Another thought--
Obviously if the workers were rebelling, and given the general description of complete regimentation to maximize production, etc., Ford's efforts were wrong--deeply so.
And the other thread(s) outlining his use of thugs and anti-semitism show how generally misguided he was,
...but a lot of what the narrator said about how Ford's experiment in the Amazon was
supposed to run sounds not so bad.
If those claims were true--either in the case of Ford's society or for some hypothetical society--and if instead of being imposed by a white industrialist trying to engineer (almost literally) his version of an ideal society, they were brought about in a more democratic (small-d democratic) manner, wouldn't that be all well and good?
Here's a story about a public housing development in New Orleans (and how, post-Katrina, it was going to [and subsequently was, IIRC] torn down to allow developers to control it's prime real estate/site). But Ouroussoff gives the history of the development and much of it's early programming sounds similar to Ford's, but in this case it's held up as a model for what should be:
(the part that parallels Ford's effort is in bold)
IDEAS & TRENDS: UNBUILDING -- ARCHITECTURE; All Fall Down
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
The ravaged neighborhoods of New Orleans make a grim backdrop for imagining the future of American cities. But despite its criminally slow pace, the rebuilding of this city is emerging as one of the most aggressive works of social engineering in America since the postwar boom of the 1950s. And architecture and urban planning have become critical tools in shaping that new order.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's plan to demolish four of the city's biggest low-income housing developments at a time when the city still cannot shelter the majority of its residents. The plan, which is being challenged in federal court by local housing advocates, would replace more than 5,000 units of public housing with a range of privately owned mixed-income developments.
Billed as a strategy for relieving the entrenched poverty of the city's urban slums, it is based on familiar arguments about the alienating effects of large-scale postwar inner-city housing.
But this argument seems strangely disingenuous in New Orleans. Built at the height of the New Deal, the city's public housing projects have little in common with the dehumanizing superblocks and grim plazas that have long been an emblem of urban poverty. Modestly scaled, they include some of the best public housing built in the United States.
So it's not surprising that many of its residents suspect a sinister agenda is at work here. Locked out of the planning process, they fear the planned demolitions are part of a broad effort to prevent displaced poor people from returning to New Orleans.
This demolition strategy is not new. It is part of a long-standing campaign to dismantle the nation's public housing system that began in the 1970s. That campaign was based on the valid belief that the concentration of the poor into segregated ghettos condemned them to a permanent cycle of poverty, crime and drugs. Specifically, it was directed at the large-scale postwar housing developments that became a fixture of American cities in the 1960s -- anonymous blocks of concrete housing, like Chicago's recently partially demolished Cabrini-Green, whose deadening uniformity seemed to strip the poor of their identity, reducing them to repetitive numbers in a vast bureaucratic machine.
The last few decades have witnessed the emergence of a new model for public housing: mixed-income developments whose designs are largely based on New Urbanist town-planning principles. Nostalgic visions of Middle America, they are marked by narrow pedestrian streets and quaint two-story houses with pitched roofs and covered porches. For HUD, they have become the default mode for rebuilding in New Orleans.
But if the sight of workers dynamiting an abandoned housing complex was a cause for celebration in Chicago's North Side, the notion is stupefying in New Orleans, whose public housing embodies many of those same New Urbanist ideals: pedestrian friendly environments whose pitched roofs, shallow porches and wrought iron rails have as much to do with 19th-century historical precedents as with late Modernism.
More specifically, they were inspired by local developments such as the 1850s Pontalba Apartments and late-19th ''Garden City'' proposals, whose winding tree-lined streets and open green spaces were seen as an antidote to the filth and congestion of the industrial city.
The low red-brick housing blocks of the Lafitte Avenue project, in the historically black neighborhood of Treme, for example, are scaled to fit within the surrounding neighborhood of Creole cottages and shotgun houses. To lessen the sense of isolation, the architects extended the surrounding street grid through the site with a mix of roadways and pedestrian paths. As you move deeper into the complex, the buildings frame a series of communal courtyards sheltered by the canopies of enormous oak trees. Nature, here, was intended to foster spiritual as well as physical well being.
That care was reflected in the quality of construction as well. Solidly built, the buildings' detailed brickwork, tile roofs and wrought-iron balustrades represent a level of craft more likely found on an Ivy League campus than in a contemporary public housing complex.
They would be almost impossible to reproduce in the kind of bottom-line developments that have become the norm.
In truth, the collapse of New Orleans' public housing system had less to do with bad design than with cynical government policies, which were rooted in the city's divisive racial politics. Up through the 1950s, residents of Lafitte were supported by a network of social services, from nursery schools financed by the Works Progress Administration to onsite medical care, adult education programs, Boy Scout groups and gardening clubs.
But as the middle class fled to the suburbs in the 1960s, these services were gradually stripped away, transforming entire areas of the inner city into ghettos for the black underclass.
By 2002, conditions had worsened to the point that the city of New Orleans agreed to turn control of its public housing over to HUD. Today, the richly landscaped gardens are gone. Many of the lawns have been paved over and replaced by basketball courts. Huge garbage bins, some with fading paintings of balloons, are scattered across decaying lots. Towering floodlights illuminate forbidding concrete pathways.
That neglect has now touched bottom in post-Katrina New Orleans. Most of the city's public housing was boarded up a few months after the storm -- long before most residents were able to claim their possessions or clean out their refrigerators. Many are now rat-infested. And while HUD has promised that anyone who comes back will be provided housing in the same neighborhood, those residents that have managed to return have had little voice about what their housing will be. (By comparison, the city has set up numerous town meetings to help homeowners decide how to rebuild their neighborhoods.)
The point is not that projects like Lafitte should be painstakingly restored to their original condition; nor are we likely to return to the same spirit of social optimism that created them any time soon. None of the projects rise to the level, say, of the best Modernist workers housing built in Europe in the 1920s, some of which were such refined architectural compositions that their apartments are now occupied by upper-middle-class sophisticates.
But they certainly rank above the level of much of the conventional middle-class housing being churned out today. And it is not difficult to imagine how a number of thoughtful modifications -- the addition of new buildings, extensive landscaping, extending the existing street grid to anchor the project more firmly into the city -- could transform the project into model housing.
Yet HUD has never seriously considered such a plan. And although HUD says it has studied what it would cost to restore the projects, it has not released any figures. Finally, it has been unwilling to acknowledge the psychic damage of ripping out more of the city's fabric at a time when New Orleans has yet to heal the wounds of Hurricane Katrina.
HUD officials say they have not yet set a date for demolition, but they have already selected a team of developers -- Enterprise Community Partners and Providence Community Housing, an arm of the Catholic church -- which are working on plans for the site. Meanwhile, HUD's vision of the future is already visible several miles away at the New Fischer development in Algiers. Built to replace a decaying 1960s-era housing complex, part of which is still under demolition, the neighborhood's rows of two-story houses, painted in cheery pastel colors, will be occupied by a mix of low- and middle-income families. Its porch-lined streets are straight from a Norman Rockwell painting of small-town America.
But in many ways, the development is also an illusion. Conceived as an internalized world, with the majority of its narrow streets dead-ending into nowhere, the development is virtually cut off from the lifeblood of the surrounding city -- the shops, streets, parks and freeways that weave the city into an urban whole. And its uniform rows of houses represent a vision of conformity that has little to do with urban life. Instead, it replaces one vision of social isolation with another.
In its broadest sense, that approach is part of the continued assault against cities as places of contact and friction, where life is embraced in its full range. By smoothing over differences, it seeks to make the city safe for returning suburbanites and tourists.
This is a fool's game. The challenge in New Orleans is to piece together the fragments of a shattered culture.
Sadly, HUD's plan manages to trivialize the past without engaging the painful realities that have shorn this city apart.
...so my question is, how close (or far) was Ford from actually doing the right thing? Was he only 'off' in his controlling manner of imposing his ideas of proper moral conduct? How about other industrialist-idealists like Robert Owen? Owen's a hero--Ford's a villain, but they have more than a few points of similarity.
(hmm. I'm thinking this out as I'm writing it, and now I'm wondering how to put this into an assignment for my students, this fall: to have them somehow explore and compare the two men and their efforts to create a utopia. Any thoughts?)
And I think the question is larger than just Ford--think about the British Empire and all the cultural imperialism it entailed. There are obvious, undeniable 'atrocities' at the heart of it. But if the good were weighed against the bad, how far out of balance would the scale be? We look now at the 'wrongs' done to non-Europeans, and given the continued corporate imperialism, those past wrongs
should be central to our views of continued Western (or Western-style?) domination/exploitation of various people(s)--but there are certain material gains that have come about--not everywhere, but in many places--better diet, housing, public health, education, and at least the idea of a democratically elected government, etc.
The fact such gains are so distributed in such a grossly inequitable manner makes for an atrocity, but would we undo
all that was done? Who here wants to go back to the pre-industrial era's by-hand style of subsistence agriculture? (think middle ages, open-sewers, rural poverty, etc.) Obviously, it doesn't have to be a choice between the two extremes--and what I'm trying to solicit/get at, is: at what point between those extremes would you draw a line? I'm too long winded in asking it--apologies for that--because doing so is frought with difficulties: one can't be a booster for imperialism now that we've come to recognize it's true, brutal nature--but could there be a 'good' (think $100 lap-top, 'green'/sustainable communities?) version of it?
Or, maybe more to the point, is anyone interested/willing to look at how Ford--for all that he
was wrong about--was not always 'wrong' about things?
Posted: Thu May 08, 2008 2:23 pm
