Planning, if it is to be successful, must start at the beginning. The beginning, according to Wright’s approach, is the total situation of a village or a metropolis in its statewide and multi-state region.

The country was really a number of natural “flow systems.” MacKaye also saw towns and cities as part of these flows systems–determined, to be sure, by natural resources but built by men. If the two systems did not operate in harmony, either the land would be ruined or the towns fail.

The New Communities Movement

In the early twenties, discussions were held on community problems in meetings in New York City. They all felt that the piecemeal development of residential communities on endless gridiron tracts was wasteful and unnecessary.
Worse still, it did not produce the kind of housing and communities we ware capable of creating. The common practice of laying out block-pattern streets long before the builder arrived on the scene prevented clustered community design and the interspersal of open and built-up spaces.

By forming home building corporations, financed by prosperous companies seeking long-term investments, well-de-signed communities could be build.

The answer to this problem was the “super-block,” an island of green, bordered by houses and carefully skirted by peripheral automobile roads. Parking areas were conveniently located along the peripheral roads in carefully sited clusters.

Radburn idea to create a series of super-blocks, each around an open green with the greens themselves interconnected. Within the greens, pathways led to schools, shopping, and other centers. The greenways were pedestrian ways. Where they crossed a street they bridged over it or passed under it. The automobile circulation did not interfere with, or endanger, the pedestrian. Auto access to houses was by means of a short dead-end road. Hence the houses were arranged as cul-de-sac clusters around a stub service drive. The main circulation streets were also kept generally free of parked cars to allow unhindered flow of through traffic.

Essential to the Radburn idea was the scheduling and coordination of its construction. No town can be built as a whole overnight–unless it is built for a special purpose or by one large company. An essential aspect of the Radburn idea was the organization of the town into cohesive neighborhoods.

The idea would be applicable not only to new towns but to large city areas. One of the objectives of re-planning old cities became the creation of neighborhood centers and the physical delineation of neighborhood groups.

From the book: “The Architecture of Town and Cities”, Paul Spreiregen, AIA