The City of To-morrow O NLY a sense of its intrinsic
importance could, I think, have supported Mr. Etchells in his task of translating the syncopated and exclamatory French of M. Le Corbusier's book L'Urbanisme into its English equivalent The City of Tomorrow.* But it is well that the job has been done, and done so well, for at long last we English do seem able, if not to learn, at least to listen to those who would instruct us in the difficult art of town- making, and no one has more startling things to say on the subject than M. Le Corbusier.
He is chiefly startling because he looks into the near future with unprejudiced eyes and sees there problems of population and transport and the like that most of us dare scarcely contemplate and, having seen them, boldly and logically plans accordingly. I said "unprejudiced," but that is not strictly true, for he has a bias in favour of the straight line and the rectangle that amounts almost to a passion and that informs his every design, whether it be for a suburban villa or for the complete rebuilding of central Paris. What Baron Haussmann did for the straightening out of that city would be as nothing to the major operation proposed by surgeon Le Corbusier, who would utterly remove its present inside and construct a new one on his much admired "grid-plan." Vast blocks, each containing thousands of apartments upraised in angular and terraced grandeur above tree and grass bordered squares and boulevards, would make the heart of Paris a city of towers and gardens—the only alter- native, according to him, being a heart paralysed and choked by an appalling congestion of traffic and a popu- lation degenerating from lack of light and air.
Perhaps he is right. If he is, one can only hope that Paris will be warned in time and avert strangulation by submitting herself to the surgeon's knife whilst she is still on this side of disaster.
If Paris is on the brink of so alarming a condition we have little cause to be complacent about London. Indeed, we are not yet even at the stage of discussing adequately far-reaching schemes for future development, so that we may reasonably count upon nothing actually being done until long after conditions have become almost insupportable.
America has made her own mistakes in plenty and has further had the benefit of seeing us make ours on a grand scale and over and over again, but now she has begun to think. The Committee that is dealing with the planning of greater New York, for instance, is already carefully preparing the lay-out for 1965, when the population is expected to reach twenty-one millions. Already appropriate areas are reserved for this or that : docks, railways, factories, traffic, and shopping centres, public gardens, parks, parkways, agricultural belts, and forest camping zones, are all shown on large-scale maps that are being constantly elaborated. Doubtless New York, being humanly fallible, will fall short of the paper- perfection prepared for her. But she knows what she ought to do, and she has set up for herself an ideal of civic amenity that, whether fully realized in fact or not, should be an example to all the world.
To be sure, there are a few fortunate cities that are and have been so wisely governed as to have little need of such an example, still less of drastic surgical operations, but they are not to be found in England.
I happen to have just returned from visiting two of these shining exceptions, Stockholm and Hamburg, the first owing its happy state in part to the long-established Town Planning laws of Sweden, in part to the great * The City of To-morrow. By Le Corbusier. Translated by Frederick Rtchells. (Rodker. 25s.) modern Renaissance of all the visual arts which is now drawing the eyes of the rest of Europe towards Scan- dinavia. Hamburg, on the other hand, is an example of the beneficent effects of the system of expert manage- ment by "Town Managers," or Burgomasters, specially trained and qualified for their enormously responsible jobs, which obtains in Germany. This " Free and Hanseatic City" has, or should have, a particular interest for us English as being not only a great world-port and a great manufacturing town as well, but also, and in spite of that, a most graciously welcoming city, with every civilized amenity and with all the air of having been chiefly laid out for leisure and delight. Glasgow, Liver- pool, Cardiff, Hull !—it humiliates one to think that the ships which sail from Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Hamburg must dock at English ports so lamentably different !
It is something that we have begun to realize the full measure of the catastrophe that the Industrial Revolu- tion brought both to our English towns and to our countryside and consequently to our national civilization. Yet we are doing little or nothing to ensure that we proceed less barbarously in the future. True, we begin to talk of Town and Regional planning, and here and there thought-out schemes are actually adopted, but it is doubtful if anything short of a comprehensive and correlated development scheme for the whole country can suffice to give us an even tolerably efficient and seemly framework for a future which, we like to believe, may be more, and not less, civilized than our past.
Essentially the modern world lives in towns and on the roads which connect them, as M. le Corbusier fully recognizes, and what he has to say concerns statesmen and administrators no less than architects and surveyors.
Being much given to aphorism, he is temptingly easy to quote :— "A town is a tool. Towns no longer fulfil this function. They are ineffectual ; they use up our bodies, they thwart our souls. The lack of order to be found everywhere in them offends us ; their degradation wounds our self-esteem and humiliates our sense of dignity. They are not worthy of the age ; they are no longer worthy of us. . . . You cannot be a ' defeatist ' and achieve any- thing at all ; faith is necessary and confidence in the innate decency of people. . . . A moment comes when a widespread enthusiasm is capable of revolutionizing an epoch. Throughout the world we see the array of mighty powers, both in the industrial and in the social spheres ; we see, emerging from the chaos, ordered and logical aspirations. . . . New forms come to birth ; the world adopts a new attitude. The old prejudices crumble and crack and totter. . . The force of the reaction reveals the force of the movement."
M. Le Corbusier, you will see, has a valiant faith in the future ; he believes that humanity may, with courage, begin entering even now on a new phase of civilization which will eclipse all that has gone before, if only— if only—it will prepare for that glowing picture an adequately generous frame.
The author is generous with plans and diagrams, graphs, statistics, and figures, yet whilst he is chiefly and rightly concerned with practical problems and with economics, he is far too wise a man to believe that that is all.
"The eye perceives, the brain registers, the heart beats . . . we shall come to consider as more important than the mechanism of the city, what we may call the coal of the city. The soul of the city is that part of it which is of no value from the practical side of exis- tence; it is, quite simply, its poetry."
All of which is both true and eloquent, yet no more true and no more eloquent than what John Ruskin was saying to us in just such words sixty years ago. We would not heed our English prophet then. Will the Swiss one get a better hearing now ? I think so, for he finds us reaping our wild oats with pain and bitterness, and no longer sowing quite as recklessly as of old,
CLOLTGii WILLIAMS-ELLIi
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