Charles Mulford Robinson
Taking advantage of Burnham’s City Beautiful “coolness” Charles Mulford. Robinson, a journalist by trade, injected new vitality into the civic improvement movement by linking it in 1899 with the furor created by the Great White City. Robinson’s publication of a three-part series “Improvement in City Life” in the Atlantic Monthly[1], enlarged upon the civic improvement movement by insisting that public buildings and even infrastructure could reflect beauty and that a city hall, a public library or even a tree-lined boulevard and statutes-monuments could achieve civic improvement goals and purposes:
‘When one speaks of the aesthetic side of American cities, one thinks at once of their public buildings; of their parks, statues and boulevards. But in any right conception of urban loveliness these would be only the special objects of a general and harmonious beauty’…. Robinson took the broadest possible view of what he called civic art and discussed practical ameliorations such as limiting the height of buildings, removing advertising, cleaning streets, planting trees, improving lighting and installing public art…. He emphasized that while city governments sometimes took the lead in these improvements, a variety of private organizations such as municipal art societies, park associations and (of course) civic clubs (associations), also had roles to play, in a way that anticipated today’s park conservancies and downtown business improvement districts.[2]
Robinson, according to Rybczynski, coined the label “City Beautiful”.[3] Robinson in 1901 also wrote “The Improvement of Towns and Cities” which served as the first “text” on city planning moving that policy area further down the road toward professionalization. In Robinson we can see the rather subtle coexistence between planning and certain forms of economic development.
Thanks to his writing, Robinson became a national figure and was engaged as a planning consultant by a number of cities, including Sacramento, Santa Barbara, Fort Wayne, Denver, Des Moines, Omaha and Honolulu. He was part of the team that designed a ‘Model City’ for the popular 1904 Saint Louis World’s Fair; served on planning commissions in Rochester, New York and Columbus Ohio; and was appointed professor of civic design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, one of only two universities in the United States to offer courses in city planning (Harvard was the other).[4]
[1] He later wrote several important works such as Improvement of Towns and Cities and his classic, Modern Civic Art. By 1902 civic improvement could be defined as “the promotion of outdoor art, public beauty, town, village and neighborhood improvement”, in the same year the Chautauqua institution prepared and disseminated “improvement study guides” to the association’s members. At its third convention in 1902, the League created fourteen advisory committees including ones on “municipal reform” and settlements, sanitation”. Billing itself as a “federation of organizations and individuals aiming to promote the higher life of American communities” the American League was spearheading the spread of civic associations in municipalities across the nation–to large cities such as Buffalo, Chicago, St. Paul, Milwaukee, and St. Louis and to smaller, frontier and left coast towns. A 1905 survey revealed that nearly 2500 civic associations existed[1].
[2] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas about Cities (New York, Scribner, 2010) pp. 16-17; the first quote is Robinson’s drawn from Improvement in City Life (Atlantic Monthly).
[3] Robinson was actually a member of the board of the American League of Civic Improvement and the American Civic Association board as well. His concepts deeply affected both the emerging planning movement and were adopted by the newly founded American Society of Landscape Architects. See Rybczynski, op. cit. pp. 18-19. Wilson will credit the title to Harrisburg’s Ms. Dock. I have no idea which is the more correct and will assume both were first.
[4] Witold Rybczynski, Makeshift Metropolis op. cit. p. 23.
Ron W. Coan 