One Hundred Years of City Planning's Enduring and Evolving Connections

Abstract

Problem: In 2009, 100 years after the first national meeting of the Progressive reformers who laid the foundation of the profession, the field of city planning marks a landmark anniversary. While enormous changes have occurred in the United States, then, as now, dealing with growth is a persistent theme.

Purpose: This article introduces the centennial issue celebrating the field's anniversary in the Journal of the American Planning Association, provides context for articles appearing here, explores the implications of the past for contemporary planning, and points to some ideas for educating city planners in the succeeding decades.

Methods: The authors employ the traditional methods of their specialty as planning historians, including reviewing and synthesizing primary and secondary sources related to the topic at hand.

Results and conclusions: Three themes unify this centennial issue. First, the articles explore the interplay of ideas, societal trends, and development of authority over managing growth that shaped the field. Second, they show how common concerns persist over time. Third, they look at the concept of “change,” how it is variously defined, and how it has been a central theme and driver of the field.

Takeaway for practice: The centennial issue emphasizes the importance of understanding the context of planning (i.e., locating people, places, and policies in time) in order to track the growth of the profession and its concerns. It performs the key function of planning history: to illuminate the past in order to explain the present and inform the future.

Research support: None.

Keywords:

• National Conference on City Planning
• planning history
• congestion
• sprawl
• sustainability

Notes

1. We use city data to make accurate comparisons with 1909, but the growth rates for metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), were as follows between 1980 and 2006: New York 17%, Los Angeles 12%, Chicago 21%, Houston 82%, and Phoenix 177%. Only the Phoenix MSA approached city rates of growth at the turn of the 20th century.

2. We have selected representative areas, but with more space we might have included international planning, preservation planning, economic development, legal and administrative issues, regional planning, and others.

3. The speakers were: Secretary of the Treasury, Franklin MacVeagh; Secretary of the Interior, Richard A. Ballinger; immensely powerful and second longest-serving Speaker of the House, Joseph G. Cannon (R-IL); developer of Chevy Chase, MD, and Senator, Francis G. Newlands (D-NV); Commissioner of the District of Columbia and Surgeon General, George A. Sternberg, (who also served as former chair of the commission that advised Theodore Roosevelt on the housing conditions in Washington, DC); and lawyer and appointee of President William Howard Taft, Henry B. F. Macfarland.

4. In 1935, the NCCP merged with the American Civic Association to form the American Civic and Planning Association. A year earlier, municipal reform advocates had created ASPO. By 1942, ASPO took responsibility for the National Conference on Planning, sponsoring the annual meeting until its merger into the APA in 1978. APA now runs the national planning conference (Birch, 1980).

5. The conference, “Re-Imagining Cities: Urban Design After Peak Oil,” sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania in early November 2008, produced a manifesto, Educating Urban Designers for Post-Carbon Cities that included definitions of the problem, a summary of the challenges, and agreement on unifying principles. It is available in its entirety at http://www.upenn.edu/penniur/afteroil/Educating%20Urban%20Designers.pdf