For a brief moment in the early 1960s the world stood dangerously close to the brink of peace. But as President Kennedy negotiated limits on nuclear weapons testing in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, contractors like the Rand Corporation started to get nervous. Military planning was their bread and butter, and the cold war thaw was bad for business. Eyes on the bottom line, they decided to find new customers for their services just as city planners, having botched urban renewal, were looking for help. “The partnership seemed made in heaven,” writes Northwestern University historian and sociologist Jennifer Light, “a more scientifically sound approach to planning and management for cities and more contracts for the defense and aerospace community.” Instead it turned out to be a marriage of convenience in which the cities got screwed.
At the end of World War II, having flattened Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Americans might well have concluded that their own cities needed the exact opposite of war technology. Instead they embraced it. In the late 1940s guilt-ridden scientists wanted their research to produce something less destructive than the atomic bomb. In the late 50s city planners wanted a more sophisticated approach to revitalization than urban renewal, with its naive assumption that changes in the physical landscape would produce desirable social change. Finally, in the 60s, cash-starved urbanists gave up railing against bloated military budgets and sought instead to adapt the tools those budgets had bought.
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“For average urban dwellers, the dispersal movement’s effects were negligible,” writes Light. “For the ‘power elite,’ by contrast, this engagement produced a marriage with lasting effects.” Dispersal planning was the party at which atomic scientists, military strategists, professional planners, businesspeople, and federal and local officials got to know one another, producing relationships that would shape planning initiatives for years to come.
Light doesn’t spend much time systematically cataloging every level of error involved in these collaborations, but this may be the deepest one. The military has just one goal to which all others are subordinated, but neither cities nor ordinary human beings work this way. Perhaps an army can be programmed like a computer, but if so that’s only because it’s a specialized tool designed for a specialized purpose.
One flowchart displayed seven steps in the production of weaponry, the other, city planning. In step one, “threat assessment,” military planners obtain “intelligence based estimates of enemy threat in specific region and time,” while city planners make a “determination of threat of urban blight to the community.” By step four the military planners are developing “candidate concepts” to fill gaps in their existing arsenal, while their urban counterparts strive to fill gaps in “existing action programs.” In the seventh and final step the military deploys its new weapons, while the city planners submit their “action program plans.” Evidently if you could do one, you could do the other.
From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America, by Jennifer S. Light, Johns Hopkins University Press, $42.
