Modernism and Early Urban Planning

As described by Richard T. LeGates and Frederic Stout in Early Urban Planning (1998), the planning profession under went much change through the 19^th century to the mid 20^th century. Early city planning developed in response to over-crowding and poor living conditions caused by mass rural to urban migration during the industrial revolution. The parks movement sought to alleviate the unaesthetic and unhealthy nature of industrial cities by including open green spaces into the urban form (eg. Central Park in Manhattan, New York)

The Garden City movement begun by Ebenzer Howard was a further progression of urban planning in addressing the full gamut of urban development issues. Howard envisioned the creation of towns with small populations that would provide the ameneties of urban life while retaining connection with surroudning natural areas.

Concerns for public health and green space where replaced by the City Beautiful Movement. The movement’s primary focus was the beautification of cities using monumental grandeur. A highly influential advocate of the movement was Daniel Burnham who created the famous Plan for Chicago in 1909.

The aesthetically driven goals of City Beautiful were eventually supplanted by concerns for the efficiency and functionality of cities. This shift was associated with the rise of Progressivism before and after WW1. It sought to fully engage the height of scientific thinking into the development of society.

Early planning tended not to go beyond the limits of single cities. Patrick Geddes, however, expanding on the ideas of Ebenzer Howard, expressed the need for a regional scope in planning. This idea was furthered by proponents such as Lewis Mumford who saw the development of transport and communication technologies as an opportunity to decentralized urban areas into surrounding regions.

In 1922 Charles Eduard Jeaneret proposed “A Contemporary City for Three Million People”. It was a modernist vision of a large-scale settlement of unadorned skyscrapers separated by open parkland. Although it seemed to be in direct opposition to Howards’s Garden City thought, this model actually held many of the same ideals such as city decongestion and density retention. An alternative modernist form was proposed by Frank Lloyd Wright. He envisioned cities with no substantial suburban concentration, rather sprawling suburbs of acre blocks with automobiles as the dominant transport mode. It is interesting to note that both these visions of urban form have come to be the dominant features of large cities of today.