City Beautiful the Elder: the City Practical
Other cities implemented City Beautiful CBD projects over the next few years, including Detroit, Pittsburgh and, as mentioned, Philadelphia. Cities out West and in the South (Dallas) attempted it, with less success, as well (to be discussed in later chapters). Prestigious college’s, such as Johns Hopkins (Baltimore), Rice (Houston), Southern Methodist (Dallas), California Institute of Technology (Los Angeles) and the University of Colorado (Denver) designed their campus around city beautiful principles. Train stations, built in imitation of Union Station, were constructed in New York, Kansas City, Dallas and Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, [1] The City Beautiful Movement was in its heyday during the first decade of the twentieth century, but by the end of the decade the pushback was hard. It really started in 1909 at the First National Conference on City Planning. By the middle of the second decade it was increasingly apparent that America was likely to join into the European War. The heyday of the City Practical, or for some the City Functional and for others, the City Efficient was the 1920’s—but the shift from one to the other played out in the second decade.
Wrap Up and Segue way
Lest the reader let an important elements of the City Beautiful slip by “hidden in plain sight”, as it were. The City Beautiful was yet another early expression of the infamous herd-like, copy-cat imitation that, over the next hundred years, will play out as typical of innovation diffusion in the history of economic development. In an age of change, technology, innovation and disruption, the felt-need was for order, security, bringing together of diverse groups, bridging divisions into a community in which one could take pride, pledge one’s loyalty, and secure an identity. Lost, also, in plain sight is that the plans, parks, wide tree-line boulevards and civic centers of the City Beautiful were characteristic of an Age and Big Cities that were enjoying huge population increases, huge leaps in standards and quality of living and lifestyle (despite the massive inequalities that also existed), and pure unheard of economic growth—the industry-sector profit life cycle was in its booming second stage. The City Beautiful is what the politics of growth look like—and how they shape the goals and programs of economic development.
The economic development legacy left at the end of the Gilded Age was a number of separate, but interrelated strategy/policy arenas. Core economic development centered in chambers and chamber-style economic development. Another arena, city-building, was, at root a stage of a city’s development which required intensive economic development strategies and charismatic leadership. The Gilded Age policy anarchy set up a number of policy areas (streets, transportation, water-related distribution, and harbors) loosely centered in municipal government boards and commissions, and focused on government financed and administered infrastructure projects—which by the Progressive Age had been merged into a mega Public Works Department. Except for chamber-style economic development (and during the course of the Progressive Age, port authorities) economic development lacked a perceived integrity or professional cohesion. Rather economic development tagged along with each of these “swirls” of policy, whirlpools, a later public policy commentator would call them. The Parks and Boulevard Movement was another such policy area, and to accomplish its ends, that Movement had defined itself during the first phase of the City Beautiful as serving, in significant measure, economic development purposes with tools that would be core to future economic development strategies. So as it had with any number of policy swirls, economic development tagged along with the City Beautiful.
After 1900, certainly by 1910, it became evident“ City Beautiful” had degenerated into a mere label that included many swirls of Progressive Age trends, concerns, professions, and organizations. Floating on that Progressivist tide, these overlapping, but autonomous swirls, without premeditation or even reflection, redefined “beautiful” and focused instead on “city”. City Beautiful separated from the Parks and Boulevard Movement and gravitated toward several Progressivist swirls. Economic development, itself an ill-perceived nexus of unconnected swirls of autonomous activities, flirted on the edges of these swirls, but during the City Beautiful era was pulled ever more deeply into one: planning.
Plans/Codes, Zoning, and Planned Communities/Neighborhoods pushed aside parks/boulevards. Planning called for recreation to be located in dense, urban neighborhoods, and promoted satellite suburbs composed of building-clusters in single-function districts that could better satisfy and affect human wants and behavior. Architectural design and a grouped assemblage of illustrious buildings such as libraries, post offices, city halls, community centers, museums and cultural palaces achieved a scale supposedly sufficient to inspire the human spirit to not only overcome the pathologies of the industrial city, but impart on that spirit a civic pride and loyalty that this central business, cultural and government district was the capital of the metropolitan area.
In this atmosphere, zoning seemed both logical and necessary to order the city and to maintain the integrity, property values and economic vitality of the specialized districts. In 1907[2], Hartford Connecticut established the first Planning Commission in the nation. Within a decade, virtually every city had one. By the 1920’s these planning departments were developing metropolitan plans for their regions. The city planning department took its place in the governmental bureaucracy, a partner with the chamber in municipal economic development. Olmsted Jr. in1914, with funds from the Russell Sage Foundation, published Carrying Out the City Plan advocated planning commissions and long-range comprehensive plans and so planning spread and planning commissions were established throughout the nation, in cities of all sizes. In 1926, Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co provided the Supreme Court’s imprimatur to zone without compensation to private owners. The great leap forward for the City Beautiful, to be expected, was led by our ‘make big plans” Daniel Burnham in 1909.
The relationship of City Efficient, City Beautiful, the rise of planning, and even scientific management to contemporary economic development policy-making seems relatively straightforward and foundational. The story behind the formulation of the community development approach to economic development, which will be discussed in the following pages, is more awkward and somewhat convoluted. Awareness that the “planned communities” approach, an important variant of the city-building strategy which emerged from the early twentieth century Progressive Movement, is largely unknown today. Both community development and planned communities formed into recognizable economic development approaches during these early twentieth century years and in evolutionary variants continued through to the present time. An offshoot of these approaches, neighborhood-based economic development, also crystallized in these early years.
[1] Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis, op. cit. p. 25
[2] Steinberger, op. cit. p. 27
Ron W. Coan 