To all ye here present in the parish of St.
Xavier, in the borough of Lincoln Park, in the beautiful but polluted city of Chicago, governed by our most gracious and often loquacious King Richard of Bridgeport.
Under the providence of Almighty God, we greet you in peace and love.
Recorded history stretches back 5 ,000 years.
5 ,000 years ago, there were already great cities in existence.
What is good about cities is the same now as it was then.
As Sophocles put it, the city is people.
I beseech you to join with us in our merry celebration.
All hail! All hail! All hail! A lot of times in the city, people just go by and they won't notice anything at all.
Like coming up on the aisle today.
Nobody really noticed, which I thought was fabulous, because I was wearing this whole thing, as you see it now.
I prefer the country to the city, but you know, you have to make a living.
The city, there's a lot going on, but the farm just, I don't know, there wouldn't be enough action.
I guess it's people.
And that's the reason I like Lincoln Park, too, because there are a lot of things happening.
A wonderful sense of community.
What's important about a sense of community? Why should that exist? Because it doesn't exist many places in Chicago, I don't think.
And this is one of the places that it does exist.
Lincoln Park is a lively community in Chicago.
More than many other parts of the city, there is still a lingering sense of the village, something that is hard to find these days in American cities.
And that, many experts believe, is exactly what is wrong with them.
The basic building block of the city is the neighborhood, the village within the city.
Without viable neighborhoods, the city becomes a collection of strangers, an anonymous and faceless place.
From about 12 ,000 years ago, the vast majority of people all through the planet have lived in small villages and neighborhoods.
Up to within the last 50 years, four -fifths of the population on this planet lived in villages.
This is an environment which has a long tradition.
Take Greenwich Village.
Greenwich Village wasn't a village even 100 years ago in the old sense.
And yet there was a kind of neighborliness and friendliness, recognition that they were part of the same unit.
People used to be proud of being members of the old Ninth Ward, much more than they were proud of being New Yorkers.
These qualities are the things that kept the, these are the human qualities, the underlying face -to -face realities, which our impersonal abstract culture has almost wiped out.
A city is not bricks and mortar, glass and steel.
It is the life, the human life, the web of interrelationships that is important.
City life is the life of many people living close together.
The social structure of the city is far more important than the buildings themselves.
High -rise buildings have given us the ability to concentrate fantastic numbers of people in small areas.
What we have failed to consider is the effect this environment will have on the social organization of the city.
The way people have lived for 12 ,000 years, isn't it to be dismissed and written off just because somebody is going to make a profit out of providing a different kind of a city for them to live in? Well, I think New York is insane in building out to the bulk headline with a brand new layer of city which will tower above everything we see there now when New York has a marvelous chance to limit its growth and have the growth happen in the boroughs and in other places.
There's some kind of insane process which says that we must realize all potential real set values.
Growth itself and bigness and power alone don't make a great city.
People talk, as Jane Jacobs does, about the great city at the moment when it's in the state of complete deterioration, when life is scarcely possible anymore in our biggest city.
The sky's a cry, look at the tears roll down the street.
Our cities have been built for profit instead of people or to minimize costs at the expense of the poor.
The most extreme example is public housing.
One of the worst of these is the Pruitt -Igo project in St.
Louis.
This now defunct prison for the poor consisted of 36 buildings.
Although it was anticipated that large numbers of children would live there, the project was originally built without a single playground.
Over the years, Pruitt -Igo bred violence and misery.
There was an interaction between the design and the problems that the community had, particularly the heavy concentration of children and early teenagers and the lack of an ability to control those kids and their behavior so that in many ways the people in Pruitt -Igo felt tyrannized by children, whether it was children dropping rocks or bottles out of high windows as you were breaking your windows.
And then the management, which was hardly very competent in our understanding, making you pay for the windows which your neighbor's children had broken.
People in Pruitt -Igo often spoke of it as a jungle and they tended to hold rather dim views of their neighbors and they saw the place as a dangerous, difficult, morally threatening environment.
That tended to make people feel over time that perhaps there was something wrong with them or otherwise they wouldn't be stuck in a place like that.
I think it had particularly that effect on the children in the project.
In our short -sighted drive to realize all potential real estate value or to cut costs at the expense of basic human needs, we have set in motion forces that will be set us for a long time.
Crime in the urban environment is epidemic and, short of a police state, there is no way law and order can be policed into being.
Order must be organic.
People must have a stake in the functioning of the city, something to gain by that order, something to lose if the order breaks down, a sense that it is responsive to their needs.
The children of Pruitt -Igo, like the children of the streets in many parts of our cities, have experienced a hostile, bitter, and sometimes brutal world.
Is it any wonder that they give as bad as they got? Oh, what a meal stuffed, huh? Amazing, really.
What I mean, listen, that's slides of Afghanistan right now.
No, really, Dave, listen, I have to go home.
Oh, no, hey, honey, honey, come here, he said he had to go home.
Oh, no, I know.
I got an arrow.
Look, when it gets late, it's very dangerous outside, so I thought I'd get home before the trouble starts.
Well, no, you have a point.
It is a jungle out there.
No, I know.
And not only there.
Did you tell him? No, I didn't tell him.
Not only on the street.
What do you mean? In our high -rise, the lady next door was stabbed, she was raped, repeatedly assaulted, and they ripped off her whole stereo system.
Oh, really? How many speakers did she have? She had four speakers.
Beautiful walnut.
A German turntable and quadrasonic sound.
Everything went.
Terrible.
Terrible.
Are you parked near here? A couple blocks.
Run to your car.
Run to my car? You're going to run me down the middle of the street in a zigzag motion, in and out of the light seat.
No, I don't think so, honey.
What do you mean? Well, if the police see him running in this neighborhood, they'll shoot him on sight.
Oh, yeah.
Sure.
I'll take a cab to my car.
All right.
Okay, that's a good idea.
One more thing.
What? If you get home...
When I get home? When I get home? I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
When you get home, just give us a ring.
Let us know you're safe.
Okay, that's a good idea.
And listen, in addition to that, why don't you buzz up from the lobby just to let us know you made it that far? All right? All right.
If you think it's necessary...
Oh, you won't be too sorry.
You want to let me out? Oh, yeah.
All right.
Here you go.
Look, you do me a favor.
Lock your door as soon as I leave.
Are you kidding me? I've got the whole house locked in here.
All right.
Take it easy.
Bye -bye.
So long, Harold.
Love that guy.
Hey! What do you mean there's somebody out there? There's somebody out there.
Who is it? Harold! Oh, no, it's...
That's not the cat, buddy.
What do you mean, cats don't knock on doors, baby? Oh, but they think it's someone speeding by.
They sound like people are driving me up.
Now, wait a minute.
Hey, see that human knock? I don't knock.
You call the police.
I don't know their number.
Now, look, the man next door, pal, with the paper...
He's your friend.
You like him better than I do.
You like the college person, like that.
I didn't go to college.
You invited him to college.
I lied about telling him I didn't go.
You invited him to this house.
But maybe he started something out there.
No, no, no, stop! I don't know.
All right, Harold, I'm coming.
I'm coming, Harold.
Oh, God, what happened? He caught my finger in the door.
Oh, God, what happened? Oh, God, what happened? One of the unique characteristics of our age is that we are all within reach.
Nowhere is this more true than in a big city.
Large numbers of people live in close proximity.
No man is an island.
Thus, it is difficult to escape your neighbor's problems.
The urban poor are, for all practical purposes, trapped in the city.
You know, we live in an economy that is more and more interdependent.
In the old days, if you didn't make it in the city, you had an exit.
And the exit was to go back to the farm.
Even in the Depression, the Great Depression, a very substantial number of city unemployed went back to the farms.
Today, I think it's 4 % of the workforce is in rural areas, and many of them are very poor, marginal farmers.
Who in the city, slums, has a relative back in the farms? Answer.
Damn few people.
So that when the slums don't work, as indeed they don't, there's no exit.
You really are stuck there.
The old escape hatch was literally migration.
I mean, you went from the city to the country.
The new escape hatch has to be the ability to find a workable career in the city itself.
A livable life in the city itself.
You've got to find jobs for people.
You've got to train people to make those jobs.
Those jobs have to be better than dead -end jobs.
The top priority has to be for families that are poor to have the kind of incomes that will allow them not to be poor anymore.
We managed to think up almost every other possible intervention, but somehow we're not able to see to it that families just don't have to live with low incomes.
The eradication of poverty would probably do more than any other single act to improve city life.
But many things are necessary.
We must tame the explosive growth of the city and tailor it to the needs of the people who must live in it.
How is this to be done? The first step is by simply asking the people what they want.
By coming in with a fresh idea, first of all, and then slowly approaching the people and the community and finding out what's in their minds and what they think should be done.
Often they have very good ideas which they haven't been able to explain to anybody or get anybody to listen to.
When we get to re -planning our communities, we can plan them so as to make cooperation much easier, make cooperation between parents looking after their children, babysitting.
Nobody can look after their children successfully if they're 15 stories above the ground and their little child who is in need of a mother's help is 15 stories away from them.
The urban environment is the most complex series of systems we've yet to devise.
Technology has given us the tools to build enormous buildings in a matter of months.
It may also help us to build them right.
At MIT's School of Architecture, computer scientists are working out methods for predicting the effect of urban designs before they are actually constructed.
The problems are too complicated for one man to solve now.
That's an accepted fact.
That's why the team concept, for instance, of in designing is becoming very common these days.
We're just proposing that a machine be one member of the team.
Let's look at the situation as it now exists.
It's largely done on the basis of intuitive decision making, on the basis of economic decisions, on the basis of people that have money, can make decisions in positions of power.
They aren't likely to change their mode of decision making unless they're shown something better.
Charles Libby works with a computer language called discourse, which he helped invent.
The problem he's working with here is how to arrange the open space within a projected development so that it will be most accessible to the children who will live there.
Stored in the computer's memory are various attributes of the proposed development, information from maps and aerial photographs, population densities, and so on.
Libby first asks the computer to display the kind of information it has on the subject.
Then he asks how many kids will live there.
Answer, 1 ,262.
In this display, dots indicate low density.
H indicates high density.
O stands for open space, or park.
Using mathematical models that describe the way children use parks, the computer determines the number of kids who will use the park on an average nice day.
Answer, 412.
Libby and the computer then participate in a dialogue that generates alternatives to the original plan.
Finally, they arrive at an arrangement of open space better than the original plan.
473 kids would use the park instead of 412.
A lot of what we're trying to do is to give people access to computers in a much more human way.
Humanize the computers, if you will.
James Taggart works with a computer language called Hunch.
Hunch allows people to communicate with a computer directly by means of sketching.
Other computer languages being developed deal with the interrelationship of common space, such as an urban neighborhood, and with the flow of services in an urban environment.
Police services, sanitary services, and so forth.
Thus it may be that the computer will form the basis of a nervous system that will help us coordinate human needs in the built environment.
The computer may help us, but it will not bail us out.
Basically our problems are not technological, but human.
The city is people.
Until, as a society, we come to terms with that fact.
Until we understand that a healthy city must articulate the life and needs of its people, we have little hope of improving the situation.
In our great cities, a large part of the population show no vestige of the human heritage.
They are hostile to each other and hostile to the rest of the community.
We must, the one great task of man from the very beginning was how to become human.
We must learn this all over again.
Honey, honey, it's so crazy! No, no, no, no! No, I'm going to get you! Doctor, you doctor! What? I can't hear you.
I've been beaten up and maced.
Oh, you see, you need a bone specialist and an eye, your nose, and a throat.
No, help me.
You understand, I'm a urologist.
I don't care.
If I treat you in the park, buddy, I could get sued for malpractice.
Will you help me? Let's go and take two after, will you? Wait! Oh, you look like you're in pretty bad shape, brother.
You haven't let Zeus into your life.
I don't need it.
He's bringing you peace.
I don't need it.
You don't want peace? I want peace.
You don't want peace? What, you're some kind of pig? You don't want peace? I don't want peace.
I give you peace.
I'm not a pig.
I'm not a pig.
Hey, who's a pig? Huh? You're calling me a pig? Come on, let them play.
Come on, guys, you make me sick.
Oh, he's screaming about police brutality.
I'll show you police brutality! Where's your car parked? I'm going to give you a ticket.
Wait, officer.
The ugliness I find in cities today is the ugliness of a deranged organism, which is destroying itself.
And it's like a garden full of weeds, or it's like anything that isn't working.
The functional distress of great cities that require people who live in them to suffer incredible amounts of inconvenience and hazard and delay and so on and wrong drives to work, they're becoming less and less habitable.
People were too tired at the end of the day to deal seriously with political problems.
They left it to the boss.
Originally, they left it to the king, some kind of centralized authority.
Now they have enough leisure to spend on politics.
There's nothing more fascinating.
Dealing with other men, dealing with manipulating, controlling, cooperating with other men.
And as soon as people learn that this is the real, one of the real games of life, they'll begin to know politics can be used for many purposes.
It can be used for corrupt purposes too, but it can also be used for enlightened ones.
And when a sufficient number of intelligent, animated, and emotionally undisturbed citizens are interested in politics, the city's new kind of city will grow around us faster than ever before.
I believe direct citizens action is necessary in Chicago simply because our elected officials are responsible to the democratic machine, they're responsible to big business, and they're all responsible to money.
But they are not responsible to the average citizen, you and me.
We have a perfect example today.
A hundred senior citizens, taxpayers and residents of Chicago, some of them for 50 years.
They were down at the county board with a simple plea.
Help us save our homes.
In Chicago, a group called the Citizens Action Program is composed of intelligent, animated, and emotionally undisturbed citizens interested in politics.
CAP participates in the political life of the city, and not just in an election year.
Dennis Sweeney, who's worked with CAP for more than a year now, is an ex -Chicago policeman who learned a lot about how the city operates while he was on the force.
As a patrolman on the street, generally you only see the small things.
But you learn right off that money means power.
I'm talking about things as small as fixing a parking ticket, the things as large as getting a permit to build lake point towers on the lakefront.
It all comes down to the same thing.
At CAP, we feel there's only one answer.
That's what Len Doobie calls people power.
Lots of people with big mouths, and they use them.
And that's all we've got besides our research and occasional technical expertise to fight the men who want to destroy our lake and enable urban progress.
Mr.
Chairman, members of the committee, I'm Paul Booth.
I'm representing the Citizens Action Program, or CAP.
Citizens Action Program is an ecology organization.
It is also a taxpayers' organization.
It is not true that this is a tax boon to the city of Chicago, these high -rise plans.
In fact, it is a tax drain.
There is another city in the world, it was said that there are none with lakefronts as beautiful as ours.
There's at least one, Geneva, Switzerland, where some of our local politicians bank.
You can be sure that they don't build high -rises on that lakefront.
As a politician and as a legislator, when you refer to politicians who bank in Switzerland, you cast a despairing remark against me.
And as a witness, that doesn't go over too well.
The citizens and taxpayers of Chicago believe that the same people who have been victimizing us by rigging the taxes in favor of special interests against the ordinary taxpayer, the same interests, for example, that kept that icy air rights area that we're talking about off the tax rolls, illegally off the tax rolls, for 18 months after it was turned over for commercial development.
A shocking deprivation of money when the schools need money.
You don't think that if a small homeowner has an improvement that they omit that from the tax rolls, but $6 million in tax money was lost annually, those same people who run that crooked assessor's office, some of them have been indicted.
I think it's highly irregular to go into the taxing authorities to charge criminal.
That has nothing to do with the bill.
It's not germane to these hearings.
And I'm going to rule it out of order and we'll continue with the next question.
Well, Senator, the question was raised.
I realize that, Senator, the question was raised.
Representative Mann, you are not going to jot me down.
The question has been answered and we've gone beyond the question.
Now, do you want to hold these hearings or don't you? It's your bill.
Next question.
We went to St.
Philip and got these hearings.
Please, please, please, whoever's out there.
How do you have to leave? All right, you may.
You're asked to leave and you can't keep still.
I'm leaving, but you're putting me on the job.
Goodbye, goodbye.
Go escort him out, if you will, please.
Ladies and gentlemen.
Well, then get out.
If you can't keep your mouth shut, get out.
Don't spoil it for everybody else.
These other people want this bill heard.
Shut your big mouth and get out.
Oh, I really must say this.
Now, you may sit down.
You may leave also.
I'm not waiting.
Do you want me to close this up? Sit down.
You're out of order.
Now, we came here to hear it.
This is completely irrelevant to me.
You may leave, Joe.
Sit down.
Most people have the notion that if any great change is to be affected, it will be done through the government or through the bureaucracy or through education, somebody else's education.
Whereas the only place where any real change begins is with oneself.
The city is people.
It is people that are the real riches of the city.
People who suffer from the city's current harshness and hazards, and people who must change it.
Our cities and city governments have become too big to manage intelligently from a central authority.
They are over -centralized, and, according to the law, according to experts like Lewis Mumford, should be decentralized.
Each area of the city should be able to exercise control over the affairs of life that directly concern it.
At the heart of a healthy city is the village, the small community, the neighborhood.
At the heart of the neighborhood is the individual who feels that, if something is wrong, he can do something to change it.
A healthy city is one in which the people, all the people, have a stake in the functioning order, something to lose if that order breaks down, a sense that it is responsive to their needs.
And we are never alone, we eat, drink, play.
And we are never alone, we eat, drink, play.
La la la la la la la la la la la la
