First, in one sense, conventional planning is alive and well. U.S. cities continue to create and implement comprehensive plans and zoning regulations in the same ways they have since the advent of planning in the 1920s. There have been two notable changes. First, the size and complexity of plans and regulations has increased. As an example, the city of Austin, Texas has identified 67 plans, policies, and regulations adopted in the city since completing their last comprehensive plan in 1978. Secondly, although it’s not commonly recognized as part of planning, the historic preservation movement has had a tremendous impact on planning in urban areas. Preservation regulations are generally modeled on planning and zoning controls. New planning tools such as form-based codes, design review, inclusionary zoning, and other innovations share the same regulatory approach dating back to the 1920s, one that is rooted in the city’s “police powers” to create regulations for the health, safety, and welfare of the population.

Outside of this creeping expansion of proscriptive, regulatory planning, there have been alternative developments. Community development organizations and bottom-up initiatives have introduced new models of participatory planning. They should not be overlooked, but in most places city governments retain their central role in urban development. Although the process of creating plans has changed substantially, elected officials retain the final authority to modify or reject plans and development proposals. In its most advanced forms, the community development movement relies on government resources and permission to achieve their goals. (Cobbling together grants and subsidies, “pushing through” projects, etc)

Planning theorists have proposed several new models for the field, however none have significantly effected professional practice.

• Paul Davidoff’s concept of advocacy planning is still widely discussed and taught. He proposed planners should follow the approach of the legal profession, providing each community with resources to create their own plan. However, the model has many well-known criticisms. Who gets a planner, and how are they paid? How does the government decide which plan will prevail? How should large-scale investment decisions be made?
• John Friedman articulated a philosophy he referred to as “non-Euclidean” planning. He argued planning should be iterative, normative, creative, and based in social learning. Although this certainly describes some of the most innovative examples of planning, it is unclear how it could be followed to reform the role of government. Although containing provocative ideas, it requires further development and integration with a broader theory of governance before it can be readily applied.
• Finally, one of the most influential developments has been the ‘communicative turn’ advocated by a variety of planning theorists. Adopting the theories of Habermas, this group focuses on the work of planning as shaping views and collecting information through processes of dialog. It also forms the theoretical basis for the consensus building approach, where stakeholders are brought together to discuss contested policy issues. In their new book Planning With Complexity, Judith Innes and David Booher provide a comprehensive statement of this philosophy and attempt to integrate it with theories of governance. They advocate for an adaptive, collaborative, distributed, and nonlinear government. Just published earlier this year, it remains to be seen in what ways these ideas can be translated into concrete practices.

I think planning can take two — perhaps contradictory — directions.

First, planning can celebrate the dynamism of the private city. Under this scenario, the field would pull back from detailed plans and regulations, seeking ways to encourage private actors to produce the desired ends. The strategy need not concede to private interests, but would seek to make public benefits predictable, transparent, and simple. It would entail the courage to voluntarily limit what powers planners would exercise. In turn, governments would take an even bolder approach to the framework of urbanization: shaping streets, lots, infrastructure, and markets.

Second, planning could re-assert government’s role in shaping the city through empowerment, not regulation. Experiments in participatory governance and budgeting could point the way towards a future where governments function as miniature development states. In this context, planning would be focused on structuring processes to involve citizens and organizations in governance in new ways, and sparking entrepreneurship and innovation.

After the intellectual fall of the rational-comprehensive model of policy analysis, critics have often held the problem with planning lay with its methods. If planners didn’t posses any special skills or methods, the argument goes, what claim to legitimacy do they have? I argue this collapse of a sphere of professional authority unveiled a deeper, more fundamental crisis: of democratic legitimacy. Both of my “directions” share a critical evaluation of the legitimate power and structure of government. As a field embedded in structures of governance, planning cannot be reformed without a vision for a reformed and revitalized urban democracy.

A trained sociologist, as a newly minted PhD Hampton taught at the MIT Urban Studies and Planning program from 2001 to 2005. Here he developed and launched I-Neighbors, a “social networking service that connects residents of geographic neighborhoods.” The website allows registered users to look up and join “neighborhoods.” Each neighborhood has a variety of default functions: email list, polls, business reviews, photos, documents, events, and a directory of other members. Originally it had a “GovLink” service allowing users to connect to local elected officials, but this has been shut down due to cost.

Although the website could use some design tweaks (fonts are too small, for one), the website is reasonably straightforward to use and clearly carefully thought out. I think I remember reading the site was accompanied with some offline training sessions in the Boston area.

Unfortunately, it’s taken off in relatively few neighborhoods. According to a 2006 paper, as of then 23.6% of website users hadn’t joined any neighborhood, and only 9 neighborhoods have over 50 users. These facts suggest it’s either not what they’re looking for, too complicated, or have another usability issue. When users look up a zip code, if another user has not created a neighborhood the systems says there “are currently no i-Neighborhoods in your area” asking, in smaller letters, if they want to create one. Creating new neighborhoods is simple enough, but I bet pre-creating any searched for neighborhood would get more users engaged in the system.

Individually, the tools are useful, and in fact sites have thrived performing almost all individually:

• Business reviews – Yelp
• Geocoded Photos – Flickr
• Neighborhood listservs – Yahoo, Google, private lists
• Neighborhood news – Variety of local news, blogs, neighborhood (offline) newsletters.

Why isn’t there greater use of these functions on the website? In marketing parlance, the ‘unique value proposition’ of social networking websites, is the content and the people, not the functionality. Thus in the fickle world of social networking, some have thrived while others have withered according to their relative popularity among users, not necessarily the sophistication of the functionality. I-Neighbors has struggled to take off in many communities.

Additionally, the content is carefully organized into neighborhood-specific stovepipes. This reduces the potential users able to see, say, the review of a local business. Additionally, urban residents have famously fluid conceptions of neighborhoods, suggesting perhaps the content should be organized in a less rigid way. Although functioning in some ways like a social networking websites, users don’t select which friends they will allow to see their profiles, instead all members of the neighborhood are thrown in together. Additionally, there’s no search functionality for users and users can only see other people in their networks, not across the system. These barriers to finding other people thwart one potential source of interest in the system.

A related conundrum for academic innovators is although they may be able to imagine possible new tools, they can rarely keep pace with the private sector in terms of usability, design, and functionality. However, the market may not produce the websites with precisely the sort of arrangement or functionality we’d like to see. I give Prof. Hampton credit for developing such a sophisticated tool, but it will have trouble to keep pace with private sector websites with dedicated staff making continual improvement.s

One approach to the success of a myriad of highly specialized sites for specific geographically specific information is the one taken by EveryBlock, which aggregates private and government data for every block (or zip code), including Yelp! reviews, geotagged Flickr photos, restaurant inspections, blog posts and crime reports.

A Success Story

One neighborhood, profiled in this academic paper, was particularly successful, resulting in a very vibrant email list. What can we learn from this case? This neighborhood was already well organized offline, is a physically distinct community with an association that adopted I-Neighbors as a platform for online collaboration. The group requires members to use their real names (something the e-democracy.org folks believe in). As an aside, the use of the site also shows the direct connection between neighborhood media to planning and policy, a early hot topics was a redevelopment plans, how the neighborhood corporation was investing revenue in the neighborhood.

This successful neighborhood benefited from several very active members. Although hyperactive participants can be a liability, overwhelming visitors or dominating conversations, a core of enthusiastic participants can benefit a forum because they create a public good – information and opinion – that others can read or react to. This relates to Noor Ali-Hasan’s blog study that argued active conversation starting blogs play an important role in a larger ecosystem of online communication.

Closing Questions

Considering the lessons this website provides, two questions arise. First, what is new? What new information was communicated, new relationships developed, or most importantly new outcomes resulted in the real world? It’s not clear how you could prove something like this, but it is the question of central importance evaluating the significance of a new community-building tool. The second but related question, how did the online intervention change existing relationships and arrangements? Did it reinforce them, alter them in another way? Answering these questions rigorously — about I-Neighbors or any other community building website — will help us understand the true potential for the Internet to affect local communities.

> I-Neighbors.org

“While America is more metropolitan than ever,” point out several scholars with the Brookings Institution in a recent article, “As a nation, we remain fixed in old arrangements, established decades ago and kept in place by bureaucratic inertia and entrenched political interests.” This results in a miss-allocation of resources and a lack of strategic vision for metropolitan development. Their article contains a few concrete suggestions. On the topic of infrastructure, they adopt a couple ideas percolating in Washington I’ve written about before – an infrastructure bank for financing and an independent commission to replace earmarks with national planning:

… Congress should create a permanent, independent commission�the Strategic Transportation Investments Commission (STIC)�to set a unified priority map for U.S. transportation and use its work to inform the activities of a new National Infrastructure Bank (NIB).

This approach differs significantly from our current strategy, which puts money and decision-making power into the hands of 50 state departments of transportation and hopes that the sum of all these decisions will yield a strong national system.

The article also urges greater metropolitan governance and regional cooperation, including additional funds and powers for metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), and applying regional policies to existing funding programs.

Such proposals are reasonable and necessary, but longtime observers may remember older arguments, including David Rusk’s “Cities Without Suburbs” from the early 90s, an even older “regionalization” debates and proposals dating back to the birth of suburbia in the 1940s and 50s. Has America ever had national planning to shape metropolitan development?

National Planning in America

“The great paradox of national planning,” muses historian Robert Fishman, “is that Americans have practiced it so successfully while continually claiming it doesn�t exist.” In his provocative article “1808 – 1908 – 2008 – National Planning for America” Fishman describes three episodes of national planning.

1808 was the year of Albert Gallatin’s Report on Roads and Canals, a Federal government report that Fishman argues remains “a model of long-term strategic thinking tied to national policy.” The plan clearly identified a set of key infrastructure investments for the Federal government, and related these investments to what were perhaps the two most important policy goals – distributing vast western lands to small farmers, and provide for the transportation links to connect these hinterlands with the east. Written before the railroad, the plan proposed a bold system of highways and canals. Although implementation took nearly a hundred years, many of these connections were ultimately built by the turn of the century.

1908 stands for the next major phase in national policy. The success of the earlier policies to use canals and railroads to link agriculture with urban markets precipitated the problems troubling Theodore Roosevelt. The year marked a Conference of the Governors of the United States where environmental issues were discussed, along with the “unbalanced transportation system dominated by railroad monopolies” that resulted in “economic inefficiency and regional imbalance.” To Fishman, “The interstates completed the regional restructuring that was implicit in the 1908 vision, helping to shift population from the rail-dependent cities of the East and Midwest to Sunbelt regions where systems of federally-financed infrastructure (water, electricity, roads, ports, housing) made possible the explosive growth that has re-shaped this country over the last sixty years.”

Where does that leave us today, at the time of the article in 2008?

As we reach the hundred-year marks for both these plans, there is ample evidence that, as in 1908, we have now reached the point where the planning vision that had shaped the nation for the previous century is exhausted and even counter-productive. The 1908 Conservation/National Development vision has done its work in saving millions of acres of threatened forests and farmlands and bringing hope and prosperity to once-neglected and poverty-stricken regions of the South and West that are now leaders in growth and prosperity. But the inherent contradiction between the conservation and national development aspects of the plan are now inescapable. Ironically, a plan based on an ideal of conservation helped to create a decentralized nation whose basic patterns of intensive land, energy and water consumption are now unsustainable. Moreover, the vision of national equity and regional regeneration inherent in the plan has been lost as some favored cities and regions forge ahead while others lag.

New Paradigm Emerging?

One irony is that the mode chosen to break the railroad monopolies in the 20th Century — highways — is now a major source of environmental harm, cause of undesired forms of metropolitan growth, and catalyst of the decline of passenger rail. This brings us to the one major exception to the stimulus bill’s use of conventional funding mechanisms: high speed rail. The bill earmarked $8 billion for development of high speed rail, separate from Amtrak. Qualifying projects must be along one of the several identified national corridors. Like Gallatin’s plan, embedded in this map of the corridors is a vision for future urban growth. Instead of re-creating a nationwide network such as we had at the turn of the century, the system features six discontinuous networks. Yes, it’s primarily a regional and metropolitan investment, not a national one, and a plan sure to bolster the economies of our largest metropolitan areas.

Will the next transportation bill (whether called CLEAN-TEA or any other name) usher in a new era of national and metropolitan planning? Perhaps. Still awaiting reform is the constallation of other Federal programs related to urban development, ostensibly coordinated by Obama’s much-discussed Office of Urban Affairs. Given other priorities, the long list of policies in that area remains largely untouched. Only time will tell which reforms and proposals will take root in this new era of national planning.

The book features an account of the wrangling with local officials over the subdivision’s site plan, trade-offs on architectural design, technical challenge of providing utilities in a rural area, and the ever-present developer’s bottom line. This rich detail makes it a particularly good introduction to the topic of land development, and it’s little wonder the author is one of the keynote speakers at the American Planning Association conference in Minneapolis this spring. I’ll leave further description of the book to the many reviews that have already been published, whether by the Where Blog, Business Week, or The New York Times.

Despite the good things about it, I have three main concerns about the conclusions it draws about American urbanism in the 21st Century.

First, the book falls victim to selection bias, presenting a distorted view of the American city and traditional neighborhood design. Although Rybczynski describes New Daleville as “neotraditional” and takes great pains to draw links with well known New Urbanist communities like Seaside, Florida or the Kentlands, Maryland, his subdivision shares little with these famous places. Miles from retail amenities, jobs, water and sewer infrastructure, and any of the myriad of other practical ingredients to actual traditional communities, New Daleville is nothing more than a glorified rural subdivision. It’s much-ballyhooed density (the plan was more dense that other area subdivisions) isn’t very impressive either — 125 homes on 90 acres. Although the developer has proven traditional neighborhood development credentials, this is not the project that embodies them. Furthermore, while I appreciate Rybczynski’s impulse to move beyond the over-studied urban core, he’s far overshot his mark. Located in a rural area far from any city, New Daleville is not characteristic of most residential development.

View Larger Map

Second, Rybczynski omits the powerful role of public policy in shaping the form of American cities. He claims the preponderance of single family homes in America reveal a cultural preference, citing neighborhoods with single-family homes around the world and a cultural tradition traced back to Britain and the low countries in Europe. While I agree that culture has played a role, our policies have shaped urban development in powerful ways. The Interstate Highway System (which at one time meant the federal government funded 90% of state’s cost of new interstate highways) made low-density suburbs an option for urban workers. The federal government single-handedly created the “plain vanilla” 30-year fixed rate mortgage. Before FHA subsidies enforced the type, commercial home mortgages required substantial down payments and short payback periods. The federal government also created the secondary market for mortgages, adding a further incentive for home ownership to the substantial tax benefits. An anecdote in Rybczynski’s chapter on Levittown illustrates this precise issue:

“… at the urging of local government officials, the Levitts offered a two-bedroom rental unit for sixty-five dollars a month. Since the monthly mortgage payment on a Levittowner was sixty dollars, there were few takers, and the so-called Budgeteer was soon discontinued.” (165)

He omits the reason the mortgage was cheaper: FHA insurance. I don’t intend to resolve the culture/policy chicken and egg problem, but a quick international comparison can show how policy can influence the form of housing. The U.S., Britain, and Australia are all relatively wealthy countries sharing historical and cultural ties. As we would expect, they share similar homeownership rates (around 66-69%). However, the profile of their housing stock is quite different: a whopping 31% of housing units in Britain are row homes or semi-detached units, compared to just 5.6% in the U.S. On the other hand, Australia outstrips the home-loving U.S. in its popularity of single-family homes. And the percentage of Americans living in multifamily buildings is a healthy 26.3%, so clearly single-family homes aren’t the full story. Here’s the full table:

These differences are the result of a range of forces: approaches to public housing, transportation policy, geography, environmental protection, and yes, culture.

Lastly, the location of his project means the only form of transportation is the automobile. Although it is true the car is king for most American transportation, the absence of any choice whatsoever is artificial. The American Public Transit Administration estimates only 20% of the country are without some form of public transit service. New Daleville’s residents fall into this minority.

The irony is that I think Rybczynski knows all this, describing in chapter nine in detail why many wouldn’t consider New Daleville “smart growth,” concluding “for hardcore, transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocates of smart growth, New Daleville is merely more of the same, what they don’t want.” (89) He immediately follows this with a description of how the form of the neighborhood will encourage socialization, reduce stormwater runoff, encourage walking, protect open space, and include shared play areas and public space. These attributes, he writes, “will be small reminders to the people living there that they are not only private homeowners but also members of a community. That will be smarter growth indeed.”

In his 1987 book, historian Robert Fishman described suburbia as “bourgeois utopias,” arguing their cultural origins lay with evangelical Christian men in 19th century London who sought to combine proximity to the city’s jobs with an idyllic, urban residential life free of urban vice. Fishman argues the modern movement of jobs and industry to the periphery has meant the end of true suburbs under his definition. Perhaps Last Harvest is part of the suburban tradition: holding up an idealized, rural, economically unsustainable lifestyle as the best way to live, even if the reality of American cities tells a more complex story.

Fishman observes, “the bourgeois utopia rested on a frighteningly unstable economic base. The bourgeois utopia depended for its survival on market forces that even the bourgeoisie could not control.” It is on this note that emeritus urban planning professor David R. Godschalk closes his generally positive review of Last Harvest in last October’s Urban Land:

It is ironic that Rybczynski, with his magisterial grasp of American development history, did not anticipate fully the impact of the current development downturn. Perhaps the five years that he devoted to studying the project blinded him to the cruel force of the boom-and-bust cycle, especially on vulnerable rural subdivisions remote from an urban real estate market. Today, according to Web and news reports, Ryan Homes is offering a cash-back bonus and up to 60 percent off chosen options, and New Daleville is only about half built out with prices halved to get homes off the market.

In the end, these criticisms aside, Last Harvest opens up the largely mysterious process of land development to a popular audience, laying bare the complex factors that produce urban space. By provoking a dialogue and explaining the contrasting viewpoints of the story’s different actors, Rybczynski does urbanists a service and elevates the conversation around residential development. If it provokes an urban planner to build on the work started by Christopher Leinberger in The Option of Urbanism and pen an equally complex and compelling accessible book in reply, so much the better. That at least is the view of this, “transit-first, rebuild-the-center-city, regional planning advocate of smart growth.”

> Amazon.com: Last Harvest: How a Cornfield Became New Daleville

A tiny, twisting staircase led up one floor to another tiny room and bathroom, and the staircase led up again to a bedroom. Instead of conveying claustrophobia, the house exuded a comfortable, almost nautical sensation of functional smallness. The style was known as a “trinity house,” Emily explained, a uniquely Philadelphia invention. My interest piqued, I turned to the web and library for more information on these unique structures. My search eventually led to one of the city’s most famous residents, Benjamin Franklin, and offered a window into the city’s early history. Many trinity houses turned up for sale or rent on Craigslist, often along with photos of their interiors. A discussion forum operated by a local blog describes residents moving beds in through second story windows, and the unique quirks of living in such small homes.

Few websites could describe their origins, number, or typical form. One real estate website described the type as some of the city�s oldest houses, generally over 100 years old, cozy, and located off shared courtyards. A Frommer�s webpage describing the architecture one might encounter during a walking tour provides just one short sentence, contrasting them with their larger neighbors, �The less wealthy lived in �trinity� houses — one room on each of three floors, named for faith, hope, and charity.� However, other sources contradicted the name�s origin. The introduction to a collection of stories about the 19th century working class neighborhood Flatiron reports residents of the Catholic section called their 14-foot-wide homes “Father, Son and Holy Ghost houses” for their three-room makeup.(1)

Early examples of the buildings dating from the 18th century have been preserved in a National Historic Landmark called Elfreth�s Alley. A nonprofit educational organization sponsors tours of the alley and boast it�s the oldest continuously inhabited neighborhood in America. While the official website doesn�t use the term, another unofficial website describes the architecture as Georgian and �trinity.�

A 1986 Philadelphia Magazine article by Stephen Fried points out the homes are precisely what city founder William Penn hoped to avoid when he founded a city he envisioned would be a “greene Country Towne” filled with homes set amid gardens. The article describes the homes usual form, reporting they are “much in demand” among the well-to-do, and that sometimes several are combined to form “quadities” or “quantities.” For an example of the form, the author suggests Elfreth�s Alley, or the 1900 block of Waverly Street. The author also describes a typical layout: a kitchen in the basement, and the homes often had two front entrances, one leading up to the living room and another providing access to the basement.(2)

An essay on housing for the poor provides additional insight into the origin and early history of the homes. The author describes how property speculators built long rows of identical row homes, and even how the city took possession of small alleyways and subdivided them. The process of what he calls back-alley dwellings is described:

The back-alley dwellings represented a particularly difficult problem. They took several forms. Owners of houses fronting on main streets might simply add on buildings in the rear to the end of the lot, creating a dark, unpaved, unsewered alley. A more famous Philadelphia rear-dwelling was the band-box, or “father, son, holy ghost” house. These houses rarely fronted the streets, but instead were built in the back yards and formed little courts, which were often invisible from the street. Of three, or less frequently two, stories, they contained only one room per floor, with an unenclosed stairway leading from one floor to another. They could be suitable for one small family, but they were unfit for the poor who often crowded into them. These real courts multiplied as the city’s original large lots were subdivided. They were probably built both for speculation and for servants’ quarters. Of great significance is the fact that they were rear dwellings, often obscured from the view of passers-by.(3)

This description is accompanied in the text by a diagram from W. E. B. DuBois�s text The Philadelphia Negro. However, a simple aerial photograph of the trinities above can illustrate the ingenuity of Philadelphia’s alley developers:

Sutherland describes how these houses afford home ownership to the city�s ethnic communities and avoid the problems of high-density tenements like in New York. However, the overcrowding and substandard sanitation caused high rates of typhoid and tuberculosis. His analysis of tenant owners reveals they generally did not hold extensive properties, and often lived in the building itself or nearby.

Sam Bass Warner�s classic account of Philadelphia�s growth suggests one of the city�s most famous residents was responsible for several trinity homes.

To accommodate as many families in so little space some of the blocks for the ward had been cut by alleys so that little houses might be crowded onto the back lots of the houses facing the main streets. Strawberry Alley and Elbow Lane cut through the first block, Petty�s alley divided the third block, and Benjamin Franklin had begun the alley process with his house lot off Market Street in the second block of the ward. He had built a row of three houses on Market Street, thereby turning his home yard into an interior lot. � In the early nineteenth century Franklin’s home parcel became Franklin Court, an alley lot which opened up the interior of the block.(4)

Warner reports the tremendous density and low sanitation caused periodic epidemics of yellow fever, typhoid, small pox, and dysentery. He finds the 1774 census reported 1,401 people and 337 dwellings in the city�s middle ward, composed in turn of five developed block of “slightly less than five acres of land.” Erring on the generous side to assume the ward was composed of 25 acres of developed land would yield the density of 13.5 dwelling units per acre (more than 55 people per acre), considered a high density today, let alone in an era without modern sanitation. He reports that street railways opened up “cast tracts of cheap suburban land and thereby destroyed the market for new alley construction.” Noting many of the old alleys remained standing for years “giving discomfort to Philadelphia�s poor for many generations.”

It is no small irony that the extremely dense urban fabric that constituted an urban problem in the 18th century is precisely the antidote to 21st century ones: sprawl, housing un-affordability, and auto dependence. Now may be the right time to learn from Philadelphia’s trinities, to study their dimensions and construction, as we seek to learn how to build more humane, resource-efficient urban homes and neighborhoods.

> See also my post on “An Architectural Aesthetic of Efficiency,” about how the “forced austerity” of the third world can result in a fundamental re-evaluation of residential architecture

(1) Gerard, Shields. Flatiron. Hilliard & Harris Publishers: 2006.
(2) Fried, Stephen. Philadelphia Magazine. April 1986. “The Trinity House � Last Thing Founding Father Thought He�d Be Remembered For.”
(3) Sutherland, John F. “Housing for the Poor in the City of Homes: Philadelphia at the Turn of the Century.” Chapter 9 in The Peoples of Philadelphia: A History of Ethnic Groups and Lower-Class Life, 1790-1940. Allen F. Davis and Mark H. Haller, eds. Philadelphia: Philadelphia University Press, 1998.

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)

After the completion of the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the business leaders who had commissioned and funded the plan formed the Chicago Plan Commission. The commission�s first chair, Charles H. Wacker, retained a former salesman and self-made marketing expert Walter Dwight Moody to craft an ambitious promotion effort to build broad public knowledge and support of the plan. Moody�s first publication for the commission was a ninety-page, hard bounded reference work titled Chicago�s Greatest Issue: An Official Plan, that was sent to over 165,000 Chicago residents, property owners and tenants who paid $25.00 or more in rent. The booklet rebutted critics of the plan and is credited for contributing to support for the first plan bond. Moody also wrote a 137-page textbook, titled Wacker�s Manual of the Plan of Chicago: Municipal Economy, which he convinced city officials to include into the city�s civics curriculum for all 8th grade students. Planning historian Thomas Schlerenth described the text as the first textbook in American city planning.(3)

Moody thought that planning was divided into two parts: first, a technical branch in architecture and engineering that creates plans, and a second “which is promotive, is likewise scientifically professional and could be truthfully termed the dynamic power behind the throne of accomplishment.”(4) Like other progressive urban reformers, Schlerenth argues Moody saw his task as to link planning reform with extensive public information for both adults and children. Moody supplemented the manual with thousands of pamphlets, hundreds of slide presentations to some 175,000 citizens, a documentary movie about the plan, and even talking points distributed to clergymen encouraging them to preach on the virtues of city planning on a designated “Plan of Chicago Sunday.”

The unprecedented publicity was one cause for the implementation of large parts of the plan, and the creation of a city planning legacy relevant even today. Although citizens were not directly involved in the creation of the plan, their votes influenced which recommendations were implemented. The publicity campaign enabled plan advocates to coordinate private decisions and build political support for government actions. The history of the Plan of Chicago demonstrates the “dynamic power” of a good plan well promoted.

Although citizens and civic leaders in dozens of American communities created city plans in the early 20th Century, government�s power to enforce them was limited. Governments had the ability to build public facilities and exercise eminent domain for public uses like roads and government buildings, but they did not posses the legal authority to regulate the development and use of privately owned land through zoning. The landmark 1926 Supreme Court Case Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365, settled the matter, upholding the Village of Euclid�s zoning ordinance as a reasonable extension of the town�s police power. The Court also rejected the Ambler Reality Company�s claim that the zoning violated their right to due process.

Mandating Participation: State Planning and Zoning Acts
In the wake of the case the U.S. Department of Commerce circulated two highly influential model acts for states interested in allowing cities to adopt zoning ordinances, the Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (1926), and the Standard City Planning Enabling Act (1928).(5) Conceived by lawyers, these two model laws were deliberately written in response to the Euclid v. Ambler case. Although the legal language is oriented towards guaranteeing property owners the legal minimum required to satisfy the due process requirements of notice and hearing, the footnotes reveal an earlier, progressive-era belief in the intrinsic need for extensive public involvement.(6)

The Standard Zoning Enabling Act (1926) published by the U.S. Department of Commerce contained language requiring public notice and access to hearings, and encouraged public involvement in a footnote. Before enacting or amending a zoning code in a given community, the model law stipulated “no such regulation, restriction, or boundary shall become effective until after a public hearing in relation thereto, at which parties in interest and citizens shall have an opportunity to be heard.” The law continued to require “At least 15 days� notice of the time and place of such hearing shall be published in an official paper, or a paper of general circulation, in such municipality.” A footnote explains “it was thought wise to require by statute that there be a public hearing � There should be, as a matter of policy, many such hearings.” It also notes specifically that any citizen should be permitted to be heard, not merely property owners.(7) Although mentioning the importance of “many” hearings, the law is designed specifically to meet the legal standard of due process through at least one public hearings and notices. Once the legal authority to plan through zoning was secured through law, public participation shifted from something absolutely required for planning to something to allow and encourage through meetings. The attitude towards public involvement in the zoning enabling act is similar to the position taken by the model act specifically for planning published two years later.

The Comprehensive Planning Enabling Act (1928) provided for the creation of comprehensive planning commissions by state jurisdictions. Before enacting a comprehensive plan, the act requires “the commission shall hold at least one public hearing thereon, notice of the time and place of which shall be given by one publication in a newspaper of general circulation in the municipality and in the official gazette, if any, of the municipality.”(8) A footnote describes a rational for the public hearing that extends beyond the satisfaction of a legal due process requirement, and is worth quoting at length:

The public hearing previous to the adoption of the plan or substantial part thereof has at least two values of importance. One of these is that those who are or may be dissatisfied with the plan, for economic, sentimental, or other reasons, will have the opportunity to present their objections and thus get the satisfaction of having their objections produce amendments which they desire, or at least the feeling that their objections have been given courteous and thorough consideration. The other great value of the public hearing is as an educating force; that is, it draws the public�s attention to the plan, cause some members of the public to examine it, to discuss it, to hear about it, and gets publicity upon the plan and planning. Thus the plan begins its life with some public interest in it and recognition of its importance.

The quote hints at the awareness by planners that participation can have the functional use of not only building consensus (and here, diffusing the most dissatisfied) but also encouraging broad based knowledge necessary for implementation. Like the zoning act, it also requires notice and hearing for subdivision controls also.

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, the approach contained in the laws became widely adopted in the country. Citizen planning and zoning commissions, public newspaper notices, and public meetings became the common tools for allowing involvement in planning processes. After World War II, a newly dynamic economy and new federal funds for urban renewal would highlight the limitations of this restrained approach to planning.

The Housing Act of 1949 made significant funds available to cities to engage in slum clearance programs, and very soon after the passage of the law a host of cities launched significant clearance programs, often in low-income African American neighborhoods. The National Defense and Interstate Highways Act of 1956 provided funds for road construction providing funds to realize highway plans for urban areas, often being planned since the 1920s. In cities throughout the country, civic elites used the machinery of zoning and planning � combined with federal dollars � to forcibly remove low-income and African American communities for urban renewal projects. Despite public hearing requirements, low income communities had little meaningful input in the creation and execution of renewal plans.(9) By the early 1960s, scholarly critics concluded what many had discovered through personal experience: the urban renewal program did not protect the interests of those displaced, and was undemocratic. In his 1964 classic The Federal Bulldozer, Marin Anderson suggested each renewal project should be approved through popular referendum, ironically the very means used to implement parts of the 1909 Chicago Plan.(10) Another critique of urban renewal sarcastically argues that urban renewal must be “shielded from the voters,” observing “the more directly democratic a local urban renewal program is, the more likely is to live from hand-to-mouth,” and that the “City Planning Commission is consulted when appropriate (that is, after the basic decisions have been made)”(11)

Inventing ‘Maximum Feasible Participation’
In large part in response to the history of urban renewal, President Johnson�s War on Poverty invented an important new terminology and approach to participation in urban planning. The 1964 Economic Opportunity Act committed significant federal funds to a variety of efforts to combat poverty in America. It created the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) and over 1,000 Community Action Agencies (CAA) who were eligible to receive funds for a variety of social programs. The Community Action Agencies ranged from community groups, nonprofits, and city agencies, but the law required all be “developed and conducted with the maximum feasible participation of the residents of the area.”

Daniel Patrick Moynihan�s account of the legislation focused on the origins and repercussions of the phrase.(12) Moynihan noted that Robert F. Kennedy was the only administration witness to touch on the subject during legislative hearings, describing the clause as providing the poor with a “real voice in their institutions.”(13) His book includes a description of the voluntary guide created by federal administrators describing how community action programs could satisfy the maximum feasible participation requirement.

“The requirement of resident participation,” the Guide continues, “applies to all stages of a community action program, from its inception on.” Participation must be “meaningful” and “effective.” It should be brought about by “traditional democratic approaches and techniques such as group forums and discussions, nominations, and balloting.” It should be stimulated by “grass-roots involvement” committees; by “block elections, petitions and referendums”; by “newsletters to neighborhood leaders and potential leaders”; by “promotional techniques, including use of films, literature, and mobile units operating from information centers.” Further, residents should be given “meaningful opportunities � either as individuals or in groups, to protest or to propose additions to or changes in the ways in which a community action program is being planned or undertaken.”(14)

However, for the first two years of the program the precise meaning of “maximum feasible participation” was left undefined, with OEO offering little specific guidance other than that the CAA board should contain some representatives of the poor. Privately, federal administrators arbitrarily suggested one-third of the governing body an appropriate number. The issue of how the poor would be represented was intensely debated in dozens of cities, often distracting from the mission to tackle poverty. In 1966, the U.S. Congress stipulated democratically selected representatives of the poor comprise one-third of the boards, and in 1967 the Green Amendment allowed local elected officials to designate the official CAA for their area.(15)

The Great Society experience with maximum feasible participation had several important lasting effects. First, it established the principle that government planners should proactively ensure the involvement of citizens of low-income communities. Second, despite the professional consensus that involving low-income communities improved planning, it highlighted the lack of methods and techniques to translate the abstract goal of “participation” into reality. The inability of the OEO to translate the legislative requirement into meaningful techniques forced the CAA boards to debate the issue themselves. Beginning in the 1960s, the planning profession increasingly turned to the problem of defining participation and describing what it would mean in practical terms, described in the following section. Lastly, while having a profound intellectual impact in the profession, the legal requirement only ever applied to a shrinking slice of funds for social programs. Other planning processes � such as city plan commissions and zoning � were unaffected by the War on Poverty�s participation requirements.

The story continues in Part 3: Public Participation Theory

View my Citizen Participation and the Internet Index

1) Carl Smith, “The Plan of Chicago,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 2005), (accessed 15 April 2008).
2) Thomas J. Schlerenth, “Burnham�s Plan and Moody�s Manual: City Planning as Progressive Reform,” Journal of the American Planning Association 47, 1 (1983), 70-82.
3) Ibid., 72.
4) Ibid., 70-82.
5) U.S. Department of Commerce Standard Enabling Acts, (accessed 9 January 2008).
6) Bradford J. White and Paul W. Edmondson, Procedural Due Process in Plain English: A Guide for Preservation Commissions (Washington, D.C.: National Trust for Historic Preservation, 2001).
7) U.S. Department of Commerce, 6-7
8 ) Comprehensive Plan Enabling Act 1928, 12.
9) For a description of the experience of urban renewal in Detroit, see Thomas Sugrue, Origins of the Urban Crisis (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996).
10) Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer, (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1964, McGraw-Hill Paperback edition, 1967), 225.
11) Scott Greer, Urban Renewal and American Cities: The Dilemma of Democratic Intervention, (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1965), 89-91.
12) Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding: community action in the war on poverty, (New York: Free Press, 1969), 87. It should be noted the book did not receive positive reception, the New York Times described it as a “desultory after-dinner conversation, in which all sharpness and bite of analysis have dissolved in self- contradiction, [and] vague ellipses �” from Adam Walinsky, “Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding,” New York Times, 2 February 1969.
13) Moynihan, 91.
14) Moynihan, 97-98.
15) Lillian B. Rubin, “Maximum Feasible Participation: The Origins, Implications, and Present Status,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 385, Evaluating the War on Poverty. (Sep., 1969), 24.

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

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

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

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.”