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

2. The City as a Communication System

C H A P T E R T W O The City as a Communication System In “How U.S. Cities Can Prepare for Atomic War,” a 1950 article in Life Magazine , Norbert Wiener, a professor of mathematics at MIT, joined the dispersal conversation. Wiener expressed his fear that centralized American cities— dif~cult to evacuate and dif~cult to defend—were easy targets for a nuclear strike. This father of cybernetics proposed accelerating the trend toward suburban growth as a defense strategy. Highways—“life belts,” in his terms— would serve as conduits away from the city in the event of a nuclear attack. Wiener argued that dispersing the population, a “long overdue reform,” would simultaneously alleviate urban problems.1 Wiener was not the ~rst to suggest that U.S. cities were likely targets for attack , nor that dispersal would solve urban problems. Yet his cybernetic view of cities as communications systems offered a new rationale for the plan. “A city is primarily a communications center,” he explained, “serving the same purpose as a nerve center in the body.” Cities functioned best when information could easily be exchanged, and the persistent “traf~c jams in streets and subways ” signaled these exchanges could be much improved.2 With the basic principles of cybernetics suggesting that “the distinction between material transportation and message transportation is not in any theoretical sense permanent and unbridgeable,” Wiener argued that communications technology could knit together a physically dispersed population.3 In the near future, he predicted, transportation of increasingly sophisticated materials via communications networks would become common. Wiener’s vision of a distributed population alongside a sophisticated information network was the centerpiece of his vision for a healthy and humane future society. Wiener died in 1964, before ARPANET would make his predictions about message transmission a reality. Yet during the last years of his life, several urban experiments got under way to bring cybernetic principles to city planning and management. Communication technologies would not be used for dispersed citizen-citizen or citizen-government communications, as Wiener imagined. Rather, his image of cities as information processing systems would be applied to reshaping urban planning and management practices. In every era, one or two “images of the city” dominate urban planning and management; techniques and technologies can play a de~ning role. In his bestseller The Image of the City (1960), Wiener’s MIT colleague Kevin Lynch, professor of city and regional planning, investigated how average citizens experience cities.4 The book—an effort to aid designers struggling to improve the urban order and make it more responsive to users’ needs—sought to understand how city residents make mental maps of their everyday environment . By juxtaposing laypersons’ images with expert images from colleagues in the ~eld, Lynch revealed a fundamental disconnect between the goals of experts and the objectives of average citizens. His book was a metaphor for the failures of urban renewal. Lynch’s ~ndings made clear that the image of the city most commonly put forth by experts, which had driven so much of urban policy, planning, and management in the 1950s, would need signi~cant revisions to better serve city populations. For urban decision makers seeking a new “image of the city” in the wake of urban renewal’s failures, Wiener’s conception of cities in cybernetic terms held wide appeal. In the late-1950s and through the 1960s, the belief that cities might be understood as communication systems gained popularity among both academics and practitioners.5 From this vision, it soon followed that principles from cybernetics and computing technologies found broad application in city planning and management. By 1966, Richard Meier and Richard Duke would write in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners that the ur36 Command, Control, and Community ban professions were experiencing a “revolution” in theory and practice, with computers at the center of this transformation.6 The image of the city as a communication system drew upon the science of cybernetics and its close cousin systems analysis, a technique for military decision making developed at the RAND Corporation in the 1940s. Electronic computers, ~rst developed for ballistics-data processing, were also military innovations of the 1940s. That the techniques and technologies adopted to transform city planning and management in the postrenewal era were ~rst developed for the task of military planning and management suggests another kind of revolution was under way in the American urban professions, one...