by Daphne Spain
Jon Peterson's Birth of City Planning is a
traditional history that expands his earlier work on the City Beautiful
Movement (1893 to 1910). It differs from the previous work by
identifying sanitary reform and the civic art movement as antecedents to
the City Beautiful (hence the "1840" in the title), and by tracing the
contributions of the City Beautiful Movement to the emergence of city
planning as a profession responsible for the public good. The birth of
city planning is dated variously as 1901, with Charles Mulford
Robinson's book, The Improvement of Towns and Cities; as 1902
with the McMillan plan for Washington, D.C.; as 1904 with a New York
City comprehensive plan; as 1908 with popular usage of the term; and as
1910 with the ascendance of Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.'s vision for
planning. Peterson chose 1917 as the "end of the beginning" because it
marked the point at which, he believes, the ideal of the comprehensive
plan died.
In addition to differentiating the City Beautiful
from city planning, Peterson makes a somewhat forced distinction between
"city" planning and "urban" planning. According to Peterson, generic
urban planning refers to the broad array of ideas, techniques, and
procedures by which people have shaped urban form since the founding of
cities. American "city" planning is a distinct chapter in that longer
history. City planning was born during the Progressive Era as an effort
to make existing cities function more efficiently. When it died is less
clear, although it clearly no longer exists in its pure form. The grand
ambitions inherent in a comprehensive vision were undermined by
planners' inability to implement them. Instead, planning has evolved
into a piecemeal endeavor, but one, ironically, suitable for the
contemporary fragmented metropolis.
Peterson highlights three developments during the
late-nineteenth century that proved crucial to the development of city
planning. The first was recognition that sanitary reform was necessary
to reduce the public health risks of crowded tenements. Second, large
parks were identified as another antidote to urban congestion, and,
third, American cities were perceived as more visually chaotic than
Europe's grand cities. The Chicago World's Columbian Exposition of 1893
and the subsequent City Beautiful movement addressed all three of these
concerns. Civic commissions in Chicago, Manila, San Francisco, and
Washington, D.C. hired architect Daniel Burnham, principal designer of
the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, to impose order similar to
that of the fantastical White City.
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