A Brief History of Public Participation in Urban Planning

This post is Part 2 of my public participation in urban planning series, adapted from my urban planning final paper, Citizen Participation and the Internet in Urban Planning.

In order to describe the potential uses of the Internet in public participation in planning, this section will begin with a short history of public participation in planning. The history seeks to challenge the profession’s view of participation as simply the public processes designed and controlled by planners. Public participation includes not only the deliberate hearings, but also the role of politicians, civic activists, business leaders, the media, and others in engaging in or forcing public conversation about planning topics. Before the advent of modern urban planning regulation, American urban planners directly communicated with the public in order to implement their plans. The framers of early zoning laws sought to engage the public through an open and transparent process. Given the increasing power of citizen groups and growing complexity of urban development, contemporary planners crafting outreach strategies can learn from this history to achieve consensus about and the coordination of new urban development.

Participation to Realize Burnham’s Plan of Chicago
The Plan of Chicago of 1909 is an important document in the early history of American city planning. A group of Chicago business leaders commissioned architect and planner Daniel Burnham to create a plan for the city’s development. The plan reacted to the congestion and pollution created by industrialization and rapid urban growth by calling for new infrastructure, parks, and establishing a framework for future development. Noted for its comprehensive approach, the plan was adopted by city government, who created one of the country’s first city planning commissions to oversee its implementation. Although the plan’s creation is widely cited for helping to spark the planning movement in America, it is also associated with an important early example of public participation in urban planning.(1)

In 1909, city governments did not yet have the legal authority implement plans through zoning and an official planning commission. As a result, plan advocates turned to an unprecedented publicity campaign to win public support for the plan. Although the plan was commissioned by elites and presented to citizens through a propagandistic publicity campaign, plan advocates viewed public education as integral to the practice of planning itself. Voting citizens held direct power over the plan, since plan implementation depended on the approval of public bonds at the ballot box for road expansions, parks, and other initiatives. Therefore, before planners obtained the legal authority and institutionalized power to implement plans, the success of the nascent field depended on voluntary public and private coordination, created through broad public communication.(2)
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Remembering 1968

I thought I would post a short note commemorating two anniversaries, one significant to the nation and the other the city of Washington. Forty years ago today Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. That event sparked civic disturbances in over 100 cities including Washington, D.C.

This map, published in the book Ten Blocks from the White House shows the extent of fires and looting. The event lay the groundwork for both the large number of subsidized housing projects along these corridors and new private developments like U Street’s Ellington and DCUSA in Columbia Heights.

The late 1960s events are also usually said to be related population decline. Like most cities, its population peaked around 1950 — 18 years before the civil disorder. Population decline should be understood as an interplay not only of urban problems causing middle class “flight,” but also the draw of the suburbs in the form of superior public services and inexpensive housing subsidized by government highways and mortgage programs.

Here are just a few links, please feel free to contribute more in the comments.

> Previous post: Understanding the 1960s’s ‘Civil Disorders’
> History News Network: April 4th, 1968
> W. Post: 40 Years After King, Legacies of the Riot

Chicago Maps Exhibit Closing Soon

A diverse collection of some of the world’s most famous and interesting maps is now on display at the Field Museum of Chicago. For those in Chicago hoping to see it should hurry, as the exhibit closes January 27th. Fortunately for the rest of us, the exhibit features an elaborate online exhibit showcasing some of the cartographic treasures.

Maps featured in the exhibit include a 1300 B.C. town plan, the world’s oldest map drawn to scale (right), the world’s oldest surviving road map, a 1500 map of the road to Rome, Dr. John Snow’s famous 1855 Cholera map of London, as well as beautiful Chinese and Japanese maps.

The exhibit website and impressive 3D virtual gallery contains lots of information on these maps. My only complaint: the images are too small to examine the maps’ finer details.

>> Maps: Finding Our Place in the World
>> Maps Virtual Gallery

AHA Conference Schedule

I’m attending the American Historical Association Conference this weekend, held in the Woodley Park hotels here in Washington, D.C. A list of the sessions I’m thinking of attending is below, and the asterisked ones I’ll be at for sure.

Readers may also be interested to know I’ve also applied to five PhD programs to start next fall. They are programs in history at University of Pennsylvania, University of Maryland, Northwestern and the University of Michigan, and also to the HASTS program at MIT.

Thursday, January 3

3:00 - 5:00 p.m.

Teaching Urban History

Friday, January 4

9:30 - 11:30 a.m.

Historicism and Its Limits

Tech Tools for Historians

The People’s House Roundtable

Managing Everyday Risks in the Twentieth Century: Pedestrians, the AUtomobile, and the Enclosure Movement

* De Facto Segregation: Regional Fallacies, Racial Myths, Historical Practices (M. Lassiter)

2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

Closing the “Passion Gap”

5:30 - 6:30 p.m.

Graduate Students Forum

Saturday, January 5

9:00 - 11:00 a.m.

* Hurricane Katrina and the History of Disaster (L. Vale)

Economic History of the Book in the US

11:30 a.m. - 1:30 p.m.

Learning to Teach: History Education for the 21st Century

2:30 - 4:30 p.m.

* Secure … for Whom? Campus Violence in Historical Perspective, from the Bell Tower to Blacksburg

Sunday, January 6

11:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m.

* Historians Going Public: Taking History to Newspapers, Radio, TV, Film, Public Libraries, Web Sites, and Blogs

19th Century Scots and Your Regional Sewer Authority

At the recent Society of American City and Regional Planning History conference I attended in Portland, Maine, outgoing president historian Greg Hise gave a lecture on the declining interest among academics in regions and regional planning.

In a post for Planetizen’s Interchange blog, I suggested that contrary to the views expressed at the conference there actually is a good deal of regional study and planning taking place in the U.S. I argue the reasons regions are not well studied by the academy include the exploding scale of “metropolitan” areas, the organization of records, intellectual preoccupation with the city, and and yes, the waning influence of regionalist thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes.

A somewhat eccentric figure, Patrick Geddes’ theories about the relationship between cities and their regions was highly influential among early planners. His “valley section,” a version of which appears below, conveys the geographic and economic scope of his theories.

However, his work is generally abstruse. Project Gutenberg’s copy of his 1904 text “Civics: as Applied Sociology” and his illustration below offer a taste to the curious.

Needless to say the profession has gained a much richer perspective by moving beyond such early thinkers, however the insistence on a regional scope has been diluted.

Read more or offer your own thoughts on my Planetizen post: “Whither the Region? Good Question.”

Upcoming Conferences

I am planning to attend the following upcoming conferences:

Society for City and Regional Planning History Conference
October 25-28 - Portland, Maine ($150 for students)

Washington, D.C. Historical Studies Conference
Nov. 1-3 - Carnegie Library, Washington, D.C. (free)

American Historical Association Annual Meeting
Jan. 3-6, 2008 - Woodley Park, Washington, D.C. ($75 for students)

Do You Know UNESCO?

Quick, can you name the 20 sites in the United States designated by the United Nations as World Heritage Sites?

If you are like me, the answer is probably no. On my trip to South Africa, I was struck by how proud that country is of its 8 sites, which includes Robben Island and the Cape Floral Region, both seen here. Since 1972, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has sought to identify, protect, and preserve natural and cultural sites around the world of “outstanding value to humanity.” The list currently contains 660 cultural, 166 natural and 25 mixed properties in 141 countries. (The UNESCO website is also quite good, with an interactive map and RSS feeds)

For the record, here’s the U.S. sites that made the list, along with the year of their addition.

Cultural: La Fortaleza and San Juan National Historic Site in Puerto Rico (1983), Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site (1982), Chaco Culture (1987), Independence Hall (1979), Mesa Verde National Park (1978), Monticello and the University of Virginia in Charlottesville (1987), Pueblo de Taos (1992), Statue of Liberty (1984)

Natural: Carlsbad Caverns National Park (1995), Everglades National Park (1979), Grand Canyon National Park (1979), Great Smoky Mountains National Park (1983), Hawaii Volcanoes National Park (1987), Kluane / Wrangell-St Elias / Glacier Bay / Tatshenshini-Alsek (1979), Mammoth Cave National Park (1981), Olympic National Park (1981), Redwood National and State Parks (1980), Waterton Glacier International Peace Park (1995), Yellowstone National Park (1978), Yosemite National Park (1984)

Americans may be more familiar with the National Park Service’s roughly 2,400 National Historic Landmarks, or the much larger National Register of Historic Places, which contains 96,373 entries and counting.

> UNESCO World Heritage List
> U.S. National Register of Historic Places

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