Communitas (book)

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Communitas
Communitas (book).jpg
First edition
AuthorPercival Goodman, Paul Goodman
SubjectUrban planning
PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
Publication date
1947
Pages141

Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life is a 1947 book on community and city planning by Percival and Paul Goodman. The book is divided into ‘A manual of modern plans’ reviewing the conceptual history of twentieth-century planning and ‘Three community paradigm’, a series of utopias proposing answers to the central question of the book: ‘How to find the right relations between means and ends?’[1]

Contents[]

Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life argues for "human scale" urban planning, in which buildings, cities, economics, and society are made to suit immediate community needs.[2] It is presented as an illustrated primer on how city planning effects socioeconomic order and citizen empowerment to better their communities. The book's first half addresses historical and modern approaches to urban planning,[3] while the second half introduces the authors' own urban proposals.[4]

The authors overview modern takes on urbanism, each in brief: self-contained garden cities, production-focused industrialized plans, and rural–urban integrated plans. Their introduction of garden cities extends to the works of Patrick Geddes, Ebenezer Howard, and Raymond Unwin. Their survey of urban production includes the American mill town, Chinese and Soviet industrial plans, and Buckminster Fuller's utopian project.[3] While lukewarm on industrial projects of both American private capitalist and Soviet state capitalist societies, they criticize Fuller's focus on technology.[4] Lastly, the authors' collection of humane combinations of rural and urban life, i.e., integrated plans, encompasses Borsodian homesteads, kibbutzim, progressive schools, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and works of Frank Lloyd Wright.[3] They also write on the integration of work and life, agriculture and manufacturing, and communal and regional development. While the authors lament a perceived loss of collective American spirit, they compare communal experiments to the artistic vanguards in that many are unsuccessful but influential in pollinating subsequent efforts. The Goodmans advocate for city squares designed to support rich human interactions. They criticize American obsession with large, industrial buildings and, in the International Style of Le Corbusier, a lack of humane aesthetic.[4]

The other part of Communitas presents three community paradigms original to the Goodmans. Each represents a specific set of socioeconomic values expressed through its community's design. The first program of compulsive consumption—a satire for contemporary American consumer society—imagines the city as a department store. Made to minimize barriers to buying and selling, the program's society and politics are made to mimic the frenetic culture of advertising. The compulsive consumption program ends with a ritual potlatch festival to clear out old goods and begin another consumption cycle. The second program is an integrated community with libertarian (anarchist) values of liberating work, industrial democracy, and aesthetics. Expert workers collectively drive industry in the integrated program, redesigning work and domestic life with psychological, moral, and technical considerations.[5]

Publication[]

The brothers Percival (Percy) and Paul Goodman, an architect and a humanist, respectively, co-authored Communitas. The idea developed from Percy's exhibition concept for a "city of tomorrow", which he had unsuccessfully proposed for Otis Elevator at the 1939 World's Fair. As was customary for Paul's collaboration style, he rewrote the concept as a satirical pastiche of consumerism.[6] Secure in his own career and proud of his brother's analytic imagination, Percy did not take offense and the pair worked together without rivalry.[7] Paul wrote the book in his theoretical style, suggestive and practical in tone rather than definitive or normative.[8] Percy provided the book's illustrations.[3]

Communitas was first written in the early 1940s and edited in 1946 for publication in Chicago the next year. A revised edition was published in 1960 in New York. It rearranges the book's contents and tightens some passages, including the conclusion. Some examples were added (e.g., Chinese commune and Black Mountain College), and others updated (e.g., highway materials). Though the revised edition puts more emphasis on the role of "affluence", the book remained mostly the same.[9]

Reception[]

Sociologist David Riesman, who later wrote The Lonely Crowd, offers an extended, positive critique towards the Goodmans' book in The Yale Law Journal the same year as the title's publication.[9][10] The sociologist notes issues with the Goodmans' sparse treatment of history and comments on the book's intellectual forebears, in particular, dependence on scholar of cities Lewis Mumford and unfairness towards garden city movement founder Ebenezer Howard.[9]

Throughout Communitas, the authors, as New Yorkers, are dismissive of cultures unlike the megacity's, potentially conflating historical precedent with the natural effects of environmental design.[3]

Three decades from its publication, despite some details growing outdated, literary critic Kingsley Widmer considered the book's "imaginative sociology" approach to utopian social thinking and urban planning—combining real social problems with speculative moral philosophy—to have continued relevance.[2] Widmer likened Communitas to "libertarian footnotes on Plato's Republic"[3] and considered it Paul Goodman's best book.[11]

Legacy[]

Communitas became known as a major work of urban planning, and some consider it Paul Goodman's masterpiece. Yet the book only received this recognition following the resurgence of interest in Paul Goodman's works late in his life.[12] It became an influential essay during the 1960s[13] when Random House republished the title in 1960 alongside Goodman's landmark Growing Up Absurd,[12] yet the book received little published discussion in subsequent decades.[9]

The "communitas" concept in Victor Turner's anthropology of ritual borrowed from the Goodmans.[14]

The book was among the foremost influences of American historian Gar Alperovitz.[15] Literary critic Kingsley Widmer suggested that some 1960s communal experiments drew inspiration from the Goodmans, including progressive schools, free universities, and living-working communes.[4]

Notes[]

  1. ^ Caves, R. W. (2004). Encyclopedia of the City. Routledge. p. 121.
  2. ^ a b Widmer 1980, p. 42.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Widmer 1980, p. 43.
  4. ^ a b c d Widmer 1980, p. 44.
  5. ^ Widmer 1980, pp. 44–45.
  6. ^ Stoehr 1994, p. 86.
  7. ^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 86–87.
  8. ^ Stoehr 1994, pp. 124–125.
  9. ^ a b c d Widmer 1980, p. 156.
  10. ^ Riesman 1947.
  11. ^ Widmer 1980, p. 49.
  12. ^ a b Smith 2001, p. 180.
  13. ^ Gottlieb, Robert (1993). Forcing the spring : The transformation of the American environmental movement. ISBN 9781559631235.
  14. ^ St. John, Graham (2014). "Victor Turner". Oxford Bibliographies Online. doi:10.1093/OBO/9780199766567-0074.
  15. ^ Doughty, Howard A. (2013). "What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution". College Quarterly. 16 (3). ISSN 1195-4353. EBSCOhost 97762664.

References[]

External links[]

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