Invented Edens

KARGON AND MOLELLA
technology/urban studies
Invented Invented Edens
Edens TECH NO-CITI ES

OF TH E
TW E NTI ETH CE NTU RY
ROBERT H. KARGON AND
TECHNO-CITIES ARTHUR P. MOLELLA
OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
H T T P : / / M I T P R E S S . M I T. E D U
Invented Edens
Robert H. Kargon is Willis K. Shepard Professor of the History “With imagination and wide-ranging scholarship, Robert H. Industrialization created cities of Dickensian squalor that
of Science at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author Kargon and Arthur P. Molella bring together techno-cities from were crowded, smoky, dirty, and disease-ridden. By the begin-
of The Rise of Robert Millikan: A Life in American Science New Deal America to Fascist Italy to communist Russia. And ning of the twentieth century, urban visionaries were looking
and other books. Arthur P. Molella is Jerome and Dorothy behind this remarkable synthesis is a deep examination of for ways to improve living and working conditions in indus-
Lemelson Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson the power and limitation of utopian planning to shape actual trial cities. In Invented Edens, Robert Kargon and Arthur
Center. He is the co-editor (with Joyce Bedi) of Inventing for cities.” Molella trace the arc of one form of urban design, which they
the Environment (2003, MIT Press). Robert Fishman, Emil Lorch Professor, Taubman College of term the techno-city: a planned city developed in conjunction
Architecture and Planning, University of Michigan with large industrial or technological enterprises, blending
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02142

“Invented Edens offers a profoundly original perspective on
ROBERT H. KARGON AND the technological and the pastoral, the mill town and the
Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation garden city. Techno-cities of the twentieth century range from
ARTHUR P. MOLELLA
MD DALIM #970845 6/17/08 SILVER ORANGE GREEN PURPLE

the interaction between technology and everyday life in the factory towns in Mussolini’s Italy to the Disney creation of
twentieth century. Using case studies of planned urban envi- Celebration, Florida. Kargon and Molella show that the tech-
ronments, the book makes a path-breaking contribution to no-city represents an experiment in integrating modern
our understanding of modernity. Kargon and Molella present technology into the world of ideal life. Techno-cities mirror
a galaxy of visionaries—and show in fascinating detail how society’s understanding of current technologies and, at the
the interplay between the ideas and actions of these modern- same time, seek to regain the lost virtues of the edenic pre-
minded critics of the machine age contributed to the fash- industrial village.
ioning of cityscapes in which industrial technology and human The idea of the techno-city transcended ideologies, crossed
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

values could exist in harmony, not in conflict.” national borders, and spanned the entire twentieth century.
Robert Fox, Department of History, Oxford University Kargon and Molella map the concept through a series of ex-
emplars. These include Norris, Tennessee, home to the Ten-
nessee Valley Authority; Torviscosa, Italy, built by Italy’s Fascist
government to accommodate synthetic textile manufacturing
(and featured in an early short by Michelangelo Antonioni);
Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela, planned by a team from MIT and
Harvard; and, finally, Disney’s Celebration—perhaps the ul-
timate techno-city, a fantasy city reflecting an era in which
virtual experiences are rapidly replacing actual ones.
THE MIT PRESS

978-0-262-11320-5
Book design by Sharon Deacon Warne, jacket design by Margarita Encomienda

I n v e n t e d E dens
Leme lson Center S tudies in Invention an d I n n o v a ti o n
Arthur P. Mol e lla and Joyc e Bedi, gene ra l e dit o r s
Arthur P. Molella and Joyce Bedi, editors, Inventing for the Environment
Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005
Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella, Invented Edens: Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century
Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century
Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella
The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2008 Massachusetts Institute 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.
For information on quantity discounts, email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.
Set in Engravers Gothic and Bembo by SPi Publisher Services, Puducherry, India.
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kargon, Robert Hugh.

Invented Edens : techno-cities of the twentieth century / Robert H. Kargon and
Arthur P. Molella.
p. cm. — (Lemelson Center studies in invention and innovation)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-11320-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Cities and towns—Effect of technological innovations on—20th century.
2. Information technology—Social aspects—20th century. 3. Telecommunication—
Social aspects—20th century. I. Molella, Arthur P., 1944–. II. Title.
HT166.K357 2008
307.7609'04—dc22
2007045982
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: The Arc of Utopias 1
1 Neotechnics in the Garden: The Marriage of Country

and Town 7
2 Planning for National Regeneration: Techno-Cities in

the Interwar Years 25
3 Techno-Città: Technology and Urban Design in Fascist

Italy 47
4 The Techno-City Goes to War: America in World War II

and After 67
5 Utopia Revived: From Industrial Modernism to

Communit y 91
6 The City of Disciplines: Utopia Denied, Utopia

Restored 113
7 Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism 131
Conclusion: The Fate of the Industrial Eden 149
Notes 157
Index 187
Ack n o w le dgments
The techno-city was an international phenomenon, and hence each chapter

of this book represents an adventure of sorts in a different time and place.
Over the past several years, many individuals guided and enriched our jour-
neys. We are grateful to Logiusto Oliviero and Enea Baldassi for welcoming
us to Torviscosa, Italy, sharing their memories, and revealing the treasures of
that techno-city’s Documentation Center. Elena Agnini assisted in translat-
ing our Italian correspondence.Verushka Leonardi provided an enlightening
visit to the sister Mussolini city of Sabaudia. Patrizia Bonifazio took us on an
unforgettable tour of her open-air museum for Olivetti’s Ivrea, while Jeremy
Kargon’s architect’s eye enhanced our appreciation of the town’s modernism.
Winfried Nerdinger led us to important Nazi-era publications about Salz
gitter, Germany. For our study of Oak Ridge,Tennessee, we owe a deep debt
of gratitude to our intern Michelle Kang for research assistance at the
National Archives and Records Administration, whose archival experts
greatly aided this project. Cynthia C. Kelly connected us with a host of cura-
tors and other specialists in Oak Ridge, at the American Museum of Science
and Energy, in the Department of Energy, and in the National Park Service.
Joseph Barnes of The Celebration Company gave freely of his time and his
design philosophy during our visit to that Disney town.
Equally indispensable to this project were archivists and staff at numerous
repositories, including the Olivetti Archives at Ivrea, the MIT Archives, the
Chicago Architects Oral History Project, the Chicago Art Institute, the
Frances Loeb Library of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design,
the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Cornell University
Library, and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of
Pennsylvania. We also wish to thank the many colleagues who listened to
viii acknowledgments
and critiqued our various presentations along the road to this book. We
cannot begin to name them all, but at the top of our list are Stuart W. Leslie,
Morris Low, Miriam Levin, Alan Morrison, Simon Joss, and Geoffrey
Copland. We also received many valuable suggestions from our colleagues at
meetings of the Society for the History of Technology and at academic
round tables held at Case Western University, at Westminster University in
London, at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American
History, and at The Johns Hopkins University’s Department of the History
of Science and Technology
We benefited greatly from the thoughts and suggestions of our editors
at The MIT Press: Marguerite Avery for enthusiastically taking this book
under her wing, and Paul Bethge for doing his best to blend the authors’
voices. Substantial parts of chapter 7 appeared earlier as “Culture, Technol-
ogy and Constructed Memory in Disney’s New Town: Techno-Nostalgia in
Historical Perspective,” in Cultures of Control, ed. Miriam Levin (Harwood,
2000). We are grateful to Dr. Levin and to Taylor and Francis Publishers for
permission to reprint this material.
None of this journey would have been possible without steadfast sup-
port from our respective home bases in Baltimore and Washington, DC.
We are grateful to colleagues at The Johns Hopkins University, especially
Sharon Kingsland, for reinforcement and encouragement. The Smithsonian
Institution’s Lemelson Center team kept us energized with their ideas and
on track: we depended particularly on Joyce Bedi’s expert editorial judg-
ment and pursuit of elusive illustrations and Claudine Klose’s adroit and ever
cheerful handling of administrative logjams. Throughout this venture, we
have been grateful for the constant assistance of friends and family. Marcia
Kargon’s patience and support was essential to the success of this project and
is much appreciated. Roya Marefat shared her keen perceptions of the built
environment as culture, and Mina Marefat her enthusiastic appreciation of
modern architecture.The generous aid of the Lemelson Foundation at every
stage of this project is gratefully acknowledged.
The book is dedicated to our parents, Giacinto and Betty, Ira and Inez.
I n t r o d ucti on: T he Ar c of Uto pi as
The birth pangs of the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis came on

quickly and were painful in the extreme. Within living memory of many of
their inhabitants, smoky, dirty, disease-ridden cities replaced small market
towns and even open fields or marshes. The search for ways to create better
housing and workplaces and healthier, more elevated lives began almost
immediately. This book traces the history of some important ideas that were
meant to chart this better way.
The book rests on a series of exemplars, or case studies, of what we term
“techno-cities,” defined as cities planned and developed in conjunction with
large technological or industrial projects. No group ever marched under a
“techno-cities” banner, nor, for that matter, did contemporary advocates
even use the term “techno-city.” Rather, the notion of techno-cities is our
retrospective category, putting under one roof those who advocated, vari-
ously, the concepts of Garden City, utopia (or eutopia), new town (or città
nuova, or neue Stadt), or community (comunità)—always with the modifier
“techno-” implied. The cities chosen for closer examination were subjected
to one additional criterion: all were either actually built and inhabited or (in
the case of Minnesota Experimental City) had substantial resources invested
in them. In Walden, Henry David Thoreau advised: “If you have built castles
in the air, your work need not have been lost; that is where they should be.
Now, put the foundations under them.”1 Our protagonists followed this path.
As Thoreau suggested, they attempted to put life into their thought.
Some of our cases have attracted the attention of a variety of scholars from
a wide assortment of disciplines. Most of these studies place the cities in a par-
ticular national or disciplinary context—for example, German or American
history, architecture, planning, utopianism, economic history, or urbanism. We
12 introduction
intend to bring cohesion and order to these various viewpoints and put them
into a new and useful framework, bringing the perspectives of intellectual his-
tory and the history of technology into the story.
As we see it, the techno-city represents an experiment in integrating
modern technology into the world of ideal life. Our story involves tracing
a variant of the utopian strain, born more than 500 years ago, that surged
during the excesses of late-nineteenth-century industrialism. At the dawn
of the twentieth century, utopian ideas were taken seriously; more impor-
tantly, they captured the imagination of multitudes and had a forceful influ-
ence on public life.2 In particular, leaders of the modern movement who
came of age at the time of World War I were determined to create a new
utopia by applying the latest technologies and an innovative style to the
built environment.The techno-city phenomenon responded to many of the
same utopian imperatives as modernism—in particular, a quest for renewal
after the destruction of war—and shared much of the same social agenda,
including affordable housing in healthy and livable cities. But there was a
difference. For example, most designers of our techno-cities, more acutely
aware of technological excess, never took to such radical Corbusian notions
as the home as a “machine for living,” and often preferred vernacular styles
for their housing projects. Nor, on the German scene, was the Bauhaus style
unequivocally accepted. Rather, most techno-cities blended modernist ele-
ments with what could be interpreted as anti-modernist elements. As we
will see, the marriage was interesting but difficult.
Techno-cities, like all other cities, are rooted in their times and reflect their
historical context.They mirror a society’s understanding of current technol-
ogies and their role in shaping lives. They expose, as well, aspirations for the
future. Because they were planned in connection with large technological or
industrial projects, techno-cities are especially interesting for understanding
the complex relations between technology and its social environment in the
industrial and post-industrial eras. They embody especially well themes that
are present in the early reactions to the urban excesses of the industrial era
and that continue to resonate.
Techno-cities were the twentieth-century descendants of the paternal-
ist company towns of the Industrial Revolution. As early as 1816, Robert
Owen’s New Lanark was designed both to soften the austerity of industrial-
ism and to provide a better way of life for his workers. The New England
The Arc of Utopias 13
mill towns built after the ideas of Robert Lowell and Titus Salt’s 1850 Saltaire
were likewise artifacts of the family-owned companies of the later Industrial
Revolution. The mask of paternalism slipped away, however, in the ill-fated
town of Pullman (1880), revealing the social control beneath. The English
city planner Ebenezer Howard knew of this earlier tradition and departed
from it in both social and physical form, though Cadbury’s Bournville and
Lever’s Port Sunlight are often seen as precursors.3
Finally, our techno-cities are purpose-driven inventions. Like some of
their forerunners, many planners of techno-cities, our inventors, were drawn
to the nostalgic notion of the pre-industrial village Eden. Might it not
be possible to regain the lost virtues of village life without sacrificing the
undoubted gains of industrial advance? Can we plan to incorporate in some
new Eden the best parts of both worlds (including clean new technolo-
gies) while discarding the worst parts? We employ the neologism “techno-
nostalgia” in the hope that some readers will find it useful enough to forgive
its unattractive tone.
The nostalgic quest for a reformed industrial village drew on powerful ide-
ologies of localism in both the United States and Europe. Within the mod-
ern movement, which helped generate the techno-cities phenomenon, there
have always been tensions between the local and the national and between
the particular and the universal. As David Harvey points out, the “flux and
ephemerality of flexible accumulation” of modern capitalism intensified the
search for a sense of place.4 Although dating as far back as the post-Civil War
years, America’s “cult of the local” reemerged early in the twentieth century
as a political reform movement, a reassertion of small-town political power
against the growing national influence of urban elites and industrial manag-
ers.5 But it soon expressed itself in terms of values and a battle for cultural
control.6 In their attempts to reconcile modern technology with small-town
cultural values, the creators of the techno-city embraced a traditional vil-
lage aesthetic in their architectural and city plans. In general, localism almost
always involved a reassertion of communitarian values and social forms in an
era of mass society and anonymous industrial labor.
The theme of community was equally, if not more, powerful in the estab-
lishment of European techno-cities. In modern Germany, with the persistence
of its rural, home-town tradition, the term Gemeinschaft—meaning “com-
munity,” in contrast with Gesellschaft (“society”)—epitomized a communal
14 introduction
sensibility that often spilled over into folk and race consciousness. In post-
Fascist Italy, it went under the name “comunità,” which carried a strong polit-
ical agenda as well as a cultural agenda. Both Gemeinschaft and comunità
called for the strengthening of community social bonds in the face of the
socially destructive effects of unchecked industrialization.
In time, social scientists would enter the scene in both Europe and America
with different core values that did not include the same sense of community
cohesion. This would eventually lead, in the middle of the twentieth century,
to a split among advocates of the techno-city between academic social sci-
entists and more traditional planners who viewed the creation of new towns,
not as a science, but more a form of artistic and moral expression. Despite
these differences, both factions shared a common belief in the healing powers
of modern technology.Within the techno-city ideal, there remained a tension
bordering on paradox between traditional values and those of technological
modernism.
The vast literature on Garden Cities, planned decentralization, and alter-
native towns slights the important role that new technologies (more specifi-
cally, the idea of new technologies) played in their plans. Ebenezer Howard
saw science and technology as a critical part of his “master key” to the success
of his “social city.” Patrick Geddes coined the term “neotechnics” to refer
to the new constructive technologies of the twentieth century, contrasting
them with the older, dirtier, more destructive paleotechnics of the heyday
of the Industrial Revolution. For Geddes and his American disciple Lewis
Mumford, the Coketowns of Dickensian North Britain and the Pittsburghs
of the United States would be cured by a regional approach to decentraliza-
tion and the integration of the best of the town and the country. Electricity,
radio, the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane made this amalgama-
tion possible. Rural isolation, urban congestion, disease, and separation from
nature would be greatly reduced or even eliminated. The amelioration of
human nature follows from the betterment of the environment.
As the case studies selected for this book will show, this notion of amelio-
ration transcended ideology. Views as different as New Deal liberalism, Italian
Fascism, Soviet Communism, and German Nazism were able to accommo-
date a penchant for planning and a desire to improve the city by bringing
it closer to a nation’s roots in its countryside. Norris, Torviscosa, Sotsgorod,
and Salzgitter aimed at producing (respectively) the new democratic citizen,
The Arc of Utopias 15
the new Italian man, the new Soviet worker, and the new “blood and soil”
German. The Garden City idea, malleable and seductive, survived into the
years of World War II with the Tennessee city of Oak Ridge, and then into
the years of the Cold War, emphasizing its decentralization aspect to make
a transition from hope for the future to defense against atomic annihila-
tion. Postwar reconstruction revived the utopian dreams and forms. Adriano
Olivetti, in his plans for the town of Ivrea and for the Canavese region,
expressly drew on the ideas of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford (the last of
whom he personally cultivated) and developed an eclectic philosophy of
development based on comunità. Postwar faith in the power of academic
science led to the ambitions revealed in the planning of Ciudad Guayana,
Venezuela, by a joint Harvard-MIT planning team, and in the rejection of
what the specialists called “utopianism.” The challenges of Ciudad Guayana
also disclose a utopianism of another kind. The purpose of another form
of interdisciplinary planning, that of the Minnesota Experimental City and
France’s Le Vaudreuil, was in fact more openly and technocratically utopian.
The Florida town of Celebration is a fit finale to the story of techno-cities
of the twentieth century. In an era in which virtual experiences are rapidly
replacing actual experiences as the mainstays of our lives, it is not surprising
that a fantasy city in support of the new industry of animation becomes the
ultimate techno-city.
Techno-cities were widespread in the twentieth century—far more so
than we expected when we undertook this study. They extended from North
and South America to Eurasia. This book addresses only a small sample of
this broad phenomenon. Structured in this way, the book cannot, of course,
be exhaustive; many worthy and interesting places are omitted. Further, this
is neither a history of utopian dreams nor a history of the profession of urban
planning, although both subjects are touched upon. We aim at the relation-
ship of ideas about urban design, technology’s role in shaping societies, and
an achievable future. This is, ultimately, the story of ideals confronting the
reality of modern life.
1 Ne o t ec hn ic s in the Garden: The M arr iage
o f C o u n t ry and Town
In 1898 the son of a small shop owner, a man with no special education or
background, published a book that possessed an amazing energy. Despite
lukewarm reception by critics, within a few years its influence spread around
the world. Ebenezer Howard, a 48-year-old Londoner, had been trying for
the better part of a decade to earn notice for his ideas. With the help of a
£50 subsidy he self-published To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform.
A year later, he founded the Garden City Association; in 1902 he published
a revised and expanded version of the book as Garden Cities of To-morrow.
Within a decade Howard was internationally recognized as an urban theorist
and the Garden City idea had traversed the world.
The origin of the idea lay in the widespread dismay, even revulsion, at
the late-nineteenth-century growth and condition of large metropolises.
The literature is wide and deep with critiques of the phenomenal growth
of cities with its attendant crowding, pollution, poverty, disease, and crime.
John Ruskin was far from lonely in reviling the “staggering mass that chokes
and crushes.”1 Howard—a Londoner born, according to his own testimony,
“within the sound of Bow Bells”—had left school at the age of 15 and had
worked as a clerk in the City of London. In 1871, at the age of 21, he left
England to farm in Nebraska. Howard survived a single winter in that harsh
climate; the farming experiment was a clear failure. Moving to Chicago
after the Great Fire, he took a position as a legal stenographer for the firm of
Ely, Burnham and Bartlett. Howard’s four years in Chicago helped broaden
his intellectual horizons. It was in Chicago (whose Latin motto translated as
“the City in the Garden”) that his attention turned, according to his own
later statement, toward “a defined conception of an intelligently arranged
town, a sort of marriage between town and country.”2
Chapter 1
Isaiah Berlin described two kinds of minds: the hedgehog and the fox.
The fox knows many things; the hedgehog pursues one Big Idea.3 Howard
was a hedgehog. His Big Idea was to meld town and country into the
“Garden City.” The intellectual roots of that idea have been explored by
many scholars and at great length. Of the thinkers upon whom Howard
is said to have drawn, great names abound: Benjamin Ward Richardson,
Henry George, Edward Gibbon Wakefield, John Ruskin, William
Morris, Herbert Spencer, Thomas Spence, Alfred Marshall, James Silk
Buckingham, Peter Kropotkin, Edward Bellamy. Of these undoubtedly
significant sources, one in particular stands out. Edward Bellamy was both
inspiration and catalyst, for Howard was not only a man of ideas, he also
saw himself as a man of action.
The American writer Edward Bellamy was at the end of the nineteenth
century, and is today, best known for his utopian novel Looking Backward
2000 –1887, first published in 1888. It sold in the millions and was translated
into more than twenty languages. Ebenezer Howard came into possession of
a copy of this book before it was published in Great Britain. The effect it had
on him was, according to his biographer Robert Beevers, “electrifying.” In
a 1910 article titled “Spiritual Influences Towards Social Progress” Howard
wrote: “I was transported by the wonderful power of the writer into a new
society. . . . There came to me an overpowering sense of the quite temporary
nature of nearly all I saw and of its entire unsuitability for the working life
of the new order—the order of justice, unity and friendliness.” He lobbied
the publisher William Reeves to produce the book in Britain. The reluctant
Reeves agreed only after Howard personally guaranteed the purchase of the
first one hundred copies. Howard himself labored (unpaid) to provide an index
to the volume.4
What most attracted Howard to Looking Backward was a vision of a nation
organized cooperatively to eliminate both dire want and excessive wealth.
In Bellamy’s words, “the nation guarantees the nurture, education, and
comfortable maintenance of every citizen from the cradle to the grave.”5
Bellamy’s utopia was decidedly urban (“at my feet lay a great city”) and suf-
fused with high technology, anticipating transportation and communication
innovations of the twentieth century, including the “musical telephone”
(radio), the credit card, and electricity for heat as well as for light. But the
calm beauty of Boston of the year 2000 was inspiring:
neotechnics in the garden
Miles of broad streets, shaded by trees and lined with fine buildings for the most part
not in continuous blocks but set in larger or smaller enclosures, stretched in every
direction. Every quarter contained large open squares filled with trees, along which
statues glistened and fountains flashed in the late-afternoon sun. Public buildings of a
colossal size and architectural grandeur unparalleled in my day raised their stately piles
on every side. Surely I had never seen this city nor one comparable to it before.6
Even if, as many Howard scholars maintain, Howard retained reservations

about the centralizing, even totalizing, character of Bellamy’s state-run soci-
ety, he was without question invigorated and catalyzed by the prospect of a
plan for a just society along socialist lines. After the British publication of
Looking Backward, Howard began to meet with like-minded friends to dis-
cuss Bellamy’s ideas, and became involved with the Nationalisation of
Labour Society (NLS), founded in 1890 to promote Bellamy’s ideas.7 By
February 1892, according to its Nationalisation News, the NLS was actively
engaged in planning a Bellamyite community for 2,000 people. Howard
had already drafted an early attempt to picture the Garden City, titled “A
City of Health and How to Build It,” and he allied himself, despite concep-
tual differences, with the cause. He presented his views—the first public
presentation of his Garden City ideas—in February 1893, in an address
before the NLS. Howard’s plan was warmly received and “adopted” by the
Society. The NLS was, however, in no position to act on the plan, and
Howard turned toward publishing his views in the form of a book.8
The earliest draft of To-morrow is a manuscript titled “The Master Key,”
dated about 1892. The title page shows a large key, the shaft or barrel of which
is labeled “Science, Religion.” (See figure 1.1.) This shaft operates “the wards,”
or unlocking mechanism, which contains the labels “experimental or object-
lesson method,” “love of society,” “love of nature,” and “a New City on New
Land.” The lever is labeled with contemporary issues: health, recreation, educa-
tion, land reform, temperance reform, old-age pensions, railway rates reform,
etc. According to Howard’s biographer Robert Beevers, this document “reveals
more explicitly than any other surviving document the philosophy underlying
the garden city.” The project, Howard exclaims, “while appealing to the reli-
gious and altruistic side of our nature, appeals also to our love of the beautiful and
even to our innate desire for material progress and personal advancement.” It is
in the unlocking mechanism, the wards, that contradictions are resolved. There
will be no split between nature and society, between country and town.9
10 Chapter 1
Figure 1.1
This unpublished diagram by Ebenezer Howard points out the importance of
science and religion to his social vision. (Howard Papers, Hertfordshire Archives and
Local Studies)
neotechnics in the garden 11
In the several drafts between “The Master Key” of 1892 and the pub-
lished To-morrow of 1898, the name of the planned city metamorphosed
from “Unionville” to “Rurisville” to “Garden City” as Howard searched
for the right label to express the reconciliation between town and country.
In 1896, Howard submitted to the Contemporary Review a long article, titled
“A Garden City, or One Solution to Many Problems,” that was essentially
a summary of what was eventually to be his book. The piece was rejected.
Undeterred, he worked on, and at the beginning of 1898, with the £50
loan enabling Howard to guarantee most of the first printing, Swan and
Sonnenschein agreed to publish the book which appeared in October of
that year as To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, and republished in
slightly altered form in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow.10
In his introduction, Howard claims that it is almost universally agreed that
“it is deeply to be deplored that people should continue to stream into the
already over-crowded cities, and should thus further deplete the country dis-
tricts.” The answer to the question of how to restore people to “that beautiful
land of ours, with its canopy of sky, the air that blows upon it, the sun that
warms it, the rain and dew that moisten it . . . is indeed a Master Key.” This
key can be found in the following passage: “There are in reality not only, as
is so constantly assumed, two alternatives—town life and country life—but a
third alternative, in which all the advantages of the most energetic and active
town life, with all the beauty and delight of the country may be secured in
perfect combination.” The town and the country, Howard continues, may be
regarded as two magnets drawing population. The town attracts by offering
employment and advancement, society and amusement. These are offset by
high costs, anomie, air pollution, long working hours and commuting time.
The country offers the beauties of nature, fresh air, and low rents, advantages
that are offset by long hours of labor, lack of amusements, lack of social inter-
course, and frequently drought. Why not harvest the best of both? “As man
and woman by their varied gifts and faculties supplement each other, so should
town and country. . . . Town and country must be married, and out of this joy-
ous union will spring a new hope, a new life, a new civilization.” He urges
the construction of a new magnet to draw population, the “Town-Country.”
The book To-morrow will show how social opportunities and enjoyment of
nature can co-exist; how higher wages can be provided along with lower rents
and taxes, how wealth can be created, and “how the bounds of freedom may
12 Chapter 1
Figure 1.2
Howard’s “three magnets” as illustrated in Garden Cities of To-morrow.
be widened.”11 Howard’s illustration of his “three magnets” is reproduced

here as figure 1.2.
Physically, the Garden City would be a new, planned town placed in
the countryside. Howard projected a population of 32,000 on about 1,000
acres, surrounded by a large green space. Jobs would be provided by light,
worker-friendly industries (engineering, boots, cycles, jam-making, etc.)
and services. The town would have a circular form, with a radius of a little
more than a kilometer, so that people could walk to their work. At the
center of the city would be a park, ringed by impressive public buildings.
Howard suggests a startling Bellamy-like consumerist innovation: surround-
ing the park at the center of the city will be a glass arcade, very wide, that he
calls the “Crystal Palace.” “Here manufactured goods are exposed for sale,
and here most of that class of shopping which requires the joy of delibera-
tion and selection is done.” At the outer ring, “factories, warehouses, dairies,
markets, coal yards, timber yards” enjoy frontage on the main railway line.
Smoke is kept to a minimum; “all machinery is driven by electric energy.”
The refuse is recycled for use in agriculture.12 (See figure 1.3.)
How is all this to be financed and managed? The land will be purchased
at low rural prices and vested in a trust operated by four gentlemen. As the
Garden City grows, land values will rise and rents will increase. The four
gentlemen will then be able to pay off the mortgage, and to provide for
social benefits as old-age pensions, accident insurance, etc. Thus common
land ownership will form the basis and ensure the future.13 Since the Garden
City by its very nature is limited in size, population growth may be accom-
modated by the establishment of sister garden cities of the same type, inter-
connected (by the time of the 1902 edition) by a rapid rail link. (See figure
1.4.) Howard described this cluster as the “social city.”
As Robert Fishman and others have pointed out, Howard preferred to
call himself an “inventor” rather than a planner or theorist.14 But inventors
cannot exercise perfect control over the understanding, use, and reception
of their creations. There is a common phenomenon that one may term “the
escape of invention.” The invention of the Garden City follows this pat-
tern. Innovation often is as much political as economic; politics requires
compromise. To institutionalize ideas is to transform them. Shortly after the
publication of To-morrow, Howard formed the Garden City Association to
move forward with the implementation of his ideas. The Association was
14 Chapter 1
Figure 1.3
A detailed view of Howard’s garden city in Garden Cities of To-morrow.
formed in close association with a group that demonstrated early interest in

To-morrow, the Land Nationalisation Society (LNS), founded in 1881 by the
naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace. The LNS attracted middle-class reformers,
mainly professionals. Non-revolutionary, it reinforced Howard’s emphases
on peaceful reform and common ownership of land. The first meeting of
the Garden City Association took place on June 10, 1899, and many of its
members were drawn from the Land Nationalisation Society. The chair-
man of the meeting, Sir John Leng, was a Liberal member of parliament
from Dundee.15 A major change occurred in 1901 when Howard, encour-
aged by an article written by the barrister and former Liberal M.P. Ralph
Neville, enlisted Neville’s support and services as chairman of the Garden
City Association. Through Neville, Howard met the industrialists George
Cadbury and William Hesketh Lever. The two Garden City evangelists
convinced the industrialists that the Garden City was a continuation of their
own company towns, Bournville and Port Sunlight.16
Figure 1.4
Howard’s diagram of clusters of garden cities in Garden Cities of To-morrow.
16 Chapter 1
By the time of the 1902 appearance of Garden Cities of To-morrow, the

Garden City Association had more than 1,300 members, including peers
of the realm, bishops, academics, representatives of the press, industrialists,
writers, and 23 members of parliament. Neville was in effect the executive
director.17 Howard’s social program was seemingly swamped by middle-
class enthusiasm for the plan. His greatest supporters were not driven by his
socialist program and his cooperative vision. They were intrigued, rather,
by the allure of his solution to the problem of the metropolis and by the
romance of the marriage of town and country.
Money was raised and owing to a fortunate (for the Association) agricul-
tural depression, land was bought inexpensively. Almost 35 miles northeast
of London, the Garden City of Letchworth would rise. Barry Parker and
Raymond Unwin were taken on as architect-planners. The escape of the
invention of the Garden City was nearly complete. First came the land ques-
tion. The Board, led by Neville, offered standard 99-year leaseholds as well
as “Howard leases,” 999-year leases with rates reviewed every five (later ten)
years, with the rise in rents paying off the stockholders. Almost all tenants chose
the former. Next came the city plan. Parker and Unwin abandoned Howard’s
geometric grid. Industries were placed in an industrial “park.” The Crystal
Palace was replaced by a curving street of shops. The railway tracks separated
the houses from the industries. Howard tended to make the best of it. Of the
land situation, he wrote (1904): “In my book I set forth an ideal to be attained;
in our practical scheme we have to advance gradually.” Of the city plan, he
wrote: “I always felt I was merely putting forward a draft scheme which would
naturally have to be altered in accordance with the circumstances in which it
sought to express itself.” In the end, as Robert Fishman wrote, “the Garden
City movement . . . gradually lost its commitment to social change and became
a city planning movement in the narrow sense.”18 But the Garden City idea
flashed around the world. By the beginning of the Great War, Garden City
Associations were established in the United States, in France, in Germany, in
Belgium, in Japan, in Russia, in Italy, in Spain, in the Netherlands, in Austria,
and elsewhere.19 Garden cities were being planned and built. The idea of the
marriage of country and town had crossed national and cultural barriers. Few
around the world remembered Howard’s social plans and economic devices.
Howard’s neo-Romantic love of the British countryside had tremendous
appeal for his new middle-class, professional audience. Moreover, Howard’s
vision of glass pavilions, clean, electricity-run industries, and fast trains and
his talk of science as a fundament of his program spoke of “progress” and
“the future” to his constituency.
Howard found a kindred spirit in Patrick Geddes (1854–1932), an eccen-
tric Scots biologist, sociologist, and city planner. Howard first met Geddes
in the summer of 1904, and the two kept up a friendly professional friend-
ship for at least a decade.20 Despite some important differences in approach
(such as Howard’s concentration on new towns), they shared a concern for
the city in the region, and for the role of new, clean technologies as part of
the path to the future.
On July 18, 1904, Geddes, a founder of the new Sociological Society,
made a forceful call for local observation and practical effort as a part of the
new sociology of cities in order to appeal to civic workers and “practical
men.” In an address titled “Civics: as Applied Sociology,” Geddes laid out
his ideas of the “Regional Survey” as part of an effort to understand the evo-
lution of urban life. Geddes starts with the notion of the geographic region as
his basic unit. He describes what he would later call the “Valley Section”:
Beneath vast hunting desolations lie the pastoral hillsides, below these again
scattered arable crofts and sparsely dotted hamlets lead us to the small upland vil-
lage of the main glen: from this again one descends to the large and prosperous
village of the foothills and its railway terminus, where lowland and highland meet.
East or west, each mountain valley has its analogous terminal and initial village,
upon its fertile fan-shaped slope, and with its corresponding minor market; while,
central to the broad agricultural strath with its slow meandering river, stands the
prosperous market town, the road and railway junction upon which all the glen-
villages converge. . . . Finally, at the mouth of its estuary, rises the smoke of the great
manufacturing city, a central world-market in its way.21
For Geddes’s audience, the message is clear: “It takes the whole region to make
the city.” Ebenezer Howard rose to lead the discussion, terming Geddes’s paper
“luminous and picturesque.” Howard’s concern remained population move-
ment away from the country into the manufacturing city, leaving the former
“more bare of active, vigorous healthy life,” and he proceeded to advertise the
Garden City Association and the Garden City Company which “Prof. Geddes
wishes well, I know.” Mr. J. M. Robertson urged that Professor Geddes’s
“next paper should give us a definition of progress.” In January 1905 Geddes
did so when he presented Part II of “Civics,” expanding upon his notion of
18 Chapter 1
urban evolution by concentrating on those institutions that bore the burden of

development. These institutions are, in the main, knowledge-storing and
knowledge-advancing foundations such as the school and the “cloister” or in
special cases, the university.22 By 1915 and the publication of Cities in Evolution,
Geddes reformulated the Valley Section and the industrial age, by analogy with
the anthropologist’s use of paleolithic and neolithic, into paleotechnic and neo-
technic, the former describing the “older and ruder elements of the Industrial
Age” and the latter “the finer type.” The “town,” the paleotechnic accretion
still dominated by earlier mental sets, specialized and narrow, develops into the
“city,” its neotechnic descendant, through institutions which enable it to
change and grow, to evolve to a higher level. The town has collieries, steam-
engines, and staple manufactures. It is “crowded and monotonous.” The neo-
technic order, on the other hand, is characterized by “skill directed by life
towards life and for life,” a better use of resources, “public conservation” and
clean industries.23 As the paleotechnic gives way to the neotechnic, the school
(the transmitter of craft knowledge, rote learning) gives way to the cloister or
university (the promoter of new knowledge and its application).
Pierre Clavel sees Geddes’s theoretical approach as adding new dimen-
sions to Howard’s. Whereas Howard’s town-country magnet offers little
to point the way to institutional change that makes the transition possi-
ble, Geddes stresses institution-building (school, cloister), expanding con-
sciousness, and preparing for action. In short, whereas Howard proposes a
plan, Geddes announces a movement. Howard, the utopian, lays out a map
within which change would arrive, but Geddes elaborates a vision of citi-
zenship (“civics”) that will prepare a population to build its change.24
Both Howard and Geddes were visionaries of influence. As is true of
most visionaries, their appeal lay in the perceptions and interpretations
of their varied audiences; in contrast with many visionaries, their charm
was enhanced by their vigorous calls to action. Their call was heeded by
Lewis Mumford (1895–1990), a New Yorker who stumbled upon Geddes’s
ideas in 1914. Undeterred by Geddes’s “crabbed and cryptic prose,” the
young Mumford was stirred by the Scotsman’s insistence that theory
must be enriched by experience and completed by action. The budding
urbanist devoured Geddes’s notion that the two main traditions in biol-
ogy are “reflections of the urban and rustic”—that is, the abstract-analytic
and the concrete-intuitive (which emphasizes the mystery and wonder of
life). Geddes carries over this idea into his understanding of the evolution
of cities, and provides a biological basis for both Geddes’s and Mumford’s
attraction to Ebenezer Howard’s proposed union of country and city.25
While a student at New York’s scientific-technical Stuyvesant High
School, Lewis Mumford fancied himself a budding engineer, contributing
five notes on radio devices to Hugo Gernsback’s Modern Electrics in 1911 and
1912. His career took a detour when he failed mathematics, but Stuyvesant’s
modern curriculum, one stressing the union of mind and hand, served him
well in charting a new course.26 For Mumford, Geddes’s call for the reno-
vation of urban life and his program for civic action were the alarums that
woke his talents. Exploring the New York area with an eye to adding expe-
rience to reflection, he took notes and sketched critical essays. In 1916 he
began writing an essay titled “A Regional Policy for Manhattan,” his first
attempt along Geddesian and Howardian lines. He followed this essay with
notes for a longer comparative study of Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia, which he proposed to a publisher; it was rejected. Undaunted,
in 1920 he wrote “Counter-Tendencies: An Outline of Regional Policy,”
which also failed to interest book publishers. Mumford succeeded, however,
in seeing The Story of Utopias published in 1922. In this book, the regionalist
plan was not far from the surface. In his historical survey of utopias, which he
divides into those of escape and of reconstruction, Mumford retains, mostly
in the background, his sense of “eutopia” or “good place” as the goal of
reconstruction. In discussing Plato’s Republic, for example, he argues that the
author “had an ‘ideal’ section of land in his mind—what the geographer
calls the ‘valley section.’ ” Toward the end of the book, Mumford shifts
to a discussion of social archetypes that underlie contemporary towns and
cities in the United States and in Europe. The three he singles out are the
“Country House,” “Coketown” (the paleotechnic, industrial agglomeration
of Dickens), and “Megalopolis” (the overgrown city-region of the modern
bureaucratic nation-state). The Country House is the seat of the aristocracy
and designed to serve the ease and comfort of the rulers of society. “Culture
came to mean not a participation in the creative activities of one’s own
community, but the acquisition of the products of other communities.”
Coketown (Manchester, Pittsburgh, Newark) “is devoted to the production
of material goods.” The status of a family, in Coketown, “can be told by
the size of its rubbish heap.” Finally, in the service of the National State, is
20 Chapter 1
“Megalopolis.” Here Mumford expresses his most alarming concerns about

the direction of modern life, for “the ultimate aim of the megalopolis is to
conduct the whole of human life and intercourse through the medium of
paper,” thus squeezing out the world of nature. “Whereas the inhabitants
of a national Utopia may originally have been as diverse as the trees in a for-
est, they tend to become, under the influence of education and propaganda,
as similar as telegraph poles.” While his critiques are damning, Mumford
only hints at the character of his eutopian plans. He briefly praises Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden City, terming Howard’s book To-morrow “persuasive.” In
closing, Mumford explicitly acknowledges his debt to his mentor as he would
many times afterwards: “Professor Geddes is the outstanding exponent of the
Eutopian method both in thought and in practical activity. . . . [His] books are
mines from which all sorts of precious thoughts can be quarried.”27
Mumford had not yet met the man he considered his teacher and guide.
As early as 1915 Mumford had written to Geddes’s Outlook Tower with
the intention of studying there. In 1917 he began a correspondence with
the great man himself, signing his first letter “your affectionate and respect-
ful pupil.” The correspondence continued until Geddes’s death in 1932,
and survived even the disastrous meeting of the two in the spring of 1923.
Geddes’s visit to the United States, arranged by Mumford, was the occasion
of a serious mismatch of expectations. Geddes had expected to find in the
younger man an assistant willing to perform the tedious tasks of dissemi-
nation of his ideas, tasks for which Geddes had little patience. Mumford’s
extravagant closings (“yours gratefully,” “yours devotedly,” “yours in dis-
cipleship”) may have given Geddes cause to assume Mumford’s compliance.
And Mumford saw himself as a junior collaborator, a view encouraged by
the weighty substance of the letters. In any case, the personal interaction
seems to have freed Mumford from the thrall of Geddes’s methods, if not of
his root ideas. Mumford generously, perhaps too generously, continued to
acknowledge a large debt to the Scotsman for many years.28
In preparing for Geddes’s visit, Mumford joined what he described as “the
group that is most prepared to receive you here.” It consisted of young plan-
ners, journalists, engineers, and architects drawn together by Charles Harris
Whitaker, the editor of the Journal of the Institute of Architects. Members included,
in addition to Mumford, Clarence Stein, the architect and future planner (with
his partner Henry Wright) of Radburn, an American Garden City, who “is in
the act of starting a Garden City Association”; Benton MacKaye, the future
developer of the Appalachian Trail, described by Mumford as “a forester
who is bent on developing a eutopia in the Appalachian region”; “Stewart
[sic] Chase, a public accountant who has followed Veblen’s lead”; and Henry
Wright, a landscape architect. It was a heady time. Mumford described the
group as “a real university.”29 Subsequently, the group’s mission was the
establishment of what they termed the “regional city,” a combination of the
ideas of Geddes and Howard. It was intended to be their solution to urban
ills in America. The group coalesced as the Regional Planning Association of
America (RPAA), with Stein as president and Mumford as secretary.30 Stein
had proposed the name “Garden City and Regional Planning Association” as
early as 1923, but Mumford convinced him to drop “Garden City” in order
to emphasize the group’s commitment to regionalism.31 In a letter to Geddes
in 1926, Mumford wrote: “We are attempting to discard the word Garden
City, and Regional City is our present substitute, which must carry with it the
notion of a balanced relation with the region, as well as a complete environ-
ment within the city for work, play and domesticity.”32
In May 1925 the group published a special issue of The Survey Graphic that
laid out their vision of regionalism. The introduction, titled “The Regional
Community,” acknowledges their debt for “its underlying idea” to Geddes,
“a long-bearded Scot.” The plan, founded on “the seer of cities” Geddes’s
principle of “relating masses of population to the land,” is “linked in spirit
and practice with the garden cities of England” and “binds up the common
hopes of scattered planners in many cities.”33 In one of two essays, Mumford
expands on the RPAA’s regionalist philosophy. In “Regions—To Live In,”
he exclaims: “The hope of the city lies outside itself.” The forces that have
created the metropolis have created a hopeless situation for improvement
within it alone. Regional planning, on the other hand, offers hope for the
entire region within which a city can flourish. “It does not aim at urbaniz-
ing automatically the whole available countryside; it aims equally at ruralizing
the stony wastes of our cities. . . . The civic objective of the regional planning
movement is summed up with peculiar accuracy in the concept of the gar-
den city.” Mumford envisions Howard’s town-country magnet: “urban in its
advantages, permanently rural in its situation.”34 Clarence Stein’s contribu-
tion, titled “Dinosaur Cities,” analyzes in great detail the problems of the great
metropolises, especially congestion with all its attendant costs. “The big city,”
22 Chapter 1
Stein writes, “is bankrupt. The little city that has adopted a program of mere
expansion . . . is headed in the same direction.”35 Mumford’s second article,
“The Fourth Migration,” provides the therapy. Mumford argues that there
are two Americas: that of the original settlement and that of three “migra-
tions.” (See figure 1.5) The America of the original settlement is Edenic, with
“well-rounded industrial and agricultural life, based on the fullest use of their
regional resources through the water-wheel, mill and farm” and a “fine pro-
vincial culture, humbly represented in the schools, universities, lyceums and
churches.” It was the America of “Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman and
Poe.” Then came the three “migrations,” the first marked by the clearing of
the western lands, the second by the creation of the dingy, crowded, polluted
Figure 1.5
Mumford described urbanization as the result of three internal migrations. His
“fourth migration,” he hoped, would lead to a decentralized, regional solution to
urban problems. (The Survey: Graphic Number, 1925)
industrial cities, and the third by the rise of the great metropolises of New
York and Chicago. But now, Mumford argues, we are on the threshold of the
Fourth Migration, which offers the hope of renewal.
The key to the success of the fourth migration is the changed technologi-
cal environment. Whereas the railroad, the factory, and the telegraph were
centralizing technologies (what Geddes termed “paleotechnics”), the new
technologies of transportation, production, power distribution, and com-
munication are decentralizing and distributive—that is, neotechnic. For
example, Mumford writes, whereas the railroad is linear, the automobile
is “areal”: “The automobile has brought goods and markets together, not
linearly as the railroads tend to do, but areally. . . . Chain stores have been
quick to grasp the advantages. . . . Similarly the automobile has increased the
radius of the school and library service.” But mainly, the automobile has
liberated the concentration of population: “The tendency of the automo-
bile . . . is within limits to disperse population rather than concentrate it.”
Likewise, new means of communication, for example radio, are distributive
and decentralizing rather than, like the telegraph, linear. Finally, electri-
cal power transmission favors a wide distribution of population. The first
three migrations have not favored a good environment; the fourth migra-
tion, aided by neotechnics, has a chance to restore the balance and harmony
of the original settlement, between man and nature, between technology
and culture. “Even if there were no fourth migration on the horizon,”
Mumford concludes, “it would be necessary to invent one.”36 The idea of
the lost Eden and the power of new, clean, powerful technologies to restore
it is a powerful trope in modern Western societies, dating at least as far back
as Francis Bacon. In its twentieth-century form it can be termed “techno-
nostalgia.” We see traces of it in Enlightenment and nineteenth-century
utopian writers; it reappears powerfully in Howard, Geddes, and Mumford.
Mumford’s friend and collaborator Benton MacKaye expresses it this way:
The pattern that we visualize would be based on that of New England up to the
1880’s . . . viz. a layout of small villages and towns. . . . The boasted and boosted
American metropolis . . . mushroomed from the quick combine of steam factory,
long rail haul, and high finance; it remains now as a hangover headache from these
forces. Meanwhile new forces have appeared—those of the ‘motor and power’ era.
Mumford’s conclusion was that “Megalopolis is not merely on the downgrade. . . . Its
suicide . . . will probably take place in a decisive way within the next generation.”37
24 Chapter 1
The techno-nostalgia of the RPAA group is forcefully revealed in a 1939 film

titled The City. Clarence Stein initiated the effort; Lewis Mumford wrote the
narration. The City was directed by Willard Van Dyke and narrated by Morris
Carnovsky. Aaron Copland wrote the music. The film was shown eight times a
week during the run of the 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. In a review in the
New York Post, Archer Winsten wrote: “If there were nothing else worth seeing
at the fair, this picture would justify the trip and all the exhaustion.”38
The City is divided into three parts, loosely following the schema of
Mumford’s article “The Fourth Migration.” Part one, filmed in Shirley
Center, Massachusetts, begins with a lost Eden: a New England village in
which nature and technology exist in harmony. The audience sees images of
water wheels, a little boy on a wagon looking skyward, a smithy, a church
spire, apples and vegetables, and a town meeting. It is an idyll, a world
in balance. Suddenly we are thrown into part two (filmed in Pittsburgh),
which depicts a world thrown out of balance. It is the arena of paleotech-
nics. Industry, smoke, and overcrowding have thrown the world out of kil-
ter. There are hard images of belching smokestacks, girders, blast furnaces.
We no longer experience Eden; we are in Inferno. The village has meta-
morphosed into Coketown. We see children playing in mud, swimming in
polluted water, and crossing railroad tracks. Is this the future we wish for
our children? Similarly, the section of part two depicting the large metropo-
lis (filmed in New York) evinces the mechanization of modern life, the rush
and hurry to nowhere, congestion, endless traffic: “Cities, where people
count the seconds and lose the days.” Even Sunday, supposedly a day of rest
and recreation, becomes a cacophony of sirens, stalled cars, and traffic jams.
The music, which in the first part was pastoral, becomes cacophonic. And
suddenly . . . calm. We enter a new world via a sleek airplane, a symbol of
neotechnics. The audience is transported to the new Regional City (filmed
in Greenbelt, Maryland and in Radburn, New Jersey). We see homes with
grass, children riding bicycles, and men walking to work in clean factories
and playing softball. We are shown clean water, vegetables, and fruit. The
world of mankind and technology is in balance once again. The lost Eden is
restored by good sense, good planning, and good technology.39
2 P l a n ni ng for N ati onal R egenerat i on:
T ec h n o - Cit i es in the Interwar Years
The Regional Planning Association of America was hardly alone in its vision
of embedding new, powerful technologies in rational plans. World War I
and the ensuing worldwide depression refocused attention on the need for
comprehensive approaches to economic and social development. In the
1920s and the 1930s, dramatic visions of the future mixed with often viru-
lent ideologies in bold attempts to devise inventive solutions to long-
standing problems. Powerful activist regimes were established in autocratic
Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union as well as in democratic America.
The European nations faced not only the worldwide economic depression
but also the challenges of securing their authoritarian rule and building their
military capacity for the eventual showdown with their enemies. As confi-
dence in centralized planning was immense, to address these problems they
established new planned cities in connection with technical enterprises.
These “techno-cities” were created by visionaries in each country as exem-
plars for the environmental, economic, and moral regeneration of the
nation. First, all advocated the decentralization of industry. “Back to the
soil” provided a motto that was at once geographic, economic and, by
recalling a simpler life, morally uplifting. Second, despite the nostalgia for a
pre-industrial land and people bond, these attempts to transform the nation
paradoxically extolled the central role of science and technology in building
a new future. In an important sense, these techno-cities were inventions
aimed at implementing a nation’s planned tomorrow.
Debate over ways to remedy the town-country divide and other Garden
City ideas occurred early and vigorously in the new Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics. Ebenezer Howard’s book To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real
Reform (1898, reissued as Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1902) was translated
26 Chapter 2
into Russian by Alexander Block in 1911, and two years later a Garden
City Society was established in St. Petersburg.1 The original officers of the
Garden City Society included two lawyers, two physicians, and an archi-
tect; membership was drawn broadly from within the Russian Empire, with
one-third of the members drawn from outside Russia. The Howard banner
was carried forthrightly by the architect and planner Vladimir Nikolaevich
Semionov (sometimes transliterated as Semenov), who lectured on such sub-
jects as “Basic Principles of Garden Cities.” Semionov (1874–1960) had met
Ebenezer Howard while in a period of residency in England during which
he worked for Howard’s colleague Raymond Unwin. In 1912 he published
Bladoustroistvo [The Public Servicing or Planning of Towns], a book that was
imbued with Garden City ideals.2 The Society’s hopes were advanced by
Semionov’s planned city Prozorovka, whose civic center, radial plan, and
greenbelt closely resembled English models.3 Prozorovka, about 25 miles
from Moscow, was built as a town for railway employees. Its municipal
center had services, recreation on the Moscow River, a small lake, public
baths, and a laundry. The town was served by utilities unusual for Russia at
the time: water from artesian wells, a sewage system, a garbage incinerator,
and electricity. It was widely viewed as a model town.4
The Russian Garden City Society dispersed in 1918 amid the tumult of the
Russian Revolution. It was re-founded in Moscow in 1922. Soon a plethora
of garden cities associated with industrial efforts were begun, including a “Red
Garden City” (planned by K. Karasov in connection with the Istomin Cotton
Mill) at Smolensk and A. Ol’s “Red October” near Petrograd.5 The slogan
“The Garden City—City of Liberated Labor”—was commonly heard.6
The occasion of the rebirth of the Garden City Society also initiated a
great debate about the future of the city and the nature of city planning. All
sides agreed on the importance of overcoming the town-country divide.
More orthodox disciples of Ebenezer Howard, including V. N. Semionov,
Alexander Ivanitsky, and Grigory Barkhin, argued for the efficiency, the
public health advantages, and the aesthetics of the garden city.7 Generally
aligned against them were the “Urbanists” or “Sotsgorod” (Socialist Town)
group, among whom the theorist Leonid Sabsovich was prominent. The
Urbanists usually advocated the planning of middle-size cities (usually under
80,000–100,000) in connection with industrial sites or state farms (sov-
khozy). Sabsovich’s Sotsgorod would be composed of collective dwellings
Planning for National Regeneration 27
(“dwelling combines”) and would be based on a mixed agricultural and

industrial economy.8 Opposing both the Garden City advocates and the
Urbanists were the Disurbanists, led by Moisei Okhitovich and Moisei Ya.
Ginzburg. They argued against the building of cities and towns and for a
more uniform distribution of population. Anticipating Frank Lloyd Wright’s
conception of Broadacre City, the Disurbanists relied on new technologies
to make credible their vision of a dispersed population employed and resi-
dent over a dispersed territory connected by fast automobiles, good roads,
accessible communication networks, and a readily available power supply.
People would live and work in park-like settings along linear transportation
routes.9
In 1930, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Miliutin published The Problem of
Building Socialist Cities, a work widely seen as a middle way between the
Urbanists and the Disurbanists. Miliutin was the most energetic Soviet pro-
ponent of the “linear” city, first proposed by the Spanish theorist Arturo
Soria y Mata in 1882. Miliutin refit this concept to accommodate a com-
munist society.10 Peppered with quotations from Marx, Engels, and Lenin,
The Problem of Building Socialist Cities begins with a statement of the essential
problem: “The massive reconstruction of the economy on socialist prin-
ciples inexorably demands a reconstruction in culture and in our way of
life. . . . The Soviet village must be built in such a way as not to perpetuate
the very conditions we are struggling against, but rather to create the basis
for organization of a new socialist, collective way of life.” The problems
of the industrial city of bourgeois society cannot be solved by the “liberals’
ideas of the green city or the garden city.” The problem must be formulated
in a new way: “We must review the very meaning of the word ‘city’. . . .
The modern city is a product of a mercantile society and will die together
with it.” The answer, Miliutin argues, has been provided by Marx, Engels,
and Lenin: we must eliminate the differences between country and city.11 In
the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels advocated “the combination of
agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinc-
tion between town and country.”12 Miliutin inserts a quotation from Lenin
that was a favorite among Soviet planners of all types: “the unification of
industry with agriculture on the basis of a conscious application of science.”
Miliutin settles the disagreements among Soviet planners: “For us there can
be no controversy about urbanization or disurbanization. . . . The city and
28 Chapter 2
the town stretch their hands to one another; thus will these arguments be
solved.” In this way, the “marriage of town and country” of the bourgeois
Howard, Geddes, and Mumford are sanitized for Soviet socialism by Marx,
Engels, and Lenin.13
Miliutin calls his socialist linear city a “flowing functional-assembly-line
system.” Residential and communal zones must be set up in parallel to the
productive (industrial) zone and separated from it by a green belt no less than
500 meters wide, but the residences are no more than a 20-minute walk
from work. The highway is placed between the residences and the pro-
ductive zone and the railway lines are positioned behind the line of indus-
trial buildings. Agricultural territory is positioned beyond the residences.
Medical dispensaries are located in the residential zone, and hospitals sited at
the borders of the settlement. Prevailing winds mainly blow from the resi-
dential toward the industrial. (See figure 2.1.)
In The Problem of Building Socialist Cities Miliutin sketches out plans for
two new techno-cities: Magnitogorsk in the Urals and Stalingrad (at one
time Tsaritsyn and now Volgograd) on the Volga River. Magnitogorsk was
conceived as a metallurgical center; the planning contract was awarded to
the German architect Ernst May, who adapted the Miliutin-Soria idea of a
linear city.14 Miliutin’s linear Stalingrad plan was later further adapted by the
Garden City advocate V. N. Semionov.15 The city was destroyed in 1943
and rebuilt after the war.16
For Soviet architects and planners and for Communist Party officials, the
building of new cities in new ways was an essential step towards creating
the New Soviet Citizen: “All attention must be directed toward the cre-
ation of a real material basis for the new way of life.”17 This faith in the Plan
cut across ideological lines. In the Soviet Union, in Fascist Italy, in Nazi
Germany, and in democratic America the importance of planned cities
grew and strengthened. The remainder of this chapter will compare case
studies of two such endeavors: Norris, Tennessee (established in connec-
tion with the Tennessee Valley Authority) and Salzgitter, Germany (estab-
lished in connection with the Hermann-Göring-Werke, an armaments
factory).
Norris was planned and built in the 1930s as a home for employees of the
Tennessee Valley Authority, but its planners envisioned it as a model for the
nation. Begun in the period of severe economic distress known as the Great
Figure 2.1
Miliutin’s linear plan for Stalingrad included a green zone to separate residential
from industrial areas. (Miliutin, Sotsgorod )
Depression, Norris was to exemplify what rational and humane planning

could do for Americans as a people. As part of the early New Deal pro-
gram of President Franklin Roosevelt, Norris was planned to improve, to
innovate, to ameliorate, and, above all, to provide hope. Genetically linked
to utopias of the nineteenth century, it was a product of the technologi-
cal optimism so common in America. Using technology appropriately, the
optimistic view held, Americans could protect themselves from the worst
excesses of rapid growth : unchecked industrial capitalism, untoward urban-
ization, and rampant expansion of the population.
In the immediate aftermath of World War I, Henry Ford was considered
a genius who contributed to the technological marvel that was the modern
age. In July 1921, Ford made a proposal to the U.S. government to take
30 Chapter 2
over, for $5 million, its dams and nitrate plants along the Tennessee River
at Muscle Shoals in Alabama for the production of electric power and fer-
tilizer. This offer brought to a head decades of debate over public versus
private ownership of these resources. Senator George Norris, a Republican
from Nebraska, opposed the plan. He pointed out that the listed properties
were built at a cost of $90 million, and this figure did not include much real
estate and natural resources. He submitted a bill to Congress for government
operation.18 In January 1922, Henry Ford astonished the nation by coming
out with an expanded version of his vision of the future of Muscle Shoals,
a vision that greatly increased his popularity and changed the debate over
Muscle Shoals forever. On January 12, the New York Times ran an article
headlined “Ford Plans a City 75 Miles in Length.” The article, which went
out on the Associated Press wire, outlined Ford’s plan for a new regional
development model for the Tennessee Valley, including a city 75 miles in
length for the Muscle Shoals area. “It would be made up,” the article stated,
“of several large towns or small cities. This is in line with the manufacturer’s
view that men and their families should live in small communities where
benefits of rural or near-rural life would not entirely be lost.”19 Ford’s vision
set off a frenzy of enthusiasm in the region and a wild boom in the real estate
market. Thomas Edison, Ford’s good friend, publicly announced his sup-
port for the plan and advised Congress to accept it.20
The “Seventy-Five Mile City” was the subject of a long laudatory piece
in the September 1922 issue of Scientific American. The new Tennessee Valley
industrial center would depend on the establishment of linked “hydro-driven
plants.” Between these factories would be the “farm-homes of the factory
workers. An employe [sic] can . . . be a food-producer and salary-earner at
the same time.”21 The “factory and farm close together, yet co-operation
between them. . . . The automobile industry would be a pygmy beside it.”22
Shortly thereafter, in an interview with the magazine Automotive Industries,
Ford envisioned “a great industrial city on the banks of the Tennessee,
which will rival Detroit.”23 The idea inspired Lewis Mumford. He wrote to
his mentor Geddes: “Here is a first-rate neotechnic project. . . . What are we
to suggest? How are we to alter Mr. Ford’s plans as to what must be done?
My only answer to this, so far, is to show him that the city is not merely a
vehicle for commerce and industry, but a place where the social heritage is
preserved and re-shaped.”24
Mumford was saved from inevitable disillusionment and disappointment

when Ford’s plan was rejected by Congress. The opposition was led by
Senator Norris, an advocate of public power. Ford bitterly characterized
the opposition as that of “the international Jews.” However, he made one
claim that rings true: “If we haven’t done anything else, we have shown
what Muscle Shoals are worth.”25 Ford had changed the public’s think-
ing about Muscle Shoals. No longer would the question be about fertilizer
and hydroelectric power alone; it would increasingly focus on the larger
vision—a regional plan to uplift the area from backwardness to leadership.
The Tennessee Valley could be a great utopian experiment to reverse some
of the excesses of the industrial revolution which Ford had done so much
to advance. Ford, not a proponent of urbanization, decried the movement
of farmers from the land into the cities. “Factory and farm,” he said as early
as 1918, “should have been organized as adjuncts of one another, and not as
competitors.” The city, in his view, had been a mistake.26
Others too, inspired by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea, were
intrigued by the idea of a union between farm and industry. The Farm Cities
Corporation was incorporated in Delaware in 1921. Among its earliest
members were the well-known American city planner John Nolen and his
British mentor, Raymond Unwin; F. H. Newell of the U.S. Reclamation
Service; Hugh MacRae, a banker; and Thomas Adams, a town planning
advisor to the government of Canada. The charter of the Farm Cities
Corporation stated that its purpose was to establish typical farm cities where
“families can cultivate the land profitably, and, at the same time, can enjoy
the social, intellectual and economic advantages of community life.”27 Nolen
turned his attention directly to the planning of “farm-cities” and planned
Penderlea in North Carolina and the more successful Clewiston, along the
shores of Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Clewiston began with the hiring of
Nolen by the property owners John and Marian O’Brien and their succes-
sors, the Celotex Company of Chicago, a subsidiary of the Southern Sugar
Company. The economy of Clewiston was based on sugar and on celotex,
building materials made from by-products of sugar milling. Nolen’s plan
included 30 square miles of homes, an industrial park, an airport, hotels, a
marina, and farm plots.28
These ideas resonated with those of another public figure: Governor
Franklin Delano Roosevelt of New York. One historian of Henry Ford
32 Chapter 2
writes that within a year of signing the Tennessee Valley Authority legislation,
Roosevelt, now president of the United States, invited Ford to the White
House to discuss “getting people out of dead cities and into the country.”29
With Ford, Roosevelt shared a commitment to “the land.” Roosevelt, the
Hudson Valley patroon, had a visceral distrust of high-density urbanization.
And, like Ford, Roosevelt was seeking a new way to mitigate the worst
excesses of industrialization.
For Roosevelt, unlike Ford, one way out was through planning, and
especially regional planning. Roosevelt became interested in regional
planning, by his own testimony, through his uncle Frederic Delano.
Before World War I, Delano had introduced Roosevelt to the City of
Chicago Plan. “I think from that very moment,” Roosevelt wrote in
1932, “I have been interested in not the mere planning of a single city
but in the larger aspects of planning. It is the way of the future.”30 Upon
his nephew’s election to the presidency, Delano moved to Washington
as an advisor, and became head of the newly created National Planning
Board.31 Delano had been, at 32, president of the Wabash Railroad, a
sparkplug in the creation of Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan of 1908 and
the chairman of the planning committee for the New York Regional
Plan of the 1920s.32
While governor of New York State, Roosevelt had solidified his concern
with planning, and, as Paul Conkin has written, his enthusiasm for “preserv-
ing scarce resources, for moving as many people as possible back onto the
land, and for making cities as orderly and as countrylike as possible.”33 In a
June 1931 address on state planning, Roosevelt foreshadowed his philoso-
phy as president: “Government, both State and national, must accept the
responsibility of doing what it can do soundly, with considered forethought
and along definitely constructive, not passive lines.” One of the key areas of
concern is land utilization:
Hitherto, we have spoken of two types of living and only two—urban and rural.
I believe we can look forward to three rather than two types in the future, for there
is a definite place for an intermediate type between the urban and the rural, namely
a rural-industrial group. . . . It is my thought that many of the problems of transpor-
tation, of overcrowded cities, of high cost of living, of better health for the race,
of a better population as a whole can be solved by the States themselves during the
coming generation.34
Roosevelt’s interest in regionalism doubtless was behind the invitation to

be keynote speaker at the July 1931 Roundtable on Regional Planning at
the University of Virginia. Powerhouses of the New York-based Regional
Planning Association of America were there: Clarence Stein, Lewis
Mumford, Henry Wright, and Benton MacKaye. Stuart Chase, Howard
Odum, Charles W. Eliot II, Frederick Newell, and others made presenta-
tions. Roosevelt forcefully asked a receptive audience: “Isn’t there a third
possibility [between urban and rural], a possibility to create by cooperative
effort some form of living which will combine industry and agriculture?”35
This important theme, a third way between city and rural area, is repeated
often during the years leading up to Roosevelt’s successful campaign for the
presidency and during the first years of the New Deal. Over and over again,
he would denounce “the profligate waste of natural resources” and the
“gigantic waste” which industrial advance has entailed.36 After his election in
November 1932 and before his inauguration as president, Roosevelt made a
point of traveling to Muscle Shoals, where he made these extemporaneous
remarks:
I am determined on two things. . . . The first is to put Muscle Shoals to work. The

second is to make Muscle Shoals a part of an even greater development that will take
in all of that magnificent Tennessee River from the mountains of Virginia down to
the Ohio and the Gulf. . . . Muscle Shoals is more today than a mere opportunity for
the Federal Government to do a kind turn for the people in one small section of a
couple of States. Muscle Shoals gives us the opportunity to accomplish a great pur-
pose for the people of many States and, indeed, for the whole Union. Because there
we have an opportunity of setting an example of planning, not just for ourselves
but for the generations to come, tying in industry and agriculture and forestry and
flood prevention, tying them all into a unified whole over a distance of a thousand
miles.37
Within weeks of assuming office, Roosevelt moved to establish the

Tennessee Valley Authority, combining Senator Norris’s interests in power,
the agriculturalists’ concerns with fertilizer production, and Roosevelt’s
vision of regional planning in an all-encompassing bill, which Roosevelt
signed on May 18, 1933.38 Roosevelt next turned his attention to selecting
a director for the TVA. He had consulted Arthur E. Morgan, president of
Antioch University, a flood-control engineer and a scholar of the utopian
writer Edward Bellamy. Morgan had shown a serious interest in community
34 Chapter 2
redevelopment. Morgan’s interview with Roosevelt reinforces the notion

that Roosevelt was interested in the TVA as an exemplar of regional plan-
ning and not merely as a source of power and fertilizer. Morgan later
reported that Roosevelt “talked chiefly about a designed and planned social
and economic order. That was what was first in his mind.”39
Within a month of the signing of the TVA Bill, Roosevelt’s choice for its
first director began planning for a new community associated with the new
dam at Cove Creek, Tennessee. It would be a permanent town, rather than
temporary housing for TVA workers, and it would, at Morgan’s insistence,
be called Norris, after the senator who had fought so hard for the TVA
bill.40 One of the people brought on board early was Benton MacKaye,
stalwart of the RPAA, founder of the Wilderness Society, and conceiver of
the Appalachian Trail. In an article in the May 1933 issue of Survey Graphic
titled “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” MacKaye extolled the breadth,
scope, and depth of Roosevelt’s plan for the Tennessee Valley: “President
Roosevelt has spread it out from a dam to a river to a region. . . . He has
done more—he has related a local project to a national emergency; he has
sown the seed of that “national planning” announced in his inauguration
speech.”41 MacKaye was ultimately concerned with the protection of “the
basic settings”: wilderness, community, and wayside. To stem the tide of the
“metropolitan slum” he urged the “townless highway” and the “highway-
less town.” Highways would bypass the town and would be connected to it
by spur roads. Surrounded by green spaces, the town would be to the region
as the cul-de-sac was to the main road.42 “The Tennessee Valley project,”
MacKaye concluded, “sows the seed of a national plan for the country’s
redevelopment. . . . Further steps . . . must in due course carry on the national
evolution conceived in the Roosevelt statesmanship.”43
The planning and the implementation of Norris were in the hands of
Earle Draper, director of the Division of Land Planning and Housing of
the TVA, and his assistant director, Tracy Augur. Augur had already earned
a reputation as an eloquent advocate of American garden cities.44 Augur
had completed a landscape architecture master’s thesis on planning and the
Garden City at Harvard in 1921. He was working in the office of planner
John Nolen, who had just developed an interest in “farm-cities” (a version
of Howard’s town-country magnet).45 The TVA town of Norris was put on
the fast track. The site for the town was picked in July 1933, and housing
construction started in January 1934. (See figure 2.2.) The idea remained
“high concept.” In December 1933, Earle Draper wrote:
To serve the entire community a complete town center has been laid out adjacent
to a 14-acre public recreation ground. . . . Here will be grouped the public hall and
administration building, a small hotel, stores, public market, bus station and service
garage and other community features as the need arises. Centered on the main axis
of this group will be the public school, away from traffic. . . . The utilities, including
electric distribution station and steam laundry are relegated to nearby but unobtrusive
locations. . . . [Norris] will demonstrate that the unduly congested, insanitary, matter-
of-fact ugliness and the usual haphazard growth . . . can be avoided inexpensively.46
Tracy Augur, director of planning for Norris, drew a direct line from
the Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal to Norris. According to Augur,
the town had three “focal points”: a community center, a construction camp
site, and a machine shop center devoted to attracting future industry. It
Figure 2.2
Tracy Augur’s plan for the resettlement of families displaced by Norris Reservoir,
1934. (The Tennessee Planner)
36 Chapter 2
Figure 2.3
Model homes in Norris Village. (Walter Creese and Earle S. Draper Jr.)
p rojected a population of 1,000–1,500 families. The houses were constructed

to be simple, easy to maintain, and make the maximum use of electricity for
heating and cooking.47 (See figure 2.3.) The town had a greenbelt around
it and, consonant with Roosevelt’s rural-industrial ideas, provided places for
a ome instruction center (cooking, child care, budgeting and furnishing), a
trades and engineering center (auto mechanics, aviation, plumbing, wrought
iron work, electrical and mechanical skills), and in the greenbelt dairy and
poultry farms so that Norris workers could engage in part-time agriculture.
The intention remained to educate workers to become foremen and manag-
ers, and to provide an agricultural-industrial basis for everyday life.48
One important aim of the plan was to draw industry into Norris to
balance its rural situation and to enable its residents to partake of a rural-
industrial community, or what TVA literature described as “a community
based upon the orderly combination of industrial work and subsistence
and farming.”49 The planners drew explicitly upon the ideas of Ebenezer
Howard and Patrick Geddes. “What Howard proposed,” wrote Draper and
Augur, “was a solution of the housing problem, not by building model ten-
ements or workers’ suburbs, but by taking the population before it reached
the slums and giving it housing facilities of a far superior sort.” The result
was “not merely a new type of city but of a new type of region.” The town
of Norris’s “single broad goal” was “the evolution of a way of living in the
Valley.”50 According to Augur, “the fundamentals of the plan were never
sacrificed—a recognition of the underlying purposes of the community—a
sympathetic treatment of the site, abundant open space for children’s play
and adult recreation, attractiveness in all things big and little, from the iron
bracket of the street signpost to the roadway’s gentle curve and the school’s
straightforward architecture, simplicity, economy, a place designed for
pleasant living and convenient work.”51
The reality, however, fell far short of the dream. The costs of housing
were higher than had been projected. As a result, members of the TVA’s
professional staff were attracted to the original houses in Norris, while
workers found themselves able to afford only the cinder-block houses in the
southeast corner. Similarly, industry was not drawn into Norris. The small
population and the rural location (approximately 25 miles from Knoxville)
made Norris unattractive to businesses and industry. By 1936, when the
major phases of construction were over, workers had begun to leave Norris,
replaced in the housing units by outsiders from a waiting list. The origi-
nal élan of Norris was undermined, and it began to look more and more
like a bedroom suburb of Knoxville. Moreover, the TVA itself was under-
going great changes. The two additional directors appointed by President
Roosevelt (David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan) consistently outvoted
Arthur Morgan and increasingly turned the TVA into an agency for eco-
nomic development.52 Lilienthal publicly asserted “I do not have much faith
in uplift.”53 By 1937 the TVA had decided to sell Norris, having long before
abandoned its ideas of regional development.54
While the early Roosevelt administration was developing Norris as a city of
the future, Hitler’s Reich was laying plans for Salzgitter, a neue Stadt, or new
town, about 20 kilometers south of the Lower Saxon city of Braunschweig. It
derived its name from nearby salt springs and from one of the original towns
of the area, Gitter. Salzgitter housed workers for a vast new mining and steel-
making complex known as the Hermann-Göring-Werke. Although hav-
ing different proximate causes, the National Socialist new town of Salzgitter
and the TVA project at Norris shared many ideological goals. Both experi-
ments sought to reinvent the city and its environs in response to impend-
ing industrialization. Both identified with but were profoundly ambivalent
about technology, hoping to temper modern technological civilization with
38 Chapter 2
rural values and appreciations of nature. And, as with Norris, the story of
Salzgitter serves as a window on a fascinating process of invention and rein-
vention. But although Salzgitter mirrored the TVA in significant respects, it
was a reflection in a distorted mirror, an image twisted by the extreme social,
political, and economic conditions of Nazi Germany.
In the words of Salzgitter’s architect, Herbert Rimpl: “With the rise
of the [Hermann Göring] Werke the villages and the farm towns of the
Salzgitter hills were awakened from their peaceful existence.”55 A farming
area of 55,000 acres, approximately 20,000 people, and some thirty small
towns became, in just a few short years, “one of the largest concentrations of
industrial might in the world.”56 The agent of this astonishing transformation
was the Reich’s secret rearmament drive of the 1930s. Having surrendered
to the Allies its main iron and steel-producing regions in Alsace-Lorraine
after World War I, Germany looked for areas that would provide alterna-
tive sources of ore. Extensive deposits in the Salzgitter hills, known since
ancient times, had remained dormant because of the inferior quality of the
ore. For centuries Salzgitter had been known as a bucolic agricultural dis-
trict of wheat and sugar beet fields, its only claim to fame being mineral
baths frequented by the princes of Braunschweig.57 Interwar German pol-
itics and an invention changed all that. A newly patented chemical pro-
cess introduced an economical method for enriching Salzgitter’s low-grade
ore. Hermann Göring, the powerful Field Marshall responsible for making
Germany resource independent, incorporated Salzgitter in his Soviet-style
four-year plan for putting Germany’s economy and natural resources on a
war footing.58
In 1937 a huge industrial complex of mines, foundries, molding plants,
forges, chemical and electrical facilities, and other support installations was
coming into being at Salzgitter. Lacking a pool of local skilled labor, the proj-
ect imported workers from elsewhere in Germany and Europe. When labor
continued to fall short of needs, the regime erected a concentration camp
nearby to supply slave labor.59 Salzgitter exploded in size, soon ranking as the
fastest growing and the most densely populated region in Germany.60 With
the huge influx of workers and their families, Göring was confronted with a
housing crisis. An overall plan for new housing construction was needed.
The Reich’s approach to the housing problem was more than a prag-
matic measure. It reflected concerns deeply rooted in German history and
culture. Salzgitter’s planners resolved to avoid the mistakes of Germany’s

industrial revolution, whose rapid onset—the fastest in Europe—had gen-
erated extreme social and economic dislocations. (The anxieties from this
rapid modernization are well documented in Oswald Spengler’s Decline of
the West.61) The planners feared that the Hermann-Göring-Werke would
inflict the same human and environmental problems as Germany’s indus-
trialization: flight from the land, urban overcrowding and sprawl, noxious
air, unhealthy living conditions, and working-class ghettos.62 Of even greater
concern to Germans of this generation was the destruction of community,
of Gemeinschaft (whose distinction from Gesellschaft was so critical to
Ferdinand Tönnies and to the sociologists of the Frankfurt School).63 Who
could predict what moral and spiritual damage would result from depriving
citizens of rural community, open air, the healing light of the countryside,
and natural connections to the land? Combined with Germany’s long his-
tory of anti-city sentiment, such concerns strongly colored the planning for
Salzgitter.
Yet the Reich was reluctant to forgo the technology that provided the
foundation of economic, military, and political strength for the modern
nation-state. In inventing Salzgitter, it pursued a seemingly paradoxical
course of preserving the bucolic benefits of rural life while building up the
Reich’s industrial and military might.
Incorporating ideas from Britain, Italy, and the United States, Salzgitter
retranslated the concept of the new town into National Socialist terms.
The solutions to housing, industrial, and environmental problems were
wrapped in a Blut und Boden (blood-and-soil) ideology that found
expression in a paradoxical Nazi world view that combined awe of mod-
ern industrial might with a nostalgic pre-modern vision of das Volk, a
romantic myth of small-town agrarian Germany—a cultural contradiction
that Jeffrey Herf has labeled “reactionary modernism.”64 This contradic-
tory ideology was the basis for Germany’s Siedlungsprogramme (settle-
ment program), which created thousands of new towns of various sizes
during the 1920s and the 1930s.65 Salzgitter served as a model project. An
expression of German anti-urban sentiments that go back at least to the
seventeenth century, the program was an offshoot of Ebenezer Howard’s
Garden City movement, which had spawned immediate imitators in
Germany. Cities like Letchworth had German parallels in the new town
40 Chapter 2
plans of the anti-Semitic propagandist Theodor Fritsch.66 Relocating city

dwellers to smaller settlements at the edge of cities or in the countryside,
the Reich’s decentralization program—also referred to as “internal colo-
nization” or “repatriation”—produced new housing projects around the
country, often in conjunction with industrial sites.
Nazi propagandists believed that resettlement would remove downtrod-
den city dwellers from corrupt urban environments and bind them spiri-
tually and morally to Mutter-Erde (Mother Earth) in a new form of rural
industrial town. In practice, the decentralization program became a tool of
social control and forced migration of undesirables. Focused on minority
groups and workers, the policy would eventually have deadly implications
in the Holocaust.
Two high Nazi officials, Richard Walter Darré and Gottfried Feder,
developed the ideologies for the German Siedlungsprogramme. Darré,
Hitler’s agriculture minister and one of the Nazi party’s most powerful
figures, brought a fierce anti-urban and anti-technology bias to National
Socialist thinking. His blood-and-soil philosophy categorized Europe’s
aboriginal peoples as either “settlers” or “nomads.” Darré idealized the
rural, land-loving peasantry—the settlers—as precursors of the Nordic race.
In contrast, the nomads, progenitors of all non-Aryan and especially the
Semitic and “oriental” races, were the citified purveyors of godless technol-
ogy. Darré called for “repatriating” urban populations to the soil as the only
way to restore Nordic values. When Heinrich Himmler appointed him head
of the Race and Settlement Office of the Nazi SS, Darré was able to apply
his racist mythologizing with deadly consequences.67
Gottfried Feder, the Reich’s Siedlungskommisar (Settlement Commissar)
launched a program of invented cities that aimed to reconcile urban/tech-
nological and rural/agrarian values. He had a powerful role in shaping the
Reich’s policy of decentralization and its blood-and-soil ideology. Not
sharing Darré’s anti-technology biases, he envisioned green towns of about
20,000 people, combining industry and agriculture—Germany’s official
development policy dating from Bismarck’s Sammlungspolitik (politics of
“pulling together”) of “iron and rye.” Feder compared the new city to an
organism, hierarchically organized in a nationwide system, much as group-
ings of cells constitute the body.68 His ultimate goal was “the dissolution of
the metropolis, in order to make our people be settled again, to give them
again their roots in the soil. . . . The reincorporation of the metropolitan

populations into the rhythm of the German landscape is one of the principal
tasks of the National Socialist government.”69
Nazi resettlement policies converged in the planning for Salzgitter, one
of the Reich’s most ambitious attempts to blend industry and agriculture,
town and country. Herbert Rimpl, Hitler’s chief industrial architect and
after Albert Speer the leading architect of the Nazi era, had the contract
for the overall planning of the Salzgitter Werke, including its administra-
tive facilities and its housing. His company employed some 700 architects
and had branches throughout Germany.70 One of Hermann Göring’s
favored contractors, he built numerous air force and industrial installa-
tions for the Luftwaffe chief. Salzgitter was one of his most important
commissions.
In a book written a decade after the Salzgitter project, Rimpl revealed
some of his philosophical thinking behind the new town.71 His love of
nature emerges as a motivation. “Yearning for Nature” (Natursehnsucht),
he wrote, “logically follows technology,” a sentiment that resonated with
Nazi anti-industrial attitudes.72 “Already in 1905, after the epoch of the
crassest materialism, the Garden City of Letchworth was built as a logical
reaction.” A great admirer of Howard’s original garden city, Rimpl praised
England’s new domestic style, in which the house “is oriented toward the
sun and bound with nature. The garden is a part of the house, whose inner
spaces it extends outward, over terraces or meadows, over flower or veg-
etable gardens.” Finally, “the basis for the rise of this kind of dwelling was
the hated industrial city. . . . ” At times, Rimpl’s sense of nature verges on
religious awe. For example: “The inclusion of the breadth of landscape in
cities, the opening up to nature afforded by glass houses, the yearning for
green, for gardens, the sun, water, the mountains, undisturbed forests, all of
these are visible signs of the embodiment of a pantheistic point of view.”
At the behest of Hitler, Rimpl laid out his plans and rationale for
Salzgitter in a prominent Nazi art journal.73 (See figure 2.4.) Ordered by
his government patrons to preserve a sense of the rural and natural within
the heavily industrialized landscape, Rimpl confronted the contradictions
in National Socialist ideology between nature and technology. He chose
an eclectic blend of architectural styles to articulate the town’s distinct
components. The principal public buildings—the Volkshalle and the Nazi
42 Chapter 2
Figure 2.4
Rimpl’s town plan for Salzgitter. (Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich,” Die
Baukunst, April 1939)
eadquarters—adopted the neo-classical gigantism of Albert Speer. (See fig-

h
ure 2.5.) For Salzgitter’s steel factories, Rimpl took advantage of the effi-
ciencies of glass and steel construction of the International Style. (His firm
employed many former Bauhäusler.) His plans for the projected 15,000–
20,000 workers’ homes embraced the vernacular style of traditional German
housing.74
Figuratively unifying the disparate parts was an organic metaphor drawn
from the heart of Nazi ideology.75 Like Speer, Rimpl viewed architecture
as both a practical and symbolic art. Therefore, his plans for the Nazi tech-
nology town can be read not only as a literal blueprint but also as a set of
signs and symbols. Rimpl’s plans embodied the notion of the “body poli-
tic,” a metaphorical comparison of the town to the human body. A tradi-
tion that goes as far back as Plato’s Republic and that found corroboration
in contemporary German cell theory, the “body politic” concept justified
social arrangements by declaring them “natural.”76 Salzgitter was to function
as—and be—an organism at one with nature, a Nazi garden city.
Both to separate it from and to connect it to major urban and indus-
trial centers, Rimpl nestled Salzgitter in the heart of an existing rail and
autobahn network, to which he added a canal as another mode of access.
Environmental considerations—the availability of clean air and sun, the
visual landscape, soil, water, and health factors—figured prominently in the
choice of location. Rimpl located the town in a valley north of the foothills
Figure 2.5
Rimpl’s rendering of the main plaza for Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke.
(Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, ” April 1939)
44 Chapter 2
of the ore-bearing Harz Mountains and west of the foundry areas, so that
prevailing winds would carry airborne pollutants away from the town.77
Salzgitter was to serve as a hub for existing towns of the district and for new
settlements built to accommodate the influx of workers. The town proper was
projected to have a population of about 130,000; the entire region, including
the mines and industrial sites, would eventually contain 250,000 people.78
Salzgitter was defined by the confluence of two rivers, the Flothe and
the Fuhse. Rimpl invoked the “body politic” metaphor quite literally. The
Flothe formed a 2-kilometer backbone for the town, while the conver-
gence of the two rivers defined the skeleton. The juncture of valleys pro-
vided a setting for a sport and health complex—the town’s heart. This green
area, conducting cleansing mountain winds through the town, served as
the lungs. (“Die grüne Lunge,” the common expression for a city’s cen-
tral green, took on in this instance a heightened metaphoric meaning.) The
whole effect was to “give the new industrial city the character of a city in
the country.”79 A transportation node at the town’s northeast end became
the legs and arteries. A second symbolic point, the site of the Volkshalle and
the Nazi Party’s headquarters, represented the head that directed the body’s
organic functions. (See figure 2.6.) The head maintained the all-important
Figure 2.6
The Volkshalle and Nazi Headquarters represented the “head” that ruled the “body”
of Salzgitter. (Rimpl, “Die Kunst im Dritten Reich,” April 1939)
hierarchy and “Ordnung,” a reminder of the authoritarian subtext of Nazi

organicism. The town’s residential areas operated on the same hierarchi-
cal principles. The apartment buildings and single-family dwellings formed
cells, while the roads winding among them, coming off rectilinear major
arteries, were the capillaries that gave them vitality.80 Green gardens and
common areas kept the system sunned and oxygenated. The cells in turn
formed a subsystem of small communities, each with its own schools, gro-
ceries, and public amenities.81 Multi-story buildings stood at the center of
each community, preserving a sense of order and control from the cen-
ter and above.82 Rimpl separated the main transportation routes from the
residential areas, embedding them in Salzgitter’s greenbelt, the town’s outer
“skin” and a buffer against other population centers.
The body politic of Salzgitter, however, never fully matured. Rimpl’s
grand scheme lay uncompleted at war’s end, remaining in the form of ren-
derings and models. With Germany’s defeat, the Werke shut down, ceding
their role back to the Ruhr and other revived iron districts. Salzgitter lived—
and lives—on, however. During the Cold War, West Germany maintained
the region and, to some extent, its industries, primarily for political reasons.
In an area so close to East Germany, it wanted to maintain a show of stable
employment. However, the garden city experiment was over.
Both Norris and Salzgitter offer insight into perceptions of the urban
condition as we enter the twenty-first century. Both were interesting early
attempts to come to grips with problems left by the worst excesses of the
industrial revolution and of unplanned urban sprawl through a union of town
and country. Both displayed enormous confidence in planning for the future.
Moreover, planners in both the United States and Germany tended to see
the problems in regional terms, and ultimately in national terms as well, fore-
shadowing later attempts, in the 1980s and 1990s, to take up these issues.
In the end, of course, both Norris and Salzgitter were failures, whether
judged by their own initial goals or by today’s standards. Each failed owing
to contingencies. Germany lost World War II and was disarmed. The
Hermann-Göring-Werke ceased to function, and Salzgitter lost its raison
d’être. After the war, the nationalist and Volkisch ideology of Salzgitter fell
into disrepute; the German people wished to forget. Norris was practically
stillborn. Just as it was beginning to develop, it lost its political backing.
The New Deal, confronted by the stubbornly resistant Depression, turned
46 Chapter 2
away from visionary planning and toward practical, ad hoc solutions. The
pragmatists at the TVA—David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan—ejected
Arthur Morgan, and the TVA turned mainly to producing and distribut-
ing electrical power. Beyond contingency, however, both experiments
were ultimately victims of an intrinsically untenable concept. The inner
contradictions of the founding idea—a massive industrial complex within
a “green” environment—may have doomed them from the start. In Seeing
Like a State, James Scott calls the impulse behind this kind of planned city
“high modernism,” an ideology combining faith in scientific and techni-
cal progress, rational design of the social order and control over nature.83
Salzgitter and Norris reflect all these, plus a characteristically pre-World War
I nostalgia for the rural and a distrust of the industrial city. The legacy of the
1930s’ techno-cities is precisely this: they remind us once again of questions
of the limits and strengths of planning; of looking for the optimum ways to
deal with sprawl and congestion through the Garden City idea; of the role
of visions of the future, utopian thrusts, and their dangers.
3 Te ch n o -C i ttà: Te c hno logy and Urban
D e sig n in Fas ci st Ita ly
Like Norris and Salzgitter, the northern Italian town of Torviscosa drew on
the rising optimism for centralized planning and on widespread regard for
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City notions. In line with Fascist doctrine and
practice, Torviscosa was a government-industry partnership. It began with
SNIA (Società Navigazione Industriale Applicazione) Viscosa, a company
that produced viscose or rayon fiber, a synthetic material that came into
heavy demand during the 1930s. Torviscosa was the creation of SNIA’s pres-
ident, Franco Marinotti, an Italian strongman in the Mussolini mold, who
built it under the auspices of Il Duce’s sweeping “città nuova” program.
Instituted to reclaim agricultural land in Italy’s malaria-ridden coastal marshes
and to create new jobs, the vast building program produced more than a
dozen “città di fondazione” (meaning “foundation towns,” and referring to
their role in anchoring the new Italy). One of the most promising of these
foundation towns was Torviscosa. To realize this project, Marinotti needed
land, easy means of transport, and a willing workforce, all of which Torviscosa
appeared to satisfy. The Mussolini-Marinotti alliance was a marriage made, if
not in heaven, at some other place of political and economic advantage.
Torviscosa lies in the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, about

85 kilometers northeast of Venice along the major road and rail routes con-
necting Venice and Trieste. Although both town and factory have been
restored and modernized since World War II, a visit to Torviscosa is still a
journey into Fascist memory. Torviscosa and its chemical factory, now a
SNIA subsidiary called Caffaro (Industrie Chimiche Caffaro), are well-
preserved mementos of the Mussolini era, time capsules of nationalistic aspi-
ration. Although Allied bombing had leveled the factory, its headquarters
48 Chapter 3
building has been carefully restored to its original form. Signs of faded Fascist
glory can still be seen in the chemical plant and other buildings, in public art
and sculpture, and in plaques and monuments dedicated to the town’s
revered founder, Franco Marinotti. The original city hall and the Piazza del
Popolo survive intact, as does the town’s central green space, with its gar-
dens and sporting facilities, its movie theater, and its ristoro/dopolavoro
(rest and “after-work” recreation center). Adjacent to the factory head
quarters stands the chemical firm’s Franco Marinotti Information and
Documentation Center, a substantial red brick structure of more recent vin-
tage with a soaring 60-meter tower fashioned to evoke the town’s period
Fascist style. Place names and other explicit tokens of the Fascist era, most
dramatically a Fascist ax on one of SNIA’s chemical conversion towers, were
long ago done away with. But Mussolini’s partiality for classic modernism,
evoking the glories of ancient Rome, left a permanent imprint on Torviscosa,
as it did on many Italian cities. A master at manipulating architectural sym-
bols, Il Duce deployed a cadre of Italian architects, including the acclaimed
Marcello Piacentini, to remake the Italian cityscape in the monumental style
famously associated with his regime.1 Torviscosa, Sabaudia, and Rome itself
testify to the power of his architectural influence.
As of this writing, some of SNIA’s early managers and workers still reside
in the town’s original housing district, preserved much as it was in the 1930s.
I Primi di Torviscosa (Torviscosa’s Pioneers), historically self-conscious
retirees, remain proud of the role they played in Italy’s industrial revitaliza-
tion and work hard to keep the historical flame alive. (See figure 3.1.) What
binds them to Torviscosa beyond the housing they occupy—reputedly the
most commodious of the città di fondazione—is devotion to the company’s
memory.2 Since the 1940s, they have been the self-appointed keepers of
town and company history. The Documentation Center, which they main-
tain on a volunteer basis, contains the archives, libraries, films, and exhibits
about the city’s creation, including large-scale architectural models detail-
ing the evolution of the city plan.3 The Center stands as a symbol of both
historical consciousness and former grandeur. Its tower, designed by the
architect Cesare Pea and visible from almost any location in town, looms
imperiously, even ominously, a powerful echo of the town’s Fascist origins.
It also serves to remind us that there are in fact two Torviscosas—the real
town and its history, and the one that served as symbol and stage for Fascist
Techno-Città 49
Figure 3.1
Franco Marinotti and son Paolo meet with I Primi di Torviscosa in 1964. (Archivio
Primi di Torviscosa)
50 Chapter 3
ideology and propaganda. The twin Torviscosas remain so intertwined that

it is impossible to discern where one ends and the other begins.
Torviscosa’s origins lay in Mussolini’s war against cities, whose cor-
rupted cores, he contended, were among the most destructive legacies of
the Industrial Revolution. Inflamed by Spengler’s Decline of the West, he
raged against urban man’s insulation from nature. From the German his-
torian and philosopher, he learned about the superiority of honest coun-
try folk to degenerate urban “parasites” and “nomads.” Cities, Mussolini
believed, bred worker alienation, class conflict, and, in some cases, even
revolution.4 Advocating decentralization and the shift of population to rural
areas, Il Duce issued a decree in 1939 restricting immigration to urban cen-
ters. Moving industry out of the city into the country would bind work-
ers to rural values, and, it was also expected, to the regime that gave them
land, home, and work—a Fascist corroboration of the Nazi blood-and-soil
ideology.
On the eve of the global depression, which formed the essential back-
drop to all techno-cities of the period, the Fascist government launched an
aggressive program of rural town building. It established thirteen new città
di fondazione, constructing them in two waves.5 Towns of land reclama-
tion and ruralization came first. Prominent among these were Mussolinia,
renamed Arborea after the War, on the island of Sardinia in 1928 and
Littoria (for the Fascist lictor), now called Latina, in 1932. Mussolini’s spe-
cial showpiece cities were those founded on reclaimed marshlands in the
Latium region southeast of Rome in the Pontine Marshes (Agro Pontino,
in Italian). (See figure 3.2.) For centuries Roman rulers had tried but failed
to drain the marshes in the hinterland of the imperial city. Where Caesars
had fallen short, however, Il Duce prevailed. After clearing the mosquito-
infested, malarial swamps, his regime built five new towns on the reclaimed
land, including Sabaudia and Littoria. At the latter’s formal inauguration,
Mussolini claimed a historic victory: “That which was attempted in vain
over the past twenty-five centuries today we are translating into living real-
ity.”6 With the second wave of urban construction came the technology-
driven towns designed specifically to support autarchy, the Fascist policy of
resource and economic independence. Along with Torviscosa—the Città
della Cellulosa—this wave also swept in the Città del Carbone (coal mining)
and the Città dell’Aeronautica.7
Techno-Città 51
Figure 3.2
Mussolini saw the draining of the Pontine Marshes as a propaganda coup.
(Associazione Culturale Novecento. Cover illustration for quaderno dell’ONC, 1936
by Duilio Cambellotti, as reproduced in Pellegrini and Vittori, Sabaudia)
52 Chapter 3
Whatever their varied rationales, all of Mussolini’s new cities bespoke the
Fascist revulsion against the metropolis and a yearning for small-town life.
At the same time, they stood for the modern, revolutionary face of Italian
Fascism. Sabaudia, a resort town on the Pontine Marshes, was and remains
famous for its futuristic “rational” modernism.8 Its Fascist architecture and its
Art Deco elements echoed those of Torviscosa and other città di fondazione.
Thus, at the core of the città nuove there was always the sense of an unre-
solved contradiction. While showing a futuristic drive, they also harkened to
the past, often to the glories of imperial Rome.9 In Fascist propaganda, iden-
tifying the old and new worlds of Italian leadership promoted the nation’s
image as a progressive leader. The forward-looking Torviscosa, too, claimed
a Roman past in its buildings and statuary, and also incorporated local Friulian
history and tradition. An equally powerful influence on Il Duce’s new towns
was the Garden City idea. Luigi Piccinato, head of the group of four young
architects belonging to the Italian Movement for Rational Architecture who
won the competition to build Sabaudia, drew much of his inspiration from
Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city, the American architect’s variation on
the Garden City. Piccinato envisioned a decentralized urban structure, free
of crowding, slums, traffic jams, pollution, and crime.10
In her comparative study of New Deal and Fascist communities, Diane
Ghirardo notes that “New Towns were of enormous propaganda significance
for the [Italian] government.” The ability to create a whole new city from
swampland in a strikingly short time seemed like a feat of magic.11 Through such
achievements, the regime flaunted its power, advertising its superiority to both
capitalist and socialist forms of government. Torviscosa, like its sister new towns,
was as much cultural statement as political and economic strategy. In that city
as well as others, Fascist cultural policies aimed to mobilize and reform, even
remake the Italian people. The new towns program was instrumental to these
reforms. Reclaiming swampland upon which new cities would arise stood for
social redemption. In 1928, Mussolini declaimed: “Redeem the earth; and with
the earth, man; and with men, the race.”12 As Ruth Ben-Ghiat has observed, land
reclamation “merely constituted the most concrete manifestation of the Fascists’
desire to purify the nation of all social and cultural pathology . . . [part of ] a com-
prehensive project to combat degeneration and radically renew Italian society by
‘pulling up the bad weeds and cleaning up the soil.’ ”13 Out of the città nuove,
Mussolini proclaimed, would emerge an Italian uomo nouvo—a new man.
Techno-Città 53
The town of Torviscosa was the invention of Franco Marinotti (1891–

1966), a leading figure in Milanese politics and in the Italian textile industry.
After serving as vice-mayor of Milan, he became president of the Province
of Milan, and “consigliere nazionale.”14 In 1938, he was elevated to Count
of Torviscosa. Born and educated in the Veneto, Marinotti went to Milan to
find work. Landing a job as an accountant at a silk-spinning firm, he gained
his first foothold in the textile industry. In 1913, he worked as an attorney
for a Russian-Italian textile firm, also specializing in silk. Work took him to
Russia during the war, where he rose quickly through the company ranks.
He returned to Italy after the war in 1918 to embark on a long career in the
chemical firm that gave birth to Torviscosa.15
SNIA—originally the Società di Navigazione Italo Americana, a joint-
stock company—had it beginnings during World War I as a shipper of coal
from the United States to Italy. After the war, the firm went into the syn-
thetic textile and chemical business and became known as SNIA Viscosa
(Società Navigazione Industriale Applicazione Viscosa). Soon it was a major
player in the international textile industry. Marinotti joined SNIA Viscosa
in the early1930s, after the company had fallen on hard times because of the
Great Depression and bad management. He quickly assumed effective con-
trol of the firm, and in 1938 he became its president.16
Textiles assumed major importance in the Italian economy of the early
1930s. As an export commodity, they helped to offset Depression-generated
problems in trade, production, and currency instability. Attempting to
align SNIA with the autarchic policies of the Fascist regime, Marinotti sold
Mussolini on the idea of “Italian Cellulose,” an independent New Town for
the production of viscose rayon that his firm would develop and control. It
was conceived along the lines of the paternalistic industrial towns set up by
such companies as Fiat, Pirelli, and Breda. Marinotti cited three reasons for
choosing the Friuli region as the site for the new town: it had a great deal of
unproductive agricultural land ripe for reclamation, it suffered high unem-
ployment, and its existing transportation networks would facilitate recon-
struction.17 Once its project was accepted by the regime, SNIA received
massive infusions of government funds for constructing the new town.
SNIA needed high-quality cellulose to produce its new fibers, but inter-
national sanctions imposed by the League of Nations after Italy invaded
Ethiopia in 1935 blocked the importation of pulp from Canada and other
54 Chapter 3
timber-producing regions. After experimenting with a variety of plants,

including the fast-growing eucalyptus, SNIA’s labs discovered a replacement
in an annual plant that could grow rapidly in Torviscosa’s Mediterranean
climate: Arundo donax, a reed familiarly known as canna gentile (sweet
cane). They also devised a calcium bisulfite process to extract cellulose from
Arundo donax and convert it into viscose rayon. (See figure 3.3.)
To make way for Torviscosa, the government expropriated land in and
around Torre di Zuino. The medieval town lay at the center of a depressed
agricultural region, largely swampland along the Lagoon of Marano on the
Adriatic Sea. In the 1920s, the province of Friuli was struggling to recover
from World War I, which had wreaked havoc on its agricultural and silk-
worm industries. SNIA acquired nearly 6,000 hectares of damaged land,
1,200 of which were to be devoted to the cultivation of canna gentile.
After draining the swamps, the firm set up a subsidiary, SAICI (La Società
Agricola Industriale Cellulosa Italiana), to farm Arundo donax and extract
cellulose—the Garden City marriage of agriculture and industry. After
completing the cellulose factory and its research laboratories, SAICI erected
supporting industrial sites, including plants to produce hydroelectric power
and soda. The company not only managed the research, development, and
production of synthetics; it also ran the town, receiving both jurisdiction
and generous funding from the state.18
Construction of the town commenced in 1937. In 1940 it became an
independent commune under the name Torre di Viscosa (after the medi-
eval town’s landmark tower), soon contracted to Torviscosa. The plan ini-
tially called for a peak population of 20,000, but projections were eventually
scaled back to a more realistic 5,000. To design Torviscosa, Marinotti chose
the architect Giuseppe de Min, a relative with whom he had worked for
many years in Milan.19
On September 21, 1938, the initial phase of the town opened to great
fanfare, Benito Mussolini doing the inaugural honors. In Fascist myth the
town was built in less than a year: “In 320 days,” Marinotti declared at the
inaugural ceremony, “faith, tenacity, labor have made a new conquest. In
the sign of the Littorio [lictor, the Roman officer who carried the fasces],
the new city of cellulose has emerged, clear and important evidence of the
Nation’s autarchic victory.”20 In reality, the major elements of the town
weren’t in place until the early 1940s.
Techno-Città 55
Figure 3.3
Wagons deliver sweet cane to chemical towers for the production of viscose. (Archivio
Primi di Torviscosa)
56 Chapter 3
In making his plans for Torviscosa, Marinotti drew on recent experience.

As president of the province of Milan, he was responsible for the creation
of new borgate semirurali (suburban hamlets). The effort involved experi-
ments on worker housing, traffic flow, and integrating city and country. In
his study of the origins of Torviscosa, Massimo Bortolotti points out that
Marinotti’s hamlet initiative was part of a broader Italian movement for total
or integrated architecture that focused on problems in “urbanistica rurale.”21
Marinotti encouraged Giuseppe de Min to apply what he learned about
regional planning in Milan to Torviscosa. They also found urban models
in England’s industrial villages, America’s company towns, and Germany’s
workers’ settlements. Striving for a balance between city and country, they
embedded the town’s factories and other buildings in large green spaces.
Torviscosa sat in the midst of natural terrain, the Friulian marshes. De Min
artfully used natural features (trees, hedges, meadowlands) to set off build-
ings and to articulate a harmonious relationship between factory and city.22
Dominating all was the gigantic cellulose factory, consisting of eleven sec-
tions, each devoted to a different phase of viscose production, combining to
more than a kilometer in length. The street leading to the factory was lined
with noble sculptures, memorial plaques, and stately urns. Across from the
plant, arrayed on an arc, were a movie theater and a “ristoro/dopolavoro”—
an after-work facility that combined the functions of hotel, restaurant, tav-
ern, and recreation center. The purpose of the ristoro/dopolavoro was to
restore not only the body but also the spirit. Such public amenities served
the company’s paternalist desire to control all aspects of workers’ lives,
during and outside work hours. Operating the dopolavoro was the Opera
Nazionale Dopolavoro, a national organization established in 1925 to pro-
mote safe and healthy working conditions and the efficient employment of
workers. Not only did it strive to ameliorate their physical conditions; it also
looked after their moral and spiritual well-being, in keeping with Fascist
precepts.23
Public service areas were integral to the town’s design. The ristoro and
theater admitted to a large public park containing a swimming pool, soccer
field, tennis courts, a bocce field, and other public recreational facilities. The
park separated the factory complex from the civic center. Torviscosa had all
the essential buildings of a typical Fascist città nuova: town hall, church,
post office, youth center, and other government structures.24 At one end of
Techno-Città 57
Torviscosa’s central square was a combined town hall/Fascist Party building,

notable for its Fascist-modern clock tower. (See figure 3.4.) Contrasting
with the tower’s modernism was the traditional architecture of the porticos
arranged laterally along the original Piazza of the Empire, known today as
the Piazza del Popolo. The ground level was devoted to shops, and the
second level to living areas. This mix of styles held political and cultural
meaning. De Min’s approach was to combine forward-looking modernism
(associated with the regime) with the references to Italy’s traditional culture
of the contadini, or peasantry.25 Adjacent to the piazza were the school and
nursery school—structures typical of the città di fondazione.
On the city’s south side, there was housing for employees. In the tradi-
tion of the città nuove, the town houses were simple in plan and arrayed in
rows, each with a small garden in the back. Heights of the spacious two-
story units varied, but in general they reinforced a social order of uniform
comfort centered on the family.26 In placing the workers’ housing, De Min
carefully researched traffic patterns to the factories and their surrounding
agricultural lands. (See figure 3.5.)
The Fascists’ autarchic policy required the use of local resources and
builders. De Min varied and modulated his materials, for example using
red brick for the factory complex and traditional stone and plaster for civic
structures. The blend of materials symbolized Torviscosa’s status as a private
Figure 3.4
Torviscosa Town Hall on the Piazza del Popolo reflects typical architectural styles of
Mussolini’s cittá di fondazione. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )
58 Chapter 3
Figure 3.5
Employee housing was laid out in simple rows. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )
city within a state—the Fascist fusion of private capitalism and government.

In Torviscosa, in contrast to some other città nuove, private power domi-
nated. Built on private land owned by SNIA Viscosa, the commune rented
its property from the corporation.27
Such was the real Torviscosa, as it was and, to a large extent, still is. But
there was also the Torviscosa of Fascist ideology and myth. The original
town was dressed up in Fascist symbols, most conspicuous the chemical
conversion tower in the form of a colossal fasces. National-popolari statues,
exemplars of the Italian social realist style, flanked the factory entrance, as
they still do today. Sculpted by the artist Leone Lodi, one features a heroic
male nude, an agricultural worker wielding a shovel, standing before his
seated wife and son; the other features a second male figure reining in a
rearing horse, symbolizing man’s control of nature and industry. (See figure
3.6.) Reliefs on the factory’s facade and remnants of statuary along the park
project the Fascist goal of integrating agriculture and industry. Marinotti,
even more prominent than Mussolini in Torviscosa, personally orchestrated
the civic decor, toning down some of the Fascist references so as not to
detract from his own power. In contrast with other Mussolini towns, there
was no grand separate Casa del Fascio; it shared quarters with the town hall.
Techno-Città 59
Figure 3.6
Lodi Sculptures frame Cesare Pea’s distinctive tower for the Information and
Documentation Center. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )
60 Chapter 3
Literary propagandists were enlisted in the selling of Torviscosa. In 1938,

SNIA’s publicity office asked the Futurist poet and writer Filippo Tomasso
Marinetti to give his imprimatur to the Fascist project, commissioning some
lines of verse in honor of the town’s opening. The notorious Futurist had
streaked to fame decades earlier with his polemic “Foundation and Manifesto
of Futurism,” first published in 1909, which, like other writings by his fellow
Futurists, glorified combat, speed, violence, and the Machine Age. Marinetti
prefaced his ode, titled “Il Poema di Torre Viscosa,” with a typical mani-
festo calling for La Poesia dei Tecnicismi—Manifesto Futurista, a poetry
of technics for the new era of Fascism. Long an ardent supporter of the
Mussolini regime, Marinetti still showed some of his old fire, the boldness of
Torviscosa’s technological experiment apparently fanning the flames anew.
“Il Poema di Torre Viscosa” is a celebration of Fascist autarchy.28 Its
theme is the confrontation of industry and nature, or, more precisely, the
conquest of nature by technology, which would seem at odds with the har-
mony of nature and technology envisioned by Marinotti and Mussolini.
But conflict was the essence of Futurism. The poem is not about human
actors, but about the clash of forces. Marinetti animates nature, while deify-
ing the physical and chemical processes that convert cane to cellulose and
viscose rayon. The poet begins by setting a tragic scene: A field of graceful
reeds, swaying in the breeze, in their gentle innocence almost inviting their
impending doom at the teeth of mechanized harvesters.
They were graceful, too graceful,

Reeds in the immense cane fields of Porto Buso
Each a spring that would tremble under the weight of a swallow
So graceful as to deserve, indeed to require
An improvised tempest of deadly steel.
Enter now the “Goddess of Geometry,” personifying the physical and

chemical processes of cellulose conversion—indeed the very power of
modern technology. Mercilessly, she mows down the tender reeds, then
digests them in her boilers and chemical cauldrons. All to the greater glory
of Fascism:
O Goddess of Geometry, devour ever the fields of cane of the new city of Torviscosa
Calcium bisulfite
Swimming pools for the children of workers
Techno-Città 61
Playing fields for soccer and bocce

The Avenues Vittorio Veneto and Arnaldo Mussolini
Theaters and refectories for thousands of workers
Lofty woods of plane trees and horse chestnuts for a myriad of bicycles
Climb, climb! ever upward to the new constellation whose stars form the word
AUTARCHIA!!
To further trumpet its achievements in industry and town-building,

SNIA sponsored a series of documentary films. As the new towns arose
at the astonishing rate of almost one per year, Mussolini made it a prac-
tice to attend groundbreaking ceremonies, using such events to promote his
regime.29 SNIA’s filmmakers documented one such occasion: the dedication
of Torviscosa on September 21, 1938. In the film’s opening sequences, Il
Duce addresses the cheering masses. (See figure 3.7.) Framing the open-air
scene were two enormous towers emblazoned with his Latinized title, “Dux,
Dux.” In a stentorian voice-over, Mussolini pays tribute to Marinotti’s tri-
umph for Fascism and autarchy:
I declare today, the 21st of September of the 16th year of Fascism, as a day of victory
in the battle that we have joined to achieve the ultimate possibilities for autarchy.
Up to only a few months ago, this was a lost land [but] after only a few months of
work and force we have created this establishment, among the grandest in Italy. In
[your regard?] and above all others . . . , I nominate to be at the side of all of us our
comrade Marinotti. He has faithfully obeyed my orders like a disciplined and clever
soldier.
Another film clip, dating from 1940, documents the expansion and formal
completion of Torviscosa. Swastikas on the factory’s facade advertise
Mussolini’s recent alliance with Hitler.
Giuseppe de Min, Torviscosa’s architect, marked the city’s opening
with a whimsical poem, the “Ballata della canna” (Ballad of the Reed).30
De Min tells about troubles in Paradise. Adam is miserable, frustrated by
Eve’s unceasing and insatiable hunger for expensive garments. Eve demands
the finest dresses, woven only of the best fabrics. Pushed to exhaustion by
his futile efforts to placate her, Adam learns of a wondrous chemical trans-
formation, the process that turns canna gentile into dazzling synthetic fab-
rics: “Sette canne un bel vestito/accontentano il marito” (Seven reeds, one
beautiful dress gratify the husband). Stunning new fashions are now cheap
62 Chapter 3
Figure 3.7
Mussolini and Marinotti, beneath the Fascist symbol, at the inauguration of the SAICI
factory, September 21, 1938. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )
and widely available, even in Eden. The wonders of science have satisfied
Eve and lifted Adam’s burden. Not only have Adam and Eve found con-
tentment, but Torviscosa’s industrial workers are happy and Italy becomes
rich in the process.
In 1949, SNIA commissioned Michelangelo Antonioni, a native of north-
east Italy, to produce a short publicity film about the cane harvest and viscose
production. His film Sette canne, un vestito (also known as Seven Reeds, One
Suit, echoing a line from Giuseppe de Min’s poem and probably drawn from
a SNIA advertising slogan), celebrates how a reclaimed piece of swampland
Techno-Città 63
and research-based technology have pioneered an entirely new form of pro-

duction. Viewed as a replacement for Friuli’s precarious silk industry, with its
costly and laborious traditional methods, Torviscosa’s viscose factories require
a mere seven reeds of cane to produce a new suit or dress. With millions of
canes grown each year, the manufacturing possibilities are virtually limitless.31
At the time of the aforementioned commission, Antonioni was embark-
ing on his film career with such short fiction-documentaries as Gente del
Po (1943), Roma-Montevideo (1943), and Nettezza urbana (1948), dramatic
inquiries into the everyday lives of working-class Italians. In contrast, Sette
canne, un vestito, debuting in 1949, was a story not about workers—though
workers do appear—but about a transformative technology. Still, it was a
film in the emerging Antonioni style, a stark and original cinematic state-
ment visually extending his earlier artistic efforts. Shot in black and white,
scenes of industrious workers harvesting Arundo donax and producing rayon
blended Antonioni’s signature neoverismo with an element of technological
fantasy. With its oblique camera angles and its portentous score, Sette canne,
un vestito echoed such iconic documentaries as Pare Lorenz’s The Plow That
Broke the Plains. Although the documentary is only 9 minutes long, we can
see the hand of a modern master.
As Sette canne, un vestito opens, mechanical harvesters march through tall
fields of Arundo donax. Trucks overflowing with reed then deliver their
cargo to a distant castello misterioso—SNIA’s towering chemical process-
ing plants. Theatrical factory scenes depict boiling cauldrons, automated
machines, and flowing white viscose. Although workers are shown laboring
in fields and factories, the film’s true protagonist is neither man nor nature,
but the machine. The successive stages of cellulose extraction—boiling,
dissolving, reconstituting, and washing, followed by the extrusion of the
viscose filament—are portrayed as mysterious processes, magically generat-
ing stylish garments from a small bundle of cane. The story of Torviscosa’s
research-based technology culminates in a final scene on the catwalks of
fashion houses, where sleek models display brilliant garments of viscose
rayon. In 9 minutes, Sette canne, un vestito has taken us from field to factory
to fashion—a succinct chronicle of a new form of production that combines
scientific research with industrial and consumer output. (See figure 3.8.)
The integrated forces of agriculture and chemistry have achieved a singular
victory pointing to a bounteous future.
Figure 3.8
Three scenes from Antonioni’s Sette canne, un vestito, taking us from field to factory
to fashion. (Archivio Primi di Torviscosa )
Techno-Città 65
Sponsored by SNIA, Sette canne, un vestito would be expected to deliver

the company’s message. Indeed, the contrast between this company film of
technical triumph and consumer fantasy and Antonioni’s more socially aware
productions is striking. Some critics have even suggested that the film’s final
fashion scene was not the celebration of technology it purported to be but
a subversive message about the trivial ends of industrial labor. Conceivably,
by ending on a note of middle-class luxury, Antonioni intended to under-
mine the message of his corporate sponsors. Given other aspects of the film
and Antonioni’s politics, however, this was not a likely scenario. There is no
suggestion that the film’s farm and chemical workers belong to an oppressed
underclass. Nor are there any hints of Chaplinesque satire of automation.
An avowed but at best a tepid Marxist, Antonioni most likely believed in
and faithfully delivered the company message: SNIA was at the technologi-
cal forefront, and Torviscosa offered a progressive industrial model for the
future Italy.
The story of Torviscosa did not end with World War II. Thanks to Italy’s
postwar economic boom, the town continued to grow. But SNIA grew
faster, increasing its dominance over the town. The company was evolving
into an industry giant, a global conglomerate with branches in Spain, South
Africa, India, and Russia. In the 1960s, it stopped making cellulose and
expanded aggressively into the area of chemical intermediates. Vertically
integrated, SNIA grew to include a thermo-electric power station and
hydroelectric plants. It also continued to pursue its strategy of agriculture-
industry integration, eventually replacing its Arundo donax crop with other
specialized cultures, including poplar trees, fruits, cereals, fodder, and dairy
production.
While its historic city core was rebuilt after the war in its original style,
Torviscosa modernized. Today it advertises itself as an advanced technol-
ogy city centered on Caffaro, a SNIA subsidiary. The needs of industry now
clearly overshadow the town’s early utopian goals. Yet, despite the pressures
of capitalism, these founding ideals are still recalled to some extent by the
company’s founding employees. They remember once being part of some-
thing special, and they keep that memory alive today. Whether they will pass
this dedication on to another generation, it is too early to say.
Sabaudia, a sister foundation town, provides a revealing contrast. It, too,
was an ideal city built on reclaimed swampland. Unlike Torviscosa, however,
66 Chapter 3
it served agricultural and recreational purposes. Besides being “an eminently

agricultural town,” it became a popular Italian beach resort, renowned for
its well-preserved examples of “architectural rationalism.” As such, its origi-
nal justifications still make sense; there is no apparent gap between what
was and what is. Torviscosa, on the other hand, has had the formidable task
of blending industrial modernism with rural ideals. The tension between
a pastoral tradition and modern industrialization verged on contradiction,
one that afflicted almost all techno-cities of the era.32 Torviscosa’s booming
industrial sector appears to have broken the tension, not by blending with
its opposite, but by overwhelming the town’s animating utopian beliefs.
The remnants of Fascist architecture and symbolism and the memory of its
pioneers are practically all that remain of the original dream.33
In the end, nostalgia for a rural past and a distrust of the industrial urban
future ran counter to history. Torviscosa may stake some claim to success,
however. Despite sustaining severe damage during World War II, both the
factory and the town survived and flourished. Torviscosa’s secret may lay
in its ability to transform itself within its new environment. Less grandiose
than its counterparts elsewhere, and better integrated into its surroundings,
Torviscosa remains a pleasant industrial town. Some of the ideological dress-
ing of the city—the neo-Fascist tower, the Lodi statuary, the memorials to
Marinotti—remains frozen in time, though shed of the most explicit Fascist
references. A more modest and positive legacy may be the town’s still extant
ristoro/dopolavoro, a symbol of the optimistic visions of the town’s found-
ers, who saw a chance for restoring harmony among workers, industry, and
nature. What actually came to pass was neither the grandiose vision of Il
Duce nor that of the Futurist Marinetti. Still, Torviscosa recalls the once
fervent belief in the transformative power of planning and technology, a
belief that in many ways endures.
4 T h e T echno-C i ty Goes to War: A merica in
W o rl d W a r II and After
Techno-cities conceived during the 1930s soon felt the effects of war. The
defeat of Germany and Italy more or less marked the end of Salzgitter and
Torviscosa as model environments, though the two cities managed to survive
the conflict and, in Torviscosa’s case, even the leveling of its industrial core.
Their postwar versions were only shells of what they once were, however:
they had lost that flush of utopian enthusiasm. The trauma of war ended one
generation of techno-city idealism and could have halted the techno-city
project altogether. Yet in the United States, surprisingly, the Garden City
concept continued to make its mark during World War II, though in a modi-
fied form and as an adjunct to wartime planning rather than as a guiding
motif. Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of three major “atomic cities” established
in that period, represents a culmination of one branch of the techno-city story
that began in Stalinist Russia: the isolated, specialized community in the ser-
vice of larger state military goals. Though it is the focus of this chapter, Oak
Ridge was only one species of techno-city planned for wartime America.
Even before Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the U.S.
government had begun to mobilize the nation’s huge productive capacity. The
path was not always smooth and even. A particularly compelling example is the
Ford Motor Company’s plant devoted to bomber production at Willow Run,
Michigan, a village about 20 miles outside Detroit. Ford broke ground for the
Willow Run Bomber Plant in April 1941. Transportation shortages eliminated
the original notion of having 10,000 workers commute from homes in Detroit
and surrounding towns. But even the nearby city of Ypsilanti was overwhelmed
by the demand. The conditions for workers and their families were understat-
edly described as “wretched.” The United Auto Workers were mounting
68 Chapter 4
b itter protests. In September 1941, Walter Reuther, vice-president of the

union and chairman of its housing and education committee, was advocating
an ambitious plan for “Defense City,” a new city with housing for workers
and, in part, planned by workers. The plan’s chief author was the architect-
planner Oskar Stonorov.1 Stonorov, born in Frankfurt in 1905, was educated
in Italy and Switzerland. He arrived in the United States in 1929 and settled in
Philadelphia. There he began to interest himself in public housing. Early on, he
associated with a group that included Catherine Bauer (Lewis Mumford’s col-
laborator, friend, and lover, and the author of the influential 1934 book Modern
Housing), Alfred Kastner (an architect), and John Edelman (research director of
the International Ladies Garment Workers Union). In the 1930s, Stonorov
and Kastner designed the Philadelphia branch of the American Federation of
Hosiery Workers’ Carl Mackley Houses, which, possibly for the first time,
included the workers as “community designers.” Stonorov was not limited to
providing shelter but rather envisioned changing society. “Housing,” he wrote,
“is the demand for the reorganization of rotten communities into stable, sane
and healthy societies.”2 In 1941 Reuther and Stonorov began a professional
and personal friendship that lasted until they died together in a plane crash in
1970. In November 1941, President Roosevelt was prevailed upon by his labor
allies to endorse the Reuther-Stonorov plan, and the United Auto Workers
declared less than a week before Pearl Harbor that Defense City would be a
“laboratory for post-war life and housing.” As a “park-living town,” it would
dramatically advance the Garden City approach. The Detroit News called it a
“slumless garden city.”3
Competing plans from real estate interests and even from the University
of Michigan complicated the situation. By the spring of 1942, however, the
National Housing Agency, under John Blandford, stepped in with ideas,
not only for housing but also for a model city that they dubbed “Bomber
City.”4 Tracy Augur of the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the plan-
ners of Norris, was brought in to help in the planning of Bomber City.5
Despite Norris’s failure to develop as planned, Augur was eager to advance
city planning by taking advantage of new technologies and new social and
economic needs: “The country is ready for something new in cities. It is
keyed up to streamlined trains, to television, to air conditioned homes and
to transcontinental and transoceanic air travel that reduced days to hours.
Never since the first colonies were planned . . . has there been such an oppor-
The Techno-City Goes to War 69
tunity to build completely new communities designed for the particular

social and economic complex of our times.”6
The design of Bomber City was, in the words of Architectural Forum, “the
best guide for postwar planning we have yet produced.” The five neighbor-
hoods and the town center were each given to a different team of planners and
architects. The town center was the responsibility of the firm of the Finnish
architect Eliel Saarinen. A green space surrounded the city and reached into
the neighborhoods. A main road provided a belt girdling the town, with four
spokes reaching from center to periphery. Neighborhood Unit Three was
designed by Stonorov and his partner, the young Philadelphian Louis Kahn,
destined to become one of America’s most influential architects. “The char-
acter of the town,” Stonorov and Kahn wrote, “is neither urban nor subur-
ban; its safety, spaciousness and convenience [offers] a powerful inducement
to permanent settlement.” Both Stonorov and Kahn were dedicated, politi-
cally and socially, to worker-resident participation in planning. The “work-
er’s committee” chose to have the houses oriented not toward the street
but to the garden side. They strongly preferred “super-blocks” of up to 100
acres. The neighborhood as a unit was determined by the elementary school,
nursery and small shopping center. The houses were of the “ground-freed”
type, with living space on the second floor and the ground floor devoted to
utility and garage purposes. Skidmore, Owings, Merrill and Andrews were
chosen for Neighborhood Unit Two. They used the county highway bor-
dering the site as a collector road with no houses on it. “Both pedestrians and
motorists would receive a more favorable impression of the development if
the vistas were clear, extending down through the garden areas.”7
Tracy Augur reported that the plan (figure 4.1) was “social rather than
physical.” People would be encouraged to enjoy community life, freed
from heavy traffic, with social amenities (schools, playgrounds, nurseries,
neighbors) within easy walking distance. “Despite the differences in site
design [among neighborhoods], the provision of abundant open space was
a common characteristic.” At the heart of the plan was the institution of the
school, “serving all ages and catering to their many educational, recreational
and other social needs,” a vote of confidence in America’s future.8
Bomber City was never built. The reports of the plans elicited a gale
of opposition. Outraged protests came from real estate interests, from local
politicians, and from the Ford Motor Company. The Washtenaw County
70 Chapter 4
Figure 4.1
Augur’s plan for “Bomber City” was a “social” diagram, not a “physical” one.
(Architectural Record)
Board of Supervisors sent the county’s prosecutor, George Meader, to

Washington to protest the proposed “social experiment” and the locating
of “foreigners” in their county. Henry Riggs, professor emeritus of civil
engineering at the University of Michigan, expressed concern for the pol-
lution of the Huron River; he also feared that Bomber City would be a
“foreign or colored settlement or a ‘ghost town.’ ” Henry Ford feared that
his “archenemies” the DuPonts were behind the choice of the site, and
ordered that federal employees be ejected from Ford-owned land. Attorneys
announced the Ford Motor Company would fight Bomber City “with
every legal method.”9 The federal government retreated in the face of a
delay of bomber production. The vision of a model city was sacrificed, and
permanent housing was transformed into temporary housing.
A radical new technology—nuclear fission and the atomic bomb—set

the stage for another variation on the techno-city. Under the top secret
Manhattan Project, three atomic cities sprang up virtually overnight in
remote regions of the United States to house the tens of thousands of scien-
tists, engineers, technicians, and construction workers who developed the
bomb. Security and safety concerns dictated the isolated setting of these sup-
port cities away from major population centers, secret locations which the
code name “Manhattan Engineer District” was designed to conceal.10 In this
instance, technology moved into the garden out of wartime necessity rather
than choice. Post-Hiroshima, the reality of the bomb had a further impact
on urban planning. It forced a rethinking of how cities should be config-
ured to maximize chances of surviving nuclear war. While these ideas had
potential implications for all major U.S. cities, our story begins in a secluded
setting in the American South.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was one of three Manhattan Project support cities
established during the War to develop the atomic bomb. Begun in 1942,
Oak Ridge became the headquarters of the Manhattan Project by late sum-
mer of the following year. Oak Ridge’s mission was to enrich uranium fuel
by a process of separating the fissionable isotope uranium 235 from uranium
238. Although not so well known as Los Alamos, New Mexico, or Hanford,
Washington, the Oak Ridge facility commanded more money and resources
than the other two cities combined. And, while Hanford was the largest in
area of the three sites, Oak Ridge had by far the largest population.11 The
Army Corps of Engineers, which ran the Manhattan Project, lavished atten-
tion and money on the city commensurate with its strategic importance.
For the duration of the war and beyond, Oak Ridge remained hidden
behind security fences. Few Americans—indeed, few Tennesseans—knew
of the city’s existence. With the opening of the gates of the Oak Ridge
government reservation in 1949 and the slow declassification of documents,
a still ongoing process, the city’s secrets gradually began to emerge. The first
accounts of Oak Ridge, prepared under government auspices, were typically
written from the top down, focusing on the project’s administrative, scientific,
and technical history. They revealed little about the city itself or its residents
beyond basic facts and abstract statistical milestones: the site’s total area, peak
population, electric power requirements, and so on.
72 Chapter 4
The heroic achievements of atomic scientists and engineers dominated

these early historical accounts. The patriotism and sacrifices of atomic workers
and their families were also duly celebrated. Documentary films as well as
exhibits at the local atomic museum, the American Museum of Science and
Energy (AMSE), originally founded as the American Museum of Atomic
Energy to preserve the city’s historic role, highlighted similar themes.12 (See
figure 4.2.) The AMSE’s presentation on the Manhattan Project, its signa-
ture exhibition, tells the stories of Fermi, Einstein, Oppenheimer, and other
atomic pioneers, while offering visitors basic lessons in the physics of the
bomb and of nuclear enrichment. The museum provided tantalizing but
limited glimpses of the city’s construction and the lives of the workers.
Forty years after the Manhattan Project, however, a fuller picture began
to emerge, centering not on weapons laboratories or production plants,
Figure 4.2
Oak Ridge’s original “Atomic Museum.” (American Museum of Science and
Energy)
but on everyday life in the atomic village. In their ground-breaking 1981

study City Behind a Fence, Charles Johnson and Charles Jackson offered new
perspectives on the town. Drawing on oral histories and newly declassified
documents, they looked behind the official facade and explored the realities
of everyday life on the Manhattan Project.13
Johnson and Jackson shed important new light on the planning, design, and
construction of this invented city. Their research showed that Oak Ridge’s
planners hoped to achieve something innovative and livable, despite the gritty
realities of life there—the lack of adequate housing for the ballooning popula-
tion, the mud on unfinished streets and walkways, and the physical and psy-
chological hardship of living behind security fences.14 According to the town’s
official design criteria, the needs of the industrial plants and security came first,
taking priority over “any endeavor to establish an ideal community in the social
or aesthetic sense. It follows that, except for the essentials, the town was not
provided with the number or quality of facilities available in normal American
communities.”15 In view of these official priorities, Oak Ridge planners never
made much publicly of the visionary aspects of their plan. Yet, despite the real-
ities of war and the strict financial limits placed on housing construction, Oak
Ridge was not a typical military support city. Its architects never gave up their
idealism and the New Town model found a significant place in their plans.16
While Oak Ridge did not advertise a utopian vision, the idea of Oak Ridge as
a techno-city is to be found in the mundane details of governmental budgets
and brochures promoting the town’s business and building plans.
Oak Ridge is a 30-minute drive from Knoxville in the heart of East
Tennessee. It lies on the rugged Cumberland Plateau, in Bear Creek Valley
and along the slopes of Black Oak Ridge. For the Army Corps of Engineers,
the site was close to ideal. Land was cheap and there was an abundant sup-
ply of labor. The TVA provided for the enormous electrical needs of the
enrichment plants. Its distance from the coast minimized the risk of enemy
detection and attack. Nearby highways, a railway link, and the Clinch River
provided ready-made transportation lanes. Its topography was also suited to
building bombs: a series of parallel ridges and valleys allowed for separation
of living from factory areas. Since dangers of nuclear accidents were largely
unknown, production plants could be separated from one another in neigh-
boring valleys, protected by intervening ridges from the effects of potential
mishaps.17
74 Chapter 4
The production plants at Oak Ridge were overbuilt and strategically

redundant. The Advisory Committee on Uranium, appointed by President
Roosevelt in 1939, had determined that enriched samples of the uranium
235 isotope were the most promising fuel source for bombs. Uranium 235
existed in combination with the far more abundant uranium 238. Since the
isotopes were chemically identical, separating them was exceedingly dif-
ficult, requiring physical, not chemical, means of separation. But no one
knew in advance which technique would succeed. Oak Ridge was therefore
required to experiment with four competing processes: the K25 plant used
the so-called gaseous diffusion method of separating uranium 235 from ura-
nium 238; the Y12 facility tested an electromagnetic separation technique;
a nuclear pile, known as X-10, converted uranium 238 into plutonium; a
high-speed centrifuge was designed to separate the lighter from the heavier
isotope. The centrifuge was eventually cancelled.18
To make way for these plants and the new support city, approximately
one thousand farming families were removed from the 59,000-acre site,
their land hastily expropriated by the government. Planning for the new
town began in June 1942, with Stone and Webster, the regular building
contractors for the Manhattan Engineer District, taking the lead. Initially,
they were responsible for building both the production plants and the
town. From the beginning, Oak Ridge’s government planners wanted to
build as habitable a city as possible, one designed to minimize the stresses
on Manhattan Project personnel and their families. They had learned from
reactions to the bare-bones government-issue approach used at the Los
Alamos nuclear site where the bomb was made. It was widely regarded as a
disaster for its inhabitants.
Early on it was decided to “relieve Stone & Webster of the added respon-
sibility of the design of the town (although it would retain managerial
responsibility) so that its maximum efforts could be concentrated on the
design of the Electromagnetic Plant.”19 But, there was more to the deci-
sion than a division of labor, according to transcripts of discussions between
S&W principals and Colonel James Marshall, the military official who had
initial responsibility for building Oak Ridge.20 Marshall urged General Leslie
Groves, the army’s ranking officer on the Manhattan Project, not to accept
Stone and Webster’s plans. He argued that they were little more than imi-
tations of previous “government villages” in Ocala, Florida, and Eastport,
Maine. Marshall considered them uninspired and far less desirable than plans
he had seen implemented at the TVA’s Norris.
Instead Marshall recommended a team of the John B. Pierce Foundation
of New York, pioneers of prefabricated housing during the Depression, and
the Chicago architectural firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, fresh from
their involvement with the unrealized Bomber City. He praised their broader,
human-centered approach to mass-produced housing.21 They were known for
their innovative designs and materials. SOM partner Louis Skidmore, who had
a prominent design role in Chicago’s 1933 “Century of Progress” World’s Fair,
used the fair as a testing ground for new scientific building methods, including
prefabricated construction, new types of lighting, and synthetic building mate-
rials.22 Persuaded by Marshall, Groves reassigned Stone and Webster, leaving
them in charge of building the uranium plants and the overall management of
Oak Ridge construction. In 1943, construction began on the government res-
ervation, originally known as Site X and later renamed the Clinton Engineer
Works, after a nearby village. The town itself was named Oak Ridge, report-
edly at the suggestion of the employees of the Manhattan Engineer District.23
Both names presumably sounded innocuous enough to avoid arousing suspi-
cion of its secret mission.
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill developed the architectural designs, while
the Pierce Foundation served as consultants. Without ever knowing the secret
purpose of Site X, the SOM-Pierce partnership produced a master plan for
the federal enclave in record time. Manifesting the influence of the Garden
City model, their plans separated work, recreation, and housing areas. Their
street layout allowed for efficient transportation between home and work
districts while diverting cars away from the neighborhoods. The planners
were strongly influenced by the precedent of nearby Norris and had input
from Tracy Augur, who served as an important link between Oak Ridge and
Norris. They had also worked with Augur on the Bomber City project.
In its quest for habitability, the Army wanted Oak Ridge “to approxi-
mate a typical American small town as much as possible.”24 SOM partner
Nathaniel Owings divided the town into “a number of villages.” (See figure
4.3.) Each village, Owings wrote, “must be largely self-contained, every-
thing within walking distance, sized to support efficiently the proper com-
bination of educational units . . . , shopping centers—all facilities common to
the neighborhood.” About 1,500 families, consisting of about 5,000–6,000
76 Chapter 4
Figure 4.3
An Oak Ridge neighborhood near Hillside Road. (National Archives and Records
Administration)
adults and 1,800–2,000 children, constituted a village.25 Small and relatively

close to one another, the neighborhoods made for a walking city. Workers,
however, still had to commute to the production plants, kept at what was
thought to be a safe distance from living areas.
To house workers and their families, the architects and the Pierce
Foundation employed an innovative, patented high-tech material, an asbestos-
cement fireproof blend called Cemesto. The product was manufactured by
the Celotex Company, with whom the Pierce Foundation worked during
the Depression. In the 1920s, the Celotex Company had been a developer
of Clewiston, John Nolen’s farm-factory techno-city in Florida.26 Celotex’s
Cemesto houses were shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.27 (See
figure 4.4.) The components of these houses, produced in a factory, were
quickly assembled on site. The so-called alphabet housings (A–H) included
single-family and multi-family homes and apartments for families and single
workers. (See figure 4.5.) Houses at Oak Ridge were designed to be low in
cost and rapidly built—reportedly one could be put up in 30 minutes—but
with a premium on “livability.” Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s Cemesto
Figure 4.4
Celotex’s Cemesto homes were featured at the 1939 NewYorkWorld’s Fair. (Smithsonian
Institution)
78 Chapter 4
Figure 4.5
An “A House” was the smallest of Oak Ridge’s family of “alphabet houses.”
(A. Molella)
houses allowed for very quick and cheap construction, falling well within the
strict government limit of $7,500 per house.
By 1945, more than 1,000 houses, 90 dormitories, and many smaller units,
including trailers and hutments, were built. The government consistently
underestimated how many personnel would be needed at Oak Ridge. Stone
and Webster were originally told to plan for a population of 5,000, but the
figure rose quickly to 13,000, eventually peaking in 1945 at 75,000. In three
years, Oak Ridge would become the fifth largest city in Tennessee.28 Still,
housing never kept up with demand, causing chronic shortages of living
quarters for the city’s workers. Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill began to
import prefabricated housing from the TVA, adapting them to the condi-
tions of Oak Ridge.29 (See figure 4.6.)
As Oak Ridge continued to grow, Manhattan Project officials were
concerned not only with housing, but with improving its status as a true
community.30 They carefully planned the locations of drug stores, grocer-
ies, restaurants, community gathering places, and other amenities. Taking
Figure 4.6
An Oak Ridge neighborhood amidst the mud. (National Archives and Records
Administration)
care of the needs of families was a priority. Planners paid much attention to
schools, nursery schools, and play areas. Despite a reluctance to get involved
in religious affairs, the government also made sure that spaces for religious
observances continued to keep pace with the town’s population.
In operating the plants and town, the government adopted the “GOCO”
mode: Government Owned, Contactor Operated. Corporate contractors,
including DuPont, Union Carbide, and Tennessee Eastman, operated the ura-
nium plants. Although retaining final authority, the Army wanted to avoid
the direct responsibilities of managing the town, Therefore, the A. C. Turner
Company, which was responsible for building Oak Ridge, set up a subsidiary,
the Roane-Anderson Corporation, to administer the town. Civilian manage-
ment, it was hoped, would give residents a sense of self-determination in spite
of federal controls. To promote a sense of community, Roane-Anderson gave
the streets names rather than the numbers standard for military posts.31 They also
worked closely with the Army to soften the psychological effects of the security
fences and the restrictions on the movements of residents and workers.32
From the Garden City point of view, Oak Ridge’s most notable features
were its greenbelt and the parklands surrounding its neighborhoods. While
security needs dictated the isolated location, Oak Ridge’s planners took
80 Chapter 4
aximum advantage of the rural setting. Stone and Webster had initially bull-
m
dozed much of the area, leveling hills and destroying much of the greenery.
Doing their best to reverse this course (though never able to do away with
the mud), Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill restored the native landscape as
far as possible, artfully embedding within it the complex of research facilities,
nuclear reactors, and enrichment plants. Green surroundings were deemed
essential. Despite his training under the renowned modernist Ludwig Mies
van der Rohe, Ambrose Richardson, SOM’s architect in charge of the Oak
Ridge project, favored a less austere aesthetic, noting that “the whole empha-
sis from my design point of view was on the green.” “I’m a strong believer,”
he said, “that a building cannot be better than the setting that it’s in [and] in
the landscape identified with the building.” He recalled a quotation from
Nathaniel Owings: “A person can’t grow where a tree can’t grow.”33 Owings
himself initially viewed the rugged Oak Ridge landscape as something of a
tabula rasa to be manipulated at will, “a kind of clean, uncluttered, uncom-
mitted area with nothing to stand in the way of an ideal plan.”34 Though
soon discovering it was anything but a blank slate, Owings was able to work
with the existing topography to incorporate landscape into the residents’
lives: “Their houses were to be oriented for sun and prevailing winds, ample
land provided so that the grass and the trees and the flowers might grow.
The alley in the gridiron city plan was banished.”35 “Here in one stroke,”
Owings averred, “we could eliminate many of the vices inherent in existing
city plans.” Garages, kitchens, furnace rooms, and other utilities were located
at the back of the houses and were accessed by service lanes. On the front
of the house, the living rooms and recreation areas looked out on a field,
park, or garden, thus retaining the intimacy of man and nature. According
to the historian Peter Bacon Hales, the planners conceived of a “community
imbedded within and deeply respectful of nature—or, more appropriately,
Nature. For all its modernity and technology and its application of an indus-
trially streamlined assembly-line construction program, the plan harked back
to the American romantic conceptions of the place of man in nature. . . .”36
While innovative in their overall plan for Oak Ridge and even futuristic
in their construction methods, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill still wanted
to project a traditional small-town ideal. Hales viewed the result as “a bril-
liant amalgam of forward-looking and deeply conservative themes.”37 The
architects envisioned a medium-size community with tree-lined streets and
other features that made nostalgic reference to a small-town American past.

Homes were built in traditional styles and arranged not in a modern grid
pattern but in organic clusters to foster a sense of community. Porches and
fireplaces adorned even the most modest homes.38 When a Washington offi-
cial referred to Oak Ridge as a military camp, Lieutenant Colonel Thomas
Crenshaw, spokesman for the Clinton Engineer Works, took strong excep-
tion. “The government,” he said, “has built a village.39
Although slated for demolition after its job was done, Oak Ridge contin-
ued to exist after World War II, kept in business by the Cold War and the
nuclear arms race. Once it decided to maintain the town, the Atomic Energy
Commission called on Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill to draft a new mas-
ter plan. The firm submitted its ideas in 1948.40 The objectives of the plan
were to transform the “temporary layout built to serve a war-time expedi-
ent” into an “efficient, beautiful city.” With the population of Oak Ridge
now standing at 36,000, Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill wanted to preserve
its small-town character. In the words of the plan, while “Oak Ridge was
originally programmed and built to be a special type of city,” it was impor-
tant that the “desirable small town characteristic should be maintained and
fostered in the redevelopment and new planning.” The plan addressed both
commercial and residential development, which was to be done by private
investors and developers under government regulation.
A greenbelt with embedded industries figured prominently in the new
plan. If Oak Ridge was to be viable, provision for its future industrial needs
could not be ignored. The plan set aside sufficient land for industrial use,
consolidating it into “prescribed districts to protect residential areas.” These
industrial areas “should be separated from residential areas by highways, rec-
reation areas, or protective green belts.”41 A system of parks—small ones
within neighborhoods and large ones in more central locations—took
advantage of the natural assets of the Oak Ridge area.
Tracy Augur, who served on the Board of Consultants for the plan, argued
that Oak Ridge’s main shortcoming was its lack of an adequate commercial
base. Much of the plan, therefore, focused on developing a central business
district, shopping centers, and other commercial ventures that would guar-
antee the city’s postwar economic survival. Once detached from the federal
government’s direct control and largesse, the town would have to prove
82 Chapter 4
its commercial potential to investors. But beyond economic considerations,

Augur believed, Oak Ridge needed a community identity. “The new [city]
center,” he noted, “is designed to be, in truth, the heart of the community,
the place that is in the minds of citizens and visitors alike when they think
of Oak Ridge. . . . If it does not become a center of community life it cannot
become a fully successful business center either.”42 A 1950 brochure pro-
moting the proposed business district has an almost utopian feel. It presents
Oak Ridge’s nuclear industry as a symbol of peace and security, avoiding
any reminders of the bomb itself.43 Several other plans to “permanentize”
Oak Ridge followed, all with the same objective of developing an inviting
and economically sustainable community.
Today the citizens of Oak Ridge, ever in search of new corporate and govern-
ment contracts, continue to base their future on nuclear research and develop-
ment. Independence from government support has not been achieved. Despite
the expectations of planners, Oak Ridge remains almost entirely dependent
on funding from the Department of Energy, successor to the Atomic Energy
Commission. Cold War weapons programs continued to pump money into
the area after World War II, stunting any prospects of economic diversification.
A wholly owned subsidiary of the Department of Energy, it remains the gov-
ernment equivalent of a company town long after the end of the Cold War. Its
civic leaders are still wrestling with problems of becoming self-sustaining.
The gap between the dream for Oak Ridge and the reality remains wide. It
could hardly be described as the typical American small town. Its idyllic features
stood out in the architects’ plans and blueprints. But, as one observer has pointed
out, photographs of the site present a starkly different picture of “a harshly unre-
lieved landscape of conformity,” with houses aligned monotonously along the
ridges on land “stripped of vegetation by District graders.”44 More importantly,
there is no concealing what the city is really about: the monumental uranium
enrichment plants that stand at its center. Building K-25, dedicated to the gas-
eous diffusion process, is by far the largest structure. A mile-long U-shaped
behemoth, it covers 40 acres. When it was built, it was the largest building in
the world under one roof. Today, it continues to loom over the rural landscape
from behind formidable security fences. (See figure 4.7.)
Despite the factories and all the intrusions of technological modernity,
there remains in Oak Ridge a curious kind of small-town insularity that is
less myth than cultural throwback. Oak Ridge is in many ways a city locked
Figure 4.7
The decommissioned Plant K-25, where uranium was refined by the gaseous
diffusion process, still looms from behind security fences. (A. Molella)
in the past. It is tied to it economically, culturally, and by the force of its his-
tory. Its secret life and its special role in World War II continue to shape it.
From the beginning, its population was distinct from surrounding residents:
most came from elsewhere, often speaking in European accents. Better edu-
cated than their neighbors, they had better incomes, better schools, and,
it was rumored, even better beer.45 The city was literally fenced off from
the world and, despite its 59,000 acres, was omitted from maps until 1949,
when its gates were opened. Today, its skewed economy, entirely depen-
dent on government funding, reinforces its cultural and social isolation.
Oak Ridge’s founders, planners, and citizens have always been keenly
aware of their historic role. Their hopes and self-image are inscribed in the
American Museum of Science and Energy, still supported by the Department
of Energy but shaped also by the ethos of the local community. Within it are
hints of a special technological destiny. Its exhibitions even repeat a popu-
lar local myth: around 1900, John Hendrix, regarded as something of a local
prophet, had one of his periodic visions. He foresaw an amazing change in
84 Chapter 4
two local farming communities. Along the sides of the then sparsely populated
Black Oak Ridge, he predicted the rise of a city and a railroad. Thousands of
people would go down into the valley to work in large buildings and factories.
The Hendrix story lent an air of inevitability to the town and its mission.46
The American Museum of Science and Energy presents an almost idyllic
picture of Oak Ridge and its work. Its Manhattan Project exhibition and its
presentation of nuclear weapons (the atomic museums are the official gov-
ernment repositories for such artifacts) are curiously sanitized of any mention
of the destruction brought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or of the continuing
threats to civilization of nuclear war. The bomb is presented as the guarantor
of security rather than a weapon of mass destruction. (See figure 4.8.) One sec-
tion of the exhibition documents the creation of the city and the construction
of its housing. Photos taken by the Army Corps of Engineers show the original
farmland and every phase of construction. The AMSE faces head-on some of
the problematic aspects of that history, the removal of the original farming
community and the treatment of segregated black workers. The cleanup of
Figure 4.8
The shell of a Mark 28 hydrogen bomb, on display at the American Museum of
Science and Energy. (A. Molella)
nuclear waste, a big issue at Oak Ridge and other atomic cities today, is well
documented at the museum. But it is presented as a largely successful work
in progress, with little said about the dangers in human terms to the workers
and residents in the area.47 In its unqualified confidence in nuclear R&D, the
AMSE reinforces the booster mentality of Oak Ridge’s 1950s sales brochures.
Despite the harsh realities of its conception, Oak Ridge was the product
of an almost mythic vision. To be sure, the city lies in a pleasant rustic land-
scape, and most of its original homes and neighborhoods still stand, as does
its first shopping center. But, the addition of modern strip malls and traffic
congestion hardly suggest an ideal community. Today’s Oak Ridge would
never be mistaken for a nineteenth-century American village, and certainly
not for one of the farming villages it displaced.
In the end, Oak Ridge presents an incongruous scene. As a birthplace
of the bomb, it is at the epicenter of one of the most terrifying realities of
our time. But it was also a place of imagined, even idealized visions. While
a unique city invented for a unique purpose, Oak Ridge resembled other
techno-cities in several ways: It was a combined government-private effort.
It was built around a large technological enterprise. It was also conceived
in part as a Garden City. Despite official disclaimers, there was a utopian
strain in the designs of its planners. The town also manifested an element
of techno-nostalgia in Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill’s effort to evoke the
feeling of a traditional American village. And like other techno-cities, Oak
Ridge was both a real city and a symbol. Ultimately, it was less than its plan-
ners envisioned but more than a typical military support city.48
The enduring and indisputable legacy of Oak Ridge would always be writ-
ten in the events of August 6 and August 9, 1945, when two Japanese cit-
ies were destroyed by the first atomic bombs used in warfare. The stunning
and dramatic end to the war in the Pacific continued to imprint itself onto
American public life in the years following Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Soon
after the bombing, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, in June 1946,
raised an “insistent question”: “What if the target for the bomb had been an
American city?”49 The report of the Strategic Bombing Survey noted that the
two cities were chosen because of their concentration of activities and popu-
lation. Despite Nagasaki’s greater population density, it suffered only about
half as many deaths as Hiroshima. The difference was due to the dispersed
86 Chapter 4
built-up pockets at Nagasaki; Hiroshima’s population was concentrated at

its center. “The casualty rates at Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the report con-
tinued, “applied to the massed inhabitants of Manhattan, Brooklyn and the
Bronx, yield a grim conclusion.” Further, the report noted, “an enemy view-
ing our national economy must not find bottlenecks which use of the atomic
bomb could choke off to throttle our productive capacity.”50 Earlier in 1946,
the sociologist William Ogburn launched a discussion on the problem of
dispersing urban populations and resources with his essay “Sociology and the
Atom.” Despite the drastic dislocations it would entail, Ogburn suggested,
dispersal might be a blessing in disguise, for the quality of life would improve
“with well-planned smaller cities and towns.”51
The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki especially shocked the sci-
entific community.52 Very early on, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists took
up the issue of civil defense and, in particular, the re-forming of cities to
minimize damage to their populations, industries, and civil life. The nuclear
physicist Edward Teller was one of the contributors to the dialog on the
dispersal of cities and industries.
In May of 1948, the Bulletin published an article by Tracy Augur, who
was then consulting on the master plan for Oak Ridge. Augur seized on the
defense issue to promote what he saw as sound city planning. In “Dispersal
of Cities as a Defense Measure,” he notes that the United States was about
to do a great deal of city building. We may, he argues, just as well build our
cities to reduce our vulnerability to outside attack. And, “it happens that a
sound program of dispersal for our cities would improve our position for a
life of peace at the same time it improved our chance of averting war and
of surviving one if it came.” Like the scientists who wrote for the Bulletin,
Augur argued for cluster cities.53 In another article, published in October
of 1948, he pursued the theme of peacetime advantage by fleshing out the
argument for smaller, dispersed, planned cities.54 Augur was later hired by
the National Security Resources Board to help formulate a plan for the dis-
persal of the federal government’s resources in case of emergency.55
A disciple of Ebenezer Howard since his graduate student days at Harvard,
Tracy Augur invoked the English planner’s authority to buttress the argu-
ment for dispersal.56 In an August 1946 speech to the American Institute of
Planners, he said: “Howard made a convincing presentation of the case [for
cluster cities] almost fifty years ago when he proposed the reorganization of
great urban concentrations into clusters of garden cities separated by green-

belts of farm lands and recreation areas.”57 Howard, said Augur, “had a keen
eye for the causes of urban decay and the national decay that comes with it.”
Augur asserted that Howard’s case for the Garden City as the ideal combi-
nation of the urban and the rural “has never been successfully challenged.”
Although Howard conceived of the decentralized city in the days of the
horse and buggy, when “mass transportation was the almost exclusive prov-
ince of the steam railroad; and when telephones, radios, and movies were
unknown,” it was also a concept for the atomic age.58 Augur argued that the
Garden City was eminently compatible with modern science and technology.
He urged his audience of city planners not to fixate on the destructive power
of the atom, but to consider the benefits as well. The problems of modern
cities—congestion, slums, crime, unhealthy air and water—stemmed from
their failure to keep pace with technological change and scientific knowl-
edge. Echoing the “cultural lag” theory of William Ogburn, an advocate of
urban dispersal, Augur wrote: “In discussing the planning of cities to take
advantage of the atomic age, it must be remembered that they have not yet
caught up with the age of steam. They have a long, long way to go! Ever
since the industrial revolution gave them pre-eminence in national affairs
they have lagged behind the technical advances of the times in the rate at
which they passed on the social and economic benefits to their citizens.”59
Like Ogburn, Augur believed that Americans were addressing techno-
logical change with outdated nineteenth-century attitudes.
In considering the advantages of atomic energy, Augur asked “Is there in
prospect any such dramatic change in the way of living as that which has been
brought to our way of dying?”60 His answer was an emphatic yes. Among
the possibilities were virtually limitless sources of heat and power. He envi-
sioned central heating systems, “smokeless and odorless,” that would cheaply
heat entire cities, power plants that would take electric power to poor isolated
regions of the country and the world, and, “of even greater promise . . . the use
of radioactive materials in medicine and to facilitate new researches and discov-
eries in every field of science.” To use the language of Patrick Geddes, Augur
foresaw a neotechnic revolution in the Garden Cities of the atomic age.
To those who argued that limiting the size of cities to 100,000 or less would
deprive them of advantages gained from the industrial revolution, Augur gave
a “systems” counter-argument. Although much smaller than modern cities,
88 Chapter 4
the new dispersed cities were intended to be separate but not isolated from
one another. The net of modern communications would bind them together.
Each city had a specialized function that it performed in concert with other
cities. The resulting interconnected whole, when viewed on a national scale,
would add up to considerably more than the sum of the parts. Recalling the
organic metaphors popular among German city planners of the 1930s, Augur
compared dispersed cities to biological cells. “The simpler biologic forms,” he
explained in a speech to the American Institute of Planners, “are those com-
posed of a single cell or of a group of cells all filling simple functions.” In con-
trast, “the higher forms come with specialization.”61 In Augur’s opinion, the
solutions to the problem of updating the city for the new age were not tech-
nological, but rather social and rational. Calling for new ways of planning and
action, he advised against “the old devices of widening streets, zoning stores
out of residential districts or redeveloping old slums with new ones.” Instead,
he urged American city planners to define the desired “qualities of social life”
and then to develop urban structures conducive to those social goals.62
In 1949, Ralph Lapp, a well-known Office of Naval Research and Manhattan
Project scientist, published a book titled Must We Hide? 63 Chapter 13, titled
“Dispersion,” envisioned dispersed cities as healthier, happier places. Not only
will dispersion of population and industries reduce the attractiveness of cities
as targets, but—forced by the bomb—we have a chance for “a social revolu-
tion comparable in scope to the industrial revolution.” The optimum city, Lapp
argues, has a population of about 100,000. “The plan” he writes, “should con-
template the spreading out of industry and residences into close-knit but not
highly concentrated units. These units might consist of a series of small satel-
lite cities with the individual units separated by perhaps 3 miles. . . . Another
possibility is the doughnut city . . . in which the usual congested central area is
replaced by a park or an airport, with the important facilities located around the
periphery. . . . The rod-like city . . . might make for a simple solution of the trans-
portation problem if the geography permitted such a development.”64
Lapp’s book was generally well received in the journals of opinion and in the
newspapers, though its optimism about enduring the perils of the atomic age did
not sit well with others.65 Lapp continued to proselytize for urban dispersal in a
series of articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and in more popular journals.66
Among city planners, the dispersal strategy was appropriated by two very
different groups of thinkers about the future of the city. Some, like Tracy
Augur, saw in the devastation wrought by World War II bombing impressive

justification for their already strong views that decentralization and regional
planning by preserving a balance between city and country. Augur was a
member, along with Lewis Mumford, Benton MacKaye, and Clarence Stein,
of the Regional Planning Association of America, a group heavily influenced
by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideas and by the organicist views of the
Scots philosopher and city planner Patrick Geddes. Others saw decentraliza-
tion as advancing the postwar program of what the historian Robert Fishman
has termed “corporate regionalism,” which saw the urban future in a move-
ment away from the center to the periphery and away from the congested
over-developed northern and eastern regions of the country to the relatively
under-developed South and West.67 Both groups drew on a long history of
decentralization planning schemes, including those of Arturo Soria y Mata’s
nineteenth-century “linear city,” Howard’s Garden Cities of the early twenti-
eth century, N. A. Miliutin’s pre-World War II linear industrial city, postwar
British new towns, Swedish satellite towns, and many other exemplars.68
In the postwar era, dispersal strategies began to blur with another impor-
tant phenomenon: the wholesale suburbanization of America. Indeed, as
Katherine Tobin has shown, American policy makers promoted subur-
ban development in the 1950s in part as a strategy to withstand an atomic
attack.69 In signing the Federal Highway Act of 1956, President Dwight D.
Eisenhower noted that the new road system would permit quick evacuation
in the event of such an attack. But many urban reformers found little com-
fort in suburbia, which they believed failed to address the fundamental prob-
lems of large cities. Rather, planners like Augur were offering an alternative
to both large cities and suburbs in their modified Garden City notion.
After August 1949, when the Soviet Union’s test of an atomic bomb broke
the United States’ monopoly on atomic weapons, the prospect of nuclear war
took on a new and shocking meaning. On January 31, 1950, President Harry
Truman announced his decision to proceed with the development of the
hydrogen bomb or “Super.” The Federation of Atomic Scientists warned:
“No nation is secure against the hydrogen bomb. Of all the cities in the
world not one presents a better target than New York.”70 When the Korean
War began, in the summer of 1950, the probability of nuclear confrontation
rose uncomfortably. A number of scientists again weighed in with dispersal
plans. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology mathematician Norbert
90 Chapter 4
Wiener, founder of cybernetics, even made a brief foray into the re-design of
cities that was reported in a December 1950 issue of Life magazine.71
In the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for May 1950, the physicist Robert
Bacher pointed out that with a hydrogen bomb a thousand times more pow-
erful than the Hiroshima bomb, the radius of destruction would be about 10
miles. “Such a hydrogen bomb,” he noted, “would be sufficiently great to
cause almost complete destruction of any metropolitan area known today.”72
Confident in the powers of science and technology to solve all problems,
postwar scientists and engineers now confronted their limits.
A June 1954 article in Architectural Forum explored “What the Hydrogen
Bomb Means to City and Industrial Planning.”73 “Some planners,” it noted,
“think urban dispersal is now hopeless but far more agree with government
experts who say the big bomb only makes wide dispersal more urgent.” The
quoted experts included Tracy Augur, then Director of the Urban Targets
Division of the Office of Defense Mobilization. “Too many of our eggs are
in too few baskets and the baskets are too big and easy to hit,” Augur said
about the concentration of the U.S. population in large cities. What counts
is not the survivability of individual cities but their vulnerability as a group.
As a practical strategy, Augur advised that our great cities could remain as
they are, as long as “new growth is diverted to the smaller zones and reason-
able steps are taken to reduce excessive population densities.”
Early in 1954 came the critical event that demonstrated that the techno-
logical moment for the dispersal “movement” was over. On March 1, the
United States carried out its BRAVO nuclear explosion tests at Bikini Atoll
in the Marshall Islands. Eighty-five miles away, the soon-to-be-famous
Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon was hit by radioactive fallout and most of
its crew came down with radiation poisoning. “Fallout” became a hot issue,
along with the massive destructiveness of the blast. At a press conference later
that month, Lewis Strauss, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission,
told reporters that “an H-bomb can be made. . . . large enough to take out
a city.” “Any city?” the reporters asked. “Any city,” Strauss replied, even
New York’s “metropolitan area.” The New York Times’s account of this
press conference bore the headline “H-BOMB CAN WIPE OUT ANY
CITY.”74 In 1955, radioactive rain fell on Chicago. It seemed clear to many
that the day of urban dispersal for defense was at an end. Advocates of the
techno-city ideal would now return to more traditional justifications.
5 Utopia Revived: From Industrial Modernism
to Community
In 1933, Adriano Olivetti, 32 years of age, was named Director General of

his father’s company. Adriano had joined the Olivetti company as an
unskilled worker in 1924. It was not, of course, a long, hard climb upwards
for him: “As the eldest son of the factory owner, I rapidly progressed in a
career which others, although more gifted than I, could not follow.” In
1925 his father, Camillo, sent him to the United States to study manage-
ment techniques. Upon his return the following year, a vast reorganization
of the company began. In the decade before Adriano assumed the general
directorship, the results of his American experience were apparent: assembly
methods were improved, an advertising department and planning offices
were established, allied companies were founded in Spain, Latin America,
and Belgium, and the portable typewriter was introduced. The workforce
more than doubled, and production (in terms of units produced) sextupled.1
Once a small, private company, Olivetti became a global corporation.
Adriano’s father, Camillo, was an enlightened factory owner. From a
Piedmontese Jewish family of farmers and small-time real estate brokers,
Camillo Olivetti studied engineering at the Politecnico of Turin under
Galileo Ferraris. He built his typewriter factory in his home town, Ivrea,
in 1908. Described as a “friend and admirer of the great Italian socialists,
Filippo Turati and Oddino Morgari,” he contributed to the anti-Fascist
weekly Tempi Nuovi. Camillo was no Marxist; instead of class warfare, he
advocated cooperation between workers, managers, and owners. Within his
own firm he acted to establish generous worker welfare programs.2 Adriano,
however, assumed responsibility within the firm during the apogee of the
“planning” movement in Europe, planning the company’s business, plan-
ning the physical plant, planning the company’s urban setting, and planning
92 Chapter 5
the company’s locale. Like his father, Adriano studied engineering at the
Politecnico of Turin. Already steeped in modern management according to
F. W. Taylor and Henry Ford, an interest reinforced by his relationship with
the Ente Nazionale per l’Organizzazione Scientifica del Lavoro, Adriano
entered the cultural world of modernism. The “modernist” drive included
a new emphasis on design aesthetics, graphics, a renewed emphasis on social
policies and, decisively, modern architecture.3 Robert Fishman has defined
modernism as “the ideology of the Plan. The architect was to emerge as the
Planner, leader and organizer of a whole industrial society whose ends were
beauty and order.”4 Adriano was swept up. He brought Le Corbusier to Ivrea
in 1934 to discuss management, architecture, and planning.5 He brought
together a stellar group of young architects and planners to help him plan
for the expansion of his company’s facilities and for the development of the
region. The architects Gino Pollini and Luigi Figini were commissioned to
design modernist additions to the Officine Olivetti complex. Later Adriano
came into association with the BBPR architectural group (Ernesto Nathan
Rogers, Gian Luigi Banfi, Ludovico Belgiojoso, and Enrico Peressutti), who
helped draft the Valle d’Aosta Plan, about which more later.6
Pollini and the BBPR Group were members of the Congrès Internationaux
d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), founded in 1928 by Le Corbusier,
Siegfried Giedion, and others and dedicated to the integration of modern
architecture and urban and regional design in an industrial age. Its found-
ing document, the “La Sarraz Declaration,” insisted that the economic and
social demands of industrialization required “rationalization and standard-
ization.” Architecture, industry, and politics could no longer be separated,
and “town planning is the organization of life in all regions.” Urbanization’s
“essence,” the declaration continued, “is of a functional order.”7 From 1931
on, the CIAM promoted the theme of the “Functional City” which was
previewed at Milan’s Triennale, organized by CIAM members Gino Pollini
and Piero Bottoni in the spring of 1933. At this meeting work of Wright,
Mies, Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier, Gropius, and other architects were
shown, and 26 model houses were displayed, including Figini and Pollini’s
Villa-Studio for the Artist. There Adriano Olivetti learned of their work
and of the CIAM’s Functional City.8
The CIAM’s 1933 Congress was held on the cruise ship Patris II, which
sailed from Marseille to Piraeus-Athens on July 29. On July 30, Le Corbusier
Utopia Revived 93
addressed the Congress and outlined his idea of the Functional City—a city
planned according to the four basic functions: dwelling, work, leisure, and
circulation (transportation, communication). He spoke of the “new scale”
introduced by the railway and the automobile. After docking at Piraeus, the
Congress continued its deliberations in Athens, and opened a Functional
City exhibition organized by Emil Roth at the National Polytechnic
School. Owing to internal disagreements, final resolutions were not passed;
however, an article in the September issue of the journal Beaux Arts laid
out the principles that Le Corbusier later published as The Athens Charter
(1941). The principles emphasized human scale, the importance for town
planning of the four functions (dwelling, circulation, work, and leisure), and
the necessity of seeing and understanding the town as part of its region.9
Inspired, Adriano initiated studies in 1934 that would later emerge as the
“General (Regulatory) Plan of the Valle d’Aosta,” and by 1935 he had begun
to collect around him a group of architects and planners.10 Chief among
these architects and planners were Gino Pollini, Luigi Figini, Piero Bottoni,
and the afore-mentioned BBPR group. The BBPR architects and planners
had gained considerable notice with their Pavia Plan of 1933. For a compe-
tition to re-plan the ancient town of Pavia, they had submitted (along with
the engineer Gaetano Ciocca) a “fascist” or “corporativist” plan to make
Pavia a model city laid out according to the principles of the CIAM’s and Le
Corbusier’s Functional City. For Ciocca and the BBPR group the “corpo-
rativist city” was a new approach to modernization, a “third way” between
capitalism and socialism. The chief aim was “to shape the perfect Italian of
tomorrow.” Their plan began with Ciocca and Rogers’s theoretical posi-
tion, declaring corporativism as a response to the congested, unhealthy capi-
talist city bequeathed by the Industrial Revolution. The new Pavia would
be planned according to the principles of the CIAM’s Athens meeting: a
reasoned segregation of residences, industrial, and leisure zones, an emphasis
on healthy living, access to green spaces, and the use of modern technol-
ogy in transit and communication plans. Three zones of the city included
the “old city core” (part of which would be razed and rebuilt for reasons
of aesthetics and hygiene), the “expanded city” (comprising industrial and
military areas), and the “new city” (a place of innovation, with transporta-
tion links, a “city of study,” and a “city of sports”). The plan was rejected by
the Italian government in favor of a more classical approach.11 Some of the
94 Chapter 5
ideas, however, found their way through the BBPR group into Adriano’s
regional approach to Ivrea and its surroundings.
Over a three-year period, Olivetti’s team produced an Aosta Valley plan
which was finally published by the Olivetti company in 1937 as the Piano
Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta.12 (See figure 5.1.) As early as 1936 the team laid out
their ideas at the Milan Triennale, and early in 1937 they displayed their ideas in
Rome at the Galleria della Confederazione Nazionale Artisti Professionisti and
also at the Paris Exposition of 1937. In his introduction to the 1937 publication
Figure 5.1
Pamphlet cover for the regional plan for the Valle d’Aosta, 1937. (Associazione
Archivio Storico Olivetti )
Utopia Revived 95
of the Piano, Adriano stressed that the published plan was only an example of
what can be done and a provisional indication of their methods.13 The central
concept of the Plan was regionalism. The conception of the region was histori-
cal, cultural, and industrial, not administrative. Adriano’s focus was the mod-
ernization or rationalization of industry in all its forms, and the Plan brought
together architects and social scientists to integrate the development of industry,
the town, and the entire region.14 The Plan projected a Valle d’Aosta energized
by tourism (not surprising, perhaps, as Adriano was president of the local tour-
ist board). The document consisted of four individual development plans: an
Aosta urban plan (designed by Banfi, Peressuti, and Rogers), a ski resort at Pila,
a settlement plan for the Breuil Valley (designed by Belgiojoso and Bottoni),
and a development plan for Courmayeur at Mont Blanc (designed by Pollini
and Figini). Decked out with scientific observations, statistics, and diagrams, the
Plan presented itself as rigorous, rational, and factual. In 1943 the studies and
projects were edited into a volume titled Studi i proposte preliminari per il Piano
Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta. An industrial district for Ivrea, first conceived in
1934, was included.15
The Valle d’Aosta Plan failed to obtain the requisite political backing.
Adriano Olivetti’s biographer, Valerio Ochetto, notes that Mussolini blue-
penciled “no” on the plan and pointedly refused to visit the Olivetti factory
during his visit to Ivrea in 1939.16 But Adriano pushed forward on other
fronts. In 1937 he founded the journal Tecnica ed Organizazzione, the first of
many important publishing ventures of this kind. The new journal’s subtitle,
Uomini machine metodi nella costruzione corporativa (Men, Machines, Methods in
Corporate Manufacturing), reflects Adriano’s commitment to industrial mod-
ernism along with a sensitivity to the political climate. The journal’s articles
concerned the organization of factory and firm without bureaucracy, sales
networks, what services a company should offer its workers and the public,
professional education, the market, industrial architecture, and urban planning.
The third number of the journal (1937) featured an article on the Bata shoe
company of Zlin, Czechoslovakia, whose design department prepared a manu-
script on the ideal industrial town. Ultimately, three new satellite towns were
built according to modernist-CIAM or Functional City principles: Batovany
(called Partizanske since 1949), Zruc nad Sazavou, and Sezimovo Usti.17
Adriano also turned again to planning, this time with a more limited goal.
He returned to Figini and Pollini’s plan for Ivrea and financed studies for a
96 Chapter 5
general plan for the town. The commission was given to Figini alone, but
he brought in Egisippo Devoti of the National Fascist Union of Engineers
(Adriano was the local president of that organization) and Luigi Piccinato,
the planner of the Fascist new town of Sabaudia. In the period 1938–1941
a number of studies were made dealing with rehabilitating the roads and
structures that were in poor condition, renovating the historic center, wid-
ening the streets, and expanding the city with three new neighborhoods and
a new industrial district along the lines of Figini and Pollini’s 1934 proposal.
This plan for Ivrea, too, went for the most part unbuilt.18
Internal company reform was also on the agenda. With Figini and Pollini
hired on as architects, Adriano transformed the company with new mod-
ernist glass and concrete buildings. (See figure 5.2.) Workers’ benefits were
expanded with a factory cafeteria service (1936), extended vacation time
(1936), transport systems and enlarged social services (1937), and planning
for a village for employees (1937). Adriano became president of Olivetti in
1938, succeeding his father. The following year, a high school was added to
the existing mechanics training center, and a summer camp for children was
begun. Figini and Pollini’s dramatic new nursery school, begun in 1930,
was completed in 1942. Despite the exigencies of the war, employee hous-
ing (Borgo Olivetti) was opened, and construction of the Via Castellamonte
housing was underway.19 (See figure 5.3.) The historian Giorgio Ciucci sees
the Borgo and the Via Castellamonte as exemplars of Adriano’s rational-
ist vision. Buildings, sports areas, and even the neighborhoods themselves
are arranged along an axis that coincides with that of the factory. “These
designs,” Ciucci remarks, “expressed that search for a rational order which
marks Adriano Olivetti’s whole program.”20 (See figure 5.4.)
Adriano’s relationship with the Mussolini regime had been complex, and
after Il Duce’s fall the situation became even more tangled. He was arrested
and imprisoned by the Badoglio government in Rome in 1943 for warn-
ing the United States about Pietro Badoglio’s trustworthiness.21 In February
1944 he escaped to Switzerland, where he remained until May 1945.22 In
exile, Adriano was in contact with like-minded intellectuals and was able to
think deeply about the political and social meanings of his modernism.
For Adriano Olivetti, exile in Switzerland was a difficult but life-changing
interlude. It provided time for him to order his ideas—which had been ges-
tating well before his exile—about postwar political and industrial planning.
Utopia Revived 97
Figure 5.2
The second addition to Olivetti workshops at Ivrea, designed by L. Figini and
G. Pollini (1939–1940). (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti )
98 Chapter 5
Figure 5.3
The modernist tradition continued when Adriano Olivetti’s son Roberto commis
sioned Roberto Gabetti and Aimaro d’Isola to build the West Residential Unit
(1968–1971). Completely below ground on the outer semicircle, the housing was
known to its inhabitants as “Mole City.” (Roya Marefat)
By the summer of 1942, he considered the outcome of the war a foregone

conclusion: Italy and the Axis powers were bound to lose now that the
United States had entered the hostilities. He and his allies immediately began
to plan for Italy’s postwar reconstruction and “resurrection.”23 Programs and
manifestos for the future Italy were passed among the co-conspirators, and in
1942 and 1943 Adriano circulated typewritten essays that were the germ of
larger works to come.24 Adriano’s doctrine of “Comunità concreta,” a grand
utopian vision of cooperative communities, was beginning to take shape.
Adriano returned from Switzerland ablaze with regionalism, impressed
by examples of planning’s successes, and inspired by the spirit of grass-roots
community. According to his biographer, his new “maestri” included the
philosopher Emmanuel Mounier, the architect-planner Erwin Gutkind,
the urbanist Lewis Mumford, and David Lilienthal of the Tennessee Valley
Authority, all of whose recent books Adriano eagerly devoured.25 In The
Utopia Revived 99
Figure 5.4
Eduard Vittoria’s Olivetti Study and Research Center, Ivrea, 1951–1955. ( Jeremy
Kargon)
Culture of Cities (1938), Mumford stressed the importance of the region,

“an area large enough to embrace a sufficient range of interests and small
enough to keep these interests in focus and make them a subject of collec-
tive concern.” Under the new regime of regionalism, “it is necessary . . . to
create centers of industrial and civic life and to re-invigorate with new plans
and activities such older towns and villages as are favorably situated. . . . The
standards set for production must not only include private consumption
but public works—houses and highways, parks and gardens, cities and civic
institutes and all the interconnecting tissue that finally compose an organic
region. . . . The re-animation and re-building of regions, as deliberate works
of collective art, is the grand task of politics for the opening generation.”26
Another writer influenced by Mumford, and read closely by Olivetti, was
the architect and planner Erwin Gutkind. In 1943, Gutkind—a refugee to
London (and ultimately Philadelphia) from Nazi Germany—published a two-
volume work anticipating postwar reconstruction. In Creative Demobilisation,
100 Chapter 5
the first volume of which is titled The Principles of National Planning, Gutkind
lays out an argument for regional planning, decentralization, and the impor-
tance of the community: “The interests of the community must govern every
scheme in general and in detail. Private interests must be subordinated to this
principle without impeding personal freedom.”27
A prime example used by both Mumford, and Gutkind was the suc-
cess of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had been created by
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. In 1944, TVA chair-
man David Lilienthal published a book dedicated “to the people who live
in the Tennessee Valley region” and titled TVA: Democracy on the March.
This book’s optimism and its faith in science and in the boundless energy
of democracy resonated with Adriano’s experience and purpose. “This is
a book,” Lilienthal writes, “about tomorrow.” He believes “in the great
potentialities for well-being of the machine and technology and science”
and “that through the practice of democracy the world of technology holds
out the greatest opportunity in all history for the development of the indi-
vidual.”28 Adriano had found a kindred spirit!
In a chapter titled “Planning and Planners,” Lilienthal refutes the canard that
planning is soulless, anti-democratic, and intrinsically bureaucratic. “A great
plan,” he writes, “a moral and indeed a religious purpose, deep and fundamen-
tal is democracy’s answer both to our own homegrown would-be dictators and
foreign anti-democracy alike. . . . Here is the life principle of democratic planning—an
awakening in the whole people of a sense of this common moral purpose.”29 Moreover,
it can be accomplished and accomplished now. “There must be more than a
conviction, a sure confidence that it can be done. There must be a sense of
urgency, a sense that this is the day on which to turn the first shovel.”30
Adriano’s theoretical discourses, which germinated in Switzerland,
reflected the profound influence of these writers and activists. Ordine politico
delle comunità (1945)31 and L’idea di una comunità concreta (1950) were, as Chiara
Mazzoleni has opined, “an original re-interpretation of the regionalism of
Lewis Mumford.”32
Adriano’s theory of community offered a regional solution to what he
regarded as the era’s most urgent problem: out-of-control industrialization
and urbanization. While valuing technology, the factory, and its power as
primary generators of wealth in society, he saw in them a peril as well.33
Siegfried Giedion’s compelling question—would man or mechanization
Utopia Revived 101
“take command”?—deeply worried him. But Adriano believed that the root
of the problem went deeper: “The crisis of contemporary society arises not
from the machine, but from the persistence, in a world profoundly altered,
of inadequate political structures.”34 To address the crisis, he would soon
call for wholesale reform of the Italian political and economic system. After
such a transformation, the problem of man and machine would be simply
and quickly resolved.
Adriano Olivetti offered a sweeping solution in the form of the comunità
concreta, a combined material and spiritual conception. During his exile in
Switzerland, he outlined his theory in an epigrammatic treatise titled L’Ordine
politico delle comunità. Though born of a period of crisis, it was the result of
years of philosophical reflection. Adriano derived many of its essential fea-
tures from his personal experience as a factory owner and manager and native
of Ivrea and the Canavese region. “Prima di essere una istituzione teorica, la
Comunità fu vita,” he wrote, acknowledging that his models actually pre-
existed, albeit in a latent form, ripe for theoretical generalization.35
Time and again Adriano returned to his native Ivrea and Canavese as a
personal touchstone. The Ordine was in effect a codification of that per-
sonal experience. In a later book, Democracy Without Political Parties, Adriano
chronicled his life’s journey, including his disillusionment with socialist rev-
olution in 1922, the inspiration of his father’s humanitarian, paternalistic fac-
tory management, and his own awakening to the community idea.36 Adriano
shared his father’s benevolent paternalism as well as his social reformist zeal.
But whereas Camillo had thought of the Olivetti plant more as an artisanal
workshop than factory, Adriano aimed to transform the firm into a modern
industry and sought more sweeping scientific and rational approaches to
industrial problems. As a political-economic concept, his community idea
provided a “third way” for postwar Italy. “To escape [the present] complex
crisis,” he wrote, “many make the error of restricting our choices between
state Socialism and Liberalism. . . . The present plan is a tentative attempt to
indicate concretely a third way that responds to the multiple exigencies of
the moral and material order.”37
As a new regional model, community was Adriano Olivetti’s answer to
what he identified as Italy’s fundamental political dilemma: its administrative
units were either too large or too small for human needs. Ideally containing
between 75,000 and 150,000 inhabitants, the community was designed to
102 Chapter 5
be midway between the Italian province and the commune, or county. In

territory, the community was roughly equivalent to the traditional diocese
or electoral district. He envisioned Italy as a federation of 400–500 auton-
omous communities, organized in a hierarchy of ever-larger governing
units.38
According to Olivetti’s “organic plan of industrial decentralization,” com
munities were rural nodes, each centering on a factory, an industry, or a
technology.39 For his immediate models, Olivetti looked to “the Fiat Com
munity at Mirafiori, the Ansaldo Community at Cornigliano, the Galileo
Community at Rinfredi.” Also mentioned were such “new industrial villages
of America” as “aluminium city”—a reference to Aluminum City Terrace, a
defense housing project built on the outskirts of Pittsburgh by Walter Gropius
and Marcel Breuer.40 Central to the concept was the inclusion of large swaths
of agricultural land within the jurisdiction of each community, thus forming a
complete regional entity. By putting agricultural and industrial activity under
unified administration, he aimed for a symbiosis between an agricultural and
industrial economy. Although no more an admirer of Marx than his father,
he traced this notion to a passage in the Communist Manifesto which asserted
that combining farm and industrial labor would eventually erase all mean-
ingful distinctions between city and country.41 Agricultural reform was an
important prerequisite to the success of his plan. Olivetti called for breaking
down feudal estates into units owned by small proprietors at the community
level. Under this scheme, small farmers would band together in community
groups or cooperatives to pursue a more modern, scientific agriculture.42
But the community plan was far more than a purely political-administra-
tive measure. It was designed to transform all human relations. The com-
munity was a “natural unit” built to the measure of man and, as such, the
ultimate vehicle for political and spiritual expression: “The ‘misura umana’
of a community,” according to the Ordine, is defined by the natural limits
of human social relationships—“by the finite possibilities which are at
the disposal of every person for establishing social contacts.” For a com-
munity to function optimally, its citizens must be directly in touch with
one another and, as much as possible, with their political leaders: “an
organism is harmonious and efficient only when the people in charge of
certain determined tasks can explain those tasks through direct contacts.”43
Reminiscent of Leonardo’s “Vitruvian Man,” the community represented
Utopia Revived 103
the “spazio naturale dell’uomo.” After the destruction and disintegration

caused by the war, it would provide a new “organic unity.” It was “meant
to recall once more the lost harmony to the works of man,” a harmony that
would transcend all conflicts.44
While it was true that modern forms of transportation could expand
human space by technologically extending human physical limits, Olivetti
was wary of them. In modern Italian society, such technologies often served
as vehicles of political control rather than facilitators of human capability and
spontaneity: “The Community shall be the dominion of man, the Region
can be controlled by means of a motor-car, the State by means of an aero-
plane or a railway. Only the Community is unique, completely human.”45
Like other techno-cities, Olivetti’s community was a walking city, not a
motorized zone.
In effect, the human-sized community functioned as a single great organ-
ism: “The Community is an organ of the Region and of the State: it is later
transformed, since it is based on a natural body, into an economic organ,
later into a means of spiritual and moral affirmation.”46 Quoting the town
planner Giovanni Astengo, Olivetti likened communities to cellular organ-
isms, whose combination leads to ever-larger forms.47 Originating in the
realm of the body, the community ultimately rose to the level of the spirit,
its highest manifestation. Olivetti’s organic holism was just one of the many
holdovers from fascist organicist ideology.
Olivetti thought deeply about the implications of community for human
liberty. A major theme of the Ordine is the tension between individual free-
dom and state power. In the community concept, Olivetti aimed to redefine
the relationship between individuals and society. Drawing on the writings
of Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mounier, he made a fundamental philo-
sophical distinction between the “Person,” one who is closely connected
to others and to the community, and the “Individual,” an isolated egocen-
tric, a creature of capitalist individualism.48 The community structure would
provide for a satisfying “personhood” without totally submerging and sub-
ordinating the individual in society, as he believed communism had done.
Large cities, Adriano Olivetti maintained, were the antithesis of com-
munity and therefore incapable of delivering the desired degree of unity and
harmony. Products of unbridled industrial expansion, they were antiquated,
oppressive, congested centers, ever on the verge of chaos. But Olivetti was
104 Chapter 5
no revolutionary. Admitting that cities had made great contributions to

civilization and culture, rather than demand their demolition, he called for
their gradual transformation into more human-centered, natural agglomera-
tions.49 In theory, he believed, the community and the city could co-exist,
at least for a time, as long as cities gradually shifted course in the direction of
Olivetti’s community ideal.
The Ordine offered a vision of a communitarian utopia, to be sure, yet
it was a distinctly earth-bound utopia. Olivetti chose the term “concrete
community” advisedly. It anchored the community in real experience, in
material life, and, above all, in the land itself. Ever the pragmatist, Olivetti
was suspicious of purely theoretical gestures. Experience had taught him
the dangers of ideal systems. He had seen the Nazis and the Fascists adopt a
perverse form of Hegelian philosophy to justify the apotheosis of the state,
brutal dictatorship, and a toxic “racial metaphysics.” At the other end of the
political spectrum, he had witnessed similar distortions in the name of Hegel
in Marx’s historical materialism. Condemning all forms of “state-idolatry,”
Olivetti aimed to restore individual freedoms within the context of a liberal
society, the sort of social contract that he believed had prevailed in Europe
before the rise of Fascism and Nazism.50 In the end, he believed, the true
community is a synthesis of the material and the spiritual. Despite his prag-
matic bent, at times Olivetti’s deep belief in the idea of a homogeneous
concrete community, binding people to their region, to their land, and,
through the land, to one another, seemed to look back to the blood-and soil
ideology of the previous fascist generation of planners.
Love of nature, verging on worship, infused Olivetti’s notion of the
concrete community (echoing the romantic rhetoric of Salzgitter archi-
tect Herbert Rimpl.) The call for a return to the land and to nature was
a revealing sub-theme of the Ordine. The Italian commune, in its current
form, he lamented, “almost always excludes nature and the countryside.”
Integrating agricultural lands into the new order will gradually put mod-
ern life back into direct contact with nature. Olivetti even saw hope for
modern cities, where nature had been wantonly suppressed, if not elimi-
nated. He envisioned their gradual transformation into “urban organisms
in which nature is once more given its rightful function and man has the
sentiment of a more harmonious and more complete life, both in and out-
side his work.”51 He was confident that, properly directed, the city would
Utopia Revived 105
eventually find its way back to nature. Drawing inspiration from his native
Canavese, Olivetti paints his regional landscape in rhapsodic brush-strokes:
“ . . . the Community itself was already born, in natural and human dimen-
sions, in my small native land: the Canavese. The straight line of the Serra,
the twisting course of the river Dora, the scenery of the beloved mountains
of the Val d’Aosta, then, amid the green fields, the wheat-fields, the closely
worked vineyards, encircling the towns through which I had passed, ten, a
hundred times. These were the natural limits of a territory which the faith
and imagination of a tenacious group of men could save from the shut pro-
vincial atmosphere, preparing a happier place when tomorrow the factory,
nature, life, brought back to a spiritual unity, may give new dignity to a new
man.”52 Olivetti sees the community as a Christian polity. He thus pictures
a natural paradise, a Garden of Eden before the fall. Out of it will emerge
a redeemed “Uomo nuovo,” the New Man promised by a generation of
Italian community reformers.
While Olivetti reveled in nature, the community was in the end a human
construct, requiring a strong, carefully considered political framework. Accor
dingly, the Ordine outlined a system of government. A hallmark of the com-
munity was its unitary outlook—the unity of the organism—which implied
oversight by a single authority that could coordinate its complex activities. As a
model, Olivetti held up the “unified approach” of the TVA in its role as a single
territorial authority.53 Yet he worried about the threat of centralized power
to democracy and liberty. His remedy was to divide that authority among co-
equal bodies, each one a sub-organism in its own right. Such a strategy lim-
ited central control while also serving as a check on the masses, who might
otherwise be invested with too much power under a pure democracy. Olivetti’s
governmental structure predicated a balance among the popular sovereignty of
the masses, the power of trade unions, and the cultural authority of experts.
Power was vested in three entities: a president elected under universal suffrage, a
vice-president elected only by workers and trade unionists, and a cultural repre-
sentative elected by “men of competence.” Framing all was a governing moral
and ethical system rooted in Christian belief and doctrine.54
As important as religion was as a guide for Olivetti, he believed equally in
the cultural authority of secular elites of scientists, engineers, architects, and art-
ists. Expert knowledge played a fundamental role in community governance,
even as it put a brake on democratic mass rule. Cultural elites, Olivetti asserted,
106 Chapter 5
must lead, but not oppress. In addition to wielding political power, the com-
munities were to serve as cultural centers to inform and nourish the spirit.
Olivetti assigned especially high social and political status to science and
to academic organizations as sources of independent, disinterested power
and criticism. The “scientific tradition of the universities or of the superior
scientific institutes” is responsible for making critical judgments about the
culture of a community. Accordingly, Olivetti advocated freedom of scien-
tific research, but with the proviso that knowledge should always be at the
service of the community and of “the exigencies of economic life.” Science,
above all, should never be “separable from ethical ends, since it is clear that
when this last is lacking science and technique submit man to the dominion
of the machine which he is no longer able to control, and which might lead
civilization towards its own auto-destruction.”55
In view of his artistic sensibilities, it no surprise that Olivetti also favored
artists and artistic freedom. But again, such freedoms had to serve society
and, therefore, function within prescribed limits. Just as Mussolini imposed
strong direction on the design of his città nuove, Olivetti insisted on rules of
harmony and form in community planning. Choices of architectural style or
public art, such as murals, must be “entrusted to organizations which repre-
sent living forces and critical-scientific traditions in the domain of Art itself.”
Under such a regime, private homes could be independently designed, as
long as they remained “in harmony with a determined artistic tradition.”56
Otherwise chaos would prevail, not only in art but also in society.
Olivetti carried these same precepts into town and regional planning. As
head of the 1937 Val d’Aosta plan, he strictly enforced aesthetic standards. He
contrasted his own “unitary vision” of the valley with a botched plan devel-
oped by the Italian government a decade earlier. Conducted without central
planning or strong direction from the top, the prior results were confused
and chaotic—an affront, Olivetti sharply noted, to the area’s grand artistic
heritage from Caesar Augustus. Compared to such disastrous attempts at city
planning, he wrote, “those modest tentatives of organic solutions undertaken
by Fascism in Littoria and Sabaudia” deserved a measure of praise.57
After his return from Switzerland, Olivetti turned from reflection
to action. In 1946, convinced by his study and his experience that (as
Lilienthal urged) a sense of urgency was necessary, Olivetti founded the
journal Comunità. (See figure 5.5.) In 1948 he established the “Movimento
Utopia Revived 107
Figure 5.5
Adriano Olivetti in front of his factories in Ivrea. This photo was used on cover of
Communità no. 78 (1960). (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti)
di Comunità.” The Movimento was to be a forum for debate, organiz-

ing political discussion, political education, and political action that would
utilize newly established community centers (as Gutkind had suggested in
Creative Demobilisation), staffed by Movement volunteers throughout the
Canavese region and eventually throughout Italy, to spread its artistic and
cultural precepts, as well as providing a variety of community services.
These Community Centers were allied with other regional and national
institutions to resolve social conflicts in the factory and to promote the
merging of light industry and farming.58 Olivetti’s “Edizioni di Comunità”
published articles, pamphlets, and books, including Italian translations of
works on architecture and planning by such urbanists as Lewis Mumford
and Erwin Gutkind. This same group published the art and society journal
Sele Arte between 1952 and 1966. The Movimento shifted from its edu-
cational role into the political arena by entering the elections of 1953 and
108 Chapter 5
1958. The community movement reached its peak in the mid 1950s, and
in 1956 Olivetti was elected mayor of Ivrea, his highest political office.
In 1948 Olivetti joined the steering committee of the Istituto Nazionale di
Urbanistica (INU). In 1950 he would become that organization’s president.
In 1949 he financed the resuscitation of its journal Urbanistica. Olivetti
assumed the title of direttore and appointed Giovanni Astengo editor-in-chief.
Astengo (1915–1990), a graduate architect of the Politecnico di Torino who
was associated with the Movimento di Comunità, helped Olivetti reorganize
Urbanistica and became vice-president of the INU in 1950.59 (See figure 5.6.)
The first number of the newly revived Urbanistica ( July–August 1949)
highlighted an opening statement, titled “Resuming the Road,” in which
Olivetti asserts that “urbanistics” will reclaim planning for the future of
the Paese (country). The first featured article was a translation of Lewis
Mumford’s “Planning for the Diverse Phases of Life.” Mumford contrib-
uted three articles in the first thirteen issues, including a biography of Patrick
Geddes. A biography of Mumford appeared in the second issue (as did a
sketch of Siegfried Giedion), one of Ebenezer Howard in the third issue,
and one of Mumford’s collaborator Clarence Stein in the thirteenth. Erwin
Gutkind was a favored invitee, contributing six articles in the first fourteen
issues, more than any other non-Italian. Meanwhile Gutkind was attaining
a worldwide reputation for “social ecology” with such books as Community
and Environment: A Discourse on Social Ecology (Watts, 1953) and Expanding
the Environment: The End of Cities—The Rise of Communities (Freedom Press,
1953). The latter, according to Mazzoleni, was one of the most popular texts
among Italian architects and “stood at the centre of the discussion regarding
nucleated development.”60
Once again Adriano Olivetti took it upon himself to organize a general
plan for Ivrea, this time for the town and the Canavese region. In early 1952
he formed the Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento Urbanistico del Canavese,
which included the architects Ludovico Quaroni, Nello Renacco, and
Annibale Fiocchi and the engineer Enrico Ranieri. (See figure 5.7.) The
anarchist writer and urbanist Carlo Doglio was general secretary and was
mainly concerned with the social and political aspects of the plan. The orga-
nization of the effort was ambitious; no other large city in Italy had such
a general plan. Sociologists, statisticians, agricultural, and labor economists
were brought in. The plan proposed a “cluster organization” of the city
Utopia Revived 109
Figure 5.6
Olivetti revived the journal Urbanistica. (Istituto Nazionale di Urbanistica )
110 Chapter 5
Figure 5.7
The Gruppo Tecnico Coordinamento Urbanistico del Canavese developed this
town plan for Ivrea in 1955. (Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti )
Utopia Revived 111
based on a “federation of residential units,” and a reworking of the commu-

nications system.61 The plan, initially rejected by the Ivrea Town Council,
was adopted in modified form in 1956.
One of the most interesting projects and one most closely consonant with
regionalist, decentralizing philosophy was the Istituto per il Rinnovamento
Urbano e Rurale [Institute for Urban and Rural Renewal] program, begun in
late 1954 and known by its Italian acronym, I-RUR. I-RUR was an attempt
to realize many of the theoretical notions about linking town and country
outlined in the Ordine. The high unemployment rate and the encroached-upon
rural character of the Canavese spurred Olivetti to rethink the relationship
of town and country in an industrializing economy. Olivetti was concerned
to preserve the best in Italian life. In an address titled “Community Ideals,”
he stated: “Town and country planning becomes extraordinarily important,
because it has the function of organizing and adapting the plans which closely
reflect the life and resources of the community.” Like Howard, Geddes, and
Mumford, Olivetti rejects the conventional conception of a rigid separa-
tion between the urban and the rural, and looks instead to “1st, a symbiosis
between industrial and agricultural economy, 2nd a gradual organization of
modern life in touch with nature in the farming areas, 3rd the transformation
of big and congested metropolitan areas into urban organisms where nature
can be restored to its rightful place . . . 4th the extension to isolated villages of
the benefits of medical care, educational and recreational activities which are
generally the privilege of more important centers.” The main building block
of this symbiosis is “an intermediate structure between the individual and the
state—a new real community.”62 Accordingly, Adriano Olivetti established
I-RUR, with himself as president. It was an association of public agencies,
private companies and private individuals. The organization was closely linked
to the Olivetti Company, which made payments to I-RUR, and to Adriano
Olivetti himself through personal relations with I-RUR members such as
Franco Momigliano, Ignazio Weiss, Roberto Giuducci, Geno Pampaloni,
and Umberto Rossi.63
The mission of I-RUR, as outlined in its charter, was to study and to
build agricultural and industrial settlements in order to improve the eco-
nomic and social conditions of the Canavese, to raise the level of cultural
life of the population, to improve the unemployment situation, and to
promote, create, develop, and eventually manage artisanal, industrial, and
112 Chapter 5
agricultural activities. Eventually nine settlements were constructed, four of

them agricultural (including the agricultural cooperative of Montalenghe)
and five of them industrial (including a laboratory at Vidracco, designed by
the architect Eduardo Vittoria). After the sudden death of Adriano Olivetti
in 1960, I-RUR went into decline. No further new projects were begun,
and I-RUR was phased out in the period 1965–1972.64
Lewis Mumford, in his memoirs, characterized Adriano Olivetti as a
modern version of Aristotle’s “Magnificent man,” one “who uses his riches
to some purpose.”65 Olivetti would have been pleased; his labors indeed had
a philosophical end. In an address before a conference at Berlin in 1956,
Adriano summed up the framework within which he moved:
Both history and reason lead us to the solution which is the optimum community,
neither too big nor too small; a community that can be measured on the human
scale. The large, the huge, the gigantic in all times, in all fields—enormous facto-
ries, overcrowded metropolises, authoritarian monopolistic states, mass parties—all
are under indictment. They are the Leviathans of our age, doomed to disappear,
and give place to more pliant, more harmonious, in a word, more human forms of
life.66
The fundamental idea, Olivetti continues in a vein directly adopted from

the Ordine, is to create communal interests, both material and moral, out of
the natural affinities of the region in which people live and work. The effort
he had begun, the creation of a Canavese regional community, had now
begun to produce results. “We employ a variety of instruments in the fields
of culture, economics, administration and labour organization; and attempt
to focus them on a single spiritual goal: a real community. In this process,
they also become political.”67
Thus, Adriano Olivetti’s evolved modernist version of “the Plan,” orga-
nized around comunità, was infused both with what he termed “spirit” and
with politics. The sociologist Robert Nisbet tartly remarked that Adriano
“collected intellectuals as other industrialists collected art.”68 Olivetti was,
however, no dabbler. Inspired by the utopians and strengthened by sociolo-
gists, planners, architects, and historians, Olivetti approached his Plan as a
philosophical enterprise. Unfortunately for that enterprise, in the brave new
postwar world utopia was yesterday’s world.
6 Th e Ci t y of Di s cipli nes: Uto pi a Deni ed,
U t o pia R e stored
Tough-minded idealism was required. Fascism and Nazism had been swept
away by World War II, and the worldwide depression was over, but the task of
reconstruction was both an opportunity and a burden. Lloyd Rodwin, an
intellectually ambitious graduate student of land economics at the University
of Wisconsin, grappled with big issues in “Garden Cities and the Metropolis,”
a curious article that appeared in the August 1945 Journal of Land and Public
Utility Economics. Spurred by defense-related interest in decentralizing cities,
Rodwin mounted a scathing attack on Ebenezer Howard’s “Garden City the-
sis,” claiming that it “overlooked some of the essential tasks of the metropolis”
and that it neglected “problems confronting existing communities.” He blasted
Howard’s views on rural migration, population growth, the location of indus-
try, urban costs, and municipal government. The urgent challenge, he main-
tained, was to understand “how to rebuild our existing cities and solve some of
their pressing problems,” instead of conceiving new towns. Rodwin criticized
Lewis Mumford’s Culture of Cities for its interest in the ruralization of industry
and for the notion that neotechnics or biotechnics will lead to urban dispersal.1
Remarkably, two well-known Regionalists, admirers of the Garden City,
responded to young Rodwin’s paper. Catherine Bauer (later Catherine Bauer
Wurster), while agreeing that it would be “worse than useless to try to gear city
planning to the fantastic potentialities of atomic warfare,” was much less opti-
mistic about the future of metropolitan (as opposed to decentralized) develop-
ment, and asserted that it was “too soon to bury the Garden City movement.”
Lewis Mumford, too, weighed in. Joining with Rodwin and Bauer in dismiss-
ing the military reasons for dispersal, Mumford reaffirmed his critique of high-
density planning: “Howard realized, as apparently Mr. Rodwin does not, that
a million people, grouped in twenty or thirty Garden Cities, would have
114 Chapter 6
advantages for living that a million people grouped in a unitary city do not pos-
sess.”2 In an extended and rather cutting rejoinder, Rodwin wrote: “Not only
must our present cities be reckoned with but a crucial element for the success
of most new cities lies in the nature of the relationships that must govern exist-
ing and new communities.”3 He continued to be harshly critical of Mumford’s
“inadequate documentation and analysis,” and dismissive of his “premature
flair for generalization.” He charged Mumford with lack of attention “to what
is essentially the heart of a community plan, viz. economic background and
trends.”4 Rodwin consistently underscored the contrast between his social sci-
ence approach, grounded in economics, and Mumford’s less disciplined views.
By the spring of 1946, when the exchange was published, Rodwin had
received his master’s degree in land economics and had entered Harvard
University to pursue a doctorate in planning, which he received in 1949. His
first published book pointedly continued the debate with the Howardians.
Titled The British New Towns Policy: Problems and Implications, and pub-
lished in 1956, it picked up where the 1945–46 exchange had left off, with
Rodwin openly critical of a “utopian” approach to urban problems. He dis-
cussed the British New Towns approach that was growing out of the New
Towns Act of 1946 and the Town Development Act of 1952 in the context
of “Newtopia versus Megalopolis.”5 The American Sociological Review praised
Rodwin’s “emphasis on the need for research in the social sciences as a
necessary condition for sound planning.”6 But in another review, Howard’s
disciple Frederic Osborn complained that “Mr. Rodwin has produced no
evidence that they [difficulties in building Garden Cities] were due to inno-
cence or slovenliness in the thinking of the proponents.” As a rejoinder
to Rodwin, he charged that “the Achilles Heel of Social Scientists [is] the
belief that the art of juggling can be acquired by studying the theory of
three-dimensional dynamics.”7
Rodwin’s approach to planning—to transform it into urban studies by
drawing on many disciplines across the social sciences and the humanities—
was already clearly outlined in The British New Towns.8 He gained the
chance to act on these principles in 1958 when he was appointed director
of the new Center for Urban and Regional Studies in MIT’s Department
of City and Regional Planning. The establishment of centers for multi-
disciplinary practices was rapidly becoming a part of MIT’s culture. Leaders
in both the faculty and the administration saw these centers as important
The City of Disciplines 115
instruments. The former saw them as means of addressing contemporary

problems that crossed disciplinary boundaries; the latter viewed them as
ways of overcoming departmental barriers within the university. These cen-
ters became prominent foci of research and education not only in the sci-
ences and engineering but also in the social sciences. MIT, more than any
other American university, took up the challenge, first laid down as the
“fourth point” in President Truman’s inaugural address of 1949, to “embark
on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances
and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of under-
developed areas.” The main instrument was MIT’s Center for International
Studies (CENIS), widely perceived as a source of knowledge on foreign
policy and economic assistance for the Eisenhower administration. Max
Millikan (a former CIA director of economic research) and Walt Rostow
(an economist and an economic historian) of CENIS stressed moderniza-
tion theory and “nation building” as America’s foreign policy agenda for the
developing world.9
In 1959, Rodwin co-founded (with Martin Meyerson, Harvard’s
Williams Professor of City Planning and Urban Research) the interdisci-
plinary Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies. Meyerson became
that center’s first director and Rodwin the chair of its Faculty Committee.10
Meyerson and Rodwin agreed on the need for an infusion of social sci-
ence rigor into planning. In an essay titled “The Utopian Tradition and the
Planning of Cities,” Meyerson argued that the social scientist “describes
rather than prescribes,” whereas the utopian’s “arbitrary, simplified view”
results in caricature. “Unlike utopia,” he continued, social science “speci-
fies the means of achieving” a desirable future.11 “The “main reason” for
the founding of the Joint Center was, according to Rodwin, “to push for a
broader more direct involvement on the part of the social sciences in urban
and regional studies.”12 A golden opportunity presented itself. More pre-
cisely, Rodwin helped create a splendid chance to apply their conception of
urbanism in rapidly developing, oil-rich Venezuela.
In 1960, Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Romulo Betancourt,
created the Corporación Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) to develop the under-
populated and relatively undeveloped southeastern region of his country.13
Of special interest was the area at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni
rivers, a region rich in iron ore, timber, and hydroelectric power. Two U.S.
116 Chapter 6
companies had constructed iron-ore processing facilities there in the 1950s,

and the Venezuelan government began to build a steel plant nearby. The CVG
was charged with developing an overall plan for the region. Needing trained
assistance, the CVG turned to Meyerson and Rodwin’s Joint Center for help.
The president of the CVG was Colonel (later General) Rafael Alfonzo Ravard,
a graduate of MIT.14 While Rodwin was in Venezuela at the invitation of a
former MIT planning student, Colonel Alfonzo Ravard persuaded Rodwin to
accompany him on a tour of the area. Rodwin recalled “the handsome hydro-
electric facilities and the elegant, still unfinished steel plant, conventional but
still powerful symbols of big dreams.” Apparently Rodwin was not immune
to the lure of Big Dreams: “I suggested that the Joint Center might organize
a team that—together with a group of Venezuelan associates—might work
out some strategies for attacking the problems of regional development in the
Guyana. The team could be backed up by specialists in planning, architecture,
law, economics sociology, public administration, civil engineering, and other
relevant disciplines at both universities.”15 Rodwin’s group would have all this
and a research component too. It was, to be sure, a City of Disciplines, an aca-
demic dream project. Rodwin clearly saw the importance of the project both
for Venezuela and for the practice of urban planning. Modernization envi-
sioned economic growth and promised the transformation of what Rodwin
termed “backward regions.” The chance to create a new city provided the
opportunity “for boldness, imagination, and innovation in urban design on a
scale rarely possible elsewhere.”16
Rodwin’s plan for the multi-disciplinary team was difficult to execute.
Norman Williams (a visiting professor of urban planning at MIT, a gradu-
ate of the Yale Law School, and an expert on planning law) was named
the project’s director. His tenure was scheduled to end in December 1962
owing to previous commitments. In any case, his family’s housing needs
precluded residency on site; he required a swimming pool, and therefore
he located in Caracas. The project’s director of urban design, Wilhelm von
Moltke, also was unable to live in Ciudad Guayana; his wife, a concert pia-
nist, required a piano. Von Moltke was a Philadelphia urban designer who
was also on the staff at the University of Pennsylvania. He had previously
worked with Stonorov and Kahn, who had developed an important part of
the urban plan for Bomber City at Willow Run. Alexander Ganz, an eco-
nomic consultant with extensive Latin American experience, was chosen
as chief of economic analysis. He mainly worked from outside the area. In

the end, a multidisciplinary team of specialists was assembled, comprising
urban designers, economists, architects, a political scientist, and an anthro-
pologist.17 Most commuted from Caracas; some, like the anthropologist Lisa
Peattie, lived on “the site.” Peattie had been an anthropologist at Queens
College and at the Bank Street College of Education. She had had some
field experience in Latin America.18
The first task, as Rodwin saw it, was to assess the economic potential of
Ciudad Guayana. By 1961 the town’s population had grown from 4,000 to
more than 40,000. Within a year, it had added 10,000 more. By the end of
the first planning phase, in 1964, the population was 70,000. The demands
for water, electricity, roads, schools, sewers, and bridges were becoming
urgent. The team had to accommodate immediate needs and, at the same
time, prevent these needs from interfering with the long-range plans.
While the economic planning was proceeding, the physical layout of the
city was charted under the direction of von Moltke. The first estimates pro-
jected a population of 415,000 by 1975; later the projection was reduced to
221,000. According to Rodwin, the central question was “Should the new
city be built around the steel plant? The planners finally decided that . . . it
would be far preferable to form the city by uniting the existing elements.”19
Von Moltke’s plan of December 1964 lays out what he terms the “visual
development strategy.” (See figure 6.1.) He sees three “visual units”: the
concave bowl of the town of San Felix in the far east of the district; the
central valley to the west; and, closer to the steel mill at the western extrem-
ity, the western plateau. The main idea is to connect the three visual units
with a central boulevard, the Avenida Guayana. Several design concepts
were considered and rejected in favor of a “linear city” extending from the
steel mill in the west to San Felix in the east. The rationale for this choice
boiled down to two factors: the importance of the heavy industrial complex,
which had to be situated near the steel mill, and the idea that the east-west
pole would foster growth and development along the central boulevard.
Such a pattern of development would facilitate the use of a unitary system of
services and transport, rather than have them duplicated at greater cost.20
In von Moltke’s plan, a sense of unity for Ciudad Guayana depends on
the Avenida Guayana. All the major elements of the linear city are laid out
as nodes along it. From the west, one proceeds from the steel mill along the
118 Chapter 6
Figure 6.1
Von Moltke’s comprehensive physical concept for Ciudad Guayana, as illustrated in
“The Evolution of Linear Form” (1964). (Lloyd Rodwin and Associates, Planning
Urban Growth and Regional Development: The Experience of the Guayana Program of
Venezuela, MIT Press, 1969)
Avenida to the heavy industry district, and thence to the airport and on to
Alta Vista, the commercial district. Alta Vista is located halfway between
the steel mill and San Felix. “All traffic from existing residential areas to
central Venezuela and to the western industrial areas passes through it.”
Traveling east, at the confluence of the Orinoco and Caroni rivers, near
the site of the bridge across the Caroni, is Punta Vista. Here, according
to von Moltke, are situated the activities that “symbolize the highest aspi-
rations of the city”: the cultural center, institutions of higher education
and research, and “high-quality” residences. (See figure 6.2.) Punta Vista’s
buildings are in a park-like setting, “creating a unique environment at this
unique site.” East of Punta Vista lies a Medical Center with a 280-bed
general hospital. Finally we reach the lagoon on which San Felix sits, with
apartment houses, sports center, shopping center, and a waterfront recre-
ational area. “This series of nodes along the urban spine will establish visual
continuity from the steel mill in the west to San Felix in the east; it will also
provide continuity of experiences and activities. The development strategy
has as its goal to use the Avenida Guayana as a catalyst for public and pri-
vate investments through the creation of a strong image.”21 (See figure 6.3.)
Figure 6.2
This architect’s rendering highlights tree-shaded semi-public spaces and pedestrian
pathways for middle-class housing. (Frances Loeb Library, Harvard Graduate School
of Design)
The geometric plan, embedded in the topography, fit well into the con-
tours of the economic plan. It must be remembered, however, that Ciudad
Guayana’s plan was not written on a blank slate. By the time the team
arrived in Caracas and Ciudad Guayana, nearly 45,000 people were living
there. Although most of the land was publicly owned, some private devel-
opment already existed, and a municipality with a Chamber of Commerce
and even a Rotary Club was already in place. The planners planned, but the
residents, many of whom were oblivious to the existence of the CVG and
the Joint Center, saw the development occurring around them as spontane-
ous or the result of efforts by “the companies” that operated the steel mill
and the iron mines.22 The team’s anthropologist, Lisa Peattie, was charged
with developing ideas on “customs and values” affecting housing and com-
merce, and with illuminating social problems arising from the development
process. Peattie, one of the very few top team members who chose to live
in Ciudad Guayana, saw the design process as a social process, and looked
120 Chapter 6
Figure 6.3
This plan for Ciudad Guayana shows the original town of San Felix, mining company
towns, a steel mill, and a new bridge across the Orinoco. (illustration by John Langley
Howard, courtesy Daniel Bernstein)
at the whole from the bottom up. “Anthropologists,” she wrote, “have a
notable tendency to think small.”23
Lloyd Rodwin’s early assessments were very positive. In 1965 he opined:
“Ciudad Guayana is now a lusty, booming town whose future is still in
the balance.” The CVG showed “remarkable acumen and leadership” and
maintained “an impressive reputation and political backing.” The relation-
ship between the CVG and the Joint Center revealed differences in outlook
and “point of view” but demonstrated the need for “sincere respect for dif-
ferent views and sympathy for failings.” Most importantly, however, “the
outstanding lesson” of the Ciudad Guayana “experience” is that “political
leaders and builders of cities can profit from the formal enlistment of the
skill and resources of knowledge available in universities.”24
In his 1969 edited volume Planning Urban Growth, Rodwin republished the
1965 piece, adding a new chapter (“Reflections on Collaborative Planning”)
that was considerably more candid about the variety of schisms that opened in
the project at its inception.25 One of the most fundamental divides was described
by the anthropologist Lisa Peattie as the Platonic City versus the Aristotelian
City. The latter appears as a congeries of neighborhoods, businesses, local
rganizations, and individuals; the former is visualized most clearly in diagrams,

o
plans, and architectural renderings. The classical division in thinking (dating at
least as far back as St. Isidore in the seventh century) about cities is the physi-
cal city (urbs) versus the socio-political city (civitas). In this case, more popu-
larly, it can be seen as plans vs. people. One team member is recalled to have
remarked: “Willo [von Moltke, the urban designer] lives in the Platonic City;
Lisa [Peattie, the anthropologist] lives in the Aristotelian City.”26 Rodwin
thought of himself as a bridge between the two—a social reformer who, unlike
the utopians, would base reform on good science. “Our main concern,” he
told Peattie in 1983, “was to introduce social and economic considerations
into planning. I thought that if you could introduce solid technical thinking, it
would be solid thinking socially.”27
Rodwin was a liberal reformer who wished to plan not only for develop-
ment but also for community and a humane society. He believed, not with-
out nuance, that the social sciences would provide the path.
Other specialists inevitably saw the city through different sets of eyes. An
old proverb sagely explains that “to a man with a hammer, the whole world
is a nail.” Accordingly, each discipline possessed its own tool, and its own
set of priorities. The economists’ goal, industrial growth, set the framework.
Their vision did not include the social or the aesthetic. The urban design-
ers, however, added to it the goal of a “livable” city of beauty, one that was
aesthetically pleasing and provided desirable amenities. The transportation
planners focused on efficiency of movement, a potential source of conflict
with the designers. The anthropologist, who described herself as a liberal
with a “commitment to the underdog,” lived at the “site,” whereas the
economists, planners, and designers felt no need to do so and visited from
Caracas. The anthropologist, reprovingly, saw the planners’ efforts as aimed
toward “a future middle class” and toward developing a model for future
urban planning enterprises. Just as the planner of Brasilia refused to visit
the site in order to avoid sullying the purity of his design, the designers and
planners of Ciudad Guayana were reluctant to involve themselves with the
city’s residents or, in some cases, their concerns. One of the directors of the
Joint Center noted that “the current population was a small group of people
compared to the population of the city of the future.”28
Another feature of the “Caracas versus the site” split was the inevitable
divide between the perspectives of the Venezuelan leadership of the CVG and
122 Chapter 6
their American consultants. The head of the CVG, Colonel Rafael Alfonzo
Ravard, possessed a reputation, according to Peattie, for “clean technocratic
administration.” MIT trained, he presented himself as an engineer with
engineering proclivities. As a technocrat, Alfonzo Ravard was able to sur-
vive the transition from authoritarian to democratic rule under Betancourt.
One American staff member reported that Alfonzo Ravard’s main interest
was the Guri Dam and its hydroelectric facilities; “Ravard liked electric
power.” A Venezuelan member confirmed that he “wanted to justify the
dam.” The high-level administrators around Alfonzo Ravard were bound to
him personally as well as professionally. According to Peattie, they were all
Catholics, products of the Caracas Jesuit school, and either Opus Dei activ-
ists or in the Movimiento Familiar Cristiano. Alfonzo Ravard’s engineers
were project oriented and viewed the American planners as idealists some-
what out of touch with the hard realities of Venezuelan development.29 The
American planners, generally, were far more sensitive to the social aspects of
the enterprise, and were as a group politically to the left of Alfonzo Ravard
and his associates, and ethnically and religiously more diverse. In his 1965
assessment Rodwin guardedly referred to “deep rooted differences in out-
look between the Venezuelan experts and their foreign consultants from the
U.S.” By 1969 Rodwin was willing to be more explicit. Most of his people,
he said, were “do-gooders,” and the Venezuelans wanted to prevent the
Ciudad Guayana locals “from botching up the job.” He noted that his desire
to collaborate with the Central University of Venezuela had been squelched
by the leadership’s firm admonition that the academic group was “infested
with left-wing and irresponsible elements.”30 The resultant effort was inevi-
tably a compromise of visions.
Today Ciudad Guayana is a city of more than 800,000 stretching 25 miles
along the Orinoco. It is an important port. Its population is growing rel-
atively fast, owing to its continuing economic importance.31 The dreams
of its Joint Center planners are, nonetheless, not necessarily embedded in
the life of the city. Peattie’s 1987 retrospective reviewed the original goals
and the apparent results. The Joint Center planners wanted “economic effi-
ciency, amenity, social equity and community.” In 1987 the city lacked
all four. Regarding efficiency, Peattie described a city in which 75 per-
cent of the population lived at one end of a linear city while two-thirds
of the employed worked at the other end. The long commute was subject
to bottlenecks and delays over a bridge and business districts. Both parts of
the city lacked amenities. San Felix was still a shantytown with badly paved
or unpaved streets. Only one-third of the houses were connected to the
water system. Many children remained unschooled. Peattie excoriated the
social inequity. The CVG invested almost 40 times as much per capita in
the upper-class sections as in the working-class districts. It was not surpris-
ing, therefore, that Ciudad Guayana lacked community. Peattie reported
“strong social segregation within the urban area.”32
Where does the fault lie? One can blame the limitations of the plan-
ners, the politics of the situation, outside interference, or the very essence of
planning. The beauty of planner’s dreams is always sullied by hard reality. In
the case of Ciudad Guayana, as one Venezuelan economist said, “No matter
how well they plan it, people keep moving in and messing it up.”33 But in
the end, Rodwin’s dream of creating a City of Disciplines, the social science
answer to urban problems, remained unattainable.
If Lloyd Rodwin’s multi-disciplinary “urban studies” approach did not—
in this case—meet its practitioners’ high expectations, there were others who
envisioned the “new city” terrain with different eyes. For some of them, the
dramatic successes of engineering and science during and after World War II
in cooperatively developing both military and civilian technologies was a les-
son to be carried over to the increasingly pressing problems of the American
city. Moreover, the proven ability of intersectoral coordination (i.e., com-
bining the intellectual, economic, and political resources of academe, gov-
ernment, and industry) to accomplish even visionary goals could be brought
into play.34 One such effort was spearheaded by the scientist-engineer
Athelstan Spilhaus. Born in South Africa, Spilhaus received advanced degrees
at MIT (M.S., 1938), and Cape Town (Ph.D., 1948). His scientific research
centered on upper atmosphere meteorology and oceanography; his interests
ranged even more widely. He was the inventor of the bathythermograph,
a device that made possible the measurement of ocean temperatures and
depths from a moving vessel. He became a U.S. citizen in 1946, and in 1949
he was appointed dean of the Institute of Technology at the University of
Minnesota, a position he held until 1966.35
In 1966, before leaving the University of Minnesota, Spilhaus wrote an
article for the Minneapolis Tribune proposing an experimental city in which
new technologies for urban living could be developed, tested, and used. It
124 Chapter 6
would be a laboratory and a pilot plant for new systems, such as his own ideas
for urban recycling, urban transportation systems, and environmental balance.
Spilhaus enlisted as allies Otto Silha (a University of Minnesota trustee and
the Tribune’s publisher) and Wayne Thompson (the city manager of Oakland,
California, who had organized a conference to examine how NASA tech-
nologies could be applied to urban problems).36 Spilhaus elaborated on his
vision in an address before the American Association for the Advancement
of Science in December 1967. Just as Lewis Mumford was abandoning his
faith in the renewing promise of neotechnics, Spilhaus revived and reinter-
preted in contemporary terms the vision of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford.
In this address, later published in Science, Spilhaus proposed the “develop-
ment of a system of dispersed cities of controlled size . . . surrounded by ample
areas of open land. The proposed Minnesota Experimental City will be a
prototype.” The initial planning committee included Silha, Thompson, and
Spilhaus, plus Walter Vivrett and Max Feldman, so that business, industry
and the University of Minnesota were all represented. The first year’s fund-
ing was a joint effort of ten private industrial firms and three federal cabi-
net departments (Housing and Urban Development; Health, Education and
Welfare; Commerce). The Minnesota legislature was soon brought in and
supplied further backing. Spilhaus added, as well, a national steering commit-
tee that included the inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller, the econo-
mist Walter Heller, General Bernard Schriever, the University of Minnesota
political scientist Malcolm Moos, the theologian Martin Marty, Whitney
Young of the Urban League, and others.37
Spilhaus’s address renewed the Garden City idea, updating neotechnics to
include not only the application of the latest technologies, but also research
and development:
Planning, constructing, populating and managing a dispersed city highly suitable for
industry, commerce and human occupation will require the leadership, imagination
and enthusiasm of scientists, industrialists and educators alike. We must be prepared
to discard convention and to experiment with new and radical ideas. We must uti-
lize the most advanced methods of construction, transportation, communications,
waste removal and city management.
For this “demonstration model” approach to succeed, a “blank slate” must

be prepared. An entirely new city, far from and independent of existing
metropolises, must be fashioned. New technologies such as atomic power

enable us to build cities even in desert areas, to desalinate ocean water, and
to use the residue to fertilize areas vast enough “to feed the entire popula-
tions of ten cities the size of the proposed experimental city.”
The Minnesota Experimental City (abbreviated MXC) would be built on
an enormous underground substructure housing power and utility lines, stor-
age facilities for water and building materials, heating plants and cold storage,
underground pipes for wastes, and underground parking. Police, ambulance,
and emergency services would utilize underground roadways. Above ground,
at least parts of the city would be under a temperature-controlled dome two
miles in diameter. Transportation above ground would be free. “It is obvi-
ous to me, “Spilhaus concluded, “that we must use all of our land for living,
not just tiny fractions of it. To do this we must look at solutions that envisage
urban dispersal, and if we are to disperse into new planned cities, a national
experimental cities program is an urgent must.”38 The Experimental City
effort would be based at the University of Minnesota, which would invite
“interested national experts from many disciplines.”39
In 1969 the state of Minnesota created a Minnesota Experimental City
Authority with a two-year appropriation. The work of design was funded with
private contributions totaling more than $500,000. Representatives of the Ford
Motor Company, the Boise Cascade Company, North Star Research, the
Dayton Hudson Corporation, and Northern Natural Gas all had representa-
tives in the early planning stages.40 Martin Marty has left a wry account of his
service on the steering panel:
The real theorist behind this was a great technocrat, Athelstan Spilhaus who could
never see something without asking how technology could improve it. When he
retired from Minnesota to Florida, the golf course people complained that metal
tees were always there and were grinding up the mowers. And he thought, “I have
a good idea.” He compacted manure into tees and therefore when you just leave
them there, they’ll disintegrate and they’ll fertilize the greens. What he didn’t know
was that a lot of guys in the locker room pick their teeth with their tees!
Marty also recalled:
R. Buckminster Fuller—Mr. Twenty-First Century—was on the panel. . . . We

were to build a city—utopia—of two hundred and fifty thousand people. It had to
be at least seventy-five miles from any other urban centre. It would be built around
126 Chapter 6
a branch of the University of Minnesota; 3M and all the other big firms would have
a base there. We thought of everything.41
A site in Aitkin and Cass counties, near Swatara, was selected. An oppo-
sition group, Save Our Northland, emerged. Its president, Dale LaRoque
of Grand Rapids, organized a marathon walk to oppose the Experimental
City. The group began a campaign of letter writing and an effort to pack
hearing rooms of the legislature with opponents was undertaken. Legislators
began to be concerned about what was originally seen as a project without
serious opposition. At the same time, cost estimates began to rise sharply.
A report to the legislature estimated the costs at between $10 billion and
$15 billion. Fuller’s idea for a covering dome was seen by some as the last
straw. Whatever the causes, the result was that the Minnesota Legislature
denied further requests for funds for land acquisition, and the Minnesota
Experimental City died.42 Though never implemented, the MXC initiative
is an indicator of a deep vein of confidence in the ability of new technolo-
gies to resolve problems created, in part at least, by old technologies. MXC
also provides ample testimony to the resilience and continued power of the
Garden City idea and to the hope of neotechnics.
The French government was more successful, up to a point, in mounting
a multidisciplinary new city in the 1960s. Le Vaudreuil is located in the lower
Seine valley about 15 miles southeast of Rouen, a city of oil refineries and tex-
tile factories. On the axis of a major transportation corridor between Paris and
Le Havre, it sits astride not only the river route but also an electric railway, a
major Normandy highway, and a nexus of oil, gas, and electrical lines.43 The
original rationale for the new town was to help alleviate the growing population
pressure on central Paris without strangling the capital city in suburban sprawl.
Among some eight new towns planned for the capital region, Le Vaudreuil was
conceived as a self-sustaining satellite city with its own industrial core.
The French government appropriated the equivalent of $120 million for
planning, housing, and public works for Le Vaudreuil. Under a bilateral agree-
ment between Presidents Georges Pompidou and Richard Nixon, the U.S.
Department of Housing and Urban Development cooperated in the venture,
which was to serve as a model for the development of new urban technologies.
In 1967, the Délégation Général à l’Aménagement Territoire et à
l’Action Régionale (DATAR—the French government agency charged
with France’s five-year national development plan) designated Le Vaudreuil
an experimental city and projected an eventual population of 140,000.

Having studied the weaknesses and the strengths of British new town plan-
ning extensively, the French planners wished to avoid “over-planning” (by
which they meant static and self-contained planning). They envisioned an
organic evolution from a 500-acre central core (“le germe de ville”), with
the population growing slowly from about 15,000 in 1970 to 140,000 by
2000. (See figure 6.4.)
The multi-disciplinary team also had to find a way to navigate around
the powerful legacy in France of the Swiss architect Le Corbusier, whose
bold artistic vision of urban reconstruction was fundamentally antithetical
to their cautious, technocratic approach.44 Rather than dispersing cities, Le
Corbusier had called for concentrating urban populations in “immeubles vil-
las” (large blocks of stacked apartment modules) and, even more radically, in
monumental, high-density central skyscrapers surrounded by green spaces.
According to the satellite-city model, Le Vaudreuil was to have its own
employment base in an industrial zone centered on the manufacture of
plastics and pharmaceuticals. Anchors for the new area included the phar-
maceutical firm Upjohn and new production laboratories of the Pasteur
Institute, which the French parliament decided to locate in the new techno-
city. Construction plans also included a National Agricultural Engineering
School.45 It would be neither a company town nor an industrial dormitory.
Zoning would be kept minimal, with shops, businesses, and light industry
interspersed with housing.
Besides absorbing overflow population in the capital region, the new
town of Le Vaudreuil had a second major goal: to serve as a model for the
abatement of urban air and river pollution. New kinds of systems would
reduce pollution and costs. For example, solid wastes would be transported
under ground to treatment plants and incinerators, helping heat the city. As
at MXC, there would be underground storage, and also underground park-
ing for automobiles, although the use of automobiles would be discouraged.
Above ground, walkways would encourage pedestrian traffic, and micro-
centers of commercial areas would encourage residents to walk, not ride.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent four-
teen representatives, all of whom resided either at the site or in Paris. The
French engineer-in-chief, Jean-Paul Lacaze, organized a multi-disciplinary
team of about thirty specialists, including architects, designers, urbanists,
128 Chapter 6
Figure 6.4
This map of Le Vaudreuil, published in Science, shows industrial and recreational areas.
(reprinted with permission from AAAS)
environmentalists, demographers, psychologists, sociologists, programmers,

experts in industrial development, and futurists.46 Lacaze sent this team to
Washington to consult with American experts.47 With the creation of the
Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 and heightened environmental
awareness in the United States, the American team was particularly inter-
ested in observing the French government’s multidisciplinary approach to
pollution reduction. According to a State Department cable on the project,48
the principal value of the Le Vaudreuil experiment
lies in a unique development of techniques, probably over a considerable time scale,

for multidisciplinary environmental planning and management and for the practi-
cal application of pollution control measures to urban development. It is expected
that standar[d]s, regulations, measurement methods, monitoring, measuring and
abatement equipment and citizens’ participation will be investigated for air, water,
noise, solid waste, ecology and other environmental factors, all within the frame-
work of a comprehensive approach to the improvement of the quality of the urban
environment and the protection of nature.
Although the Garden City movement may have had few followers in
France, the environmental city concept can nevertheless be seen as a spiri-
tual descendant of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City.49
Despite (or perhaps because of) the impressive array of governmental spon-
sors, opposition to Le Vaudreuil arose at once. Uprooted landowners and
local residents fearful of a major alteration in their way of life condemned Le
Vaudreuil as a monstrous creation of technocrats.50 Skeptics of the claims of
Le Vaudreuil’s pollution-control experts also soon raised their voices. Rather
than a “city without smoke, pollution, without escaping gases . . . where one
can see the sky, where you can fill your lungs,” according to a Paris Match
exposé, there would be a city of noxious gases spewed forth by the textile
firm Sica.51 However, resigned to inevitable urbanization and disdaining the
urban sprawl infecting most postwar growth, most in the area accepted the
new town. By 1977, 1,300 residences had been built.52 But the obstacles to
the de novo creation of a city made themselves apparent. By the year 2000,
the population of the town, renamed Val-de-Reuil in 1984, was only about
14,000, one-tenth of the original estimate. Perhaps too close to Rouen and
too far from Paris, Val-de-Reuil still struggles.
130 Chapter 6
Neither social science, nor engineering futurism, nor Le Vaudreuil’s flex-

ible planning solved the conundrum of the new town. Jane Jacobs, author
of the 1961 book The Death and Life of American Cities, was an influential
critic of postwar urban renewal and planning schemes. Distrustful of before-
the-fact blueprints that governed the lives of city dwellers, she was a thorn
in the side of bureaucrats, city planners, regional visionaries, and academic
planners. Lewis Mumford and others scorned “Mother Jacobs’ home rem-
edies” and insisted that not all urban areas could be her beloved Greenwich
Village. However, her critique of the planning enterprise remains powerful
and influential.
7 Te c h n o -N osta l gia and the New U rban ism
In 1996, the Walt Disney World Company opened for settlement a new
town in Florida and bestowed on it the upbeat name “Celebration.” The
origins and the character of this new place shed considerable light on the
ideas of progress, the ideas of urban design, and the ideas of technology’s
role in society that are held by important elements of American culture.
Though its small-town visage effectively disguises it, Celebration is as much
an industrial city as Ivrea, Italy or Gary, Indiana. The industry is entertain-
ment, and the heart of it is what Southern California calls “The Industry”:
the film business. With Disneyland in 1955, Walt Disney built on the popu-
lar success of his feature-length cartoon movies by pioneering a multimedia
link with the tourist trade.
Today the town of Celebration sits amidst a budding technopolis, an
attempt to create a “Florida High Tech Corridor.” The regional technol-
ogy experiment, still in its early stages, is anchored by several central Florida
universities and by Space Coast companies allied with NASA. The Orlando
branch of Walt Disney Imagineering helps anchor this twenty-first-century
high-tech complex.1 Indeed, Walt Disney World Resort’s importation of
talent for its creative industries helped create the skilled labor pool under-
girding this regional initiative. Undoubtedly, many of these knowledge
workers and their families call Celebration home. Still, despite these local
developments, it would be a mistake to confuse Celebration and its indus-
tries with an ordinary high-technology region. As we will suggest in this
chapter, Celebration may represent a new stage for the techno-city, a tran-
scendent realm located somewhere between the real and the imagined.
Celebration began as Walt Disney’s utopian dream, born of the techno-
logical optimism of the 1920s and the 1930s—the optimism that culminated
132 Chapter 7
in the representations of the future city at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in New
York. This potent vision took concrete form in Disney’s theme parks and,
especially, in his plan for a real urban development that was to be known as
EPCOT (standing for Experimental Prototype Community Of Tomorrow).
The original concept drew broadly on American technical enthusiasms in
urban design, exemplified by Henry Ford’s 75-mile city, by Le Corbusier’s
Ville Radieuse and City of Towers, and even by Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing
Stories. It is a tradition that persists in the “futuropolis” ideas of Paolo Soleri.2
These exemplars of rational planning married to unbounded technical progress
were intended, through architecture, spatial configurations, transportation
systems, and other infrastructure, to shape the behaviors of the inhabitants for
the better.
This chapter will trace the evolution of Walt Disney’s new town idea
from EPCOT through the succeeding generation of Disney planners who
brought to the enterprise new ideas of urban design and future-oriented
technologies appropriate to the 1990s. Along with the “New Urbanism” and
the emphasis on the new information technologies, there is in Celebration
evidence of a continued belief in technology’s power to shape human
behavior and forms of social organization, which fits very comfortably in
the well-defined Disney corporate formula for success. The incongruities
inherent in this attempt to mold society via planning and high technology
will be evident in the history of the development of Disney’s new town.
After 1955, when Disneyland Park opened at Anaheim, California, the
Disney company found itself in an entirely new situation. It had gained a
great deal of experience in matters that were far from its original business of
animation, including transportation, electronic systems, crowd manipula-
tion, and the efficient handling of huge numbers of people. In short, the
Disney Company was facing problems that cities faced daily. It had also
established an international reputation for ingenuity and innovation.
In 1963, before a Harvard University audience, the developer James
Rouse—the creator of Columbia, Maryland, and a pioneer of “recre-
ational shopping” venues such as Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and
Harborplace in Baltimore—asserted that “the greatest piece of urban design
in the United States today is Disneyland.”3 Walt Disney was pleased with this
attention and liked to think optimistically of his role in molding the future.
Disney conceived the idea of a city that would be a living experiment show-
Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism 133
ing the way for others. According to the Disney Family Museum, “Walt
imagined Epcot as a real city, in which tens of thousands of people could
work and live—and enjoy the latest technologies produced by American cor-
porations.”4 “EPCOT,” Disney said, “would be like the city of tomorrow
ought to be . . . a planned, controlled community, a showcase for American
industry and research.” In Walt Disney’s original vision, EPCOT was to be a
model city for 20,000 Disney employees.5 (See figure 7.1.)
Walt Disney died on December 15, 1966, before Walt Disney World in
Florida was built and before EPCOT could be established. But he left a film
outlining his ideas, and by means of this film he “testified” posthumously
before the Florida legislature. The futuristic city EPCOT would be laid out
like a wheel, the hub containing a downtown under an air-conditioned
dome. The 50-acre downtown would contain a 30-story hotel, a convention
Figure 7.1
“Project X,” an early conception of the city EPCOT, as rendered by George Rester
and painted and modified by Herbert Ryman (1966). (© Disney Enterprises, Inc.)
134 Chapter 7
center, theaters, restaurants, shops, and office buildings. There would be a

minimum of traffic; monorails would connect the center with the residential
areas. High-density apartments and low-density housing in greenbelts would
serve a population of 20,000.6
In the film that was shown to the Florida legislature, Disney asked for
exemptions from existing building codes and regulations so that the Disney
company would have the “freedom to work with American industry” and
the “flexibility” . . . to keep pace with tomorrow’s world.”7 His wish was
granted in the form of the Reedy Creek Improvement District, which
has surprising—even startling—autonomy.8 From Disney’s viewpoint, the
Reedy Creek Improvement District drastically reduced the prospect of
messy politics interfering with the plan. It was necessary, Disney believed,
both to protect the company’s interests and the technocratic version of
utopia—an experimental city—that he was proffering.
Walt Disney’s plans were a variation on optimistic, consumption-oriented
utopian dreams like those imagined in Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking
Backward.9 And Howard’s Garden Cities of To-morrow was one of three vol-
umes that reportedly inspired his urban vision. Walt Disney’s successors at
the Disney corporation soon realized that Walt’s utopian plans placed great
burdens on the company. If they were to be carried out, the company would
be faced with enormous development costs, uncertain financial return, and
perhaps the political problems that go along with a real population. EPCOT
evolved into Epcot Center, an amusement park with ambitions—some
would say pretensions—to educate.
Epcot Center is a huge tract of land to the south and east of the Magic
Kingdom and the Disney Resort Hotels. It has two distinct areas: World
Showcase (in which various “nations” are represented) and Future World. The
latter has pavilions, each with a corporate sponsor, “celebrating the limitless
potential of science, industry and technology in creating a better tomorrow.”10
Instead of Disney’s original idea of a living “experimental community,” the new
version is a perpetual and vastly updated 1939 World’s Fair. It was a harbinger of
what two decades later would become a relatively big business: edu-tainment.
By the 1990s, the Walt Disney Company was in the hands of new people
and under different corporate circumstances, but there was a great deal of
continuity in its corporate culture. The old corporate culture—an extension
of Walt Disney—was a business selling the American idea of progress driven
by private initiative, know-how, up-to-dateness, and small-town values.
The new culture of the 1990s commodified these themes and wrapped them
in new packages appropriate to the times: community, environmental sensi-
tivity, social and ethnic diversity. It is important to note that in the business
environment of Disney in the 1990s the amusement parks were no longer
a mere addendum to a film empire; they were the driving force. Synergism
between parks, films, and merchandising is a powerful Disney strategy. At
Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort there emerged a ring of new “themed”
hotels and resorts displaying such synergism. It was in this context that, in
the early 1990s, Michael Eisner, then chief executive officer of the Walt
Disney Company, began to see a future for the undeveloped land west and
south of Epcot.
Eisner was fascinated by architecture, building design, and develop-
ment. Under his leadership, the Disney Company began a greatly acceler-
ated development strategy, the crown jewel of which—sometimes referred
to as “Dream City”—was an update of Walt Disney’s original concept
of a high-technology experimental prototype city.11 “Dream City” was
renamed Celebration (the choice, one version has it, of Eisner and his wife).
Celebration is a town for a projected population of 20,000 in about 8,000
housing units. It comprises nearly 5,000 acres, plus a greenbelt of com-
parable size to “protect” it from clutter such as is perceived to surround
California’s Disneyland.
Not only had the Disney Company evolved from Walt Disney’s ideas under
Eisner; prevailing ideas about architecture and urban design had changed too.
In 1966, the artist’s rendition of EPCOT depicted structures drawn from
1930s “futuristic” ideas and a modernist city with greenbelt-protected sub-
urbs. The original EPCOT city is strikingly reminiscent of the model city
of 1960 that Norman Bel Geddes created for the 1939 World’s Fair. The
new town of Celebration, on the other hand, draws heavily on post-modern
architecture and on the New Urbanism (an urban design movement popular
in the 1990s). Michael Graves is among the Walt Disney Company’s favored
architects. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, pioneers of the New
Urbanism, were brought into the planning of Celebration early on, and their
Florida town, Seaside, is one of the models for Celebration.
The concept of “New Urbanism” is somewhat loose, but most agree that
its ingredients include higher density than most suburbs allow, a disdain
for the automobile and a preference for the pedestrian, a positive attitude
136 Chapter 7
toward public transit, public open spaces, mixed land usage, and easy access
from residential areas to shops, schools, and workplaces. All of these together
are intended to encourage a closer sense of “community,” a notion often
invoked in this context but rarely defined. Here Celebration drew on the
experiences of the builders of Seaside, a resort town of about 80 acres on
the Gulf Coast.12 Some of these ideas were consonant with those of Walt
Disney (for example, “pedestrianism” and “community”), but most of them
developed in reaction to suburban sprawl and to the rise of edge or beltway
cities—changes that occurred long after Disney’s demise.
The Celebration Company opened the first phase of its master plan on July
4, 1996. By 2000, Celebration had about 1,500 residents in several hundred
homes and apartments, a downtown, and a business park. The model utopian
community was projected to take about 15 years to complete. Even in the
first decade of the twenty-first century, Celebration is a complex, evolv-
ing phenomenon with many interesting facets (political, cultural, aesthetic,
social, and technological). From the start it received a great deal of attention
from journalists, scholars, and cultural critics. Of special interest is the cultural
role of technology, both actual and ideological, in the new town.13
To the visitor, Celebration makes a bold and colorful first impres-
sion, but it seems at first glance far from the futuristic spectacle originally
envisioned by Walt Disney. A dramatic tension between the past and the
future has always been a hallmark of a Disney theme park. It is the tension
between the nostalgia of Main Street, U.S.A. and the futuristic wonder of
Tomorrowland. However, when it came to building Celebration—not a
fantasy world, but a real community for real people—the past seemed to
emerge triumphant. Celebration’s planners apparently believed that only a
return to the past could truly serve the imperatives of the new urbanism.
At first sight, then, futuristic technology—in fact, technology of any sort—
seems to have receded into the background at Celebration. The informed
visitor can easily discern the outlines of a Norman Rockwell scene in the
making: tree-lined streets, old-fashioned architectural styles, picket fences, a
golf course, a town square facing a small man-made lake. And everywhere
there are front porches, which Celebration’s planners saw as a prerequisite for
neighborhood intimacy. (See figure 7.2.) Conspicuously absent are any signs
of advanced forms of public transportation (such as that old Disney standby
the monorail), TV and radio towers, and other familiar accoutrements of
modern technological society.
Figure 7.2
A view of Teal Avenue in Celebration, Florida. (© The Celebration Company)
Celebration suggests a new model for the future of technological society,

a radical departure from the sort of futuristic thinking that animated Walt
Disney and his generation. It is fixated less on physical transformation than
on the essentially invisible but no less powerful applications of the telecom-
munications revolution—a revolution designed to give us both our past and
our future at the same time.
Despite their invisibility, advanced digital technologies played a prominent role
in the Disney scheme for Celebration. Disney’s promotional brochure proudly
listed technology as one of the five cornerstones anchoring the new community,
the others being place, health, education, and community. Information and
communications are the featured technologies. In the early days, the sales pitch
to prospective owners was made in techno-jargon meant to appeal to enthusiasts
of the Information Revolution. The telecommunications firm AT&T, which
at the time had the contract to build the local communications network for
Celebration, advertised its fiber-optics systems in breathless prose:
138 Chapter 7
When completed, the Celebration Network is envisioned to be a comprehensive,

digital, fiber-to-the-curb network providing voice, data and video communication
throughout the community. Plans called for the centerpiece of this infrastructure
to be an AT&T SLC-2000 Access System with FLX Switched Digital Video. The
System, a joint development between AT&T Network Systems and BroadBand
Technologies Inc., is planned to enable Celebration subscribers to obtain services
ranging from standard telephone service to full motion high-definition digital
interactive multimedia services.14
To implement the system, AT&T planned to invite Celebration’s first 300

families to participate in a “living laboratory” designed to “analyze and eval-
uate consumer attitudes and behavioral data concerning proposed products
and services.”15
Some of Celebration’s critics have decried its unbridled technologi-
cal enthusiasm. Yet what is remarkable about Celebration, in view of the
Disney Company’s record of technological flamboyance, is the attempt
to temper this enthusiasm with humanistic concern. According to Eisner,
“the real magic is not in the building, physical structures, or even in the
technology. . . . We are interested in the civic infrastructure, because it is the
human element that will make the community great.”16
Technology, in short, would seem tightly bonded to the community ideal,
the most important of the five “cornerstones” set down by Celebration’s
planners.
In an interview with the present authors, Joe Barnes, Celebration’s archi-
tectural manager and for a long time the arbiter of its rigidly controlled archi-
tectural standards, paid very little attention to the technological infrastructure;
that was someone else’s department. His eye was, rather, on aesthetic mat-
ters, on community values, and, above all, on tradition. In architectural
terms, “tradition” meant conformity to the six architectural styles deemed
acceptable for Celebration: Colonial Revival, Coastal, Classical, Victorian,
Mediterranean, and French. Customers were able to buy ready-made designs,
or they were free to use their own architects (who were then required to
adhere to the detailed specifications contained in a mammoth “pattern book”
developed by the Pittsburgh-based firm UDA Architects).
According to Barnes, the styles adopted for Celebration’s apartments and
homes reflected the demands of the market. Extensive surveys and focus
groups had determined that the public preferred the psychological comforts
of pre-World War II architectural styles. Inspired by these responses,

Celebration’s planners conducted extensive research in Southern vernacular
architecture, which eventually provided the template for most of the town’s
homes and apartment buildings.
But Celebration’s downtown departed from this vernacular tradition,
becoming instead a showcase for the creations of star architects. Among
these are a post office by Michael Graves, a bank by Robert Venturi and
Denise Scott Brown, a visitor center by Charles Moore, and a town hall by
Philip Johnson. Cast in colorful pastels, the downtown is a study in a kind
of conservative post-modernism. (See figure 7.3.) The only hint of futuristic
fantasy is in Cesar Pelli’s impressively spired two-theater cinema. (See figure
7.4.) Although designed as part of the master plan, Celebration’s downtown
looks less like a planned ensemble than a mélange of showpieces—a kind of
architectural theme park.
At Celebration—in sharp contrast to Buck Rogers-style futurism, in which
ultra-modern skyscrapers, crystalline domes, soaring highways, and personal
flying machines dominated or even defined imagined urban scenes—
technology is discreetly hidden. Celebration’s technologies are underground,
within the walls, or tucked in the garage behind the house. Disney’s planners
clearly sensed that familiar versions of technological progress no longer sold
Figure 7.3
Celebration’s downtown. (© The Celebration Company)
140 Chapter 7
Figure 7.4
Celebration’s Associated Cinemas, designed by Cesar Pelli. Used by permission of
The Celebration Company.
as they once had—at least when it came to how people want to live. They
worked hard to give the impression of subordinating technology to human
needs, rather than vice versa.
In terms of technical expectations, a visit to the first phase of model homes
in Celebration turned out to be almost anti-climactic. The only visible signs
of technology were baseboard outlets for a central vacuum cleaner system
and a slightly enhanced entertainment center housing a CD player, a com-
puter station, a radio, a television, and a video recorder.
Celebration’s developers did not claim that its technology per se was
anything more than state-of-the-art. What was new, they claimed, was the
application of an advanced fiber-optics network to the whole community
environment. They were particularly proud of the Celebration School, where
students “have access to the latest technology, and work in flexible ‘neigh-
borhood’ classrooms with a team of teachers.” The network was designed to
connect students’ homes with their schools and with an electronic library.
The Celebration Health Center, designed by Robert Stern Architects “in
the manner of a grand spa hotel” and emphasizing health maintenance, was
similarly high-tech. Plans included telemedicine facilities, allowing doctors,
for example, to monitor a patient’s heart rate and blood pressure via the net-
work. Among other future benefits of Celebration’s information network
promised by Disney were interactive banking, voting from home, virtual
offices at home, home energy management, instant communication among
the residences and between residents and community facilities and retail
establishments, and, not least, electronic home security networks linking each
resident to a central monitoring station.17 Clearly, however, Eisner and com-
pany had grand designs for this infrastructure. It was basic to their plan. The
Disney Company’s faith in information technology as a cornerstone of com-
munity may indeed seem, to some, utopian fantasy, but it is nothing new;
it is typical of the high—perhaps exaggerated—hopes frequently associated
with the telecommunications revolution. Information technology is often
seen as fostering egalitarianism, as shifting power from large urban centers to
towns and villages, and as preserving person-to-person communication in
mass society—all values of the “new urbanism.”18
Celebration’s communications system as originally designed was not only
an advance into the future; it was also a technological fix. Within 10 years of
Celebration’s opening, it was recognized that some of the early experiments
142 Chapter 7
in new urbanism were losing their original community spirit. According

to reports from the new urbanist frontier, citizens in Columbia, Maryland
have shown signs of putting self-interest before the welfare of the com-
munity. Evidence ranges from a preference for private over public schools
to avoidance of neighbors at mailboxes, which were purposely clustered
to promote encounters.19 In the face of these anti-communitarian trends,
information networks offer both physical privacy and personal communi-
cation. In a way, the new digital technologies offer a virtual community
should the physical community flag. Even if people decline to sit on all
those front porches in Celebration, they can at least meet on the Internet.
Even allowing for the fact that Celebration is still evolving, a visitor will find
that there are remarkably few people on the street, and almost none on their
porches. Whether the new information networks will work for or against
the communitarian ethos so many desire is yet to be worked out on stages
larger than Celebration. Perhaps the Celebration case study will ultimately
illuminate the issue.20
Moreover, whether the new information networks ultimately empower
the individual and the village or instead greatly enhance the power of cen-
tral authorities is one of the great questions of modern technological soci-
ety. The reaction to Celebration has been ambivalent in this respect. Those
skeptical of Disney’s utopian aspirations emphasize the disturbing aspects
of communications technologies, while the believers, of course, emphasize
the positive.21 Critical reaction to Celebration has tended to reflect modern
society’s general ambivalence about the Information Revolution.
The initial public response to the opening of Celebration was extraordi-
nary. So many customers lined up to purchase new homes in Celebration that
the Company had to institute a lottery. Twelve hundred people paid $1,000
deposits just to make an appointment to discuss buying a lot.22 The winners
were first in line to build residences in the new town, billed as “a nineteenth-
century town for the late twentieth century.” Not only potential residents,
but also journalists, academics, architects, builders, and sightseers patrolled the
streets of the downtown and the unfinished neighborhoods. The early apprais-
als, as expected, were mixed. John Kasarda of the Kenan Institute of Private
Enterprise at the University of North Carolina was positive: “Disney again
has its thumb on the pulse of the American public.” Patrick Burke of Michael
Graves Architects declared “I think they’ve done the right thing. . . . I just wish
it had a different name.” Peter Miller, an urban planner at the University of

Miami, opined on the allure of the Disney “name.” Visitors’ reactions varied.
A retiree said “Anything Disney touches, everything they do is first class.”
A psychologist from a nearby town said “This really scares me. I just asked the
girl if she heard of the movie The Stepford Wives and she hadn’t. I’m not sure
I believe that.” Some visitors rejected the insistent emphasis on community:
“I want my privacy.”23 Some early residents, as if expecting McGuffey’s Reader,
were dismayed by the experimental ideas for schooling.
Some architectural and planning professionals, too, were dissenters. John
Henry, an Orlando architect, called Celebration “a subdivision on steroids”
and said “There is nothing cultural there, nothing scenic there. . . . A nucleus for
a community it is not.” Aesthetically, Henry maintained, Celebration reeks of
“pastel banality with homogeneous finish (due to single developer build-out of
the entire ensemble and too much stucco finish).”24 A Florida developer who
chose to remain anonymous said “It looks more like an amusement park to me.
Everything is so cutesy and looks so artificial, like out of a Disney movie.”25
The Celebration concept found its market. Many people found the
Disney corporation comforting. For example, the Erharts sold their home
in the Maryland suburb of Rockville and moved to Celebration, where they
spent more than $550,000 (1996 dollars) on their new home. “If it wasn’t
Disney,” said Joe Erhart, “we wouldn’t be moving there.”26 Many willingly
traded political responsibility for what they perceived to be a benevolent
and protective corporate authority associated with the Disney image.27 In a
perceptive account of his year in Celebration, the sociologist Andrew Ross
emphasized the “blurring of the lines between public and private.” It was,
he wrote, “the embodiment of something called the private-public realm.”
Walt Disney made that the heart of his original concept, and his version of
“private government” was part of its attractiveness to many of its residents.
“Most Celebrationites,” according to Ross, “were attracted to the efficiency
of private government. . . . Many spoke to me of their loss of faith in pub-
lic institutions.”28 Their faith seems to lie with the Disney corporation and
with its grip on the future. The sociologist Sharon Zukin pointed out that
EPCOT joined “entertainment values to motifs of social control.” As origi-
nally conceived, it was to embody a “conservative utopia,” with comfort
designed in and conflict designed out. Celebration appears to have confirmed
her judgment.29
144 Chapter 7
On the surface it may seem that Celebration is not the high-tech utopia
that Walt Disney envisioned shortly before his death. In a New Yorker article
titled “Tomorrowland,” Witold Rybczynski wrote that Michael Eisner’s
Celebration is actually the opposite of Walt Disney’s urban vision. Whereas
Disney imagined a world in which problems would be solved by science
and technology, Celebration puts technology in the background and con-
centrates on putting in place the less tangible civic infrastructure that is a
prerequisite for community.30 But is it really the opposite? Celebration is
a 1990s version of the blend of technology and old-fashioned values that
Walt Disney held dear. Most journalists and commentators, when discussing
Celebration, invoke the name of Norman Rockwell, conjuring up images
of the small-town America of the past. But though outwardly Celebration
may bring to mind Norman Rockwell, underneath it is more like Rockwell
International, the aerospace company.
The advertising for Celebration invoked the small-town, homespun image,
but it also emphasized high technology. (See figure 7.5.) Early on, prospec-
tive residents were often reminded of the “feature-rich communications tap-
estry” provided by AT&T’s Advanced Technology Panel for Celebration.31
Figure 7.5
A promotional image from an advertisement for Celebration. (© The Celebration
Company)
The Economist noted that “what people want in their homes . . . are all the
conveniences and technology of modern life, but hidden in ‘timeless’ archi-
tecture.”32 Inside the small-town skin, a fiber-optics network was to link
every resident to the Internet and to Celebration’s own network. When the
industry standard changed, the ads claimed, so would Celebration’s advo-
cacy. A brochure on Celebration’s “strategic alliances” boasts an impres-
sive list of high-tech companies, including AT&T, Honeywell, and General
Electric. Andrew Ross explains that these allies (which the Disney Company
sometimes calls “coopetitors”) are there “to showcase their names and
products.”33
Celebration was, in fact, a better-thought-out combination of Walt
Disney’s Main Street nostalgia with his love for the “futuristic” than his
original 1966 idea for EPCOT. Celebration was built on a shrewd “techno-
nostalgia” that combines a yearning for a mythical “way it used to be” with
a profound admiration for technical progress.
In a deep sense, Celebration remained true to Disney’s enduring formula
for success: draw out from within each of us our images and stereotypes,
and use clever techniques to make them “real.” Whether by means of fairy-
tale films, Epcot World Showcase pavilions, the Magic Kingdom Park, or
resort hotels with simulated histories, the Disney visitor is furnished with
memories of a simulated past. These “memories” reinforce the images or
stereotypes that the visitor already possesses upon arrival. For example, in
Epcot’s World Showcase France pavilion one finds men in berets, striped
shirts, and neckerchiefs; in the Japan pavilion, women in kimonos; in the
Germany pavilion, men in lederhosen. One guest excitedly exclaimed that
he “saw more here in two hours than . . . in two weeks in Europe.” What
Disney does, and does expertly, is draw out these constructed memories
from each individual and make them tangible with flair, style, and technical
wizardry. The simulation becomes, in a sense, more real than the original.
While crowds are gaping at artificial alligators in some pirate’s lagoon in
the Magic Kingdom Park, few are encountering real alligators a few short
miles away in a Florida river. Celebration does precisely the same. It invokes
a simpler, more neighborly life, one that draws more from Andy Hardy
movies than from historical research or living memory. Consider this pas-
sage from a Celebration brochure titled “Downtown Celebration Walking
Tour”:
146 Chapter 7
Before World War II, many Americans lived in small towns, enjoying a convivial
and comparatively simple existence. The intimacy of small town life has vanished
over the past five decades. As cities grew and suburbs sprawled, neighborliness
became little more than a memory. Celebration is designed to offer a return to a
more sociable and civic-minded way of life.
As one commentator has put it, Celebration “promises to enact memo-

ries that most Americans have never experienced but desperately desire.”34
But even though Celebration may present itself as old-fashioned in the best
sense, it insists on its futuristic credentials. Consider this, from a brochure
titled “Celebration Network”:
Every apartment and home in Celebration will be linked by a fiber optic network
that will carry telephone, video and all data services. The idea is old-fashioned one-
on-one communication, but with sophisticated technology.
Russ Rymer, in a perceptive article titled “Back to the Future: Disney

Reinvents the Company Town,” characterized Walt Disney as the Louis
Pasteur of history—as a man who perfected ways to protect people from the
viral effects of memory by injecting it back into them in a denatured form.
As long as the technique was used in the service of amusement, it could
be very amusing. Applied to public life, as it is in Celebration, it becomes
something more grave.35
Savoring constructed memory is one thing; trying to “relive” it is another.
Celebration’s planners understood very well that few citizens were prepared
to return to a small-town past, even if that were possible—no matter how
inviting the “memory.” Twentieth-century Americans left the security of
small towns for the cities, and then the suburbs, for a variety of compelling
reasons, including jobs, schools, health care, consumer goods, and cultural
life. To be sure, a reverse trend is now under way. But, as we have seen,
even carefully planned experimental communities such as Columbia are los-
ing some of the communitarian ideals that were deemed so important by
their founders.
No small part of Disney’s genius in selling Celebration was to combine
the inducements of a rose-tinted past with those of a fabricated future—a
sort of reverse nostalgia. Disney advertises a new brand of futurism based
on the promises of up-to-date technologies.36 Since the full implications of
new technologies are always only partially understood, what Celebration

offers is as much an incompletely drafted hope as a reality. Whether these
technological advantages can make the urban village work for a new gen-
eration of Americans remains to be seen.37 But, as Disney theme parks have
proved beyond a doubt, a simulated past and a fantasy future make a potent
blend—a blend that few consumers can resist.
Celebration is, appropriately, our last example of the techno-city. We
live in a world in which, by choice, artificial or virtual experiences increas-
ingly substitute for real ones. Stage-set cities increasingly replace real ones
as desirable tourist destinations. The popularity of Disneylands in Japan and
France (with their ersatz visits to America’s Main Street and Wild West) and
that of Florida’s Epcot (with its “France,” “Germany,” and “Japan” pavil-
ions) attest to the trend. Las Vegas, too, has become Disney-fied—consider
the Paris Las Vegas Hotel (with its Eiffel Tower), the New York, New York
Hotel (with popular local landmarks conveniently bunched together), and
the Venetian Hotel (with its “almost exactly to scale” Piazza San Marco).
In a world in which one of the most important industries is entertain-
ment, movies and television programs have become “experiences” for most
people. All aspects of culture consequently tend to veer toward entertain-
ment and are measured by its standards. Architecture becomes an “attrac-
tion”; museums are increasingly organized around “blockbuster” shows
(Impressionism preferred); all levels of education are required to be amusing
as well as edifying. So too is it with cities. Celebration is a fantasy to live in.
To grasp this concept more fully, one need only visit the town in winter
and witness, on the half-hour, the artificial snowfall. Children and adults in
shorts and tank tops cheerfully frolic in ersatz snow. Truly, at one and the
same time, it is jolly and creepy.
Throughout the twentieth century, actual techno-cities were faced
with contradictions, some of which were impossible to erase. An artificial
experience, on the other hand, is much easier to control. Since we “experi-
ence” the world of fun and imagination at Walt Disney World Resort, the
planners of Celebration ask (innocently enough), why not live in it?
C o ncl u s i on: T he Fate of the Industr ial Eden
Techno-cities, as we have defined them, abounded in the twentieth cen-

tury, but we make no claims about the existence of a techno-cities “move-
ment.” If not a movement, techno-cities represented an ideal. This new
vision of technology in the country had its prophets. As seminal influences,
certain names surface repeatedly, Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Lewis
Mumford, and Tracy Auger among the most prominent. These men—who
were aware of one another and who often referred to one another—went
on to influence other visionaries and men of action: Herbert Rimpl,
Vladimir Semionov, Franco Marinotti, Andrea Olivetti, Oskar Stonorov,
James Marshall, Lloyd Rodwin, and Jean-Paul Lacaze.
But, more than a dispassionate high ideal, techno-cities were inventions with
politics, exemplars of ideology frozen in concrete, brick, and steel. An ideology
is a framework of ideas that structures the way individuals and groups look at the
world.1 These organized beliefs were part of the great early-twentieth-century
obsession with the impact of modern science and technology on society. There
was really only one basic question: Does science-based technology ultimately
improve or worsen the human condition, and, if the latter, can technology
heal what it has injured?
As we have observed, every techno-city had at its core a deep structural ten-
sion, a fault line waiting to break. It was a tension arising from trying to bind
together two seemingly opposed ideals: that of modern technology and indus-
try and that of a pre-industrial Eden. Combining hopes or expectations for the
future with a yearning for the past engendered what we term “techno-nostalgia.”
These were fundamental contradictions within the culture of modernity.
Modernism brought with it the Machine and urbanization, forces widely
celebrated as progressive and liberating. But to some it was a problematic
150 Conclusion
b enefactor. From the beginning, the modernist camp bred renegades, still
believers, to be sure, but wary of the dark side of the modern. These dis-
senters focused on the human costs of technology. Were the benefits of the
machine, automation, and the industrial city worth the degradation of work,
the ravages to the natural and the human-built environment, the loss of com-
munity, and the wounds to the human spirit? Such views did not represent the
abandonment of modernism, but rather exposed inner contradictions within
modernist ideology. As David Harvey and Jeffrey Herf have pointed out,
modernism both extolled and condemned technology.2 Unlike those radicals
who called for destroying the machine and returning to a pre-industrial Eden,
the modernist reformers sought reconciliation between machines and soci-
ety. Assuming that society and the environment are mutually shaping, their
solutions were in effect evolutionary and ecological. They offered holistic
and organic interpretations of the relationship between nature, technology,
and community.
At once fascinated and repulsed by the Machine, pioneering modernist
critics like Sigfried Giedion and Lewis Mumford embodied the two sides of
modernism. Reconciliation came in the form of holistic reintegration of man
into his natural and artificial environments.3 Both regarded the aesthetics and
spirit of the built environment as essential to man’s spiritual regeneration.
The invention of the techno-city offered a concrete approach to harnessing
a new kind of technology to the cause of harmony and community.
Our city-builders approached technology as both problem and solution.
This paradox is more generally a birth spasm of modernity, a concept rede-
fined by industrialism during the course of the nineteenth century. The
Industrial Revolution was a rapid, dramatic alteration in the conditions of
life in Western European nations (led by Great Britain, France, and later
Germany), and also in the United States. Driven by technology and new
forms of industrial and commercial practice, the first Industrial Revolution
created new social classes and drove dramatic increases in population, a rise
in food production and distribution, and the creation of immense cities.
These cities became both causes and effects of change. They became both
the producers and the products of “the modern.”
What defined “the modern”? As Marx and others saw, industrialism—
especially in its capitalist form—instituted a regime of endless and seemingly
limitless transformation. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Marx
The Fate of the Industrial Eden 151
and Engels described the new age: “Constant revolutionizing of production,

uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty
and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed,
fast-frozen relations . . . are swept away, all new-formed ones become anti-
quated before they can ossify.”4 What defines modernity is the core belief
that this constant change can be controlled and rationalized.
The second industrial revolution, coming late in the nineteenth century,
bonded science and technology, institutionalized that bond, and held out
the promise of the production of knowledge and the fruits of knowledge—
a cornucopia of new technologies. The dark side of industrialism, already
apparent in London, Manchester, Pittsburgh, Chicago, and elsewhere, dem-
onstrated the effects of congestion, pollution, and disease. And the cure?
The remedy suggested was a blend of old and new, of past and present, of
nature and artifice.
Techno-cities used technology in two primary ways. Some were designed
to support a dominant central technology; others incorporated new tech-
nologies in their infrastructures. Most used technology in both ways.
Central technologies ranged from Salzgitter’s heavy industries in mining
and steel, the TVA’s hydro-electric power, Willow Run’s bomber facto-
ries and Oak Ridge’s nuclear weapons plants to lighter research-based tech-
nologies in viscose at Torviscosa, pharmaceuticals at Le Vaudreuil, office
machines in Ivrea, and entertainment technologies at Disney’s Celebration
—Mumfordian neotechnics. Infrastructure technologies embraced inno-
vative building techniques and materials like “Cemesto” (Oak Ridge) and
“gas-concrete” (Salzgitter), public housing experiments at Willow Run,
architectural modernism in Salzgitter and Ivrea, traffic and demographic
studies produced for Ciudad Guayana, environmental plans for Salzgitter,
Torviscosa, and Le Vaudreuil, and the Internet-based communications
network designed into Celebration.
Allowing for national and regional differences, techno-cities shared certain
basic characteristics, similarities born of a common response to a changing
international political, economic, and cultural environment. All represented
a reaction against the classic industrial city. Most were rooted in Howard’s
original Garden City concept: the three-way marriage of town and coun-
try and industry, and a faith in a revamped modern technology. They were
designed to be towns of strictly defined geographical and population limits,
152 Conclusion
with walkable streets and distances, separate but closely connected work and
residential areas, open air, recreation spaces, and greenbelts. For the most
part, they also shared ideological goals: the renewal of mankind (Mussolini’s
“uomo nuovo”), regionalism (Olivetti’s plan for the Valle d’Aosta, the
Regional Planning Association of America’s ideals for Norris), community
(Ivrea), organic ideologies (Rimpl’s concept for Salzgitter), the melding of
agriculture and industry (Torviscosa and I-RUR in Olivetti’s Canavese),
back to the soil (Salzgitter), and romantic love of Nature (Ivrea and, to some
extent, Oak Ridge).
Despite these common features, techno-cities displayed significant
regional and national differences. They were designed as local solutions,
with hoped-for wider implications. Back-to-the-soil dogmas, strongest in
the 1930s and the 1940s, firmly rooted the techno-city in its place, where it
occupied a unique ecological niche. Thus, Salzgitter resembled but did not
mirror contemporary Torviscosa, nor was postwar Ivrea in any sense a clone
of Fascist Torviscosa. All powerfully reflected different local conditions.
The techno-city proved to be an exceptionally durable instrument,
mainly because of its adaptability. It had none of the rigidities or limita-
tions of a dyed-in-the-wool ideological movement. For more than a cen-
tury, it served widely disparate agendas. Bellamy, Howard, Geddes, and
Mumford used it as an escape from the industrial city. Wedding utopian
ism with innovative technology, they provided the foundations of the
techno-city concept. Recovering from World War I and confronting the
Depression, governments in the United States, Russia, Germany, and Italy
seized on the techno-city for purposes of cultural and economic regenera-
tion. Roosevelt’s New Deal, Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, Mussolini’s Autarchy,
and Hitler’s vision of a Third Reich produced technologically enhanced
Edens that were to be the birthplaces of a “new man.” The techno-city of
the late 1920s and the 1930s thus had a special romantic allure.
The realities of World War II dispelled much of this romanticism, but the
mystique of the techno-city lived on, turning now to war work. Drawing
on experiences in the TVA and on futuristic exhibitions at World’s Fairs,
the planners of Oak Ridge hoped that the Garden City notion combined
with modern building techniques would mitigate the harsh realities of
working and living in the strange new world of nuclear weapons. They
undertook the ultimate challenge of converting a nuclear weapons site into
a classic American small town, a feat of architectural alchemy. The techno-

city seemed to provide the answer. It even found a place in the postwar
urban dispersal movement as a means of coping with nuclear apocalypse.
But despite these war-related projects, the techno-city ideal seemed to be
in retreat.
A revival of a sort occurred in northern Italy. Restoring community was
an aim for all techno-cities, but in Adriano Olivetti’s vision of Ivrea, comu-
nità became a supreme goal. A man of grand philosophical and aesthetic
vision, Olivetti saw in his family’s original company town the basis for a
new form of community that would restore war-ravaged Italy to its former
glory. With him we have the vision of utopia as work of art.
Indeed, it was a reaction against grand artistic approaches that led down
another road to utopia. Lloyd Rodwin and like-minded planners turned
to scientific multi-disciplinary methods that signaled a major shift in the
approach to the techno-city. Ciudad Guayana was undertaken by the MIT-
Harvard team not primarily for the sake of Venezuelans but as an experiment
to prove the efficacy of their theoretical approach. This was a significant
turning point for the concept of the techno-city.
The sociologist Max Weber distinguishes between two rationalities:
Zweckrationalität (instrumental rationality) and Wertrationalität (values
rationality). The former is the sagacity of means; the latter establishes the
ends or goals. Instrumental reason helps us to move efficiently from point
A to point B. Values rationality helps us to define or understand those end
points. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City idea, subsequently embraced by
Geddes and Mumford, was a means to a clearly defined “values rational”
goal: namely, a humane life, harmonious with the natural world and, owing
to neotechnics, in tune as well with the constructed environment. This
value-permeated, idea-rich end is often termed “utopian.”
But instrumental reason tends to crowd out other forms of rationality.
Technique, especially successful technique, has its own special magnetism.
It was the plan, the technique of marrying country and city, of uniting the
natural and the artificial, that was taken up, at first by the newly emerging
profession of city planners and subsequently as a means of national regen-
eration by state planners during the course of the 1930s. Part of the plan-
ning vocabulary by the post-World War II period, it fit snugly into atomic
age decentralization and diffusion civil defense strategies. It was the postwar
154 Conclusion
reconstruction of Europe that gave Olivetti and his disciples the opportu-
nity to resurrect the goals of Howard, Geddes, and Mumford as part of
his values-centered movement of comunità. By the mid 1950s, in most
of the Western world, such utopianism had begun to appear quaint. The
planned city was not only to be professionalized, it was to be scientized
and engineered. Ciudad Guayana benefited from a team of social scientists;
Minnesota Experimental City was planned as a “prototype”; Le Vaudreuil’s
planning was to be “flexible.” In the end, even the powerful instrumental-
ity of science and technology would give way to the power of marketing.
Celebration, Florida marks the transformation of the utopian socio-political
goals of the founders into a myth—a myth, moreover, commodified and
attractively packaged.
All the techno-cities examined in this book still exist today. Their core
industries continue to sustain them. Some of those industries, includ-
ing Torviscosa’s SNIA/Caffaro and the nuclear industries at Oak Ridge,
are thriving. But, with the possible exception of the contested ideals of
Celebration, it is fair to say that little of the initial idealism lives on. These
techno-cities survive as hollow shells. This is not surprising, since their time
has passed; there is nothing quite so stale as last year’s utopia. What finally
defeated them, however, were the inner contradictions of the attempt to
combine big technology and nature. In short, the center was too weak to
hold. The machine in the garden is a seductive dream, but a problematic
reality. Hence, judged by the standards they had set for themselves, Norris,
Torviscosa, Salzgitter, Ivrea, Ciudad Guayana, and other towns discussed in
this book were ultimately failures.
Perhaps the model was flawed from the beginning. In the final chapter of
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs criticized Ebenezer
Howard’s Garden City model as a simplistic solution to the complex prob-
lem of cities—simplistic because it was based on outdated physical science:
Garden City planning theory had its beginnings in the late nineteenth century,
and Ebenezer Howard attacked the problem of town planning much as if he were
a nineteenth-century physical scientist analyzing a two-variable problem of sim-
plicity. The two major variables in the Garden City concept of planning were
the quantity of housing (or population) and the number of jobs. These two were
conceived of as simply and directly related to each other, in the form of rela-
tively closed systems. In turn, the housing had its subsidiary variables, related to
it in equally direct, simple, mutually independent form: playgrounds, open space,

schools, community center, standardized supplies and services. The town as a
whole was conceived of, again, as one of the two variables in a direct, simple,
town-greenbelt relationship. As a system of order, that is about all there was to it.
And on this simple base of two-variable relationships was created an entire theory
of self-contained towns as a means of redistributing the population of cities and
(hopefully) achieving regional planning.5
Jacobs argues that cities are not two-variable mechanical systems but living,
organized structures with myriad variables—systems of organized complex-
ity. They are organizations of living entities. And, as such, cities must be
understood in biological rather than physical terms. From her vantage point
of the early 1960s, Jacobs argued that solutions will come from new
approaches suggested by the biological sciences.
If we accept Jacobs’s argument, the techno-city was based on an obsolete
form, a simplistic utopian scheme for a complex age, and perhaps destined
for failure. Yet we would argue that the techno-city did evolve beyond
Howard’s Garden City model in some of the directions Jacobs suggests.
In Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford advanced a theory of “organic
mechanism” to supersede the classical mechanical view of the universe.6
This theory, Mumford contended, would reconcile the machine and urban
civilization. The organic metaphors Rimpl used in Salzgitter, endemic to
Nazi thought, similarly invoked contemporary shifts in scientific paradigms
from the physical to the vitalistic and biological, with cell theory providing a
model of hierarchical organization for the town. More generally, Olivetti’s
artistic approach represented an attempt to grasp the living complexity of
human social organization. In comparison, perhaps the attempt to scientize
the process of techno-cities at Ciudad Guayana or Minnesota Experimental
City was a step backward in engineering human relations. The fact remains
that the techno-city was a complex historical phenomenon whose rise and
fall require intricate scrutiny.
In any event, the techno-city experiment had largely run its course by
2000. Having lost that inner spark of idealism, most techno-cities have been
absorbed in conurbations as industrial nodes or as bedroom communities, dis-
solving into suburbia. Techno-cities have been succeeded by “technopoles”
such as Northern California’s Silicon Valley, the Boston area’s Route 128,
and Sophia Antipolis near Nice; by the growing fad for technology corridors
156 Conclusion
around the world; by the rise of edge cities such as Tysons Corner, Virginia;
and by “science cities” such as Tsukuba, on the outskirts of Tokyo. These
new forms can be dynamic and economically robust, but they are devoid of
utopian impulse and increasingly immersed in their own urban problems.
In comparison with their rather soulless successors, despite repugnant fas-
cist dogmas in 1930s Germany and Italy, our fading techno-cities might be
judged bold social experiments. Most of them arose in response to crises—
urban blight, disease, social and political revolution, national humiliation,
economic depression, environmental devastation, war (even nuclear war).
In such trying circumstances, visionaries of various stripes dared to dream
of inventing a new Eden. Although no city plan could ever live up to such
high expectations, each of these ventures offered hopes for a new beginning
and, at a least for a time, made those hopes into a living reality.
Notes
Introduction
1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Houghton Mifflin, 1960 [1854]), 215.
2. Krishan Kumar, Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Blackwell, 1987),
419–420.
3. Robert Fishman, “The Bounded City,” in From Garden City to Green City: The Legacy
of Ebenezer Howard, ed. K. Parsons and D. Schuyler ( Johns Hopkins University Press,
2002), 61; Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia (Macmillan, 1988), 47, 133;
Françoise Choay, The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (Braziller, 1970), 30.
4. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1989), 276–277, 303.
5. Bill Kirkpatrick argues in his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation Localism in

American Media, 1920–1934 (University of Wisconsin, Madison) that the local-
national split influenced the shape of early American broadcasting.
6. Robert Wiebe defined it as a split between local power and politics and “national-
class values” (Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy, University of
Chicago Press, 1995, 144–149).
Chapter 1
1. Ruskin (1881) is quoted in Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European
and American Thought 1820–1840 (Columbia University Press, 1985), 39.
2. Robert Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard
(Macmillan, 1988), 2–7. Our understanding of Howard also owes a significant debt
158 notes to chapter 1
to Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank
Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (Basic Books, 1977), 23–88.
3. Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History
(Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1953), passim.
4. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 27–28.
5. Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000–1887 (Signet, 1960 [1888]), 73.
6. Ibid., 43. On Bellamy as a city planner see John Mullin and Kenneth Payne,
“Thoughts on Edward Bellamy as City Planner: The Ordered Art of Geometry,”
Planning History Studies 11 (1997): 17–29.
7. Stephen V. Ward, “Ebenezer Howard: His Life and Times,” in From Garden City
to Green City: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard, ed. K. Parsons and D. Schuyler ( Johns
Hopkins University Press, 2002), 19.
8. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 53–54; Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 30.
9. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 40–42.
10. Ibid.,57
11. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow, ed. F. Osborn (MIT Press,
1965), 44–49. We are using the edition of Garden Cities of To-morrow edited by
Osborn, which restores the elisions from the 1898 edition.
12. Ibid., 51–57.
13. See Peter Hall and Colin Ward, Sociable Cities: The Legacy of Ebenezer Howard
(Wiley, 1998), 25–28
14. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 27.
15. Dugald Macfadyen, Sir Ebenezer Howard and the Town Planning Movement (MIT
Press, 1970), 25–26.
16. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 57–62.
17. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 79.

notes to chapter 1 159
18. Fishman, Urban Utopias, 64–68, 80; Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 92–98, 103.
19. Ward, “Ebenezer Howard,” 28.
20. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia, 98.
21. P. Geddes, “Civics: as Applied Sociology,” in F. Galton, E. Westermarck,

P. Geddes, et al., Sociological Papers, volume 1 (Macmillan, 1905), 105.
22. Ibid., 106, 119–123; Geddes, “Civics: as Concrete and Applied Sociology,
Part II,” in F. Galton, P. Geddes, M. Sadler, et al. Sociological Papers, volume 2
(1906), 83–92.
23. Patrick Geddes, Cities in Evolution (1950 [1915]), 32–42.
24. Pierre Clavel, “Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes,” in From Garden City to
Green City, ed. Parsons and Schuyler, 47–52.
25. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life (Dial, 1982), 144–149. For broad interpreta-
tions of Mumford and Geddes, see Thomas Hughes and Agatha Hughes, eds., Lewis
Mumford: Public Intellectual (Oxford University Press, 1990).
26. Arthur Molella, “Mumford in Historiographical Context,” in Lewis Mumford,

ed. Hughes and Hughes, 23–27. On Geddes, see also Rosalind Williams, “Mumford
as an Historian of Technology,” in ibid., 43–65.
27. Lewis Mumford, The Story of Utopias (Boni and Liveright, 1922), 33, 138, 205,
218, 229–230.
28. Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes, Correspondence, ed. F. Novak Jr. (Rout
ledge, 1995), 43–153.
29. Mumford to Geddes, 25 March 1923, in ibid., 172
30. Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 115. See also Planning the
Fourth Migration: The Neglected Vision of the Regional Planning Association of America,
ed. C. Sussman (MIT Press, 1976), 17–21; Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the
1920’s: The Contribution of the Regional Planning Association of America (University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1963).
31. Mark Luccarelli, Lewis Mumford and the Ecological Region: The Politics of Planning
(Guilford,1995), 77. See also Kermit Parsons, “Collaborative Genius: The Regional
160 notes to chapters 1and 2
Planning Association of America,” Journal of the American Planning Association 60

(1994), 462–482.
32. Mumford to Geddes, 9 July 1926, in Mumford and Geddes, Correspondence, 248
33. “The Regional Community,” in The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925): 129.
34. Lewis Mumford, “Regions—To Live In,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV
(1925), 151–152.
35. Clarence Stein, “Dinosaur Cities,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV (1925),
134–138.
36. Lewis Mumford, “The Fourth Migration,” The Survey: Graphic Number LIV
(1925), 131–133.
37. Benton MacKaye to Ellery A. Foster, 30 July 1940, in Mumford Papers,

University of Pennsylvania. A separate letter, written by Mumford to MacKaye in July
1940, is quoted in this letter. Compare ideas of a Lost Eden and techno-nostalgia with
Bacon’s notion of a “Second Creation,” as discussed in Thomas P. Hughes, Human-
Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (University of Chicago Press,
2004).
38. Wojtowicz, Lewis Mumford and American Modernism, 142–143; Archer Winsten,
“The City Goes to the Fair,” New York Post, June 23, 1939.
39. The City, presented by American Institute of Planning; directed and photo-
graphed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke; commentary by Lewis Mumford.
Chapter 2
1. Robert Beevers, A Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard
(St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 177–178.
2. Catherine Cooke, “Russian Responses to the Garden City,” Architectural Review
163 (1978), 353, 356.
3. S. Frederick Starr, “The Revival and Schism of Urban Planning in Twentieth-
Century Russia,” in The City in Russian History, ed. M. Hamm (University of
Kentucky Press, 1976), 232–234. Semionov is described as a “student” of Howard
on p. 78 of Andrew Elam Day’s Ph.D. dissertation, Building Socialism: The Politics
of the Soviet Cityscape in the Stalin Era (Columbia University, 1998).
4. Cooke, “Russian Responses,” 357.
5. Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture (Rizzoli, 1987), 274. See also
R. Antony French, Plans, Pragmatism and People: The Legacy of Soviet Planning for Today’s
Cities (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 31–32; Starr, “Revival and Schism,” 236.
6. George Sprague, “Introduction” to N. A. Miliutin, Sotsgorod: The Problem of

Building Socialist Cities (MIT Press, 1974), 5
7. French, Plans, Pragmatism and People, 35–37.
8. Milka Bliznakov, “Urban Planning in the USSR: Integrative Theories,” in Hamm,
The City in Russian History, 246–248; Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers, 284–285.
9. Bliznakov, “Urban Planning in the USSR,” 249, Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers, 335
10. Ervin Galantay, New Towns: Antiquity to the Present (Braziller, 1975), 55.
11. Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 50, 54, 60.
12. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Marx
and Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed. L. Feuer (Doubleday Anchor,
1959), 28.
13. Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 56, 60.
14. On the building of Magnitogorsk, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain:

Stalinism as a Civilization (University of California Press, 1995).
15. French, Plans, Pragmatism and People, 45. On Semionov’s role see Day, Building
Socialism, 92–96.
16. For an account of a later Soviet techno-city, see Paul Josephson, New Atlantis
Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton University Press, 1997).
17. Miliutin, Sotsgorod, 120.
18. Judson King, The Conservation Fight (Public Affairs Press, 1959), 98.
19. “Ford Plans a City 75 Miles in Length,” New York Times, January 12, 1922.
20. Preston Hubbard, Origins of the TVA (Vanderbilt University Press, 1961), 40.
21. Littell McClung, “The Seventy-Five Mile City,” Scientific American, September
1922, 156.
22. Ibid., 214.
23. “Ford Tells What He Hopes to Do with Muscle Shoals,” Automotive Industries
47 (October 19, 1922), 753.
24. L. Mumford to P. Geddes, January 15, 1922, in Lewis Mumford and Patrick
Geddes, The Correspondence, ed. F. Novak (Routledge, 1995), 115–116.
25. “Ford Tells,” 753.
26. Allan Nevins and F. E. Hill, Ford: Expansion and Challenge 1915–1933 (Scribner,
1957), 227.
27. George H. Gall, “Making Farm Life Profitable and Pleasant: Building a Farm
City,” National Real Estate Journal 24 (May 21, 1923): 29–32, 29.
28. John L. Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement:
A History of Culture Change and Response, 1900–1940, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1964, 396–397; Lower Charlotte Reconnaissance
Report, Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program, Draft, 2005, 25; Richard
Amero, “John Nolen,” http://members.cox.net/ramero.
29. Reynold Wik, Henry Ford and Grass-Roots America (University of Michigan
Press, 1972), 193.
30. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Growing Up by Plan,” The Survey 67 (February 1, 1932), 483.
31. Walter Creese, TVA’s Public Planning (University of Tennessee Press, 1990),
38–39; Donald Krueckeberg, “Norris and Environmental Tradition,” paper pre-
sented at conference A Planned Community: Norris Tennessee after 50 Years,
October 14–16, 1983, 7–8.
32. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 38–39.
33. Paul Conkin, “Intellectual and Political Roots,” in E. Hargrove and P. Conkin,
TVA: Fifty Years of Grass-Roots Bureaucracy (University of Illinois Press, 1983), 24.
34. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Public Papers and Addresses (Random House, 1938),
486–487, 494.
notes to chaPter 2 163
35. Roosevelt, quoted in Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 51.
36. Roosevelt, Address at Oglethorpe University, May 1932, in Public Papers and
Addresses, 642.
37. Roosevelt, “Informal Extemporaneous Remarks, January 21, 1933,” in Public

Papers and Addresses, 888–889.
38. Frank Friedel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: Launching the New Deal (Little, Brown,
1973), 351.
39. Ibid.
40. Roy Talbert Jr., FDR’s Utopian: Arthur Morgan of the TVA (University of Mis
sissippi Press, 1987), 115.
41. B. MacKaye, “Tennessee—Seed of a National Plan,” Survey Graphic 22 (1933),

251.
42. Ibid., 293.
43. Ibid., 294.
44. Roy Lubove, Community Planning in the 1920s: The Contribution of the Regional
Planning Association of America (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963), 40.
45. Tracy Augur, Industrial Growth in America and the Garden City, thesis,
Harvard University, 1921), 21; Hancock, John Nolen and the American City
Planning Movement, 424, 622.
46. Earle Draper, “The New TVA Town of Norris, Tennessee,” American City and
County 48 (1933), 68.
47. Tracy Augur, “The Planning of the Town of Norris,” American Architect and
Architecture 148 (1936), 19–26.
48. Creese, TVA’s Public Planning, 258–259.
49. Charles Stevenson, “A Contrast in Perfect Towns,” The Nation’s Business 25 (1937), 19.
50. Earle Draper and Tracy Augur, “The Regional Approach to the Housing
Problem,” Law and Contemporary Problems 1 (1934), 173–174.
164 notes to chaPter 2
51. Tracy Augur, quoted in National Resources Committee, Supplementary

Report of the Urbanism Committee, II (Washington, 1939), 72.
52. Thomas McCraw, Morgan vs. Lilienthal, the Feud within the TVA (Loyola University Press,
1970), 36; Richard Lowitt, “TVA 1933–45,” in Hargrove and Conkin, TVA, 44–45.
53. Daniel Schaffer, “Ideal and Reality in 1930s Regional Planning: The Case of
the Tennessee Valley Authority,” Planning Perspectives 1 (1986), 31.
54. Daniel Schaffer, “The Tennessee Transplant,” Town and Country Planning 53
(1984), 316–318.
55. Herbert Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” in Die Baukunst,

Die Kunst im Dritten Reich, April 1939, 140. Translations are by the authors unless
otherwise indicated.
56. Winfried Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus (Prestel, 1993),

172. We are grateful to Dr. Nerdinger, Director of the Architecture Museum at the
Technische Universität München, for his insights about German sources on Nazi
architecture and town planning.
57. By far the best source on the development of the Salzgitter region is Christian
Schneider, Stadtgründung im Drittten Reich, Wolfsburg und Salzgitter (Heinz Moos
Verlag, 1978).
58. Ibid., 55–57.
59. Jean Chardonnet, Métropoles Économiques (Armand Colin, 1968), 101; Hans
Günter Schönwälder, Werden und Wandel des Industriegebietes Salzgitter, Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Hamburg, 1967, 81.
60. Schönwälder, Werden und Wandel, 81–83. The population was initially pro-
jected to grow to 300,000 but never actually reached that size. See Chardonnet,
Métropoles Économiques, 113.
61. On Spengler’s and the National Socialist reaction against the modernist city and
industrial state, see Carl E. Schorske, Thinking with History: Explorations in the Passage
to Modernism (Princeton University Press, 1998), 52–53.
62. On the Nazis’ ideological antipathy to cities and industrialization, see Barbara
Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Harvard University
Press, 1968), 155; Schneider, Stadtgründung im Drittten Reich, 9, 11.
notes to chaPter 2 165
63. On Ferdinand Tönnies’s distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft in

response to industrialization, see Arthur Mitzman, Sociology and Estrangement: Three
Sociologists of Imperial Germany (Knopf, 1973).
64. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar
and the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1986).
65. Among them were edge cities near Düsseldorf, several in industrial areas of
Berlin, and elsewhere. By 1941, some 355 million Reichsmarks had been spent to
create a reported 184,000 “Kleinsiedlungen”—new mining, steel, and agricultural
towns—and more than 275,000 dwellings, apartments and “Volkswohnungen,”
for middle class, working class, poor, and unemployed Germans. One of the most
interesting examples of a new German industrial town (recalling places like Pullman,
Illinois, and, to some extent, Norris, Tennessee) was the Stadt des KdF-Wagens, the
Volkswagen factory town near Braunschweig. This town was built under Reich
auspices by Ferdinand Porsche, a great admirer of Henry Ford. See Schneider,
Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 63.
66. On the adoption of the Garden City movement in Germany, see Schneider,
Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 10. Schneider notes that the German movement directly fol-
lowed the Howard model, not Fritsch’s. See also Ute Peltz-Dreckmann, Nationalsozialistischer
Siedlungsbau (Minerva, 1978), 43–45, 203f.; Gerhard Fehl, “The Nazi Garden City,” in The
Garden City: Past, Present, and Future, ed. S. Ward (Spon, 1992), 88–106.
67. Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 154–56.
68. Heavily influenced by Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City ideal, Feder sketched
out a “new city” plan that established the template for towns like Salzgitter in
“Versuch der Begründung einer neuen Stadtbaukunst aus der sozialen Struktur
der Bevolkerung.” For outlines of Feder’s proposals, see Peltz-Dreckmann,
Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau, 43–45, 193–204.
69. Quoted and translated in Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 205–206.
70. In December 1937, “Wohnungs A.G.” was incorporated in Braunschweig to

build and manage the housing for the employees of the Reichswerke. See Schneider,
Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 62.
71. Herbert Rimpl, Die Geistigen Grundlagen der Baukunst unserer Zeit (Verlag Georg
D. W. Callwey, 1953) is written in a grand philosophical mode often affected by
architects who have achieved a certain degree of eminence. The book provides
insights into Rimpl’s ideology.
72. All quotations from Rimpl, Geistigen Grundlagen, 6, 134–135, 137.
73. Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke.”
74. As Nerdinger points out (Bauhaus-Moderne, 172), Rimpl’s firm was known for
hiring modernists, including a considerable number from the Bauhaus and Gropius’s
office. The “Bauhäusler” assumed leading positions in Rimpl’s giant Salzgitter oper-
ation, making it “the largest reservoir in Germany” for the modern architects who
did not flee the country after the rise of the National Socialists. For photographs of
the workers’ housing, see Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 79–80.
75. See Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from
Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton University Press, 1996).
76. See especially The Republic, Book IV, where the components of the state are
compared to those of the individual. On the German biological theories underlying
the notion of the state as organism, see Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 59.
77. Rimpl, “Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” 148, 179. Rimpl justifies
the choice of site and layout in terms of its harmony with the natural environment
and topography.
78. Ibid., 140–141. The projected size of Salzgitter fell well beyond the population
guidelines of Feder, who envisioned as an ideal “Mittel-Stadt” a city of approxi-
mately 20,000––large enough to be self-sufficient and to avoid the backward con-
ditions of small German villages but small enough to avoid dependence on special
modes of transport and other disadvantages of big cities. See Peltz-Dreckmann,
Nationalsozialistischer Siedlungsbau, 194, 197.
79. Ibid., 148.
80. Among the dwellings were about 300 experimental homes, using such new materials
as “gas-concrete” and novel building techniques. See Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne, 172.
81. See Chardonnet, Métropoles Économiques, 114. In this respect, Rimpl’s designs
showed the influence of the “Neighborhood” concept developed by American city
planners in the 1920s. See Schneider, Stadtgründung im Dritten Reich, 67.
82. Rimpl explains: “The architectonic Gestalt leads from the green outer areas in
the form of settlers’ houses, and the single-storey row houses and detached homes
through the two-storey apartment areas to the closely adjacent city center whose
dominating structures give the general impression that the city was designed by an
notes to chaPters 2 and 3 167
overpowering Will.” (“Die Stadt der Hermann-Göring-Werke,” 149) It has been

suggested that the overall organization of Salzgitter represented the hierarchical
organization of the Nazi party, reminding the people graphically of the precedence
of the social and political order. See Nerdinger, Bauhaus-Moderne, 67.
83. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State (Yale University Press, 1998), 89–90.
Chapter 3
1. Borden W. Painter Jr., Mussolini’s Rome: Rebuilding the Eternal City (Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), xvi–xvii. Painter cites Spiro Kostof, The Third Rome, 1870–1950:
Traffic and Glory (exhibition catalog, University Art Museum, Berkeley, 1973), 39.
See also Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist
Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), 18.
2. On a visit to Torviscosa, we received the fortunate guidance of a retired SNIA

manager, Logiusto Oliviero, who also invited us to his townhouse, one of the origi-
nals built for Torviscosa. The Primi di Torviscosa maintain a website on the town’s
history at www.primiditorviscosa.it/.
3. We are deeply grateful to Enea Baldassi, volunteer head of the company’s
Documentation Center, for his assistance with the history of SNIA and Torviscosa.
The photographs, models, exhibits, and records he preserves provide an in-depth
glimpse of the firm’s and the city’s past.
4. Roberta Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 1890–1962, thesis for architectural degree,
Istituto Universitario di Architettura Venezia, 1991–1992, vol. 1, p. 86. Spengler is
quoted in Riccardo Mariani, Facismo e Città Nuove (Feltrinelli, 1976), 796–797.
5. Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 24.
6. Ibid., 26.
7. Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 91
8. Giorgio Pellegrini and Massimiliano Vittori, Sabaudia, 1933–1943, L’Utopia

Mediterranea del Razionalismo (Comune di Sabaudia, Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Agro
Pontino, 2002), 4.
9. Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 25.
10. Ibid., 4.
11. Ibid., 26.
12. Quoted in Henry Millon, “Some New Towns in Italy in the 1930s,” in Art and
Architecture in the Service of Politics, ed. H. Millon and L. Nochlin (MIT Press, 1978), 326.
13. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (University of California Press, 2001), 4.
14. Massimo Bortolotti, Torviscosa, Nascità di una Città (Casamassima Libri, 1988),
68.
15. Marinotti, “Note Autobiografiche,” in Viaggio Nella Memoria, Storia delle Origini
Industriali di Torviscosa e del suo Fondatore Franco Marinotti, Associazione “Primi di
Torviscosa” con la collaborazione delle Industrie Chimiche Caffaro, Torviscosa,
1998, 9–24.
16. Bortolotti (Torviscosa, 65–105) outlines Marinotti’s relationship with SNIA.

Marinotti was formally named president in 1939.
17. “Torre di Zuino, alla Vigilia dell’arrivo della SAICI,” from Cooperative
Culturali Friuli-Venezia Giulia, n.d., from Archives of SNIA. We are indebted to
Enea Baldassi for showing us this 50th anniversary document.
18. Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 86–87.
19. Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 70.
20. The quotation is from “Torre di Zuino, alla Vigilia dell’arrivo della SAICI.”
The translation is ours.
21. Bortolotti, Torviscosa, 83–84. For examples of this architectural scholarship,

he refers to the writings of Giuseppe Pagano, particularly the text by Pagano and
Guarniero Daniel on L’architettura Rurale Italiana.
22. Bortolotti, Torviscosa, 92.
23. Ibid., 98.
24. Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, 24.
25. Bortolotti (Torviscosa, 85, 89) contrasts Marinotti’s philosophy with Olivetti’s
“progetto di razionalizzazione,” though he tends to overestimate the latter’s
Taylorist and “productivist” approach.
notes to chaPters 3 and 4 169
26. Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 110–112.
27. Ibid., 119–120; Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 55, 87.
28. First published as Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Il Poema di Torre Viscosa. Parole in
libertà futuriste, Gli Aeropoeti Futuristi dedicano al Duce (Milan, Officine Esperia, 1938).
We are citing the version reprinted in Bortolotti, Torviscosa, La Poesia industriali di
Marinetti, 47–62. Translation by the authors.
29. Painter, Mussolini’s Rome, 85, 87.
30. Reproduced in Cortiana, Giuseppe de Min, 175: 1–3.
31. Although listed in Antonioni’s filmography, the short documentary was lost
until the early 1990s, when a scholar from the local cinema society rediscovered it
in the SNIA archives. Happily, Torviscosa’s Pioneers had the foresight to preserve it
along with other documentary films about SNIA and their town.
32. Ghirardo, Building New Communities, 60. Promotional literature today on

Sabaudia celebrates the town’s dual assets: its agricultural richness and seaside beauty.
33. Such cities need not lose sight of their founding mythos. Greenbelt, Maryland,
in the Washington suburbs, still retains some of the socialist, communitarian flavor
imparted by its founders.
Chapter 4
1. Sarah Jo Peterson, The Politics of Land Use in World War II Michigan:
Building Bombers and Communities, Ph.D. dissertation, Yale University, 2002,
138–141.
2. Ursula Cliff, “Oskar Stonorov, Housing Pioneer,” Design and Environment 2
(1971), 50–57.
3. Peterson, The Politics of Land Use, 142, 163. Roosevelt’s letter is reprinted in
United Automobile Worker, December 1, 1941, 6.
4. Margaret Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front: Women, Blacks and the
Struggle for Public Housing,” in World War II and the American Dream, ed. D.
Albrecht (MIT Press, 1995), 114–117.
5. Peterson, The Politics of Land Use, 184.

6. Tracy Augur, “New Towns in the National Economy (March 1937),” Augur
Papers, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.
Box 1. Published in Planner’s Journal 3 (1937), 42.
7. “The Town of Willow Run,” Architectural Forum 78 (1943), 37–54, 52. On com-
munity involvement, see Stonorov and Kahn’s 1954 pamphlet Why City Planning is
Your Responsibility (Revere Copper Co.).
8. Tracy Augur, “Planning Principles Applied in Wartime: An Account of the

Planning of a Town for Willow Run Workers,” Architectural Record 93 (1943), 72–76.
9. Crawford, “Daily Life on the Home Front,” 118; Peterson, The Politics of Land
Use, 184–186.
10. Cynthia C. Kelly, ed., The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic bomb by Its
Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2007). Robert S.
Norris’s essay “Manhattan Project Sites in Manhattan” reinterprets the code name
not as arbitrary but as designating the original location and headquarters of the
Manhattan Project.
11. Charles W. Johnson and Charles O. Jackson, City Behind a Fence: Oak Ridge,
Tennessee, 1942–1946 (University of Tennessee Press, 1981), xx.
12. The American Museum of Atomic Energy opened in 1949 when the security
fences came down. Its name was changed in 1978 to reflect the transformation of
the AEC into the Department of Energy and its expanded energy mandate. A typi-
cal film treatment is Keith McDaniel’s 2005 documentary The Secret City: The Oak
Ridge Story.
13. Johnson and Jackson opened the way for other studies of American atomic
cities, among them, Jon Hunner, Inventing Los Alamos, The Growth of an Atomic
Community (University of Oklahoma Press, 2004); Patrick Kerry Moore, Federal
Enclaves: The Community Culture of Department of Energy Cities: Livermore,
Los Alamos, Oak Ridge, Ph.D. dissertation, Arizona State University, 1997; and
Hales, Atomic Spaces, cited below.
14. Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 35.
15. National Archives and Record Administration, Atlanta [hereinafter NARA,

Atlanta], RG #326 Accession #326–DO-8505, Job #4NN-326–8505, Box #160, File
“Manhattan District History, Book I: General Vol. 12—CEW Central Facilities,” 83–84.
16. Peter Bacon Hales, Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project (University of
Illinois Press, 1997), 78–79.
17. Vincent C. Jones, Manhattan: The Army and the Atomic Bomb (Center of Military
History, United States, Army 1985), 432–435.
18. For more details on the physical techniques, see U.S. Department of Energy,
The Manhattan Project: Making the Atomic Bomb, 1999 edition (available from Office
of Scientific and Technical Information, Oak Ridge), 5–6, 14.
19. “Manhattan District History,” 83–84.
20. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 81.
21. Ibid., 3.
22. Louis Skidmore, “Science Dictates the Building Mode for 1933,” Chicago
Commerce 26 (February 21, 1931), 1.
24. Ibid., 35.
25. Nathaniel B. Owings, The Spaces In Between: An Architect’s Journey (Houghton

Mifflin, 1973), 93–94.
26. John L. Hancock, John Nolen and the American City Planning Movement:
A History of Culture Change and Response, 1900–1940, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1964, 396–397; Lower Charlotte Reconnaissance
Report, Charlotte Harbor National Estuary Program, Draft, 2005, 25; Richard
Amero, “John Nolen,” http://members.cox.net/ramero.
27. The Celotex House: The Town of Tomorrow Demonstration Home No. 17,
New York World’s Fair 1939 (Smithsonian Institution Libraries, National Museum
of American History, NA7208.C39 1939).
28. Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, xx.
29. “Manhattan District History,” 7.3 (111).
30. “Clinton Engineer Works,” Folder 620. Box 80, “General Correspondence,
1942–1948,” RG 77, Entry 5, NARA, College Park, Maryland.
32. Such restrictions on residents were not unprecedented. America’s Resettlement

Administration, for instance, controlled New Deal towns with guards and other
means. See Diane Ghirardo, Building New Communities: New Deal America and Fascist
Italy (Princeton University Press, 1989), 55.
33. Oral History of Ambrose M. Richardson, FAIA, interview by Betty J. Blum, Chicago
Architects Oral History Project, Department of Architecture (Art Institute of Chicago,
1990 [rev. 2005]), 230.
34. Owings, The Spaces In Between, 95.
35. Ibid., 93.
36. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 85.
37. Ibid., 82.
38. Ibid., 83.
39. Quoted in Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 38.
40. “Preliminary Master Plan, Oak Ridge, Tennessee,” 9–12, RG #326, Accession
# Direct, Job # 326–88–004, Box #6: Community History Files, 1943–1962,
NARA, Atlanta.
41. Ibid., 27, 34.
42. Augur to L. Z. Dolan, December 28, 1949, filed with Master Plan.
43. “Community Management, Commercial Development in Oak Ridge,” Box 1:

“Community History,” RG 326, Job #326–88–004, NARA, Atlanta.
44. Hales, Atomic Spaces, 87–88.
45. Johnson and Jackson, City Behind a Fence, 50–51.
46. The story is also reported in George Robinson, The Oak Ridge Story: The Saga
of People Who Share in History (Southern Publishers, 1950), 17–19.
47. Russell B. Olwell, in At Work in the Atomic City: A Labor and Social History of
Oak Ridge, Tennessee (University of Tennessee Press, 2004), uses newly declassified
material to document worker concerns about radiation and chemical accidents and
about the effects of low-level radiation.
48. Today, Oak Ridge has returned in some respects to its wartime isolation. The
events of September 11, 2001, have placed it in lockdown mode, and nuclear weap-
ons are again a live issue. Access to some of its main historical sites, such as the X-10
Reactor, has become limited. For the public, the mysteries and mystique of this
techno-city are likely to remain for some time to come.
49. United States Strategic Bombing Survey, The Effects of the Bombing on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki (Washington, 1946), 36, quoted in “The Atomic Bomb and Our
Cities . . . from Report of U.S. Strategic Bomb Survey,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist
2 (August 1, 1946), 31, and in Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American
Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (1985; reprint, with new preface,
1994) 15.
50. “The Atomic Bomb and Our Cities,” 29–30.
51. Quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 176.
52. See Jennifer S. Light, From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban
Problems in Cold War America ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), chapter 1.
53. Tracy Augur, “The Dispersal of Cities as a Defense Measure,” Bulletin of

the Atomic Scientists 4 (May 1948), 131–134. For an interesting and valuable dis-
cussion of urban planners’ ideas about dispersal of cities in reaction to the bomb,
see M. Q. Dudley, “Sprawl as Strategy: City Planners Face the Bomb,” Journal of
Planning Education and Research 21 (fall 2001), 52–63.
54. Augur, “The Dispersal of Cities—a Feasible Program,” Bulletin of the Atomic
Scientists 4 (October 1948), 312–315.
55. Tom Vanderbilt, Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America
(Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 79–80.
56. Tracy Augur, Industrial Growth in America and the Garden City, Master’s the-
sis, Harvard University 1921, Augur Papers, Box 1, Division of Rare and Manuscript
Collections, Cornell University Library.
57. “Planning Cities for the Atomic Age,” typescript dated May 5, 1946, Augur
Papers, Box 1, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University
Library. The August speech was later excerpted in “Planning Cities for the Atomic
Age,” American City, August 1946, 75–76.
58. Ibid., 7.
59. Ibid., 6. (Cultural lag, as defined by Ogburn in his 1922 book Social Change,
was the idea that social change does not occur at same rates as technological inven-
tion and diffusion.)
60. Ibid., 5.
61. Ibid., 6.
62. Ibid.
63. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 91, 314–315.
64. Ralph Eugene Lapp, Must We Hide? (Addison-Wesley, 1949), 161–165, 180.
65. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 321. Many anti-war and pro-international
control activists were vehemently opposed to these civil defense ideas. In 1948,
David Bradley, a physician, published No Place to Hide, a New York Times “best-
seller” and Book-of-the-Month Club selection, in which he argued that there was,
in fact, no defense.
66. Ralph Lapp, “The Strategy of Civil Defense,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
6 (August-September 1950), 241–43; “The Atom—the Defense of Our Cities,”
The Reporter 3 (September 12, 1950), 26–30; “Hydrogen Bombs IV. What Is the
Problem of Organizing an Effective Civil Defense Against It?” Scientific American
182 ( June 1950), 11–15.
67. Robert Fishman, “The Metropolitan Tradition in American Planning,” in The

American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy, ed. R. Fishman (Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 2000) 179–181.
68. Ervin Galantay, New Towns: Antiquity to the Present (Braziller, 1975), 53–78.
69. Kathleen A. Tobin, “The Reduction of Urban Vulnerability: Revisiting 1950s

American Suburbanization as Civil Defense,” Cold War History 2 ( January 2002), 25.
70. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (March 1950), 74.
71. Kargon and Molella, “The City as Communications Net: Norbert Wiener, the
Atomic Bomb, and Urban Dispersal,” Technology and Culture 45 (October 2004),
764–777.
notes to chapters 4 and 5 175
72. R. Bacher, “The Hydrogen Bomb,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 6 (May
1950), 135.
73. Pages 39–40. A clipping of the article is among Augur papers (Box 2, Notebook
dated 1954, no. 8).
74. Guy Oakes, The Imaginary War: Civil Defense and American Cold War Culture
(Oxford University Press, 1994), 60.
Chapter 5
1. A. Olivetti, “Toward the History of a Factory,” in Olivetti 1908–1958, ed.

R. Musatti, L. Bigiaretti, and G. Soavi (Ivrea, Ing. C. Olivetti & c., S.p.A., 1958),
11–12, 173–176.
2. “Camillo Olivetti,” in ibid., 22–24.
3. Patrizia Bonifazio and Paolo Scrivano, Olivetti Builds: Modern Architecture in Ivrea,
Guide to the Open Air Museum (Skira, 2001), 23.
4. Robert Fishman, “Utopia and Its Discontents,” Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 39 (1980), 153.
5. Giorgio Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” L’architecture d’aujourd’hui

no. 188 (1976), 7.
6. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 49–50.
7. Ulrich Conrads, ed., Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (MIT
Press, 1970), 109–111.
8. Eric Mumford, CIAM Discourses on Urbanism, 1928–1960 (MIT Press, 2000),
76; Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” 7.
9. Mumford, CIAM Discourses, 77–87; “CIAM: Charter of Athens: tenets,” in

Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes, 137–145.
10. Valerio Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti (A. Mondadori, 1985), 88; Bonifazio and
Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 103.
11. Jeffrey Schnapp, “Excavating the Corporativist City,” Modernism/Modernity

11 (2004), 89–104. See also Schnapp, Building Fascism, Communism and Liberal
Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca—Architect, Inventor, Farmer, Writer, Engineer (Stanford Uni

versity Press, 2004), 71–79.
12. Piano Regolatore della Valle d’Aosta (Ivrea, 1937).
13. Elio Riccarand, Storia della Valle d’Aosta Contemporanea 1919–1945 (Stylos,
2000), 179–185.
14. Patrizia Bonifazio, “Mass-Production, Territory, Community in Adriano

Olivetti’s Experience 1933–1960” Ivrea MOMONECO Seminar 12 (September
13, 2003), http://72.14.209.104/
15. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 105.
16. Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 91.
17. “Batovany-Partizanske,” at http://momoneco.kotka.fi. See also Henrieta

Moravcíková, “Social and Architectural Phenomenon of the Bataism in Slovakia,”
Slovak Sociological Review 36 (2004), 519–543.
18. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 105–110; Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la commu-
nauté des clercs,” 10.
19. R. Musatti, L. Bigiaretti, and G. Soavi, eds., Olivetti 1908–1958 (Ing.

C. Olivetti & c., S.p.A., 1958), 179–180; Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds,
23–24, 49–59.
20. Ciucci, “Ivrea ou la communauté des clercs,” 10.
21. Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 116–118. Olivetti’s debriefing by the American

O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services) is in the Records of the Office of Strategic
Services, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 226, Box 367.
22. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 17.
23. Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, chapter 7: “Cospiratore per la Libertà.” Adriano

Olivetti, Società, Stato, Comunità (Edizioni di Comunità, 1952), 17.
24. “Riforma politica, riforma sociale” and a “Memorandum sullo stato federale
delle Comunità.” Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 115.
25. Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 141, 175.

26. Lewis Mumford, Culture of Cities (Harcourt, Brace 1938), 314, 346–348.
27. Erwin Gutkind, Creative Demobilisation, volume 1: The Principles of National

Planning (K. Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1943), 284.
28. David E. Lilienthal, TVA: Democracy on the March (Harper, 1944), xi–xii.
29. Ibid., 197–198.
30. Ibid., 223.
31. L’Ordine politico delle comunità dello Stato secondo le leggi dello spirito (Nouve edi
zioni Ivrea, 1945).
32. Chiara Mazzoleni, “The Concept of Community in Italian Town Planning in

the 1950s,” Planning Perspectives 18 (2003), 326.
33. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 30; Adriano Olivetti, Democracy without
Political Parties (Edizioni di Comunità, 1951), 9.
34. Olivetti, Democracy, 96; quotation from Olivetti, L’Ordine, vii. Unless other-
wise indicated, all translations from the Ordine are by the authors.
35. Ibid., xi. “Before becoming a theoretical institution, the Community lived.”
36. Chapter 11, “Notes for the Story of a Factory,” Olivetti, Democracy, 157–168.
37. Olivetti, L’Ordine, viii.
38. Olivetti, Democracy, 17, 18, 24; Ochetto, Adriano Olivetti, 126.
39. Olivetti, Democracy, 17, 62, 87.
40. “Aluminum City Terrace,” http://www.archinform.net
41. Olivetti, Democracy, 64. See p. 27 above.
42. Ibid., chapter 9, “Technique of the Agrarian Reform,” 99–114.
43. Olivetti, Ordine, 4–7.
44. Olivetti, Democracy, 29.

45. Olivetti, Ordine, 5; Olivetti, Democracy, 14–15.
47. Ibid., 86–87.
48. Olivetti, Ordine, 13–15.
49. Ibid., 11: “Le grande città saranno trasformate e non distrutte.”
50. Olivetti, Democracy, 26, 28, 31–33.
51. Ibid., 19.
52. Ibid., 167–168.
53. Ibid., 93–94. Olivetti quotes David Lilienthal at length on the necessity of cen-
tral control in the TVA.
54. Ibid., 12, 15–152.
55. Ibid., 11, 36, 44. Olivetti, Ordine, 30–31.
57. Ibid., 84–85.
58. Eleanor Brilliant, “The Vision of Adriano Olivetti,” Voluntas 4 (1993), 108.
See also Umberto Serafini, Adriano Olivetti e il Movimento comunità: una anticipazione
scomoda, un discorso aperto (Rome, Officina, 1982).
59. Paolo Scrivano, “The Elusive Politics of Theory and Practice: Giovanni
Astengo, Giorgio Rigotti and the Post-war Debate over the Plan for Turin,”
Planning Perspectives 15 (2000), 8.
60. Mazzoleni, “The Concept of Community,” 332.
61. Nello Renacco, “Il piano regolatore generale di Ivrea,” Urbanistica no. 15/16
(1955), 188–194; Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 112.
62. Adriano Olivetti, Community Ideals (Milano, 1956), 21–22.

63. Bonifazio and Scrivano, Olivetti Builds, 115–116.
64. Roberto Olivetti, “La Società Olivetti nel Canavese” Urbanistica no. 33 (1961),
85–86.
65. Lewis Mumford, Sketches from Life (Dial, 1982), 482.
66. Adriano Olivetti, Community Ideals, 6–7.
67. Ibid., 11, 16.
68. R. Nisbet, review of Edward Shils, The Intellectuals and the Powers. American
Journal of Sociology 79 (1973), 724.
Chapter 6
1. Lloyd Rodwin, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis,” Journal of Land and
Public Utility Economics 21 (1945), 268–281; “Garden Cities and the Metropolis:
A Rejoinder,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 69.
2. Catherine Bauer, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Reply,” Journal of Land
and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 65–66; Lewis Mumford, “Garden Cities and
the Metropolis: A Reply,” Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946),
66–69
3. Lloyd Rodwin, “Garden Cities and the Metropolis: A Rejoinder,” Journal of
Land and Public Utility Economics 22 (1946), 77. On Rodwin’s letter to Mumford
(December 16, 1945, Mumford Papers, University of Pennsylvania), Mumford
penciled in “Garden City principle has gained with war experience.”
4. Lloyd Rodwin, “Review of L. Mumford, City Development,” Journal of Land and
Public Utility Economics 21 (1945), 304–305.
5. Lloyd Rodwin, The British New Towns Policy (Harvard University Press, 1956),
24 ff.
6. N. Gist, “British New Towns Policy,” American Sociological Review 21 (1956),
647–648.
7. F. J. Osborn, “The British New Towns Policy,” Land Economics 32 (1956),
281–284. See also F. J. Osborn and A. Whittick, The New Towns: The Answer to
Megalopolis (MIT Press, 1969), 106.
8. Rodwin, British New Towns Policy, 194–195.
9. Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation
Building” in the Kennedy Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2000), charts the
rise and fall of modernization theory through the Alliance for Progress, the Peace
Corps, and the Strategic Hamlet Program in Vietnam. For an insider’s look at
CENIS, see Walter Rostow, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Foreign Aid (University of
Texas Press, 1985). For a more critical perspective, see Allan A. Needell, “Project
Troy and the Cold War Annexation of the Social Sciences” and Bruce Cumings,
“Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies During and After
the Cold War,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences
During the Cold War, ed. C. Simpson (New Press, 1998), 3–38, 159–188. On the
“MIT idea” and the engineer’s role, see Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon,
“Exporting MIT: Science, Technology and Nation-Building in India and Iran,”
Osiris 21 (2006), 110–130.
10. Christopher Klemek, Urbanism as Reform: Modernist Planning and the Crisis
of Urban Liberalism in Europe and North America, 1945–1975, Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 2004, 108–109
11. Martin Meyerson, “The Utopian Tradition and the Planning of Cities,” in The
Future Metropolis, ed. L. Rodwin (Braziller, 1961), 235, 247.
12. Lloyd Rodwin and B. Sanyal, eds., The Profession of City Planning (Rutgers
University Press, 2000), 19.
13. Cathy Rakowski, “Evaluating Development: Theory, Ideology and Planning

in Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela,” International Journal of Contemporary Sociology 26
(1989), 71–73. See also Clara Irazabal, “A Planned City Comes of Age: Rethinking
Ciudad Guayana Today,” Journal of Latin American Geography 3 (2004), 22–51.
14. Lisa Peattie, Planning: Rethinking Ciudad Guayana (University of Michigan

Press, 1987), 27.
15. Lloyd Rodwin, “Introduction,” in Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development:
The Experience of the Guayana Program of Venezuela (L. Rodwin and Associates, 1969),
1–2.
16. Rodwin, “Planning Guayana: A General Perspective,” in Planning Urban Growth

and Regional Development, 10.
17. Peattie, Planning, 42, 45, 48–49.

18. Thomas Herrick, “Preliminary Outline—Volume II—History of Project,”

Ciudad Guayana Papers, Loeb Library, Harvard University, chapter IV, 1–2.
19. Rodwin, “Planning Guayana,” 16.
20. W. von Moltke, “The Visual Development Strategy for Ciudad Guayana, December
1964),” Frances Loeb Library, School of Design, Harvard University, 4. A later published
version appears as Wilhelm von Moltke, “The Visual Development of Ciudad Guayana,”
in Taming Megalopolis, ed. H. Eldredge (Doubleday Anchor, 1967), I, 274–287.
21. Von Moltke, “Visual Development” (1967), 278–282.
22. Lisa Peattie, “Conflicting Views of the Project: Caracas versus the Site,” in
Rodwin, Planning Urban Growth and Regional Development, 453–454.
23. Lisa Peattie, The View from the Barrio (University of Michigan Press, 1968), 1.
24. Lloyd Rodwin, “Ciudad Guayana: A New City,” Scientific American, September
1965, 130–131.
25. Lloyd Rodwin, “Reflections on Collaborative Planning,” in Planning Urban

Growth, 467–491.
26. Peattie, Planning, 56–58.
27. Ibid., 36
28. Ibid., 58, 61.
29. Ibid., 27–28.
30. Rodwin, “Reflections on Collaborative Planning,” in Planning Urban Growth,

469–470.
31. Irazabal, “A Planned City Comes of Age,” 22–51
32. Peattie, Planning, 11–12.
33. Ibid., 16.
34. See Stuart W. Leslie and Robert Kargon, “Selling Silicon Valley: Frederick
Terman’s Model for Regional Advantage,” Business History Review 70 (1996),
435–472; Robert Kargon and Stuart W. Leslie, “Imagined Geographies: Princeton,

Stanford and the Boundaries of Useful Knowledge in Postwar America,” Minerva
32 (1994), 121–143; R. Kargon, E. Schoenberger, and S. Leslie, “Far Beyond Big
Science: Science Regions and the Organization of Research and Development,” in
Big Science: The Growth of Large Scale Research, ed. P. Galison and B. Hevly (Stanford
University Press, 1992), 334–354.
35. William Nierenberg, “Athelstan Spilhaus,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical

Society 144 (2000), 343–347.
36. James A. Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City: The Case

of Minnesota Experimental City,” in Innovations for Future Cities, ed. G. Golany
(Praeger, 1976), 113.
37. Athelstan Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” Science 159 (1968), 710–715;
Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City,” 114.
38. Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” 714–715.
39. Athelstan Spilhaus, “The Experimental City,” in America’s Changing Environment,

ed. R. Revelle and H. Landsberg (Beacon, 1970), 230.
40. Alcott, “Planning of an Innovative Free-Standing City,” 115–116. See also

James R. Prescott, “The Planning for Experimental City,” Land Economics 46
(1970), 68–75.
41. Martin Marty, http://209.85.165.104. For an expurgated version, see “But Even
So, Look at That: An Ironic Perspective on Utopias,” in E. Rothstein, H. Muschamp,
and M. Marty, Visions of Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2003), 85–88.
42. “Our Newest New Town” Time, February 26, 1973. See also excerpt from
Leo Trunt, Beyond the Circle (Gateway, 1998) at http://209.85.165.104/.
43. Jean Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil (Dominique Vincent, 1977), 20–21.
44. Ibid., 42–43.
45. National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of State, Central
Foreign Policy Files, Record Group 59, Electronic Telegrams, November 2, 1973.
46. Francois Caviglioli, “On ne pourra pas vivre dans la cité modèle: ça sent trop
mauvais,” Paris Match, January 15, 1972, 17.
47. Constance Holden, “Le Vaudreuil: French Experiment in Urbanism without

Tears,” Science 174 (1971), 39–42.
48. National Archives and Records Administration, U.S. Department of State, Central
Foreign Policy Files, Record Group 59, Electronic Telegrams, November 2, 1973.
49. “Parfaitement ignorée en France, où la conception même de cité-jardin fait sourire

de commisération l’immense majorité de nos architectes, l’oeuvre d’Ebenezer Howard,
dans les pays anglo-saxens, garde un très fort écho.” (Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil, 37)
50. For a description of the powerful reaction against the town and its technocratic
creators, see Loic Vadelorge, “Val-de-Reuil: une histoire nécessaire,” Études nor-
mandes, no. 2 (2004), 5–18.
51. Caviglioli, “On ne pourra pas vivre dans la cité modèle,” 16 (our translation).
52. Maze, L’Aventure du Vaudreuil, 11–48; Gale Crouse, “Review of Maze,

L’Aventure du Vaudreuil,” French Review 53 (1980), 626–627.
Chapter 7
1. Carmo A. D’Cruz, Tom O’Neal, et al., “Technopolis Creation: Critical Success
Factors and Creation of the Central Florida Technopolis,” in Program for the
NCIIA 11th Annual Meeting, Tampa, Florida, March 22–24, 2007. O’Neal noted
that Disney World continues to lend support, albeit minor support, to local high-
tech industries (personal communication). See also http://www.floridahightech.
com/. Walt was fascinated by the space program and was an early supporter of
NASA, which “acknowledged that Disney’s early drumbeating for its program was
instrumental in generating public support for space exploration” (Neal Gabler, Walt
Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), xiii, 517).
2. Little McClung, “The Seventy-Five Mile City: What Henry Ford Wants to
Do with Muscle Shoals,” Scientific American, September 1922, 156–157; Robert
Scheckley, Futuropolis (Bergstrom, 1978), passim.
3. Bob Thomas, Walt Disney: An American Original (Hyperion, 1994), 387.
4. Quoted in Michael Lassell, Celebration: The Story of a Town (Disney Editions,
2004), 20.
5. Quotation from Sharon Zukin, Landscapes of Power: From Detroit to Disney World
(University of California Press, 1991), 224. On the original purpose of EPCOT, see
Andrew Ross, The Celebration Chronicles: Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Property Value
in Disney’s New Town (Ballantine Books, 1999), 53. We thank Margaret Adamic of
Disney Publishing Worldwide, Inc. for assistance with permissions for the illustra-
tions in this chapter.
6. “Disneyworld Amusement Center with Domed City Set for Florida,” New York
Times, February 3, 1967, 1.
7. Quoted in John Findlay, Magic Lands (University of California Press, 1992), 111.
8. See Stephen Fjellman, Vinyl Leaves (Westview, 1992), 121. See also Joshua W.
Shenk, “Hidden Kingdom: Disney’s Political Blueprint,” The American Prospect no.
21 (1995), 80–84. On “special districts,” see Richard O. Brooks, New Towns and
Communal Values (Praeger, 1974), 61.
9. See Krishan Kumar, Utopianism and Anti-utopianism in Modern Times (Blackwell, 1987);
Howard Segal, Technological Utopianism in American Culture (University of Chicago Press,
1985); T. J. Jackson Lears and R. W. Fox, eds., Cultures of Consumption (Pantheon, 1983);
Neal Gabler, Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Knopf, 2006), 608.
10. Epcot brochure.
11. Ron Grover, The Disney Touch (Business One Irwin, 1991), passim.
12. James Howard Kunstler, Home from Nowhere (Simon and Schuster, 1996), 150–152.
13. In view of the incipient state of the enterprise, particularly in its technological
features, the description that follows relies on both promotional literature outlining
the overall Disney concept and our personal observations.
14. “AT&T and Disney to Build High Tech Community of the Future,” AT&T
news release, July 26, 1995. Later, VISTA United assumed ownership and mainte-
nance of the community network.
15. Ibid.
16. The Celebration Company, “Celebration: American Town Taking Shape in

Central Florida,” Disney brochure, 1.
17. “AT&T and Disney to Build High Tech Community.”
18. For an example, see Mike Mills, “Orbit Wars,” Washington Post Magazine,
August 3, 1997, 8–13.
19. Katherine Shaver, “Columbia’s Community Values,” Washington Post, August

24, 1997.
20. See Steven Lubar, InfoCulture: The Smithsonian Book of Information Age Inventions
(Houghton Mifflin, 1993). This theme is widely discussed in the popular periodical
Wired.
21. Mark Slouka, “The Illusion of Life,” New Statesman and Society, January 12,
1996, reprinted in World Press Review, May 1996, 28–29.
22. Caroline Mayer, “The Mickey House Club,” Washington Post, November 15,
1996.
23. Craig Wilson, “Celebration Puts Disney in Reality’s Realm,” USA Today,
October 18, 1995.
24. Mayer, “The Mickey House Club”; John Henry, “Is Celebration Mayberry or a
Stepford Village?” ProBuilder Magazine News, September 1, 1996, 47.
25. Mayer, “The Mickey House Club.”
26. Jean Marbella, “Mickey House,” Baltimore Sun, May 20, 1996.
27. This has led to the first signs of political dissent within Celebration. See Michael
Pollan, “Town Building Is No Mickey Mouse Operation,” New York Times
Magazine, December 14, 1997, 56 ff.
28. Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 310–311.
29. Zukin, Landscapes of Power, 224, 231. Though the fact that residents are treated
like customers rather than citizens has its attractions, it sometimes can be exasperat-
ing. One resident exclaimed “I’ve had enough of this. I’ve got pixie dust coming
out of my ass.” (Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 325)
30. Witold Rybczynski, “Tomorrowland,” New Yorker, July 22, 1996, 38
31. N. Sullivan, “Virtual mouse people.” Home Office Computing, October 1995, 136
32. The Economist, December 1995, 27.
33. Ross, Celebration Chronicles, 62.

186 notes to 7 and conclusion
34. Andrew F. Wood, “Spaghetti Dinners and Fireflies in a Jar” (http://www.sjsu.

edu/faculty/wooda/celebessay1.html).
35. Russ Rymer, “Back to the Future: Disney Reinvents the Company Town,”
Harper’s, October 1996, 77.
36. Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins, Celebration U.S.A.: Living in Disney’s
Brave New Town (Henry Holt, 1999), 147–158.
37. Ibid., 325–327.
Conclusion
1. On ideology and utopia, see Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (Harcourt
Brace, 1936), passim.
2. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins
of Cultural Change (Blackwell, 1989), 24; Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism:
Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge University
Press, 1984).
3. Arthur P. Molella, “Science Moderne: Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and
Architecture and Mechanization Takes Command,” Technology and Culture 43 (2002),
374–389.
4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy, ed.
L. Feuer (Doubleday Anchor, 1959), 10.
5. Jane Jacobs, “The Kind of Problem a City Is,” in The Death and Life of Great
American Cities (Random House, 1961), 435.
6. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Harcourt Brace, 1934), 368–373.
Index
Adams, Thomas, 31 Celebration, 136–147

Alfonzo Ravard, Rafael, 116 Celotex, 76–78
American Museum of Science and Cemesto, 76–78
Energy, 72, 83–85 Center for International Studies, MIT,
Antonioni, Michelangelo, 62 114, 115
Arborea, 50 Center for Urban and Regional Studies,
Astengo, Giovanni, 108 MIT, 114, 115
AT&T, 137, 138, 144 Chase, Stuart, 21, 33
Atomic bomb, 71, 85, 86, 89, 113 CIAM (Congrès Internationaux
Augur, Tracy, 34–37, 68, 69, 75, 81, d’Architecture Moderne), 92, 93
82, 86–90 Cities in Evolution (Geddes), 18
Autarchy, 50, 53, 54, 57, 60–62, 152 City (film), 24
City Behind a Fence (Johnson and
Bacher, Robert, 90 Jackson), 73
Banfi, Gian Luigi, 92 Ciudad Guayana, 115–123
Barkhin, Gregory, 26 “Civics: As Applied Sociology”
Barnes, Joe, 138 (Geddes), 17, 18
Bauer, Catherine, 68, 113 Clewiston, 31, 76
BBPR Architectural Group, 92, 93 Cold War, 45, 81, 82
Bellamy, Edward, 8, 9 Columbia, Maryland, 132, 142,
Betancourt, Romulo, 115, 116 146
Blandford, John, 68 Community movement, 101–108,
Blood and soil, 39, 41, 50 111, 146
Bomber City, 67–70 Conservative utopia, 143
Bottoni, Piero, 92, 93 Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana,
Bournville, 3, 14 115, 116
Brown, Denise Scott, 139 Corporativist city, 93, 94
Crystal Palace, 13
Cadbury, George, 14, 16 Cultural lag theory, 87
Canavese, 101, 105, 108–112 Czech modernist towns, 95
188 index
Darré, Richard Walter, 40 Garden City movement, 13–18, 36, 39,

Death and Life of Great American Cities 40, 47, 52, 67, 75, 79, 85, 124, 125,
(Jacobs), 154, 155 129
Decline of the West (Spengler), 39, 50 Garden City Society, 26
Defense City, 68 Geddes, Patrick, 17, 18, 21, 36, 89
Delano, Frederic, 32 Giedion, Sigfried, 92, 100, 101, 150
Délégation Général à l’Aménagement Ginzburg, Moisei Iakovlevich, 27
Territoire et à l’Action Régionale, Göring, Hermann, 38
126, 127 Graves, Michael, 135, 139
De Min, Giuseppe, 54–58, 61, 62 Greenbelts, 26, 28, 29, 34, 36, 69, 79,
Democracy without Political Parties 81, 87, 134–136, 152, 155
(Olivetti), 101 Groves, Leslie, 74
Disneyland, 131, 132 Gutkind, Erwin, 98–100, 108
Disney, Walt, 131–133, 136, 144,
146 Hanford, Washington, 71
Disurbanists, 27 Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban
Draper, Earle, 34–37 Studies, 115
Duany, Andres, 135 Heller, Walter, 124
Henry, John, 143
Edelman, John, 68 Herf, Jeffrey, 39
Eisner, Michael, 135, 138, 144 Hermann-Göring-Werke, 37
Eliot, Charles W. II, 33 Howard, Ebenezer, 7, 8, 16–18, 21, 36,
Environmental city concept, 129 39, 86, 87
EPCOT, 132–134
Industrial Revolution, 2–4, 31, 39, 45,
Farm Cities Corporation, 31 50, 87, 88, 93, 150, 151
Fascism, 4, 52, 60–62, 104, 106, Istituto Nazionale de Urbanistica, 108
113 Istituto per il Rinnovamento Urbano e
Feder, Gottfried, 40, 41 Rurale, 111, 112
Feldman, Max, 124 Ivanitsky, Alexander, 26
Figini, Luigi, 92 Ivrea, 91, 92, 95, 96, 108–111, 151
Ford, Henry, 29–32, 70, 132
Ford Motor Company, 67–70 Jackson, Charles, 73
Foundation towns, 47, 65 Jacobs, Jane, 130, 154, 155
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 124 Johnson, Charles, 73
Functional City, 92, 93 Johnson, Philip, 139
Futurism, 60
Kastner, Alfred, 68
Ganz, Alexander, 116, 117
Garden Cities of Tomorrow (Howard), 7, Lacaze, Jean-Paul, 127, 129
11, 25, 26 Land Nationalisation Society, 14
Garden City Associations, 13–16 Land reclamation, 50, 52, 54
Index 189
Lapp, Ralph, 88 National Planning Board, 32

Latina, 50 National Security Resources Board, 86
Le Corbusier, 92, 93, 127, 132 National Socialist ideology, 4, 37–45
Leng, John, 14 Nature worship, 104, 105
Letchworth, 16, 39, 40 Neville, Ralph, 14, 16
Le Vaudreuil, 126–130, 151, 154 New Deal, 29, 33, 45, 52, 100, 152
Lever, William Hesketh, 14, 16 Newell, Frederick H., 31, 33
Lilienthal, David, 37, 46, 98, 100 New Lanark, 2
Linear city, 27, 28 New towns, 37–45, 114
Littoria, 50 New urbanism, 132, 135, 136, 141
Looking Backward (Bellamy), 8, 9 Nolen, John, 31, 34
L’Ordine politico delle communità Norris, George, 30
(Olivetti), 101–104 Norris, 28, 29, 34–37
Los Alamos, 71, 74
Oak Ridge, 74–86, 151
MacKaye, Benton, 21, 23, 24, 34, 89 Odum, Howard, 33
MacRae, Hugh, 31 Ogburn, William, 86, 87
Magnitogorsk, 28 Okhitovich, Moisei, 27
Manhattan Project, 71–73 Olivetti, Adriano, 91, 92, 96–107, 112
Marinetti, Filippo Tomasso, 60 Olivetti, Camillo, 91
Marinotti, Franco, 47, 53 Owings, Nathaniel, 75, 80
Marshall, James, 74, 75
Marty, Martin, 124, 125 Parker, Barry, 16
Marx, Karl, 27, 28, 102, 104, 150 Pavia Plan, 93
May, Ernst, 28 Peattie, Lisa, 117, 119, 120
Meyerson, Martin, 115 Penderlea, 31
Miliutin, Nikolai Aleksandrovich, 27 Peressutti, Enrico, 92
Minnesota Experimental City, 124–126 Piacentini, Marcello, 48
Modernism, 39, 40, 92, 149–151 Piccinato, Luigi, 52
Moore, Charles, 139 Pierce Foundation, 75
Morgan, Arthur E., 33, 34, 46 Planning movement, 91, 92, 100
Morgan, Harcourt, 37, 46 Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth, 135
Mounier, Emmanuel, 98 Pollini, Gino, 92
Mumford, Lewis, 18–22, 30, 98, 99, Pontine Marshes, 50–52
108, 112, 155 Port Sunlight, 3, 14
Muscle Shoals, 30, 31 Problem of Building Socialist Cities
Mussolinia, 50 (Miliutin), 27, 28
Mussolini, Benito, 47–50, 54
Must We Hide? (Lapp), 88 Reactionary modernism, 39, 40
Regionalism, 16–24, 89, 95, 99–104, 111
National Housing Agency, 68 Regional Planning Association of
Nationalisation of Labour Society, 9 America, 21–24, 33, 89
190 index
Regional Survey, 17 Tennessee Valley Authority, 28–31, 38,

Reuther, Walter, 68 73, 98, 99, 105, 151
Reverse nostalgia, 146, 147 Thompson, Wayne, 124
Richardson, Ambrose, 80 Torviscosa, 47–66, 151
Rimpl, Herbert, 38, 41–43, 104
Rodwin, Lloyd, 113–117, 120, 121 Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
Rogers, Ernesto Nathan, 92 25–28
Roosevelt, Franklin D., 29–34 United Auto Workers, 67, 68
Rouse, James, 132 Unwin, Raymond, 16, 31
Urban dispersal, 86–90
Sabaudia, 50, 52, 65 Urbanism, 26, 27, 108, 109
Sabsovich, Leonid, 26, 27 Urban studies, 114, 115
Saltaire, 3 Utopianism, 1, 5, 152, 154
Salzgitter, 37–45, 151
Schriever, Bernard, 124 Val de Reuil (Le Vaudreuil), 126–130,
Seaside, 135 151, 154
Semionev, Vladimir Nikolarvich, 26, 28 Valle d’Aosta plan, 94, 95
Seri, Paolo, 132 Venturi, Robert, 139
Sette cane, un vestito (film), 62–65 Vivrett, Walter, 124
Silha, Otto, 124 Volgograd, 28
Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, 75–81 Von Moltke, Wilhelm, 116
SNIA (Società Navigazione Industriale
Applicazione) Viscosa, 47, 53, 61 Walt Disney Company, 134, 135,
Sociological Society, 17 145–147
Soria y Mata, Arturo, 27, 28 Walt Disney World Resorts, 131
Sotsgorod, 26, 27 Weber, Max, 153
Speer, Albert, 41, 42 Wiener, Norbert, 89, 90
Spengler, Oswald, 39, 50 Whitaker, Charles Harris, 20, 21
Spilhaus, Athelstan, 123–125 Williams, Norman, 116
Stalingrad, 28 Willow Run, Michigan, 67–70, 151
Stein, Clarence, 20–22, 33, 89 World’s Fairs, 24, 75–77, 132–135, 152
Stone and Webster, 74 World War I, 2, 25, 29, 53, 54, 152
Stonorov, Oskar, 68 World War II, 45, 47, 66, 67, 81, 89,
Story of Utopias (Mumford), 19, 20 113, 139, 152
Strauss, Lewis, 90 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 52
Suburbanization, 89 Wright, Henry, 21, 34
Survey Graphic, 21–24
Young, Whitney, 124
Techno-cities, 1–5, 25, 46, 149–156
Techno-nostalgia, 23, 24, 137–141, 149 Zukin, Sharon, 143
Technopoles, 155, 156
Teller, Edward, 86

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KARGON AND MOLELLA

Invented Invented Edens

Edens TECH NO-CITI ES

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS 02142

MD DALIM #970845 6/17/08 SILVER ORANGE GREEN PURPLE

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

THE MIT PRESS

Book design by Sharon Deacon Warne, jacket design by Margarita Encomienda

Paul E. Ceruzzi, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945–2005

Techno-Cities of the Twentieth Century

Robert H. Kargon and Arthur P. Molella

The MIT Press

For information on quantity discounts, email special_sales@mitpress.mit.edu.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kargon, Robert Hugh.

Introduction: The Arc of Utopias 1

1 Neotechnics in the Garden: The Marriage of Country

2 Planning for National Regeneration: Techno-Cities in

3 Techno-Città: Technology and Urban Design in Fascist

4 The Techno-City Goes to War: America in World War II

5 Utopia Revived: From Industrial Modernism to

6 The City of Disciplines: Utopia Denied, Utopia

7 Techno-Nostalgia and the New Urbanism 131

Conclusion: The Fate of the Industrial Eden 149

The techno-city was an international phenomenon, and hence each chapter

The birth pangs of the nineteenth-century industrial metropolis came on

Even if, as many Howard scholars maintain, Howard retained reservations

be widened.”11 Howard’s illustration of his “three magnets” is reproduced

formed in close association with a group that demonstrated early interest in

By the time of the 1902 appearance of Garden Cities of To-morrow, the

urban evolution by concentrating on those institutions that bore the burden of

“Megalopolis.” Here Mumford expresses his most alarming concerns about

The techno-nostalgia of the RPAA group is forcefully revealed in a 1939 film

(“dwelling combines”) and would be based on a mixed agricultural and

Depression, Norris was to exemplify what rational and humane planning

Mumford was saved from inevitable disillusionment and disappointment

Roosevelt’s interest in regionalism doubtless was behind the invitation to

I am determined on two things. . . . The first is to put Muscle Shoals to work. The

Within weeks of assuming office, Roosevelt moved to establish the

redevelopment. Morgan’s interview with Roosevelt reinforces the notion

p­ rojected a population of 1,000–1,500 families. The houses were constructed

culture. Salzgitter’s planners resolved to avoid the mistakes of Germany’s

plans of the anti-Semitic propagandist Theodor Fritsch.66 Relocating city

again their roots in the soil. . . . The reincorporation of the metropolitan

­ eadquarters—adopted the neo-classical gigantism of Albert Speer. (See fig-

hierarchy and “Ordnung,” a reminder of the authoritarian subtext of Nazi

Torviscosa lies in the northern Italian region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, about

ideology and propaganda. The twin Torviscosas remain so intertwined that

The town of Torviscosa was the invention of Franco Marinotti (1891–

timber-producing regions. After experimenting with a variety of plants,

In making his plans for Torviscosa, Marinotti drew on recent experience.

Torviscosa’s central square was a combined town hall/Fascist Party building,

city within a state—the Fascist fusion of private capitalism and government.

Literary propagandists were enlisted in the selling of Torviscosa. In 1938,

They were graceful, too graceful,

Enter now the “Goddess of Geometry,” personifying the physical and

Playing fields for soccer and bocce

To further trumpet its achievements in industry and town-building,

and research-based technology have pioneered an entirely new form of pro-

Sponsored by SNIA, Sette canne, un vestito would be expected to deliver

it served agricultural and recreational purposes. Besides being “an eminently

b­ itter protests. In September 1941, Walter Reuther, vice-president of the

tunity to build completely new communities designed for the particular

Board of Supervisors sent the county’s prosecutor, George Meader, to

p rojected a population of 1,000–1,500 families. The houses were constructed

eadquarters—adopted the neo-classical gigantism of Albert Speer. (See fig-

b itter protests. In September 1941, Walter Reuther, vice-president of the

the “spazio naturale dell’uomo.” After the destruction and disintegration

rganizations, and individuals; the former is visualized most clearly in diagrams,