"...A certain trivial standardization has taken hold in the interior arrangement and exterior appearance which will definitely class these buildings once they are erected as, 'those buildings which the government built to house the poor people.' This is a very dangerous fact when we consider what the purpose of low-cost housing is, at its present state of infancy in the United States, not only to house slum-dweller or poor people but also to establish standards of living in a new mode of living quite different from what individual speculative activity has created." Oscar Stonorov, Architect; internal communication , Works Progress Administration, 1935

This Week:

As the enthusiasm of the "City Beautiful" movement faded, after about 1910, Americans were left with the assumption that cities were not entities that were left to grow by themselves, through the interaction of competing interests (cf. Teaford last quarter), but entities that should be planned and shaped in advance. As a result, the profession of urban planner emerged, and several schools of thought, especially the British "Garden City" movement and the European continental "Ville Radieuse" of the Frenchman Le Corbusier. All of this assumed that the city was to serve the health and happiness of its inhabitants (fine there) and that such planners knew how to quantify that health and happiness (less good there). In the end, we got the Chicago Housing Authority in 1933.

Readings:

• In course packet:
  Donald Krueckeberg, "Introduction" to Introduction to Planning History in the United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1990), pp. 1-12.
  William Wilson, "Moles and Skylarks," Ibid., pp. 88-121.
  Henry Wright and Clarence Stein, "Radburn", Towards New Towns for America (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press for Public Administration Services, Chicago, 1951), pp. 37-79.
  Richard Pommer, "The Architecture of Urban Housing in the United States During the 1930's", Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, (December, 1978), pp. 235-264
  Devereux Bowley, The Poorhouse, (Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 1978) chapters 1, 2 and 5.
  
  Krueckeberg and Wilson are established historians of the planning movement in America who summarize very swiftly the evolution of the movement and the competing, alternative paths. Henry Wright (John Wright of the NU Classics Department's grandfather) and his partner Clarence Stein were the leaders of the British-derived "Garden City" movement, which moved away from the "City Beautiful" towards a generalization of the suburb. Their book is one of the basic texts of American planning history, and Radburn, New Jersey (along with Greenbelt, Maryland), is the most extensive project they carried out. Richard Pommer is a contemporary historian who examines the emergence of European-inspired high-rise housing in America during the Depression, its utopian objectives, and what went wrong. Bowley, depicting the first years of the CHA, goes deeper into just how wrong it went here in Chicago.
• Electronic Resources: Week 9 Notebook