Tomorrow’s City Is New but Not Improved

I remember a show from the 1964-65 World’s Fair. Marionettes danced on the stage. “Oh, it’s a great big beautiful tomorrow,” they sang, making stilted, marionette motions by tilting their heads to mark every word . . . “a -- great -- big -- beautiful -- tomorrow!”

Millions saw that show, and I think of it whenever I read of a new scheme for the future. A family of life-sized marionettes starts out in a turn-of-the-century house and many scenes later ends up in the future. With each scene the marionettes gracefully age as their appliances get newer. The wood-burning stove becomes the gas range, electric range, microwave oven. And in the last scene--the great big beautiful tomorrow--there were the space-age shapes of appliances yet to be, the magic of the future, progress marching into infinity, yet so close it made you want to reach up and touch the things on stage.

We would leapfrog into the future, invention by invention, toaster by blender, appliance by appliance until at last, all our devices in order, we would arrive at utopia somewhere the other side of the checkout counter.

That is the world we were promised. Along the way our cities, like some marvelous new appliance, would be replaced with a newer model. We would have cities of glittering white towers planted in green parks, as the great modern architect Le Corbusier dictated, or we would have cities with no downtown, cities spread across the countryside with each family on its homestead, as Frank Lloyd Wright proposed, or we would live in paradise on the 100th floor with our airplane hangared next door, as Hugh Ferriss and the other skyscraper utopians of the 1920s promised.

One thing was sure: The city of tomorrow would put to shame the city of yesterday, just as the refrigerator made the ice box obsolete. Another thing was for sure, too: We’d be happier, more peaceful (and productive) people. Here is Le Corbusier: “Free, man tends to geometry.” And if we followed the “radiant harmony” of his geometry, he said, the world’s cities could become “irresistible forces stimulating collective enthusiasm, collective action and general joy and pride, and in consequence individual happiness everywhere . . . the modern world would begin to emerge from behind its labor-blackened face and hands, and would beam around, powerful, happy, believing . . . . “

There were others--too many others to quote--who promised deliverance through their brand of architecture: the right angle, the curvilinear road in the park, the tower of glass. Each fervently preached that his was the magic geometry that, like the tumblers on a lock, would open the way to the good life.

Now look again: The city of the future is here today. It is, to a large extent, the world we were promised. We have skyscrapers in number and height that would impress the cliff dwellers of the 1920s. And our transcontinental highways rival the “motorways” that astonished visitors to the 1939 World’s Fair.

Yet no one would proclaim the American city as a wonder of the age. The optimism is gone and we have the fragments of many utopias. Our cities have gotten newer and newer, as promised. And with each improvement, less livable. Why?

We haven’t created places but rather inventions. We have downtowns lacking any of the attributes that used to be the definition of urban life: people strolling, civic attitude, public space, community, you name it. Instead, we have collections of sleek, efficient 10-, 40-, 80-story appliances that work all day and are shut down at night, leaving streets drained of energy and movement, empty of people.

Speaking at a conference a few years back, Jaquelin Robertson, dean of the school of architecture at the University of Virginia, defined the problem: “We must really abandon the hope that architecture is going to make good cities, and that the better the design of the buildings, the better the cities. It’s just clearly not true. There are beautifully designed buildings all over the country. Architecture is everywhere and the architects are becoming celebrities, but cities are getting worse.”

The American city is a carnival of variety, each building straining for novelty, Robertson said, but there is little thought given to how this might all form any kind of livable public space. And until we have even the crudest blueprint of what cities are, we won’t make them, she said. We will continue to build. We have lots of built-up places, but we’re not building cities--not this culture, not yet.

The prophets of utopia will not lead us into their promised land. In city design, as with any tangled problem, there is no one grand solution.

One scenario involves a future of wonderful gadgets in an environment unfit for human habitation. An article in the Los Angeles Times Magazine (April 3) shows a family more alive in their electronics than their life: They teleconference, their son is watched by a video-screen school principal, they have computer-generated images of Monets on the walls, a robot, “the ultimate appliance,” does their housework. Outside, the ozone layer has thinned, smog has thickened and traffic creeps ever slower, albeit in wonderful new cars. During the entire typical day, no one in the whole family ever touches another person, or anything green, growing or living. They are so like that family of happy marionettes on stage, except that we can see outside the room, see beyond the myth.

The myth was that the heroic architect-planner would build us out of our misery. Where does that leave our Buck Rogers’ future? It’s time to put it away in the closet, with other outmoded toys. The “great big beautiful tomorrow” we were promised is now but another antique.