Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
However, the original élan of Norris was undermined, and it began to look
more and more like a bedroom suburb of Knoxville. Moreover, the TVA
itself was undergoing great changes.The two additional directors appointed
by Roosevelt (David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan) consistently out-
voted Arthur Morgan and turned the TVA increasingly into an agency for
economic development.
30
By 1937 the TVA decided to sell Norris, having
long before abandoned its regional development ideas.
31
SALZGITTER, GERMANY: AS IN A DISTORTED MIRROR
While the Roosevelt administration developed its city of the future in Ten-
nessee, Hitler's Reich was making similar plans for a
neue Stadt
called
Salzgitter about 20 kilometers to the south of the Lower Saxon city of
Braunschweig. Taking its name from one of the original villages in the
region, it was built to house workers for a vast new mining and iron- and
steel-making complex known as the Hermann-Göring-Werke. Although
having quite different proximate causes, the National Socialist New Town
and the TVA project shared some of the same environmental and ideolog-
ical goals. Both experiments sought to reinvent the environment in
response to impending industrialization. Both identified with technology,
but expressed a profound ambivalence toward it—a desire to mitigate the
effects of modern technological civilization with rural values and an appre-
ciation of nature. And, as with Norris, Tennessee, the fate and fortunes of
Salzgitter serve as a trail along which we can follow a fascinating process of
invention and reinvention. But, while the Reich's project mirrored the TVA
in significant respects, it was as if its reflection were seen in a distorted mir-
ror, twisted by the extreme social, political, and economic conditions of the
Nazi era.
ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION: THE CITY OF THE HERMANN-GÖRING-
WERKE
In the words of its architect, Herbert Rimpl: “With the rise of the [Her-
mann Göring] Werke the villages and the farm towns of the Salzgitter hills
were awakened from their peaceful existence.”
32
A farming area of 55,000
acres, approximately 20,000 people, and some thirty small towns became, in
just a few years,“one of the largest concentrations of industrial might in the
world.”
33
