Perry, Clarence Arthur

Clarence Arthur Perry (1872–1944) was a recreation specialist whose widely influential studies made clear the relationship among the social, cultural, and physical aspects of community. Perry advocated for the development of neighborhood and community recreation centers, frequently in relation to local schools, and in 1923, incorporated his ideas and research into a community model called the “neighborhood unit concept.” Published in 1929 as part of The Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs, “The Neighborhood Unit” proposed a schematic physical plan designed to cultivate neighborhood social structure and ameliorate the dangers, alienation, and general social deterioration observed in the urban environment.

Perry believed in the necessity of face-to-face contact for community formation and that the built environment—streets, designed open space, and the specific arrangement of buildings housing public institutions—was a vital factor in shaping social behaviors such as community pride and civic responsibility.

The neighborhood unit was composed of four components, arranged in relation to each other, each with related social and spatial qualities. The first component was the elementary school, centrally placed on the site. The school determined the neighborhood unit's area and population, which was based on children's purported need to live within a half mile of their school and a school population of about 1,000. Thus the neighborhood unit was finite, and not subject to expansion.

[Page 567]The second component of the neighborhood unit was a circulation pattern that replaced the urban grid with a boundary of through traffic arteries and interior streets that functioned solely to provide access to homes and the centrally located school. In this manner, children were spared from crossing busy thoroughfares to travel to school or recreational facilities, and the neighborhood was given visible and spatial edges.

The provision and development of open spaces was the plan's third component. Parks and playgrounds with play areas for children near their homes were to compose at least 10 percent of the total area. The physical presence of small neighborhood parks, Perry believed, would stimulate local pride and community feeling, attitudes that formed the basis of responsible civic behavior. The final aspect of Perry's neighborhood unit was the placement of commercial services at the intersections of the bordering through streets. Located at busy intersections, these shopping centers would serve the residential areas within a neighborhood, and they would likewise be accessible to adjacent communities.

Perry's specific solution of a physically defined neighborhood unit that could serve as a template for urban, suburban, and rural community development referenced the garden city movement, led by Ebenezer Howard at the turn of the century; the settlement house movement in England and America and the related community center movement; and other theoretical discussions among architects and planners concerning urban community design. A personal influence was his own neighborhood of Forest Hills Gardens, a planned community designed by the Olmsted Brothers and architect Grosvenor Atterbury with attention to street type differentiation, reservation of public and semipublic open spaces, and strategic aesthetic and logistic placement of public structures and amenities.

The influence of Perry's neighborhood unit concept can be seen in realized communities, including Sunnyside Gardens, Queens (1924), and Radburn, New Jersey (1928); the three greenbelt towns of the Resettlement Administration, especially Greenbelt, Maryland (1935); and the new towns of the 1960s such as Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia. Today, New Urbanist architects and planners advocate the design of finite communities, whose physical designs integrate a centrally placed school, division of through and local circulation, public open space, and clustered commercial services.

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