Greenbelt America: A New Deal Vision for Suburban Public Housing
详细信息
- 作者：MacKean ; Molly Timmins
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2013
- 关键词：Social sciences ; Communication and the arts ; Green
- 导师：Binford, Henry C.
- 毕业院校：Northwestern University
- Department：History
- 专业：American history;Architecture;Urban planning
- ISBN：9781303122729
- CBH：3563776
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：40180834
- Pages：263
文摘
This study investigates the history and radical implications of the greenbelt towns, built by the New Deal Resettlement Administration (RA) between 1935 and 1937 and governed by various federal agencies until their privatization after WWII. Under Rexford Tugwell's controversial leadership, the RA built three greenbelt communities outside of American cities: Greenbelt outside of Washington, D.C.; Greendale outside of Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Greenhills outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Following from Ebenezer Howard's Garden City model, these comprehensively-planned and publicly-owned towns sought to provide residents better living conditions than they could find or afford within cities, using public ownership of an enclosing "greenbelt" to protect each community from overdevelopment. The planners of the greenbelt towns embraced the logic that public planning and ownership were critical to the creation of quality, affordable housing. The venture reflected the accumulated wisdom of the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA), an influential and radical planning group whose members -- Clarence Stein, Lewis Mumford, Catherine Bauer, Edith Elmer Wood, and others -- believed that the nation needed to circumvent the speculative market to improve its housing stock. These were lessons that RPAA members learned while creating planned communities in Sunnyside, New York, and Radburn, New Jersey. There, individuals like Stein experimented with planning models that could facilitate healthier community through "social learning," and there they also determined that such environments could never remain affordable within the speculative housing market. This study argues that the greenbelt program's commitment to public and regional planning marked a dramatic departure from the trajectory of the nation's other housing programs. While most New Deal programs reinforced the nation's foundering private housing market, the greenbelt program presupposed that the private market had permanently failed to provide citizens adequate, affordable housing. This study investigates this radical thread of anti-speculative thinking and planning, examining where it came from, how it surfaced during the New Deal, and how it fared in the hands of federal agents. Whatever the flaws of their implementation, the greenbelt towns evidenced federal commitment to ambitious and permanent public planning, a process that the program's advocates believed critical to the long-term health of the nation.