Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800–1920 by Stanley K. Schultz

Abstract

448 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE intracity Los Angeles Railway prospered. He reinvested profits in new technology which made travel faster and cheaper. Meanwhile, he profited from natural gas piped from Kern County and hydroelectric power he produced for his cars. Huntington was also a collector, and it was George Ellery Hale who persuaded him to bring his books and paintings to San Marino and set up a trust for their future use by the public and scholars. Character­ istically, Huntington collected books, manuscripts, and paintings in ways similar to his business methods. He bought whole libraries, hired the best agents to find what he wanted, spent lavishly, and shrewdly timed his successful acquisitions. In researching the achievements of this remarkable pioneer, Friedricks used the recently opened Huntington business papers at the world-famous library as well as other primary materials. Other books, most notably Spencer Crump’s Ride the Big Red Cars, have covered the Pacific Electric story, but this is the first work to cover in detail the full scope of Huntington’s development of the region. The book includes several interpretive maps, charts, and photographs, indispensable for a subject tied to local geography and technology. John E. Baur Dr. Baur is professor of history at California State University, Northridge. He has published four books and numerous articles on California and the West. Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800— 1920. By Stanley K. Schultz. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. Pp. xviii + 275; illustrations, notes, index. $34.95. In Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning, 1800—1920, Stanley Schultz stands the traditional interpretation of the origins of American city planning on its head. He argues that, long before Burnham and Olmstead laid out the plans for Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, sanitarians, landscape archi­ tects, municipal engineers, novelists, and others had established the conceptual foundations of the planning movement and had begun engaging in the activities of the planning profession intended to rationalize, humanize, and rehabilitate cities. Rather than represent­ ing the start of something new, the White City was the culmination of existing ideas and techniques, an event that marked the maturity of planning as an approach to dealing with the long-term problems associated with industrialization and city growth. Schultz traces the origins of planning back to the utopian writers and secular and religious utopian community builders who, as early as 1802, began exploring the possibilities of perfecting human society in response to industrial and technological development. Following an overview of the development of the city’s police powers and other TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 449 aspects of municipal law, Schultz argues that the sanitary reform movement set in motion the conceptual and institutional forces that would ultimately produce modern planning organizations. By the late 1840s, sanitarians were agitating for a range of improvements in the urban landscape closely identified with modern city planning, such as street cleaning, pure water supply, and sewerage. Sanitarianism in turn gave rise to the municipal engineering and public health professions. As they entered city government to construct public works and otherwise improve living conditions during the second half of the 19th century, municipal engineers and public health profes­ sionals created the legal, institutional, and philosophical apparatuses that would form the foundations of the city planning bureaucracy of the 20th century. This brief summary of Constructing Urban Culture does not dojustice to it. Schultz has packed the book with interesting, thought-provoking material. His revisionist interpretation of the origins of planning makes the book an important addition to the literature on the history of city planning. But his contribution to the literature is much greater than this. Schultz has succeeded in synthesizing an enormous amount of original research with ideas and concepts drawn from recently published historians, like Hendrik Hartog, Joel Tarr, and Jon Peter­ son, whose work has illuminated aspects of the history of city planning, like the role of the law, municipal engineering, and public works development in the development of the urban environment, that have only recently begun to command the attention they deserve. With its wealth of citations of original 19th-century primary sources, as well as of this...