Bartholomew, Harland

Born in 1889, Harland Bartholomew spent his early years on the East Coast. His tertiary education was limited to 2 years at Rutgers University, where he studied civil engineering. He then accepted a job with the city of Newark as a planning consultant, and subsequently became one of the earliest fulltime municipal planners in the United States. Bartholomew retired in 1961 and died in 1989.

Bartholomew pursued a tripartite career: as director of planning for Newark, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C.; in private practice as the founder of Harland Bartholomew Associates; and as an instructor at the University of Illinois. Urban planning was an emerging discipline in the 1910s, and Bartholomew was able to influence the field in discernible ways. His primary concern was planning a scientific enterprise. Accordingly, he expanded upon the concept of the “comprehensive plan.” The comprehensive plan combined zoning and land use, major streets, transit, transportation, recreation, and civic art into a single entity. It considered past trends and made longterm projections.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bartholomew recognized the interrelatedness of social, economic, and physical criteria in urban development. His firm developed more than 500 comprehensive plans for American cities between 1919 and 1984. Two innovations facilitated this feat. Recognizing the disadvantages of the dominant “hit and run” consulting system, Bartholomew established longer term associations between planners and communities. A planner was assigned to a community for 2 to 4 years, during which he worked with a planning commission to develop a comprehensive plan. To encourage continuous activity, this “field man” was encouraged to remain with the community after the contract period as director of planning. Thus, Bartholomew was partly responsble for the acceptance of planning as a legitimate concern of local governments, as well as the dispersion of planners across the country. In addition, he was one of the first to organize an interdisciplinary practice that included architects, landscape architects, and civil engineers. The immediate availability of necessary expertise streamlined the planning process. Also important in Bartholomew's oeuvre are his contributions to the development of urban renewal as a national and local concern and the initiation of a comprehensive interstate highway [Page 69]system. Bartholomew saw himself as an advocate for his profession and for urban constituencies. He was prominent in professional organizations, including the American Institute of Certified Planners, the Society of Landscape Architects, and the Society of Civil Engineers.

Yet, many of the charges leveled against the discipline also apply to Bartholomew's work. Cities like Battle Creek, Michigan, for which Bartholomew's firm developed a comprehensive plan, are still attempting to overcome their traumatic experiences of urban renewal, slum clearance, and highway expansion. Former residents of declared “slum areas” still contend that their neighborhoods were not slums. As minorities, residents were excluded from decisionmaking processes. Fifty years later, resentment still thrives because of the limited provisions made for housing and the lack of attention paid to the effects of displacement. Despite their best intentions, Bartholomew and his colleagues were not able to develop the level of foresight necessary to preclude the urban crisis.

...