City Planners Advise Urban Redesigning

William Zeckendorf, president of Webb & Knapp, Inc., set the theme for the Harvard Urban Design Conference last night when he asserted that "the future of the city must be subordinated to the city planning board."

Speaking before a large audience in New Lecture Hall, Zeckendorf cited Boston as an example of bad planning. "The satellite cancer towns," he said, "have wrecked this city financially. Those who own it don't live in it, and those who live in it don't own it." He said later that Cambridge was one of the towns injurious to Boston's economic life.

Zeckendorf predicted that the earth's population would reach three billion by 1975. Without immediate urban "reshaping" to meet this increase, he felt that cities would flow into each other "in an endless morbid fluid community."

The problems of traffic congestion and public reaction to planning were stressed by the two other speakers on the program, Victor Gruen, an architect, and Andrew Heiskell, publisher of Life magazine. Heiskell emphasized the opposition encountered by city planners, and quoted early abuse of Rockefeller Center by the New York Times and Walter Lippmann, who called Radio City Music Hall "a pedestal for a peanut."

Gruen called for more complete rehabilitation projects, and showed slides with plans for the ideal city. With 80 million cars expected on the road by 1967, he said, present urban forms were no longer practical. Citing the statistic that one person is killed or injured every six minutes, he urged "a peaceful co-existence between automobiles and the human race."

The difficulty in present urban forms, Gruen said, is that the twofold purposes of streets--providing shopping centers as well as a rapid flow of traffic--are antithetical. According to his plan, residential "clusters" of buildings would form "constellations" around a social center. Traffic would emerge from these clusters into "freeways," and then into large loop and belt arteries.

Reviewing Gruen's plan, Juan Luis Sert, Dean of the Graduate School of Design and chairman of last night's discussion, expressed the hope that the conference, which ends today, would result in a "clear and concise statement about planning philosophy."