PLANNING HISTORY: PART II

1900-1930s: persistent and expanded urban problems and a diversity of (inadequate?) responses

• Industrial hyper-development presented new challenges eliciting a diversity of complex responses.

• Economic depression (1929-39) stimulated “New

Deal” action ranging from environmental planning, to urban and industrial/labor as well as social reform.

Shattered dreams, lost hope

The Planning Responses

Reflected differing perspectives/philosophies

and differing outcomes.

Pragmatists (moles) Utopians (Skylarks)

The solutions: realistic or utopian?

• City Efficient – Regulate and Redevelop

• New Communities – Reject,Recreate, and

Relocate

City Efficient: Pragmatic professionals

Who were they - -Architects: Daniel Burnham (master planner and “father of American architecture”)

- Lawyers (Alfred Bettman and Edward Bassett

- Engineers (Robert Moses) - Social Critics (Jane Jacobs) - Publicists/strategists (Walter Moody)

The Pragmatic

Planners

Walter Moody Jane Jacobs

Pragmatic ideology

Their perspective• Improve city form for better functioning• Engage in new construction to improve

infrastructure• Adopt policies (control approach) to achieve

desired goalsTheir vision• Maintenance of capitalist orderSocial Order• Support for democracy and individualism

Idealists (utopian) plannersTheir Perspective: The city needed to be revamped and people relocated.

Their vision:• Anti-urban • Embraced semi-rural landscapes with green belt areas • Implementation of mixed use landscape for self

sufficiency • Urban design - blend of country and city • Ideal size of city - 30-40,000 population

Social order• Prescriptive (at the cost of some laissez faire

individualism)

Who were labeled the idealists?

Best known:

Ebenezer Howard (1850-1929)

Robert Owen (1771-1858)

Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)

Frank Lloyd Wright(1867-1959)

Edouard de Jeanneret aka LeCorbusier (1887-1990)

Lewis Mumford (1895-1979)

Best known idealists…

Frank Lloyd Wright: Architect & Planner

LeCorbusier: Seeking economies of scale in late capitalism?

To which of these camps do you belong?

• Idealist?

• Pragmatist?

• Contemporary evidence of a blended perspective?

III. CITY EFFICIENT MOVEMENT

(aka: City Scientific, or City Functional)

Application of empiricism (scientific data gathering)

• Educational and professional institutions promote the planning process and establish professionalism in planning

• Planners sought public support through systematic marketing efforts.

• Emergence of public-private partnerships in land developments

See works of Robert Moses and Daniel Burnham, Walter Moody for examples

Robert Moses: NY Master Builder -bridges, parks, parkways …

City efficient: accommodating the automobile.

The Automobile Shapes The city (from article by M. V. Melosi) Ford Model T-automobile 1920s

A search for new beginnings: Garden Cities- the utopian response

A vision realized but never entirely enduring:• 1824: New Harmony: a model village for America • 1903: Letchworth: England first garden city• 1920: Welwyn: England second garden city• 1928: Radburn: First Garden City built in USA• See Howard’s maps p.143-45 in Platt

Refer also to article by Robert Fishman (required reading)

Ebenezer Howard’s ideal city design

Radburn, NJ:Enduring planning icon

A Garden City for USA –Radburn, NJ

The American Architect commented (1980): Radburn:

Represents the first scientific effort that has ever been made to establish a community designed exclusively to minimize the danger of automobile accidents.…It was also the desire of the builders to create not only a [safe] community ..but …one of beauty in appearance and the utmost in modern efficiency.

Quoted in Kreukeberg 1087, p. 128

Radburn: Lasting contributions to planning

1. “NGO”-private partnership

2. Separation of traffic by mode (the pedestrian path system does not cross any major roads at grade)

3. Creation of mixed use largely residential "superblocks”.

4. Introduced five-step planning process - has been a lasting guide:

• i) formulate goals • ii) collect data • iii) develop plan • iv) implement plan• iv) evaluate at later date

Radburn: How ideal?

• Current population status versus planning goal?

• Built for which social class(es)? • Diverse or homogenous ethnic/social

groups?• Efficient use of urban space?• Access to employment?

Recapping planning accomplishments during 1920s

• 1906: First Major historic preservation act: The Antiquities Act of 1906

• 1909: First– National Conference on City Planning (NCCP)

• 1909: Plan of Chicago• 1916 National Park Service created• 1916: First comprehensive zoning ordinance adopted in

NY• 1917: American City Planning Institute (ACPI) formed• 1926: The rise of Zoning• See list of dates in handout

Zoning Legalized

• 1922 – President Hoover’s government issued the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act

• 1922 - Start of conflict between Village of Euclid and Ambler Realty Co.

• 1926 - Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of comprehensive zoning(see Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company)

• 1928 - Standard City Planning Enabling Act (dictated what could occur in the city)

Zoning’s seminal court cases (1)

• Discuss case:

Euclid v. Ambler Realty Company

See handout

New Deal Public Works and Grande Vision of the 1930s

President F. D. Roosevelt’s New Deal “Planning” Actions

• Successes and failures of Roosevelt's "New Deal" programs

• See chart in the handout.

Relief in sight

•Roosevelt creates new programs •CCC gives work to youth

•Monastery opens soup kitchen

                                    

!

New Deal: pragmatic and utopic

• The pragmatic: CWA, CCC, Social Security ….

• The idealistic: Natural Resources Planning Board (1939-43) Became involved in national, state and regional planning.