A CITY VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS

An account of Dartmouth's undergraduate program in city planning and urban studies

PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY

THE overwhelming characteristic of modern American civilization is increasing urbanism, going hand in hand with the rapid growth of industrialization and the increased pervasiveness and scale of human organization. Dartmouth's undergraduates are essentially urban (suburban) products returning after, one trusts, certain intellectual polishing to an urban milieu. The College thus has a serious responsibility to urban America which is partially fulfilled by the loosely knit and curiously efficacious City Planning and Urban Studies Program.

This pastoral undergraduate institution, situated somewhat outside the limits of Jean Gottmann's "Megalopolis," has in the years since World War II sent close to one hundred graduates on to advanced degrees in city planning, architecture (with planning interests), urban administration and related fields. Leading eastern graduate schools and urban research centers actively recruit in Hanover and consider Dartmouth as unsurpassed in stimulating undergraduates to undertake graduate work in their professional fields. The present chairman of the program was invited by the Washington Center for Metropolitan Studies in the late fall of 1961 to discuss in a brief series of meetings Dartmouth's undergraduate program in urbanism before representatives of various national organizations, Federal agencies, and universities. This conference resulted in a brochure, The Dartmouth Story: Undergraduate Educationfor Urban Life and Urban Affairs, written jointly with Atlee Shidler of the Washington Center, which has had wide circulation, eliciting a large number of library queries for additional copies and concrete requests for further details from a number of universities in this country and Canada. Two representatives of Princeton from the School of Architecture and the Bureau of Urban Research visited the College in April to consult with the staff as a basis for starting a similar program.

In keeping with the liberal arts tradition, Dartmouth's City Planning and Urban Studies Program is not primarily pre-professional training; it is rather a broad educational response to the fact that ours is a predominantly urban society. The program reflects a strengthening of the urban dimension in a wide range of courses. It relates undergraduate to graduate education in a dynamic and flexible manner. It has attracted a high caliber of student and included a promising field study seminar offered in cooperation with M.I.T. in the Boston area.

To institutions of general education the Dartmouth Program has a special significance as it shows how foundations can be built for later specializations, and to the graduate and professional schools it illustrates a desirable preparation and recruiting device for their programs.

THE general American educational response to urbanization has tended to be additive, specialized, confined to the classroom, focused on the United States, and concentrated at the graduate and professional levels. We have added courses, majors, departments, and institutions to the existing educational structure. We have developed specialized graduate programs for training urbanaffairs professionals and technicians. We have done little, however, to exploit the educational potential of the metropolitan environment. We have devoted only slight attention to urbanization abroad. And we have hardly begun to examine the potential role of undergraduate education either as the source of a citizenry prepared for urban affairs or as a means of motivating and preparing students to train for careers in urban affairs.

To be sure, a growing number of universities and colleges offer undergraduate degrees in city planning. Many offer a variety of urban subject courses which at a few institutions may be combined into an urban studies major. Some are putting students into metropolitan environments in active ways that familiarize them with the processes of decision-making and technological innovation and expose them to the highest levels of professional thought and practice.

But the most promising aspect of the developing undergraduate response to urbanization is the work of individual academic specialists who, approaching urban society as an important aspect of their own field rather than as a separate discipline, are either introducing urban themes into traditional courses or strengthening those themes where they already exist. Their effort looks toward meeting the urban education needs of all students. In varying degrees, this is the situation at many institutions. It is very much the situation at Dartmouth, but the unique development here is the emergence of a reasonably formal program that actively coordinates and promotes this approach to urban studies. This program has gone a long way toward providing a considerable number of undergraduates with a basic understanding of urban development and urban life, but it also provides outstanding preparation and screening for graduate work and professional training without offering either a special degree or even an urban studies major.

THE basic elements of the program are an introductory core course on worldwide urban growth, problems and planning; two or three other special courses; cooperation among the faculty members who teach courses that contain urban subject matter; an advisory service to students and faculty; a coordinating senior seminar with opportunity for research; a system of summer internships; and an inter-university seminar. Cooperation, counseling, coordination, and a few special courses comprise the essential ingredients of the Dartmouth Program.

The introductory course dates back to 1921 when it was first offered as "City Planning, Civic Art and Domestic Architecture" in the Art Department. In the early thirties it became "The Art of City Planning," under the joint direction of Lewis Mumford and the German Bauhaus architect and planner, Walter Curt Behrendt. Hugh Morrison, an architectural historian (who with his wife has done so much for the Hanover Town Plan), taught the course during the late thirties and early forties. This variety of skills firmly established the course as a vehicle of general education. After World War II it passed to an urban sociologist, who retitled it "An Introduction to City Planning and Urban Studies."

The focus of the course as taught by a sociologist naturally has shifted from design to social science, but it has retained a considerable. physical planning content, thereby underscoring the view that a basic aim of urban studies is to make design more sensitive to fundamental human needs and social values. The course also has changed from a somewhat specialized pre-professional one into a general introduction to current urban conditions that views the city as a dynamic whole in the larger society. It has thus become an effective means for motivating students to take other courses in the program, to do advanced work in urban studies, and to choose careers in planning and urban affairs. The early orientation of the program toward international experience, given to it initially by Mumford and Behrendt, has been maintained and strengthened, thus already dovetailing neatly with the expanding program for a Comparative Studies Center, primarily for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

The introductory course, itself, is divided into four parts. Part I, "An Urban Mess," explores the impact of metropolitan growth on traditional human and specifically urban values and raises the question: Is city planning the solution? citing the brilliant Stockholm Metropolitan Plan as a possible answer. Part 11, "The Planning Process," considers such matters as organization for planning, zoning as a planning tool, planning and the political process, and state and Federal roles in urban development and planning. Part III, "Planning Problems," deals first with general urban functions and then turns to community and neighborhood aspects of housing, and particularly to Garden Cities, Greenbelt Towns, British New Towns, and Park Forest. Part IV, "Renewal," considers conservation, rehabilitation, and redevelopment in terms of specific programs in various cities.

On first acquaintance with city planning nd urban studies, Dartmouth students are often attracted to the design and technical aspects. Later they become interested in social, economic, and administrative problems. At once ambitious and idealistic, they discover planning as a field in which they can both "do good" and achieve professional status with reasonable pay. In addition, they are intrigued, as organization men in training, by the seeming managerial possibilities of city and metropolitan planning and administration.

In the closely-knit academic community of Hanover, it became evident several years ago that courses in various departments were incorporating increasing amounts of urban subject matter. Gradually those efforts were coordinated. A set of gentlemen's agreements of the you-teach-that-and-I'll-teach-this kind, best described as the "sloppy British approach," were worked out. Some of the principal courses and departments involved are Administration in the Department of Administration; Modern Architecture, Basic Design, Architectural Design, and Urban Design (newly instituted and brilliantly taught by a commuting Harvard instructor in 1962 and presently taught by Hanover's well-known architect, Edgar H. Hunter '3B) in Art; Economic and Social Statistics, Tax Problems, and Intermediate Economic Theory in Economics; Cartography, Commercial and Industrial Geography, and Industrial Locations in Geography; The Politics of the Metropolitan Region, Public Administration and Policy Development, and Political Behavior in Government; The City, An Introduction to City Planning and Urban Studies, and a coordinating senior seminar in Sociology; and a new seminar on urbanization in the nineteenth century in History.

As the rather loose arrangements between the members of the faculty matured, the question of the desirability of an inter-departmental major inevitably arose. The decision of faculty and administration was to preserve the general education framework only slightly formalized in these developing arrangements. A new major did not, in their judgment, represent what Dartmouth was best equipped to contribute to the field at present. They chose instead to organize what had evolved as essentially an advisory and coordinating service to both students and faculty. Dartmouth would continue to familiarize its students with planning and other urban-affairs professions, but, in keeping with its broad liberal arts tradition, it would approach urbanism as a dimension of thought and as an important aspect of many fields and professions.

An already substantial and slowly growing portion of the intellectual resources of Dartmouth College are thus being focused on the city, much as the American Academy in Rome has brought scholars from various disciplines together to focus on ancient civilization. The result is that students are being educated to viewthe city as an organic whole—a dynamic combination of people, physical environment, institutions, neighborhoods, architecture, functions, values, economic activities, government, interest groups, leadership, and traditions. Dartmouth is educating urbanists, not planners or architects or administrators; these jobs are left to graduate and professional schools.

On the other hand, the Dartmouth Program extends the horizons of students whose career goals are already firmly set. Many students, for instance, who are aiming toward careers in architecture emerge from the program with a strong bent in the direction of urban design.

THE program was strengthened when it brought into its orbit an ingenious joint Dartmouth-M.I.T. seminar in political science. Organized by Robert C. Wood of M.I.T. and Frank Smallwood of Dartmouth, the seminar brought together in a single study group students of public administration, liberal arts, engineering, and social science. In their junior year (there have been a few seniors) six Dartmouth students and six M.I.T. students spend a full term together in the Boston area.* Other variations on this may be tried shortly, with the possible inclusion of other similarly located non-urban colleges under the Sociology Department. The students work in a coordinating seminar, and each must complete a research project resulting from field work in the Boston area. According to Dean Burnham Kelly of the College of Architecture

at Cornell, they are inaugurating a compulsory "Cornell in New York City" for their graduate students in architecture and planning specifically modeled on the Dartmouth-M.I.T. seminar. The scheme here has received new impetus by active cooperation with the Dartmouth Public Affairs Center which administers foundation and other support for such enterprises leading toward the public service.

The entire Dartmouth Program is tied together by a coordinating senior seminar that is, in effect, a continuation of the introductory course on city planning and urban studies but requiring research (field where practicable) on some chosen topic in urbanism. It employs the resources of the participating departments, and it draws lecturers from other universities and from the world of affairs. Representatives of leading graduate schools of planning and urban studies often lecture to the introductory course as well as to this seminar, integrating these trips to Hanover into their general recruitment program.

Among special inducements of the program are summer internships aimed at juniors (for feedback purposes) which carry sufficient total stipend to enable the student to return to college in the autumn with $500 saved for senior expenses. During past years our undergraduates have performed useful services for the Manchester (N. H.) Redevelopment Authority, the New Hampshire Department of Resources and Economic Development, The Cleveland Foundation, Penjerdel (a citizens' non-profit group planning for the greater Philadelphia metropolitan region), the Boston Redevelopment Authority, and the Manchester (N. H.) Planning Board. The Manchester Savings Bank helped financially in this latter program for its city through Charles Nims '31, president. Undergraduates are encouraged to find paying jobs for themselves and are aided in this. During the summer of 1962, three boys worked for a local planning consultant. This year, Michael Berne '64 will serve as an assistant to the dynamic Mr. Barnes, New York's Traffic Commissioner; Fred L. Bates '64 is to make a special study of housing for the aged under the auspices of the San Francisco Housing Authority (where he worked in 1962), and Duncan I. Hughes '65 will be with the Manchester (N. H.) Housing Authority. Among those with Public Affairs grants working in local government affairs this summer is David G. Blanchette '64, a Senior Fellow, who will devote his time to the economic geography of Coos County for the New Hampshire State Department of Resources and Economic Development. Professor Albert Carlson of the Geography Department, who has been a moving floure in the Dartmouth-Lake Sunapee Resion and the Connecticut Valley Conference and who was instrumental in having Grafton County (including Hanover) qualified under the Area Redevelopment Act, has been working closely with Blanchette. In the summer of 1962 twelve Dartmouth students served as interns in urban affairs. Provision has already been made under the new Summer Term to grant credit for research courses in absentia under faculty guidance; we expect to incorporate some of the above projects under this rubric if not this summer, shortly thereafter. The possibility of getting into print even before leaving college is another attraction; two student-faculty research projects have resulted in journal articles.

But the principal inducement is simply the intellectual stimulation and the flexible structure of the Dartmouth Program. A student may enter or leave it by many routes and at any time. The number of courses he takes is optional. It may be one or as many as five or six, depending largely on whether he is a freshman or a senior when he discovers and informally enters the program. A geography major, for instance, may not develop an interest in urban studies until he has taken the course on Industrial Locations in his junior or senior year. He may then enroll in the introductory course or in such other courses as The Politics of the Metropolitan Region, Architectural Design, or Economic and Social Statistics. His decision will depend on his interests, on the number of electives available to him, and on the advice of his department and of the chairman of the program.

Thus the program is highly flexible, more circular than hierarchical in struc ture. For the student it is a means of co ordinating whatever electives, either in his major department or in another, he may wish to use to explore the field of city planning and urban studies. The system capitalizes on and reinforces the process whereby many undergraduates scout the curriculum in search of a career. This flexibility and diffuseness have given an urban dimension to a growing segment of the Dartmouth curriculum.

As noted above, an average of four or five men per year go from the program to graduate training in city planning, urban studies, and urban and metropolitan administration. Two have won Sears-Roebuck city planning fellowships, and all are appreciated by planning schools, which increasingly seek the breadth and depth of a liberal arts education as preparation for professional education. Alan Kravitz '63 is entering the Department of City and Regional Planning at North Carolina as a Ph.D. candidate in the autumn, holding a three-year National Defense Graduate Fellowship worth approximately $8,000, while James F. Davies '63 and R. B. Stephenson '63 go to Harvard, and D. G. Stuart '63 to Cornell for similar programs at the Master's level. Stuart Mahlin '63, with a grant of $4500, is starting his Master's in Public Administration at the Fels Ins titute of Local and State Government at the University of Pennsylvania.

With the growing interest in broadly humanistic studies in preparation for the vocation of engineering, it is anticipated that there will be an increasing tie-up with the Thayer School; Professor William P. Kimball is presently spending six months in Washington as consultant with the Area Redevelopment Administration. The great impact of urban redevelopment on business has already resulted in a growing cooperation with the Tuck School. The Public Affairs Center conferences on the public service as a career, held in the academic years 1961-62 and 1962-63, have further stimulated undergraduate interest at both the local and national level. In passing, it should be noted that the style and quality of our great metropolitan areas are important counters for gains in international affairs; conversely "an urban mess" hardly makes a valid argument for the presumed excellence of the much-touted "American Way of Life."

Each year, ten to fifteen additional men, who have worked on the fringes of the program, begin graduate training for other, not specifically urban-oriented, professions. They will be more effective, both as professionals and as citizens, for having been alerted by a program that seeks to relate the traditional liberal arts curriculum more strongly to the urban society in which we live. There is, obviously, an urban dimension to all modern careers. A still larger number of men will have taken one or more of the courses without participating in the program in any organized way. These further accomplishments of the Dartmouth Program are important, for the field of urban affairs is highly dependent upon informed political and civic leadership.

Dartmouth has thus shown a way in which an undergraduate institution can prepare students both for urban living and for careers in urban affairs, much as students for years have been prepared for careers in medicine, law, engineering, and other professions. It has done so without new staff or new educational structure, without endless committee meetings and negotiations, and without any direct financial strain—except on the generously helpful foundations. Surely other colleges and universities can profitably examine the Dartmouth experience for its possible relevance to their own situations—and they are doing so.

* This was not given in 1962-63 as both Wood and Smallwood were on leave; it will be reinstated in 1963-64.

Professor Albert E. Carlson of the Geography Department meeting with his classin commercial and industrial geography, which deals with geographic and economicfactors helping to determine the location of major plants and industries.

Problems in town and city planning are studied in the Art Department course, ''UrbanDesign " shown meeting in one of the design studios in Hopkins Center. Edgar H.Hunter '38 (c), Lecturer in Architectural Design, teaches the course.

AUTHOR: H. Wentworth Eldredge '31, Professor of Sociology and Chairman of Dartmouth's City Planning and Urban Studies Program, is working primarily on the administrative and social aspects of metropolitan, national, and international planning. In 1957 and 1962 he went to England to study Britain's New Towns, a subject on which he has lectured in this country and abroad. Plans are nearly complete for his commuting to Harvard during the fall term as Visiting Lecturer in the Graduate Department of City and Regional Planning. Professor Eldredge, who took his Ph.D. at Yale in 1935 and joined the Dartmouth faculty that year, also specializes in foreign affairs. A consultant to the White House staff in 1956, he was a member of President Kennedy's 1961 Citizens Committee for International Development, and during the past seven years he has lectured frequently at the NATO Defense College in Paris, the French National War College, the German General Staff School, the Belgian War College, and the U. S. Air Force Academy. The June and July issues of the NATO Letter, official NATO journal, will print his two-part article on "Political-Psychological Warfare by a Coalition," covering some of the material of his recent foreign affairs lectures. He is co-author of the sociology text Culture and Society, and his book The Elite and PoliticalDemocracy: The Dilemma of Power in Modern Society will be published this fall.