Neighborhood Planning: The Birth of Contemporary Community Development
The dominant paradigm in the early planning movement reflected a sincere belief that the physical environment could (1) change/affect individual attitudes, behavior and values to reflect desired social ends and (2) that economic growth and community prosperity could be achieved through the provision or modernization of the physical structures, infrastructure and land use patterns of urban areas. The emphasis, obviously, was upon the built environment of a city.
As time passed, some Progressive reformers, notably those social reformers whose concerns principally were for the individuals, the immigrants, the victims of mental health disease, and the poverty-stricken. They were ultimately more interested and concerned with “people”. In the early years of the social reform movement, such social reformers could accept that change in the physical structures, away from the tenement, and establishment of mental health facilities in park-like environments, were wonderful solutions to the misery of individuals. As time elapsed, however, the link between individuals, the people, and fixation upon the built environment became more obscure and even tenuous. By the middle 1920’s and 1930’s, while many housing advocates advocated slum clearance and public housing, other social reform types openly questioned where the individual, the residents of these structures, fit into the picture. Were they largely being forgotten? Had planning become too rational? Too bureaucratic? Too aligned with “business” interests and profit?
Perhaps the first obvious manifestation with this unease of social reformers, mainstream housing planners and City Beautiful advocates jelled around planning for neighborhoods. A leader in this neighborhood planning sector was Clarence Arthur Perry; Perry was deeply involved in the earlier period with the Forest Hills Gardens project (developed in 1909 and with the support of the Russell Sage Foundation). Satisfied that Forest Hills preserved the balance between the physical and the social (individual), Perry then, as an employee of Russell Sage, moved into the community center–recreation movement[1] Perry’s 1910 book, Wider Use of the School Plan became the movement’s bible and it was supplemented by many additional pamphlets and monographs over the years.
Perry himself described the community center movement as “but an extension of the settlement movement”[2] and perceived neighborhoods and neighborhood facilities as the link between individuals-residents, their overall well-being, and an effective democracy.[3]
In the more fluid period of their history, before planners attempted to establish as separate discipline, social and recreation workers were active participants in planning circles, thereby interjecting many of their special concerns into planning proposals. The neighborhood approach to those civic concerns can be traced to a 1907 St Louis plan. While other cities, following the inspiration of the 1893 Columbian Exposition, were proposing centralized civic centers as part of their efforts to promote the city beautiful, the Civic League of St Louis suggested formation of a half-a-dozen civic centers in various parts of the city that could combine semi-public and private facilities around a common center.[4]
At that time, the notion that “physical changes in the urban fabric … could improve social life and enhance citizenship”. These links were supported by a 1909 work by Charles Horton Cooley, Social Organization, in which he argued that the family, the play group, and the neighborhood or community group of elders were the three most important factors in the socialization process–he saw the neighborhood as the nursery for what he called the primary ideals, such as loyalty, truth, service and kindness”.[5] For these early neighborhood activists and planners, the neighborhood, if planned correctly, could recreate in urban America the small town and the virtues associated with small town living. In 1924 Perry wrote that a planned neighborhood
with its physical demarcation, its planned recreational facilities, its accessible shopping centers, and it’s convenient circulatory system … would furnish the kind of environment where vigorous health, a rich social life, civic efficiency, and a progressive community consciousness would spontaneously develop and permanently flourish.[6]
How do these social reforms tie into economic development? In the minds of these social reformers it worked this way: for example a park and recreational system in Birmingham Alabama in 1911 was defended by its planner, the noted Charles Mulford Robinson in the following way:
To an increasing degree, the better class of labor chooses its abode, and chooses the city where it secures the most for a given wage. Undoubtedly also opportunities for wholesome recreation increase the efficiency of labor and its contentment. When the offices of the National Cash Register Company, a few years ago were asking a city in which to locate anew their plant, one of the first questions asked was regarding the park acreage, its accessibility and the opportunity for recreation.[7]
The positions advocated by these neighborhood planners dovetailed nicely with the prescriptions and perspective of the early Chicago School of Sociology represented by the work of Robert Park, Burgess and McKenzie[8]. The school of thought was built around its conception of the city as an ecosystem that evolved in a Darwinian-like manner (urban ecological approach). As such competition, between social groups, over physical space led to the development of distinctive geographies (an example would be a neighborhood) populated by individuals associated with the social (usually ethnic and racial) groups. As would be expected, class and income would enter into the competition and the competition would result in a hierarchy of neighborhoods and this hierarchy was expressed in rental and housing prices. Age of housing would normally become associated with the low end of housing values and prices and naturally the least wealthy would be “filtered” into the oldest housing and the wealthy into the newest.
Based on this an approach to housing and neighborhoods, called neighborhood succession, was developed in which the addition of new housing, destruction of older housing and/or the introduction of additional social, ethnic and racial groups would launch a population flow from one neighborhood to the next–creating a new hierarchy of neighborhoods. As such neighborhoods and their resident population would “evolve” in a pattern of neighborhood succession over time and distance. The first Chicago school fell out of academic favor long ago, but it persists in the various real estate professions to the present day. Variations of this Chicago school theme were used to explain suburbanization[9] as well as central city evolution. Contemporary economic developers would be wise to keep this approach in the back of their mind in that, while exceptions to their approach can occur (gentrification, for instance), many current neighborhoods do superficially, at least, follow the outlines of this now very aged model.
During the 1930’s, as planners and housing advocates moved closer to slum clearance and housing projects–hoping at the time to integrate these concepts into New Deal housing legislation (Wagner Act, for instance)–some social reform advocates abandoned the neighborhood concept as “obsolete” (Jesse Steiner, President of National Community Center Association). These revisionists argued that neighborhoods to achieve the effects described above needed to be, more or less, homogenous–and that Depression era neighborhoods had become too heterogeneous and too dense to achieve the desired effects. Neighborhoods could, and were, becoming “pseudo-neighborhoods”. The issue of homogeneity or diversity of residents would eventually be resolved by new conceptions of neighborhood based more on their replication of American diversity at the neighborhood level. Another issue, whether blight was a cancer which had to be completely removed, or instead be incrementally removed in stages–through substantial rehabilitation and housing code enforcement divided neighborhood level advocates and it would not be resolved until the 1950’s.
These ruptures in the original neighborhood planning and Chicago school models coincided with the emergence of the “business-Progressive” approach to housing and slum clearance. The business progressive model was most concerned with the effects of the Depression on neighborhoods of the central city and with the prospect of increasing suburbanization throughout the pre-World War II period. The realities of the Great Migration were now very evident in the form of physical-structural blight, the deterioration and insufficient supply of housing and the decay and non-competiveness of inner city neighborhoods and which made such entities uncompetitive with new suburban developments.
From hindsight we can now trace the gradual victory of the business-Progressives first in the years leading up to the Second World War, through the Second World War, and climaxing in its immediate aftermath. In this period, social reformers either joined with housing planners and moved toward public housing and slum clearance or were pretty much shoved aside. Some like Mary Simkhovitch retained their sympathy for and commitment to settlement house style neighborhood planning and Daniel Carpenter, Hudson Guild Neighborhood House in New York City stuck to his early concepts into the fifties. In general, however, this approach to community and economic development entered into a very lean period until the end of the fifties.
[1] This movement was very active through World War I, formed a national association, the Community Center Association, and attached itself to the newly emerging discipline of sociology (most associated with the Chicago School of Sociology). The American Sociological Association and the Community Center Association met jointly in 1923. The movement started by urging public schools in neighborhoods to let their playgrounds be used for general neighborhood resident use and then moved onto the construction of community centers which could serve a variety of resident needs including neighborhood meetings, adult education, and recreation. “Every school house [was to be] a community capital, and every community a little democracy” was its public goal. See Howard Gillette, Jr., “The Evolution of Neighborhood Planning: From the Progressive Era to the 1949 Housing Act”, Journal of Urban History, Volume 9, Number 4, August 1983, pp. 421-444.
[2] The settlement movement’s golden years were between 1880 and 1920. The idea was to build “settlement houses” in poor neighborhoods where middle class volunteers would live, share values, alleviate poverty and provide health services, daycare, education and serve as role models to neighborhood residents. By 1913, it was claimed that 413 such settlement houses were in operation in 32 states (H. Husock, “Bring Back the Settlement House”, Public Welfare, Volume 51 (1993), Number 4). Jane Adam’s Hull House is a prominent example and the PBS-BBC “Call the Midwife” is a visual depiction of an English urban facility much like a settlement house. Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers hospitality houses continued this tradition through the Depression years.
[3] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. p.423.
[4] Gillette, Jr. op. cit. pp. 423-424. Henry Wright was intricately involved with this St Louis plan. Charles Mulford Robinson endorsed civic center movement and by the 1920’s the movement was very much included in planning journals and the profession. Boston’s Mary Follett and Robert Woods were also prominent advocates of this movement.
[5] Gillette, Jr. op cit. p. 425.
[6] Quote in Gillette Jr., p.427 from Architectural Record (January, 1932), p. 41.
[7] Cited in Boyer, op. cit., p. 36
[8] There are today two schools of Chicago sociology. We refer, of course, to the first which was in its heyday before the 1940’s. Robert Park, Ernest Burgess and Roderick McKenzie, the City (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1925) is the focal point of our discussion. Edward Banfield and James Q. Wilson’s, City Politics carried that perspective into the sixties and extended it to political science. One can perhaps argue that this approach took a turn with Roger S Ahlbrandt, Jr. and James V. Cunningham, A New Public Policy for Neighborhood Preservation (Praeger, 1079) and with Anthony Downs, Neighborhoods and Urban Development (Washington D.C., Brookings Institution Press, 1981) who plugs in an “arbitrage” model to neighborhoods succession.
[9] See for example, Hanlon and Hanlon and Vicino.
Ron W. Coan 