Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Peter Ekman, author of the new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism. Peter Ekman teaches the history and theory of landscape and urbanism in the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. He is a postdoctoral fellow at USC center on science, technology and public life, and at the Berggruen Institute. We spoke to Peter about why within the field of urban planning, the Joint Center for Urban Studies, founded in 1959, took a preeminent role; how the Joint Center's ideas on the urban future dramatically evolved over a relatively short period of time; and, how the history of planning runs in parallel with the history of time itself.Hello, Peter, welcome to the podcast.
Hello.
Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism.Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it come to be?
Well, I can tell this in a few different ways.
First thing I should mention is that, so this is my first book, potentially not my dissertation. I wrote a dissertation on a different topic entirely. It was in the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley few years back. I sort of need to say a little bit about that in order to explain how I got here. That dissertation was much more a regional case study of Northern California, looking at basically patterns of industrialization and suburbanization in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Again, very much a regional case study, sort of a landscape history of suburbanization. Looked closely at a set of satellite cities and company towns, which I've been pitching as sort of a pre history of the post war suburb. There was a lot of interest at that time. Suppose there still is in telling the history of the American suburbs a little bit differently and going back to before the post world war two moment, in order to understand where some of those patterns came from. And so I was digging into this fast, you know, literature on on suburbanization, and a lot of the really classic literature on that pattern had been written in the post war period. And it I began to realize that a number of these works and a number of other sort of classic works that really established the field of urban history and urban studies as we know it in this country were connected in this very particular way. So works like Sam Bass Warner's Streetcar Suburbs, sort of classic, I think, 1962 book on early suburbanization in in Boston, and other just sort of canonical works of that period, Kevin Lynch's Image of the City, still widely consulted book that came out in 1960 remains sort of enduringly magical and widely assigned in a variety of different urban studies courses and other works besides, had all come out of the same place, and they all had this Same seal and name and sort of set of references within it, they all had something to do with this entity called the Joint Center for Urban Studies. So I began to get very curious about this. I realized that there was this sort of broader moment, this broader attempt to define a larger interdisciplinary set of approaches to this thing called the city, to define the city as a settlement type, to define the urban, the Metropolitan, to think about urbanization as a process. There are these whole sets of works that are linked in this in this way, um, and so I started looking into this, and it turned out, yes, in fact, there was this center of urban studies that was founded in 1959 the Joint Center ends up being really the key institutional site for this book that we're here to talk about. And I just realized this, this called out for a different kind of investigation than the one that I thought I had, I had undertaken. And you know, there's some sort of fundamental questions here that are interesting, from sort of a history of science, history of knowledge perspective, what kind of object is the city so called? What is needed to theorize or historicize this, this entity and make claims at that level of generality, and what types of institutions, what organizations of knowledge, what forms of knowledge are cropping up at this particular point in time, this again, late 50s, early 60s, moment in American life, and, and, and, and why? And so that's sort of one way of telling the origin story. Another is that, you know, I mentioned I've been in California, happily at Berkeley for a number of years. Not a bad place to be. And I'd written this dissertation that was also all about California. I'm not from California. I had not, I had not gone to grad school in California in order to study that region or to study the American west at all. I sort of found my way into that topic when, you know, I realized that the environment around me was organized quite differently from the cities and suburbs that I had known growing up, born in Washington, DC, grew up mostly in North North Jersey had lived in Boston, had lived in New York City, and I was I found that the landscape around me was, in a sense, posing questions of me, that intuition alone was no good in answering. I found myself driven into the archives. Became sort of a landscape historian of that region, in a sense, without meaning to but a few years on,
I don't know familiarity breeds contempt. I felt, I felt that after, after a few years, I couldn't reasonably be expected to both live in and write full time or about about California. So in a sense, you know, late dissertation, early postdoc period, I just found myself organically casting about for a different kind of project, and the book, the books, again, sort of arose on the fringes of the dissertation, that original project, you know, it'll, it'll become a book when it's ready to become a book. In terms of the themes that this book, timing, the future Metropolis addresses. We'll get into this in greater detail. But I also am concurrently, just sort of noticed an uptick in, you know, scholarly and theoretical discussions, but also just in public life, generally, sort of an uptick in talk of the urban future in a couple of different ways, both sort of outsized, optimistic, even utopian hopes for the Urban future, and probably over confident attempts to make claims about IT knowledge, claims about about the future, which by definition, is not knowable in advance. And I just realized that there were a lot of anxieties about the future as as well that are taking on different forms, I think, in the age of widely documented but also widely denied climate change.
Interesting, interesting. Wow. Well, you had mentioned institutions of knowledge. Your book is a history of urban studies, urban knowledge, but you focus in, as you mentioned earlier on, the Joint Center for Urban Studies. Tell us more about the center, what they're known for, what are some of the key milestones that you discovered.
Glad to Yeah, and I'll try to be brief and economical in sizing up this really quite sprawling institution. The Joint Center is formed in 1959 so it's you see, the name, written a couple of different ways, formally, is the Harvard MIT Joint Center of Urban Studies. It's a Joint Center in a few different senses, joint in the sense of bringing together a whole bunch of different disciplines, but just practically due to the fact that it's bringing together faculties from two different universities, both in Cambridge mass of course, but novel in that way, to to have combined these, these, these faculties, it's formed.
I mean, we can, we can go earlier than 1959 at MIT in particular, but but also to an extent at Harvard, over the course of the 1950s there are rumblings, there are conversations, there sort of in informal discussion groups that are thinking around the possibility of devising some sort of interdisciplinary approach, or again, sort of Institute, center, program, school, even to address things urban. But the key year is 1959 in that year, the Ford Foundation, which is what you know, one of the major players in post war philanthropy immensely consequential for a number of different disciplines. In 1959, Ford frees up quite a bit of funding and sort of plants this center at Harvard and MIT. They are planting centers of urban studies and other fields elsewhere. But you get the sense from the outset, they are thinking of the Joint Center as sort of the first among equals. They're very invested in its success. They are fairly closely monitoring the center during the first few years of its operation.
This is all you know amid the question of, why are they so interested in doing this through a number of ways you might answer this, but you know, this is the age of so called urban crisis. That language of urban crisis usually stated in the singular, the urban crisis. That's not really normalized until the 1960s but in the 1950s there's quite a lot of talk, again, just in sort of public discourse, policy discourse, about urban problems in the plural, or the urban problem as this kind of overarching thing that needs to be craft and understood, theorized and somehow, somehow resolved. It's the age of urban renewal since 1949 in one form, and then since the Housing Act of 1954 there's large scale demolition and rebuilding at or near the centers of most American cities. That's sort of the context. There's a lot of lot of sort of official anxiety about the future of the American city, the very sort of viability and solubility of the city as as as a as a space. So the Joint Center during the first, I don't know, four or five years produces a remarkable number of works. Again, several of these are still pretty widely read, widely assigned and consulted. You get the sense that they are seeking to produce and serialize and sort of demonstrate by adjacency the promise of a fully interdisciplinary approach to the city. So, you know, architects and physical planners have their way of talking about the city, social scientists, geologists, anthropologists, field by field. There are all these different approaches, the underlying sort of methodological wagers that there might be some way of synthesizing these the term future metropolis in the title, I'm sort of cribbing from a book that the Joint Center puts out, first a conference they convene in 1960 and then a journal issue in a book after that in 1961 called The Future Metropolis. I think of that as sort of the first kind of collective statement made by the center in more or less one voice, variety of different perspectives articulated within it. It is an edited collection. It's often, it's often somewhat difficult to speak of the Center, you know, adopting one univocal position, and indeed, the way they structure these discussions and their publication program really embraces and savers and and foregrounds, you know, a plurality of approaches, but that's probably the closest, closest we could come to their kind of opening salvo and marking out this new, this new, this new set of approaches the future metropolis. And as the title would suggest, they're very focused on the future. So what I end up doing, we'll talk about this more, but what I end up doing, really throughout the book, is tease out sort of the underlying, implicit or explicit, temporal imaginations that are animating so much urban planning, urban design, Urban Research. During this period, the Joint Center under its first, you know, very generous wave of funding from Ford is quite productive through the 1960s the Ford funding cuts off around 1970-71 there are a number of different personnel shifts, leadership shifts. It's possible to sort of periodize their output in three or four year chunks based on who's directing it. The founding directors are planning from MIT named Lloyd rodwin and from Harvard by the name of Martin Meyerson. But there are other folks in charge as things move along, some of whom are quite well known scholars in their own right, quite famous or infamous public figures in their own right.
In 1963, the political scientist James Q Wilson assumes the directorship In 1966, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, of all people, eventually, a senator from New York, again widely exposed public figure. He directs the Center for a few years. There are a few other names in the mix, sort of remarkable. How many prominent urbanists, or just public intellectuals and social scientists cross through,or, I should say, pass through the center in some form during those first 10 or so years. The cast of characters is vast and varied it provides, and it can feel like an almost complete census of sort of urban expertise at that point in time. And you know, I should say that, you know, organizationally, the V center to speak of the center is to speak of this somewhat blurry, shape shifting, diffuse, miscellaneous entity. The question of who was quote, unquote, at the center at any given point in time is a little hard to say. People would come and go, people would take part in one publication, one conference, and then sort of drop off. But organizationally, it's a fairly curious case study. I think it probably is the best institutional location through which one could glimpse, or at least attempt to glimpse, this broader complex of post war urban research. And again, these attempts to sort of solidify and define and elaborate on this encompassing approach to the American city at a time of great change, and using methods of their own devising to predict or somehow project it's likely futures. One additional episode that I should mention this has been sort of general and confined to these universities and confined to the cities of the US, a crucial part of the story here, and something that I devote more, more than a chapter of the book to, is a project that they get involved in in 1961.
So for all this talk of the the future metropolis, we're talking mostly about social scientists and urban planners at a moment when the split between so called Physical Planning people who basically build stuff and work in, you know, concrete and asphalt and rails and curbs on the one hand, and what might be called Social Planning, or participatory planning, or something other than design is being is becoming increasingly clear, and the the antagonisms between the more physical and the more kind of social science approaches are becoming ever more clear. The Joint Center is generally not in the business of building the so called Future metropolis. They are, by and large, not proposing specific designs. There are some architects in the mix, for instance, some landscape architects, but it's not at the absolute core of what they're about. But there is one, I think, pretty glaring exception to this, through a sort of incidental set of contacts forged by Lloyd Brodwyn of MIT and some international consulting work that he'd been doing in his own name, the Joint Center ends up signing on as really the key institutional partner in the construction of a new town, a city that's being built from scratch, sort of a mid, mid sized industrial city built From scratch in the eastern part of Venezuela. Venezuela is geopolitically complicated at this point in times from a classic Petro state, freshly democratized as of 1958 but very much involved in this kind of classic resource led developmentalism, and through this complex set of partnerships, the Joint Center signs on with a group called the CVGas an acronym for a longer Spanish name, but it's basically a regional development authority in this one part of Venezuela, several hours from Caracas, which has grown quite large by this point in time. The CVG is modeled on the Tennessee Valley Authority in the US, and sort of New Deal period of the US, and they are purporting to build again from scratch. This, this, this industrial city called ciudad Guayana. I go into greater detail in the book it's it's quite interesting from a sort of physical planning and urban design perspective, between 1961 and 66 the Joint Center pretty much has exclusive access to this design process, both as consultants and participants in the process. They are actively working with this regional development body down south, but also as scholars. And part of the deal is that you know, between 61 and 66 this five year period, they alone, will be able to observe the planning process and the construction process of this city from scratch in real time. And as part of this deal they strike, they are committed to producing this whole body of scholarly literature reflecting on this new city, this purpose built city, built to essentially their own specifications of what a city ought to look like. And from this one purpose built case, seek to make a set of generalizations about the city so called, so this really interesting sort of transnational flow or circulation of ideas, and the arrows always point both ways, from north to south and south back to the north. And as I argue, as I think I show, somewhat persuasively, what's going on in Venezuela
in terms of its successes, and especially in terms of the failures of this project ends up affecting how the Joint Center and a whole bunch of other urbanists up in the US end up thinking about the American city and the possibilities of planning it, of imagining during the course of its future, and in a sense, solving the urban problem, so called. So there's a broader kind of political story. The sort of Cold War context of this is hard to ignore. Venezuela is as a very particular role in Kennedy's geopolitics in particular. But even just within the US, there's this pretty clear political shift from the early Joint Center of circa 1960 to the Joint Center of about 1970, not just sort of a swing from left to right, per se, although that's one way of thinking about it. This the shift from this kind of extreme confidence in the knowability and tractability of the urban future to these pretty intense doubts and this loss of confidence, loss of faith, and in the in the most extreme cases, really claims that the city is, in fact, unknowable, and because it's unknowable, because the future sort of can't be gotten at precisely in this way that the entire undertaking of planning might have been conceived by a basic category mistake. So the Joint Center actually does become one of the, I think, really central institutions in articulating a set of basically neoconservative perspectives on the American city starts out, starts out the decade as a basically sort of post war liberal, kind of center left undertaking. But there's this very clear set of political shifts and drifts basically to the right, which I am narrating and rephrasing in these sort of epistemological terms on the know ability of the future and the solubility of the city as a as a so called problem. Interesting, yeah, it's really fascinating to see the trajectory of the Joint Center for Urban Studies going from, as you said, very confident. This is the this is the future we want. This is the future metropolis, and very conceptual. But then they, then they start working with the taking their abstract ideas and trying to put them into concrete reality. It doesn't work out as well as they originally thought. What, what is the with this new town project in South America, in Venezuela? What do you think was like the central aha moment for them to realize that maybe they, as you said, now there's a lot of doubt and uncertainty in their direction. I don't know if there's one moment really. I think you can, you can see that there are doubts about the extent to which you know the execution will match the concept, probably as early as 6263 really, just a year into it.
After they wrap up that contract work in 66 they continue to publish a variety of works on the topic, using this city as case and building, in a sense, an entire urban studies curriculum around it. Not everyone disavows the project. Not everyone comes to the same conclusion about it. But I mean, just empirically, their population projections were way off. The ability of the designers and with with with them, the Venezuelan state to provide housing, or formal housing, at least for all of these new residents of the city, fell way short of projections. And you might imagine that a lot of people on site come to sort of resent these imposed futures, especially when they're coming from, from a bunch of Americans. So it's complicated number of, number of things going on. I'm interested in the, I don't know, just sort of the logical structure of how they derive these conclusions, and the different ways in which the pretty demonstrable failures of this one planning project is one example of bad planning leads some of them, at least, and especially those of them who are basically tacking to the right politically, to sort of pronounce the impossibility of any planning. There's no essential linkage between these two things. This one project failed. Does that mean that, you know, urban planning as we know it, is futile? They increasingly try to make that argument is just interesting, how much they're hanging on this one again, sort of purpose built, custom built city as laboratory, and the, I don't know, just sort of Audacity with which they're seeking to generalize from that case to all of the other cities that they're aware of up in the US.
Wow. Wow. So as alluded to in the title of your book, time plays a critical role. Timing the Future Metropolis, foresight, knowledge, doubt. So in the introduction, there's a sentence that really caught my eye, the history of planning runs in parallel with and has enriched by the history of time itself. So tell us your thoughts on this intersection of planning and concepts of time, such as foresight, time horizons, futurism and being future lists. Yeah, there's a lot to say here. It's, of course, conceptually central to what I'm to what I'm doing here.
Let's see, well, I mean, in a sense. It's It's not to say that this hasn't been acknowledged, that it hasn't been addressed by some authors, but you know to plan is to plan ahead, like planning is fundamentally future making proposition. Planning is this one specialized form of foresight.
In some ways, this is a banal observation about this verb to plan, but in the context of city and regional planning, there's, there have been remarkably few attempts, really full fledged attempts, as I, as I sort of conceive them, to really theorize this and historicize it in a complex in a complex way, and what this book does, and maybe sort of prototypes for other similar studies of this or other periods, shows that if you, if you look back, if you, if you, if you make sort of the futurity of Planning, sort of conceptual issue deserving of a rich intellectual historical perspective, we can see that the ways in which planners, designers, social scientists, policy makers, public intellectuals, all these different characters in the equation here the ways in which they have attempted to envision the future, those have played out in very different ways at different points in time. I mean, we could go back to the New Deal. We could go back to the progressive era. We could go back to the city beautiful movement, or the sort of early city planning movement in this country. We could go deeper into the 19th century, or earlier than than that. There's a vast archive of sort of visions of the future. The history of the urban future is a rich and rewarding field to explore vast history of utopias and dystopias,
In the case of the Joint Center and this broader kind of post war Urban Studies complex when these social scientists get particularly serious about bringing their methodologies to bear on and enrich and also, in some ways check the the often overconfident designs of, you know, modernists at that at that point in time, you see that these, these fairly interesting conversations about essentially attempts, not just to prophecy the future, but to methodically project the urban future again, the basically unknowable urban future, on the basis of what we do know about the past and present. And so there's this whole sort of logical structure of inferential thinking across these different tenses. The book talks a lot about time. It talks about tense as well past, present and future knowledge about one being brought to bear, being leveraged to make a set of claims about the other.
And so I detail this in a variety of variety of different ways. I don't know. I think what I'm doing conceptually in this book has been latent and implicit in so much of the literature on urban planning and urban history, in the case of the Joint Center, and this be sort of my last major, major point on this, there's a whole literature that sort of bubbles up and that I think is bound up with what I've sketched for you as this basic kind of tack to the political right, this kind of neoconservative turn.
A number of scholars in the mix here become increasingly interested, not just in whether planners can intervene on the future. They become interested in a more kind of social science and cognitive science, way in the extent to which ordinary residents of cities are themselves able to orient themselves to the probable or desirable future, and through a bunch of work that comes out of the Joint Center on the case of Ciudad Guayana, prominently by a person named Donald Appleyard. It's coming out of sort of a planning and landscape tradition, and then on the domestic front, through work by Edward Banfield, a very conservative political scientist, actually, who was already a conservative before the Joint Center got going, but sort of ramps up his involvement, which crests in a 1970 book called The UN heavenly city. In these ostensibly very different kinds of work addressed to different parts of the world with very different sort of moods and political implications, you see a number of Joint Center figures getting very interested in time orientation, time horizons, seeking to determine empirically whether you know through through qualitative social research, whether ordinary residents of these cities are themselves oriented to the future, or are certain groups in society, and the way these post war scholars phrase it, this is, you know, strongly colored by questions of race and class and in rather unfortunate ways. Actually, you know, can urban society be divided up, be classified in terms of divergent time orientations? Are some groups of people more present or more future oriented than others, and how does that at the level of sort of cognitive framework enable or constrain the work of planners themselves. So it's this very it's this multi layered set of approaches when we start thinking about time, foresight, futurity, and this broader split between sort of the planners and the planned for when you start looking at how these different sorts of scholars attempt attempts, but largely, I don't know, largely fail to to to bridge that gap. I think the story becomes fairly interesting.
Of course, of course, yeah. And we can learn just as much. I mean, this is a platitude. We can learn just as much as from our successes, as our failures. And anyone that's interested in post war Urban Studies, your book dramatically recasts, adds complexity to both prominent figures, as well as our understanding of urban studies and urban knowledge. So I want to thank you for writing the book. It was great talking with you about your new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism Thank you so much. Peter
Jonathan, thanks a lot. I appreciate it.
That was Peter Eckman, author of the new book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America's Postwar Urbanism You can purchase Peter eckman's new book as an affordable paperback at our website, Cornell press.cornell.edu,and use the promo code 09 pod to save 30% off if you live in the UK, use the discount code see us announce and visit the website combined academic.co.uThank you For listening to 1869, the Cornell University Press podcast.
