BUILDING FOR SCHOOL AND COMMUNITY - Kennedy Bibliothek

25. But the United States is not unique in its decentralized political
form. Most of the democratic countries of the non-communist world are
structured in similar patterns of decentralization. A micro-scale expression
of the need of people to have a sense of physical territoriality
and roots is the "neighborhood movement", which cities in the United States
and many other countries are increasingly experiencing today. The neighborhood
movement has become increasingly activist, political, and organized.
Neighborhood leaders have found that when hundreds of people are organized
to arrive at City Hall with pennants flying and slogans aloft on placards',
to promote (or fight) particular issues or projects or "rights", they can
have a potent effect on a mayor, a city council, or a public department,
to say nothing of their impact on the neighborhood's sense of identity and
emerging self-image. The curious thing is that this emerging identity
occurs, not only in old long-established neighborhoods in cities, but in
urban situations where no neighborhood was previously known to exist.
Here are two examples from different countries.
26. In London in 1971 a fringe area lying between several historic neighborhoods
including Notting Hill, Golborne and North Kensington was to have
been demolished and replaced with new housing. The proposal led to a
surge of community identity, at first around the political issues of the
re-development itself, and then around the issue of the. quality of community
life, leading very quickly to the establishment of an entirely new neighborhood
consciousness in both social and physical form, called Swinbrook.(l)
27. In Minneapolis, United States, in the late 60's a "new town in town",
to be called Cedar Riverside, was proposed. Like the London example, it
called for the demolition of a large area of apparently nondescript slums
in which lived a transient population of elderly people, students and urban
unemployed. A surge of community identity where none previously existed
led to a neighborhood organization which by 1976 had forced the developers
into court and bankruptcy.(2)
The "Neighborhood" is a Place and also a Rich Cross-Section of Citizens
28. Swinbrook and Cedar Riverside are interesting examples because in
both cases the planners and architects thought that there were no
1) Graham Towers, "Swinbrook: Testbed for Participation", The Architects
Journal, London, 12 March 1976, and Bob Redpath,."The Hard Case for
Community", New Society, London, 18 November 1974, pages 541-542.
2) Rodney E. Engelen, "Cedar Riverside, A Case Study", The Practicing
Planner, published by The American Institute of Planners, Washington,
D.C., April 1976, pages 30-40.
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