After the decimation of the urban fabric resulting from the 1963 earthquake, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, became a center of town planning and architectural activity. The aftermath response was unprecedented, with eighty-five countries offering aid and thirty-five nations raising Skopje to a priority status within the United Nations (UN). The acclaimed Japanese architect, Kenzo Tange, was awarded first prize in the subsequent UN competition for the reconstruction master plan and was asked to work with the second prize winners, Zagreb firm Miscevic and Wenzler. The design and rebuilding produced one of the greatest collaborative and visionary realizations of a complete city concept undertaken in history. Yet, the significance of Skopje’s reconstruction has slipped from architectural consciousness. "Actor network theory" (ANT) offers insights into the social dynamics of large-scale projects and provides a lens by which to investigate five features of the reconstruction of Skopje: (1) the social process, including problematization, interessement, enrollment, and mobilization; (2) the key participants; (3) the project scale; (4) artifacts; and (5) project duration. ANT proves to be a useful tool for understanding both the heroic achievement and the subsequent neglect of Skopje reconstructed.
Separation of classes was as much a part of early twentieth-century Los Angeles residential development as racial segregation. While one is certainly more pernicious than the other, the two often went hand in hand. Developers used similar tools to create these divided communities: restrictive covenants, reliance on the courts to uphold those covenants, and advertising. They purposefully planned residential space intended to keep different classes of people separate and ensure white communities. This history becomes especially significant in light of present-day discussions of urban inequity, gentrification, and mixed-income neighborhoods.
This article takes up the creation of Boston’s Beacon Hill historic district during the 1950s as a significant chapter of preservation planning history. Inspired by similar efforts in the South, this campaign succeeded in a decade commonly associated with conformity and consensus, suburbia and urban renewal, obsolescence and progress. Activists on Beacon Hill persuaded their neighbors and city and state officials that the heretofore little-used technique of historic district designation should be employed in a big, northern industrial city. In so doing, they led the way for the more widespread historic preservation movement that followed during the 1960s and 1970s.
Staten Island grew rapidly after the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964. Mayor John Lindsay introduced a plan to control and guide development there and encouraged planned unit development. The Rouse Company, then building Columbia, Maryland, was contracted to plan new communities for the southern third of Staten Island to more than double the borough’s population. State Senator John Marchi introduced legislation for the South Richmond Development Corporation in 1971. The plan called for the city to use eminent domain to buy property and transfer it to the Rouse Company, which would also construct residential towers on landfill in Raritan Bay. Behind the banner of private property rights, the Conservative Party led opposition to the proposal, and their influence over elected officials on Staten Island led to the legislation’s defeat in Albany. Private development in South Richmond proceeded apace in the decades after without significant design or environmental constraints, or any master plan.
In the mid-1960s, the Staten Island Citizens Planning Committee (SICPC) thwarted plans for the Richmond Parkway, seeking instead to weave dense, affordable housing options within a network of linear preserves they donned "the Greenbelt." By the mid-1970s, however, the SICPC decoupled their environmental concerns from dense housing schemes, turning instead toward ecological zoning strategies. The SICPC’s changing vision reveals the policies and park spaces that emerged when environmentalists ran square into the realities of the mid-1970s fiscal crisis. If such policies proved effective for preserving biodiversity, they also helped cement the segregated landscape taking shape across the metropolis.
In the 1910s, the bungalow colony Harding Park developed on marshy Clason Point. Through the 1930s–1950s, Robert Moses sought to modernize this East Bronx waterfront through the Parks Department and the Committee on Slum Clearance. While localism and special legislative treatment enabled Harding Park’s preservation as a co-op in 1981, the abandonment of master planning left neighboring Soundview Park unfinished. The entwined histories of recreation and residency on Clason Point reveal the beneficial and detrimental effects of both urban renewal and community development, while also demonstrating the complicated relationship between localism and large-scale planning in postwar New York City.
While the privatization of parks has been controversial since the 1980s, the origins of public–private parks in New York City were complex. During the 1970s fiscal crisis, the Parks and Recreation Department suffered severe budget cuts and was forced to drastically reduce services. Faced with parks that were falling apart, thousands of volunteers in block associations and community groups began to maintain parks on their own. They pioneered a radical forms of "do-it-yourself" urbanism with guerrilla horticulture, community gardens, children-fashioned adventure playgrounds, tree-planting drives, makeshift ambulances, and volunteer patrols. By the early 1980s, these "self-help" efforts coalesced into new public–private parks. The history of public–private parks is thus one of privatizations in the plural and points to an array of antistatist impulses that emerged on both the left and right in the 1970s.
Japan’s Capital Construction Law, enacted in 1950, was intended to create the ability to obtain special financial assistance from the state to break the impasse of Tokyo’s reconstruction by regarding its planning and development as a national undertaking. However, recent studies in Japan’s planning history claim that the law was an infringement of local autonomy. This article considers how this law was discussed in the National Diet, which enacted it, and in a local referendum among Tokyoites as well as how its original proponents, particularly the metropolitan government planner Hideaki Ishikawa, who created the reconstruction plan for Tokyo, justified it.
Historians have brought attention to African American women’s contributions to planning, specifically as it relates to housing and social service program delivery. This article builds upon that scholarship by adding the work of the Farmers’ Improvement Society and its Women’s Barnyard Auxiliary, African American mutual aid groups active and founded during the Progressive Era. This article foregrounds the contributions of this racial uplift group to planning practice and scholarship. Second, the article sheds light on the unique approach to planning rural, poor mutual aid groups employed. Finally, this article complicates popular assumptions about similar Progressive Era, "Uplift Movement" groups.
Traditional urban renewal scholarship has emphasized the experiences of America’s largest cities, leaving the equally significant story of urban renewal in small cities largely unexplored. This is particularly surprising, given that the overwhelming majority of communities to have received urban renewal funds had populations of less than 50,000. This article uses the state of Kentucky to develop a framework for analyzing the effects of the federal urban renewal program on small cities in the United States. Of particular importance for this research is recognizing the value of the June 30, 1974, Urban Renewal Directory as a data source.
The role that parks played in Manhattan changed dramatically during the antebellum period. Originally dismissed as unnecessary on an island embraced by rivers, parks became a tool for real estate development and gentrification in the 1830s. By the 1850s, politicians, journalists, and landscape architects believed Central Park could be a social salve for a city with rising crime rates, increasingly visible poverty, and deepening class divisions. While many factors (public health, the psychological need for parks, and property values) would remain the same, the changing social conversation showed how ideas of public space were transforming, in rhetoric if not reality.
Like many American cities, Portland attempted to use urban planning and policy to control the geographic spread of adult entertainment during the 1970s. Portland’s efforts, however, were complicated by Oregon’s famously liberal state constitution. City Hall, the City Attorney, and the Planning Bureau spent nearly two decades trying to find a solution that would please angry city residents without violating the state constitution. As city officials worked to find a unique solution for their city, the technology used to disseminate adult entertainment was changing. Technological change was more rapid than policy change. The regulations ultimately adopted by the city did not fit the new landscape of adult businesses.
Why does a large institution build in a flood-prone area and how does it respond when flooding causes great damage? This is a case study of a major flood event—the 2008 Iowa–Cedar River flood—and the University of Iowa, whose recovery is expected to cost about US$750 million. The case explores the factors that led a major institution to invest so much of its infrastructure into a flood-prone river shed and then describes and evaluates the decision-making process the University has undertaken with the goal of becoming a more sustainable and resilient campus.
John Nolen was one of the first planners to build a national consulting practice focused on new towns. However, his office began to struggle financially in the late 1920s. Despite a thirty-year record, Nolen had no paying private-sector clients after 1931 and finally had to downsize his office. He survived on New Deal contracts for a while. But eventually he could not obtain work even from the Resettlement Administration, where his former protégés were implementing his ideas. Modern new town ideas from Clarence Stein were ascendant. Seen as a relic, Nolen died without a single project pending in his portfolio.
This article details the vision, goals, and legacy of Interface: Providence, the 1974 Downtown Providence master plan that proposed to transform the city center into an autorestricted regional mass transit hub where public parks replaced surface parking lots and rigid functional zoning gave way to higher densities and mixed uses. Interface catalyzed a generation of Downtown advocates who valued historic preservation, walkable streets, and quality public spaces as first principles. And yet, the plan’s big-picture vision of a transit-oriented metropolis with Downtown as its center had relatively little impact on subsequent transportation policy, and, by this measure, Interface remains an untested proposition.
This article explores experimental historic preservation practices at Silo City, a cultural campus "built" around three vacant grain elevators in Buffalo, New York. Amid the not-fully-deindustrialized landscape that Reyner Banham famously called a "Concrete Atlantis," these practices operate outside traditional adaptive reuse markets, without significant public funding, and exploit historic industrial sites in their "as is" condition. This article argues that these practices have the potential to redefine preservation as an accessible and enjoyable practice rather than a means to a historically rigorous restoration or expansive local development stimulus; and are well suited for hard-to-preserve industrial sites in declining cities.
In 1951, the San Francisco Bay Area suburb of Walnut Creek welcomed the construction of a major shopping center adjacent to their downtown area—a configuration that would lead municipal planners to prioritize retail development for their city. Walnut Creek’s nonlinear path to retail dominance over the next several decades exemplifies not only the increasingly multivariate climate surrounding suburban retail development in the latter half of the twentieth century but also the increasingly autonomous role of municipal planners who have used retail as a versatile component of suburban spatial development in an age of metropolitan flux.
In 1943, after Japanese Canadians were uprooted from coastal British Columbia, federal officials commenced selling all of their property without consent. This article argues that the dispossession of Japanese-Canadian-owned property has an urban history that has been largely overlooked, as arguments for the dispossession emerged from the Vancouver municipal government, which focused federal attention on the historic Japanese-Canadian neighborhood in the city. Federal officials seized upon the condition of a small number of deteriorating "slum" properties as a justification of wholesale dispossession. An initiative town planners in Vancouver thus helped to motivate the wholesale dispossession of Japanese Canadians.
In 1949, San Diego was one of the first major California cities to switch to a bus-only transit fleet. As time went on, both San Diego and its neighbor Tijuana saw explosive population growth, and in the 1970s a combination of strong leadership and a stroke of luck led to San Diego constructing the first post–World War II light rail system in the United States. The original system went from downtown to the Mexican border and received national and international attention for being delivered on time, under budget, and without federal funds. This article explores the system’s origins, strengths, shortcomings, and legacy.
Everything that happens on the ground, every spatial intervention, has an impact on land and its value. It follows that the ability of governments to regulate the matter in its relations with private developers and landowners is of extreme importance for the civil society as a whole. Nowadays, in consideration of the fact that municipalities are short on financial resources, the need on the part of local governments to recapture part of the increase in the value of land that is generated from change in land use and other public investments, and so make landowners and developers contribute to the realization and maintenance of the public parts of the city, is ever more compelling. This article presents a historical review of the planning and fiscal measures that have been introduced in Italy since 1865 to deal with the question of betterment value with the intent of showing its importance and the specificities of the subject in city planning for central and local government.
During the inauguration in 1857, a mysterious and lethal outbreak afflicted guests at the National Hotel in Washington, DC. The aftermath suggests a revision to the standard narrative of urban history in the antebellum years: a relatively smooth trajectory of improvement culminating in the prominence of experts during the Progressive Era. The response to the National Hotel sickness, in contrast, highlights the political tension attending this period—in one of the most planned American cities to date. The media fueled speculation about the disease to promote perceptions of bureaucratic incompetence, conspiracy, and mistrust toward city officials.
This article examines two racially integrated labor union-sponsored housing cooperatives developed in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s. The projects offer examples of small-scale alternative paths to postwar suburbanization and inner-city decline. St. Francis Square, in the Western Addition neighborhood of San Francisco, was sponsored by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. Sunnyhills, in the newly incorporated town of Milpitas in Santa Clara County, was sponsored by the United Automobile Workers. The projects illustrate how the postwar strategies of growth liberalism and the urban growth machine, which facilitated private investment and racial segregation in the service of economic development, simultaneously expanded and checked municipal and labor union priorities.
Outdoor advertising proliferation and the development of land use regulations in Los Angeles illustrate the complicated nature of balancing the economic and physical aspects of urban development. Regulating outdoor advertising is part of a movement to control the spatial structure of the consumer economy and manage the appearance of the landscape through zoning. The efforts of planners to regulate outdoor advertising are frequently challenged legally or stalled by political indecision. The history of Los Angeles billboard regulation illuminates the financial demands for encouraging the spectacle of consumer landscapes as well as the persistent difficulty planners have had regulating urban appearance.
Those who aspire to practice "sustainable development" often bemoan the difficultly of achieving the ideal balance of the three E’s made famous in the Brundtland Report: economy, ecology, and equity. Further, developments produced in the name of "sustainability" are commonly critiqued for their lack of regional climatic and cultural sensitivity. But Avion Village, a 600-unit affordable housing project built by the US Defense Department’s Mutual Ownership Housing Pilot Program in 1941—designed for innovative efficiency by Richard Neutra, made regionally appropriate by David Williams, and sold to residents as "mutually owned" by Colonel Lawrence Westbrook—illustrated the possibilities of triple bottom line development well before the language of sustainability emerged.
This article discusses some adaptations of the garden-city concept in Brazil and reveals how a foreign physical model was conveniently matched to specific civic purposes. The layout of three planned new towns—Águas de São Pedro, Maringá, and Goiânia—and two garden suburbs (Jardim América and Jardim Shangri-lá) are analyzed along with their planners’ discourses and their representations in the contemporary local press. The analysis reveals that the garden-city concept was used as a path to modernity, a civilizing instrument, and a tool for real-estate venture by involving processes of representation and institutionalization which were different to those at their point of origin.
While many authors have discussed the environmental planning methodology outlined by Ian McHarg in Design with Nature, little attention has been paid to the influence of modern architecture upon that planning and design manifesto. This article addresses that deficiency by examining three early articles by McHarg—"Open Space and Housing" (1955), "The Court House Concept" (1957), and "The Humane City" (1958). These articles situate McHarg’s promotion of open space, and his environmental activism, in relationship to an ambitious intellectual and political rationale that is firmly rooted within the functional, social, aesthetic, and heroic traditions of architectural modernism.
This article examines land governance transitions during the transformation from a monarchy to a western/US private property governance system in the Hawaiian Islands, covering the historical structures through the 1830s, the implementation of the Māhele (division) during the 1840s–1850s, and the immediate consequences. Though the Hawaiian monarchy initiated land reforms in part to protect indigenous Hawaiian commoners from eviction, the institutions and practices created through land reform effectively disadvantaged indigenous Hawaiian commoners from claiming property, and later, even the Hawaiian monarchy lost direct control over lands that the King had set aside. Implications of this analysis for future research and political debate are discussed.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century, more than twenty plans were prepared for the Los Angeles Civic Center. With their monumental architectural style, broad boulevards and landscaped public plazas, these proposals draw heavily from planning’s early City Beautiful roots and challenge the idea that Los Angeles had only a "brief infatuation" with the movement. This article considers a number of these proposals, paying particular attention to two schemes that bookend the local movement: the 1907 plan prepared by Charles Mulford Robinson for the Municipal Art Commission and the plan prepared by the Allied Architects Association in the mid-1920s. While neither was implemented in full, the discussions that surrounded their adoption demonstrate a continued local interest in aesthetically oriented planning at a grand scale. A close reading of these plans, and especially the ways in which the authors attempt to communicate their ideas visually provides an opportunity to consider how the profession incorporated competing ideas about art and science, professional expertise, race and real estate, in its attempt to persuade public officials and the public at large to act.
This study uses urban regime theory to understand the events surrounding Fargo urban renewal during the 1950s. Specifically, it focuses upon the struggle between realtors, banking officers, government officials, and other local actors, as they established a plan for relocating Fargo residents displaced by urban renewal. With a downtown Civic Center as their ultimate goal, coalition partners set aside their differences and produced an unprecedented plan: to avoid any reliance on public housing, relocation would be handled via the private sector, specifically the Fargo Board of Realtors. The study demonstrates that this relocation plan and its subsequent revisions reflected the interests of the individual regime members.
In post–World War II America, planners touted new towns as one answer to the increasingly evident evils of suburban sprawl. These trace their history to Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City, as well as more recent examples such as Radburn. Some of these post-war new towns are well known, such as Columbia and Reston, but one, Peachtree City, Georgia, has largely escaped scholarly notice. Peachtree began at the same time as Columbia but took much longer to develop. This article examines Peachtree’s origins and growth, along with the motivations of those who founded and settled in it. It was strongly progressive and environmentally sensitive in a time and place where these qualities were unusual.
Palermo suburbs have grown and developed at the expense of becoming isolated from other parts of the city. Ancient boroughs have been eradicated, alongside their urban identities. The challenges of a cosmopolitan and global world are felt even in middle-sized, fringe cities like Palermo, as its suburbs are forced to become tiles of an urban mosaic that is created by urban development. It is the duty of urban scholars to clarify and strengthen the relationships between these urban parts, and in the process restore the neglected notion of neighborhood. By overcoming the distinction between cities and urban sprawl, the controversial dispute may be resolved by urban scholars. Through historical and social analyses, this article outlines two possible transformations the boroughs can take: either as outskirts or as neighborhoods.
The traditional core of the University of Virginia campus, created by Thomas Jefferson in the early nineteenth century, affords an instructive case study in how restoration of its physical fabric can continue to be a viable treatment, lending new insight on its designer’s intent, while also allowing changes to the complex that have been made over time to remain and enhance its overall historical richness. This both-and planning strategy emphasizes the overarching importance of Jefferson’s scheme, but avoids the constraints of a museum piece or, worse, the lapsing into a themed cliché. The lessons learned with this project carry important implications of the treatment of historic districts that possess transcendent core physical attributes, yet also have other, minor qualities that contribute to the significance of the whole by virtue of their differences.
Nearly forty years ago, the City of Berkeley’s progressive activists and elected officials began an effort to use city government to develop democratic, community-controlled housing that would not be subject to the market and would assist in building a movement for social justice. Although progressives gained long-term control of the city government, over the years they largely abandoned the goal of economic democracy due to a combination of limited local resources, changing political priorities, and the need for professionalism in housing production and management. Today, most of the City’s housing funding goes to two highly professional regional nonprofit housing organizations headquartered in Berkeley, which maintain a landlord–tenant relationship with residents but are part of a broader nonprofit housing movement.
This article examines the development of the Lisbon metropolis in the period between 1940 and 1966, looking for the ways in which urban and metropolitan planning established design and organizational connections with infrastructural development. Two arguments emphasize the changing role of infrastructure—starting as the driving force of a national policy of public works committed to the political construction of a modern capital and becoming the unfulfilled backbone of a late industrialization policy associated with morphological disruption in the context of a fast growing metropolis. A third argument of synthesis claims metropolitan public space as a key to acknowledge and design interfacing spaces of infrastructural mediation.
In the 1950s, the Committee on Slum Clearance of the City of New York, headed by Robert Moses, published twenty-six site-specific slum clearance brochures. A major portion of each one of these brochures attempted to demonstrate the blighted conditions that prevailed in the area to be redeveloped. These sections included maps, statistics, descriptions, and photographs. Moses wanted to keep the texts in the brochures short and allow the photographs and the illustrations to demonstrate the shortcomings of the areas designated as slums. This article analyzes the photographs that appeared in the "Demonstration of Slum Conditions" (later renamed to "Demonstration of Blight") section of the brochures and raises a number of questions concerning the process and the paradigm under which Moses’s slum clearance organization was operating. Both the process and the paradigm of slum clearance in New York City involved elected officials, planning commissioners, and even the judiciary.
Over the past decade, green infrastructure has emerged as a subject of significant interest in city and regional planning; yet, this discussion is not entirely new. Significant elements can be traced to the work of Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., in the nineteenth century, and the roots of the urban planning and landscape architecture professions. As evidence, this article frames three aspects of Olmsted’s work within contemporary green infrastructure theory and practice: ecosystem services and human well-being; environmental restoration; and comprehensive planning. The article then addresses Olmsted’s philosophy regarding the civilizing influence of urbanism and concludes that green infrastructure may be integral to the evolution of the twenty-first century city.
Curitiba, Brazil, is recognized as a model of urban planning. The city’s innovative practices have been internationally praised for the past twenty years, although the first plans that enabled the urban form that Curitiba has today are rarely acknowledged. Sustainable initiatives were implemented in Curitiba before sustainability became the preferred alternative for development; however, the people behind Curitiba’s innovations have not been properly recognized. This article provides a historical overview of all the urban plans that have made the Curitiba paradigm possible. It also recounts Curitiba’s urban development and planning history through the voices of some of the people who contributed to making it the city that it is today. In addition to archival research, a series of interviews reveals their stories and memories of the experience of planning a city to be the best it can be. Their commentary on Curitiba’s future suggests the work is not done. The article concludes with an appraisal of sustainability within the Curitiba context.
Archival research shows that village improvement was not simply a prequel to City Beautiful, but part of a larger rural reform movement responsible for developing small town American in the late nineteenth century. This article presents a detailed historical account of the Laurel Hill Association in Stockbridge, MA, and an overview of the scope of improvement theory and practice at the national level between 1853 and 1893, the period of village improvement’s greatest impact on the development of small town America. This fuller history of village improvement offers important distinctions and emphases that have been previously neglected or not recognized in planning history literature. Further, in light of recent interest in small town America as a precedent for contemporary urban design, this research offers practitioners greater understanding of this archetype’s planning history.
The planning philosophy of David Rockefeller and his Downtown-Lower Manhattan Association shaped the development of New York’s Battery Park City. Although the project’s plans evolved from a superblock development resembling a space station to an example of New Urbanism, each design was aimed at creating a walkable, mixed-use, twenty-four-hour city in Lower Manhattan that would support the nearby financial district. Overall, the history of the project demonstrates that continuity exists between a philosophy of slum clearance urban renewal and current urban planning thinking. Additionally, Battery Park shows how planners sought to remake financial districts at a time of urban crisis.