spire is recognisable. The project involved renewal of Pennsylvania colonial era residences and development of a landscaped plaza for scheduled recreation and relaxation
interests. It must be recognised that the slum has a social environment which for many is an acceptable com- munity life as well as being a stopping place for many of society's transients.
Studies of Boston's notorious north end showed the Italian community to prefer the location because it conveyed a strong identity for Italians through out the city. In Indianapolis the de- pressed areas of the city were for the adjusted poor, the indolent and the social outcasts. While New York's lower East side, a once strong Jewish community, represented services to the cultural needs of orthodox Jews, as well as the poor and the aged.
That the city is constantly chang- ing is well recognised but when renewal concentrates on the physical problem, while obscuring the creative restraints of the social problem, it then faces the people least likely to want to change with the overwhelming forces of seem- ingly instant change. The results tend to be unsatisfactory for all involved. There is an urgent need for the urban sociologist to devise improved methods of hastening the rate of social adjust ment among the poor, in order to offset the inherent difficulty of physi- cal renewal's speed and its disrupting effects of rapid re-orientation.
The balance sheet begins to read as a list of social debits and physical cre- dits but this is not entirely the case. Along with the agreed monument build- ing there has been an impetus to cultural movements, notably in the form of centres and a considerable encouragement to civic interests has
followed. Religious institutions have been buttressed, through their role as non-profit sponsors of market rate and federal housing, built through banks but with government insurance against default of payment.
Low rent housing has been ex- panded at least through the stimulus to appropriations through renewal in- terest. High rent housing has been built in the city to help counter the loss of leadership to the suburbs. In- dustry has been offered considerable inducement through the locations made available within the city. Above all traffic planning has been highlighted as a priority concern along with some rationalising of odd lots.
Through all of this a whole new forum has been created for the healthy debate of aesthetic standards appro- priate to the twentieth century cities yet to be.
The future
What are the lessons to be learned from the American experience and what new forms of development can be prescribed for cities and their renewal plans?
The first and obvious comment is that the renewal movement will be slow, expensive and is in no way a panacea. The programmes for renewal in the past have concentrated on the conspicuous but these areas, while very expensive to alter, affect only a small percentage of the population and an even smaller percentage of the land area. The depressingly ordinary majori ty of our cities remains unaltered.
Increased sophistication will be shown towards the grey areas of the city especially with the growing con- ception of it as a needed place of tran- sients, along with its relationship to the city at large. This change of attitude on one hand and the increasing com- petition for limited funds on the other will mean smaller and smaller areas will be renewed at any one time in a given locality.
Perhaps the most significant change, the threshold of which has already been crossed, is the growth of citizen parti- cipation and the advocate planner who, as a freelance professional spokesman for a neighbourhood, represents a new step towards communication between the governed and those who govern.
The suburban challenge, to the im- portance of the central function of the city, is being expressed commercially through the re-location of shopping centres; and socially by the abandon- ment of the elite for the residential attractions of the suburbs. Both these considerations threaten the tax base of the already financially long suffering cities and represent a political weak- ness. Renewal is thus the only way an established city and make land available where it counts — near the centre.
It can be assumed that, with all their weaknesses, renewal programmes will continue, the strongest advocates for them being those with a vested in- terest in a viable city centre. This fact need not be heralded with undue pes- simism so long as this beginning is honestly viewed as experimental and the experience gained is drawn upon - not cast aside because of its failings and a different approach advocated.
Lessons already learned contain a few universal truths for many cities of the world cities, it should be added, that to a large part, share the environ- mental characteristics of their Ameri- can contemporaries.
Author
Mr. Terence P. Byrnes, ARAIA, MCP (Yale), is a lecturer in the Depart- ment of Architecture, Hong Kong. He spent three years working on the urban renewal programmes of New Haven and Hartford, Conn. as a neighbour- hood planner.
Far East BUILDER, May 1969
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