Planning History

1. PLAN 3022: Planning History & Theory
Week 03: Emergence of the Planning Professional – City Beautiful
Anuradha Mukherji
Assistant Professor of Urban and Regional Planning

2. ‘Beautiful’ Movement
I. Municipal Art Movement
1. Fusion of art, architecture,
and planning
2. Beautification rather than
functionality
3. Focus on points in the city:
arches, fountains, statues, and
other works of urban design
and decoration

3. ‘Beautiful’ Movement
II. Civic improvement
• Backed by Municipal Art Movement
• To counterbalance the heavy hand of industrialization
III. Outdoor art
• Led by Frederic Law Olmsted
• Promotion of park, park system, and parkways
IV. Classical design
• Neoclassical style: great boulevards, grand perspectives, grouped public
buildings, etc.

5. ‘Beautiful’ Movement
America
• Middle- and upper-middle-class Americans attempt to refashion their cities in
order to boost business
• Aesthetic improvements
• Functional improvements (“city practical”): sewerage and water supply, refuse
collection, active recreation, and public transportation
• Promote a harmonious + social order that would increase the quality of life
Colonial Spaces
• To express imperial dominance and racial exclusiveness
Europe (1930s)
• By totalitarian dictators to impose megalomaniac visions of glory on their capitals
(Stalin, Hitler)

6. World’ Fair: Columbian Exposition
May – October, 1893: Celebration of 400th
anniversary of the landing of Columbus
Daniel H. Burnham (1846-1912): Chief of
Construction
Definitive World Fairs of all time:
• Exposition covered 600 acres
• Based on French Neoclassical architecture
principles of symmetry, balance and
splendor
• Exceeded the scale and grandeur of world
fairs
• Became a symbol of emerging American
Exceptionalism

7. Chicago Fair

9. Kansas City, MO
Movement took root in the great
commercial cities of Midwest – Kansas
City, Denver, Seattle
KANSAS CITY
• A system with parks and boulevards
• Began in 1893

10. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL: KEY
PEOPLE
William Rockhill Nelson (1841-1915)
• A real estate developer and founder of
The Kansas City Star
• Using his newspaper, he convinced the
community that parks and boulevards
were necessary
• Aggressively supported the parks and
boulevards, rallying public enthusiasm,
showcasing achievement, and helping the
community mindful of the value of green
spaces.

11. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL: KEY
PEOPLE
August Robert Meyer (1851-1905)
• A successful businessman and developer
of the park and boulevard system for
Kansas City as first president of the
Commission of Parks.

12. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL: KEY
PEOPLE
George E. Kessler (1862-1923)
• A city planner and landscape architect
who designed the Kansas City park and
boulevard system

13. KANSAS CITY
Report of 1893 (Meyer & Kessler)
• A comprehensive plan
• Favored scenic preservation and
recreation within the city
• Rejected Olmstedian suburban
landscape park
“..we.. recognize that there exist
within the boundaries of our city other
special and urgent problems and
peculiar conditions that … should
engage our attention first.”

14. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL
“A comprehensive, well-planned and thoroughly maintained
boulevard system would combine rural with urban advantages
and check the tendency to … build residences in the suburbs.
…
Compact settlement would result in better sanitation, street
maintenance, and street service. … the best and most
expensive residences will go up along boulevards…” (Meyer)

15. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL

16. KANSAS CITY BEAUTIFUL
The Paseo
boulevard

17. Kansas City
Swope Park (1896)
• Thomas H. Swope donated almost 1,334
acres

18. Kansas City
Swope Park (1896)

19. Kansas City
Union Station (1909)
• Architect Jarvis Hunt
• Financed by levies on business property
in the downtown area

20. Kansas City
Union Station (1909)
• Plans for a civic center
• To eliminate saloons and possible
crimes
• Acquisition of a four-block front of
land, extending south to Penn Valley
Park
• Widening the street required

21. Kansas City
1915
• Links between the great North Terrace
Park and Swope parks
• Passed through or near all the interior
parks and some of the playgrounds

22. Kansas City Beautiful
• The boulevards and their east-west links tied the parks and entire city
together
• Almost 1,992.25 acres of parks, 676 parkway acres, and almost 90 miles of
boulevards (1915)  some 219 parks in the city limit (current)
• Beautifying neighborhood
• Increased property values
• Prevalence and effects on substandard housings (massive slum clearance,
minority property owners, low-income white squatters)
• Recreational opportunities for residents people
• Environmental benefits
• Establishing the Kansas City Art Commission
• Civic arts – “City of Fountains”

23. Kansas City Beautiful
• Too concerned with cosmetic display
• Little concerned with housing
• Lack of practical humanitarianism
“The poor only occasionally could afford to escape from their squalid, confining
surroundings to view the architectural perfection and to experience the aesthetic
delights of the remote improvement” (Benjamin Marsh)
• Cost
“we have rushed to plan showy civic centers of gigantic cost..”... “A city planned for
social benefit and economic efficiency would be beautiful.” (Pope)

24. The Chicago Plan
• 1909
• The birth of modern city
planning
• Architect-Urban Planner Daniel
H. Burnham & Edward Bennett
• Begun by the Merchants Club
in 1906  Published the plan
by Commercial Club of Chicago
in 1909  A gift to the city Daniel Burnham Edward Bennett

25. The Chicago Plan
4Six Major Physical Elements
• Improvement of lakefront (parks for the public)
• Developing a highway system (radial and circumferential highways)
• Improving a complete railway system (freight and passenger)
• Acquisition of an outer park system (parks & forest preserves)
• Arranging systematic streets (streets and bridges in the city)
• Creation of a civic center of cultural institutions and government

26. Kansas CityImprovement of lakefront (parks for the public)
From a dumping ground
To a public park

27. Developing a highway system (radial and circumferential
highways)
Chicago, 1900

28. Complete railway system (freight and passenger)
Proposed transportation center

29. Chicago
Acquisition of an outer park
system (parks & forest
preserves)

30. Chicago
Arranging systematic streets
(streets and bridges in the city)

31. ChicagoCreation of a civic center of cultural institutions and government
N. Michigan Ave.
“heart of the city” plan
“Paris on the Prairie”

32. Concluding Points
4The City Beautiful
• Manifested over an 80 year period in a variety of social, political and
cultural contexts
• Planning: A tool of finance capitalism; an agent of imperialism; an
instrument of personal totalitarianism
• Architecture: A symbol of power, concentration on the monumental and
the superficial
• Complete lack of interest in the wider social purposes on planning
• Planning for display, architecture as theatre and design intended to
impress and control