City Beautiful Movement

The City Beautiful movement rose in late nineteenth-century America as a reformist attempt by the ruling elites to solve the urban crisis that was plaguing big cities across the country during the Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century and particularly during the economic depression of 1893 to 1897. With its emphasis on comprehensive, large-scale planning, the City Beautiful movement would set the standards for modern city planning.

The vanishing of the agrarian society, coupled with the increasing processes of immigration and urbanization, had led to a drastic rise of the population in urban areas across the country. From 1860 to 1910 the American population as a whole had increased from 31.4 million to 91.9 million, and 46 percent of Americans lived in urban areas, as manufacturing jobs in the city industry replaced agriculture jobs in the countryside. In the same time period, the number of American cities with over 100,000 residents rose from 8 to 50, while in 1910 several cities had a population exceeding the 1 million mark.

The striking concentration of poverty in core urban areas created dangerous sanitary conditions, phenomena of congestion and overcrowding in tenements, while at the same time the improvement of transportation systems spurred the unrelenting outmigration of the upper classes to the suburbs and the countryside. The massive migration of families to the city in search of opportunity in the rising industry led to a climate of social unrest, labor struggles, and ethnic conflicts.

Overcrowding, blight, and crime became major concerns for the elite classes, who lived in fear for their own safety. In 1890 Jacob Riis reported about the living conditions in the tenements of New York City:

Riis's writings, a dramatic documentation of poverty and disenfranchisement in dense urban settlements, were interpreted as a strong call for social reform.

The City Beautiful movement rose as a response by the ruling elites to these concerns. The reformist and paternalistic goal of the movement (which mobilized architects, planners, and social reformers) was to bring social order and control to the city through an improved, orderly, and beautified urban environment: A new city would lead to a new harmonious sense of community and belonging for all citizens, thus removing the causes of social conflicts. According to Julie K. Rose, the underlying assumption of the movement was “the idea that beauty could act as an effective social control device.”

In major industrial cities, the growing phenomenon of labor upheaval had resulted in legislatures damping down labor movements, systematic state repression, and violent confrontations between police and labor protesters. The Haymarket Affair in Chicago (May 1886), which had begun as a peaceful rally in support of striking workers, resulted in the death of several protesters, police officers, and civilians. The highly controversial trial that followed brought the capital executions of four, presumably innocent, anarchists. Following the example of the 1851 Universal Exhibition in London's Crystal Palace—which was strongly encouraged by the British government to counter the spread of political radicalism and to celebrate the global expansion of the British Empire— Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 was championed by the city's political and economic elites with the aim of cementing a badly divided society and of rescuing the city's reputation after the worldwide publicity and outcry over the Haymarket trial.

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