National Academies Press: OpenBook
« Previous: OVERVIEWS
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 31
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 32
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 33
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 34
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 35
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 36
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 37
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 38
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 39
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 40
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 41
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 42
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 43
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 44
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 45
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 46
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 47
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 48
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 49
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 50
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 51
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 52
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 53
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 54
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 55
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 56
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 57
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 58
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 59
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 60
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 61
Suggested Citation:"METHODOLOGIES." National Academy of Engineering. 1969. Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/18468.
×
Page 62

Below is the uncorrected machine-read text of this chapter, intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text of each book. Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.

SOCIAL AND POLITICAL REALITIES IN THE CITY John A. Buggs It is important, at the very beginning, to indicate to you that in talking about social and political realities of the city, I am not sure that either I or very many other people know what they all are. I have not come to perpetrate a fraud on you by suggesting that I am familiar with all of them. What I am not here to do is best illustrated, perhaps, by the story of a man who was stepping down off a curb in order to cross a very busy intersection. He was very lightly brushed by an automobile; and he immediately looked around and saw that the car was being driven by a very opulent-looking man, and that the automobile was a Rolls Royce. So like any red-blooded, quick-thinking American citi/en, he collapsed to the pavement. An ambulance came and took him to the hospital. He stated that he had been struck in a vital spot and was unable to move. He stayed in the hospital six months, and was examined by all kinds of physicians. In due course he instituted suit in the amount of a million dollars against that opulent-looking man who had allegedly struck him. When the case came to trial, the plaintiff was wheeled into the courtroom on his stretcher, still unable to move. Evidence was presented by the defense to the effect that the plaintiff had been examined immediately after the alleged accident; that no one could find any place on his body at which he had even been touched by the automobile, let alone severely injured. But here before the court was a man who had lain immobile for six months. So, the court found in his behalf, and granted him a judgment of a million dollars. The man went home, where an insurance adjuster called on him. The adjuster threw a million dollar check on the man's chest and said, "I have been assigned to stay with you for the rest of your life. And if you ever get out of bed and attempt to spend any of this money, you are going back to court to be charged with fraud and misrepresenta- tion." Whereupon the man replied, "Well, if you are married, you had better call your wife and tell her to pack your things, because in about an hour an ambulance is coming for me, and they are going to put me on a plane and fly me to Paris. In Paris, I will be met by another ambulance, and it will take me to the little town of Lourdes. And when I get there, you are going to see the damndest miracle you ever saw. . .." How I wish that the social and political realities of the city could be taken to Lourdes! But they cannot; and we have to deal with them in a nonmiraculous way, I am afraid. The greatest achievement of man, in the twentieth century, is megalopolis. It is not the invention of any one person, or of any one group, but rather a weaving together of all the various strands of modern technological achieve- ment-the breakthroughs in mass communications, trans- portation, and construction-into a sprawling, complex entity that shapes the daily lives of all of us, and within whose booming, buzzing confusion we all increasingly live our lives and find our destinies. At its best, it is a magnificent thing. Never before in the history of man have such riches been spread at the feet of us all. For the first time in human history, a society can provide food, clothing, and comfort for every citizen and make available the great storehouses of music, drama, and art to every man and his family. It can provide recreation, excitement, and meaningful leisure for everyone. With a semblance of ease, you engineers, scientists, and planners have annihilated the gaps of time, space, and communication that formerly cut us off from one another and confined us to live in a rather narrow orbit. Or so, at least, we like to think. We rejoice in the splendid buildings-public and private-that line our avenues; and we delight in the cultural and recreational facilities that have been built for us. Even though we grumble at them, we use the freeways, and our cars transport us swiftly in whatever direction we wish to go. Is this the reality of the city? Or is there another city-unseen, hidden away-that belies our technology and our grandiose schemes, a city within whose confines life at 31

its fullest is not possible; a mean, crabbed city, whose daily deprivations mock at all our concepts of the good life? This we know: In the midst of plenty we are confronted by problems of hard-core poverty, by a mass of citizens for whom poverty is not an accident of economic stress but a way of life. Despite the greatest educational apparatus known, we must still deal with the functional illiterate and the culturally starved. We have in our midst a growing number of people who are technologically unem- ployable-men and women who cannot handle the simplest machines, but for whom there is no longer any fruitful work, since we less and less employ human beings as machines. And tucked behind our avenues, and along our freeways, and amid our factories are the shacks and the hovels of the poor. In our central cities are the ghettos to which we relegate those to whom the dominant group in our society has denied the choice of living space. Every major city of our nation is plagued by the problems of urban blight-spiritual as well as physical-and by death and decay at its core. Until we face these basic realities of urban life, all our efforts must be in vain; and all our window-dressing becomes the garlanding of an empty shell. Just as our democracy promises freedom and equality for all men, so must our cities make the good life a reality for all men. Otherwise, our cities have no reason for being, and must in time wither, as did some of the great cities of the past. Stewart Alsop, in 1965, said that a kind of "outcast society" had been created in our cities. Harrington called it the "Other America," and with good reason, because it is quite different from normal American society, this "Other America." This "outcast society" is being perpetuated, and is even being made quasi-hereditary, because, as Harrington says, the children of this "Other America" are not being equipped, either by experience or by education, to escape from their "outcast" condition into the normal currents of American life. Why is this true? In 1962, a little over seven years ago, Charles Silberman, writing in FORTUNE, had this to say about why this is true. I should like to read several paragraphs, because I do not know that anyone could have said it better. At the outset, Silberman quotes Paul N. Ylvisaker, then of the Ford Foundation, who at the time had observed: The approved way to talk about cities these days is to speak solemnly, sadly, ominously, and fearfully about their problems. You don't rate as an expert on the city unless you foresee its doom. Silberman then continues: Doom is easy to foresee in the spreading slums, the increasing crime rates, the public disaffection of almost every large city. And yet the city can survive, as it has survived for a century and a half. Indeed, American cities today have a chance to achieve their greatest success and their greatest glory. For this to happen, however, city planners and civic leaders will have to understand better than they do now what their cities' greatest problem is. It is not, as so many assume, to bring the wandering middle class back from the suburbs. The large city, as Jane Jacobs in ARCHITECTURAL FORUM has put it, cannot import a middle class; it must manufacture its own. And, indeed, most of the huge middle class that dominates American life today was manufactured in the big-city slums of yesteryear. Cities always have had to create their own stable, cultivated citizenry out of whatever raw material lay at hand. For the American city during the past 150 years, the raw material was the stream of immigrants pouring in from Britain, Ireland, Germany, Norway, Russia, Italy, and a dozen other lands. The city needed these immigrants to build its streets and offices, to man its factories, service its homes and hotels and restaurants, and do all the dirty and menial jobs that older residents disdained. But the city did more than use its newcomers; it equipped them to take their place as fully participating members of U.S. society. Doing this-bringing people from society's backwaters into the mainstream of American life-has always been the principal business, the principal glory, of the American city. It isn't any longer; the city is in trouble today because it isn't dealing successfully with its newcomers. They are still pouring in-not from County Cork, or Bavaria, or Sicily, or Galicia, but from Jackson, Mississippi, and Memphis, Tennessee, and a host of towns and hamlets with names like Sunflower, Rolling Fork, and Dyersburg. The new immigrants are distinguished from the older residents not by religion or national origin, but by color. Between 1950 and 1960 the twelve largest U.S. cities lost over two million white residents; they gained nearly two million Negro residents. It is the explosive growth of their Negro populations, in fact, that constitutes the large cities' principal problem and concern. When city officials talk about spreading slums, they are talking in the main about physical deterioration of the areas inhabited by Negroes. And when they talk about juvenile delinquency, or the burden of welfare payments, or any of a long list of city problems, officials are talking principally about the problems of Negro adjustment to city life. For the large city is not absorbing and "urbanizing" its new Negro residents rapidly enough; its slums are no longer acting as the incubator of a new middle class. One reason for this failure is that city planners have been more interested in upgrading the value of the city's real estate than in upgrading the lives of the human beings who inhabit the real estate. They have tried to create middle-class neighborhoods by driving lower-class Negro residents out of the neighborhoods being renewed, and bringing white middle-class residents in; 32

Negroes bitterly refer to urban renewal as "Negro removal."* The effort is doomed to failure. Driving the Negroes out of one area merely creates a new and frequently worse slum somewhere else in the city. The city can be saved only if it faces up to the fact that "the urban problem" is in large measure a Negro problem. But the Negro problem is more than just an urban problem; it is also the problem of all the U.S. rural or urban, North or South-though it is in the large northern cities that the solution is most likely. That last point is one on which Silberman and I have disagreement. I tend to think that it will be perhaps in the large southern cities that the problem will most likely be solved first. He is saying, in effect, that delinquency of all kinds is to some extent a function of social class, social values, and the environmental situation in which people find them- selves. And he is saying that if environment can change, social values have a better chance to undergo a change. But a decent physical environment, although it is desirable, will not in and of itself stimulate significant changes in social values, particularly if-as is true in some public housing and urban redevelopment projects-that better environment is surrounded by dilapidated slum areas, and if the people inhabiting the "new" environment are of the same class and the same race and holding essentially the same social values. The city, in short, is not serving its historical function, because it has undergone a qualitative change. It is no longer merely a larger version of the traditional city, but a new and different form of human settlement. A major characteristic of this city, which may be referred to as a megalopolis, is low-density development, a phenomenon that has been going on for the past 30 to 35 years, which is encouraged by a lack of popular support for an attack on the problems of the causes and of the region as an entity. The growth of suburbia speeds up the decline of the city. Slums grow faster than they can be cleared. This is true even in New York City, which has the largest slum-clearance program in the nation. It is true because, as a result of slum clearance and the construction of public housing, the tax base is lowered; services are curtailed because the tax base is lowered; deterioration is speeded up; and the cycle is continued. Our cities today, the central cities, are being left without children, except minority group children. In most major cities the percentage of Negro children in schools far exceeds their percentage in the general population. White families that can afford to do so are moving to the suburbs *An estimated 80 percent of the families relocated by urban renewal projects have been Negro. or sending their children to private schools. The federal government has not been bereft of its input into some of the problems that our cities now have. The political decisions and actions of the federal govern- ment have contributed substantially to the decline of the city. The FHA is workable primarily in low-cost land areas, and is not viable, really, in the high-cost areas of the city. Public housing has rejected all those whose incomes exceeded a prescribed limit. This, coupled with what was and still is in many areas a deliberate program of segregation, has created in many places an environment lacking all the positive attributes of urban life. The fact that more and more Negroes, Mexican- Americans, and Puerto Ricans inhabit the central city has resulted in public housing being primarily an area of low-income minority-group families. Dispersal of the urban population has not come about solely as a result of a free and open market. Government has induced people to buy in the suburbs, through FHA and VA loan guarantees. It has also provided subsidies for conventional loans for suburban development, by insuring investments in savings and loan institutions that must be invested in home mortgages. Public housing itself has been a prisoner of its opponents, who have largely determined its character. Locating public housing in the inner city has contributed to keeping lower-income families in the city and has strength- ened the patterns of segregation, while another arm of the same government has financed housing for the elderly, in suburban areas. One might ask, "Why is this not the case with public housing?" Suburban housing is going up now. However, we can still alter the site selection policies that crystallize public housing in our central cities. Other federal subsidies have helped the decline of the inner city, also. Subsidies, and the mechanization of agriculture, have pushed black people, poor white people, and Mexican-Americans off the farms and into the cities. The late Catherine Bauer pointed out that the desire of the New Deal was to do something about that one-third of the nation that was "ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed"; and that the efforts to do this resulted in a standardized, one-age group, one-color district, devoted wholly to residents. She said, however, that this was not the result of any conscious overall plan or public decision to encourage maximum social segregation. It came about, she felt, as a side result of forces and policies employed for quite different and often distinctly progressive and idealistic ends. I somehow doubt that. If you look at a little book entitled How the Federal Government Has Helped Create 33

the Ghetto, you will discover that the FHA, in its manual, back in 1938, made it very clear to private builders that it would not view with great favor guarantees for loans on property that permitted a mixed character of ownership. Our metropolitan areas have become more and more fractionalized from the point of view of race, economic status, and to some extent, political affiliation. Politics, as almost anyone can see by reading the newspapers these days, is becoming structured along racial lines. One of the major objections to the "one-man, one- vote" dictum of the Supreme Court was related to the growing strength of the big-city black vote. Such a political schism is fast rendering state political processes almost immobile in some instances, unable to resolve community problems because of conflicting values of the core city (black) versus the surrounding suburbs (white). Here in Washington we have a problem of that nature. It has been going on for a long time. The debate of the Freeway, the Three Sisters Bridge, in which everyone living in the suburbs wants the Freeway, in order to get into Washington to work, but which the black people oppose. Their position is that "You will put 25,000 of us out of our homes, and you have made no plans-and we don't expect that you will-as to where we are going to go." It is a problem, I think, that is developing in many communities throughout this nation. In recent years the developing tensions have resulted in one of the most troubled periods in our history since the Civil War. Government at all levels appears to want to deal effectively with the problems highlighted by the events of our recent past; but it has not been very successful even in sustaining an initial commitment to do something, or in many cases even in making the initial commitment neces- sary to change our national and our local priorities, that would permit us to do something. For example, in the field of housing, in the Model Cities Program, in the Rent Supplement Program, in the new 235 and 236 Programs-all were funded below the authorized level; and the authorizations were generally well below the recommendations of the executive branch with respect to funding, so that the funding represented no change at all in our priorities and, to some extent, a withdrawal from priorities that had originally been set forth. And so, even when the objectives had been set, they have not really been realized. I don't know how many of us are aware that of the 810,000 public housing units allocated to be built in this nation between 1949 and 1955, only 460,000 were completed by 1967. Other kinds of priorities concern us, too. The govern- ment spends $564 million annually on commodities and food stamp programs, and we have recently been told of the widespread hunger that exists in many parts of this country; but $4.5 billion is invested on agricultural price supports, which means that we spend eight times as much making food scarce as we do in making it available to those who need it. That $4.5 billion goes largely into the hands of wealthy corporate farmers. We say that many of our social and political problems could be solved through education, housing, better health, and more jobs. But the Department of Defense each year spends more money than all of the federal, state, and local governments combined spend on education, housing, health, old age assistance, poverty programs, and manpower training. Based on hard evidence, the National Urban Coalition steering committee has unequivocally stated that $5 billion to $10 billion could be cut out of the Defense budget without injuring our ability to defend ourselves, and that this money could go into some of the kinds of programs that people in this nation need and want. The spread of the cities, the change in their relation- ship to their geographical surroundings, the growing fragmentation of local government, the competing needs for resources, the growing polarization of our citizenry- have all created the fearful reality that is today's city. Our first job, therefore, is the reordering of our priorities to meet the needs of the people. In this connection it "is interesting to note, from the recent NEWSWEEK special report on the white majority, entitled "Troubled America," that the priorities of the white middle-class people of this country are startlingly similar to those of the black people. They were more concerned about how their tax money was being spent than they were about the tax burden itself. They wanted more money spent on job training, medical care, fighting crime, improving schools, better housing-especially in the ghetto. These people wanted more money spent on these things than is spent on defense, space exploration, and foreign aid. But this alone will not solve our problem. All poor people-regardless of whether they are black, brown, or white-must feel that if this country is going to change, they have a real stake in helping it to change; and to help them, we must forge a partnership between elements that in this country have rarely worked together before. This is the whole purpose of the development of the coalition concept. Let me tell you what I mean by "getting people together." About a month ago I visited a relatively small, highly industrialized midwestern town that has a good urban coalition. And I saw something happening around the table in the board room of one of the largest companies in this country that frankly, as a little boy from Brunswick, Georgia, I never expected to see. 34

I saw the chairmen of five major corporations sitting around a table, and sitting at that table with them were four black people and two white people. Two of the black people were lawyers; one was a tool and die maker; and one was just an ordinary workingman who worked in one of the plants of one of the chairmen of the board sitting at that table, as did also two of the white people sitting there, regular lower middle-class individuals. The atmosphere was one of complete acceptability on the part of all the people sitting at that table, people who were calling each other by first names, and acting as though they were close friends, good friends, bound together in a commitment to do something about the problems of their city. Now you know, it really didn't matter very much to me whether the programs that coalition was involved in at that time were good or bad. The thing that impressed me was that the process taking place in that room was a process that I had never seen before, one involving people who had never worked together before in any way, people whom all of us, I think, must begin to emulate if the problem in our cities is going to be successfully attacked at all. It illustrated more than ever before that resources just aren't enough, that there are other things equally as important as the resources that we bring to bear upon the problems that we seek to solve. What this instance said to me was that for the first time, people are beginning to recognize that there are other needs that poor people and black people and brown people have. What I saw there was the fact that an opportunity was being extended by that community for people to have an ownership stake in that which they had always lived-their community-but which they could never before call their own. But there they were, making decisions about it. This gave them the feeling, I am sure, that there was a resurrection, or in some instances the birth of a belief that America held a promise for them; and that room was the place in which that promise was being fulfilled. It provided them with a real and a psychological relief from the chains that had bound them in anonymity because they owned nothing, because they could contribute little to their own progress or to that of their fellowman in the past; but now they were doing so. It gave them a handle that they could use to gain a feeling of equality with those who had been more fortunate than they. It gave them an incentive to sharpen their efforts, and to express their appreciation for living in a society of men. It provided them a vehicle through which they could be known as assets in their community. It gave them a role in determining their destiny and the destiny of the community of which they were a part. I think these are the real benefits that relieve the deep and hidden hunger of the people about whom we are concerned-the hunger for dignity, for respect, and for being viewed as real rather than as obscure people in the society of men. Howard Thurman was a chaplain at Boston University, and perhaps one of the greatest preachers of our century. He used to tell a story of what it means to be real It involved a nine-year-old boy, his mother, and his teen-aged sister, who went into a restaurant for dinner one Sunday. The waitress came around and took the mother's order and the teen-aged daughter's order, and then she said to the boy, "Young man, what will you have?" The mother started to give the order for the boy. The waitress chose not to hear the mother. Then the daughter started to give his order for him. The waitress didn't hear her, either. For the third time the waitress said, "Young man, what will you have?" He said, in a timid voice, "A hamburger, with lettuce and tomatoes." Then the waitress went back to the kitchen, and gave the mother's and the daughter's orders in a normal voice, and then in a loud voice said, "And the young man will have a hamburger with lettuce and tomatoes." The little fellow opened his eyes wide with wonder and joy and said, "Mama, she thinks I'm real!!" That is the problem, I think, that is to be faced today. If there is any one reason for the holocausts that have gripped this country in the last five years-and I am making no excuses for them, only interpreting them-it is because that was the only way some people felt they could make other people feel that they were real. Our job is to help them find a better way to do that. We are in the midst of a controversy as to whether our economic, our social, and our political systems are equal to meeting the needs of these trying times. The success of all our efforts depends, I think, on the extent to which ghetto people, poor people, and those people who particularly feel now that they are the forgotten Americans-the white middle class, the blue-collar white worker-believe that they are indeed part of the structure that makes the decisions that affect their lives and their destiny. They do not now believe this. Change, therefore, is the key word upon which the answer to our dilemma rests. The inertia against change is a natural human tendency, especially when that change challenges traditions and attitudes and threatens the struc- ture, and requires the sharing of power. That is really what people are saying: "Power has got to be shared." Change we must have, and I think we all know it. We must have it in the interest of peace and progress, or we may very well face the specter of chaos in our internal 35

social system. The city, and what happens to it and to its people in the next five years, will perhaps be America's real test of its ability to change in a systematic, orderly way. As engineers, your commitment is needed to this process, and your involvement in it is crucial to its success. The purpose for the Urban Coalition, the purpose for many such organizations today, is to help this country make orderly, systematic change, to provide the people with an opportunity to feel that they are a part of the process. But human relationships represent the crucial point at which we will succeed or fail. In the world in which we live today, it is sheer folly to resist inevitable change, which must occur in man's relation- ship to his fellowman. In the eighteenth century, Rousseau wrote that provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly save vanity; and Rousseau was probably right. Perhaps we can change; and perhaps we can change in time. That is, of course, unless we all be mad. DISCUSSION QUESTION: I think we all agree with your premise that the social conditions must change. The question really is: Suppose we were fortunate enough in the next few years to create such a climate, would the cities then be a viable place to live, or is this a necessary condition? ANSWER: It seems to me that it is necessary to the ability of the city to get the resources it needs for the purpose of making the changes required or to get the kinds of support that people in this nation are willing to give to a reordering of priorities so that that can happen. So, if the social situation does change, and by "social situation" I have reference to the kinds of attitudes that we have toward each other and the kinds of attitudes we have toward the needs of this country, I think the resources in this country, perhaps more than any other, are available to do this. The reason that we have not gotten a shift in our priorities is because there has been no overwhelming demand for it. QUESTION: What do you think that each of us, as engineers, can do to alleviate the problems in this nation? Also, in answering that question, do you believe in a social engineering team, a team made up of social scientists like yourself, who know the problems at hand, who have dealt with them, plus engineers like ourselves, with the expertise that we have in our respective fields? Can we, as a team, work together to solve the urban problems at hand? ANSWER: I think the answer to your question is "Yes." Albert Einstein once said that the only thing incomprehensible about the universe was the fact that it was incomprehensible. We have to some extent made ourselves believe that the social universe is incomprehensible, that we really don't know how to do it. I don't think that is true, at all. I think that it is possible for us to take into consideration as social scientists all of the human variables in terms of why people behave as they do. I think it is possible for us to put all of those variables, no matter how many they are, into some kind of a logical systematic context and analyze it. No one of us in his own mind has a capacity to do that, because the variables are so great and so different. This, I think, is where we need the technological expertise of those of you who are engineers, because we in the social scientific field just don't know how to do that. I think I could point out to many engineers, upon the basis of 25 years of experience, how people are likely to react under a set of given circumstances, and I suspect that practical social scientists throughout the country could add to that list, and you would have one as long as this room. But putting them together, making sense of them, developing the relationships that exist between them, and arriving at some conclusions as to what would happen (if you do "A," what do you get, and on the other hand ...?) is, I think, the real question. We need the practitioners, the theoreticians, and those who have the capacity to work with machines and to do programming. I would like very much to see the problems we face in the cities reduced in the kind of manageable fashion that scientists reduced all those variables in getting those men to the moon. I think it is possible. I may be naive, but I don't know how else we ought to go about it. QUESTION: I am engaged in building cities, and I would like to ask if engineers and sociologists are suf- ficient? Could I add bankers, lawyers, and builders? You might be able to add others, but it is a completely interdisciplinary approach that I think is required. Would you give us your viewpoint? ANSWER: I would not disagree, except at one point. I think that one cannot expect a businessman to do much more than understand and to provide the resources that are available to him. One of the problems, for example, we have discovered in the Coalition-which consists primarily of businessmen, labor leaders, ghetto people, religious leaders, and political leaders-is that if you tell a businessman to come and be a member of a continuing committee in housing to try to 36

discover what problems there are in the community in the field of housing, and to assist in devising solutions to meet those problems, you will lose him if he has to do this over a rather protracted period of time. If, on the other hand, a group of people who know something about housing would outline to that business- man what the issues really are and how best they might be solved if his influence and the resources that he would be able to bring to bear on that problem could be utilized, you have it, and he will do it, because he is interested in his community. So you are quite right; there are roles for all people in society to play in dealing with the problems of the city, but I think we have to be pretty explicit as to what those roles really are. QUESTION: Are we approaching even the definition of the problem, and are we defining it for this assembly in the right way? You say we need all disciplines, and that is true, but speaking for the engineer-oriented, might it not be more beneficial to examine the extent to which the engineers are a part of the problem when we are talking in terms of the engineer mentality? There has been enough documentation on the micro- scopic level as to how engineers in the system actually aid or, rather, add to the problem. Might we suggest that engineers ought to be educated, postgraduate or in the engineering schools, that there might be some validity in the social cost to a society? For example, if you move out 500 families to build a freeway, because that direction happens to be cheaper in terms of dollars, should you not also add the cost to the families and the cost to society for doing that to the families? What I am asking is, should we narrow our concerns and not take in the whole urban problem? "How do engineers add to the problem?" might be something that we could handle. What do you think? ANSWER: My basic reaction is that there is such a thing as an engineering decision and that there is such a thing as a political decision. I think what you are really talking about is a political decision that the engineer was never involved in. A political decision was made, on which engineers act. Mayor Jonsson raised the question as to whether engineers were more important as human beings interacting in the city or as technicians. He said, "Both." I think they do have to be both, and I don't think that they have, to a very large extent, been both in the past. Now if what you mean is whether engineers, as citizens who have a concern for their community, now have a responsibility to involve themselves in the political decision-making process that creates the situation in which they as engineers move 25,000 people out of the way, I suspect you are right. QUESTION: If you had a limited pie, and since you are in somewhat of an institution that tries to influence policy, what would be your foremost goal in trying to affect the urban environment? Secondly, if you could take only your top priority, what problem would you try to attack first? ANSWER: I would probably try to attack that problem, or those problems, that had the greatest spin-off value to all the other problems in the community. Let me explain what I mean. We are toying with the idea in the Urban Coalition to try to get cities to do several kinds of things. One is to take a comprehensive look at the city and try to deal with all the problems that they can identify as having contributed to the problem that exists there-that would be housing, jobs, education, economic development, crime and delinquency, the whole institution of justice, law enforcement-and see whether it is possible to deal with all of them on a comprehensive basis. That is what a Model Cities program attempts to do. I am not sure that that is always possible, that the resources are available to do it. But I am not answering your question. I am telling you what we are thinking about. It might be that you could say to a city and to a coalition, "Let's put every dime, and all of our intelligence, into the whole question of finding decent livable jobs for people," and just go all out on the problems of under- employment in this country, on the assumption that if individuals are able to provide effectively for themselves, they can then solve most of the other problems that exist. Or you might say that that is not viable, that you ought to take three problems-housing, jobs, and economic development-all for three different kinds of reasons: •Economic development, entrepreneurship, to give people an opportunity to be part of the decision-making process, a part of the economic system, which a person really isn't, just having a job, and that is a need. •Jobs, which is important, in order to live. •Housing, to create a different kind of environment. With those three things, we should focus in with all our resources and energy and effort, and all the problems will be solved. I don't know that I can answer your question. I am only telling you what we have been thinking. 37

WORKING WITH THE CITY GOVERNMENT-RAND'S EXPERIENCE IN NEW YORK Peter L. Szanton By now you have something about the contribution that engineers can make to urban life and about the problems involved in making that contribution effective. I would like to add some detail to that picture by reviewing with you the experience of The Rand Corporation in New York City. That experience may be of interest for several reasons: it is an attempt to apply analytic skills to real problems in a major city; it is unprecedented in scale, at least in the United States; it has taught us something about relating research to decision-making; it has produced a new kind of institution: "The New York City-Rand Institute." Some clear results are beginning to emerge. Let me briefly sketch the background for you. Late in 1967 Mayor Lindsay and his Budget Director, Frederick O'Reilly Hayes, asked Rand whether it could provide analytic support to a number of city agencies. For some years Rand had been interested in domestic problems, and it had sponsored research on urban transportation, water supply, mental health, and other problems, but its attention had been directed primarily to national security affairs, and it had never worked with a municipal government. There followed a period of three or four months in which small groups of Rand researchers met with members of the Mayor's staff and with officials of various city agencies to see whether there was any match between the interests of the city in analytic work and the problems that we felt able to address. Agreements with four agencies emerged from those meetings; the agreements became contracts, and in January 1968 Rand established a New York office and set to work on problems of health, housing, fire protection, and police. Since that time we have also begun studies on water pollution, correctional institutions, welfare, and the New York labor market. The research now involves some 85 professional analysts-roughly 60 full-time equivalents. And we ourselves have been transformed from the New York office of a California corporation to a new entity: essentially a joint venture of the city government and Rand, a New York nonprofit corporation, governed by its own board of trustees. The staff is drawn from a wide range of academic disciplines. Economists, mathematicians, operations researchers, and engineers predominate; they account, between them, for just over half our number. But they are joined by four political scientists, two biologists, four lawyers, five city planners, two psychiatrists, four sociologists, and a number of others, including a student of Chinese and the author of an unproduced musical comedy. The work of this staff, now being conducted with nine city agencies, involves some 40 or 50 separate studies- studies that are extraordinarily varied in purpose, intensity, significance, and method. Some are quick operational analyses produced by one person over a two- or three-week period; for example, an analysis of the varying number of telephone operators required to handle the shifting pattern of calls for police service. Others, such as an analysis of the economic and demographic forces at work on the city's housing stock, have occupied four or five researchers for eighteen months. Some employ new technology, as did the experiments showing that the addition of long-chain polymers to the waterstream in a firehose could, without any change in pumping pressure, increase by more than half both the amount of water discharged and the distance the stream would travel on leaving the hose. Some analyses attempt to extend the boundaries of an analytic art, such as the work that produced a mathematical model able to specify in detail how, at various points in Jamaica Bay water quality is affected by polluting discharges of changing composition, timing, and location. Some merely establish basic information: the analytic catalog that describes in compatible terms the various housing programs at work in New York; or a count of how many patients seek mental health services within their own neighborhoods, and how many go elsewhere, and where. Some try to estimate the probable costs of future programs; others design new operating policies, such as a method of routinely augmenting the police patrol force during high-crime hours. In short, the studies vary widely, and the analytic pro- cedures they employ are correspondingly diverse. I will return to some of these studies-and to others-but my purpose in this paper is not principally to 38

talk about the substance of the research, or about its methods, but to describe the ways in which we have tried to link up our research with the decision-making processes of the city, and to suggest how our work has been accepted and used. Let me turn to that subject by noting first that there have been strong forces working with us toward that end. Most important, we have had the steady support of the Mayor and the Budget Director. Without that, our work would probably never have begun; certainly it would not have been undertaken on the current scale or received with the same attention. Secondly, the city's administration was committed to changing the way governmental business is done. It had early recognized that the costs of governing the city were growing by some 15 percent each year, while the city's revenues were increasing by roughly 6 percent. It responded in two ways: by trying to secure greater financial assistance from the state and federal governments, and by determining to use the available funds with far greater effectiveness. Dominant in the second effort was the development of planning, programming, and budgeting systems for the city's operating agencies; also important were the expansion of analytic staffs within the government and the use of outside consultants. The city has turned not only to Rand, but also to McKinsey & Co., Systems Development Corporation, The Vera Institute, Meridian Engineering, and a number of other organizations. The point here is that an environment had been established in which analysis had to precede decisions, especially decisions to allocate funds. Planning, programming, and budgeting systems, as many of you well know, are management routines requiring departments to accompany their annual budget requests with papers that specify departmental objectives, identify alternative programs for meeting those objectives, analyze the relative costs and benefits of those programs, and make clear what they expect their recom- mended programs to accomplish and at what costs. We have assisted the agencies in all phases of this work, and in the recruiting and training of their analytic and management staffs as well. In this way we have been able not only to perform studies of particular problems, but to help strengthen the process by which the agencies routinely make decisions. Third, the city itself is paying for most of our work-at an annual level of roughly $2.5 million, to which Rand is adding about $150,000 annually, and foundation support another $300,000. The financial stake involved has had the effect of quite powerfully concentrating the attention of both producer and consumer on the quality, relevance, and utility of the research. And finally, New York is a city whose bureaucracies, for all their problems, nonetheless contain many men of ability and dedication. The generations of civil servants who entered city service in the Depression and just after World War II seem to have been especially able. We began, however, with some disadvantages as well. For one thing, there were few analysts at Rand in 1967 who were deeply familiar with many urban problems, or who were knowledgeable about New York City. Our relative ignorance was matched, moreover, by a considerable scepticism in the city government concerning research consultants. The experience of some administrators was that researchers tended either to inform them of what they already knew, or to produce in fat volumes full of Greek letters and Latin words findings that might not be familiar but in any event could not be understood. They were familiar with research whose principal result was public criticism of an agency's performance. And above all, they had observed that consultants liked to address problems in their pure and uncontaminated form, thereby ensuring conclusions that no city government had the money, the managerial talent, or the political power to put into effect. And consultants of whatever variety, having delivered their conclusions, typically went away. In addition to that scepticism, we also faced, at least, a wary attitude from some of the municipal employee unions. They regarded us as efficiency experts who might seek either to impose tighter management or to substitute capital for labor. Finally, we faced mixed feelings even among some of our natural allies. These were the officials of scientific and analytic backgrounds who were already charged with research tasks in the agencies. They saw us as fellow analysts to be sure, but some also feared-reasonably enough-that we would become rivals for the time and attention of decision-makers and for the limited analytic budgets then available. It may be worth noting that, apart from these patterns of support and opposition, we found ourselves dealing with municipal functions with very different intellectual histories. The water resources field, for example, had a well-developed analytic tradition and the department was technically sophisticated. The fire-fighting function, on the other hand, had been virtually ignored by analysts for the last century, and the fire department therefore had no experience with formal analysis of major questions. Police work had behind it a literature on the sociology of crime, and had benefited greatly by the work in 1966 and 1967 of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. Nonetheless, many important problems remained unanalyzed, including the basic ef- ficiency question of whether and to what extent increases in police manpower, or alternative methods of deploying it, deterred or apprehended criminals. 39

What we found, therefore, in the agencies we began to work with were sharply varying degrees of technical competence, of familiarity with research, and indeed, of commonly accepted intellectual premises. But it was not true that tolerance for outside analysts varied with the strength of a prior analytic tradition. Indeed, it is tempting to conclude that the relationship was inverse; the fire department, in any event, is clearly one of the agencies that has most fully participated in the analyses we began, and has used them most effectively. Let me try to comment now on the way in which we attempted to adapt to this environment, and to adapt in such a way as not only to be able to do research, but to enlarge the chances of it being useful.The first point to make is that we began by addressing ourselves primarily to problems that then concerned responsible officials. We did do some lobbying for studies that seemed significant only to us, and we undertook some. The city has since come to regard several of them as important. But most of our first year was devoted to problems of more or less immediate interest to agency heads or to the Mayor's office. We did not, then, meditate about ultimate solutions to funda- mental problems. Nor did we attempt to outline a systematic view of the city. We accepted the risk of suboptimization in return for the chance of immediate utility. It would have been hard to do otherwise, for two reasons. The first, of course, was that the agencies were our clients, paying for the research and expecting something usable from it. In addition, we were not then competent to do otherwise. Next comes what was probably our major lesson of the first year. We learned to involve city people deeply in the work. We found it necessary to do more than to get data from staffs and present briefings to their chiefs. Wherever possible we now attempt to have agency people themselves participate fully in the work-checking our assumptions, challenging our hypotheses, proposing alterna- tive lines of inquiry, noting barriers to implementation. It has not always been possible to find city officials or staff members willing to involve themselves so deeply. But where this kind of joint effort has evolved, it yields benefits hard to overstate. It improves the quality and realism of the research; it creates small groups of city officials with stakes of their own in the success and utility of the studies, and it helps to stimulate in the internal processes of the agencies a more analytic approach to other issues as well. Thirdly, we have looked at some of the organizational changes that new policies might require, and have helped to bring them about. The Housing and Development Adminis- tration, for example, has available a number of quite distinct policy measures that it can apply to badly deteriorated buildings: code enforcement, rent reduction, receivership, tax abatement, loans for rehabilitation, and so forth. But a deteriorated building typically comes to the attention of the city in only one connection at a time: tenants' complaints of lack of heat in the winter, for example. Investigation then discloses a violation of the housing code, and the process of code enforcement automatically follows. But a straightforward enforcement of the housing code may have exactly the reverse of the effect intended. If the economics of the building make major repairs a losing investment, an attempt to simply enforce the law is likely to induce the landlord to walk directly away from the building. More than 7,000 buildings in New York are now abandoned, and after abandonment they are very quickly vandalized and burned out. It seemed clear to us, therefore-as it did to many in the agency-that when such a building came to the attention of the city, it ought to be treated first as a problem of evaluation. Someone should decide, in each particular case, whether the city ought to impose sanctions, or offer assistance, and under which programs, and to what extent. This necessity suggested the creation of an evaluation unit whose purpose was to provide this kind of building diagnosis, and only then to refer the building to the appropriate office for action. Such a unit required much better information than was readily available, and we therefore helped design and test the necessary information system. Here we were able to go farther. The problem of deciding which city program should apply is not simple. The economic effects of alternative programs and combina- tions of programs can be estimated in advance, but only at enormous effort if the calculations are made by hand. What we went on to do, therefore, was to build a computer model. The model estimates the future financial character- istics of any given building after the application of each of some alternative forms of city action-calculating probable rent levels, cash flows, loan pay-back periods, discounted present value, and so forth. It then automatically rejects those programs whose effects fail to meet prespecified criteria and prints out, in a form readily usable by the evaluation staff, a document summarizing the effects of the various feasible programs. The model is just now going into use, operating by means of a remote terminal from the offices of the new evaluation unit. A similar effort was undertaken for the police depart- ment. When 3,000 additional patrolmen were provided to the force, we were asked to suggest how they should be deployed. Together with the department's planning staff, we identified eleven neighborhood characteristics that seemed important to the question of police deployment: total population, crime rate, number of street miles, arrest-rate, number of calls for police services, and so forth. We then developed a simple computer model that allows 40

anyone using it to assign to each of those characteristics any relative weighting he considers appropriate. Given weightings, the computer automatically types out a detailed set of deployment figures, by precinct, for the 3,000 men. At the same time it calculates some predicted indicators of police performance under such a deployment, for example, mean time for a car to respond to a call, and workload per patrolman. A number of police officials have sat at the computer, supplied their own weighting schemes, and examined the results. These are interesting examples, I think, of decision- makers working quite directly with computers. They also suggest our interest in providing analytic methods that city officials can readily use on their own. Next, as I've already suggested, we have tried to help make the city government a more effective consumer of research. We have argued that the small analytic staffs within the city agencies had to be expanded, and we have assisted in that expansion through recruitment and training. In some cases their growth has been dramatic. In the Housing and Development Administration, a central research group that numbered 6 or 7 two years ago now has a staff of 45 or 50. But more important than size is influence. Analytic staffs have come to occupy a much more powerful role in the making of decisions within their agencies. That has resulted largely from the insistence by the Mayor's office that major programs and especially new programs be thought through before they are funded. But it has also followed from the growing capability of the analytic staffs themselves and from their ability to make effective use of consultants. Finally, we ourselves have undergone a major change. The longer our work went on, the clearer it became that its full value would accrue only if it were sustained over an extended period of time. A permanent institution, devoted solely to the analysis of urban problems and oriented specifically to New York, seemed a useful instrument both for symbolizing our commitment to serious, sustained, and relevant research, and for undertaking the responsibility for carrying it out. The Ford Foundation most generously agreed to commit $900,000 to such an institution over the first three years of its life, and last Spring New York and Rand jointly established the New York City-Rand Institute. It is a New York nonprofit corporation intended, in the language of its Certificate of Incorporation, 'To conduct programs of scientific research and study, and to provide reports and recommendations relevant to the operations, planning or administration of the City of New York." It is the first attempt by a major city government and a research institution to establish a center for the continuing applica- tion of science and of analytic techniques to problems of urban life and local government. The creation of the Institute seems to me one of the most hopeful and significant outcomes of our activities so far. Perhaps 1 have emphasized too much what we have accomplished. Obviously, it is only a beginning. We have yet to attempt any work on many major problems: transportation, education, air pollution, and waste disposal. We will want to explore such areas because they are important in their own right and because, of course, they interact with many of the problems we are already addressing. Nearer at hand, we want to press inquiries into relationships between the various subjects we are working on. Narcotics addiction, for example, obviously affects and is affected by law enforcement, health care, unem- ployment, housing deterioration, and the rising incidence of fires. Moreover, we will continue work already begun on the interactions between housing and welfare policies, and unemployment rates. We will also want to attempt analyses that cut across our other topics: to look freshly at which services a city should itself provide and which should simply be pur- chased; and at the utility of publishing statistical indicators of the quality of life in the city. We will also want to develop much closer ties to the local universities where-especially among graduate students and the young faculty-considerable analytic skill is eager to work more directly on problems of social importance. Perhaps the Institute can serve as one bridge between government and academia, to the advantage of both. And finally, we must address a problem raised by John Buggs. Our presence in New York reflects a deep-rooted and pervasive tendency: a tendency for cities, like all large organizations, to base their planning increasingly on tech- nical studies, detailed analyses, expert advice. Given the complexity of the problems that cities face, and the size and importance of the investments involved, this develop- ment is inevitable and proper. But it is on a collision course with another tendency, equally deep-rooted and equally legitimate: the growing unwillingness of nongovernmental groups-neighborhood and ethnic groups particularly-to accept decisions that affect their lives but that they have no part in making. That collision cannot be avoided, but the conflicts it produces can be cast in much more manageable and indeed, perhaps, creative terms if groups other than government agencies have access to technical advice and analytic procedures. Over time, one of the important tasks of the Institute will be to explore the possibilities of building that bridge as well. So there is much yet that remains to be done, but we may have made a useful beginning. 41

DISCUSSION QUESTION: Are the results of your research available to the public at large, or is it required to be available? ANSWER: It is required to be available, if I under- stood you correctly, but much of it is not unavailable. The unavailability comes in several forms. The most ominous form is probably in fact the least important. Under our contracts with the city, anything we wish to publish must be approved and cleared for publica- tion. In actual fact, I don't think that is going to be an enormous bar to the dissemination of our work. What turns out to be a much more operational disincentive is simply our style of operation. Although an enormous number of internal working papers are produced, and the number must be well over 500 by now, these were not designed and were never thought of by the authors as publishable papers. Publishable papers are very slow in being developed, simply because the organization is not oriented toward the production of a finished paper but toward a kind of interaction with the governmental body that produces decisions. I think at this moment there are only five published documents that have also been cleared and are generally available. There are going to be many, many more than that. A lot of these are coming out of the pipeline, having entered it a year and a half ago. QUESTION: Is the participation of the local groups just a matter of a feeling of participation, or is it a way that they have of assuring themselves that you are accomplishing the objectives that they would be interested in having you accomplish, as opposed to those that might be identified by some agency head? ANSWER: I didn't mean to convey that we are working with local groups. In fact, we are not. What I did intend to say solely was that our organization and all others like it are going to have to come to grips, as governments are coming to grips, with the problems of creating an informed and analytically equipped set of nongovernmental interest groups. QUESTION: Would you be willing to describe the evaluation process that is involved? Presumably, some people look at predictions and look at what has happened after you have made your analyses. Is there a city group? What is the process that is involved? ANSWER: There is no formal city group that is explicitly charged with the evaluation of what we are doing. There are two kinds of evaluation, but by far the most important is the evaluation made by the clients. One of the characteristics in trying to work in this way is that when you make recommendations, they have a higher than normal probability of getting tested. One has a chance not only to talk about the suitability of the research methodology used, as against alternative methods, but one can actually talk about whether the recommendation works. There is something as to which agency heads themselves, the people signing the contracts with us, have some feelings. But they are in a moderately good position, better than they are with respect to most researchers, to evaluate the utility of the work. Secondly, two organizations that report directly to the Mayor-the Science and Technology Council and the Operations Research Council, both of them composed of distinguished men with analytic backgrounds-have once in awhile cast an eye at us, and the Operations Research Council has made an effort, looking in the beginning at our design, and sitting in on our formal briefings. QUESTION: There are a few students here who, I am sure, are concerned about urban problems and want to deal with them, I am sure that their concern is manifested in their curricula. What would you recommend as a good preparation as to going into what is now becoming to be known more and more as "urban engineering"? How should the undergraduate, from your viewpoint, prepare to deal with the problems? Secondly, in many circles, it is being discussed that maybe a project like NASA, in which people from various disciplines, that is, applied sciences, are brought together to deal with one problem, one goal. Do you think that a task force like NASA could be developed to deal with urban problems, that would provide this technical knowledge to urban centers or that may do some type of work in urban centers? ANSWER: My answer to the first question comes in several parts. I think it is hopeless to think that any of us can individually come to grips with each of the relevant analytic methods. We are going to have to accept the fact that all of us, while we may have a smattering of various disciplines, are primarily economists, sociologists, or what- ever, which begins to suggest an answer to your second question. But let me go on a little bit with the first. It is a question I happen to think a good deal about, because my own background is entirely nonquantitative. I am a lawyer, and beyond that, a historian, two almost useless disciplines. I know what I would do if I went back to school. I would do work in economics and statistics, and it seems to me that the perspectives of economics and the discipline of statistics provide between them, I think, a more powerful single perspective on a variety of problems than any other that I know. But I am sure you could get a range of 42

opinions on that. As to the second question, it seems to me that the enterprise I have described is like NASA in one respect. That is to say, it does involve a pooling of a wide variety of disciplines around a common set of tasks. I think that is very useful, and I think there are ways of systematically pooling talents, only just a beginning to be explored. Such an effort ought to be unlike NASA in that it is not dedicated and cannot be dedicated to a clearly defined straightforward goal set well into the future. Getting to the moon is difficult, but at least you can be sure that this is what you want to do. You can be sure for ten years at a time, anyway. We are at a stage in our thinking about the cities where it is a good deal less clear what our priorities will be ten years from now. To gear up one huge overriding effort tied to one goal, such as housing or providing a minimum of fourteen years of education to everyone in the country, is to risk a massive "missing of the point," as we will discover later, after a decade of lost time. 43

SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AS A TOOL FOR URBAN PLANNING Jay W. Forrester New ways are becoming available for analyzing our social systems. These permit the design of revised policies to improve the behavior of the systems within which we live. Many of the ideas discussed here are treated more fully in my book Urban Dynamics,* which shows the city as an interacting system of industry, housing, and people. The book presents a theory, in the form of a computer model, that interrelates the components of a city. It shows how the interacting processes produce urban growth and cause growth to give way to stagnation. Various changes in policies are examined within the laboratory model to show their effect on an urban area. A number of presently popular proposals are tested-a job training program, job creation by bussing to suburban industries or by the government as employer of last resort, financial subsidies to the city, and low-cost-housing programs. These all are shown to lie between neutral and detrimental in their effect on a depressed urban area. The evolution of an urban area from growth into stagnation creates a condition of excess housing. Housing is excess compared to the population and compared to the availability of income earning oppor- tunities. To reestablish a healthy economic balance and a continuous process of internal renewal, it appears necessary to reduce the inherent excess housing of depressed areas and to encourage the conversion of part of the land to industrial use. By so doing, a large enough wage and salary stream can be brought from the outside economy to make the area self-sustaining. As you can see, these results are controversial. If they are right, it shows that most of the traditional steps taken to alleviate the conditions of our cities may actually be making matters worse. The book first appeared this last May; it is already in the second printing. Although it has so far received little public notice in this country, it has become the center of a political tempest in Canada. North of the border, newspaper headlines, editorials, and radio and television panel discussions are debating its merits. Urban Dynamics is based on methods for studying complex systems that form a bridge between engineering and the social sciences. Although I will present here some results from the book, my principal emphasis will be on the importance of the methods to all social systems. Over a decade ago at MIT we began to examine the dynamic characteristics of managerial systems. The field known as "industrial dynamics" resulted.* Industrial dynamics belongs to the same general subject area as feedback systems, servomechanisms theory, and cyber- netics. Industrial dynamics is the study of how the feedback loop structure of a system produces the dynamic behavior of that system. In managerial terms industrial dynamics makes possible the structuring of the components and policies of a system to show how the resulting dynamic behavior is produced. In terms of social systems it deals with the forces that arise within a system to cause changes through time. A design study of a social system seeks changes in structure and policies that will improve the behavior of the system. Some people recoil at the thought of designing social systems. They feel that designing a society is immoral. But we have no choice about living in a system that has been designed. The laws, tax policies, and traditions of a society constitute the design of a social system. Our available choice is only between different designs. If we lament the functioning of our cities, or the persistence of inflation, or the changes in our environment, we mean that we prefer a social system of a different design. In the design process, the behavior modes of a system are first observed to identify the symptoms of trouble. Second, the system is searched for the feedback structures that might produce the observed behavior. Third, the level and rate variables making up that structure are identified and explicitly described in the equations of a computer simulation model. Fourth, the computer model is then used to simulate in the laboratory the dynamic behavior implicit in the identified structure. Fifth, the structure is modified *Jay W. Forrester, Urban Dynamics, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969. •Jay W. Forrester, Industrial Dynamics, The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1961. 44

5? — L J UNDER- EMPLOYED MANAGERIAL - R LABOR 'RCFISSCNAL 0. V " /\ LT Figure 1. Urban structure. until components of the structure and the resulting behavior agree with the observed conditions in the actual system. Sixth, modified policies can then be introduced into the simulation model in search of usable and ac- ceptable policies that give improved behavior. This design process brings the essential substance of u social system into the laboratory where the system can be studied. Laboratory representation of a social system can be far more effective than most people would expect. Anything that can be stated or described about a social system can be represented in such a laboratory model. The major difficulty is the rarity of skilled professional talent. There are very few men with a knowledge of the proper guiding principles and with experience in perceiving the pertinent feedback structure of complex, poorly defined systems. Whatever one may say about the shortcomings of the process, there is no comparably effective substitute. Surprising discoveries come from this combination of theory and laboratory experimentation. We observe that relatively simple structures produce much of the complex behavior of real-life systems. We find that people's skills in perception are very different from those commonly sup- posed. It is often asserted in the social sciences that people are unreliable in analyzing their own actions, yet we find time and again that the policies and practices that people know they are following are the ones that interact to produce the most troublesome consequences. Conversely it can be clearly demonstrated that the vaunted powers of judgment and intuition usually deceive the person who tries to guess the time-varying consequences that follow even from a completely known system structure. We find that the modes of behavior that are most conspicuous in managerial, urban, and economic systems are produced by nonlinearities within those systems. The linearized models that have been used in much of engineering and the social sciences cannot even approximate the important modes of Figure 2. Information links to the underemployed-arrival rate. behavior in our social systems. The most visible and troublesome modes are manifestations of nonlinear inter- actions. We find it relatively straightforward to include the so-called intangible factors relating to psychological variables, attitudes, and human reactions. Again, if the influences can be discussed and described, they can be inserted in the policy structure of a model. Any person who discusses why people act the way they do, or explains a past decision, or anticipates a future action is relating the surrounding circumstances to the corresponding human response. Any such discussion is a description of decision- making policy. Any such policy statement can be put into a system model. A body of dynamic theory and principles of structure is emerging that allows us to organize and understand complex systems.* For example, the feedback loop becomes the basic building block of systems. Within the feedback loop there are two and only two kinds of variables. One is the level variable produced by integration, the other is the policy statement or rate variable that governs the changes in a system. The level variables are changed only by the rates of flow. The rate variables depend only on the levels. Any path through a system network encounters alternating level and rate variables. These and many other principles of structure are universal in the entire sweep of systems that change through time. Furthermore, the structure of a system determines its *Jay W. Forrester, Principles of Systems (preliminary printing of first ten chapters), Wright-Allen Press, Inc., Room 516, 238 Main Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142. 45

possible modes of behavior. Identical structures recur as one moves between apparently dissimilar fields. These identical structures behave in identical ways wherever they are found. The same principles of structure and the same relation- ships between structure and behavior apply to a simple swinging pendulum, a chemical plant, the processes of management, internal medicine, economics, power politics, and psychiatry. A universal approach to time-varying systems is emerging that seems capable of dealing with systems of any complexity. We observe that students, as they master the principles and practice of dynamic analysis, develop a remarkable mobility between fields of endeavor. The same person can clarify the dynamics of how a transistor functions, organize the processes of a public health epidemic, design new management policies to avoid stagnation in product growth, discover the sensitive factors in ecological change, and show how government policies affect the growth and decline of a city. Some diagrams showing urban behavior will illustrate these ideas. Figure 1 shows the central structure of an urban area. The nine rectangles represent the selected level variables. The 22 valve symbols represent the rates of flow that cause the nine system levels to change. Engineers often refer to these level variables as the state variables of a system. The distinction between level and rate variables is also familiar to anyone who examines financial statements. Balance sheet variables are always separated from variables on the profit-and-loss statement. They are separate because they are conceptually quite different. The balance sheet variables are system levels. They are created by ac- cumulating financial flows. The profit-and-loss variables are system rates. This sharp distinction is found in all systems. In the simplified urban system of Figure 1, nine levels are grouped into three subsystems. Across the top the industrial sector contains commercial buildings in three categories distinguished primarily by age. Across the center are residential buildings in three categories, also dis- tinguished by age and condition. Across the bottom are three economic categories of population. Because of their complexity, the information linkages connecting the system levels to the system rates are not shown on this figure. In this figure one can begin to detect the reasons for urban decline. The age of a building tends to determine the character of its occupants. A new commercial building is occupied by a healthy, successful commercial organization that uses relatively more managers and skilled workers than those who are unskilled. As the building ages, it tends to house a progressively less successful enterprise with lower employment skills. In addition to the changing employment mix as the industrial building ages, there is a tendency for total employment per unit of floor space to decline. On the other hand, as residential buildings age there is a tendency for occupancy to increase as well as to shift to a lower economic category of population. One perceives then a condition where the aging of buildings in an urban area simultaneously reduces the opportunities for employment and increases the population. The average income and standard of living decline. Figure 2 shows the same nine system levels and one of the 22 flow rates. The dotted lines are the information linkages from the system levels to control the one flow rate, here the arrival of underemployed population into the urban area. The various levels of the system combine to create a composite "attractiveness" that determines the inflow rate to the area. If the area is more attractive than those from which people might come, a net inward population flow occurs. If the area is less attractive, an outward flow dominates. Five components of attractiveness are shown in Figure 2. In the upper right corner, UJM is the underemployed to job multiplier that relates the population to the available jobs and represents the income-earning attractiveness of the area. The circle UAMM generates the attractiveness created by upward economic mobility. In other words, an area with high upward economic mobility is more attractive than one offering no hope of advance- ment. The circle UHM relates the underemployed popula- tion to the available housing. The area becomes more attractive as housing becomes more available. UHPM represents the attractiveness of a low-cost-housing program if such exists. And in the lower right corner PEM is the influence on attractiveness of the public expenditure per capita. As per capita expenditure rises, it means better public services, better schools, and higher welfare budgets. The concept of attractiveness is fundamental to the population flows. All of the characteristics of an area that make it attractive, these five and many more, combine to influence migration. An attractive area draws people. But almost every component of attractiveness is driven down by an increase in population. If there is an excess of housing, the area is attractive, but a rising population crowds the housing. If there is an excess of jobs, the area is attractive, but the incoming flow of people fills those jobs. In other words, migration continues until the attractiveness of the area falls and becomes equal to all other places from which people might come. An important idea follows from examining these components of attractiveness. In a condition of population equilibrium, all areas must be equally attractive to any given population class, otherwise net migration would occur. If one component of attractiveness is increased in an area, other components must necessarily fall to establish a new equilibrium. Compensating changes in the components of attractiveness explain many past failures in our cities 46

Labor Worker housing Underemployed '' :enterprise: . housing: 8 i 8 Years Figure 3. Growth and stagnation. wherein we attempt to improve one aspect of the city only to discover that other aspects have become worse. In making a laboratory model of a social system one should not attempt straightaway to solve a problem. Instead one should generate a model that will create the trouble symptoms. Only if one fully understands the processes whereby difficulties are created can he hope to correct the causes. This means that we want a model of an urban area that can start with empty land, grow a city, and show the processes whereby economic health falters into stagnation and decay. As another guide to modeling, one should not start by building a model of a particular situation, but instead should model the general class of systems under study. This may seem surprising, but the general model is simpler and initially is more informative than a model of a special case. Here we wish to model the general process of urban growth and stagnation. It should be a model that, with proper changes in parameters, is good for New York, Calcutta, a gold rush camp, or West Berlin. These all seem to have very different characteristics, but they have certain elements in common that describe their urban processes. There are fewer concepts that are common to all than are to be found in any one. The general model can strip away the multitude of detail that confuses any one special situation. The general model identifies the central processes and is a statement of the theory for the entire class of systems. Figure 3 shows the behavior of the laboratory model of an urban area. It presents the nine system level variables over 250 years. The first 100 years is a period of exponential growth but then the land area becomes filled, growth ceases, and the aging process begins. At year 100 near the end of the growth phase, the labor population is almost double the underemployed population. This is a ;Under- ; Land I employed ; fraction I to housing ! occupied / ., . Underemployed 'ratio ratio needed job ral io 5 , , • • • • • ••••••••• "•=•« Years Figure 4. Compensating changes in housing and employ- ment. healthy mix that is well matched to the job distribution in the area and that gives a high upward economic mobility to the underemployed population. But by year 150, the labor population has fallen and the underemployed population has risen until these two groups are almost equal. Business activity has declined and the area has taken on the characteristics of a depressed city. This has occurred because of the way that the industry, housing, and populations in Figure 1 have interacted with each other. Figure 4 shows other variables during the same 250 years. Notice especially the underemployed to job ratio and the underemployed to housing ratio. During most of the first 100 years of growth these two ratios were almost constant. The underemployed to housing ratio was high (above the center of the figure) meaning that the popula- tion is large compared to the housing. In other words, during the first 100 years there was a housing shortage for the underemployed population. On the other hand, the underemployed to job ratio was low, meaning that the population was below the job opportunities, jobs were readily available, economic opportunity was good, and upward economic mobility was high. During this early period of growth and high economic activity, the under- employed population was being effectively adjusted in relation to other activity by balancing good economic opportunity against a housing shortage. But between 90 and 140 years, notice the sharp reversal of the curves for underemployed to job ratio and underemployed to housing ratio. Within this 50-year span, the underemployed have increased while available jobs decreased; the result is a precipitous rise in unemployment. But in this same period, the housing that is aging and becoming available to the underemployed is rising even 47

ii*. IIKI 8 SSS CHCKCfItfCCtCCtttCII LCHPC=.05 , Underemployed / housing /*<,' *j;*•'•"" ~4" Yeors Figure 5. Decline of urban area caused by low-cost-housing construction each year for 2.5 percent of the underem- ployed. ••^•^ "to job re tio '""; 1 ;;>, 1 eremployec 1 ....".".". •"""»•»«» ^2. to f ousing rat o x Tan ra tio needed 1 ••••i K- — — 4 \ ^M^* . ^^^^ i 0<Id s i rf a v a * 4 1 Years Figure 6. Rising unemployment and falling occupancy of housing. more rapidly than the underemployed population. Jobs have become scarce while housing has become surplus. The model is behaving the way our cities do. Many people seem not to realize that the depressed areas of our cities are areas of excess housing. The economy of the area is not able to maintain all of the available housing. Because of low incomes, people crowd into some dwelling units while other buildings are abandoned, stand idle, and decay. Recall the earlier comments about compensating movements in the components of attractiveness. Here, as housing becomes more available, jobs become more scarce. The stagnating urban area has become a social trap. Excess housing beckons people and causes inward migration until the rising population drives down the standard of living far enough to stop the population inflow. Anything that tends to raise the standard of living is defeated by a rise of population into the empty housing. Figure 5 shows 50 years beginning with the conditions found at the end of Figure 3. At time 0, a low-cost-housing program is introduced that each year builds low-cost housing for 2.5 percent of the underemployed population. Observe what happens. Underemployed housing, which is being actively constructed, rises 45 percent, but premium housing falls 35 percent, and worker housing falls 30 percent. New enterprise declines 50 percent and mature business declines 45 percent, all in the 50-year period. Economic conditions become sufficiently worse that even the underemployed population, although it rises initially, eventually falls to slightly less than its beginning value. These changes are a result of the low-cost-housing program. In Figure 6, the corresponding underemployed to job ratio has risen 30 percent indicating substantially higher unemployment while the underemployed to housing ratio has fallen 30 percent indicating a still higher excess of housing. Again, the two components of attractiveness compensate for one another with better housing and a falling standard of living. In the long run, the low-cost- housing program has not served the interests of the low-income residents. Instead, it has intensified the social trapping characteristic of the area. Over the period, the tax levies rise 35 percent. The area has become worse from almost all viewpoints. In this same manner job training programs, job creation programs, and financial subsidies were examined. All lie between ineffective and harmful. The low-cost- housing program was the most powerful in depressing the condition of a stagnant urban area. The depressed areas of our cities seem to be character- ized by excess housing compared to jobs and by excessive concentration of low-income population. These conditions, created by aging industrial and residential buildings, inter- act to drive out the upper-income population and business activity, and to reduce the tax base. Once the decline starts, it tends to accelerate. Unless one can devise urban management policies that produce continuous renewal, difficulties are inherent. Figure 7 shows an urban condition that begins with stagnation and then changes toward revival. Here 5 percent of the slum housing is removed each year and the incentives for new enterprise construction are increased somewhat. The result is a cascading of mutual interactions that raise the economic activity of the area, increase upward economic mobility for the underemployed population, and shift the population internally from the underemployed to the labor class. This is done without driving the existing low-income population out of the area. Underemployed housing is reduced. Initially this reduction comes largely 48

5.8 r ts *.*.*.* **.*.* rrlrsrrtrrrrrrrtflffitfiff«ii£iiSi«sis«iii§l9Si I Yeors Figure 7. Revival caused by removing 5 percent of underemployed housing each year and encouraging business construction to generate jobs. from the empty housing. The resulting housing shortage restrains the population inflow that would otherwise defeat the revival of the area. Figure 8 shows the same 50-year span as in the preceding figure. Here again, employment and housing move in opposite directions. The underemployed to job ratio falls, which means more jobs and lower unemploy- ment. On the other hand, the underemployed to housing ratio rises, which means a tighter housing situation. If the economic circumstances are to be improved, we must accept some compensating change in other components of attractiveness. Here it is the increased tightness of housing that allows job opportunities to increase faster than population until a good economic balance is reached. I stress economic revival as the first stage of rebuilding a depressed area because it appears that an economic base must precede social and cultural development. It is simply not possible to increase all of the attractiveness components of an area simultaneously. Attractiveness is here defined in a very broad sense. For example, legal restrictions like an immigration barrier into a country can produce enough "unattractiveness" to inward migration so that other components might be maintained at a high level. But wherever one component of attractiveness is high, others will be found low. Engineers, especially, should consider the com- pensating changes that will occur in the attractiveness components of an area because engineers tend to deal with economic considerations and technology. Economic and technical factors are more concrete than the intangible "quality of life" variables. The economic and technical aspects of a city are the ones we most easily see how to improve. Our technological society tends, therefore, to observe, react to, and improve the economic and technical Figure 8. Falling unemployment and rise in housing occupancy. aspects of a city. Such improvements increase the technical and economic components of urban attractiveness. But as a result, population density rises until the urban area once again reaches attractiveness equilibrium with its environ- ment. The burden of forced reduction in other components of attractiveness falls on the quality of life variables- crowding, pollution, and psychological stress. These less tangible variables have been weak, hard to measure, and defenseless against the persuasiveness and the certainty of improvement shown by the technical and economic con- siderations. But we are entering a time when a reversal will occur between the formerly weak and strong variables. For a substantial fraction of our population, the standard of living is already high enough so that more gain in the economic and technical areas will come at too high a price in the quality-of-life components of our environment. The engineer, if he continues to serve society, must balance a greater number of social needs against one another. At one time his task was simply to balance financial cost against economic performance of his technology. Now the product and also the medium of payment are both expanding. Social value and quality of life become part of the product. Psychological stress, ugliness, and crowding become part of the cost. Engineers who fail to recognize this broadened role will be vilified and castigated by a society that perceives them as narrow and insensitive to the demands of the times. When a system misbehaves, we should ask ourselves what policies within that system cause the undesirable characteristics. If we examine the laws under which a city operates, we see a structure of regulations that could hardly be better designed to create stagnation and decline. The aging and decay of buildings is central to the urban decline process, yet we see throughout our tax laws and regulations numerous incentives to keep old buildings in place. As the 49

value of a building decreases, so do the assessed taxes. The reduced expense makes it possible to retain the old building longer. For income tax purposes under some circumstances, the value of a building can be depreciated several times. This produces incentives to keep an old building in place. Here is not the place for detail, but it seems clear that a different set of tax laws and city regulations could be devised to produce the individual incentives necessary for continuous renewal. As an example, I recently saw a suggestion that each building have a mandatory trust fund into which the owner must pay a levy each year. At any time, whoever owns the building can draw out the money in the trust fund if he demolishes the building and clears the land. This, you see, would create an earlier incentive for replacement. Property tax levies and income tax accounting could both be changed to produce pressures in the same direction. Our studies of managerial, urban, and other social systems have uncovered many general characteristics of complex systems to which we must be alert if we are to avoid continuing to create detrimental modes of behavior. First, complex systems are counterintuitive. They behave in ways that are opposite to what most people expect. They are counterintuitive because our experience and intuition have been developed almost entirely from contact with simple systems. But in many ways, simple systems behave exactly the opposite from complex systems. Therefore, our experience misleads us into drawing the wrong conclusions about complex social systems. Second, complex systems are strongly resistant to most policy changes. A new policy tends to warp the system so that slightly changed levels present new informa- tion to the policy points in the system. The new informa- tion, as processed through the new policies, tends to give the old results. There are inherent reasons within complex systems why so many of our attempts at correcting a city, a company, or an economy are destined to fail. But, third, the converse is also true. There are points in systems from which favorable influence will radiate. Often these points are difficult to perceive. Often the action required is the opposite to that which might be expected. But when these points are found, they tend to radiate new information streams in such a way that the new circumstances, when processed through the old attitudes and policies, produce a new result. Fourth, complex systems tend to counteract most active programs aimed at alleviating symptoms. For example, Chapter 4 in Urban Dynamics shows how a job training program can increase the number of under- employed in a city. When outside action tries to alter the condition of a system, the system relaxes its own internal processes aimed at the same result and throws the burden ever more onto the outside force that is attempting to produce a correction. The internal need for action is reduced and the external supplier of action must work ever harder. Fifth, in complex systems the short-term response to a policy change is apt to be in the opposite direction from the long-term effect. This is especially treacherous. A policy change that improves matters in the short run lays a foundation for degradation in the long run. The short tenure of men in political office favors decisions that produce results quickly. These are often the very actions that eventually drive the system to ever-worsening per- formance. Short-run versus long-run reversal processes are all around us. If an agricultural country is to industrialize, it must accumulate railroads, factories, and steel mills. This capital accumulation can only be done by forgoing con- sumption and reducing the standard of living first in order that the standard of living may rise at a later time. If a company faces declining earnings because its products are obsolete, it must invest more heavily in product research and incur even deeper short-term losses if it is to recover in the more distant future to a profitable product stream. A student forgoes short-term earning opportunities by attending college in order to increase his longer-term earning capability. This reversal between the short run and the long run occurs repeatedly. Sixth, a system contains internal dynamic mechanisms that produce the observed undesirable behavior. If we ignore the fundamental causes and simply try to overwhelm the symptoms, we pit two great sets of forces against one another. In general, our social systems have evolved to a very stable configuration. If the system is troublesome, we should expect that the causes of the trouble are deeply embedded. The causes will outlast our persistence in overwhelming the symptoms. Furthermore, the internal pressures usually rise to counteract a corrective force from the outside. We can expend all our energy to no avail in trying to compensate for the troubles unless we discover the basic causes and redesign the system so that it spontaneously moves to a new mode of behavior. For the last of these characteristics of complex systems, we must recognize that a certain ensemble of conditions goes with each possible mode of a system. More specifically, each mode of a system is accompanied by a set of pressures characteristic of that mode. We cannot sustain a particular mode unless we are willing to accept the corresponding pressures. For example, contrast the depressed mode of a city in Figures 5 and 6 with the revived mode in Figures 7 and 8. The depressed mode is one characterized by the pressures that come from decaying buildings, low incomes, and social disorientation. But the revived mode also contains pressures. The revived mode is 50

sustained by the housing shortage and the legal and tax pressures that generate a steady demolition and replace- ment of old buildings. But everyone in the system will want to alleviate the pressures. Active industry will want more employees; residents will want more floor space; and outsiders will want housing so they can move to the attractive job opportunities. Rents will be high. These pressures are easy to relieve by increasing the fraction of the land area permissible for housing, by keeping old buildings in place longer, and by allowing taller apartment buildings. But such moves will start the area back toward the depressed mode. We must decide the kind of system we want with knowledge of and acceptance of the accom- panying pressures. Instead, much of our social legislation of the last several decades has consisted of trying to relieve one set of pressures after another. The result is a system mode characterized by inflexibility, conformity, crowding, frustration, supremacy of the organization over the in- dividual, and a choking of the environment. And the resulting pressures, acting through the counterintuitive and short- versus long-term reversal characteristics of complex systems, may well move us further in the same direction. I am suggesting that the time is approaching when we can design social systems to obtain far better behavior. Different policies could change our urban areas from ones that are designed to deteriorate into ones that are de- signed for self-renewal. One can foresee a time when we will understand far better the relationships among monetary policy, interest rates, unemployment, and foreign exchange. Already such studies have thrown new light on the processes of corporate growth, on the reasons for product stagnation and loss of market share, and on the growth and decline of cities. But to design new policies for social systems requires a level of skill that is rare. The kind of system modeling and policy design that I have been describing requires a professional training at least as extensive as that in any of the established professions. The proper training requires theory, laboratory, case studies, apprenticeship, and practicing experience. But in the area of designing the dynamic behavior of social systems, there are as yet no adequate professional schools. The educational materials are still in the develop- ment stage. The few who show skill in this area have learned by apprenticeship and by trial and error. This audience, interested as it is in the long-run improvement of society, can make its greatest contribution by encouraging research and educational programs aimed at developing a high level of talent. Again, the long run competes with the short run. Creating educational materials and teachers will at first absorb money and talent that in the short run might instead be devoted to solving particular present social problems. Unless a proper balance is main- tained, with substantial energy devoted to establishing an educational" capability for enlarging the future pool of skills in social system design, the time when we can master our own systems will be further delayed. DISCUSSION QUESTION: If you are essentially looking to the design of an open system, when you take into account the entire system, do the answers turn out to be the same? ANSWER: The terminology "open or closed system" is used in a variety of ways, and used in quite opposite meanings by different people, so that it is hard to use that phraseology in a meaningful way. I can answer the substance of the question by saying that in this particular model we recognize that the surrounding world is always changing, but we are looking at how the city relates to the surrounding world. What are its characteristics relative to the surrounding world? In- cidentally, I might say that I don't present the model as the main point here; I present the method. If one finds defects in the particular model statement, one simply corrects it. If one is really working in this field, a model lasts for maybe a whole hour, because it is continuously in the process of refinement and improvement but, actually, what is done here, I think, is sound. It is a model of the city relative to the surrounding circumstances. This is the only way that one could have any sensible meaning to a 250-year time span. QUESTION: Are you assigning equal weight to all elements of population, and, therefore, is the lower income group heavily penalized? ANSWER: As a general comment, these systems are insensitive to parameters put in the models. One can change the parameters by a factor of 5 without changing the conclusions, and this is a characteristic on nonlinear multiple-loop systems. These characteristics are not suspected generally, because they are not true in simple linear systems. As one goes to a more accurate representation of a system, he finds that the need for accuracy in parameters comes in an entirely different order of magnitude than normally expected. 51

This throws, in my opinion, a great deal of doubt on the economy of the large data-gathering programs that go on in the social sciences, because I think they are gathering data that are not particularly pertinent. QUESTION: It seems to me that the problem of excess low-cost housing might be relieved by portable, or transportable, housing. Have you considered the simul- taneous modeling of two or more cities where the excess housing is juggled back and forth between the cities to stabilize the overall dynamics? ANSWER: It has been discussed; it has not been done. One can propound hundreds of questions that one would like to explore, but until there are people and resources to examine them, only a very small number will actually be looked at. At this stage we can ask questions far faster than they can be coped with. I could discuss why I think that question would not throw a great deal of new light on the situation, but the only way to satisfy a question is usually to make the proper model change and see if it matters. This is the only way to satisfy the person that asks the question that either he has hit upon an important idea or to show that he has not. Basically, as I say, these systems are counterintuitive, and that applied to my view of them as well as other people's. QUESTION: Would you clarify for us the extent to which you are telling us what the city is like or what your model is like? I ask that with particular reference to your ability to validate the model, particularly when you talk about the model of a system existing over a 250-year time span. We are interested in the future, and we must consider the fact that the structure of the model itself must be fundamentally changing in time. ANSWER: As to whether I was discussing the behavior of the model or cities, 1 believe I was doing both, but other people may have different opinions and out of those clashes of opinion will come deeper understanding. Let me say a word about the question of validity and some of the values of modeling. First of all, there is no possible conceptual proof of the validity of a model. There is only confidence in it to the extent that you have examined it and compared it to the system you are interested in. So validity is a relative matter. The standard for comparison here is basically a formal model versus the mental model that would otherwise be used for decision- making. It is not the standard of the model versus the model that people carry around in their heads, and this is not a very tough competition. QUESTION: I would like to raise the question again of the open versus closed system, because I think it is important in the conclusions that you draw from the particular model you had. Phrasing it another way, one might ask: are you after a national housing-a national policy-or are you after a policy that applies to a particular city? Specifically, by reducing the amount of low-income housing in a city, you drive the underemployed in that city to some other city, which you then call the universe outside your model. If you are concerned with that other area, would you perhaps come to different conclusions as to what policy you should use in a given city? ANSWER: This is one of the recurring misunder- standings that we don't know how to cope with, because we try to show that one doesn't have to drive the people out. This is a revival from the inside for the people there at the beginning. You can carry old housing removal to the extreme that has been done in some urban renewal programs, wholesale demolition, which drives people out. The only thing we are suggesting is to keep the inflow from going up; we don't even reduce the inflow. We don't increase the inflow rate or the normal outflow rate, but you do keep inflow from rising above what it had been while this revival process gets started. The policy is independent of the scope of application. It works in one city without throwing a burden on others, and it can be applied as many times as you want to. So, you don't really face that kind of a compromise. Generally speaking, in the redesign of policies for social systems, one does not initially face compromises, because the performance of most systems, corporate and govern- mental, are sufficiently low that you can begin by getting something for nothing. In other words, you can begin to get improvements in some dimensions without trade-off. If one initially faced the problem of trade-off, it would mean we already had the best possible performance according to some set of criteria, but I am saying that we do not have the best possible performance by any criteria. Initially one can get improve- ments in some dimensions without a corresponding decline elsewhere. Eventually, we will run out of opportunities that do not require compromise. Then we will find that trade-offs become necessary. I think that we are a long way from mandatory trade-offs in most of our systems. QUESTION: Perhaps one of the most important statements you made was to the effect that in the very large systems we have a great insensitivity to the changes in parameters in the system. Many of our young revolu- tionaries claim that to a certain extent we are not going to get anywhere fiddling around with some of the parameters in our system, but we have to change the system as a whole. Would you please comment on that? ANSWER: The biggest objection I have to the radical movement is that it is not radical. It is simply doing by 52

slightly ruder methods what we have been doing for 40 years. It is following short-term intuitive objectives that will carry us farther down the very road that we have already been traveling. Before these processes turn around, we must have widespread public understanding of the nature of complex social systems. One cannot push such ideas onto the public. There will need to be a rather long process of examination and education, and a very large number of people have to come to the support of what I have been saying. If I am right, the indicated changes will come very slowly and only after widespread public understanding of the nature of the systems of which we are a part. I think the radical student movement is rebelling against the symptoms, but they are falling into what I said was the counterintuitive trap, the things that they are proposing to do are not going to do a thing for the symptoms that they properly enough object to. QUESTION: Does your model have any way of handling irrational action on behalf of people, when the communication channels get clogged up and people perceive different things differently? ANSWER: You have tied up a large number of concepts in that question. Irrationality is certainly included in model systems and must be before you come to a full understanding. On the other hand, when you mention the question of perceptions being different from reality, that is a different matter, and also must be included in a realistic system model, because a model contains the real state of affairs and also the perceived state of affairs, and includes the discrepancies between these, and includes the bias, the cross-talk, the distortion, the delays. There are six or eight kinds of information defects that are extremely important in the behavior of a system, and a lot of our systems can be understood only if one understands the realities of the information channels because it is in those realities or those deficiencies that the real explanation of many modes of behavior lie. So a model deals simultaneously, with variables that are called the real system, but never do you make those available as part of the decision-making inputs unless the discrepancies are considered trivial, and usually they are not. 53

THE COMMUNICATIONS OF CONFRONTATION Stephen F. Keating It is an honor to be here to talk with you about our cities and the job we have to do in our metropolitan centers. It is appropriate, I think, that these issues be brought before an engineering forum. Engineers have always figured prominently in the big objectives Americans have assigned themselves. If you look around this industrial civilization, you are impressed by what engineering can accomplish. It is only natural that we turn to you when our cities find themselves in urgent need. When you examine those needs, as you are doing here, you find that most of the questions ultimately resolve themselves into people questions. What do we want and what do we reject? What are our priorities and our values? Resolving questions of this sort demands effective communication. It requires participation. This comes quite naturally to most of us, because direct democracy is the American ideal, which emerged from the democracy of the Greek city-state, where a system of citizens' councils passed laws, declared war, authorized expenditures from the treasury and decided court cases. The tradition has found its purest expression in America in the old New England town meeting. Here was direct communication, the immediate expression of the will of the people. In our folklore and in our self-image, we still picture the town meeting as a distillation of democracy. Recently the town meeting philosophy has gained special new appeal for us. We have been made forceably aware of the troubles in our cities. And we have come to realize that everyone in the city demands the right to be heard in correcting these ills. Minorities want to be heard among the majority. The poor want a voice for the first time. The jobless and the uneducated, who have previously been silent, are now demanding the right to speak. The affairs of the community, we found, can no longer be left up to the city council or the political leaders or the "establishment." Sections of the community who had never been heard from-people from across the tracks, or across the river, from the East Side or the Near South Side, depending on your city-all were demanding a part in deciding the new shape of the city and were making themselves heard. Suddenly the town meeting idea had brand-new, twentieth-century appeal. Some answers to today's problems seemed to be firmly rooted in the most cherished tradition of our past. We congratulated ourselves that we had an off-the- shelf answer to our crises. We would simply dust off the town meeting idea and put it to work in the neighborhood centers, the private social and welfare groups, and the government agencies that sprang up to correct urban conditions. These organizations stood outside the constitu- tional law-making and administrative machinery. But they work parallel to and in cooperation with government bodies at all levels and could provide a measure of immediate expression of the will of the people-direct democracy. But we soon discovered that it's too late for the town meeting. In the past few years, thousands of meetings have been held to give everyone a voice in urban affairs-and some people have been surprised to find that they have been not at all like the New England town meeting. Instead of logical discussions and orderly balloting we have often had bickering, shouting, demonstrations, and, sometimes, violence. This has been looked upon by some people as failure of the whole idea of applying direct democracy to urban ills and has made them not only discouraged with the process but has even, in some cases, turned their goodwill into hostility. It's as though they saw the town meeting idea as the answer to the whole question and, when reality did not fulfill their ideal, they lost interest and gave up on any possible solution. We should not, however, be discouraged by the anger and emotion nor even by the violence that attend today's participatory democracy. And perhaps we won't be quite as hostile to the idea of direct participation if we understand why the meetings we hold today can't possibly work anything like our cherished ideal of the town meetings of the past. It was basic to the town meeting that the people shared a community of thought, a common background. If they did not all stand on the same side of every issue, at 54

least they could readily agree on what the issues were. And their value judgments were closely parallel. There was basic agreement on goals and the means available to reach them. It made it possible to clarify issues quickly and, with little rancor, come to agreement and plan a program. But today the city represents a wider variety of people, voices, opinions, goals, and aspirations. Our need today is not to restrict representation to a few people of like background and similar views, but to open the forum to a wide range of heritage, attitude, and social motivation. We want as many people as possible to be represented. The Urban Coalition, with which much of my own work in this area has been identified, was designed expressly as a forum for the silent minorities who had not had a chance to be heard. But in the town meeting, the emphasis was not on difference but on sameness. In many town meetings you didn't get a vote if you weren't a property owner. In Greece, all citizens could sit in the peoples' council, but citizenship was not extended to slaves, servants, women, or those born outside the city. Perhaps only 50 percent of the population were citizens. With this kind of selectivity, there was bound to be wide areas of agreement that could serve as a base for logical procedure, reasoned discourse, and orderly decision making. On the most basic questions, consensus had been formed years before the meeting opened. Our purpose today is to make our urban councils not homogenous, but as heterogeneous as possible. We should not be surprised or dismayed if we find clashing differences of goals and opinions. The clashes do not mean however, that we can't communicate. They simply show that our job of communication is different now. We cannot depend on the rigid town meeting formula, and if we are going to make our communication effective, we must understand how it works today. My purpose is to make some observations about the communication of confrontation and to point out some of the tasks it can accomplish and is accomplishing. To begin with, most of us believe that communication is more necessary than ever. You have always needed communications to keep a city operating. Today we need communications to keep it from flying to pieces. All the parts of our urban societies recognize this. Minorities place such a high value on communications, in fact, that they now award top positions of leadership to those who are the most articulate. Black people, for instance, want to be heard. They want to make people pay attention. It is almost as though they were saying: "All right, after all these years, white America now has to listen; let's find spokesmen who can make them sit up and take notice." When such high value is placed on being heard, then, of course, articulate spokesmen will emerge. Whether you agree with the variety of positions they take, they illustrate the importance placed on speaking up. Stokely Carmichel became a leader because he talks in terms that are strident and straightforward. The Rev. Jesse Jackson also comes through loud and clear. And Rap Brown got his name from his ability to rap out the black viewpoint with boldness and determination. It often appears that the urban poor and the minority groups are so pleased with having an audience, after all these years, that they place a high premium on the simple pleasure of speaking up and being heard. We all enjoy getting something off our chest. And, at this point in history, who can blame them? Their spokesmen are naturally strident and insistent-and if it often seems they are speaking more to their own constituents than to the rest of society, then perhaps they are. But the job of the rest of society is not to grow indignant or defensive, but to use this channel of communication to accomplish the task our whole society has to do. The communications of confrontation may be un- pleasant, even offensive, to some, but at least it is communication and we can use it most profitably if we understand how it operates. All communications start with an agreement that there is something to talk about, a problem (to apply the word that is in ubiquitous use today). This agreement has been forthcoming in every city. We all recognize that urban society is seriously off balance. And although we don't know exactly what the trouble is, we all agree that a problem exists. The next step in communication is to define the problem. This is where the work begins. And this is where so much of the hang-up occurs in the talk and writing about our cities. The complexity of the problem is almost bewildering. Incidents that occur are difficult to evaluate: • After the Newark rioting a magazine published a picture of a rioter running out of a store carrying his loot; he had his arms full of Tide detergent. Is the problem here a decaying respect for law and order, or is it a problem of human need? • An out-of-work father leaves home because his wife and children can live better on a steady welfare check without the drag of his joblessness. Is this a problem of breakdown of traditional family bonds, or is it a problem of economic opportunity? • A black high school student comes home and tells his father he has become interested in accounting. His father discourages the boy from taking it because he knows the disappointment and heart break that black workers have experienced in trying to get office jobs. 55

Is this a problem of education, or a problem of race prejudice? The complexity of the situation also shows through in the language we use to discuss it. We use words like ghetto, prejudice, opportunity, poor, law and order, black com- munity, lily-white, conspiracy, and poverty psychology The language gives you a feeling not only for the difficulty of understanding the subject but also for its high emotional content. (Words like these also illustrate the inadequacy of the language we use to talk about urban social ills. In all times of radical change-such as the scientific revolution of the eighteenth century and the industrial revolution of the nineteenth-new concepts are developed and new words are invented or adapted to discuss them. Perhaps the social revolution of our century will also develop a more serviceable vocabulary, which will help us to better under- stand urban society.) A third step in any communications process is to define goals. You and I, when we face a business problem within our companies may have all kinds of hurdles to overcome in reaching a solution, but at least we normally know where we are trying to go, we have a reasonably clear vision of our business goal. In the short term, the goal may be to design cost-effectiveness into a new product. In the longer term the goal may be to increase the profitability and economic security of the firm. We agree on the goal because it's a part of the business. In the communications of confrontation, common goals are not so readily apparent. This is true because of the widely ranging background of spokesmen, and their wide differences in constituencies, points-of-view, and objectives. Contending factions cannot easily be identified. It is a temptation to describe the urban problem simply as a rivalry of the haves versus the have-nots or the blacks versus the whites or the left versus the right. But such over- simplification does not lead to understanding. If you want to make any sense of the urban dialogue, you have to determine who is talking to whom. This takes time, but until you know this, it is hard to figure out what goals and objectives people are trying to reach. It is a general rule that in any group-a club, a political party, a business, or a nation-there is always less organiza- tion than there appears to be from the outsider's view. The group always seems to have more uniformity of opinion, more cohesiveness of spirit, and more singleness of purpose than really exist. A group may be violently torn on many issues, but from outside the group, we tend to minimize the division. We don't see the differences because the organiza- tion will normally prepare a solid front for the view of outsiders. Furthermore, we tend to identify people by pasting organizational labels on them, then we look at the labels instead of the people. Naturally, they all look alike. Thus, the majority population of a city tends to view the minority as a single group working with coordination and discipline to change our urban societies. But this view is off target. It assumes an organization and agreement that does not exist in the movement. In Minneapolis, for instance, if you speak of the "minority" as a homogenous group, you fail to take into account the differences between the black part of the minority and the Indian part of the minority. Their goals are quite different, almost directly opposed to each other. Black citizens generally want a more secure and dignified place in a homogenous society. Indian spokesmen, on the other hand, seem to be asking for a chance to develop separately in something approximating the traditional Indian culture. Indian residents are also divided among themselves on some issues. Recently there was a clash between two Minneapolis Indian groups over which organization should develop plans for an Indian community center. Rivalry between the groups was centered on the view that one was best able to express Indian claims and complaints while the other was most representative of the broad range of the city's Indian population. The same lack of organization exists on the side of the white majority, too, and black people are sometimes surprised to learn that there is no solid, well-disciplined white conspiracy operating against them. An example of this division in Minneapolis was the Ron Edwards case, an explosive issue for three months early last year. The mayor nominated Edwards as one of the 15 members of the new Human Relations Commission. Nominations had to be ratified by the city council. Edwards is an intense young black man whom the mayor believed could well represent the militant factions in the black community. He also had a record of four misdemeanors, and he was rejected by a majority of the city council. The mayor continued his support of Edwards, however, and a stalemate developed. A number of Minneapolis businessmen became increasingly concerned as time went on. Some sided with the council majority, some with the minority, but all recognized that the question had to be resolved quickly. Accordingly, they began to work with spokesmen on both sides of the issue to create an area of agreement. Eventually, without a sense of loss or embarrassment for anyone, Edwards was approved and took his seat on the commission. The division and the contention over this issue among whites was something of an eye-opener to many black people who had looked upon the white community as a monolithic structure. When it was all over, Edwards said, "Man, before this thing started, you couldn't have made me believe that white cats like Plank, Cowles, and Keating would have come out and supported me. When the councilmen first hollered on me, I figured, 'Here we 56

go-they're going to put me out to the wolves.' I was surprised when that didn't happen." Thus it may be slow work to establish goals in urban conflict situations because of the difficulty in defining positions, even among groups that would appear at first glance to constitute a solid body of philosophy and opinion. It is necessary to establish who is speaking for whom before you can crystallize goals and aims. In business it's called identifying market segments. In politics it is determining the views of the constituency. Lacking clearcut definitions of urban problems and consensus on urban goals, it is not surprising that we are having a great deal of difficulty arriving at the next stage of communications: the process of measuring trade-offs and selecting the appropriate options. In old New England, almost all of this process would have been complete before the town meeting began. Nearly everyone made about the same living and made it in about the same way; it must have been fairly easy to decide on whether or not there was a problem with the town well or grazing sheep on the common. Likewise, there would have been general agreement on goals. Everyone would have agreed that they needed water and wanted their fair share of grazing rights. Most of the town meeting would have been spent considering the trade-offs: What to do about the pump, how to write the grazing laws. In the cities today we have far to go before we reach the point of deciding trade-offs. I suspect that when we have progressed that far, much of the thunder and lightning will disappear from the confrontation-because problems and goals are matters that generate feeling and emotion, while trade-offs are more objective, are quantified more easily, and are decided more often as a matter of logic. The emotion aroused by value judgments over problems and goals creates an atmosphere of confrontation in urban communications. Added to this is the feeling among many minority spokesmen that it is necessary to establish a power base in order to get everyone on a footing of equality before the talking starts. There is a feeling that it is necessary to "catch up" with the white majority in terms of power and respect in order to have equality at the bargaining table. Militancy is seen as one answer to the need to catch up quickly. Every city has developed minority leaders who use aggressiveness to assert the power of their constituency. In Minneapolis, one such leader is Matt Eubanks, who has said he employs confrontation and demonstration to press his demands and keep local institutions on the defensive. Last month he told the Minneapolis Urban Coalition: "Well never come back down here. We're going to do what we have to do. We've got to build our black people. We cannot build our black people, our revolutionary forces, through groups devoted to the status quo." Matt believes it is the black man's first duty to gain power-and the most effective route to power, he believes, is confrontation. Only after you have grasped the handles of power can you negotiate successfully, in his view. He has said that the way to gain control is to assume control. It is clear that, although not all the black community goes all the way with Eubanks, there is a good deal of minority sympathy with his view that confrontation is a route to power. One Negro leader believes that Eubanks is too militant, but even he has said, "It takes people like Matt to make others move. What I say to Matt is 'thank you,' because we're going to start to move." Matt Eubanks and hundreds of other black leaders are using confrontation to build their power base-not to replace communication, but to help them make sure communication is effective. You could sum up the difference between the town meeting and our own urban communications by saying that today we are trying to catch up with the times by taking all the steps of communications at once. We are trying to identify problems, establish goals, and evaluate trade-offs, all under the pressure of urgent circumstances. The poor and the racial minorities are trying to speak from a power base and build the base at the same time. In the communications of confrontation we are trying to make the hose while we put out the fire. We should not be surprised if there is more confusion and if results come more slowly than we could wish. In spite of this, however, our halting, suspicious, and sometimes hostile communication is accomplishing something. While we are developing our techniques of talking and understanding in the cities, we are also showing some progress. We have to; if we wait until the hose is made, the house will have burned down. All over the country, we are seeing heartening results. But for examples I will confine myself to the city where I have been involved, Minneapolis. And I will refer to just those activities in which the Urban Coalition has taken part, because those are the activities that I am most familiar with. I assure you that whatever progress the Coalition has made has been through the activities of a great many organizations. The Coalition identifies its own role as being that of both a forum and a catalyst. As a forum, the Coalition is a place where all points of view may be heard. As a catalyst, Coalition committees try to determine priority needs and help public and private agencies on needed programs. The Minneapolis Coalition worked with other agencies to place 1,300 young people in summer jobs last year. There were 2,200 jobs filled with hard-core unemployed. 57

This summer 1,800 young people were placed-and we could have filled more, but we ran out of kids. Every boy and girl from target areas who wanted a job, got a job. Of permanent jobs, we have a goal of 4,500 disadvantaged employees on board by June 30, 1971. Today we are about 20 percent ahead of our monthly schedule toward that goal. Over the long term, the answer to many minority and poverty problems lies in education. The University of Minnesota and other colleges have set up programs to work with Minneapolis schools in training teachers to better understand the special educational problems of minority groups and disadvantaged neighborhoods. A program at both the University of Minnesota and Augsburg College provides financial and tutorial help for disadvantaged students. At the University, the faculty started a fund for direct financial aid to needy students. At Augsburg substantial funds were committed to a program to provide both financial and academic assistance. Recently, the Coalition began a project, in cooperation with the Urban League, which could be one of our most fruitful programs. A business development task force was set up to aid in the development of minority-owned businesses in two ways: First, by helping to arrange bridging, or complementary financing, for existing companies; and secondly by helping to create new minority-owned businesses in selected market areas. To date, approximately 30 bridging loans involving direct financing in excess of $100,000 have been arranged. The availability of this privately contributed money has made possible conventional financing of these same companies in an amount well over half a million dollars. The Coalition has also been instrumental in turning the attention of the Minneapolis United Fund toward the inner city and the needs of ghetto neighborhoods. Early last year, the United Fund undertook a special priority drive to raise funds earmarked for a summer program. The project was a success and was credited with doing much to keep it a cool summer in Minneapolis. One of the most successful parts of the program was the Summer Olympics, an inner-city neighborhood athletic program that has now become an annual event. Following this special drive, the United Fund distribution policies were changed to channel a greater portion of funds to agencies working with the poor and the disadvantaged. Programs like these are helping us to make the social adjustments our urban societies have to undergo. They are being created because we have proved that we can communicate in the city. Direct democracy is at work, even though participation is not much like a town meeting or a council of citizens in the Athens of Pericles. In spite of an environment of tension, we are learning how to talk to each other and how to listen. We are coming to understand how the communication of confrontation works. And the most important lesson is that confrontation is itself a form of communication. Certainly there is friction. There is indeed abrasion, violent language, and demonstration. It is frustrating and sometimes enraging. But we are learning that communication itself is valuable. In this area, certainly, the medium is the message. And we are discovering how to communicate with each other. And we are learning how to crystallize opinion so that we can turn words into helpful programs for social change and urban progress. Perhaps in the near future our urban dialogue will be quieter, more polite, and more amenable to Robert's Rules of Order. In the meantime we will have to learn from confrontation. Perhaps the friction we are experiencing today produces the heat that will weld this country into a unified and cohesive society-the kind of society that made the town meeting possible. DISCUSSION QUESTION: I would like to ask you a question on the Vietnam Moratorium, not in connection with Vietnam, but in connection with forms of communication. Would you give us an overview of what you think this might mean as far as people communicating better? ANSWER: You are asking, obviously, a nonexpert in the field of communications. As I have said, confrontation and differences of opinion is a part of the very fabric of our life in this country. All of us don't have to agree. I think that any vehicle that in a constructive fashion-a relatively peaceful fashion-identifies the feelings and beliefs of some of our people is a valid form of communication. It doesn't necessarily represent the fact that the great silent majority has to agree, but it is a form of communication, just as the communication in the ghetto, and the communication 70 years ago in the union movement, has been a form of communication that has proved its usefulness. I am not here as an expert on the Moratorium. I think that as a vehicle of communication it must have been somewhat effective. Whether it was completely is for 58

someone else to judge. QUESTION: We have heard the minority spoken of as an identity and the majority spoken of as an identity. I am rapidly approaching the view that there is no majority, unless one says there are more women than men, and they constitute "the majority." Would you comment on whether there is a majority? ANSWER: One of our problems is that we have pasted labels on people. We have assumed that all the Indian people in Minneapolis have the same aspirations and priorities. They don't. The same is true of many of the black organizations. The minorities are slowly learning the fact that the establishment, or whatever you want to call that white majority, doesn't exist. In Minneapolis, a number of people expressed some surprise that fourteen businessmen who created the original Urban Coalition had widely differing views on what should be done. It is one of our problems that we listen to the first loud voice and assume that if it says we want housing, we want housing. Increasingly we are sorting out some of these voices, and until we do that on both sides, we are going to have trouble communicating. QUESTION: Do you think that the engineer has any particular function or role to play in the confrontation that you mentioned? ANSWER: Every citizen has a role. I was asked to come here to speak to this basically engineering audience, and I obviously don't speak from the background of an engineer. To the extent that you all have a stake in this country, whether you are engineers or lawyers or whatever, you must become involved. Professor Forrester illustrated more effectively than I could that the engineer has a special talent in terms of seeing through, and in terms of logic of things that could be done. I say with great humility before this audience that you are going to have to get in and get a piece of the action. You cannot wait until the systems are designed, or design them from the outside and then come in and implement them. You are going to have to feel some of the heat so that you understand not only the logic, but some of the emotion of the problem. QUESTION: When confrontation was mentioned, the thing that came into my mind is the kind of group-therapy psychology that has been tried out, for example, with blacks and policemen speaking out what they feel. Has Minneapolis included this kind of approach? ANSWER: I would have to say in all honesty that there has been some of it, but it hasn't been intentional. We are experimenting in some areas along these same lines. The confrontation, however, to which I was alluding has been much more basic and gutsy, if you will. These issues come out. Although there is a role to be played, I think that may tend to oversimplify the problem. I think you would have to see it in its real light, as it really is, and there are some great people all over the country who are very idealistic, who feel that if we could sit down in a comfortable environment of their own choosing and discuss racism and so forth, that we might solve these problems. Over a long, long period of generations this might be so, and it certainly would help. It will not, however, in the near term do much toward solving the nitty gritty that we have to solve if we are going on to solutions in the years to come. 59

Session III CASE HISTORIES Thomas C. Kavanagh, Chairman

Next: CASE HISTORIES »
Engineer and the City: A Symposium Sponsored by the National Academy of Engineering at Its Fifth Autumn Meeting, October 22-23, 1969 Get This Book
×
MyNAP members save 10% online.
Login or Register to save!
Download Free PDF
  1. ×

    Welcome to OpenBook!

    You're looking at OpenBook, NAP.edu's online reading room since 1999. Based on feedback from you, our users, we've made some improvements that make it easier than ever to read thousands of publications on our website.

    Do you want to take a quick tour of the OpenBook's features?

    No Thanks Take a Tour »
  2. ×

    Show this book's table of contents, where you can jump to any chapter by name.

    « Back Next »
  3. ×

    ...or use these buttons to go back to the previous chapter or skip to the next one.

    « Back Next »
  4. ×

    Jump up to the previous page or down to the next one. Also, you can type in a page number and press Enter to go directly to that page in the book.

    « Back Next »
  5. ×

    To search the entire text of this book, type in your search term here and press Enter.

    « Back Next »
  6. ×

    Share a link to this book page on your preferred social network or via email.

    « Back Next »
  7. ×

    View our suggested citation for this chapter.

    « Back Next »
  8. ×

    Ready to take your reading offline? Click here to buy this book in print or download it as a free PDF, if available.

    « Back Next »
Stay Connected!