The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917 Sara E. Wermiel (bio) The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917. By Jon A. Peterson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Pp. xxi+431. $59.95. The history of city planning in the United States is a topic that would seem to fall within the area of study dealing with urban infrastructure and technology. After all, the purpose of a city plan, according to Jon Peterson, is to help the public exercise "general multipurpose control of the city's future growth" (p. 35)—and infrastructural development is a tool of this control. Peterson found that few engineers were involved in city planning at its inception. Nevertheless, historians of technology may find this book of interest because it tells a detailed story of the social construction of an important artifact (the city plan) and how a technical field (city planning) emerged. It is thoroughly researched, its arguments are clear, and it is well designed and illustrated. It should prove useful for teaching about industrialization and urbanization, to which city planning was a response—an effort to shape urban growth in the public interest. To begin, Peterson describes his subject, city planning, as being a distinct field of endeavor and historical phenomenon. Its defining feature is the comprehensive city plan, a document or artifact that presents an overall vision for a city. Before 1900, such documents did not exist, although various movements had the shaping of urban settlements as their goal. What distinguishes the earlier efforts from city planning is that they had a single focus or else were piecemeal and lacked a comprehensive vision. Comprehensiveness is the sine qua non of city planning. Special-purpose reform efforts that antedated city planning were responses to the growth and concentration of population and business that began to overwhelm municipal infrastructure and traditional methods for coping. Of these special-purpose projects, the ones that contributed most to the formation of city planning were those dealing with sanitation (water supply, sewerage), parks, and civic art. The City Beautiful movement was particularly important; images of attractive, orderly city centers encouraged Americans to think that cities could express the common purposes of their residents. The flowering of this movement set the stage for public [End Page 674] acceptance of the nation's first comprehensive city plan: the McMillan Plan for Washington, D.C., issued in 1902, which combined civic center development with planning for parks and other goals. Although this influential document arose from unique and contingent circumstances, for Peterson the "story of the McMillan Plan . . . is the foundation story of American city planning" (p. 78). In the third part of his book, Peterson recounts in fascinating detail how men and women crafted something conceptually new out of disparate movements. Their ideas took root because of a receptive Progressive Era environment—"the complex drift of late-nineteenth-century public thought away from competitive and individualistic ethics toward more altruistic, cooperative values" (p. 101). One of the contingent developments in the emergence of city planning was the preference of its founders for administrative commissions or boards rather than city departments, which had budgets to build things. This created a fatal contradiction: planners and planning commissions made big plans, but had little or no power to implement them. Because few city plans were carried out as originally conceived, Peterson concludes that city planning was unworkable. Rather, he argues, planners resorted to "opportunistic interventionism" or piecemeal actions, which comprehensive plans had been created to replace. This and other factors—fragmentation of the core-centered city, vanishing faith in a unitary public good—led to city planning's eventual demise: "As a field premised on a comprehensive vision," Peterson writes, "[city planning] no longer exists" (p. xvii). One can be completely convinced by Peterson's analysis of what did and did not contribute to the origins of city planning, and one can also acknowledge the weakness of planning in the United States, and yet still disagree with this conclusion. That city plans are not carried out all at once, or only parts are completed before they are revised, does not mean that they do...