Returning to Radburn

Abstract

The “new urbanist” vision for contemporary neighborhoods looks back to the streetscapes of the pre-automobile era for inspiration, intentionally overlooking the automobile-adaptive community design era which began in America with Clarence Stein’s and Henry Wright’s “Town for the Motor Age” Radburn¹ in the late 1920s. New urbanism establishes a theoretical position fundamentally at odds with “garden city” design principles which differentiate streetscapes and community open space. New urbanists do this by downplaying or ignoring the conflict inherent in the idea that a neighborhood street should attempt to serve as civic interface while simultaneously serving as the outdoor focus for neighborhood social life. The author proposes that experimental and innovative Radburn, rather than pre-modern, pre-automobile town design, is the logical starting point for understanding how to form contemporary neighborhoods, because Radburn actually began to address the dilemma posed by the new automobility. Subsequent “garden city” experiments such as the American New Towns of the 1960s and later planned unit developments paid homage to Radburn, but abandoned particular radical aspects of the Radburn concept; thus we have not witnessed the true evolution of Radburn in North American suburbia. However, the few planned communities which did remain true to Radburn’s radicalism, such as Winnipeg, Manitoba’s postwar Wildwood Park, do reflect this evolution. This paper will address the fundamental opposition that constitutes the relationship between new urbanism and the Radburn concept, and will reveal that the present-day landscapes of Wildwood Park and of Radburn itself have evolved to offer insights for how the Radburn concept can be adapted for contemporary community planning.