ARE CITIES COMMUNITIES? EARLY DEBATES ON URBANISM

TAMAS T OTH

The period of reconstruction and the restoration of capitalist relations which lasted until the late 1950s in West Germany was of great importance to urban development. As 40% of the housing in present-day West Germany had been destroyed in the war, the significant growth of the population due to resettlement, the influx from East Germany and the post-war demographic boom resulted in an acute housing shortage. The urgent mass demand for housing made capital investment in the building industry highly lucrative in the years of the "economic miracle." According to statistics, about 15 million homes were built between 1949 and the late 1970s. By 1956--at least statistically--every family in West Germany had a home and every person had at least one room of his own.

More importantly, however, there were some qualitative changes in the West German settlement structure. Experts agree that a new period began around 1960 in West Germany's urban development with the growing influence of the economy's third or service sector. This new trend of urbanization began to elicit increasing criticism from the early sixties, while in the seventies urban debates assumed ideological importance.

The various ideological tendencies in urbanism and urban criticism^l elaborated which at times were carried into practice in West Germany after World War II considerably differed from the conservative anti-urbanism formerly so influential in Germany (see my chapter, above); indeed the two frequently engaged in open polemics. While conservative anti-urbanism displayed an anti-capitalist attitude, relying on obviously mystified pre-capitalist ideals (like villages in agrarian societies and pre-industrial towns), the new tendencies decidedly accepted capitalist urban development as at least inevitable and irreversible. On the other hand, unlike Ri ehl, Tonn ies, Spe ngler, etc., who concentrated on the universal relevance of modern urban development and interpreted it on theoretical level of a philosophy of history, most analysts of the post-war period abandoned the examination of such global aspects of urbanization. What the restoration period apparently required was a sober-minded analysis of the status quo, on the one hand, and a basically practical involvement, on the other. This, in turn, resulted in an ideological rejection of all ideologies in the revived urban sociology.

Before long, however, the spread of these attitudes of hostility toward ideology and theory began to hinder the analysis and interpretation of the facts and materials accumulated by the rapidly expanding empirical research. Some sought a solution in choosing comparatively concrete research objectives which supposedly could be analyzed in a direct, empirical manner and yet at the same time worked also like a lens in focusing upon and illuminating the diffuse tendencies of society as a whole. Forms of human settlement appeared to be typical models for such structures and tendencies. And indeed, the first major results of post-war empirical research in West Germany were achieved in the field of urban sociology.

A dominant trend in post-war urban sociology up to the late fifties was called Gemeindesoziologie. (Though the term is generally accepted, its ambiguity has caused much difficulty even in German-speaking areas. As "Gemeinde" may mean village, town, city, community parish, congregation, etc., it cannot be translated precisely by any single word.² According to one of its leading exponents, R. K onig, Gemeindesoziologie is a coordinated complex of three branches of empirical sociological research, namely, that concerning: (1) towns and cities, (2) villages and rural areas, and (3) the interactions between urban and rural regions.

Post-war urban research in West Germany was at first patterned on American models (and partly supported directly by American authorities financially and scientifically). It is clear now that the periods and trends of American urban sociology must be interpreted in the context of the social and political tendencies within the USA. It is also obvious now that the social criticism in the USA of the twenties eventually gave way to a kind of "unbiased scientism" which, however, did not rule out the possibility of a manipulative adaptation of research findings to the status quo in the spirit of "social technique". Nevertheless, after the war many West German researchers adopted American research methods with, at times, uncritical enthusiasm. Rejecting because for their ideological implications the conceptions of former German theorists, which either had been compromised during the era of Fa scism or proved unfeasible under the new circumstances, they considered positivist methods in sociology to be a guarantee of scientific objectivity. As is widely seen today, Gemeindesoziologie succeeded in pinpointing many remarkable facts but failed to cope intellectually with the new empirical materials for it remained empiricist throughout. As a matter of fact, R. K onig himself considered this "thought-less empiricism" to be detrimental to the prestige of Gemeindesoziologie. Indeed, Konig's and the others' efforts were sometimes billed--not without justification--as a trend "in search of a theory". These facts notwithstanding, Gemeindesoziologie never fully complied with the criteria of empirical sociology, nor did it arrive at a creative theory.

Of all the researchers involved, it was R. Konig who set out most determinedly "in search of a theory." As we shall see, he wished to elaborate a general and "neutral" concept of the Gemeinde. Sharply differentiating between its administrative and the sociological aspects he defined it in terms of the latter as "a place where the extreme complexity of society as a whole can be directly perceived and even experienced by the people." But, having declared the Gemeinde to be "a basic form of social existence in its empirical reality" and raised heuristic hopes in the reader, in a sense Konig retreats. Although consistently refusing to interpret human settlements as isolated and independent phenomena, he thought it the specific task of Gemeindesoziologie to study them in terms of their specific socio-cultural nature. In this conception the Gemeinde is both a local unit (lokale einheit) and "a definite social system."

The "social system" of a settlement however, is considered by Konig as practically independent of economic, demographic, administrative and ecological features; he interprets it as the structural interrelatedness of "specifically social moments". Translated into practice, this means that the focus of research shifted to discrete investigations of social group relations, to communication systems, social control and cultural traditions characterizing individual settlements. All this took place precisely in a period when, in addition to the overall importance of economic aspects, the role of the specifically local determinants of social life was being significantly reduced. Of course, there were more empirical surveys whose organizers proved more responsive to global social relations, yet at least in the field of theory the only real merit of Gemeindesoziologie seems in retrospect to have been its effort to supersede the conservative heritage.

The essays of Rie hl, Tonni es, and Spe ngler--and, in another context, of M. We ber and W. So mbart--aimed at creating general typologies of human settlements which sometimes reached the level of a philosophy of history. Nevertheless, all these typologies proved to be specified to varying extents in economic and social terms as well. In comparison, even though more of less problematic in their content, certainly it was a step backward to examine mainly what was "specifically local in character" among the "values" and "symbols" that were supposed to ensure the inner cohesion of a given settlement, as well as in the social interactions.

Relatively, however, West German researchers of this period made some progress by turning against the conservative thinkers' passionate and often demagogic anti-city stance, empirically reviewing their arguments, disproving them and showing their ideological implications. The specific "neutrality" of R. Ko nig's or H. Kot ter's definition of the "Gemeinde" reflects a sort of synthesis of these recognitions.

What the new Gemeinde concept disproves in the first place is the sharp conservative contrast between village and town, and between small town and big city, implying as well an unmistakable value judgment. Konig sees no reason to consider a small commune more "natural" or "organic" (and hence to be judged more favorably) than a metropolis; in theory Kotter finds no considerable difference between rural and urban settlements. In view of the conspicuously sharp "class divisions" of modern society, irrespective of the type of settlements, Konig repeatedly and emphatically rejects the identification of Gemeinde and Gemeinschaft (the latter term in Tonnies' interpretation denoting an integrated community). In his analysis of the history of the German village, Kotter proves how utterly untenable were the ideologies that idealized the way of life in the allegedly "harmonic," "well-arranged" and "organic" preindustrial rural communes which were the basic frame of reference for the conservative agrarian policy. Post-war research also has refuted the demographic and "anthropological"racist arguments of anti-urbanism.

Nevertheless, one problem raised by the conservatives engaged the attention of urban research for quite some time: notably, social disintegration as an allegedly inevitable consequence of city-life. No doubt it is not fully unjustified to speak of the "rootlessness," "atomization" or "proletarianization" of the working masses, especially in big cities during the industrial revolution, since the change-over to a new way of life on a mass scale entailed great difficulties. Engels' youthful writings also bear this out. Conservative German thinkers, however, regarded the allegedly growing disintegration of the urban masses always to be an immediate threat to the political status quo. After World War II this also was more subtly treated by research.

Such Gemeinde-sociologists engaged in big-city research as E. P feil tried to answer the question whether "people in big cities are really lonely or not" (Sc helsky) on the basis of a thorough empirical analysis of human relations.³ They found that although a certain degree of "anonymity" and "indifference" was typical of their passing and superficial relationships, city dwellers were not devoid of attachments from the point of view of urban sociology. True, in the cities as elsewhere the traditional large family was reduced to a unit of two generations with few children and lost many of its former functions, especially in production but it did not disintegrate.

The family adjusted flexibly to the changed urban circumstances. To offset the alienated sphere of production, the family assumed a greater role in protecting the intimacy of human life and defending the psychic integrity of the personality. Modern housework was assigned a new economic functions, etc. Studies of neighborly relations have shown also that it is quite unwarranted to speak of the irreversible disintegration of all human communities and relations in modern cities. E. Pfeil and others wished to define in terms of urban sociology and as objectively as possible the extent to which individuals and their communities are isolated and integrated in the post-war big cities. But they did not use their findings to form general value judgments--certainly not direct ones and, even less, negative ones--on cities as complex phenomena.

So the extreme ideal types of conservative urban policy failed the test of the time. Its representatives had ignored the subtle differentiation and social problems of small settlements. They also underrated the advantages that big cities offer to the development of new types of human relationships, whereas the main trends in urban planning after World War II relied precisely on these advantages in an effort to solve the problem of a developing disintegration.

Conceptions of green-belt suburbs and neighborhood units, ideas prompted by elements of the Charter of Athens which had a fundamental influence on urban reconstruction in West Germany,⁴ embraced a program of "loosening up and articulating the settlement structures? Their aim was not only to put a stop to the "amorphous growth" of modern cities and to bring about "organically articulated" urban settlements divided by smaller territorial units or "cells," but also to give a specific "social shape" to the cities.⁵ They sought to organize the atomized masses into living communities-chiefly into neighborhood communities-which were supposed to "reintegrate" city dwellers in political, ideological and sociopolitical terms. As several West German scholars have pointed out, this "integration"--a widely and uncritically adopted goal in the post-war years--was meant to reinforce the basis of legitimation of the capitalist system just being restored in modern democratic conditions.

It is typical of modern Western architecture to pursue the idea of integration, borrowed from the classical Greeks and reformulated in several utopian conceptions, with an overtone of social criticism. Here, however, the notion is often tamed to become a tool of "social technique" (or social engineering) with a view to a close interrelation and interaction of settlement and socio-political structures. If the rational core of that idea be ignored one cannot comprehend either the full importance of nineteenth and twentieth century Western urban models for the social sciences or their practical impact. Although urban and, more importantly, housing conditions strongly influence the everyday existence of the population and may entail serious socio-ideological consequences, it seems basically erroneous to assume, as did the advocates of urbanism motivated by social engineering, that by manipulating these relations--by revolutionizing architecture or the patterns of settlement--one might radically reform the entire society.⁶ This was realized also in West Germany where, after a brief triumphal march, the "neighborhood ideologies" sustained final defeat. Hence, "neutral" Gemeindesoziologie, after having refuted the pessimism of conservative anti-urbanism, had to admit the failure of the optimism of "neighborhood ideologies."

True, the specialized literature normally differentiates between neighborhood units as specific forms of community and as basic units of a town with definite institutions. While the latter proved technically feasible as the principle for dividing an urban territory, the ideals mainly of preindustrial communities often reminiscent of Tonni es--which were almost always present in the background in West Germany--did not strike root in the urban soil of modern (especially post-war) capitalism. Neighborhood communities eventually failed to exert the integrative influence expected of them: they failed "to exercise a therapeutic effect on the social and personal problems of city dwellers." (F. Pfei1).⁷

In the sixties urban research in West Germany took several new directions. This is manifest clearly, for example, by the powerful influence of H. P. B ahrdt who discarded the conservative goal of "total integration" and replaced it with the idea of "partial integration" as better suited to modern Western ideals. Opposed to neighborhood ideologies that "want to deprive cities precisely of what makes a city be a city," he not only approved of urbanization in general, but regarded as the best way of reviving settlements to extend the "still rudimentary urban way of life in the throes of emerging," and to further "urbanize" the big cities. Rejecting both the biological analogies of organistic ideas so fashionable after the war and the unphilosophical empiricism of Gemeindesoziologie, Bahrdt reaffirmed the role of "abstract thoughts," declaring that "the basic concepts of urban planning . . . must be defined by philosophy, social anthropology, sociology and economics." In this regard, he went beyond exploring the specifically local implications of the social processes taking place in the urban environment and raised the question of the dynamic interrelation between definite social states and definite urban structures. In this way, Bahrdt's work is a transition between Gemeinde-research and the "sociology of urban construction" (Soziologie des Stadtebaus).⁸

In the final analysis, the new questions were raised by the problems of a new phase in urban development and in West German society as a whole. No doubt West German post-war reconstruction managed to alleviate the acute quantitative housing shortage. Yet in terms of global society it caused such grave and multiple malfunctions as to elicit massive, almost nationwide unrest. (This kind of urban criticism reached its peak in 1977.) Bah rdt was one of the first thinkers to realize the new negative consequences of urban development after the war, and in terms of quality considered reconstruction a definite failure of the whole West German society.

Let us at least note the main symptoms⁹ which increasingly alarmed the public in the sixties and seventies. After the war, the gaps caused by the war destruction in the old infrastructural pattern were filled in. These constructions were determined by the size and ownership of the building sites.

Soon, however, in West Germany inner city development was relegated to the background, giving way to tendencies of massive agglomeration. In particular in the period between the mid-fifties and the late sixties huge housing estates mushroomed on the outskirts of cities: virtual "subcities" cropped up in quick succession. At the same time, masses of the population began to swarm more and more to the outlying suburbs.

Both forms of housing developments (especially the suburban type) are diffuse and land-intensive. The sprawl of cities led to a sharp drop in the number of improved building sites and posed a major threat to the vigorously expanding "leisure-industry" which required vast areas. All this pushed up land prices and rents, and precipitated land speculation.

To compound the problem, neighborhoods with different functions were separated territorially as well, or the territorial sectors of a town became "monofunctional." Especially conspicuous was the split between the city center and the residential areas. While the latter became purely "living-or bed-towns" devoid almost of all productive and even of commercial functions, the allegedly "superior" forms of efficiently utilizing the sites in the city centers squeezed out the residential apartments, sectors of commerce, etc., as is spectacularly shown by the difference in the day and night population. As city life continued to be "center-oriented" after the war the gravitation towards the center even increased. As public transportation failed to cope with the related requirements of sprawling settlements, the above processes were paralleled by a mass spread of the private cars. All this led to a chronic crisis, and occasional "collapse," of traffic in (big) cities.

Thus, when Bahrdt took seriously the widely held view that modern urban development must be "man-centered" he could not but conclude that the West German cities and apartment living "did not satisfy the needs of urban job holders." In accordance with his general urban theory, Bahrdt stressed the problems caused by the disruption of the former equilibrium between the two vitally important spheres of urban life, the private and the public on the one hand, appropriate forms of the public sphere either were distorted or failed to emerge both in neighborhoods and in city centers while, on the other hand, excessive privatization was taking place as city dwellers locked themselves up in their privacy and became centrally concerned with how more efficiently to consume leisure time.

For this reason Ba hrdt turned against the program of "loosening up and articulating" the settlement structures. On the one hand, he says: "the sub-units of an urban social organization experienced collectively cannot be arbitrarily small, as below a certain magnitude the urban character is lost." On the other hand, to follow out his train of thought, no city center can be arbitrarily busy either, as too heavy traffic might destroy the preconditions of the specific forms of publicity: "the multifuctional character on a perceptible scale." The public sphere of a given district should not be "integrated" to any arbitrary extent, because that might jeopardize the independence of the private sphere and reduce man to "rural" and "feudal" conditions. Nor can a settlement be wholly inarticulated or unplanned for Bahrdt would claim that the loss of the "clarity" or "transparency" of a district--features postulated by Konig--contributed largely to the decline of publicity."

For Bahrdt, the right proportions and appropriately chosen scale are of paramount importance. Carefully weighing the advantages and disadvantages, he tries to find a constructive compromise amidst the antinomies of West German urban development. His general goal is "to restore with architectural measures the public or communal sphere of the city," and the healthy correlation between the private and the public.

The critical writings on urbanism by A. Mitscherlich, a renowned social psychologist from Frankfurt, though falling short of Bahrdt's in subtlety of analysis, also caused extensive repercussions. Modern urbanism, he claims, could not keep pace with the biological and technical processes of the growth and concentration respectively of the population. The city, once the cradle of civil rights, produced such incredible disasters as wars, unemployment and Nazism in our century. The intimacy of human relations withered in the cities of a "technocratic mass society" as interpersonal communication was replaced by anonymous transmissions. All the efforts of urban planners reveal a shocking ignorance of genuine human needs. The "unfriendliness" and monotony of modern cities result in the political alienation of the population and their emotional exodus from the urban universe. In metropolises troubled souls become drug addicts and the sub-cultures of crime flourish. Therefore, Mitscherlich opines, the task is to create "eubiotic" environmental forms that may provide the minimal biological and psychological conditions in order for socialization to be effective in an urban context.

Mitsc herlich's Frankfurt circle inspired the efforts of H. Berndt, A. Lorenzer and K. Horn, who tried to identify the social and psychological contents of modern architecture. Heide Berndt first used the phrase which probably most aptly sums up the criticism made by West German urbanists since the early sixties, namely that the modern city has "lost its urban character." (Verlust von Urbanitat im Studtebau.) Although the writings of the above three authors, especially the sections on the history of ideologies, afford several remarkable observations, their final conclusion is quite moderate: namely, as the monofunctional development of different urban sectors unfavorably influences the interpersonal behavior of people, the architectural and aesthetic axioms of urban planning must be renewed; and the way to do this is by "experimenting."

Let us now examine how the trend of Bahardt understands the causes underlying the above-mentioned symptoms and the concrete ways to correct urban development. Mitscherlich sees the cities as political formations; Bahrdt, too, intends his books as "political brochures" in his attacks on the anomalies of post-war urbanization. The central concern of both is the alarming dramatic decline in the weight of local (communal) politics. In their view this resulted in personages and groups (e.g., building contractors) with great influence in the development of a city being driven by an "undiminished egoism," since this no longer is curbed by the responsibility of the "citizen." They do more, however, than merely expose and condemn individual profiteering and the grave social consequences of privately owned land and housing for the majority of the inhabitants of a town.

They also formulate a more general judgment: "If there is a point where the free market economy has failed," Mitscherlich writes, "it is the reconstruction of our cities." In analyzing the limitations of liberal housing, Bahr dt even draws attention to the (relative) backwardness of the West German building industry, which in fact had more than an insignificant role in perpetuating the problem. Yet both conclude that the failure of reconstruction could have been avoided "simply by more intelligence and better nerves," that the resulting crisis even could be altered subsequently "with some courage and consideration."

In our opinion however, this demand for a political interpretation of West German urban development stopped with the mere acknowledgement of the influence of certain politically relevant ideologies. Besides the direct effects of conservative anti-urbanism, Bahrdt emphasizes as ideological attitudes "restorative liberalism" and the "apolitical technicism" of technocratic urban planning. At the same time, however, he points out--partly under the influence of the so-called "decline of ideologies"--that by the sixties the former comprehensive, "history-making" ideologies had disintegrated, their distorted vestiges living on as "quasi-taboos" which continued to exert their influence in various eclectic admixtures. Bahrdt's main achievement was to explore with considerable objectivity the practical impact of the major ideological factors in effect during the first two decades of urban development in the Federal Republic of Germany. He discarded their extremes, synthesized in a subtle and well-balanced theory those elements of the questions which had been formulated and the proposed solutions which he considered still rational and summarized his conclusions in a program for urban architecture. Most significantly, Bahrdt regarded the cooperation among the scientific disciplines concerned with studying various processes of urbanization to be the main tool in bridging the gap between theory and practice and in solving the problems.

Thus, through the sixties the criticism of the negative features of modern urbanization was carried out of place in the works of the above-mentioned authors--with shifting emphases, of course--mainly in terms of ideological criticism. As such, it often stressed highly interesting and comparatively progressive viewpoints. In essentials, however, this critical line did not go beyond the theoretical postulates of the contemporary interpretations of modern urban development but merely relativity their theses one against the other. Progress in this respect picked up momentum at the very end of the sixties and mostly from the beginning of the seventies when several representatives of a quite radical new-left criticism of capitalist urbanization came to a progressive realization of the significance for social sciences of the city as the "medium of exploitation". Viewed from this angle, the tendencies of ideological criticism deriving from Bahrdt appear as ultimately rather "affirmative" and promotive of the social and political status quo.¹⁰

If reconstruction diverted West German urbanization in a problematic direction, the question as to who had set the false direction should be answered. Bahrdt and his colleagues had at least raised the question of the ideological responsibility of the immediate protagonists of these developmental processes (architects, urban planners, building contractors, real estate owners, etc.). What is more, they also exposed in more or less concrete terms the historical origin and social value-orientation of the ideologies analyzed and giving expression to the "awakened sense of justice" of contemporary German scholarship. At the same time, however, they unwittingly hindered the exploration of the deeper components of West German urbanization by channeling the public discontent in a definite direction.

Their analysis of urban development form the point of view of ideological criticism has its defects. Though the apartments, houses and neighborhoods can in some way be conceived as embodiments of ideologies and, though the urban environment, as influencing ideologies, ideological content is not to be comprehended not by analyzing the "urbanists' conception of society" (as the title of Berndt's book suggests) in the first place. Wedged more and more firmly between the socio-political and aesthetic convictions of the urbanists and the actual development of the urban environment is the increasing influence of social interest groups, bureaucratic structures and technical constraints. The ideological factors which most effectively modify development are institutionalized in the guiding principles of the central housing and urban policies, the law concerning groundplots and the taxation system. On can reveal these often hidden contents only gradually, through ideological criticism of the complex process of urban planning. True, Ba hrdt and Mi tscherlich also take notice of the state's role, expecting it to have more courage to intervene firmly and introduce "social legislation." But they fail to conceptualize the state as the theoretical and practical representatives of distinct social interests.

Actually, in the fifties and sixties the West German state's housing and urban policies played an active role in several regards in the spread of the negative consequences of modern urbanization. This policy turned into an official program those elements of reform ideologies (suburban movement, neighborhood communities, Charter of Athens) which tended to "slacken and articulate" the settlement structures. Most of these reform ideologies, however, which never gained mass influence in Germany before the post-war period, were originally devised to solve the problems raised chiefly by conservative urban criticism. Further, if we realize that a market economy regulated exclusively by the mechanism of free competition often entails dysfunctional consequences in urbanization and housing, then we must also note that it was none other than the state's housing policy which in 1960 radically "reliberalized" the West German housing market--in spite of itself, as it were.

It is also important that, following from the above, the state had given priority to the building of freehold family houses from 1956 onward: nearly 50% of new homes belonged to this category from the end of the fifties. In West Germany a whole system of prejudices and illusions, a real "home-of-your-own ideology" (Eigenheimideologie) evolved around this form of housing and property and influenced the mentality of millions of people.¹¹ This conception, whose early advocates had already been sharply attacked by Engels, was severely criticized because of its integrative function by M. Kallm unzer in 1971. In point of fact, she stresses, the "home-of-your-own ideology" legitimated the capitalist system of production by making attractive values and ideas which harmonized with the theory of the "social market economy" (soziale Marktwirtschaft), the basic socio-economic conception of the Christian Democrats. The doctrine of the social market economy connected with A. Muller-Armack and L. Erha rd blends various, mostly neo-liberal ideas, as well as Christian social concepts of property and personality, most suitably implemented through the "own-family-house" as a specific and particularly popular form of private property.

The notion of the "house-of-your-own" expressed and fostered the belief that no free and autonomous personality or social security could be imagined without some form of private property as its basis. This served as a frame of reference for the so-called performance-ideologies which sought to legitimize the hierarchic structure of West German society according to the difference in performance and social usefulness of individuals (the private home featuring as the measure and reward of personal effort). Also, it laid the ideational ground for the government's social policy which attempted to encourage the "formation of property" on a mass scale by "redistributing" some of the social wealth.

In the sixties however, most urban researchers had started from the urban processes' dysfunctional consequences which were obvious at the level of everyday experience. As a corollary to the fact that critical attention came slowly to be focussed on the role of the "monofunctionality" of certain urban sectors in the loss of their "urban character," these dysfunctional phenomena were, paradoxically enough widely attributed to the onesidedness of architectural functionalism and to the functionalist-structuralist trends in urban sociology (summed up in 1968 by Schmidt-Rehlenberg), on which technocratic urban planning heavily relied. However, as they failed to comprehend the general nature¹² of the West German state's housing and urban policy in this period, they did not raise the question whether the long delay in solving the West German urban problems was only accidental or ideologically postulated, whether the criticized dysfunctions were not actually "functional" in terms of some covert but comprehensive social interests.

Such questions, of course, cannot be raised and even less answered correctly, if the researcher forgoes the dimension of social totality or excludes economic factors from the interpretation of that totality. The major historical types of urban development and the successive socio-economic formations seem substantially related to one another. A deeper insight into urban development in West Germany could be obtained only by studying it more or less consistently as capitalist urban development, taking a systematic account of the complex economic mechanisms this implied.¹³ Such an approach reveals that the symptoms of the modern urban crisis are the spontaneous negative outcomes of often rival economic strategies expressing various interests of power and profit, which can be tolerated by the ruling interests for some time.

This is what accounts for the odd fact that, although the symptoms of crisis generated mass unrest and although Bahrdt, for instance, admittedly wanted only to create optimal environmental forms for the status quo, he failed to translate into practice even his seemingly most obvious and feasible urbanist ideas. Generally speaking, it was impossible to restore both the ideal neighborhood communities and the harmony of the "private" and "public" in urban life. Typically enough, Mitscherlich thought that no one but an enemy of his would demand of him more than a critique. Nor could other authors put forth comprehensive, but at the same time concrete and practical proposals to solve the urban crisis. Yet proposals were not wanting in quantity. What is more, the practical response to some of them also gained strength (somewhat surprisingly) from the end of the sixties.

A series of theories proposed in the footsteps of Bahrdt and Berndt have favored the preservation of restoration of the urban character of cities.¹⁴ They no longer belonged to the clearly progressive endeavors of West German urbanology in the seventies. Yet, besides their quite wide-ranging impact, they were noteworthy because they expressed international tendencies. They were linked not only with certain American views (J. Jacobs), but also with some elements of the earlier work of H. Lefebvre. Their arguments adduced in defence of the "urban character" used mostly a rather obscure terminology indicative of uncertainty as to content.

"Man continues to remain in the center and when this type of urbanology wishes to assert its claim to scholarship it consciously draws on a philosophical anthropology. But it is a "negative anthropology" for lack of an acceptable image of man. It assigns major significance again to the city as a form of human self-representation, but acknowledges that the existing order is no longer generally acceptable. Thus, the social content to be expressed has ceased to be unambiguous. These authors claim that what urbanology could do--note how necessity turns into virtue--is to recognize this "openness" of urban development and ensure cooperation among all the scientific disciplines concerned with urban research in order to alleviate some strictly delimited partial problems.

Of the latter, the clearly demonstrable alienating effect of the architectural environment is stressed above all. In the view of these urbanists, the deterioration of the city-dwellers' intercommunication and their decreasing ability to identify with their surroundings leads indifference to public life and growth in the dangers of conformism and manipulation. Since, however, their horizon is the determinative implications of social production, at best they attribute the problems of urban residents to certain specifically urban conditions of labor. Some "comprehensive" but unfeasible conceptions envisage the solution in radically reuniting urban functions which have become spatially separated over the past decades (G. Su ter). The majority, however, hope to eliminate "alienation" by improving "communication" through typically urban means.

One of the central categories of urban research in West Germany is public life. C. H eil proposes developing the critical forms of urban public life in pedagogical-political ways. In most cases, however, after divesting this of its political dimension what remains is the various forms of "everyday public life" which, in turn, blend into the everyday forms of communication. H. Gla ser proposes only aesthetic and psychological approaches to modifying man's relation to this environment. He would do this by creating in the given "one-dimensional" urban milieu "ecological playgrounds" which encourage more "encounters", "relations" and "interactions" among the people in order to "orientate" and "socialize" them. These urbanistic counter-places (Gegenorte) are realized in the quite prosaic forms of no-car zones, walking malls, etc., which really do help to mitigate the dreariness of downtowns.

In the final analysis, however, the defence of the "urban character" are often unwitting protagonists of gradually more and more deliberate economic and power interests. They gained ground rapidly after the SPD-FDP coalition came to power in 1969, because its new urban and housing policy (Stadtebauforderungsgesetz, 1971) included some conclusions of the urban debates of the sixties.

The considerable rise in the activity of various state and local agencies in the field of regional and urban planning, however, is not attributable only to the arguments of the urbanists. Politics had to face up to the specific social tensions and the increasing demand of a part of the population for participation in urban politics rooted in urban problems. Above all, as the possibilities of private capital significantly changed in West Germany over the second half of the sixties (note, for example, the economic recession of 1966-67), the creation of new, up-to-date infrastructural conditions for the accumulation of capital in urbanization and transportation, as earlier in education and research, could no longer be put off. Obviously, private capital is interested in a problem-free supply of labor and the appeal of the "high value of leisure" in a truly urbanized environment is an important element in the rivalry for highly qualified labor.

Last but not least, one must remember the outstanding traditional role of towns, cities and their centers in the turnover of consumer goods. Of course, there have been significant changes in this respect as well over the past decades due to the rising importance of the mass media as channels of advertisement and the spread of such new commercial forms as, e.g., suburban shopping centers, mail order houses, etc. Nevertheless, private capital has important vested interests in preserving (or restoring) the city centers "remaining urban functions which cannot be taken over by other media" (Gu de). Visitors to city centers are first and foremost consumers who are offered, in addition to such specific shopping possibilities as more department stores and elegant boutiques, some extravagances as well. Sometimes these include the historic atmosphere of a set of old monuments and mainly high-class restaurants, cafes and bars, and a variety of shows, concert houses and theatres. A city center whose specific atmosphere makes "shopping a pleasure" is not simply a place for consumption: it is also characterized by "the consumption of the place," to use Lefebvre's words.

In recent years profit strategies have changed and the urban significance of the third sector of the capitalist economy has increased considerably. This has made it both necessary and possible for the changes sketched above to take place gradually, without affecting the basic system of production. Unwittingly or not, enthusiastic reference to the cities' "urban character" and undiscriminatory allusions to the unquestioned significance of urban development in civilization and the complex of "urban virtues" sometimes endows this very trend with progressive features.

Institute of Philosophy

Hungarian Academy of Science

Budapest, Hungary

1. H. K orte, Soziologie der Stadt (Munich: Juventa Verlag, 1972); and H. Be rndt, Das Gesellschaftsbild bei Stadtplanern (Stuttgart: Kramer Verlag, 1968), provide thorough studies of this point.

2. Between 1950 and 1970 this trend produced about 55 publications, among which: R. K onig, Grundformen der Gesellschaft (Hamburg: Die Gemeinde, 1958) and "Einige Bemerkungen zur Sociologie der Gemeinde," Kolner Zeitschrift fur Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Sonderheft 1, 1962; H. K otter, "Die Gemeinde in der landlichen Soziologie," Kolner Zeitschrift, and Kotter/Krekeler, "Zur Sociologie der Stadt-Land Beziehunger," Handbuch der empirischen Sozialforschung (Bd. 10), (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1977); etc. In the field of research on the Gemeinde, we used the following works: Adorno/Horkh eimer, "Gemeindestudien," in Soziologische Exkurse, by the same authors (Frankfurt/Koln: 1974); R. Zoll, Gemeinde als Alibi. Materialien zur politischen Soziologie der Gemeinde (Munich: 1972); H.-L. Siew ert, "Ansatze und Konzepte innerhalb der Gemeindesoziologie," in H.-G. Weh ling, ed., Kommunalpolitik (Hamburg: 1975).

3. See: E. Pfei l, "Soziologie der GroBstadt," in Gehlen/Schelsky, Soziologie (Dusseldorf: Diederichs Verlag, 1955); E. Pfeil, "Nachbarkreis und Verkehrskreis in der GroBstadt," in Mackensen, ed., Daseinformen in der GroBstadt (Tubingen: 1955). See also H. P. B ahrdt, Die Moderne Grossstadt, Soziologische Uberlegungen zum Stadtebau (Rowohlt: 1961).

4. The Athens Charter is an important document of functionalism in architecture. It was accepted at the congress of the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1933 and had great influence on town-planning after the Second World War. The relationship of the trends and their influence in West Germany are dealt with by: K. Z apf, Ruckstandige Viertel (Frankfurt/M.: 1969), pp. 18-33; M. Kal lmunzer, "Zur Kritik der Eigenheimideologie," manuscript (Munich, 1971), pp. 57-68; H. Berndt, pp. 35-72. Useful information on problems and trends in modern urbanism can be found in: F. Cho y, L'urbanisme: Utopies et realites, une anthologie (Paris: Seuil, 1975); I. Pe renyi, The Modern City (Budapest: Technical Publishing House, 1967); Modern Encyclopedia on Architecture (Budapest: Technical Publishing House, 1978).

5. Essential references here include; Gode ritz, Ra iner, Hof fmann, Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt (Tubingen: Wasmuth, 1957), and S. Gie dion, Architektur und Gemeinschaft (Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag, 1956). For criticism of this trend see E. Ba uer, "Integration als Wunsch und Wert in der Soziologie der Stadt, Versuch einer Ideologiekritik, in Soziologie der Stadt.

6. See: Programme und Manifeste zur Architktur des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zusammengestellt und kommentiert von U. Conr ads, (Frankfurt: Verlag Ullstein, 1964), pp. 28 and 59, and I. Rosows "Die Sozialen Wirkungen der physisohen Umwelt (1958)," in Materialien zur Siedlungssoziologie; G. Ribei ll: "Elements pour une approche gramscienne du cadre de vie," Espaces et Societes (1975); K. Zapf, pp. 18-21.

7. E. P feil, Grosstadt-Forschung (Hannover: Janecke Verlag, 1972), pp. 343-348; H. Klages, Der Nachbarschaftsgedanke und die nachbarlche Wirklichkeit in der Grossstadt (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1958); H. B. Bah rdt, Humaner Stadtebau (Munchen: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1973 (first edition, 1967), pp. 95-111.

8. Bahrdt, Die moderne Grossstadt, and Humaner Stadtebau, and excerpts from works by Bahrdt in: Varosszociologia (Budapest: The Publishing House of Economy and Law, 1973); A. M itscherlich, Die Unwirtlichkeit unserer Studte. Anstiftung zu Unfrieden (Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1967); A. Mitscherlich, Thesen zur Stadt der Zukunft (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971); B erndt/Lorenzer/Horn, Architekture als Ideologie (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968); H. Be rndt, "Der Verlust von Urbanitat im StadtBbau", Das Argument (1967/4); H. Berndt, Das Gesellschaftsbild bei Stadtplanern.

9. Aspects on the subject: T. Tot h, "Problems of Urbanism in the Developed Capitalist Countries," Vilagossag (1977/12).

10. In connection with this the following materials were used: H. C. He lms, Die Stadt--Medium der Ausbeutung. Historische Perspektiven des Stadtebaus, and studies by L. Buck hardt, H. C. Kirch enmann and P. Nei tzke in Kapitalistischer Stadtebau, ed. Helms/Jansen (Berlin: Luchterhand Verlag, 1970); the analyses by H. K orte, E. Ba uer and Br ake/Gerlach in the Soziologie der Stadt cited earlier.

11. The question is analyzed in a highly interesting manner by Kall munzer, op. cit.

12. As many have pointed out, the main aim of the housing policy of the CDU-CSU can be summarized as follows: to restore a purely capitalist organization of housing management; as a corollary to gain the support of the people by promoting the idea of the private homes; and to use housing policy as an instrument of employment and business cycle policies.

13. E.g., S. Bie rmann, "Stadt und Stadtplanung, Ein Ansatz zu einer sozialwissenschaftlichen Theorie" (xeroxed diploma thesis) (Munchen, 1971); the authors of "Kapitalistischer Standtebau," Soziologie der Stadt and Kursbuch, no. 27, as well as M. Kallmunzer, op. cit. However, the representatives of this trend fail to match their comprehensive analysis and criticism of West German urban development with the outlines of an alternative urban program.

14. These endeavors are aptly illustrated by the studies of Urbanistik, Neue Aspekte der Stadtentwicklung, hrsg. von H. Glaser (Munchen: Verlag C. H. Beck, 1974), and C. Hei l, Kommunikation und Entfremdung (Stuttgart: Kramer Verlag, 1971). Cf. also: C. Su ter, Die grossen Stadte (Bergisch Gladbach: G. Lubbe Verlag, 1966). For a criticism of these views see: H. Linde, "Urbanitat" in Handworterbuch der Raumforschung und der Raumordnung (Hannover: Janecke Verlag, 1970); S. Gu de, "Wirtschaftsentwicklung, Infrastrukturpolitik und Stadtplanung," in Soziologie der Stadt, S. Gude, "Der Bedeutungswandel der Stadt als politische Finheit" in Zur Politisierung der Stadtplanung (Dusseldorf: Bertelsmann Verlag, 1971); R. B auer, "Stadt und Regionalplanung, I," Neue Politische Literatur (1976/1); M. Kallmunzer, pp. 168-182; and P. Pete rs, A varos az emberert [Town for Man] (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), pp. 63-73.

*Only the most essential references are given here.