The seers: pioneer thinkers in urban planning, from

3 The seers: pioneer thinkers in urban planning, from

1880 to 1945

The whole of Chapter 2 has concentrated on the evolution of what can be called, broadly, the urban problem in Britain from the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century to the outbreak of the Second World War. We have looked at the facts of urban devel- opment and at the attempts – often faltering and not very effective ones – on the part of central and local administration to deal with some of the resulting problems. This was the world of practical men grappling with practical matters. But no less important, during this time, were the writings and the influence of thinkers about the urban problem. Often their writings and their lectures reached only a tiny minority of sympathetic people. To practical men of the time, much of what they asserted would seem utopian, even cranky. Yet in sum, and in retrospect, the influence of all of them has been liter- ally incalculable; furthermore, it still continues.

This delay in the recognition and acceptance of their ideas is very important. Some of these ideas were more or less fully developed by the end of the nineteenth century, and

a large part were known to the interested public by the end of the First World War. Yet with the exception of some small-scale experiments up to 1939, nearly all the influence on practical policy and design has come since 1945. One obvious peril in this is that no matter how topical and how appropriate these thinkers were in analysing the problems of their own age, their remedies might be at least partially outdated by the time they came to be taken seriously. We shall need to judge for ourselves how serious this has been.

It is useful to divide the thinkers into two groups: the Anglo-American group and the continental European group. The basis of the distinction here is more than one of conve- nience. Basically, the background of the two groups of thinkers has been quite different. We have already seen in Chapter 2 that in England and Wales (Scotland in this respect has been rather more like the European continent), cities began to spread out after about 1860: first the middle class and then (especially with the growth of public housing after the First World War) the working class began to move out of the congested inner rings of cities into single-family homes with individual gardens, built at densities of 10 or 12 houses to the acre (25–30/hectare). Exactly the same process occurred, from about the same time, in most American cities, though in some cases the process was delayed by the great wave of arrivals of national groups (such as Italians, Greeks, Russians, Poles, and Jews from Russia and Poland) between 1880 and 1910; they crowded together in ethnic ghettos in the inner areas of cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, and took some time to join the general outward movement. Nevertheless, by the 1920s and 1930s there was a rapid growth of single-family housing around all American cities, served by public transport and then, increasingly, by the private car. This was a tradition which, by and large, writers and thinkers in both Britain and the United States accepted as the starting point.

On the Continent it was quite otherwise. As cities grew rapidly under the impact of industrialization and movement from the countryside, generally several decades after On the Continent it was quite otherwise. As cities grew rapidly under the impact of industrialization and movement from the countryside, generally several decades after