Up from the Sidewalks

General Electric, the nation's fourth largest industrial corporation (1965 sales: $6.2 billion) is about to start building cities -- cities planned from the sidewalks up, each costing between $800 million and $1 billion and in tended to house as many as 100,000 people.

Within the next twelve months, G.E.

expects to acquire land for the first such project in one of 42 U.S. counties now under study. Completing the construction should take 15 to 20 years.

"We mean to make a profit," says G.E.

President Fred J. Borch. "But these undertakings won't serve our objectives if that's all they produce. We want them to serve as showpieces for technological and other breakthroughs."

By going into new areas, the company hopes to escape the cost-boosting wastes imbedded in most building codes, zoning and subdivision ordinances. It expects to gain a free hand for technical experiments by guaranteeing to rip out and replace anything that fails to work. By creating its own captive market, the company should be able to absorb the immense cost of technical innovation that inhibits many promising new building ideas. "We have been a supplier of products for houses," ex plains George T. Bogard, head of G.E.'s recently created Community Systems Development Division. "Now we're try ing to become a supplier of a whole new system of building."

G.E.'s entry into the city-building field reinforces a major trend of the '60s. By one recent count, there are now no fewer than 25 such "new towns" being built across the U.S. Humble Oil, largest U.S. subsidiary of Standard Oil Co. (New Jersey), is building a new town for 140,000 people near Houston.

A subsidiary of American-Hawaiian Steamship Co. last month opened the first section of a new city for 70,000 north of Los Angeles. Goodyear is creating a new city for occupancy by 75,000 to 100,000 residents on 13,000 acres of cotton farm it no longer needs near Phoenix. Most of these efforts involve little new technology, but G.E. already has a 60-man staff at work devising new techniques.

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