Communitas and Its Impact on City Planning

The city planner’s approach to the improvement of society differs sharply from that of the intellectual. The planner seeks improvement by manipulating spatial relationships, that is, through the coordination of the natural environment, space, and man-made land uses such as buildings, neighborhoods and highways. Except for a quite recent concern with the economic base, the planner has paid little attention to the social structure or economy of the city. In essence, he believes that the well-planned and esthetically pleasing community will assure a good life for its citizens.

For some time now, this approach—called physical planning in the professional jargon—has been under attack from various quarters. During the 1950s it became increasingly clear that the old and new ailments of the city could not be healed by such physical solutions as project planning, zoning, master planning and urban renewal. Projects such as New York’s Lincoln Square and Philadelphia’s Penn Center are still being proposed and built, but it is doubtful that they can revitalize downtown or stem the flow of middle-class residents out of the city. Progress is being made with zoning ordinances and master plans, but so far, neither the new concepts drafted by the planners nor the watered-down versions that are finally adopted have solved downtown congestion or halted the spread of slums. Urban renewal has resulted primarily in subsidized luxury housing, and the transfer of slum dwellers from one blighted area to another.

As a result, there is a growing recognition that the problems of the city are economic, social and political; that rearranging land uses and replacing buildings does not solve these; and that the solutions must be economic, social and political. This new awareness has been stimulated by the entry of social scientists into city planning, and by the critical comments of other intellectuals, especially those who see that their way of life, which is dependent on the city, is being threatened by the continued expansion of the slums, the destruction of the traditional urban texture by large-scale renewal projects, and by the departure of their middle-class audience to the suburbs.

The outcome of these tendencies has been the gradual development of a new approach to city planning, which rejects the idea of social betterment through physical re-arrangements alone. This approach, which I call goal-oriented, determines the public and private goals of the community, ranks them in priority, and finds the best means for their achievement from among all available resources, human as well as physical.