10 - Urban Planning, Transportation, and Suburban Development: Striking a Balance

Summary

Perhaps the central question facing urban and regional planners in the late twentieth century was that of the relationship between the forces of government and those of the private economy. One American student of transportation policies wrote that the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany exemplify the “market” and the “social subsidy” models of public policy, respectively. That is, Americans tended to mistrust public intervention in the market, whereas Germans did not trust private firms to make the right decisions for the community. Neither country has ever conformed rigidly to one model, but in the face of many forces making German and American cities more alike, different attitudes persisted, and they influenced the way many people viewed urban policies across the Atlantic.

GLOBAL FORCES AND TRANSATLANTIC SIMILARITIES

The late 1960s marked a new era in the urban policies of the United States' and the Federal Republic's urban policies, although the circumstances were rather different in the two countries. In Germany, the enormous task of postwar reconstruction was drawing to a close. The pressing shortage of housing no longer overshadowed attempts to rethink the design of cities and their connections to the hinterland. As a result, Germans were less likely than before to envy the conditions in American cities. For their part, Americans saw more crisis than opportunity. The urban riots of the 1960s called attention to the growing racial and economic segregation that had accompanied the decentralization of American cities. Some American planners began to look to Europe, including Germany, for models of urban vitality, but much evidence suggested that German cities were in fact following the same course of development as American ones, if more slowly.