Book Review

Canada and the United States

The central theme of this focused study of Hartford, Connecticut's space-planning movements is the rise of "segregation" as the master planning ethic by the early 1920s. This medium-sized city (population of only 150,000 by 1930) provides Peter C. Baldwin with a case study both small enough to be highly knowable and large enough to share concerns with the largest metropolises. In the 1850s, Hartford's crusading minister Horace Bushnell practically founded American city planning through his romantic theological arguments that the emergent class, ethnic, and race divisions of the rising American city could be overcome through environmental contact in shared park and street spaces that would remake the city in the image of the bourgeois home. By the 1920s, however, planners eagerly embraced and reinforced social divisions through zoning for specific property values and uses. Baldwin reconstructs this transformation chronologically. In the early efforts of the 1860s to 1900, reformers sought to "purify" the entire city of poor environmental influences. Their idealism was tempered by the gradual discovery that it was easier to segregate and divide urban space than to purify and unify it. An accumulation of segregated spaces evolved: first the segregation of parks, as metaphoric "parlors"; then newspaper girls and boys (from one another and from pedophilic danger); then parks and playgrounds suited to different class uses; and then express delivery men and cart peddlers. Finally, by the late 1910s and early 1920s, the official city plans envisioned whole portions of the city devoted to different social classes and social uses enforced through major traffic street plans and zoning laws.

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