Ecology,” Ecological Monographs X ( July
1940):349.
4. Paul T. Bryant, “The Quality of the Day: The Achievement of Benton MacKaye”
(Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, 1965), 52–56. Two of
MacKaye’s teachers at Harvard were Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and William Mor-
ris Davis. MacKaye would later credit both William Morris Davis and the British
biologist-geographer Thomas Henry Huxley as the initiators of the study of “physi-
ography.” Physiography: An Introduction to the Study of Nature, London: Macmillan and
Co., 1877, a seminal book by Huxley, studied the Thames basin, by relating the
characteristics of the region to the changing effects of tides and atmospheric condi-
tions, thus departing from a previous method of study that focused on the classifica-
tion of artifacts. Davis too addressed the dynamic terms of geology by examining
fluvial activity, erosion, and glaciation. Bryant wrote of Nathaniel Southgate Shaler,
“Shaler was a student of Agassiz and learned from him the naturalist’s approach to
science, the discipline of close observation, the importance of detail, and above all
the significance of relationships. This concern for relationships, for interaction and
process, Shaler carried beyond his purely scientific work into a consideration of sci-
ence’s place in society and its influence upon the character of men.” Bryant, “The
Quality of the Day,” 52.
5. MacKaye used the term “river system” in Benton MacKaye, “The New Exploration:
Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” The Survey Graphic 65 (1 May 1925): 154, 153;
 24

and Benton MacKaye, “The New Northwest Passage.” The Nation 122 (2 June 1926):
|

603. He used “watershed” and “levee” in many of his publications. He also used the
Part 1

word “flow” throughout his work to describe economies, population migrations, and
distribution patterns in addition to fluvial movements.
6. MacKaye, “Regional Planning and Ecology,” 349.
7. Bryant, “The Quality of the Day,” 9, 11, 10; and Percy MacKaye. Epoch: The Life of
Steele MacKaye, vol. 1, 122–123. Paul Bryant’s unpublished dissertation is the best
book-length biographical text on Benton MacKaye—one that had the advantage of
personal interviews and correspondence with him.
8. Bryant, 12.
9. Larry Anderson, “Yesterday’s City: Steele MacKaye’s Grandiose Folly,” Chicago His-
tory 16 (3, 4) (fall and winter 1987–88): 105, 110–111.
10. Bryant, 8. To distinguish himself from his father, for instance, Steele MacKaye added
the “e” to the family’s surname to regain the Scottish pronunciation.
11. Ibid., 15–16. Bryant writes, “[Percy MacKaye] . . . sometimes magnifies fleeting con-
tacts into important connections and sometimes mentions important names when
they have little bearing on his father’s career.”
12. Bryant, 15, 17–18; and Percy MacKaye, Epoch, vol. 2, 467–469.
13. Benton MacKaye, “Geography to Geotechnics.” Serial publication in The Survey: 1.
“Global Law,” 87 ( June 1951): 268.
14. Benton MacKaye in Percy MacKaye, Epoch, vol. 2, 475.
15. Benton MacKaye, From Geography to Geotechnics, p. 22.
16. Philip Boardman, Patrick Geddes: Maker of the Future (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1944), 155, ix.
17. Peter Hall, Cities of Tomorrow (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 143–45. Peter
Hall has demonstrated that the terms paleotechnic and neotechnic were Kropotkin’s
own, and he notes that Kropotkin met both Howard and Geddes. Pyotr Kropotkin,
Fields Factories and Workshops (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1898), 350; and
Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1950), 48.
18. Novak, 360–363.
19. MacKaye proposed to the group that perhaps geotechnics might be a more provocative
term than “regional planning.” Several of the RPAA members were skeptical of the
new title, however, though Mumford used it in some of his later writings. In a later
compilation, From Geography to Geotechnics, MacKaye told, with typical modesty and
candor, a story about his reluctance to use the term in relation to his work of the
1920s and 1930s because he could not find it in the dictionary. In the 1940s, Mac-
Kaye finally found geotechnics in the dictionary defined as “the applied science of
making the world more habitable.” “I swallowed a howl I lest I should break the
library edict of ‘silence.’ My inhibitions over the years evaporated. The name was
now respectable. Once in the dictionary it could be employed in all companies—
and with a definition better than my own. And so, at long last, the name. Meanwhile,
during those years and under various names, I had been working on the thing.” Bry-
ant, 24.
20. Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (New York: Humanities Press Inc., 1979), 88.
21. Lewis Mumford in a previously unpublished biographical essay on Patrick Geddes
entitled, “The Geddesian Gambit,” ed. Frank G. Novak Jr., Lewis Mumford and Pat-
rick Geddes: The Correspondence (London: Routledge, 1995), 363.
1.1 S U B T R A C T I O N I N V E R S I O N R E M O T E :
APPALACHIAN TRAIL

MacKaye’s Appalachian Trail proposal was simple. A footpath following the

crest of the Appalachian ridge would travel from Maine to Georgia as one
continuous trail 2,000 miles in length. Though it was only a footpath, Mac-
Kaye characterized the proposal as a “transportation project,” because by its
placement, the trail inverted the conventional hierarchy of transportation
and development infrastructure. Typically, long-distance rail or highways
formed the main transportation trunks, with primary, secondary, and tertiary
streets leading to pedestrian networks. Conversely, in the trail arrangement,
a footpath was the dominant infrastructure that would organize streets and
rails. Branch lines of the trail and special railways would extend this landscape
into thirty-six of the largest nearby metropolitan areas. The mountain ridge
became the central spine of development, replacing the tall buildings of the
metropolis and reversing its dominant pattern of concentric growth. An in-
frastructure of land or “super national” forest and a network of compact
communities and industries would crystallize around the footpath to replace
the suburbs. The interstate geological formation of the Appalachian ridge
would function as a kind of public utility or reservoir of natural resources,
organizing transportation and hydroelectrical networks while locating indus-
try and community. The trail idea proposed no master plan but rather an
ordering principle for a new economy. It would broadcast a field of influence
and a new mechanism for the migrations of population as well as the econo-
mies of production and distribution (figure 1.1.1).1
MacKaye first conceived of a long-distance trail while camping through
the White Mountains when he was nineteen and later returned to the idea
while working for the government in Washington. He worked for the De-
partment of Forestry under Gifford Pinchot from 1905–1918 and for the
1.1.1 Illustration accompanying Appalachian Trail project showing parallel railways and waterways.
Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” Journal of the American In-
stitute of Architects IXX (October 1921): 7.
 27

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Department of Labor from 1918–1919. MacKaye was a member of a new pro-

Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail

fession of foresters and planners who often envisioned their role not as a
segregated specialization but as an interdisciplinary advocacy. Under Pinchot,
MacKaye was given responsibility for a large number of America’s public land
preserves, and he worked on a bill to manage land conservation and fuel
extraction in Alaska. While working for the Department of Labor, he began
to formulate ideas linking forestry to other economies of employment and
settlement that were published in a report entitled Employment and Natural
Resources (1919). Influenced by the postwar plans of several countries to
colonize unsettled lands as a means of housing and employment for re-
turning veterans, the report proposed a group of permanent encampments
for work and/or recreation with an Appalachian trail at their center. It recom-
mended a reorientation of labor toward working the land, making it both a
preserve and an employment resource, and it featured the trail as the means
for just such a reorientation of resources. The mountain landscape would sup-
posedly also act as a cultural tonic for returning veterans as well as a means
of organizing depressed rural and logging industries.2
During the 1910s and 1920s, MacKaye was a member of several intellec-
tual cadres interested in reforming legislation. While in Washington, he be-
longed to a group of journalists, activists, and government workers who
called themselves, the “Hell Raisers.” The group composed and promoted leg-
islative reform addressing, among other things, the organization of electricity,
land, and other natural resources.3 Their radical political leanings were rein-
forced by association with the Communist Party and the programs of the
Soviet Union. During this time MacKaye, for instance, studied Russian and
considered going to the Soviet Union as a “volunteer technician.” MacKaye,
together with Frederick Ackerman, Charles Whitaker, and Stuart Chase, fellow
“Hell Raisers,” was also part of the Technical Alliance for a time.4 While Acker-
man continued to be a leader of the technocracy movement, MacKaye and
Chase felt somewhat alienated from the scientific determinism espoused by
the group and its leader, Howard Scott. Chase, an economist and admirer of
Veblen, later wrote, “Scott was a difficult man to work with—a real Napole-
onic type.” 5 The two turned their attentions instead to a new group of intel-
lectuals called “Whitaker’s group,” which would later be called the RPAA.
When the RPAA formed, there was some question about whether it should
be a larger organization or a “small group of technicians.” 6 Like the Technical
Alliance, they were intellectuals attempting to effect policy changes in much
28
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larger organizations. Though the RPAA remained a loose aggregate of profes-

1.1

sionals pursuing separate prototypes, the group also developed a collective

platform concerning the systemic management of resources and the emerg-
ing pattern of new infrastructure networks.
MacKaye’s work, and the Appalachian Trail in particular, were critical to
the formulation of the RPAA platform. MacKaye wrote an article about the
trail in 1921 for the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, where
Charles Whitaker was then editor. The article got the attention of two other
“Whitaker’s group” members, Clarence Stein and Lewis Mumford. After meet-
ing MacKaye, Stein thought the trail idea was a provocative means of ex-
panding the agendas of a committee he was chairing for the American
Institute of Architects, the Commission on Community Planning.7 Mumford
was later introduced to MacKaye in 1923 as the RPAA was forming. The trail
idea was so well aimed and it represented so many of both the community
building and land management goals of regionalists, that it helped to galva-
nize the RPAA in its early days. It became a kind of trope of regional plan-
ning efforts.
More interesting than its association with any one platform or critique,
however, was the character of the Appalachian Trail as an organization. As in
geological models, the Appalachian organization was analogous to the ruts
and divides caused by glaciation and glacial flow. Like a continental divide,
watershed, or levee, it contained and shaped reciprocal exchange and activity
along its length. MacKaye would later extend this fluvial model by likening
the trail to a kind of levee that contained and shaped development. The trail
was governed by additional organizational protocols as well. It was also a
linear subtraction along the crestline of a mountain range, an “open way”
that had the power to rearrange priorities in an industrial economy.8 Finally,
the trail was immaterial. It was a void or a line of force, not a construction.
This largely invisible physical alteration, however, effected a simple but radi-
cal reversal in the flows of commerce and population migration. Without
vastly changing the physical arrangements, but reversing the protocols of its
use, this “supertrail” remagnetized and recentered development in the terri-
tory through which it passed, remotely affecting areas some distance from
the spine. It would format industrial and urban patterns, changing them from
a series of concentric nodes to a more evenly distributed network straddling a
spine. The entire network also multiplied intelligence and connection through
parallelism and differential connection between different species of network.
 29

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It was not a single trail but a “cobweb” of trails that would cover the moun-

Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail

tain and recircuit all the existing transportation networks, creating new
branches and circuits.9
Among the most important qualities of the trail’s organization was its
power as a partial or tactical intervention. The footpath, though scaled to the
body within a single section, when extended for hundreds of miles became a
powerful mark or divide in the land. And while there was a direction of travel,
there were no fixed termini. The trail also traveled through similar crestline
terrain at its interior, but it organized vastly different terrain at its periphery.
The tactical placement of a single detail, repeated or extended, would have
enormous radiating effect. Since the sites were constituted within patterns
of connection and process, population flows, transportation and utility net-
works, and other distributive protocols, small adjustments were potentially
very effective within the larger organization. Even though the Appalachian
Trail was mammoth in size, it initiated a process of systemic though not nec-
essarily comprehensive changes, and after attaining a gigantic length, the
network relationships were no longer simple.
In the years following the Appalachian Trail article, MacKaye continued
to mine the prototype for more meaning. He treated this special kind of line
and the large land organizations it was intended to adjust as a heuristic de-
vice to discover more about the workings of the land. He studied it in pan-
orama and cross section, and he studied its effect on labor, resources, and
population migration. In 1922, MacKaye wrote that the Appalachian Trail was
“deeply calculated to interest not only architects and landscape architects
but foresters and all others of the genus ‘engineer.’” 10 MacKaye proposed that
reconditioning the industrial and terrestrial landscape could only be directed
by the “composite mind of several engineers.” 11 Hydroengineers, foresters, sil-
viculturalists, and economists, for instance, were all technicians in this en-
deavor. MacKaye considered land-based engineering and natural resource
planning to be on a par with those forms of engineering which were later to
be privileged in America, namely those related to commerce and defense. He
considered his own practice of Geotechnics or “regional engineering,” as he
called it, to be a kind of composite form.12
As the new field of electrical and automobile networks became critical
layers in the Appalachian organization, they materialized a network of associ-
ations MacKaye had projected for the trail. Rather than considering these
networks as alien, he conceived of these emerging technologies as part of an
30
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inclusive ecology. Highways and hydroelectrical grids operated on an almost

1.1

geological scale, thus expanding the industrial ecology into an environmental

realm beyond the scale of the machine metaphors and motion studies used
by technocrats. As a by-product of fluvial activity, electricity could be under-
stood as an energy abstraction as well as a terrestrial activity. In another
article about the trail, entitled “Appalachian Power: Servant or Master? [The
Survey Graphic, March 1924].” MacKaye calculated, in horsepower, the units
of potential energy available through coal and water resources along the Ap-
palachian spine. He borrowed terms like “quanta” used by technocrats, but
used them to refer not only to units of energy but to units of culture. A unit
was equal to 1 percent of the total horse power resources from carbon and
water in the area and corresponded to one of the labor recreational settle-
ments he planned for the Appalachian Trail. The new networks were also recali-
brating the framework of place and potentially locating industry independent
of the metropolis. MacKaye said of the new electrical grid, “The factory need
not go to Niagara, Niagara can go to the factory, that is within a radius of
some three hundred miles.” MacKaye wrote of a net overlaid on the Appala-
chian spine whose interstices were anchored by the development of natural
resources in specific locations. The hydroelectric grids materialized a network
of relationships that were already latent in the landscape (figure 1.1.2).13
The trail fueled MacKaye’s fascination with the interactivity between ur-
ban and rural regions, and he used it to model an understanding of conges-
tion on a city street as a consequence of sites that however remote, were
reciprocal and consequential rather than discrete. Using cross-sections of the
New England plateau, he traced the flow of material from the “source” to the
“mouth” from the “sphere of ‘origin’ to the sphere of ‘distribution’; from the
simple to the complex. . . .” The various diverse tributaries of production con-
tributed to giant confluences like New York, which MacKaye likened to an-
other kind of Niagara. “Let us understand that traffic congestion on State
Street and subway congestion at ‘Park Street under’ are resultants of activi-
ties taking place in Dakota and Texas, in New York and Charleston, as well as
in Somerville.” 14 “Here the strands are woven on a continental scale,” MacKaye
wrote of his new exploration. “Some day, of course, we shall have to enter
Boston. But on the same day we shall have to enter New York and Chicago
and San Francisco (and perhaps even Liverpool and Hong Kong). For these are
all in the sphere of distribution. They are nerve centers of a continuous flow
that is continental (intercontinental) in its vastness (figure 1.1.3).” 15
1.1.2 Illustration accompanying “Appalachian Power: Servant or Master.” The caption reads, “Each
Circle marks the center of one percent of the continuous potential horse power from coal and water
within the area shown: The 61 black circles are centers of coal power, and the 39 white circles of wa-
ter power. The super-populated belt is shown in dark shading; the Appalachian Mountain belt is un-
shaded.” Benton MacKaye, “Appalachian Power: Servant or Master,” Survey Graphic (March 1924):
619.
32
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1.1

1.1.3 Cross-section of New England included in “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wil-
derness.” Benton MacKaye, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” Survey
Graphic 54 (1925): 155.

As MacKaye continued to develop the trail prototype, he began to posi-

tion the Appalachian Trail as a piece of this global infrastructure. It would
filter and reroute east-west rail and vehicular freight potentially developing
new global ports or at least making the global ports of the large cities more
efficient. These rearrangements and consolidations of continental infrastruc-
ture systems would together become part of a renovated global system.
MacKaye wrote, “A number of world-scale industrial enterprises have been
achieved, or projected—the Panama and Suez canals; the Trans-Siberian and
Cape-to-Cairo railways; continental systems of giant power; industrialization
of agriculture. These things suggest an unconscious groping toward a con-
trolled integration of world industry (figure 1.1.4).” 16
In 1927 MacKaye even proposed a new type of atlas, charting activity
rather than territory within industrial infrastructure. This “World Atlas of
Commodity Flow” would survey global requirements, resources, and lines of
travel by air, ocean liner, and rail. The atlas would support not only the re-
arrangement of global infrastructure and transportation routes but also the
formulation of new protocols for the economies of distribution among coun-
 33

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Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail
1.1.4 Projected “Lines of World Communication” from “Industrial Exploration,” a serial publication
in The Nation. Benton MacKaye, “Charting the World’s Commodity Flow,” The Nation: I, 125 (July
20, 1927): 72.

tries. MacKaye set out a seemingly impossible mission for the atlas that ri-
valed the absurd ambitions of the technocrats. It proposed to chart the
world’s physical and psychic requirements, measuring the need for food,
clothing, and shelter as well as the need for culture and beauty. It would
correlate between population and the fact that most people “eat wheat for
breakfast” or that “cotton is a universal garment,” and it would also measure
the world’s potential resources in horsepower.17 Given the breadth of the
34
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project, it was perhaps no surprise that MacKaye found no funding for the
1.1

project. In a letter to Geddes in 1925, Mumford wrote that MacKaye had not
yet found the financing for his “world atlas of potential commodity flow”
and was therefore “elaborating the more general and social points of his
thought.” 18

Jessie Hardy Stubbs

While in Washington and associating with the “Hell Raisers,” Mac-
Kaye lived in a cooperative household, not coincidentally nicknamed
“Hell House.” In 1917, he married the prominent suffragette, Jessie
Hardy Stubbs. Stubbs was an antiwar activist who led disarmament
campaigns and conferences. She outlined a book entitled The Sexual
Revolution, which proposed to illustrate, in part, a political and eco-
nomic world where the most powerful roles were controlled by women
rather than men.19 In 1918 Stubbs had a severe nervous breakdown,
and though she recuperated temporarily after a trip to the country,
she continued to suffer from headaches and anxieties. She committed
suicide in 1921, and MacKaye retreated to Shirley, Massachusetts, to
the homes of friends and later to New York City.20 He rarely spoke of
his marriage again.

Technocracy
The technocracy movement of the 1920s and 1930s initiated the prac-
tice of using engineering as a tool of political policy. Early technocracy
theory grew on the one hand from a socialist critique of capitalism,
one fueled by post-World War I and Depression era economies, but
the movement was also prompted by the very persuasions that were
partly responsible for these economies—Taylorism and Fordism.
Thorstein Veblen led the movement initially. His ruminations about
the fallacies and affectations of capitalism, published in The Engineers
and the Price System (1921), hinged on a critic of those business struc-
tures that generated inflated profits and wasteful distribution. A better
leader, Veblen argued, was the engineer. The engineer already embod-
ied the ethic of the worker and could scientifically rearrange the
doomed business system. The worker-engineer could more easily as-
cend to a position among the political elite, and a system based on
 35

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units of energy, rather than an artificial system of prices, would pro-

Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail

vide more equitably for everyone. The book and Veblen’s New School
(New York City) discussion group inspired one of its members, How-
ard Scott, to form an offshoot group, the Technical Alliance. Scott was
a self-styled technocrat and village bohemian who dressed in a kind of
engineer’s costume—a soft shirt, red tie, red handkerchief, and large
leather jacket. While influenced by Veblen, he led his own charge as
the head of several organizations and journals, including the Technical
Alliance, of which he was “chief engineer.” 21
By 1933, the technocracy movement had received some of its
strongest criticism and some of its most significant praise. Though it
had reached the peak of its popularity, the group was also on the verge
of a divisive split. Howard Scott joined with Walter Rautenstrauch’s
Committee on Technocracy at Columbia to work on the Energy Survey
of North America. Scott published a kind of manifesto in the January,
1933, issue of Harper’s Magazine. It was one of the few statements from
the group to make procedural proposals, describing, among other
things, a new currency of energy units.22
Scott was the most visible member of the group. His technologi-
cal determinism overshadowed the group’s attention to social issues,
and his public stance alienated other members of the Committee
on Technocracy like Rautenstrauch and Ackerman.23 Rautenstrauch
thought the engineer would supply a quantitative method to a political
structure, not replace that structure by declaring engineers as the only
capable elected officials. The technocracy movement split into a more
radical faction led by Howard Scott, Technocracy Inc., and a more
reform-minded group, the Continental Committee, established by
Ackerman and led by Harold Loeb.
As the leader of Technocracy Inc., Scott replaced his engineer-as-
bohemian costume with a kind of uniform, a gray suit and blue tie.
Together with one of his devotees, Columbia geophysicist M. King
Hubbert, he wrote the Technocracy Study Course, further elaborating the
group’s platform and eventual plans. As outlined in the Harper’s Maga-
zine article, “energy certificates” would replace currency, and a corpo-
rate syndicate headed by a “technate” would replace the existing
political hierarchy. The technate would even be served by electronic
machines that would help sort and tabulate the massive amounts of
36
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data necessary for the governing engineers to accurately direct pro-

1.1

duction.24 The same technologies that threatened labor would be used

to maintain a self-regulating economy. The promise of technology’s
own self-organizing, self-regulating economy, however, relied on a
perpetually forthcoming effort in comprehensive information collec-
tion. Once the necessary data had been compiled, technology and pro-
duction would finally become rationalized and predictable.
Loeb, leading the Continental Committee, was a friend of Scott’s
in the Greenwhich Village days. While Scott adopted the style of the
engineer-as-bohemian, Loeb took up the habits of the more common
literati-as-bohemian. Loeb conducted a study entitled Plan of Plenty
that led the Continental Committee away from technological positiv-
ism and toward a program to adjust existing economic mechanisms in
a way that resembled the Keynesian approach of New Deal bureau-
crats. The committee was more inclusive in its membership as well.
For instance, it was supported by Stuart Chase who had been articulat-
ing a similar contention in his books of the previous ten years and who
had been alienated from the more radical proposals of Scott.25
In the ensuing years, some of the technocrats’ proposals were in-
corporated into a less radical attitude toward the superiority of engi-
neering, but one that still favored quantifiable approaches to problem
solving. Influenced by technocracy theories during the New Deal pe-
riod, a generation of young practitioners sought opportunities for the
application of engineering intelligence through planning. The survey,
inventory, and report would become a standard practice of policymak-
ing in Washington.
 37

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Notes

Subtraction Inversion Remote: The Appalachian Trail

1. Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” reprint
Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 19 (October 1921): 1–8; and Benton
MacKaye, “Great Appalachian Trail from New Hampshire to the Carolinas,” New
York Times, Sunday, 18 Feb. 1923.
2. Benton MacKaye, in the introduction to From Geography to Geotechnics, ed. Paul T.
Bryant, 5.
3. Biographer Paul Bryant wrote that their “. . . efforts ranged from arousing indigna-
tion over a Maryland law permitting flogging of criminals to proposals for eliminat-
ing private profit in the munitions industry, from federal control of water power to
the granting of suffrage to women.” Bryant, 90; and Lewis Mumford in the introduc-
tion to The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1962), xii. Reprinted from 1928 version.
4. Bryant, 34–36; and Larry Anderson, unpublished biography of MacKaye. Courtesy
of the author.
5. Stuart Chase, “My Friend Benton” in “Benton MacKaye: A Tribute by Lewis Mum-
ford, Stuart Chase, Paul Oehser, Frederick Gutheim, Harley P. Holden, Paul T. Bry-
ant, Robert M. Howes, C.J.S. Durham,” The Living Wilderness 39 n., 132 ( January/
March 1976):18.
6. Minutes of the Regional Planning Association of America, 7 June 1923, are quoted
in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Associa-
tion of America, ed. Carl Sussman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 17.
7. John Ross, “Benton MacKaye: The Appalachian Trail,” in The American Planner: Bio-
graphies and Recollections, ed. Donald A. Krueckeberg (New York and London: Meth-
uen, 1983), 203–5.
8. Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York:
Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), 179.
9. Benton MacKaye, “Progress Toward the Appalachian Trail,” Appalachia 15 (Decem-
ber 1922):244.
10. Ibid.
11. Benton MacKaye, “Appalachian Power: Servant or Master,” Survey Graphic 51(1
March 1924):618–19.
12. MacKaye, The New Exploration, 34–5.
13. MacKaye, “Appalachian Power: Servant or Master,” 619; and Robert W. Bruere,
“Giant Power—Region-Builder,” The Survey Graphic 54(1 May 1925):161–64.
14. Benton MacKaye, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” The
Survey Graphic 65 (1 May 1925):155, 156.
15. Ibid., 194, 156.
16. Benton MacKaye, “Industrial Exploration,” serial publication in The Nation: “II.
Charting the World’s Requirements,” 125 (27 July 1927):92; and “I. Charting the
World’s Commodity Flow,” 125 (20 July 1927): 72; and Benton MacKaye, “II. Chart-
ing the World’s Requirements,” 92. The article was weakest when it was prescriptive
about the need to, among other things, “untangle” metropolitan “bottlenecks,” but
it was most significant in its proposal to explore “parallel (and competing) lines of
commodity flow.”
17. Benton MacKaye, “Industrial Exploration,” serial publication in The Nation: “II.
Charting the World’s Requirements,” 92.
18. Frank G. Novak Jr., Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence (London:
Routiedge, 1995), 232.
19. Larry Anderson, unpublished biography of MacKaye.
20. MacKaye to Katherine Menhenharr, April 25, 1921, Benton MacKaye papers,
38

Dartmouth College Library. Bryant does not mention MacKaye’s wife in his bio-
|

graphical work. A scrapbook of Stubbs life can be found among these MacKaye
1.1

papers.
21. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, reprinted by Mentor Books, 1953
(original publication 1899); and William E. Akin, Technocracy and the American
Dream: The Technocrat Movements, 1900–1941 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1977), 34.
22. Akin, 65–66, 80–96.
23. Allen Raymond, What Is Technocracy? (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc.,
1933), 100–119. One critic, journalist Allen Raymond, wrote a series of articles
about the movement and published a book entitled What Is Technocracy? that raised
further questions about the mythical figure of Howard Scott. For instance, did Scott
ever receive a doctor’s degree, and why was he referred to as “Dr. Scott” while at
Columbia? Scott himself told Raymond that he was called “Dr.” because it was sim-
ply customary to call associates of the university “doctor” or “professor.” Had he
been an “engineer and technician” on the Muscle Shoals project in Alabama? No
one on the project could remember Scott at first, save one witness who remembered
him as a peculiar character who carried a gun and gave the impression of being a
German spy. When his position of “equipment engineer” was investigated, it led
only to reports of his incompetence on the job and the reasons for his being fired.
In some cases Allen did not question but simply repeated the apocryphal stories
about Scott’s allegedly fraudulent behavior, and he tactfully stopped before seriously
compromising reports from reputable figures that, despite his eccentricities, Scott
had a massive grasp on his subject.
24. Akin, 101, 137–140.
25. Ibid., 116–130.
1.2 F R A M E W O R K : T E R R A I N C O G N I T A
AND ENVIRONMENT

As MacKaye applied his infrastructure ideas to not only continental but global
networks, he began to develop not a physical prototype but a cultural persua-
sion or script that could be used as a tool to reconstitute infrastructure or-
ganizations. An article in 1925 and a subsequent book in 1928, both of which
were titled The New Exploration, articulated the notion that technological
systems had their own ecologies that could be adjusted by new physical as
well as perceptual “frameworks.” 1 Effecting change did not necessarily in-
volve physical restructuring. MacKaye’s method of “visualizing,” as he would
call it, allowed him to highlight the protocols of activity and exchange within
an environment, which were often pliable and filled with new sites and
opportunities. The article and book developed an argument that gently dis-
mantled some of the prevailing methods of organizing land by revealing
new territory within them—territory that MacKaye sometimes called terra
incognita or environment—territory essentially discovered within a new
arrangement of perceptions.
Even the earliest Appalachian Trail article made way for the new organi-
zation by adjusting perceptions about the history and economy of the eastern
seaboard. MacKaye usually began an article or book by placing his reader in
an extreme spatial or temporal location. For instance, in the 1921 article, he
placed the reader on the trail at a high altitude and likened their range of
vision to that of a giant. He wrote, “Let us assume the existence of a giant
standing high on the skyline along these mountain ridges, his head just
scraping the floating clouds. What would he see from this skyline as he strode
along its length from north to south?” Both as a forester and a mountaineer,
MacKaye had walked along the Appalachian ridge and surveyed the sur-
rounding land from its peak. Even though at any one position the trail section
40
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was small, its length and height enlarged an individual’s experience by ex-
1.2

tending the body’s visual range. From the giant’s vantage point, MacKaye also
inventoried the natural resources of coal, water, and woodlands as well as the
psychic, recreational resources along the whole length of the crestline. He
imagined that the cartoon giant enlarged not only the visual but the tempo-
ral frame of reference as well, enabling a view of several historical periods at
once from the time of Indian settlements and Daniel Boone to the industrial-
ization of large metropolitan areas.2
The giant, though clownish and typical of MacKaye’s often elementary
sometimes even corny writing style, nevertheless demonstrated a very real
mental faculty. For MacKaye, physical passage through the landscape by, for
instance walking or riding, provided a mnemonic structure to store and index
memory and experience. Movements of the body exercised the mind and
stimulated memory and understanding. MacKaye’s theatrical family moved
from New York City to the colonial town of Shirley, Massachusetts, when he
was nine years old. Less interested in quoting the bard and grooming himself
as another of the family’s esthetes, MacKaye was fascinated instead with the
humor and slang of common parlance and the outdoor world of the town.
As a teenager, he devised “expeditions” through the woods of Shirley that he
numbered and recorded in a book. Biographers, friends like Mumford, and
MacKaye himself have perhaps romanticized these walks as formative boy-
hood events. Most were short and sketchy, but they represented a much more
expansive practice that MacKaye’s brother Percy would later call “expedition
nining” after one of the favorite walks.3 “Expedition nining” outlined a very
specific mental craft. Features of the land, flora, and fauna acted as mne-
monic devises to prompt stories and geological sagas that were intertwined
with literature and autobiography. Like acting techniques that use mental
and physical cues and rhythms to construct, store and release an entire virtual
world, MacKaye’s childhood expeditions allowed him to store experience in
both the walking body and the landscape. Landscape was found within the
mind, but that landscape could also be understood as mind and experience.
The world was mind, and this virtual space could be cultivated by repeated
perceptions that were stored and cross-referenced with knowledge from his-
tory, geology, and other cultural endeavors.
The trail was a long gigantic spectacle, and like Steele MacKaye’s massive
theatrical extravaganzas, it was intended to recreate rather than represent an
experience—one that also, magically, expanded into temporal realms outside
 41

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the present. Like MacKaye’s own expeditions, perceptions involved more than

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

simply visual contact with the scenery. Passage along the trail enveloped the
individual in a motion picture experience and a script that was consciously
compiled, stored and reconstituted. The high altitude enlarged views, while
the narrow path collapsed many historical epochs into a single body and a
single moment. The view from the mountain panorama summoned the larger
history of human migrations, geological eras, and biological cycles. The Appa-
lachian Trail was the “longest marked path in the world paralleled by the age-
old, greatest of all Indian Trails—The Great Indian Warpath—which formerly
extended from the Creek territory in Alabama north into Pennsylvania, the
lowland or valley counterpart of the crest-line Appalachian Trail.” 4 A carefully
placed vantage point and a simple set of narratives that manipulated the
temporal framework of the experience adjusted the most instant and imma-
terial layer in the landscape organization—the cultural persuasions that in-
fluenced its perception.

Te r r a I n c o g n i t a
In the 1925 article, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,”
MacKaye claimed that his adjusted vision of the land revealed new territory
within it. Contained within a special issue of Survey Graphic, one that served
as a print manifesto for the RPAA, the article ostensibly contributed to the
group’s ideas about network regionalism. Among articles articulating the
group’s antimetropolitan platform, MacKaye’s produced an unusual portrayal
of the industrial landscape. In the article he introduced his proposals within
a kind of fast-forward pageant of global history that collapsed time from
Mesopotamia to the present and criss-crossed the globe from Siberia and
Sumatra to the Hwang-Ho Valley. Speeding through discoveries and explora-
tions by da Gama, Magellan, and Peary, using expressions like “iron horse” or
“westward ho!” and mentioning Daniel Boone and the Egyptians in the same
breath, he concluded the saga with the voyages of Peary, Amundsen, and
Scott and their discoveries of the North and South Poles. Though these dis-
coveries marked the end of the planet’s terrestrial exploration, MacKaye de-
scribed an “interchange” where this final discovery delivered the explorer to
a new uncharted territory. Man “in dispelling one wilderness . . . has created
another,” MacKaye wrote. “For the intricate equipment of civilization is in
itself a wilderness. He has unraveled the labyrinth of river and coast line but
has spun the labyrinth of industry.” The grids for electricity and automobiles
42
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as well as a collection of other lines of flow for goods and population migra-
1.2

tion formed a “surface web,” “a working thing; a rough hewn organism—a

system” whose “physiology” resembled “that of a river system.” This “indus-
trial wilderness” or “wilderness of civilization” was a kind of geological for-
mation, read not for its shape but for its recording of change and movement.
The “incognito of industry” that MacKaye would later call the “terra incog-
nita,” lay as the undiscovered territory within the successive flows of popula-
tion and development.5
Like the “open way” of the Appalachian Trail, the terra incognita was
neither vacancy nor tabula rasa; it was neither cleared nor raised but rather
found. It was a site constructed through the subtraction of dominant devel-
opment patterns. Despite the actual dominance of these industrial forces in
the landscape, MacKaye reversed their position to be the negative field, the
dumb network, within a landscape cultivated by more diverse agents of cul-
ture. The “new exploration” of this terra incognita was to discover a more
“efficient framework” that lay below the “surface web.” The process of discov-
ery involved selecting, reframing, and revising within the layers and remain-
ders of both active and obsolete industrial infrastructure.6 Unlike specifically
formal proposals, the operatives of adjustment involved deflecting, diffusing,
or reframing and crafting new adjacencies or relationships among multiple
parts.

E n v i ro n m e n t
In 1928 MacKaye published his best known book, The New Exploration: A
Philosophy of Regional Planning. The book compiled all of his ideas and pro-
totypes of the 1910s and 1920s and, like Chase’s The Tragedy of Waste or
Mumford’s The Golden Day, it attempted a large holistic synthesis of cultural
trends and a more general “philosophy” of regional planning that sometimes
grew strained under the weight of more comprehensive pronouncements.
Most of The New Exploration outlined a catechism of the basic tenets of
MacKaye’s regional planning philosophy. Like Geddes and the other members
of the RPAA, he charted a chronology of developmental periods that he
described as “flows.” He identified an “outflow” of early settlement and explo-
ration on foot and horseback, a “reflow” of railway settlement and industrial-
ization, the “inflow” to urban areas, and the “backflow” to the suburbs caused
by extreme densities associated with the skyscraper. The book reinforced
MacKaye’s opposition between indigenous and metropolitan culture as well
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as his distinctions between urban, rural, and primeval lands.7 MacKaye’s ro-

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

mance with primeval wilderness and his moralizing about what he called
“metropolitan invasion” further polarized his position on metropolitan versus
indigenous culture. Casting regional planning as a global effort, he wrote of
a technology of “world integration”—a “terrestrial lacework”—with networks
for not only for commerce and communication but also for land-based ex-
change and ecological balance.8
Perhaps what remains as one of the most provocative aspects of the
book was MacKaye’s merger of engineering and what he called the “art of
developing environment,” not only making a more subjective art form critical
to an engineering approach, but treating a specific kind of artistic contem-
plation as a means of cultural production. MacKaye considered: “(1) Material
resources (soils, forest, metallic ores). (2) Energy resources (the mechanical
energy resident in falling water, coal seams, and other natural elements). (3)
Psychological resources (the human psychological energy, or happiness, resi-
dent in a natural setting or environment).” The latent power of the environ-
ment as mined and “converted” by the artist was considered to be like the
latent power in waterfalls and dams. It was, like electricity, an “outward flow”
of energy.9
The narrative of the book itself demonstrated MacKaye’s craft for con-
structing sites from psychic material. It began by placing the reader, again,
in several high altitude vantage points, one of which was the tallest building
in Times Square. From the interior of the metropolis, MacKaye surveyed the
flows of traffic and the concentric organization commanding undeveloped
land at the urban periphery. The reader was then led below to the street and
under the street surface to the subway to observe the currents from a re-
gional and global “watershed” of commerce surrounding New York City. The
reader’s position was then shifted to the summit of Mount Monadnock, New
Hampshire, which MacKaye called the “Fujiyama of New England.” Mount
Monadnock afforded the view of an entire region, one penetrated by the
paths of early settlers, divided into the jurisdictions of states and villages, and
criss-crossed with roads and rail lines. With typical histrionics, MacKaye
wrote, “a million details—a little section of the world. . . . We pronounce it all There is one terra incognita
not yet touched. And that is
‘beautiful,’ and then decide that it is time to be going home. But wait! Let us
the world itself. This is not the
tarry awhile—till we see the things we look upon. Let us lay down the field world of continents and natu-
glass and take up a stronger telescope—the eye of the imagination. . . . Let us ral harbors; it is the world of
visualize once more.” 10 For MacKaye the vision was of two “worlds.” In the railways and of seaports. It is
44
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not the world of intricate metropolitan world, the city controlled the natural world in the distance.
1.2

mountain fastnesses but the From Mount Monadnock, the land was the resource that issued instructions
world of metropolitan for shaping commerce. Its water and minerals fueled industry and agriculture
fastnesses.16
and sanctioned development of Boston far off in the distance. Mount Mo-
—Benton MacKaye
nadnock was the negative of the metropolitan world. From Mount Mo-
Let us, from the top of the nadnock, the metropolis did not establish the commanding order, rather, the
Empire State building and via land’s latent resources appeared to organize the metropolis.
the airplane of the imagina- “Visualization” was a “psychological conversion” of the land’s resources.
tion, take cosmic flight in “Visualizing” involved a larger abstract reappraisal of the environment that
search of the perspective to
incorporated ideas about knowing through seeing and seeing through think-
see this problem whole.
We head outward toward the ing. Intellectual understanding was deepened through a kind of enhanced
moon and then look back. perception—enhanced not through powers of magnification but through
What a meager object planet powers of time. MacKaye proposed looking long enough to see, in time lapse,
earth becomes—a little round the activity changing a slowing animating landscape—to see not the still but
cheese with yeast working the motion picture. The practice engaged the mind and the body in sum-
here and there is small
moning multiple scenarios over time. MacKaye consciously shaped these mo-
blotches that we dub
“America,” “Europe,” “China”! tion pictures and memories into a virtual space within which understanding
The yeast appears to rise and and interplay were multiplied without conscious control. This space was the
fall in alternate war-like environment. It was a kind of “common mind.” Quoting Thoreau, MacKaye
spasms and depressions. We referred to the environment as “the very atmosphere and medium through
go far enough away to get a which we look.” 11 More importantly, with the creation of this motion picture,
truly cosmic view; then come
his own contemplative process joined the protocols of industrial production,
in closer to study the surface
in detail. and he could express an economy in quantities of “psychic resources.”
We find the “cobweb” of ear- Throughout the book, MacKaye distinguished his art from aesthetics or
thian industrial civilization, a planning practices and from the work of “‘general appreciators’” or “amateur,
matrix of tiny streams—a ver- landscape makers,” instead likening the practice to a fusion of military and
itable blood system—whereby theatrical techniques. The “appreciators” were “found in the ranks of such
the earthians somehow make
movements as those for establishing national parks and forests, and for the
a living. Each stream is an ar-
ticle of need. We pick out eradication of city slums.” They were “fighters against specific evils,” and
three of them—silk, flour, MacKaye, in contrast, saw the environment as a larger political and eco-
nails—elements respectively nomic stage.12
of clothing, food, shelter. We MacKaye described military strategy as “one kind of regional planning.”
follow their paths around the He wrote, “It is the charting and visualizing of deliberate, coordinated action
planet.17
over an extended territory.” Military strategies also prepared for unforeseen
—Benton MacKaye
contingencies that unfolded over time.13 The military analogy was significant.
Don’t confuse environment MacKaye conceived of his gigantic brand of landscape operation as some-
with beauty: don’t confuse thing like a massive mobilization of the country’s resources during war time,
 45

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and MacKaye often proposed his infrastructure project in relation to wartime the total source with any part

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

efforts or postwar employment. As he hinted in the first Appalachian Trail thereof. Environment is out-
article, landscape, the armies of men needed to develop it, and the scale of ward influence; it is literal
the endeavor might even be a psychological substitute for the dramatic and and mental atmosphere; it is a
permeating medium of life.18
emotional release associated with war. MacKaye argued that the “lure of the
—Benton MacKaye
scouting life” could rival that of the military; it only needed to be “drama-
tized” in a way that was equally “spectacular.” 14 As a virtual project, MacKaye And the art itself is ready at
also thought that the effort to build such a trail would be pliably merged hand awaiting its realization.
with other projects concerning forestry, community building, highway devel- It is a synthesis of various am-
opment, and water control or dam building efforts, making it possible to ad- ateur efforts of the naturalist,
the photographer, the local
just an economy by adjusting a virtual as well as physical site.
historian, the folk-player, the
The theatrical analogy was equally significant. The planner who prepared civic leader. This synthesis is
as an actor prepared for theater pursued a very different craft from that of gradually moulding itself into
the planner as engineer of optimal conditions. The actor prepared by storing a distinctive form of culture—
in the mind and the body emotional tropes related to event, activity, and it has been called “outdoor
duration. Those moments were assembled like small motion pictures that re- culture”: it is the art of devel-
oping environment. The flow
constituted the material of a script as well as its subtexts and alternative
of water over Niagara Falls
scenarios. The planner or environmental artist would deliberately use mental- possesses a potential me-
temporal space to develop multiple iterations of the plan. “Every deliberate chanical power which the
action—big or little, good or bad, military or industrial—starts in the mind. It engineer can develop and
must be conceived and rehearsed in the realm of thought before it can take convert to man’s needs; this
place in the physical. It must be created before it can be done.” 15 Often, for same flow over Niagara pos-
sesses a potential spiritual
MacKaye, these rehearsals involved the ability to see cultural protocols in an
power which the artist can
inverted form—to see the negative of a dominant development format. This develop and convert to hu-
altered perception was not a prelude to making, but was itself the conversion man ends.19
of resources and the production of space. —Benton MacKaye
46
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We rest our case on the Network Regionalism

1.2

findings of the aeroplane ob- When planning historians have profiled the RPAA, they have usually
server. . . . He sees the indus- included a few remarkable plot lines. The RPAAs membership refer-
trial structure in physical
enced many professions and disciplines, among them architecture,
terms. Money and price, the
laws on the statute books, the finance, forestry, and economics. Charles Whitaker was primarily re-
property lines on surveyor’s sponsible for gathering the group together during April of 1923 in
maps, the findings of the Clarence Stein’s office in New York City.20 Though its numbers ex-
learned economists are be- panded from time to time, MacKaye, Mumford, Stein, and Wright
yond his purview. He sees formed a core group.21 Many of the members brought experience
land, mines, waterways, mills,
from positions in Washington during World War I. Mumford
machinery, houses, and men.
He sees them moreover not as brought a familiarity with the New York publishing world and a
a single aerial photograph, seven-year correspondence with Sir Patrick Geddes. The group met
but as an aerial motion pic- informally, found some consensus and produced, with relative ease
ture—with sufficient time el- and speed, two of the most significant residential prototypes of the
ement to note movement and twentieth century, Sunnyside, in Queens, New York, and Radburn,
change.36
New Jersey. Though often remembered for their residential proto-
—Stuart Chase
types, the RPAA also addressed larger organizations of industry and
The sight of a New England infrastructure and attempted to forge an expanded role for planning
village green after a long ab- within the nationwide economies of distribution and settlement. The
sence brings a mist to my president of the United States admired them, and some of their ideas
eyes. This is where I was born, contributed to the blueprint of the New Deal’s regional and residential
my homeland, the place I love.
planning. Their vision relied on the complexity and variability of com-
The Alps look cold and bleak
beside the White Mountains munity at a point when America endorsed a standardized, generic
of New Hampshire. One sign- form of community making. In hindsight, many of their principles
board on the Mohawk Trail and prescriptions have appeared to some to be well suited to address
hurts me more than a hundred midcentury planning problems. Neglect of their work during the post-
on the Rocky Mountains . . .”37 war period has often been characterized as a missed opportunity. In
—Stuart Chase
fact, the RPAA has often been portrayed and has often portrayed itself
Although its members are as a group of mistreated heroes.
known in some quarters for The RPAA argued that the concentric urban growth pattern
their advocacy of public should be replaced by a “network of cities of different forms and sizes,
housing and their important set in the midst of publicly protected open spaces permanently dedi-
experiments in community cated to agriculture and recreation.” Mumford would later call this
and neighborhood design, the
network, the “metropolis in a new constellation,” saying, “this is the
group’s greatest collective
contribution has been almost organic type of city that the technology of our time, the electric grid,
totally ignored: the members the telephone, the radio, television, fast transportation, information
sought to replace the existing storage and transmission, has made possible” 22 The Survey Graphic Re-
 47

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gional Planning Number (May 1925) and and a film entitled The City centralized and profit-

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

(1939) served as manifestoes for the group. oriented metropolitan society
The cover illustration for the Survey Graphic issue dramatized the with a decentralized and more
socialized one made up of en-
major contention of the RPAA. With a split image, it juxtaposed a
vironmentally balanced re-
congested city like Pittsburgh against an image of a father, daughter, gions. Even today, the idea is
and baby strolling through a healthy landscape that contained a ver- radical.38
nacular cottage and a hydroelectric dam. The group often used both —Carl Sussman
historical and technological imagery within a mixture of reportage,
metaphor, and allegory to form their persuasions. Most of the RPAA
members contributed articles to the issue that dramatized the evils of
the metropolis and argued that new infrastructure and housing were
instruments for rearranging and recalibrating developmental patterns.
Mumford’s article, “The Fourth Migration,” attempted to demonstrate
the historical inevitability of the RPAA’s approach by tracking three
migrations of population from the city to the West and then back to
the city via different infrastructure networks. He claimed that new au-
tomobile, airplane, and commercial infrastructures would initiate a
“fourth migration” that might operate centripetally or centrifugally,
thus either reinforcing the metropolitan structure or defining distribu-
tive networks of decentralized industry.23 Stuart Chase contributed an
article entitled “Coals to Newcastle” that outlined wasteful distribu-
tion economies in America. Many of the other articles intensified the
group’s entrenched position against the evil powers of the metropolis.
By the late 1920s, the RPAA was among those groups anxious
to lobby the New Deal government about their approach to regional
planning. In 1931 they invited the then governor, but soon to be presi-
dent, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), to a round table on regional-
ism held at the University of Virginia (UVA). Chase, MacKaye,
Mumford, and Wright spoke at the round table. Mumford’s talk ar-
gued for deriving a “common meaning” for the notion of regional
planning.24 Other groups, most notably the Regional Planning Associ-
ation (RPA), also used the term “region” but used it in reference to
metropolitan regionalism and a reprise of City Beautiful planning that
was anathema to the RPAA’s goals.25 MacKaye discussed his concept
of “liquid planning.” 26 Chase delivered a rather giddy speech in which
he claimed that “a combination of Russia and a certain October 29th,”
had initiated the new “planning pandemonium.” Given the success of
48
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experiments Chase had witnessed as a trade-union delegate to Russia

1.2

during World War I, the American economy, with its wasteful land
boom practices and severe depression, looked bleak by comparison.
Chase could and did say, “I told you so.” His book Tragedy of Waste had
forecast these problems, though he gave some credit for new planning
concerns to the “astute propaganda” of his colleagues in the RPAA.
Since intelligentsia in all fields were cooking up five-year plans, Chase
also proposed his own plan for “economic regions,” saying the “great
task of master planning is to bring purchasing power into alignment
with the growth of the technical arts. . . . It means tinkering with the
credit system, tinkering with wages, tinkering with hours of labor.” 27
The plan was later echoed in his book A New Deal (1932), from which
came the nickname for FDR’s New Deal administration. In the book,
Chase aligned with an increasingly accepted Keynesian approach, set-
ting out the basic tenants of FDR’s New Deal as: “A managed cur-
rency. The drastic redistribution of the national income through
income and inheritance taxes. A huge program of public works.” 28
At the UVA conference and during the presidential campaign,
FDR spoke of the need for an experiment in regional-national plan-
ning that might also generate employment. Many assumed that the
Muscles Shoals project was a likely candidate for this planning test
case. As part of the National Defense Act of 1916, the government
had constructed some nitrate plants at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and
disposal of the properties was a lingering issue. Many proponents,
from RPAA members to Henry Ford to Howard Scott, had ideas or
affiliations with the Muscle Shoals development.29 Senator A. E. Mor-
gan fought for and eventually directed legislation in which not only
Muscle Shoals but the entire Tennessee River watershed would be-
come a supranational water control project under the newly formed
TVA. The TVA focused on hydroelectric power and water manage-
ment to renew agricultural areas while preserving and enhancing
cultural activities. Though there was much theorizing about the pres-
ervation of existing regional culture, the activities of the TVA both
renovated and disrupted the settlement of thousands of people.30
Mumford expressed disappointment that he and other RPAA
members were not given significant jobs in TVA. The TVA’s adminis-
trative triumvirate was southern and pursued three different reflec-
 49

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tions of New Deal liberalism, which occasionally led to crossed

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

directions from the board. Several administrative jobs went to local or
regional personnel. For instance, Earl Draper who headed the division
of Land Planning and Housing, had worked on southern suburbs and,
under John Nolen, the planned town of Kingsport, Tennessee. TVA
historian Walter Creese quotes a conversation between A. E. Morgan
and Draper in which Morgan expressed a desire to hire people who
were aware of local conditions and would not be controlled by a
“clique or a group that is preconceived in the notions of what has to
be done . . .”31
Among the different visions of America’s future exhibited at the
1939 World’s Fair, Futurama and Democracity were perhaps the most
notable. In the Science and Education Building, however, the chief
attraction was yet another vision of the future, the film manifesto of
the RPAA entitled The City.32 With narration by Lewis Mumford and
music by Aaron Copland, The City, reiterating the party line, por-
trayed the evils of the metropolis and the virtues of small communities
molded from the region. Filmmaking suited the RPAA’s methods, in
that it presented a world formed from the selective documentation of
existing conditions. The City contrasted the slums of Pittsburgh and
the hectic pace of New York City with the tranquility, order, and good
sense of Radburn and the greenbelt towns. These new towns were
populated by children on bicycles or mothers tending to babies and
allotment gardens. They were associated, however, not with the so-
cialist collective, but rather with the American colonial small town.
Shirley, Massachusetts, MacKaye’s hometown, so clearly outlined the
civic and cultural functions of the RPAA paradigm that it became a
kind of mascot for the group and the star of The City.
MacKaye and several of the RPAA members like Mumford, Stein,
and Chase indulged in quite of bit of sentimentality about the New
England small town during their careers. Avoiding associations with
laissez-faire capitalism that created towns like “Zenith,” the RPAA re-
ferred instead to an American urban form with origins in the eigh-
teenth century but which remained largely intact in the 1920s and
1930s—the typical colonial New England town. They referred to the
political and ecological position of these towns as compact, largely
agricultural, communities cultivating and taking instruction from the
50
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natural resources, and geologic presence of the land. The City patiently
1.2

observed women baking pies and the simple technologies of the water-
wheel miller, the blacksmith, and the farmer. MacKaye and Chase
were both New Englanders, and The New Exploration, was itself a kind
of hymn to the New England small town. MacKaye claimed that the
small settlement generated a true cosmopolitanism and that the me-
tropolis generated a kind of “standardized exotic” as inauthentic and
artificial as its own money-based economy. MacKaye wrote in The
New Exploration, “Cosmopolitanism adds to the world’s variety: metro-
politanism adds to the world’s monotony.” By taking cues from the
specialties of the landscape and soils as they change from area to area,
the towns would contain more variety than the great monolith of the
metropolis.33
The nostalgic Yankee moralizing, however, was mixed with hopes
of a bright new “neotechnic” society. The film also showed cars and
townless highways moving efficiently through the country, and air-
planes taking off as the narrator read, “Science takes flight at last for
human goals. . . .” The group often used airplane views or motion pic-
ture metaphors to take a more comprehensive look at the landscape or
animate exchange and activity within it, while at the same time associ-
ating with twentieth-century technological advances. As Stein and
Mumford were in Shirley filming The City, however, Stein wrote to
MacKaye, “The other thing which is lacking and, I am afraid, will be
somewhat difficult to secure, is any scenes of the community itself. As
soon as one tries to gather a crowd of people these days, one gets a
whole lot of automobiles in the foreground. Although we are not go-
ing to pretend that this is a colonial village in colonial times, somehow
or other, we have the fear that the thing will seem a little out of charac-
ter if there is too much of the automobile age.” 34
Showing the old city and the new, Mumford’s narration claimed,
“You take your choice. Each one is real. Each one is possible. Order
has come—order and life together. We’ve got the skills. We’ve found
the way. We built the cities. All that we know about machines and
soils and raw materials and human ways of living is waiting. We can
reproduce the pattern and better it a thousand times. It’s here! The
new city. Ready to serve a better age. You and your children—the
choice is yours” 35
 51

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Notes

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

1. Benton MacKaye, “The New Exploration: Charting the Industrial Wilderness,” The
Survey Graphic 65 (1 May 1925): 153.
2. Benton MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” reprint
Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 19 (October 1921): 4.
3. Bryant, 16, 19–30.
4. MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail,” 4.
5. MacKaye, “The New Exploration,” 179, 153, 154. Benton MacKaye, “The New
Northwest Passage,” The Nation 122 (2 June 1926): 603; Benton MacKaye, “Indus-
trial Exploration,” serial publication in The Nation: “I. Charting the World’s Com-
modity Flow,” 125 (20 July 1927): 71. MacKaye used the word incognito in The New
Exploration and terra incognita in “The New Northwest Passage” and “Charting the
World’s Commodity Flow.”
6. MacKaye, “The New Exploration,” 154.
7. MacKaye, The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Har-
court, Brace and Company, Inc., 1928), 56–94.
8. Ibid., 20.
9. Ibid., 50–51.
10. Ibid., 50.
11. Ibid., 213–214, 212, 205 (MacKaye quoting Thoreau), 213.
12. Ibid., 212.
13. Ibid., 153.
14. MacKaye, “An Appalachian Trail,” reprint, Journal of the American Institute of Archi-
tects, 19 (October 1921): 8.
15. MacKaye, The New Exploration, 1928, 152.
16. MacKaye, “The New Northwest Passage,” The Nation 122 (2 June 1926): 603.
17. MacKaye, “End or Peak of Civilization?” The Survey 47 (1 October 1932): 441.
18. MacKaye, “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” Survey Graphic, 22 (May 1933),
254.
19. MacKaye, “To Keep Malignant Growths Off Our Highways,” Boston Evening Tran-
script, February 21, 1928.
20. Frank G. Novak Jr. Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes: The Correspondence (London:
Routledge, 1995), 172; and Stuart Chase, “My Friend Benton” in “Benton MacKaye:
A Tribute by Lewis Mumford, Stuart Chase, Paul Oehser, Frederick Gutheim, Har-
ley P. Holden, Paul T. Bryant, Robert M. Howes, C.J.S. Durham,” The Living Wil-
derness, 39 n. 132 ( January/March, 1976):18.
21. The charter members included engineer and architect Frederick Ackerman (1878–
1950) Frederick Bigger, builder and financier Alexander Bing, John Bright, writer
and economist Stuart Chase, forester and regional planner Benton MacKaye, writer
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), architect Clarence Stein (1882–1975), journalist and
editor of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, C. H. Whitaker (1872–
1935) and architect and planner Henry Wright (1878–1936). Housing experts Cath-
erine Bauer (1905–1964) and Edith Elmer Wood (1871–1945) as well as Tracy Augur
and Clarence Arthur Perry were among those who were later involved. Carl Suss-
man, ed. Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected vision of the Regional Planning
Association of America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976, 2, 7.
22. Lewis Mumford, Statement before the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorga-
nization, Friday, April 21, 1967, MacKaye papers, Dartmouth College Library,
manuscript copy, 9, 3.
23. Lewis Mumford, “The Fourth Migration,” The Survey Graphic 54 no. 3 (1 May
1925): 130–33.
52

24. Lewis Mumford, “Regional Planning,” Institute of Public Affairs. Round Table on
|

Regionalism (5th Session: 1931: University of Virginia) July 6–11, 1931, 199. Por-
1.2

tions of this conference are reprinted in Sussman, 197–215.

25. The Regional Planning Association, begun in 1921 under the philanthropic sponsor-
ship of the Russell Sage Foundation, was developing another type of regional plan
that it later published in 1929. Both groups used the term “region” but used it to
define different goals. Whereas the RPAA proposals represented a radical reversal of
urban centrality with roots in the Garden City tradition, the Regional Plan Associa-
tion proposal represented a late chapter in the City Beautiful tradition. Charles Dyer
Norton, the young man who proposed the New York project, was Daniel Burnham’s
son-in-law, a trustee for the Russell Sage Foundation, and an active proponent of
Burnham’s plan for the City of Chicago in 1909. The regional plan for New York
City and its environs would, like the Chicago plan, propose a metropolitan organiza-
tion of the region’s infrastructure, suburbs, and parkland. The final plan completed
in 1929 after a decade’s work produced ten volumes. The RPA contributed an article
to the Survey Graphic regional planning issue in 1925, but shortly after the publica-
tion of the RPA’s larger final report, Mumford and Thomas Adams, the project’s
director, engaged in a public debate in the pages of the New Republic in 1932. For
the RPAA, the most egregious error of the RPA was of course, that it invested the
city with even more power rather than divesting that power to smaller centers of
population. Some have argued that while the RPAA got the attention of FDR, its
antagonism of the RPA alienated them as potential New Deal personnel since Del-
ano administered the New York project as well as the National Resources Planning
Board, one of the main New Deal planning agencies. Regional Plan Association,
“New York Today—and Tomorrow?” 139; and Carl Sussman reprinted the debate
between Adams and Mumford in Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision
of the Regional Planning Association of America.
26. Benton MacKaye, “Cultural Aspects of Regionalism,” Round Table on Regionalism (9
July 1931), 1–7.
27. Stuart Chase, “The Concept of Planning,” Round Table on Regionalism, reprinted in
Sussman, 209, 210, 212, 216.
28. Stuart Chase, A New Deal (New York: MacMillan Company, 1932), 192, 213–241.
29. Roscoe C. Martin, ed., TVA: The First Twenty Years. (Knoxville: The University of
Alabama Press and the University of Tennessee Press, 1956), 3; and Allen Raymond,
What is Technocracy? (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company Inc., 1933).
30. Phoebe Cutler, The Public Landscape of the New Deal (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1985), 136; and Michael McDonald and John Muldowny, TVA and the Dispos-
sessed: Resettlement of Population in the Norris Dam Area, (Knoxville: University of Ten-
nessee Press, 1982).
31. Walter Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1990), 248. Creese sites Jordy’s “A Wholesome Environment,”
25–26; also in Creese, 253, Draper interviewed, 30 December 1969, Oral History
Project, The John Willard Brister Library, Memphis State University, Memphis,
Tennessee.
32. Wurts, Richard, Appelbaum, Stanley, et. al, The New York World’s Fair 1939–1940
(New York: Dover Publications, 1977), 3, 89.
33. MacKaye, The New Exploration, 59, 60, 76; Benton MacKaye. “Outdoor Culture:
The Philosophy of Through Trails,” Landscape Architecture, 17 (April, 1927): 167,
(reprint p. 5); Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration, 63, 71.
34. Stein to MacKaye, 26 August 1938, Benton MacKaye papers, special collections,
Dartmouth College Library.
 53

35. The City, Presented by American Institute of Planners through Civic Films, Inc.,

|
produced by American Documentary Films, Inc. (1939). Directed and photographed

Framework: Terra Incognita and Environment

by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke. Narration by Lewis Mumford, music by
Aaron Copland.
36. Stuart Chase, The Tragedy of Waste (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1925), 24–25.
37. Stuart Chase, “Coals to Newcastle,” Survey Graphic 54, no. 3 (1 May 1925): 212.
38. Carl Sussman, ed., Planning the Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional
Planning Association of America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1976), 3.
1.3 P A R T I T I O N : W A T E R S H E D A N D W A Y S I D E

Though MacKaye articulated a philosophy of regional planning in The New

Exploration, his TVA career involved actual prototypes. The dams, waterways,
hydroelectric easements, and highways of the TVA were all systems that di-
rectly related to his fluvial models for active organizations. In fact, since the
UVA round table on regionalism MacKaye had begun to characterize his par-
ticular approach as “liquid planning.” Unlike solid planning, the components
of liquid planning were active. A decorative landscape fixed by an aesthetic
pattern was an example of solid planning, whereas a field of crops, as a rota-
tional organization, was an example of liquid planning. Highways, railroads,
and ports were also examples of liquid planning, since their shape or position
was less important than the flow of goods among them. MacKaye described
the “iron web” of civilization as a circulatory system, the strands of which
were “hollow” and, like “veins,” carried the “vital liquid element.” 1
In 1932, just months before Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to
the presidency, MacKaye joked in a letter to his friend Clarence Stein, “How
can he [FDR] run the country unless the RPA tells him how?” 2 The RPAA was
thought to have been influential in shaping the New Deal blueprint as well
as national planning experiments like the TVA. But in the early days of the
New Deal, the RPAA was just one group among the many planning enthusi-
asts to arrive in Washington. There were many authors of the TVA legislation.
Technocracy and futurism, sampled as ideology or style, colored the more
romantic or nostalgic renderings of back-to-the-land sentiments.3 Like river
control and dam building projects of the 1920s, the TVA would be host to all
of the sentiments and politics associated with these often conflicting notions
of engineering and reform.4
Finally, MacKaye was the only charter member of the RPAA who was
given a position in the TVA, and while he was disappointed that most of his
 55

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colleagues were not involved, he was delighted with the job. At the TVA, a

Partition: Watershed and Wayside

collegial atmosphere of thinkers and planners concentrated in a few buildings
created a kind of miniature District of Columbia in Tennessee and a global
experiment in planning. MacKaye received visitors like A. E. Morgan, Henry
Wright, Raymond Unwin, Stuart Chase, David Cushman Coyle, Clarence Stein,
and a group of younger colleagues who gathered around him for study and
entertainment. He wrote to Stuart Chase, “We’ve got a crowd of bully boys
and girls down here—worthy of the HR [Hell Raisers]—suffragette days in
Washington. . . . I was given the little chore of laying out a regional plan for
the whole Tennessee Valley—a plan for a plan; this constitutes my job; I have
the best job in the TVA and the best job of my life . . .”5
Among the TVA bureaucrats, there were plenty of conflicting notions
concerning both valley and national planning. Some of the national planning
schemes were colored by technocracy theories and others by traditional uto-
pian ideologies. Characterizing the two minds of the TVA, MacKaye jokingly
complained to Chase about both the “landscape artichokes” who were inter-
ested in “esthetics and beautification” as well as the “hard-boiled engineers
[men of the type of our friend Howard].” The “esthetes” appeared to be un-
aware of the many different kinds of problem solving involved with the econ-
omy of a region. The “he-men” heroes of engineering unwittingly aligned
themselves with the “industrial captains” as “practomaniacs” who regarded
many critical aspects of culture as superfluous.6
MacKaye avoided the aesthetic, technical, and planning cults by concen-
trating on “liquid planning” and developing organizational expressions for
activity within organizations. He developed two specialized types of partition,
watershed and the wayside, that appeared again and again in his TVA writ-
ings. These partitions were not about simple subdivisions of space or de-
marcations of territory but rather about designating an active boundary. A
watershed, for instance, marked not only edge but also relative concentra-
tions of program or radiating effects from some discrete but generative fea-
ture of the site. It could be elastic or inelastic, porous or solid, and it could
directly or indirectly alter the constitution of an organization. Different from
a region bounded by “fixed lines,” a watershed was a planar fluvial system
that modeled a “sphere of influence” or an area radiating from a point of
activity.7 As the area adjacent to the roadway, the wayside too was an active
boundary that affected a larger organization. The part of the wayside that
was right-of-way was truly terra incognita, a ribbon of land bounded by
56
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statistical, mathematical, and legal formulations of traffic engineers that lay

1.3

adjacent to and even connected every different watershed and landscape of

the region. Though it was a neutral or unexplored territory, it could be desig-
nated in ways that affected all the surrounding land as well as the experience
of driving on the roadway. MacKaye also merged the repertoires of watershed
and wayside to create a special tool for repartitioning the country into new
political jurisdictions.

Wa ys i d e
In the first hundred days of FDR’s administration, when it appear that a pilot
national planning project might involve water problems in the Tennessee
River Valley, MacKaye pursued a public conversation with the New Deal ad-
ministration by publishing not only an outline scheme for the Tennessee Val-
ley but an approach to understanding watershed and valley systems across
the nation. In articles like “The Challenge of Muscle Shoals,” [Nation 1933],
“The Tennessee River Project: First Step in a National Plan” [New York Times
1933], and “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan” [Survey Graphic 1933] he
applied his models of fluvial dynamics not only to water but to electricity,
highways and population migrations. The “‘stream control’ was of two kinds:
the stream of water in the rivers, and the stream of development along the
highways.” 8
The highway was a strong liquid planning prototype and one of Mac-
Kaye’s most effective and politically popular planning instruments. It was a
continental-intercontinental intervention that affected commercial as well as
recreational traffic. Moreover, highway building was becoming increasingly
prominent within the national agenda. In the years just before his tenure at
the TVA, MacKaye published several proposals for the limited-access highway
as a terrestrial infrastructure, among them: “Townless Highways” [1930],
“Roads Vs. Shuttles” [1931] and “Cement Railroads” [1932]. Like the Appa-
lachian Trail, highways and parkways were, along with railroads, units of
regional organization. MacKaye’s latest liquid planning prototype, the “town-
less highway,” proposed a wide easement or wayside as insulation from devel-
opment. Access would only occur at specialized interchanges that would
eliminate grade crossings. Distinct communities would be developed some
distance from the roadway. Like most limited-access highway proposals,
MacKaye proposed to separate the two directions of traffic, making it possible
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Partition: Watershed and Wayside
1.3.1 Control of “streams” by “levees.” The openways crossing and flanking the motor ways: The sys-
tem of levees interlocking with the system of metropolitan streams. Benton MacKaye, The New Ex-
ploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928),
194.

to use not only the two waysides but the very large central area as a means
of organizing and accumulating land for a terrestrial network.9 The townless
highway was just another of MacKaye’s specialized linear prototypes. He
wrote to Clarence Stein in 1929, that the townless highway idea was the
“complement in a sense of ‘an Appalachian Trail’. One follows the primeval In thinking up schemes for
crestline or main ‘dam’ across the metropolitan ‘stream’; the other follows Roosevelt I find myself going
the ‘stream’ itself (figure 1.3.1).” 10 back to the visualization that
I tried to popularize last win-
MacKaye was also particularly interested in addressing those forms of
ter in my ‘Open Door’ article,
transportation that, like waterways, airways, and “landways,” crossed long in which housing, highways,
distances without interruption. Both railroads and the limited access high- and wilderness areas were
ways were examples of these “specialized landways.” The wayside, as part of placed in one great flying
this right-of-way, was “a strip of public land devoted to movement,” one wedge—highways being the
physically and legally insulated from grade crossing and commercial access. ‘center rush’.26
—Benton MacKaye
MacKaye considered the wayside to be a critical conduit between towns and
wilderness or recreation areas. He recognized that crafting wayside space in- [From his post at the TVA,
volved crafting the law that changed uses and perception of the space. He MacKaye wrote to his friend
wrote that a “cordon sanitaire” or “some other tightly woven brand of ‘legal Stein about visits from “people
58
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whom I’ve casually known in fence’ must be strung between the stations of each side of the road.” 11 While
1.3

the whirl of New York and at the TVA, MacKaye wrote sample legislation for amendments to the two
Washington” and one partic- Federal Aid Highway acts. For MacKaye, the legislation would create a nation-
ular banquet for Sir Raymond
wide system of highways with broad rights-of-way and limited access, by-
Unwin which characterized
the atmosphere of the TVA.] passing cities. The creation of a national highway system automatically meant
An enormous crowd filled the the parallel formation of a diverse national network of wayside landscapes.
lobby—all of them of course
eager to see this particular big Wa t e rsh e d
man from across the seas [Sir MacKaye also merged the ideas of watershed and wayside in the creation of
Raymond Unwin]. Many of
national planning partitions. In the New York Times article MacKaye had writ-
our friends were in the swirl
and we joshed and gurgled ten before arriving at the TVA; he discussed the Tennessee Valley as a system
among them. Any man who that was part of a larger “intermountain” area made up of the Mississippi
had a wife had her along. And basin and the Appalachian Valley. He proposed building a highway in the
there were many singleites of intermountain “lane” formed by the valleys running from Lake Champlain to
each gender. Harvey and I Tennessee. This highway was to act like a levee that would not only control
went floating through the
water but contain and format development along its length. He then ex-
human sea. Somebody sud-
denly took my arm. Who tended the vision to imagine a series of belts and valleys across the country
could it be—among all the that could be related by similar conditions and viewed as a new “public do-
many good friends there pres- main,” or political jurisdiction, and he described these river and valley systems
ent? Was it of TVA or Knox- as “lanes of national development.” 12 MacKaye posed the provocative chal-
ville?—‘carpet bagger or lenge, “Question, is this dream of President Roosevelt’s to come true in a
cannibal’? Was it lady or
piece of true statescraft—or in one more real-estate adventure? Is the word
gent? I turned—it was Sir R.
I presented Harvey to him and ‘Tennessee’ to join company with ‘Florida’? (figure 1.3.2).”13
the three of us rolled on arm- The TVA presided over a area that crossed state boundaries to assume
in-arm. Later we parted—Sir the apolitical shape of a watershed, one which was roughly the size of Ohio.
T. and Henry and the other Throughout his career, MacKaye was interested in political organizations like
visitors to the speakers table, the TVA that recognized boundaries other than those related to territorial
Harvey and I and merry spon-
acquisition or the conveniences of geometrical property survey. The shape of
taneous crew to one of the
side tables where we frisked a region or the external boundary criteria depended on an emanating genera-
and bellowed softly and all tive activity and was often an elastic condition. The region’s organization
but threw the biscuits at each might have both centripetal and centrifugal influence on populations and
other while the waiter goods. In his TVA writings, MacKaye treated each of the industries, from milk
brought on the soup, the ice to timber, as a kind of watershed, and later he would even use the term “traf-
cream, the salad, and—finally
fic shed” to describe changing transportation volumes. All these different
the steak. You see it was a
PLANNING dinner. Henry and “economic watersheds” coexisted in a system that constantly differentiated
Sir T. made the principal not only the borders of the region, but its internal workings.14 In 1937, after
speeches—both accompanied leaving the TVA, he began using this special idea of watershed as an organiza-
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Partition: Watershed and Wayside
1.3.2 Lanes of national development as mapped in article, “The Tennessee River Project: First Step
in National Plan.” a) Appalachian Valleys, b) Mississippi Basin, c) Columbia-Sacramento Valley,
1) Tennessee Valley 2) Pittsburgh-Alegheny Area, 3) Minnesota-Wisconsin Forest Area, 4) Columbia-
Yellowstone Area, 5) Colorado-Platte Area, 6) Lower Mississippi Area. Benton MacKaye, “The Tennes-
see River Project: First Step in National Plan,” New York Times (16 April 16, 1933):3.

tional expression for new national political partitions. Rather than consider- alternately by looks of deep
ing the whole of the country as a palette to be subdivided, he focused first wisdom and flashing bursts of
on internal mechanisms or generative centers that would command a sur- laughter. . . . If ever I write my
memoirs the starred chapter
rounding order or organizational field with its own variable boundaries. These
thereof I’m living right now in
fields or areas were often larger than a single valley or watershed and often these nights and days. And
more like a valley system whose boundaries might be related to not only the only way to tell you
fluvial but agricultural or geological features as well. MacKaye devised a thereof is to turn this letter
scheme based on the watersheds of seven major river valleys in the country, into a Memoir and stop the
a scheme he called the “seven little TVAs,” and he later devised a similar living for the writing. So
come on down and live it with
scheme based on some of the TVA studies, called “the new thirteen,” which
me and tell the dear Aline we
divided the nation into thirteen regions (figure 1.3.3).15 only need her smile to make
MacKaye’s proposals for new national frameworks independent of state the blueprints live.27
boundaries were perhaps influenced by similar studies being conducted in —Benton MacKaye
Washington by the National Resources Committee (NRC).16 The NRC was es-
tablished to make qualitative and quantitative appraisals as well as future There’s a lot of guff about
aesthetics and beautification;
plans for regional development, public works, population distribution, and
and nonindustrial planning is
60
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1.3

1.3.3 “The New Thirteen” a hand-drawn scheme for a federation of regions. Benton MacKaye,
Geotechnics of North America, unpublished manuscript, Benton MacKaye papers, Dartmouth
College Library.

yet in the hands of the ‘land- housing among other things.17 The NRC produced several hundred of the
scape artichokes’ who would most lucid and thorough surveys and plans of the country’s resource poten-
cope with the problem of life’s tials. In 1935, the NRC published one of its most notable reports, Regional
setting and background in
Factors in National Planning, that proposed to repartition the nation into
terms of planting pansies. But
‘the flowers that bloom in the regional planning jurisdictions. The NRC consulted a variety of bureaucrats,
spring, tra-la, have nothing to intellectuals, and planners of the day, and while reflecting a liberal direction,
do with the case.’ On the other the NRC sought a broad political base and aligned with other New Deal agen-
hand, the hard-boiled indus- cies in its recommendations to regulate the economy through consumption
trial engineers (men of the and insurance. The NRC (also called the National Planning Board, National
type of our friend Howard)
Resources Board, National Resources Committee, and the National Resources
are too high and mighty to
think on the thing—human Planning Board) was sanctioned by executive power and shuttled under the
sensibility—that the whole umbrella of several different pieces of legislation. It was renamed and re-
damn show is all about; they organized under various jurisdictions to avoid controversy when “planning,”
as well as the industrial ‘cap- particularly national planning, was a politically sensitive notion.18 Toward the
tains’ themselves, are what end of the 1930s, an increasingly conservative congress was suspicious of
my old brother James use to
the power and the political leanings of advisory groups close to the president.
call ‘practomaniacs.’ They are
merely grown up men who By the late 1930s and early 1940s, these kind of planning activities were
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often associated with socialistic proposals and the board or committee was like to play tin engine and

Partition: Watershed and Wayside

abolished.19 choo-choo car. We might say
Ostensibly, the study, Regional Factors in National Planning, only re- ‘the hammers that clang in
the spring, bang, bang, have
viewed an existing “interstate cooperation movement.” Interstate metropoli-
nothing to do the case.’ 28
tan agencies like the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, the New —Benton MacKaye
England National Resources Board, and the Pacific-Northwest National Re-
sources Board, were examples of this type of cooperation. The report included Meanwhile the example of the
a map of ten valley authorities other than TVA that had been proposed in physical sciences has cor-
Congress as of 1935. In the seventy-fourth Congress, “over a dozen” bills were rupted the arts of economics
and sociology. Merely because
introduced proposing various regional development authorities, and the re-
a few billion dancing mole-
port treated these as precedent for a new national organization.20 Since New cules can be described by a
Deal power structures already appeared to threaten the balance of powers mathematical formula, and
between federal and state governments, the National Resources Committee their behavior predicted
portrayed itself as a coordinator of intergovernmental cooperation that would within certain limits, the illu-
only further decentralize power rather than create a new political authority.21 sion has arisen that the eco-
nomic and social behavior of
The report assembled a remarkable series of maps that reorganized the
man can be treated likewise. A
nation around jurisdictions other than states. These jurisdictions were often pseudoscience is one that col-
defined, not by territorial boundaries but by organizational expressions for lects a series of verifiable
activities related to land or commerce in the region. The report studied the facts, such as bumps on the
implications of defining regions by “indefinite areas,” by “static elements” skull, and derives conclusions
such as “geological features,” or by a “dynamic entity.” For instance, genera- therefrom that have nothing
to do with the case. The value
tive centers might define a field radially and “elastic boundaries” would be
of a statistical collection of
responsive to fluctuating conditions of population and economy.22 Most of facts can be easily exagger-
the study’s conclusions were compiled into a series of five maps. The first ated. There are too many
mapped regions centered on “major metropolitan influence,” where subna- other loose facts that failed to
tional centers generated a flexible field to absorb and regulate the region’s get into the collection. This is
changing conditions. A second map showed the country organized around a big world, and a pailful of
small facts has no more scar-
cities that would serve as convenient administrative centers. A third map,
city value than a pailful of
based on groups of states, and a fourth based on a “single function” such as sand on the beach. Hence the
agriculture or water problems were discouraged. The fifth and final map in pseudoscientific aroma of
the series was based on composite regional problems. These composite re- economics and sociology as
gions were, in a sense, the resultant of multiple overlays mapping physical, currently practiced. Nobody
sociocultural, and economic features. The five maps supported the commit- but God can possibly know
enough to design a social or
tee’s final designations of twelve regions. Shortly thereafter these planning
an economic order in the way
ideas began to be implemented, and by 1936 every state except Delaware had in which an engineer designs
a planning board. There were also plans for other river valley authorities like a bridge.29
the TVA for the Missouri, Mississippi, Red, and Arkansas Rivers (figure 1.3.4).23 —David Cushman Coyle
1.3.4 Diagrams from National Resources Committee. Regional Factors in National Planning and
Development. (a) Possible planning regions based upon major metropolitan influence; (b) pos-
sible planning regions based upon administrative convenience; (c) national resource board plan-
ning districts based upon group-of-states arrangement; (d) national resources board water
resources regions based upon a single function; (e) possible planning regions based upon com-
posite planning problems. U.S. National Resources Committee. Regional Factors in National Plan-
ning and Development (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), 158, 160, 162,
164, 165.
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I n t e r n a t i o n a l H i g h w a y N e t w o r k s a n d Pa r t i t i o ns

Partition: Watershed and Wayside

After his retirement to Shirley, Massachusetts, MacKaye continued to sketch Suppose the government of
and map giant plans for linear infrastructure prototypes and national systems the state called the “United
States,” instead of laying out
of watersheds and partitions, working very diligently, but for no one in partic-
the land of Louis in rectangles
ular. He was interested not only in the way that these new infrastructures and in shapes resembling ex-
could reconfigure national jurisdictions but also in the way they might estab- tinct animals, had followed
lish international and intercontinental linkages. As early as 1926, in an article the policy of LaSalle in his
entitled, “The New Northwest Passage,” MacKaye mapped an intercontinental fictitious career of continen-
infrastructure system between the world’s two largest producers, North tal planner. In what wise
would little Tommy be obliged
America and Asia. In MacKaye’s plan, Roald Amundsen’s 1924, trans-Arctic
now to relearn his geography
air and ocean route from New York to Peking provided the initial mark around lesson pertaining to the map
which to develop a linear network of intercontinental infrastructures with of U.S.A.? . . . He would look
possible landing stations near the North Pole as well as rail linkages to other hereon in vain for those eight
major global cities like Berlin Paris, Moscow, London, and San Francisco (fig- and forty cockeyed daubs of
ure 1.3.5).24 varied colors. Instead, he
would discern a bakers dozen
In retirement, MacKaye also designed an Alaska-Siberia highway that
or so of ample sized forms,
would crystallize around logging and defense installations. Since, by the bounded by barriers between
1950s, the chief focus of America’s highway building efforts would be the flows of water and of traffic.
interstate highway system, alternative highway approaches became increas- A careful count might reveal
ingly rare. In 1942, however, there were proposals in Congress for highways thirteen of them.30
linking various North and South American countries. One congressional —Benton MacKaye

measure proposed a highway across Canada linking Alaska with the lower
forty-eight states. MacKaye extended the idea by proposing that the North In January of 1891, I recall my
American section of the road might form the eastern leg of a longer military brother Benton, at the age of
highway from Edmonton, Alberta, to Irkutsk, Siberia. The Alaska-Siberia- twelve, reading aloud to some
Burma Road, as he called it, was consistent with military strategy toward both of the family the Constitution
of his “Cosmopolitan Organi-
the Japanese and the USSR. Knowing the Alaskan and Siberian terrain and
sation”: a world-scheme for
studying the locations of military bases, MacKaye devised a route sympathetic the abolition of all national
to construction and defense as well as a practical scheme for the highway’s barriers and prejudices. In his
execution—one that organized the experience and effort of many groups, after-career (since his R. M.
including foresters, loggers, and military personnel over a period of time suf- degree in Forestry at Harvard)
ficient to construct and then manage the road (figure 1.3.6).25 during constructive planning
in government conservation
As a complex global instrument of physical, economic, and political reor-
of our natural resources and
ganization, the Alaska-Siberia highway was the kind of problem MacKaye had in editorial writings, Benton
trained himself to address. Though he was not able to influence legislation, MacKaye has developed from
the highway plan was an interesting reprise of MacKaye’s radical Washington his boyish thought on “Agri-
64
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1.3

1.3.5 Map of the “New Northwest Passage—New York to Peking.” Benton MacKaye, “The New North-
west Passage,” The Nation, (June 2, 1926):603–604.

culture” and “Cosmopoli- days when Russia was a fascination among his group of left-wing activists.
tanism” a comprehensive The road cross-referenced many of MacKaye’s previous prototypes. Like the
philosophy of Land Use in its
Appalachian Trail, it aligned the highway with larger continental and geologi-
natural and Human ramifica-
cal features and linked it to employment, community, and large-scale military
tions, conceived as a problem
of super-engineering—his mobilization programs. It was also linked to his proposals for new land-based
“New Exploration,” some as- political jurisdictions, which, like watersheds, would have elastic boundaries.
pects of which he has For MacKaye, however, the artistry and engineering involved not the shape of
glimpsed in articles by him the roadbed or the landscaping of the roadside but rather the organizational
published in the Survey, the
architecture. He was interested in establishing new political, economic, and
Nation, and other journals.31
employment affiliations that would rearrange the prevailing protocols for
—Percy MacKaye
public infrastructure building.
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Partition: Watershed and Wayside
1.3.6 Plan for an Alaska-Siberia-Burma Road. Benton MacKaye, “Alaska-Siberia Burma Road,” The
New Republic (March 2, 1942):292–294.

Notes
1. Benton MacKaye, “Cultural Aspects of Regionalism,” Round Table on Regionalism, (9
July 1931), 1, 1–7; and Benton MacKaye, “End or Peak of Civilization?” The Survey
47 (1 October 1932): 441.
2. MacKaye to Stein, September 24, 1932. MacKaye, on this occasion, referred to the
RPAA as the RPA.
3. MacKaye to Stein, 27 May 1933; MacKaye to Stein 30 May 1933.; Stein to MacKaye
6 June 1933.
4. Paul Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1959).
5. MacKaye to Chase, 20 July 1935.
6. Ibid.
7. MacKaye, “What is a Region in Planning?” TVA office memorandum to Tracy Agur,
October 1934 (revised 26 October 1935).
8. MacKaye, “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” Survey Graphic 22 (May 1933): 53.
9. MacKaye, “The Townless Highway,” The New Republic 62 (12 March 1930): 93–5.
10. MacKaye to Stein, 10 October 1929.
11. MacKaye, “Motorway Legislation: Dual-Transport vs. Mono-Transport,” office
memorandum to Tracy Augur, head planner from Benton MacKaye, regional plan-
ner, 19 February 1936, 5, 11, 16, 11.
12. MacKaye, “The Tennessee River Project: First Step in a National Plan.” New York
Times, 16 April 1933, 3.
66

13. MacKaye, “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” 253, 252, 294.

|

14. MacKaye, “What is a Region in Planning?”

1.3

15. (“Seven Little TVA’s”) sketch in Benton MacKaye papers, Dartmouth College Li-
brary. “The New Thirteen” in Benton MacKaye, Geotechnics of North America, un-
published manuscript, MacKaye papers.
16. MacKaye met with National Planning Board representatives while he was at the
TVA.
17. Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: the National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore
and London: Johns Hopkins University Press for Resources for the Future Inc.,
1981), 43.
18. The NRC was legislated by the National Industrial Recovery Act of June 16, 1933
as part of the Public Works Administration. In June of 1934, the NRC was replaced
by a National Resources Board that would consolidate various long-range planning
efforts into one group under the direct jurisdiction of the President. In 1935, the
name of this group was changed to the National Resources Committee, and its legal
base changed from the now unconstitutional National Industrial Recovery Act to
the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935. In 1939 the group was changed
yet again under a presidential reorganization scheme to be the National Resources
Planning Board, dropped its cabinet members and had to go to the Congress rather
than the president for appropriations; and John Hancock, “The New Deal and
American Planning: the 1930’s” in Two Centuries of American Planning, ed. Daniel
Schaffer (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 201–203.
19. Clawson, 225–236; Walter Creese, TVA’s Public Planning: The Vision, The Reality
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), 324–336; Alan Brinkley, The End
of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1995), 66–72; Jordan A. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roose-
velt, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 20–21; and Clawson, 52–71.
20. U.S. National Resources Committee, Regional Factors in National Planning and Devel-
opment (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935), 107.
21. Ibid, 115, 113.
22. Ibid, 140–141, 155, 18, 165. MacKaye, too, used the term “elastic” to describe the
boundary conditions of regions modeled after watersheds.
23. Ibid, 155–77.
24. MacKaye, “I. Charting the World’s Commodity Flow,” 72; and MacKaye, “The New
Northwest Passage,” The Nation 122 (2 June 1926): 603.
25. MacKaye, “Alaska-Siberia-Burma Road,” The New Republic, CVI (March 2, 1942):
292–294.
26. MacKaye to Stein, 15 November 1932.
27. MacKaye to Stein, 28 September 1934. MacKaye refers to Aline MacMahon, Clar-
ence Stein’s wife and a Hollywood film actress. MacKaye’s underlining.
28. MacKaye to Chase, 20 July 1935.
29. David Cushman Coyle, “The Twilight of National Planning,” Harper’s Monthly Mag-
azine, 171 (October 1935): 559.
30. Benton MacKaye, The New Thirteen: Whither State and Region in American Fed-
eralism,” from Geotechnics of North America: Viewpoints of its Habitability, unpublished.
Manuscript dated April 1953 MacKaye papers, Dartmouth College Library.
31. Percy MacKaye, Epoch: The Life of Steele MacKaye, vol. 1 and 2 (New York: Boni and
Liveright, 1927).
1.4 S I T E S

MacKaye was an inventor of organizational protocols, an artist whose me-

dium involved not only physical sites, but also those temporal, virtual, and
procedural sites that have generally remained unexpressed in the fields of
design and planning. His prototypes might be characterized as linear net-
works or partitions that incorporated both transportation and utility pro-
grams as well as instructions for cultivating land and translating between
land, community, and industry. He tinkered with organizations by subtracting
pieces from them, reversing their governing protocols or reconditioning their
distributed components by means of both remote and direct agents of
change. These adjustments were reliant on carefully selected positions in
space and within a culture of thought. Planning only involved highlighting
or adjusting an existing condition within which there were several optional
contingencies. Similarly, MacKaye’s infrastructures had no definite bound-
aries but rather a repertoire of possible behaviors that could change over
time. A site of intervention, understood to be part of an ecology, need not
attempt comprehensive control over the organization to affect it. MacKaye’s
interventions were wild cards, usually involving partial or tactical adjust-
ments that would have some radiating effect within the organization.
Just as MacKaye understood his sites of intervention to be distributed,
tactical, or remote, so he also conducted his practice with a light touch. His
work lay outside the boundaries of any single profession. He did not fit the
model of an heroic figure in either the technocracy or environmental move-
ments. He did not become a well-known New Dealer, and he never achieved
the fame of some of his RPAA colleagues. Clarence Stein and his wife, actress
Aline McMahon, were great friends to MacKaye and had often helped him
with money on occasions when the lack of disciplinary boundaries proved to
68
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be less than lucrative. Stein once called him “the most disinterested man I
1.4

ever met.” 1 He followed the verbs rather than the nouns in culture. He was
interested in neither the leading role or the chorus of the play, but the mise-
en-scène. Although MacKaye’s infrastructure prototypes were clearly ex-
plained within his writings, his eccentric practice may have been less clearly
delineated even in his own mind. This practice, itself a kind of wild card,
shared organizational attributes with his infrastructure prototypes and often
involved the same kind of perceptual tricks and inverted cultural scripts
about positions of power in culture.
Although he often talked about increased economic efficiency, MacKaye
was not intent on using his infrastructure prototypes to optimize organiza-
tional structure, a desire that appears to have underwritten so many cultural
endeavors of the twentieth century. At some point in this century, for in-
stance, technocrats and environmentalists have both pursued models of ho-
listic or self-organizing systems with recursive structure. The technocrats
claimed that technology could be self-regulating if tools like computers
would compile enough data to reveal its most efficient ecology. Environmen-
talists have portrayed the planet as a single self-regulating organism whose
balance may be upset by man’s extremes. Technological potentials inspired
visions of heroism among the technocrats and sent the environmentalists
into crisis. The midcentury cybernetics conferences that investigated the pos-
sibility of automatic or self-balancing systems in biological and technological
ecologies contributed to both movements. Their discussions mixed models
between a broad range of disciplines from anthropology to neurophysiology
to computational networks.2 The late twentieth-century preoccupations with
new technologies have often revived a rather narrow range of ideas from
these researches. The possibility of circular, self-organizing systems of inter-
activity, artificial intelligence, predictability, and optimization within com-
plexity are among those inherited fascinations. The received agenda perhaps
even obscures a broader project of cybernetics—which was to characterize
interplay and organization in many different environments and systems.
Fascinated with biological systems, Ian McHarg, a more recent proponent
of a position similar to that of MacKaye and Geddes, used in his book, Design
with Nature, images of nautilus shells, snowflakes, bees, and other organic
organizations to discuss the growth of cities as a process that generated “nat-
ural” patterns.3 MacKaye was, however, not interested in idealized biological
patterns or recursive organizational systems. He might be more easily identi-
 69

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fied not with the positivistic ideologies surrounding cybernetics, but with its

Sites
broader goals and its rather unusual personnel. For instance, MacKaye’s ec-
centric practice often resembled that of Gregory Bateson. Like MacKaye,
Bateson was interested in ecological expressions or organizational architec-
ture. He broadly applied cybernetics’ most abstract principles to analysis of
tribal behavior in New Guinea, a digital language for dolphins, or processes
of addiction and fellowship in Alcoholics Anonymous. In fact, Bateson’s work
and cybernetics in general may be most interesting not for their content and
certainly not for their holistic views but for the way in which they prompted
cross-environmental and interdisciplinary modeling of ecological relation-
ships and ideas.
Though MacKaye played a role in the midcentury environmental move-
ment as a cofounder with Aldo Leopold (1886–1948) of the Wilderness
Society, he did not site his work within a cultural conflict. He carried the
antimetropolitan flag, but his practice relied on elementary and subtle craft
rather than an entrenched position. The careers of Leopold and MacKaye form
an interesting parallel. Leopold also studied forestry, worked with Gifford Pin-
chot, and based some of his thinking on Thoreau. Like MacKaye, he was
among the first to use the word environment. The environmental movement
however, was characterized more by Leopold’s approach to ecology and envi-
ronment than MacKaye’s. Leopold’s philosophy sponsored an emotional con-
cern for the preservation and protection of animals and plants, and his
sentiments were expressed with a kind of literary poetic. Leopold gave the
name “wilderness area or trail” to prototypes like MacKaye’s linear landscape
infrastructures, and these terms survived to influence legislation.4 Sand
County Almanac, published a year after Leopold’s death, became one of envi-
ronmentalism’s “sacred texts.” Leopold is remembered as kind of “patron
saint.” He has been described as “the Moses of the New Conservation impulse
of the 1960s and 1970s, who handed down the Tablets of the Law but did
not live to enter the promised land.” Wallace Stegner described him as “an
American Isaiah.” 5 MacKaye noted that Leopold made “one of the very few
contributions thus far to the psychology of regional planning,” but both the
moral and psychological spiritualism associated with the environmental
movement’s appreciation of landscape were very different from MacKaye’s
environmental art, which was about exploring an industrial wilderness and
often finding opportunity even within what would appear to be an oppos-
ing force.6
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Although the eccentricities of MacKaye biography have made him at-

1.4

tractive to scholars, these eccentricities also resist some of culture’s favorite

treatments of personality. The environmental movement was predisposed to
recall MacKaye’s role as a conservationist and preservationist rather than a
technician and an artist. The greenway movement, organized to preserve
abandoned infrastructure corridors for recreational trails, has adopted Mac-
Kaye as a kind of mascot. A younger generation of environmentalists has been
interested in the part of MacKaye’s practice that celebrated the phenomenal,
revelatory world of communion with nature. MacKaye was proposing inge-
nious, provocative, and even radical revisions of both terrestrial and techno-
logical ecologies, but the speculations of this kind of terrestrial technician
did not fit the more comfortable personae of the Yankee naturalist.
MacKaye has also often been analyzed as a “Mumford influence,” since
Mumford was remembered as the chief cultural proponent of neotechnic co-
operation between terrestrial and technological forces. Mumford designed
his career to satisfy the requirements of a cultural critic and author with a
broad social and political program, and he did not split his time between
writing and designing prototypes. MacKaye’s choice to write a major book
like The New Exploration no doubt owed something to Mumford’s influence.
A new edition of MacKaye’s The New Exploration was published in 1962 dur-
ing the incipient years of the modern environmental movement. In the intro-
duction, Mumford, typically effusive, wrote that the book should have “a
place on the same shelf that holds Henry Thoreau’s Walden and George Per-
kins Marsh’s Man and Nature.” He went further to liken MacKaye’s voice not
only to Thoreau, “but Davy Crockett, Audubon, and Mark Twain.” 7 Mumford
was always generous in his estimations of MacKaye and often couched his
public critiques in praise. Stopping just short of apologizing for MacKaye’s
extremes, he often tried to clarify and realign MacKaye’s views to make them
Let no one misread my friend’s
character or his life mission. more presentable, while at the same time associating himself with some edi-
Though no small part of torial aspect of MacKaye’s various publications.
MacKaye’s thought was de- When MacKaye retired to Shirley, Massachusetts, in 1945, Mumford en-
voted to preserving and prop- couraged him to write an autobiography of geotechnics. Geotechnics of
erly utilizing wilderness areas, North America: Viewpoints of Its Habitability, MacKaye’s final opus, was
as the base of all other parts
written in the ensuing twenty years and finished in 1965 when he was eighty-
of the human heritage, he
never thought of the wilder- six years old. He worked from a drafty room in a small house, a room with
ness as the last refuge of de- books, a stuffed bird and all of his charts and drawings of new national orga-
spairing hermits, who might nizational schemes. While its writing style expressed the flavor of his experi-
 71

wish to escape from the com-

|
ence, it was not an autobiography but rather an exegesis on the philosophy

Sites
of geotechnics or a descriptive version of what MacKaye had previously called plexities and mischiefs of civ-
ilized life. He was never a
the “World Atlas of Commodity Flow.” With somewhat quaint titles like “The
mere simple-lifer, still less an
Quadruped Economy (Food and Paw)” or “From Ice to Iroquois,” the book at- antiurbanist. Like Thoreau,
tempted a simple understanding of land planning from its inception. Though MacKaye appreciated the
the style served MacKaye’s purpose of relaying profound paradigm shifts by communal values of the New
way of simple language and situations, here, the elementary tone also accom- England villages, and even
panied somewhat elementary concepts.8 Mumford read the manuscript and better than Thoreau he ap-
preciated the culture of cities.
wrote back a long and affectionate letter to his friend saying that after sev-
So far from believing that
eral readings, he considered it to be unpublishable, largely because of its man’s three major environ-
breadth. It was a retelling, Mumford said, not only of MacKaye’s personal ments, the primeval, the rural,
experience, but of the history of the continent, a history that was for the and the communal or urban,
most part already “in the public domain.” The manuscript needed editing, a were mutually exclusive,
job for which neither Mumford nor Stein could volunteer. Mumford sug- MacKaye held rather that
they were complementary,
gested that copies of the book be distributed to a selection of libraries.
and all three were necessary
Though Geotechnics of North America was never published, a compilation for man’s full development.
of new and previously published articles entitled From Geography to Geo- MacKaye was all these things.
technics, did, in some ways, function as the autobiography Mumford had If MacKaye’s work, aside from
previously suggested.9 the A. T., was often too far off
Only practice with actual sites and prototypes appeared to relieve Mac- the beaten track to gain pub-
lic attention, still less to win
Kaye of his tendency to search for totalizing frameworks within which to
popularity, this was because
map global history. This epistemological juggling as evidenced by his ever- he himself was opening fresh
expanding outlines and classifications was perhaps symptomatic of a mind trails, though sometimes cov-
that was ironically unwilling to finalize those kinds of determinations. In any ering his footsteps by using
event, the historical material was, in some sense, not intended to relay history old-fashioned terms, obsolete
as would a historian, but rather to condition the reader’s perceptions for his data, or testimony drawn from
the great teachers of his
own idiosyncratic continental saga. Finally, with an extreme form of resource-
youth, whose names are
fulness, MacKaye sited his prototypes in this organizational territory and in hardly known today even by
doing so retooled and recircuited some of the most powerful development scholars.10
protocols in America. —Lewis Mumford

Notes
1. Clarence Stein wrote a letter of recommendation on MacKaye’s behalf to TVA’s
director of unemployment, C. L. Richie, 7 October 1933.
2. Influenced by midcentury fascinations with biological systems, Ian McHarg—a
more recent proponent of a position similar to that of MacKaye and Geddes—used
in his book, Design With Nature, images of nautilus shells, snowflakes, bees, and
72

other organic organizations to discuss the growth of cities as a process that generated
|

“natural” patterns.
1.4

3. Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, N.Y.: Natural History Press, 1969).
4. MacKaye, The New Exploration, 203. This characterization of wilderness survived to
influence important pieces of legislation like the 1946 Bill for Wilderness Belts, The
Wilderness Act of 1964, and The National Trails System Act of 1968.
5. John L. Thomas, “Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and the Regional Vision,” in
Lewis Mumford Public Intellectual, eds. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 66–99; Philip Shabecoff quoted histo-
rian Donald Fleming and Stegner in A Fierce Green Fire: The American Environmental
Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), xiii, 90, n. 28.
6. MacKaye, New Exploration, 203.
7. Lewis Mumford in the introduction to Benton MacKaye, The New Exploration (Ur-
bana: University of Illinois Press, 1962), vii.
8. MacKaye, From Geography to Geotechnics, unpublished manuscript, Benton MacKaye
papers, Darthmouth College Library. Pictures of MacKaye’s study in Shirley can be
found in the MacKaye papers.
9. Mumford to MacKaye, 2 November 1970, MacKaye papers Dartmouth College
Library.
10. Lewis Mumford in Stuart Chase, Lewis Mumford, and others, “Benton MacKaye:
A Tribute by Lewis Mumford, Stuart Chase, Paul Oehser, Frederick Gutheim, Har-
ley P. Holden, Paul T. Bryant, Robert M. Howes, C. J. S. Durham,” The Living Wil-
derness, 39 n 132 ( January/March, 1976), 17.
Part 2
2.0 D I F F E R E N T I A L H I G H W A Y S

The history of the interstate highway is contained within our amnesic recol-
lections of the recent past, and its dominance over all other transportation
formats in America has perhaps obscured our ability to see it as an adjustable
and differential network. Many highway histories have treated the interstate
as a predestined event in a patriotic saga. A pilgrim put one foot in front of
another or a cow strode beyond the pasture for the first time, and soon, the
rutted trails were paved with concrete, the wagon wheels faded to pneumatic
tires, and these and other abstractions of movement evolved inevitably into
the federal government’s version of the limited-access highway. The more
contentious histories have usually taken an entrenched position against the
villainous collusion between federal agencies and private automobile inter-
ests, pointing out a kind of conspiracy within companies like General Motors
to not only dominate but eliminate all other forms of transportation, particu-
larly interurban rail. Other histories have treated the interstate as yet more
evidence of the long-standing tradition of using engineering expertise to
galvanize legislation.
Though justified by claims of reasoned expertise, the history of highway
networks proceeded by illogical steps. For instance, specifications for the sys-
tem were designed for a long-distance network but were applied to an inter-
city network. In addition, the primary reason for routing the highway through
the city involved the increased revenues to be gained from higher volumes
of urban traffic, but as the costs of the highway escalated, it became clear
that the majority of those costs were due to urban mileage. The highway was
also understood to be an evacuation facility for the urban areas in times of
war, yet it had the adverse effect of concentrating population in those urban
centers. Highways were projected to solve some of the city’s traffic problems,
 76
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but most of them increased commuting time. Since cars were sold to thou-
Part 2

sands of Americans before there were adequate roads to accommodate them,

in a sense, the vehicle and its infrastructure were sold separately, and the
highway network was routed in relation to the distribution of automobile
products in urban areas. The forces that facilitated legislation of the Inter-
state highway system eventually merged with the agendas of commerce and
defense, and for all the claims of pioneering individualism, for all the pictures
of Conestoga wagons used in its promotion, the interstate was one of the
most centrally controlled and bureaucratically directed chapters in American
history, it policies remaining largely the same over a period of decades. The
legislative history was protracted over fifty years, but the extent of change
after passage of the Interstate Highway Act in 1956 was massive and rapid.
The interstate was the largest public works project and the most prominent
national network to be built in this century. As perplexing as these now famil-
iar historical curiosities was the lack of coordination and integration between
the highway and other adjacent transportation networks and landscapes. The
following episodes look at eccentric proposals for national highway systems
that treated the highway as a differential or intermodal network capable of
translating between carriers and infrastructure formats.
Using statistical models, traffic engineers designed the interstate as a
response to vehicle populations. Engineers derived formulas to handle vari-
able loads at different times of the day, but the equations always yielded the
highway as a fixed register of dynamic equilibrium or movement at a particu-
lar speed. Traffic engineering principles determined everything from the di-
mension of the highway to the turning radius of the driveway, and they also
governed the hierarchy of tertiary, secondary and, minor streets. Even minor
streets were sized for large phantom vehicles moving at top speeds. Not only
was the organization of the highway network contingent on vehicle popula-
tions, but the design of the roadway itself was engineered to be viewed from
a static position inside the vehicle. Similarly, while early highway designers
saw the road as a means of accessing a diverse set of regional landscapes by
car, it was eventually designed as a hermetic system that created its own
channel of surrounding traffic-engineered landscape contours. The highway
was legislated as an intercity network, yet it was not specialized to interface
with the complexities of the city, and was simply designed to pass uninter-
rupted through urban fabric. Rather than becoming differentiated at its
intersections, the system replicated itself, generating products and morphol-
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ogies of its own structure within more complex urban environments. Al-

Differential Highways
though initial speculations about the highway considered terminals and
exchange points to be of the highest importance, eventually, with inter-
changes such as the cloverleaf, the chief intent was not interchange, but
elimination of change and the creation of a smooth, homogeneous experi-
ence. Interchanges designed as switches or transformers from one kind of
traffic to another would represent obstacles to continuous speed, and so in
the organizational logic of highway building other forms of transportation
should be segregated. The interstate highway system was designed as a frozen
shape—a dumb network with dumb switches.
Since Bel Geddes’ Futurama exhibit of 1939, the possibility of building
intelligence and differentiation into the highway network by automating it
has been a persistent dream. In fact, highways and electronic networks have
often been paired in the public consciousness, sharing similar predictions and
contradictions surrounding freedom versus control. For instance, the high-
way’s promise of greater “elbow room” was not unlike the Web’s promise of
a new frontier. The promotions or coercions of automobile highway associa-
tions at midcentury resembled the insider’s swagger of today’s network afi-
cionados like George Gilders and Nicholas Negroponte, as they advise the
businessmen of America about power centers on the new information high-
way. Cars, like electronic keyboards, appeared to be at the individual’s control
while also providing access to a vast, expansive territory. Both networks have
sponsored popular jargon and promotional imagery in lieu of an understand-
ing of the real operatives of network space.
Communication systems inform the highway system, however, not only
as an applied technology, but as technology that might loan its active reper-
toire or network protocols to the highway’s own species of site. For instance,
in communication networks, network intelligence relies on smart and flexible
patterns of switching between heterogeneous components and multiple
scales of activity. Multiplicity, differentiation, and diversity are understood to
strengthen a network, and the smarter the system the more its operation runs
counter to conventional notions of efficiency. Network redundancies serve
this parallelism by providing a surplus of options and pathways in a network
that are the key to its precision. The opportunity for switching within the
system is one measure of this parallelism and depth. Much of the speculation
about electronic networks concerns the central or individual control of these
switches. Internet legislation differs significantly from that of the interstate
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highway since the utilities involved will develop greater by using each other’s
Part 2

infrastructures to carry the various TV, video, and internet transmissions.

Ironically, both the history of cross-purposes and the multiple segre-
gated transportation networks in cities and outlying landscapes potentially
provide very fertile ground for a more intelligent network architecture in the
highway system. Many of the redundancies among the various transportation
networks have developed through cycles of replacement and supposed obso-
lescence, unaccompanied by a process of selection and recombination that
would build parallelism in the network and better match carriers to transpor-
tation needs. Both the highway and the rail fought for exclusivity and domi-
nance. This same fight for exclusive formats has not only been part of the
history of highways and railroads but other kinds of utility networks as well.
Even software-hardware platforms have been in dispute for this reason, de-
spite the fact that the real intelligence behind their operation often involves
the knowledge of how to patch between them. Redundancies among trans-
portation systems, like highway, rail, and air, however, increase the possibility
of switching between systems to produce a better fit between task and car-
rier. The system is rich with these potential switch sites for interchanges and
urban terminals. Similarly, networks of land as well as the networks of other
carriers, though often segregated, are positioned to operate in parallel with
the highway. The highway right-of-way and its adjacent lands are critical
sites in adjusting this kind of parallelism. These new sites might borrow a
repertoire from not only our most recent telematic networks but also from
the earliest experiments with the highway.
Before the system became so highly codified, some proposals for the
highway treated it not as a single hermetic corridor of space containing road-
way and right-of-way but rather as a set of separate, interdependent sites.
Highway intersections, terminals, and rights-of-way, for instance, were
among the sites that drew speculation from several independent practitioners
who regarded the network as an active and variable organization that could
be affected by several species of different programs. Just as various electrical
and electronic networks often mimic each other or share a repertoire of orga-
nizational operatives, so the highway borrowed from, for instance, the rail-
road. Like the railroad, the highway was a long-distance insulated corridor
with controlled exchange points for potential interplay between landscape
and other transportation networks. Schemes for urban automobile terminals
and urban or interregional interchanges also proposed to mix and exchange
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cargo and passengers between different kinds of vehicles and different kinds

Differential Highways
of transportation modalities. Some specialized highways also evolved from
urban boulevards or interstate parks. While the highway may have become a
tool of land exploitation, the origins of the long-distance highway were
linked to the development of interurban or continental terrestrial networks.
Some practitioners proposed a kind of parallelism among independent net-
works of railway, waterway, or roadway not only at the intersections but
along the linear segments of each network, thus loading intelligence into the
switches or surfaces of the highway corridor.
The episodes in part II look at various schemes for highway organizations
both when the idea of an interstate system was relatively new as well as when
it began to grow to completion in the ensuing decades. Although highways
were almost exclusively controlled by federal traffic engineers, some design-
ers considered the highway to be within their purview. Federal highway agen-
cies and a broader cast of practitioners, including Warren Manning, Benton
MacKaye, Norman Bel Geddes, Egmont Arens, Lady Bird Johnson, Lawrence
Halprin, William Whyte, and the automated highway research teams of the
1960s and 1970s, are among the players included in the discussion.

Interstate Highway Ask Vice-President Al Gore

Barraged with road-building proposals during the first-quarter of the about telecommunication and
twentieth century, the federal government, in association with state he thinks of highways. Dur-
ing a recent interview at his
governments, assumed new responsibilities for highway planning. Fed-
office in the West Wing of
eral involvement in road-building efforts at the turn of the century pri- the White House, Gore re-
marily addressed road improvement in areas beyond the paved streets of called that when he was a
the city. Early government agencies cooperated with states and organ- boy in Carthage, Tennessee,
izations like the American Automobile Association and the American his family couldn’t get into
Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO). In 1914, they even their new car and drive to
Nashville—a fifty-mile trip—
deputized the AASHO as an official consultant to federal road agen-
with any speed, because the
cies.2 In fact, the AASHO established a practice of writing the legisla- road was just two lanes all
tion to be presented in Congress and years later would be among the the way. He also recalled a
most influential groups in legislating the interstate network.3 scene from the 1950s: “I
By the 1910s, as automobile registration continued to rise, many watched my father preside
of these private groups, who together formed the “good roads move- over the creation of the inter-
state highway system as the
ment,” assembled at various congresses to organize themselves and the
chairman of a subcommittee
state officials who represented them. This partnership among federal of the Senate Public Works
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Committee. I remember sit- and state officials as well as automobile interests would be critical to
Part 2

ting in the room when they highway development in the coming years.4
voted to make the signs green Two highway acts, the Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1916 and
on the interstate system.” He
1921 marked the beginning of a recurring pattern in which neutral,
recalls, in sum, that an asser-
tive government helped open apolitical technical expertise was the galvanizing force for highway
the country to travel and legislation.5 The acts also established protocols for financing and co-
commerce.1 operation among federal and state governments in planning a national
highway system.
In 1919, after two earlier reorganizations, the Bureau of Public
Roads (BPR) took over from the Department of Agriculture and ad-
ministered federal highway efforts during the critical planning stages
of the interstate system. Thomas H. MacDonald served as bureau
chief for the whole of this important period. The BPR became a clear-
ing house for technical information, allowing the government to
maintain authority with limited financial responsibility. Still, the road-
ways were often built according to conflicting standards and were of-
ten neither internally coherent or coordinated between counties and
states. For instance, roads often did not meet across state lines. In ad-
dition, because there were no standards concerning access to frontage,
these roads were already becoming lined with commerce.6
Meanwhile, in the 1920s, automobile manufacture had grown to
be a major United States industry, and the National Highway Users
Conference representing truckers, farmers, fuel companies, and auto-
mobile manufacturers had become a powerful lobby.7 Still, even after
another Federal Highway Act in 1921, the government did not legis-
late any of the many proposals for a national highway system.8
Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939) and Interregional Highways (1944)
were landmark reports which provided the basic blueprint for Federal
highway building in the next decades, and have often been referenced
as a seminal documents in the development of the interstate system.9
The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1944 did not result in any inter-
state highway construction, however, it did initiate the process of ne-
gotiating routes for the system. By 1947, the federal-state partnership
had designated the routes for 37,000 miles of the possible 40,000-mile
network, and though that network included 2,900 miles of urban
routes, congressional studies related to defense recommended addi-
tional urban mileage. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, more and
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more urban mileage was added to the proposed designs for an inter-

Differential Highways
state system, and with each new version of the highway legislation, the
federal government took responsibility for a larger and larger percent-
age of the total costs, until it was virtually paying for the entire proj-
ect.10 The BPR made yet another study, Needs of the Highway systems,
1955–84, in which they recommended a 37,700 mile system, costing
$23.2 billion. Of this estimate, 46 percent would be spent on urban
routes. The subsidies were attractive to those urban planners who
were anxious for coordination between highway plans and existing ur-
ban planning schemes, and many believed that highways would rejuve-
nate urban areas.11
The Clay hearings (October 1954) and the Gore hearings (1955)
were pivotal in legislating the interstate. Both heard testimony from
private lobbying groups, planners, manufacturers, highway planners
like Robert Moses, conservationists, and representatives of other
transportation systems. The Clay Committee was composed not of
planners or urbanists but rather of representatives from construction
companies, teamsters, banking, and manufacturing. Most of the dis-
cussion avoided any issues that involved rethinking the prevailing con-
cept of the interstate as an urban connector. In fact, the hearing began
with a report that indicated a doubling of the estimated cost of the
highway from approximately $50 billion to $100 billion largely due to
urban mileage. Helen Leavitt wrote in Superhighway-Superhoax, “They
knew even then that the local traffic would provide the revenue to pay
for an interstate system designed for long-haul and rural traffic. The
hurdle was how to get the heavy traffic onto the system when the heavy
traffic was urban and mostly short trips.” 12
The Gore hearings addressed the obvious problems of entering
urban fabric with rather short-sighted concerns. The urban highway
mileage was discussed as if it applied to circumferential routes, yet
testimony reflected an awareness that the highway would generate
more urban traffic. The assessment of this increased urban congestion
became doubly perverse when regarded positively for the extra reve-
nue it would generate. Some who testified were alert to defense and
safety issues, while others were only concerned that municipalities
might misuse government funds. There was little discussion of urban
transit, or of the successes of long-distance railroad in World War II
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defense efforts. Interestingly, Howard Zahnister, chosen by Benton

Part 2

MacKaye to be director of the Wilderness Society, also received no

response to his testimony. Without reference to any alternative intelli-
gence about highway planning, Zahnister testified in the defensive
posture of a conservationist and preservationist, pleading with the
powers that be to protect wilderness landscapes. The days when a
forester-technician would provide one of the most interesting specula-
tions about the economies of automobile infrastructure and even pro-
pose a possible physical arrangement for that infrastructure were
over.13 Three bills, including an administration bill, were considered
in the House of Representatives in 1955, but neither House nor Sen-
ate enacted legislation. Whatever variance in the legislation, each suc-
cessive bill steadily increased both the urban mileage and the federal
percentage of funding.14
Highway lobbies and legislators expected 1955 to be the year
of highway legislation. The National Highway Users Conference
stepped up its highway campaign.15 The group’s newsletter, Highway
Highlights, had become a glossy magazine, featuring inspiring articles
from the so-called “highwaymen,” the planners or powerful businesses
with interests in highway-related industries like automobiles, gasoline,
rubber, and concrete. Other publications supported by these lobbying
groups included the American Road Builder Magazine, Roads and Streets
Magazine, and Engineering News-Record.16 The National Highway
Users Conference, among other groups, published pamphlets and ar-
ticles emphasizing the importance of the new system to manufactur-
ing, farming, defense, and industry. Automobile manufacturers like
General Motors (GM) could also claim to have done a patriotic duty
that should be rewarded in peacetime. C. F. Kettering of GM ad-
dressed the country on a regular radio show, “As ‘Ket’ Sees It,” in
which he described the ways that the automobile industry had unified
America. It had trained the technicians who were critical in wartime
production and returned to the job to meet the postwar demand for
automobiles. Typical of the promotion efforts was a 1954 GM film,
entitled “Give Yourself the Green Light,” that told the familiar saga
of the inevitability of the highway and claimed that the country “didn’t
dream big enough.” Given the massive proliferation of vehicles, it was
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the responsibility of every American to make highways for themselves

Differential Highways
and for “those in the back seat.” 17
When Congress returned in 1956, the highway lobbyists and pro-
moters had done a thorough job of arousing the public. A joint House
committee developed a bill that was revised by the Senate to incorpo-
rate some points of an earlier Gore bill. With additional compromises
between the two houses, the bill was passed on June 26, 1956, and
signed by President Eisenhower on June 29, 1956. The 42,000 miles
of four-lane highways would be called the National System of Inter-
state and Defense Highways. The federal government would pay 90
percent of the costs, an even larger proportion than it did for defense
highways in 1941. The bill had two titles, one controlling physical
standards and the other controlling revenues. The physical standards
were consistent with those reports of the BPR that had been published
since 1939. Previously, federal highway funds had been allocated from
the General Fund of the Treasury, but now revenues collected from
state motor-vehicle user taxes would be held in a Highway Trust Fund
and used on a pay-as-you-go basis for highway construction.18
Not only did interstate legislation describe a dumb network in
terms of urban intermodality, but it would also control a fixed plan for
a period of over twenty years. If anything, the highway system ex-
cluded information other than that which reinforced its own rules,
funding mechanisms, and commercial interests. Highway critiques,
like Road to Ruin (1968) by A. Q. Mowbray, specifically targeted the
trust fund as a self-perpetuating institution that could direct tax
monies to highways despite other transportation needs, and Helen
Leavitt’s Superhighway-Superhoax (1970) even included a family tree
showing personnel linkages among highway-related business organi-
zations and official state and federal highway departments. As evi-
denced by repeated articles on such things as materials, maintenance
costs, trip length, traffic volume, and tire longevity in the BPR’s jour-
nal, Public Roads, not only the market field associated with vehicle
ownership but the statistical data regarding highway bankability and
durability began to shape the traffic-engineered highway. As a federal
project the highway system was also seen in terms of jobs and other
conditions that could be quantified statistically or mathematically. The
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highway-building process was the most extended public works project

Part 2

in American history, and yet there were no mechanisms for learning

and adaptation in the process but rather a process of monitoring
greater return on the federal investment.

Notes
1. Ken Auletta, “Annals of Communication: Under the Wire,” The New Yorker (17 Janu-
ary 1994):49.
2. The first official agency was the Office of Road Inquiry (ORI) established in 1893.
Its next incamations were the Office of Public Road Inquiry (OPRI) 1899 and the
Office of Public Roads (OPR) in 1905. U.S. Federal Highway Administration, Amer-
ica’s Highways, 1776–1976, 46, 52, 54, 60, 79.
3. Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1941–1956 (Lawrence: Regents
Press of Kansas, 1979), 23.
4. U.S. Federal Highway Administration, America’s Highways, 1776–1976, (Washing-
ton: Department of Transportation, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977). Even
before the turn of the century, an official of the Federal Office of Public Inquiry
(OPI) proposed a transcontinental highway connecting two north-south highways,
one on the east coast and one on the west coast.
5. Seely, Building the American Highway System: Engineers as Policy Makers (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1987), 38, 68, 225.
6. America’s Highways, 1776–1976, 87; and Helen Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax
(Garden City: New York: Doubleday and Co., 1970), 28.
7. Rose, 9, 2, 3, 10. In 1905, 78,000 automobiles were registered; in 1910, 458,500
automobiles were registered and by the 1920s automobile manufacturing was a ma-
jor American industry.
8. Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax, 23–24; and U.S. FHA, America’s Highways, 1776–
1976, 108.
9. America’s Highways, 1776–1976, 466.
10. Leavitt, 29, cites an issue of Roads and Streets, August 1954; and U.S. FHA, America’s
Highways, 1776–1976, 468.
11. Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1969), 539–41.
12. Leavitt, 30, 30–51, 29–36, 32.
13. Ibid., 37–51.
14. America’s Highways, 1776–1976, 468.
15. Ibid., 470.
16. Leavitt, 28–29, 115; and A Q. Mowbray, The Road to Ruin (New York: J. B. Lippin-
cott Company, 1968), 22.
17. Charles F. Kettering, As “Ket” Sees It: A Series of Radio Talks by C. F. Kettering of Gen-
eral Motors (Detroit: General Motors Corporation), Undated; and Give Yourself the
Green Light, Produced by the Jam Handy Organization for General Motors public
relations, March 19, 1954.
18. America’s Highways, 1776–1976, 471–72, 467–471.
2.1 R E D U N D A N C Y A N D I N T E R S T I C E :
TRANSCONTINENTAL AND INTERCITY
NETWORKS

Although the interstate highway system was designed as an intercity network,

some earlier experiments and proposals treated the highway as a long-
distance transcontinental route that bypassed cities and interfaced terrestrial
networks as well as other forms of conveyance like the railroad. Some even
replicated the terminal and switching operatives of the railroad, while others
proposed to place the highway in the service of national parks. In these
proposals the highway not only mimicked the organizational repertoire of
adjacent networks but also generated some interdependence or parallelism
among them. Redundant or coincident organizations potentially facilitated
interface among rail, water, and highway for not only intermodal exchange
but network specialization.

Tr a n s c o n t i n e n t a ls
Even the earliest transcontinental automobile crossings linked road building
to the growing population of vehicles and to the vehicle as a product. Many
of the turn-of-the-century crossings were promotional stunts where motor-
ists set out across the country until they passed the edges of the last field
and began to follow the ruts of the wagon trails that had settled the West.
The first true cross-country highway was the Lincoln Highway (1913–1927).
It was sponsored by the Lincoln Highway Association through donations and
subscriptions from cement companies and automobile industries, and it was
built, ostensibly, to promote a relatively insignificant invention—the Prest-
O-Lite automobile lighting system.1 Other booster groups who sponsored
“themed” highways like the Lincoln Highway maintained private control over
their projects but associated with the government to avail themselves of
highway design expertise.
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Perhaps the most unusual transcontinental highway networks were

2.1

planned in conjunction with interstate parks. Some were privately funded by

tourism while others were proposed as part of the national park system. For
instance, in 1930, Congress entertained a proposal for an Eastern Park-to-
Park Highway connecting Washington, Shenandoah National Park, the Great
Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave, near Louisville, Kentucky.2 Another
park-to-park highway bill, proposed in the House of Representatives in 1934
described four parkways that would link national parks across the entire con-
tinental United States. The interstices of these networks were not major U.S.
cities, as they would later be in the interstate network, but were rather loca-
tions like Grand Canyon National Park, Boulder Dam, Yosemite, or Niagra
Falls.3 Yet another transcontinental park-to-park highway plan proposed to
connect Acadia National Park in Maine with Everglades National Park in Flor-
ida, providing along the way an intercity route between Boston and Washing-
ton.4 Skyline drives were another popular park-highway hybrid that routed a
limited access roadway along the crest of a mountain range. In 1934, skyline
drives were proposed for the Presidential Range, the Green Mountains, the
Blue Ridge, and the Great Smoky Mountains.5 The Blue Ridge Parkway, and
another similar interstate parkway, the Natchez Trace, did not link national
parks but rather merged the protocols of park and highway into giant linear
interstate organizations of public land.
By the late 1930s and early 1940s, transcontinental roads were generally
proposed in conjunction with national highway systems. The 1938 Bulkley
Bill proposed a system of ten transcontinental highways. Three would run
east-west and seven would run north-south. The highways would have from
four to twelve lanes arranged within a 300 foot right-of-way, and like a rail-
road, they would be as straight as possible to efficiently connect two points,
in most cases two cities (figure 2.1.1). In 1939 the Synder Bill proposed a
similar system of nine transcontinentals each with 100 foot roadways and
500 foot-wide rights-of-way. By 1940 there were several different working
models of the limited-access highway or parkway in America and four major
transcontinental routes, the Lincoln Highway, the Santa Fe Trail, the Broadway
of America, and the Yellowstone Route. Cross-country motorists could also
weave through the many federal-state sponsored roads some of which oper-
ated across state boundaries and even within subnational regional systems.6
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Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks
2.1.1 Bulkley plan for superhighways (1938). Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York:
Random House, 1940), 257.

“ T r u n k - L i n e T ra f fic T ra c ks ”
One of the first highway proposals that looked opportunistically at redun-
dancy and possible intermodality among various transportation networks was
made not by a traffic engineer but by a landscape architect. In 1923 War-
ren H. Manning (1860–1938) published what he called “A National Plan Study
Brief” that, similar to the proposed studies of the technocracy movement,
surveyed water power, mineral resources, soils, factory centers, rainfall, for-
ested areas, and infrastructure within the United States and proposed a new
plan for their management. Manning also called for a national planning
committee that would, after a similar survey, establish regional designations
across the country. Saying that “The great world nations are now interdepen-
dent units,” Manning imagined that these regions would be the main units in
a national and international system of production and distribution. He also
assumed that production quotients and regional designations could be deter-
mined and quantified and that the transportation routes could be sized and
routed accordingly. Manning inventoried the country’s main geological for-
mations and identified the well-worn paths of travel through its valleys and
basins. Acknowledging federal and private efforts to build transcontinental
highways and noting that the federal government was “opening the way for
great national trunk-line thoroughfares,” Manning proposed a system of
88
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“trunk-line traffic tracks.” The tracks would be composed of 220 foot-wide

2.1

trunk lines with eight roadways, four in each direction, and the roadways
would be specialized for freight vehicles, express trucks, passenger buses, and
automobiles. They would be located outside the city and Manning proposed,
“Where practicable such great trunk-lines should lie next to railways and wa-
terways, and be provided with facilities for freight interchange.” He also pro-
posed adjustments to reorganize the railroad system so that highways might
serve the railroads “as feeders rather than competitors.” When framing the
main issues of a national transportation system, Manning predicted that the
greatest challenges would be related to “adequate terminals, traffic classifica-
tion, and exchange points for the highway, railway, waterway, and airway
routes.” Traffic from the city and from other kinds of state roads would access
the trunk line through interchanges where “directors of traffic” would “clas-
sify” the vehicles and dispatch them onto the appropriate and least trafficked
roadway (figure 2.1.2).7
In its organizational architecture, the most significant aspect of Man-
ning’s proposal was the way in which he increased the complexity and capac-
ity of the network by simply doubling it. Manning mapped two sets of
thoroughfares, one for commercial routes and another for recreational
routes. These two networks of roadways and landways were to cross and run
in parallel. The recreational routes were given names like “Niagra way,” “Graz-
ing way” or “Ozark way,” while the commercial routes were called “great north
tracks” or “great south tracks.” The recreational routes would accommodate
the changing character of the land and deliver the motorist to diverse re-
gions, while commercial routes would accommodate changing patterns of
distribution for agricultural and industrial products. The apparent redundan-
cies and inefficiencies of the system would help to make it more specialized
and intelligent since, though limited, the network would have some internal
means of flexibility and adaptation. These networks were determined by ex-
isting conditions in the land but they would also begin to provide a frame-
work for the acquisition of additional urban or recreational land.8

C e m e n t R a i l ro a d s
Like Manning’s network, MacKaye’s “cement railroads” also merged highways
with railroads to achieve several different kinds of intermodal exchange.
MacKaye called the highway a “new kind of railway” and likened the automo-
bile to an individually operated locomotive or a “cross between a carriage and
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Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks
2.1.2 Warren Manning’s 1923 mapping of transcontinental highways, titled “Commercial and Recre-
ation Areas and Connecting Ways.” Warren H. Manning, “A National Plan Study Brief,” special supple-
ment to Landscape Architecture (July 1923) vol. 13, no. 4:17.

a railroad car.” He would later even describe the automobile as an amphibious

vehicle because it potentially reduced the number of exchanges between car,
water, railroad, and automobile, saying, “Our motorcar jumps in and out from
one medium of transport to another, just like a frog jumping from dry land
into the water and out again.” 9 Cement railroads would be designed with
double tracks, junctions, and separations between freight, passenger, express,
and local traffic. They would be insulated from commercial buildings and resi-
dences, and the junction points or “station stops” would be operated as they
were for the railroad by “switch and signal.” 10
Most significantly, the cement railroad proposed to build the automobile
tracks along the abandoned rights-of-way of other infrastructure networks
so that they might be better positioned “to serve as links in an allied system.”
MacKaye claimed that half of a highway between Boston and New York al-
ready existed in the form of approximately 100 miles of abandoned railroad
tracks between the two cities, and he mapped possible routes for converted
railroads in Connecticut and Massachusetts as well (figure 2.1.3). Abandoned,
short-distance rail rights-of-way could be converted from steel to concrete,
thus making highways and railways part of an economy of land use and
90
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2.1

2.1.3 Map showing reuse of railroad rights-of-way for limited access motorways. Benton MacKaye,
“Cement Railroads,” The Survey, LXVIII (November 1, 1932), 541–542.

making both networks more viable in terms of construction costs and unre-
covered revenues. The redundant networks would provide specialized services
beyond the capacity of any one network.11

R e g i o n a l - M e t ro p o l i t a n H i g h w a ys
In the same way that early long-distance highways replicated railroad opera-
tives or responded to landscape activities, regional parkways were influenced
not only by the activities of the landscape but also by the complexities of the
urban core. Just as the Lincoln Highway reached the west coast, the West-
chester parkways joined the Bronx River Parkway to form a metropolitan
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highway network north of New York City. Parkway designers used the ex-

Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks

panded street section to address a number of civic and landscape agendas
related not only to aesthetics but also to the manipulation of land value and
the control of the metropolitan regional environs. City Beautiful planners,
designed the spatial relationships as well as the financial protocols and the
logistics of collaboration between different planning jurisdictions, projecting
parkway networks as a new framework for transportation between city and
country. The Bronx River Parkway, outside the New York City limits, for in-
stance, was designed to organize utilities and transportation while also ad-
dressing issues of conservation and pollution. The Bronx River was cleaned
and dredged to build the parkway, and the wide right-of-way purchased for
the parkway would be an obstacle to further pollution. New York City and
Westchester County shared the costs and Westchester County provided a new
sewer line along the length of the parkway. From 1910 to 1932 land values
increased along the parkway by almost 1,200 percent.12 Regional-scale, inter-
city parkways also served as the federal government’s rehearsals for the long-
distance interstate highways. The first federal parkway, legislated in 1928, was
the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, and it was followed in 1930 by the
George Washington Memorial Parkway and the Colonial National Parkway
that traveled from Jamestown through Williamstown to Yorktown. Mean-
while state and federal partnerships or metropolitan agencies like those
headed by Robert Moses in New York City continued to develop parkways
turnpikes and other intercity highway networks that would also serve as
models for the Interstate.13

To l l R o a d s a n d F r e e R o a d s a n d I n t e r r e g i o n a l H i g h w a y s
Two federal reports that would provide the blueprints for interstate highway
design were ostensibly initiated in the context of plans for a transcontinental
network. In 1938, Congress charged the Bureau of Public Roads (BPR) to study
the feasibility of three east-west and three north-south transcontinental su-
perhighways to be operated as toll roads. The BPR’s report, Toll Roads and
Free Roads, however, was a trial balloon for the bureau’s new science of traf-
fic engineering. Another pivotal federal report entitled Interregional High-
ways (1944), inherited conclusions and data generated by Toll Roads and Free
Roads. Taken together, the two reports recorded the prevailing intelligence
associated with traffic engineering as well as some of the last alternative
92
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proposals to the midcentury interstate highway. The dry bureaucratic tone of

2.1

the reports was essential to their persuasive power, and even when leading
to illogical conclusions the sober, stepwise presentation of engineering ex-
pertise was rarely questioned. Using statistical models, the active organiza-
tion of automobile movement would gradually begin to reflect the shape of
a population of vehicle owners.
The BPR’s initial charge to determine the feasibility of long-distance
highways as toll roads proved to be pivotal in the determination of the inter-
state highway as an intercity rather than transcontinental system. As pro-
posed, the 14,300 mile system would bypass most cities. Through data
collections, however, the bureau determined that neither transcontinental
or semicontinental travel was insufficient to warrant construction of these
highways as toll roads. Most trips were relatively short and they originated
in cities. There was also a greater likelihood that long-distance travel would
originate in cities. If the highways were to be operated as toll roads, only the
areas surrounding the largest cities would provide the necessary traffic to
make the proposal feasible.14 Consequently, the bureau recommended a net-
work of free highways arranged as an intercity matrix. The BPR had already
aligned itself with the policies of the War Department and the state highway
departments in support of a comprehensive nationwide system of interre-
gional highways. The recommended plan proposed, not six transcontinentals
(14,300 miles), but a 26,700 mile system with the federal government sup-
porting more than half the costs. Highway taxes on gasoline would be one
source of funding. This funding scheme was in effect until the legislation of
the interstate highway in 1956, when the government virtually funded the
highway building project in its entirety.15 The various mappings of the net-
work showed the highways entering the center of large cities, and while there
was a some indication that specialized infrastructure would be necessary for
urban areas, apart from the mention of terminal and beltlines, there was no
discussion of what would constitute “adequate facilities” for handling in-
creased traffic. In fact, there was some evidence that the BPR believed these
highways would address urban congestion.16
Another significant highway report, Interregional Highways (1944) was
requested by FDR to investigate the possibilities of a national interregional
highway system. Not surprisingly, after studying data from BPR and Defense
Department deliberations, the report reached the same conclusion that a na-
tionwide system relying on taxation for its funding must serve the urban
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Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks
2.1.4 Interstate highway networks projected by the Interregional Highways Committee (1944) and
based on similar mappings from the Bureau of Public Roads publication Toll Roads and Free Roads
(1939): the 14,300 mile, 26,700 mile, 78,800 mile network and the recommended 33,920 mile
network. President of the United States, Interregional Highways, 78th Congress, 2d session,
House document No. 379 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944), 138, 139, 142, 7.

areas where traffic was greatest. A staff from the BPR served the committee
in analyzing 14,300, 29,300, 48,300, and 78,800 mile networks, and it finally
endorsed a 39,000 mile interstate scheme with 33,900 miles of rural highways
and 5,000 miles of urban routes. The committee was aware that the network
would both “attract” and “serve” a greater traffic volume, and that it would
not solve urban congestion problems.17 Highways were portrayed, however,
as urban planning tools for redistributing population to the suburbs and pav-
ing over urban blight, and though urban routes would be responsible for two-
thirds of the total cost of the network, the report treated even the 78,800
mile network as another iteration of a similar organization (figure 2.1.4).18
The transcity connectors and the long-haul routes had entirely different
requirements in relation to congestion, finance, and intermodality. Yet sur-
prisingly, apart from showing urban sections of the highway as elevated or
stacked structures, both reports indicated that the physical specifications for
intercity highways should be essentially the same as for transcontinentals.19
94
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Norman Bel Geddes

2.1

For Norman Bel Geddes, architect of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit, high-
ways were the work of designers as well as traffic engineers. Bel Geddes’ book
Magic Motorways (1940) published many of his own ideas for, among other
things, intersections, lighting systems control towers, and a national system
of highways. Bel Geddes designed his national scheme as an overlay on the
BPR’s 26,700 mile proposal that he considered to be a “palliative for present
traffic ills rather than as a preventive for the future.” In determining the inter-
stices of the network, he first attempted to connect all the urban areas. When
the result was a very dense web of highways concentrated on the east coast,
he devised another triangulated grid of straight highways evenly distributed
across the entire country. The grid would pass very close to but not enter the
largest cities. Intersections in the resulting grid were subcenters that served
smaller metropolitan areas.20 Bel Geddes recognized the importance of traffic
loads coming from cities, but he did not necessarily wish to reinforce that
pattern. If anything, his national motorway plan favored the idea of building
highways on land that was less expensive and that would transport a popula-
tion away from the city into more open country. Bel Geddes’ prophesies often
aligned with Frank Lloyd Wright’s concerns about the use of open land for
new development patterns. Farms and towns like those in the Futurama
model would develop along transportation routes rather than in direct de-
pendence on the metropolis. The difference between Bel Geddes proposal and
What is inexcusable, it seems
to me, is that highway engi- the BPR’s transcity proposal was enormous, since Geddes’ grid would have
neers have, with magnificent established an entirely new network of urbanism and exchange, operating
fidelity repeated all the worst independent of urban areas (figure 2.1.5).
errors of the railroad era and, Though the highway was designed specifically for a single carrier and a
because of their public sup- limited range of speeds, it would eventually be routed in a way that max-
port, have widened their
imized its contact with the most intricate and complex networks in dense
scope. Instead of adding a
new element of flexibility and urban areas. The chief parameters for design of the interstate system would
breadth to a railroad system be vehicle populations and numbers of trips between cities. These statistical
that had become rigid in its studies reinforced easy, sure equations about the size and morphology of
concentration on interconti- highways as well as their financing. There would be no diverse set of urban
nental traffic and had pro- exchange points offering specialized or adaptable service and, while the
duced a linear distribution of
highway would actually follow the railroad into the city, it would remain seg-
population, the highway en-
gineers have largely been regated from it (figure 2.1.6).
duplicating the railroad sys- Helen Leavitt’s exposé of highway legislation, Superhighway-Superhoax
tem and—as in the New (1970) concludes with a story about President Eisenhower in a meeting with
2.1.5 1939 national motorway plan. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random
House, 1940), 278.
2.1.6 Cartoon with caption—“Nature’s Carpet” [city parkways] by John W. Morley. National Commit-
tee on the Housing Emergency, Inc., Tomorrow’s Town, June 1944, 1.
96

York and the Connecticut

|

highway engineers in 1959, three years after he had signed the interstate
2.1

throughways—have been sup- highway legislation. As he viewed plans for the local network in Washington,
planting it. Rejecting the op-
D.C., he was surprise to learn that interstate highways would go through ur-
portunity of enlarging the
scope of our public transpor- ban areas, since he had understood that they would go around urban centers.
tation system, our public He was distressed by the amount of automobile traffic entering the city as
authorities have been dis- well as the highway traffic he encountered when going outside of the city
mantling it; and in the very to play golf. Just a few years earlier in 1954, Eisenhower had proposed two
act of doing this, they are transcontinental highways, one going east-west from New York to Portland,
both undermining the city
Oregon, and another traveling north-south from the upper Mississippi to the
and degrading the country
side, and, not least, reducing Gulf. Ironically, Eisenhower’s proposal, though fairly late in the history of
our transportation facilities.22 highway developments, resembled in intent and character some of the earli-
—Lewis Mumford est efforts at building transcontinental highways and parkways.21

Notes
1. Lincoln Highway Association, The Lincoln Highway: The Story of a Crusade that Made
History (New York, Dodd, Mead and Company: 1935), 9; and Norman Bel Geddes,
Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940), 144.
2. Harley E. Jolley, The Blue Ridge Parkway (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee
Press, 1969), 15–18.
3. U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, “A Bill: For the utilization of the recre-
ational areas of the United States by a national parkway on a 200 foot right-of-way
connecting the national parks.” H. R. 9896. 73rd Congress, 2nd Session. Washing-
ton: U.S. Government Printing Office, 9 June 1934. The bill proposed that in the
East, a parkway would run from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Miami, Florida. In the West,
the parkway would connect Grand Canyon National Park, Boulder Dam, Yosemite,
and finally Mount Rainier National Park in Washington. In the North, the parkway
would connect Mount Rainier, Yellowstone, Grand Teton, Wind Cave National
Parks, the Great Lakes, Niagara Falls, the Mohawk Valley, and finally the Eastern
National Parkway. In the South, the Great Smoky Mountains would be linked to the
Grand Canyon National Park.
4. U.S. National Resources Board: District No. 1, New England Regional Planning
Commission. Boston to Washington Limited Motorway, preliminary report. Bos-
ton: New England Regional Planning Commission, 22 May 1935.
5. Benton MacKaye, “Flankline vs. Skyline,” Appalachia, 20 (1934): 104. MacKaye was
opposed to skyline drives, proposing instead that the highway occupy the “flankline”
and leave the crestline for exploring on foot.
6. Bel Geddes, 255–56, 145.
7. Warren H. Manning, “A National Plan Study Brief,” special supplement to Landscape
Architecture, vol. 13, no. 4, ( July 1923): 3, 4, 16–18. Manning included an alarming
remark in the article, saying, “. . . the United States is especially favored as a home
for the white race and for the development of its highest civilization.”
8. Ibid., 18, 17, plate after 16.
9. Benton MacKaye, “Motorway Legislation: Dual Transport vs. Monotransport,” of-
 97

fice memorandum to Tracy Augur, head planner, from Benton MacKaye, regional

|
planner, 19 February 1936, 9.

Redundancy and Interstice: Transcontinental and Intercity Networks

10. Benton MacKaye, “Cement Railroads,” The Survey 68 (1 November 1932): 541–542.
MacKaye was familiar with Manning’s proposals.
11. Ibid.
12. John Nolen and Henry V. Hubbard, Harvard City Planning Studies, Volume XI: Park-
ways and Land Values (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), xii, xi; U.S. Federal
Highway Administration, America’s Highways, 1776–1976 (Washington: Department
of Transportation, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), 133; and Parkways and
Land Values, 93, 72–100.
13. America’s Highways, 1776–1976, Rae, 79–81. The Saw Mill River Parkway (com-
pleted in 1930), the Hutchinson River (completed in 1928), and the Cross County
were characterized as recreational throughways and park connectors. They were
based on the Bronx River Parkway idea but were largely used by commuters. The
parkways were tied to several urban programs, but the parkways of Westchester Bos-
ton and Kansas City all followed natural features of the land. At the time in West-
chester, following the rivers generally also meant following existing lines of traffic
flow into and around the city.
14. U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Tolls Roads and Free Roads, 76th Congress, 1st session,
H. doc. no. 272, v. 20, 1939, 13, 44, 41, 33, 50–52.
15. Ibid., 121–22. In 1941, The Defense Highway Act increased state subsides for roads
connecting to wartime defense plants. The federal government stepped up its contri-
bution from 50 percent to 75 percent for this effort. Since defense justified increased
federal expenditures, this act set an important precedent. All ensuing legislation and
arguments for highways emphasized the highway as a defense asset. The interstate
was even discussed as a method of evacuating cities, though the common wisdom
was that it was not a network designed for heavy or variable urban traffic volume.
America’s Highways, 1776–1976, 467.
16. U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Tolls Roads and Free Roads, 90, 110, 111. Not only did
the report assert the need for this intercity network but it also proposed that this
kind of limited-access highway addressed central urban congestion. The report
praised the “bold” deployment of the idea in the New York City region with the
Henry Hudson Parkway and Merrit Parkways, and it called for new transcity arteries
as a means of replacing aging inner-city infrastructure.
17. President of the United States, Interregional Highways, 78th Congress, 2d session, H.
doc. no. 379. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944, 4.
18. Ibid., passim.
19. U.S. Bureau of Public Roads, Tolls Roads and Free Roads, 121–22; and President of the
United States, Interregional Highways, 64 and plates VII, X.
20. Bel Geddes, 257, 278, 81, 275–78.
21. Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax, 298–99, 29.
22. Lewis Mumford, “On Freedom, Freeways and Flexibility: The Private Correspon-
dence of Messrs Wolfe and Mumford,” JAIA, 1959, 74–77.
2.2 S W I T C H : T E R M I N A L ,
INTERCHANGE, VEHICLE

During the interstate’s many design deliberations, federal traffic engineers

and other transportation experts continually emphasized the importance of
terminals and points of interchange between air, rail, surface, and water
routes as among the most critical sites in the new limited-access highway
network. Despite all the careful and controversial planning of the highway,
however, federal agencies did not conduct sustained research concerning the
effects of this long-distance system on the urban fabric before the interstate
was built. Outside of the federal bureaucracy, however, municipal authorities,
railroads, electronics companies, independent designers, and even automobile
companies proposed intermodal inventions for interchanges, terminals, and
specialized vehicles that would act as switching mechanisms for exchange
between carriers and networks. Some were mechanical, and some were elec-
tronic. Unlike a binary switch with two positions, however, most of these
transportation switches were like a differential, designed to perform a more
continuous operation of translation to regulate or modulate the organization
over a period of time. Some were located at the intersections of various
networks and others operated as distributed agents or vehicles within the
network.

Te r m i n a ls
When federal agencies or Washington think tanks recommended urban high-
way terminals, which—like railroad terminals—would store vehicles and
transfer freight or passengers to other carriers, there were few precedents to
which they could refer. Throughout his career, in and out of government,
Wilfred Owen was among those who wrote, in the voice of the Washington-
trained policy technician, about the need for consolidated urban and regional
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transportation authorities as well as bus, truck, and automobile terminals.1 In

Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle

writings for the NRPB or the Brookings Institution, Owen studied a range of
intermodal issues from terminal logistics and economics to new transporta-
tion gadgetry like carveyors, moving sidewalks, and convertiplanes.2 He ap-
plauded New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal that integrated expressway,
bus, and parking facilities. The Port Authority’s Union Motor Terminal, be-
tween the Holland Tunnel and Hudson River, piers was also a complete facility
for freight transfer from large to small carriers with specialized equipment,
mechanical conveyance, truck repair, and parking as well as areas to accom-
modate business functions and traveling truckers. Another Port Authority
terminal, the Union Inland Terminal, was essentially a vertical loading dock
inside a block-sized commercial loft building. With giant truck elevators, it
collapsed storage, business, and delivery functions into a single intermodal
structure. Entrepreneurs and municipal authorities in other large cities also
attempted individual experiments like those in the New York metropolitan
area.3 Interregional Highways has sometimes been considered one of the bet-
ter federal highway planning documents because it discussed, even if in a
limited way, the need for terminals, parking structures, and circumferential
transfer points.4 The committee recommended consolidating infrastructure
networks, specifically rail and highway lines, and it cited two examples of
infrastructure stacking in New York City—the Henry Hudson Parkway and the
East River Drive.5
In 1946 industrial designer, Egmont Arens, designed a series of terminal
facilities that he called the “Manhattan Inner-Loop Skyway.” Arens was
among a generation of industrial designers that included Norman Bel Geddes,
Raymond Loewy, and Donald Desky who would be fascinated with vehicles,
from automobiles to space capsules. Though futuristic vehicle designs often
satisfied the desire for transportation innovations. Arens project proposed to
reorganize the city’s highway networks, and with typical planning brarado, it
also claimed to both traffic congestion and housing shortages. An elevated
arterial roadway would provide a continuous loop of terminal facilities “for
every type of vehicle, including several decks of parking space, bus termi-
nals, mail freight, and package sorting stations” as well as interurban bus
connections, airport links, and helicopter transportation. Towers rising above
the arterial would maximize “housing cubage.” The loop would simply sub-
tract existing urban fabric in its path. Only modern buildings would be “left
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standing.” On-street parking would be replaced by parking garages. The entire

2.2

system would link up to Moses plans for elevated crosstown arterials, like
the proposed Mid-Manhattan Expressway. Arens also optimistically predicted
that the entire loop could be traveled in sixteen minutes.6
Interstate legislation sanctioned the use of not only air rights but also
the area below the highway for parking or other public programs. This feature
might have been used to pursue peripheral parking facilities, stacking of vari-
ous transportation modalities, or specialized switch buildings for exchange
of passengers and freight, but in most official planning reports, air rights
were treated as stand-ins for real considerations regarding the highway in
urban fabric. When faced with the argument that highway funds robbed
money from other urgently needed urban programs like housing, public ad-
ministrators often offered air rights as a possible consolation site for housing
or as a bargaining chip in relocating housing that was to be pulled down for
highway building.7
Just as the interstate was being legislated in the 1950s, reinforcing the
dominance of wheeled vehicles among all carriers, railroads and automobile
companies were beginning to experiment in earnest with intermodality. The
federal government freely subsidized the automobile and trucking industries
while curbing the power of the railroad through regulation of its sometimes
corruptible practices. This combination of policies exacerbated the segrega-
tion between highway and rail companies. Railroads and truckers were often
wary of each other and not always enthusiastic about adopting intermodal
plans. Many carriers continued to experiment within existing ports, ware-
houses, and terminals, however, to facilitate freight exchanges between
trucks and railroad cars since often a mixture of train, truck, and ship travel
was the most efficient means of conveying freight. Even automobile compa-
nies understood the power of controlling the switches in transportation
systems.8
Like contemporary battles over software platforms, from the 1920s on,
a number of competing intermodal inventions were introduced, each vying
to be the dominant platform. Most were inspired by eccentric situations that
invited some cross-reference between different transportation protocols. For
instance, some railroads provided a “piggyback” service where truck trailers
could be transported on flat cars, and the piggyback idea was often called
“circus loading” because it borrowed a technique that had been used in load-
ing circus wagons onto flatcars. A few railroad executives also had experience
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Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle
2.2.1 Intermodal arrangement designed by General Motors in 1953. David DeBoer, Piggyback and
Containers (San Marino, California: Golden West Books, 1992), 30. Illustration from GM Rail-
Highway Coordination booklet.

in both the automobile and railroad business, and to them the intermodal
puzzle was particularly compelling since trucking was taking over a growing
percentage of their business. In 1953, even General Motors Electro-Motive
Division engineered equipment and designed a loading protocol for piggy-
back trailers that would allow them to be driven onto the flatcar by truck,
unleashed and secured for travel (figure 2.2.1). Each gadget, machine, or cou-
pling entered the market place with optimistic claims of fitness and usually
an enthusiastic name, such as Adapto, Minipiggi, Flexi-van or Trailer Train.
There were also several ways in which either the truckers or the railroad could
legally provide the service of truck-trailer transport. Either company could
broker the shipment and provide the equipment, or a third party, based in the
terminal, could handle any portion of the shipping transfer. As inventions and
protocols proliferated however, and no standard emerged from the lengthy
trial-and-error process terminals were often outfitted with incompatible
couplings and equipment for piggyback service.9
As early as the 1920s and 1930s, railroads provided a container service
for freight that occupied less than a train-car load and even developed mech-
anized terminals to hoist the containers onto trucks. In the mid 1950s, the
container idea resurfaced not as the small stackable box of previous years
but as a truck trailer without wheels. Container handling required terminal
mechanization of some kind, however, and the closest thing to a standard in
most ports or terminals was still the truck trailer with its wheels in place. As
102
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terminals began to mechanize in the 1960s and 1970s, several different types
2.2

of cranes and hoists were used for fitting either trailers or containers onto
flatcars. With some guidance from the federal government, many of the
competing formats gave way to con-tainer shipment during the 1970s.
Mechanized terminals handling double-stacked containers provided a truly
competitive alternative to long-haul trucking. In the 1980s various carriers
not only consolidated within their own ranks but also merged with other
carriers. In the same way that computer companies have merged with compa-
nies providing television and internet services, rail, truck, and steamship
merged and created their own intermodal terminals and cross-formats.10
One idea for terminal switching, which—like Aren’s proposal—included
not only freight but passenger exchange, came from Lawrence Halprin, an
architect, planner and Washington consultant during the 1960s and 1970s.
Halprin called for “multiple use of the highway corridor both vertically and
horizontally. . . .” His “traffic architecture,” as he called it, proposed new sec-
tions for stacking and condensing highways, transit, and other programs in
the urban fabric. Outside the city, Halprin proposed selective land acquisition
of parcels adjacent to the highway as a means of gaining additional revenues
and thus leveraging renovations to the system.11 In Freeways, one of Halprin’s
several books about highways, he featured a photomontage design by Geof-
frey Jellicoe for the Ponte Vecchio in Florence that proposed to condense
traffic, hotels, entertainment, and sports facilities in one building envelope.
Halprin’s traffic architecture also appeared to reference Jellicoe’s Motopia, a
projected city that merged automobile circulation with other conglomerate
programs into a giant grid of richly sectioned megastructures and rooftop
roadways.12

I n t e rc h a n g e s
Prior to the design of the interstate, several designers of the period consid-
ered traffic engineering to be within their purview and developed new types
of highway interchanges for exurban highway junctions. Most highway inter-
changes systems, like the “T” crossing and the cloverleaf, were designed to
provide uninterrupted speed and increased safety through simple grade sepa-
rations and entry ramps. In 1935, landscape architect Charles Downing Lay
proposed an unusual merger of highway interchange and community. In Lay’s
formulations, the limited-access highway was a protocol for recombining
new and old roadways as well as a means of appropriating land for different
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kinds of development. Given several separated lanes of traffic, directions

Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle

could be assigned to each lane on an alternating basis according to traffic
flow. Through independent alignments and the possible divergence of the
two roadways, Lay also proposed to incorporate existing roadways and create
parks within the irregular spaces between them. Exurban communities might
also be sited between separated roadways that were approximately a mile
apart. The roadways would meet again for important bridges or intersections.
The several hundred feet insulating the roadway would provide a kind of
greenbelt around the small community, and routing the highway away from
urban areas thus reduced land acquisition costs.13 Frank Lloyd Wright also
designed interchanges within the context of Broadacre City designs, and like
most interchanges, his designs provided continuous movement through grade
separations. Wright’s interchange was a monolithic landscaped structure,
however, bermed into the ground by its underpass and designed to include a
partially covered walkway so that it provided its own spatial enclosures rather
than merely a crossing between two highways.14 Though the typical cloverleaf
radius was 75 feet, the Bel Geddes interchange featured in the 1939 Futu-
rama exhibit allowed each lane to thread its way through the crossing around
a 1,000 foot radius without reducing speeds. Multidecking at large intersec-
tions would further relieve congestion. Borrowing operatives from both the
railroad and the airport, Bel Geddes also proposed that overpass bridges
broadcast electronic radio controls to dispatch cars and monitor speeds. The
roadway would also be redesigned so that the control strip and lighting
source would run under the center-line of the automobile. While in the 1960s
there was interest in America in buildings accommodating highways, vehicles,
and conglomerate programs, there was perhaps nothing that displayed an
overt interest in exurban interchange design, and very little work addressed
urban interchanges as directly as did the proposals of, for instance Brian Rich-
ards and Warren Chalk in Britain with their 1966 design of a superstructure
to handle exchanges between four transportation systems. Switching intelli-
gence became less important than optimizing larger networks of movement
(figures 2.2.2 and 2.2.3).15

C o n v e r t i b l e V e h i c l e s a n d A u t o m a t i c S ys t e m s
Many speculations about intermodality would eventually reside in the car
itself as a convertible object. Wright was one of the few architects to make
spatial relationships of community at least somewhat dependent on the
2.2.2 Scheme for housing communities built between roadways of a limited access highway.
Charles Dowing Lay, “New Town for High Speed Road,” Landscape Architect (November 1935):353.
2.2.3 Control bridge: Future motorway style. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York:
Random House, 1940), 81.
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convertibility of the vehicle. With the autogyro, the vehicle itself provided an

Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle

intermodal switch by adapting to short and long-distance travel. By the late
1930s and early 1940s, science fiction designs for futuristic vehicles crossed
the car with airplanes, trains, and rockets. In 1944, in his regular radio ad-
dress, “As ‘Ket’ Sees It,” General Motors President C. F. Kettering, assessing the
many magazine illustrations of “your car of tomorrow” that appeared during
the war years, said, “Some of the cars they show have transparent, plastic
tops, and bodies shaped like an egg. Others have detachable helicopter blades
or wings so that you can drive through Main Street traffic like an ordinary
car. When you get home you simply snap on the wings or blades. Then you
travel through the air to lake or seashore for the weekend. These ‘dream cars’
or ‘magic carpets’ capture the fancy of everyone.” 16 When individual vehicle
production could not support these more extreme forms of convertibility,
rocketship and airplane hybrids would only be evidenced in the car’s aerody-
namic styling, thus substituting futuristic imagery and vestigial details for
intelligence and complexity in the system.
In the end, the typical car was not very convertible or amphibious. It did
not fly, swim, or attach itself to radio controlled tracks. Bel Geddes’ vision of
an automated highway, however, remained an ongoing quest among trans-
portation researchers. Radio, radar, and other electronic devices were primar-
ily used in piecemeal ways by law enforcement and for traffic engineering
studies. Publications like Science Digest projected the expanded use of these
devices to create the “car that drives itself,” and in the 1950s General Motors
developed the “Autoline” prototype for electronically controlled vehicles and
tracks not unlike those of the Futurama exhibit. Communications companies
like RCA and Philco also researched the concept.17
Although early twentieth-century transportation research focused on
replacing mass transit with individually controlled vehicles, from the 1950s
through the 1970s, both public and private research often focused on either
new forms of mass transit or dual-mode, personal transit vehicles that hy-
bridized automobile and mass-transit vehicles, thus providing not only fixed
stops within the city but also individual destinations outside the city. For
instance, an automatic skybus or monorail might follow standard routes
through the city and then enter a more finely grained network of roadways.
Some of these proposals involved an entirely new physical infrastructure
while others devised some kind of adaptive mechanism for the car, allowing
it to attach to a roadway control track. Most of the control tracks involved
106
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some kind of guideway to propel the car’s wheels or lock into its chassis while
2.2

others proposed undercarriage pallets or roof-mounted systems. Among

these prototypes were the Commucar, the Glideway, the StaRRcar, the Ur-
mobile (Cornell Aeronautical Laboratories), the PAT or Palletted Automated
Transport System, and the Mustang (Ford Motor Company).18 Other dual-
mode systems proposed that the individual car might be conveyed by mass-
transit tracks. For instance, one project for a pneumatic system provided
automobile adapters onto which one’s vehicle could ride piggyback. This as-
semblage would be propelled on a cushion of air over a double-track system
and switched at particular stops.19
Though the automatic vehicle might only be desirable for long trips, it
was only financially feasible in congested areas. In America in the 1970s,
research continued on a dual-mode transport system for repetitive commuter
trips in large cities. Congress also heard testimony about the Aramis project
in France. For twenty years, this project attempted to develop a mass-transit
system of autolike vehicles that would follow tracks but split off to deliver
individual passengers to their destinations. Though most of these proposals
ran into insurmountable problems, the idea appeared to present such a tanta-
lizing possibility to academic researchers, automobile companies, aeronauti-
cal companies, and governments both in America and abroad that all of them
continued to fund projects for dual-mode vehicles (figure 2.2.4).20

S y s t e ms A n a l y si s
Highway planners of the 1960s and 1970s used computers to study as well as
to automate transportation systems. They were also using systems analysis and
abstract biological metaphors similar to those of the cyberneticists to make
projections about the future organization of the city and its infrastructure.21
For instance, in 1966, Scientific American featured an article on systems
analysis of urban transportation published by a research group working from
a federally funded Housing and Urban Development study contract. The
group built mathematical computer models for several cities and used them
to study different approaches to renovating urban transportation problems.
As the quintessential planning committee, the research group was composed
of a “large team of specialists: engineers, city planners, mathematicians, soci-
ologists, economists, and computer programmers.” They set out to test the
effectiveness of either making piecemeal adjustments to the transportation
system or replacing it with new personal transit systems. Perhaps not surpris-
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Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle
2.2.4 Dual-mode tracked air cushion vehicles Francois Giraud, “Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles,” High-
Speed Ground Transportation; Proceedings (Pittsburgh: Transportation Research Institute,
Carnegie-Mellon University, 1969), 26.

ingly, when the eager scientists and planners loaded in the data for a new
transit system with all-new personal transportation “capsules,” it performed
significantly better than the piecemeal approach. The report also concluded
that replacing all the infrastructure of the various cities modeled would even
be cheaper than attempting to gradually improve existing ones. No personal
transportation systems had been successfully built, but the group saw no rea-
son to think that the technology would not soon be perfected.
Whereas dual-mode mass transit systems usually encountered difficulty
in accommodating a large volume of destinations, more recent pilot projects
have targeted commuters as a traffic population that not only travels a clear
and repetitive route but is also responsible for a great deal of urban conges-
tion. Several new plans have suggested that a commuter lane, not unlike the
carpool lane, be devoted to automated systems if either the vehicle or the
lane was equipped with special infrastructure. A “free-agent” computerized
vehicle could presumably sense obstacles, regulate the speed and route, and
108
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even mix with other kinds of traffic. Gathering the cars in groups or platoons
2.2

would offer the added advantage of increasing the capacity of the highway.
Options for these infrastructure additions might include magnetized road-
ways, transition ramps, barriers, control towers, and holding areas for cars
whose drivers have exited the automated portion but have either fallen
asleep or are not prepared to regain control of the vehicle. Highway interests
have always been good at organizing themselves and sponsoring research
efforts. The National Automated Highway System Consortium (NAHSC) has
already tested demonstration projects in the field. Many ideas about auto-
mated controls are already being rehearsed not only in pilot projects but in
new automobile gadgetry involving both digital and radar equipment, such
as cruise control, global positioning systems (GPS), and collision alerting sys-
tems, all of which relinquish some control over the vehicle while also enhanc-
ing its performance.22 Some navigational systems, like the ADVANCE system
tested in the Chicago area, simply provide information about traffic patterns
and congestion along commuter routes so that drivers may respond more
intelligently.23
Supported by increased computing power, late twentieth-century com-
plexity theorists have continued the work of midcentury systems analysts,
and both groups have demonstrated the inadequacy of the BPR’s statistical
method of traffic analysis. Most of these efforts have involved simulation
models that with some accuracy replay traffic patterns in major urban areas
and potentially uncover relationships useful to highway planning as well as
efforts to program automated vehicles. The experiments have often posi-
tioned the vehicle as itself a switch multiplied within a population of
switches, and the enthusiastic promotion of these studies has often appeared
to be motivated by the desire for the discovery of some kind of recursive or
comprehensive structure in complex traffic organizations.24
Meanwhile, planners like Lawrence Halprin were alienated from the giant
bureaucratic processes that continued to produce traffic-engineered high-
ways. Halprin regarded himself as an enlightened, artistic planner who
worked within the complexities of many social and cultural patterns, unlike
the traffic engineers, who he called “boors.” Traffic engineers were not famil-
iar with sophisticated sociological and anthropological studies as he was, and
they could not describe the city as a matrix of organic or holistic growth
patterns. Halprin too indulged in the prevailing sentiments surrounding the
“systems approach.” He used systems’ jargon to discuss “technological fore-
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casting” or the probable propagation and diffusion of technological advances The field of electromagnetic

Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle

in highway design, and he was interested in the power of computers to per- emanations, which cover a
form various highway computations.25 Countering the tendency to eliminate very wide field of electric-
wave impulses, is probably the
or replace transportation networks in favor of the dominance of either rail-
best adapted to the control of
road or automobile traffic, Halprin was interested in multiplying transporta- traffic. It is conceivable that a
tion modes and wrote about hydrofoils, electric cabs, monorails, and even control operating directly—as
funiculars not simply with a futuristic enthusiasm for motion and gadgetry a radio beam, broadcast from
but a sense of the need to diversify transportation modes to achieve a better stations located along the
fit.26 He also called for electronically controlled roadways and long-distance highway—could provide the
control desired. . . . At regular
vehicles that would move by jet tube or jet rail. He projected that “individual
intervals along the motorway
auto units” might be “fitted together for express transportation or for long- there are traffic control sta-
distance move-ment within a larger transportation shell or wheeled carrier.” tions. These may be located
“Mandatory force fields” preventing impacts between cars as well as the re- about five miles apart. The of-
routing and separation of freight and urban traffic were among his other ficers in each tower have
recommendations for automated highways.27 complete authority over the
section of road two and a half
Even though Halprin may have been alienated from the traffic engineers,
miles on either side of the.
his planning methods resembled those of the technical planners in their reli- From their vantage point they
ance on data collection and direction from Washington. To some extent, his can see the traffic flowing
writings blended with the large volume of planning documents from this pe- past them, and with their in-
riod that attempted holistic reorganization of transportation networks and struments they can com-
were often illustrated with fountains, “participatory plazas,” sunny parks on municate with any car in
the territory under their
top of urban garages, and stacked roadways running within the sections of
jurisdiction.29
skyscrapers, all surrounded by rapidograph vegetation and lit by a rapi- —Norman Bel Geddes
dograph soleil.28

Notes
1. Wilfred Owen in U.S. National Resources Planning Board, Transportation and Na-
tional Policy (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, May 1942), 384, 399;
Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway Politics 1941–1956 (Lawrence: Regents
Press of Kansas, 1979), 18.
2. Charles L. Dearing and Wilfred Owen, National Transportation Policy (Washington,
D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1949), 351–378, 305–315; and Wilfred Owen, The Met-
ropolitan Transportation Problem (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1956), 134, 116,
156–164, 247, 22.
3. The Port of New York Authority, New York Union Motor Truck Terminal: A Complete
Service for the Handling of Over-the-Road Common Carrier Freight (New York: The
Port of New York Authority, 1949).
4. President of the United States, Interregional Highways, 78th Congress, 2d session
House document no. 379 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1944),
64 and plates VII, X.
5. Ibid., 66, 67–69, 76–77. The 1944 Federal-Aid Highway Act called for the design of
110

an interstate highway system of 40,000 miles. The recommendations of the Interre-

|

gional Highway Committee would not be part of this legislation. Parking lots and
2.2

wide rights-of-way were less important than the simple promise of roads and the
jobs that accompanied their construction. Mark H. Rose, Interstate: Express Highway
Politics 1941–1956 (Lawrence: Regents Press of Kansas, 1979), 27; Leavitt, 26.
6. Egmont Arens, “Design for a New Skyway,” New York Times Magazine (13 January
1946), 18–19.
7. Helen Leavitt, Superhighway-Superhoax (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1970), 59–
60, 106.
8. David DeBoer, Piggyback and Containers (San Marino, California: Golden West
Books, 1992), passim.
9. Ibid., 11, 28, 33–41.
10. Ibid., 56, 64, 72, 177.
11. U.S. Urban Advisors to the Federal Highway Administrator, The Freeway in the City:
Principles of Planning and Design, A report to the secretary, Department of Transpor-
tation (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968), 81; and Lawrence
Halprin, Freeways (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1966), 113–148, 95,
101, 202–203.
12. Geoffrey Jellicoe, Motopia: A Study in the Evolution of Urban Landscape (New York:
Praeger, 1961). Both federally and privately funded research teams worked on simi-
lar sectional stacking systems. The Romulus project, for instance, conducted by an
MIT research team worked on a variety of networks and sectional building struc-
tures to accommodate multiple carriers and programs. MIT research team, “Project
Romulus, team concepts for urban highways and urban design; 6 reports,” Washing-
ton: Highway Research Board, National Research Council, 1968, 29–47.
13. Charles Downing Lay, “New Town for High Speed Road,” Landscape Architect (No-
vember 1935), 351–353.
14. Frank Lloyd Wright, The Living City (New York: Horizon Press, 1958), 126–129.
15. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940), 96–99,
121; and Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, (Garden City: Anchor
Press), 1973, 336.
16. Charles F. Kettering, As “Ket” Sees It: A Series of Radio Talks by C. F. Kettering of Gen-
eral Motors (Detroit: General Motors Corporation, January 16, 1944), New York
Public Library.
17. “Electronic Highway of the Future,” Science Digest, 46 (October 1959):32–5;
“Automobiles that Drive Themselves,” Dwight Baumann, “Dual-Mode Systems,”
Carnegie-Mellon Conference on Advanced Urban Transportation Systems, Pitts-
burgh National Technical Information Service 1970, 23–31.
18. Dwight Baumann, “Dual-Mode Systems,” Carnegie-Mellon Conference, 23–31.
19. Francois Giraud, “Tracked Air Cushion Vehicles,” Carnegie-Mellon Conference on
High Speed Ground Transportation (Pittsburgh: Transportation Research Institute,
Camegie-Mellon University, 1969).
20. Bruno Latour, Aramis of the Love of Technology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1996). Latour’s book is a “science fiction” novel about the desire for an
impossible emblem of modernity.
21. Even Lewis Mumford used systems jargon when speaking to the Senate Subcommit-
tee on Executive Reorganization in 1967, he said “Unfortunately, your predecessors
in the Congress developed an almost pathological fear of planning, and hated the
very word; though no great enterprise of any kind, as A. T. and T. or General Electric
or Dupont would tell you, can be carried on without long-term planning of the
most detailed sort, carefully coordinated, and constantly corrected in the light of
 111

new conditions and fresh appraisals—what is now, in the jargon of the computer

|
specialists, called ‘feedback’.” April 21, 1967, 1, 8. MacKaye papers, Dartmouth Col-

Switch: Terminal, Interchange, Vehicle

lege Library, manuscript copy.
22. James H. Rillings, “Automated Highways,” Scientific American (October 1997), 81–85.
23. “Let Your Car Do the Driving,” Edge City News (April, 1994), 1.
24. Kenneth R. Howard, “Unjamming Traffic with Computers,” Scientific American (Oc-
tober, 1997), 86–88.
25. Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks 1959–1971 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972) 265,
157, 155. U.S. Urban Advisors to the Federal Highway Administrator. The Freeway
in the City, 124, 126.
26. Halprin, Freeways, 149–154.
27. U.S. urban advisors to the federal highway administrator, 125, 126.
28. Halprin also dealt with what he called “microinfrastructure” which he identified as
the spaces of public amenities, or the “spaces between buildings.” But he often dis-
cussed the adjustment of these spaces in cosmetic terms, speaking of, for instance,
“revitalized” or “participatory plazas and fountains linked by pedestrian malls.” Law-
rence Halprin, “Landscape as Matrix,” Ekistics 191 (October 1971):290, 291.
29. Norman Bel Geddes, Magic Motorways (New York: Random House, 1940), 74–76.
2.3 P A R A L L E L N E T W O R K S : R O A D S I D E S

By the 1960s, segments of the interstate highway had been completed all
across America through many different regions and terrains. Eventually, the
over 40,000 miles of four-lane highways would be approximately 150 feet
wide including shoulders. They would consume forty-two acres for every mile
they traversed and cover 1.5 million acres of land.1 The highways were unfa-
miliar as a public utility. The right-of-way was a neutralized version of the
more varied surrounding landscapes. It was not property, and it was neither
cultivated nor preserved. Consequently it was perceived as a kind of nonsite
or a site that was fused to the roadway as a consequence of traffic engi-
neering. Not only were the intersections of the highway network determined
by vehicle populations, but the actual contours of the highway were also
shaped by a cone of vision originating inside a moving vehicle. By altering the
legal-mathematical topography, however, some proposals intended to create
from this right-of-way a parallel network that would add diversity and intelli-
gence to the entire organization.

Highway Beautiful
When critics, practitioners, and the photographers ventured out to the high-
way landscape in the 1960s, they returned with uneasy images of this new
form, which now no longer part of a model or a rendering, was standing in
the naked sun. Commentary and photography usually focused on the visual
attributes of the scene, either declaring it “ugly” or aestheticizing its as an
engineered object.
In a sense, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s
Landscape (1963) by Peter Blake was a late entry in a series of midcentury
critiques, including John Keats’ Crack in the Picture Window, (1957), William
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Whyte’s Organization Man (1952), and other sociological and/or journalistic

Parallel Networks: Roadsides

exposés of the horrors of the growing suburban landscape. Typically, the
critic, somewhat restrained by good breeding and a prestigious position in
the New York publishing world, took a soul-searching look at group behavior
in the postwar period and raised a hue and cry about a cultural conspiracy
of bad taste played out in the landscape of houses and highways outside the
city. The photography in God’s Own Junkyard appeared almost to stare at the
highway as an abstracted and not entirely comprehensible organization. The
car and the house, which shared a similar means of production, were com-
pared in low aerial photography as repeatable, identical units lined up in
parking lots or subdivision streets. The sites were portrayed as vacant, in a
way that inspired angst rather than invention. The right-of-way, perceived as
an unidentifiable nonplace or negative space, was a place to dispose of litter
or even entire cars. In fact, the metallic buildup of junk cars and car scraps
was perhaps the single-most horrifying detail to the esthetes who visited
this landscape during the 1960s, and their prescription usually involved the
screening of this ugliness through beautification efforts.2
Man-Made America: Chaos or Control? (1963) by Christopher Tunnard
and Boris Pushkarev or A View from the Road (1964) by Donald Appleyard
pursued a somewhat more detailed analysis of the changing visual perspec-
tive from a moving automobile by identifying a new spatial order and formal-
ism to accompany this visual experience. Man-Made America celebrated the
new engineered forms and design parameters that shaped these landscapes.
Tunnard and Pushkarev examined the visual experience of driving on a
straight versus a curving road for attention span and safety, and they specu-
lated about the composition of building in relation to movement along the
highway. The book even included a supposedly serious analysis of how the
identical rows of suburban houses might be relieved of monotony by varying
the setback of the houses. Since the roadside was understood visually from a
viewpoint inside a car, cosmetic ideas of planting vegetation along the road-
side or punctuating a visual experience with carefully placed stands of trees
or shrubs continued to be an acceptable response.3
When President Lyndon Johnson took office in Washington in 1963, the
interstate was growing, adding significantly to its projected 42,500 miles and
billions of dollars to its original estimate of $27 billion. His wife, Lady Bird
Johnson, had trained herself to be a powerful and amiable mascot for his
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administration, and her “women doer” luncheons entertained presentations

2.3

about the national parks and interstate highways as well as urban theorists
like Jane Jacobs. Highways became a major focus of the first lady’s beautifi-
cation program and the president’s task force on natural beauty. She is often
best remembered for her program to plant wildflowers by the roadside, an
approach that would appear to be largely cosmetic. She was interested, how-
ever, in graphically depicting the roadside as a meaningful site, one that was
neither vacant nor neutral but rather offered diverse soils and climates, as
evidenced by wildflowers particular to each region.
Mrs. Johnson’s position about beautification was somewhat contradic-
tory since she expressed great pleasure over attractive visual arrangements,
but she also felt strongly that the word “beauty” was inadequate to describe
her interests and made the beautification program an easy target for de-
tractors. Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson joked about their use of the word
“beauty” since it was often associated with garden clubs or treated as an
anachronistic holdover from the turn-of-century days of civic beautification.
Lady Bird described herself as a “born housekeeper,” a comment that for many
might confirm the weakness of her position, but which probably better re-
flected her understanding of interplay among different species of informa-
tion. She had managed households, businesses, the White House, and even
some of her husbands political chores. However naive in its specifics, her un-
derstanding of land management as a complex of problems addressed by a
diverse and interdependent economy of solutions was what distinguished
Mrs. Johnson’s approach. She once said that she wanted to move from the
“garden club to the hardware stage of the problem.” 4 Still, the beautification
movement was split between attempts to beautify with landscaping and
plantings and attempts to deal with the real mechanisms of inner-city blight,
or the larger organizations of national land holdings and parks. The beautifi-
cation movement was perhaps better understood as a persuasion that gently
aroused consciousness about issues ranging from land preservation and envi-
ronment to urban decay and, in doing so, identified sites like the roadside
right-of-way.

Scenic Roads
President Johnson’s Highway Beautification Act called for the development
of “scenic” roads and parkways, and one federal publication, A Proposed Pro-
gram for Scenic Roads and Parkways, prepared in support of the legislation
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was a remarkable artifact of this science of scenic highway design—a hybrid

Parallel Networks: Roadsides

of traffic engineering and landscape design. The report emphasized fictions
about the psychological well-being associated with driving from sea to shin-
ing sea, and it expressed the ambient sentiment that Americans had a right
to more “elbow room.” To ensure that Congress would take up its responsibility
to provide this increased freedom however, the report also advanced parallel
motives associated with defense evacuations and increased revenues from
tourism.5
Although the scenic highway would supposedly accept variety and cir-
cumstance from the terrain through which it passed, the recommendations
were nevertheless born of the systemic science of highway engineering. As
portrayed in the report, traffic engineering was itself a kind of new nature, a
natural-mathematical topography composed of contours associated with
speed and vision in motion.6 And when the curvatures of traffic movement
were coincident with the natural topography, (making dynamite unnecessary)
“environmental highway engineering” congratulated itself for its appropri-
ateness and even claimed to make scenery possible. Highways created “antici-
pation” and visually enhanced the natural beauty of the scenery. They offered
“drama” by framing nature for the automobile viewing excursion. Highway
designers could sculpt a “curvilinear alignment that harmoniously integrated
the road into its environment without unsightly scars and relieved the driver
of monotony and dullness so that he can enjoy a ‘driving for pleasure’ experi-
ence.” If properly designed, the various views from scenic overlooks would
present a series of boiled-down regional highlights and the report’s illustra-
tions supported a vision of this roadside landscape as one that was filled with
photo opportunities (figure 2.3.1).7

L e g a l To p o g ra p h y
Although most discussions of the highway landscape treated the roadway
and the right-of-way as a single site, some considered the right-of-way to
be a separate site with a separate jurisdictional and legal framework. While
the scenic roads were shaped by visual parameters and driving dynamics, their
larger rights-of-way also allowed them to be a mechanism of land acquisition
and land linkage. Private lands and recreational activities, golf courses, farms,
ranches, wooded areas, and resorts could all be gathered along the length
of a road.8 William Whyte’s The Last Landscape (1968) resembled both the
midcentury aesthetic critiques of the suburban landscape as well those of
2.3.1 Illustrations from A proposed program for scenic roads and parkways. (a) “Determine the
‘Scenic’, Then locate the road,” (b) “Illustration showing how screens of vegetation block views of
“objectionable landscape features.” U.S. Department of Commerce, President’s Council on Recre-
ation and Natural Beauty, A Proposed Program for Scenic Roads and Parkways (Washington,
D.C., U.S. Government Printing Office, June 1966), 56, 43.
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the environmental movement and its growing sense of crisis. Whyte took

Parallel Networks: Roadsides

an almost proprietary view of the roadside landscape, finding ways to claim
perceptual and legal ownership of the land between and at the edges of de-
velopments in a way that blended public and private mechanisms and en-
gaged the highway in other cultural activities. He studied the long-standing
practice of acquiring highway easements for the parkways of metropolitan
Boston or the national parkways like the Blue Ridge and the Natchez Trace,
and he outlined a constellation of political, legal, financial, and aesthetic op-
portunities for doing so.9 One of Whyte’s ideas, one echoed by the govern-
ment’s proposal for scenic highways, involved the leasing of land to farmers
and conversion of farm land for recreational use. He also proposed innovative
ways to incorporate farm land and reforestation into this view corridor.
The two essential relationships in Whyte’s writings were linearity and
linkage. Given that linear land formations had an increased surface area, lin-
ear preserves had not only the greatest capacity for contacting a population
but also the greatest capacity for linkage. “By linking open spaces . . . we can
achieve a whole that is better than the sum of the parts.” 10 These essential Getting on the subject of
relationships of linearity and linkage led Whyte to envision the potential for beautification is like picking
land conservation along linear formations like transportation corridors. He up a tangled skein of wool: all
outlined contemporary efforts to establish corridors of preserved space along the threads are interwoven . . .
existing lines within the landscape. With a kind of ecostyle appreciation of recreation and pollution and
mental health, and the crime
trails, cycling, and horse-back riding, Whyte also reviewed the contemporary
rate, and rapid transit, and
efforts to form networks of greenways along various kinds of existing linear highway beautification, and
formations such as transportation and utility easements. Perhaps most fun- the war on poverty and parks—
damental was his identification of a line of action within the land, like a linear national, state, and local. It is
path of water, as the defining factor of such a network.11 hard to hitch the conversation
Though Whyte identified a variety of highway sites with physical, legal, into one straight line, because
everything leads to some-
and virtual components, the ideas that survive from his recommendations
thing else.17
have largely supported the goals of environmentalists and preservationists as —Lady Bird Johnson
cautions against wasting or abusing land.12 Throughout most of these high-
way proposals, the perception of the roadside as a visual and commercial site Sheep can still help. Quite
or as a site that was fused to the highway as right-of-way still appeared to aside from the pastoral touch
obstruct the promise of a potentially more diversified designation of site they add, they are very effi-
cient groundskeepers and
within the easement and right-of-way. Whyte did not share MacKaye’s out-
have done an excellent job in
doorsy enthusiasm for leaping from the car and trekking through roadside many parks. A government
land preserves. He stayed inside the car and maintained a kind of preserva- aided program to put them to
tionist attitude that kept the working landscape at arms length. Like his work on landscapes could
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prove quite economic. On a contemporaries Tunnard and Pushkarev and other critics, Whyte was inter-
2.3

rotation basis, one flock could ested in relieving monotony. Curving roads, Tunnard and Pushkarev had re-
graze a very considerable area, ported, were not only more pleasant but also had lower fatality rates.
and as with mowing machin-
Plantings could make a view corridor and even help to control traffic speeds.
ery the costs might be more
than met by the fees paid by Billboards and other ugliness should be removed. But Whyte also wrote of
landowners in some cases, the “overpowering monotony” of, for instance, tree farms or agricultural par-
particularly where there are cels, and he suggested that farmers should be paid to “make it look better”
large public areas to be main- with ponds, recreational facilities and ornamental animals.13
tained, a municipal flock
could be set up.18
Virtual Roadside
—William Whyte
During the late 1950s, the vehicle, a sealed environment that contained the
You may gather that I am not body in relative stillness, prompted speculations that were very similar to
enthusiastic about the current those associated with computer-generated virtual realities of the late twenti-
beautification program. I am eth century. As the differences between automobiles became largely a matter
not. I recognize the goodwill of style, most of their adjustability and convertibility involved finely tuning
and patriotism of its instiga-
engine mechanisms and speeds, and the internal climates of air, temperature,
tors, and I recognize the need
for order and control in the and sound. Some argued that the car provided a kind of insulated chamber
American landscape. But I that neutralized physical experience and removed one from the physical
am convinced that the basic pleasures of the outdoors. In addition, the design of the highway right-of-
philosophy of this crusade is way and its wayside land was formatted according to protocols of use and
little more than a collection vision originating from inside the car, making the highway corridor a strange
of tired out middle-class
kind of hermetic, mathematical baffle.
platitudes about the need for
beauty, greenery, and the Though he joined those who found the interstate monotonous, J. B. Jack-
wickedness of bad taste.19 son, was also attracted to the “lively and lawless” highway landscape, and he
—J.B. Jackson articulated ideas about more subtle changes in car culture and roadsides sites.
Though many thought that the automobile sponsored “contemplation with-
In the last two months I have out participation,” Jackson saw it differently. He was perhaps already devel-
ridden some 10,000 miles
oping nostalgia for the new roadside culture. He wrote, “The highways
through the United States—
from New Mexico to Vermont, leading out of our towns and cities are alive with cars, driving when work is
from Georgia back to New over and before the evening meal to see how the new subdivision is getting
Mexico by way of Texas. on; out to the Dairy Queen five miles east to have a giant malt; to the drive-
If I were a foreigner this mile- in movie still further away; cars with couples necking, souped-up cars racing
age and length of time would down the measured mile; cars playing chicken, car pickups, motorcycles,
qualify me as an authority on
scooters all driving merely for the sake of driving.” 14 In “The Abstract World
the American scene, particu-
larly if I had never been here of the Hot-Rodder” Jackson associated the new culture of fast cars and physi-
before. And doubtless by now cal sports with a desire to participate rather than spectate. Water skiing,
I would be writing a book for climbing, motorcycling, or hot-rodding reflected an addiction to physical
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contact and motion, in reaction to “foolproof, sleep-inducing highways” that the Christmas trade. I would

Parallel Networks: Roadsides

did not allow one to “sense the surface under the wheels or to feel the exhila- have illustrations in it of neon
ration of a steep climb, a sharp curve, or a sudden view. We are compelled to signs and dump heaps and
monotonous subdivisions, al-
move at a uniform speed, and we no longer even have that earlier, model-T
ternating (for I should want
sense of participation in the functioning of the automobile.” 15 to be fair, of course) with bu-
Since the car was attuned to more subtle atmospheric changes and ergo- colic scenes of Colonial New
nomic conditions, and since what lay outside the highway might also, by its England and the Grand Can-
abstraction, not only indulge virtual wandering but merge with any other yon and the Redwood groves
available reality, it was easy for the car to be a kind of environmental capsule. of California. And I know the
title I would give the book:
The vehicle was a popular site for many kinds of speculations about mobile
“The Challenge of Ugliness.”
virtual environments not only in industry promotion but in information age That in itself would guarantee
projections about the uncertain future of “spaceship earth.” For instance, in a sale of at least 10,000
the 1960s, Archigram, a cadre of British architects and thinkers, developed among garden club
parodic, apocalyptic designs for portable plug-in environments like the Cus- members.20
hicle, the Rokplug, or the Logplug. For the urban nomadic cowboy these vehi- —J.B. Jackson

cles were like second skins or robots designed to enhance or created a virtual
We all know that a car is a
reality. The group even speculated about whole cities becoming vehicles or self-powered mobile room,
walking cities. By appropriating the protocols of advertising, Archigram’s with limited support systems
brilliant synthesis was at once a cynical critique of cultural coercion and a (air-conditioning, communi-
clever use of market protocols to promote the paraphernalia of a new ur- cations). We also know that a
ban organization.16 traffic jam is a collection of
rooms, so is a car-park—they
Just as the vehicle became the primary mechanism for switching be-
are really instantly formed
tween carriers and networks, so it also became the chief lens through which and constantly changing
to understand the surrounding landscape, and the highway, already a mono- communities. A drive-in res-
valent organization in its approach to roadway, would also treat the right-of- taurant ceases to exist when
way as monovalent. Designers, traffic engineers, and even land management the cars are gone (except for
experts so often understood this landscape as one that was organized by cooking hardware). A motor-
ized environment is a collec-
vision. So many post interstate practitioners appear compelled by the same
tion of service points.21
peculiar bias, one which did not necessarily rule the thinking of highway and —David Greene, Archigram
landscape designers of the previous generation. The highway planner, miscast
as the landscape painter, would better nature with visual contours that, by Cowboy international nomad-
some fabulous coincidence, reinforced the main rules of traffic engineering. hero. It used to seem a nice
Even those who worked with the right-of-way as a mathematical and legal idea to carry your environ-
ment around with you . . . But
topography were often working toward goals that associated the idea of
it can be as much of a drag as
landscape with greenery. They worked to acquire land like farms and golf having it stuck in one place.
courses that could pass as green preserve. The right-of-way was, however, Cowboy was probably one of
potentially a parallel network, one perhaps more diverse because of the the most successful carriers of
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his own environment because neutral presence of the highway. These ribbons of land whose existence de-
2.3

his hardware needs were low pended on potentially pliable design rules were sites that became all the more
(mug, saddle, bedroll, powerful because of their peculiar linear geometry and increased surface
matches) and because his
area. This surface potentially defined a network unto itself one not entirely
prime mover, horse, selected
its own fuel and was a fairly dependent on the highway’s commercial or military goals but rather one that
efficient animal robot.22 compounded the intelligence of the organization through its diversity and
—David Greene, Archigram parallelism.

Notes
1. Peter Wolf, Land in America: Its Value, Use, and Control (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1981).
2. Peter Blake, God’s Own Junkyard: The Planned Deterioration of America’s Landscape
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), passim.
3. Christopher Tunnard and Boris Pushkarev, Man Made America: Chaos or Control
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963) and Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and
John R. Myer. The View from the Road (Cambridge: Published for the Joint Center
for Urban Studies of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard Uni-
versity by MIT Press, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1964).
4. Lewis Gould, Lady Bird Johnson and the Environment (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 1988), 63.
5. U.S. Department of Commerce for the President’s Council on Recreation and Natu-
ral Beauty, A Proposed Program for Scenic Roads and Parkways (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, June 1966), 1, 6, 3–4. The proposal called for over
twenty-nine projects covering 54,411 miles of primarily existing roads and highways.
6. Ibid., 4, 185–196, 105–129, 6, 33–39. The report referenced the Westchester County
parkways, California’s Route. One, the Scenic Corridors in Wisconsin, the Van
Duzer Corridor in Oregon, the Mount Vernon Memorial Highway, the Blue Ridge
Parkway and the Natchez Trace, the George Washington Memorial Parkway, the
Kancamagus Scenic Road, the White Mountain National Forest, and the Gunflint
Trail, Minnesota.
7. Ibid., 73.
8. Ibid., 2, 51–52. The Scenic Highways report cited one interesting case in Wisconsin,
which in the 1960s began a program whereby the highway rights-of-way provided
the opportunity for accretional growth of public lands for conservation and cultiva-
tion. The project began with the Great River Road that runs through the state, and
it established a legal architecture involving the purchase of scenic easements. As each
county in the state began a similar practice, the possibilities for a network of not only
roadway but land began to emerge. Some of the properties were acquired through
condemnation, while zoning in combination with tax incentives facilitated
agreements with other landowners.
9. Ibid., 84; William H. Whyte, Jr., Securing Open Space for Urban America: Conservation
Easements, Urban Land Institute, Technical Bulletin no. 36.
10. William H. Whyte, Jr., The Last Landscape (New York: Doubleday and Company,
1968), 179.
11. Ibid., 182–195, 181. Whyte reviewed the work of Ian McHarg in proposing routes
for an interstate highway in New Jersey and the work of Philip Lewis in surveying
a potential network of preservation corridors for the State of Wisconsin.
12. Ibid., 212–223, 136.
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13. Ibid., 289.

|
14. J.B. Jackson, “Various Aspects of Landscape Analysis,” Texas Conference on Envi-

Parallel Networks: Roadsides

ronmental Crisis, University of Texas at Austin: School of Architecture, 1966, 155,
157; and J. B. Jackson, “Other-Directed Houses,” Landscape, vol. 6, no. 2 (1956–
57): 60.
15. J.B. Jackson, “The Abstract World of the Hot-Rodder,” Landscape, vol. 7, no. 2
(1957–58), 22–27, 26.
16. David Greene, Peter Cooke et al. in Archigram (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1973) No. 12 “Gardner’s Notebook,” 110–115.
17. Lady Bird Johnson, A White House Diary (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1970), 234.
18. William Whyte, The Last Landscape, 310.
19. J.B. Jackson, “Various Aspects of Landscape Analysis,” 157.
20. Ibid., 150.
21. David Greene, Peter Cooke et al. in Archigram, 110–115.
22. Ibid.
2.4 S I T E S

By excluding information that did not fit into its own internally consistent
equations, traffic engineering neutralized the organizational architecture of
the highway network. Those proposals that treated the highway as a set of
distinct sites, however, rather than a single homogeneous channel of space,
compounded the network’s intelligence. Like a game that exponentially in-
creases in complexity as it introduces wild cards or increases the number of
players, the highway potentially gained intelligence by allowing vehicles, in-
tersections, and roadsides to operate in ways that were eccentric to the rigid
rules of traffic engineering.

Ve h i c l e s
With the help of federal endorsements and funding, the vehicle whether in
a population or on its own became the primary site for transportation inno-
vations and a chief source of switching, convertibility, and translation be-
tween different modalities. Even in the face of many failures and obstacles,
vehicles, through industry support, have continued to be primary sites of re-
search concerning differential or adaptable highways. Statistical models of
traffic patterns turned out to be the wrong models to respond to a population
of vehicles. Recently, more sophisticated computer models of traffic patterns
have effectively distributed the power of switching to each individual vehicle.
While perhaps lured into similar traps regarding predictability and optimiza-
tion, these models are at least not intent on organizing the entire population
of vehicles into a single protocol and a single physical arrangement. Similarly,
dual-mode vehicles have found specific repetitive tasks for which they are,
at least for now, best suited.
Though a great deal of cultural intelligence has focused on slight person-
alizations and modulations of the vehicle, the idea of vehicle as prosthesis,
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second skin, or virtual reality capsule fits easily, perhaps too easily, into our

Sites
late twentieth-century revivals of sci-fi techno-prophesies. The vehicle dra-
matizes some of our favorite crises and fetishes; the vehicle as product, how-
ever, offers other opportunities. Both traffic engineering and merchandising
use statistical studies and population models to derive techniques for manag-
ing consumption and relating it to investment. It is not surprising that most
of the transportation inventions also follow a product model as some kind of
vehicular fitting or enhancement. Even railroad-truck intermodal systems are
designed to make the vehicle part of a telescoping order of packaging that
ends with the truck-sized container. The container is a vehicle that, like the
suburban home, has become a generic box with the power to format many
different products and spaces. However over-determined the network archi-
tecture of the highway system, the distributive organization of vehicles offers
other wild cards or tactical sites as well. The vehicle population migrates, for
instance, often rapidly changing its course in response to other volatile for-
mats in culture. Malls, for instance, just completing a half-century wave of
growth that altered millions of acres of territory, are now being replaced by
giant new retail formats. These new formats, which often colonize an outer
ring around the mall parking lot, have essentially begun to invert the central-
ized format, bringing thousands of acres of automobile infrastructure with
them. In some ways, they respond to shifting parking populations during the
course of the day since the outer ring of stores feeds on afternoon and eve-
ning vacancies at the edges of the lot. The individual vehicle is sited at the
center of these and other larger ambient shifts. So many diverse organiza-
tions have been trained to interface with the vehicle that it is potentially a
useful site for distributing another set of circumstances into the field, a field
that travels outside of any one frame of reference.
Projects for mammoth new rail and airport terminals with hotels, con-
vention centers, entertainment complexes, and other programs have been re-
current design programs in the last half of this century, and they have often
generated an organization or an urbanism that overwhelms conventional ar-
chitectural controls and orders.1 These are the switches in new global patterns
of distribution and transportation. While these projects, from those of Law-
rence Halprin and Geoffrey Jellicoe to those of Rem Koolhaas, address inter-
play between different transportation systems, consistent with the customary
desires of architects and planners, they often address with building envelope
problems related to a distributed condition. These new hubs, however, are not
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the only new sites of infrastructure intelligence. The same network under-
2.4

standing is also found in smaller distributed switch sites within the existing
infrastructure fabric—in those areas of easement and right-of-way where
segregated and redundant networks overlap or communicate.
Referencing these sites one could reinterpret an illogical sequence of
infrastructure building as a series of happy accidents. The highway’s history
of cross purposes includes a lack of coordination among modalities, cycles
of obsolescence and abandonment, redundancies and fights for dominance
among the various formats, and finally the segregation of various networks
coexisting in urban centers. Considered opportunistically, however, this his-
tory provides extremely rich sites for building another kind of intelligence
among networks. When the interstate became an intercity network diverging
from the railroad outside the city and coinciding with it inside the city, it
reduced its potential to develop a variety of exurban ports of exchange out-
side the city. Though the coincidence of rail and automobile infrastructure
inside the city intensified the potential for urban switching, rather than take
advantage of this proximity, the various carriers fought to be the most domi-
nant method of transport even when that fight created inefficiencies or rigid-
ities that ran counter to their claims of fitness and superiority. Most urban
landscapes are layered with overlapping corridor and networks, including
canals and piers, passenger rail, working and abandoned freight rail, mass
transit, surface streets, and expressways. Like the redundancies that are inten-
tionally built into an electronic network to amplify its intelligence, these sites
potentially support a kind of parallelism that, through connection, strength-
ens all of the associated networks, and they might be understood as switch
sites or sites for some kind of differential exchange among carriers.
Similarly repeated fittings potentially recondition and recircuit longer
segments of the network. The suburban interchange too has this potential
for building switching and meaningful redundancy. There were optimistic
projections, even as early as the 1940s, that airplanes would enter into the
mix of carriers, creating the need for air strips in subdivisions and office
parks.2 This vision never fully materialized and airplanes certainly were never
in any position to completely usurp any of the major modes of transport. Still
new hub organizations of air freight carriers and new intermodal superhubs
in free trade zones in America are rearranging patterns of production, stor-
age, and distribution for national and global commerce, and these new hubs
provide air links at critical junctures along the highway network.
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The sites of adjustment that lie between networks in the cities and sub-

Sites
urbs are often treated as vacancies or as places that fall between jurisdictions.
Similarly, the roadside outside the city limits is often regarded as a kind of
residual right-of-way that is fused to the purposes of the highway. The scenic
highway landscape is modeled not after the activities of the landscape but
after traffic engineering’s own “natural” contours. That land, when beautified
or adopted by communities, is still usually directed by visual protocols origi-
nating from inside the vehicle. The roadside offers a site of adjustment that
is constituted differently from the urban switch. As a linear site adjacent to
a national network, it has several unusual qualities. It has a very large surface
area and so contacts a large number of adjacent sites of different kinds, in-
cluding commercial, agricultural, residential, and public properties. The site is
constituted by many different legal designations that together form a fairly
dense topography as prominent as any other landscape feature. The right-
of-way also abuts many different kinds of land, including commercial, agri-
cultural, residential, and public properties. The most recent advocacies
surrounding the best use of the right-of-way portray it as a green preserve
free from commerce, facilitating healthful exercise and extending nonvehic-
ular connections to parks and larger land preserves. Although this use poten-
tially links many expanses of public land and many organic ecologies, it is
just one default position. The green program proposes a powerful possibility
for the roadside site in that it implicitly projects the accretional growth of
the site as a separate parallel network that is potentially national in extent.
The idea of a national web of sites, however, that lies between different linear
networks, including waterways, rail lines, and roadways, suggests possibilities
other than those strictly related to green landscape. The diversity of sites
and uses that might occupy that land are positioned to build parallelism and
intelligence among several networks. Most critical is the perception of this
roadside not as a vacancy in the traditional use of the word but as a site
that has been partially cleared of dominant programs and is overlain with a
topography of not only terrestrial but legal and commercial features. These
sometimes invisible factors may provide some of the most pliable means of
adjusting or reconditioning highway sites for different uses, thus facilitating
another series of intelligent national and local networks on the back of the
midcentury interstate highway system.
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Notes
2.4

1. For instance, Rem Koolhaas’s new town of Lille is an example of this kind of mega-
program where the most provocative space was created by simply subtracting the
separations among the several infrastructure networks at their crossing. Called the
“Piranesi” space, it is largely a visual, aesthetic cross-reference between these differ-
ent transportation networks, though it functions as a passenger exchange.
2. Stanley McMichael, Real Estate Subdivisions (New York: Prentice Hall, 1949), 5–6
and H. McKinley Conway, The Airport City and the Future Intermodal Transportation
System (Atlanta: Conway Publications, Inc., 1977) passim.
Part 3
3.0 S U B D I V I S I O N P R O D U C T S

Considered to be among the most banal and simplistic development environ-

ments, the subdivision, in league with both the market and the military dur-
ing this century, has also been one of America’s most powerful spatial
protocols. Though we have often simply labeled residential formations of
single-family houses, “suburbia,” and often also rushed to a sociological cri-
tique of this fabric, a great deal of intelligence resides in the logistical and
organizational constitution of its many distinct formats. In fact, the assem-
blage of residential subdivision formats is perhaps best described by organi-
zational expressions. For instance, the design of a single house or platting
plan does not convey critical information about the spatial character of the
aggregate. Rather, the typical postwar suburb would be best described by a
series of sequential operations performed on a repeatable dwelling. Residen-
tial fabric is typically arranged in generic formats with varying degrees of
neutrality and differentiation, and either by design or default, their financing,
ownership, and construction protocols differentiate or add complexity to
them. The house and all its attending elements, however, are also commercial
destinations, and the various fittings, which attend the building and refur-
bishing of a house, though seemingly discrete agents are powerful factors in
formatting the overall organization. Subdivision products are adjusted by yet
more products. Moreover, as an organization that commodifies space, the
subdivision is a precursor to many contemporary “real estate products” serv-
ing retail, workplace, and global commerce.
The subdivision has been treated as not only a commercial instrument to
organize consumption but a cultural instrument to instigate social or political
reform. Many well-meaning cultural engineers have been convinced that
they could systematize or aestheticize residential fabric in a way that would
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have a remedial effect on American urbanism. During the first half of the
Part 3

century, these practitioners assumed various roles in partnerships with busi-

ness and the federal government. They were engaged as “associates” from the
private sector during World War I and later as technicians, engineers, and
social planners during the Hoover and New Deal years. The episodes in part
III examine one crucial moment during the New Deal period when many of
the new technicians of “subdivision science” were present in Washington at
the same time. They were all vying to influence postwar policy on residential
fabric until by the late 1930s, in a conservative political climate, the rules of
the game shifted and private enterprise ascended to or returned to its posi-
tion as the de facto architect of the dominant postwar subdivision format.
Not only does this moment invite comparisons between different residential
organizations but because this “subdivision science” was essentially appro-
priated by a merchandising strategy, the episodes examine the way in which
architects managed to exclude themselves from the game.
In the early twentieth century most planners organized residential fabric
into one of several prevailing forms—suburban satellites, autonomous towns,
or subdivisions. These forms evolved from a variety of property organizations
in America’s urban history—from the grids of colonization and westward
expansion to specialized enclaves and company towns. The leafy railroad sub-
urbs were arranged as satellites outside the cities, whereas the more densely
platted streetcar suburbs inhabited a middle ground on the urban periphery.
During the last half of the nineteenth century, both had already begun to
make a generic commodity of lots of an acre or less with houses set against
a street populated by trees. Since most of these forms subdivided the territory
into lots, the word “subdivision” was often used to describe new parcels of
residential and nonresidential properties. This generic term began to describe
not simply a process but a distinctly different residential format used as a
means of tiling urban land into municipal neighborhoods. It was easy to com-
modify. As a neighborhood it had the fewest political responsibilities since
no separate sponsor had to finance it and make prescriptions about the char-
acter of its community. Though not originally designed to be separate from
an urban context, over the years a combination of factors, including growing
municipal boundaries, gave the subdivision the position, but not the compo-
sition, of an autonomous community. Gradually, the subdivision was gigan-
ticized. Its housing options and production protocols were made more
uniform, and it was given less access to the city both because of its boundary
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conditions and its distance from the urban core. The distributive organiza-

Subdivision Products
tions or architectures of marketing, merchandising, banking, and publicity
campaigns formed a group of unifying protocols directing the merchandising
and distribution of the individual house and lot as a repeatable commodity,
and subdivision would become a common label for the generic tract-house
development on a separate parcel of land outside the city.
The “science” of subdivision design was created in part by the willing-
ness, even eagerness, of some designers to systematize their formulations.
They had begun to call themselves “planners” a title that had previously been
associated with scientific management of industry. Early in the century, a
small number of these newly self-appointed planners, serving on various
committees for professional associations or for the federal government, de-
veloped guidelines, codes, and numerical formula that attempted to optimize
subdivision layouts. These formulations were usually accompanied by telling
forms of representation, including some specialized drawings and diagrams
that were not only representations of architectural arrangement but also
more abstract graphical tabulations of the interdependence between numeri-
cal and spatial relationships related to, for instance, infrastructure runs or
economies of density.
While, since midcentury, the subdivision has been associated with imag-
ery related to home ownership, at the beginning of the century subdivision
protocols were often treated like practical inventions. For instance, the func-
tional schematics of the Garden City in Ebenezer Howard’s To-Morrow: The
Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898) read like a somewhat effusive yet prac-
tically detailed patent application. To small acclaim, Howard actually did in-
vent several physical contraptions (the Remington typesetting typewriter
being perhaps the most notable), but Lewis Mumford likened the Garden City
diagram to the inventions of Leonardo da Vinci or the introduction of airplane
fight.1 Howard illustrated his idea with diagrams depicting simple phenomena
associated with magnets or with commonplace devices like keys and locks.
The main Garden City diagram that designers misread as an actual planimetric
representation was notation for a new commercial and cultural economy that
repositioned and recombined both the elements and activities of town and
suburb. It was a shorthand embedded with intelligence from sources as far
ranging as Taylor’s systems studies to the anarchistic writings of Kropotkin. A
network of small autonomous industrial cities would more equitably redis-
tribute property and population and finally replace the large city. Though
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capitalized in traditional ways these communities, under a different organi-

Part 3

zational protocol, would support cooperative, socialist groupings. Howard

was fascinated with America’s western expansion and its many hybrid urban
formations that were instrumental in shaping land use on a telescoping scale
from the lot to the region. In fact, the Garden City wards were not unlike the
wards of Savannah, Georgia. In both ward systems, green, private, public, and
semipublic space as well as space in the regional periphery were expressed as
quotients or functions of each other. These specialized interlocking functions
established different but complementary protocols for both predictable and
unpredictable growth in agricultural, residential, or civic space. Although
each of these programs governed the other, their interdependent relationship
did not control the shape or extent of the overall formation but rather the
contents of its unit of growth. Another invention, Unwin’s diagrams of hous-
ing densities in Nothing Gained by Overcrowding (1912), demonstrated that
for a twenty-acre lot, doubling housing density increased roadway infra-
structure, so that the cost of developing land almost doubled with only a
small reduction in the final price of each house. A smaller number of houses
were not only more economical to build, but they also provided a great deal
more open space. Unwin’s planimetric graphs demonstrated the interdepen-
dent ratios between houses, roads, gardens, and cost.2
Early twentieth-century metropolitan and federal planning projects gal-
vanized the new profession of planners, many of whom used the British
Garden City as precedent for a community-building movement in America.
During World War I, the federal government’s U.S. Housing Corporation con-
sulted a number of planners in the design of ship-building communities.
These “war towns” as they were called, were the government’s first attempts
at subsidized housing. The U.S. Housing Corporation, for planners, like the
War Industries Board for the industrialist, engaged the subdivision-housing
planner as an associate and organized the housing industry within a managed
framework. Comparative data from the financing and building of the ship-
building communities lent credence to the idea that subdivisions were quan-
tifiable organizations. Many of the planners were in the process of replacing
their City Beautiful ambitions with a new conviction about the healthy and
“scientific” city, and they looked now to public sponsorship of that effort. As
a consequence, new residential planners set up private practices that special-
ized in the making of fabric for new Garden City satellite suburbs and sub-
divisions. Many also began a practice of tabulating comparative land-use
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percentages between open space, infrastructure, public building, and resi-

Subdivision Products
dential areas. They also developed a variety of protocols for regulating the
balance between public and private space, and they shared their findings
in publications, conferences, and collaborations. Most of these techniques
involved rules-of-thumb about streets or housing aggregate that were po-
tentially highly complex when differentiated by the timing of successive
growth phases. Conventional subdivision design, as practiced in the 1910s
and 1920s used the neighborhood as a unit of metropolitan expansion and
annexation. The informal arrangements of the street operated as intermediate
organizers or functions, while lot sales provided a more anarchical and dis-
tributed differentiation of the fabric.
During the early days of the Depression, the Hoover administration
enlisted planners who, like the new experts interested in the systemic man-
agement of industry, attempted to engineer optimal subdivision protocols.
The administration lay on the cusp of change from the essentially conserva-
tive positions surrounding the roles of engineer, liberal, and planner to a more
radical double of those terms that emerged during the 1930s. The term “lib-
eral,” which prior to the New Deal was associated with laissez-faire, would
soon be synonymous with radical reform and state control. Planning too
would become a dangerous word to some during the New Deal, associated
not with civic or national boosterism but with five-year plans or the central
direction of nationwide economic and social patterns. The politics sur-
rounding individualism versus state control that maintained an ambiguous
coexistence within the politics and ideology of the Hoover Administration
would grow into distinct often opposing positions.3
During the New Deal, subdivisions and houses were political pawns and
economic indicators. Industry and community were paired not only because
planning goals linked home and work but because small communities were a
component of the industrial order, one that was not only tied to a decentral-
ized pattern of growth but was also, at midcentury, to become the product of
America’s chief industry—home building. The government sponsored several
different approaches to the use of the subdivision as an economic and social
instrument, and it was the landlord of such experiments as the subsistence
homesteads and the greenbelt towns. Many of these experiments borrowed
from the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), a tightly inte-
grated, often holistic, prescription for interlocking organizational agents like
the neighborhood unit, superblock, and the cul-de-sac. These functional
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agents had a very specific spatial repertoire that significantly altered the ar-
Part 3

rangements of the typical subdivision.

Eventually, the government reversed its previous support of the earnest
planning ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, delivering a mandate to private enter-
prise instead.4 The subdivision, like the highway, was organized according to
a product mode that made not only the house but also its surrounding space
a distributed commodity. The National Housing Act (1934) and the Federal
Housing Administration (FHA) established the house and lot as an economic
indicator or unit of currency that could be used to tune or adjust social and
economic systems by influencing consumption or employment. Private enter-
prise became not only the government’s associate but its board of directors,
and the subdivision became a major U.S. industry. Under the guise of conser-
vative politics, this extreme version of managerial capitalism ironically resem-
bled something like central statist control or state capitalism.
Depression era and postwar housing developments mixed the techniques
of traditional real estate development with vague planning notions and gar-
bled persuasions about futuristic modernism—thus the “all new scientifically
modern Cape Cod house.” The FHA published guidelines and issued approvals
for mortgage insurance, so naturally developers conformed to those guide-
lines and even began to streamline the process by submitting large tracts of
similar houses for approval. The FHA also preferred “prebuilt” subdivisions,
ones that were built all at once before the owners arrived thus constraining
those factors that typically differentiated the fabric. Borrowing military
procedures for prefabricating housing or turning the entire site into an
assembly-line organization provided few means of differentiation and few
functions of growth other than accumulation. Traditional development pro-
tocols were replaced by protocols for product distribution or financial struc-
tures. They were often expressed not as functional relationships, developing
over time, but rather as templates that formatted the entire organization
at once. The intent over the coming years was to establish the subdivision
as relatively inactive organization, one that achieved financial stability by
establishing a single static relationship among its parts and maintaining that
relationship over the life of a mortgage. The subdivision was primarily for-
matted to absorb products, and these products would be its chief source of
differentiation.
Some residential formations in the episodes discussed here were explic-
itly designed. Others were unplanned improvisational organizations that re-
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sulted from a series of default relationships related to real estate protocols,

Subdivision Products
housing aggregates, changes over time, or multiple designers. Some of the
subdivisions examined here were shaped by global maneuvers or batch sum-
mations across many similar elements or fittings. Alternative subdivisions es-
tablished some kind of intermediate organizer that behaved like a function
to group variables in space and time or use the changes in one variable to
trigger or initiate change among another set of variables. For instance, some
functions established encoded units of growth to direct an ongoing develop-
ment process. Simple streets were used in this way to modulate growth, den-
sity, calibration, or other relationships within the fabric. Some of the smartest
street networks were either unplanned, developed in periods of both planning
and neglect, or developed as a relaxed version of more controlled formula-
tions. These unplanned arrangements often achieved the greatest complexity,
either within an anarchical pattern of growth or after a few simple relation-
ships established some means of cross-reference and integration among its
parts. Those arrangements controlled by planning and styling or those ruled
entirely by property and finance usually resulted in the dumbest and most
neutralized street volumes and networks. Repetition and banality within un-
predictable patterns of consumption, not aesthetic reform, have been the
subdivision’s most powerful means of adjusting itself, and the fabric is usually
most complex when the wild cards have outnumbered the rules.
The following episodes sample planning publications and projects, gov-
ernment documents, and commercial artifacts as a means of examining the
various forms of subdivision engineering and their attendant promotional
campaigns. The episodes begin by looking at early cooperative efforts be-
tween planners and the federal government in organizing subdivisions.

Notes
1. Lewis Mumford, “The Garden City and Modern Planning,” introductory essay in
Garden Cities of To-Morrow (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1965), 29, 30.
2. Sir Raymond Unwin, Nothing Gained by Overcrowding! How the Garden City Type of
Development May Benefit Both Owner and Occupier (London: Garden Cities and Town
Planning Association, 1912).
3. Documenting shifting ideologies in New Deal liberalism, Alan Brinkley, references
Ronald Rotunda, “The ‘Liberal’ Label: Roosevelt’s Capture of a Symbol,” Public Pol-
icy 17 (1968): 377–408. Brinkley and Rotunda discuss the dual meanings of the term
“liberal” during the early 1930s.
4. Jordan A. Schwartz, The New Dealers: Power Politics in the Age of Roosevelt (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), xi.
3.1 F U N C T I O N A N D T E M P L A T E : W A R - T O W N
SUBDIVISION SCIENCE

Early twentieth-century residential planners articulated a new responsibility

for architects that involved not only the aesthetics of landscape and building
design but also the logistics of larger building and landscape organizations.
Though most of these planners advocated the design of separate communities
after the Garden City model, in the end, they almost always designed neigh-
borhood subdivisions or satellite suburbs some of which only referenced the
Garden City through radial street geometries or English-country styling. Most
of the planners were experienced, however, with techniques for differentiat-
ing the fabric over time with simple, functional relationships between, for
instance, streets and housing aggregates. These planners managed to find
various public and private sponsors and situations to rehearse their tech-
niques, and, finally, the logistics of sponsorship and financing would often
prove to be among the most powerful means of formatting the entire
organization.
Two studies, one sponsored by a private municipal organization, the 1913
Chicago City Club competition, and the other sponsored by the federal
government, the President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Own-
ership, provide a comparative sampling of their early twentieth-century at-
tempts to optimize subdivision planning. The graphics accompanying these
two studies, one before and one after the war-town projects, also marked a
tendency within the profession to record very complex spatial relationships
with a planimetric notation. Although this kind of notation was often not
simply plan but rather a graph of subdivision data registered as plan, these
graphs did not necessarily convey the functional, temporal expressions that
were critical instructions in the organization.
In their design prototypes, the new subdivision technicians typically or-
ganized residential fabric by establishing limited design controls within the
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default protocols of real estate development. Most municipal subdivisions

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

were developed with a grid of streets platted for incremental lot sales. The
planners typically established a few simple functional relationships that cre-
ated not comprehensive control but selective interdependence between sepa-
rate sets of residential elements. The tree-lined street was one of the primary
functional expressions or organizing agents against which other variables
were balanced, and it was at once durable and fragile. Planners often de-
signed a graduated set of tree-lined streets extending from the smaller scale
of individual residential lots to the larger scale of public territory. Specialized
in this way, the network was to create private areas and filter traffic volumes.
The streets were differentiated by many components, including housing, in-
frastructure, and vegetation as well as the circumstantial contributions of
many individual designers and owners over time. Many of the new subdivi-
sion and community planners were trained as landscape architects and so
knew how to design mixtures of tree species and vegetation that would resist
disease over time.
Another complex of constraints involved housing aggregates. Among
planners of the day, group housing was a practical science unto itself, a hous-
ing puzzle that inspired a number of inventive solutions. The group house
was a cross between apartment house and row house. Units could be stacked
or interlocked across what would have been row-house party walls, and
multiple entries replaced the corridors and stairs of an apartment building.
Houses were grouped in multiples as mixtures of double houses, row houses,
or stacked apartments, and they might form a continuous wall along the
street or create a series of detached groups. The group house was used in
combination with specialized street formations and architectural controls as
a means of timing and phasing growth. The grid often deformed into closes
or special residential squares to accommodate the denser grouping, and the
housing was usually styled to reference some quaint historical tradition. For-
mations like these were typically built in the initial growth phase as special
architectural assignments, and they might contain properties for sale or rent.
These special groupings were used as promotion for lot sales, since they were
believed to provide the necessary domestic imagery and density to create a
recognizable place around which the rest of the less intensely developed lots
would gradually crystallize.
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M e t r o p o l i t a n S p o ns o r s
3.1

In 1913, as part of its larger metropolitan planning vision, the Chicago City
Club held a competition for the subdivision of a quarter section of residential
property. The competition attracted Garden City designers, designers of ro-
mantic suburbs, urban reformers, and even visionaries like Frank Lloyd Wright.
The neighborhood-sized quarter section of land provided an identical palette
for comparative study of the prevailing practice in subdivision design.
Wright’s late entry rehearsed Broadacre City arrangements of suburbia. An-
other entry, by a physician, demonstrated important factors in solar orienta-
tion. All of the entries were evaluated according to careful tabulations of
such things as housing density, infrastructure costs, and open space. Though
some of the entries may have exercised slightly different subdivision options,
most contained no new organizational protocol but were rather street-
pattern compositions that looked something like obsessive subdivision man-
dalas. One exceptional entry, however, by William Drummond proposed new
protocols for developing networks of “neighborhood units.” Rather than sim-
ply subdividing the quarter section, in his scheme, the quarter section itself
became a kind of intermediate organizer or a function of larger metropolitan
growth patterns. Each of these neighborhood units would have central open
space allotments that would also serve as points of linkage for a citywide
network of such neighborhoods.1
The neighborhood unit idea was usually credited to Clarence Perry and
an article he contributed to the Regional Plan of New York and Its Environs
(1929), another metropolitan regional planning project. Perry used his own
community of Forest Hills Gardens (sponsored by the Russell Sage Founda-
tion) as a model neighborhood, and he defined the unit as a quarter-acre
radius of development around a school. Perry also calculated an optimal quo-
tient of open versus developed land and speculated about various planning
and real estate protocols for the propagation of these neighborhoods into
interconnected neighborhoods.2 His version of the neighborhood unit was
referenced both by the World War I planners and the regionalist planners
(figure 3.1.1).

T h e P re s i d e n t ’s C o n f e re n c e o n H o m e B u i l d i n g a n d
H o m e O w n e rsh i p
The Hoover administration targeted the individual house as a commodity use-
ful in stimulating the economy and home ownership as an economic tool for
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maintaining property values and a cultural tool for stabilizing the work force.

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

Hoover had been honorary president of the 1929 “Better Homes Campaign
in Rural Communities and Small Towns,” one of several private efforts after
which the federal government would later fashion its own New Deal home-
ownership campaigns. Leaflets, films, and educational publications provided
primers on such things as plumbing, decorating, curtains, cleaning, and con-
venient kitchens, and services like The Architect’s Small House Service Bureau
provided boilerplate house plans.11 Different from the engineer as technocrat,
engineers like Hoover associated with Taylorism and industrial efficiency.
Hoover himself resembled the new professional “associate” of the government
who used central authority not for statist control or economic cartelism but
“voluntary association.” Within the associationist political fraternity, old style
laissez-faire capitalists, while still maintaining a stance of independence,
could systematically reform inefficient industries and safeguard against
monopoly. The state could be used as a clearinghouse for information
and promotional publicity, and the new standards authored by professional
associates would influence the independent contractor within a kind of
“managerial capitalism.” 12
Once president, Hoover assembled his own conferences to collect intelli-
gence from practitioners of the new planning science. In 1931, The President’s
Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership engaged personnel from
most of the early planning efforts, and the reports from its two committees—
City Planning and Zoning and Subdivision Layout—were interesting artifacts
of the profession’s attitudes toward residential subdivision. Consistent with
the sentiments of its leadership, those who had helped to lead metropolitan
planning organizations, the Committee on City Planning and Zoning, en-
dorsed a “centralized” pattern of municipal growth. Neighborhood develop-
ment should not be “based upon some fanciful theory of reorganizing our
processes of urban growth,” but rather follow what had long been the “natu-
ral form of city growth, opening territory between main traffic highways.”
Now, the neighborhood unit would be the appropriate increment of both
municipal and suburban growth and an instrument for the redistribution of
population. The neighborhood unit was also seen as an increment that, unlike
The landscape architect has
the ever-expanding grid, would generate definite boundaries around neigh-
turned naturally with the
borhoods thus ensuring stable property values. The committee also endorsed evolution of our times from
public regulation of subdivisions and consultation with “experts” to promote the planning of estates to
consistent “scientific” planning.13 public parks, parkways, and
3.1.1 Chicago City Club competition, 1913. Competitive plans for subdividing a typical quarter sec-
tion of land in the outskirts of Chicago. Plans by: (a) Wilhelm Bernhard, (b) Louis H. Boynton, (c) Bra-
zer and Robb, (d) G. C. Cone, (e) H. J. Fixmer, (f) Edgar H. Lawrence and Walter B. Griffin, (g) Albert
and Ingrid Lilienberg, (h) Albert Sturr, (i) Frank Lloyd Wright, and (j) William Drummond. Alfred B. Yeo-
mans, ed., City Residential Land Development, Studies in Planning: Competitive Plans for Subdi-
viding a Typical Quarter Section of Land in the Outskirts of Chicago (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1916).
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boulevards; from boulevards The Committee on Subdivision Layout intended to demonstrate that en-
3.1

to suburban development and gineers, planners, and professional subdividers engaged in the artful science
land subdivision; from land of “modern subdivision practice” could now provide a “technical service” by
subdivision to neighborhood
coordinating streets, sidewalks, open space, and housing within the residen-
unit development and new
towns; and from new towns to tial fabric.14 Included in the report was a study conducted for the Harvard
the orderly improvement of City Planning series that, like the Chicago City Club competition, depicted
whole states and regions, and various subdivision strategies on a identical palette of 200 acres. The study
there has been a development, encapsulated subdivision science and real estate conventions as they had
step by step, in the profes- been practiced since World War I. It arrived at fairly predictable conclusions
sional technique of planning
about the relationship between density and infrastructure: 40 percent of the
to meet the requirements of
wider and still wider fields.17 land was reserved for open spaces and streets with 60 percent buildable area.
—John Nolen Tabulating cost of land, numbers of houses, utility runs, paving, and other
factors, the study scanned numerous arrangements of street, lot, and build-
We invite anyone who may ing. The plans represented spatial arrangements but also served as graphic
contemplate housing enter- tables of these various financial and spatial economies (figure 3.1.2).15
prises, to confer with us in re-
The study diagrammed arrangements with single, double, and triple
gard to our method of
conducting such work, ac- building lines, cul-de-sacs, loops, square versus hexagonal blocks, and cross-
cording to the most advanced access superblock grids. Perhaps most unusual were the diagrams of double
modern practice. . . . Booklet and triple building lines that suggested the possibility of accessing more than
of Modern Industrial Housing one row of houses from a single street. The double and triple building line
sent on request.18 developments, by necessitating a cul-de-sac extension of the street were es-
—the firm of Ballinger and
sentially approaching some of the RPAA’s special planning techniques. In fact,
Perot
the committee featured Radburn, New Jersey, as a frontispiece to the report
In addition to the “rugged in- and noted it favorably in the text. The final diagram was of a “model” neigh-
dividualist” and Christian borhood that, unlike the other diagrams, mixed multiple unit dwellings with
capitalist, there was Hoover single family houses and achieved the greatest efficiency. While the neigh-
the “organization man,” the borhood supposedly followed some larger city planning directive, there was
master administrator and or-
no graphic depiction of the relationships between the neighborhood units
ganizational genius who had
early embraced the gospel of themselves. Rather there was an intensive study of quantifiable formulaic
efficiency and the values of relationships at a much smaller scale, thus lending credence to the idea that
order, rationality, and plan- leadership was largely being provided for conventional real estate practices
ning. His experiences, both in and municipal annexation by subdivisions.16
the business world and the For many of the planners, the Harvard study’s abstract graphics would
war government, had made
have been treated as a kind of notation for a much more complex process,
him a leading member of the
new managerial and scien- one that could only be guided by years of experience. The graphics as well as
tific elite.19 the treatment of the subdivision as a discrete element unto itself, however,
—Ellis W. Hawley supported changing attitudes about residential fabric as an organization
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whose relationships were as elementary as the shorthand used to represent

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

them. More importantly, the graphics did not convey information about In recent years the whole sci-
timing. The functional relations of street and housing aggregate relied on ence and art of subdivision
incremental growth or partial control of the fabric for their complexity. Es- design has been developing
rapidly; on no account would
tablishing all the relationships at once created a planimetric template rather
a good subdivider now be
than a number of interdependent functional expressions with temporal vari- guilty of the ugly and uneco-
ables. Subdivision designs included far fewer of the sectional, volumetric, or nomic type of subdivision
experiential relationships between house, infrastructure, and topography. The that underlies most of our
plan also lent itself to the kind of financial tabulations that became the real cities; such experiments as
governing order underlying subdivision arrangements, as they became tools Radburn, New Jersey, and
many others are testing out
of banking and employment in the ensuing years. For the subdivision’s new
new and valuable principles.20
banking sponsor, these representations of building footprint facilitated the —President’s Conference on
idea that the subdivision and its houses formed an organization that could Home Building and Home
be optimized for maximum economies of space and profit. Ownership

War-Towns
In addition to being the first government-subsidized housing projects,
the so-called “war-towns” were laboratories for experimenting with
subdivision and housing protocols, addressing in particular various
means of capitalizing and structuring land acquisition, management,
and ownership. In 1918, the U.S. Shipping Board established the
Emergency Fleet Corporation and the U.S. Housing Corporation to
manage the building of new shipping communities to support defense
efforts.3 Upon entering World War I, the United States inventoried
its productivity, resources, and infrastructure. An endemic housing
shortage exacerbated by the mobilization of new military bases and
the need for expedient war time production prompted an extensive
federal appraisal of American housing.
Just a year earlier in 1917, in response to the petitions of “thou-
sands of American citizens,” the U.S. Senate had held hearings on the
feasibility of the Garden City in America.4 Most of the testimony cen-
tered around timing and sponsorship, and indeed these factors would
be strong determinants of subdivision organization throughout the
century. Though the testimony explored several funding strategies,
“copartnership” or “limited dividend” were usually quickly inserted
into the discussions to replace the word “cooperative.” In government-
3.1.2 Diagrams from study conducted for the Harvard City Planning Series: (a) single building line
in the gridiron pattern, (b) single building line in irregular pattern, (c) double building line in irregu-
lar pattern, (d) triple building line in irregular pattern, (e) cul-de-sac-loop pattern, (f) modified hexag-
onal pattern, (g) cross-access street-block pattern, (h) adaptation of model neighborhood unit to
irregular topography. President of the United States, President’s Conference on Home Building and
Home Ownership, Vol. 1 Planning for Residential Districts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1932) 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109.
146
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supported British Garden Cities, inhabitants did not buy their individ-
3.1

ual property, but rather became stockholders through the payment of

rent. When the individually owned stock equaled the value of the
property, inhabitants could become owners of that property. The sen-
ators noted that even this copartnership plan differed from the “ordi-
nary American plan” that “Americans seem to think is still the best
plan.” They noted the “distinct advantages to those of the laboring or
operative class in buying, paying for, and eventually owning” their
own property. 5 The Senate also heard testimony concerning special
industrial towns in America that had managed the initial investments
of capital to include provisions for employee-owned housing. (e.g.,
Pullman, Illinois; Gary, Indiana; Fairfield, Alabama; and Goodyear
Heights near Akron Ohio). Most of the company towns also provided
evidence of the importance of ownership by allied industries as well as
asset management by an intermediate land-holding company. Testi-
mony included several suggestions that the government follow in the
footsteps of England’s Parliament, establishing a Garden City experi-
ment with an initial loan outlay of federal funds.6 Though there had
never been communities developed with direct subsidizes of federal
funds, by the next year, a year marked by America’s entry into the war,
there would be several.
Since building houses involved a number of trades, professions,
and industries, in building the war towns the government presided
over projects affecting a broad domestic economy. Consequently, the
war towns contributed to the inclusion of housing concerns on the
nation’s agenda in the ensuing decades. Since most of the projects were
funded with a mixture of federal and private sources, the effort was in
some ways, a rehearsal for the federal government’s later involvement
in community building and public housing in the 1930s and beyond.
Though critical, the physical arrangements were perhaps not as
important as the financial arrangements that capitalized and main-
tained the war towns. Unlike some later federal community-building
projects, these war towns delegated both financial management and
land ownership to several different private entities who invested the
government contribution, often using it to return value to the com-
munity or initiate its self-maintenance.7 The organizational architec-
 147

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ture of these financial arrangements, with all their redundancies and

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

safety nets, was particularly intelligent and sturdy.
Having seen the benefits of government management and allied
private interests through their association with the World War I ship-
building communities, a number of planners began to solicit federal
and private support for what they considered to be a new planning
science. From July 25, 1918, to the end of the war on November 11,
1918, the U.S. Housing Corporation completed the plans and speci-
fications for eighty-three projects.8 Wishing to give the appearance of
a movement, John Nolen’s 1927 address to the National Conference
on City Planning reported seventy such “war towns” and at least
thirty-five “new towns, garden cities, satellite towns, or garden sub-
urbs” had been built as part of this effort.9 After the war, one of the
most prominent members of this generation of planners, John Nolen
wrote, “A new town can be built for $1,000,000. We are waking up to
this fact. We are coming to see that if a battleship costs $42,000,000
and we have been able to build a fleet of them, the actual building of
an entire city is a mere incident in terms of dollars but of the most
momentous importance to the present and future welfare of every
citizen.” 10

Mariemont and Kingsport

Two notable examples of the war-town planning science, Kingsport,
Tennessee, on the Kentucky border and Mariemont, Ohio, a satellite
of Cincinnati, were the work of John Nolen’s office. Both were in the
planning stages before World War I, but completed the first stages of
their growth between the postwar “business as usual” period of the
1920s and the Hoover years of the Depression. Critiques of these two
towns have usually focused not on their organization but on their ap-
pearance. Considered together, these two towns provide a compara-
tive framework for assessing both the deliberate and default protocols
of residential subdivision development during the interwar period. In
both, the simple grid of streets developed by lot sales was adjusted
with intermediate organizational agents, related to sponsorship, tim-
ing, and housing aggregate (figures 3.1.3 and 3.1.4).
148
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3.1

3.1.3 Plan of Mariemont, Ohio. John Nolen Papers, The Department of Manuscripts and University
Archives, Olin Library, Cornell University.

Kingsport was an American mongrel, an industrial “city func-

tional,” initially sponsored and directed by railroad executives.
Mariemont, on the other hand, was a pastoral, landscaped satellite,
sponsored by a philanthropic organization. Mariemont was developed
by members of both the Commercial Club and the Municipal Art So-
ciety in carefully tended steps. Inspired by Letchworth in England,
Mariemont, like other American versions of the Garden City, was
styled after a picturesque English village. Kingsport, on the other
hand, was developed by the members of the Chamber of Commerce
and the Boosters. The town’s history was not chronicled and cele-
 149

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brated by an adoring citizenry as it was in Mariemont, but rather un-

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

derstood through real estate artifacts and the publications of the
Rotary Club. Mariemont was comprehensively planned, whereas
Kingsport received the most minimal planning treatment and was de-
veloped in the midst of a less genteel and more anarchical pattern of
growth. At 365 acres, Mariemont was a self-contained satellite that has
remained true to its initial plat and boundaries over its several decades
of growth and has served as a kind of time capsule of the spatial vol-
umes associated with vintage 1920s planning science. At 1,100 acres,
Kingsport was almost three times the size of Mariemont and compara-
ble in size to other small American cities. Throughout its several de-
cades of growth, the town has become a museum of various twentieth-
century approaches to subdivision design.
Neither town was a garden-variety American small town like Sin-
clair Lewis’ fictional town of Zenith, though Kingsport more closely
resembled “the old Zip City.” Mariemont was one of Nolen’s favorite
examples of town-planning arrangements, while Kingsport was a kind
of problem child over which the office had little control. Touted as a
“national exemplar,” Mariemont was internationally recognized as a
successful model of the Garden City as urban satellite. In 1924, the
New York Times Magazine called the town, “The City Set at the Cross-
roads: A New Experiment in Town Planning to Fit the Motor Age.” 21
Soviet planners inspected the town. Raymond Unwin also visited and
praised Mariemont. Cited in books and articles as a noteworthy Amer-
ican variation on the Garden City idea, the town stood as precedent
for federal experiments during the New Deal period. Kingsport also
drew many visitors during the building of neighboring TVA experi-
ments. But the leadership of both towns, particularly Kingsport,
steered clear of all associations with social experiments to maintain
the character of a traditional financial venture.
Kingsport’s land was bought by railroad executives for reduced
rates because of their advance knowledge of the railroad’s route. Dif-
ferent from its company-town predecessors like Pullman, Illinois;
Alcoa, Tennessee; or Kohler Village, Wisconsin, Kingsport was spon-
sored by allied industries, including glass, dyes, synthetic fibers, char-
coal briquettes, and textiles. The town congratulated itself as a
modern model community with well oiled, Taylorized industrial
150

3.1.4 Early aerial views of Kingsport, Tennessee. John Nolen papers, #2903. Division of Rare and
Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
151
152
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arrangements, motivated businesses, diversified industry, access to

3.1

railroads and resources, and inexpensive labor. Avoiding the mistakes

of other industrial boom towns, Kingsport provided housing as a
means of settling and pacifying its workers. In 1916, Nolen was asked
to consult on an initial plan for Kingsport. The plan bluntly outlined
the essential elements of conservative southern civilization: industry,
transportation, business, religion, and family. In the plan, which had
been designed by a railroad engineer, a business boulevard rolling up-
hill from the river, connected factories, a railroad station, and a rotary
called “Church Circle” that radiated out into the residential districts
on the hills above. Nolen and his associates, Philip Foster and Earle
S. Draper, worked on various refinements of the scheme’s street design
and platting, though difficult communications and the client’s occa-
sional disregard for professional advice distanced Nolen from the pro-
ceedings. The office completed an initial plan in 1916, but the most
familiar early plan for which Nolen is often given full credit was pub-
lished after the war in 1919. It primarily refined the street hierarchy in
the central business district and added some new residential districts.22
In Mariemont, Nolen was allowed to construct an elaborate exer-
cise in 1920s town-planning techniques. At the turn of the century in
Cincinnati, Ohio, Thomas J. Emery, a first generation American from
Wales and his wife Mary Muhlenberg Emery commanded real estate
interests in Ohio that by the 1930s rivaled those of the Astor estate in
New York. When Mr. Emery died in 1906, Mary Emery established
the Thomas J. Emery Memorial, a nonprofit philanthropic corpora-
tion among whose chief projects was to create a country village out-
side Cincinnati for the workers who had helped build the Emery
empire. The Emery’s two sons, Albert and Sheldon, had both died at
an early age, and Mary Emery summoned one of their college friends,
a young man with the appropriately Dickinsian name of Charles J.
Livingood, to come to Cincinnati to manage the design and construc-
tion of her model town. While traveling in England, Livingood had
visited Letchworth which, as stylistically rendered by Raymond Un-
win and Barry Parker, portrayed the Garden City as an English coun-
try village with a bucolic blend of Ruskin and Morris and an apparent
appreciation of craft and rural cottage industry. The aesthetic appeal
of the Garden City idea and its association with the progressive ideas
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of British and American intellectuals perfectly suited Mary Emery’s

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

rather beatific dream of reforming the housing of city dwellers.23
Preliminary plans for Mariemont were made as early as 1914 be-
fore American involvement in World War I.24 In 1920 Livingood for-
mally retained Nolen as the town’s designer. Land was purchased in
the early 1920s and construction begun in 1923. The announcement
of the town appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1922 with the head-
line “Lady Bountiful’s [Mary Emery] wand is to wave over tract near
Madisonville.” 25 The Mariemont company offered both rental proper-
ties and lot sales. Citizens could buy stock in Mariemont and would
benefit from increases in land value through their own investments,
or, if the company enjoyed excess profits, the addition of extra amenit-
ies to the town. The George Babbitts of Cincinnati, however, would
read on to find that Mariemont was not to be a: “. . . laboratory for
sociological experiments in the problem of housing. It, therefore, does
not follow the English plan of copartnership building and ownership
. . . The people in this country are still individualistic in their attitude
and action and do not readily take to cooperative housing schemes.
It is a real estate development, pure and simple on normal American
lines. . . .”26 On the evening of Mariemont’s announcement, John No-
len spoke to the businessmen of Cincinnati’s Commercial Club about
the need to increase home ownership as a means of generating worker
stability and contentment. “No longer are we a nation of homeown-
ers. We are mere renters, and therefore, drifters and floaters—at least
60 percent of us.” Nolen claimed.27 He was courting a partnership that
he hoped would create a Garden City movement.
Kingsport and Mariemont incorporated both specialized and de-
fault arrangements of the street. At Kingsport, Nolen did little more
than help to shape the main streets. He designed a hierarchy of five
business streets ranging from 50 to 100 feet wide in the down-town
area.28 Elms were planted down the length of Broad Street, the central
business spine. Steeples from the Church Circle were placed on axis
with the residential streets and could be seen from the hills above. The
Mariemont plat blended radial and curvilinear grids to ac-commodate
topography as a geometric reference to both Howard and the City
Beautiful. Considering approximately 250 of the total 365 acres, a
little less than 50 percent were given over to lots, 20 percent to parks,
154
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approximately 10 percent to other public and semipublic areas, and 23

3.1

percent to streets.29 He planned for a population of 5,000 that would

eventually grow to 10,000. Nolen designed a minor street (40 to 20
foot roadway), secondary street (50 to 24 foot roadway), main street
(60 to 82 foot roadway), streetcar line street (80 feet), a business street
(100 feet), and the concourse street which ran along the bluffs at the
edge of town. Most of the residential streets had 20 to 35 foot set-
backs. The largest street, Wooster Pike, was a grand boulevard which
extended the space of the village into the city of Cincinnati. The cen-
tral square receiving Wooster Pike was 150 feet wide.30 All the streets
were lined with trees as a matter of course and to resist disease, a vari-
ety of trees were used in landscaping the town.
In both Kingsport and Mariemont, the group house, like the
street, served as kind of intermediate organizing function. At Marie-
mont, Nolen devised a scheme to both ensure variety in the fabric and
support an incremental phasing plan. The housing was accomplished
through assignments to different architects. The more densely platted
subcenters and special formations around squares or closes each re-
ceived an architectural assignment. In Kingsport, these specialized
residential districts were intended to anchor sections of town with a
neighborhood of recognizable character. Two of them, “the Fifties”
and “White City” were intended to house the bosses of the industry
and they contained double, triple, and group houses in specialized for-
mations. Platting by quarter-acre lots and separate subdivisions filled
most of the remaining area of the town.
In 1937, the federal government publish a supplementary report
to a larger study entitled “Our Cities” that inventoried planned com-
munities in America. The report looked at approximately 150 commu-
nities in America and selected 29 to survey in detail. The thorough
surveys studied physical planning issues like street size and hierarchy,
sponsorship, maintenance, governance, size, and aesthetics. Perhaps
most interesting was the fact that the study arranged its catalog of
communities according to the sponsorship and financing that was so
critical to the organizational character of residential formations. Both
towns appeared in the report. When representatives of the National
Resources Committee visited Kingsport in the 1930s, they found areas
of boom-town blight and uncontrolled growth that the Depression
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had only exacerbated.31 Unions organized during the Depression and,

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

though there were some serious episodes of labor unrest, wartime in-
dustry in both World Wars I and II created an intensified demand for
labor that temporarily masked growing problems surrounding
the town’s facilities. The town preceded Mariemont, but developed
through the growth booms of both world wars and acquired a subdivi-
sion during each successive phase of suburban growth from the De-
pression to the present. During World War II, several FHA-financed
subdivisions were developed: Cherokee Village, Baysview, and Forest
Lawn. Some contained good brick housing stock, well-platted lots,
and well-sized roadways. Other war-time housing stock ranged from
wood and brick structures to less expensive wood-frame conscript
houses or simple barrack-like boxes on streets with no other compo-
nents besides the roadway itself.32 The house and street were con-
sidered separately. The streets were usually designed to absorb a
generalized quotient or “peak load” of traffic that often rendered them
too large to sustain spatial relationships with small housing stock.
Housing was sized and shaped to constraints associated with afford-
ability and the developer’s financial protocols. Some of Kingsport’s an-
nexed areas were larger than the entire town of Mariemont. The
pattern of development called for large roadways sometimes 60 feet in
width without sidewalks or planting. Most also had set backs of over
20 feet or larger. The Elm trees died of blight after World War II, and
many of the sites were turned to parking lots in the central business
district. Mariemont on the other hand was a storybook town for a
community of “joiners.” Livingood carried out his duties like a gentle-
man overseer “curating” the main public buildings and other public
fixtures (e.g., bell tower, church, hotel, and theater) that were also
funded by the Mariemont Foundation. Paradoxically, preservation of
the quaint styling of the town has served to neutralize changes and
new relationships between the house and street almost as effectively
as postwar subdivision protocols.
Arguably, the most complex spatial organization occurred on the
mongrel streets of Kingsport or Mariemont where some accident in
the design protocols or the anarchies of lot sales and consumption laid
a richer bed of spaces. Both towns were affected by their method of
sponsorship and eventual self-governance. In the ensuing decades, the
156
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method of finance and sponsorship as directed by bureaucratic gov-

3.1

ernment agencies would prove to be one of the dominant protocols

shaping residential subdivisions.

John Nolen: Planning Rotarian

John Nolen (1869–1937) was planning’s Rotarian and dean. His career
spanned from the City Beautiful movement to the period of regional
and greenbelt town planning in the 1930s, and he was a leader and
founder of conferences and professional associations. In the 1910s and
1920s, an investor interested in establishing a suburb based on Garden
City principles could choose from a number of practitioners, but John
Nolen was among those from whom one would surely seek consulta-
tion. Nolen was at once the City Beautiful aesthetic consultant, the
Garden City reformer, and the small town booster. He kept the move-
ment and his practice alive by changing the tenor and scope of his
agenda to address any opportunity. Whether the sponsor was public
or private, he was always there, presenting his resume and indicating
his eagerness to serve in the making of a town, parkway, or region. In
fact, he often tailored his advocacies to win the support of the reform-
ers as well as the powers that be.33 By the end of his career, he had
designed 27 new towns in America and been involved in a total of
over 400 planning projects of various kinds. Nolen chronicled the
planning movement in various books, pamphlets, studies, and public
addresses.34 In addition to organizing his colleagues by leading the
early conferences, he also established a city planning curriculum at
the Harvard School of Landscape Architecture. A number of planners,
among them Earle S. Draper, Tracy B. Augur, and Jacob L. Crane,
who led significant careers during the New Deal period and after
worked in Nolen’s office.35
Having studied under Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., Nolen inher-
ited expertise from the late nineteenth-century landscape tradition.
Landscape design, often involved organizing vision and experience in
the contours of space between architectural objects and so perhaps
sponsored an experiential rather than purely formal approach to plan-
ning. Like others who began their careers in the incipient phases of a
planning movement, Nolen did not specialize. He and his colleagues
often took a broad approach to the enterprise of arranging land. He
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knew how to juggle the interdependent details of platting, promotion,

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

and the bottom line. Promoting planning “science” as a repeatable
and quantifiable phenomenon, Nolen’s office led the profession in the
practice of tabulating comparative land-use percentages between open
space, infrastructure, public building, and residential areas for se-
lected communities.
While conservative enough to seek the support of capitalists like
Henry Ford, Nolen’s writings and speeches echoed many progressive
ideologies and traditions. He campaigned for the Garden City as a
unit of development in America, and as part of a comprehensive plan
regarding labor, land use, and quality of life. In the course of his ca-
reer, his discussions of the Garden City expanded to support regional
planning goals, and his experience in the making of urban and subur-
ban streets expanded into the realm of parkway design.
In the 1980s, Nolen was revived by neotraditionalist planners
who were trying to associate the idea of “town” with their subdivi-
sions, as that idea evoked associations with a broad range of planning
Americana from the Colonial settlement to the Kansas gridiron. No-
len’s towns in particular were valued in this revival in part because he
merged several traditions within the garden-variety real estate format
associated with small municipalities. That basic format had grown out
of a longer tradition of land subdivision by grids and plats, but curi-
ously Nolen’s very specialized designs for the fabric of small munici-
palities were treated by revivalists as having a kind of authenticity, even
with the full knowledge that America has no authentic urbanism, only
a long history of diverse and hybrid models. For those accustomed to
postwar residential arrangements, the work from Nolen’s office exer-
cised an incredible variety of different aggregates and formations for
housing and real estate sales. These planning methods were, to some
degree, successfully revived in the marketplace because their cosmetic
charm was as bankable in the 1980s as it had been in the 1920s.
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Notes
3.1

1. Alfred B. Yeomans, ed., City Residential Land Development, Studies in Planning: Com-
petitive Plans for Subdividing a Typical Quarter Section of Land in the Outskirts of Chicago
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1916), passim. Gwendolyn Wright’s Moralism
and the Modern Home also contains a discussion of the competition.
2. Clarence Arthur Perry, “The Neighborhood Unit,” Regional Plan of New York and its
Environs, Volume VII Neighborhood and Community Planning (New York: Regional
Plan, 1929), 73.
3. U.S. Department of Labor, Report of the United States Housing Corporation, Volume II:
Houses, Site-planning, Utilities (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1919), 15–18.
4. Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Agriculture and Forestry, A resolution
authorizing and requesting the Senate committee on Agriculture and Forestry to
hear and consider testimony relative to the Garden City and Garden Suburb move-
ment, H. R. 10104, S. Res. 305, 64th Congress, 2nd Session (Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1917), 1.
5. Ibid., 6.
6. Ibid., passim.
7. For instance, in the development of Union Park Gardens in Delaware, the Wilming-
ton, Delaware, Chamber of Commerce organized the contributions of several local
industries involved in war-time production to capitalize the Wilmington Housing
Company. The development was then managed by an operating company, the Lib-
erty Land Co., which bought a parcel of 58 acres and gave it to the government.
The government loaned the construction costs and was repaid 5 percent per year
with balance used toward the amortization of the principal. John Nolen was the town
planner. Ballinger and Perot, designed twenty different group house types for the
554 units. Even in this small neighborhood, Nolen incorporated a hierarchy of four
different street types, including a large parkway. For Yorkship Village in Camden,
New Jersey, the government provided $10 million for the building of a town. The
land was already owned by the New York Shipbuilding Corporation residing in
Camden which set up a subsidiary agency, The Fairview Realty Company, to run
the town. This company repaid the government at 5 percent interest and 3 percent
principle per year. The rest of the profits went into the maintenance and improve-
ment of the town. Although they were attached dwellings, the ship workers owned
their houses. U.S. National Resources Committee, Urbanism Committee Urban
Planning and Land Policies: Volume II of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Com-
mittee to the National Resources Committee (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1939), 67–69.
8. U.S. Department of Labor, Report of the United States Housing Corporation, Volume II:
Houses, Site-planning, Utilities (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office,
1919), 23.
9. John Nolen, “Twenty Years of City Planning Progress in the United States, 1907–
1927,” Planning Problems of Town, City and Region Papers and Discussions at the Nine-
teenth National City Planning Conference (Washington, D.C.: National Conference,
1927), 15, 16.
10. John Nolen, “A Demonstration town for Ohio,” Journal of the Town Planning Institute
of Canada 2 (May 1923): 6.
11. Better Homes in America, Guidebook for Better Homes Campaign in Rural Communities
and Small Towns (Washington, D.C.: Better Homes in America, 1929).
12. Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New
 159

York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 9; Elis W. Hawley, American Forum Series: Herbert

|
Hoover and the Crisis of American Capitalism (Cambridge: Schenkman Publishing

Function and Template: War-Town Subdivision Science

Company, 1973), 4, 14.
13. President of the United States, President’s Conference on Home Building and Home
Ownership, vol. 1 Planning for Residential Districts (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, 1932), 8, 9, 26, 5. Membership in the City Planning and Zon-
ing Committee included Frederic Delano as chair, Charles W. Eliot II, Harland
Bartholomew, and Thomas Adams. Delano and Eliot had served on the National
Capital Park and Planning Commission in Washington, D.C., and both would later
serve as chairs of the National Resources Committee. Delano and Adams had admin-
istered the regional plan of New York and its environs. Mumford’s critiques of this
plan perhaps alienated the group from planners like Adams and leaders like Delano,
who would hold positions of power during the New Deal period.
14. Ibid. 47, 51. The committee was composed of a familiar group of planners, including
Harland Bartholomew, Henry Hubbard, chairman of City Planning at Harvard, the
developer G. A. Nichols, John Nolen, Robert Whitten, and RPAA member Henry
Wright.
15. Ibid., 85–124.
16. Ibid.
17. John Nolen. “The Landscape Architect in Regional and State Planning,” Landscape
Architecture ( July 1935): 2.
18. Advertisement, Architectural Record (1919), reprint, Nolen papers, #2903, Division
of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Libraries.
19. Elis W. Hawley, 9.
20. President’s Conference on Home Building and Home Ownership, 52.
21. Brock, H. I. “The City Set at the Crossroads: A New Experiment in Town Planning
to Fit the Motor Age,” New York Times Magazine (August 24, 1924), 7–8.
22. Ibid., 31–57; and Margaret Ripley Wolfe, Kingsport: A Planned American City (Lex-
ington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 44.
23. Warren Wright Parks, The Mariemont Story (Cincinnati: Creative Writers and Pub-
lishers, Inc., 1967), 12, 62.
24. Ibid., 17.
25. “Model Town to Arise Over Mound Village; Mariemont Likened to English Garden
City,” The Cincinnati Enquirer (April 30, 1922).
26. Anon. A Descriptive and Picture Story of Mariemont, A New Town ‘A living Exemplar’
(Cincinnati: The Mariemont Company 1925), 13–15.
27. John Nolen, Abstract of speech delivered to the Commercial Club of Cincinnati,
April, 1923, Nolen papers, #2903, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections,
Cornell University Libraries.
28. Minor residential streets were typically 40 feet wide, including planting strips and
sidewalks and were flanked by 20 foot setbacks. Secondary residential streets were
typically 50 feet wide, including planting strips and sidewalks, and were flanked by
30 to 40 foot setbacks.
29. U.S. National Resources Committee, Urbanism Committee, Urban Planning and
Land Policies: Volume II of the Supplementary Report of the Urbanism Committee to the
National Resources Committee (Washington, D. C.: U.S. Government Printing Office
1939), 18.
30. Parks, The Mariemont Story, 27–28.
31. National Resources Committee, 38, 37.
32. Wolfe, 145; and Kingsport, Tennessee (Kingsport: Rotary Club, 1938).
160

33. John Loretz Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History
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of Cultural Change and Community Response 1900–1940, Ph. D. diss., University of

3.1

Pennsylvania, 1964, 37.

34. Most notable among his books and collected writings were City Planning (1916) and
New Towns for Old (1927).
35. Hancock, 37. Other planners who worked for Nolen’s office include Russell Van
Nest Black, Philip W. Foster, Justin R. Hartzog, Hale J. Walker, Irving C. Root,
Harold A. Merrill, Max S. Wehrly, and Howard K. Menlinick.
3.2 F U N C T I O N : N E W D E A L
DEMONSTRATION PROJECTS

Advocates and practitioners reporting for duty in Washington at the beginning

of the New Deal period espoused various strains of communitarian planning
ideology associated with, for instance, regionalism, industrial decentraliza-
tion, employment relief, population redistribution, experimental agriculture,
or the virtues of home ownership. Many of these planners used their war-
time experience to form a broader and politically more radical critique of the
metropolis and its satellite suburbs. New Deal community-building programs
incorporated some of these ideas in their demonstration projects. The RPAA’s
specialized residential planning devices were widely admired among the plan-
ners in Washington. A few of these planners were, or had been, RPAA mem-
bers, and some of the demonstration projects borrowed RPAA techniques.
Two of these demonstration projects, Norris, Tennessee, and Greendale, Wis-
consin, incorporated RPAA techniques; due to different constraints of timing
and site, however, they resulted in relaxed or hybrid versions of the more
holistic RPAA prototypes. They also were among the few New Deal commu-
nity projects to use single-family detached housing, which became the domi-
nant dwelling type after the war. Consequently, these more informal projects
provided a rare glimpse of the generic postwar housing commodity arranged
under very different terms.

RPAA
The RPAA was not only intent on replacing the city’s suburban satellites with
a network of smaller regional cities, but also intended to turn the typical
subdivision grid inside out, making it dependent on a set of relationships
between house, pedestrian network, and vehicular network. The two main
RPAA prototypes, Sunnyside Gardens, Queens (1924), and Radburn, New
162
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Jersey (1928), were explicitly governed by specialized interlocking functions—

3.2

the neighborhood unit, superblock, cul de sac, and greenbelt—organizational

expressions for local as well as regional-continental relationships.
The foundation of the Sunnyside experiment was a financial organiza-
tion—one that had typically been used for urban apartment dwellings. Alex-
ander Bing, Clarence Stein, and Henry Wright funded Sunnyside through the
City Housing Corporation, (CHC) which they established as a limited-dividend
corporation. Limited-dividend corporations typically invited investors (Elea-
nor Roosevelt invested in the CHC), to contribute to affordable housing by
agreeing to receive a limited return, usually 6 percent on their investment.
Bing was the financier while Stein and Wright handled the design, but the
trio had complementary skills and treated the project as a kind of “laboratory,”
thus, both the physical and financial planning were highly integrated.1 The
partnership itself was a notable organization. Wright was an ingenious tech-
nician of the group house, who could single-handedly juggle adjustments to
utilities, room sizes, corridors, stairs, and interest rates. A fellow planner later
wrote that, “Henry had the most delicate feeling for contours; he could walk
over a fifty-acre tract and go home and sketch its contours with uncanny
accuracy.” 2 At Sunnyside, Wright proposed a different framework and orien-
tation of houses within the block system wherein remainder spaces in lots
and roadways could be put to use in group houses and community street
networks. While the row house on a city block was typically narrow and deep,
Wright’s adjusted configuration turned the row houses ninety degrees to
form a more continuous, though not unbroken wall along the street. As a
consequence the houses received more light, shared a slab, saved on party-
wall construction, and provided area for an interior green. They also reduced
maintenance costs for corridors and common internal staircases and con-
tained a mixture of different dwelling types and sizes (figure 3.2.1).3
In the Radburn prototype, the cul-de-sac, superblock, and neighborhood
unit were used as interdependent functions in a larger expression of growth.
Radburn was to have three neighborhood units, each a unit of growth deter-
mined by a half-mile radius around a school and containing a quotient of
private residential space, public green space, and circulation space. Within
each neighborhood unit, the housing would be arranged in thirty-five to fifty
acre “superblocks,” penetrated by cul-de-sacs, leaving an open spine of green
park in the center of the block. This interior green formed a large park with
long views to replace the traditional backyard. Just as the neighborhood unit
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Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects
3.2.1 Advertisement for City Housing Corporation showing Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, New York.
The Survey Graphic. Regional Planning 54 (1925): 125.

was a function of the walking distance surrounding a school, the cul-de-sac

was a function of both an interior pedestrian network, a reoriented house,
and a system of vehicular networks. The roadways were service lanes, and a
separate network of pedestrian paths used underpasses to avoid crossing
these and other vehicular networks, giving children a safe route to school.
Thus the cul-de-sacs were not dead ends or terminations of the network.
Rather, the house was a point of transfer between the vehicular and pedes-
trian networks. Houses also turned their more formal entry and rooms toward
the pedestrian path and the interior green, thus reducing the cost of street
improvements but requiring cooperative control. In a sense, strands of the
typical grid network had been pulled into a reserve of open green space and
then platted with small lots to accommodate a specialized dwelling with two
types of entry.4 The fourth component of the RPAA formula was the green-
belt, a land preserve that would buffer the community from excessive growth
either from the inside or the outside. The group was disappointed that as a
satellite suburb of New York City, Radburn was not a true regional city and
164
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3.2

3.2.2 Plan of Radburn, New Jersey. Clarence S. Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press, 1957), 50.

therefore not an emblem of their larger political program. Radburn not only
had no greenbelt, but it was also developing housing on agricultural land
that effectively served as a greenbelt for the larger metropolitan area of New
York City (figure 3.2.2).
Though the RPAA’s experimental prototypes marshaled private funds and
managed them successfully within cooperative structures, they concluded
that most private corporations were simply incapable of taking risks associ-
ated with the large expenditures of capital that community development re-
quired. As some evidence suggests, the group also wished to pursue its
holistic goals of regional reorganization unencumbered by the compromises
associated with market pressures, especially since Radburn had been crippled
by the crash of 1929. Though private industry was also serenading the gov-
ernment for subsidies, the planner’s call for public funding would eventually
alienate community-building projects within the conservative Congresses of
New Deal.5 The RPAA’s antimetropolitan bias and nostalgic sentiment about
the authenticity of the New England settlement rarefied its approach. In ad-
 165

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dition, the prototypes were often self-referential, only reluctantly inviting

Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects

circumstance or contamination from prevailing organizations of land and
housing. For instance, the RPAA’s eventual position about government fund-
ing did not engage any of the conventional protocols of real estate and fi-
nancing, so that when the cul-de-sac and superblock were borrowed by
developers of postwar tract housing, they were always quoted outside the
context of the RPAA’s specialized planning calculus. As RPAA formats were
adopted by federal community-building projects and later by private enter-
prise, they were transferred into organizations of an entirely different char-
acter. In some cases, exposure to more anarchical forms of real estate
development added intelligence to the organization. In other cases, as in the
context of the postwar FHA subdivisions, use of these formations as plani-
metric templates erased their functional relationships entirely.

N o r r is, Te n n e s s e e
In June of 1933, Arthur Morgan, one of the TVA administrators, proposed a
model town to house the workers for Norris Dam, one of several dams within
the river system. Norris, with its large greenbelt and small internal commu-
nity, was to be a demonstration town illustrating Morgan’s utopian ideologies
about community, worker, and craft.6 As the first completely hydroelectric
community, however, it was also associated with new technological goals. For
instance, the housing was based on vernacular types found in the Tennessee
hills, but the coop grocery store was styled as a gleaming, modern socialist
experiment. The houses also fashioned a folksy modernity out of new and old
materials, including brick, plywood paneling, aluminum showers, and steel
windows, but they had efficient demonstration kitchens, modern plumbing,
electric wiring, and contemporary furnishings as well (figure 3.2.3).7
Since Norris was a divergent negotiation of both regionalist and postwar
residential arrangements, the same small boxy houses that would be so preva-
lent after the war were positioned within an eccentric organizational context.
Because Norris was an emergency employment project, workers were on the
job before the plans were complete and planning perpetually lagged behind
the construction work in the field. In fact, due to the speed with which Norris
had to be built, many houses were sited and built before roads were cut,
so siting was not determined by planimetric orders but rather by vistas and
topographic contours. The groupings were not intimate but afforded the view
of a population of houses that appeared to stand together in the land rather
3.2.3 Plan of Norris, Tennessee. Norris Archives, Norris, Tennessee.
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than on individual lots. A common version of these looser superblocks and

Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects

cul-de-sacs grouped houses around a semicircular drive or semicircular green.
In some cases, the loop was enlarged to a diameter of approximately 300 feet
and sited along a topographical ridge. The houses were then spaced along
the rim of a large arc surrounding an enormous shared green space. These
variants of the superblock and cul-de-sac were further manipulated by
schedule and site constraints creating in many cases unplanned, yet more
precise spatial arrangements.
Norris and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, shared the same sponsor, and they were
thirty miles and roughly a decade apart, yet they were vastly different organi-
zations. Whereas topography dictated certain design expedients in Norris,
planimetric systems controlled the arrangement of Oak Ridge. As a massive
plant for building the bomb, the design of Oak Ridge was an expression of
an efficient distribution of elements necessary to complete a military mission.
The town was a long highway thickened by residential and commercial areas.
Perhaps the town defined a more expansive form of urbanism. Nevertheless,
there were a few special groupings or arrangements. The residential streets
were primarily sized as secondary streets and only deviated from straight lines
to negotiate topography. Most of the homes were typical of the boxy prefab-
ricated conscript housing found in many defense projects all across the coun-
try. Oak Ridge was a special case, however, design was not the foremost
consideration. For security reasons the designers, Skidmore, Owings and
Merrill, were barely given enough access to documentation to provide a rea-
sonable site plan. At Norris, over thirty-five different housing types were de-
veloped for a comparatively small number of houses (a notable figure
compared to the same ratio in postwar times when, as in the case of Levit-
town, Long Island, 17,000 homes were designed after only four models). De-
spite its pedigree, Norris would not be a precedent for suburban housing in
America. Rather, Oak Ridge and other military projects and protocols would
influence the design and construction of the postwar suburb.8

G r e e n d a l e , W i s c o ns i n
Rexford Guy Tugwell, a close advisor to FDR, member of “brains trust,” and
assistant secretary of agriculture, was among those in the New Deal adminis-
tration who skewed liberalism toward left-wing plans for comprehensive
economic restructuring, decentralization of industry, and redistribution of
population. He remained more strident than some New Deal liberals who,
168
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courting favor with the political power of private enterprise, softened their
3.2

notions of comprehensive reform in favor of more traditional business prac-

tices. For Tugwell, the revitalization of agriculture and industry were interde-
pendent, and his views were a prime target for conservative members of
Congress looking to expose leftist tendencies in the Roosevelt administration.
When he became director of the Resettlement Administration (RA) he inher-
ited a number of agricultural and industrial demonstration towns that were
underway, and he also inherited all the political suspicions associated with
them.9
The RA was ostensibly concerned with the rural poor as well as the inner-
city slums that had been collecting refugees from failed farms. Reversing pat-
terns of urban blight and encouraging home ownership were generally
accepted goals in Washington at the time, and Tugwell convinced FDR of a
project that would swap populations between blighted urban areas and sub-
urban new towns. These towns would partially depend on the city for employ-
ment, and the urban land that was vacated would, in theory, become city
parks. Tugwell’s direct line to the president helped gain approval for the proj-
ect, and he was eventually authorized to administer what was called the
Greenbelt Towns Program.10 Tugwell thought there should be 300 greenbelt
towns, yet of the twenty-five potential sites only four were finally chosen for
development and assigned chief planners. Two of the four were planned for
the east coast, with Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington being perhaps
the best known of these, and a cross-section of America’s most prominent
professional planners were quickly enlisted in the project.11
One of the three greenbelt towns, Greendale, Wisconsin, as planned by
Elbert Peets and Jacob Crane, was distinct in that it rearranged the regional-
ist functions and hybridized them with conventional residential street com-
ponents. Many of the Greenbelt, Maryland, housing blocks were built of brick,
painted white, and detailed with imagery faintly expressive of early
twentieth-century modernism, biological determinism, and the heroism of
New Deal technocracy. Considering the International Style and the group
housing employed in the other greenbelt towns to be European affectations,
Peets based Greendale on American urban hybrids. He created a grid of cul-
de-sacs and superblocks, and while one half of the town contained group
housing the other half contained detached housing and so was, along with
Norris, one of the few public projects to incorporate the single-family de-
tached house within an organization eccentric to the dominant postwar for-
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mats.12 Peets also developed a significant alternative to the Radburn house

Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects

by developing not two fronts but one side court like the side garden house
of colonial times. More importantly, by treating the house as not simply one
volume but a group of three volumes, the number of possible housing ar-
rangements increased dramatically. The garage, the house, and the yard
formed a compound of three elements in the landscape. With these elements,
Peets made large back yards, eliminated the front yards, and used the mass of
the house to create a wall along the street. A variation on that arrangement
positioned the garages for a pair of houses parallel and adjacent to the street
edge. These were not simply new generic rules or plan arrangements but
rather new organizations that altered a more fundamental chemistry of mul-
tiple houses and street (figure 3.2.4 and figure 3.2.5).
Mimicry and misquotation have been responsible for some of the most
durable urban formations in America. There was certainly nothing to revere
or preserve about the RPAA’s original holistic conception. In fact, its more
relaxed or degraded versions were as complex if not more complex than those
that strictly adhered to the formula. From an organizational perspective, a
critical distinction could only be made about the shift that occurred when
these devices of subdivision were referenced as templates or planimetric
expressions rather than interdependent functional relationships, especially
when they were adopted by a building industry that increasingly organized
housing assembly as a summation or repetition of successive operations
across identical pieces. For instance, defense-housing additions to the green-
belt towns often managed to completely neutralize the functional relation-
ships among house, cul-de-sac, and superblock.13 The FHA reproduced images
of cul-de-sacs and larger blocks as tools for solving platting formations in
the subdivision. For instance, cul-de-sacs reduced infrastructure costs and
maximized development on awkwardly shaped parcels of land. Over the years,
this “dead-end” form was also enlarged to more than double the size of the
Radburn cul-de-sacs to accommodate the turning radii of large vehicles and
fire trucks. In the 1950s, luxury suburbs adopted the cul-de-sac and su-
perblock, replacing the interior green with a golf course. When that form was
mass marketed as luxury “planned communities” in the 1970s and 1980s, a
particularly large version of the cul-de-sac was used as a device for phasing
large fields of suburban development. Rather than building a specific network
of streets all at once, the main arterial could be incrementally extended, with
cul-de-sac offshoots along its length. These cul-de-sacs were as long as
3.2.4 Plan of Greendale, Wisconsin. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washing-
ton, D.C.
3.2.5 Greendale, Views of Residential Streets Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division,
Washington, D.C.
 171

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necessary to access developable land, thus balancing infrastructure costs over

Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects

the gamble of housing sales. The golf course was not a public interior green
and when not surrounded by parks and crossed with pedestrian networks,
the cul-de-sacs were not exchange points between vehicular and pedestrian
circulation but rather very quickly formed isolated pods of development con-
nected only by arterials sized for large volumes of cars. The same planimetric
reference, without precise temporal and functional expressions, was capable
of describing two entirely different organizations.

Elbert Peets
In the course of his career, Elbert Peets witnessed a diverse gallery of
America’s cyclical housing fixations and fashions from the City Beau-
tiful period to the 1960s, so that even though Greendale was loosely
based on Williamsburg, Virginia, and some buildings were vaguely
colonial in appearance, the reference was not nostalgic. In one article,
comparing the newly restored town of Williamsburg, the Century of
Progress exhibit, and his own town of Greendale, Peets’ wry com-
mentary on the cloying, instant history of Williamsburg would be
perfectly suitable for application to our own fictional community de-
velopments of the late twentieth century. He wrote, “Williamsburg
complete with ‘Ye Olde A. and P. Foode Shoppe’ is crowded with
happy nostalgic visitors. . . . The stores are frantically picturesque and
various. . . . There is no design value in these weak deviations from
alignment, merely an affectation of unmechanicalness which, since we
know it is not modern, we are intended to assume is colonial.” In the
same article he claimed that the quaintness of Williamsburg was really
no different from the antihistorical “chic of science” at the Century
of Progress.14 Even into the 1960s, Peets continued to invent streets
and organizations for the arrangement of detached and group houses.
Later in his career, when asked what he considered to be the main
problem in contemporary planning, he replied that there were not
enough “specialized streets.” 15 Rather than “shady superblocks,” the
street network of the subdivision had become generic or “all purpose.”
“The only apparent change since the 1920s is that the houses are
smaller and the streets are wider.” 16
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Though President Roosevelt said that Greenbelt, Maryland, was

3.2

“an experiment that ought to be copied by every community in the

United States,” the greenbelt towns appear to be destined for bad press
and socialist labels.17 Greenbelt citizens were labeled “‘long-haired
New Dealers’ conducting a ‘dangerous communist experiment.’ Some
residents were even dismissed from their government jobs as security
risks.” 18 Comprehensive planning was economical in that it reduced
infrastructure costs, but schedules, weather conditions, and the added
agendas of employment relief sent the project over budget. The towns
were criticized for their expense, for competing with private enter-
prise, and for encouraging social regimentation. Detractors even
raised questions about the collective structures of the town like the
cooperative grocery store. All these factors gave the conservative pri-
vate enterprise lobbies ammunition to defeat the greenbelt idea as a
model for suburban development after World War II.19 Calling these
projects “socialistic” experiments was code for the complex of agendas
advocated by lobbies like the National Association of Real Estate
Boards (NAREB). Speaking on behalf of the NAREB, Herbert Nel-
son said: “We have had a number of demonstration projects erected
and are somewhat at a loss to know what has been demonstrated.” 20
Everyone was interested in slum clearance, perhaps most of all the
NAREB. The group was in Washington to fight against blight and to
oppose government management of property on the grounds that it
compromised popular control. For the NAREB, the greenbelt towns
diverted attention from possible government subsidies for their own
interests and defeating them was simply a good precedent against all
public housing projects.21 Ironically most of the social regimentation
in the greenbelt towns was probably no more extreme than the de facto
social constraints of postwar residential fabric, the exaggerated or
hyper-capitalistic versions of traditional real estate practices that were
packaged in an all-American form and endorsed by the FHA.
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Notes

Function: New Deal Demonstration Projects

1. Clarence Stein, Toward New Towns for America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1957),
22.
2. Henry Churchill, “Henry Wright: 1878–1936,” in The American Planner: Biographies
and Recollections, edited by Donald A. Krueckeberg (New York and London: Meth-
uen, 1983), 216.
3. Henry Wright, Rehousing Urban America (New York, Morningside Heights: Colum-
bia University Press, 1935).
4. Lewis Mumford in the introduction to Toward New Towns for America, 11. Mumford
pointed out that the “admirable device” of the superblock had been used in Cam-
bridge and Longwood, Massachusetts, since before the middle of the nineteenth
century. He continued, “Longer blocks had been used in subdivision, but super-
blocks held public space that was not accessed by vehicular networks. Curiously it
never attracted any later attention, not even from nearby planners like Olmsted and
John Nolen, though the latter had his office in Cambridge and must have repeatedly
visited these very superblocks on friendly, if not professional errands.”
5. Stein, Toward New Towns for America, 73.
6. Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny, TVA and the Dispossessed: Resettlement of
Population in the Norris Dam Area (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982),
19–20.
7. Tracy Augur, “The Planning of the Town of Norris,” reprint American Architect (April
1936), 1.
8. Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge, Tennessee
1942–46 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981), passim.
9. Paul Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cor-
nell University Press, 1959), 105, 114. The Federal Emergency Relief Administra-
tion (FERA) also began a community building effort, but by 1935, the Division of
Subsistence Homesteads had spent only a small portion of its budget and FERA had
built only two communities. Meanwhile, foreshadowing future conflicts, this activity
attracted debates in Congress about whether the government should be in the town-
building business. The Division of Subsistence Homesteads was required to set up
a more centralized disbursement of funds through the Treasury. In the ensuing year,
even the constitutionality of the FERA would be overturned.
10. David Myhra, “Rexford Guy Tugwell: Initiator of America’s Greenbelt New Towns,
1935–36,” in The American Planner: Biographies and Recollections edited by Donald
Krueckeberg (New York and London: Methuen, 1983), 236.
11. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 306, 173–74. In 1935, New Jersey citizens in Frank-
lin Township, the site of the Greenbrook project, filed injunctions against the Reset-
tlement Administration and against Tugwell himself that eventually resulted in a
decision on May 18, 1936, from the U.S. Court of appeals in Washington, D.C.,
ruling that the Emergency Relief Act was unconstitutional. Among their list of griev-
ances was the threat of reduced local revenues resulting from the fact that the RA
did not have to pay taxes as well as fears that the new community would result in
bad neighbors. They also anticipated architectural developments similar to that
which had been planned for the Jersey Homesteads, a subsistence homestead project
that had been criticized in the area. The controversy was fueled by Tugwell’s lack
of support in Washington. Tugwell’s towns had been accused of creating socialist
communes. Eventually, while the other towns were allowed to go forward, the New
Jersey town was scratched and legislation was passed that would required the RA to
make payments to and be subject to local authorities. The National Association of
Real Estate Boards issued a statement saying the decision set a good precedent that
174

would bring many public housing projects into question. Hale Walker was Green-
|

belt’s planner. Greenbrook near New Brunswick, New Jersey, was headed by Henry
3.2

Wright. The other two were planned for the midwest: Greenhills near Cincinnati
planned by Justin Hartzog and Greendale near Milwaukee, Wisconsin, planned by
Jacob Crane and Elbert Peets. To send a message discouraging federally managed
community building projects, local and federal politicians and lobbyists, including
the National Association of Real Estate Board (NAREB), sued the government and
successfully blocked the construction of Greenbrook on the grounds that it was un-
constitutional. The planners began work on the remaining three towns as arrange-
ments for land acquisition began. Joseph Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs: A
History of the Greenbelt Town Program 1935–1954 (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1971), 49.
12. Joseph Arnold, a greentowns scholar, has noted that Greendale was the first and
“. . . remains the only public housing program that built the detached houses most
Americans apparently prefer.” Arnold, The New Deal in the Suburbs, 99.
13. Clarence Stein describes how the Radburn arrangement was employed in Greenbelt,
Maryland, and compared those original developments with the town’s later war-time
defense homes developments. The defense model provided housing grouped around
a dead-end car court and with major rooms facing toward the outside. Though the
arrangement seemed similar, the activity sponsored by the arrangement is almost
the inverse of that in Radburn or the other Greenbelt cul-de-sacs. The car court was
a “dreary” and widened version unbounded by landscape hedges which would con-
tain the yard area near each house. In addition the pedestrian paths, the only entry
into green space and underpasses, were not developed and the entire arrangement,
in the end, did not separate children from automobile traffic but rather drew them
into the vehicular area of the car courts. In fact, Stein noted, a child was even killed
in an automobile accident within one of the car courts. The “uninspired” almost
barrack-like housing was unrelieved by trees or shade and was overexposed to auto-
mobile noise, since its primary entry was on the courtyard. Stein, Toward New Towns
for America, 137–148.
14. Elbert Peets, “Washington, Williamsburg the Century of Progress and Greendale,”
City Planning-Housing, Werner Hegemann, ed. (New York: Architectural Book Pub-
lishing, 1937), 396, 398, 410.
15. John Loretz Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement: A History
of Cultural Change and Community Response 1900–1940 (Ph.D. diss., University of
Pennsylvania, 1964).
16. Peets, Elbert, “Studies in planning texture for housing in Greenbelt towns,” Architec-
tural Record (September 1949), 131–137.
17. New York Times, 14 November 1936.
18. Mary Lou Williamson, ed., Greenbelt: History of a New Town, 1937–87 (Norfolk, Va.:
The Conning Company, 1987), 148.
19. Arnold in The New Deal in the Suburbs traces the demise of the greenbelt towns in
Congress.
20. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 193.
21. Mark Gelfand, A Nation of Cities: The Federal Government and Urban America 1933–
1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 115, 117.
3.3 S U M M A T I O N : S U B D I V I S I O N
MERCHANDISING

While the earnest planners were hard at work on federal demonstration proj-
ects, elsewhere in Washington the subdivision had become not a tool of polit-
ical and economic restructuring, protected from the evils of the marketplace,
but a product traveling as quickly through the marketplace as much smaller
or more temporary objects of desire. This time, rather than engaging the
rather pink notions of the planners, the war towns used their own military
protocols and building techniques. The only other architect was the “invisible
hand” of commerce formed by a giant cast of characters in the trades and
home-building industries. Since a distributed set of products would, one by
one, recondition the suburban fabric, it was their distribution and the pro-
motional campaigns that were the critical organizational sites. The FHA’s mo-
bilization of the home-building and real estate industries as well as the
reorganization and retooling of the construction industry to respond to a
population of homes also formatted the space of the subdivision.

H o us i n g C u r re n c y
Financial protocols have always influenced subdivision invention, but the 1934
National Housing Act, which was responsible for the most familiar and perva-
sive subdivision organizations of the twentieth century, clearly established a
subdivision protocol within which the design of the individual home was less
important than the architecture of its consumption and financing. New Deal
reformers were beginning to favor not comprehensive restructuring but
rather adjustment of the economy by, for instance, altering patterns of con-
sumption. The Federal Home Loan Bank Act (1932) and the Home Owner’s
Loan Act (1933) were two early experiments of this kind that used tools like
banking insurance to regulate commerce and generate confidence. The house
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was treated as a stationary form of durable goods that engaged banking in-
3.3

terests, and it was second only to agriculture in the numbers of workers and
trades it employed. Like these, the National Housing Act (NHA) of 1934 and
the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) which the bill established were in-
tended to address the housing shortage, stimulate the economy, reduce un-
employment, and increase confidence in the banking system. It did away with
multiple mortgages and set up a federally insured long-term, low-interest
single mortgage system with low monthly payments that were often cheaper
then rent.1 Despite private enterprise’s claims of greater fitness, there had
always been shortages of affordable housing. The federal government would
insure the lending institution, not the individual, against mortgage default,
and the low-priced home would be the vehicle of that insurance. Conse-
quently the first determinations about the new house involved appraisal
value, and all housing expressions would have to exist within the limit of
$16,000. An individual wishing to “modernize” a house or build a new house
would get an estimate from a contractor and receive a mortgage for that
amount from the bank. The bank would then pay the contractor to begin
work and since the loan was insured, the home owner would be able to pay
off the mortgage with a low monthly payment. The insurance premiums paid
to the FHA would make it self-supporting.2
The authors of the NHA-FHA legislation were not proponents of “subdi-
vision science” or community planning but rather were experienced primarily
in business, finance, insurance, and government.3 A number of individuals
who worked within the FHA were developers or members of the NAREB who
traded on old watchwords concerning the stabilizing influence of individual
home ownership. Though touting laissez-faire politics, the group was angling
for government subsidy of more traditional real estate practices. Subsidies
were un-American unless in service of conventional practices of private en-
terprise, especially those practiced by real estate professionals themselves.4
NAREB lobbyists were banking on more generic and streamlined processes of
development based on extreme versions of selected stylistic and real estate
traditions. Ironically the habit of gathering statistical data practiced by plan-
ners in Washington ideally suited the new goals of the FHA bureaucracy (fig-
ure 3.3.1).
The distributive protocols associated with financing, banking insurance,
and merchandising as well as the statistical study of consumption, industrial
relocation, and property valuation would now direct home building. Within
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Summation: Subdivision Merchandising
3.3.1 Cartoon with caption, “How Can We Best Do This Job Together?” by John W. Morley. National
Committee on the Housing Emergency, Inc. Tomorrow’s Town (August 1943), 1.

this product model, the patterns of distribution might be complex but the
product or repeatable unit could be controlled. Houses and entire subdivisions
would, like cars, become a major United States industry. Since the suburban
tract house was based on rent affordability, the subdivision was populated by
the equivalent of distributed apartment dwellings, each approximately 800
square feet in size. Many of the sources of differentiation, changes over time,
separate layers, or different directors were fused and neutralized into an ecol-
ogy that treated housing like a kind of currency, valued, for instance, for the
sheer numbers that could be produced.

Promotion
The NHA sponsored a Better Homes Campaign that was run like a cross be-
tween an ad campaign and a “war bond drive.” 5 The earliest NHA promotional
brochures deputized architects, contractors, building suppliers, and anyone
else involved in the building trades to drum up enthusiasm and convey each
profession’s “responsibility in the National Housing Act.” The bulletins were
written with punchy boosterism and illustrated with pictures of parades,
posters, buttons, and brochures that could be purchased from the govern-
ment to kick off a local home-building campaign. In 1934, as part of this
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massive publicity campaign, “4,000 communities were organized, 3 million

3.3

door-to-door canvass calls were made. More than a thousand newspaper car-
ried better-housing sections.” 6 The weekly newspaper, “Better Housing” had
a broad circulation to home buyers and home builders, and it was joined by
a number of other daily and weekly bulletins disseminating ideas and propa-
ganda about the growing popularity of home building.7 One cartoon ap-
pearing among the literature perhaps best illustrated the new architecture of
federal-private sponsorship. It showed Uncle Sam gesturing toward a hilltop
castle entitled “Better Housing Program.” A crowd of men representing vari-
ous industries stood to one side while banking and insurance representatives
stood on the other. As Uncle Sam gleefully ushered them on, the caption
read, “Thar’s gold in them thar hills!” 8 The FHA also produced radio spots and
movie shorts. Most of the radio programs, “Master Builder” or “Mrs. Home-
maker” were fifteen minutes long and included orchestral interludes of patri-
otic or sentimental music played at soothing tempos. They dramatized the
stories of young couples improving and purchasing homes to boost their
physical and spiritual health. “Visomatic” slide shows with a separate audio
recording were also available for showings within the community or even at
the local hardware or lumber store. Better Housing News Flashes, produced
for the federal government in 1935 by Pathé News were screened in movie
theaters to over 35 million people.9 The films dramatically depicted a cam-
paign already underway, stimulating industry and putting men to work.
Rousing trumpet fanfares and urgent narration accompanied footage of pro-
duction lines, trains and automobiles mobilizing the country and distributing
products. Home-buying couples entered charming sunlit model homes, and
the camera panned back on a world where home ownership could lead to a
“more happy and contented family life” as the official insignia of “Better
Homes Campaign” was emblazoned on the screen (figure 3.3.2).10
The Federal Home Loan Bank Board also sponsored a homes campaign
in which it solicited designs for exemplary small houses from architects
around the country. Each design was submitted on one page containing a
three-dimensional rendering and a plan of the scheme. The designs were
coded according to number of rooms and their appropriateness to climatic
and regional considerations and complied in a Home Selector Portfolio. A
potential home buyer could visit a lending institution and review a portfolio
that contained designs suitable to the area. The FHLBB also provided lending
institutions with sample brochures and actual boilerplates for ads and other
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Summation: Subdivision Merchandising
3.3.2 Cartoon with caption, “Thar’s Gold in Them There Hills,” by Harold Talburt. U.S. F.H.A. bulletin
for manufacturers advertising agencies and publishers (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1934). RG 195 File “FHA.”

promotional literature with which the lending institution could begin a Bet-
ter Homes Campaign. These ads and pamphlets explained “how to own your
own home” the “safe” and “insured” way (figure 3.3.3).11

F H A T e c h n i c a l B u l l e t i ns
An FHA loan was contingent on design inspection, and FHA underwriter’s
manuals and technical bulletins, which were distributed to a broad circula-
tion of developers and builders, created the impression that there was a pre-
ferred arrangement of suburban fabric that was likely to receive mortgage
insurance. The same graphic guidelines were reproduced widely in trade jour-
nals and other industry publications, and any developer seeking approval for
FHA mortgage insurance was likely to follow them. Though the FHA guide-
lines initially did a great deal to improve housing standards, by World War II
the agency was less interested in promoting good design and more interested
in avoiding mortgage risk with formulaic standards for houses and neighbor-
hoods. Two of these FHA technical bulletins, Planning Neighborhoods for
Small Houses (no. 5, 1936) and Planning Profitable Neighborhoods (no. 7,
1938) provided subdivision guidelines by way of simple texts and pairs of
drawings labeled “good” and “bad.” In many cases, these simple cartoon
3.3.3 3MI15-Minimum House—Architect, Hyde and Williams. FHLBB-Home Selector Portfolios:
6McC1-Chosen as McCall’s “Home of the Month”; National Archives, and Records Administration
Pickett Branch, RG 195.
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Summation: Subdivision Merchandising
graphics outlined the design parameters of a postwar suburban landscape
that would appear senseless and incomprehensible to ensuing generations.
They explained why the roads swelled, the houses shrank from the edge of the
street, and the entire organization was left blinking in the sun (figure 3.3.4).
Technical bulletin number 5 assumed the tone of a practical manual,
selectively exhibiting some of the expertise of the progressive planning
movement together with suggestions for what might be shared standards,
but just two years later technical bulletin number 7 prioritized the developer’s
financial security and the government’s mortgage risk.12 The contrast be-
tween the two documents continued. Bulletin number 5 warned against
c

3.3.4 Technical Bulletin No. 5 Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses. (a) The FHA’s quota-
tion of Radburn as a possible model of subdivision design; (b) street hierarchies: (top) typical
court or cul-de-sac, (middle) minor residential street with planting strips, (bottom) minor resi-
dential street with sidewalks and curbs combined and street trees; (c) plan diagram showing
typical neighborhood in relation to the city. Technical Bulletin No. 7, Planning Profitable Neigh-
borhoods. (a) “Long Blocks Require Crosswalks Near Center,” (b) “Plan Lots of Adequate Width,”
(c) “Protect Lots Against Adjacent Nonconforming Uses.” U.S. Federal Housing Administration,
Technical Bulletin No. 5, Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, March 15, 1936). U.S. Federal Housing Administration, Technical Bulle-
tin No. 7, Planning Profitable Neighborhoods (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, March 15, 1938).
a

b
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dividing land into small parcels and urged coordination with city-planning
3.3

authorities, while making size, however dependent on finance and timing,

Bulletin number 7 suggested that the development be sized so that it could
be “completed and sold within a period of time” that would “avoid the finan-
cial burden of carrying vacant land.” 13
Many of the graphics in bulletin number 5 quoted the RPAA’s specialized
functions and in one full-page illustration even reproduced a Radburn su-
perblock. In bulletin number 7, platting in approximately quarter-acre lots
was the default method of subdivision, and while superblocks and cul-de-
sacs were not mentioned, longer blocks of approximately 1,300 feet were
adopted, in part because they saved infrastructure costs. The larger block
contained no spine of common green or pedestrian network, however, and
all the land was private property. The cul-de-sac might be part of this ar-
rangement, but it was used to plat additional lots in odd remnant spaces or
irregularly shaped areas of a parcel.
While both bulletins encouraged street hierarchy, bulletin number 5 il-
lustrated a range of residential streets with sectional drawings showing street
trees and sidewalks. Bulletin number 7 did not provide street sections or men-
tion street tree planting. Street hierarchies were discussed as a means of re-
ducing traffic on residential streets but major and minor streets were the only
options discussed. Bulletin number 5 recommended semi-detached houses
on large lots (5,000 square feet with varying setbacks) since the land values
decreased outside the city center. Smaller lots and group housing were only
conditionally recommended, with landscaping and open play spaces offered
as an appropriate use of the resulting extra revenues.14 As a counterpoint,
both bulletins suggested offsetting the increased costs of wider lots further
from town with reduced land improvements that might involve the exclusion
of sidewalks and trees. “To make wide lots possible for low-priced homes
therefore, advantage must be taken of the simplification of land improve-
ments that low density makes possible.” 15
Bulletin number 5 discussed various densities of housing and treated lots
with wider frontage as a convenience to accommodate garages, but in Bulle-
tin number 7, such lots with wide frontage for garages were presented as a
standard.16 Gradually shifting the critical dimensions of the lot reflected less
concern for molding the space of the street and more concern for accommo-
dating an increasingly uniform housing product.
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The general remarks of both pamphlets emphasized the importance of

Summation: Subdivision Merchandising

the neighborhood’s location and surroundings. Bulletin number 7 stated that,
“The plan of a small subdivision will, to a great degree, be determined by its
surroundings. In the case of a large tract, however, it is possible to establish
a definite neighborhood environment and to protect it against unsightly out-
side surroundings and inside influences that depreciate land values.” The bul-
letin also illustrated a way in which the subdivision could “protect against
nonconforming uses” or “objectionable properties.” 17
The FHA also began to direct the temporal components of development
as well, advising against lot sales and favoring “preimproved” or prebuilt sub-
divisions.18 Though the term subdivision was still often used to refer to a
neighborhood, more and more it began to describe a generic parcel of pri-
marily residential development that was prebuilt in large numbers and main-
tained stabilized land values by means of strong boundaries. Particularly after
the war, FHA’s endorsement of prebuilt subdivisions paved the way for devel-
opments like Levittown that did not adopt the assembly-line house but rather
turned the entire site into a giant assembly line. Holes were dug, slabs poured,
and framing hoisted simultaneously in a stepwise sequence across the whole
of the site within a huge choreographed machine that was several thousand
acres large and produced fourty houses a day. Earth-moving equipment lined
up and dug the holes for several buildings at once or planted a uniform num-
ber of shrubs on each lot. Even appliances were delivered to several houses
at once. The balance sheet for this kind of subdivision was restructured as
well. The bottom line did not only correspond to an individual address but to
a process applied to hundreds or even thousands of homes. Thus, a developer
might evaluate the costs of pouring a thousand concrete slabs, and as a con-
sequence of this new tabulation of costs, find new ways to economize in the
building process. Reducing the thickness of a slab or of structural members on
an individual home would provide negligible savings, but within a summation
process, alterations to several thousand slabs or beams provided significant
savings. From prefinancing, prebuilding, and prefabrication evolved an en-
tirely new residential fabric in which all the negotiations among the pieces
occurred all at once and would be undifferentiated by iterative growth over
time. In return for more predictable resale value, the home buyer bought the
house lot together as well as accepting the simultaneous development of a
very similar fabric throughout with more predictable resale value.
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R e a l Es t a t e I n d u s t r y
3.3

Realtors, home builders, and subdividers recognized the authority of the FHA
as a sponsor and a clearinghouse of information and reproduced many of its
“good-bad” comparisons in professional publications. Since the last quarter
of the nineteenth century, subdividers had, with the help of planners and
designers, developed land and its infrastructure for lot sales, but since the
FHA favored preimprovement, the subdivider became a home builder who
also provided interior finishes and appliances. The homes substituted for
street improvements. Often, sidewalks were built only on one side of the
street and trees planted in the lawns rather than in planting strips. Alleys that
previously allowed for smaller roadways were considered a thing of the past.
An all-purpose street 50 feet wide replaced roadway variations. The garage
had become an unquestionable part of the house, and shared garages were
discouraged. New marketing studies demonstrated a clear preference for co-
In the past five weeks, I have lonial homes on curvilinear streets subdivided into quarter-acre lots. The Na-
met with more than thirty
tional Association of Homebuilders replaced the National Association of Real
groups from industry, labor,
veterans, and government. I Estate Brokers, and this new quasiprofessional group portrayed itself as the
have listened closely to their architect of scientifically planned communities and the conveyor of all kinds
recommendations; and I have of “modern know-how.” 19 The subdivider would orchestrate the integration
examined the principal avail- of commodities and infrastructure, distribute modern appliances, and provide
able data. Two sobering facts new forms of transportation. Some even forecast the advent of airplane sub-
emerge from this study in
divisions. In the same way that houses and other commodities were likened to
bold relief. First, there is an
urgent need for some 3 mil- automobile manufacture in American, so was the subdivision. One subdivider
lion moderately and low- wrote, “Just as automobiles passed through crude stages of design and me-
priced homes and apartments chanical construction over the years, so has subdivision planning emerged
during the next two years. from a mere jumble of streets, alleys, and rectangular blocks.” 20
Second, we can meet this
need only by bringing to bear
F e d e ra l H o usi n g A d m i n is t ra t i o n / Ve t e r a ns ’ A d m i n i s t r a t i o n
the same daring, determined
and hard hitting team work World War II and the Depression had organized the housing demands of sev-
with which we tackled the eral years into a single large market. After passage of the Servicemen’s Read-
emergency job of building the justment Act of 1944, the Veterans’ Administration (VA) cooperated with the
world’s most powerful war FHA by guaranteeing GI loans in lieu of equity. In 1946 the Veterans’ Emer-
machine four years ago.23 gency Housing Act was passed, sanctioning VA and FHA cooperation and a
—Wilson Wyatt FHA/VA
loosening of FHA rules and regulations. A population of returning veterans
Housing Expeditor
with similar incomes and requirements also entered the home-buying market
War and its more sobering af- within a short period of time. This link between subdivisions and the military
termath compel a new ap- affected the constitution of the organization in other ways as well. Military
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installations and procedures provided rehearsals for infrastructure, housing, praisal of family values that

Summation: Subdivision Merchandising

and communication formats. While planners were usually interested in aes- puts trivial, vapid, banal, and
thetics and other static elements of the subdivision organization, military unsatisfying things in their
true light. As a consequence,
protocols often gave primacy to organizational expressions. The subdivision
we are discovering that the
also required temporal expressions and logistical problem-solving techniques. instinct for ownership of a
Military techniques for streamlining the construction of barrack-like housing good home is not primitive
would be directly translated into private-sector building by war project build- after all but fundamental. The
ers like William Levitt as would the technologies of prefabrication and mobile number of home-owning
housing units that had been used in various war installations. families in the United States
jumped 40 percent between
1940 and 1947 to put that
Prefabrication national ration of home own-
During the 1930s, private companies, research institutes, government agen- ership at the highest level on
cies, and allied industries developed prefabricated housing prototypes, most record—55 percent of all
of which were panelized systems of steel, concrete, gypsum, and plywood. families. . . . However unmis-
The early prototypes like the Motohome came with a refrigerator full of gro- takable the trend toward
more home ownership, and
ceries. The Ibec house was constructed in one pour of concrete. The Stran
however substantial its gains
Steel house was constructed of steel rather than wood studs. The Higgins in recent years, it still is a
Thermo-namel and Lustron homes used panels made from steel coated with matter of concern that it does
porcelain enamel. All of these, including Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion, the not yet reach 45 percent of
Neff Air Form house, or the Palace Corporation suitcase house drew publicity the families in the United
as among the more experimental prototypes (figure 3.3.5). States. There is no basis for a
complacent assumption that
By the 1940s, approximately thirty prefabrication companies in America
things will advance to the
worked primarily with panelized wood and gypsum systems. The industry’s best solution by themselves.
difficulty lay in balancing the promise of high-volume production against There is a growing public
the gamble of building multiple plants across the country. Distribution of utility-institutional attitude
houses was not quite as easy as the distribution of automobiles. In fact, there toward housing. It favors
were many reasons why the prefabricated house resisted the familiar analogy government built and oper-
ated housing for a large group
between house and car. Unlike the car, houses were complex, weighty, and
of families. It is moving to-
bulky. Their assemblage involved plant labor as well as on-site labor. They did ward entrenched government
not receive subsidies like the transportation industry. The houses were also control of privately owned
entirely dependent on land and property that was heavily controlled by local rental housing. It encourages
legalities. The dry-wall panel systems did not offer a product that was sig- the institutional type of
nificantly different from conventional housing materials and they were re- house production. There is
still concerted, organized, and
garded as less durable than conventional construction because of their light
governmentally blessed effort
weight.21 to further this formula as an
The first large-scale application of prefabrication techniques was in answer to the needs of a typi-
mass-housing projects for World War II conscript housing and barracks at cal urban family. . . . Basic in
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3.3

3.3.5 Interior view, the Higgin Therm-O-Namel House. National Archives and Records Administra-
tion, Still Picture Division, R6 31, Washington, D.C.

this antitraditional formula war production sites and military bases. A typical system assembled interior
for housing America is the and exterior finishes within interlocking panels. The assembly-line house was
conviction that modern life— useful high-security sites because it could be constructed without attracting
complex, urbanized, nervous,
attention. But in many ways prefabrication techniques ironically served as a
industry-centered as it is—
does not permit the tradi- model for the regimentation of the assembly processes in conventional stick
tional home conceived as a construction. On-site construction was further rationalized by the manufac-
man’s castle to remain the ture of materials like plywood and gypsum board in four-foot modular di-
dwelling norm.24 mensions. Since FHA approval was critical to the success of these prototypes,
prefabrication companies avoided metals like aluminum or design features
There was no national hous-
like flat roofs to make their housing look more normative in appearance.22
ing problem as long as a home
was universally regarded as Though many of the individual prefabrication companies did not survive,
the stronghold of the oldest since the chief protocol of subdivision composition would soon involve re-
and most durable of govern- peatability, the seemingly small determination of critical dimensions for
ments; the citadel of that unit prefabricated components and fittings would have enormous effect. The de-
of society that demands and cision to work with 4 by 8 foot panelized sections formatted building calibra-
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tion, assemblage, and transport. Three horizontal panels in this position gets the highest loyalty of its

Summation: Subdivision Merchandising

produced a 12-foot section, while a single panel turned vertically formatted citizens. The home came first,
millions of homes for an 8-foot ceiling height. and other values fell into line
accordingly. As individuals
came to care less about
A d v e r t i si n g I n d us t r y homes, politicians came to
Prefabrication, reconversion, and the coincidental return of thousands of vet- care more about ‘housing.’ 25
erans fueled the continued practice of suburban development as a major U.S.
industry. Private enterprise itself was the architect of systems that the gov- The man who owns and loves
ernment only fine-tuned. It could no longer be entrenched against what it his home can usually be de-
pended upon to practice the
regarded as the threat of radical central control since by the end of the New
virtues of citizenship . . . . The
Deal and for decades after, it was the beneficiary of the same concentrations discontented pessimistic ele-
of federal research and planning. This concentration of power was a kind of ments in our citizenship for
silent partner, providing official seals, guarantees, insurance, and expertise the most part come from the
but never claiming authorship. Every piece of promotion characterized pri- thousands who do not own
vate enterprise as the pilot and the government as the servant. Home owner- their own homes. Other thou-
sands of renters who deeply
ship, patriotism, and individualism were the persuasions that consistently
desire the advantages that
adhered to the project of building homes even as that process became more come from home ownership
and more uniform. As home-building campaigns took hold, most of the evi- and are entitled to its attain-
dence shifted away from government documents and planning essays, and ment need to be encouraged
they began to mingle with pamphlets, newsletters, and ads of a second pro- in habits of economy and
motional campaign, now run entirely by private enterprise (figure 3.3.6). thrift by the concerted action
of industrial and commercial
Every maker, from shipbuilders to plastics manufacturers retooled their
groups.26
product to be part of this home-building effort. The same synthetic materials
that made the bomber pilot’s airplane would now make the veteran’s easy To America’s million home-
chair. Advertisements incorporated patriotic political messages and garbled makers. A home of your own!
quotations of utopian modernism to sell the traditional Cape Cod house and The dream of every true
all its accessories. Advertisements were loaded with political content during American! Your heritage from
those hardy pioneers who
this postwar period. As if deputized to carry out political reorganization, util-
wrought our nation out of the
ity and materials suppliers were almost evangelical about the “American way,” wilderness! Yours the goal
portraying home ownership, “security,” and “stability” as part of a world of they won! And yours the obli-
light beyond the darkness of war. There were also giddy predictions about gation to protect that nation
“postwar dreamitis” or “shangri-la 194x.” Several ads confronted the choice against alien dockers that
between modern and traditional styling with wary ultimatums. One cap- lead to chaos. This is the chal-
lenge of our times—a chal-
tioned a traditional house, “evolution” pairing it with a modern house cap-
lenge being met with the
tioned, “revolution.” Most of the prewar futurism was reflected less in sound common sense of our
planning and building and more in the promotion of appliances. Dishwashers forefathers and the determi-
and toasters featured dynamic styling, turbojets, and roto-towers. Many ads nation that America shall
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Summation: Subdivision Merchandising
3.3.6 Advertisement for Anaconda Copper and Brass, “Both are finding security in copper and
brass”; advertisement for Watrous Flush Valve, “Keep ’em Flushing”; advertisement for Monsanto Plas-
tics, “From a pilot seat . . .” Architectural Record (February 1943; June 1942; November 1943).

of this period featured aerial views of orderly rows of dwellings as if to claim grow by evolution not by
a market that would steadily absorb products through the end of the 1950s. revolution.
Like other durable goods, the house would be replaced or upgraded by In this struggle to preserve
American institutions, no-
new models. Refinishing gadgets and other extra fittings would relieve some
where do we find sturdier
of the indifference of the affordable homes via the same patterns of mer- backing than in the stability
chandising that had arranged the subdivision. In the late 1950s, after the and good citizenship of the
peak of the home-building boom, Levittown began publishing its own home- homeowner. For home owner-
improvement magazine called A Thousand Lanes, which featured the redeco- ship means safety, security,
rating efforts of Levittown’s home owners as the subdivision grew older. The peace, happiness.27
—Small Homes Guide,
magazine continued a trend begun in midcentury advertising. The first wave
Builder Yearbook
of ads pushed the materials of construction and infrastructure for the new
subdivision, while the second wave of ads encouraged the home owner to If modern design could be
update with new appliances, gadgets, and finishes inside the home. Each classed as a fad, the duty of
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model of refrigerator made last year’s model obsolete, perhaps because of a

3.3

the insuring offices would be new egg-tray feature, a new arrangement of the freezer, or a new color. Ma-
merely to eliminate it from terials such as laminates, decorative self-adhesive papers, paint or wallpaper,
eligibility. It appears obvious, and fabrics for interior redecoration were also featured. Most of the articles
however, that in spite of many in A Thousand Lanes were about resurfacing and refreshing a home that had
faddish features displayed by
not been constructed of very durable materials. Decks, skylights, greenhouse
it, the movement is one of
more than a transitory nature, windows, and other fittings and gadgets were also part of remodeling jobs.
and that the basic elements The only kinds of adjustments that could be made to this environment fol-
which characterize it will in lowed the same protocols that made the subdivision. The adjustment had to
all likelihood sooner or later be a widely merchandised product with limited popular options. It had to be
become characteristic of a designed and priced to be sold by the existing forms of retail and sized for
large body of our stock of
delivery in a car or small truck. Since they were largely cosmetic, the new
housing.28
—U.S. Federal Housing Ad- gadgets and fittings of the suburban environment would reinforce rather
ministration, Technical Bulle- than adjust the order of the subdivision while also initiating and formatting
tin No. 2 Modern Design a giant do-it-yourself retail machine.

FHA Homes in Metropolitan Districts

The FHA also shifted the constitution of subdivision organizations by
controlling their location and racial content. The agency’s statistical
division used the racial content of neighborhoods as an index of their
bankability and so could “redline” or exclude entire areas of a city as
mortgage risks. The FHA also mapped and rated inner-city areas not
only for race but also for juvenile delinquency, foreclosure, and mod-
ern utilities among other things as a means of determining mortgage
risk. Racial segregation was clearly directed from the technical bulle-
tins, underwriting manuals, and other publications, and it was also
part of a time-honored tradition that the real estate brokers and subdi-
viders treated as sacred dogma in an otherwise unpredictable market.
As a consequence of all of these factors, the FHA primarily financed
homes in suburban areas. Responding to criticism, the agency con-
ducted a study to determine whether it had unfairly biased its mort-
gage endorsements. The study, FHA Homes in Metropolitan Districts,
reported a trend toward municipal annexation of outlying districts that
allowed the FHA to include exurban tracts in its metropolitan desig-
nation. The FHA explained the large number of suburban subdivi-
sions not as examples of its own preferences and rules but rather as a
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general American population shift from city to suburb—one that it

Summation: Subdivision Merchandising

had no choice but to follow.29

Technical Bulletin Number 2: Modern Design

In technical bulletin number 2, Modern Design, the FHA demonstrated
its comprehension of modernism by evaluating it in relation to mort-
gage insurance risk. In fact, mortgage insurance was portrayed as the
foremost cultural protocol against which modern architecture must
reconcile itself. Regarded as another housing style, “modern design,”
since it constituted “a departure of a more or less marked degree from
the character of housing that has customarily obtained,” needed to be
addressed in relation to “risk rating, particularly on the score of prop-
erty rating and of adjustment for nonconformity.” 30 Modern design
was summed up as an approach that derived from plan and privileged
materials and massing over exterior expression such as ornament. Ac-
cording to the FHA, balance, symmetry, and division of formal and
informal spaces typical in other styles was in modern design often re-
placed by asymmetry, open plans, and reduction of room dimensions.
Often the bulletin portrayed new real estate practices as “modern”
simply because they were different from previous traditions.31 Already
broad and dilute as transplanted to American soil, “modernism” as ap-
plied to the FHA’s version at the single-family house probably only
inspired some liberty with the plan or some vestigial free-plan ele-
ments like half-height partitions or rounded kitchen counters open to
another room. The FHA document supposedly reflected some con-
sensus among practitioners that modernism’s revision of tradition
should probably be recognized as the inevitable hallmark of an un-
known but possibly advantageous future. This bulletin like the other
FHA technical bulletins was, though not regulatory, presented as a
mixture of consensus and directive.
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Notes
3.3

1. Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 196–197.
2. U.S. F.H.A., Bulletin for Manufacturers Advertising Agencies and Publishers (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), 5.
3. The first Federal Housing administrator, James A. Moffett, had been a senior vice
president of Standard Oil Company and transplanted business practices and person-
nel from the private sector to Washington. The idea of mortgage insurance was first
proposed by Winifield W. Riefler who had worked for the Federal Reserve Board
and the Central Statistical Board. U.S. F.H.A., The FHA Story in Summary: 1934–
1959, 5.
4. U.S. F.H.A., The FHA Story in Summary: 1934–1959 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov-
ernment Printing Office, 1959), 4–7; and Marc A. Weiss, The Rise of the Community
Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 1987), 145–146 or Chapter 6.
5. U.S. F.H.A., The FHA Story in Summary, 9.
6. Ibid.
7. FHA Pamphlets, Box 18, RG 195, National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) Main Branch (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office).
8. U.S. F.H.A., Bulletin for Manufacturers Advertising Agencies and Publishers (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1934), 3.
9. U.S. F.H.A., Second Annual Report (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1936), 39.
10. Better Housing News Flashes (1935), RG 31, NARA Motion Picture Division, Main
Branch, Washington, D.C.
11. Home Selector Portfolio, RG 195 Federal Home Loan Bank Board, National Archives,
Pickett Street Branch, Washington, D.C.
12. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 5 Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses (Washing-
ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, July 1, 1936), 1; and U. S. F.H.A.,
Technical Bulletin no. 7, Planning Profitable Neighborhoods (Washington, D.C.: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1938), 4.
13. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 7, 4.
14. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 5, 17, 28–29.
15. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 5, 21.
16. Ibid., 28–31; and U. S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 7, 14.
17. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 7, 5, 17.
18. Ibid., 4.
19. Stanley L. McMichael, Real Estate Subdivisions (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1949),
37, 5–6.
20. Ibid.
21. Kelly Burnham, The Prefabrication of Houses (New York: The Technology Press of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1951),
49–63, 277–279.
22. Ibid., 289, 81–84, 34–35, 90.
23. Wilson Wyatt, A Report to the President for the Housing Expediter (Washington, D.C.:
U.S. Government Printing Office, 2 February 1946).
24. Homes for America, published by the Washington Committee of the National Associ-
ation of Real Estate Boards by Charles Steward, public relations director, 1948,
67–68.
25. Ibid. 66.
26. National Lumber Manufacturers Association, Lumber and Its Utilization, vol. IV
 195

“Planning and Designing of Small Houses,” 1923, 12. Quoted in John P. Deaned.

|
Home Ownership—Is it Sound? (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1945).

Summation: Subdivision Merchandising

27. Small Homes Guide Builder Yearbook, 1938–39.
28. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 2 Modern Design (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govern-
ment Printing Office, March 15, 1936), 2.
29. U.S. F.H.A., FHA Homes in Metropolitan Districts: Characteristics of Mortgages, Homes
and Borrowers under the FHA Plan, 1934–40 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government
Printing Office, 1942), 1, 5, 6, 7.
30. U.S. F.H.A., Technical Bulletin no. 2, 1.
31. Ibid., 3.
3.4 S I T E S

The inherent complexity associated with assembling multiple houses, archi-

tects, and attending industries into some kind of organization has attracted
the interest of many cultural engineers. Planners and reformers of the subdi-
vision, however, like those in Washington during the New Deal, repeatedly
found themselves in the position of working on an organization arranged
under different parameters than those of their initial goals. In many cases
the new form was even cloaked in planning rhetoric, but the temporal site
had been rendered considerably shorter and the means of production had
entirely changed the character of the subdivision organization. Sanctioned
by the implicity all-American efforts of private industry, many of the postwar
subdivisions avoided questions of political restructuring by remaining com-
modities rather than municipalities. Most of the New Deal planning cam-
paigns treated the federal government like a sponsoring client who would
establish the financial and political architecture of community. Meanwhile,
the government turned all the accumulated planning data toward a different
purpose, and the merchandising campaign, with all the speed and power of
advertising and marketing, took the reins and became the real architect of
suburbia.
All of the statistical models of the World War I and New Deal planners
might have more accurately represented the ephemeral qualities they sought
to duplicate or control if their subdivision graphs and tabulations had been
registered against time. The merchant builders who became the new design-
ers of suburbia certainly understood the importance of temporal and logisti-
cal information, and they used those registers of time to create a housing
product that could move more rapidly through the market.
Rather than a projected social or political site, the midcentury merchan-
dising campaign found an existing practical site in a marketable product, and
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that product was the space of the house and subdivision. Within the history

Sites
of the residential subdivision, the repeated dwelling as well as its accoutre-
ment and construction techniques has always been an important site by
which to adjust residential fabric. The house became a doubly powerful site
when its assembly served as a model for the assembly processes of the subdi-
vision as a whole. The techniques and materials associated with houses or
cars dictated an approach to the site planning of the subdivision so that the
entire organization was commodified. Any kind of fitting or gadget merchan-
dised for this environment first entered the organization of the market, and
therefore had the power to not only affect a single house, but also the
larger subdivision.
Many reformers have not been interested in using the subdivision organ-
ization to adjust itself but have rather been interested in remaking the entire
organization in a new image. For the nineteenth-century designers of sub-
urbia, the turn-of-the-century Garden City planners, or even the late
twentieth-century reformers aestheticizing an organization has been a tricky
proposition. Just as some Garden City planners often merely provided a radial
arrangement of streets, as if that would reference the complex financial pro-
tocols of Howard’s invention, so the late twentieth-century reformers have
also attempted to define the indeterminate complexity of historical urban
organizations by referencing an historical aesthetic deemed to be more “au-
thentic.” Meanwhile, the dominant organizations of the marketplace have
continued to effortlessly steal their earnestly crafted quasihistorical imagery
in service of more powerful organizational protocols. The reformers long for
an authentic model that does not exist and the market longs for a generic
model that does not exist.
Comprehensive control of subdivision organizations often reduces their
complexity. For instance, while the RPAA attempted holistic control through
interlocking functional relationships, more relaxed situations in which these
functions were used generated a more open-ended and complex calculus of
relationships. In a more recent example, Christopher Alexander attempted to
build mathematical models describing housing relationships. Using set theory,
Alexander posited that the complex interactions of a limited number of hous-
ing factors could be mapped and controlled using semi-lattice structures. The
semi-lattice structure recognized overlapping and branching populations of
sets unlike a pyramidal or treelike structure that placed these components in
a hierarchical arrangement. While Alexander’s entire project was, in some
198
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sense, designed to demonstrate the unknowable complexity of community,

3.4

he was also attempting to highlight principles that would eventually have

predictable and holistic effects.
The Case Study houses and the Eichler homes were perhaps the most
notable examples of projects that both critiqued and proposed to utilize the
distributed housing market. One of the most powerful adjustments to the
housing environment, for instance, resulted from the calibration of prefabri-
cated construction materials. The Case Study houses proposed to adjust these
very powerful protocols by reassembling into a home, prefabricated pieces
that were not originally designed for domestic building. Borrowing protocols
from media and from sources as varied as the aircraft and film industries, the
Eamses, throughout their practice, found sites in many organizations op-
erating outside the conventions of architectural design. The Eichler homes
and prefabrication companies who survived into the 1950s, like Pease Homes,
also found design sites in the processes of housing fabrication, and these
companies designed not only the prefabricated pieces of the house but their
modes of assembly. Perhaps the underexploited power of proposals like these
lay in the possibility of adjusting not only the design aesthetics of the house
but the spaces between the houses and the streets by means of a similar
mechanism—a distributed product or assembly technique.
Following the Levittown precedent, other merchant builders developed
subdivisions that were a great deal larger in land area than most municipali-
ties. Luxury versions of these subdivisions, merged with security and recre-
ational amenities like golf courses, began to call themselves “planned
communities” during the 1980s. These were close cousins to the midcentury
suburban subdivision in that they followed similar market protocols by selling
imagery and obsolescence, but they offered both employment and housing
enclaves without the inconveniences of municipal government. These edge
city formats like the “real estate products” related to giant new retail and
office organizations have become commodities which America also exports
around the globe.
Optimization of the subdivision is not a meaningful desire, however,
simple functional relationships and products potentially have enormous if
not entirely predictable effects on the residential fabric that has been distrib-
uted across the country. An intermediate organizing agent might temporarily
alter a residential organization for instance, by placing variables into interde-
pendent relationships or by making batch summations of an alteration across
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its repeated components. Similarly, while most of the gadgets sent to subur-

Sites
bia, from gardening supplies to decks to barbecues, were designed to rein-
force its structure, it is also possible to imagine a fitting that does not remain
neutral to the larger organization but rather sends in an order to adjust inter-
play between the house and its surroundings or between groups of houses.
The midcentury subdivision inverted planning protocols by commodifying
subdivision space. Since these commodified formats were designed to absorb
the wild cards and jokes of the marketplace and are capable of tolerating
more circumstances than rules, they may continue to be more responsive to
salesmen and artists than to planners.
Afterword

The episodes, biographies, and models assembled here identify several differ-
ent species of site within active organizations. Though these sites are part of
many routine operations within the profession, they are not the official sites
of architectural operation. They do not take their measure from geographical
markers or geometric boundaries. They are part of an explicit architecture
of generic programs and spaces for not only land, highways, and residential
formations but offices, malls, and other franchises. An adjustment to these
protocols may be expressed as a repertoire of constraints that utilize tempo-
ral, virtual, and physical strata of site. It might be a subtraction or a virtual
adjustment that finds sites in the spin and makes space by reconditioning
perceptions. It might be a dumb component that gains intelligence in mul-
tiples. All these switches or fittings are difficult to encompass within conven-
tional representations of building or site. They are equally difficult to express
as holistic visions, since their real intelligence may depend on a tactic respon-
sive to temporary or circumstantial conditions.
Anarchical market forces or cultural persuasions that produce space in
some cases format that space to be the means of its own adjustment as it
absorbs both accidents and deliberate inventions. After a survey of the sites
and episodes collected here, one lingering impression is of the potential
power of these partial or tactical adjustments—these wild cards in the
organization.
MacKaye’s mediating lines, his trails, highways, landways, or “lanes of
national development” are almost geological mechanisms for the subtraction
and gradual redistribution of resources. They are something like giant differ-
ential partitions that change their own constitution over time, revaluing and
recombining the ingredients inside their boundaries to revolve around differ-
ent programs. In some ways they are the expansion of a single small detail
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into a gigantic field of influence. In other ways they are an evacuation, a

Afterword
subtraction, not only of physical space but of the dominant controls over a
site—controls that reside within a legal or virtual realm.
The sites that remain from our attempts at the scientific organization of
transportation networks are themselves quite dumb, in spite of all of their
claims of sophistication. The number of networks that have developed sepa-
rately however, in the fights for dominance between water, rail, highway, and
air have laid the groundwork for potential intelligence within the networks.
Those sites that lie between the networks as potential switches are extremely
powerful, since joining one complex network to another increases their com-
bined intelligence many fold. Similarly the roadside or wayside, now simply
the vacant right-of-way for the force-field of traffic engineering or the strip
of land vaguely associated with a landscape tradition is also a powerful site
in a process of acquisition and site redesignation. The roadside is also a pos-
sible switch or a site for building parallelism and redundancy among several
different networks. These slight distortions of the network are incredibly
powerful means of magnetizing traffic and development both inside and out-
side the urban center.
The sites embedded within residential formations perhaps best exhibit
the power of the small component to recondition a larger organization. The
smallest decisions involving calibration or sequence in the construction of
the midcentury suburb are extremely powerful in summation or when ampli-
fied across many multiples of houses by a global maneuver. Sometimes the
simplest rules directing a functional relationship within a population also
have very powerful effects. They potentially generate enormous systemic
changes equal in power to the carefully choreographed protocols that have
developed giant subdivision sites as a single assembly-line process. A repeated
fitting affecting not only discrete details, but interplay among components,
can potentially overwrite the existing protocols for street, yard, and other
interstitial spaces in residential formations.
Finally, these episodes are only forays into the organizational strata of
familiar environments that perhaps reveal new territory within them. The
content of these episodes or the specific territory they describe becomes less
important than the shifted perspective they intend to prompt. In fact that
shifted perspective perhaps demonstrates the irrelevance of organizing this
book into three parts with three different historical topics, since the most
interesting sites are found by crossing between them.
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In this book these sites are the territory of both individual artists and
Afterword

large groups. The most interesting artists and practitioners discussed here
treat their work as inventions engaging culture’s diverse and active agents of
change. The most powerful inventions are often tactical adjustments fueled
by larger associations and patterns of connection, so that however explicit
the intervention, once released, it is flexible enough to absorb more and more
circumstance and complexity for as long as it lasts.
Index

Ackerman, Frederick, 27, 35 highway designers, 79, 99

active organization, 2, 1–10 Magic Motorways, National Motor-
Advertising industry, 189–191 way Plan, 94–95
Alaska-Siberia Highway, 63–65 Bergson, Henri, 17, 20, 22
Alexander, Christopher, 197 Better Homes Campaign, 177–179
American Association of State Highway Better Housing News Flashes, 178
Officials (AASHO), 79 Better Housing Program, 177–179
American Automobile Association (AAA), Bing, Alexander, 162
79 Blake, Peter (God’s Own Junkyard),
Amundsen, Roald, 41, 63 112–113
Appalachian Trail, 13, 18, 25–34, 39, 40, Blue Ridge Parkway, 86, 117
45, 57, 63–64, 200–201 Bronx River Parkway, 90–91
Appleyard, Donald (A View from the Bryant, Paul, 18–19
Road), 113 Bulkley Bill, 86, 87
Aramis project, 106 Bureau of Public Roads (BPR), 80–
Archigram, 119–120 84, 92–93, 94
Arens, Egmont
“Manhattan Inner-Loop Skyway,” 79, Chalk, Warren, 103
99–100 Chase, Stuart
automobile terminals, 77, 78, 79, 98–102 A New Deal, 48
“Hell Raisers,” 27
Babbitt, 149, 153 New England towns, 46, 49
back-to-the-land movement, 14–15, 54 RPAA, 46–50
Bateson, Gregory, 68–69 technocracy, 37, 55
Bel Geddes, Norman The Tragedy of Waste, 42, 48
automated vehicles, 105, 109 TVA, 48, 55
Bel Geddes Interchange, 103 UVA Round Table on Regionalism,
Futurama exhibit of 1939, 77, 94 47–48
 204
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Chicago City Club competition (1913), Federal Housing Administration (FHA), 8,

Index

136, 138, 140–141, 142 134, 165, 169, 172

Drummond, William, and neighbor- cooperations of Veterans’ Administra-
hood units, 138 tion, 186–187
City Housing Corporation, 161–165 FHA Homes in Metropolitan Districts,
Clay Hearings (1954), 81–84 192–193
communication-information networks, 3 National Housing Act of 1934 (NHA),
highways, 77–80, 122–125, 201 175–193
conservation, 13, 69–70 racial segregation, 192–193
Coyle, David Cushman, 55, 61–83 Technical Bulletin 2: Modern Design,
cybernetics, 2, 3, 68–69, 106 191–192, 193
Technical Bulletins 5 and 7, 179–
Desky, Donald, 99 185
differential, 2, 9–10, 28, 75–79, 127– Federal Parkways, 91
131 fluvial models of organization, 6, 9–10,
Draper, Earle S., 49, 152, 156 16, 54–64, 200
Ford, Henry, 48, 157
Eastern Park-to-Park Highway, 86 Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR)
ecology, 13, 67–71 Interregional Highways, 92–93
Edison, Thomas, 19 governor of New York, 47–48
Eichler Homes, 198 Greenbelt Towns Program, 167–168,
Eisenhower, Dwight, President, 83–84, 172
94–96 New Deal planning experiments, 48,
Emerson, 17 54, 56, 58, 167–168, 172
environmentalism, 3, 13–14, 68–71 function, 9–10, 200–202
Epoch New Deal demonstration projects,
Percy MacKaye’s biography of Steele 165–171
MacKaye, 19 RPAA and organization agents,
expertise 161–165
highway planning, 75–77 subdivisions, 136–137, 143
“subdivision science,” 138–143
technocracy, 34–36 gadgets, 7, 191–192
Garden City, 131–132, 136, 137,
Federal Aid Highway Acts of 1916, 1921 143–147
and 1944, 58, 80–81 Garden City satellite, 143, 146–147,
Federal Home Loan Bank Act (1932), 175 147–157
Federal Home Loan Bank Board (FHLBB) Geddes, Sir Patrick
Home Selector Portfolio 178–179, Benton MacKaye, 17, 20–23, 42, 71
180–181 RPAA, 20–23, 47
 205

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General Motors, 75, 82, 105 home ownership, 177–178, 187–191

Index
automated vehicles, 105 Hoover, President Herbert, 15, 130, 133,
Electromotive division, 101 138–139, 142
generic spatial formats, 3, 4, 129, 130, Better Homes Campaign, 138–139
187 Howard, Ebenezer
geological models of organization, 1, Garden City, 131–132, 197
6–7, 9–10, 15–16 hydroelectricity, 6, 28
geotechnics, 13–14, 19, 20–21
Gilders, George, 77 information highway, 3, 77–78
global positioning system (GPS), 108 interchange, 6, 77–79, 102–104
“good roads movement,” 79–80 intermodal transportation networks, 7,
Gore, Al, Senator Sr., 79, 81–83 75–80, 87–90, 92–93, 100–102
Gore, Al, Vice President, 79–80 container intermodality, 100–102
Gore Hearings (1955), 81–83 Interregional Highways, 92–93, 99
governor, 9–10 Interstate Highway Act of 1956, 78,
Greenbelt, Maryland, 168, 172 79–84
Greenbelt Towns Program, 167–168 interstate highways, 8, 77–84, 86–89,
Greendale, Wisconsin, 161, 167–172 112–114
beautification, 112–118
Halprin, Lawrence interchanges, 77, 101–104
Freeways, 102 intercity networks, 78, 94–95, 97–99
highways and urban planning, 79, intermodal highways, 7, 77–82, 89–
109, 123 92, 95, 103–105
systems approach to highway plan- right-of-way, 78–79, 112–118, 119,
ning, 108–109 124–125
technological forecasting, 108–109 switches, 76–77
“traffic architecture,” 102 terminals, 76–79, 98–102
Harvard City Planning series, 142–144 transcontinentals, 85–90, 92–93
“Hell Raisers,” 27, 34, 55
highways Jackson, J. B.
automated highways, 105–109 highways and roadsides, 118–119
intermodal highways, 7, 75–79, 87– James, William, 19, 22
90, 93, 99–102, 124 Jellicoe, Geoffrey (Motopia), 102, 123
national highway networks, 6, 7, Johnson, Lady Bird
86–96 highway beautification, 79, 113–117
home building industry, 175, 176–177
FHA, 175, 176–177, 186 Keats, John (Crack in the Picture Win-
prefabrication, 187–189 dow), 112
Home Owner’s Loan Act (1933), 175 Kettering, C. F. (“As Ket Sees It”), 82, 105
 206
|

Keynesian economics, 36, 48 From Geography to Geotechnics, 71

Index

Kingsport, Tennessee, 147–156 Geddes, Sir Patrick, 20–23

Koolhaas, Rem, 123 Geotechnics of North America, 70–71
Kropotkin, Pyotr, 21–22, 131 global infrastructure, 30–34, 39, 43–
44, 54, 63–65, 67–71
Lay, Charles Downing Harvard School of Forestry, 16
interchanges, 102–104 highways, 56–58, 63–65, 79, 88–90,
Le Play, Frederic, 21 117
Leavitt, Helen (Superhighway- introduction, 6–7, 13–22
Superhoax), 81–83, 94–96 landways, 57
Leopold, Aldo, 69 “lanes of national development,” 58–
levee, 16, 28 60, 200
Levittown, Long Island, New York “liquid planning,” 47–48, 54–61
A Thousand Lanes, 190–192 material, energy, and psychological re-
merchant builders, 189–190, 197, sources, 43–44
198 military models of organization, 44–
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 167 45, 64
limited dividend corporation, 143–146, Mount Monadnock, 43–44
162 Mumford, 34, 39, 42, 70–71
Lincoln Highway Association, 85, 86, 90 organizational architecture, 16, 67–71
“liquid planning,” 47, 54–61 recursive organization, 70–71
Loeb, Harold, 35–36 “regional engineering,” 29–30
Loewy, Raymond, 99 retirement, 70–71
RPAA, 14–15, 27–28, 46–50, 54–56,
MacDonald, Thomas H. (BPR Bureau 67–68
Chief), 80 Shirley, Massachusetts, 39, 49–50, 63,
MacKaye, Benton 70
Alaska, 27, 63–64 Soviet Union, USSR, 28, 63–64
Alaska–Siberia Highway, 63–64 Stein, Clarence, 28, 46, 50, 54–55, 57–
Appalachian Trail, 13, 18, 25–34, 39, 59, 67–68, 71
40, 45, 57, 64 Tennessee Valley Authority, 54–61
“cement railroad,” 56, 88–90 The New Exploration: A Philosophy of
Employment and Natural Resources, Regional Planning, 42–45, 54, 70
27 “The New Exploration: Charting the In-
environment, 17, 39, 42–46, 69 dustrial Wilderness,” 39, 40–41
“expedition nine,” childhood in Shirley, “The New Northwest Passage,” 63
Massachusetts, 40 “The New Thirteen,” 59–60
fluvial/geological models of organiza- theatrical influences, 17, 18–19, 40–
tion, 6, 9–10, 16, 54–61, 64, 200 41, 45
 207

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townless highway, 56–58 New Thirteen, 59–60

Index
World Atlas of Commodity Flow, 30– Niagra, 30, 45
34, 39 Nietzsche, Frederich, 21
MacKaye, Percy, 19, 40, 63–64 Nolen, John, 49, 139–142, 147–157
MacKaye, Steele, 17–18, 18–19, 40 Norris, Tennessee, 161, 165–167
Manning, Warren H.
“National Plan Study Brief,” 81, 87–89 Oak Ridge, Tennessee
redundancy, 88 Levittown, Long Island, New York, 167
Mariemont, Ohio, 147–156 Norris, Tennessee, 165–167
Marsh, George Perkins, 21, 70 obsolescence
McHarg, Ian, 68 transportation infrastructure, 78, 124
McMahon, Aline, 59, 67 openway, 28
military models of organization, 1, 45, optimization, 1, 4, 198–199
138 organization man, 8
Morgan, A. E., 49, 55 organization space, 4, 1–10
Morgan, Arthur, 165 organizational architecture, 1–10,
Mowbray, A. Q. (Road to Ruin), 83 200–202
Mumford, Lewis Owen, Wilfred
Garden City, 131 automobile terminals, 98–99
Geddes, Sir Patrick, 20–23
highways, 94–96 parallelism, 2, 9–10, 28,
MacKaye, 20, 28, 34, 39–40, 42, 67–71 transportation infrastructure, 77–
RPAA, 20, 28, 46–50 79, 112–120, 124–125, 201
partition, 9–10
Natchez Trace, 86, 117 MacKaye, 54–64
National Association of Real Estate Peary, Robert Edwin, 41
Boards (NAREB) Pease Homes, 198
FHA, 176, 186 Peets, Elbert, 168–172
Nelson, Herbert, and federal demon- Perry, Clarence
stration towns, 172 neighborhood unit, 138
National Highway Users Conference, 80 Philco
National Housing Act (1934), 134, automated highways, 105
175–179 Physiography, 16
Natural Resources Committee (NRC), 18 Pinchot, Gifford, 25, 69
“Our Cities,” 154–155 Port Authority of New York, 99
Regional Factors in National Plan- Prefabrication, 187–189
ning, 59–62 Eichler and Pease Homes, 198
Negroponte, Nicholas, 77 panelized gypsum and plywood,
network architecture, 1–6, 200–202 188–189
 208
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President’s Conference on Home Build- Resettlement Administration (RA),

Index

ing and Home Ownership, 136, 167–168

138–143 Richards, Brian, 103
Pushkarev, Boris (Man-made America:
Chaos or Control?), 113, 117–118 Sand County Almanac, 69
scenic roads, 114–116, 119–120
Radburn, New Jersey A Proposed Program for Scenic
function, 161–165 Roads, 114–116
President’s Conference on Home Scott, Howard, 27, 35–36, 48, 55
Building and Home Ownership, Shirley, Massachusetts, 39, 49–50, 63,
142–143 70
quoted in FHA Technical Bulletins, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill
179–183 Norris, Tennessee, 167
RPAA, 46, 161–165 Snyder, Bill, 86
Rautenstrauch, Walter, 35 Spengler, Oswald, 21
RCA state control
automated highways, 105 vs. “voluntary association,” 133, 134
real estate products, 3, 4, 129, 198 Stein, Clarence (City Housing Corpora-
Reclus, Elise, 21 tion), 162
recursive organization, 1–10, 68 MacKaye, 28, 46, 50, 54–55, 57–59,
redundancy, 9–10 67–68, 71
transportation infrastructure, 77–79, RPAA, 28, 46, 50, 54–55, 162
85–96, 124, 201 The City, 50
Regional Plan of New York and its Envi- Stubbs, Jesse Hardy, 34
rons, 61, 138 subdivision science, 7–8, 130–131, 136–
Regional Planning Association of 143, 155–156, 176
America (RPAA), 15, 20–21, 27–28, subdivisions
41, 42 as products, 129–135, 175–177,
network regionalism, 46–50 196–199
organizational functions, 133, 161– FHA, 134, 179–185, 191–192,
165, 197 192–193
President’s Conference on Home golf course subdivisions, 198
Building and Home Ownership, metropolitan sponsors, 138
142 “pre-built subdivisions,” 134
quoted in FHA Technical Bulletins, summation, 134–135, 196–199
182–184 subtraction, 2, 9–10, 17, 28, 200
Survey Graphic Regional Planning suburbs, 129–135
Number, 46–47 FHA, 175–193
The City, 46, 49–50 summation, 9–10
remote, 9–10, 15–16, 28 subdivisions, 134–135, 196–199
 209

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Sunnyside Gardens, Queens, New York Tunnard, Christopher (Man-made

Index
function, 161–165 America: Chaos or Control?), 113,
RPAA’s network regionalism, 46 117–118
Survey Graphic, 30, 31, 46–47
switch, 2, 9–10, 77–79 U. S. Housing Corporation, 132, 143–147
transportation infrastructure, 77–79, Unwin, Raymond
98–109, 122–123 MacKaye at TVA, 55, 57–59
systems analysis Mariemont, 149–153
highways, 106–109 Nothing Gained by Overcrowding,
132
tabula rasa, 10, 42
Taylorism, 35, 138–139, 149–150 Veblen, Thorstein, 27, 34–35
technate vehicles
energy certificates and electronic switches, 122–123
machines, 35 automated, 108–113
technocracy, 3, 14–15, 34–36, 54, 68 convertible, 103–106
Continental Committee, 35–36 dual-mode, 105–107, 122
Technical Alliance, 14–15, 27–28, futuristic, 105
34–36 Veterans’ Administration (VA)
technocraze, 15 cooperation with the Federal Housing
template Administration, 186–187
subdivisions, 142–143
Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) war towns, 132, 143–147
Norris, Tennessee, 165–167 watershed, 16, 28, 54–61
Kingsport, Tennessee, 149 wayside, 54–61
MacKaye, Benton, 15, 18, 47–49, Whitaker, Charles, 27, 46
54–61 Whyte, William
terra incognita, 39, 40–42, 46, 56 highways, 81, 115–118
terrestrial infrastructure, 6, 25–34, Organization Man, 113
54–64 wild cards, 4, 6, 70, 139, 204
Thoreau, Henry David, 13, 17, 19, 44, Wilderness Society, 69, 82
70, 71 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 94, 103–105, 138,
Toll Roads and Free Roads, 91–92 140–141
townless highway, 56–58 Wright, Henry, 46, 55, 162
traffic engineering
introduction, 3, 75–78
statistical models, 76
transcontinental highways, 85–90,
92–93
Tugwell, Rexford Guy, 167–168