Over the seas a man was declaring his faith

Mass production of cars influenced the settlings of American cities already in the 1920s. Moses spiced it up by establishing Jones Beach, where summer guest could enter only by car, because the bridges on the parkways were built too low for buses - decidedly purposely. But it was not the first car-dependant affair. Country Club Plaza - the world's first out of town shopping center - accesible by car was already established. And that was just the beginning. After the World War Two mass suburbanization was haunting farmlands in the US. Thousands of square miles of farmland was turned into fileds of houses. Cheap long term housing and zoning were the keywords in fast & king-size suburbanization. Acoording to Gottdiener zoning was evident already in the 1700s in Boston, where gunpowder warehouse was moved away from the city center. Hall marks it with early 1880s in California. These two dates differ by 180 years, but it does not matter. What matters is that it is not a modern phenomenon! Zoning has been a peculiar character of cities for many centuries maybe even longer.
Next to zoning is important cheap housing in suburbanization process. In the 40s one family made history - The Levitts.
They built fast and plenty, due to standardized design, prefabricated components, new materials+tools, good marketing. People lined up to have a home in Levittown! People used to line up when they could get something that was rare -like hoses during the soviet times in Estonia. So why should not americans line up for a cheap american dream house! Levitts furfilled 82 000 people's desires. It is one of the clearest examples of housing as part of (mass)consumption.
But suburbs were mainly occupied by whites, who had all the necessary 'virtues' - shiner, car, white skin. This kind of radical 'migration' of people from the central cities to the peripheral areas transformed strongly the existing settlements. 'Hobgoblins' are according to Gottdiener: government programs, economic prosperity and failure in establishing the regional planning. All that led to unleashing the formation of Multi-centered Metropolitan Region.
Multi-centres are also 'multiforms'. Options are many - based on consumption, consumption, consumption, production, residential/recreational life. During the 1948 - 82 census used another term - Major Retail centers - to describe the situation, where consumption temples concentrated within city centers and suburban region centers. Overgrown consumerism has created more and more public space, but this space is rather worthless. According to EMORs survey about 77% of people love to shop in the big shopping centers. The continous line of 'The biggest...', 'The best supplied...', 'The cheapest prices...' labels puffed consumers holy places have become substitutes for streets (shopping streets), parks, cafes, cultural events, living, breathing spaces (multifunctionalshoppingcenter=stores+cafes+bars+restaurants+hairdressers+marts+spas+apartments+hotels+bus stations+cinemas+events like 'shopping night', 'Hullud päevad', 'Fashion shows', 'School market', 'Christmas market'...and it goes on and on). And it all is festooned with the reality that shopping places are accidentally, comfortably in the center of crossings of different places and streets.

Pasi Mäenpää asked in his performance in series of Urban Study and Action Lectures:' Has public space come to an end?'
Probably not, but it is in a fragile state, due to peoples choice based on reorganization/redefinition of public space. Altough consumerism has shaped the cities firmly since the first department stores were established (1904 Wertheims Department store in Berlin, the first in Europe), the situation has never been so drastic and worrisome. Maybe Chicago School was right all the way. Maybe city is afterall a product of human nature! And as Mäenpää interpreted Greetz and pointed out, the city as the public consumeristic space is the story we tell of ourselves to ourselves.
I hope all the exhausted, something special, extraordinary, remedial seeking self delusional souls will find peace!
But...
....before it all went so wrong a man - Ebenzer Howard was 'preaching' about peacful and human scale Garden Cities - the best of countryside and city combined togheter and Geddes was 'saving the world' on this side and on another side of the eastern hemisphere.
He had a figuered out the important feature of planning - the starting point - survey. And every surveyor has his instruments. Geddes had Outlook Tower! and a vision for anyplace - a local survey center. A center where anyone could observe different kind of relations, as he put it, 'relationship of Le Plays trilogy of Place-Work-Folk'. But Geddes and his ways of planning were judged and marked as causes of errors in national construction. However, positively stubborn Geddes kept on going. Now about 90 years later we have 'Outlook Towers' everywhere where ´modern´ living soul enters. Tough it has gone through metamorphosis due to the development of information technology and everday technolog, it still can be used partly as Geddes desired.

Adaptions

Italo Calvino has described in his American Lectures phenomena which are captivating only because they are irregular, not fixed, indistinct, not seizable with a moment, like clouds in the sky. City is same kind.
Le Corbusiers geometrical La Ville Radieuse (1933) was plotted attempt to kill the spatial mosaics of different eras and to make the city predictable and transparent. Only one of ´La Ville Radieuses´ - in Roehampton was shaped into reality.
Le Corbusiers 'killer thought' 'We must build on a clear site' could only bring clear hate in citizens hearts. Altough he was able to forsee the growth of automobiles and the growing need for public transportation, he somehow thought that since the center of a city is also heart of the business, the wide avenues must be driven through the centres and over the history. This man with manic great visions and great fiction name did not think about garaging all these cars and not to mention the environmental concerns.

Also some dictators like Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin (also a man who loves to entitle himself) were infected with the harrowing need of showy avenues. Apart from Corbusiers fantasy Il Duce established (1932) a wide parade avenue, obviously to satisfy megalomaniac needs, over the ruins of Foro Romano-heart of Roman Empire.

And Hitler, who fancied grand avenues and attached manic importance in planning to them. Hitlers obsesseion the east-west axis was completed by russians in their sector after the war and notoriously and ironically named Stalinallee (Steelavenue).

After reading different texts about Le Corbusiers work i have come to a comprehension that he as a planner had all the qualifications to be someones architect in ordinary, like Hitler had Speer and Mussolini had Piacentini. I guess we must be thankful he did not have a power-loving master in flesh, beacause as David Byrne in 'Understanding Urban' alarms with his silent words:'Plans are never merely representations. They are intended action.'
Megalomania can be found in many heads and in different outcomes. 'Geddes goes to India' equals for me 'Geddes goes insane'. Insane in the best sence - he sails to India in 1914 at the age of 60!! and tries to help India with all the possible means he has at his disposal. His thinking 'Everything to the soil' was clever, because he did not think has European, but adjusted his thinking to another cultural context. 'Garden Villages' idea had 'prototypes' like Hampstead and Ealing, but Geddes wanted to adapt this idea to Indian conditions. He described this healing process of India as the oportunity of his life as a townplanner. He was 'cultivating' in India the planning philosophy of the sixtys in the first quarter of the twentieth century. But pathfinders have almost always the same destiny, they are overlooked and unheard or ignored as 'cuckoos' or 'crank who do not know his subject' in the case of Geddes.
About 60 years later in 1975 - Saab driving architect Rod Hackney - was trying to understand the needs of a small group of residents and was swinging his finger at architects and saying:'...We, the architects, got it terribly wrong in the 60s.' Hackneys community design was first of all understanding peoples needs!, secondly working with them under their instructions and guidances in the need of making their voices to be heard by approval/rejection powers.

In 1984, nine years later even Prince Charles was agreeing with him and was comfortably leaning to the 'community design' in his speech. After a mans lifetime, akcnowledgment also 'fell to Howards and Geddeses lot'.
But that was not a happy ending of urban! Postindustrial period kept on devastating former industrial countries with no mercy. Between 1971 and 1991 London lost around half of all their industrial jobs. The side effects of postindustrialisation were redeployed+redundant people and redeployed+redundant land. Changes in economy changed the practise of urban land use. Increased/changed capital mobility made possible transnational corporations, which labor was scouted out around the world and offcourse at the lowest possible price. And the lowest possible price was paid also to workers. We have clothe brands which mark their clothes with a message to the consumer:'no child labour used'! Why? Not because consumer is thickheaded, but hungry and suffers from selective responding (responding to the cheap price but not to the production 'story'). I am sure that if someone buys a TV which is made in China he can not leave out a very high possibilty that these cheap consumer products were produced by underpaid workers, maybe even by childlabor in inadequate working conditions. And if one does not think of it he surely will after buying this TV and watching certain documentals! This kind of selective responding is part of the problem.

Rowthorn and Ramaswamy conclude:'... deindustrialization is a result of the globalization of markets...'

Consumer carousal in this changing urban scene is tricky, tricky. Hannigan's Fantasy City is a case extraordinary. It is a theme-o-centric, branded, 24-hour, modular, solipsistic, postmodern, experience. And we all have had it in some shake.

It smells like money.

And since this experience is compact, dense and deliverd with in limited time you might get an 'hangover'. But according to Byrne it has its significance. Branded fanatsy is linked to high culture through herritage. But still, why do people support and keep on experiencing fantasy city?

Mainly because it helps you to plug in to fantasy and out of real - l i g h t l y!

Breadwinners and their stories

(Im)Migration as a trigger of some kind of a problem pops out too plus many times. America (somehow) has been a land of dream come true from the distance=from the home(land) for many (im)migrants. On the spot not so much. The city of the permanent underclass decodes the end of 20th century and 21th century situation in America and in Uk very skilfully. The same year when America was experiencing economic crisis, Little Sicily/Little Hell was 'discovered' as Chicagos main florishing loculus of bootlegging, hijacking, criminal gangs. This enclave was 'operated' by 15 000 ex-peasants who moved from Sicily to America. They changed their homeland for America and lived on as sicilians, but their offsprings did not succseed in keeping their 'ethnic baggage'. Living in two social worlds led to a 'cultural hybrid' or as Park suggested a 'Marginal Man'. Solidation of their 'ethnikos' was part of the price of the american bread.
American cities were captivating and escape worthy for many others also. Their desire for better life took a shape of Greektown, Chinatown or an original new born ghetto. The percentage of black people in the cities of America grew firmly during and after the World War One. Black people started to migrate from rural areas to urban areas, mainly to ghettos in the end of 19th century, this process was quite still til 1940. Then ghettos started to widen. Even Elvis-The King of rock'n'roll was singing about ghetto and its vicious circle (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_n3ebuL1cPA):'As the snow flies, On a cold and gray chicago mornin, A poor little baby child is born, In the ghetto.......' *
In the beginning of 20th century industry 'swallowed' rural inhabitants pleasingly. For example, 65 000 blacks from the rural areas went to Chicago during the period of 1916-1918, mostly to be servants of modern industry. After the war and return of white soldiers blacks situation got worse. The history has preserved plenty of facts and photos about the first incidents and riots, involving whites, blacks, intimidation, insolts, but conclusions are still not concluded, numerous theorys have been written and told but i am not in the position to pick the one which makes the most sence probably for me and to declare it in the characters of my writing.

Even tough blacks are suffering in the cities compared to whites the number of blacks keeps growing for some reason. For example in the beginning of ninties the white majorities were only 51% in Philadelphia and 58% in Boston. After this kind of black and white figures Gottdiener brings up the best question of his book:'Where did the white people go?' and with the same attractive simplicity he answers:'To the suburbs.'
Since the 1950 suburbanization has shaped the cities. By the 1970 most of the Americans lived in suburbs and in the cities - blacks.
Why?
Because they could not suburbanize so quickly mainly for poverty and racial discrmination which also comprehends 'collective action racism' and 'white flight'. In the case of the white flight inner city whites pay more to live in all white suburban communities. They are willingly willing to pay and with the same kind of will they are ready to use even threats of violance, racial zoning, restrictive covenants and policy instruments in the case of collective action racism in order to keep the blacks out and all that for the sake of eating blood-white bread in the white neighbourhood.
Another curiosity is that blacks on average have to pay more for rental housing than whites, but less for urban housing. But if poevrty is a squatter in ones wallet then there are two 'popular' choices slum or shanty town. Slum consists of everything inadequate (public services, housing, medical care, educational care...) as does shanty town but it has also lots of informal and unofficial somethings (house, means, materials...). Villa miserias come into being because it has affordable housing for poorly paid working class and for rural migrants. But where is need there is satisfaction waiting to be discovered. And so have done inhabitants of Villas miserias. Urban migrants have started small business enterprises and thanks to the global economy subcontracting helps to create new manufacturing jobs and to give a slice of global economic bread to shanty town residents. But when the new job creation is nonsufficient may emerge informal economy. It means that workers may be undocumented and working for barter in an unregulated factory. But as Gottdienr concludes, the poor does not just sit, watch and vegetate, but they are innovative and trying to support themselves. Innovative thinking and acting was also the keyword in the case of Little Hells bootlegging, corrupted innovative approach but still. Even Gottiener has in mind similar innovative managing, like illegal building and sex/drug market. But there are also breadwinners jobs which do not embrace dealing with drugs/prostitution, like production of food, making clothes, undertaking repairs (i imagine that repair of shoes to roofs)...it is still the land of many possibilities as long as one knows how to satisfie his/her 'hunger'.


*'As the snow flies, On a cold and gray chicago mornin, A poor little baby child is born, In the ghetto, And his mama cries, cause if theres one thing that she dont need, Its another hungry mouth to feed, In the ghetto...........Well the world turns, And a hungry little boy with a runny nose, Plays in the street as the cold wind blows, In the ghetto. And his hunger burns, So he starts to roam the streets at night, And he learns how to steal, And he learns how to fightIn the ghetto, Then one night in desperation, A young man breaks away, He buys a gun, steals a car, Tries to run, but he dont get far, And his mama cries, As a crowd gathers round an angry young man, Face down on the street with a gun in his hand, In the ghetto, As her young man dies, On a cold and gray chicago mornin, Another little baby child is born, In the ghetto. '