Major American Planning Movements Flashcards
Agriculture was the primary livelihood for 90% of the population, and most towns were shipping points for the export of agricultural products. Most farms were geared toward subsistence production for family use. The rapid growth of population and the expansion of the frontier opened up large numbers of new farms, and clearing the land was a major preoccupation of farmers. The Puritan work ethic formed the basis for the agrarian philosophy associated with Thomas Jefferson. This philosophy is based on the belief that the agricultural life has the most human value, and reflected the largely rural settlement pattern in the country at that time. George Washington portrayed as ideal agrarian. After 1800, cotton became the chief crop in southern plantations, and the chief American export. In New England, subsistence agriculture gave way after 1810 to production to provide food supplies for the rapidly growing industrial towns and cities.
AGRARIAN PHILOSOPHY
For the period before 1800, landscape gardening (later called landscape architecture) is largely that of master planning and garden design for manor houses, palaces and royal properties, religious complexes, and centers of government. An example is the extensive work by André Le Nôtre at Vaux-le-Vicomte for King Louis XIV of France at the Palace of Versailles. Traces its roots back to Fredrick Law Olmstead and Calver Vaux “Greensward Plan” for Central Park (1858). Later Parks created in Minneapolis, Boston, the Greenway Necklace.
LANDSCAPE TRADITION MOVEMENT
The Public Health Movement developed in the late 1800s from a concern for public health and workers’ safety. This movement focused on the establishment of industrial safety requirements, maximum work hours, minimum housing standards, public recreation amenities, and ensuring the provision of light and air in cities. This is also the time of the “muckrakers”. In 1867 San Francisco banned slaughterhouses in certain areas in the city. New York City’s Tenement Housing Acts.
PUBLIC HEALTH MOVEMENT
Between 1890 and 1910, more than 12 million European people immigrated to the United States. They came from Ireland, Russia, Italy and other European countries and provided cheap factory labor, a demand that was created with the country’s expansion into the west following the Civil War. Many immigrants lived in crowded and disease-ridden tenements, worked long hours, and lived in poverty. Children often worked to help support the family.
Its goal was to bring the rich and the poor of society together in both physical proximity and social interconnectedness. Its main object was the establishment of “settlement houses” in poor urban areas, in which volunteer middle-class “settlement workers” would live, hoping to share knowledge and culture with, and alleviate the poverty of, their low-income neighbors. The settlement houses provided services such as daycare, education, and healthcare to improve the lives of the poor in these areas.
The most famous settlement house in the United States is Chicago’s Hull House, founded by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 after Addams visited Toynbee Hall within the previous two years. Hull House, though, was not a religious-based organization. It focused on providing education and recreational facilities for European immigrant women and children.
SETTLEMENT HOUSE MOVEMENT
In 1898, Ebenezer Howard wrote To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform. This book was later reissued in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-morrow. It explained the principles behind the Garden City. After publishing the book, he formed the Garden-City Association in England in 1899.
A Garden City is self-contained, with a population of 32,000 and a land area of 6,000 acres. A Garden City would house 30,000 people on 1,000 acres, with remaining land and population in farming areas. The Garden City was intended to bring about economic and social reform. Land ownership would be held by a corporation.
Through the Garden-City Association, Howard was able to secure funding for the development of two garden cities. In 1903, Letchworth was constructed. This was the first English city of its kind, and it was influential to the New Town Movement in the United States. Both communities were developed, but neither was self-contained. In the end, both became residential suburbs.
The idea of the Garden City caught on in the United States. The Regional Planning Association of America promoted the concept.
In 1922, the first effort at building a Garden City began in Sunnyside Gardens, New York. A total of 77 acres in Queens was purchased and was planned to have 1,202 housing units.
In 1928, the construction of the first American Garden City in Radburn, New Jersey began. It was designed by Clarence Stein and Henry Wright.
During the Depression, President Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration in 1935. This agency was responsible for the New Towns program. The New Towns program developed three cities based on Howard’s ideas: Greendale, Wisconsin; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greenbelt, Maryland.
Additionally, 99 other new towns were planned.
Following World War II, Great Britain passed the New Towns Act in 1946. This Act led to the development of more than a dozen new communities based on Howard’s ideas.
Also following World War II, Park Forest, Illinois was developed as a New Town.
Most of the Garden Cities that were developed failed to attain Howard’s ideal. Most lacked industry and true city centers and, in the end, most became residential suburbs.
GARDEN CITY MOVEMENT
During the late 1800s and early 1900s, U.S. cities were becoming places that had severe poverty, crime, and blight. At the time, there was a movement to address these issues through the expression of moral and civic virtues. Daniel Burnham was a leader in promoting this movement. City Beautiful leaders believed that creating a beautiful city would inspire residents to lead virtuous lives.
The result of the City Beautiful movement was the creation of Beaux-Arts style civic centers. The first model civic center was the White City, created by Daniel Burnham in Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Another example of a City Beautiful design is the McMillan Plan of 1901 for Washington D.C. Many cities throughout the U.S. incorporated City Beautiful ideas into creating downtown civic centers.
Daniel Burnham is an important figure in planning history. His most famous quote is “Make no little plans. They have no fire to stir men’s blood.”
Decline of the movement was caused by: (1) big business lost interest as the forces for societal change saw their power decline, (2) increased public awareness of massive corruption related to projects, and (3) the introduction of the city efficient movement.
CITY BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT
By the closing years of the nineteenth century, fast growing American cities were breaching the traditional boundaries and concepts of “city.” Political leaders responded with annexation and consolidation campaigns, such as the great Chicago annexation of 1889, which roughly tripled the area of the city, and the New York consolidation of 1897, which pulled together the separate cities of New York (Manhattan) and Brooklyn, Richmond County (Staten Island), Queens County, and part of Westchester County (the Bronx) into the single, huge City of New York. Scholars such as Adna F. Weber in The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century, Graham Taylor in Satellite Cities, and Harlan Paul Douglass in The Suburban Trend turned their gaze to the relationships between cities and their growing suburbs. The U.S. Census struggled with measuring great, growing cities, and in 1911 came up with the concept of the “metropolitan district” as a way to interpret the 1910 census, paving the way for the Standard Metropolitan Area that has been used in different versions since 1950.
The Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission (1922) was a pioneering effort to direct the physical development of more than three dozen municipalities. The Chicago Regional Planning Association (1923) was an early “council of governments.” It conducted studies, created a regional highway plan, defined zoning and subdivisions standards, and worked to convince local jurisdictions to use such standards. A number of other cities copied one or the other of these two models: the countywide agency and the regional council.
REGIONALISM (1910-1940)
saw the passage of new laws and court cases relative to land use, zoning, subdivision control, and administrative planning regulation. Civil engineers, attorneys, and public administrators began to play a larger role in city planning with an increase in demand for public services and facilities such as highways and sanitary sewers. Trying to codify practices. Depression forced this movement to stop because of (1) weakness of the American business leadership (2) emphasized awareness of the multitude of real socio-economic problems
CITY EFFICIENT MOVEMENT
developed as a result of the Depression of the 1930s. It concentrated on social and economic issues and ways of alleviating the problems of unemployment, poverty, and urban plight. Planning responses associated with the New Deal efforts under Roosevelt.
CITY HUMANE MOVEMENT
developed in the 1940s with the growth of the military and renewed industrialization. This movement was key in the preparation of the country for war efforts. This movement emphasized functionalism and administrative efficiency, and contributed to the federal government’s increased involvement in local planning and the passage of Section 701 of the Housing Act in 1954. The 701 program subsidized thousands of general plans and special projects for cities, counties, regional councils of government, and states until 1981.
CITY FUNCTIONAL MOVEMENT
Many pioneers in the field recognized that the success and effectiveness of a planning program also required citizen participation. At one time, the municipal plan was perceived as an objective, technical document that focused solely on the physical development of the community. The 1960s and ‘70s saw a renewed emphasis on social, economic, and environmental issues with the Advocacy Movement and the Environmental Movement.
During this period, some planners actively promoted social reform, supporting the interests of low-income and minority groups, wildlife, the preservation of open space, and the conservation of natural resources. It has become common for plans to more explicitly address the impact of physical development on economic, social, and environmental issues, to ensure greater consistency among policies and goals for the community.
Advocacy planning was an innovation of the 1960s, a direct consequence of the engagement of urban planners in the civil rights movement, the struggles against the displacement of low-income communities by the federal urban renewal program. It also stemmed from and fed the opportunities for innovation offered by the federal War on Poverty, including the Model Cities Program. Paul Davidoff’s “Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning” appeared in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners in 1965. Its main points were:
ADVOCACY MOVEMENT & ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
