People Rebuilding Berkeley – The Self-Creating Life of Neighborhoods

201-page report which includes a 3-page “Memorandum to the Master Plan Revision Committee, City of Berkeley”. It demonstrates an early approach to the idea of piecemeal development applied to the organic fabric of streets in a town. It proposes the following hypothesis to be tested: “There is one primary process, which plays the central role in the life of a town. This is the process by which the energy of the people of the town is liberated, and being liberated, coalesces in the creation, growth and constant repair of the common land; and proposes the local neighborhood as the fundamental unit for the Berkeley Master Plan and the planning process.” The basic point introduced was that the urban environment can be ordered by a small, step by step piecemeal process in which individuals do things with of various sizes and bugets, under the assumption that the city the size of Berkeley, with an annual budget of $20.000.000 (in 1974) would allocate a total of $2.000.000 to this process, thus allowing 200 projects a year to happen.