Cities In Great Britain Research Articles

Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia by Robert Fishman

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 457 rational, efficient leadership. He clearly prefers citizen-led “townscape ” development but finds ours, since 1930, an “Age of Illusions,” where persistent social problems are obscured, common standards are few, and power brokers’ values dominate. Without fundamental change in the socioeconomic order, constructions of the past fifty years will not soon be undone. The value of this heavily illustrated book lies in the author’s inte­ grating visible forms with underlying causes to show their cumulative effect on urban landscapes. He borrows freely and perceptively from scholars who have examined individual topics in detail, adding his observations of cities in Great Britain and North America and a few elsewhere. Relph writes with grace and wit (“[Frederick] Taylor was not a relaxed individual” [p. 94]). No one since Lewis Mumford has done a better job of integrating secondary literature and firsthand observations to produce fresh insights about modern city appearances. There are a few shortcomings, but none are serious. Most notably, as the author acknowledges, restricting the study to mostly Englishspeaking cities compromises what can be claimed about urban land­ scapes worldwide. Nevertheless, Relph is an astute observer. He has written an excellent general book and a solid critique, just the thing for readers who want to know why cities look as they do and how our sometimes flashy yet generally narrow uses of architecture, planning, technology, and cultural circumstance create mean human habitats. John Hancock Dr. Hancock is professor of urban design and planning at the University of Wash­ ington. He writes on urban and planning history, most recently on New Deal planning in the 1930s. Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia. By Robert Fishman. New York: Basic Books, 1987. Pp. xii + 241; illustrations, notes, index. $19.95. Historians have followed America’s population from the colonial frontier to grimy industrial cities and on to suburbia’s winding streets and culs-de-sac. In Bourgeois Utopias, Robert Fishman traces this in­ tellectual progression to what he sees as its next stop, which is not the post—World War II suburbanization of America recently described by Kenneth Jackson (Crabgrass Frontier, 1985) but the end of suburbia and the rise of “technoburbs” clustered in “technocities” dominated by superhighway corridors and held together by an “invisible web of advanced technology and telecommunication.” Bourgeois Utopias’ focus is not on suburbia’s social and economic characteristics but on the concept of suburbia as something created by the yearnings of the Anglo-American middle class for a close-knit, stable, homogeneous community where the family is safe from urban corruption and restored to harmony with nature. The physical man­ 458 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE ifestation of these utopian yearnings is a “distinctive low density en­ vironment defined by the primacy of the single family house set in the greenery of an open parklike setting.” It is Fishman’s conclusion that suburbia’s evolution reached its de­ nouement with the emergence of metropolitan Los Angeles. There the city was turned inside out and, instead of the downtown core, suburbs became the defining characteristic. The mass transit system was replaced by a reliance on private cars and freeways. The prevailing structural element became the single-family detached home, and the dominant land use feature was the residential lot. For a time there existed in Los Angeles a harmony among urban, rural, and suburban environments, but in the post—World War II period the disappearance of open space and increasingly congested highways upset the balance. Further, the democratization of suburban areas and the reintegration of middle-class women into the work force revealed a paradox between the suburban ideal and reality. With sin­ gle-family houses available to more and more people and new industry, offices, and shopping facilities springing up on the urban periphery, suburbs were no longer an exclusive zone of residence between city and country. As a result, Fishman argues, greater Los Angeles has become a new type of city. Nonhomogeneous technoburbs—each large enough to be a viable socioeconomic unit, with their boundaries defined by the limits of driving convenience—have beenjoined together by the high­ way grid into a multicentered technocity with weakened bonds to the...

Linear programming as a forecasting device for interregional freight flows in Great Britain

This paper reports some experiments testing the efficacy of linear programming (LP) as a method for predicting flows of commodities between regions of Great Britain. ‘Transportation problem’ solutions were found for the annual movement by road of eleven commodity categories between 78 origin and destination zones in 1964. Road distances were used as a surrogate for freight costs. Data on actual flows of these commodities in that year were available for comparison. For the more homogeneous commodity classes the LP solutions replicated the actual pattern quite well. Another experiment was carried out using the same commodities, on a subset of zones which were more homogeneous with respect to areal extent - namely the 24 major cities in Great Britain: the correspondence between LP solutions and actual flows was much closer than for all 78 zones. A further test involved finding LP solutions for total road plus rail traffic with six commodities which might be described as ‘heavy’ and which use the rail system extensively. These solutions for total flows proved to correlate with actual flows better than solutions for road movements alone. These results would appear to justify continuation of investigations of this kind using a finer commodity - and if possible zonal - breakdown. It is hoped that data on actual flows for 1967/68, which have a more disaggregated commodity classification, will be available soon. The ‘shadow prices’ of the minimizing dual of the transportation problem were produced and examined to see if they made sense in terms of notions of geographical comparative cost advantage variations for production and consumption.

Library work with children in a large city

BIRMINGHAM is the largest city in Great Britain, after London, and it is often called “The Second City”. It lies in the very centre of England, in Shakespeare's county of Warwickshire, 114 miles from London, 90 from Bristol, and less than 100 from Liverpool and Manchester.

The Library Association Conference

The Library Association Conference

The clinical and public health aspects of juvenile rheumatism in Dublin

(1) The incidence of juvenile rheumatism is no less in Dublin than in most other cities in Great Britain and Eire. (2) That it is so prevalent in Dublin is due for the most part to the gross overcrowding and unhygienic state of the living conditions of the families in question in this survey. (3) The prevention and treatment of this condition is rapidly becoming one of the major public health problems. It is definitely of greater importance than cancer, and certainly equal to that of tuberculosis. (4) There is an ideal system of supervisory clinics in Dublin and an excellent Rheumatic Unit, but the Unit is far too small. (5) Two outstanding deficiencies in the juvenile rheumatic scheme are at present found in Dublin: (a) lack of a sufficiently large convalescent rheumatic unit to meet the requirements of the school population; (b) the absence of at least one school for physically defective children where amongst other conditions, cardiac cases could be properly looked after, and given the necessary care, attention and supervision which they require.

The clinical severity of diphtheria in certain cities in Great Britain

The clinical severity of diphtheria in certain cities in Great Britain

Telephone Statistics of the World

IN Electrical Communication of July the telephone and telegraph statistics of the world have been pub lished up to January 1933. The United States have now 53 per cent of the total number of telephones in use in the world, Canada has 4 per cent, Germany 9 per cent, Great Britain 6-5 per cent,. France 4 per cent, the remaining European countries 14 per cent and all other countries 9 per cent. In January 1928, the United States had 60 per- cent and Europe 28 per cent as compared with 33-5 per cent now. Whilst the number of telephones in Europe has increased by about 20 per cent during those five years, the number in the United States has diminished by 12 per cent. San Francisco leads the world with 36-5 telephones per 100 of the population and Wash ington comes next with 33-3. Stockholm is third with 31-8. In Canada, Toronto has 25-6 and Vancouver 28-1. Paris has 15, Berlin 11-1 and Munich 10. London heads the cities in Great Britain with 8-8 and Edinburgh comes next with 6-9. Honolulu, with a population of 138,000, has 11-7 telephones per 100. Whilst the United States have 70 miles of telephone wire per 100 of the population, Canada has 48, Australia and New Zealand 39, Sweden has 32-7 and Denmark 31-5. Germany has 23-2, Great Britain and Northern Ireland 22-6 and France 10-7. India and China have only 0-11 miles of telephone wire per 100 of the population. Czechoslovakia, the United States and New Zealand use their telephones more than other countries. The telephone conversa tions per capita in these three countries in 1932 were 224-5, 204-6 and 205-8 respectively. This compares with 33 in Britain and Germany and 20-5 in France. The number of conversations by telephone now averages about 100 times as many as of com munications sent by telegraph.

Telephone Statistics of the World

THE American Telephone and Telegraph Company has published statistics in Electrical Communication for July of the telephone development of the world on January 1, 1932. Assuming the population of London to be 8,900,000, it is calculated that there are 8-7 telephones for every hundred people. This is the maximum density of the telephones of the cities in Great Britain. In France, Paris has a density of 14-2, and in Germany, Berlin leads with 11-6. San Francisco has the greatest telephone density of any city in the world, there being 39 o 1 telephones per 100 inhabitants. Other cities where the density exceeds 30 are Stockholm, Washington, Seattle and Denver. When countries are considered, we find that the United States has 15-8 telephones per hundred of the population, Canada has 13-1, Denmark 10-1, Sweden 9-1, Norway 7-0, Germany 4-8, Great Britain 4-5 and France 2-9. When telephone conversations and telegrams are considered for the year 1931, Canada heads the list with 250-3 per person, the United States comes next with 223-5, New Zealand with 200-4, and Germany with 36-9, Great Britain with 35-4 and France with 20-9 are near the bottom of the list. The figures show that 56 per cent of all the world's telephone numbers are listed in the United States. They also show that more than 50 per cent of the 12-5 million automatic or ‘dial’ telephones in the world are in the United States. The usefulness of the telephone increases according to the number of telephones in use. Even in the United States, the numbers per hundred persons are increasing every year and the saturation point still seems some distance away. The mechanical convenience of the telephone makes a strong appeal to them.

The Smoke Problem of Great Cities

IT is a significant fact that the thing which first strikes the foreigner on visiting large cities in Great Britain is the smoky atmosphere and the grimy appearance of the buildings. He wonders how we can tolerate such an environment. It is true enough that most of us do so, and it may be, as one writer has said, “that thousands of people live their lives from start to finish in the midst of black smoke and have come to regard it as a normal condition of life.” Nevertheless, there is a small section of the community who feel very differently on the subject, as the growing mass of literature on the smoke nuisance testifies. The latest contribution is a treatise on the smoke problem of cities by Sir Napier Shaw and Dr. Owens, who for many years have devoted their attention to the estimation of atmospheric impurities in London and other large towns. The most interesting section of the volume is the record of these experiments, namely,. the measurements by the standard gauges, which have been set up in various towns, and the results obtained with the dust filter and the jet dust counter, all of which have already appeared in extenso in the reports of the Committee on Atmospheric Pollution of the Meteorological Office. The volume includes also a good deal of information borrowed from other sources. The Smoke Problem of Great Cities. By Sir Napier Shaw Dr. John Switzer Owens. Pp. xvi+301. (London: Constable and Co., Ltd., 1925.) 22s. 6d. net.

TYPHOID IN CERTAIN LARGE CITIES OF EUROPE IN 1924

For comparison withThe Journal's annual survey of typhoid mortality in the large cities of the United States and for its general interest,The Journalpresents a survey of typhoid in certain large European cities that have populations exceeding 100,000. The cities are grouped by countries. A remarkably low typhoid death rate prevails in the large cities of Great Britain (Table 1). Probably no other country in the world can show so long a list of large cities free from a single typhoid death. No fewer than fifteen cities in Great Britain with a total population of 2,256,700 have a perfectly clear record for 1924, not a single typhoid death occurring in the whole of this large urban population. In the total list of fifteen British cities no municipality had a rate over 5 in 1924, and all but three had a rate less than 2. In other words,