city planning

city planning process of planning for the improvement of urban centers in order to provide healthy and safe living conditions, efficient transport and communication, adequate public facilities, and aesthetic surroundings. Planning that also includes outlying communities and highways is termed regional planning.

Early City Planning

Many ancient cities were built from definite plans. The fundamental feature of the plans of Babylon, Nineveh, and the cities of ancient Greece and of China was a geographical pattern of main streets running north and south and east and west, with a public square or forum in the center. Such a gridiron plan was used in the ancient Peruvian city of Chan Chan . It was also followed by the Romans, as in Lincoln and Chester in England; in all their towns the Romans emphasized drainage and water supply and practiced zoning. In medieval cities, built with military security in mind, the only relief from the extremely narrow streets was the space formed by municipal and church squares. The living conditions of the poorer citizens were given little attention.

With the Renaissance came the truly monumental views—wide avenues and long approaches creating vistas of handsome buildings. The new aim is seen first in special sections of a city, such as Michelangelo's grouping on the Capitoline at Rome and Bernini's piazza of St. Peter's. In most European cities through the 17th and 18th cent. there was fragmentary replanning of medieval streets. After the fire of 1666 in London, Sir Christopher Wren devised a superb plan for a complete rebuilding of the city, but the plan unfortunately was not carried out. In the 18th cent., Mannheim and Karlsruhe, Germany, were laid out geometrically; Emmanuel Héré planned Nancy, France; John Wood produced grand architectural streets and squares at Bath; and the new part of Edinburgh was laid out. In the early 19th cent. John Nash planned certain sections of London; central Vienna was improved; and Baron Haussmann remodeled Paris to produce the celebrated boulevard system with its spokes-and-hub design.

Legislation that enabled cities to make and carry out planning designs was enacted earlier in Europe than in the United States. Such laws were passed in Italy in 1865, in Sweden in 1874, and in Prussia and Great Britain in 1875. Planning in Great Britain was especially concerned with slum elimination; its greatest exponent was Sir Patrick Geddes . At the turn of the century Sir Ebenezer Howard was the founder of the modern garden city movement. The first English garden city , Letchworth, was begun in 1903.

City Planning in the United States

In the United States, early New England towns, formally disposed along wide elm-lined central roadways or commons, exhibit a conscious planning. Annapolis, Md., Philadelphia, and Paterson, N.J., were built after plans; but the most celebrated example is the city of Washington D.C., laid out according to the plan devised (1791) by Pierre Charles L'Enfant , under the supervision of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—a rectangular plan with diagonal main thoroughfares superimposed and the Capitol as the central feature.

In the 19th cent. Frederick Law Olmsted was a pioneer in city planning, especially in developing parks. State legislation enabling cities to appoint planning commissions and in some cases giving them authority to carry out the plans began in Pennsylvania in 1891. The work of Daniel Hudson Burnham for the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, 1893, was a stimulus to city planning, and Burnham, with Edward Bennett, drew up a plan for Chicago, much of which was put into execution. In 1901 a commission composed of Burnham, Charles Follen McKim, and Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., devised a scheme for the modern development and beautification of Washington, D.C., adhering to L'Enfant's original plan as a basis for all new operations.

A wide influence on planning in U.S. cities was exerted by the zoning laws adopted in New York City in 1916, which controlled the uses of each district in the city and regulated the areas and heights of buildings in relation to street width. The important Regional Survey of New York and Environs, completed in 1929, took into consideration legal and social factors as well as internal transit problems and various modes of approach to the metropolitan area.

Governmental efforts to provide employment during the depression of the 1930s led to the building (under the Federal Resettlement Administration) of three experimental model communities—Greenbelt, Md., Greendale, Wis., and Greenhills, Ohio. Among the many subsequent planned communities built by private developers are Columbia, Md., and Reston, Va. The increase of traffic and crowding together of tall buildings have crippled the street plans of many cities—especially U.S. cities that have been handicapped by their rectangular or checkerboard layouts.

Contemporary Planning

In the larger U.S. cities, physical deterioration, crowding, and complex socioeconomic factors have produced vast slums. Most urban renewal programs of the mid-20th cent. were aimed at clearing these slums through the demolition of decayed buildings and the construction of low-income and middle-income housing projects. It was found, however, that the mere replacement of old buildings with new structures did not eliminate slum conditions.

In contrast to traditional planning, which concentrated on improving the physical aspects of buildings and streets, modern city planning is increasingly concerned with the social and economic aspects of city living. The process of city planning is a highly complex, step-by-step procedure, usually involving a series of surveys and studies, development of a land-use plan and transportation plan, preparation of a budget, and approval of a unified master plan by various agencies or legislative bodies. City planners are usually part of an urban planning board or governmental agency that must take into account the characteristics and long-range welfare of the people of a particular urban community—their employment opportunities, income levels, need for transportation, schools, shopping areas, hospitals, parks and recreational facilities. They must face the problems of traffic, congestion, and pollution; they must also consider the availability of police, fire, and sanitation services, the limitations posed by zoning and other regulations, and the problems of funding. In recent years, residents of many communities have demanded greater participation in the planning of their own neighborhoods, and some planners have worked closely with community groups during various stages of the planning process.

Contemporary examples of planned cities include Brasília , the federal capital of Brazil, Rotterdam , main seaport of the Netherlands, Chandigarh , the joint capital of the Indian states of Haryana and Punjab, Islamabad , the capital of Pakistan, and Abuja , the capital of Nigeria.

Bibliography

See J. Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961, repr. 1969); L. Mumford, The City in History (1961, repr. 1966); F. Gibberd, Town Design (5th ed. 1967); W. H. Whyte, The Last Landscape (1968); H. Colman, City Planning (1971); G. E. Cherry, ed., Shaping an Urban World (1980); A. Sutcliffe, Toward the Planned City (1981); V. M. Lampugnani, Architecture and City Planning (1985).

City Planning. City planning arose early in American life. European colonizers designed St. Augustine (Spain, 1565), New Amsterdam (Holland, 1625–1626), Williamsburg (England, 1699), and New Orleans (France, 1722) as commercial and administrative centers. England began to lose its empire when it allowed colonists to plan their own cities. New Haven (1638), Charleston (1680), Philadelphia (1682–1683), and Savannah (1733) became organizing forces for colonial life, regional development, and ultimately revolution. While their prominent public spaces and buildings bespoke civic ambitions, expanding commercial streets and wharves underscored the primacy of economic interests. Civic purpose would predominate only in Washington, D.C. (1791).

As urban rivalries drove commercial expansion in the Antebellum Era, city planning became a form of speculation. To facilitate the “buying, selling, and improving of real estate,” the New York City Commissioners’ Plan of 1811 extended a gridiron of streets throughout Manhattan, offering a model for the nation. Speculation in standardized building lots encouraged rapid, chaotic growth. Driven by concerns about public health and moral order, sanitarians, lawyers, engineers, and landscape architects enlarged the scope of city planning beginning at midcentury. An expanding body of municipal law limited property rights and addressed the health, safety, and welfare of city residents. New water, sewer, transit, and park systems reduced mortality rates and, by 1900, provided Americans with the finest public services in the world.

The expansion of public services was part of an effort to construct an urban culture modeled on the middle‐class home. The “moral influence” of sewers and parks depended upon the cult of domesticity and the feminized ideal of Christian nurture. “Municipal housekeeping” included an urge to purify and compartmentalize city life that gained force from the separation of business and culture implicit in the notion of male and female spheres. Zoning, the most important tool of modern planners, was the logical culmination. In Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926) the Supreme Court declared the creation of building zones with height, bulk, and use restrictions a legitimate use of the police power to preserve residence sections “of a certain desired type.” Zoning's legal defense relied upon the same faith in middle‐class domesticity that supported municipal housekeeping.

The modern planning profession arose from Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the exemplar of municipal engineering and moral uplift. Daniel Burnham (1846–1912), the fair's director, helped popularize the City Beautiful movement. Combining innovative traffic solutions with inspiring civic spaces, Burnham's Plan of Chicago (1909) offered a watered‐down but alluring alternative to the plan of Henry George (1839–1897), elaborated in Progress and Poverty (1877–1879), to ease congestion and improve public services with a single tax on speculative realty values. Charging that the City Beautiful hid civic decay behind superficial splendor, the Georgists organized the First National Conference on City Planning (1909). Uniting settlement‐house workers, housing advocates, architects, engineers, and realtors committed to both Progressive Era social reform and social efficiency, the NCCP became the organizational vehicle for the emerging planning profession.

In the booming 1920s, planners’ focus on the technical problems of zoning and traffic won them powerful allies and professional status while insulating them from popular demands. Maximizing realty values and managing the conflicting needs of commerce and industry, zoning protected exclusive retail and residential districts and streamlined industrial production. Improved roads, traffic regulations, and parking facilitates subsidized motorists and the automotive and allied industries. After the 1929 stock market crash, city planners mourned the collapse in realty values and rediscovered urban blight. The profession revived, however, when the New Deal employed planners to design and administer public works. While some planners recaptured a reforming spirit, federal programs geared to banking and construction interests received greater support than greenbelt towns or public housing.

The 1949 Housing Act, promising “a decent home” for every American, exemplified postwar federal planning that promoted suburbanization at the expense of cities. While federal mortgage insurance and highway construction subsidized suburban growth, public housing remained underfunded, segregated, and concentrated in the inner city. After 1954, urban renewal cleared “slums” and handed the land over, at bargain prices, to private developers of luxury apartments and office towers. By the late 1960s, the destruction of the urban fabric by public authority had created such social and political problems that such urban initiatives were abandoned.

Long planned as centers of business and havens of domesticity, many American cities at the end of the twentieth century were plagued with economic decline and homelessness. As the city's economic and residential functions were partially supplanted by “technoburbs” and “gated communities,” its future appeared to depend upon a restoration of neglected civic functions. In revitalizing civic life, future planners may recapture the possibilities that have always drawn people to cities. If planning can reconnect culture to business, it might even revive the civic cooperation essential to both prosperity and social justice.
See also Architecture: Public Architecture; Automotive Industry; Highway System; Landscape Design; New Deal Era, The; Parks, Urban; Segregation, Racial; Urbanization; World's Fairs and Expositions.

Bibliography

Jane Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961.
John W. Reps , The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States, 1965.
Mel Scott , American City Planning Since 1890, 1969.
Robert Caro , The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, 1974.
Stanley K. Schultz , Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920, 1989.
John D. Fairfield , The Mysteries of the Great City: The Politics of Urban Design, 1877–1937, 1993.
Zane L. Miller and and E. Bruce Tucker , Changing Plans for America's Inner Cities: Cincinnati's Over‐the‐Rhine and Twentieth Century Urbanism, 1998.

John D. Fairfield

Advocacy planning. Term coined by the American planner Paul Davidoff in 1965, meaning architectural design and planning for powerless, inarticulate inner-city groups, notably when resisting destructive schemes by planning authorities, government agencies, or similar bodies. Among its early practitioners were ARCH (Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem), a group formed by the architect C. Richard Hatch in 1964.

Bibliography

Davidoff (1965);
Lopen (1965)