By Chet Boddy

After the Thaw

In Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Guns, Germs and Steel,” he describes how human civilization unfolded over the 13,000 years since the end of the last ice age. He explains how geography and the natural environment, rather than human intelligence, accounts for the vast differences in the development of human societies from one continent to the next. This is a totally new concept for most of us. We don’t control nature; it controls us.
Human settlements evolved from primitive villages to walled towns, then to the classic cities of Europe, Asia and Central and South America. Cities became the crowning achievements of empires.
After the fall of the Roman Empire, European cities declined into Medieval settlements clustered around castles and churches. Centuries later, fueled by foreign trade and the age of discovery, many blossomed into Renaissance cities filled with art and bustling with commerce.
Throughout history, cities have been shaped by war, trade, religion, politics and the natural environment. Most ancient cities eventually exhausted their water supply, depleted their soil or destroyed the forests which supported them. Many finally succumbed to war, famine, pestilence, disease and natural disasters. In his book "Cadillac Desert," Marc Reisner makes an alarming comparison between the western United States and the great vanished desert civilizations.

Early City Planning in the United States

In the United States, the earliest urban plans were created for the cities of Philadelphia (1682), Annapolis (1695), Colonial Williamsburg (1699) and Savannah (1733). Pierre L'Enfant's famous plan for Washington D.C. in 1791 featured dramatic diagonal and radial avenues imposed upon a gridiron street system in the classic European Baroque tradition. The avenues provided grand terminal vistas of monuments and civic buildings.
These early city plans all featured major and minor streets, ample public parks and prominent civic architecture. But they were one-shot efforts which made little provision for the rapid growth and change that was to come.
In these pre-industrial times, most people lived and worked on the farm. The poorer people in the city lived among the well-to-do as tradespeople and domestics. There were no factories, tenement houses or automobiles, and most people conducted some sort of business enterprise from their home.
The Industrial Revolution and the Westward Movement
The Industrial Revolution drew the labor force from the farms to the factories, creating dreadful slums, sanitation disasters and frequent outbreaks of disease. The first major urban reforms in the United States were aimed at preventing cholera, typhoid and yellow fever, and improving housing conditions for the poor. Germs do not discriminate between the rich and poor.
The westward movement encouraged rampant land speculation. The invention of the rectangular survey system in 1785 allowed land to be bought and sold sight unseen. Cities had to surrender their former economic and political powers to the new state governments and began to compete desperately with each other for canals and railroads and basic industries. Cities were not nice places to live. Intellectuals from Jefferson to Thoreau expressed strong anti-urban sentiments.
Boom towns like San Francisco adopted rigid gridiron patterns to accommodate rapid growth without any regard for topography. Virgin forests fell to the settler's axe, vast wetlands were "reclaimed" for agriculture and development, and rivers and lakes became industrial sewers. The corrupt boss/machine system dominated urban politics.

The Park Planner

In 1853, The City of New York acquired land for the first major urban park in the country. Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux designed Central Park in an informal style which simulated nature and expressed the romantic ideals of that period. This inspired the next generation of urban reformers, the park planners, who left a legacy of public parks in cities across North America. Among them was John McLaren, the long-time superintendent and "father" of San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.
Public parks and open spaces had always been a major feature of the earliest city plans. But rapid growth and land speculation had wiped most of them out, and rivers and lake fronts had become prime industrial property. Landscape architects began proposing designs to reclaim these areas for public use. In so doing, they became the first modern city planners.

The City Beautiful Movement

The Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago inspired the modern phase of city planning in this country. The American frontier had officially closed three years earlier, and people finally began to deal seriously with urban problems. The City Beautiful movement began in the early 1900s and continued through the first part of the 20th century.
In the beginning, urban planning was a private function performed by citizen planning commissions and paid consultants. Their main objective was to influence politicians and city governments to adopt their ideas. City planning departments did not become common until after World War II.
The first zoning ordinance in this country was adopted by New York City in 1916, only three years after the federal income tax became law. The New York ordinance regulated land use and building locations throughout the city, although its primary objective was to protect private property values. Many other cities developed their own zoning laws, and in 1926 a U. S. Supreme Court decision finally confirmed the legality of zoning.
The emergence of the private automobile in the 1920s, the Great Depression of the 1930s, then World War II and its aftermath would have a profound effect on urban planning in this country and throughout the world.

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