The Story of Urban Planning

Every American city is the product of decisions — about where to put the roads, who gets to live where, what gets torn down and what gets built in its place. Most of those decisions were made by planners, following rules that were written in response to crises that most people have forgotten.

Those rules have names. The Standard Zoning Enabling Act. Euclid v. Ambler. Urban renewal. The interstate program. The environmental laws. They appear on planning exams as a list of disconnected facts, each with a date and an acronym, none of them speaking to the others. For most people who study them, that is what they remain: a heap of true and separate things.

They were never separate. Zoning was a response to the crowding and contagion of the industrial city. Urban renewal was a response to the slums that zoning couldn't fix. The highway revolts were a response to urban renewal. The environmental laws were built out of the revolts. The housing crisis we live in now is, in part, a consequence of those very laws. Each item on the list was an answer to the one before it and the cause of the one after. There was a story beneath the trivia the entire time.

The Story of Urban Planning tells that story — from the tenements of the 1890s to the housing fights of the present — as one continuous narrative rather than a glossary of terms. It is not a study guide, and you do not need to be a planner to read it.

This is not a story of progress, in which each generation corrects the last and the city steadily improves. Nor is it a story of villains. Again and again, planners identified a real problem, acted on it with the best tools and knowledge available, and solved it — and the solution produced a new problem that the next generation inherited. The park displaced the people whose land it took. The zoning that separated the factory from the home went on to separate everyone from everyone. The clearance that removed the slum raised the tower that replaced it.

Understanding planning means learning to hold those truths at the same time: that action matters, that action is necessary, and that action carries consequences no one intends.

For planning professionals , this is the context behind the exam material — the reasons the cases were decided the way they were, why the laws were written the way they were, and what actually happened when they were applied.

For general readers , it is an account of how the American city got to be the way it is: why housing costs what it costs, why highways went where they went, why some neighborhoods survived and others didn't, and who made those decisions and on what authority.

The argument is unfinished because the city is unfinished. The next chapter belongs to the people who live in it.