HAAITATINTL, Vol. 5. Nos. I/2, PP. l-44 Pergamon Prm Ltd 19x0. Prmrcd in Grear Br~ram

Charles Abrams - Biographical Notes This section presents a mixture of notes and tributes. It opens with an appreciation of the broad significance of Abrams’ work.

A Tribute to Charles Abrams

BARBARAWARD

If we had to choose one phenomenon more than any other that is now seen to be at the root of some of the worst miseries and contradictions of development in the Third World, it is very probable that most people would no longer simply stress the unprecedented growth of population. They would also underline the torrential movement of the masses from countryside to ‘exploding cities’ and the emergence within a decade or two of megalopolis after megalopolis of five and ten and even sixteen million inhabitants, barely housed, barely employed, living in the barriadas and callampas and bidonvilles in condi- tions of squalor perhaps unequalled in the human record.

And the strange fact is that in the early post-war years, this frenetic urbanisation was not expected and for a time at least barely even noticed. It could have been expected. Although at a slower pace, developed lands had, in industrialising precipitated vast migrations and already produced their enormous conurbations - Londons, New Yorks, Tokyos. Charles Dickens brilliantly described the unanticipated, undirected, outward sprawl of London in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. The city, he wrote,

“ . . . like the giant in his travelling boots has made a stride . . . and has set his brick and mortar heel a long way in advance; but the intermediate space between the giant’s feet, as yet, is only blighted country and not town.”

Thereafter, in the intermediate “blight” there would shortly appear a

“disorderly crop of beginnings of mean houses, rising out of the rubbish, as if they had been unskillfully sown.”

In the 195Os, when the developing world was fully embarked on a similar course of modernisation, movement to the cities on a far greater scale (since population was growing twice as fast) was surely a virtual certainty, one of which recent history in developed lands was the highly visible, highly evident proof - for governments, for bureaucracies, for the whole community of planners and architects. Yet if we look back to these years, as the pace began to accelerate and the urbanising process to become ever more dominant, it must be said that it did not much occupy official attention. Industrialisation, infra- structure, occasionally a word for housing -these were the staples of early plans. It was as though details were being picked out while their part in a whole violent, convulsive process was all but lost to sight.

Yet there were exceptions to this myopia and one of the most outstanding was surely Charles Abrams. Drawing on his profound knowledge of urban problems in America and

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8 Charles Abrams-Biographical Notes

seeking to apply this experience to the emerging cities of the Third World, he was a pioneer in bringing to governments and ministries and to the new professional groups some sense of the scale of urban disorder and deprivation they would have to confront and some outlines of the strategies they would need for effective action. He could advise all the more early and successfully because he combined a very wide range of experience with great humour, immense good will and no trace of that “white man’s arrogance” which, as the activity of giving advice on development grew on an ever greater scale, became all too often a source of extreme annoyance and even a block to otherwise useful plans and ideas. But Charles Abrams saw everyone as an equal and honourable member of the human family. No one could mistake his basic common sense and humility. He gave counsel. He received in return not only a ready hearing but lasting friendship as well.

Some critics have claimed that in his profound preoccupation with housing, he, too, in some way missed the larger problems of urbanisation and the economic and social pressures that were causing the huge movements of people from country to town. But this criticism overlooks the degree to which Abrams thought of housing not simply as numbers of dwellings constructed but as the whole process by which an orderly urban community could be created. This broad interpretation can be seen in his last work The Language of Cities:

“The term (infrastructure) is frequently used in the determination of investment priorities in underdeveloped countries. One school of economists holds that a poor country should not spend much on assets for immediate consumption but should focus on infrastructure and other assets that advance productivity-roads, railways, power plants, factories, machines, and better Feed and live- stock. Use of limited resources for such things as housing, it argues, consumes the funds needed for productive development. Another school argues that poor countries, in their eagerness to raise production levels, must not ignore or subordinate investment5 in their people and thereby affect labour efficiency.

“Building homes is ‘economic’ in that houses in less developed areas are often Fmall production centres - for the tailor, dressmaker, or storekeeper. Housing also plays a major role in stimulating employment, directly or indirectly; it activates other industries and adds to local purchasing power. Whether ‘social’ or ‘economic’, it is a wise expenditure simply in terms of balanced growth. Because of the prevalence of extensive unemployment during the formative period of a new nation, a properly organised housing programme that uses a maximum of domestic materials could be the principal means of employing people productively. In 1963, about half the unemployment in some of Ghana’s cities was among construction workers. Yet these cities were experiencing a severe housing shortage.

“Housing also fosters savings and the development of other industries (such as building materials manufacture), and plays a dominant part in the capital-formation process. It is essential to keep factories functioning that produce materials for all types of construction and productive enterprises. Where housing is built -whether commercial, self help or squatter-the public investment is fixed in the vast network of public utilities and facilities. Providing the housing and utilities from the start may therefore be wise in the long run, particularly if the transportation routes arc planned simultaneously.”

These words show the degree to which Abrams had grasped urbanisation as a whole process and the flexibility with which he included in his concept of ‘housing’, work, tenure, security, services, wider economic stimulus, in short, the whole modernising process. Nor, had he lived longer, would he have lost any of this flexibility. Indeed, he was already moving towards the new emphasis placed on poor city-dwellers building and improving their own houses, under conditions of secure tenure and communally- provided sites-and-services. Indeed, the central fact in Charles Abram’s thinking was its

Charles Abrams-Biographical Notes 9

combination of vision and realism. His vision was the achievement of dignified and happy shelter for the millions. His realism was constantly at work inventing ways, both for developed and developing countries, of turning dream into fact.

The main narrative of this section, by Bernard Taper, begins here and is interrupted by other reminiscences.

A Profile of Charles Abrams

BERNARD TAPER

This profile is an edited selection from Mr Taper’s “A Lover of Cities”, The New Yorker, 4 and 11 February 1967, reproduced by kind permission of the Editor CO 1976 The New Yorker Magazine Inc. The verb tenses are those of the article at the time.

INTRODUCING ABRAM!3

Abrams, who is very much what used to be called a self-made man, has developed most of his skills in rather unorthodox ways. It is characteristic of him that, although, in addition to his job at Columbia, he has been on the faculties of MIT, the University of Pennsylvania, City College, and the New School, and has written books that scholars regard as authoritative pioneering works in his field, he never went to college as an undergraduate and does not hold a BA. His only degree is one in law, which he earned by going to night school in Brooklyn as a youth, while he was working days as a clerk for a law firm. When he is asked now how he acquired the background to be a professor, he is apt to reply in a matter-of-fact way, “By teaching courses and writing books.” His real-estate experience has been similarly out of the ordinary. During the 192Os, as a poverty-stricken young lawyer, he yearned to be of help to the underdog-just as soon as he had stopped being an underdog himself. Plunging into speculative real estate, he managed in fairly short order to make about a million dollars, and was thus reasonably free to devote himself thereafter to what he considered worthier and more challenging pursuits than making money. (In this respect, his behaviour somewhat resembled that of Lincoln Steffens, who, having decided to become a socialist, first made himself a quick pile on the Stock Exchange so that he could be a socialist in style, undisturbed by sordid material considerations.) Throughout much of his life since then, Abrams has been an ardent campaigner on behalf of numerous liberal or humanitarian causes -low-rent housing, for

example, or anti-discrimination measures -and in the process has inevitably come into conflict time and again with the powerful conservative forces of the real-estate and home- building lobbies. Because of his expertise, he is probably the most formidable opponent the real-estate interests have had to contend with, and at times his gift for provocative comment has aroused much exasperation. There are real-estate men who still seethe when they recall a speech that Abrams made at the convention of the National Association of Real Estate Boards some twenty-seven years ago. His liberalism was well-known, so when they took the risk of inviting him to speak they were prepared to be attacked by him as reactionaries; consequently they were taken aback to hear him blandly congratulate them on their success in achieving Socialism in their section of the American economy -an achievement, he said, for which he