Discover Top Posts Tagged with #planned community

Move-in day in Lakewood, California, 1953.

#reddit #snapshothistory #brolbo #moving truck #suburbs #planned neighborhood #houses #homes #movers #children #kids #pan american van #mccallson #planned community #bekins #family #lakewood #california #1953 #1950s #photography #unknown photographer #b&w #families #neighbors #neighborhood

The Addams Family (2019, Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon)

16/07/2024

(Reversed) Dachshund frieze in Parkchester housing

(Alfred Eisenstaedt. 1942?)

#Life #god #Parkchester #The Bronx #planned community

In the 1960s and 70s, there were two proposals within the United States to dome over either portions of existing cities or create an entirely new domed city as a model for future developments.

The first of these projects that we’ll be covering, is the 1960 proposal by architects Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao, where they proposed building a giant geodesic dome over midtown Manhattan, which would have covered the island from the East River to the Hudson River, from 21st Street to 64th Street.

The logic for this project, Buckminster stated, was that by covering a chunk of New York City in a giant dome, it would save on energy costs due to the dome creating a sustained temperature environment, eliminating the need for separate heating or cooling facilities during winter and summer as well as getting rid of air pollution.

This plan, obviously, didn’t go ahead, but Fuller seemed to take the projects cancellation with good humour, calling it the “world’s most successful failure“. I’m not entirely sure whether Fuller and Sadao’s plans included the dangers derived from leaded petrol, what with it being well documented that exposure to the fumes from cars in this period had an adverse effect on people’s brains.

The spike in violent crime in the late Sixties, Seventies and Eighties was even hypothesised to have been caused by the adverse effects of lead from exhaust on children’s developing brains in this period (the Lead-Crime Hypothesis)... Not saying that if the plan to dome Manhattan had been successful it would have lead to a lot of aggressive folks with severe lead poisoning twenty years later, but it might well have.

The other planned domed city was what was known as the Minnesota Experimental City or MXC. Inspired by a cartoon by a famous futurist, Dr. Athelstan Spilhaus, who was also helped create the skyway system in downtown Minneapolis, the plan was to build a planned community some three hours north of the Twin Cities in Swatara.

Within the MXC, Spilhaus proposed a planned community with 250,000 residents, experiments in technology, sociology, and education and "people movers" to replace cars and their internal combustion engines (his actually being aware of the adverse effects of cars of folks’ health). Additionally, everything that could be recycled within the MXC would be and they even proposed that a computer would be even home, long before such things became common place.

And, surprisingly, people actually bought into the idea of the MXC! In the late 1960's, Minnesota received $250,000 in seed money from the federal government and another $670,000 from businesses, and decided to build the experimental city within the economically depressed Aitkin County. By this point, Spilhaus had quit the project our of frustration over the slow pace and bureaucracy involved in building his city of tomorrow, but the project continued without him until... well...

Turns out that the residents of Aitkin County, as hard-up they were financially at the time, weren’t exactly enthusiastic about the MXC being built in their area for reasons ranging from legitimate concerns of how the construction would harm the local wildlife to people just not wanting the thing built near them. And so, following protests from the locals, changes in the local government and concerns from the Pollution Control Agency planning on the MXC was eventually abandoned in the early 1970s, despite the organisers assumptions that the residents would be happy about the MXC potentially bringing cash to the region.

It’s kind of ironic that a city planned to solve the environmental issues of the 1960s would end up getting cancelled due to the environmental concerns of the 1970s, but that’s history for you I guess.

#irregular events #Planned Community #megastructure #american history #history #New York City