Cities in Trouble—What Can Be Done

Q  Then you don't regard freeways as the answer to a city's problem?

A  They never can present a complete solution. Private automobile transportation, even with the largest amount of freeway construction, cannot solve the transportation problem for any large city.

Q  What is the answer to the city's problem?

A  I believe in a new type of metropolitan organization which I call the "cellular form" of urban planning.

Q  Would you explain that?

A  This form goes back to the way nature builds all her own creations—by grouping atoms and molecules in cellular fashion.

Q  How would you apply this cellular system to a city?

A  By starting from the simplest and smallest module—the human being—building up from there to a family unit, then a group of family units, and then to a small community.

That might be the basic cellular form in the urban environment. A number of such cellular forms—or communities—may then form a bigger one, which may be a town. But each of these cellular forms, or communities, should remain as a definite unit, and should not flow into the others.

Q  How would you keep the communities apart?

A  I feel that in our cities of the future we should arrange green spaces and separations between each one of the cellular forms, and should not allow our cities to be converted into the endless, amorphous, suburban deserts which we see today crawling over the entire countryside.

Q  Then how are these communities linked to form a city?

A  Cells, clusters of cells, constellations of such clusters form a planetary system revolving, in their activities, around a powerful solar body in the form of the metropolitan core. In this core, the highest expressions of the economic, cultural, social and work life are represented.

Q  Would we have to rebuild cities from scratch to develop this cellular system?

A  That is not necessary. We could convert the present pattern of our cities with comparatively little effort into the kind of pattern I am talking about. We could do it by using tools at our disposal which we are now misusing.

Q  Such as?

A  One of the best means for the purpose are the freeways, highways, parkways and so on that we are building today. The trouble is that now we are building them from a strictly engineering point of view—simply to connect two points of nonexistent interest in the shortest possible manner.

In building freeways today we are disrupting existing communities, often cutting them apart, cutting of homes from their schools or from their shopping centers.

Q  What should be done with these freeways?

A  We should use them to encircle the various cells of which I spoke—these clusters of human activities.

If this encircling is done in such a way as to provide green areas—as we do already in our parkways—then, while creating traffic ways, we are simultaneously creating the desirable buffers between units. And—what seems important to me—we are also forming urban units which, instead of flowing into each other, are clearly defined and separated.

Q  We've been hearing a lot lately about the "downtown mall." Is this a part of your cellular pattern?

A  Yes. It is definitely a part of it. I am frequently referred to in the press as the "father of the mall."

Though I do not want to shirk my paternal responsibilities, I must say that I am a little concerned about the kid. I believe that many mistakes are being made in its upbringing. The mall will be a success only when it grows up normally and organically.