The term city planning originated in the United States during the Progressive Era, in 1907 or 1908, about the same time that town planning emerged in Great Britain and 17 years after Stadtebau had been introduced in Germany. In each country, these words expressed new hopes to achieve greater public control over the growth and development of the physical city. By 1917, when the United States entered World War I, city planning had taken root as a novel field of public endeavor. In the 1920s, it gained wide acceptance but produced a spotty record. Seemingly eclipsed by the Depression and World War II, the planning ideal as conceived by reformers earlier in the century survived into the postwar era, only to be eroded by the decentralizing forces that recast twentieth-century urbanism and by disenchantment with the original vision. The city planning era, thus, extended from the first to sixth decades of the twentieth century. By the 1970s, it had effectively ended.
What perished was faith in the workability and centrality of the era’s core concept: the comprehensive city planning ideal. This principle held that the physical development of an existing city should be controlled by a single, overall scheme—or comprehensive city plan, usually called a Master Plan from the 1920s on. Its advocates argued that an expert or team of experts—architects, landscape designers, civil engineers, lawyers, and the like—should formulate a citywide, integrated, multipurpose scheme to guide all subsequent development of a city. Based on exhaustive study, it would be published as a report replete with diagrams, maps, and statistics. In principle, its recommendations would touch virtually every aspect of city making: everything from traffic and transit systems to replacing public buildings, from construction of parks and community facilities to the management of utilities and harbor works, as well as zoning and subdivision regulations.
City planning, thus conceived, presumed the capacity of specialists to identify and give specific form to the public interest and the willingness of the public to accept the proffered advice. Implicitly, it valued rationality, centralization, and the city as a unitary entity. With few exceptions, no one during the nineteenth century had sought to shape entire cities in this fashion.
The impetus for city planning came from the buildup and proliferation of large cities that had begun in the nineteenth century. By the start of the twentieth century, Germany and England had already become predominantly urban; and the United States, despite its vast farmlands, was moving in the same direction. Big city growth had overwhelmed older forms of urbanism rooted in maritime trade. New means of energy production and of transport and communication—coal-fired steam engines, railroads, the telegraph—had concentrated people and economic activities more than ever before, yielding enormous, densely built cities with disorderly commercial and civic cores; crowded, smoky factory districts; and congested, unsanitary housing, all of which provoked new ideas about how such places might be better built to meet human needs.
City planning also reflected trends in western thought toward the interventionist state, expressed through Progressive Era reform in the United States and both reform liberalism and socialism in Europe. Wherever the change to industrial urbanism occurred, new forms of public guidance had seemed necessary. In all, then, city planning is best understood as a historical phenomenon—it was the American version of the interventionist state with respect to the big city environment that was first conceived during the Progressive Era.
Prior to the twentieth century, other forms of urban planning had flourished in America. To better understand the distinctive thrust of city planning, a brief overview of this earlier activity is necessary. From the first European settlements along the eastern seaboard of North America in the seventeenth century until the final conquest of the transMississippi West after the Civil War, the primary task of city builders had been creating new townsites. On land never before colonized or only lightly developed, speculators, land companies, railroads, reformers, religious groups, and public officials had projected thousands of townsites in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. This activity can be called townsite planning. Unlike city planning, it focused on de novo settings.
Initially, no single formula dominated townsite planning. Seventeenth-century New England towns, which were based on huge land grants given by colonial authorities, included both a village or town center and also outlying farm lots and considerable land reserved for later distribution. Town centers followed no set pattern. Only that of New Haven, designed in 1638 as a nine-square grid, took precise geometric form. In the Middle Atlantic area, New York City grew along irregular lines after 1624, despite contrary instructions from the Dutch West India Company. Philadelphia, projected in 1682–1683 as a grid of immense size for its day (two square miles), featured two wide cross streets (Broad and Market) and five symmetrically placed public squares. These traits mirrored Renaissance town design and won favor among European travelers accustomed to the more erratic layouts common in the towns they know best.
Two southern colonies introduced Baroque civic design, with its penchant for closed street vistas and geometric spaces. Annapolis, Maryland, begun in 1695, combined two circles and a great square with radial and grid streets, and Williamsburg, Virginia, dating from 1699, featured a street closed at each end by public buildings as the spine of a “miniature grand plan.” Savannah, Georgia, begun in 1633, though not Baroque, became famous for its regularly spaced public squares. Finally, and most spectacularly, Washington, D.C., designed by Peter Charles L’Enfant in 1791, pushed Baroque grandeur to a scale and complexity beyond anything seen before or since in the American experience, laying out a capital city of world significance.
By then, however, gridiron design dominated townsite planning. Almost from the outset of American history, land speculation became commonplace, and the grid, an arrangement in which all intersecting streets and lot lines meet at right angles, offered the easiest method for platting and selling town lots. Much used in the seventeenth century, it became all but universal by the late 1700s, just in time for the westward movement to carry it beyond the Appalachians. Cheap to design, easy to stake out, and adaptable to varied usage, it required only a surveyor to produce it. As the nineteenth century progressed, it gained supremacy over Manhattan by way of the 1811 extension plan, began its conquest of the lakefront site of Chicago in 1830, and was imposed on San Francisco, despite its hills, between 1847 and 1849. Mormons in Utah, miners in Colorado, and railroad companies throughout the West all used the grid. Had nineteenth-century townsite planning required more knowledge and skill, as did the layouts of New England mill towns of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s, and Pullman, Illinois, in 1880, where the physical demands of mills and factories imposed a different form, then it might have become more than a nameless convention and sometime art.
The antecedents of twentieth-century city planning lie elsewhere. From the 1820s onward, urban growth began to outpace rural growth. From 1710 to 1820, cities of 8,000 or more had simply kept pace with the rest of society, never exceeding 4.9 percent of total population; by 1900, they comprised almost 33 percent. Before the 1820 census, no American city had exceeded 100,000 in size, the threshold for what European demographers called great cities. In 1820 New York achieved this status. By 1840 there were 3 such places; by 1860, 9; by 1880, 20; by 1900, 38; and by 1910, 68. By the latter date, three cities—New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia—exceeded 1 million residents. All this happened because cities took on new functions and embroidered old ones.
Great city urbanism, as this phenomenon will be called, overwhelmed inherited arrangements for laying out cities and satisfying human needs. Epidemics, crowding, riots, lost access to nature, vulnerability to fire, confusion over standards of public behavior, visual disorder, and shoddy building practices all seemed to worsen and require correction. Many solutions involved the urban environment. Prominent among them from the 1840s on were public water supply, systematic sewerage, parks and park systems, planned institutional sites, transit systems, picturesque suburbs, and massive urban landfills.
Such undertakings had limited objectives and may thus be called special purpose planning. Wherever such planning emerged, it supplanted less coherent and more piecemeal forms of growth. Its physical reach might be citywide, as in water supply, sewerage, or park systems; or it might address very large sites, such as university settings, suburban tracts, or exposition grounds. All this planning involved heavy capital outlays and entailed novel degrees of expertise and forethought, well beyond that required by most townsite planning.
Progressive Era urban reformers built on the experience accumulated with special purpose undertakings by seeking to plan the great city environment as if it were the unitary realm they believed it to be and wanted it to be. Two events set the stage for their generalist approach. In 1893 the Chicago World’s Fair, or World’s Columbian Exposition, featured classical buildings arrayed around an immense lakeside lagoon. It was a stunning scene. Dubbed the White City, it reintroduced the nation to Baroque design and suggested an ideal city fulfilling middle-class dreams of a better-ordered public life. But how to reach this vision of the future remained unclear. Not until the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., did a path become apparent.
Issued early in 1902, the McMillan Plan marks the beginning of American city planning. The elite architects who pressed hardest for the scheme had wanted to resurrect L’Enfant’s plan as the basis for locating new buildings and monuments in the nation’s capital. Theirs was an architectural vision. But local politics forced them to do more: design a citywide park system—a form of special purpose planning popularized in the United States after the Civil War—and address still more issues such as slum clearance, railroad station placement, and playgrounds. The upshot was a plan touted as unique for being comprehensive.
Before 1902 many civic groups had begun urging city beautification along piecemeal lines—cleaner streets, a civic monument, artistic street fixtures, a public fountain, a riverfront park, or a government center. The McMillan Plan, however, suggested that experts might be summoned to focus and coordinate local energies.
In 1904 a national movement for city planning emerged, exploiting this idea as its paradigm. By 1909 Charles Mulford Robinson, the nation’s most prolific City Beautiful writer, had produced at least 17 reports or city plans. Architect Daniel H. Burnham, famous as the master builder of the Chicago World’s Fair and the dominant force on the McMillan Commission, devised city plans for Manila and Baguio in the Philippine Islands (1904–1905) and for San Francisco (1904–1905) and Chicago (1907–1909). The Plan of Chicago remains the best known and most consequential of the comprehensive city plans issued in the United States before World War I. Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., and a younger landscape architect, John Nolen, also emerged as city planning consultants.
A turning point came in 1909. By then, planning reports, some quite modest, others elaborate, had been devised for at least 37 towns and cities, and “city planning” had come into public usage. Meanwhile, certain New York social reformers had attacked American planning as preoccupied with beauty and callous toward the masses of city laborers trapped in congested tenement districts, especially in New York. Foreign practice suggested alternatives: zoning limits on population density as in Germany and factory villages in the countryside as in Britain. In 1909 the social progressives, working through Benjamin Marsh of the Committee on Congestion of Population in New York, staged the first National Conference on City Planning in Washington, D.C., hoping to seize the initiative.
They failed. But what emerged from their challenge was city planning itself—a movement wedded to controlling urban growth and development on the basis of comprehensive city planning. Neither beauty nor social welfare alone would fix the agenda. In the years from 1909 to 1917, under the leadership of Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., the major features of this new field of public endeavor were worked out. Previously concerned with public improvements, planning now included private property as well, chiefly through zoning and subdivision regulations. In 1916 New York City adopted the first comprehensive zoning act in the nation, establishing the legal standard by which all subsequent zoning in the United States was measured. A planning literature—books, articles, and special publications—began to appear. In 1916 John Nolen edited City Planning: A Series of Papers Presenting the Essential Elements of a City Plan; and Nelson P. Lewis, the first engineer to figure prominently in the movement, published The Planning of the Modern City. Finally, those most deeply engaged in the new field organized the American City Planning Institute in 1917, a quasi-professional body established to foster discussion of technical issues.
At this time the city planing commission became the accepted institutional device for local planning. Customarily, state and local governments had set up commissions to fulfill special objectives, such as park oversight. But commissions for planning, if empowered to shape the entire city, might usurp the functions of elected officials. State and local governments thus granted them only advisory authority, except for the power to approve new subdivisions. And once created, they often put them on starvation budgets, killing all possibilities for serious plan making.
The gap between aspirations and achievement loomed large from the outset of city planning. Could comprehensive city planning be made to work? The meager tools available to control city growth suggested not. In response, most early advocates concentrated on winning public favor. The “city practical” and “city efficient” themes, prominent within the movement from 1909 to World War I and beyond, represented a recasting of planning rhetoric to enhance its appeal, especially to local chambers of commerce. Support from almost any business quarter was welcomed. Thus, in 1915–1917, when Kansas City realtor J. C. Nichols and other developers of upper-class residential areas expressed interest in drawing up plans for their new subdivisions, planners embraced them forthwith and awarded them strong political support.
The problem of workability—the key issue never solved by the city planning movement—forced planning advocates into an opportunistic stance. Presenting themselves as expressing the public interest but lacking real power to attain their full program, they seized whatever opportunities appeared, even at the price of advancing one aspect of their field at the expense of another.
Zoning offers a clear example. This idea arose outside the planning movement, chiefly as a device for protecting residential property from intrusive, nonresidential use. Early efforts along this line emerged in California (1909) and in Wisconsin and Minnesota (1913) without the benefit of planning expertise. But once planning advocates in New York City seized the issue and marshaled top-flight legal and technical talent, even they ignored a key planning principle—that zoning be based on a prior, comprehensive city plan. As zoning spread like wildfire in the 1920s, planners helped to frame the Department of Commerce Standard State Zoning Enabling Act, issued in 1923, and to argue the Euclid Village decision of the U.S. Supreme Court, which upheld zoning in principle in 1926. But locally they often crafted ordinances without benefit of a comprehensive plan. As one investigator discovered in 1929, over 754 places had adopted zoning since 1916, but since 1904 only about 200 cities had produced about 300 comprehensive plans.
American planning in the 1920s progressed institutionally but could not move much beyond opportunistic action. Thus, in 1927 the Department of Commerce encouraged states to authorize city planning commissions by publishing its Standard City Planning Enabling Act; by 1929 over 650 communities had established these bodies. But it was booming growth, combined with phenomenal increases in automobile use, that dictated action, not the abstract claims of comprehensive planning. Traffic jams and parking woes translated into urgent studies of street openings and widenings, thoroughfare plans, and traffic management proposals, sometimes by means of a comprehensive plan, but often not. Not surprisingly, engineers, most notably Harland Bartholomew, began to play more critical roles in the planning movement as independent experts. Significantly, only one city in the 1920s fulfilled the city planning ideal of legally adopting and enforcing a comprehensive plan. That was Cincinnati in 1925.
Ironically, planning in the 1920s is best remembered for two developments that forecast the end of great city urbanism. Radburn, New Jersey (1928–1929), a brilliant but isolated experiment in suburban townsite planning inspired by English garden city ideas, was a response to the auto-based urbanism then emerging. And the high profile Regional Plan of New York, prepared from 1921 to 1929, pushed comprehensive planning to a multistate regional scale (5,528 square miles), indicating the staggering sweep that auto-based urbanism would attain while outstripping the capacities of local government to exert general control.
In the few places where regional planning showed any success in the 1920s, it usually focused on highways, parks, or some other special purpose goal, thus reverting to non-comprehensive intervention. During the Depression, federal initiatives began to determine planning opportunities, a pattern that would persist until the presidency of Richard Nixon but virtually die out with that of Ronald Reagan. The Depression crippled locally funded city planning. Many dislodged planners moved to state government planning boards then being founded at the prompting of the federal government. Public housing emerged as a novel issue for most Americans after the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 authorized slum clearance and federal construction of public housing and the Housing Act of 1937 made government-financed public housing a national goal. Neither of these New Deal measures, however, made city planning a prerequisite to action.
On another front, the Resettlement Administration built three garden suburbs between 1935 and 1938: Greenbelt, Maryland, near Washington, D.C.; Greenhills, Ohio, near Cincinnati; and Greendale, Wisconsin, near Milwaukee. Each generated jobs and, like Radburn, essayed higher standards of townsite design. Finally, the National Resources Committee in 1937 outlined what might have become a national urban policy had political leaders wanted it, but they didn’t. Despite such fragmentation and agenda setting, the pre-New Deal planning ethos remained alive. During World War II, for example, as allied victory came into sight, cities such as Pittsburgh geared themselves for postwar reconstruction along comprehensive lines, partly seeking to counteract the anticipated return of economic depression.
During the quarter-century after World War II, the nation’s economy surged, and its cities exploded far beyond their old boundaries, evolving into vast metropolitan regions. Activities previously found at or near the urban core now spread far and wide: retail shopping, light industry, warehousing, office buildings, and the like. Two federal policies, neither rooted in city planning, subsidized much of this explosion. Federally insured mortgages, originated by the 1934 National Housing Act and extended to war veterans in 1944, underwrote much postwar suburbanization, while the Interstate Highway Act of 1956 projected 41,000 miles of limited-access highways that opened once remote countryside to development. Unable and unwilling to create governmental authorities commensurate with this new scale, metropolitan regions became fragmented realms, defying hopes for comprehensive, integrated control of growth just as had happened in the 1920s.
City planning, although historically rooted in great city urbanism, regained considerable prominence, especially after the 1949 National Housing Act and, more forcefully, the 1954 National Housing Act required cities to produce comprehensive plans before proceeding with federally financed slum clearance and urban renewal. But this was an illusory gain. In practice, most core city rebuilding in the late 1950s and the 1960s occurred on a project-by-project basis by setting up federally subsidized local agencies that were empowered to hire a technical staff, assemble land by purchase or eminent domain, demolish all structures, and sell the cleared site to a private developer for rebuilding. Comprehensive planning, under these circumstances, survived more as a program requirement than as a springboard for action.
From the 1950s onward, it became apparent both in older cities and in the metropolitan regions beyond that effective planning concentrated of necessity on programmatic strategies backed by aggressive politicians and business interests. Well-defined if complex goals, such as downtown renewal or the creation of regional industrial parks, stood some chance. When critics of American planning in the 1960s faulted the emphasis on physical development, they succeeded in broadening its agenda to include social issues. But this “new comprehensiveness” proved no more workable. Thus, when the “Great Society” Model Cities program (1966–1973) begun during Lyndon Johnson’s administration sought to develop a social approach, little of lasting value was achieved. Finally, when Richard Nixon commenced withdrawing federal funding for housing, urban renewal, and local planning about 1973, neither the nation’s urban areas themselves nor the array of techniques available to shape their future bore much resemblance to the great cities of an earlier era or to the city planning field that had been framed in response to their needs. Even theorists within the movement declared comprehensive planning dead as a foundation ideal and as a workable procedure.
Urban planning today is perceived to inhere in diverse activities: public-private partnerships aimed at core city growth, historic preservation, antigrowth policies, transportation design, open space and environmental preservation, neighborhood revitalization, and economic development. Some of these conflict with one another. Thus, like the late-twentieth-century urbanism it mirrors, planning today is diffuse, multifaceted, and subject to continuous change. Portions of its agenda may utilize a comprehensive approach, but the field as a whole has passed beyond coherent, unitary definition.
