Book review: The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917

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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more planning book reviews:

Book Review: Instant City

Book Review: Waiting on a Train

Book - Architecture and Violence

Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Book Review - City Building: Nine Planning Principles for the Twenty-First Century

Planning book: Forty years of Limits to Growth

City Beautiful movement - Definition

via Word IQ

The City Beautiful movement was a Progressive reform movement in North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities to counteract the perceived moral decay of poverty-stricken urban environments. The movement, which was originally most closely associated with Chicago and Washington, D.C., did not seek beauty for its own sake, but rather as a social control device for creating moral and civic virtue among urban populations. Advocates of the movement believed that such beautification could thus provide a harmonious social order that would improve the lives of the inner-city poor. 

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Civic Center: Surrogate’s Court in New York City, an example of City Beautiful architecture, by wallyg

Civic Center: Surrogate’s Court in New York City, an example of City Beautiful architecture, by wallyg

more about City Beautiful Movement:

The City Beautiful Movement by William H. Wilson

Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

City Beautiful movement

The City Beautiful Movement by William H. Wilson

by George E. Kessler

William H. Wilson in The City Beautiful Movement offers a masterful analysis of the principles, conflicts, and legacy of the City Beautiful movement. The turn-of-the-century City Beautiful movement influenced the design, planning, and management of American cities from New York to San Francisco. Its effects are still felt today. Wide, tree-lined boulevards and monumental but low-lying buildings — libraries and museums, town halls and train stations — were designed to break up the familiar American gridiron of clogged streets and uncontrolled growth.

To be sure, City Beautiful was an environmental, sociocultural, and aesthetic movement, but Wilson also sees it as its founders did: as an exercise in participatory politics aimed at changing the way citizens thought about their cities. Far from being the province of an elite, City Beautiful depended on popular participation — from voter approval of bond issues to citizen activism on behalf of beautification. In those cities where the movement failed, it failed from a lack of local political infrastructure, not from the public's rejection of planning or of the City Beautiful philosophy.

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more about City Beautiful Movement:

Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City

City Beautiful movement

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City

by Judith Paine McBrien

Few individuals have had more impact on the American city than architect and planner Daniel Hudson Burnham. In the midst of late 19th century urban disorder, Burnham offered a powerful vision of what a civilized American city could look like. He built some of the first skyscrapers in the world; directed construction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition that inspired the City Beautiful Movement; and created urban plans for Washington DC, Chicago, Cleveland, San Francisco and Manila—all before the profession of urban planning existed. In fact, some say that he invented it.

His work sought to reconcile things often thought opposite: the practical and the ideal, business and art, and capitalism and democracy. At the center of it all was the idea of a vibrant urban community. A timely, intriguing story in the American experience, Make No Little Plans: Daniel Burnham and the American City explores Burnham's fascinating career and complex legacy as public debate continues today about how and for whom cities are planned.

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Washington D.C., a good example of City Beautiful, photo by hanelly

more about City Beautiful Movement:

City Beautiful movement

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

City Beautiful movement

via Art History

The City Beautiful movement was a Progressive reform movement in North American architecture and urban planning that flourished in the 1890s and 1900s with the intent of using beautification and monumental grandeur in cities to counteract the perceived moral decay of poverty-stricken urban environments. The movement, which was originally most closely associated with Chicago and Washington, D.C., did not seek beauty for its own sake, but rather as a social control device for creating moral and civic virtue among urban populations. Advocates of the movement believed that such beautification could thus provide a harmonious social order that would improve the lives of the inner-city poor. 

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The City Hall of San Francisco California, http2007

more about City Beautiful Movement:

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

The Roots and Origins of New Urbanism

By Houshmand E. Masoumi

New Urbanism is one of the most important approaches of the Neo-Traditional Development flow. Although New Urbanism looks almost new, it has roots in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the early 1980s, Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk as two of the early leaders of the New Urbanism movement conducted a research on the urban form and architectural characteristics of the late nineteenth and twentieth century settlements of the east and northeast of America. It was before starting to work on the master plan of the most famous planning practice of New Urbanism: Seaside, Florida.
They extracted the main characteristics and formulated them as a number of guidelines, which in 1990s were developed into New Urbanism principles by the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU).

Howard’s Garden City

The works of Duany and Plater-Zyberk along with Katz, Molle, Polizoides, Corbett, and others were quite influential in the formation of New Urbanism. Some believe that the idea of such neo-traditionalism was gotten from the first two decades of the twentieth century. As the most influential, Garden City movement was the main pattern of New Urbanist way of thinking.
The 6000-acre Garden City that Ebenezer Howard introduced in his well-known book: Garden Cities of To-morrow in 1902 was influenced by the neighborhood unit of Clarence Perry. The schools were the center of the neighborhood so that the children could easily go to school and get back. Garden City had important Anglo-American features like communality, mobility, individualism, and safety of children which can also be seen in New Urbanism (Lang, 1994).

A Garden City of 66000 acres for 250000 residents

Other Roots

Another source of inspiration of the New Urbanism was the City Beautiful movement. The City Beautiful movement idea originally comes from the neoclassical architectural movement of Beaux Arts (Municipal Arts) in the nineteenth-century France.
Although the shape of the buildings in Beaux Arts architecture is different from the new urban architecture, but there are similarities between the two movements. Human relationships, environmentalism, landscape architecture, and green spaces are basic features of City Beautiful. This is the point that some scholars think that it can be the starting point of the humanist ideology of New Urbanism.

San Francisco - Civic Center: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, a good example of City Beautiful movement's works, Image by Walley Gobetz

Many critics of New Urbanism believe that unlike its name, it is not so “new”. As we see in this article, the ideas are not new. However, the views that the new urbanists have, by which they try to change the form of the sprawling cities of the United States, look fresh to many people.

References

• Howard, E. (1898), “Garden Cities of To-morrow”, London, U.K.: Sonnensc
• Lang, J. (1994), “Urban Design, the American Experience”, New York; Van Nostrand Reinhold.hein.

Civic Center: Civic Center Park - Voorhies Memorial in Denver in another examples of City Beautiful. image by Wally Gobetz

 More readings on New Urbanism:

neo-traditional development: a post modern way in urban design

What Andres Duany and Peter Calthrope Beieved in 1995

Designing Community: The Utopia of New Urbanism