This video is brought to you by Skillshare. Visit the link in the description
for two months off a Premium subscription. This is a brief history of
city planning in the United States, but our story begins before the US existed.
Prior to European settlement, cities existed in the territory now known as
the U.S. The Pueblo culture built impressive cities, as did the Mississippian culture.
Cahokia is considered one of the largest pre-European cities north of Mexico.
The Spanish were the first European power to set up shop in what is now the U.S..
St. Augustine, Florida was founded in 1565. As the Spanish were founding other cities
in the U.S. Southwest , they also codified one of the first examples of European
planning in the New World, the Law of the Indies. The Law laid out the requirements for
locating a new city as well as its design and layout. Cities had to have a
central square. Santa Fe is a great example. The 1600s saw the French and English
join the Spanish in founding new cities, particularly along the Atlantic seaboard.
New York, Boston], Charleston, and Philadelphia were all founded in this period.
By the time the U.S. declared its independence, cities had popped up all
over the east coast and southwest. Some of the larger cities, like Boston were
starting to look quite urban, while others closer to the Appalachian
frontier were little more than forts to keep out the understandably unwelcoming native tribes.
The founding of the United States didn’t do much to create an urban nation.
The Land Ordinance of 1785, which begins the gridding of the American west,
was designed to create a nation of farmers. Its author, Thomas Jefferson, hated cities.
To be fair, at this point the U.S. population was 95 percent rural.
This rural emphasis was unfortunate, because shortly after the founding fathers signed the Constitution,
which doesn’t even mention cities, something big started happening.
In the beginning of the 19th century, technological
innovations such as the steam engine and power loom started transforming the economy.
Work that had been done by artisans in villages was now done
in factories by unskilled labor. New firms and factories would locate in
cities to find enough workers, and workers moved to cities to expand their options for work.
Cities started to grow, fast. People were moving to cities faster than housing
could be built, and many of the migrants couldn’t afford good housing anyway.
Workers also had to live within walking distance to work, as no
practical mass transit existed yet. Overcrowding became a serious problem.
Sanitation was terrible. Human waste was typically disposed of in an on-site septic tank
or cesspools. Cities smelled terrible. Disease was a constant threat. The smoke
coming from the factories added to the noxious environment. It’s really
important to understand that the city of the mid 1800s was not a nice place to be.
For many people it was their first experience with urban living, and it was
profoundly negative.Industrial revolution cities needed reform. Disease was literally a
life and death situation, so that came first. New gravity-based, self-cleansing
sewer systems came on to the scene in the 1840s. The implementation of a
comprehensive sewer system, designed to clear away waste, required a citywide
“sanitary survey” to understand the topography of the city as well as a
mapping of the cesspools, outhouses, and sources of waste. These surveys are one
of the earliest acts of planning in U.S. cities and by 1907 every major US city
had a sewer system. Sewers provided fresh air, and so too did some of the first
comprehensive urban park systems. Some of the most notable designed by
Frederick Law Olmsted, including Central Park. Housing reform followed sanitation reform.
The problem was brought to the fore by reformers and journalists like
Jacob Riis, whose photos published in the book, “How the Other Half Lived” exposed
the terrible conditions people lived in during the 1880s.
Tenements were claustrophobic and exceedingly overcrowded, filled with the
many immigrants from Europe coming to New York by the day. The Lower East Side
was almost certainly the most crowded neighborhood in the world at the time,
with over 1,000 people per acre. New York’s Tenement House Act passed
in 1901 and required a separate bathroom in each unit, courtyards, and improved fire
safety measures. Many other cities passed similar laws in the coming years.
These early initiatives to fix the
industrial city focused on practical
social matters like health and housing. There were less-than-practical reformers too.
Some wanted to improve the city through monuments, slum clearance,
and neo-classical architecture. Let’s move the timeline to 1893,
he World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. The White City, chiefly designed
by architect Daniel Burnham. The White City became the template for
he City Beautiful movement, a not-so-good method of improving cities, but a pretty good
name for a city planning YouTube channel. Most of Burnham’s plans, like the one for
San Francisco, never panned out, but his plans for Chicago and the Washington Mal
were mostly completed as intended. At the beginning of the 20th century,
city planning coalesced into a distinct profession. Its roots were in the
drafting of new cities from the colonial era through the railroad towns
of the west, the social reformers of major cities, and the grand visions
of City Beautiful designers. These differing visions of city planning were debated at
the first city planning conference in 1909, with battle lines drawn between
he social reformers and the technical/aesthetic planners.
Planners, no matter their perspective, had begun to feel optimistic about urban living.
Electric streetcars were zipping through streets, and their speed and low fares
made it possible to build new housing on the periphery for the middle class,
easing overcrowding. Another transportation technology changed everything.
The Model T started rolling off of Ford’s assembly line in 1908.
Millions of the cars, and millions of other cars would be sold in the next
decade or two. Cars allowed people to commute further out into homes in
the suburbs and this radically altered cities. It’s a change similar
to the urbanization of the last century.
Most planners of the time thought that
suburban development was a good thing. Cities were better than before, but what
could be better than living in larger homes in greener surroundings?
Enthusiasm about suburbs, combined with the poor quality of early suburb design
led to some key planning responses. First, the Federal Government developed a set
of standard zoning and planning enabling acts that cities could adopt.
These model acts gave cities the authority to do zoning, approve subdivision
street layouts, form planning commissions, and adopt master plans.
This added regulation and minimum standards to the development of the suburbs.
Zoning ordinances were around in the two decades before the model enabling acts,
promoted primarily by commercial interests trying to protect their land value
from new development that attracted immigrants and people of color.
Zoning, then, as it does now, can be useful or used as a tool of exclusion.
But the Supreme Court, in Village of Euclid vs. Ambler Realty,
found zoning to be constitutional, so it was here to stay.
Others saw the slapdash, speculative suburban development and believed there
was a better way. They were the Garden Suburb designers, notably Clarence Stein
and Henry Wright. Heavily influenced by Ebenezer Howard and the English Garden City designers,
they developed new concepts for the suburbs that promoted shared ownership
of common greenspace and separate circulation for pedestrians
that kept them away from cars. Their most famous community was Radburn, New Jersey, built in 1929.
This rapid growth outward created entire metropolitan regions,
and the notion of regional planning got its start in this era.
Notable regional plans and planners include Patrick Geddes and his ideas
about conurbations, the Regional Planning Association of America, with Stein and Wright
as members, and the publishing of the Regional Plan of New York and its Environs,
a landmark regional plan published in 1929. At the same time
people were moving out of the city in cars, others were moving in. It was one of
the most dramatic demographic shifts in US history: the Great Migration. This was
the migration of over six million African Americans from the south to
northern cities from about 1916 to 1970. In the years after the Civil War and emancipation,
80 percent of black Americans still lived in the rural south, but by 1970,
80 percent lived in cities, half of them in northern cities. For immigrants, cities
were a tool of assimilation and advancement, but for the millions of
black Americans who moved to cities to work in urban factories, they found
segregation instead. Cities during the 30s and 40s were already very different
than they were at the beginning of the century. Wealthy and middle class
families were leaving for the suburbs for new tract housing, leaving behind
poor and black families. At this time, most jobs and shopping was still done in the
central city, and these new commuters needed a way to go back and forth. Cities started
building freeways using state funding. To make room, they cleared
immigrant and black neighborhoods, citing
slum clearance and upgrading.
The destruction of the city continued through urban renewal.
It’s a story told in three acts. The first is the Housing Act of 1937.
The act pitted public housing activists like Catherine Bauer against
commercial real estate interests who hated sharing the city with poor residents.
They wanted to replace slums with flashy real estate projects.
By the Housing Acts of 1949 and 1954, the real estate interests had won.
The public housing that did get built was intended for middle class families, built in
demolished black neighborhoods. Middle class whites didn’t move in,
and they became homes for poor, black families. The Housing Acts assumed that
middle class rents would pay for all maintenance and didn’t provide
Federal funding for upkeep. When poorer families moved in,
the buildings quickly deteriorated without Federal funding. The result was cities
bereft of historic neighborhoods, with bleak modernist towers in their place.
It should be pretty clear that many of the planning "solutions" to the problems of
the industrial city just created more problems themselves.
It was certainly clear to those who were displaced by freeways and urban mega projects.
In the 1960s and 1970s, urban residents began fighting back against
top-down planning that ignored the wishes of residents and
disproportionately hurt poor and minority groups. One of the most
prominent early battles is also one of the most famous—the battle over the
Lower Manhattan Expressway between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses. Jacobs was an
activist and journalist living in Greenwich Village.
Robert Moses was New York’s master builder, responsible for the construction of many
bridges, freeways, and public housing projects. He was losing influence by the 1960s,
however, and Jacobs, along with other activists, manage to halt the
Lower Manhattan Expressway project. Jacob’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
is a critique of modernist planning and urban renewal and
became one of the most influential books on planning. Jacobs was not the only one
fighting against urban freeways and urban renewal. Residents of cities across
the US had had enough. Freeway construction was halted in San Francisco
and Portland. New metro systems in San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC were built.
These impressive victories could not stop urban renewal and freeway
construction entirely. The federal government still provided enormous sums
of money to cities to build more freeways as fast as possible, thanks to
the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. This continued exodus was called white flight because,
for the most part, black families could not rent or own in the suburbs.
Restrictive covenants, racism in the real estate profession, and
redlining by banks meant that black families could not get mortgages, and even
if they could, they would not be told of listings in white neighborhoods.
This proved especially bad for black families, as jobs were now migrating to the suburbs,
in some cases in what are known as edge cities.
Many of these cities are only accessible by car, and located far from urban centers where black families lived.
The one-two punch of neighborhood-destroying urban renewal and
suburb-generating freeway construction began to slow down in the 1970s.
Urban renewal ended in 1973. Much of the interstate freeway network had been built by the
end of the 1970s, and new regulations made it much harder to build them through urban areas.
The revolts against top-down planning at the beginning of the 1960s
had become popular opinion by the 1970s, particularly with people
hostile toward government generally in the Vietnam and Watergate eras.
So-called “experts” were no longer trusted to know what was best for cities and people.
People decided that planners didn’t deserve the power they had, and there would be no more Robert Moseses.
At the same time, planning academics agreed with the people
and rebuked top-down planning. Marxist theorists began to explain urban
growth and change as movements of capital. Planning was a tool of capitalists.
Planning became a lonely profession without a direction.
The era of the master builder was over. What would become of planners? The evolved and specialized,
thanks in part to many new laws that gave planners something to do.
The Environmental Protection Agency was founded in 1970 and the Clean Air Act,
the Endangered Species Act, the Superfund Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act
all made city planning much more complicated,
as environmental concerns had to be considered with permitting new land uses.
City planners became local experts on an increasing number of federal and state
programs meant to minimize the negative impacts of new development.
The Federal Community Development Act of 1974 replaced urban renewal and provided grants
to communities to build and maintain a wide variety of projects, including
housing, public utilities, parks, and transportation. Planners had to develop
plans to apply for the community development block grants.
Transportation planning changed, too. The changes were slow, but transportation planners began
to think about all modes of transportation, not just the car.
The first bike lanes appeared in the 1970s. Cities began to invest in new light rail
lines in the 1980s. The federal government began to require better
regional transportation plans, as well. Planners became experts in all of the
technical aspects of the job, but they also became educators, facilitators, and advocates.
They lacked some of the raw
power they had before, but still
pioneered new approaches to undoing some of the harm of the previous 60 years.
Some cities implemented new smart growth measures, including urban growth boundaries.
The practice of Euclidean zoning began to receive push back,
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. Planners, as well as anyone else, can also
learn a lot from the more than 25,000 courses over at Skillshare. Skillshare is
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Thanks for watching, CC folks!
