[P2P-F] a debate on country-city (dis)urbanism, moscow 1930

Fri Apr 8 08:01:52 CEST 2011

Should be interesting for the p2p urbanist group:
http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/mikhail-okhitovich-moisei-ginzburg-and-disurbanism/

Le Corbusier, dismayed at Ginzburg’s sudden new position, wrote to his
friend pleading for his return to Urbanism:

*Moscow, March 17, 1930*

*My dear [Moisei] Ginzburg,*

*I am leaving Moscow this evening. I have been asked to write a report on
the recent competition for the Green Town of Moscow. I haven’t done so, not
wanting to present a judgment on the work of colleagues. On the other hand,
I answered the request that was made to me indirectly, by giving the
Committee for a Green Town ‘some commentaries on the development of Moscow
and the Green Town.’ My conclusions cannot agree with the enthusiasm that
the simple word ‘deurbanization’ seems to raise at the moment.*

*There is a contradiction in the term itself; this word is a fundamental
misunderstanding that has deceived many Western theoreticians and wasted a
lot of the time of governing boards of industries — a fundamental
misunderstanding that everything opposes and refutes. Society is complex; it
is not simple. Whoever tries to bring hurried and tendentious solutions to
its problems will [265] meet opposition: it revenges itself, it falls into a
state of crisis, and despite changes and regulations, it doesn’t let itself
be manipulated: it is life that decides!*

*Last evening, in the Kremlin, in the office of Mr. Lejawa, the
vice-president of the USSR, Mr. Miliutin, one of the commissars of the
people, had a thought of Lenin translated for me that, far from supporting
the thesis of deurbanization, on the contrary confirms the necessity of
urban reform.  Lenin said this: ‘If one wants to save the peasant, one must
take industry to the country.  Lenin did not say ‘If one wants to save the
town-dweller’; one mustn’t confound, there is all the difference! To take
industry to the country, that is to say industrialize the country, that is
to create places of human concentration with machines at their disposal.
The machine will make the muzhik think.  Nature is good for the city-dweller
whose mind has been galvanized by the city, who puts to work, in the city,
the diligent mechanism of his mind.  It is in the group, in shock and
cooperation, struggle and mutual help, in activity, that the mind ripens and
brings forth fruits.  One should like to think so, but reality is there; it
is not the peasant who looks at the trees in bloom and listens to the song
of the lark.  It is the town-dweller who does that.  You understand what I
mean, if, frankly, we are not fooling ourselves with words.*

*Men feel the need to get together — always, in all countries and climates.
The group brings them security and defense, the pleasure of company.  But as
soon as climates become difficult, grouping encourages industrial activity,
production by means of which men live (are dressed, make themselves
comfortable).  And intellectual production is the daughter of united men.
Intelligence develops, is sharpened, multiplies its play, acquires its
subtlety and innumerable aspects, in the mass of groups.  It is the very
fruit of concentration.  Dispersion frightens, makes poorer, and loosens all
the ties of physical and spiritual discipline, lacking which men return to
their primitive state.*

*International statistics show us that death rates are lowest in the densest
agglomerations; they diminish as populations concentrate.  These are
statistical facts; they must be accepted.*

*History shows the great movements of human thought at the mathematical
points of greatest concentration.  Under Pericles, Athens was closely
peopled like one of our modern cities, and that is why Socrates and Plato
were able to discuss pure ideas there.*

*Consider more exactly that ten centuries of premachine civilization have
made these cities for us which at the moment of mechanical expansion are a
frightful and dangerous grimace.  Admit then that the evil is there, in that
heritage, and that its salvation is here: to adapt the cities, which will
continue to concentrate themselves more and more (statistics and concomitant
elements [266] of modern progress: transports: intellectual attractions,
industrial organization); to adapt our cities to contemporary. needs, that
is to say to rebuild them (as, besides, from their birth they have
continually rebuilt themselves).*

*My dear Ginzburg, modern architecture has precisely the magnificent mission
of organizing the life of collectivities. I was the first to proclaim that
the modern cay should be an immense park, a green city. But to allow this
seeming luxury, I increased the density by four and — instead of extending
them — shortened distances.*

*I can nevertheless imagine very well, as a satellite to any urban
agglomeration for working and living, a Green Town for resting, eventually
organized as with you by turns every fifth day.*

*I even pointed out in my comments that the compulsory attendance for rest,
at least once in three periods, every fifteen days, could be applied like
time-clocking for work: and would include the practice of an adequate sport
by individual prescription of the doctors of the Green Town. The Green Town
becomes the garage where the car is checked (oil, lubrication, verification
of organs, revision, maintenance of the car). Besides, the intimacy with
nature (radiant springs, winter tempests) incites to meditation, to
introspection.*

*Please then do not see a hostile attitude in my serene and firm
affirmation: ‘Mankind tends to urbanize.’*

*Appreciate this characteristic detail yourself — one of the projects of
deurbanization proposes, among other things, to build straw huts in the
forest of the Green Town. Bravo, magnificent! as long as they are only for
weekends! But do not say that having built huts in straw, you can then tear
down Moscow.*

*Very cordially yours,*

*L.C.*

* *Ginzburg responded thus:

*My dear Le Corbusier,*

*Our recent conversation about city planning and your letter have compelled
me to rethink the entire problem, to recall your objections, the objections
you made when you visited me and which you now write about in your letter.*

*Like all my friends, I value you tremendously not only as a subtle master
architect but also as a man with the ability to solve radically and
fundamentally the important problems of organization.*

*For me you are today the greatest and most brilliant representative of the
profession that gives my life content, goal, and meaning.*

*That is why your ideas and solutions in the area of city planning have for
us a quite exceptional interest and importance.*

*You have often told me that you adore nature and would like to live always
among greenery…You write that you were the first to advocate the luxury of
an enormous park in the city…During our stroll on Tverskaia Street [the
present Gorkii Street] you told me that Perret and all the best of the
French architects had tried to take housing out of the city.  In other
words, you yourself pose the problem of giving man ideal physical
surroundings, a problem for which we are trying, in our projects, to find a
radical solution.  But you feel obliged to consider such a radical solution
possible.  In other words, in spite of your brilliant gifts, you find
yourself powerless to overcome the objective contradictions of modern
capitalism.*

*A careful study of your work shows that it is in fact a consistent and
stubborn attempt to round off the sharper corners of city planning and
smooth and soften all its rough edges.*

*You are the finest of the surgeons of the modern city, you want to cure it
of its ills whatever the cost.  Therefore you raise the entire city on
stilts, hoping to solve the insoluble urban traffic problem.  You create
wonderful gardens on the roofs of tall buildings, hoping to give people an
extra patch of green, you design homes whose occupants enjoy perfect
convenience, peace, and comfort.  But you do all this because you want to
cure the city, because you are trying to keep it essentially the same as
capitalism made it.*

*We in the USSR are in a more favorable position — we are not tied by the
past.*

*History confronts us with problems that can only have a revolutionary
solution [paraphrasing Marx] and, however feeble our resources, we will
solve them no matter what.*

*We are making a diagnosis of the modern city.  We say: yes, it is sick,
mortally sick.  But we do not want to cure it.  We prefer to destroy it and
intend to begin work on a new form of human settlement that will be free of
internal contradictions and might be called socialist.  We know that raising
a city on stilts (and you have seen that in this respect we are following
your example) does not permit a radical solution of the urban traffic
problem.  Driving between columns is almost the same as driving through
narrow streets.*

*We know that the roof garden is an excellent architectural solution, but it
cannot solve the sanitation problem, the problem of open spaces.  And
similarly, we would like to find a solution for the living unit, but not in
the form of a luxurious private home or a European-type hotel.*

*You yourself talk of international statistics which show that the birth
rate is the highest and the death rate the lowest in the most densely
populated areas.  But this is only natural.  The thinly populated centers
are poor villages and without doctors or culture, without means and without
decent food.  You write that culture develops only where people are
concentrated in large masses.  But this is perfectly understandable.  It
describes the situation in a capitalist society, though not elsewhere.  We
in the Soviet Union must make culture available to the entire population,
not merely the urban population, whatever the cost.  But to do so we cannot
transfer 100 million of our peasants to the big cities, not without
destroying our agriculture.  Accordingly, we want all the beneficial
consequences of concentration for the development of culture and, at the
same time, all the advantages of dispersal and decentralization for
spreading culture as uniformly as possible over the population.  And for
this it is necessary to create new socialist forms of population settlement
based on elimination of all the disparities between town and country.*

*You are absolutely right in your high evaluation of the collective in human
history.  But our disagreement is not along those lines.  The higher
requirements of collectivism and industrial concentration demand
decentralization and dispersal in space; that is the crux of the matter.*

*I note with pleasure that you consider it necessary to quote Lenin.  You
say that he thought of saving the peasant by introducing industry into the
village, but did not think at all of saving the city dweller.*

*But you are wrong, my dear Le Corbusier.  Not only about Lenin but Engels
and Marx thought long and often about both.  Or rather for them these were
two aspects of the same problem.*

*Permit me to quote their own words on the subject:*

*A resettlement of mankind is necessary, with the elimination of rural
neglect and isolation and the unnatural crowding of huge masses into the big
cities.*

*– Lenin*

*The separation of town and country has condemned the rural population to
millennia of backwardness and the urban population to being mere wage
slaves, it has destroyed the basis for the spiritual development of the
former and the physical development of the latter.*

*– Engels*

*The contradiction between town and country is the coarsest expression of
the subjection of the personality to the division of labor, which transforms
the individual into a limited urban animal, on the one hand, and a limited
rural animal, on the other.*

*– Marx*

*You refer to Perret’s unsuccessful attempts to take housing out of the
city.  But this too is quite understandable.  He severed an isolated member
from a complex organism.  That member inevitably wasted away.  We are
removing from the city nothing less than the city itself, its entire system
of supply and culture.  In other words, we are creating a whole new
organism.  This is quite different from what Perret was trying to do.*

*You write that the peasant does not love flowers and does not hear the song
of the skylark.  But of course he doesn’t…when he is exhausted with
backbreaking labor.  But we want our peasant to listen to the skylark.  And
we know that for this it is only necessary to lighten his labor and bring
more culture into his life.  And all this will be possible not by smoothing
out the contradictions with which the modern capitalist system is riddled,
but by creating new forms of human settlement more worthy of the future.*

*We are aware that we have yet to find the solution to this very difficult
problem.  But we cannot refrain from posing it, we cannot refrain from
trying to solve it.  That is our duty, the duty of architects who would like
to become the architects of socialism.*

*Moreover, we hope that in the future, as in the past, we shall be able to
learn a great deal from you, and that what we learn will help us to solve
our new and difficult problems.*

*Cordial greetings from myself and my friends,*

*Yours sincerely,*

*M. Ginzburg*

*From Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, 1930.*

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