The City for Poor People : The Image of Poverty American and British Documentaries of the 1930s-40s Narrated Space-Represented Space April / 2014 Dr. Cecilia Mouat Slide 0
The City for Poor People: The Image of Poverty American and British Documentaries of the 1930s-40s This research aims to identify the dominant discourses of urban spaces and architectonic models that were distributed through films. Based on Michel Foucault’s definition of discourses, as systems of thoughts and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds from which they speak, this study analyzes rhetorical practices and film techniques used in documentaries that helped to create a specific knowledge, shaping our perception of urban spaces and operating as tacit conventions that influence both designers and people that consume the designs. Since the invention of cinema, cities, neighborhoods, and domestic spaces that appear in films are not only backdrops in where stories take place; spaces in films are relevant actors, able to communicate discourses and create meanings. During the 1930s-40s, American and British authorities took advantage of the popularity of cinema, using documentary films to promote radical changes in towns and housing models. In these films, we can see urban planners and politicians presenting slum clearance programs or promoting the construction of new neighborhoods to relocate slum dwellers. Documentaries of the 1930s-40s also helped to introduce the new aesthetic of the Modern Movement in architecture, providing rationalistic explanations about the convenience of new materials, new techniques of construction, and reinforcing the idea that the new architecture was conceived for the health improvement of the population. However, the distinctive modernist image of social housing projects, with their multistory buildings and open collective spaces, which strongly contrasted with the single-family homes and low-dense neighborhoods of the middle-class, also served to position the modernist aesthetics as the new image of urban poverty. The American documentary Cities, Why they grow? Illustrates the main arguments used, especially by American films, to describe the problems of big cities: contaminated and unhealthy spaces, crowded streets that stimulate fights between people, which are also a bad influence for kids. If kids are in the streets, they can act as juvenile delinquents. The American Institute of Planners produced the documentary The City , screened in 1939. This 44-minutes film discusses the problems of industrial cities, showing chaotic and crowded environments that stimulates disorder, fights and juvenile delinquency. In the same way, other American and British documentaries produced in the 1930s-40s started to include recurrent images to describe big cities, such as smokestacks, narrow streets with cloth lines, close-ups of innocent children 1
that live in urban environments, in where streets are their playgrounds. If they stay in the streets, children have no options that become juvenile delinquents. We can see the recurrent inclusion of kids smoking and gambling. All documentaries also included the solution. In the American documentary The City , the solution was a decentralized Greenbelt community that combines open spaces of village life with the conveniences of modern engineering and planning. In fact, the solution for the middle class was based on the politics of dispersion, on the creation of new towns and low-dense suburbs close to nature, in where children could have sunlight, fresh air and open spaces to play. The notions of open space, sunlight and fresh air became a sort of medicine to cure all the illness of big cities. Commentators, urban planners, and politicians systematically repeated this discourse, which I call “the green ideal”. The green ideal emerged as a clear opposition to the overcrowded and dense big cities, and documentaries of the 1930s-40s always include natural landscapes to describe how they are the medicine to combat the evils of the overcrowded and unhealthy city. However this solution was and is for the middle-upper classes. Social housing was planned with a complete different approach, in which modernist buildings, and high-dense neighborhoods located in inner zones of cities dominated the solutions for the poorest sectors of the population. The notions of nature, sunlight, and open spaces were solved in social housing by the inclusion of playgrounds surrounded by apartment buildings. In documentary films, authorities and urban planners, providing rationalistic and convincing arguments, supported these modernist solutions. Documentaries of the 1930s-40s placed the planner as the only expert, trained to scientifically solve the complex problems of the city. HOW FICTION FILMS DISTRIBUTED THE GREEN IDEAL? In family films and romantic comedies produced between the 1930s-60s, family values, honest people, and married people were always set in low dense communities, close to the countryside, or suburban neighborhoods with single family homes, never in apartments buildings or in big cities. On the other hand, metropolitan spaces were presented as dangerous places that need disciplinary institutions; so dense urban spaces and multistory buildings were used and are still used to set stories about crime and illegal activities, such as the American urban dramas of the 1930s, in which kids of the streets were presented as troubled youth, always involved in fights. 2
In these films the only option to evade the reformatory school was the pastoral power of nature, as it is presented in the film Boys Town . Probably the most interesting example is the modernist project Gerard Gardens in Liverpool. It was built as social housing in the 1930s, and used in documentaries of the 1930s-40s to illustrate the best solution for former slum dwellers. In 1958, when British films started to use real locations, the film Violent Playground , a detective story, used the Gerald Gardens buildings to set a band of juvenile delinquents and arsonists. As a conclusion, documentaries of the 1930s-40s were the only film genre that celebrated modernist housing solutions and presented this kind of architecture linked with social housing. Doing that they showed not only the image of the urban poverty of the 20 th century, they also help to stigmatize people who inhabited these buildings, as well as, helped to stigmatize the living in metropolitan spaces. 3
SLIDE 1 This research aims to identify the dominant discourses of urban spaces and architectonic models that were distributed through films. Based on Michel Foucault’s definition of discourses, as systems of thoughts and practices that systematically construct the subjects and the worlds from which they speak, this study aims to identify rhetorical practices and film techniques used in documentaries that helped to create a specific knowledge, shaping our perception of urban spaces and operating as tacit conventions that influence both designers and people that consume the designs. SLIDE 2 Since the invention of cinema, cities, neighborhoods, and domestic spaces that appear in films are not only backdrops in where stories take place; spaces in films are relevant actors, able to communicate discourses and create meanings. During the 1930s-40s, American and British authorities took advantage of the popularity of cinema, using documentary films to promote radical changes in towns and housing models. In these films, we can see urban planners and politicians presenting the slum clearance program or promoting the construction of new neighborhoods to relocate slum dwellers. SLIDE 3 Documentaries of the 1930s-40s also helped to introduce the new aesthetic of the Modern Movement in architecture, providing rationalistic explanations about the convenience of new materials, new techniques of construction, and reinforcing the idea that the new architecture was conceived for the health improvement of the population. SLIDE 4 However, the distinctive modernist image of social housing projects, with their multistory buildings and open collective spaces, which strongly contrasted with the single-family homes and low-dense neighborhoods of the middle-class, also served to position the modernist aesthetics as the new image of urban poverty. SLIDE 5 I want to show a clip of an American documentary “Cities, Why they grow?” in order to illustrate what were the main arguments used, especially in American films, to describe the problems of big cities. SLIDE 6 1
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