fellow at USC's Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life, and at the Berggruen Institute.
Ekman applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism, and reported the following:
Page 99 finds us in the middle of a discussion of two curious works of urban analysis published in the first half of the 1960s: The View from the Road (1964), by Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John Myer; and Signs in the City (1963), by Appleyard and Lynch. There is also discussion of “Designing and Managing the Strip,” a 1974 working paper by Lynch and Michael Southworth. All three attempt to reckon with the changing forms of the American metropolitan region in the age of ascendant automobility — without simply writing them off as “formless,” although that vocabulary appears here — and to mark out strategies by which planners and architects might redesign cities and highways to enable more pleasing visual experiences at high speeds.Learn more about Timing the Future Metropolis at the Cornell University Press website.
The View from the Road, a minor classic of postwar urban studies, employs colorful language, evoking mechanized movement in terms of various senses and media: quoted here, “episodes” of automotive perception are “like a magazine serial” or an “articulated but ‘endless’ composition, of the kind typified in jazz or medieval polyphony.” View was a publication of the Joint Center for Urban Studies, an interdisciplinary institution based simultaneously at Harvard and MIT, and this page occurs within a broader discussion of the group’s equivocal efforts to “go public” with their thinking, whether in greater Boston — then planning the ring road that gave rise to this study — or elsewhere.
Page 99 certainly does not encapsulate the book, but how it diverges from the rest of the text is diagnostic, both of some failures of the Joint Center, the group through which the book narrates a broader intellectual history of planning and urbanism in the U.S., and of my own path to the topic.
The tension between “basic” and “applied” urban research recurs across all six chapters, and the Center never truly resolved it to their satisfaction or anyone else’s — e.g. the Ford Foundation, their main funder, who sounded these notes repeatedly in their periodic reviews; ordinary residents of Boston, who bristled at the Center’s tentative forays into urban redevelopment; and the residents of Ciudad Guayana, in Venezuela, of all places, where the Center helped plan a city from scratch in partnership with a regional development authority modeled on the TVA. This last episode is the focus of my fourth chapter, and there we reencounter Appleyard and Lynch. Lynch visited Ciudad Guayana as a consultant; Appleyard analyzed its central avenue as a case study in “sequence design” and later published a whole book, Planning a Pluralist City (1976), on the New Town. It is in that context, not on page 99, that readers at last see some of the remarkable visuals from The View from the Road, which include diagrams of drivers’ projected sightlines and hand-drawn images of the landscapes those drivers would be seeing, frame by passing frame, from various points along Boston’s circumferential highway.
More fundamentally, the split between the styles of thinking represented by Lynch, a central figure in postwar urbanism who grounded all of his work in a deep concern for the physical form of cities, and the majority of Joint Center principals, who overruled him and drifted toward aspatial, less richly visualized, often quantitative approaches heavily indebted to the social sciences, represents another core tension in postwar intellectual life on which my book dwells. Although it is basically a work of intellectual history, I am a geographer by training. Geography has perpetually been riven by similar splits — between quality and quantity, absolute and relational space, materiality and representation, form and process. And, as I discuss in the book’s first chapter, the discipline was being downsized across the U.S. — following the all-important closure at Harvard in 1948 — precisely as the Joint Center and other “organized research units” oriented to “urban studies” began to take the place of academic departments of geography, which, I tend to think, might have done some of the same work more compellingly.
In short, the Page 99 Test works imperfectly, but this page nonetheless offers glimpses of the larger book and documents some possibilities for postwar urbanism that remained substantially untapped.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
