| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 9.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917. By Jon A. Peterson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. xxi + 431 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $59.95.
American environmental historians have paid little attention to urban planning. Yet the rise of city planning in the United States was tied to several issues and movements that long have concerned historians of environmentalism. Jon Peterson's outstanding account of the birth of city planning therefore ought to be part of all future discussions of environmental activism in the period before World War I.	1
Peterson roots the planning vision in three reactions to the extraordinary growth of cities in the nineteenth century. The first two—sanitary reform and park building—both were efforts to deal with what Peterson terms an "environmental crisis" in the middle third of the century, when the ill-effects of unregulated growth became overwhelming. Deadly epidemics, dirty streets, smoke-filled skies, catastrophic fires, congested and unhealthy neighborhoods—all suggested to reformers that city life might become unsustainable. Though much of the literature about nineteenth-century urban sanitation written by environmental historians has focused on the creation of a sanitary infrastructure of sewers, street cleaning, and garbage collection, Peterson demonstrates that the first wave of urban environmental reform also involved efforts to design healthier landscapes.	. . .

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