Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Göring-Werke ceased to function, and Salzgitter lost its purpose. After the
war, the nationalist and
Volkisch
ideology of Salzgitter fell into disrepute; the
German people wished to forget. Norris was practically stillborn. Just as it
was beginning to develop, its political backing was cut loose from it. The
New Deal, confronted by a stubbornly resistant depression, turned away
from visionary planning and toward practical, ad hoc solutions. The prag-
matists at the TVA, David Lilienthal and Harcourt Morgan, ejected Arthur
Morgan, and the TVA turned mainly to power production and distribution.
Beyond contingency, however, both experiments were ultimately victims of
an intrinsically untenable concept. The inner contradictions of the found-
ing idea—a massive industrial complex within a “green” environment—
may have doomed them to failure from the start. In
Seeing Like a State,
James Scott termed the impulse behind this kind of planned city “high
modernism” and characterized it as an ideology combining faith in scien-
tific and technical progress, rational design of the social order, and control
over nature.
60
Salzgitter and Norris reflect all these, plus a characteristically
pre-World War I nostalgia for the rural and a distrust of the industrial city.
The legacy of the 1930s techno-cities is precisely this: they remind us
once again of questions of the limits and strengths of planning, of looking
for the optimum ways to deal with sprawl and congestion through the Gar-
den City idea, and of the role of visions of the future, the utopian thrusts,
and their dangers.
NOTES
1. James C. Scott,
Seeing Like a State
(Yale University Press, 1998), 89, 90.
2. Judson King,
The Conservation Fight
(Public Affairs Press, 1959), 98.
3. “Ford Plans a City 75 Miles in Length,”
New York Times,
January 12, 1922.
4. Preston Hubbard,
Origins of the TVA
(Vanderbilt University, 1961), 40.
5. Littell McClung, “The Seventy-Five Mile City,”
Scientific American,
September
1922, 156.
6. Ibid., 214.
7. “Ford Tells What He Hopes to Do with Muscle Shoals,”
Automotive Industries
47
(1922), October 19, 753.
