From Warfare to Welfare: Defense Intellectuals and Urban Problems in Cold War America

5. Moon-Shot Management for American Cities

C H A P T E R F I V E Moon-Shot Management for American Cities In 1968, William Mitchel, deputy assistant secretary for management systems at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, attended a workshop on technology transfer for local government leaders organized by McDonnell Douglas. Such meetings were commonplace in this era—organized efforts to bridge the acknowledged cultural chasm that separated the aerospace industry from the local governments it aimed to assist. Despite their best efforts to ~nd common ground, however, Mitchel surmised the hosts and their guests were speaking past each other. He concluded that America’s aerospace community and its urban professionals—like the nation’s black and white citizenry—remained “two worlds separated by values, infrastructure, language, skills, and economic resources” into “haves” and “have nots.”1 In re_ections that echoed the Kerner Commission’s description of a nation divided , Mitchel predicted a bumpy road ahead for future collaborations. Mitchel’s assessment of the workshop was a minority view, however, in a climate of enthusiasm for space age approaches to city administration. Several years would pass before such skeptical assessments would become mainstream . The 1969 Moon landing extended support for the variety of programs that NASA had created to showcase how innovations developed to address speci~c challenges in space also had relevance to problems on Earth. Through the 1970s, a variety of individual and institutional actors continued to rally around the idea that space age innovations had the potential to save U.S. cities . Alongside the more recent importation of other military analytic tools, nearly ~fty years of aerial photography and airphoto interpretation across city agencies—themselves products of military research and development—made many observers especially optimistic that two speci~c products of the space age—space age management and satellite reconnaissance—would be natural complements to comprehensive urban planning. Local government of~cials actively recruited aerospace executives and engineers to work for their cities, creating new programs and bureaus to experiment with these “cures for chaos.” From the vantage point of 1968, Hubert Humphrey and William Mitchel placed competing bets on the future outcomes of collaborations between aerospace and urban government. Where Humphrey predicted a new generation of space age cities, Mitchel forecast little change ahead. Neither was to ~nd himself completely correct. The aerospace community did signi~cantly in_uence the history of city operations, but not in the precise ways it had planned. Despite formal steps by NASA and its industrial allies to bring space age management and satellite reconnaissance into widespread civilian use, city administrators instead chose to adopt a different set of aerospace techniques and technologies, little promoted, to address their intelligence gathering and analysis needs. Advances in techniques for photointerpretation and technologies for aerial surveying became staples of comprehensive planning and neighborhood revitalization projects, used alone or integrated into geographic information systems. To comprehend why city planners and managers of the 1960s and 1970s preferred these innovations requires a nuanced understanding of how each technique and technology ~t—or did not ~t—the larger history of “values, infrastructure, language, skills, and economic resources ” that de~ned intelligence gathering and analysis in U.S. cities. From Strike Planning to City Planning This book began with an account of Americans’ fears about aerial attack and how in the years following World War II those fears became rationales for dispersal planning. In fact, as early as the 1920s city administrators already Moon-Shot Management for American Cities 125 were well acquainted with the techniques and technologies that would make possible the accurate targeting of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, applying innovations in aerial reconnaissance to their work. The growth of interest in aerial photography for civilian purposes during the 1920s and 1930s would not have been possible without the expertise gained from earlier military con_ict. Many of the men originally trained for wartime service in World War I became agents of technology transfer, ~nding civilian and further military applications for their talents in the years that followed. For example, George Goddard, who served as an instructor in photographic interpretation at the U.S. Army’s photography school at Cornell University and organized the ~rst Army Aerial Photographic Mapping Unit, went on to work for the Federal Board of Surveys and Maps. By 1946, Goddard was back in military and intelligence operations, deputized with recording the Operation Crossroads atomic tests on ~lm.2 Similarly, Sherman Fairchild, whose...