Reasearch Paper Proposal

History Of Urban Planning in the United States

Drive around a number of cities in the United States -- Houston, for example, or Los Angeles -- and you might think that urban planning was just a fantasy, since there seems to have been no thought whatsoever in terms of might be good for the long-term social, cultural, political, and economic health of these cities, where seemingly anything goes. On the other hand, any one of a number of planned communities that dot the newer neighborhoods across the country suggest that urban planning is simply fascism by other means as people cannot pick the flowers for their front yards. There are, of course, some cities that get their urban planning -- like that final bowl for Goldilocks -- just right. But sometimes these can seem very much in the minority, and sometimes seem to get things right more by accident than anything else.

This paper examines the history of urban planning in the United States, considering what has lead different cities to take such extremes on the one hand while others have followed more moderate, more flexible courses that have been better able to stand the test of time.

Giving the range of what goes under the heading of "urban planning," it is perhaps useful to begin with a definition of the term. In general, urban planning can be considered to be the intersection of land-use planning and transportation planning (along with, in some areas) planning to reduce the effects of pollution and climate change to improve or sustain the physical and social infrastructure and relationships of the community. Sometimes this planning is carried out on a larger geographic area and is called regional planning.

It should be noted that urban planning is not the same thing as "urban renewal," which is a governmental focus (sometimes in concert with private enterprise) to remedy a range of infrastructural and cultural problems usually in older parts of a city. Urban renewal is also associated in both the United States and other industrialized nations with efforts made to improve the housing and work conditions for racial minorities. This fact has tended to politicize the process of urban planning in the United States, with conservatives often arguing against it as a part of their overall push to limit social services.

However, urban planning is in fact a process that should be applied to all aspects of a community, and in all likelihood it dates from the very first days of human settlement into permanent cities. For example, in the fifth century BCE, Hippodamus designed the city of Alexandria for Alexander the Great, which might arguably be called the first master-planned city. The city was designed to be efficient in terms of moving goods and people from place to place; hygienic, especially in terms of supplying fresh water to all of the population; and safe, especially in terms of reducing the danger of fire (Jackson, 2985, p. 76).

Today's urban planners are focused on different issues -- but only to some extent. The list above is different now in that urban planners consider how cars and pedestrians can co-exist rather than how horse-drawn carts can co-exist with pedestrians. But the overall goals -- safety, beauty, and communal nature -- remain the same. This should hardly be surprising given that the basic needs of people have not changed dramatically over the course of the last 10,000 years or so. The only major change that has occurred is the fact that there are so many more people now, urban planning is all the more important (Jackson, 1985, p. 76).

Getting in our time machine and hurtling towards the present, urban planning in the United States began to gain momentum in the middle of the last century as the great housing boom that followed the Second World War began to eat up what had been rural land for centuries. Suburbs began to double and then double again in size like radioactive mushrooms. Commuting on newly land freeways became more and more a part of people's lives (Wheeler, 1995, p. 71). Some of these changes were generally welcome (the large backyards of the suburbs) and some were definitely less welcome (those long commutes).

One thing that was clear during the 1950s and into the 1960s was that cities were being systemically changed as more and more people moved out of the country and into urban and suburban areas. Transportation became more and more important to consider (Tunnard & Pushkarev, 1963, p. 48). So did race relations as many city residents participated in "white flight," retreating to suburbs and leaving the cities (which would begin to be called "inner cities") to blacks, and later Latinos and Asian-Americans. Cities began to fall apart, which was a problem for every one (Garvin, 2002, p. 119).

As cities seemed to become less and less functional, suburbs themselves no longer seemed socially safe enough for some people, who began to flee every further away from people who did not look like them or share their values, seeking refuge in gated communities that had all the psychological heterogeneity of Camazotz, a mythical city in Madeleine L'Engle's novel a Wrinkle in Time in which every single house has been built to be the exact same size, the exact same shape, and is painted in exactly the same color. (Even more disturbing in the novel is the fact that in front of each of these houses is a child bouncing the same type of ball in exactly the same rhythm.)