15 - Urbanist Who affected planning Flashcards
Georges-Eugène, Baron Haussmann, 1809-1891
Between 1853 and 1870, Haussmann used his authoritarian mandate to transform the medieval Paris into the paragon of a modern city.
Frederick Law Olmsted, 1822-1903
As the designer of iconic public parks and some of America’s earliest suburbs, Olmsted became known as the founding father of landscape architecture. In fact, the polymathic Olmsted helped coin the term
Daniel Burnham, 1846-1912
Daniel Burnham was an architect, urban designer, and director of works for the 1893 World’s Fair. In his Chicago architecture practice, Burnham and partner John Wellborn Root designed some of the then-tallest buildings in America, precursors to the skyscraper like the Moorish-Venetian Rookery Building, completed in 1888.
Ebenezer Howard, 1850-1928
Following the long English pastoral tradition and a personal stint as a homesteader in Nebraska, the self-educated stenographer Ebenezer Howard was attuned to the “keen and pure delights” of the countryside. But he was also a Londoner, and a realist. He understood the economic forces that were driving urbanization at the end of the 19th century, and the miserable conditions that poverty and overcrowding had created for many of his fellow city-dwellers.
Jane Addams, 1860-1935
Addams, along with Ellen Gates Starr, founded Chicago’s Hull House, a woman-run “settlement house” designed to improve the lives of immigrants and the poor in Chicago’s Near West Side. A cross between a community college, rec center, and clinic, Hull House offered shelter for victims of domestic violence and language classes for recently arrived immigrants. It also included Chicago’s first public playground, in accordance with Addams’s belief that children’s play made for happier, healthier adults.
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1963
Du Bois was a writer, sociologist, civil rights advocate, the first African American to earn a doctorate from Harvard, and a founder of the NAACP. Although The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is better known, his earlier book The Philadelphia Negro was the first sociological study of a black community in the United States. To understand Philadelphia’s segregated Seventh Ward—“a city within a city”—Du Bois analyzed its street life, housing stock, and community institutions, and conducted detailed surveys of residents.
Le Corbusier, 1887-1965
The early days of Modernist architecture and planning were heady times, and no one embodied them more than Le Corbusier (born in Switzerland as Charles-Édouard Jeanneret). His Five Points of Architecture helped spur a revolution in design, enabled by the new material of reinforced concrete.
Robert Moses, 1888-1981
Like Baron Haussmann, Moses presided over the transformation of a great city without ever holding elected office, embodying a top-down, authoritarian approach to urban planning. From the 1920s to the late 1960s, he held a diverse array of roles, often simultaneously, including parks commissioner for New York City and Long Island, New York City planning commissioner, and head of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority.
Lewis Mumford, 1895-1990
The author of more than 30 books, Lewis Mumford was a public intellectual of remarkable breadth, with a critical view that spanned history, philosophy, city planning, technology, and literature. As his New York Times obituary noted, “there was scarcely any aspect of modern society that he left unexamined.”
Catherine Bauer Wurster, 1905-1964
Catherine Bauer was a leader of the “housers”—advocates for high-quality public housing in the U.S., a cause that gathered steam during the Great Depression. After studying at Vassar and Cornell, Bauer deeply researched the European worker housing designed by Le Corbusier and other early Modernists. Her 1934 book Modern Housing was an indictment of America’s failure to build comfortable, dignified housing for ordinary people amid a national housing shortage.
Grace Lee Boggs, 1915-2015
Lee Boggs, a Chinese-American philosopher and political activist who spent decades striving for a second, more just American revolution, began her career as a brilliant young academic, moonlighting as a tenants-rights activist on Chicago’s South Side. From the early 1940s, she became enmeshed in radical black politics, with her belief in “the power that the black community has within itself to change this country when it begins to move.”
Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006
A journalist and author rather than an academic, Jacobs was a master communicator who perhaps did more to popularize critical thinking about cities than any other individual. Her 1961 bestseller The Death and Life of Great American Cities sent shockwaves through the planning and architecture establishment by dismissing the grand plans of “the Radiant Garden City Beautiful” and pointing the way toward more human-centered urban design and bottom-up decision-making.
William H. Whyte, 1917-1999
Whyte is best known for The Organization Man, his bestselling indictment of the culture of conformity in 1950s suburbia and corporate America. His emphasis on creativity and self-expression would be an inspiration for future urbanists and social critics, including Jane Jacobs, with whom he worked at Fortune, and contemporary writers like Richard Florida and David Brooks.
Ian McHarg, 1920-2001
McHarg was a pioneering landscape architect from Scotland who advocated designs that work with, rather than against, a place’s ecology. In this respect, he helped move the field of landscape architecture into the realm of environmental planning.
Whitney Young, 1921-1971
Known by fellow activists as the “inside man” of the Civil Rights Movement, Kentucky-born Whitney Young spent his decade-long tenure (1961-1971) as president of the National Urban League building bridges between the black community and the highest echelons of corporate and governmental power.
