| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Jon A. Peterson. The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917. (Creating the North American Landscape.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2003. Pp. xxi, 431. $59.95.
Jon A. Peterson argues that city planning emerged as a comprehensive discipline in the fifteen years prior to World War I. The discipline originated as a response to the problems created by "the rise of large, highly centralized urban centers" in the period the author identifies as an age of "great city urbanism" (pp. 12–13). He begins the narrative with a brief account of the nineteenth-century antecedents to modern planning, including efforts to promote sanitary reform, landscape values, and civic art. These efforts were piecemeal, lacking a comprehensive approach to the reshaping of the modern city. Consequently, even the nineteenth century's greatest achievements, such as the creation of Central Park in New York and the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, lacked sufficient vision to generate a movement toward comprehensive planning.	1
According to Peterson, a more comprehensive approach originated in 1902 when architects, engineers, politicians, artists, and civic activists battled to produce the McMillan Plan for the development of Washington. Peterson identifies the McMillan Plan as "the foundation story of American City Planning" (p. 78) because its protagonists confronted a broad array of issues including civic art, park design, slum removal, and the management of transportation. The result was unprecedented since it encouraged a belief that bold and comprehensive urban plans could be devised to revitalize cities and produce a more rational management by experts, who could control in some manner the market forces that promoted urban growth. Having gained national attention, supporters of the McMillan Plan attracted a diverse array of Progressive-Era reformers, who then coalesced in the aesthetic movement commonly identified with the "City Beautiful."	. . .

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