People have been “planning” for millennia, but urban planning as a profession has existed for just a few centuries. Planning is based on the idea that spatial location and characteristics can influence social norms and support the public good. Zoning ordinances and comprehensive plans are a contemporary examples of planning, but at its most basic level, planning is simply a way of attempting to exert some control over the collective through rational decision making.

Early city planning

“Urban” cities developed out of a growing need for commercial centers (markets), common good (defense), religion (temples), and government (palaces). Yet while collecting citizens into urban centers yielded many efficiency benefits, early urban growth was severely limited by sanitation, food supply, and availability of natural resources.

As early as 2000 BC, the city of Ur in Mesopotamia exhibited no small degree of forethought in its organization and layout. One can see a conscious decision to place the temple and palace grounds on higher ground, far from the city wall. The city wall had controlled entrances (defense). Residential areas, however, appear to be largely unplanned.

Roman cities began to exhibit a strong tradition of planning for “public” life, where large public projects not only forced the cities to organize into "zones," but also helped develop a sense of community good. Some examples of Roman public works include:

* Amphitheater (entertainment)
* Forum (military, commerce, and government)
* Temples (religion)
* Major roads (military, commerce)

Public baths (sanitation) and aqueducts (water supply) helped to increase capacity for urban population growth.

Remaking of Paris

Cutting forward 2000 years (yes, a lot happened through the intervening years, but this is a brief essay) we come to the remaking of Paris - taking a medieval city and through large public works, imposing a more contemporary plan.

Baron Haussman was appointed by Napoleon III to remake Paris in 1853. The goals of this large-scale urban transformation were to:

• Enhance military strength by cutting large avenues through the city to facilitate troop movement
  
• Facilitate commerce by paving and straightening roads
  
• Remove poor residents to suburbs
  
• Establish parks system
  
• Construct new monuments

It was estimated that implementation of Haussman's plan impacted 60% of the existing buildings in Paris. Though one of the goals of the plan was to remove poor residents, there was still quite a bit of economic diversity even within neighborhoods and buildings. Many of the four and five story walkups housed both low and high income people. Ironically, the lower income residents tended to live on the upper floors which were hotter, and required a lengthy stair climb to access.

City Beautiful and Settlement House Movements

The City Beautiful movement had its roots in the 1893 Chicago Exposition. At the time, there were two competing urban ideals brewing. These contrasting efforts were the Settlement House, and the City Beautiful.

Jane Addams was a key architect of the settlement house movement, a precursor to the profession of Social Work (Example: Hull House, 1889). Through establishment of "community centers" the settlement house movement sought to eliminate urban poverty through education, cultural assimilation, and democratic participation.

The City Beautiful movement, on the other hand believed that grand public places would inspire civic responsibility – the Chicago Exposition attempted to become a utopia contrasted against the surrounding squalor in American cities.

We can see the City Beautiful movement in action by examining the remaking of Washington DC in 1901. A committee of planners travelled abroad and studied Haussmann’s Paris at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. In the mold of Paris' wholesale makeover, crowded slums in central Washington DC were demolished an replaced with monumental government buildings. These buildings were consciously designed to inspire a feeling of awe in visitors.

Contemporary Definition of Planning

While "planning" can be a difficult idea to define, the most comprehensive definition I have found is that of John Freidman in Planning in the Public Domain. An abbreviated version of his definion is this:

Planning is the linking of knowledge to action in the public domain.

One of the most pervasive implementations of public planning is the local zoning ordinance.

Intro to Zoning

The US Constitution grants to states the legal ability to create local governments. With this comes the ability for states to devolve responsibility for planning.

Local zoning ordinances were developed in reaction to the “ills” of urban life: a means for wealthier land owners to preserve property values in the face of pollution, noise, crime, and overcrowding.

One of the first legal tests of zoning was Ambler v. City of Euclid in 1926. Ambler was a business owner in Euclid, Ohio. In accordance with the adopted city plan, the City of Euclid rezoned Ambler’s property from industrial to residential. Ambler sued the City on 14th Amendment grounds that the zoning revision “took” his property value without compensation - the property became instantly worthless to him because he could no longer conduct his business on his private property. Ambler won both the case and the appeal, but lost at the Supreme Court.

Today, there is a great deal of controversy over Eminent Domain – the right of the government to take private property for public use or greater economic good, with "just" compensation.

Zoning ordinances were developed as a tool for local citizens to better control "quality of life" issues and property values. As an element of local planning initiatives, zoning ordinaces define areas wherein a property owner's use of his or her property is restricted in favor of the "public good."

Garden Cities and Suburbs

As ideas of zoning and urban blight were being developed, several people were beginning to ponder the remaking of cities into villages - a devolution of compact urban efficiency into a garden escape. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard outlined a planned suburban town surrounded by agricultural land in Garden Cities of To-Morrow. These Garden Cities were to be highly and proscriptively planned with zones of residence, production, and entertainment rigidly divided. A 1928 implementation of this Garden City ideal was Radburn, NJ, which signalled a philosophical turning of planning efforts from remaking of urban cities for the middle class to planning and construction of new towns.

The Garden City can be characterized by small lots and multiple unit types surround common parks with pedestrian access to defined commercial zones. Auto and pedestrian traffic are separated. Prototype Garden Cities still exist today, primarily in the east, and are still largely successful.

Explosion of Suburban Development

The Garden City ideal did not end up being economically viable for large-scale housing production. In the post WW-II housing crisis, housing developments like Levittown, NY, exploded literally overnight. These suburban developments were initially racially segregated (Levitt’s rental and owner agreements specifically forbid any residents other than white).

These zoned developments with residential “neighborhoods” and commercial “centers” differed from the Garden Cities in that the zones were centered on the automobile rather than the pedestrian - zones were too large to traverse on foot and often were built without sidewalks. Today, there are nostalga “communities” of former Levittown residents throughout the US.

Other driving (no pun intended) forces spurring rapid suburbanization were:

• Federal highway system - Proposed under FDR in 1938, Highway Act of 1956 put plan in motion
  
• Race relations and civil rights - Redlining and block-busing tactics played on White people's fear of Blacks
  
• Tax incentives - The home mortgage interest deduction created a strong incentive for home ownership

Urban Renewal and Public Housing

Concurrent with the suburban explosion was the large-scale remaking of urban cities through Urban Renewal. The Housing Act of 1949 allocated federal money for large-scale clearance of “blighted” areas, including much of the land surrounding downtown St. Louis. Remaking of urban cities, dealing with poverty and crime was viewed by the planners and politicians as essentially a real estate issue rather than a community development issue.

St. Louis, for example, was home to several large-scale public housing developments. Perhaps the most (in)famous was the Pruitt-Igoe public housing development. Based on the International Style of architecture espoused by Le Corbusier and CIAM, Pruitt-Igoe was a large, modern apartment building in a “park-like” setting. There were 2,870 apartments spread over 33 buildings - completed in 1956, the complex was vacated and demolished just in 16 years later in 1972.

In reaction to the highly charged public housing failures of the post WWII era, Congress passed the Housing and Community Dev. Block Grant Act of 1974. This Act established the Community Development Block Grant to fund locally-based community and housing development activities. The Federal government essentially passes large blocks of money to local governments to be distributed in accordance with a locally developed action plan. This program is still in existence today.

Conclusion

It is my opinion that planning is a double-edged sword. We all want some degree of control over our surroundings - why should I invest time, effort, and money in improving my own piece of land unless I can be sure that my investment will be protected? On the other hand, it seems that we have lost control over planning as a tool for achieving that logical end. In our haste to implement plans and ordinances to facilitate those plans, the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction.

Take eminent domain as an example. The courts have determined that private property can be taken not just when necessary to implement a large-scale public works project, but for the simple reason that another private entity could put that property to a higher economic use (shopping mall trumps home). Issues like this are never black-and-white. Yet I look at neighborhoods across the country and become fearful that it is too easy for developers to demonstrate an economic case that will persuade local politicians to take viable, occupied properties from private owners.

Restrictive covenants are another example. Almost all suburban subdivisions have restrictive covenants that set up "rules" by which property owners must abide. In order for a private citizen to purchase a piece of property from another private citizen, he or she must agree to the covenants. They dictate everything from the maximum height grass in the front lawn to acceptable siding colors to how many cars can be parked on the street in front of your house. We see the results of these restrictive covenants in the banal, repetitious design of the suburban house. We see the results of this ideology of control as people self-segregate into racially and economically homogeneous conclaves.

When we trade uncertainty for regulation and density for personal insulation, we lose out on experiencing the diversity inherent in the simmering stew of urban life.