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

1. Planning for the Atomic Age: Creating a Community of Experts

C H A P T E R O N E Planning for the Atomic Age Creating a Community of Experts In a presentation to the American Municipal Association in November 1945, University of Chicago sociologist Louis Wirth asked a question that was on many minds in the months following the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki : “Does the atomic bomb doom the modern city?” Re_ecting on the science of atomic destruction, much of it developed at his own institution, he suggested the answer to this question was no.1 Wirth cited the size and growth pattern of the nation’s cities and the administrative changes needed to disperse populations and industries away from downtowns vulnerable to attack. He concluded that such a massive reshaping of urban form could not reasonably be achieved in a short amount of time. Whether or not a bomb might “doom” the modern city in the event of an atomic attack, the existence of atomic weapons should not drive American city planning. According to Wirth, the realistic strategy for assuring urban security was world control of atomic weapons—not defensive city planning. Wirth’s resistance to dispersal is unsurprising, given that his life’s work revolved around neighborhood-based studies of concentrated urban culture. Yet this opinion leader in so much urban research would cultivate less of a following in his conclusions about the ideal form for postwar cities. In the years immediately following World War II, a remarkable amount of expert attention began to focus on the question of what cities should look like in the atomic age. Defense experts, atomic scientists, urban planners, and public of~cials united around the idea of “defensive dispersal”—that deliberate dispersal of population and industries could reduce cities’ vulnerability to attack. That any scholar’s resistance to defensive dispersal lacked broad appeal ~ts neatly with standard accounts of American urban development. Classic narratives of American urban and suburban history have long emphasized the theme of urban disintegration in the postwar period. In the decades from 1945 to 1975, myriad forces dispersed the nation’s populations and industries . The federal urban renewal program gutted urban cores. The national highway program cut wide swaths through many cities. Private developers created suburbs such as Levittown for returning GIs. Suburban and regional malls decimated street life and commercial districts of downtowns. Middle -class whites _ed cities for the safety of suburbs and private communities. Whether they have emphasized the primacy of public policies, private developers , speci~c building types, creditors, industry, or simply the desire of the middle classes, urban and suburban historians have placed the stories of sprawl and fear of the city at center stage in their accounts of American postwar urban development.2 The actual dispersal of America’s twentieth-century urban physical landscape owes far more to the range of factors that scholars already have identi~ed than to the defensive dispersal movement. However, as a force acting on the American urban professional landscape, the movement’s impact was signi~cant and lasting. While in 1945 Louis Wirth argued against a national dispersal program on account of the accompanying need for centralized governance and planning, many other urban professionals, from planners to politicians, viewed the proposal to align city planning with the nation’s security needs as a great opportunity. As dispersal planning provided for the national defense, simultaneously it seemed to promise solutions to many city problems that urban leaders had identi~ed in the prewar period—including traf~c, congestion, and slums. Defense rationales for dispersal offered strategic rhetorical backing to bolster political support for comprehensive postwar planning, for increased federal aid to cities, for the continuing professionalPlanning for the Atomic Age 11 ization of planning and urban administration, and for increased funding to urban research. It is this story of dispersal that served as a turning point in American urban history. For in these conversations about dispersal, a new approach to city planning and management, dedicating military expertise to the nation’s urban needs, began to take shape. The military-industrial-academic complex that in~ltrated so many aspects of life in the cold war would also guide American approaches to addressing urban problems. From the walled cities of ancient Rome and the Renaissance to nineteenth -century Paris, where Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann created boulevards to facilitate the movement of troops through the city, concerns about 12 From Warfare to Welfare Fig. 1...