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Thirty Years of "Smart Growth" in Oregon

2012-06-21T02:28:37Z

99.135.136.38: Created page with "''This paper attempts to condense all the literature that has been written about Oregon's unique program of land-use planning, which came out of the environmentalist movement in ..."

''This paper attempts to condense all the literature that has been written about Oregon's unique program of land-use planning, which came out of the environmentalist movement in the early 1970s. The best-known feature of this system is the "urban growth boundary," which is a line around each city in the state that clearly marks what land is city and country. Most of the writing about this stuff is deadly, deadly boring, and my paper is unfortunately a reflection of that material. I think this is still interesting, though, because historians often write about how things got fucked up in the past, about chances missed and alternatives not taken. Oregon is a case where a constructive solution might actually have been pursued, and that in itself is a nice change of pace.''

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"For nearly three decades, Oregonians have built and nurtured a system and philosophy of land-use planning that is the envy of people throughout the world." Although rather strongly put, the sentiment behind these words can be found in almost any newspaper, magazine or history book that discusses planning in Oregon. Designers, politicians, activists and pundits have a penchant for words like "benchmark" or "model" when discussing the state, and planners elsewhere have looked with envy to a land where thoughtful organization of space is both embraced and enforced. The above statement, written by a longtime planner in response to a rare attack on the achievements of Oregon's leading city, bears all the marks of a classic Portland plaudit: the author put the emphasis on people rather than the state ("Oregonians") and implied that the system itself possesses some kind of unique philosophy or culture that makes its success possible. This sense of possessiveness, of involvement in the process of planning, appears throughout works on Oregon land-use policy, alongside some substantial minimum of respect for the program's accomplishments.

Doubts, however, have not been unknown. As early as 1974, when the program was in its infancy, Charles E. Little reflected on the legislative process that brought comprehensive, statewide planning into existence and wondered if too many compromises had been made: "The question now is, for Oregonians as well as students of their land-use legislation, did anything worthwhile really happen?" Thirty years have passed and the answer to that question is not abundantly clear. The compromises appear not to have been mere expedients of state politics and legislative committees but, rather, an integral part of the system itself. The available scholarship suggests that, since its inception, Oregon's unique land-use program has survived by accomodating threats and turning political challengers into stakeholders of the planning regime. Unsurprisingly, developers have figured prominently in debates and studies about planning, since the decisions of state and local governments can directly determine how (and whether) land is used. The powerful role of homebuilders and their ilk, as both friends and enemies, has led scholars to question whether planning was ever anything but a tool of business, but most research suggests a more complex picture. The Oregon land-use program has been able to go far by reaching far, incorporating numerous interests into its constituency and offering something to almost everybody. Planning has, so far, reconciled contradictions to the sufficient satisfaction of the interested groups, although it may have created new contradictions in the process, laid away for future discovery.

The first work on the subject, Little's The New Oregon Trail charted the tortuous legislative process that eventually created the state-local partnership and "urban growth boundary" system that have defined Oregon planning ever since. Little followed the efforts of state Senator Hector Macpherson, a dairy farmer who began to push for comprehensive planning out of fear that farmland would be gobbled up in the rapidly urbanizing Willamette Valley. Most of the state's significant cities were located in this region between the Coastal and Cascade mountain ranges, but the Valley also included the most fertile farmland in Oregon. Macpherson's first rendition of Senate Bill 100, introduced in Fall 1972, called for the creation of fourteen boards that would create plans for their respective regions of Oregon, under the supervision of several layers of bureaucracy: a new state-level Department of Land Conservation and Development, a commission made of citizens appointed by the Governor, and an oversight group in the state House and Senate. If the entire process failed, the Governor could impose plans or revise inadequate ones. Not surprisingly, Little argued, many Oregonians chafed at the prospect of so much bulky new government, particularly the new fourteen districts the law would have carved in the state. Macpherson and his colleagues had hoped to craft a bill that everyone could support, but "it managed to gore nearly everybody's ox."

The legislators went back to the drawing board and came up with SB 100 as it is known today. The new version retained little but the DLCD. Local counties would draw up their own plans in accordance with goals established by DLCD's policymaking committee, the Land Conservation and Development Commission, which would approve or reject the local plans based on these goals. Little emphasized that the new bill included a crucial new provision the original lacked: a requirement that local governments invent some means through which citizens could participate in the process of formulating plans. In this spirit, the first of the nineteen goals LCDC called for "Citizen Involvement." Mitch Rohse, in his glossary of Oregon planning jargon, provided the full text of these goals, the remainder of which dealt with:

2) Land Use Planning

3) Agricultural Lands

4) Forest Lands

5) Open Spaces, Scenic and Historic Areas, and Natural Resources

6) Air, Water, and Land Resources Quality

7) Areas Subject to Natural Disasters and Hazards

8) Recreational Needs

9) Economy of the State

10) Housing

11) Public Facilities and Services

12) Transportation

13) Energy Conservation

14) Urbanization

15) Willamette River Greenway

16) Estuarine Resources

17) Coastal Shorelands

18) Beaches and Dunes

19) Ocean Resources

The labels themselves sound extremely general, but buried in the goals are some consequential details. The "Urbanization" standard, for instance, stipulated that "urban growth boundaries shall be established to identify and separate urbanizable land from rural land." The UGB requirement directly addressed the issue of sprawl that first set Hector Macpherson on his quest, while drawing more intense political struggle than any other aspect of the program. Local governments were charged to draw lines that would allow for twenty years of growth; this requirement was sufficiently elastic and subjective that it invited a good deal of haggling between state and local governments, as well as among landowners whose agendas varied.

Scholars have situated these political developments in a larger pattern called the "quiet revolution." Fred Bosslman and David Callies invented the planning usage of this term in their 1972 study The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control, which touched on Oregon's early efforts at state involvement in managing land and growth. Looking back from the early 1990s, Gerrit Knaap and Bill Nelson argued that Oregon was on the frontlines of a movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s to take a large portion of control over land away from local governments. They classified Oregon as a "first-generation planning state," along with Hawaii, Florida, California and other states that took different steps toward comprehensive planning during this period. Georgia, Maine, New Jersey, Washington, Rhode Island, and Connecticut began to develop similar laws in a later wave of statewide planning, but somehow Oregon has emerged from both generations as the state perhaps most closely associated with enlightened planning. "Oregon has nurtured and enhanced its land use program" for several decades, Knaap and Nelson wrote, serving as a model when the second group of states began to formulate their own new laws.

Calling it a quiet evolution rather than revolution, Michael K. Heiman argued that the new involvement of states like Oregon in land-use planning was just a further step in the long process of organizing land for capitalist production. Middle and upper class liberals had initiated city planning and zoning in the early twentieth century to serve their own interests, developing property for the ends of the biggest and most influential landowners. "Since the mid-1960s, however, a majority of the states have reassumed a share of the police power originally delegated to municipalities sufficient to address land use issues deemed to be of more than local concern," Heiman said. In his view, the reformers of the 1920s were not that different from later liberals like Tom McCall, although some of the buzzwords, like environmentalism, happened to be new. In Heiman's view, capitalism was the only relevant philosophy in city planning.

Although The Quiet Evolution dealt with the development of planning in New York's Hudson Valley, much of its analysis fits with analogous events in Oregon. Limiting urban growth meant setting a boundary twenty years or more out from the then-current built environment, which suggests that the program's aim was not to curtail development but promote a particular vision of development. This vision, as Heiman suggested, would benefit some and not others. Research by Gerrit Knaap and Bill Nelson has shown that urban growth boundaries redistribute wealth from areas outside the line to those inside, since property values increased for urbanizable land. The authors pointed to the example of Salem, where some landowners fought to have their holdings included in the boundary in order to reap any windfall that might follow from the categorization. More importantly, Knaap demonstrated that UGBs could function as "timing constraints," sending signals to owners, investors and developers about when land would be used. The regulation fostered economic efficiency by introducing an element of predictability into property development. Farmers could run their operations safe in the knowledge that, for the foreseeable future, their land would be slotted for rural usage, immune to the threat of speculative pressures that might force them to quit farming and sell out. Meanwhile, developers and homebuilders could know which land to buy and how soon to do it, while benefiting from the increase of land values along the inner rim of the UGB.

Matthew I. Slavin's work on economic development policy in Oregon corroborates Heiman's view of planning as a means of enhancing the real estate market. A too-free market could make doing business difficult, as had occurred during Oregon's frenetic growth of the 1960s and 1970s. According to Slavin, "The period leading up to 1973 often saw urban sprawl disjoin the type of land holdings best suited for large-scale industrial and commercial development in Oregon." Major business enterprises found that the only suitable lots of land were far removed from essential services, while random development had produced many small parcels within reach of the urban infrastructure. As a result, said Slavin, the Association of Oregon Industries lobbied hard for the land-use planning legislation and tried to influence its content as much as possible.

Slavin's portrayal of the lobbying and legislating process matches up with the Heiman perspective. Groups like the AOI pursued state-level legislation because local authorities were not managing property with sufficient competence and expediency. "[Planning's] strongest advocates have included representatives from prodevelopment and large-scale enterprises," Heiman said. "Periodically these businesses were concerned that local municipalities were ill prepared or unwilling to accommodate and service their needs." Large, well-organized developers had the greatest stake in a more orderly business environment, and they seized the tools of government to produce a real estate situation more conducive to their interests.

Numerous scholars have conceded that planning served to reorganize the land market along more efficient lines, but few shared Michael Heiman's critical perspective of this process. Carl Abbott, for instance, appeared to come to much the same conclusion as Heiman: "It is particularly relevant to note that the basic function of modern land use planning -- to assure predictability in the process of land conversion and development -- coincides with an essential characteristic of public bureaucracy." However, Abbott valued the better procedures of bureaucracy, viewing them as essential to pursuing the public good through participatory politics. Heiman perhaps rightly complained about the orientation of most scholarship on planning. "Conventional treatments of the so-called quiet revolution are ideological, indeed participatory advocacy for the most part," he observed. Certainly, scholars like Knaap, Nelson, Abbott, and others who have written on Oregon planning share a liberal, progressive ideology that assumes the essential potential of state action for the common good. These authors regularly acknowledge the pluses and minuses that accrue to different interest groups in the workings of public policy, but they do not believe that the state is necessarily a tool of a capitalist class.

Nevertheless, capitalists of various sorts are hard to avoid in this body of literature, as developers and homebuilders have been crucial and influential constituents of the planning regime. No observer has suggested that business has been solidly antagonistic to the planning program, but scholars have disagreed about how and when business interests supported statewide planning. Some have argued that private sector leaders had been in the forefront of land-use policy from the start, and the economic analyses of Knaap and Nelson suggest that developers, farmers and others would have found much to like in the urban growth boundary system. Charles E. Little's account of the creation of SB 100 reveals the deep involvement of business leaders in the legislative process. Senator Hector Macpherson's Land Use Policy Action Group, which first laid out the ideas and proposals that became the LCDC system, included, "local government planners, economists, specialists in agriculture, businessmen, and environmentalists." Even in the law's ill-fated first rendition, Little observed, "the powerful economic interests of the state -- developers, industry, loggers, farmers, tourism groups -- had not, in any organized way, come out flat-footedly against the bill as a whole." When Macpherson and his allies sought to rework the bill to make it passable, they put together a committee that included representatives from manufacturing, homebuilding, lumber and other industries. In this play-by-play description of the law's genesis, Little never let business leaders slip out of view for long. The bill that resulted, it seems, must have been palatable to a variety of industrial interests.

However, a narrative also exists in which business leaders dallied with opposition to land-use planning before eventually coming around in the program's second decade. H. Jeffrey Leonard has argued that business support was unreliable during the various referenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s. The economic downturn of this period had been particularly harsh for Oregon, and many citizens were beginning to question whether land-use planning had made the burden of depression heavier for their state than others. According to Leonard, the liberal, environmentalist group 1000 Friends of Oregon realized what might be lost if planning could not be reconciled, in the public mind and policy, with economic development and decided to take action. "In working to prod local governments to comply with LCDC's housing and urban development goals," Leonard wrote, "1,000 Friends played a pivotal role in converting the homebuilding industry from opposing the state land-use program in the statewide referendum in 1976 to supporting the program in a similar 1978 referendum."

Gerrit Knaap and Arthur C. Nelson have explained the shift of business attitudes toward planning by emphasizing the difference between the formulation and implementation stages of city plans. The first phase of the program required local communities to draw up plans with urban growth boundaries and other features consonant with the LCDC's nineteen goals. The state would then review these plans to determine if local planners had strayed from its ideals on Housing, Transportation and other aspects of growth. LCDC rejected some plans and caused immense frustration in many communities, while localities dragged their feet so much that all plans were not complete until 1986. However, as Knaap and Nelson observed, the balance of power shifted considerably once communities began implementing plans. The "burden of proof" now rested on the state government to challenge local decisionmaking, whereas before city planners had to be able to justify their plans to LCDC. The dynamic between interest groups changed even more dramatically. "Local land-use control favors local developers and local landowners and frustrates environmentalists, such as 1000 Friends," Knaap and Nelson said. Environmentalists and service industries had been successful in influencing the state level of planning, which mostly involved formulating plans, and resource-based industries and local groups had been more effective in the implementation stage. Although Knaap and Nelson insisted that the program was not wholly owned by developers, the authors did concede that this interest group had enjoyed unique success throughout the planning process. "Developers," they said, "appear remarkably effective at both levels of government."

Like economic development, housing has emerged as a pivotal concern of activists, interest groups and, subsequently, the planning regime itself. Any state venture into the development of land will likely influence the nature of human shelter, and housing issues have been present in, if not central to, Oregon's land-use politics from the start. Whether favorable to state housing policies or not, most scholars have acknowledged the ambivalence housing advocates have felt toward the program. As Nohad Toulan observed, the 1973 legislation might have enthused environmentalists and worried business leaders, but antipoverty activists remained undecided about its consequences. Some worried that bounding the cities and limiting the amount of developable land would push up housing prices, with builders gravitating toward the upper end of the housing market. Such consequences might not be foremost in the minds of middle-class environmentalists and other SB 100 supporters.

Other housing advocates saw a more hopeful picture. After all, the statewide goals made "Housing" a priority, with government responsible for providing an adequate range of housing options to citizens. In this spirit, Toulan conceived of Oregon's program as a step forward into a more comprehensive concern with social welfare. The nineteen goals engaged the state on a broad array of issues (housing, transportation, recreation), while making crucial connections between suburban sprawl, low-income housing problems and environmental degradation. Michael Heiman might consider these developments to be merely the extension of state power in the service of capital, but Toulan, like virtually all other students of Oregon planning, interpreted such moves as the ameliorative work of the liberal state.

Where observers do disagree is whether these efforts have achieved their stated aims of improving the quality and diversity of housing. The Metropolitan Housing Rule of 1981, for instance, has been a key point of contention between scholars. This law applied to the areas of Clackamas, Multnomah and Washington counties that make up the greater Portland area. "Jurisdictions other than small developed cities must designate sufficient buildable land to provide the opportunity for at least 50 percent of new residential units to be attached single-family housing or multiple family housing," read the Rule's opening paragraph. The six largest cities within the Metro UGB had to plan for densities of ten or more dwelling units per acre, and most remaining areas were required to plan for eight dwellings or, in a few cases, six dwellings per acre. The Rule allowed for further exceptions in unusual cases, but its orientation was clearly away from the production of free-standing, single-family homes.

Legislation of this kind could clearly help fulfill the mandate of the state's land-use planning goals. If, as Tom McCall so passionately insisted, planning should be used to limit sprawl, devices like the Metropolitan Housing Rule could serve to counteract the excesses of other parts of the program -- such as UGBs drawn so liberally that they extend even farther than the loose twenty-year expectation written into the law. Nohad Toulan has argued that the MHR complemented the statewide program by assuring that planning does not simply produce a curtailed kind of sprawl but, rather, creates desirable content within the limits of city boundaries. "It can be argued that MHR, which came eight years after adoption of SB 100, integrated housing with all its social concerns into the mainstream of the Oregon land use planning process," he said. In other words, MHR gave some socially conscious teeth to the abstract good intentions of the state's planning goals.

Be that as it may, Gerrit Knaap and Arthur C. Nelson have cast considerable doubt on the Metropolitan Housing Rule's ability to influence the actual content of development. They argued that the Rule did not go far enough in dictating the form of new housing, encouraging rather stipulating high-density growth. "Although the Metropolitan Housing Rule made multiple-familyÖ housing possible, it did not make it profitable," Knaap and Nelson said. "In the absence of constraints on urban land supplies, the land price remained low; and low land price creates incentives to use more land in development." Several aspects of the planning program in general and MHR in particular conflict with their argument. Setting urban growth boundaries did make the included land more valuable, thus putting some pressure on developers to use space more carefully. Moreover, the MHR did more than encourage or allow higher-density development. The Rule actually set out specific requirements for the proportion of new growth that would house multiple families and the number of units that must, on average, occupy a single acre.

Evidence suggests that the problem may not be in the Rule itself but in its enforcement. Knaap and Nelson noted that new growth under the MHR found 9.58 units per acre in areas with a ten-unit requirement, 8.42 in eight-unit zones, and 3.09 in six-unit neighborhoods. One could construe these figures as evidence of the law's failure or success, but they certainly imply that, in at least some areas, compliance and enforcement have been less than complete. Elsewhere, the authors' data send similarly mixed signals. "The percentage of multiple-family starts in the Portland area did increase markedly after 1984," they wrote, "but the share of multiple-family housing starts was also high in Portland during the early 1970s, long before the Metropolitan Housing Rule was adopted." Here again Knaap and Nelson based their argument against the effectiveness of the program on inconclusive evidence. Whether housing density rates had been high over ten years earlier does not bear on whether the MHR successfully implemented its own requirements in the mid-1980s.

Knaap and Nelson went on to use an argument that pops up frequently in assessments of Oregon policy: that the tangible results of land-use planning turned out to be little different from parallel developments in other states. They extended their critique of the Metropolitan Housing Rule by observing, "What is more, the pattern of multiple-family starts in Portland is not discernibly different from the pattern in other western cities." Nohad Toulan made a similar claim, but with a rather different bent. It may be true, he admitted, that developers did not completely comply with the density requirements. Whether housing affordability and urban congestion have increased or decreased remained an open question. "There is no evidence that, with growth management and strict housing rules, the Portland area is in any worse position than similar areas in other parts of the country," Toulan insisted. Since growth management carried with it other, less tangible benefits, "this by itself is an adequate measure of successÖ" If the program managed to accomplish some positive ends without causing discernible damage, then it had worked well. No news is good news. For Knaap and Nelson, Portland's similarity to other cities was a sign of the shortcomings of land-use planning, while for Toulan the comparison could be as a success story. Scholars often point to such comparisons to support their interpretations of Oregon planning, whether to counter claims that planning has done damage (like Toulan) or to show that the program has been ineffectual.

The question might be better put if scholars compared not Oregon to other states but, rather, Portland to other cities. No writer has yet alleged that Goal 14 has produced enlightened housing results anywhere else in the state. As Nohad Toulan observed, "The approach has been generally successful when regulations and guidelines went all the way in defining the expected outcome," but greater Portland was the only region that has taken independent action to turn the statewide housing goal into a more precise, specific instrument. The LCDC has required all localities to draw up plans that conform, in some way or another, to the nineteen planning standards, but the agency has probably been reluctant to impose stricter regulations like the Metropolitan Housing Rule on communities. One could argue that a success story in Portland is not insignificant. H. Jeffrey Leonard estimated that 80% of the state's population lives in the Willamette Valley, and Portland has long surpassed all other Oregon cities in size. Portland, then, is much of Oregon in numerical terms, but it is still just Portland.

Whether they believe that the planning regime has really delivered the goods or not, most scholars agree that the program has adroitly responded to issues like housing and economic development over the years, and one might reasonably ask why the LCDC system has managed to survive serious doubts on these fronts. The severe economic downturn of the early 1980s, for instance, led many to question whether urban growth boundaries and other regulations had choked off Oregon's growth possibilities, setting the "conservation" in LCDC too high above "development." Similarly, the Metropolitan Housing Rule can be seen as a response to concerns that planning had done too little to determine the type and variety of housing on the market. Scholars have trotted out a variety of explanations for the continued success -- or, at least, existence -- of statewide planning and the UGB system in Oregon. The broad coalition of interest groups that supports land-use planning is, perhaps, the most ubiquitous character in all these studies, more so than environmentalists, neighborhood associations or any other player alone. The question, then, is why and how the coalition that spawned SB 100 in 1973 and carried it through four ballot box battles managed to stick together for so long.

Several observers have argued that Oregon's homogeneity made the cooperation between interest groups possible. Developers, farmers, urban professionals and others could find common ground behind the land-use planning program because they already had so much in common. As Carl Abbott noted, many Oregonians can trace their lineage back to Anglo-Saxon northeasterners who first settled the state in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The preponderance of Episcopalians and Congregationalists over Baptists and Roman Catholics in the state suggests such shared origins. H. Jeffrey Leonard cited the words of land-use attorney Ed Sullivan to explain the success of planning in Oregon. "The absence of cohesive minorities in Oregon may be a bigger factor in maintaining consensus and avoiding irreconcilable conflict than people think," Sullivan said. "For the most part, Oregon is dominated by an extremely homogeneous, white, middle-class population." The homogeneity argument alone is unsatisfactory. Somewhere in the background lurks a racist and unfounded assumption that white, black and brown people could not agree on public policy as have the solid Anglo-Saxons of Connecticut derivation.

Carl Abbott has gone farther than most in expanding the simple observation of social similarity in Oregon to a broader question of political culture. His essay "The Oregon Planning Style" traces different strands of moralism and conservatism in the state's history and politics, arguing that Oregonians have traditionally valued the public interest over the individual. The official state heroes, after all, are iconoclastic crusaders for the common good like the progressive William U'ren and the feminist Abigail Scott Dunaway. Abbott also pointed out, though, that the people of Oregon have been conservative in matters of taxation and state intervention, pursuing the public interest at least partly by carefully guarding the status quo's best elements. The state's trademark environmentalism, he suggested, was the perfect example of a progressive politics that sought to preserve the past. "In a conservative and moralistic state, land use planning has allowed Oregonians to be community minded and "good without being revolutionary," he observed. To Abbott, the participatory, procedural innovations of land-use planning were also distinctly Oregonian. "It is not just the content of the statewide goals that is rooted in Oregon's political culture," he argued. "The goal-setting process used in Oregon planning draws directly on the state's core values. It has tended to be participatory and explicitly rational."

H. Jeffrey Leonard complicated this view of Oregonian political culture by highlighting the social and political outlook of the state's newcomers, many of whom came from California. In his study for the Conservation Foundation, Leonard suggested that it was not Oregonians who pushed for land-use planning so much as the outsiders, most of whom naturally gravitated to the economically vibrant Willamette Valley. "Nearly 40 percent of all immigrants to Oregon had come from California, where many had witnessed the decline of agriculture and loss of prime farmlands in California's coastal valleys," he wrote. "These residents provided the core of a constituency committed to protecting agricultural land from the encroachments of urban development." Few California emigres were likely to move into the sagebrush and timber country of Oregon's vast interior, where growth in both population and economy was low, and support for land-use planning was certainly strongest in the Willamette Valley, among farmers and urbanites alike.

If Leonard were right about the influence of the new Oregonians, then Tom McCall's rhetoric of exclusion begins to sound more like bluster than bravery. When he implored outsiders to "visit, but please don't stay," the governor may have been wagging his finger at his own real and potential supporters. Indeed, references to the ravages of California abound in nearly every account of the planning program's birth. In his early assessment, Charles Little quoted an Oregonian woman, Sherry Smith, saying, "Mention the Santa Clara Valley around hereÖ and everybody turns green." Considering the influence of in-migration during the robust years of the sixties and seventies leads one to a rather different conclusion than McCall and company had assumed. The endless jeremiads against Los Angeles in the literature of Oregon planning might have derived from bitter experience as much as the neighborly anxiety of native Oregonians peering over the border.

Of course, Californians spooked by San Fernando sprawl could not have remade Oregon politics from scratch. They moved into a state with its own institutions, which bore the marks of the outlook of past and present citizens. Judging from the available research, a synthesis of Carl Abbott and H. Jeffrey Leonard's arguments looks most reliable. The dramatic emergence of environmentalist legislation and statewide planning in the sixties and seventies probably resulted from the convergence of traditional Oregonian ideals and the political experience of Californian migrants in the Willamette Valley during this period.

Talk of natives and immigrants aside, Carl Abbott's work continues to interest because of his emphasis on bureaucracy and the culture that supports it. The word "bureaucracy" has taken on such negative connotations in the contemporary United States that Abbott seems somehow amiss in focusing on its benefits. Words like "process," "procedure," or "structure" might serve better to explain the political mechanisms that Abbott believed made the land-use program both responsive and resilient. From the beginning, state planners spent resources on efforts like the "rolling public involvement shows" of 1974, which elicited the concerns and opinions of ordinary citizens about their physical environment. Abbott argued that these aspects of the program did more than provide input from regular Oregonians; it also integrated thousands of participants into a base of support by making them feel they had a stake in the process.

The history of neighborhood groups in Oregon planning provides further examples of the state's cultural habit of including and incorporating. Several scholars have pointed out the often oppositional role these organizations could play in planning, particularly when the arena for dispute moved to the city or county level. Nohad Toulan, for instance, said that such groups often disliked new zoning rules for fear of losing "community character" to high density development. However, Carl Abbott demonstrated how Portland responded to the increasingly militant stand that many neighborhood organizations were taking against city planning in the early 1970s: activist Mayor Neil Goldschmidt established an Office of Neighborhood Associations that would provide these groups with a direct avenue of communication to local government. The ONA "furnished a set of ëadvocate bureaucrats' whose first concern was to articulate neighborhood interests," Abbott said. "The procedures of physical planning were viewed from the bottom up as tools for achieving the social and political goals of stable population and local control." These bureaucratic innovations took shape primarily in 1974 and 1975, just as statewide land-use planning rolled into motion. Institutions like the ONA probably helped ease conflicts that would later result from state and local planning decisions, from urban growth boundaries to the Metropolitan Housing Rule. Whereas local groups could have remained in perpetual conflict with the larger planning agenda, the Portland city government sought to neutralize discord by distributing "stakes" as far and wide as possible.

How far and how wide has that spreading process gone, however? Oregon planners and leaders have sought to craft as broad a coalition as possible, but scholarship suggests that some groups and individuals have remained permanently on the outs. Those people, for instance, who ideologically oppose state regulation of land have found little comfort over the years. Scholars suggest that the consensus on the need for planning has been frustratingly strong. "Even the opponents of the LCDC system, in other words, argued about how to plan, not whether to plan, leaving the goals themselves above the political battle as examples of right thinking," Carl Abbott observed. A flip through recent pages of the Portland Business Journal affirms that even the business community seldom questions land-use planning itself, but instead debates the finer points of planning decisions. Abbott noted that Oregon lacked the sort of "Sagebrush Rebellion" that gripped neighboring states like Nevada and Utah in the 1980s, in which discontented citizens organized behind a "radical individualist agenda" and the idea of property rights. Of course, the antiplanning referenda of the late 1970s and early 1980s could be construed as Oregon's nearest equivalent of such an insurgency. Perhaps the property activists resigned in frustration after four failed attempts to stop the state's depredations on their frontyards.

Research has also occasionally provided the example of a group that refused to "play ball" when the state entreats it, ONA-like, to join the process. Carl Abbott discussed a conflict that emerged in the 1980s when businesses and the city government sought to redevelop Portland's North End, where many homeless people lived in a "skid road." The plan was first hatched in the city's Downtown Plan of 1972, but the surge in homelessness during the time of Ronald Reagan put greater pressure on the neighborhood. Social service agencies objected that the new commercial ventures would threaten their ability to care for these unfortunate citizens. "The Portland solution to this classic land use conflict was to bypass political debate with organizational negotiation," Abbott wrote, as the two sides made a truce: service groups agreed to limit the number of shelter beds in the area and the Development Commission pledged to push for more affordable housing. Whether such promises could do much good for troubled individuals with little access to money is quite unclear. In any case, one consequence of the new coalition was unmistakable. According to Abbott, a "maverick agency was frozen out of the district by political muscle and bankrupted by the evaporation of contribution. No organized outsiders remain to threaten the social service/low-income housing coalition."

This sense of political mechanism helps soften an image of Oregon planning that portrays the entire regime as, firstly and persistently, the handmaiden of developers and other business interests. One could read the histories of Charles Little, Matthew Slavin, Gerrit Knaap and others as a story in which business had the first and last word on everything. As Little showed, private sector representatives helped craft the land-use planning bill in the state legislature, and, as H. Jeffrey Leonard suggested, key industries still demanded considerable wooing if they were going to stay in the support column when LCDC encountered electoral challenges. If nothing else, one could suggest that business set the terms of debate and possibility in which Oregonians hammered the program out.

While the influence of developers and other industries has been undeniable, the literature suggests that the inclusive political character of Oregon planning has at least checked business interests with a steady flow of claims from environmentalists, neighborhood groups, and housing advocates. Indeed, 1000 Friends of Oregon has emerged in nearly all studies as the heaviest of political heavyweights in land-use politics. Gerrit Knaap and Bill Nelson probably correctly observed that environmentalists enjoyed less influence at the local level than on higher planes, but numerous scholars have recognized the power of 1000 Friends to influence policymaking and enforcement through activist litigation. The organizational baby of Tom McCall came to agitate on issues ranging from housing to transportation, overcoming the caricature of a narrowly ecological group. Moreover, Deborah Howe argued that determining the parameters of discourse is not the province of developers alone, if at all. "1000 Friends is the primary generator of information about the Oregon planning program," Howe wrote, "and therefore the informaton they provide tends to become the common wisdom." Apart from the occasional academic investigator, 1000 Friends appears to have exercised a near monopoly on producing research about Oregon planning, generally titled toward their own policy positions.

The inclusive quality of Oregon planning, and its attendant durability, may be traced to the original structure of the legislation itself. Consider two observations about the land-use system together: Charles Little described the bill as an "empty vessel" by the time it escaped gutting and reshaping in committee, and Nohad Toulan implied that SB 100 opened new vistas for the state's social engagement. The system's attention to such a wide range of social and political issues -- nineteen of them, in fact -- has provided an opening for later groups to enter the scene and legitimately register their claims by filling in the empty spaces. "The high number of goals may also explain why some goals have become high-threshold concerns, receiving a great deal of attention, and others, such as the Energy Conservation Goal (Goal 13) and Historic Preservation goal (Goal 5), have been relegated to the back burner." As Abbott suggested, Oregon's political culture led its leaders and citizens to craft an involving, engaging process for planning, and this system seems to have offered enough stakes to enough people to preserve itself in fat times and lean.

Pleasing everybody, however, might eventually mean pleasing no one. All the concessions it took to make a consensus this long-lasting could add up over time. The boom times of the 1990s were particularly kind to Portland, but such bountiful growth may have put a pressure on the housing market unknown in the prosperous 1970s, when there was plenty of land left within the boundary, or in the 1980s, when severe depression meant that little new housing was built or sought. Some environmentalists and planners have been dissatisfied with the ability of UGBs and density requirements to constrain suburban sprawl over time. Most notably, the designer Andres Duany sought to "punch holes" in the Portland myth after taking an unguided tour to the outer reaches of the metro area. "To my surprise, as soon as I left the prewar urbanism (to which my previous visits had been confined)," Duany wrote, "I found all the new areas on the way to the urban boundary were chock full of the usual sprawl one finds in any U.S. city." Duany argued that environmentalists had been hoodwinked by hard-driving developers who got whatever they wanted while no one was looking. "There is still the sort of developer who should be interviewed for the Smithsonian oral history archives along with sharecroppers and buffalo hunters," Duany wrote. "They survived only because their natural predator, the environmentalist, has been neutralized by the sense of security the urban boundary provides."

Duany's invective recalled the insinuation -- albeit more open and aghast here than elsewhere -- that land-use planning has been the tool of developers all along. For all the guesses of later scholars, a better answer to the development question could be found in Charles Little's first foray. It is tempting to think that a program of boundaries would be about limits alone. Certainly, the heated rhetoric of the program's early 1970s origins carried antigrowth connotations, as farmers fretted about runaway suburbs and "Not Los Angeles" was a rallying cry. Anyone sitting in the Oregon legislature when Governor Tom McCall railed against "condomania" and "the grasping wastrels of the land" might have thought that Oregonians wanted to put the kibosh on growth altogether. Indeed, scholars have found the McCall tirade so irresistible that almost every book on Oregon planning quotes him at length, providing readers a window into the language and emotion of the time.

Beneath the flourishes, however, what sounds like "antigrowth" turns out to be something like "smart growth." Little closed The New Oregon Trail by interviewing McCall, and their conversation revealed much about the ideological center of the new land-use planning crusade. "We're not as 'violent' as pure preservationists want us to be," the governor said. "Nor are we as much of a consumer and user of natural resources as perhaps some industrials would want us to be." He told the people of the state that guarding Oregon's resources then would pay off later, when businesses would line up at the door to make use of its high quality of life. "A little belt-tightening now," he said, "would give us the ability to pick and choose later on." The emphasis was on facilitating future development rather than stopping current development. Just as urban growth boundaries helped to organize the land market for greater efficiency, the planning program sought not just to conserve resources, but to conserve them for later use.

It should be no surprise to Andres Duany that the Portland landscape resembles the rest of the United States more than its city-on-a-hill image admits. Features like urban growth boundaries and minimum-density housing may not be precisely business-as-usual, but they are a matter of business nonetheless. Oregon could not have opted out of the bigger landscape even if it wanted to do so. The state was still enmeshed in the car culture, federal housing policies and other great phenomena of American life, sharing also a set of economic and political actors -- homebuilders, developers, resource industries -- who assured that the state would not wish to opt out in any case. The planning legislation of 1974 created a Land Conservation and Development Commission, and no word of that title should be forgotten. They were probably not haphazardly chosen. The literature on Oregon planning suggests that the state's people have managed to make a still striking difference in how they develop their physical and social surroundings. Suburbs may have been built and some farms may have been paved over, but probably fewer than would have occurred otherwise. Oregonians were able to navigate the dangers of political discourse thanks to flexible legislation that opened up new possibilities for social intervention and a political culture that favored cooperation and participation. Given all the pressures on the American landscape, even making a mixed bag takes a good deal of aplomb.

**Alex Cummings**

== Bibliography ==

* Abbott, Carl, Deborah Howe and Sy Adler. Planning the Oregon Way: A Twenty-Year Evaluation. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 1994.

* Abbott, Carl. Portland: Planning, Politics, and Growth in a Twentieth Century City. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.

* Bosselman, Fred and David Callies. The Quiet Revolution in Land Use Control. Washington, DC: Council on Environmental Quality, 1972.

* Cogan, Arnold. "Critic of Portland Planning Misses Mark." Oregonian. 2 January 2000.

* Duany, Andres. "Punching Holes in Portland." Oregonian. 9 December 1999.

* Heiman, Michael K. The Quiet Evolution: Power, Planning, and Profits in New York State. New York: Praeger, 1988.

* Knaap, Gerrit and Arthur C. Nelson. The Regulated Landscape: Lessons on State Land Use Planning from Oregon. Cambridge, MA: Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 1992.

* Leonard, H. Jeffrey. Managing Oregon's Growth: The Politics of Development Planning. Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation, 1983.

* Little, Charles E. The New Oregon Trail: An Account of the Development and Passage of State Land-Use Legislation in Oregon. Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation, 1974.

* Rohse, Mitch. Land-Use Planning in Oregon: A No-Nonsense Handbook in Plain English. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University, 1987.

The Emergence of Urban Planning in the South, 1880-1930

2012-06-21T02:24:00Z

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To take a bibliography of southern history on its face, one could conclude that urban planning never touched the American South. No historian has yet made a comprehensive study of planning in southern cities. Southern urban planning has enjoyed the full attention of scholars only in the occasional dissertation or journal article, and these have taken the form of case studies looking at planning in a few cities or a single state. Otherwise, scholarly treatment of southern planning has played a supporting - and distinctly minor - role in more general studies of southern urban development, wherein a historian discusses planning for a few pages before moving on to topics like commercial architecture, railroad development, or the ideology of boosterism. Taken together, the direct and indirect studies provide a rough outline of how southerners responded to city environments between 1880 and 1930: urban planning emerged in the South in the early twentieth century in answer to the disorder created by rapid urbanization and industrialization after Reconstruction, first manifesting as private efforts to beautify the urban landscape and later as official government programs to make more efficient and stable cities. Given the lack of direct attention paid to the subject, this picture necessarily lacks the completeness that a comprehensive study could bring; in particular, historians’ overriding focus on the role of business elites in shaping the landscape has kept scholars from fully understanding the complexity of planning the southern city.

The historical study of southern cities, and planning in particular, long received little attention. Surveying the field in 1953, the editors of The Journal of Southern History noted that considerable territory lay open for southern historians to explore in the cities: “Much has been written about the rural South, but there is to date too little tangible evidence that the southern scholar has thought much about the urban South.” The authors went on to identify “city planning and lack of planning” as one of the topics as yet neglected by historians. More than ten years later, Norman Johnston observed in a study of urban planner Harland Bartholomew, “The present state of an historical record of twentieth century planning processes in the United States is marked primarily by its paucity.” By the 1960s few scholars had tackled the subject of southern cities directly or of American planning in general.

Interest in southern urban history surged not long after Johnston wrote, as a spate of dissertations and monographs appeared on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon and Charles P. Garofalo wrote dissertations about, respectively, architecture and business attitudes in Atlanta in the early 1970s, and Kay Haire Huggins completed a doctoral study of city and regional planning in North Carolina in 1967. Two leading scholars of the urban South, Blaine Brownell and David Goldfield, published books and articles beginning in the 1970s. Each of these works addressed issues of urban planning in varying degrees, although only Huggins and occasionally Brownell pursued planning as a primary topic of concern.

The Journal of Southern History implied that any story of urban development in the South might be as much about a “lack of planning” as planning itself, and many scholars have described southern cities as almost completely lacking conscious form or design. David Goldfield arged that urban development in the South was chaotic in the late nineteenth century, noting unpaved roads and the presence of highly undeveloped areas throughout cities. “Some parts of [Atlanta] were positively wilderness,” Goldfield observed, “and a guidebook of the time recommended fish and duck-hunting in the city’s ninth ward, a district ‘which has never been visited by man, and as unknown as the centre of Africa.’” Similarly, Howard Preston argued that urbanites devoted their energies after the desolation of the Civil War to commercial construction, leaving roads deficient and disorderly and parks nonexistent.

Others have pointed out that the urban landscape had evolved with some degree of premeditated form. Lawrence Larsen, for instance, noted that most cities had a gridiron street plan of some kind. “By 1880, whether southern towns began as forts, blockhouses, stockades, elaborately planned communities, or hastily platted promotions,” he wrote, “a distinguishing feature was some form of rectangular street plan.” Larsen placed this feature within the larger American scene, arguing that the gridiron plan was “an American legacy to urban planning,” found in the mining towns of California as much as the bustling new cities of the South. Thomas Hanchett confirmed Larsen’s observation about street patterns in his study of Charlotte, North Carolina, tracing them to a strong tradition of urban planning in the city’s earliest years. A royal charter dictated Charlotte’s layout upon its inception, and for well over a century city officials carefully dictated the design of Charlotte streets. “In each expansion,” Hanchett wrote, “the new streets were planned by a decision of the community leaders rather than by any individual entrepreneur… Not until the dawn of the industrial era would that tradition be questioned.”

These findings suggest that a more orderly pattern of urban planning predated both industrialization and the formal government planning of the twentieth century, but was lost in the shuffle of the late nineteenth century’s rapid urbanization. Indeed, urban growth after Reconstruction posed an array of problems that local leaders were ill-equipped as well as disinclined to confront. In his study of attitudes among urban elites, Blaine Brownell argued that city leaders held growth to be an end in itself and allowed the city to billow out into surrounding areas, taking little care to integrate these “seemingly indigestible chunks of land and people” into an orderly urban scheme. Several other scholars have painted a similar portrait of unresponsive leadership during the expansive years of the late nineteenth century. Kay Haire Huggins has shown that politicians, the press and others in North Carolina began to call for parks, land-use regulations and other forms of planning during this period, but local governments failed to act on any of these suggestions until well into the twentieth century. Similarly, Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon observed of Atlanta, “Promoters and publicists boasted of the city’s many skyscrapers and talked much in the public press about the need for a ‘City Beautiful,’ but the rapidly expanding city was unable to obtain support for comprehensive planning ideas…”

David Goldfield’s Atlanta guidebook provides a clue to the unequal application of what efforts southern cities did make to shape the urban environment. Areas like Atlanta’s ninth district, which had a predominantly black population, received almost none of the benefits of government action, he said, while the central business district and higher class residential areas sometimes would. The limited government philosophy embraced by southerners during this period assumed that property owners would be responsible for paving roads adjacent to their holdings. Urban leaders were satisfied with this policy as far as areas inhabited primarily by poorer residents were concerned, Goldfield argued, but city governments periodically applied public money to enhancing the downtown areas, as well as the new suburban areas then being developed. As a result, the majority of streets in southern cities languished in poor condition well into the twentieth century.

Scholars have identified annexation as a major feature of southern urban policy in the late nineteenth century, but they have assessed the motivations of boundary-pushing leaders differently. Howard Rabinowitz argued that city leaders enthusiastically expanded urban boundaries during this period partly to post impressive gains from one census to the next. Local boosters believed, Rabinowitz said, that annexation would create the impression that their city was progressing rapidly by padding population statistics with outlying areas. David Goldfield agreed that annexation served a certain public relations purpose: “Following the antebellum precept that growth meant progress, southern urban leaders made up in territory what they lacked in economic and population growth.” However, Professor Goldfield also suggested that interests in land speculation and streetcar development drove the policy of annexation in many cities, since land values would likely rise and the extension of public services would make outlying lands – where streetcar lines were extending – more desirable for homeowners. In contrast, Rabinowitz emphasized the desire of urban leaders to capture the tax base of those who would be living in the developing suburbs. Goldfield’s interpretation seems more probable, given its emphasis on benefits that would accrue to speculative interests rather than revenue for city government itself. After all, the newly minted city residents of suburban neighborhoods received the lion’s share of benefits from city services, such as paving and lighting, as older areas suffered and lower-class neighborhoods continued to be neglected entirely. Capturing a new tax base would accomplish little if most resources were going to be shifted to these areas anyway.

In any case, the central role of business elites has been a consistent theme in studies of southern planning. Businessmen were able to dominate the planning process because they occupied most positions of political power in southern cities. “By fostering close ties with business and government leaders (usually the same people in southern cities),” argued David Goldfield, “[professional planners] demonstrated how their profession could further the city’s economic interests - a primary concern of the civic elite.” Several works have sought to identify this class and clarify what their interests were. For instance, in The Urban Ethos in the South Blaine Brownell sought to analyze the opinions “enunciated by a conscious urban elite,” because these people had “the requisite power and resources, and the greater opportunity, to determine urban policy and translate their thinking into action.” Brownell described this group of resourceful, influential city-dwellers as a “commercial-civic elite,” composed primarily of white male business leaders “whose principal focus of attention was the downtown business district, and whose views were most often reflected in the major urban newspapers and in many other printed sources.” These individuals have played some role in every history of southern planning, and their part has usually been a central one.

Many scholars have defined the interests of this elite exclusively in terms of business interests, with planning understood as a means to sell the city to outsiders. David Goldfield characterized Progressivism as essentially an overhaul of government on a business model that emphasized efficiency and economic growth, with city planning a key example of such Progressive reforms in the South. “The somewhat chaotic, rustic environment that characterized southern cities concerned image-conscious leaders,” Goldfield wrote, “though they did little beyond tidying up the central business district.” Urban planning, then, was primarily concerned with creating a positive and appealing business climate. Likewise, Norman Johnston pointed to the exhortations of Memphis business leaders in support of planning: “There follows a peroration on the attractiveness of planning for the businessman (‘… it pays to be able to say there are no slums,’ ‘It pays even in dollars and cents,’ ‘Beauty pays!’”)…” This was not beauty for beauty’s sake, but, rather, beauty for business’s sake. Goldfield would likely quibble with the enthusiastic businessmen quoted in Johnston’s work; as expedient as it may have been “to say there are no slums,” he insisted in Cotton Fields that Harland Bartholomew’s plans for Memphis, Knoxville and New Orleans deliberately lacked any provisions for ameliorating social problems. According to Goldfield, “There was a clear understanding between client and planner that ‘housing and other “social” concerns’ were to be eliminated from the final recommendations.”

Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon demonstrated the primacy of economic growth in shaping the landscape by highlighting the low value ascribed to parks and open space by Atlanta’s leaders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her essay, “Frederick Law Olmsted and Joel Hurt: Planning for Atlanta,” Lyon vividly described the experience of Olmsted upon arriving in the Gate City. “Not even one small plot of green space greeted the country’s foremost landscape architect upon his arrival,” according to Lyon. “The area adjacent to the depot in front of his hotel, which had served the postwar decade a city park, was covered by a solid block of recently constructed business buildings.” What little open space existed in Atlanta fell victim to the dictates of expanding commerce, and Olmsted’s suggestions for comprehensive planning of parks and green spaces ultimately fell on deaf ears within the practically minded business community. Other forms of planning, however, could fare better than proposals for parks and other public amenities. As Lyon observed in her dissertation, “The city’s businessmen did press for the services and civic improvements they deemed important to the city’s commercial growth… Planning that was not directly related to the utilitarian side of business was largely ignored everywhere.”

Other assessments have construed the concerns of these “image-conscious” elites in less narrowly economic terms. Charles P. Garofalo’s dissertation, “Business Ideas in Atlanta,” takes an approach similar to Brownell’s Urban Ethos by making the mentality of urban elites his object of study. Like Brownell, Lyon and others, Garofalo identified “organized businessmen operating through their local chambers of commerce, trade associations, and other bodies” as the chief actors in systematically affecting the urban landscape through planning. However, he argued that the “status of their community” and social control were the driving concerns of these businessmen, not merely economic growth per se. Garofalo made the interesting choice of discussing architecture and planning practices in a chapter devoted to “The Arts,” grouping these “civic arts” with painting, theatre, music and opera as facets of the businessman’s search for status. For the businessmen in Garofalo’s study, urban planning was essential if Atlanta were ever to achieve greatness of the proper magnitude. The author pointed, for instance, to William J. Sayward’s plea for Atlantans “not to go down in history as a nation of traders simply like the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians”; Atlanta would have to take better care with its urban environment if it hoped to attain the status of an Athens or Rome. In Garofalo’s view, a desire for control over the city, which became increasingly disordered as it grew, also motivated elites. He argued that the surge of interest in parks during the 1920s represented “an attempt at social regulation,” although he did not provide much evidence for how or why calls for park development aimed at social control.

The “commercial-civic elite” — typically defined as a group of white, male business leaders — has occupied a conspicuous place in the historical literature, but several historians have noted the role of women’s groups in the developing of planning in the South. One could argue that distinguishing between businessmen and their wives makes little difference, since both can be defined economically as members of an elite class. However, the literature demonstrates that affluent women had goals and resources distinct from those of the businessmen who played a role in the development of planning. According to Kay Haire Huggins, women’s organizations devoted to the beautification of cities in North Carolina emerged from church groups and literary discussion clubs during the first decade of the twentieth century. These clubs concerned themselves chiefly with improving school buildings, cleaning streets and sidewalks, and beautifying the urban landscape with shrubbery and other decorations. Huggins showed that progressive women moved from smaller, more isolated projects, such as improving a single schoolhouse, to larger-scale programs like a citywide clean-up campaign.

The expanding scope of women’s activism in North Carolina led to the first formal efforts at city planning, Huggins argued, but women lacked the resources to realize their plans. This process culminated in North Carolina’s first comprehensive city plan, when the Woman’s Club in Raleigh commissioned a leading spokesman for civic design, Charles Mulford Robinson, to create a design for Raleigh in 1912. Robinson’s plan emphasized beautification of the city, calling for “the elimination of overhead wiring, sign and billboard control, the use of more ‘comely’ waste receptacles, and a more efficient system of collecting rubbish”; he also envisioned improved parks and playgrounds and a grand public square around the capitol building. The Woman’s Club sold copies of the plan in the hope that the public would study it and embrace Robinson’s recommendations, but the plan ultimately faded into obscurity. Huggins attributed the plan’s failure to the women’s political inexperience and the club’s inability to fund extensive projects independently. However, they did establish a precedent that foreshadowed the active embrace of planning by local governments a decade later.

The Woman’s Club pursued a concept of planning embodied in the “City Beautiful” movement of the early twentieth century, and scholars have agreed that this represented a key step in the establishment of urban planning in the South. Most have placed the beginning of this movement in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, where the elaborate construction of a “Great White City” had sparked Americans’ interest in civic art, classical architecture, and landscaping. City Beautiful advocates aimed to make the urban landscape more aesthetically appealing with statues, tree-planting programs, wide boulevards and other beautification projects. Historians have concurred that the City Beautiful movement failed to realize its goals, with most citing the prohibitive cost of improvements that were thought to be merely decorative. The first planning commissions during the early years of the twentieth century embraced the City Beautiful concept, said Lyon, but they “had little money and less power.” In The Rise of the Urban South, Lawrence Larsen also acknowledged the financial limitations of planning concerned primarily with beautification: “Few people objected to urban beautification. The problem was to raise money, particularly in the South.” However, unlike most other historians, Larsen argued that the City Beautiful was not necessarily an import from Chicago. “By 1880, the new City Beautiful movement already had strong southern roots [in] the concept that cities could have pleasing environments… A number of cities already had parks. Beautification was an old concept in Dixie.”

Every study of planning in the South acknowledges a transition from the City Beautiful to a more practical subsequent period of planning. Although the City Beautiful movement pressed mostly for superficial reforms and met with little actual success, it served as the forerunner of the formal planning programs embraced during the 1920s. Various scholars have called this succeeding movement the “City Efficient,” “City Useful,” and “City Practical” period, owing to the multiple terms used by people during the period. City governments throughout the South initiated official planning commissions during the 1920s, beginning with legislation passed by North Carolina in 1919 allowing local communities to establish such bodies. As state and local governments began to take up the cause of urban planning, aesthetic concerns gave way to an emphasis on efficiency and practical application. “Considerations of cleanliness and artful symmetry remained, to be sure,” Blaine Brownell argued, “but these were clearly secondary to matters of urban transportation, land use, and subdivision controls.” Alternately, Kay Haire Huggins defined the City Useful ideal as “a city with adequate public utilities, parks, an efficient network of roads and transportation, and, above all, a municipality which spent its money economically.”

Historians have disagreed as to the cause of the shift from beauty to utility. Brownell attributed the new interest in practicality to the mentality of the elites who ran city governments and hired planners. Huggins, on the other hand, argued that planners had already begun to view their work as a science rather than an art during the 1910s. “North Carolina,” she wrote, “whose only plan from 1900-1917 was drawn up by Robinson, was, therefore, a little behind the more advanced national pace.” Norman Johnston offered a slightly different perspective in his study of Harland Bartholomew and the rise of the planning profession, contending that groups emphasizing aesthetics and efficiency had long coexisted during the early years of planning. The impact of trends within the planning community should not be discounted. Historians have shown that city governments repeatedly called upon planners from outside the South to design their cities; Memphis, for instance, turned to St. Louis’ Bartholomew, and the people of Raleigh hired Chicago’s Charles Mulford Robinson. These planners appear to have brought the national discourse of planning with them to southern cities, meaning that larger trends were likely to have influenced southern policymakers. Whether Johnston or Huggins is correct about the evolution of planning attitudes, concern for beautification clearly preoccupied many influential planners up to the 1910s, and the City Efficient idea dominated by the time many states and cities had formally adopted planning as a government function during the 1920s.

Setting planners aside, few historians have analyzed the differing visions of urban development promoted by private citizens, such as the women’s groups, and the state-backed planning projects that followed. Planning focused on tweaking the aesthetic appeal of urban landscapes when it was the province of civic groups working with private funds, but worked toward creating a more efficient city and a climate conducive to economic growth when governments took on planning and invested public money. Scholars might fruitfully press Blaine Brownell’s argument about the ideology of urban elites further and explore what relationship, if any, existed between these parallel changes. In other words, historians could investigate not just the mentality of the businessmen who ran the government, but also of others who contributed to the planning process. Why did women’s groups envision a particular kind of landscape? Did earlier conceptions of urban improvement persist and compete with those of business leaders once local governments embraced planning? Although the shift in emphasis within planning circles has been widely noted, no one has yet puzzled out the origins of the perspectives held by these historical participants.

While historians acknowledge that the City Useful movement brought a more comprehensive approach to urban problems, many point out that the new plans only addressed a few issues thoroughly. Earlier civic groups often dealt with one aspect of the city at a time – a citywide clean-up, for instance, or the beautification of a particular school – but the city planning commissions developed plans that ostensibly tackled a variety of problems at once. “A typical comprehensive plan,” wrote Kay Haire Huggins, “presented inventories of land-use, transportation, the basic economic activities of the city, and the existing provisions for public welfare, in particular health, recreation, and housing.” Despite these wide-ranging concerns, she said, the plans often directed greatest attention to transportation issues. Huggins argued that city leaders devoted most of their energy to relieving traffic congestion, providing automobile parking, and widening streets because they considered such reforms “good business,” aimed at increasing efficiency and facilitating economic growth. Blaine A. Brownell found a similar pattern in Harland Bartholomew’s plan for Memphis. The planner devoted sections to “major streets, transit, transportation, recreation, zoning, and civic art,” but the sections on zoning and streets were most fully developed.

Goldfield and Brownell have demonstrated how the complex motivations that drove transportation policy led to unexpected results. Professor Brownell argued that planners improved streets in the central business district and expanded the street system into less developed areas of the city not only to foster outward growth, but also to enhance access to the downtown area. He attributed these reforms to the motivations of businessmen, particularly real estate interests and developers, who sought to increase property values and foster confidence in expansion. As David Goldfield observed, however, the conflicting aims of elevating the central city and promoting speculation-driven growth could cause significant problems. “Planners believed,” he wrote, “that a decentralized metropolis would enhance the central business district by removing competing residential uses and by improving access to the center.” By the 1940s, leaders in Richmond had discovered that roads led out of their dowtown as much as into it, and called upon Bartholomew to develop a plan to save an increasingly neglected central city. By then, Goldfield said, their efforts were largely in vain.

Apart from transportation, zoning has occupied the interest of historians researching the new city planning boards of this period. Even after planning bodies became officially recognized by state and local governments, they still served in an advisory capacity to urban leaders. Zoning had a special significance because it represented the first independent, coercive power that many planners possessed. Whereas planners could before only recommend a street system to a city government, now they could stipulate specific land-uses and require that property owners conform to their dictates. In her work on planning in North Carolina, Kay Haire Huggins documented how this new government power met with significant resistance from citizens unused to intrusive regulation. Planning boards, she said, were often so consumed by hearing appeals over zoning disputes that they could devote few resources to larger, long-term projects.

Scholars have discussed zoning as part of an ideological shift that valued insulating residential areas from other economic uses. Local leaders conceived of industrial and commercial ventures as intrusions in people’s living space, unlike an earlier urban pattern that freely mingled uses. The public had to intervene, planners thought, to prevent one property owner from using his land in a way that would reduce the value of his neighbors’ holdings. Kay Haire Huggins argued that a new idea of creating “neighborhoods” drove planners and politicians to utilize zoning codes, as suggested by a Durham plan: “Have a City Plan prepared by experts and officially adopted so that people will feel safe in buying real estate and improving it in a manner characteristic of the neighborhood.” This statement embraced both the pecuniary interest in property values and an ideal of the neighborhood. Blaine A. Brownell found similar attitudes in Memphis’s planning program. Mixed-use areas, so common in the past, were labeled “transitional,” and planners like Bartholomew sought to “give stability and character” to districts that included a variety of land-uses.

Unfortunately, the character of a neighborhood could also mean its racial composition, and several historians have documented how southern planners used zoning codes to fix residential segregation in place. Although primarily concerned with the effect of the automobile on residential patterns in the early twentieth century, Howard Preston’s Automobile Age Atlanta includes a discussion of urban planners and political leaders’ commitment to planning segregation, even against the dictates of federal law. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1917 decision Buchanan v. Warley that cities could not require residential segregation based on race, but Preston said that this did not stop Atlanta and numerous other southern cities from promulgating just such zoning regulations. Planners and politicians usually schemed to confine black people to a city’s older areas. However, simple divisions of space into “white” and “colored” areas could be problematic, and Blaine A. Brownell has shown how elites developed creative exceptions to preserve desired elements of the status quo. Most codes, he said, permitted white people to own property in the black areas, thus protecting white landlords, and allowed for black employees to continue residing in servant quarters in white areas.

Thomas Hanchett, Howard Preston and others have argued that zoning did not create residential segregation from scratch, but codified and reinforced existing patterns of segregation. According to Hanchett, a considerable degree of residential integration between black and white people persisted in cities like Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte for more than twenty years after the Civil War. Hanchett traced the beginning of residential segregation to the political struggles of 1890s, after which, he says, black people began to cluster in separate communities. Preston emphasized the economic basis for increasing segregation, arguing that most black citizens could not afford to reside in the new suburban developments of North Atlanta, to which the white middle and upper classes were then flocking. Since some black citizens could afford the pricey new neighborhoods – and the threat of black suburbanites pressing into white areas unnerved political leaders – legal innovations such as deed restrictions and zoning stepped into prevent this from happening. A 1922 zoning ordinance defined North Atlanta as a “For Whites Only” residential area, while setting aside other parts of the city “For Colored Only” - the same year that Atlanta’s first official Planning Commission came into existence.

Many histories of planning and related issues stop at 1930, suggesting a turning point in urban development. Blaine Brownell’s The Urban Ethos in the South covers the 1920s, the decade when most formal planning programs came into existence. Similarly, Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon’s dissertation on the architecture of Atlanta’s central business district deals with the years 1866 to 1930. Lyon argued that the Great Depression ended, at least temporarily, the period of robust construction with which she was concerned, and that the emergence of the automobile altered the course of urban development enough to mark the beginning of a new period. Kay Haire Huggins also argued that the Depression curtailed planning efforts, as local governments responded to falling tax revenue by cutting “unnecessary expenses.” Given the hardships of the time, city planning hardly seemed to be an essential service.

The literature suggests that, even before economic calamity intervened, urban planners were poor in influence, power and funding. Indeed, historians have generally judged the early planning programs a failure. Several have cited the lack of political leverage held by groups who advocated planning as a major limitation. The women’s groups who undertook beautification projects and initiated the first city plans lacked political experience and, more importantly, power. Without the vote or representation in government, the Raleigh Woman’s Club opted to publish its plan in the hope that it would find an audience. Even the official planning boards that came to power in the 1920s could only recommend plans to local leaders, although the invention of zoning did lend them some independent power. This lack of political influence led to a lack of funding as well. “People supported the idea of planning but did not come to grips with the full implications of implementation,” Kay Haire Huggins argued. “They never gave planning boards sufficient power or funds to carry out their programs.” Operating on a shoestring budget and occupying a mostly advisory role, planners could not fully realize their ideas for developing the urban landscape.

The gap between idea and implementation could be a broad one in an enterprise wholly underwritten and overseen by business interests. The business elites who dominated city government in the South may have liked the idea of urban planning, but, Huggins suggested, they stiffly opposed any revision to the landscape that might infringe on their profit margins. Charlotte, for instance, did not have a city planning commission until 1929 because many prominent businessmen opposed zoning. Suburban residents had pressed for a zoning ordinance to prevent stores from being established in the affluent Dilworth neighborhood, but businessmen protested because they felt their property would lose value if zoned residential. Although fifty citizens came out in support of zoning and only six opposed, Huggins said, every city commissioner voted against the ordinance. Blaine A. Brownell found that real estate interests resisted zoning in many other southern cities, although most were eventually persuaded by the argument that zoning could stabilize property values and protect their investments. As both Huggins and Brownell demonstrated, disputes over zoning and subdivision regulations often overwhelmed planning boards such that “long range planning gave way… to immediate, piecemeal changes.”

Historians’ preoccupation with the goals and role of elite businessmen in the history of southern planning may have narrowed the field of vision too much. Given their prominence in local government, and the narrow political space afforded by the disfranchisement of black and many white voters, they would necessarily loom large in any history of a public policy like planning. However, this focus has largely kept scholars from analyzing the role of other groups and interests in affecting the urban landscape. For instance, did black citizens challenge the legal legimitacy of racist zoning after the Supreme Court’s Buchanan decision clearly forbade laws mandating residential segregation? What ways, if any, could people resist these efforts to organize the landscape? Scholars may find a greater diversity of interests and opinions among the elite as well. Businessmen may have had a lock on local government, but the middle and upper classes appear to have housed a variety of responses to planning. Some findings tentatively suggest that conflicts existed between varying business interests and different members of the affluent classes, as when Kay Haire Huggins showed suburbanites and real estate interests clashing over zoning codes in Charlotte. Further study could examine fractures within the groups that actually could participate in local politics and policymaking, and how this competition of interests yielded changes in policy and the landscape.

As these questions suggest, many potential directions for research take off from points already briefly touched by historians. For instance, several scholars have discussed the issue of parks in southern cities, but it is not yet clear how these public spaces developed over time. Some historians have emphasized the existence of planning and parks prior to the period of the City Beautiful movement. Lawrence Larsen has argued that urban beautification and a modest measure of planning had long been practiced in the South, giving as evidence the park systems of New Orleans and Savannah. These were not the product of Progressive Era zeal but had been developed long before the modern planning commissions came along. Likewise, Howard Rabinowitz argued that Norfolk, Atlanta, Charleston and several other cities had already created a substantial stock of parks by the turn of the century. However, it is not yet clear how much modern planning differed from earlier efforts. Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon’s work on Atlanta suggested that the fortunes of public space shifted significantly over time. Atlanta, she said, had a downtown park prior to the 1880s, which was then covered over by business buildings; after the turn of the century Atlantans worked to develop several new parks into the landscape. By studying the evolution of one city’s park system over time, a historian could gauge how much the expanded public action of the early twentieth century actually represented a break from the past.

Scholars could also explore the relationship between private and public planning efforts. The construction of suburbs by developers and mill villages by industrialists could both legitimately fall under the rubric of planning. Since the historiography of all planning projects would have been beyond the scope of a short paper, I have focused on planning by noncommercial entities like private nonprofits and local governments. David Goldfield, for one, has briefly discussed how urban governance came to incorporate privately planned, outlying areas, but questions persist. How were mill villages, which were often built outside city limits, absorbed into cities? How did the annexation of suburbs unfold politically? Such situations involve fairly well ordered chunks of space that would have to be integrated into the existing landscape of cities and the strategies of planners.

The subject of urban planning in the South, then, invites greater attention than it has yet received. Historians have charted a general course of development from the rapid urbanization begun during the 1880s to the work of middle and upper class citizens, first through limited private actions and then, in the 1920s, through official planning by local government. The rough sequence from freewheeling urban development to the City Beautiful and Useful movements appears in virtually every work on southern urban planning, along with an emphasis on the role of local elites in shaping the landscape. Beyond this much remains to be learned. Most problematic, scholars’ attention to the power and influence of affluent businessmen has resulted in a simplistic picture that may overlook greater participation and competition of interests in the planning of southern cities. Historians have made gestures in a variety of directions – the evolution of parks and public space, for instance, or political conflict within the planning process – that could be more fully pursued. By and large, scholars have dealt with these issues in works devoted either to much larger topics, such as urbanization in general, or to more specific subjects tangent to planning, like business attitudes in southern cities. As a result, their findings have often been cursory, and a thorough study of urban planning in a particular city or region could flesh out our still skeletal understanding of the South’s urban landscape.

'''Alex Cummings'''

== Bibliography ==

* Brown, Catherine. The Urban South: A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

* Brownell, Blaine A. “The Commercial-Civic Elite and City Planning in Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans in the 1920’s.” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 339-368.

* —-. The Urban Ethos in the South, 1920-1930. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

* —-. “The Urban Mind in the South: Growth of Urban Consciousness in Southern Cities, 1920-1927.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1969.

* Brownell, Blaine A., and David R. Goldfield, ed. The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

* Garofalo, Charles P. “Business Ideas in Atlanta, 1916-1935.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1972.

* Goldfield, David R. Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

* Huggins, Kay Haire. “City Planning in North Carolina, 1900-1929.” North Carolina Historical Review 46 (1969): 377-397.

* Huggins, Kay Haire. “The Evolution of City and Regional Planning in North Carolina, 1900-1950.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1967.

* Johnston, Norman. “Harland Bartholomew: His Comprehensive Plans and Science of Planning.” Ph.D diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1964.

* Larsen, Lawrence H. The Rise of the Urban South. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

* Lyon, Elizabeth Anne Mack. “Business Buildings in Atlanta: A Study in Urban Growth and Form.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1971.

* “Research Possibilities in Southern History.” Journal of Southern History 16 (1950): 52-63.

* White, Dana F., and Victor A. Kramer, ed. Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

The Emergence of Urban Planning in the South, 1880-1930

2012-06-21T02:22:44Z

99.135.136.38: Created page with " To take a bibliography of southern history on its face, one could conclude that urban planning never touched the American South. No historian has yet made a comprehensive study..."

To take a bibliography of southern history on its face, one could conclude that urban planning never touched the American South. No historian has yet made a comprehensive study of planning in southern cities. Southern urban planning has enjoyed the full attention of scholars only in the occasional dissertation or journal article, and these have taken the form of case studies looking at planning in a few cities or a single state. Otherwise, scholarly treatment of southern planning has played a supporting - and distinctly minor - role in more general studies of southern urban development, wherein a historian discusses planning for a few pages before moving on to topics like commercial architecture, railroad development, or the ideology of boosterism. Taken together, the direct and indirect studies provide a rough outline of how southerners responded to city environments between 1880 and 1930: urban planning emerged in the South in the early twentieth century in answer to the disorder created by rapid urbanization and industrialization after Reconstruction, first manifesting as private efforts to beautify the urban landscape and later as official government programs to make more efficient and stable cities. Given the lack of direct attention paid to the subject, this picture necessarily lacks the completeness that a comprehensive study could bring; in particular, historians’ overriding focus on the role of business elites in shaping the landscape has kept scholars from fully understanding the complexity of planning the southern city.

The historical study of southern cities, and planning in particular, long received little attention. Surveying the field in 1953, the editors of The Journal of Southern History noted that considerable territory lay open for southern historians to explore in the cities: “Much has been written about the rural South, but there is to date too little tangible evidence that the southern scholar has thought much about the urban South.” The authors went on to identify “city planning and lack of planning” as one of the topics as yet neglected by historians. More than ten years later, Norman Johnston observed in a study of urban planner Harland Bartholomew, “The present state of an historical record of twentieth century planning processes in the United States is marked primarily by its paucity.” By the 1960s few scholars had tackled the subject of southern cities directly or of American planning in general.

Interest in southern urban history surged not long after Johnston wrote, as a spate of dissertations and monographs appeared on the scene in the 1960s and 1970s. Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon and Charles P. Garofalo wrote dissertations about, respectively, architecture and business attitudes in Atlanta in the early 1970s, and Kay Haire Huggins completed a doctoral study of city and regional planning in North Carolina in 1967. Two leading scholars of the urban South, Blaine Brownell and David Goldfield, published books and articles beginning in the 1970s. Each of these works addressed issues of urban planning in varying degrees, although only Huggins and occasionally Brownell pursued planning as a primary topic of concern.

The Journal of Southern History implied that any story of urban development in the South might be as much about a “lack of planning” as planning itself, and many scholars have described southern cities as almost completely lacking conscious form or design. David Goldfield arged that urban development in the South was chaotic in the late nineteenth century, noting unpaved roads and the presence of highly undeveloped areas throughout cities. “Some parts of [Atlanta] were positively wilderness,” Goldfield observed, “and a guidebook of the time recommended fish and duck-hunting in the city’s ninth ward, a district ‘which has never been visited by man, and as unknown as the centre of Africa.’” Similarly, Howard Preston argued that urbanites devoted their energies after the desolation of the Civil War to commercial construction, leaving roads deficient and disorderly and parks nonexistent.

Others have pointed out that the urban landscape had evolved with some degree of premeditated form. Lawrence Larsen, for instance, noted that most cities had a gridiron street plan of some kind. “By 1880, whether southern towns began as forts, blockhouses, stockades, elaborately planned communities, or hastily platted promotions,” he wrote, “a distinguishing feature was some form of rectangular street plan.” Larsen placed this feature within the larger American scene, arguing that the gridiron plan was “an American legacy to urban planning,” found in the mining towns of California as much as the bustling new cities of the South. Thomas Hanchett confirmed Larsen’s observation about street patterns in his study of Charlotte, North Carolina, tracing them to a strong tradition of urban planning in the city’s earliest years. A royal charter dictated Charlotte’s layout upon its inception, and for well over a century city officials carefully dictated the design of Charlotte streets. “In each expansion,” Hanchett wrote, “the new streets were planned by a decision of the community leaders rather than by any individual entrepreneur… Not until the dawn of the industrial era would that tradition be questioned.”

These findings suggest that a more orderly pattern of urban planning predated both industrialization and the formal government planning of the twentieth century, but was lost in the shuffle of the late nineteenth century’s rapid urbanization. Indeed, urban growth after Reconstruction posed an array of problems that local leaders were ill-equipped as well as disinclined to confront. In his study of attitudes among urban elites, Blaine Brownell argued that city leaders held growth to be an end in itself and allowed the city to billow out into surrounding areas, taking little care to integrate these “seemingly indigestible chunks of land and people” into an orderly urban scheme. Several other scholars have painted a similar portrait of unresponsive leadership during the expansive years of the late nineteenth century. Kay Haire Huggins has shown that politicians, the press and others in North Carolina began to call for parks, land-use regulations and other forms of planning during this period, but local governments failed to act on any of these suggestions until well into the twentieth century. Similarly, Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon observed of Atlanta, “Promoters and publicists boasted of the city’s many skyscrapers and talked much in the public press about the need for a ‘City Beautiful,’ but the rapidly expanding city was unable to obtain support for comprehensive planning ideas…”

David Goldfield’s Atlanta guidebook provides a clue to the unequal application of what efforts southern cities did make to shape the urban environment. Areas like Atlanta’s ninth district, which had a predominantly black population, received almost none of the benefits of government action, he said, while the central business district and higher class residential areas sometimes would. The limited government philosophy embraced by southerners during this period assumed that property owners would be responsible for paving roads adjacent to their holdings. Urban leaders were satisfied with this policy as far as areas inhabited primarily by poorer residents were concerned, Goldfield argued, but city governments periodically applied public money to enhancing the downtown areas, as well as the new suburban areas then being developed. As a result, the majority of streets in southern cities languished in poor condition well into the twentieth century.

Scholars have identified annexation as a major feature of southern urban policy in the late nineteenth century, but they have assessed the motivations of boundary-pushing leaders differently. Howard Rabinowitz argued that city leaders enthusiastically expanded urban boundaries during this period partly to post impressive gains from one census to the next. Local boosters believed, Rabinowitz said, that annexation would create the impression that their city was progressing rapidly by padding population statistics with outlying areas. David Goldfield agreed that annexation served a certain public relations purpose: “Following the antebellum precept that growth meant progress, southern urban leaders made up in territory what they lacked in economic and population growth.” However, Professor Goldfield also suggested that interests in land speculation and streetcar development drove the policy of annexation in many cities, since land values would likely rise and the extension of public services would make outlying lands – where streetcar lines were extending – more desirable for homeowners. In contrast, Rabinowitz emphasized the desire of urban leaders to capture the tax base of those who would be living in the developing suburbs. Goldfield’s interpretation seems more probable, given its emphasis on benefits that would accrue to speculative interests rather than revenue for city government itself. After all, the newly minted city residents of suburban neighborhoods received the lion’s share of benefits from city services, such as paving and lighting, as older areas suffered and lower-class neighborhoods continued to be neglected entirely. Capturing a new tax base would accomplish little if most resources were going to be shifted to these areas anyway.

In any case, the central role of business elites has been a consistent theme in studies of southern planning. Businessmen were able to dominate the planning process because they occupied most positions of political power in southern cities. “By fostering close ties with business and government leaders (usually the same people in southern cities),” argued David Goldfield, “[professional planners] demonstrated how their profession could further the city’s economic interests - a primary concern of the civic elite.” Several works have sought to identify this class and clarify what their interests were. For instance, in The Urban Ethos in the South Blaine Brownell sought to analyze the opinions “enunciated by a conscious urban elite,” because these people had “the requisite power and resources, and the greater opportunity, to determine urban policy and translate their thinking into action.” Brownell described this group of resourceful, influential city-dwellers as a “commercial-civic elite,” composed primarily of white male business leaders “whose principal focus of attention was the downtown business district, and whose views were most often reflected in the major urban newspapers and in many other printed sources.” These individuals have played some role in every history of southern planning, and their part has usually been a central one.

Many scholars have defined the interests of this elite exclusively in terms of business interests, with planning understood as a means to sell the city to outsiders. David Goldfield characterized Progressivism as essentially an overhaul of government on a business model that emphasized efficiency and economic growth, with city planning a key example of such Progressive reforms in the South. “The somewhat chaotic, rustic environment that characterized southern cities concerned image-conscious leaders,” Goldfield wrote, “though they did little beyond tidying up the central business district.” Urban planning, then, was primarily concerned with creating a positive and appealing business climate. Likewise, Norman Johnston pointed to the exhortations of Memphis business leaders in support of planning: “There follows a peroration on the attractiveness of planning for the businessman (‘… it pays to be able to say there are no slums,’ ‘It pays even in dollars and cents,’ ‘Beauty pays!’”)…” This was not beauty for beauty’s sake, but, rather, beauty for business’s sake. Goldfield would likely quibble with the enthusiastic businessmen quoted in Johnston’s work; as expedient as it may have been “to say there are no slums,” he insisted in Cotton Fields that Harland Bartholomew’s plans for Memphis, Knoxville and New Orleans deliberately lacked any provisions for ameliorating social problems. According to Goldfield, “There was a clear understanding between client and planner that ‘housing and other “social” concerns’ were to be eliminated from the final recommendations.”

Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon demonstrated the primacy of economic growth in shaping the landscape by highlighting the low value ascribed to parks and open space by Atlanta’s leaders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In her essay, “Frederick Law Olmsted and Joel Hurt: Planning for Atlanta,” Lyon vividly described the experience of Olmsted upon arriving in the Gate City. “Not even one small plot of green space greeted the country’s foremost landscape architect upon his arrival,” according to Lyon. “The area adjacent to the depot in front of his hotel, which had served the postwar decade a city park, was covered by a solid block of recently constructed business buildings.” What little open space existed in Atlanta fell victim to the dictates of expanding commerce, and Olmsted’s suggestions for comprehensive planning of parks and green spaces ultimately fell on deaf ears within the practically minded business community. Other forms of planning, however, could fare better than proposals for parks and other public amenities. As Lyon observed in her dissertation, “The city’s businessmen did press for the services and civic improvements they deemed important to the city’s commercial growth… Planning that was not directly related to the utilitarian side of business was largely ignored everywhere.”

Other assessments have construed the concerns of these “image-conscious” elites in less narrowly economic terms. Charles P. Garofalo’s dissertation, “Business Ideas in Atlanta,” takes an approach similar to Brownell’s Urban Ethos by making the mentality of urban elites his object of study. Like Brownell, Lyon and others, Garofalo identified “organized businessmen operating through their local chambers of commerce, trade associations, and other bodies” as the chief actors in systematically affecting the urban landscape through planning. However, he argued that the “status of their community” and social control were the driving concerns of these businessmen, not merely economic growth per se. Garofalo made the interesting choice of discussing architecture and planning practices in a chapter devoted to “The Arts,” grouping these “civic arts” with painting, theatre, music and opera as facets of the businessman’s search for status. For the businessmen in Garofalo’s study, urban planning was essential if Atlanta were ever to achieve greatness of the proper magnitude. The author pointed, for instance, to William J. Sayward’s plea for Atlantans “not to go down in history as a nation of traders simply like the Phoenicians and the Carthaginians”; Atlanta would have to take better care with its urban environment if it hoped to attain the status of an Athens or Rome. In Garofalo’s view, a desire for control over the city, which became increasingly disordered as it grew, also motivated elites. He argued that the surge of interest in parks during the 1920s represented “an attempt at social regulation,” although he did not provide much evidence for how or why calls for park development aimed at social control.

The “commercial-civic elite” — typically defined as a group of white, male business leaders — has occupied a conspicuous place in the historical literature, but several historians have noted the role of women’s groups in the developing of planning in the South. One could argue that distinguishing between businessmen and their wives makes little difference, since both can be defined economically as members of an elite class. However, the literature demonstrates that affluent women had goals and resources distinct from those of the businessmen who played a role in the development of planning. According to Kay Haire Huggins, women’s organizations devoted to the beautification of cities in North Carolina emerged from church groups and literary discussion clubs during the first decade of the twentieth century. These clubs concerned themselves chiefly with improving school buildings, cleaning streets and sidewalks, and beautifying the urban landscape with shrubbery and other decorations. Huggins showed that progressive women moved from smaller, more isolated projects, such as improving a single schoolhouse, to larger-scale programs like a citywide clean-up campaign.

The expanding scope of women’s activism in North Carolina led to the first formal efforts at city planning, Huggins argued, but women lacked the resources to realize their plans. This process culminated in North Carolina’s first comprehensive city plan, when the Woman’s Club in Raleigh commissioned a leading spokesman for civic design, Charles Mulford Robinson, to create a design for Raleigh in 1912. Robinson’s plan emphasized beautification of the city, calling for “the elimination of overhead wiring, sign and billboard control, the use of more ‘comely’ waste receptacles, and a more efficient system of collecting rubbish”; he also envisioned improved parks and playgrounds and a grand public square around the capitol building. The Woman’s Club sold copies of the plan in the hope that the public would study it and embrace Robinson’s recommendations, but the plan ultimately faded into obscurity. Huggins attributed the plan’s failure to the women’s political inexperience and the club’s inability to fund extensive projects independently. However, they did establish a precedent that foreshadowed the active embrace of planning by local governments a decade later.

The Woman’s Club pursued a concept of planning embodied in the “City Beautiful” movement of the early twentieth century, and scholars have agreed that this represented a key step in the establishment of urban planning in the South. Most have placed the beginning of this movement in the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, where the elaborate construction of a “Great White City” had sparked Americans’ interest in civic art, classical architecture, and landscaping. City Beautiful advocates aimed to make the urban landscape more aesthetically appealing with statues, tree-planting programs, wide boulevards and other beautification projects. Historians have concurred that the City Beautiful movement failed to realize its goals, with most citing the prohibitive cost of improvements that were thought to be merely decorative. The first planning commissions during the early years of the twentieth century embraced the City Beautiful concept, said Lyon, but they “had little money and less power.” In The Rise of the Urban South, Lawrence Larsen also acknowledged the financial limitations of planning concerned primarily with beautification: “Few people objected to urban beautification. The problem was to raise money, particularly in the South.” However, unlike most other historians, Larsen argued that the City Beautiful was not necessarily an import from Chicago. “By 1880, the new City Beautiful movement already had strong southern roots [in] the concept that cities could have pleasing environments… A number of cities already had parks. Beautification was an old concept in Dixie.”

Every study of planning in the South acknowledges a transition from the City Beautiful to a more practical subsequent period of planning. Although the City Beautiful movement pressed mostly for superficial reforms and met with little actual success, it served as the forerunner of the formal planning programs embraced during the 1920s. Various scholars have called this succeeding movement the “City Efficient,” “City Useful,” and “City Practical” period, owing to the multiple terms used by people during the period. City governments throughout the South initiated official planning commissions during the 1920s, beginning with legislation passed by North Carolina in 1919 allowing local communities to establish such bodies. As state and local governments began to take up the cause of urban planning, aesthetic concerns gave way to an emphasis on efficiency and practical application. “Considerations of cleanliness and artful symmetry remained, to be sure,” Blaine Brownell argued, “but these were clearly secondary to matters of urban transportation, land use, and subdivision controls.” Alternately, Kay Haire Huggins defined the City Useful ideal as “a city with adequate public utilities, parks, an efficient network of roads and transportation, and, above all, a municipality which spent its money economically.”

Historians have disagreed as to the cause of the shift from beauty to utility. Brownell attributed the new interest in practicality to the mentality of the elites who ran city governments and hired planners. Huggins, on the other hand, argued that planners had already begun to view their work as a science rather than an art during the 1910s. “North Carolina,” she wrote, “whose only plan from 1900-1917 was drawn up by Robinson, was, therefore, a little behind the more advanced national pace.” Norman Johnston offered a slightly different perspective in his study of Harland Bartholomew and the rise of the planning profession, contending that groups emphasizing aesthetics and efficiency had long coexisted during the early years of planning. The impact of trends within the planning community should not be discounted. Historians have shown that city governments repeatedly called upon planners from outside the South to design their cities; Memphis, for instance, turned to St. Louis’ Bartholomew, and the people of Raleigh hired Chicago’s Charles Mulford Robinson. These planners appear to have brought the national discourse of planning with them to southern cities, meaning that larger trends were likely to have influenced southern policymakers. Whether Johnston or Huggins is correct about the evolution of planning attitudes, concern for beautification clearly preoccupied many influential planners up to the 1910s, and the City Efficient idea dominated by the time many states and cities had formally adopted planning as a government function during the 1920s.

Setting planners aside, few historians have analyzed the differing visions of urban development promoted by private citizens, such as the women’s groups, and the state-backed planning projects that followed. Planning focused on tweaking the aesthetic appeal of urban landscapes when it was the province of civic groups working with private funds, but worked toward creating a more efficient city and a climate conducive to economic growth when governments took on planning and invested public money. Scholars might fruitfully press Blaine Brownell’s argument about the ideology of urban elites further and explore what relationship, if any, existed between these parallel changes. In other words, historians could investigate not just the mentality of the businessmen who ran the government, but also of others who contributed to the planning process. Why did women’s groups envision a particular kind of landscape? Did earlier conceptions of urban improvement persist and compete with those of business leaders once local governments embraced planning? Although the shift in emphasis within planning circles has been widely noted, no one has yet puzzled out the origins of the perspectives held by these historical participants.

While historians acknowledge that the City Useful movement brought a more comprehensive approach to urban problems, many point out that the new plans only addressed a few issues thoroughly. Earlier civic groups often dealt with one aspect of the city at a time – a citywide clean-up, for instance, or the beautification of a particular school – but the city planning commissions developed plans that ostensibly tackled a variety of problems at once. “A typical comprehensive plan,” wrote Kay Haire Huggins, “presented inventories of land-use, transportation, the basic economic activities of the city, and the existing provisions for public welfare, in particular health, recreation, and housing.” Despite these wide-ranging concerns, she said, the plans often directed greatest attention to transportation issues. Huggins argued that city leaders devoted most of their energy to relieving traffic congestion, providing automobile parking, and widening streets because they considered such reforms “good business,” aimed at increasing efficiency and facilitating economic growth. Blaine A. Brownell found a similar pattern in Harland Bartholomew’s plan for Memphis. The planner devoted sections to “major streets, transit, transportation, recreation, zoning, and civic art,” but the sections on zoning and streets were most fully developed.

Goldfield and Brownell have demonstrated how the complex motivations that drove transportation policy led to unexpected results. Professor Brownell argued that planners improved streets in the central business district and expanded the street system into less developed areas of the city not only to foster outward growth, but also to enhance access to the downtown area. He attributed these reforms to the motivations of businessmen, particularly real estate interests and developers, who sought to increase property values and foster confidence in expansion. As David Goldfield observed, however, the conflicting aims of elevating the central city and promoting speculation-driven growth could cause significant problems. “Planners believed,” he wrote, “that a decentralized metropolis would enhance the central business district by removing competing residential uses and by improving access to the center.” By the 1940s, leaders in Richmond had discovered that roads led out of their dowtown as much as into it, and called upon Bartholomew to develop a plan to save an increasingly neglected central city. By then, Goldfield said, their efforts were largely in vain.

Apart from transportation, zoning has occupied the interest of historians researching the new city planning boards of this period. Even after planning bodies became officially recognized by state and local governments, they still served in an advisory capacity to urban leaders. Zoning had a special significance because it represented the first independent, coercive power that many planners possessed. Whereas planners could before only recommend a street system to a city government, now they could stipulate specific land-uses and require that property owners conform to their dictates. In her work on planning in North Carolina, Kay Haire Huggins documented how this new government power met with significant resistance from citizens unused to intrusive regulation. Planning boards, she said, were often so consumed by hearing appeals over zoning disputes that they could devote few resources to larger, long-term projects.

Scholars have discussed zoning as part of an ideological shift that valued insulating residential areas from other economic uses. Local leaders conceived of industrial and commercial ventures as intrusions in people’s living space, unlike an earlier urban pattern that freely mingled uses. The public had to intervene, planners thought, to prevent one property owner from using his land in a way that would reduce the value of his neighbors’ holdings. Kay Haire Huggins argued that a new idea of creating “neighborhoods” drove planners and politicians to utilize zoning codes, as suggested by a Durham plan: “Have a City Plan prepared by experts and officially adopted so that people will feel safe in buying real estate and improving it in a manner characteristic of the neighborhood.” This statement embraced both the pecuniary interest in property values and an ideal of the neighborhood. Blaine A. Brownell found similar attitudes in Memphis’s planning program. Mixed-use areas, so common in the past, were labeled “transitional,” and planners like Bartholomew sought to “give stability and character” to districts that included a variety of land-uses.

Unfortunately, the character of a neighborhood could also mean its racial composition, and several historians have documented how southern planners used zoning codes to fix residential segregation in place. Although primarily concerned with the effect of the automobile on residential patterns in the early twentieth century, Howard Preston’s Automobile Age Atlanta includes a discussion of urban planners and political leaders’ commitment to planning segregation, even against the dictates of federal law. The Supreme Court ruled in the 1917 decision Buchanan v. Warley that cities could not require residential segregation based on race, but Preston said that this did not stop Atlanta and numerous other southern cities from promulgating just such zoning regulations. Planners and politicians usually schemed to confine black people to a city’s older areas. However, simple divisions of space into “white” and “colored” areas could be problematic, and Blaine A. Brownell has shown how elites developed creative exceptions to preserve desired elements of the status quo. Most codes, he said, permitted white people to own property in the black areas, thus protecting white landlords, and allowed for black employees to continue residing in servant quarters in white areas.

Thomas Hanchett, Howard Preston and others have argued that zoning did not create residential segregation from scratch, but codified and reinforced existing patterns of segregation. According to Hanchett, a considerable degree of residential integration between black and white people persisted in cities like Houston, Atlanta and Charlotte for more than twenty years after the Civil War. Hanchett traced the beginning of residential segregation to the political struggles of 1890s, after which, he says, black people began to cluster in separate communities. Preston emphasized the economic basis for increasing segregation, arguing that most black citizens could not afford to reside in the new suburban developments of North Atlanta, to which the white middle and upper classes were then flocking. Since some black citizens could afford the pricey new neighborhoods – and the threat of black suburbanites pressing into white areas unnerved political leaders – legal innovations such as deed restrictions and zoning stepped into prevent this from happening. A 1922 zoning ordinance defined North Atlanta as a “For Whites Only” residential area, while setting aside other parts of the city “For Colored Only” - the same year that Atlanta’s first official Planning Commission came into existence.

Many histories of planning and related issues stop at 1930, suggesting a turning point in urban development. Blaine Brownell’s The Urban Ethos in the South covers the 1920s, the decade when most formal planning programs came into existence. Similarly, Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon’s dissertation on the architecture of Atlanta’s central business district deals with the years 1866 to 1930. Lyon argued that the Great Depression ended, at least temporarily, the period of robust construction with which she was concerned, and that the emergence of the automobile altered the course of urban development enough to mark the beginning of a new period. Kay Haire Huggins also argued that the Depression curtailed planning efforts, as local governments responded to falling tax revenue by cutting “unnecessary expenses.” Given the hardships of the time, city planning hardly seemed to be an essential service.

The literature suggests that, even before economic calamity intervened, urban planners were poor in influence, power and funding. Indeed, historians have generally judged the early planning programs a failure. Several have cited the lack of political leverage held by groups who advocated planning as a major limitation. The women’s groups who undertook beautification projects and initiated the first city plans lacked political experience and, more importantly, power. Without the vote or representation in government, the Raleigh Woman’s Club opted to publish its plan in the hope that it would find an audience. Even the official planning boards that came to power in the 1920s could only recommend plans to local leaders, although the invention of zoning did lend them some independent power. This lack of political influence led to a lack of funding as well. “People supported the idea of planning but did not come to grips with the full implications of implementation,” Kay Haire Huggins argued. “They never gave planning boards sufficient power or funds to carry out their programs.” Operating on a shoestring budget and occupying a mostly advisory role, planners could not fully realize their ideas for developing the urban landscape.

The gap between idea and implementation could be a broad one in an enterprise wholly underwritten and overseen by business interests. The business elites who dominated city government in the South may have liked the idea of urban planning, but, Huggins suggested, they stiffly opposed any revision to the landscape that might infringe on their profit margins. Charlotte, for instance, did not have a city planning commission until 1929 because many prominent businessmen opposed zoning. Suburban residents had pressed for a zoning ordinance to prevent stores from being established in the affluent Dilworth neighborhood, but businessmen protested because they felt their property would lose value if zoned residential. Although fifty citizens came out in support of zoning and only six opposed, Huggins said, every city commissioner voted against the ordinance. Blaine A. Brownell found that real estate interests resisted zoning in many other southern cities, although most were eventually persuaded by the argument that zoning could stabilize property values and protect their investments. As both Huggins and Brownell demonstrated, disputes over zoning and subdivision regulations often overwhelmed planning boards such that “long range planning gave way… to immediate, piecemeal changes.”

Historians’ preoccupation with the goals and role of elite businessmen in the history of southern planning may have narrowed the field of vision too much. Given their prominence in local government, and the narrow political space afforded by the disfranchisement of black and many white voters, they would necessarily loom large in any history of a public policy like planning. However, this focus has largely kept scholars from analyzing the role of other groups and interests in affecting the urban landscape. For instance, did black citizens challenge the legal legimitacy of racist zoning after the Supreme Court’s Buchanan decision clearly forbade laws mandating residential segregation? What ways, if any, could people resist these efforts to organize the landscape? Scholars may find a greater diversity of interests and opinions among the elite as well. Businessmen may have had a lock on local government, but the middle and upper classes appear to have housed a variety of responses to planning. Some findings tentatively suggest that conflicts existed between varying business interests and different members of the affluent classes, as when Kay Haire Huggins showed suburbanites and real estate interests clashing over zoning codes in Charlotte. Further study could examine fractures within the groups that actually could participate in local politics and policymaking, and how this competition of interests yielded changes in policy and the landscape.

As these questions suggest, many potential directions for research take off from points already briefly touched by historians. For instance, several scholars have discussed the issue of parks in southern cities, but it is not yet clear how these public spaces developed over time. Some historians have emphasized the existence of planning and parks prior to the period of the City Beautiful movement. Lawrence Larsen has argued that urban beautification and a modest measure of planning had long been practiced in the South, giving as evidence the park systems of New Orleans and Savannah. These were not the product of Progressive Era zeal but had been developed long before the modern planning commissions came along. Likewise, Howard Rabinowitz argued that Norfolk, Atlanta, Charleston and several other cities had already created a substantial stock of parks by the turn of the century. However, it is not yet clear how much modern planning differed from earlier efforts. Elizabeth Anne Mack Lyon’s work on Atlanta suggested that the fortunes of public space shifted significantly over time. Atlanta, she said, had a downtown park prior to the 1880s, which was then covered over by business buildings; after the turn of the century Atlantans worked to develop several new parks into the landscape. By studying the evolution of one city’s park system over time, a historian could gauge how much the expanded public action of the early twentieth century actually represented a break from the past.

Scholars could also explore the relationship between private and public planning efforts. The construction of suburbs by developers and mill villages by industrialists could both legitimately fall under the rubric of planning. Since the historiography of all planning projects would have been beyond the scope of a short paper, I have focused on planning by noncommercial entities like private nonprofits and local governments. David Goldfield, for one, has briefly discussed how urban governance came to incorporate privately planned, outlying areas, but questions persist. How were mill villages, which were often built outside city limits, absorbed into cities? How did the annexation of suburbs unfold politically? Such situations involve fairly well ordered chunks of space that would have to be integrated into the existing landscape of cities and the strategies of planners.

The subject of urban planning in the South, then, invites greater attention than it has yet received. Historians have charted a general course of development from the rapid urbanization begun during the 1880s to the work of middle and upper class citizens, first through limited private actions and then, in the 1920s, through official planning by local government. The rough sequence from freewheeling urban development to the City Beautiful and Useful movements appears in virtually every work on southern urban planning, along with an emphasis on the role of local elites in shaping the landscape. Beyond this much remains to be learned. Most problematic, scholars’ attention to the power and influence of affluent businessmen has resulted in a simplistic picture that may overlook greater participation and competition of interests in the planning of southern cities. Historians have made gestures in a variety of directions – the evolution of parks and public space, for instance, or political conflict within the planning process – that could be more fully pursued. By and large, scholars have dealt with these issues in works devoted either to much larger topics, such as urbanization in general, or to more specific subjects tangent to planning, like business attitudes in southern cities. As a result, their findings have often been cursory, and a thorough study of urban planning in a particular city or region could flesh out our still skeletal understanding of the South’s urban landscape.

Alex Cummings

Bibliography

Brown, Catherine. The Urban South: A Bibliography. New York: Greenwood Press, 1989.

Brownell, Blaine A. “The Commercial-Civic Elite and City Planning in Atlanta, Memphis, and New Orleans in the 1920’s.” Journal of Southern History 41 (1975): 339-368.

—-. The Urban Ethos in the South, 1920-1930. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

—-. “The Urban Mind in the South: Growth of Urban Consciousness in Southern Cities, 1920-1927.” Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1969.

Brownell, Blaine A., and David R. Goldfield, ed. The City in Southern History: The Growth of Urban Civilization in the South. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

Garofalo, Charles P. “Business Ideas in Atlanta, 1916-1935.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1972.

Goldfield, David R. Cotton Fields and Skyscrapers: Southern City and Region. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

Huggins, Kay Haire. “City Planning in North Carolina, 1900-1929.” North Carolina Historical Review 46 (1969): 377-397.

Huggins, Kay Haire. “The Evolution of City and Regional Planning in North Carolina, 1900-1950.” Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1967.

Johnston, Norman. “Harland Bartholomew: His Comprehensive Plans and Science of Planning.” Ph.D diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1964.

Larsen, Lawrence H. The Rise of the Urban South. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1985.

Lyon, Elizabeth Anne Mack. “Business Buildings in Atlanta: A Study in Urban Growth and Form.” Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1971.

“Research Possibilities in Southern History.” Journal of Southern History 16 (1950): 52-63.

White, Dana F., and Victor A. Kramer, ed. Olmsted South: Old South Critic/New South Planner. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Noise, from Dos Passos to Bob Pollard

2012-06-21T02:20:37Z

99.135.136.38: Created page with "It is often said that the United States is a post-industrial society with an information economy. The American enterprise is now driven by services and the creation of intellectu..."

It is often said that the United States is a post-industrial society with an information economy. The American enterprise is now driven by services and the creation of intellectual property, in the form of entertainment, pharmaceuticals, software and other forms of “information.” Most thinkers have linked this shift to two big changes: the widespread introduction of computers, and the connecting of all these computers through modern telecommunications, including advances in phone, cable, and satellite connectivity. Whole disciplines of information science and information theory have emerged since the 1940s to interpret this new infrastructure of communication, and we have grown accustomed to treating all expression, all thought, all interaction as a statistical, quantifiable transmission of information. Anything that gets in the way of that transmission is noise. And in a system that seeks the fastest, most profitable ways to make, move, send, sale, and receive information, noise is a potential threat.

The anthropologist Brian Larkin has written thoughtfully about the aesthetics and political implications of noise in his work on video piracy in Nigeria. The noise generated by endless copying takes on a life of its own. “Cheap tape recorders, old televisions, blurred videos that are the copy of a copy of a copy,” Larkin says. “These are the material distortions endemic to the reproduction of media goods in situations of poverty and illegality...” The distortion is an imprint of the conditions under which such goods are made and distributed, a disordered society. The circulation of pirate goods is also a sort of noise in the total system of communication from the perspective of Western media corporations, who would rather see the leaks that disseminate bootleg distortion around the world plugged up. Bootlegs stand in contrast to the vision of efficient delivery of sound and vision that media companies would desire in a perfect world.

It is little wonder that we tend to think of communication as the sending of a signal from point A to point B. In a society that worships the ideals of the market, we have come to imagine our communication with each other purely as a matter of exchange, not as an encounter or engagement between two or more people – what Heidegger would call “being with.” We are not being with each other when we talk; we are sending things to and from each other.

But is the dream of perfect communication – the pure, unimpeded transfer of information from one to another – anything more than an elusive ideal? To better understand what’s at stake culturally in the so-called “information economy,” we need to examine the way theorists have thought of the relationship between epistemology and technology. Students of communication always deal with how people come to know things. Jacques Attali, George Myerson, Paolo Virno and others have argued that particular ideologies about how we learn and speak accompany the emergence of various media; people usually create a new device with a particular notion of ideal communication in mind. How communication is defined can have dramatic consequences for how we live.

We can start from the premise that there is an external world, and that we are born with some means and invent others for processing information about it. The medium, which is in the middle, strives to render its inputs in useful ways, which implies some kind of (greater or lesser) correspondence between what is perceived and the perception. We can change the media in various ways – their nature is as dynamic as the world inside and out. As Torben Sangild has written, "There is a constant discrepancy between the essentially indescribable object and the attempt to verbalize and understand it,” but people have aimed to minimize this gap in most media. “Long before it was given… theoretical expression, noise had always been experienced as destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, an aggression against the code-structuring messages,” according to Attali. The goal has been to produce a recording that captures sound clearly, or a photograph that resembles as much as possible what the human eye perceives in a given time and place.

Perfect accuracy would mean that the picture perceived is identical to the outside world in all relevant details. It is possible to conceive of such a situation, even if its realization would be unlikely or even impossible. Clarity in literature, technology, art, social organization, construction or philosophy extends both productive and destructive possibilities. It would be wrong to fault this yearning for accuracy as a wholesale flaw of modernism, capitalism, science or some other bogeyman. Desire for efficiency can lead to elegance of expression and material abundance. Blinders help people to see and function, while also introducing the danger of missing or dismissing important information.

One version of the search for clarity would ultimately attain perfect communication – signals that are smoothly transmitted, instantly understood, and enacted without flaw. One can draw an analogy from the relationship of the external world, the sensory organs, language and the mind to the operation of a telephone system. Ideally, what exists on one end would appear in the highest resolution on the other, unpolluted. The best computer would find the exact file you want as soon as it comes to mind; this dream stretches back all the way to Vannevar Bush's pre-digital idea of a "memex" tape machine of the 1940s, which followed "associative trails" marked and remembered during one's work in a microfilm library. A command to open would open, and nothing would ever crash, because no confusion could occur within the machine as to what should be done when.

When David Brent, the nightmare boss of BBC’s The Office, declared that “a company runs on efficiency of communication,” he was not just mouthing a management cliché. This satire of white collar misery neatly summarizes the model of communication toward which technology and modern administration strive. A richer example can be found in a 1996 commercial for Lotus office software. A young boy named Mikey Powers writes a letter to Lotus declaring that “business is boring,” and computers should be used for fun and “surfing.” Suddenly, actor Denis Leary appears in the bedroom and tells Mikey to go to bed. “You can’t handle the fact that big companies are using the web to save a billion dollars and get their products to market faster,” Leary snarled. “All you care about is fooling around on your computer, right? Well, who pays for that fancy computer? Your parents. How do they make money…? Business.” Investment in technology demands that “fooling around” be subordinated to the more legitimate purposes of business. Communication is a means to practical ends in the strictest sense – order, efficacy, productivity, and, as Lotus suggests, ever greater acceleration.

The organizing zeal of capitalism reveals the darker side of the Internet and Adrienne Rich's "dream of a common language." The World Wide Web uses uniform protocols (i.e. rules and procedures) so that a computer can hook up to it and exchange information with any other, from Bangladesh to the US. Computer scientists called this "end to end" programming, because it did not matter what was actually happening on one computer or the other – a card game, a spreadsheet or word processing – the parts in between were simple, effective and similar enough for communication to happen anyway. In other words, TCP/IP can be viewed as a common language or lingua franca, the pragmatist's Esperanto. The brilliant ideas of Tim Berners-Lee and other key programmers have opened up a flexible and expansive medium for the use of many people in the world. Some critics argue, though, that the Internet language eliminates difference and sucks things great and small into one flat, homogeneous medium.

Paul Edwards argues that the metaphor of the human body as an information processing machine – a computer – provided the basis for the new cognitive psychology that developed out of World War II, with clear political implications. The war presented communication as an immensely practical problem, since soldiers often could not hear commands against the din of tanks and bombs. The solution required cutting of many kinds: scientists working for the Department of Defense had to find ways both to reduce noise and to strip language down to its barest, instrumental essentials. The integration of humans into high-tech weapons systems encouraged a view of the human brain as a computer, receiving and acting upon signals according to an internally defined set of procedures. In such a scenario, communication consists of “transmissions through a command chain.” Military researchers inadvertently betrayed many of their underlying assumptions with the name chosen for a new gizmo, the “ear warden,” which ensured that sailors could discern instructions from the surrounding sounds of combat. “Noise caused chaos by breaking the links of the chain of command,” Edwards writes. “Ear Wardens restored order. Anything other than the effective movement of instructions is, like the rattle of a battlefield, useless noise. Effective technology and management would police the boundaries of perception.

This ideology extends far beyond military applications or even the academic psychology that grew out of defense research. The goal of clear transmission of orders toward practical ends pervades the consumer market and the workplace. Our socialization to technology mimics our ideal for machinery. You are at home with the new device when you can pull the cell phone from your pocket, unlock the keypad, open your message box, and bring the phone to your ear through muscle memory, with the minimum attention possible. Thought can then be allocated to other tasks, increasing your general efficiency. It would be frustrating to contact a call center for some corporation and find that the person on the other end does not know which button to push, or the best way to navigate through options on a computer screen to find the solution to your problem. I used to work the phone at a pizza place, and I surely inflicted some angst when I could not figure out how to punch in a special deal on so many wings and so many breadsticks for $5.99. I recall also that I got annoyed when the customer continually changed from one topping to three to two, or wanted blue cheese dressing instead of the originally stated preference for ranch. If only Jimbo Cloninger had planned out his choices in advance and proceeded in an efficient manner.

If demands and commands could be conveyed otherwise, the need for language as we understand it could disappear. What would be needed instead is a code and a system to deliver it, which would report information and convey instructions. George Myerson investigated these dystopian tendencies in his work on Martin Heidegger and Jurgen Habermas. In a sense, he says, both the mobile phone and the computerization of service industries seek to minimize communication. Although it is possible to use the text messaging function of a phone to express a lengthy meditation on a complex subject, the medium does lend itself (both in its function and pricing) to swift, abbreviated bits of information: "Dinner at my house," or "Meet at 7."

Myerson uses the example of a Starbucks coffeeshop that allows people to call in their orders. While walking to the shop, a person could use a mobile phone to type in the order (half-caf, skim milk, etc.) using a menu of options, pay with a credit card, and pick up the drink – without actually talking to anyone at all. The servants, both the barista and the computer, would receive instructions and carry them out with nary a hitch. The person who bought the coffee might work in much the same way, in an office, shop floor, or classroom somewhere. “In the mobile [phone] vision,” Myerson observes, “we have millions of goal-seeking atoms, making basic contacts through the network.” Heidegger and Habermas, in contrast, argued that human interaction should be slow, deliberate and carefully considered, with two people sharing information in order to reach a mutual understanding.

So goes the dream of enhanced humanity, flawless telecommunication and maximum efficiency. You can imagine the "Invisible Hand" multitasking and micromanaging, or Thomas Frank's Market God truly coordinating some idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. The possibility remains that a fully accurate means of perception could confront an organization of details so complex and lapidary that a new kind of "noise" would emerge from the arrangement of information, even if each piece were delivered to the mind in identical form. One can imagine a computer screen filled with so many tiled or transparent windows that cacophony results, although the limitations of information processing could possibly be overcome. At present, neither our minds nor our machines can comprehend any way to encompass, interpret and ultimately regulate the vast system of cause and effect in the weather. There are too many undisclosed variables involved, and interactions are too complex and mercurial to be recorded and manipulated. The noise and the margin of error include all those things we cannot perceive, process or anticipate.

Attali argues that dissonance can contribute to more accurate perception or even generate new ways of seeing. “Noise is the source of… mutations in the structuring codes,” he writes. “For despite the death it contains, noise carries order within itself; it carries new information.” From this perspective, noise is true, or another part of the truth to be precise. It comes in from the side-view mirror, usually closer than it appears. “The very absence of meaning in pure noise or in the meaningless repetition of a message, by unchanneling auditory sensations, frees the listener’s imagination.” The malfunction can jolt an individual from the hold of habit and procedure.

Reproduction in general and piracy in particular offer the possibility that production under less regulated conditions will result in novel outcomes: more production, more variations, more noise. The tools available to the ordinary person, in both rich or poor nations, are almost always less advanced than those used by corporations and government. This fact often, but not always, means a competitive disadvantage for the small producer, but in any case the products created by the masses are likely to be different in nature than those produced by large industries. These differences could prove to be irrelevant to people, or they could accumulate and lead to new content, styles and uses.

Fondness for technical shortcomings, limitations and noise has a rich history in twentieth century culture. John Dos Passos swiped clippings from newspapers and magazines to create a sort of background noise in his epic novel, U.S.A., a literary sampling so unexpected that Esquire and other magazines provided instructions to help readers make heads or tails of the passages. In this way, Dos Passos employed consternation as a creative force; and, as Sonic Youth suggested early in their career, perfect clarity is not always a virtue. Confusion, after all, Is Sex (1983). Lev Manovich points to the unexpected shortcomings of digital representation for a more recent example. On its face, digitization seems to conform neatly to the efficient, clarion ideal of communication discussed by Edwards, Myerson and others; computers can convert any words, sounds or images into an exact numerical code, which then can be transmitted and recreated digit by digit, pixel by pixel.

However, these data require a great deal of storage, and scientists have devised ways to compress information by carefully deleting parts of the representation. “While, in theory, computer technology entails the flawless replication of data, its actual use in contemporary society is characterized by loss of data, degradation, and noise,” Manovich says. Despite the hype, analog and digital media both involve distortion. In the Nigerian context, Brian Larkin has described the effects of distortion as an aesthetic of “technological collapse,” pointing to the cases when media do not work well as opposed to when they do. Kim Cascone argues that composers in the late twentieth century have sought to exploit the imperfection of technology as a style in itself. The whirring, buzzing static of media machines that crash has taken center stage for some. “‘Failure' has become a prominent aesthetic… revealing digital tools to be only as perfect, precise, and efficient as the humans who build them,” she writes. “New techniques are often discovered by accident or by the failure of an intended technique or experiment."

In much the same spirit, several distinct genres in popular music have either intentionally incorporated noise, or embraced the consequences of lagging technology and low funds as a sign of pride. Punk rock in the 1970s famously sought to rip the fussily pristine music of the mainstream to shreds, stripping rock & roll to its roughest elements. Initially, many thought such a break would liberate and contradict bourgeois ideals of craft and capital investment in culture. “All the other music was like watching color movies,” singer Michael Stipe recalled of first hearing punk, “but this is like watching staticky black-and-white TV. And that made incredible sense to me… Their whole Zeitgeist was that anybody could do it.” Sangild observes, though, that the artists who delved deeper into noise after punk often used the sound to represent “melancholy, pain, fear, death, excess, perversion – in short, what the philosopher Georges Bataille… has called "the heterogeneous." Such a style may implicitly criticize social norms, but one also recognizes these same emotions from Attali’s account of how traditional societies conceived of noise.

Alongside “No Wave,” “noise rock” and other clanging subgenres, the notion of “lo-fi” also took root – independent music created with the cheapest means of home recording, accepting static and emphasizing spontaneity. Such music could present itself as a populist folk form, substantively different because of its freedom from financial and technological barriers to self-representation. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, Guided By Voices recorded about eight hundred short, fragmentary songs, which suggested that the formulas of composition would also break down alongside the quality of sound. On a representative record, twenty-eight tracks add up to forty-one minutes; each would take about a half an hour to record, played into bottom-of-the-line microphones from Radio Shack positioned among beer cans and garbage. The techniques resulted in a deliberately tinny sound, wrapped around surrealistic song “snippets” that recalled transistor radios as much as the cut-up methods of the Oulipo and Burroughs. The sounds also bore the mark of their modest birthplace – a four track tape recorder in the bedroom of a Dayton, Ohio elementary school teacher.

But in music, noise cannot refer only to sonic roughage, like a bludgeoning rhythm or background noise. It also applies to the juxtaposition of dissimilar or unexpected elements one finds in much electronic music, where bits from a variety of sources can be combined into a sound collage – a snatch of classical sitar, a George Clinton bass line, and a programmed beat. Hip-hop emerged alongside the underground market in recordings, and business, government and musicians’ groups viewed the techniques of DJs and samplers who assembled old sounds in new configurations as another form of piracy. Public Enemy dramatized the legal conflict in the 1987 recording, “Caught, Can We Get a Witness,” in which the sampler is busted like a common thief. “Caught, now in court ‘cause I stole a beat,” Chuck D said. “This is a sampling sport, but I’m giving it a new name. What you hear is mine.” D talks of the sound as a “mineral” found in the earth, which, as with John Locke of old, became his own because he transformed it into something new.

For Chuck D, ownership comes from consciously changing a sound by putting it into a new context or distorting it, while others have celebrated unconscious appropriation. By sampling, recontextualizing, and transforming bits of other works, artists stand against the idea of musical culture as a smooth, frictionless market of bought-and-sold sounds, easily measured. No one knows how many “copies” of a given recording exist in one form or another, and an otherwise easily quantified business becomes unmeasurable. Sounds, otherwise for sale on the market, go in unpredictable directions and end up in strange places. Poet Kenneth Goldsmith’s Head Citations, for instance, consists of popular song lyrics that, misheard, morph into bizarre variations. The songs might have come out garbled because of a radio station badly tuned, a scratchy record, or plain bad hearing on the part of the listener, but they all resonate with the broader culture through the creative associations that the mind makes to cope with noise. “This is the dawning of the age of malaria,” Goldsmith begins, going on to note, “We built this city on the wrong damn road,” and “What a man, what a man, when the money comes in.”

There are, then, two types of noise: political and literal. The first directly contravenes the authoritarian model of perfect communication promoted by capitalist technology (interrupting the flow of instructions, appropriating intellectual property from the mainstream market) or proposes an alternative model of expression (talk that does not convey orders). This activity is noise from the perspective of management. It is extra, redundant, unnecessary and sometimes damaging communication – things that do not need to be or should not be said. The second describes the specific qualities of expression through the new devices of cultural reproduction, which fall short of an ideal of crystal-clear representation and sometimes do so creatively.

The post-industrial society must find ways to handle these phenomena, because the tools it uses to control, supervise and manage are often the ones that can be used to express and appropriate. The systems of surveillance and coordination that allowed capitalism to transform itself in the 1970s developed right alongside new practices like sampling, piracy and home recording, which disrupted old patterns of production and ideas about property and creativity. As Gilles Deleuze argued, “The societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses.”

'''Alex Cummings'''

The (Limited) Historiography of Music Piracy in the US

2012-06-21T02:18:21Z

99.135.136.38: Created page with "The historical literature on music piracy encompasses works on both intellectual property and media technology -- not simply because the latter enables the appropriation of the f..."

The historical literature on music piracy encompasses works on both intellectual property and media technology -- not simply because the latter enables the appropriation of the former, but because these two factors have mutually constituted each other through the social practices of bootleggers, listeners, musicians, and record companies. Taking the long view, Siva Vaidhynathan's ''Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity'' examines how concepts of copyright related to an array of cultural practices, especially as different media fostered new types of expression. ''Copyrights and Copywrongs'' traces the evolution of American law from its roots in the earliest British printing regulations in 1557, touching on the Constitution's mandate for copyright and Mark Twain's crusade for better protection of authors. Not long after Twain succeeded in his efforts, though, challenges to the regulation of copyright proliferated, as “photocopy machines, cheap cameras, film, video tape, and digital and computer technology… allowed almost any person to distribute a facsimile of almost anything to almost anyone almost anywhere.” However, Vaidhyanathan is more interested in how people think about the ownership of ideas and expressions, and how borrowing and copying function in musical traditions such as blues, rock & roll and hip-hop. His book does not dwell long on the use of new media for distributing unauthorized copies of recordings in the market; piracy merits a few mentions, and bootlegging none.

A resource that deals with the illicit market for recordings is Clinton Heylin's ''Bootleg: A History of the Other Recording Industry'', which charts the fortunes of the music-lovers who brought numerous unreleased and live recordings to the fans of artists who might have preferred their music stay in the vault – or the basement, in Dylan's case. A useful and engaging work, Bootleg is far from academic in tone and format, openly avowing its support for bootlegging as a worthwhile cultural practice. Heylin does not seek to fit the upstart labels of the late 1960s and early 1970s into a wider-ranging historical analysis, nor does he address the history of the other "other recording industry" – that of outright pirates, who were guided primarily by commercial motivations and made more or less exact copies of the hits. This business existed alongside the fan-oriented bootleggers, but ''Bootleg'' sticks to a common distinction between the two. In my view, both kinds of enterprises reproduced the creative works of others without permission and should be analyzed together. At the same time, a historian must take seriously the terms that were widely used at the time and understand why journalists and so many others insisted on the differences among bootlegging, counterfeiting and piracy.

Barring any direct commentary on piracy in America, one must turn to general works on intellectual property. Edward Samuels's ''The Illustrated History of Copyright'' provides the most accessible guide to a subject that often leads authors into impenetrable pedantry. Like Vaidhyanathan, Samuels begins at the beginning, taking the reader from the invention of the printing press and the 1710 Statute of Anne through the Internet and digital technology. The book treats each medium and its related court cases and legislation separately, with a chapter for "Books and Literary Works," "Music and Sound Recordings," "Movies and Television" and "The Computer.” Samuels treats each case and Congressional debate as a pragmatic compromise between different economic interests. In the process, the reader does not learn much about alternatives to the conclusion judges and politicians eventually settled on, as the complexities of decision-making disappear into a Panglossian take on copyright law. For instance, one of the key questions this dissertation seeks to answer is muffled in Samuels's history: "Although the record companies had lobbied for protection of recordings as early as the 1906 hearings, for various reasons Congress did not act." Why recordings went unprotected goes unexplained, although Samuels does have an idea of why the law changed in the early 1970s. "The technological advance that reintroduced urgency was the development of the relatively inexpensive and efficient tape recorder," he observes. Indeed, he notes that the following years saw an unprecedented flurry of revisions to copyright, such as the Copyright Act of 1976, the Trademark Counterfeiting Act of 1984, and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, among others. “Whether by amendment or otherwise,” he writes, “copyright has hardly stood still, and indeed may have changed more in the past few decades than it had in the previous two centuries.”

Whether the advent of the tape recorder as a popular consumer good touched off this new round of technological and legal innovation remains unclear. The essential contradiction can be found in the 1969 Bob Dylan bootleg ''Great White Wonder'': the recordings have been known as "the basement tapes," and Dylan even released them officially under this name in 1975, but the actual copies of ''Wonder'' that circulated in 1969 were vinyl albums. Indeed, Heylin's work and my own search for actual recordings affirms that most of the first wave of bootlegs did not appear on cassette, at least not at first. Tape recorders certainly helped people capture music at concerts, and perhaps cassettes made it easier to sneak unreleased recordings out of the studio. In any case, the role of technology in prompting both the expansion of the illicit market and the legislative response to piracy will be clarified by this dissertation.

The history of media technology is another body of literature that bears on the topic of piracy. Historians have produced a vast literature about the ways that media like radio and television changed American politics, culture, social habits, and so on, and more recent developments like the personal computer and the Internet have attracted considerable attention since their introduction. Many authors have written about the long-term evolution of telecommunications, as in Brian Winston's ''Media Technology and Society'', a sweeping view of radio, television, phonograms, cable, the Internet and many other media. In the grand sweep, though, cassettes warrant only a few pages, and nowhere is piracy a topic of concern. Winston does provide some crucial historical background about how magnetic tape was first invented in 1930s Germany, pilfered by victorious Americans after World War II, incorporated into radio broadcasting in the 1950s and eventually popularized in cassette form as a consumer good in the 1960s and 1970s. Jonathan Sterne’s ''The Audible Past'' seeks to investigate the “origins of sound reproduction,” but does not deal directly with the tape recorder. (In fairness, as a work on “origins,” the book tends to focus more on the earlier years of cultural and technological change.) Vaidhyanathan, for one, discusses the significance of sampling – using digital technology to incorporate part of an existing recording into a new one – as a form of unauthorized reproduction. However, he sees this practice as having more in common with the borrowing of chord patterns from other artists in blues and rock & roll than with bootlegging or piracy.

Strictly technical works do not provide much more help. Since companies like Sony and TDK were instrumental in developing the new media that fostered piracy, one would expect that studies of Japanese technology would provide some insight into the development of cassettes and tape recorders. Gene Gregory's Japanese Electronics Technology: Enterprise and Innovation focuses almost exclusively on advances in television, semiconductors and other high-tech fields. Akio Morita's memoir, ''Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony'', provides some insight into the technical background of new media developed by his company. In her intriguing work, ''The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles'', Hillel Schwartz remarks that some Western observers in the 1950s and 1960s attributed Japanese success in developing recording and copying technologies to their alleged tendency to imitate others, as monkeys are said to do. This same racist attitude recurred in the case of the videocassette recorder, and the resulting hullaballoo has attracted more attention from scholars than the earlier audiocassette. When Sony released the Betamax recorder in the mid 1970s, the US entertainment industry responded with a major lawsuit, alleging that the device would destroy the television and movie businesses by permitting unrestrained copying of their products. Jack Valenti, the voice of the Motion Pictures Association of America, best captured the xenophobic fervor when he told Congress, “It is... a piece of sardonic irony that while the Japanese are unable to duplicate the American films by a flank assault, they can destroy it by this video cassette recorder.” The extravagant rhetoric and the high-stakes Supreme Court case over the Betamax have drawn the attention of James Lardner, whose 1987 work ''Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese and the Onslaught of the VCR'' examines the widespread anxiety over Japanese competition in this period and, specifically, the entertainment industry's fear of technological annihilation. Joshua Greenberg, in an unpublished dissertation called “From Betamax to Blockbuster,” addresses many of the same issues, with more emphasis on the social uses of videotapes. For whatever reason, the development of the VCR and its use for illicit reproduction have been widely discussed, even though music piracy emerged earlier and arguably had a greater legal impact.

Sound recording has a literature of its own, apart from the broader history of media. Most works on audio technology devote a good deal of attention to the music industry, especially after experimental early days of the phonograph, while books focused on music often gloss over the technical aspects of sound recording in order to focus on artistic evolution or business history. David and Russell Sanjek's ''Pennies from Heaven'' fits into this category: organized in chronological sections, the book offers a deal-by-deal chronicle of the antics and travails of the music industry, as entrepreneurs lurched from lawsuit to labor dispute and endlessly undercut each other. Perpetual squabbles seem to have prevented the songwriters' organization, ASCAP, jukebox operators, broadcasters and record companies from agreeing to a set of copyright revisions, attempted in the 1950s but passed only in 1972.

In their attention for detail, the Sanjeks also describe key phases of technological change in sound recording, including the introduction of compact cassettes by Philips in 1963 and Lear's invention of the eight-track tape the following year. As Andre Millard observes in ''America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound'', a portable form of recorded music had long been sought, as experiments with putting phonograph disc players in cars had yielded no success. If anything, one gets the impression from Sanjek that the music business was too distracted by the transition from the 78 records to 33s in the 1950s to come up with a viable solution to this problem. Philips's compact cassette offered too low a sound quality to take off at first; however, since the company chose not to protect its patent for the cassette, companies such as Matsushita, Nakamichi and Sony were able to improve the design significantly over the next few years. In the meantime, the Lear jet company arranged with Ford to install eight-track players in cars and with RCA to provide the “software” (music) for the new accessory. Millard observes that, since the tape could be started with one hand, it was ideal for driving, although the eight-track lacked the recording function that would make Philips's compact cassette more attractive in the long run.

These authors argue that the cassette had numerous effects on practices of sound recording, not the least of which was piracy. Millard offers two very different applications of tape: businessmen used cassettes to record meetings and conversations, while the pioneers of rap music, unable to afford recording in a studio or obtain support from any major labels, used the same double-cassette tape decks that were employed in piracy to manufacture their own works. Similarly, in ''Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music'', Michael Chanan notes that electronics firms marketed their cassettes and recorders as an alternative to working with studios or labels. "The claim was not beyond the bounds of imagination," Chanan points out. "Some artists have recorded hit singles and even LPs in their bedrooms." Indeed, these technologies facilitated not only the emergence of hip-hop, but also subsequent genres like punk, indie rock, and lo-fi, which often embraced the technical limitations of low-budget recording as an aesthetic device.

Such applications of the new media reflect the restructuring of the music industry in the late twentieth century, as the production of music diversified while control of distribution and marketing consolidated in a handful of international conglomerates. Even though the 1960s saw a round of mergers between big and small record companies, Millard points out that numerous musicians and industry veterans set out to start their own labels and recording studios, while producers such as George Martin freed themselves from the major labels and started freelancing. This trend toward the creation of independent production units in the recording process may help explain why bootleggers in the late 1960s were able to find pressing plants that would manufacture their records. Robert Burnett, in ''The Global Jukebox'', argues that a two-tiered system developed on an international level: starting in the 1960s, the five or six major record companies developed a symbiotic (or perhaps parasitic) relationship with smaller labels, which would take chances on new styles that the majors would eventually adopt. This relationship prevails for both independents in the US and local record companies in foreign countries, which serve the multinational companies in much the same way. Both Millard and Burnett concur that an actual takeover was hardly necessary, as independent companies depended on the marketing muscle of vast conglomerates like MCA to get their records on the shelves.

Chanan observed the irony of this new situation: “The market is highly volatile and the costs of innovation are ever increasing, with the result that innovation is driven less by the manufacturers of software than those who produce hardware. The former, if they fall behind, are liable to be swallowed up, like Decca,” which was acquired by a subsidiary of Philips. To be successful, a record company must fit into the network of a megacorporation that not only sells stereos and tape players, but might also run funeral parlors and supermarkets. These firms are in the position of pushing the hardware that permits the easy appropriation of their software – one of the perils of “synergy.” This overlapping of interests could explain why the US entertainment industry launched a frontal assault on the videocassette recorder and not the audio recorder: the VCR was introduced by a Japanese company, Sony, that had no substantial holdings in music, movies or television at the time, while the electronics companies that introduced audio cassettes also had stakes in the music industry.

The international angle on piracy has not been limited to the work of Schwarz, Lardner and Burnett. Peter Manuel has examined the broad impact of the “cassette culture” in India, which restructured the music industry, gave means of expression to the political fringes, allowed an explosion of folk music, and bedeviled producers of all kinds with a booming pirate trade. Until the 1970s, one could get a feel for the music business in India by looking at the name of the dominant British firm: His Master’s Voice. Given the high cost of entry into the vinyl market, popular music tended toward homogeneous film songs that could reach the widest possible audience and suited the state’s goal of national unity. When cassettes and tape recorders began circulating in India, entrepreneurs started making music that could appeal to regional tastes and niche markets, such as classical music or bhajan or qawwali traditions that had rarely been recorded before. The new businesses ranged from tax-paying firms to massive pirate networks to small-time shops that would record a mix of selected songs for the consumer. In any case, the option to avoid central control, whether by a corporation or the state, remained open. Such new outlets, Manuel warned, could inhibit indigenous development by providing foreign music at artificially low cost and poaching on the small profit margins of local producers. Still, the unpredictable environment offered the possibility of greater creativity. “Cassettes have further blurred the already oversimplistic distinction between producers and consumers of music,” Manuel wrote, “highlighting the existence of various intermediate agents, who imitate, recycle, recreate, and freely appropriate elements of mass culture.”

Brian Larkin has looked more closely at the ramifications of piracy by examining the use of video and audio cassettes in Nigeria. He argues that illegal reproduction works as an integral part of the greater circulation of goods and ideas on the world market, as part of the “infrastructure” or “architecture” of globalization. For Larkin, piracy “represents the potential of technologies of reproduction – the supple ability to store, reproduce, and retrieve data – when shorn from the legal frameworks that limit their application.” Indeed, he sees the black market as a site where hybrids develop and unexpected possibilities may result from the constraints of production. The noise in an illegal copy may reveal whole new subjective and aesthetic experiences, as colors break down and outlines fade into a delirious light. The physical infrastructure of piracy, he argues, also gives rise to indigenous industries and genres, like Nigeria’s “videofilm” business, manufactured on the same machines that make pirate prints.

This discussion of historiography shows that few have directly analyzed music piracy in the United States, nor has the history of media technologies that contributed to the growth of unauthorized reproduction been well developed. Recent works have attempted to remedy this shortcoming of the literature. These studies include music critic Greg Kot's excellent ''Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music'', which focuses primarily on how mp3 technology has upset a corrupt and ossified record industry; Lucas Hilderbrand's ''Inherent Vice'', which focuses on the legal dimensions and material culture of video bootlegging; and the collection ''Sound in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction'', edited by David Suisman and Susan Strasser.

'''Alex Cummings'''

''You can contact the author at akbar.jenkins@gmail.com.''

Comparing Colonization Efforts in the New World

2012-06-21T01:37:44Z

99.135.136.38:

The short version: the Spanish got here first and dominated the scene for most of the sixteenth century, with a supporting role from the Portuguese (who have only the Pope and absolute misunderstanding of geography to thank for the popularity of their language today). They wanted gold and silver — they found quite a lot of it and sat fat on their riches for a long while. The mines in South America allowed the Spanish to surpass their mercantile competitors in exporting money, but it also had two related downsides: one, the conquistadores established an empire that was wide-ranging but shallow, eschewing agriculture and concerted European settlement for extractive industries; and two, the abundance of specie in Spain gave little incentive to develop their domestic economy. There were nearly always more men in Spanish America than women, resulting in the creation of a large mestizo, or mixed, population rather than large, European-dominated settlements. Religion became a major side project of the invaders, but importing priests also does little for the gender ratio or the establishment of stable families. The Spanish were never very well rooted in the New World and when, in 1588, the Spanish Armada fiasco demolished the image of Spain's invulnerability in the Atlantic, these weak foundations were revealed. The English and French began to lose their inhibitions about colonization, and Spain's eventual, nearly total evacuation from the New World had begun.

Jamestown came in 1607 and Quebec followed in 1608. The early histories of these settlements are full of misery and failure. Ultimately, the French failure in places like Canada, Acadia, and Louisiana was more consistent than that of the English, who also experienced plenty of starvation before they figured out subsistence and commercial (tobacco, rice) cultivation. All colonial projects depended for their survival and growth on political stability in Europe, of which there was rarely much. War prevented supplies from reaching Walter Raleigh's early settlement at Roanoke in the late 1580s, and the residents were discovered to be missing almost completely without a trace three years later. In another example, lack of attention from the crown and capitalists, along with political upheavals - both international disputes and internal religious conflicts - continually foiled French attempts to prosper in Canada. In the 1620s the distraction of a new war with England cut the last settlements in Quebec off from supply convoys, forcing Samuel de Champlain's tiny settlement to surrender to the English after getting scrawny from foraging in the dirt.

But practical misfortune and international intrigue were not the only factors defining success and failure. The French approached North America in a rather different way than the English. As different parties made their intermittent attempts at serious settlement in New France - venture capitalists, the church, the crown - traders and explorers were simultaneously venturing throughout the continent, trying to cast as wide a net as possible. The authorities were annoyed by this overreach, which saddled them with even greater burdens of territory to defend, but they could do little to stop it. In any case, trade in furs (essential to the unstoppable beaver hat craze in Europe) created a colonialism characterized by dispersed settlements and networks of relations with Native Americans, who were cooperative but also rightly suspicious of the French throughout. The fur trade mattered to the French for political and military reasons as much as economic ones — they used control of strategic points along the rivers of North America to secure their influence throughout the continent. As WJ Eccles observed, "New France was, in fact, a river empire."

By comparison, the early English colonists clung to the coast, built farms and often traded with the inland Native Americans through intermediaries. Here too inward adventures were difficult to contain, as resistance to the Proclamation of 1763 (which attempted to limit English expansion) and the whole history of the United States would eventually show, but the English seemed to have adopted a somewhat more sedentary, rooted pattern than their French or Spanish competitors. The English experience of "colonization" in Ireland had taught them to crush different, inferior cultures (indeed, people of lesser "race") and establish culturally homogenous communities of their own as beachheads of conquest. Historians have suggested that this lesson shaped English attitudes in North America. Their pattern of fixed settlements of Europeans appear to have practically succeeded, making more food and better goods, than the open-ended relationships and networks that the French employed with Native Americans. The French project contained basic contradictions — they might seek advantage by cooperating with (and trying to manipulate) Native Americans up to a point, but their interests - that of an expansionary foreign power with a totally different culture - were antithetical to the interests of Native Americans in the long run. The English did try politicking among the Native Americans at times, but their policy of total intolerance and steady, incremental destruction of neighbors seems to have succeeded, judging from the ongoing string of French military misadventures that obliterated their North American empire.

'''Clement Lime'''

Nineteeth Century United States

2012-06-21T01:32:41Z

99.135.136.38:

* Menahem Blondheim. [[News over the Wires|News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897]] (1994).
* Paul Boyer.[[Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920]] (1992).
* Amy Bridges. [[A City in the Republic|A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics]] (2008).
* Francis G. Couvares. [[The Remaking of Pittsburgh|The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City 1877-1919]] (1984).
* Robin L. Einhorn. [[Property Rules|Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872]] (2001).
* Philip J. Ethington. [[The Public City|The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900]] (2001).
* Ann Fabian. [[Card Sharps and Bucket Shops|Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America]] (1999).
* Eric Foner. [[Reconstruction|Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877]] (2002).
* Eugene D. Genovese. [[Roll, Jordan, Roll|Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made]] (1976).
* Steven Hahn. [[A Nation under Our Feet|A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration]] (2005).
* Harper-Ho, V. [[Noncitizen Voting Rights|Noncitizen Voting Rights: The History, the Law and Current Prospects for Change]]. Immigr. & Nat’lity L. Rev., 21, 477. (2000).
* Steven Hertzberg. [[Strangers Within the Gate City|Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915]] (1978).
* Thomas R. Hietala. [[Manifest Design|Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire]] (2002).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Richard Hofstadter.[[Social Darwinism in American Thought]] (1992).
* John R. Hornady.[[Atlanta, yesterday, today and tomorrow]] (1922).
* Amy Kaplan.[[The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture]] (2005).
* Drew R. McCoy. [[The Elusive Republic|The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America]] (1996).
* Pearson, R. [[Towards an Historical Model of Services Innovation|Towards an Historical Model of Services Innovation: The Case of the Insurance Industry, 1700–1914]]. The Economic History Review, 50(2) , 235–256. (1997).
* Wallace Putnam Reed. [[History of Atlanta, Georgia|History of Atlanta, Georgia: with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers]] (2011).
* Heather Cox Richardson. [[The Death of Reconstruction|The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901]] (2004).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Mary P. Ryan. [[Women in Public|Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880]] (1992).
* Allison L. Sneider. [[Suffragists in an Imperial Age|Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929]] (2008).
* Christine Stansell. [[City of Women|City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860]] (1987).
* Jr, Sam Bass Warner. [[The Private City|The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth]] (1987).
* Sean Wilentz. [[Chants Democratic|Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, 20th Anniversary Edition]] (2004).
* T. Harry Williams.[[Lincoln and His Generals]] (2011).

Nineteeth Century United States

2012-06-21T01:31:36Z

99.135.136.38: Created page with "* Menahem Blondheim. News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897 (1994). * Paul Boyer.[[Urban Masses and ..."

* Menahem Blondheim. [[News over the Wires|News over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897]] (1994).
* Paul Boyer.[[Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920]] (1992).
* Amy Bridges. [[A City in the Republic|A City in the Republic: Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics]] (2008).
* Francis G. Couvares. [[The Remaking of Pittsburgh|The Remaking of Pittsburgh: Class and Culture in an Industrializing City 1877-1919]] (1984).
* Robin L. Einhorn. [[Property Rules|Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872]] (2001).
* Philip J. Ethington. [[The Public City|The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900]] (2001).
* Ann Fabian. [[Card Sharps and Bucket Shops|Card Sharps and Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America]] (1999).
* Eric Foner. [[Reconstruction|Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877]] (2002).
* Eugene D. Genovese. [[Roll, Jordan, Roll|Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made]] (1976).
* Steven Hahn. [[A Nation under Our Feet|A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration]] (2005).
Harper-Ho, V. (2000). [[Noncitizen Voting Rights|Noncitizen Voting Rights: The History, the Law and Current Prospects for Change]]. Immigr. & Nat’lity L. Rev., 21, 477.
* Steven Hertzberg. [[Strangers Within the Gate City|Strangers Within the Gate City: The Jews of Atlanta, 1845-1915]] (1978).
* Thomas R. Hietala. [[Manifest Design|Manifest Design: American Exceptionalism and Empire]] (2002).
* Richard Hofstadter. [[The American Political Tradition|The American Political Tradition: And the Men Who Made it]] (1989).
* Richard Hofstadter.[[Social Darwinism in American Thought]] (1992).
* John R. Hornady.[[Atlanta, yesterday, today and tomorrow]] (1922).
* Amy Kaplan.[[The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture]] (2005).
* Drew R. McCoy. [[The Elusive Republic|The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America]] (1996).
Pearson, R. (1997). [[Towards an Historical Model of Services Innovation|Towards an Historical Model of Services Innovation: The Case of the Insurance Industry, 1700–1914]]. The Economic History Review, 50(2) , 235–256.
* Wallace Putnam Reed. [[History of Atlanta, Georgia|History of Atlanta, Georgia: with illustrations and biographical sketches of some of its prominent men and pioneers]] (2011).
* Heather Cox Richardson. [[The Death of Reconstruction|The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901]] (2004).
* Daniel T. Rodgers. [[Contested Truths|Contested Truths: Keywords in American Politics Since Independence]] (1998).
* Mary P. Ryan. [[Women in Public|Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880]] (1992).
* Allison L. Sneider. [[Suffragists in an Imperial Age|Suffragists in an Imperial Age: U.S. Expansion and the Woman Question, 1870-1929]] (2008).
* Christine Stansell. [[City of Women|City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789-1860]] (1987).
* Jr, Sam Bass Warner. [[The Private City|The Private City: Philadelphia in Three Periods of Its Growth]] (1987).
* Sean Wilentz. [[Chants Democratic|Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850, 20th Anniversary Edition]] (2004).
* T. Harry Williams.[[Lincoln and His Generals]] (2011).