Urban Planning

Although cities have always to some extent been planned, the modern profession of urban planning emerged during the 20th century in response to deteriorating conditions of contemporary industrial cities and to the dramatic transformations brought about by rapid urbanization. Planning encompasses a wide range of city-making processes and functions, including land use decision making, policy guidance, economic development, and neighborhood revitalization. It seeks to plan cities in such a way as to reconcile the goals of economic development, social justice, and environmental protection.

However, as it evolved from its early design orientation as architecture writ large to its later conceptualization as a generic methodology of rational public decision making, urban planning has become increasingly controversial, both within and without the profession. Critical planning theorists recognize that all planning is inherently distributive and therefore inherently political as well.

The planner's role as an “expert” has been questioned by many, especially in regard to achieving a proper balance between expertise and citizen input. The justifications, assumptions, methods, and outcomes of planning have all come under scrutiny and criticism, leading to new paradigms seen as more appropriate to addressing the needs and concerns of a pluralistic, globalized society.

Three basic eras characterize the arc of modern planning history: the formative decades in which the problems of the rapidly growing cities in Europe and North America inspired not just movements of reform but utopian alternatives (1800–1910); the period of institutionalization, professionalization, and self-recognition, as well as national and regional planning efforts (1910–45); and the postwar era, in which planning became standardized with systems and rational approaches, only to enter a time of crisis, diversification, and reevaluation.

As the northern industrial city expanded to unprecedented size and density in the 19th century, reformist and visionary efforts sought to address overcrowding and to separate dangerous industries from housing. Such ideas were famously realized in the so-called White City of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, which in turn inspired the American “City Beautiful” movement and its somewhat deterministic notions of inspiring civic virtue through monumentality.

In the early decades of the 20th century, informal associations concerned with urban and regional development became formalized into planning commissions, which produced [Page 424]smaller-scale area plans and later, metropolitan comprehensive plans. Planning at this point was seen as an extension of architecture and was more concerned with the rational layout of cities through zoning rather than explicit social policy goals.

Throughout the Depression and through the war years, urban development in North America was slowed by the Depression, as well as the exigencies of wartime production. However, New Deal–era home financing, the exploding demand for housing, and the need to rebuild European and Japanese cities after the war contributed to a tremendous demand for planning expertise in urban development and rebuilding. In the face of these challenges, planners adopted instrumentally rational decision making to implement large-scale suburbanization, urban renewal, and public works projects, largely through the use of Euclidean zoning separating residential from commercial, industrial, and institutional uses.

In the mid-20th century, planning adhered to what is referred to as its “modernist project,” wherein cities were to be transformed by technological innovation and decision making informed by scientific knowledge, which was to be applied to all aspects of society through rational planning. Much like Le Corbusier, whose shocking 1925 Plan Voisin was intended to replace much of Paris' Right Bank district with identical and massive towers, modernist planners felt free to ignore historic precedent as a source of urban design. Formalism-or the notion that “form follows function”-dominated planning.

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