Should be interesting for the p2p urbanist group: <a href="http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/mikhail-okhitovich-moisei-ginzburg-and-disurbanism/">http://rosswolfe.wordpress.com/2011/04/07/mikhail-okhitovich-moisei-ginzburg-and-disurbanism/</a><br>
<br><p style="text-align: left;">Le Corbusier, dismayed at Ginzburg’s sudden
new position, wrote to his friend pleading for his return to Urbanism:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Moscow, March 17, 1930</strong></p>
<p><strong>My dear [Moisei] Ginzburg,</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>There is a contradiction in the term itself; this word is a <em>fundamental
misunderstanding</em> 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!</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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).</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Please then do not see a hostile attitude in my serene and
firm affirmation: ‘Mankind tends to urbanize.’</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Very cordially yours,</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>L.C.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong><em> </em></strong>Ginzburg
responded thus:</p>
<p><strong>My dear Le Corbusier,</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>For me you are today the greatest and most brilliant
representative of the profession that gives my life content, goal, and
meaning.</strong></p>
<p><strong>That is why your ideas and solutions in the area of city
planning have for us a quite exceptional interest and importance.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>We in the USSR are in a more favorable position — we are not
tied by the past.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Permit me to quote their own words on the subject:</strong></p>
<blockquote><p><strong><em>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</em>.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>– Lenin</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><p><strong><em>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</em>.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>– Engels</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><p><strong><em>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</em>.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>– Marx</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p><strong>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.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Cordial greetings from myself and
my friends,</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>Yours sincerely,</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><strong>M. Ginzburg</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><strong>From <em>Sovremennaia Arkhitektura</em>,
1930.</strong></p><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a> - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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