American City Planning Research Articles

Why American City Planning Needs a More Entrepreneurial Practice Modality

This commentary argues that current practice modalities are inadequate to meet the planning challenges of the day and that planners should seek out more entrepreneurial approaches. I offer three additional observations to support this argument: (1) the choice of local planning practice modality is too often determined by convention and familiarity; (2) local planners have become too reliant on regulation as their primary implementation tool; and (3) the recent performance record of counties in states with strong planning and regulatory regimes is underwhelming when compared with their counterparts in states with weaker planning regimes.

In Memoriam: David P. Schuyler

In Memoriam: David P. Schuyler

Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition

Book Review| March 01 2021 Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern Americans. By Guarneri, Julia. Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2017. 330 pp. Cloth, $45.00; paper, $30.00; e-book available.Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. By Daniel, Julia E.Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press. 2017. ix, 200 pp. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $27.50; e-book, $55.00.The Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition. By Rowan, Jamin Creed. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press. 2017. 195 pp. Cloth, $47.50; e-book available. Barbara Eckstein Barbara Eckstein Barbara Eckstein has pursued matters urban and environmental in the books Sustaining New Orleans (2006) and Story and Sustainability (coedited with James Throgmorton, 2003) and in other publications and actions. She recently retired from the English department at the University of Iowa where she taught courses in environmental humanities; built, with students, faculty and public partners, peoplesweathermap.org; and was a member of the Center for Global and Regional Environmental Research. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2021) 93 (1): 148–150. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878566 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara Eckstein; Newsprint Metropolis: City Papers and the Making of Modern AmericansBuilding Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City PlanningThe Sociable City: An American Intellectual Tradition. American Literature 1 March 2021; 93 (1): 148–150. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-8878566 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Literature Search Advanced Search The result of meticulous historical scholarship, Newsprint Metropolis provides a cleanly written account of the role played by major US metropolitan newspapers in the making of cities and their inhabitants from 1880 to 1930. For her case studies Julia Guarneri chooses Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The interest of Guarneri’s book, uninterrupted by any urban theorizing, lies in the explication of how this making occurred and in the numerous illustrations enhancing that explication. Both the decades and the cities at the center of the argument prove well chosen. Although the book’s introduction, which provides a less than fulsome account of the diversity of Americans, their news, and newspaper options, raises some questions about how they might fare in its pages, the chapters do tell a story increasingly attuned to exactly which readers are being made as Americans by major metropolitan newspapers,... Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel, and: The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World by Matthew Griffiths

Building Natures: Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel, and: The New Poetics of Climate Change: Modernist Aesthetics for a Warming World by Matthew Griffiths

Correction notice

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) 2011 Biennial Awards Competition. Published in Journal of Planning History, volume 18, issue 2 (May), pp. 159-162 by Sage Publications in 2019. An announcement piece titled “The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) 2011 Biennial Awards Competition” (pp. 159-162) was inadvertently included in the above mentioned issue. It is outdated and should not be considered a part of the issue.

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) 2011 Biennial Awards Competition

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) 2011 Biennial Awards Competition

Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel

Reviewed by: Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning by Julia E. Daniel Mika Kennedy Building Natures Modern American Poetry, Landscape Architecture, and City Planning. By Julia E. Daniel. University of Virginia Press, 2017. 214 pp. Building Natures enters what is by now a familiar conundrum about the nature of nature: while often mourned as something lost in the face of human industrialization, most environmental humanists now operate from the assumption that nature has included anthropogenic activity since there were anthropoi to include. This turn, however, is not exclusive to the rise of ecocriticism in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Building Natures, Daniel traces the debate about the nature of nature across the landscape of Modernist poetry. Pairing extended close readings of the works of Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore with readings of the authors' personal archives and the architectural plans that shaped the parks they walked, Daniel brings literary study into conversation with the fields of landscape architecture and city planning. By reading architectural planning documents as cultural texts, Daniel grounds debates about the nature of nature that might otherwise risk endless equivocation; thus grounded, Daniel explores how early planners' and architects'civic goals evinced themselves in the formal qualities of the parks they built and how those formal qualities are ultimately interrogated in Modernist poetry. While Modernism is often understood as an aesthetic turn away from nature and the idealized Romantic preoccupation with nature, Daniel's thick descriptions of her primary sources demonstrate Modernist poetry's [End Page 225] continuing investments in it. Daniel argues that the nature Modernist poets concerned themselves with was "emphatically modern and American," such as city parks; conventionally natural spaces transformed by industrial development; and even the purported last frontiers of the United States, its national parks. As distinct from traditional pastoral visions of nature, Daniel claims that nature in Modernist poetics "always carries about with it a set of implied scare quotes" (9). Nature in Modernist poetics is bound up in the dark side of the United States' pastoral and frontier myths—a dark side that recognizes that the United States' seemingly untouchable, mythic wilderness or benevolent pastoral scenes were critically shaped by human activity—often resulting in the aggravation of societal inequalities that were themselves meant to appear natural. Ultimately, Building Natures studies the role of artifice in Modernist poetry, arguing that focus on artifice draws attention to the artificer and, therefore, to the societal motivations and strategies that shape our environments. The first chapter of Building Natures concerns itself with the burgeoning city of Chicago, and architect Daniel Burnham's "developing understanding of postfrontier nature as an architectural and deeply human artifice that must be built into American cityscapes" (23). Burnham's Plan of Chicago (1909) frames green spaces as integral to and consciously a part of the American city. By placing Burnham in conversation with Carl Sandburg's poetry, Daniel argues that the metaphors that built Chicago—the poet's and the architect's both—articulate tensions between separating nature and the city and integrating the two. In complicating easy binaries between city and nature, or man and nature, however, Daniel notes that Sandburg also expresses a tendency to nativize the process of building, eliding the difference between Native land claims and claims of white settlers. In Sandburg's poetry, white settlers are made native to Chicago by participating in the city's creation, from its buildings to its green spaces. Through this process, they become part of the environment of the city, and the city becomes a part of them. While this focus on the process of urban creation inscribes new ways of understanding the city as a space of comingling between man and nature, it also erases the dispossession and forced assimilation that undergirds industrial growth. It posits a narrative that privileges creation—in that Chicago's inhabitants become native by virtue of making their own place—without acknowledging that this place first had to be taken from those already Native. [End Page 226] Though readings of the poetry of Wallace Stevens often presume Stevens to view nature in its pastoral mode, in chapter 2 Daniel...

Report from the 16th Biennial SACRPH Conference on planning history: 5–8 November 2015, Los Angeles, California

One of the great traditions of the conferences of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) is to hold the conference at remarkable old hotels. The 16th conference held t...

The New Communalism

This article argues that understanding the vision of Planned Unit Development (PUD) advocates in the mid-twentieth century corrects the common misconception that American city planning and development practices turned away from traditional notions of urbanism in that period. However, although PUD remains a significant regulatory tool, it does not meet the vision of its early advocates due to pragmatic and political limitations. This article uses a case study of PUD in Los Angeles to explain the intentions and fate of private and public sector promoters of the PUD concept in the decades following the Second World War.

Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning by Christine Boyer

Planners rely upon planning history to provide a sense of their position in society and the importance of their work. To reinter­ pret that history is to change the background upon which planners operate in the present and to influence their vision of the future. Traditional histories of American city planning tell a story of gra­ dual, but inexorable, progress, beginning with the reform move­ ments of the late nineteenth century and leading steadily toward increasing social acceptance, technical advancement, and institu­ tional consolidation. Personalities, famous plans, and legislative milestones march past, forming a narrative that is, on the whole, reassuring. Planning is portrayed as an activity that has emerged from tenuous beginnings to become a sophisticated profession, guiding urban change in the public interest.

Sidebar: The Blue Ridge Corridor Experience

ncmedicaljournal.com 291 efficient, more livable, more attractive, and less chaotic. The planning conferences held in 1909 and 1910 were both called the National Conference on City Planning and the Problems of Congestion. But by 1911, Olmstead had persuaded the planning association to drop the phrase “the Problems of Congestion” from the name of the conference. Olmstead wanted to develop city planning as a field of physical planning and knowledge. Unlike Marsh, he was not interested in mounting a national campaign for social reform [3]. So city planners took their leave of social reformers and public health advocates and went in a different direction. In 1917, the American City Planning Institute was formed as a professional society [4]. The history and purpose of planning and public health are clearly intertwined. In the early 20th century, policymakers also recognized this interconnectedness. Congress passed the standard state enabling acts for zoning and planning in the 1920s [5]. Section 1 of the zoning legislation states that the act is for regulating land use “for the purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community...” [6] Then and today, any local government with a zoning code has language in it that ties zoning to public health. Although, public health is one of the pillars of zoning, it had lost its connection with the planning profession until recently. Planning and public health, which had once had much in common, became very specialized and separate fields in the 20th century. The 2 professions are once again joining forces to tackle a common problem: the public health consequences due to suburbanization.

Brazilian city planners, American city planning? New perspectives on urban planning in Rio de Janeiro, 1930–1945

This article analyses the connections between the ideas and principles of American city planning from 1920 with those articulated by Brazilian city planners in the 1930s and implemented by the administration of the City of Rio de Janeiro, then the capital of Brazil, notably during the period of the Estado Novo [The New State] from 1937 to 1945. In a period characterized by the centralization of political power and the concentration of decision‐making in the hands of the president and the state, the City of Rio de Janeiro undertook a series of restructuring projects which utilized new forms of administration and organization. This article explores the links between urban planning in Brazil and the USA that were a notable feature of these projects. It examines particular requirements set down in city plans, city planning commissions and funding for urban activities, such as ‘excess condemnation’, by focusing upon articles and books written by four Brazilian engineers and proposals put forward by the American City Planning Institute, detailed in the proceedings of the National Conference on City Planning, in the periodical, City Planning and works by affiliated authors.

Conference report: The 13th National Conference on Planning History, (SACRPH), Oakland, 2009

Europeans, especially, may be forgiven for assuming that planning history in the United States must be a limited subject and a frail intellectual endeavour. After all, urban regions there are noted neither for their age nor for the rigour and consistency with which they have been planned. However, since 1986, the continuing vitality of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH)1 has challenged sceptics and perhaps even surprised its own membership. Attendance at SACRPH's latest biennial conference, in Oakland, California from 15 to 18 October 2009 reached an all-time high of about 300.2 Those present supported, and required, eight concurrent paper sessions spread over two days. These were bookended by field trips, paralleled by an academic book display (with free coffee), and interspersed with lunchtime plenaries or panels, breakfast and evening meetings, corridor kibbitzing, and evening bull sessions in excellent local bars.3 On this evidence, planning history in the United States is very much alive and well. Its conferences have been the lifeblood of SACRPH, sustaining the organisation and indeed the field of study itself. Continuing a tradition established by a founder, Laurence Gerckens, they have always been stimulating, well-organised, eclectic and welcoming. The Oakland gathering was typical. Optional field trips included a food tour of the Oakland waterfront and tours of housing and housing projects in West Oakland (once home to the Black Panthers), of ethnic districts near the downtown, of Berkeley's architecture, San Francisco's urban renewal and of recent agricultural development (including vineyards) in Marin and Sonoma counties. (One vineyard - Ravenswood, if you must know - was a conference sponsor.) In between were squeezed plenary sessions on regional equity and San Francisco Bay Area planning initiatives; an end-of-term address by SACRPH president, Robin Bachin; 54 conference sessions that included roundtables on publishing and cultural sustainability; a dissertation workshop, and a poster session for undergraduate or Masters students; and a concluding awards ceremony and reception. Everything that I observed ran smoothly, while conversation hummed, notably at the three evening receptions, courtesy of excellent food and, on two occasions, complimentary drinks. The eclecticism of the conference, noted by President-elect Alison Isenberg in her introduction to Bachin's Presidential Address, was apparent in the fact that it attracts planners and preservationists, as well as urban historians, in significant numbers. To be sure, many of the planners were from the Bay Area, and spoke about local issues, while the historians came from across the United States and Canada.4 None the less, many sessions and one plenary brought the two groups together, and this did promote dialogue. In part, such exchange is possible because, despite the everyday pressures to focus upon the present and immediate future, some planners have a concern for the long-term implications of public intervention. In part it also reflects the fact that a high proportion of urban and planning historians - who in Oakland included a sprinkling of historical geographers like myself, as well as those employed to teach urban, architectural and planning history - have interests that are focused on the recent past, or upon the connections between past and present. Thus, for example, Lawrence Vale enumerated the parallels between the slum clearance programs of the 1930s-1950s era and the HOPE VI initiatives, which are meant to revitalise public housing, sometimes through demolition. In addition, a whole session, for example, was devoted to an historical assessment of recent policies of Smart Growth. The linkages between planners and historians were nicely exemplified at the concluding awards ceremony. The organisation's most prestigious award is the Gerckens prize. In Oakland the names of the two latest recipients were announced. …

Pasadena's Civic Center: A Grand Vision Realized, Despoiled, and Revived

The story of Pasadena's civic center parallels the broad outlines of developments in twentieth-century American architecture and city planning. Beginning with the City Beautiful movement in the early 1900s that was driven by civic improvement organizations, often preponderantly female and led by a cultural elite, several Beaux Arts civic center plans were produced, most notably in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco. City planners and civic elites envisioned ensembles of public buildings that emulated the squares of Europe, with the important difference that in America the focus would be a civic building, a state capitol or a city hall, in place of the church or cathedral that dominated the European public square. For the most part, the medieval town did not allow Renaissance and Baroque thinkers to impose their plans for grand axial vistas on existing cities, although these visions were worked out in garden designs. At the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where Haussmann had transformed the medieval city in the nineteenth century, American architects learned the precepts of Beaux Arts planning and design and saw with their own eyes the visual effects of broad tree-lined boulevards terminated by monumental works of architecture to create grand urban vistas.

News from the field: 12th biennial Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) conference, 25–28 October 2007

The 12th biennial Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) conference was held 25–28 October 2007. Co‐hosted with the Northern New England Chapter of the American Planning A...

F.L.ライトの『リヴィング・シティ』にみられるR.W.エマソンの農業思想の影響に関する研究

The aim of this paper is to evaluate an philosophy of city planning by Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), a famous architect, in the context of modem American city planning by specifically scrutinizing his discourses on 'The Living City' (1958) where the Broadacre City was proposed, and to identify philosophical influence of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), a famous philosopher, on agrarian thought of Wright. After collecting exhaustively Wright's discourses on agriculture and the Broadacre City together with Emerson's discourses on agriculture, we categorized and compared them to clarify any similarity and difference. We concluded that the Wright's agrarian thoughts have strong influence from Emerson's agrarian thoughts in the context of transcendentalism, and Wright designed his ideal city where farmers have genuine lives in the form of Broadacre City.

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

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...

The Birth of "Land Use Planning" in American City Planning

The Birth of "Land Use Planning" in American City Planning

The Birth of "Land Use Planning" in American City Planning

The Birth of "Land Use Planning" in American City Planning

Multidimensional Land Use Classification and How it Evolved: Reflections on a Methodological Innovation in Urban Planning

That planning history is a thriving subject is evidenced by the continuing success of Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) conferences and those of other planning history organizations. Its vigor is also proven by the many varieties of history that find a voice in these conferences: histories of famous city plans and of renowned planners, histories of state planning and of national planning agencies, and histories of great planning movements. Unfortunately, not all types of planning history are as well represented. Among the most neglected are methodological and conceptual histories. In this article, the author presents the story of a conceptual and methodological innovation in urban planning known as multidimensional land use classification. Since its appearance more than forty years ago, it has influenced the way planners think about land use as well as the manner in which land use data are organized. This article places multidimensional classification in its historical context and explains how and why it came to be from the standpoint of one who had a role in its development.