(2023-09-07) Johnson Return Of The Progress City

Steven Johnson: Return Of The “Progress City.” A few weeks ago, the Times broke a story about a secretive group of high-tech luminaries who had been quietly buying up farmland in Solano County

the tech titans appeared to be plotting out a city with a settlement pattern that was more Jane Jacobs than Ayn Rand

in principle, I like the idea of fostering more experiments in how we organize and build our communities

In last week’s Hard Fork podcast, Kevin Roose and Casey Newton had a typically entertaining conversation about the story

I’d much rather have the super-wealthy investing in trial balloons for reinventing how cities work than investing in spaceships or super yachts.

The problem, of course, is that you’re left with a society where the only experiments that can be run at scale are ones funded by the super-rich—and running them at scale is important when you are trying to invent a new kind of urbanism that depends by definition on hundreds of thousands of people embracing it.

the first thing that popped into my head when I read the Times piece was the the crazy historical precedent for all this: Walt Disney’s original plans for EPCOT.

EPCOT’s roots extend back to one of the most tragic figures in 20th-century urban design and planning: the Austrian “environment designer” Victor Gruen.

in 1956 Gruen completed work on Southdale Center, which would become his most famous—and, to some, notorious—project. Gruen designed Southdale as a two-level structure linked by opposing escalators

to modern eyes, the reference to European urbanity is lost: Southdale Center is, inescapably, a modern shopping mall, the first of its kind.

But the mall itself had been only a small part of Gruen’s design for Southdale and its descendants

Gruen’s real vision was for a dense, mixed-use, pedestrian-based urban center

He later expanded his vision of the new city in an eclectic series of planning briefs, speeches, and essays, culminating in a book called The Heart of Our Cities.

Even Jane Jacobs was smitten by Gruen’s designs. Describing a plan for a new Fort Worth that Gruen had developed but never built, Jacobs wrote, “The service done by the Fort Worth plan is of incalculable value, [and will] set in motion new ideas about the function of the city and the way people use the city.”

Yet developers never took to Gruen’s larger vision.

The mall didn’t just help create the modern, postwar suburb; it also helped undermine the prewar city

Gruen would eventually renounce his creation, or at least the distorted version of it that the mall developers had implemented: “I refuse to pay alimony,” he proclaimed, “for these bastard developments.”

his ideas nonetheless managed to attract one devoted fan who had the financial resources to put them into action: Walt Disney

Disney planned to design an entire functioning city from scratch, first called a “Progress City,” then “a city of tomorrow,” then EPCOT.

In 1966, Disney set up a skunkworks operation on their Burbank lot, in a lofty space that was quickly dubbed “The Florida Room,” where a team of imagineering urban planners labored over mock-ups of their new city. Disney apparently kept a copy of The Heart of Our Cities on his desk

In the late summer of 1966, he made a thirty-minute film introducing Disney World.

Disney spends almost no time discussing the amusement-park

Instead, he focuses extensively on his “city of tomorrow,” showing prototypes and sketches

it turned out to be the last film that Walt Disney ever made. (He was already terminally ill with cancer during the filming.)

The first thing that should be said about EPCOT is that, like Gruen’s original plan for Southdale, it was going to be an entire community oriented around a mall. “Most important, this entire fifty acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed,” a narrator explains in the 1966 film. “In this climate-controlled environment

It was, for starters, profoundly anti-automobile. At the center of the city was a zone that Gruen had come to call the Pedshed, defined by the “desirable walking distance” of an average citizen. Cars would be banned from the entire Pedshed area.

EPCOT residents would use their cars only on “weekend pleasure trips.”

the Walt Disney Corporation turned EPCOT into yet another theme park, with its bizarre and slightly sad hybrid of Bucky Fuller-style futurism and It’s-A-Small-World globalism

Why weren’t progress cities built? The easiest way to dismiss the Gruen/EPCOT vision is to focus on the centrality of the mall itself. Now that mall culture is in decline—in the United States and Europe at least—we understand that the overly programmed nature of the mall environment ended up being a fatal flaw. (That doesn't explain why none were built in the 1970s.)

as the developers standardized Gruen’s original plan, and as the big chain stores grew more powerful, malls became interchangeable: a characterless cocoon of J.Crew and the Body Shop and Bloomingdale’s. Eventually, our appetite for novelty and surprise overcame the convenience and ubiquity of mall culture, and people began turning back to the old downtowns.

dismissing EPCOT as a crowning moment in the history of suburbanization—the city of the future is built around a mall!— diverts the eye from the other elements of the plan that actually might have value, whether they ultimately get put into place in Solano, or some other experiment. The fact that Jacobs, who had an intense antipathy to top-down planners, saw merit in the Gruen model should tell us something.