The Evolution of City Planning in America.

“A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness.”- Aristotle

Way back when America was still a smattering of outposts and colonies, not even a country yet, little conscious thought went into planning towns. The first settlements, such as Jamestown, Boston, and New Amsterdam, followed no systematic design.

However, as early as 1638, the first evidence of modern town planning was seen in New Haven, Connecticut. In the birthplace of the Yale University campus, New Haven featured nice large squares of common areas carefully arranged in rows of three (still to this day called the “New Haven Green”). With a church in its center and business and government buildings on its perimeter, this layout became the standard for planning many subsequent Colonial towns.

These common greens, wide streets, canals within the city, etc. served two other important purposes. Too often, densely packed and ill-planned population centers in the 19^th century were susceptible to the spread of fires and also disease, but modern planners were wise enough to create buffer zones to help contain both. 

Thereafter, cities were expected to offer solutions to social problems – not just cause them.

City planning took a step forward in 1748, when an architect named Giambattista Nolli was the first to map out an entire city, including streets, parks, common areas, and important buildings, from a bird's eye view with no central focal point – called the Nolli Map.

The task of preparing for the growth of cities soon spawned a new field: city planner, as well as organizations and groups meant to empower its members. In fact, the American City Planning Institute was formed in 1917, and The American Society of Planning Officials in 1934.

In the 1800s and the first part of the 20^th century, cities were built fairly haphazardly, with communities springing forth in a spiraling outward pattern without rhyme or reason. However, the advent of steel in construction changed all of that in the 20^th century, with industrialists taking advantage.

Soon, cities were being built upwards towards the sky, with a focus on population density – not growing outwards. In major cities like New York and Chicago, skyscrapers exploded towards the heavens, with banks, department stores, theaters, and office buildings following suit.

Suddenly, the concept of city planning was no longer a two-dimensional task envisioned at ground level, but in 3-D with the element of altitude. For instance, newly laid streets had to adhere to the Setback Principle, developed by architect Hugh Ferriss in 1916. Streets had to be 50' to 100' wide in order to accommodate wider and taller skyscrapers, following a standard ratio of 11:2 (height to street width).

To service the growing number of new workers who needed to access these centralized downtowns, mass transit evolved, too. Most people that worked and played in the city centers no longer lived there, but commuted in from “streetcar suburbs,” which were new subdivisions laid as an extension of the downtown grid and sold parcel by parcel to homeowners, developers, and businesses.

In response to the rapidly over-crowded new cities, iconic architect and designer Frank Lloyd Wright was perhaps one of the fathers of the modern suburb. He took the model for the urban grid and transposed it into the countryside, planning structured and aligned communities where each family had exactly one acre of land.

Likewise, urban planner Le Corbusier wanted to solve the issue of overcrowding in cities by building mass housing up, not out, and his ideas became a major influence in designing high-rise public housing decades later.

Through the 1950s and 60s, architect Kevin Lynch looked to plan cities not from a top-down approach, but considering the actual experiences of regular people and inhabitants within the city. This bottom-up approach to city planning changed the landscape of blossoming metropolisis forever after.

In 1961, city planner Jean Gottamn also started considering a new phenomenon among cities – “megaregions.” He was one of the first to think about cities not as individual self-sustaining units, but within the context of other mega population centers in the region. Therefore, issues of transportation, the economy, and the environment were considered on a regional or multi-city perspective.

A renowned city planner named Andres Duany expressed his vision for the next era of urban planning in 2000 with his "Transect" approach. These take the traditional grid system but section it off into six zones, each progressively more green and less urban. Starting with SD (Special District, then T6 (Urban Core), the Transect continue with T5 (Urban Center), T4 (General Urban), T3 (Sub-Urban), T2 (Rural), and then T1 (Natural).

You know which city follows this general outline, although unwittingly? Sacramento has its Old Town as the Special District, downtown giving way to midtown, and then more rural and green East Sacramento and wooded campus of Sacramento State.

So what’ss the future of city planning? Smart cities that are walkable or easy to navigate via public transport, integrate urban forests and plenty of green areas, and are equipped with usable smart technology are on the horizon.

Look for part two of this blog where we cover the advances in technology, environmental control, and planning that will go into our smart cities of the near future.