Planning History

Question 1

The Land Ordinance Act of 1785 (Who wrote it, Purpose)?

Answer 1

By Thomas Jefferson. It created the process where lands west of the Appalachian Mountains, east of the Mississippi River, and north of the Ohio River, were were gridded, surveyed, and sold. It created townships. Issue was that gov couldn’t tax residents, instead turn to selling land.

Question 2

How big were Townships created in 1785? And how big were their sections?

Answer 2

36 sq miles. Sections were 1 sq mi (640 acres) - 36 sections per Township.

Question 3

The Homestead Act of 1862

Answer 3

Enacted during the Civil War in 1862, a law that gave people free land (160 acres) in the west of the U.S. in order to expand the country westward and settle the land with farms. They had to live on and “improve” their plot by cultivating the land.

Question 4

The Morrill Act 1862

Answer 4

Allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges in U.S. states westward using the proceeds from sales of federally-owned land, often obtained from indigenous tribes through treaty, cession, or seizure.

Question 5

General Land Law Revision Act 1981

Answer 5

A.k.a the Forest Reserve Act of 1891 - by President Benjamin Harrison. - Allow for the creation of federal forest preserves.

Question 6

What were to 2 laws in the 1920 that were key for City Planning?

Answer 6

1) Standard Zoning Enabling Act - 1922 - allowed states to zone
2) Standing City Planning Act - 1928 - planning commission, create master plan, control of private subdivision of land

Question 7

L’Enfant Plan of 1791 (Who, Who Hired, What is it)?

Answer 7

Pierre L’Enfant, hired by George Washington. Created the Washington D.C. plan inspired by Paris. Baroque, diagonal boulevards.

Question 8

World Columbian Expo (Who, Year, Major Themes)?

Answer 8

1846-1912 - Daniel Burnham - City Beautiful - The “White City” - Focused on aesthetics - POC were kept out.

Question 9

What did McMillan Commitee and Daniel Burnham do in 1901?

Answer 9

Resurrected the L’Enfant Plan for Washington DC.

Question 10

Chicago Plan of 1901

Answer 10

Visual and aesthetic harmony. Crux of City Beautiful. Criticized for ignoring true issues and poverty.

Question 11

City Beautiful Movement (Year Range, Key Themes)

Answer 11

1890s – 1920s – City Beautiful Movement
o Reaction to slums and poor living conditions in urban tenements
o Promoted organized comprehensive urban planning
o Design must not be separate than social issues, should promote civic pride and engagement
o Focus on incorporating civic center, parks, public spaces, and grand boulevards
o Monumental buildings anchoring long, straight axes and open spaces that highlight the grandeur of the structures around them
o Beaux-Arts, neoclassical, and baroque architecture
o Intertwined with Garden City movement (Britain) and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City Major Projects:
 World Columbian Exposition of 1893
 McMillan Plan – redesign of Washing DC (National Mall and Lincoln Memorial)
 Detroit’s Michigan Central Station
Critiques:
 Jane Jacobs – “it focuses too much on aesthetics, excluding social factors and at the expense of the people (slum clearance, displacement)”
 Rigorous planned spaces to promote utopian ideals, which actually led to urban inequality it originally intended to improve (typical…)
 Led to urban renewal programs

Question 12

Garden City Movement (Year, Who, Intent)?

Answer 12

• 1898 – Garden City Movement – Ebenezer Howard
  
  • 1989 he published Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (aka Garden Cities of Tomorrow)
  • Utopian city concept from Great Britain
  • Self-sufficient towns (all needed uses) with greenbelts and green space
  • Communal ownership of land
  • Magnets where people would live and work
  • Aimed to address urban industrial problems (overcrowding, congestion, filth)

Question 13

What were the 3 garden cities according to Ebenezer Howard in UK?

Answer 13

1. Letchworth
2. Welwyn Garden City
3. Wythenshawe

Question 14

The City Functional Movement

Answer 14

• Aka City Efficient Movement or City Scientific Movement
• Reaction against City Beautiful Movement
• Focuses on efficiency for commerce and movement of people (decongestion)
• Critique: it lead to land use segregation and prioritized automobiles
• Around 1909, City Beautiful began to give way To City Efficient or City Practical movement.
• Focus on efficient land use and transportation patterns over visionary beauty.
• Standardized planning enabling acts.
• FLO, Jr. Saw planning as an ongoing process rather than one master plan to be implemented.
• Early roots of desire to zone land.

Question 15

When was the first national planning conference and what was it called?

Answer 15

National Conference on City Planning of 1901 - launched the planning profession

Question 16

What two organizations formed the APA and when?

Answer 16

The American Planning Institute (API) (formerly the American City Planning Institute (ACPI)) and American Society of Planning Official (ASPO) merged in 1977

Question 17

When was the Code of Ethics written?

Answer 17

1971

Question 18

Introduction to City Planning 1901 (who wrote it and what was it about)?

Answer 18

Benjamin Marsh

Question 19

What was the first city to adopt a zoning code?

Answer 19

NYC in 1916

• Divided city into residential, commercial, and unrestricted districts with 5 building heights
• Building setbacks
• Ziggurat buildings

Question 20

Who is considered the father of zoning?

Answer 20

Edward M. Basset

Chairman of Heights of Buildings Commission in NYC

Created the NYC 1916 Comprehensive Zoning Code

Question 21

What act enabled zoning and what year?

Answer 21

Standard State Zoning Enabling Act 1922

Influenced by Herber Hoover

Question 22

Who was Edward Bassett and his significance?

Answer 22

He is the “Father of Zoning”

Advocate for zoning and helped create the first Zoning Code for NYC

Was on the Height of Buildings Commission

Question 23

City Humane Movement

Answer 23

Developed in 1930s as a result of Depression.
Focus on jobs and housing as a part of social policy. People-oriented movement halted by the reorientation of national priorities to military matters in the late 1930s and the early 1940s.

Question 24

Regional Plan of NY and its Environs 1929

Answer 24

Quintessential “City Efficient” plan.

Massive Metropolitan Plan, contained Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit concept

Question 25

What is the Neighborhood Unit and who came up with it?

Answer 25

Clarence Perry - see diagram - neighborhood is anchored by school/community center, surrounded by a mix of housing. But it was racist - homogenous social units

Question 26

RPAA vs. RPA

Answer 26

Regional Planning Association of American (Lewis Mumford) was against RPA (Regional Planning Agency of NY) because it wasn’t enough about social/economic equity

Question 27

Radburn, IL (significance and planner)?

Answer 27

• Clarence Stein
• Garden City ideas
• The superblock, the clustering of individual houses around cul-de-sacs, the separation of vehicular and pedestrian traffic
• “Town for the Motor Age.”
• Only partially finished because of the stock market crash

Question 28

Suburban Expansion / Greenbelt Towns

Answer 28

Happened after planning gets popular in 1910/1920s

Move outside of the City, Anti-Urban

Major costs for roads to serve suburbs

More parks/green space, individualism

Jane Jacobs criticized metros for promoting it and not focusing on urban issues

Question 29

National Housing Act of 1934

Answer 29

The National Housing Act was signed on June 27, 1934, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to improve housing conditions, make housing and mortgages more accessible and affordable, and to reduce the foreclosure rate during the Great Depression. The law was part of the New Deal.

Question 30

Which City wrote the first zoning ordinance?

Answer 30

San Francisco 1867 - passed the first land use zoning restriction prohibiting the location of obnoxious uses. (NYC was the first comprehensive zoning code)

Question 31

_______ argued that towns planned on a grid are visually appealing, but they are are not effective at deterring invaders. He argued that if a city is infiltrated, people can easily navigate the streets and that it would be better to have streets people can get lost in, promoting security.

Answer 31

Aristotle

Question 32

Radiant City

Answer 32

Le Corbusier - 1930s - The basic strategy behind these various schemes was to create vertical architecture and leave plenty of shared open space in between for people to use and enjoy. The resulting horizontal areas would serve as traffic corridors as well as public landscapes with lush greenery. Pedestrians, cyclists, drivers and public transportation users were given dedicated routes to get around, set up (or down) at various elevations.

Question 33

Antiquities Act of 1906

Answer 33

The Act created the basis for the federal government’s efforts to protect archeological sites from looting and vandalism. - Create historic National Landmarks for preservation.

Question 34

Which industry classification system replaced the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification System (SIC)?

Answer 34

North American Industry Classification System. NAICS was developed jointly by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico in 2002.

Question 35

Which city had the first regional plan?

Answer 35

Plan of Chicago 1909 by Daniel Burnham

Question 36

What is the largest concrete structure in the US, built in 1942?

Answer 36

The largest concrete structure in the US in 1942 was the Grand Coulee Dam, located on the Columbia River in the state of Washington.

Question 37

What made the 1954 Housing Act especially significant for urban planning?

Answer 37

The Housing Act of 1954 created section 701 comprehensive planning program – federal planning assistance to local governments, which was a significant boost to local area planning.

The 1954 Act provided funding for 140,000 units of public housing, giving preferential treatment to families that would be relocated for slum eradication or revitalization. In 1965, federal housing programs came under the purview of the new United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Question 38

What statement best characterizes the beginnings of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system?

Answer 38

It opened in the early 1970s but its story began right after World War II.

The first segment of the BART system officially opened in 1972 following decades of engineering work and political and funding challenges. The BART story began in 1946 and gradually evolved at informal gatherings of business and civic leaders on both sides of the San Francisco Bay.

Question 39

Concentric Model 
(who/what)?

Answer 39

Ernest Burgess (1925) - CBD at core
Rent Dip Curve

Burgess was a sociologist who studied the growth of Chicago. He believed that cities grow in a series of outward rings, and land use is based on distance from downtown. There were five rings in his theory: 1) the central business district, which houses a concentration of governmental, office, and commercial uses; 2) the industrial zone; 3) the zone of transition, which has a mix of industrial and low-income housing (at one time this ring had high-income, large houses); 4) the zone of middle class housing; and 5) the commuter zone, with higher-income housing.

Burgess’s work was foundational to the concept of a bid rent curve, which is a theory explaining land use patterns based on how much people are willing to pay for land, in turn, based on the profits that are likely to receive from maintaining a business on that land. The CBD, for example, will have the highest number of customers and so the most profit, and is at the steep end of the bid rent curve.

Question 40

Sector Model 
(who/what)?

Answer 40

Homer Hoyt (1939)

Sectors radiating out from the city center along transportation centers.

Hoyt was in the real estate business in Chicago and was interested in high-end residential development. Hoyt disagreed with Burgess’ conception of city growth and argued that land uses vary based on transportation routes. The city, as a result, was a series of sectors radiating out from the center of the city.

Question 41

Multiple Nuclei Model

Answer 41

Chauncy Harris and Edward Ullman in the 1945 article “The Nature of Cities”…

Urban growth around multiple centers of activity.

They argued that cities develop a series of specific land use nuclei. A land use nucleus is formed because of accessibility to natural resources, clustering of similar uses, land prices, and the repelling power of land uses.

Question 42

Central Place Theory

Answer 42

Walter Christaller (1933)

To explain the size and spacing of cities.

The theory states that there is a minimum market threshold to bring a firm to a city and there is a maximum range of people who are willing to travel to receive goods and services. Central Place Theory can also be useful as a way of understanding the hierarchy of retail establishments in cities (for example nail salons on every block, a grocery store every 10 blocks, and a large shopping center servicing a much larger area).

Question 43

What is Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Concept and how many residents does it contain?

Answer 43

It is a self-contained neighborhood that evolves around a central civic center/use like a school. Everything is within walking distance.

5,000-9,000 residents (a bit more than my high school)

Question 44

Prior to the advent of comprehensive zoning ordinances, how did local governments deal with land use?

Answer 44

Nuisance Laws

Question 45

Was Euclid’s zoning ordinance used as a standard used by many other communities?

Answer 45

No, the ordinance was not very good (hence the legal challenge), so other cities chose to write different ordinances.

Question 46

What did the Indian Reorganization Act 1934 provide for?

Answer 46

The 1934 Act allowed Native Americans to adopt a constitution and organize for their common welfare within reservations.

Question 47

Who designed Radburn, New Jersey?

Answer 47

Henry Wright

Question 48

Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Concept (1929) was published in which of the following plans?

Answer 48

Regional Survey of New York and Its Environs

Question 49

Which of the following communities were designed with the automobile in mind?

Select one:

a. Pullman, IL
b. Mariemont, OH and Radburn, NJ
c. Letchworth and Welwyn Garden City, UK
d. Radburn, NJ and Lake Forest, IL

Answer 49

Mariemont was a planned automobile suburb built in 1923. Radburn, NJ, built in 1929, was explicitly an attempt to work out the problem of the automobile using the superblock. Neither the company town of Pullman, IL (1880) nor the garden city of Letchworth, U.K. (1909) considered the impact of automobiles in their design.

Question 50

What feature characterizes Columbia, Maryland?

Select one:

a. Self contained villages and neighborhood clusters
b. Prior land assembly
c. Jobs-housing balance
d. All of these are valid answers.

Answer 50

In 1963, the Rouse Company began the development of Columbia, Maryland. The 14,000-acre master planned development was developed to provide jobs, recreation, shopping, health care, and a mix of housing at different price points. The development was designed to create a jobs-housing balance.

The correct answer is: All of these are valid answers.