Emergence of Urban Planning in the United States | How Urban Development Emerged in United States

The Emergence of Urban Planning in the United States

This is a brief history of city planning in the United States, however, our tale begins long before the United States was founded. Cities existed throughout the land that is now known as the United States before European arrival. The Pueblo and Mississippian cultures both created spectacular cities. Cahokia is regarded as one of the most important pre-European towns north of Mexico. The Spanish were the first European power to establish themselves in what is now the United States. St. Augustine, Florida, was established in 1565. While establishing other towns in the American Southwest, the Spanish formalized one of the earliest examples of European design in the New World, the Law of the Indies.

Cahokia

The Law outlined the prerequisites for establishing a new city, as well as its design and structure. Cities have to have a central square. Santa Fe is a fantastic example. In the 1600s, the French and English joined the Spanish in establishing new towns, mainly along the Atlantic coast. During this time, New York, Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia were all founded. Cities had sprouted up all across the east coast and southwest by the time the United States declared its independence. Some of the bigger cities, like Boston, were beginning to seem rather urban, while others closer to the Appalachian border were little more than forts to keep out the naturally hostile local tribes.

The creation of United States accomplished nothing to build an urban country. The Land Ordinance of 1785, which began the gridding of the American west, was intended to establish a nation of farmers. Its originator, Thomas Jefferson, despised cities. To be fair, the United States' population was 95 percent rural at the time. This rural emphasis was unfortunate because something significant began to happen immediately after the founding fathers signed the Constitution, which does not even mention cities.

Thomas Jefferson: An American statesman, diplomat, lawyer, architect, philosopher, and president. 

Technological developments such as the steam engine and power loom began to revolutionize the economy from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Work once performed by craftspeople in communities was now performed in factories by unskilled workers. New enterprises and factories would settle in cities to find adequate workers, and workers would relocate to cities to broaden their employment opportunities. Cities began to expand rapidly. People were flocking to cities faster than housing could be constructed, and many of the migrants couldn't afford decent housing in the first place. Workers had to reside within walking distance of work because there was no viable mass transit at the time.

Overcrowding become a major issue. The sanitation was appalling. Human waste was normally disposed of in a septic tank or cesspool on-site. Cities had a foul odor. The illness posed an ongoing hazard. The smoke from the factories contributed to the poisonous atmosphere. It is critical to recognize that the metropolis of the mid-1800s was not a pleasant place to live. It was many people's first encounter with city living, and it was an unpleasant one. Cities throughout the Industrial Revolution required transformation. Because the ailment was a matter of life and death, it came first. In the 1840s, new gravity-based, self-cleaning sewage systems were on the scene.

The installation of a complete sewage system, designed to remove waste, necessitated a citywide "sanitary survey" to comprehend the geography of the city, as well as mapping the cesspools, outhouses, and waste sources. These studies were among the earliest acts of development in American cities, and by 1907, every major US city had a sewage system. Sewers offered clean air, as did some of the earliest extensive urban park systems. Housing reform was implemented after sanitation reform. Reformers and journalists like Jacob Riis, whose photos were published in the book "How the Other Half Lived," exposed the terrible conditions people lived in during the 1880s, and brought the problem to light.

Jacob August Riis: A Danish-American social reformer, journalist, and social documentary photographer.

Tenements were cramped and congested, with numerous immigrants from Europe arriving in New York by the day. With almost 1,000 people per acre, the Lower East Side was probably definitely the most densely populated district in the world at the time. The Tenement House Act of New York, passed in 1901, mandated a separate bathroom in each apartment, courtyards, and better fire protection precautions. Many more cities followed suit in the years that followed. These early endeavors to repair the industrial metropolis concentrated on practical social issues such as health and housing. Other reformers were less than realistic. Some wished to improve the city by erecting monuments, clearing slums, and constructing neo-classical architecture.

Let's jump ahead to 1893, to the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Architect Daniel Burnham was primarily responsible for the design of the White City. The White City became the model for the City Beautiful movement, a bad way of developing communities. Most of Burnham's proposals, such as the one for San Francisco, never came to fruition, while his plans for Chicago and Washington were generally carried out as planned. At the turn of the twentieth century, city planning evolved as a unique profession. Its origins may be traced back to the colonial era, through railroad settlements in the west, social reformers in big cities, and the great ambitions of City Beautiful planners.

Daniel Burnham design for San Francisco

At the inaugural city planning conference in 1909, these opposing ideas of city planning were contested, with battle lines set between social reformers and technical/aesthetic planners. Planners, regardless of their viewpoint, have come to feel positive about urban living. Electric streetcars were zipping through neighborhoods, and their speed and inexpensive fares enabled the middle class to develop new dwellings on the outskirts, alleviating overcrowding. Another mode of transportation altered everything. In 1908, the Model T rolled off Ford's manufacturing line. Millions of automobiles, as well as millions of other vehicles, would be sold over the following decade or two. Cars allowed people to commute further out into the suburbs, fundamentally altering cities.

It's a shift akin to the past century's urbanization. Most planners at the time felt suburbanization was a positive thing. Cities have improved, but what could be better than living in larger homes in greener surroundings? Suburban enthusiasm, combined with the poor quality of early suburb architecture, resulted in some significant planning reactions. First, the federal government created a series of zoning and planning enabling statutes that cities could use. Cities were given the right to perform zoning, approve subdivision street layouts, organize planning commissions, and adopt master plans under these model acts. This provided control and minimum standards for suburban development.

Zoning regulations existed for two decades before model enabling statutes and were largely advocated by business interests seeking to safeguard their land value from new construction attracting immigrants and people of color. Zoning, then, like now, may be beneficial or utilized to exclude people. However, the Supreme Court ruled in Village of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty that zoning was constitutional, therefore it was here to stay. Others observed sloppy, speculative suburban construction and thought there had to be a better way. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright were Garden Suburb designers. They devised innovative plans for suburbia that emphasized shared ownership of communal greenspace and distinct circulation for pedestrians that kept them apart from cars, heavily influenced by Ebenezer Howard and English Garden City planners.

Radburn, New Jersey, their most famous municipality, was built in 1929. This rapid development resulted in the formation of entire metropolitan regions, and the notion of regional planning originated during this period. Notable regional plans and planners include Patrick Geddes and his conurbation ideas, the Regional Planning Association of America, which included Stein and Wright, and the 1929 publication of the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs, a landmark regional plan. At the same time as individuals were leaving the city in vehicles, others were moving in. One of the major population shifts in American history was the Great Migration. Between 1916 and 1970, about six million African Americans relocated from the south to the north.

In the years following the Civil War and their freedom, 80 percent of black Americans resided in the rural south, but by 1970, 80 percent were living in cities, with half of them in northern cities. Cities provided a platform for immigrants' integration and growth, but millions of Black Americans who migrated to cities to work in factories instead found segregation. Cities in the 1930s and 1940s had already seen substantial changes since the turn of the century. Rich and middle-class families were moving to the suburbs in quest of brand-new tract homes, leaving impoverished and black people behind. These new commuters need transportation because the majority of employment and shopping was still done in the city center at the time.

Cities began constructing highways using state funds. They removed immigrant and black areas to take place, alleging slum removal and improvement. The ruin of the city was carried on through urban redevelopment. The plot is divided into three acts. The first is the 1937 Housing Act. The ordinance pitted public housing campaigners like Catherine Bauer against commercial real estate companies who despised having to share the city with impoverished people. They sought to replace slums with dazzling real estate developments. Real estate interests prevailed with the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954. The public housing that was developed was aimed at middle-class families and was erected in razed black areas. Middle-class whites did not come in, and the houses were occupied by poor black families.

The Housing Acts believed that middle-class rentals would cover all maintenance costs and did not give Federal assistance for maintenance. Without Federal financing, the structures gradually deteriorated when poorer families moved in. As a result, cities lost their traditional districts and replaced them with austere modernist buildings. It should be obvious that many of the planning "solutions" to the industrial city's problems just generated new problems. Those who had been displaced by roads and urban megaprojects were undoubtedly aware of this. In the 1960s and 1970s, urban inhabitants began to resist top-down planning that ignored individuals' interests and disproportionately harmed poor and minority populations.

One of the most significant early clashes was over the Lower Manhattan Expressway between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Jane Jacobs, a Greenwich Village activist, and writer, and Robert Moses was the great builder of New York, responsible for several bridges, roads, and public housing projects. By the 1960s, however, he was losing power, and Jacobs, together with other activists, were able to halt the Lower Manhattan Expressway project. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacob's book, is a critique of modernist planning and urban regeneration that has become one of the most influential books on planning. Jacobs was far from alone in his opposition to urban freeways and urban redevelopment.

Residents in cities across the United States had had enough. In San Francisco and Portland, freeway development has been suspended. New metro systems were created in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington D.C. These stunning triumphs could not completely halt urban regeneration and motorway building. Thanks to the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956, the federal government continued to grant vast quantities of money to communities for them to build as many highways as possible. Because black families could not rent or purchase in the suburbs, this ongoing migration was dubbed the "white flight." Restrictive covenants, racism in the real estate industry, and bank redlining meant that black families couldn't acquire mortgages, and even if they could, they wouldn't be informed about listings in white communities.

This was especially devastating for black families, as jobs were increasingly relocating to suburbs, and in some cases, edge cities. Many of these cities are only accessible by automobile and are located far from major hubs populated by black families. In the 1970s, the one-two punch of neighborhood-destroying urban redevelopment and suburb-creating motorway expansion began to halt. In 1973, urban regeneration came to a stop. By the end of the 1970s, much of the interstate highway network had been constructed, and new restrictions made it much more difficult to build them through metropolitan areas. The protests against top-down planning that began in the early 1960s had become widespread beliefs by the 1970s, particularly among those who were antagonistic to the government in general during the Vietnam and Watergate eras.

So-called "experts" could no longer be relied on to determine what was best for cities and individuals. People determined that planners deserved less authority, and there would be no more Robert Moses. Simultaneously, planning academics agreed with the public and condemned top-down planning. Marxist thinkers began to interpret urban growth and change as capital flows. Capitalists used planning as a tool. Without a clear goal, planning becomes a lonely job. The age of the master builder has passed. What would happen to planners? They grew and specialized as a result of several new rules that gave planners something to do.

The Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970, and the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, Superfund Act, and National Environmental Policy Act all made city planning significantly more difficult because environmental concerns had to be considered when allowing new land uses. City planners became local authorities on an increasing number of federal and state measures aimed at reducing the negative consequences of expanding growth. The Federal Community Development Act of 1974 replaced urban renewal by granting funds to municipalities to build and maintain a variety of projects such as housing, public utilities, parks, and transportation. To apply for community development block grants, planners must produce plans.

Transportation planning has also evolved. The improvements were gradual, but transportation planners began to include all means of mobility, not only the automobile. Bike lanes originally appeared in the 1970s. In the 1980s, cities began to invest in new light rail routes. The federal government, too, began to demand stronger regional transportation planning. Planners not only became specialists in all elements of the business, but they also became educators, facilitators, and champions. They lacked some of their prior sheer might, but they nonetheless pioneered innovative techniques to reverse some of the damage done over the preceding 60 years. Some cities have introduced new smart growth policies, such as urban growth boundaries.

The practice of Euclidean zoning began to receive pushback, criticized for its use as a tool of exclusion and its promotion of car-only development. Cities encouraged transit-oriented development in the suburbs to give residents an alternative to ever-increasing freeway traffic. Urban challenges remain today. Gentrification and high housing prices are pushing residents out of cities. Car usage is still incredibly high, even given what we now know about their negative impacts. Cities are still segregated by race and income. Self-driving cars could have far-reaching impacts, some we still can’t predict. There will be lots for planners to do in the future, and they now have a rich history to reflect on and learn from.

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