“City Beautiful” Revisited

Abstract

In the arena of American urban planning history, there has been nothing so evocative and immediately recognizable as the urban form normally associated with the city beautiful movement: classically inspired, monumental architecture; wide, tree-flanked boulevards and large civic spaces; the grand urban axis punctuated with statuary, or obelisk. The most famous expression of the movement in the United States is the mall and surrounding area in Washington D.C., along with lesser known achievements in places like Chicago, Kansas City, and Denver. This highly public face of city beautiful has been clearly, and correctly, associated with white, middle-class, male-dominated membership that developed particular methods of operation. These included the reliance on professional opinion in the name of efficiency and beauty, a search for reform by working within the political and economic structures, and belief in the positive effects of behavior modification through environmental improvement. 1 The historiography on the movement also indicates a shared involvement of both men and women. And yet the first two elements of that methodology would immediately indicate the exclusion of women from meaningful involvement-since access to higher education (necessary to obtain professional status) and political structures (at a time when most were not allowed suffrage even at state level) were very difficult, if not impossible, obstacles to overcome. The reality of women's position in society then begs the question of exactly to what degree, and in what manner, they were involved in city beautiful. A review of the historiography of the movement, in particular William H. Wilson's 1989 seminal work, provides some clues toward an answer.In general, historians of the planning professions have relied on a succession of momentous personalities and the occasional revolutionary idea to document the profession's evolution. In her book, Making the Invisible Visible,

Urban Form, Growth, and Accessibility in Space and Time: Anatomy of Land Use at the Parcel-Level in a Small to Medium-Sized American City

“…The average UTD from residential land use to industrial land use started to grow from 1938 and was steadily maintained after 1973. The average UTD from residential to open space decreased from 1853 to 1947 and kept increasing from 1948 to 2014, which could be partially explained by the impacts of the City's Beautiful Movement in the early part of the 20th century [56] and the residential suburbanization from the urban core since the middle of 20th century when fast highway expansion and car adoption occurred [57]. The travel distance from residential to industrial and open space were evidently longer than the average accessibility from residential to commercial and office through all time periods.…”

Illicit Motherhood: Recrafting Postcolonial Feminist Resistance in Edna O’Brien’s The Love Object and Jhumpa Lahiri’s Hell-Heaven

“…Domestic spaces, functioning historically under a patriarchal signifying system, have maintained a distinct binary between the public and the private, while reinforcing "men's power advantage" (Szczygiel 2003). In the context of literary productions, such dualistic divisions of public spaces as masculine and private spaces as feminine (Landes 1998) found a particularly explicit expression in 19th century fiction (specifically in novels), propagating a gendered bias that finds reflection even in contemporary fiction.…”

Making a Modern Barrio: Infrastructure and Progress in Mexico City, 1900-1903

“…The project also differed from other large-scale city planning schemes in its focus on improving the city's marginalized areas, which critics of the City Beautiful movement complained its proponents ignored. 12 Furthermore, Landa y Escandón's vision did not involve the widespread demolition of working-class neighborhoods-a central component of urban renewal projects in Europe and elsewhere in Latin America in this period. The ayuntamiento never sought to replace the barrios with grand parks and boulevards, as governments in Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, and, most famously, Paris sought to achieve under Baron Haussmann's sweeping urban redesign of the 1860s-the scheme that served, to varying degrees, as a model for Latin America's planners.…”