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6. Encounters with the Arch-Modern - Regional Planning and Growth Control
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T he Bay Area uprising for parks, open space, and bay protection has been a confrontation with the forces of urbanization, at times a mortal combat against the paved and the dammed. This has all too frequently been defensive, piecemeal actions by local groups feeling the hot breath of the bulldozers on their neck of the woods. In the efforts to save the bay, protect the coast, and create a national park at the Golden Gate, one finds only hints of a larger vision of containment of the monster metropolis. Nonetheless, an overarching vision has been nurtured all along by one organization above all: People for Open Space/Greenbelt Alliance. It has provided a necessary utopian and regionalist outlook on the greenbelt, urban planning, and metropolitan government for fifty years. This has been more than a struggle to conserve green and pleasant lands. Local efforts to stop the development juggernaut have shown, time and again, the need to grasp the nettle of urban growth, including suburban sprawl, housing supply, and local government. Planners and conservationists have therefore tried to rewrite the rules of the game through strong planning measures, government reform, and urban-growth controls. This has added up to a movement of considerable force, even though the utopian ideals of the most radical planners and visionaries have not been realized. As a result, urban development in the Bay Area has not been an uncontested 130 6 encounters with the arch-modern Regional Planning and Growth Control table c. Bay Area Population Growth (nine counties, by decade) Total Population Increase Percent 1940 1,734,308 156,299 9.9 1950 2,681,322 947,014 54.6 1960 3,638,939 957,617 35.7 1970 4,630,576 991,637 27.3 1980 5,179,759 549,183 11.9 1990 6,023,577 843,818 16.2 2000 6,783,760 760,183 12.6 source: www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/historical/copop18602000. encounters with the arch-modern: regional planning 131 process, as in so much of the United States; it is questioned, fought over, reconfigured, and frequently stopped in its tracks. Here again we are witnesses to the two-headed nature of the greening of the Bay Area. On the one hand, the leadership has typically come from the elite—both upper class and intellectuals from the university communities— and its agenda has been both utopian and conservative with regard to the city. On the other hand, the growth-control movement has called up a kind of mass participation in and cry for local democracy, and its success in making the city more livable is inextricable from popular conviction and mobilization. cry california The greenbelt movement was born in opposition to the great postwar growth boom, when the Bay Area was adding a million people a decade. Future prospects must have seemed appalling to people accustomed to a compact city like San Francisco and a still-modest regional population of a couple million. Developers and government agencies had delirious visions of doubling and redoubling the scale of the metropolis. One such document , promulgated by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and U.S. Department of Commerce in 1960, envisioned more than fourteen million people in the Bay Area by the next century. The Association of Bay Area Governments predicted a more modest seven million by 1990—a figure only a decade off the mark.1 As it was, in 1980 the Bay Area would have more people than forty other states of the union. [18.212.102.174] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:44 GMT) Midcentury Modernists In counterflow to the prevailing Babbitry of local growth boosters, a broad critique of unchecked urbanization emerged among the region’s intelligentsia . Nothing quite like this had happened before, even in the age of Muir. The Bay Area in the 1960s was a hotbed of radical, green ideas among planners, political scientists, biologists, and journalists. The usual accounts of postwar environmental thought, running from Fairfield Osborn to Rachel Carson, give too little credit to these Californians.2 The first voices in the wilderness were a group of planning students from Berkeley who came together in the late 1930s as a group calling themselves Telesis. Telesis was a typical avant-garde formation, complete with manifesto . They mounted an influential exhibit called “Space for Living” in 1939 that awakened San Franciscans to modern planning and architecture and to the idea of an urban greenbelt. The group included future Berkeley professors T...