Why don’t we have the cities we need?

Most of us live in cities and enjoy every chance of escaping into the country. Why? Because we are happy to get away from our cities. Does that mean we do not have the cities we need to feel really at our ease in these modern times? That would be pretty bad, for millions of people are forced to live in cities, and not all of them get invitations to visit the Rocky Mountains.

As you know, all European cities were founded and their layout fixed long before motorization was even dreamed of. They were very well designed to meet the needs of people who went about their business on foot or used horse-drawn vehicles. Most citizens were tradesmen or craftsmen and lived where they worked. So they had no idea of the shuttle traffic between home and work that turns our cities into witches’ caldrons four times, or at least twice, a day.

There is no need for me to give you a description of those medieval towns, which were actually fortresses. You all know them, at least from pictures. Indeed, it will not be long before we, too, shall know them only from pictures. For we moderns living in the cities we have in­herited from our forebears have developed needs that those cities are less and less able to meet. And these vital needs are forcing us not merely to extend the limits of our cities but to destroy their very heart­—if bombs have not done so already.

To console us there are cities like Florence or Munich or Paris, which are saved by their worldwide renown, or Siena and Rothenburg, whose very smallness keeps them intact. They make up the category of beautiful cities we can still show American tourists. But it is a category without a future, for as time goes on they will be less and less capable of coping with the tasks that the future will set them. They are in the process of becoming museums where everything is beautiful and nothing is of any practical use.

To dismay us, instead, there are cities like the Frankfurt of today—congeries of modern, or merely modernistic, multistory buildings, all of which have the bad luck to stand where medieval gabled houses once rightly stood. What I mean is that the rise of a modern city is impeded precisely by the presence of these modern buildings. The same thing can be seen today in all European countries, and it is a joke that does not make anyone laugh.

Frankfurt was dreadfully damaged by bombs. The inner town in particular was practically razed to the ground. Yet the layout of the old town, which will never arise from its ruins, was preserved and the old streets are now lined with new buildings. Strangely enough, the cathedral—the focal point of the old town—seems to be no longer in its former position. Of course it has not been moved, but a suburban settlement has been built at its feet. And it is funny to see a cathedral in a suburb.

To put it briefly, the hopes that wartime destruction would offer a unique opportunity for building rational new cities in Europe did not materialize. Perhaps I should say: “Thank God for that”—otherwise it might be used to justify the production of new bombs. What a decade of reconstruction has achieved is a monument to incredible industry, especially in Germany, but it is not town planning.

And how are things in my own country, Switzerland? No bombs fell on us, or hardly any. A young man from Texas or Nevada, unaccustomed to such small countries, did drop a dozen rather heavy bombs. The United States immediately paid up a few million dollars to cover the damage. A very friendly gesture but not enough to start town planning.

What I should like to say about Switzerland is that we are doing our own destruction. We are not mad enough simply to tear down our venerable old towns to make room for modern cities. We are far madder; we widen one street after the other to make them safe for pedestrians because motor cars keep multiplying like rabbits—our public squares are only architectural at dawn, for the rest of the day they are mere parking lots—and then we erect multistory buildings that hold more people and so bring more traffic into the medieval streets. Then we invent a labyrinth of one-way streets that make our life miserable; and even that is no use. In the end we have to remove the medieval fountains, widen the streets again—though even that will not do much good—and so on, until we have destroyed the town our forefathers left us without building the city for our future descendants.

There you have the situation in a nutshell. If man were a rational being, what would he do about it?

Everyone knows that architects are chock full of ideas. There is no lack of genial projects drafted by Le Corbusier, Gropius, Neutra, Wiener and Sert, Salmona, and many others. And when we study them, we cannot help being amazed. For these projects are not only capable of satisfying the vital demands of our life today but would even be more economical than anything that is being done at present. Then why are they not realized? That is the question that preoccupies me most. Are democracy and planning two things that mutually exclude each other? Or, to put it differently, who is really responsible for the formation or deformation of our cities?

One fine morning, when I was still an architect, I saw an open field, almost the last surviving field on the bank of the Limmat (which is the Hudson of Zurich). I love my home town and made the following suggestion: The municipality should purchase the field that I had been offered; we should found a cooperative society for an artists’ settlement; the municipality would keep the title to the land and so be able to dispose of it in time to come, and we would merely rent it. That would prevent one of the last green fields on the river bank from being devastated by a real estate speculator. So I went to the Town Planner. “That’s not a new idea”, he said. “We wanted to do the same thing long ago. Go to the Mayor and tell him I agree.” The Mayor also agreed. “I want the city to take the opportunity to buy the land while it is still for sale at a reasonable price. Go and tell the Town Planner I agree.”

But it was already too late! Thirty-six cents a square foot was the price I was asked. The city offered forty; an anonymous speculator bid forty-five; the city agreed, so the speculator raised it to fifty. The Town Council saw how important the lot was for the town plan and accepted the price. The speculator went up to fifty-five. And so on until he got it at last for sixty-four cents a square foot. And now it is being built up on that basis and exploited without the slightest regard for, and in defiance of, all the laws of town planning we learned at school.

What is the lesson of my story?

The ground on which our cities are built has become a trading commodity. In Zurich, a town of 400,000 inhabitants, the annual profit on this commodity—which, after all, is no mere commodity but our land, our fatherland—is in excess of 20 million dollars. Where does that profit come from? Who pays it? The answer is: the inhabitants, the tenants, at a rate of fifty dollars a year each. That is not right, but I don’t want to take it tragically. Let them have it, the few who still refuse to believe that money does not give happiness. But I should like to ask another question. Is it right that those few who care only for profit should plan our cities? They do so, in fact; and, as we have seen, it is a catastrophe.

Why do I prefer to live in an ancient hovel of the old town or in a village? Indeed, I am actually on the point of buying an old, old house in a little medieval town. Why? Our town planning—which is really no planning at all—estranges our towns and us. As I see it, all these settlements are ghettos for different income groups. The neighborhood is not a cross-section of the whole society. The fact that all the people who live in it have more or less the same monthly salary does not make for unity but only for uniformity. In my genuine city, instead—and I mean the sort of city that used to exist and that we must build again—I have neighbors of all sorts, both richer and poorer than myself: a lawyer, a chimney-sweep, a large family, an eccentric recluse, a toper who beats his wife, a trusty policeman, a butcher richer than all the rest of us together, a girl who had a lot of nocturnal visitors, and even a singing teacher who gets on my nerves. And yet I feel better and closer to life in its many aspects when I am surrounded by a neighborhood that is lively and real than in any income-bracket ghetto, however comfortable. The fate of our society depends to a great extent on whether we solve the neighborhood problem or not. I am not surprised that town planning as understood at present is incapable of finding the solution. For it is not based on a democratic order of society but on real estate speculation, and that cannot be called planning but rather the exploitation of development.

Here is another question. Who is really responsible for the development of our cities? The architect? Or the local authorities? Or the land owners? Or the whole body of citizens? I come from a country that I love insofar as it is a democracy and hate when it falls short of it. And I believe in the responsibility of the citizens. In other words, we have the cities we deserve.

How was it in the days when real cities were built? A prince—and that means a layman—set the problem, and the architect solved it. Of course I don’t want to have the princes back again! But the same principle applies to a democracy: It is for the layman and not the expert to set the problem; the expert’s job is to solve it. If we replace the word “layman” with “citizens” or “society,” we obtain the following axiom: Town planning is far more a political than a technical question.

We cannot build for the past, and we want to build for the future. How are we to do it? So that we shall feel just as much at home as our forebears did in their cities.

Why do I feel more at home in Venice than in Chicago? Or, to put it more politely, why am I happier on the piazza of Santa Fe than on San Francisco’s Market Street? I like just strolling about. It is one of the marks of a good city that I am glad to stop there and that I go there even if I have no business to do. The city should be a meeting place. For instance, I would hardly go to Wall Street if I hadn’t any money, for after office hours Wall Street is a grave. But I do go to the piazza in Venice or Santa Fe—just to stroll about, look at the people, and perhaps meet someone. I wouldn’t call it a stroll when the red lights keep pulling me up in my tracks or I am forced to hurry across the street just because the crowd does so at the beck of a green light.

Walking distance is the basic principle. Even Paris I can only feel on foot. A gallery, a bar, a cathedral, a barbershop, the library, the river, a bank, a florist’s shop, the tax collector’s office—they must all be within the orbit of my whim, within walking distance. For if I have to get into my car or take a public conveyance to reach a definite goal, that involves a decision. And when I have made my decision and climbed into my car I can see a lot of people who get in my way, but I feel quite alone. To stroll means to be close to people, a pedestrian among pedestrians. That makes me a member of society. I can stop when I see an attractive girl and stare into the same shop window.

Why are we losing all this?

That is easily explained. Traffic, already now and still more in the future, needs a lot of room—many times as much room as our European cities, which were built for pedestrians, can give it. And if we let traffic have all the room it needs, the result will be that our cities will stretch out until they are no longer cities. Los Angeles is an example of this. Once I drove on and on hoping against hope to reach Los Angeles; at last I decided that I had missed it and had passed it by an hour ago. And all the time I was right in the middle of it. But Los Angeles has no middle, no inside! There are only houses, streets, gardens, streets, garages, more houses, more streets, gas stations, drug stores, cinemas, gardens, streets, houses, streets, gardens—until at last, thank God! the desert starts. It is the Tower of Babel tumbled down and strewn over umpteen square miles in a hundred thousand fragments.

Is this inevitable? That would be sad indeed.

If the alternative is so logical that no architect who reflects can help hitting on it, why hasn’t it been realized long ago?

Because it can only be realized by founding a new town, or at least a new city.

Where are the founders to be found?

Three of us—a young historian, a young political economist, and myself—made an attempt to smoke out the founders a year ago. We published a pamphlet called “Look Out, Switzerland!”¹ In it we mocked our towns. We jested over the disparity between the wealth of money and the dearth of deeds. We abused our political parties for being mere trading companies interested only in sharing momentary profits and challenged them to become political parties once more, namely, bearers of ideas, and so turn politics into a productive struggle to build our future. We abused society because it was no longer a society but a slave of the technocrats and urged it to get into a huddle and define the problem to be solved by the experts. We demanded the foundation of a new city somewhere in Switzerland, not as an architectural experiment (as I already said, the ideas have been framed long ago) but rather as a political experiment. We wanted to prove that democracy is capable of solving the problems of today.

What was the result of the publication?

Jeremias Gotthelf—a Swiss country preacher and one of the greatest epic poets in the German language—once said: “If you throw a stick into the pig sty, the sow you hit squeals.” And that is just what happened. Squeals were heard from all sides. We sold ten thousand copies in two months and received thousands of answers, 90 per cent of them positive. Then came a barrage from the press, 70 per cent negative. Why was that? We asked for a proof that our democracy was really alive. Did that makes us Communists? We became the talk of the town for a day, and that was the end of it. But not quite. That same year several municipalities wrote saying they would welcome the task of administering the new city. Those same newspapers that had nothing but hard knocks for us during the first round wrote about town planning as never before. And from all over Switzerland and Germany we received invitations to lecture on the new city. The parties we had abused took the new city as the subject of their next meetings. The People’s University started a course on the new city. A group of planners and students founded an association for the promotion of the new city—and we ourselves are curious to see the result.

It has already had one important result.

The idea of founding a city is a very uncomfortable one. For anyone who merely considers doing so cannot avoid making decisions that stretch far beyond the sphere of architecture, decisions of a political nature. Founding a city means choosing a form of life. Once out in the wide open spaces, we are stripped of all the excuses we had in our old towns, where we could always say our bands were tied. It makes us very embarrassed. Do we really know what we want? One cannot plan a city unless ones knows what sort of society will live in it. In other words, in ultimate analysis what interests us is not to have a city as attractive as all the models we have seen, but first and foremost to have a society capable of solving the problems of our age. And town planning is only one of those problems, though an important and particularly obvious one.

The mayor of a German town said to me: “It’s a wonderful idea, Mr. Frisch, but take my advice. Build your city without asking the people how they want to live; build it and then, if you really must, make room for democracy.” That is exactly what we do not want. We want the new city to be the product and expression of a social and sovereign democracy. That is what we boast of being every day, and we have got to prove it—for instance, by building that New City.