Emergence of Urban Planning as a Separate Entity

The Emergence of Urban Planning as a Separate Entity

An urban planner didn't exist until the first half of the 20th century. There was no subject known as "city planning." Universities did not teach it until things started to change. Planning united all the fields, including sociology, architecture, and design. Up until the early 20th century, city planning, or what we now consider city planning, had not been any official or professional field. This changed as people in many professions and practices understood the need for a unified school of cities. Planning for the city had neither a department nor a discipline of study.

Other disciplines, including architecture, design, sociology, politics, and other fields, also contributed a little amount of planning. One of the breakthroughs of the early 20th century was the blending of many city ideals, practices, theories, and philosophies into planning. Planners suddenly had enormous authority and immense duty to reconstruct cities and urban life, thanks to the emergence of the first formal comprehensive plans and general plans in places like New York and London.

This depicts the Daniel Burnham design for San Francisco, which, unlike Chicago, was never fully achieved. Some of you may be able to predict why from the year, which is 1905. Naturally, the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906 would destroy the majority of the city, and because the city had to be rebuilt so rapidly, some ofthese conceptst was destroyed. However, you can see that only a small portion of Daniel Burnham's big diagonals and avenues were ever constructed into the city as it swiftly recovered from the fire. This is especially true in outside neighborhoods like Saint Francis.

Daniel Burnham design for San Francisco

City agencies, governmental bodies, and private persons began to recognize planning as a significant new practice field, and city planners began to emerge as extremely potent agents and shapers of cities. Thus, planning czars—or, to put it another way, planning dictators like Robert Moses—were one of the developments of the 20th century. Robert Moses in the image below is symbolic since he is bigger than life and the city itself. He is staring down at the bridge and the metropolitan setting that he is contributing to. Moses wasn't a builder. Although he wasn't a philosopher, as a planner he had a great deal of influence on the built environment that was influenced by Baron Von Haussmann's work in Paris in the 1870s and other rival modernist groups like Le Corbusier.

Robert Moses 

Robert Moses took a look at New York, which had surpassed London to become the world's largest metropolis by the 1930s. He pulled out a pen and sketched the city's environment in fresh, contemporary forms. Moses was in command of several governmental agencies, and because he was never elected, he had access to enormous quantities of money. Robert Moses built roads and motorways including the Long Island Expressway, the Cross Bronx Expressway, and the FDR Drive to execute his infrastructure. The following section, where we begin to discuss the reactions, begins with a discussion of the road networks, some of which were built and others that weren't.

The cross Manhattan highway, which would have gone directly through Greenwich Village, was never completed, but much of this was built due to opposition to modernism and a return to a more human-based, small-scale approach to design advocated by campaigners like Jane Jacobs. Planning was becoming recognized as a field of study at the same time. Since Harvard University established the country's first planning department in 1923, successive generations of students have studied planning and entered the field in a variety of ways.

Sociologists in Chicago started to group together around urban studies astheirs own field of study in the 1920s and 1930s. The Chicago School of Urban Sociology, founded by scholars like Lewis Worth and Robert Park, is credited with establishing urban sociology. People like Park and Worth built on earlier traditions to create a school of what it meant to study the city. They looked at issues like class explanation, neighborhood decline explanation, the orientation of different ethnic groups in urban space, and various forms of urban social organization. Chicago was a good place to do this because it was such a patchwork of neighborhoods, ethnic neighborhoods, including white ethnic neighborhoods as well as African-American and Latinx neighborhoods.

The Chicago school provided a laboratory where many sorts of ethnography could be conducted using various approaches. Therefore, mapping was frequently used as a technique to show where ethnic groups worked, what kinds of homes people lived in, and what kinds of structures were there. These would be shown using various visualization techniques and sent to the computer. Late in the 20th century, these systems evolved into what are today known as geographic information systems, or GIS. We owe the Chicago school a great deal of gratitude for that, but the United States was not the only country to adopt this new way of thinking about cities.

To build his brand of urban philosophy, Walter Benjamin just strolled the streets of Paris while making observations, making observations, and writing about the urban condition and the modern city. It wasn't to navigate the city, according to Benjamin. That doesn't imply much, but being lost in a city is just as difficult and educational as getting lost in the wilderness. Little streets in the center of the city must reflect the times of day for him as plainly as a mountain valley, and street names must speak to the urban traveler like the cracking of dry twigs. Benjamin wrote that in 1934 as a part of his unfinished study on Paris arcades.