The thing that struck me as I started my research was how long it took for that idea to catch on. Despite wide publicity for that first one [Country Club Plaza in Kansas City], shopping centers remained a rarity for thirty years. The problem was cost. Erecting a big new shopping center made economic sense only in very well-to-do neighborhoods. If you’re a real estate developer, it makes much more sense just to sell house lots because you get your money back immediately. You have to operate a shopping center for many years before you make a profit. In Kansas City, the developer was already making a bundle of bucks from his lot sales and he figured he could sell even more houselots by building that shopping center — as an attraction, a loss leader.

Not until the mid 1950s did shopping centers appear in any numbers. The first enclosed shopping mall is generally considered to be Southdale Mall, built in 1956 outside of Minneapolis. Then suddenly shopping centers take off, and they’re EVERYWHERE. Why then? Why so suddenly?

Historians have tended to offer three interrelated explanations: rise in use of automobiles, general residential suburbanization, and white flight. I looked at three very different cities, Charlotte, North Carolina, Cortland, New York, and Scranton / Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, to see if those factors explained the exponential rise in shopping plaza construction. None did.

For instance, automobiles — clearly the shopping center exists to serve the auto, but auto ownership was high in all three cities long before shopping centers popped up around the end of the 1950s. I could find no “tipping point” in absolute numbers or per capita number of cars — no magic number across the three cities when cars began to “require” shopping centers.

Same with suburbanization and white flight. Again, suburbanization of housing does set the stage for the shopping center; well-to-do customers were moving to the suburbs and the stores wanted to follow them. But rate of suburban growth had nothing to do with timing of centers in my three cities. Charlotte grew great guns in the 1950s and 60s, Cortland was a town of 20,000 people and always has been, and Scranton / Wilkes Barre LOST population steadily throughout this entire period, both in the city and in the suburbs. Yet in all of those places, whether there was suburban growth or not, shopping centers came around the end of the ’50s. White flight also fails as an explanation: in both Cortland and Scranton / Wilkes Barre, the percentage of African-Americans remained constant at around one percent. So clearly something else was going on.

The explanation is quite unexpected: a change in tax laws. By accident the federal government began subsidizing new shopping center construction.

In 1954, Congress passed a change in the tax law, something called “accelerated depreciation.” Republicans controlled the Presidency and both houses of Congress, and very much wanted to use government to help business. There was a small recession on and they wanted to get people to invest in manufacturing, so they offered a tax break intended to spur factory construction. It turned out because of a quirk in the language that the law applied not just to factories but to any “income-producing” building.

You see, the tax code had always given a write-off toward the cost of replacing business buildings. Any factory or store will eventually wear out. It needs a new roof, this or that needs replacing. From its inception in the 1910s, the US tax code allowed businesspeople to deduct a certain percentage of their building’s value each year so that at the end of so many years they would have enough money to replace the building. Typically forty years was considered the “useful life” of a structure. You deducted 1/40th of the building’s value each year; instead of paying it in taxes, you got to hold onto it, with the intent that you’d put it under your mattress and save it toward the day the building needed repairs or replacement.

In 1954, Congress greatly accelerated that depreciation timetable, so that you could take twice as big a tax break in the early years. But nothing said you actually had to use the money for renovating the building, so it became tax-free income. The acceleration clause was so powerful that on paper it could look like you were losing money on your building for years even though the building’s value was going up. In fact, you could claim losses even in excess of the amount of profit you were making on the building, and you could apply those losses to other kinds of income. You could use them as a “tax shelter.”

So in the mid-50s, commercial real estate became a tax shelter — you built in order to get these paper losses and shelter other kinds of income. Accelerated depreciation produced an unintended boom in ALL types of commercial construction. Especially in suburbia. You could only get the full write-off on new construction, not renovation of an existing structure. And depreciation applied only to buildings and not to land. So you wanted to spend very little for land and a great deal on the building so you could get the biggest tax break. And where was land cheapest and new construction easiest? The math pushed developers towards the edge of town.

The economic logic of the tax law spurred all sorts of new kinds of suburban development. There’s a tremendous boom in suburban apartments that starts in the late 50s. There’s a tremendous boom in suburban office development. America’s first office park pops up in 1955 and within a decade there are office parks all over the place. Same situation with industrial parks. Investors are looking for tax shelters so now they build whole new factory districts on the edge of town.

The central point of my research, I’d say, is the discovery that US shopping centers did not supplant downtowns purely because “the public demanded them.” Customers certainly liked the easy free parking and the newness of the mall, but federal tax subsidies played a big role as well. Can we measure how many shopping centers met real demand and how many were built just for investment purposes? Well, if you compare the United States to Canada (particularly Ontario, which had similar numbers of cars and suburbanization to the US) you find that the countries had virtually the same number of shopping centers per capita in the mid-50s — before the US tax change. But by the end of the 60s, the United States had twice as many per capita. If you wanted to extrapolate from that, you could say that perhaps half of American shopping centers were genuinely desired and the other half were to some extent the result of this tax break.

The triumph of the shopping center had wide ripple effects on American habits and lifestyles. For one thing, structures built under accelerated depreciation were intended to be disposable. You reaped the tax break as long as the law allowed, usually seven to fifteen years, then unloaded the project. So builders got out of the habit of building for the ages and instead perfected construction techniques to match the tax timetable — you could buy “fifteen year” or “thirty year” roofs, for example. Today dead and dying shopping plazas are a major suburban blight in most American cities. I lived in Atlanta for a year, in a quite desirable suburb, and within a mile of my house there were three struggling shopping centers riddled with vacant space because new centers had opened further out in the ’80s and pirated the tenants.

… Accelerated depreciation was thus the engine behind a sweeping new pattern of urban development. Most downtowns remained alive and healthy until the 60s, but when these new suburban downtowns came into being, the old downtown nosedived into decline. Sometime around 1960, geographers began to notice — academics love to invent labels — that shopping center development had turned from “consequent” to “catalytic.” Consequent meant you built shopping in the middle of customers’ houses. Because of the federal subsidy in the form of a tax break, though, it now became economical to move out beyond the city and to build a new downtown. In the late 50s or early 60s, development became catalytic, where developers started going out way beyond the edge of town and erecting shopping centers in the cornfields. Suburban office parks and apartment complexes followed. This is the beginning of what we now call “edge city.”

The edge city phenomenon became unmistakable after 1981, when the Reagan Congress changed the depreciation structure to allow write-off of a building not in forty years, but in fifteen years. From 1981 to 1986 when that break was repealed, America saw tremendous overbuilding. The tax incentive was such that in Texas, for instance, they start talking about “see-through” office buildings, where developers built purely to get the tax break — they’d earn money even if the space never rented.

Resources

This article was originally published in Long Term View, the public policy journal of the Massachussetts School of Law at Andover. The article was written with the assistance of journalist Nancy Bernhard. A complete version of the article is online in the “Positions” section of Cloud-Cuckoo.net.

A more academic treatment of this topic, by the same author, is:
Hanchett, Thomas W., “U.S. Tax Policy and the Shopping-Center Boom of the 1950s and 1960s.” The American Historical Review, Vol. 101, No. 4 (Oct., 1996), pp. 1082-1110.

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell drew on Hanchett’s research for The Terrazzo Jungle, an essay on the planning history and failed ideals of suburban malls.

That’s exactly what Holzheimer did in his short paper, Urban Development Intensities in the Washington, DC Metropolitan Area. He looked at overall intensity for historic neighborhoods and for new, transit oriented, mixed use centers. For good measure, he also looked at suburban employment centers, including the so-called edge cities like Tysons Corner.

The unexpected conclusion: Historic neighborhoods are more intense than edge cities.

The areas Holzheimer looked at included:

• Rosslyn, VA — a post-WWII concentration of offices and apartments near downtown DC. Many of its towers are in the 20-30 story range, while its streets tend to be wide and car-oriented (view profile).
• Bethesda, MD — a suburban transit oriented district that has been redeveloped over the past 20 years. It has an equal mix of 2-4 story commercial buildings and 15-20 story towers (view profile).
• Georgetown, DC — a walkable 18th century town that is mostly 3-5 story townhouses, with some detached houses, and some commercial buildings built since the 1970s in the 6-10 story range (view profile).
• Alexandria, VA — a walkable 18th century town that is mostly 2-4 story townhouses, with some very recent commercial and residential construction in the 6-11 story range (view profile).
• Tysons Corner, VA — the archetypal edge city. Tysons is one of the largest suburban commercial centers in America. It has malls, big-box shopping, towers in the 7-22 story range, and residential complexes in the 3-4 story range. With wide arterials and highways everywhere, Tysons is completely car oriented (view profile).

This table shows a selection of Holzheimer’s numbers:

Summarizing these findings, Holzheimer wrote:

One perhaps surprising conclusion that can be reached from the data is that the development intensity of Tysons Corner and its edge city comparables is below that of the two 18th century cities of Georgetown and Alexandria. While both of these older cities have increased their development intensity over the past two hundred years, it has been within generally the same development envelope prescribed by the street grid and height and scale of the original buildings. Furthermore, their street grids have accommodated traffic levels associated with 21st century America. … Georgetown and Alexandria are generally perceived as pedestrian oriented, moderate scale urban places, without significant height. It is worthwhile to note that development intensities of 50 or higher do not need to be uncomfortable environments for walking and can easily accommodate activities of daily living. … with few exceptions, development intensities found today fall far short of the intensity levels of those of the 18th century cities around which Washington was developed. (emphasis added)

That’s surprising and important because it confounds popular assumptions. Historic 18th century towns are seen as quaint, sleepy and obsolete. Suburban edge cities, with their jammed highways and tall towers, are seen as dynamic activity centers.

When one compares the actual land use intensity of both patterns, however, the 18th century pattern comes out ahead.

Historic Neighborhoods

Downtown Washington is easily the most intense area in the region. It’s also extremely diverse in urban design. Under the citywide 12-story height limit, DC encompasses post-WWII and contemporary office blocks, apartment towers, government districts, museum/civic districts, and historic districts. The analysis could be extended by breaking out specific neighborhoods. In particular, how do the historic neighborhoods stack up?

Some of DC’s most walkable historic neighborhoods are:

• Dupont Circle — Built from the 1870s to the early 20th century, the brick townhouses are 3-4 stories, apartments and office buildings range from 3-7 stories, and there are a few newer 9-12 story buildings (view profile).
• Adams Morgan / Kalorama — Built during the first few decades of the 20th century, its large townhouses are 3-4 stories. Apartment buildings are in the 6-8 story range, with a few at 10-12 stories (view profile).
• U Street / Logan Circle — Built in the decades following the Civil War through the early 20th century, the neighborhood is mostly 2-3 story townhouses, with some 6-8 story buildings being built on the avenues (view profile).
• Capitol Hill — Began to be developed in the 1790s with construction continuing throughout the 19th century. Almost entirely 2-3 story townhouses with some 3-5 story commercial buildings (view profile).

This table shows Aurbach’s numbers:

Overall intensity spans the gamut, but even quiet, mostly 2-3 story Capitol Hill rivals Tysons Corner. Dupont Circle rivals the DC area’s newer, taller transit oriented developments for overall intensity.

Historic neighborhoods continue to provide viable models for comfortable, attractive and walkable density. The high-performance design and planning techniques employed by these neighborhoods are well worth studying.

Notes

All table figures are derived from Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments estimates for 2005.

Dupont Circle bounded by Massachusetts Avenue, Florida Avenue and 16th Street. TAZ 46, 47, 48 and 49.

Adams Morgan / Kalorama bounded by Connecticut Avenue, Calvert Street & Columbia Road on the north, 16th Street and Florida Avenue. TAZ 114, 115 and 116.

U Street / Logan Circle bounded by Florida Avenue, 7th Street, P Street and 16th Street. TAZ 52, 53 and 54.

Capitol Hill bounded by 4th Street, F Street NE, 11th Street and I-295. TAZ 149, 150, 162, 163, 177 and 178.

Resources

Deriving Urban Density and Intensity in Greater Washington, D.C. — A PLANetizen article by Terry Holzheimer, based on the paper referenced above

Arlington Economic Development — A department of the Arlington County government

Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments — population and employment forecasts and related maps

The Garreau Group — Inventor of the term “edge city”

Description of Tysons Corner by the Fairfax County Economic Development Authority

National Park Service — Washington DC Historic Districts

Delightful Density by Laurence Aurbach — More on the topic of historic neighborhoods and their densities.

Climbing the cliff from Lower Town to Upper Town on Côte de la Montagne.

At the foot of the funicular (an easier way to travel up the cliff) on the Quartier Petit Champlain commercial street.

A hilltop with the opposite bank of the Saint Lawrence River visible in the far distance.

The Terrace Dufferin, a wide boardwalk perched high above the river. The Château Frontenac hotel dominates the skyline of the old city. From here you can see…

… activity on the river like this Canadian Coast Guard ship.

Sturdy rowhouses facing the Parc Bastion de la Reine, a grassy lawn surrounding La Citadelle (The Fortress). Click on this image to see a larger version.

In Lower Town, the plaza Place Royale and the chuch of Notre Dame des Victoires.

Another view overlooking Lower Town from the Parc Montmorency.

A less-visited section of the Old City.

A mixed use street with shops and cafes outside of Old Québec.

All photographs on this page are copyright © 2007 by Laurence Aurbach.

Resources

A Brief History of the City of Québec — Official City of Québec website.

Historic District of Old Québec — UNESCO World Heritage List. Includes spectacular 360 degree panoramas.

Quartier Petit Champlain (photos) — Claims to be the oldest commercial district in North America. Certainly one of the cutest.

Société du 400e anniversaire de Québec — July 3, 2008 is the 400th anniversary of the founding of Québec City.

Map of Old Quebec

Disconnected street networks were the default, entrenched pattern of development in post-WWII America. However, by the early 1960s a backlash had arisen in opposition to the conventional planning wisdom. This countermovement snowballed through the 60s and 70s, and by the 1980s the issue had filtered into the architectural profession and scholarly research.

Part II of this series described how disconnected street patterns became ubiquitous in U.S., with the mandate in particular coming from the Federal Housing Administration. By 1941, over 200 cities had instituted subdivision regulations that encouraged disconnected street patterns.

The building industry helped to codify and entrench those standards nationwide. The Urban Land Institute (ULI) published recommendations in 1947 that promoted disconnected patterns. The Institute for Transportation Engineers’ (ITE) Recommended Practice for Subdivision Streets (1965) recommended discontinuous local streets. In ITE publications through the 1980s and 1990s, recommendations for low connectivity remained unchanged. ITE standards were adopted wholesale by public works departments throughout the nation. More than any other single source, ITE publications directed the street patterns of U.S. development in the late twentieth century.

Meanwhile, the visionary wing of the architectural profession was launched on a trajectory of the fantastic, drawing deeply from pulp science fiction and heroic feats of gigantic engineering. Ideas for the metropolis of the future encompassed cities floating on the ocean and resting on the ocean bottom, cities drifting in the air, mobile cities, and modular cities whose component parts could split off, travel to other parts of the world, and recombine with other modules to form new, instant cities. The thread running through many of these proposals was that of a lifestyle entirely divorced from the ground, from the rhythms of the natural world, and from human scale and walking. All life was to be machine-mediated and pedestrian networks were superfluous.

It wasn’t until the car culture had assumed complete hegemony in America that Jane Jacobs revisited street connectivity and its relationship to successful, vital cities.

Jacobs was a writer who eventually became one of the leading thinkers and activists for city life and pedestrian-oriented streets. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs wrote that the greatness of cities is based on their diversity — diversity in enterprises, retail trade, cultural facilities, and entertainment. She championed the small and the idiosyncratic: small manufacturers, small offices, specialized shops, art movies, nightclubs, etc. She said that great variety in commerce is related to variety in cultural opportunities, streetscapes, and populations.

Four conditions are indispensable for generating city diversity:

• Mixed use serving different functions and schedules
• A mix of old and new buildings
• High population density
• Short blocks — Jacobs’ exact quote is “Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.”

For Jacobs, small blocks were essential for a simple reason: Blocks that were too big made walking inconvenient. There was no reason to make a lengthy detour around a big block. Where blocks were too long, pedestrians were channeled into the same routes every day. That made walking dull, constrained street life, and limited the area where storefronts could be successful. Not only do vital areas require small blocks, but routes must be continuous as well. “In city districts that become successful and magnetic, streets are virtually never made to disappear,” wrote Jacobs.

In support of her argument, Jacobs presented examples from sections of Manhattan, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. Frequent streets are a means to an end, she wrote:

The means by which they work (attracting mixtures of users along them) and the results they can help accomplish (the growth of diversity) are inextricably related. The relationship is reciprocal.

– The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p. 186

Christopher Alexander, in his influential essay A City is Not a Tree (1965), argued against dendritic (tree-like) patterns in urban planning. Alexander addressed tree-like patterns in several realms — social, political and physical. However, his examples and illustrations focused on street networks and land use mix. Alexander wrote that planning philosophies underlying tree-like patterns are authoritarian, artificial and inhumane. The dendritic organization of space fails to correspond to social realities and is psychologically damaging.

Many of the writers of the 50s and 60s who were advocating a more human-scale, pedestrian-oriented urban design had support from the Rockefeller Foundation. These included Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, Christopher Tunnard, Ian Nairn, Edmund Bacon and others.

Throughout the following decades the backlash against disconnected street networks gathered steam as part of a greater movement to reclaim the importance of walkability in urban design. Léon Krier’s theoretical designs and advocacy in the U.S., and Jan Gehl’s pedestrian research published in Life Between Buildings (1971) were influential.

A handful of urban plans were adopted and developments broke ground, based on networks of small blocks and connected streets. Some of these included the St. Lawrence Neighborhood Plan in downtown Toronto (1975), the Randolph Neighborhood in Richmond, VA (1977), Battery Park City in Manhattan (1979), and Seaside in the panhandle of Florida (1981).

By the 1990s, codes and standards for connectivity were starting to be adopted by municipalities and standards-setting organizations. Significantly, the Institute of Transportation Engineers published its first set of alternative standards as a “proposed recommended practice” intended to support walkability: Traditional Neighborhood Development Street Design Guidelines (1997). After 60 years of disconnected, dendritic street patterns, it looked as if a few in the professions might consider alternatives. But the force of inertia was strong; the shift to alternatives has been slow in some quarters, while the bias toward automobile orientation has continued unabated in others.

Resources

Handy, Susan, Robert G. Paterson and Kent Butler, Planning for Street Connectivity: Getting From Here to There. Planning Advisory Service Report 515, American Planning Association, 2003.

Southworth, Michael and Eran Ben-Joseph, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities. Island Press, 2003.

The Timeline of New Urbanism lists numerous publications and activities that were undertaken during this period. The online database includes more than 1,000 entries in six categories.

… colonial governments passed ordinances requiring the owners of slaughterhouses and other nuisance business to clean their premises and forbidding them to toss their wastes into adjacent streets, street drains, and streams. They also used their police powers to separate the traditional nuisance industries from people living in densely settled parts of towns, villages, and cities by relegating those industries to peripheral locations. To institutionalize the principle of separation, several colonial governments enacted laws that authorized municipal governments to regulate the location of nuisance industries. Elsewhere, colonial and early national town and state governments protected communities against egregious industrial stenches through public nuisance actions, using their police powers to force businesses that violated the norm of separation to shut down and relocate to less densely populated areas.

That was the regulatory response to traditional nuisances like slaughterhouses and tanneries. But when industrial pollution began impacting the quality of urban life, the law could not adapt to rapid change. Judges and juries were blind to the harms caused by new technologies, a blindness that seems to have been rooted in cognitive psychology. Industrial pollution was too new and unfamiliar; judges could not conceive that the impacts were equal to — or worse than — traditional nuisances.

Again from Rosen:

The judges’ willingness to impose injunctions and damage awards on the traditional nuisance industries and extreme reluctance to impose them on the new industries suggests that their conception of material nuisance was the product of pre-industrial cultural schemas that evolved before large factories powered by coal-burning steam engines and producing or utilizing toxic chemicals became commonplace. These symbolic understandings were rooted in a era in which the truly horrible stenches of slaughterhouses and rendering businesses stood out in screaming sharpness against the ordinary stenches, smokes, and liquid wastes coming from homes, churches, stables, stores, and workshops that had for millennia constituted the generally accepted sensory backdrop of everyday life. They framed a worldview in which the only sort of industrial emissions that most people “knew” were so abnormal as to constitute an intolerable material harm — that caused damage so bad that they obviously required state intervention — were those that were generated by the traditional nuisance industries.

It took one or two generations before industrial pollution was generally accepted to be a legal nuisance. At the same time, the rate of invention was accelerating. New and unfamiliar industrial processes were introduced, many with unrecognized toxic effects. There were no health or safety regulations for those industries.

Formal zoning ordinances began appearing in the U.S. in the early twentieth century. Various reasons have been identified for the trend. Increasing urbanization required rules to prevent fires, ensure adequate sunlight and ventilation, and maintain the efficiency of travel and shipping. The growing numbers of immigrants arriving from overseas and African Americans moving from the rural South certainly played a role, as there were determined efforts to create segregated racial enclaves in most cities.

However, a hypothesis that may be worth exploring is that zoning as we know it is in part a response to the extreme complexity of pollution in the twentieth century. It could be that trying to sort out the specific harms of each pollutant or activity became overwhelmingly burdensome to the court system. It was much easier to segregate all production activities from residential areas than to identify which ones were compatible.

Photographic credit: Oil Region of Pennsylvania and New York, 1860?-1910?. The Robert N. Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views, courtesy of The New York Public Library.

Photo by Lane Transit District

In honor of the EmX beginning service, here is a transit history poster I made some years ago, titled Streetcars of Eugene 1907-1927. The poster shows the system in 1912, a period when streetcars were used to boost real estate development. That’s why some of the lines ran through empty fields. These days, planners recommend “land use first”: The demand for development and codes that support transit oriented development should be in place before transit lines are built.

Streetcars of Eugene 1907-1927
Silkscreened 20″ X 28″ poster

Key
Urban land uses circa 1912
(Orange) Public, Religious, Commercial
(Green) Residential, Parks, Cemeteries
Copyright 1990 by Laurence Aurbach

The System

… was said to be the greatest small-city system in the United States. Trolleys rolled through the streets and suburbs of Eugene for twenty years, serving commuters, farmers, manufacturers and joyriders alike. Railroads were the primary means of transportation during this era, and were considered the key to economic development. Horsepower was becoming outmoded by technology, and automobiles were slow, fragile and expensive. Eugene’s desire to become a regional distribution center prompted the construction of over eighteen miles of lines for a town of 11,500 persons.

The system was built by the Portland, Eugene & Eastern Co. for an estimated half-million 1912 dollars. Through 1915, PE&E operated the cars on a franchise granted by the City Council. Southern Pacific assumed management subsequent to that date.

All routes ran daily on a half-hour schedule from 6 a.m. to midnight, except the Fairmount line which ran on a 20-minute schedule from 11:45 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. A ride on the streetcars cost 5 to 10 cents, and reportedly excellent service was provided by the twenty-seven motormen, conductors and mechanics.

The Cars

Only the finest trolley cars were suitable for Eugene. Manufactured in St. Louis, the nine cars featured electric heaters and rattan seats. A variety of styles were used, including open, enclosed, and “California Style” semi-enclosed cars. They all ran on standard gauge track and were powered by 500-volt DC overhead cables.

The cars were 45 feet long with a maximum capacity of 100 passengers. When not in use, they were parked at the PE&E carbarns located at 13th and Beech.

The Routes

1. Blair: Built 1912. Length 2.0 miles.

This line was operated in conjunction with the College Crest line.

Roads traveled: 8th, Blair, River.

2. College Crest: Built 1910. Length 6.2 miles.

Eugene residents enjoyed countryside excursions when warm weather allowed riding in open-air trolleys. Day hikers used this loop as a jumpoff point for hikes up Spencer Butte.

Roads traveled: Willamette, 11th, Polk, 18th, Friendly, 19th, Jefferson, 24th, Friendly, 28th, 29th, Willamette.

3. Fairmount: Built 1907 to the University; extended 1908 to Hendricks Park. Length 5.6 miles.

The only presently existing streetcar tracks are located on Columbia Avenue.

Roads traveled: Willamette, 11th, Alder, 13th, University, 26th, Columbia, Fairmount, Moss, 13th, Alder, 11th, Willamette.

4. West Springfield: Built 1910. Length 4.8 miles.

For several years, Eugene was dry while Springfield was the only wet town from Salem to Medford. Saturday night drinking parties were so popular in Springfield that a 2-car “drunken special” ran at midnight, when the bars closed. A sheriff was stationed in each car to prevent harassment of women.

On Sundays, hundreds rode to Judkins Point ballfield, where they spent the afternoon cheering on the home team.

Roads traveled: Willamette, 11th, Franklin, parallel to Southern Pacific tracks, South A bridge, Main.

Before the automobile age, people didn’t think much about connectivity. It was taken for granted that well-connected street networks were the best way to build cities. The routes between buildings had to be as convenient as possible because everyone moved slowly, compared to today’s motorized transport. Most city folk traveled at 2-4 mph (the speed of walking) and even those with vehicles didn’t move much faster than 7-9 mph (the speed of a horse and buggy).

The invention of the automobile changed all that and gushers of oil provided the fuel. Growth of vehicle production was explosive. America went from 8,000 vehicles in 1900 to 9.2 million in 1920 and 23 million in 1930. In 1916, military trucks allowed the French to win the battle of Verdun. It was the first time motorized vehicles were decisive in a large battle. World War I was pivotal in motorizing the U.S. military.

Some architects and planners believed they could transmute the power of mass motor vehicle use into a force for good: a force to alleviate poverty, squalor and oppression of the masses. European modernists like Charles-Edouard “Le Corbusier” Jeanneret and Ludwig Hilberseimer were revolutionaries, fascinated with large-scale schemes that would wipe away the old order and comprehensively reorganize cities for personal mobility via the automobile. The selling points were speed, efficiency, cleanliness and progress, a message that played especially well in America.

Ludwig Hilberseimer, Hochhausstadt, 1924

The American regionalism movement denounced overcrowded, unhealthy cities and the growing threat posed by automobile collisions. As mass ownership of cars and trucks became a reality in the 1920s, the regionalists along with their allies in government, and eventually the real estate industry, began to rethink thoroughfare patterns. Here was something new, they reasoned: door to door service at 30 mph or better! Gradually they concluded that all the old assumptions about connectivity could be tossed aside. Drawing on the Garden City tradition, their solution was a universal pattern of low density cul de sacs set in superblocks.

These initiatives were blows to connected streets in multiple ways. Disconnected street networks became the default pattern throughout the second half of the twentieth century.

Flashback: Gilded Age fantasies

There was nothing new about proposals for a vertical, industrial metropolis. By the 1920s, various visions had been floating around for over a generation. Possibly the earliest was King Champ Gillette’s “Metropolis,” which he outlined in his book The Human Drift (1894). Gillette proposed a city of high rise towers to be located in the region of Buffalo, NY and powered by Niagara Falls. Everyone would live in 25-story apartments arranged around domed atria.

Gillette proposed a well-connected street network made of hexagonal blocks and triangular, glass-roofed islands. Below the surface were three levels for electric transport, deliveries, maintenance and infrastructure. Gillette’s blocks were 900 feet across, which was large for a pedestrian-oriented plan but on par with Manhattan’s 800-foot blocks.

The Human Drift was in the same tradition as other Gilded Age proposals like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: a socialist utopia aiming to redress the excesses of capitalist exploitation. Desultory efforts to build the “Metropolis” scheme came to nothing. Gillette went on to much greater success as an inventor of safety razors.

Visions of the vertical metropolis continued to catch the public’s fancy. William Robinson Leigh, a painter of wilderness landscapes and Indians, painted his atypical “Visionary City” in 1908. Leigh portrayed the urban superstructure of the future as a vertiginous massif illuminated by a ruddy sunset. But even this megastructural vision had a well-connected thoroughfare network, with bridge crossings spaced at regular city block intervals.

“King’s Dream of New York” appeared in the 1908 annual souvenir book of New York architecture published by the Moses King Corporation. A more bustling version than Leigh’s future, this was the Manhattan of 1908 compounded vertically, yet retaining its fundamental pedestrian orientation at ground level.

King’s visions of the future metropolis were enormously popular and appeared for several years after his death (in 1909), growing continually more refined.

In Chicago, planner Daniel Burnham was commissioned to create a plan for the Chicago region. Burnham was the most famous planner in the nation, having designed and built the epochal 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and having planned the National Mall in Washington. Burnham’s 1909 Chicago plan proposed multilevel thoroughfares snaking through downtown with towers rising above. The upper level was to be a grand boulevard for pedestrians and vehicles, while the lower level would serve as an intermodal freight distribution network. This was actually built (albeit for automobiles only) as Wacker Drive in 1924-26.

The vertical metropolis was in the Zeitgeist of the day — but always with a pedestrian and mass transit orientation.

From vertical to hyperurban

In post-World War I America, the vertical metropolis idea continued to develop in response to a growing culture of centralization and professionalism. This was exemplified by the new profession of city planning and the great expansion of zoning power. In New York, architect Harvey Wiley Corbett and illustrator Hugh Ferriss studied the maximum building envelope allowed by zoning, and the resulting ziggurat form became an icon of architectural gigantism and technological optimism.

Corbett and Ferriss popularized their vision through books and exhibitions, including the 1925 Titan City show in Wannamaker’s department store. Some schemes had pedestrian scale connectivity via elevated catwalks, but others showed stupendous megastructures expanded to the point where the human figure was lost altogether.

A German film director named Fritz Lang was very taken with this version of hyperurbanism. In 1923, he and his wife began work on the screenplay for an epic science fiction film called Metropolis. While still in the development phase, Lang visited Manhattan and the powerful impact of the city influenced his concept for the film. Metropolis, with its groundbreaking special effects, stood for 50 years as the preeminent cinematic representation of hyperurbanism and influenced countless films and television shows.

Although certain urban districts around the world bear a resemblance to the vertical metropolis, today it lives on more in popular imagination than in real life. Two other trends have had a much greater influence on the connectivity of the built environment: modernism and regionalism.

Modernists reboot the city

Modernist European architects were emphatic that city plans embody the very latest technological innovations in both letter and spirit. In his “Plan voisin pour Paris (City for Three Million Inhabitants)” of 1922-25, Le Corbusier made the most dramatic leap yet towards the auto-oriented city. He demanded that existing cities be razed and built anew from the ground up. He proposed a thoroughfare network composed of multi-level freeways, forming a grid of superblocks 1,300 feet on a side. All citizens would live in 60-story towers and slabs, creating densities of 400 people/acre while also freeing most of the surface as open space for sports and decorative landscaping.

In Le Corbusier’s concept, the street was abolished. He opposed the placement of residences next to streets with a fundamentalist’s fervor:

The automobile ought to stop right in front of any given door… which means that the houses open out onto the traffic lane. And that is what we can no longer tolerate: TO LIVE! To breathe — TO LIVE! Homes to inhabit. The present idea of the street must be abolished: DEATH OF THE STREET! DEATH OF THE STREET!

– The Radiant City, p. 124

Because freeway ramps would connect directly to the towers’ garages, there was scarcely any need for people to walk anywhere. But in case they did have the desire, there would be underground tunnels allowing pedestrians to access neighboring superblocks and streetcar stops.

Le Corbusier rejected the American idea of vertical urbanism, calling it “new medievalism.” (In fact, Le Corbusier rejected just about everything that didn’t conform exactly to his vision.) He offered his perception of the skyscraper city:

The skyscraper has petrified the cities. In an age of speed, the skyscraper has congested the city. A statement of fact: the skyscraper has reinstated the pedestrian, exclusively. The pedestrian crawls at the feet of those skyscrapers like a beetle at the foot of a steeple.

– The Radiant City, p. 126

Le Corbusier was a master salesman and became one of the most respected architects of the 20th century. Although no entire city was built according to his plans, today many urban districts around the world resemble his vision. America in particular was receptive to the “tower in the park” idea, and it guided scores of public housing projects, urban renewal projects, office parks and downtown reconstructions. However, the American realizations were far less dense and concentrated than Le Corbusier had specified.

Branching out

Le Corbusier had strong words for the vertical urbanism produced by fellow modernists such as Hilberseimer:

A wretched kind of “modernism” this! The pedestrians in the air, the vehicles hogging the ground! It looks very clever: we shall all have a super time up on those catwalks. But those “R.U.R.” pedestrians will soon be living in “Metropolis,” becoming more depressed, more depraved, until one day they will blow up the catwalks, and the buildings, and the machines, and everything. This is a picture of anti-reason itself, of error, of thoughtlessness. Madness.

– The Radiant City, p. 122

Hilberseimer came to agree with his colleague’s criticism. Reflecting on his early 1920s ideas, he wrote:

The repetition of the blocks resulted in too much uniformity. Every natural thing was excluded: no tree or grassy area broke the monotony… the result was more a necropolis than a metropolis, a sterile landscape of asphalt and cement, inhuman in every aspect.

– In the Shadow of Mies: Ludwig Hilberseimer, Architect, Educator, and Urban Planner, p. 17.

In the late 1920s, Hilberseimer began to theorize more dispersed settlement patterns with more green space. He proposed a strict separation of uses into dedicated districts: industrial, commerce and administration, and residential. He developed “branching” or dendritic thoroughfare patterns to eliminate automobile conflicts and danger to pedestrians.

This, then, is what the default development pattern in the U.S. came to resemble most closely: a collection of isolated, single-use pods, each depending from highway-type arterials. Every local street ended in a cul de sac. The principle of disconnection was comprehensive and absolute.

Hilberseimer fled Germany and began teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology with Mies van der Rohe in 1938. He was the founder and chair of IIT’s Department of City and Regional Planning and helped to rewrite Chicago’s building codes.

A garden for the motor age

Many people shared Le Corbusier’s revulsion at the stress, crowding and pollution of the city, but most had a different solution in mind: escape to a more idyllic, more rustic town or village. In the field of urban planning, that urge was expressed in the Garden City movement. The first Garden City was Bedford Park in London (1875), but street patterns were well-connected until English architects Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker began the design of Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1905.

Until that time, cul de sacs were viewed as cesspools of poverty and disease. They were actually outlawed by a nationwide street ordinance in order to ensure better living conditions. Parker and Unwin wanted to design Hampstead with numerous short (400 foot) cul de sacs, so they lobbied for, and won passage of, “The Hampstead Garden Suburban Act” that legalized their design.

Hampstead Garden Suburb featured large blocks that averaged about 1,000 feet across at the longest dimension. Many blocks had a garden or orchard at the center; the entire development was designed so that every household could have a producing garden. The blocks had pedestrian lanes continuing from the ends of the cul de sacs, so that the pedestrian network was well connected even though the vehicular network was not.

Unwin eventually became an international expert on planning and his Garden City projects became famous. Naturally, Le Corbusier had something to say about Garden Cities:

The garden city leads to individualism. In reality, to an enslaved individualism, a sterile isolation of the individual. It brings in its wake the destruction of social spirit, the downfall of collective forces; it leads to annihilation of the collective will; materially, it opposes the fruitful application of scientific discoveries, it restricts comfort; by increasing the amount of time lost, it constitutes an attack upon freedom.

– The Radiant City, p. 38

Many others felt differently. A group of American architects and planners felt the Garden City approach, including its regional planning aspects, was an ideal solution to urban overcrowding, housing shortages, pollution, crime and sickness.

Two members of that group, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright, took a study tour of Letchworth and Hampstead Garden Suburb in 1922. They knew immediately this was the model they needed. In 1923, Stein and nineteen others founded the Regional Planning Association of America (RPAA) to adapt the Garden City for American needs, and to develop an alternative vision of regional planning. They invited Raymond Unwin to help develop their theoretical framework. For Unwin this began several rounds of consulting and lecturing in the U.S.

Stein and Wright designed Radburn, N.J. in 1928, the first U.S. development planned exclusively with superblocks and cul de sacs. Residential blocks averaged about 2,500 feet in length, and each had parkland in its center.

Pedestrian pathways were carefully segregated from streets, and pedestrian underpasses allowed pedestrians to access commercial areas without crossing major roads.

Eleanor Roosevelt helped to form the corporation that built Radburn, and served on its board. This connection proved very convenient for Stein and the RPAA in the years to come. Stein designed or consulted on numerous developments that combined superblocks, cul de sacs, internal parks and pedestrian segregation from streets, most built with federal support and funding. The most well known are Greenbelt, MD (1935) and Baldwin Hills Village, CA (1941). Some of the better known offshoots are Reston, VA (1963) and Village Homes, CA (1975).

Far more influential, however, was the federal government’s adoption of language and standards derived from Stein and the RPAA. The Federal Housing Administration’s 1936 bulletin Planning Neighborhoods for Small Houses explicitly rejected thoroughfare connectivity on the grounds that it was wasteful, expensive and hazardous. The FHA recommended dendritic thoroughfare patterns: cul de sacs or loops that led to collectors and arterials. The FHA prescribed cul de sacs as the most attractive street layout for family dwellings.

The incentive for adopting FHA standards was guaranteed mortgages. What developer in his right mind could pass up a no-lose investment? The FHA invited developers to submit their plans for review. Next,

FHA consultants would then analyze plans and suggest layouts conforming to FHA guidelines for securing an insured mortgage. It was a powerful control tool and naturally, almost all subdivision developers submitted plans for review to ensure a guaranteed mortgage.

- Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities, p. 85

The authority went to the top. One FHA administrator told his advisory board that through insured mortgages, “You could also control the population trend, the neighborhood standards, and material and everything else through the president.”

The RPAA had astonishing success getting their principles institutionalized (although some of the consequences were certainly unintended). Margaret Mead once said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world” — especially when they have the ear of the president. Thus, disconnected street networks became encoded into the very foundation of U.S. land development for the remainder of the twentieth century.

Sources

Axelrod, Jeremiah Borenstein “Los Angeles is not the city it could have been: Cultural Representation, Traffic, and Urban Modernity in Jazz Age America,” Literary and Visual Representations of Three American Cities, 1870s to 1930s. University of Birmingham Press (electronic book), December 2000.

Gillette, King Champ, “Metropolis,” The Human Drift. New Era Publishing Co., 1894. Reprint: Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, Inc., 1976, pp. 88-112. Online excerpt edited by John W. Reps.

Hilberseimer, Ludwig Karl, Ludwig Karl Hilberseimer Papers, c.1885-1995, Ryerson and Burnham Archives, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago.

Kaderbek, Stan L, “Wacker Drive viaduct reconstruction project,” ITE Journal. March 2001.

Larsen, Kristin, “Cities to Come: Clarence Stein’s Postwar Regionalism,” Journal of Planning History. Vol. 4 No. 1, February 2005, pp. 33-51.

Le Corbusier, The Radiant City. The Orion Press, 1964.

Maliszewski, Paul, “Looking Forward.” Cabinet, Issue 19, Fall 2005.

Scott, Mel, American City Planning. University of California Press, 1971.

Southworth, Michael and Eran Ben-Joseph, Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities. Island Press, 2003.

Unwin, Raymond, Town Planning in Practice. Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Willis, Carol, “Titan City,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology Magazine. Volume 2 Issue 2, Fall 1986.

Zimmerman, Claire, “Comrades and Citizens: Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and K. Michael Hays” Part. City University of New York, Issue 3, Spring 1998.

The opening sequence, filmed in black and white, is a paean to Progress (with particular attention to the field of highway engineering). Then at minute 7:50, the film switches to Technicolor and begins a tour of the Futurama exhibit — a vision of the futuristic world of 1960. Throughout the film, narration is intoned in a reverent, quasi-religious manner backed by portentous skating-rink theremin music.

At 14:30 the automated freeway lanes are explained.

At 17:30 the great metropolis of 1960 is described, in almost all respects exactly opposite to the principles of new urbanism. “Residential, commercial and industrial areas all have been separated for greater efficiency and greater convenience,” states the narrator. “On all express thoroughfares, the rights of way have been so routed, as to displace outmoded business sections and undesirable slum areas whenever possible.”

At 19:50 close-ups of the downtown intersection are shown, which then cut to a full-size outdoor mock-up of the same street section.

The film concludes with “Fantasia”-like animation and ever more heated rhetoric about Progress and the Great American Way.

The Futurama exhibit was the most popular at the Fair; observers said there was never a break in its long waiting lines. After the Fair closed in 1940, designer Norman Bel Geddes planned to take the exhibit on the road — or, more precisely, to the air, traveling the U.S. in a giant Zeppelin.

However, preparations for war were making Futurama’s message superfluous. GM and Ford were already heavily involved in German war production. Germany invaded Poland in late 1939, and the theme of the Fair changed from 1939′s “Building the World of Tomorrow” to 1940′s “For Peace and Freedom.” By mid-1940 GM was gearing up for domestic war production and the need for a nationwide campaign to envision a superhighway future was eliminated.

Technical Notes

The film “To New Horizons” is part of the Prelinger Collection of the Internet Archives. The film is available in several different formats, which are listed along the left-hand side of this page. Here is the Internet Archive’s help page for viewing movies. The Internet Archive recommends VLC Media Player and MPlayer for Mac. Other players that may work are regular Quicktime and Real Player, Windows Media Player, and programs that play DVDs on your computer.

Other Resources

• Photographs and tour of the GM Pavilion and Futurama ride from the collection of Paul M. Van Dort.

• Photographs of the Futurama exhibit from Columbia University’s “Call it Home” production

• GM’s Futurama tour booklet courtesy of PopCult Magazine

• Postcards collected by professor Andrew F. Wood of San Jose State University:

• Aerial view of the 1960 street model
• Fairgoers on the Futurama ride
• Aerial view of the GM Pavilion

• Background research for the stage show “Boozy: The Life, Death, & Subsequent Vilification of Le Corbusier” including:

• Photos of the Futurama exhibit, mostly by Life Magazine
• The Democracity exhibit, similar in many ways to Futurama but located in the Perisphere rather than the GM pavilion
• Earlier, nearly identical city models created by Norman Bel Geddes for Shell Oil
• Antecedent “Radiant City” designs by Le Corbusier from 1922 and 1925

Ancient Grid Plans

By 2600 BC, Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley (present-day Pakistan) was built with blocks divided by a grid of straight streets, laid out in perfect right angles, running north-south and east-west. Each block was subdivided by small lanes. Mohenjo-Daro was the largest of many grid-plan towns and villages that existed in the region from 2600-1900 BC.

Obeserving the urban planning of the Indus Valley civilization, archeologist B. B. Lal wrote, “Well-regulated streets [were] oriented almost invariably along with the cardinal directions, thus forming a grid-iron pattern. [At Kalibangan] even the widths of these streets were in a set ratio, i.e. if the narrowest lane was one unit in width, the other streets were twice, thrice and so on.”

A workers’ village at Giza, Egypt (2570-2500 BC) housed a rotating labor force, and was laid out in blocks of long galleries separated by streets in a formal grid. Many pyramid-cult cities used a common orientation: a north-south axis from the royal palace, and an east-west axis from the temple, meeting at a central plaza where King and God merged and crossed.

Hammurabi (17th century BC) was a king of the Babylonian Empire who made Babylon the world’s first great metropolis. He rebuilt Babylon, building and restoring temples, city walls, public buildings, and building canals for irrigation. The city was razed and rebuilt several times over the next 1,000 years and there is some archeological dispute about the original date of Babylon’s grid layout. Certainly by the reign of King Nebuchadnezzar II (604-562 BC) the major avenues of Babylon were built wide and straight, intersected approximately at right angles, and were paved with bricks and bitumen (a tar-like substance derived from crude oil).

The tradition of grid plans in China dates from the 7th century BC at least. Guidelines put into writing in the Kaogongji (possibly during the Spring and Autumn Period of 770-476 BC) specified a canonical form for the ideal capital city: “When designing a capital city, it should be laid out in a square grid measuring nine by nine li (about 4.5 kilometers) per side, with three gates on each of the city walls. There should be nine streets and nine avenues, each wide enough for nine horse carts to pass abreast. The palace should be in the center of the city, with the ancestral temple on the left, temples to the deities on the right, office buildings in front, and a marketplace behind.”

The first planned Greek city was probably Miletus, built after 479 BC. Its gridded design has been credited to Hippodamus (although this is probably apocryphal), a Greek intellectual associated with the Pythagoreans. The grid plan was often used by Roman city planners, based originally on its use in military camps known as castra (singular: castrum). One of the best-preserved can be found in the ruins of Timgad in present-day Algeria. The Roman castrum is characterized by a precisely orthogonal grid, traversed by two axial streets called the cardo and the decumanus that cross at right angles at the center.

Grid planning in the ancient Americas was less established, but the tradition of orienting buildings to specific compass directions resulted in many cities, villages, and building complexes having an orthogonal pattern. Teotihuacan, near modern-day Mexico City, was in its time one of the largest cities in the world, a center of industry and culture. At its height between 150 AD and 450 AD, the city’s orthogonal pattern covered eight square miles.

Asia from the First Millennium AD

As Japan and the Korean peninsula became politically unified in the 7th century AD, those societies adopted Chinese grid-planning principles in numerous locations. The ancient capitals of Japan, such as Fujiwara-kyô (694-710 AD), Nara (Heijô-Kyô, 710-784 AD), and Kyoto (Heian-Kyô, 794-1868 AD) used grid plans. So did Kyongju in Shilla (present-day Korea), also of the same era. The grid-planning tradition in Asia continued through the beginning of the 20th century.

Europe and Its Colonies

New European towns were planned using grids beginning in the 12th century, most prodigiously in the bastides of southern France that were built during the 13th and 14th centuries. Medieval European new towns using grid plans were widespread, ranging from Wales to the Florentine region (present-day Italy). Many were built on ancient grids originally established as Roman colonial outposts.

The Roman model was also used in Spanish fortification settlements during the Reconquista of Ferdinand and Isabella. The military town of Santa Fe near Granada took the form of a castrum, but was modified with the addition of a central plaza.

That modified form may have been the prototype for new cities established during the Spanish colonization of the Americas, beginning with the founding of La Laguna (on the Canary Islands) in 1496. In 1573, King Phillip II of Spain compiled the Laws of the Indies to guide the construction and administration of colonial communities. The Laws specified a square or rectangular central plaza with eight principal streets running from the plaza’s corners. Hundreds of grid-plan communities throughout the Americas were established according to this pattern, echoing the practices of earlier Indian civilizations.

Conclusion

By and large, ancient grid plans were expressions of military organization, colonial conquest, or political/economic domination. Grids were most often used when there was a large amount of territory to occupy in a short time. They were also used to establish formal order and spatial focus on particular functions of urban life — civic, religious, governmental, etc. In many cases, the orientation of the grid and placement of structures had cosmological, religious or other symbolic meanings.

Picturesque or naturalistic urban plans, with street maps that resemble a field of cracked mud, are the antithesis of grid plans. The historical record shows that they developed through generative and iterative processes over longer periods of time. For that reason, they are sometimes called organic plans. I’m not aware of evidence that naturalistic plans were ever designed all at once, or imposed by authoritarian leaders.

However, it is erroneous to make a causal link between particular urban plan patterns and particular political systems or ethical standards. Grid plans have been used for ruthless military operations as well as peaceful and democratic small towns. In Europe, naturalistic plans developed under feudal oppression, but also nurtured the medieval self-governing guilds and the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Resources

Kostof, Spiro, The city shaped: urban patterns and meanings through history. London: Thames and Hudson, 1991.

Lopez, Maria, et al., Transformation and Current Use of Traditional Grid Pattern Cities. 8th International Conference of the Asian Planning Schools Association, 11-14 September 2005.

Mieroop, Marc Van de, “Reading Babylon”, American Journal of Archaeology, Issue 107, No. 2, April 2003, pp. 257-275.

Morris, A.E.J., History of Urban Form Before the Industrial Revolution (Third Edition). Prentice-Hall, 1994.

Nara Women’s University, Jô-Bô System of Heijô-Kyô – City Planning in Ancient Japan. Noboru Ogata of Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies, Kyoto University.

Reps, John W., The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965.

Stanislawski, Dan, The Origin and Spread of the Grid-Pattern Town. Geographical Review, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Jan., 1946), pp. 105-120.

Vance, James E. Jr., The Continuing City: Urban Morphology in Western Civilization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

The Urban Past: An International Urban History Bibliography

Note: I wrote a slightly different version of this article and posted it to Wikipedia in December 2004/January 2005. Wikipedia is an open source document, so any text posted there is subject to both improvement and degradation over time.