Table of contents

Kalos: What is to be done with our World.
By Alfred de Grazia

PC.GIF     NC.GIF

PART SEVEN: Reconstitution
CHAPTER XXVII


METROPOLIS




Soon half the world will live in towns and cities.1 But half of these people will be from the rural areas, and nothing will have been provided for them except some work for which they are ill-suited and living conditions that are not worse than those from which they escaped. Since their act of migration was voluntary, they feel freer. At the same time, great numbers of the true urbanites have been abandoning their centres to the new invaders; skulking by night in their comfortable scattered camps, they dart in and out to earn their daily bread. They know how to run cities; at least some memories remain and they have experts to advise them, but it is now for them a useless art. They are part of a destroyed public, a self-destroyed public whose morale disintegrated under the slogan of "Every man for himself!"

To Abandon the Cities

The predicament of large cities has been worse at times in history. Rome was practically abandoned when the Goths wrecked her aqueducts. No major city of the world is being abandoned because of the disruption of facilities. We exclude at the moment the capital cities of Biafra and Hanoi, engulfed in war, and various cities of China where crowds of people are being driven into the countryside to work and eat, ostensibly for reasons of state.2 We exempt also the cities of India where millions live on the streets in semi starvation and illness. No can we go much farther before reaching the gates of riot-torn American cities and huge surplus population agglomerates like Cairo and Rio de Janeiro.

The need in for new facilities greater in size and extent than all existing facilities to accommodate urban populations that will have increased twentyfold over a period of only eighty years, form 1920 to 2000 A.D.

Thus spoke the Secretary-General to the world in 1969.3

The situation is so bad, certainly, as to elicit apathy and escapism. If one is satisfied with the sporadic well-being that an educated egotist can attain, then all proof of evil is useless. (Certain souls, so long as they survive, are complacent in a doomed army at Stalingrad or in a concentration camp.) Whether speaking of rurality or metropolis, work or school, state or church, the Kalotic Revolution, nor indeed any intended change, does not prevail over absolute social despair. Any project larger than onself requires a spark of social indignation or the sting of a social lash.

This point may be stressed here, because the metropolis, to all those who have raised themselves beyond the level of the mass of rural refugees and persons stupefied by its mass routines, looms up as a graveyard of living souls. If they can have confidence in their ability to reconstruct existence in the metropolis, then no other problem facing Kalos can break their morale.

The following facts are true of all great cities of the contemporary world, including the 100 listed on pages 484-5.4

They are physically disorganized, unplanned, party in shambles, psychologically and morally disgusting from the viewpoints of kalotic concensus. One half of the available territory of Los Angeles is used for the conduct and care of transportation.

They have no ruling public. They are dominated by national and provincial politicians and bureaucracy. All too few persons in them believe that they have the authority, discretion, or ability required to achieve even conventional solutions, much less kalotic solutions, of their problem.5

Most of the inhabitants of contemporary cities are suffering from "metroneurosis."6 Metroneurosis is an aggravation of the effects of the excitation of perceptual distortions, sensory abuse, anomic disorders, paranoid feelings, dissolution of personal ties, over-indulgence in chemically-produced euphorias, self-identity bewilderment, complexity-anxiety, and self-induced hypnotic automatism.7

The cities are dominated by anachronistic laws, profuse rules, unending juridical procedures, abstractionist rights, and critically situated doorkeeping groups who block, together if not alone, every way to kalotic reform.

These conditions are getting worse, not better. Indicators of illness, discontent, crime, confusion, inadaptability, and physical disrepair are going up, not down. Depending upon their age as cities, they have experienced several or more reform movements. Not one has succeeded in stemming the ugly flood. Each small cleansing-whether physical or moral-has been erased and buried in the muck of the next succeeding tide of problems.

Again, half a billion people eat, sleep, work, copulate, and raise children in these cities-somehow. But only the diabolist (of which there are some numbers) is pleased with the prospect.

Then why should not the cities be abandoned? This question is only worth a sentence in reply: Not until the third wave of the Kalotic Revolution, centuries away, can man organize society to obtain what the cities provide without the present heavy concentration of people in them, for rurality being what it is, there is nowhere to go with the kalotic Revolution but to the cities. Moreover, the city of 200,000 to a million persons, well connected with a rural hinterland, affords the best known setting for a variety of work, for education, for cultural activities, and for entertainment.

Indictment of Reform

How then shall the cities be remade?

Certainly not by the romantic Myth of the Return. There are bold, bohemian, and diabolic urbanites who cannot be kept from the bowels of the metropolis no matter what the personal costs of moving there and staying there. When they live thus on a personal basis, struggling for personal survival in a hostile but attractive environment, they do not help with the Revolution. But they are a source of strength when a program for the city is proposed and radical measures must be taken. They are sufficiently alienated from the old society to recognize immediately the necessities of the new. They are often capable of extraordinary personal sacrifices. They also have numerous skills for waging the battle of the cities.

At the least, they are distinct from the educated suburbanites, who are available only by the day and scattered to a thousand places far away by night. From such places, agitation becomes more and more difficult, even as the crisis of the city gets more intense and more and more direct confrontations are required. Until the urbanite vanguard is supported by a program and a movement, they are there, a standing contradiction to the present methods of handling urban problems.

These methods, futile, partial, and often ill-intentioned by most of those who engage in the operations, are :

1. To build huge beehive houses in which the poor and middle-income groups are concentrated and segregated. veritable concrete compounds, the cpartheid!

2. To bulldoze poor areas for highways, for office buildings, and for select dwellings for the middle and upper-income groups.8

3. To let the immigrants in and shut them off within the city center or in slum-suburbs, apart from the independently policed and organized suburbs.

4. To let any speculator, builder, corporation, union, or other economic interest take a bite from the body of the city, as the price of preventing trouble and creating an illusion of progress.

5. To effuse talk and plans. Let everyone live a moment longer from one illusion to the next. Bury the middle-class in wordage; ignore the non-talking, plan-less poor.

6. To shut out the Tutors from power, by placing them in bureaucracies; how many university administrators, for example, are couched on committees flying the flags of the rich, the famous, and conventional political types.

This is the indictment of the cities of plutocracy, dystrocracy, and stratocracy (for the modern military juntas, neither aristocratic not urban, cannot conceive of the psycho-physical conditions of civil masses).9 But what of taxocracy, especially socialist and communist regimes? Would they not attend to the needs of the worker, these governments founded upon the image of the workingman?

Indeed the earliest town-planning schemes, as the Industrial Revolution changed the landscape of England and the continent, were the accomplishments largely of socialists: Owen, St. Simon, Fourier, Cabet, Gobin, and many others. For it would seem normal, and actually was natural to redesign the total new life of the victim of the enclosures, the machine, and the capitalist.

But from the time of the revolutions of 1848 and the Communist Manifesto those who planned cities became the enemies of the socialist revolutionaries, who saw in them only the temporary alleviation of a worker's pains and therefore an obstacle to the great class revolt. Frederick Engels was eager to denounce experiments in town planning or in resettling factories in partially agricultural surroundings, or in providing workers' services through companies. No alternative programs were proposed by the Marxists: the worker, like the primitive Christian, must suffer in this hell or earth until one great day a Revolution would come, after which matters would somehow resolve themselves.

"Engels preferred to regard the future organization of the towns as a mere consequence of the general economic revolution towards which the workingclass must move..."10 This attitude helped to emasculate city architecture and planning; it suppressed city development as a practical goal of public policy; it fostered the deplorable aesthetics of communist party bosses when the revolution succeeded.

With such philosophy before their eyes and only segregated ugly surroundings to inspire them, it is no wonder that socialists followed communists, and almost everywhere in the world where taxocracy has triumphed, crowded and inadequate housing in buildings looking like prisons have been built to commemorate the victory. Only the industrial retardation of the new regimes, especially with regards to consumer goods, has kept their streets from being congested, their lakes from spoilage,11 their peoples from metroneurosis.

Reverting for comparison to the methods by which plutocratic cities are ruled and ruined, we see that socialism is particularly adept at building ugly, impersonal edifices; it constructs splendid worker-dwarfing worker-centers; it discriminates in housing between the official and working classes; and it shuts out speculators, capitalists, protesters, and critics who draw systemic inferences from everyday annoyances. It restrains the ordinary citizen's "do-it-yourself" possibilities. Communism engages the intelligentsia (who must be urban) on its behalf, and starves it and exiles it when in opposition. Under the circumstances. East Berlin is a dead city while West Berlin lives; Basle is more exciting than Moscow; Peking is a dull grey slug, while New York is a caged animal that gnaws furiously at its bars.

Consolidation and Integration

Probably all cities of today suffer from internal segregation. In South Africa and the United States segregation approaches apartheid. Nowhere does individual segregation follow bureaucratic prescription so much as in the taxocracies, notably the Soviet Union. A coercive regime will always prefer a policy of segregation of social classes to protect officialdom from buffeting by the general population. In times of discontent, too, the ruling groups have to be specially protected and guarded against revolutionary influences. American segregation comes out of voluntary personal decisions, and it is reinforced by legal boundaries that are permitted and fostered by state laws in the form of suburbs whose control lies in the hands of interests hostile to the kalotic development of the total metropolis.

Segregation, whether voluntary, pressured, apartheid, or prescriptive is anti-kalotic. To desegregate requires smothering apartheid propaganda in counter-propaganda and releasing the legal bonds that enjoin social separation. In the United States and in some other countries, this means forcing legislatures to consolidate metropolises. Where the crazy fencing of peoples is done to divorce the worst troubled of society from their superiors in rank and wealth, whether by social pressure and market arrangements or by fiat and planning, two principles need to be applied.

One is the formula for metropolitan consolidation; Every community that works in the city should be part of the city's jurisdiction. The formula for metropolitan integration is; Every community that works in the city and every neighborhood in the city should present a spectrum of the total colors of the society.

Cosmarchic Organization

Transportation systems, communication systems, mental and physical health, population, control, housing, recreation, and crime control are the major problem-areas, suited to metropolitan jurisdiction. This method of public financing is to be accomplished by the single Head Tax, divisible first by the toparchic assembly, then and for some time by the regional congress and ultimately by the World Congress. Cooperative jurisdiction is maintained over several problem-areas with other constituent-representative forms, that is, with the Functional Association Boards and the toparchies (usually nations but sometimes federal sub-divisions).

Hence the world has to be viewed as a map of cities for these purposes. As Annamarie Hauck Walsh concluded from her comparative studies, :there is a growing tendency throughout the world to recognize the great metropolis as a distinct entity."12 There are now about one hundred cities of over one million population. By the time the present immigration from the countryside is brought under control and the proportions of the new world ecology take from, this number may reach two hundred.

Within the cosmarchy, a distinct representative structure for the cities is stipulated in order that the great problems of man that are enveloped within urbanism can be made highly visible and appropriately treated. Accordingly, the expected four billion people of the world can form into one hundred metropolitan constituencies. On the first level the rural population will belong to the nearest city jurisdiction in regard to the aforesaid problems, jurisdiction being defined by the reach of its lines of physical and public communication.

The councils of both the small and large cites within the metropolitan community can elect representatives to the metropolitan council. The council in turn elects a representative to a seat in the metropolitan regional council and to the World Congress.

Numerous cities of a million or more persons will be parts of a diadic, triadic, or other configuration of cities. Each set makes up a single metropolitan community. The number of metropolitan communities of the world can be fixed for a time at one hundred; the population of each metropolitan community will vary. The average will be equal to the world population divided by 100; this comes to about 40,000,000 souls.

The kalotic organization of metropolises is designed to permit urban voices to be heard weight in the councils of the world. It is also to assure rural areas that they belong to a metropolitan jurisdiction that is charged with connecting up with them and supplying them with the services that are especially urban in nature.

The metropolises belong also to the nation-state, of course. It is the nation-state that manages the forces of defense, coordinates on a conciliar basis the foreign relations of a territory (including especially boundary management), and acts as the general over-all inspector and critic of the process of government and society, thus taking on a large research and evaluation role to supplement and cross-check in an independent fashion the considerable research and development activities of the community and functional structures.

The territories of the metropolitan communities will vary greatly. The Buenos Aires community will extend over a large territory. Paris over a smaller one, Calcutta over an even smaller one.

Often the metropolitan community will cross a national boundary, as presently drawn. It will leap the boundary through representation, not directly. That is, the Buenos Aires community will be joined by the Montevideo (Uruguay) portion through representatives from the Uruguayan section. This is not difficult to calculate or apportion; it permits metropolitan councils to act internationally from the very beginning without exciting extreme opposition from nationalists.13

The communities will be urbanized in differing degree. The rural population of some will be relatively greater. The rural traits of some communities will dominate because of the nature of the cities themselves. Some cities are preponderantly of a traditional type, with large semi-rural occupational groups of rural life-style.14 London, New York, Tokyo, and Paris contain large proportions of completely urbanized residents. Because of this and the other facts adduced, kalotic laws will be uniform more in principle than in detail from one metropolitan community to another, just as they will be amongst the nation-states.

Such would be only one instance of the need for autonomy of the metropolis. More direct efforts must be made, beginning now, to free the cities from their statal authorities. If their legislative jurisdiction is extended even to their most obvious points of social control according to the formulas for consolidation and integration, and if financial independence through "block grants" from Head Tax Collections is extended, the cities of today can go a long way in kalotic lawmaking.

The opponents of metropolitan autonomy are toparchic rulers who operate on a more general level, such as national or federal, politicians and bureaucrats of department of interior and like agencies plus numerous anarchic, diabolic, parasitic groups with in the metropolis itself.

There is no limit to the contrivances for butchering the body politics. Literally hundreds of techniques and tactics are employed-legally, extra-legally, and illegally-to take advantage of the helplessness of a great city. In today's world the smallest, most insignificant nation-state has more control over its destiny and more self-protective devices than the metropolitan community of Milan, Shanghai, Tokyo, or Chicago. In New York City in any single year there are several strikes and slowdowns against the city, numerous strikes and deliberate slowdowns of work within the city, numerous riots, numerous exposes of graft and corruption, and continuous disputes with surrounding towns within the metropolitan community and with the state and federal governments. The city is literally beleaguered on all sides and buffered by the 3600 War.

The cost of crime to New York City each year is a billion dollars, of corruption another billion, of all kinds of snarls, slowdowns, strikes, and systemic inefficiences an additional five billions. And the total negative effect is not made up for by the positive kalotic existence afforded a tiny proportion of the population. Eighty percent of New Yorkers are on the threshold of neurosis or beyond; although American rural areas, which are "urban" by world standards, may often show the same proportion, the occasions for strains to manifest themselves are much greater in the city. Extreme luxury alternates with continuous exposure to discomfort.

New Cities

New cities should be created. The civilized ancients founded new towns; Phoenicians, Greeks, and Italians sent colonies abroad. Alexander and Dinocrates created the great city of Alexandria. Much less of this occurred during the Age of Discoveries, where new towns grew largely from voluntary and individual settlement. The Soviet Union has pioneered in the techniques of founding new cities, to build up undeveloped sections of the vast country. In Europe, following World War II, the planning of new towns was part of the movement towards the socialist new world. Especially in England, the new profession of city planning was exercised on twenty-eight new towns. In the U.S.A. entrepreneurs have built extensive developments, amounting in a couple of cases to new small cities. Only in the Russia case has the recent experience been of great practical moment. There, owing to the almost completely open-ended settings of Siberia and to the full support of the government in which coercion, propaganda, and the compulsory allocation of resources energized the effort, the new cities have indeed come into being, achieved identity, and developed large hinterlands.

The forming of new cities is generally only one important segment of the Kalotic Revolution of the metropolis. It should be organized in a special manner to avoid the extreme compulsiveness of the Russian effort and the insufficiency of the efforts elsewhere.15

The process of creating a new city can begin by forming a consortium of banking, building, machinery, automative, research, and other large companies.16 "Although estimates vary considerably, it has been stated that in the United States of America a new city for 250,000 will cost $1 billion.17 The New City Corporation would draw upon the people of an existing metropolitan area, which could be Boston, Chicago, Berlin, or Bombay. It would settle upon a site, in an area that is thinly populated, barren, but potentially well located. The vast demands and resources of a large city can overcome most defects of site. For example, the U.S. government and a few private owners can turn over many square miles in the mountain and southern states for urban developments at extremely low cost. Since the consortium is non-governmental, its chances of succeeding are improved; it cannot fall before gusts of popular resentment; the bureaucracy will not be able to abort or suffocate the project; and vetoes of special interests in the old city will be meaningless.

The legislation should provide for the human organization of New City along kalotic lines. The principles for toparchic organization would be followed. The means of recruiting the Colonizers will be by successive lotteries within the old city and among its rural areas, that is, throughout the Founding Metro politan Community. The Lottery is designed to select resident representatively from all parts of the population. Thus, in a metropolitan community of thirty million persons, a quarter million persons, randomly selected, would be invited to join the New City. Successive (or simultaneous second preference) drawings would be run. Each person thus volunteering would on the average choose two persons to colonize with himself or herself.

The governments pro tem of New City would be the consortium managers with all of their planning and consulting apparatus, which is a kind of representative government itself; this group would ultimately turn New City into a de jure government and political system,when the city is completely established. The balance sheet of the consortium becomes the balance sheet of New City. The project slides easily and simply from non-governmental to governmental, for, after all, in kalocracy the two sets of institutions are much like.

The construction organization of New City would come from competitive bidding by all corporations of the present Metropolitan Community. Thus architectural firms, building companies, hospitals, schools, colleges, utility companies, associations of personal counsellors, electrical contractors, and other major suppliers of infrastructural components of New City would contract with New City governments to provide services and personnel. The performance of great logistical tasks by consortiums, army forces, and single corporations in erecting new cities (e.g. Camh Ranh Bay [Vietnam], Siberian towns, Iranian Oil, the Normandy Landing [WWII], and many other cases) shows that great size and speed are possible; but now the tasks of similar enormous proportion to be undertaken must be kalotic in nature.

The thousands of calculations that would be required are as easily manipulated today by computer systems as the estimates for outfitting the Santa Maria or the Mayflower for venturing to America several centuries ago, or for the space vehicles of the Soviet Union and U.S.A. The dynamic structures of whole nations have already been programmed in model form for computers. Present-day modes of passing time and spending energy would be converted into new kalotic and more efficient ways.

We must fix the general certainty in our minds: Everything is available except the general dawning in human minds of this certainty. The New City, founded along kalotic lines, is practical; the required morale, extent, and flexibility of productive effort, and human organization can be mobilized to confront the need.

Reforming the Present Cities

The cities of today should be drastically reformed. Assuming that a new cities program will control problems of growth, the metropolitan kalocracy requires changes of the following order:

The concentration of school population into very large "educational parks" would end the bitter and unprofitable strife of social classes and ethnic groups. An educational park should be a center for the formal teaching of students of all ages, designed to serve half a million citizens, more of less, served by specially designed transportation systems, and operating as autonomous organizations.18 Parks should provide the full range of educational opportunities, be financed out of the sale of old properties and bond issues, and be alternately operated by governmental and non-governmental authorities to encourage innovations, comparisons of costs, and evaluation of results.

The social services should be reorganized along the lines of the personal counsellors (see above, p. 334), using a voluntary Foster-Counsellor scheme.19 When the income and tax reforms that we envision have been adopted, counsellors can be paid by the individuals using their services.

Orient the newcomers to the cities.20 The large majority of them are of rural or village background, ignorant of the minimal requirements of metropolitan life, and prey to advice that is practically all anti-kalotic. One appropriate means is a simple registration procedure for all in-migrants, asking at that time only the question whether they would resent having someone call on them to offer any information they might want regarding life in the city. A large organization of volunteers could provide knowledgable citizens who would contact the immigrants and give them whatever information on laws, customs, transportation, work, and recreational facilities might appear to be useful. Such a practice would reduce considerably the strains and mistakes of one's first months in a great city and hasten the feeling of participation in a meaningful metropolitan public. A matters stand, most first encounters with public figures are on the occasion of a mishap or crime, or with person of very similar circumstances whose advice is as likely to be bad as good.

Set up a consortium of companies to sell bonds, buy up slum properties, renovate them, and turn over title to the residents on a condominium basis. The landlords are paid by the consortium; the tenant-owners pay for their apartments on a long-term schedule.

Set up a kalotic corporate organization for all buildings of considerable size and encourage the same kind of organization among neighbourhoods and housing developments. The typical large building should have arrangements approaching, if not equalling, the involvement of housing cooperatives and condo-miniums, even if originally designed and built upon speculation by entirely outside syndicates or companies. Also, more enjoyment in use and in property is to be gained by the residents of single-family dwellings through such arrangements than they gain through the fiction of "complete private ownership of one's own home;" the feeling of security can be as great also.

In countless experiences, it has been shown that the use of existing procedures of government - laws, zoning rules, public hearings, newspaper editorials, etc., - have failed to stop the mastication of modern cities by the cannibals within. Every protest is greeted by another bloody gulp. Human communities are scattered as dust to the winds by bulldozers and their cries deafened by the roar of traffic and the pounding of piledrivers. These enormous costs, which far exceed the money that changes hands, are taken out of the bodies and minds of the people. But actually how do you measure unhappiness? Simply living amidst the cannibal scene is a penalty of the kind that gave rise to the great socalist movements of the nineteenth century.

To stop all of this, and paradoxically to reach the nuclei of plans such as those put out by non-government civic groups (e.g., The New York Regional Planning Commission), those citizens who are disgusted should boycott the established procedures and take their opposition into the streets and buildings. To get a people's park where a brute of a building is going up in a crowded quarter requires thousands of demonstrators and a hundred prone bodies. Police support is rarely possible, but police sympathy can often be obtained. The first success guarantees several more successes.

Metropolitan communities are the best mediums for kalotic propaganda. Advertising, press agentry, and public relations are to some extent necessary for the healthy operation of all systems of human relations - in marketing, health services, employment services, and so forth. This hortatory industry has been misunderstood and under-utilized in taxocracies, and abused in plutocracies where great resources have been overconcentrated and wasted. A large proportion of the talents-pool of plutocracies, especially in the United States, goes into the advertisement of cigarettes, beer, soaps, fake cures, women's underwear, and many other similar objects, while the system of kalotic principles goes unadvocated. The original preaching occupation, the clergy, is side-tracked, by-passed, and partially shut off.

The distortions of reality, apart from the non-expression of kalotic principles, spread and stressed by "Hollywood," and "Madison Avenue," with their imitators and networks around the world, form a grave obstacle to the vision and practice of a kalotic society. The remedy here is not legislation, which will not now work, but stressed democracy, direct action by the Kalotic Public, operating both inside and outside of the occupations and all of their suppliers (including universities) within the general organizational framework of the metropolitan community.

Structural changes and policing changes are spokes of elsewhere. The reform of personality and the family are equally important and go hand-in-glove with the revolution of the metropolis. The metropolitan solutions, too, are part of the 3600 solutions. All of these constitute the Kalotic Revolution of the cities. If one wishes to compare this program with all that conventional politics and existing interests can produce, let him examine the "convocation" issued by the "Urban Coalition" at a grandiose meeting of 1,000 top leaders of America in 1957, following grave riots in a number of cities.21 There is here "enough power to turn this country around,' declared Whitney Young (National Urban League head). Yes: around and around and around. Again, taxocracy; pap, practicality, and pomp.

The Kalotic Crowd

The old city needs the "kalotic public" badly. The kalotic public is composed of those unwavering, though-minded, and directionally-motivated people who are prepared at any and all times, like pastors and doctors, for a direct confrontation with the resisting powers of dystrocracy taxocracy, plutocracy, and stratocracy.

The kalotic public has this in common with the city crowds that sparked so many uprising in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries: It contains many people who are ready to go onto the streets and into buildings. In this day a great building is a street, just at a telephone wire is a part of the voice and ear under the American Constitution.

But the kalotic public is an educated crowd, skilled, wellconnected, a crowd with a 360 plan in mind, a crowd capable of as many subdivisions as there are targets, a multiple-warhead-missile. How can rapid and deep change be brought about without a vigorous population of demonstrators? Modern society cannot move without.

In 1953, The province of Ontario, Canada Metropolitan Toronto by a federation of thirteen smaller municipalities. This was touted as a great success by observers of city government everywhere. The population, which reached close to two millions by 1969, was given a Council formed of elected officials from the municipalities, with powers to acton fiscal affairs, roads, suburban schools, waterworks, and sewers. Within the Council an unexpectedly vigorous executive built itself so that the Chairman and a Cabinet, analogous to the Secretary-General and Secretariat of the United Nations, began to speak and act in metropolitan terms.

Nevertheless, a dozen years of experience showed that the Metropolitan Community as a whole performed only at the minimum level of its powers and perspectives.22 The ex officio Council member acted with close refrence to their narrow constituency feelings. The large Province feared an integrated and autonomous metropolis. The interests of economic and social types were indifferent and uninvolved.

The performance of this Canadian experiment parallels on the whole that of other experiments with metropolitan governments that were pulled together through the political and legal processes of the existing order. A hundred years of creeping positive changes will be taken up in achieving metropolitan reorganization and autonomy in the absence of a revolution, that is, without a political movement that has broad goals, a sense of urgency, a set of unprecedented techniques of change, and an elite that will use them effectively.23

During that century, the ineptitude of the cities will corrupt the whole spectrum of social change; the failure of the metropolis brings a series of troubles in itself and adds to the troubles of world politics and personal life. And all during this time, too, the piecemeal changes will be so slow in catching up with the disorders they are intended particularly to rectify, that they will do as much harm as good.24 Nowhere more clearly than in the world's metropolises does one see how badly we need swift methods of change. Indeed typical is the following expression among city reformers:

It was not until the city administration was literally confronted with a crisis and threatened violence that they agreed to give the funds for these programs, notwithstanding the fact that they agreed in principle that it would be a good idea to give these funds for these programs.25

For every reform they seek, the Tutors have to invent symbolic methods of calling the attention of the potential decision makers and the public to a proposed reform and of embarrassing them continuously until they act favorably. The reform itself must become a pleasure by comparison with the pains of non-reform. Those infamous factory-owners of the early Industrial Revolution who, as the poet wrote, played golf while the child-workers glimpsed them from the factory windows, are gone; the scene was changed not by golf losing its charms or children becoming rich, but rather by shaming the owners, by demonstrations, by riots, by propaganda, by people who found time in their lives to agitate the question.

The fecundity of imagination and the high technical skill that serve the plutocracy can readily invent hundreds of techniques for the Kalotic Revolution in the metropolis. But they will have to be impelled too by a new courage and vigor among the tutorial element, for the present-day potential tutors are not used to attacking the status quo or calling for anything save what would please their masters. Are they prepared to add daily to the list of ways to shame, deter, divert, convert, captivate and enlist politicians, officialdom, and the public; to show how to set up token blockades of the suburbs; to frustrate the erection of buildings through dislocation of supplies, records, personnel and access; to boycott college classes, talks, and programs that give themselves over to the advocacy of trivival changes that preclude larger transformations of society; in short, radicalize the methods of action through stressed democracy?






Footnotes PART SEVEN, CHAPTER XXVII:
1. Definitions of urban are many and data unreliable, but the best estimate projects an urban population of 1,971 billions out of a total of 3,605 for 1970. (Kingsley Davis, World Urbanization, 1950-1970).
2. Cf. New York Times, January 15, 1969.
3. Problems of the Human Environment (E/4667, N.Y., U.N., 26 May 1969), p. 9.
4. The growing body of scientific work on the cities of the world is best represented by Annamarie H. Walsh, The Urban Challenge to Government: An International Comparison of Thirteen Cities (New York: Praeger, 1968) and the special studies of the individual cities, published subsequently. See also Charles Jencks, Architecture 2000 (London: Studies Vista, 1971).
5. Cf. William W. Biddle and L. J. Biddle, The Community Development Process: The Rediscovery of Local Initiative (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1965), Chapter 11.
6. Cf.,e.g. Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1965).
7. "Communication-saturation" and "Communication-overload" are terms used by Richard L. Meier (Characteristies of the New Urbanization, University of Chicago paper, 1953) and Karl Deutsch ("On Social Communication and the Metropolis" in Daedalus [Winter, 1961], pp. 99-110) to signify a major causal condition of metroneurosis.
8. M. Fried, "Grieving for a Lost Home," L. J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 151-71; see the Gratiot and Corktown, Detroit, project histories in Robert J. Mowitz and Deil S. Wright, Profile of a Metropolis (Detroit: Wayne University Press, 1962).
9. Cf. Nels Anderson, ed., The Urban Community: A World Perspective (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winstone, 1959).
10. Cf. Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1967), p. 146.
11. But the great Lake Baikal, deepest in the world, was becoming polluted and its animal life decimated in 1969.
12. Quoted in Stanley Scott, "The Study of Urban Government," XXIX Public Administrative R. (1969), pp. 546,547.
13. The Port of New York Authority, an interstate body composed of New York State and New Jersey representatives, is a precedent, Cf. W. V. Barton, Interstate Compacts in the Political Process (Chapel Hill, N. C.: U. of N. C. Press, 1967.
14. Cf. Gideon Sjoberg, The Pre-Industrial City: Its Past and Present: David V. Glass, "Population Growth and Structure," in UNESCO, Social Aspects of Economic Developments in Latin America (Paris, 1969).
15. The English government in January, 1969, announced plans for a new city of half a million person.
16. The present writer introduced a proposal for new cities into the Report of the Task Force for Voluntary Action to President-elect Nixon in December, 1968. His proposals differ markedly form the British schemes and the proposals for 110 new cities published by a committee of officials of Urban America, Inc., the National Association of countries, the National League of Cities, and the U.S. Conference of Mayors (cf. New York Times, May 25, 1969, pp. 1,61), in that, as attested here, he foresees a non-government consortium organizing the New City whereas the committee has taken for granted a bureaucratic solution. Michael Harrington, in his book, Toward a Democratic Left (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969), pp. 288-9, describes President Eisenhower's transient hope for the new cities idea.
17. Secretary-General of the UN, op., p. 10.
18. Cf. A. J. Ferendino, "High Honors for the Educational Parks," (American Institute of Architects Plant Study BT-1-62, AIA Journal, Dec., 1987).
19. See in addition, Ralph E. Pumphrey, "The Reinstitutionalization of Social Welfare," in Sam B. Warner, Jr., Ed., Planning for a Nation of Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1966), p. 285.
20. The sociology of this process is becoming known; cf. "Migration and Adaptation," 13 American Behavioral Scientist (1969).
21. "Urban Coalition: Turning the Country Around," City (October, 1957), pp. 1-3, 15-16.
22. Cf. Harold Kaplan, Urban Political Systems: A Functional Analysis of Metro Toronto (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967). Also, Edward Sofen, The Miami Metropolitan Experience (Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1963).
23. A plan may be "revolutionary" (as Scott Greer calls the Miami, St. Louis, and Cleveland plans [Governing the Metropolis, New York: Wiley, 1962]) but the effort immense and effects small.
24. E.g., "All available evidence suggest that the drawbacks to the indefinite growth of the conurbations, and particularly of London, are in fact much greater than when the Barlow Commission made its report on post-World War II urban planning in England, according to Peter Self (Cities in Flood, 1957), quoted by William Petersen, in The Politics of Population (New York: Doubleday and Co., 1964), p. 327. Or see Gerd Wilcke, "Housing Program, Still in Infancy, Already a Prospective Failure," New York times, March 16, 1969, Section 3, pp. 1,7.
25. Richard Belford, attorney and member of New Haven Commission on Equal Opportunities in Fred Powledge, "New Haven: Triumph and Trouble in Model City," II The Washington Monthly (February, 1970). pp. 49-62, p. 59.


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