Urban Design and the New Environmentalists

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Urban Design and the New Environmentalists: The Legacy of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Urban Design Research Initiatives

Peter L. Laurence Abstract: History of Urban Design and role of the Rockefeller Foundation.

n the late 1950s, three pioneering scientists undertook controversial projects that

would prove essential to understanding our world today, shaping our

environmental consciousness: Charles Keeling began measuring atmospheric CO2

concentrations; Rachel Carson started writing Silent Spring; and M. King Hubbert

published his prediction of the depletion of U.S. oil reserves. In the same years,

architects, city planners, and landscape architects were re-‐imagining their approach

to the environment: Kevin Lynch pursued basic research into human perception of

the built environment; Jane Jacobs began writing The Death and Life of Great

American Cities; and Ian McHarg reinvented the field of landscape architecture,

starting a decade-‐long effort to define a new approach to designing with nature.

Although the scientists would independently contribute to a new consciousness,

these figures were part of a shared effort: all opposed the prevailing “urban

renewal” approach to the redevelopment of cities in favor of a more

“environmental” approach; all were part of a remarkable Rockefeller Foundation

research initiative that helped to define the new field of urban design; and all met in

October 1958 at a Foundation-‐sponsored Urban Design conference hosted by the

University of Pennsylvania. Although from different fields and backgrounds, at that

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conference they discussed urban design in the context of environment, and, to

indicate their shared concerns, collectively described themselves as

“environmentalists.” This publication, the 2008 Penn-‐Rockefeller anniversary

conference, and, more significantly, the urban-‐environmental consciousness of its

participants, all owe something to the legacy of that time and those events.

The Origins of Urban Design and the Impact of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Urban Design Research Initiative

“Urban,” in the early 1950s, was an idea not unlike what “sustainable” is today. It

reflected a new consciousness about the environment, and one that was similarly

borne of crisis. After World War II there was a great shortage of housing, and cities,

neglected since the Great Depression due to financial hardships and wartime

material rationing, were in need of rebuilding. With a population boom and a

suburban building boom on the horizon, the U.S. Housing Act of 1949 provided for

the demolition of slums and new construction in the form of “urban

redevelopment,” and it was around this time that the term “urban design” came into

use. With the passage of the Housing Act of 1954, which broadened the parameters

for demolition beyond slums, “urban redevelopment” became “urban renewal,” and

the newly coined term “urban design” gained increasing currency. The neologism

modernized the existing city design practice known as “civic design,” which in turn

had updated the practice known as “civic art” around the turn of the century, and

indicated renewed purpose. Like “sustainable” design, “urban” design sought to

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align the design fields with larger trends and new concerns. A new era was in the

making. As Lewis Mumford wrote in opening his introduction to Clarence Stein’s

notable postwar memoir-‐manifesto Toward New Towns for America (1951), “Except

for colonial times, hardly a beginning has been made, up to now, on the history of

American city development and urban design.”1

Apart from Lewis Mumford’s prescient use of the term, some of the earliest

references to “urban design” are found in the archives of the Rockefeller

Foundation. In 1952, Foundation directors became interested in the future of the

American city, and soon inaugurated a research initiative that would contribute

significantly to defining and shaping the new field of urban design.2

The instigator was Wallace K. Harrison. Architect of Rockefeller Center and

long-‐time friend of Nelson Rockefeller, Harrison was a newly appointed executive of

the Rockefeller Foundation. At the height of his career, his portrait, surrounded by

images of his masterworks in the background, adorned the cover of Time in

November 1952. From Rockefeller Center to his latest undertaking, the not-‐yet-‐

public Lincoln Center redevelopment project, he was intimate with city

redevelopment practices from the era of Civic Design to the new era of Urban

Renewal. Perhaps with a sense of the disparity between postwar redevelopment

ambitions and the knowledge needed to undertake it, he suggested that the

Foundation support research in city design and redevelopment. He recommended

MIT as a good place for this, being newly acquainted with Portland architect-‐

engineer Pietro Belluschi, a Lincoln Center master-‐plan team member and new Dean

of the MIT School of Architecture and City Planning. With the added support of

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former MIT president and Foundation Trustee Karl Compton, a grant initiative that

would help define a new field was launched.

The Rockefeller Foundation’s support of city planning and design research

was not unprecedented. In 1929, the Foundation had made a large grant that

established the first City Planning degree program at Harvard Graduate School of

Design.3 However, after World War II, city planning was still regarded as a relatively

new and inexperienced field, and one that was necessary but insufficient to the

complex task of renovating cities. As Foundation Humanities Division directors

established early in their conversations with MIT faculty, by 1953, most city

planning programs were still in their infancy, having been founded since the War’s

end, and, in general, did not adequately address aesthetic and humanistic concerns.

As amateur urbanist and MIT Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences John Burchard

Ely observed, postwar city planning had neglected “aesthetic elements to

concentrate largely on technical ones of communication, hygiene, and economics.”4

For this reason, he had supported the creation of a new MIT Center for Urban and

Regional Studies in 1952, as “a means of bringing together architecture and city

planning,” as well as the phenomenologically-‐oriented research of MIT professors

and Center for Urban and Regional Studies affiliates Kevin Lynch and Gyorgy Kepes,

who were studying “the visual aspects of the physical environment.”5 Since little

systematic research had been done on “the three-‐dimensional urban environment,”

all agreed that their work was a good starting point toward understanding the

implications of urban redevelopment and renewal practices.

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Following an initial research proposal in 1953, which matter-‐of-‐factly used

the term ‘urban design’ without explanation, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded

its first urban design research grant to Lynch and Kepes in 1954. On this occasion,

Foundation directors described the significance of the new field, recognizing its

potential for synthesizing architectural design with city planning objectives. They

wrote,

“The Division of Humanities has no intention of entering the general field of

city planning. Urban design, however, is one of the fields in which the arts have most

direct impact on the quality of human life. In view of the relative neglect of aesthetic

aspects in connection with city planning during the last few decades, an effort to

restore the balance in thinking in connection with city design seems well justified

under the Foundation’s program in the arts.”6

This conception of urban design, as articulated by Rockefeller Foundation

directors, was not only timely, but prescient. As a synthesizing practice, urban

design responded to the new “urban” national legislative agenda and echoed the

contemporaneous interest in integrating architecture and the arts. From the

standpoint of the design professions, this formulation also anticipated the

interpretation of urban design as a synthesis of architecture, city planning, and

landscape architecture, as articulated by GSD Dean José Luis Sert a few years later at

the 1956 “Harvard Urban Design Conference.”

Over the next ten or so years, the Foundation’s urban design research

program, which developed between 1952 and 1965, remained an inclusive and

groundbreaking endeavor, supporting research that produced some of the seminal

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works of the new field. Lynch and Kepes’ research was published in part as The

Image of the City (1960). A grant to Christopher Tunnard at Yale resulted in a 1958

conference “Civilizing the American Roadscape” and the National Book Award-‐

winning Man-Made America: Chaos or Control (1963), a multi-‐scaled analysis of the

built environment that critiqued urban sprawl. A series of grants to the University of

Pennsylvania starting in 1956 resulted in the historic 1958 “Conference on Urban

Design Criticism,” discussed below; E. A. Gutkind’s eight-‐volume International

History of City Development (1964-‐72); Ian Nairn’s The American Landscape: A

Critical View (1965); Ed Bacon’s The Design of Cities (1967); and support of Ian

McHarg’s rebuilding of the Landscape Architecture department at Penn, leading to

his field-‐changing book Design with Nature (1969). Although not typically associated

with the field of urban design, in part because she did not like or use the term, was

Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which was in many

ways the urban counterpart to McHarg’s environmental design, and one of the most

significant outcomes of the Foundation’s urban design grant initiative.7

The 1958 Penn-Rockefeller Conference on Urban Design Criticism

The 1958 University of Pennsylvania “Conference on Urban Design Criticism”

unfolded from a conversation between Jane Jacobs and Rockefeller Foundation

Humanities director Chadbourne Gilpatric in the summer of 1958.

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Gilpatric, who by then had become the champion of the Foundation’s urban

design research initiative, was impressed by Jacobs recent articles on cities and

urban redevelopment, and sought her opinion on Penn grant proposals that he was

reviewing at the time. She expressed enthusiastic approval of Ian McHarg’s idea for

a book about “civic design and related landscape architecture,” and general support

for the Penn faculty and the emerging Philadelphia School, which she knew quite

well, since the city was part of her beat as associate editor for Architectural Forum.

Penn, she believed, was perhaps the “most productive and influential center at

present in the United States,” due not only to the individual strengths of faculty like

William L.C. Wheaton and Louis Kahn, but because of a shared “concern with the

importance of the community as well as the usual physical and economic

considerations.”8

When the opportunity presented itself, Jacobs recommended that the

Rockefeller Foundation “find and give opportunities for observation and writing to

some first-‐rate architectural critics who could develop helpful new ideas for the

planning of cities.”9 Like her colleague and boss, Architectural Forum editor Douglas

Haskell, Jacobs was concerned by the lack of critical writing on architecture and

urban design in the American professional and public press. The idea struck a chord

with Gilpatric, who had a personal interest not only in cities, but in literary criticism.

In the following weeks, he proposed to William Wheaton, Director of Penn’s new

Institute for Urban Studies, that the School of Fine Arts host a conference on the

subject, and discussed with Jacobs her grant proposal for a book on cities. In

October 1958, Foundation grants underwrote the related Penn “Conference on

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Urban Design Criticism” and Jane Jacobs’ leave from Architectural Forum to write

the manuscript that became The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

By 1958, the transformations underway in U.S. cities had outpaced the

professional capacity to adequately follow or understand them. The Supreme Court

case Berman v. Parker, which upheld the power of eminent domain for urban

renewal, and the Highway Act of 1956 contributed to exponential annual increases

in numbers of renewal projects. As Penn conference co-‐organizer David Crane put it,

“Urban design has become everybody’s business and yet it is nobody’s business.”10

The purpose of the Penn conference, which was preliminarily titled the

“Conference on Criticism in Urban Design,” was therefore to stimulate reflection and

criticism of the redevelopment process and projects. As Crane recalled in the

conference working paper, “The idea of this conference came out when a Rockefeller

Foundation official noted that a certain well-‐known urban renewal scheme had been

published widely without critical commentary of any kind.” Alluding to Gilpatric’s

broader interests in cultural criticism, he continued, “Further reflection on this

circumstance showed that there is even more to be done in the arts of urban

redevelopment than the Foundation had previously observed in its efforts to

stimulate better criticism and review in music and literature.”11 As William Wheaton

wrote in the initial grant proposal, “the low state of urban design in America today”

was a reflection of the lack of value for design by the public and elected officials, as

well as “inadequate standards and knowledge on the part of the professions directly

concerned with city building, particularly architects, landscape architects, and city

planners.”12 A greater “quality and quantity” of writing about urban design and

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redevelopment was therefore needed, and this aimed across the spectrum of

authorship and readership, from theory to practice, professional to layman,

scholarly journal to public press. A “contemporary theory of urban design” needed

development, even as critical writing concerning urban design needed to engage the

public, practicing professions, and the civic and business leaders who made “daily

decisions regarding the man-‐made environment.”13

Recognizing the problems of urban redevelopment was not the same as

solving them, however. Developing urban design theory and criticism was a

challenge when the very term “urban design” remained a matter for discussion. As

Crane observed in the conference working paper, “Urban design is a new phrase, at

least too new or too ambiguous for any metropolitan classified directories to list any

practitioners of the art. The phrase has been used in a rather timid reawakening of

professional interests in the conscious esthetic choices in city development.”14

Although Crane had been thinking about the term for some years—he had studied

city planning with Wheaton at Harvard, worked as an assistant on Lynch and Kepes’

early Foundation-‐sponsored research at MIT, and had returned to Harvard to

lecture on urban design in early 1956—at Penn, as elsewhere, the terms “civic

design” and “townscape” were still used.15 Despite Wheaton and Crane’s objections,

Penn’s new Civic Design program, founded in 1956, was given the more familiar

term by Dean G. Holmes Perkins, likely because of the influence of Clarence Stein

and Gordon Stephenson (director of the oldest Civic Design program, established at

University of Liverpool in 1909), years earlier, before the emergence of a more

“American urban design.” Crane, who later directed the Penn program, was keen to

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establish it as “the progenitor of graduate programs in ‘urban design’” because of

these internal terminological debates.16 For Wheaton and Crane, however, urban

design was the appropriate shorthand for “design of the urban environment.”17 The

term reflected a new consciousness among the “environmental professions,” with

their horizons raised above the civic center to the larger man-‐made environment,

“the whole of the human settlement… as a connected fabric.”18

From an understanding of the “environmentalism” of urban design it

followed that the Conference on Urban Design Criticism required the participation

not only of the “environmental professions”—architects, city planners, and

landscape architects—but the architectural and cultural critics who would engage

the public in the critical process. Representing practice and the academy were Louis

Kahn, I. M. Pei, Gordon Stephenson, G. Holmes Perkins, Arthur C. Holden, Kevin

Lynch, Catherine Bauer Wurster, William Wheaton, David Crane, and Ian McHarg.

Among the critics were Lewis Mumford, Jane Jacobs, Grady Clay, J. B. Jackson, Leslie

Cheek, Eric Larrabee, Fritz Gutheim, Edward Weeks, and Chadbourne Gilpatric.

Other participants with interest or experience in civic and urban design who were

invited and considered for the conference, but who did not attend, included Walter

Gropius, Joseph Hudnut, John Burchard, Victor Gruen, and Holly Whyte.

In an effort to keep the participants focused (Jane Jacobs, a veteran of the

Harvard Urban Design conference, was skeptical about how much a conference

could accomplish), the three-‐day affair was held at the Westchester Country Club,

conveniently located near New York City, where meals, tea, and cocktails were

provided, and the program ran from morning to evening. The talks were

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organized into three primary groups—Philosophical Views; Efforts, Inhibitions, and

Failings in the Urban Design Press; and Idea and Form in Urban Design Criticism.

Talks on criticism and the press included Chadbourne Gilpatric’s “The Meaning of

Depth in Criticism,” Gordon Stephenson’s “Design and City Planning as Seen in the

Press,” Frederick Gutheim’s “Efforts of the Working Press,” Grady Clay’s “Form and

Method in Design Criticism,” Catherine Bauer’s “Professional Introspection and

Extroversion,” and Jane Jacobs’ “Inhibiting Factors in Criticism.” Talks on urbanism,

the city, and environment included Louis Kahn’s “Ideas of the City,” Clay’s

“Ruminations on European Townscapes,” Bauer’s “Asian Vernaculars in Urban

Design,” Arthur Holden’s “Sonnets for My City,” Kevin Lynch’s “Idea-‐Building and the

Instruments of Communication,” J. B. Jackson’s “ Ecology and Values in

Environment,” and Ian McHarg’s “New and Old Attitudes in Urban Environment.”19

Foundation director Gilpatric, a Rhodes scholar and former professor of

philosophy, among other career accomplishments, later described the conference as

“the most febrile and intellectual conference I have ever attended.”20 Conversation

ranged from the development of “the creation of a philosophy of urban design” to

specific projects meant “to build public awareness and appreciation of the urban

environment.”21 As later reported by Grady Clay in the Journal of the AIA, when

conversation bogged down in details, “Gilpatric reminded the group of ‘our common

concern: the future of great cities’.”22

The scope and complexity of issues made it clear to all participants that “the

problem of urban design criticism” would not be solved by “any one-‐purpose

solution.”23 The list of “possible measures” discussed in the concluding session was

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long and prescient. It included items like scholarly and popular books on topics like

the “History of the Suburb,” complimented by criticism not only of the end-‐product,

but the enabling processes and fundamental forces that, for example, created

suburban sprawl. “Don’t be content with the usual Ain’t-‐It-‐Awful outburst against

suburban sprawl,” reported Clay. “If the basic reason for suburban leapfrogging of

subdivisions is speculative holding of land, then go to work on speculation; find out

all the alternatives.”24 Other proposals included an institute or “center of

‘environmentalism,’ drawing on and acting upon all the learned fields presently or

potentially related to the design of environment,” a new “journal directed to

‘environmentalists’,” and other projects meant to celebrate the potential of vibrant

urban life.25

Gilpatric had hoped that the conference would point the way toward “a more

philosophical approach to what our cities should provide for civilized life, before

going all out to stimulate critical writing.”26 The participants’ latent

“environmentalism,” their understandings of the complexity and interconnectivity

of natural and social urban ecologies, would congeal into such a philosophy in the

years ahead. Describing, for example, of J. B. Jackson’s journal Landscape, Crane

observed that writing there “establishes a bridge between architecture, landscape

architecture, town planning, anthropology, sociology, conservation, and geography,

all through a single principle of rural settlements ecology. We can only regret that it

is not an urban ecology which draws all these interests together.”27 This synthesis,

however, would soon take place in McHarg’s and Jacobs’ work.

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At the moment, however, it was criticism that was the common theme of the

conference. Despite any present-‐day stereotypes about the passivity of the 1950s,

Grady Clay reported that “running through many of the discussions was the theme

of controversy—local fights deliberately provoked to promote public understanding

of design issues. Not precious, involved bickering over abstruse details the public

cannot or will not understand,” he continued, “but controversy over matters of

widest interest.”28 Discussion included “protest walks” against urban renewal

projects; “an American ‘Counter Attack Bureau’” modeled on the British

Architectural Review; “more controversy” (Bauer); “subsidies for massive

controversy” and more “vigorous ‘destructive criticism’” (Clay); and “more tough-‐

mindedness” (Jacobs).29

In the end, although the Conference on Urban Design Criticism produced no

publication, Foundation director Gilpatric predicted that the conference would have

“a wide-‐spread effect… through what the individuals took away with them.”30 Years

later, Grady Clay confirmed that “The conference incited all of us into publications of

every sort; and was a career turning-‐point for many.”31 This was true for Clay,

McHarg, and especially Jane Jacobs, who began writing The Death and Life of Great

American Cities (1961) in the weeks following the Conference on Urban Design

Criticism. As a project that developed, along with the conference, from her

suggestion that the Rockefeller Foundation support architectural and urban

criticism, Jacobs’ book fulfilled many of the recommendations of the conference

participants—a highly critical examination of urban redevelopment practices,

written for the widest readership, which proposed a comprehensive philosophy

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about the nature of the urban environment—and was perhaps the most significant

outcome of the Penn-‐Rockefeller Conference on Urban Design Criticism and the

Foundation’s urban design research initiative.

Urban Design and the New Environmentalists Today

The 2008 Penn-‐Rockefeller conference Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After the

Age of Oil commemorated the 1958 Conference on Urban Design Criticism by

conceiving an inclusive and ambitious event that would bring together participants

from around the world to consider the great challenges facing the built

environment, and indeed urban civilization as we know it, in the decades ahead.

Although the 2008 conference did not dwell on urban design history of

preceding five decades, there were echoes of the past. Robert Socolow spoke of the

damning environmental legacy of the Interstate Highway System, recalling Jacobs’

and others’ criticism of the 1956 Highway Act and its attendant urban renewal

projects. Jason Bregman and Lance Hosey reiterated the everlasting importance of

the design of the built environment, which was so important to David Crane and

others of the first generation of “urban designers.” Taner Oc, discussing the

importance of considering the special needs of urban populations, particularly the

aged, recalled another theme of particular interest to Jane Jacobs. Neal Peirce, Alex

Steffen, and Richard Saul Wurman echoed a central theme of the 1958 conference in

discussing the importance of communicating critical and complex urban design

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issues to a wider audience. And, at the conclusion of the conference, Roy Strickland

repeated Grady Clay’s call of fifty years earlier for more vigorous and revolutionary

criticism.

Despite the many, perhaps too many, echoes of 1958, the 2008 Penn-‐

Rockefeller conference may have marked a turning point. Although the participants

walked in the deep footsteps of an earlier generation of urban designers—who had

a prescient sense of the limits of natural resources, the intricacies of natural and

urban ecologies, and who, as described in the preceding pages, considered

themselves “environmentalists”—that earlier generation could not have imagined

the extent of present challenges and those on the horizon. Although Ian McHarg and

Jane Jacobs discussed threats to urban civilization from their various perspectives,

they did not then imagine the threats to global civilization that have been described

by Peter Head, William Rees, and Elizabeth Colbert. Although an earlier generation

of architects and urban designers was concerned with reinventing architectural

functionalism at the urban scale, and re-‐imagining functional cities, they could not

have imagined the significance of the work of Bill Dunster, James van Hemert,

Behnisch, or Arup in re-‐imagining sustainable urban environments.

Finally, although urban design education was only in its infancy in 1958,

participants of the Conference of Urban Design Criticism could not have imagined

how much work was yet to be done not only in teaching urban design fundamentals,

but in preparing a new generation of urban designers for post-‐carbon cities after the

age of oil. As when the term “urban design” was coined, hardly a beginning has been

made, but a new era is in the making.

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Acknowledgements Special thanks to Grady Clay and Judith McCandless; Mathew Crane; Marguerite Gilpatric; Daniel Lerch; Darwin Stapleton and Michele Hiltzik of the Rockefeller Archive Center; and Joan Shigekawa and Darren Walker of the Rockefeller Foundation. Notes 1 Lewis Mumford, “Introduction,” Toward New Towns for America (1951) (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 11. 2 Peter L. Laurence, “The Death and Life of Urban Design: Jane Jacobs, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the New Research in Urbanism,” Journal of Urban Design 11 (Jun. 2006), 145-72. 3 Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Report, 1929 (NY: Rockefeller Foundation), 259-60. 4 Charles B. Fahs, Interview with John B. Ely, Jul. 24, 1953 (RF RG 1.2, MIT City Planning, Series 200R, Box 375, Folder 3330.30) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter RAC). 5 Charles B. Fahs, Interview with MIT Architecture and Planning Faculty, Sept. 18, 1953, ibid. D'Arms, E. F. and L. C. Devinney, Interview with MIT Architecture and Planning Faculty, Feb. 17, 1954, ibid. 6 Rockefeller Foundation Humanities Division, Grant Report for MIT Lynch-Kepes City Planning Study (RF 54034), Apr. 7, 1954, ibid. 7 Peter L. Laurence, “Urban Design Criticism: Jane Jacobs and the Development of American Architectural Criticism and Urban Design Theory, 1935-1965” (PhD Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania), unpublished. 8 Chadbourne Gilpatric, Interview with Jane Jacobs, Jun. 4, 1958 (RF RG 1.2 Series 200R, Box 390, Folder 3380) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 9 Chadbourne Gilpatric, Interview with Jane Jacobs, May 9, 1958, ibid. 10 David Crane, “A Working Paper for The University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism” (RF RG 1.2, University of Pennsylvania-Community Planning Conference, October 1958-61, Ser 200, Box 457, File 3904) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC, 7. 11 Ibid, 1. 12 [William L.C. Wheaton], University of Pennsylvania Institute for Urban Studies, “A Proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation for a Conference on Criticism in Urban Design,” Jun. 12, 1958, ibid, 2. 13 Crane, “Working Paper,” 2. 14 Ibid, 6. 15 Jill Pearlman discusses the shift from civic design to urban design at Harvard GSD in “Breaking Common Ground: Joseph Hudnut and the Prehistory of Urban Design,” Josep Lluís Sert, The Architect of Urban Design, 1953-1969, Eric Mumford and Hashim Sarkis, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 118. See also, David Gosling, The Evolution of American Urban Design (Chichester, England: Wiley-Academy, 2003) and Eric Mumford, Defining Urban Design: CIAM Architects and the Formation of a Discipline, 1937-69 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 16 Ann Strong and George Thomas, The Book of the School: 100 Years of the Graduate School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Graduate School of Fine Arts), 141. 17 Wheaton, “Proposal,” 1. 18 Crane, “Working Paper,” 7-8. 19 [D. A. Crane, G. H. Perkins, W. L. C. Wheaton], Program for University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism (RF RG 1.2, University of Pennsylvania-Community Planning Conference, October 1958-61, Ser 200, Box 457, File 3905) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 20 Chadbourne Gilpatric, Report to Rockefeller Foundation Directors on Conference on Urban Design Criticism, July 23, 1959 (RF RG 1.2, University of Pennsylvania-Community Planning Conference, October 1958-61, Ser 200, Box 457, File 3904) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 21 [David Crane], “Possible Measures,” Oct. 4, 1958 (RF RG 1.2, University of Pennsylvania-Community Planning Conference, October 1958-61, Ser 200, Box 457, File 3905) Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC, 1. 22 Grady Clay, “The University of Pennsylvania Conference on Urban Design Criticism,” Journal of the American Institute of Architects 31 (Jan. 1959), 27. Gilpatric’s use of the phrase “great cities” likely had an influence of the title of Jane Jacobs’ forthcoming book. 23 Crane, “Working Paper,” 6. 24 Clay, “Conference,” 27. 25 Crane, “Possible Measures,” 1-2.

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26 Crane, “Working Paper,” [Gilpatric letter to Wheaton, Jun. 17, 1958], 2. 27 Ibid, 13. 28 Clay, “Conference,” 27. 29 Crane, “Working Paper,” 11, 21; Clay, “Conference,” 26, 27. The sentiments expressed at the Conference on Urban Design Criticism likely helped incited Jane Jacobs to public activism after the Conference on Urban Design Criticism and the publication of Death and Life. Her professional criticism and public activism were more subdued prior to the conference. 30 Gilpatric, “Report,” 1. 31 Grady Clay, Letter to Helen Horowitz, Jan. 25, 1996 (Personal papers of Grady Clay, courtesy of Grady Clay).

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