| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2

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| Book Review | The Michigan Historical Review, 34.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Reviews

Carl Smith. The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 183. Bibliographical essay. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Cloth, $22.00.
To many observers of nineteenth-century American urban life, Chicago was an incomprehensible setting of rich, poor, pollution, and grandeur amid the fastest urban growth in American history. The scene was difficult to define partly because it had virtually no past. Indeed, it is interesting that early in this fascinating book Carl Smith reminds us that it is no coincidence that with its Board of Trade Chicagoans invented the idea of buying and selling the future itself. Chicago could do nothing but look ahead, because unlike the great cities in Europe of the time—or even those on America's Eastern Seaboard—it had no spatial-social history to hold it back.	1
The book's story begins with Daniel Burnham, the architect-director of America's unsurpassed world's fair, the Chicago Colombian Exhibition of 1893. Influenced by Haussman's nineteenth-century rebuilding of Paris, Burnham's 1909 Plan of Chicago still stands as the most influential urban-planning document in American history—addressing a multitude of problems including pollution, massive overcrowding, labor conflicts, inadequate infrastructure, and population growth. Chicago, as Burnham and his planning collaborators believed, was choking on its own success; the plan was to be the way out and the way forward.	2
Urban planning was not new to Chicago when Burnham took up the idea, but it had arrived by way of ad hoc initiatives such as reversing the Chicago River, creating a park here and there, building the great Union Stock Yard, and so forth. Indeed, these projects were less about civic life than about making money—something Chicagoans were extremely good at. Quality of life was not an identifiable engine of change. Even the leveling of a good part of the city by the Great Fire of 1873, as it turns out, was a lost opportunity to rethink of the city as something other than a place to make money.	. . .

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