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Abstract
This paper explores the fierce debate between engineers and urban planners over the validity of disciplinary tools at the time of the construction of the Interstate Highway System in the United States, particularly those moments when the system invaded the heart of the existing city. This debate, far from a collegial discussion over the future of the city, was a collision between viscerally held positions. On the one hand, engineers, strongly linked to prevailing political–economical structures, redefined the city through the pragmatism of a method. On the other, architects and urbanists argued for a project that would define a theory of “the urban,” or recover a notion of urbanity. In this context, method and theory seemed irreconcilable opposites, the former associated with notions of efficiency and seen as an authority able to respond to the project at hand, the latter understood to be an overly specific instrument, unsuitable for the largest public works project in American history. Three conferences, Hartford (1957), Sagamore (1958) and Hershey (1962) became the stage for a disciplinary debate between architects and engineers in the search for professional validation.
Notes
1 The Interstate Highway System is also known as the Dwight D. Eisenhower System of Interstate and Defense Highways.
2 Although the system had existed as an idea within federal government since the beginning of the twentieth century, it was President Franklin D. Roosevelt who, in 1939, first requested an official report to study the feasibility of a territorial network of toll highways. The study, called “Toll and Free Roads,” concluded that the system would be justifiable not so much as a territorial network but as one that branched into the heart of cities, because the biggest percentage of trips would be generated in and out of urban areas. This conclusion generated a financial obstacle that lasted for almost twenty years as the system could not be financed by tolls alone.
3 In 1956, President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which established that the Interstate Highway System would be financed by a ninety percent contribution from federal government and ten percent from state government. The bill sealed and boosted the interstate network project that had been amongst federal and state planning goals for almost fifty years.
4 The federal administration and control of the highway system was carried out by the Bureau of Public Roads.
5 The interest of Connecticut Life Insurance Company in organizing this conference was to try to establish the capacity of the Interstate Highways System to impact on land value, based on the opinions and projections of the representatives of several fields.
6 The list of attendees was very diverse, as were the institutions or backgrounds they represented. Among the many who participated were Albert Cole from the Housing and Home Financing Agency; Edward Ackerman from the Water Resources Program; Boyd Barnard from the Urban Land Institute; J. B. Thomas from the Texas Electric Service; Edmund Bacon, then Director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission; Clarence Stein, co-founder of the Regional Planning Association of America; Victor Gruen, so-called “father of shopping malls”; Carl Feiss, a renowned urban planner; and a long list of journalists, real estate agents, bankers, university representatives, and many others. The event was an authentic melting pot of private, public, intellectual, and academic interests under the same roof.
7 Tallamy was, at the time of the conference, Federal Highway Administrator; his role was to act as chief advisor to the president with regard to expressways as well as to oversee the Bureau of Public Roads. Mumford was an influential American architectural writer and critic whose main focus was the dramatic transformation occurring in American cities and its relationship to the government programs that helped to trigger it.
8 By the 1950s the unstoppable growth of the suburbs, the decay of urban centers, and the flight of businesses to the broader metropolitan areas were challenging the formal and functional organization of the city. The highways system had been seen since early in the century as a vehicle to revitalize the inner urban areas, especially downtowns, and to bring economic activity back to the city.
9 Bertram Tallamy, “Highways to the Future,” in “The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region”, conference proceedings, Hartford, Connecticut, September 9, 1957, 2.
10 Ibid., 4.
11 Lewis Mumford, closing remarks to “The New Highways: Challenge to the Metropolitan Region,” conference proceedings, 11.
12 “We need a new type of city. We have to turn our backs on both the obsolete metropolis in its old form and the equally obsolete ruinous suburban development. The name of this type of city was given to it long ago by a group of us, including the foremost of them, Clarence Stein, who really fastened on the name in spite of my doubts, the Regional City”; ibid.
13 The principles of the Regional City were established by the Regional Planning Association of America, founded by Stein, Henry Wright, Benton MacKaye, and Mumford.
14 The National Resources Planning Committee was created by President Roosevelt in 1935 and abolished in 1939 under suspicion of excessive government intervention. The objective of the committee was to control, plan, and balance the use of natural resources, especially land linking all the agencies and policies related with their development. Port authorities are public bodies formed to operate transportation infrastructures. Mumford suggested broadening the capacities of the port authority to include an executive capacity with respect to three agents involved in structuring the territory: infrastructures, land use, and population distribution.
15 The conference was organized by the Automotive Safety Foundation with the support of the Highways Research Board and a highway committee formed by the American Municipal Association and the American Association of State Highways Officials.
16 Alfred E. Johnson, “The Sagamore Conference on Highways and Urban Development,” Syracuse University, New York, 1958, 5.
17 “The Sagamore Conference on Highways and Urban Development,” 6.
18 Ibid., 19.
19 The conference was sponsored by the US Housing and Home Finance Agency, the US Bureau of Public Roads, and the Automotive Safety Foundation.
20 “Freeways in the Urban Setting. The Hershey Conference,” conference proceedings, Automotive Safety Foundation, Washington, DC, Citation1962, n.p.
21 The research into the aesthetic values of highways developed by Appleyard, Lynch, and Myer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) would be published as the mythical book The View From the Road (Citation1964). “We became interested in the aesthetics of highways out of a concern with the visual formlessness of our cities and an intuition that the new expressway might be one of our best means of re-establishing coherence and order on the mew metropolitan scale […] the highway […] is a good example of […] the problem of designing visual sequences for the observer in motion”; Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Citation1964), “Preface.”
22 The Federal-Aid Highway Act is the name of Law 87–866; it was signed by President Kennedy on October 23, 1962.