The Last Landscape

William H. Whyte

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780812208504
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The remaining corner of an old farm, unclaimed by developers. The brook squeezed between housing plans. Abandoned railroad lines. The stand of woods along an expanded highway. These are the outposts of what was once a larger pattern of forests and farms, the "last landscape." According to William H. Whyte, the place to work out the problems of our metropolitan areas is within those areas, not outside them. The age of unchecked expansion without consequence is over, but where there is waste and neglect there is opportunity. Our cities and suburbs are not jammed; they just look that way. There are in fact plenty of ways to use this existing space to the benefit of the community, and The Last Landscape provides a practical and timeless framework for making informed decisions about its use.Called "the best study available on the problems of open space" by the New York Times when it first appeared in 1968, The Last Landscape introduced many cornerstone ideas for land conservation, urging all of us to make better use of the land that has survived amid suburban sprawl. Whyte's pioneering work on easements led to the passage of major open space statutes in many states, and his argument for using and linking green spaces, however small the areas may be, is a recommendation that has more currency today than ever before.

1

Introduction

This book is about the way our metropolitan areas look and the way they might look. Its thesis is that they are going to look much better, that they are going to be much better places to live in, and that one of the reasons they are is that a lot more people are going to be living in them.

Many thoughtful observers believe the opposite is true. They hold that not only is the landscape of our cities and suburbs a hideous mess, as indeed much of it is, but that it is bound to become much worse. The saturation point has been reached, they say, and unless growth and population trends are redirected, our metropolitan areas will become fouler yet. Some think they are beyond redemption already and that the only real hope is to start afresh, somewhere else, with new towns and cities.

But there is a good side to the mess. We needed it. It is disciplining us to do out of necessity what we refused to do by choice. We have been the most prodigal of people with land, and for years we wasted it with impunity. There was so much of it, and no matter how much we fouled it, there was always more over the next hill, or so it seemed.

For all our romantic veneration of the frontier tradition, however, we were steadily moving closer together. Well before 1900, most Americans were living in cities, and the great growth of the metropolitan areas that we think is so recent was well under way. Much more growth was yet to come, but by the twenties the trolley lines and commuter railroads had pushed the outer edge of suburbia almost as far as it is today.

In filling out the metropolis, however, we treated land as though we were in fact on the frontier. With the great postwar expansion of suburbia in the forties and fifties, we carried this to the point of caricature. We were using five acres to do the work of one, and the result was not only bad economics but bad aesthetics. People began to feel that if things looked this awful, something had gone wrong. At last we were having our noses rubbed in it.

The less of our landscape there is to save, the better our chances of saving it. It is a shame we have to lose so much land to learn the lesson, but desecration does seem a prerequisite for action. People have to be outraged. Most of the new land-use legislation and the pioneering programs did not come about as the result of foresighted, thoughtful analysis. They came about because people got mad over something they could see. Some of the most significant legislation can be traced to a small local outrage—a line of trees being chopped down for a highway, a meadow being asphalted for a parking area.

The quality of the environment was becoming a gut issue, and politicians sensed it well. The result was a wave of public programs. Starting in 1961 with New York State’s open-space bond issue of $75 million, voters began approving bond issues and additional taxes for the saving of open space. They approved them by large pluralities, city people especially.

During this period there was a significant shift of emphasis in Washington toward the needs of city people. The report of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission marked a notable turn in this respect. When Congress established the Commission in 1958 it expected a traditional approach to recreation, with the emphasis on the big open spaces and national parks; as a matter of fact, it specifically excluded city areas from the study. The Commission looked at them just the same. It had to. The simple, close-to-home activities, it discovered, are by far and away the most important to Americans. The place to meet this need, said chairman Laurance S. Rockefeller, is where most Americans live—in the cities and suburbs.

Congress was coming around to this way of thinking. In 1961 a modest grant program for urban open spaces had been proposed by Senator Harrison Williams; for a number of extraneous reasons (including an over-violent attack on it by Senator Everett Dirksen) the proposal wound up as part of the 1961 Housing Act. Several years later Congress set up the Land and Water Conservation Fund that had been recommended by ORRRC. These new programs and those of the states did not earmark as much grant money for cities as cities would have liked, but far more was being sent their way than had ever been sent before. More yet came with President Johnson’s “natural beauty” programs. Terminology to the contrary, these dealt more with man-made beauty than nature and were directed primarily at the urban areas.

Almost as important as the money programs were a succession of state acts broadening the public’s control powers over land use. Measures that would have seemed wildly socialistic only a decade or so before were being approved by state legislators with remarkably little controversy, and often by unanimous vote. Many of these statutes are still sleepers and local governments are only now beginning to realize what has been handed them. But the powers are considerable and the first court tests have been favorable. Communities can, among other things, use the right of eminent domain to acquire not only land outright but rights in private land; in the form of easements, they can buy away from landowners the right to build along roadsides or stream banks; or they can buy for the public the right to fish along the stream, communities can also buy land and then sell it or lease it back to people who will use it the way the community wants them to. There are techniques for buying open space on the installment plan, and for fouling up speculators’ plans. In terms of need, let it be said, nowhere near enough money has yet been provided, and certainly more legislation is needed. But let us count some blessings. With the tools at hand, there is a tremendous amount we can do to make the metropolis more amenable, and we can do it now.

Others have a more apocalyptic vision. Some say that we are on the threshold of a “post-industrial society”–i.e. it’s a whole new ball game now—and that entirely new forms of living must be devised. They see a breakthrough in environmental planning with teams of specialists applying systems analysis and computer technology to create the city of the future. A number of people have already begun jumping the gun, and in the recent upsurge of futurology have been devoting great energy and imagination to anticipating what forms these cities will take. Even the popular magazines are now full of pictures of megacities, stilt cities, linear cities, and such.

Some are to be located far, far away from any place. A government-aided research project has just been launched for the planning of an “Experimental City” to be located somewhere in Minnesota or the Great Plains. Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, the prime mover of the project, visualizes a self-contained city with a population limit of 250,000 people. The city would test a host of technological advances. Many of its functions would be put underground and possibly a transparent dome two miles in diameter might be constructed. Dr. Spilhaus, who thinks present cities are something of a lost cause, believes that Experimental City can be the progenitor of many such settlements.

These visions are not like those of the science-fiction writers, whose mordant utopias have a nasty way of crossing up the people who devise them. They are clearly meant to be beneficent. The forms of them differ: some stick up into the sky, much like Le Corbusier’s “Radiant City” of the twenties; some are domes; others are horizontal, consisting of a single eight- or ten-tiered building stretching miles and miles across the landscape. But they are all alike in one fundamental respect. The slate on which they are drawn has been wiped absolutely clean. In the perspective renderings of them, there is no trace of what once was. The old cities appear to have vanished, and in the great sea of greenness in which the new ones are seen, even the traces of today’s suburbia are extinguished.

Far out as these visions may seem, they are only a projection of current planning orthodoxies, and the same decentralist, clean-slate urge they manifest is to be found in many of the metropolitan plans that are now being drafted for the year 2000 (the third millennium—what an emboldening ring it has!). As a first step, planners draw detailed projections as to the number of people to be housed in the year 2000, what their incomes will be, their work week, pleasure hours and so on. Their graphs are surprisingly precise. Some even extend to the year 2020.

Whatever prophecy is in this book is for the short term. It is difficult enough to look ten years ahead, and for the life of me I do not see how anyone can hope to say with any exactitude how people are going to be living some thirty-five years hence. Computer technology may make it more fun to try but it is not going to give us the gift of prophecy previously withheld.

What is being fed into the machines is a set of rather questionable assumptions. What comes out is an extrapolation of the trends of the last twenty years—surging population, increasing affluence, and more leisure. Maybe these will continue. Maybe they will not. The very unanimity and assurance with which these projections are made should be enough to make one quite nervous. As I will suggest in a later chapter, by trying to meet the problems of surging prosperity, we may have let ourselves in for a gigantic cross-up.

But planners are a sanguine lot. They have taken literally Daniel Burnham’s admonition to make no little plans, and like him they believe that a noble design once set on paper will have the capacity to bring about its reality. These fatuous maxims have been beggared by reality time and again, but faith in the grand design is stronger than ever.

To arrive at it, the planners hypothesize a number of alternatives. The first will be termed “unplanned growth” or “semi-planned growth” or “planned sprawl.” Actually, this will be the most challenging alternative to work with, since there is a fair chance something like it will come about. It is anathema to planners, however, some of whom would as soon go to hell with a comprehensive plan as heaven without one. They go on to sketch the grand designs, such as rings of satellite cities, radial corridors, or wedges. After the pros and cons of each are matched against the others, the optimum is chosen. Whatever its geometries, it will call for a sweeping rearrangement of the region with its growth dispersed into self-contained new cities, each separated from the other by huge expanses of open space.

Designs can indeed help shape growth, but only when the designs and growth are going in the same direction. Most of the year 2000 plans are essentially centrifugal—that is, they would push everything outward away from the city, decentralize its functions, and reduce densities by spreading the population over a much greater land area. I think the evidence is staring us in the face that the basic growth trends are in the other direction; that they are toward greater centralization and toward higher rather than lower density.

There will be no brief here for letting the free market decide how we are going to grow, but where people and institutions are putting their money is a phenomenon worthy of respect, and planning which goes against the grain usually comes a cropper. The English, who have far more stringent land controls than we do, have been doing their best to constrain London, but the beast keeps growing. Most thinking Frenchmen agree that Paris is much too big in relation to the rest of the country, and Paris keeps growing. The Russians have been doing everything they can to curb Moscow, and it keeps on growing.

Maybe there is a reason. This kind of growth is not so unplanned. It is the result of a multitude of planning decisions by individuals and groups, and not some blind, lemminglike urge. Consider, for example, the great office building boom that has taken place in our cities. After the war it was widely prophesied that there would be a wholesale exodus of managerial people from the city as businesses resettled in campuses out in the country. Business proceeded to concentrate more managerial and service people in the city than ever before—and in the most crowded, highest-priced part of it. Each year alarmed observers warned that the saturation point had now been reached and that for sanity’s sake it had to stop. The load on the streets, on the trains, on restaurants, and on people’s nerves was surely becoming intolerable. But more and more buildings went up, with big old buildings being torn down to put up bigger new buildings. It was crazy, perhaps, but somehow it seemed to work out.

At the same time, of course, metropolitan areas have been pushing outward along the periphery, and they will probably continue to. But there is a built-in limit to lateral extension, and I don’t think that our metropolitan areas are going to congeal into one undifferentiated mess. They certainly do not have to. A metropolitan area can take care of a great many more people by only a very slight expansion of its radius. Once it is a certain size—say fifty miles across—a slight enlargement of the periphery will vastly increase the acreage, with each additional mile outward adding almost a fifth again as much area.

But outward expansion can be an extremely costly way to handle growth, If the trend to low density sprawl were to continue, the result would be what New York’s Regional Plan Association calls Spread City–“not a true city because it lacks centers, nor a suburb because it is not a satellite of any city, nor is it truly rural because it is loosely covered with houses and urban facilities”. This pattern scatters the places where people work as well as the homes they live in; it makes them utterly dependent on cars and unnecessarily lengthens the trip they have to make.

When commercial and job facilities are so scattered, the kind of concentration that makes possible a high level of urban services is ruled out. The facilities are all over the place, and you have to drive from one to get to the other. Each one serves a single function—a discount center here, a string of steak ranches there—and they are rarely massed so that the parts make a whole. The same thing applies to culture centers, museums, and libraries that have been going up. They are not being located in high-traffic areas; as the Regional Plan Association says, “Cheap land and monumentality of buildings seem to be the major criteria.”

On the face it would appear that we are in for more of the same kind of scatteration; drive out along almost any fringe area and you can see the same wasteful pattern being repeated. Yet there are signs of a counter trend to centralization. By this I do not mean a return to one center, the old core center of the business district, but the growth of a number of centers, some of them based on older communities, some of them new.

So far, the new centers have been a largely unplanned phenomena. A good example is the huge complex of facilities that has been going up around the Valley Forge interchange outside Philadelphia. Twenty years ago it was a crossroads hamlet. Now it is filled with research laboratories, light industrial plants, shopping centers, and large scale motels. It is not an ideal center—you have to have a car to use any part of it—but it is indicative of the direction we are headed in. We are likely to see much more clustering of facilities and more emphasis on multipurpose centers. Shopping centers, for example, started as single-purpose facilities devoted almost entirely to retailing. Most of the new ones, however, embrace a large and mutually supported mixture of activities, theaters, convention facilities, recreation centers, and the like.

There is still, to be sure, a good bit of what could be called strip growth along the highways. The string of electronic firms along Boston’s circumferential Route 128 is the most notable example; similar growth is taking place along other beltways, but I think that the multipurpose center, like the one at Valley Forge, is likely to be the pattern of the future. There is, I must concede, some wishful thinking in this respect. Having just scolded planner for trying to predict too far ahead, I should be circumspect myself. But this much can be said. The move to high-density centers not only makes for a much better land-use pattern, it happens to be more economic for the commercial interests involved. Planning that seeks to strengthen this trend will be working with the grain rather than against it.

I think that the bulk of the significant growth is going to take place within our present metropolitan areas. I think we are going to see a build-up, not a fragmentation, of the core cities. There will be a filling in of the bypassed land in the gray area between the cities and suburbia and a more intensive development—a redevelopment, if you will—of suburbia itself. New towns, yes, but I will wager that the ones which work out will not be self-contained and that they will not be somewhere off in the hinterland. We are, in sum, going to operate our metropolitan areas much closer to capacity and with more people living on a given amount of land.

A prescription for disaster, some would say. The literature of planning and conservation—indeed, American literature in general—has a deep antiurban streak, and the very reason for the city concentration is viewed as its mortal defect. The terms carry their own censure–“insensate concentration,” “urban overgrowth,” “urbanoid”–and by epithet they take it as self-evident that people must pay a terrible price for living close together. Lately there has been much talk about experiments with rats that show that when they get crowded they get neurotic, and therefore, by implication, so must human beings. The bias is also evident in planning brochures and documentary films on the urban plight. The stock shots of bad things always show forms of concentration: telephoto shots of massed rooftops, telephoto shots of cars jammed on a freeway, shots of harried, nervous-looking people crowding sidewalks. None of this is supported with any research on actual human behavior, which is a pity, for there are some interesting questions to look into. If people do not like being crowded, why do they persist in going where they will be crowded? How much is too much?

But the questions are somewhat beside the point, and of all people we Americans probably have the least reason for fretting about them. Our densities are not high at all. They are low. In some of the slum sections of the city, to be sure, there are too many people crowded together. But overcrowding—which is too many people per room—is not the same thing as high density. The residential density in most of our cities is quite reasonable.

So is the density of the metropolitan areas around them. By European standards they are enviably underpopulated. The densest in this country are the metropolitan areas along the Boston-New York-Washington axis; the 150 counties that make up this Atlantic urban region contain 67,690 square miles and 43 million people. If this region was developed to the same average density as the western Netherlands, the number of people would be tripled. The comparison is an extreme one perhaps, but so is the difference in appearance. Our areas look more filled up than the ones that really are.

I am not arguing that it would be good to have many extra people, nor am I decrying the long-range importance of population control. In one of those unheralded shifts that confound analysis, Americans have lately begun having somewhat fewer babies than before and if the trend continues, the increase in population will not be as fearful as the demographers have forecast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Politics of Open Space
• The Devices
• The Plans
• Development
• Landscape Action
• Design and Density
• Bibliography
• Index