Definition
Urban planning is the professional discipline that designs the physical, social, and economic organization of cities. As a recognized profession it emerged in the early twentieth century (the American Institute of Planners was founded in 1917), professionalized through the 1920s-1950s, and reached its peak influence — and produced its most consequential failures — between roughly 1945 and 1975.
Robert Moses, though he never claimed the formal title planner, was the most powerful urban-planning operator of the twentieth century in America. His career — the subject of Robert Caro's The Power Broker — defines both what mid-century urban planning could accomplish and what it cost.
Why urban planning matters
The mid-century paradigm
Mid-century American urban planning rested on several convictions that look more clearly contestable in retrospect:
Cities are engineering problems. The dominant metaphor was hydraulic: traffic to be moved, populations to be circulated, blight to be drained. The metaphor implied an expert who could optimize the system from above.
Existing neighborhoods are obstacles. The blight designations of Title I slum clearance, the right-of-way takings for highways, the demolition of working-class neighborhoods for housing projects — all treated existing neighborhoods as friction to be cleared.
The motorist is the modern user. Postwar planning assumed an increasingly automobile-dependent populace and designed accordingly. Mass transit, walkability, and street-level commerce were treated as residual concerns.
Professionalism trumps community input. The expert planner, trained in the methods, knew what the city needed better than the residents did. Community organizing against planning decisions was treated as parochial NIMBYism.
Each conviction was defended by competent professionals. Each, in hindsight, was substantially wrong.
The Caro-Jacobs critique
The two foundational mid-century critiques of urban planning are Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and Robert Caro's The Power Broker (1974). They make complementary arguments:
Jacobs. Cities are ecosystems. Their economic, social, and physical health depends on dense, mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods with short blocks, varied building ages, and active street life. Mid-century planning destroyed all four properties. The result is dead urban spaces — the housing-project superblock, the cleared urban-renewal site, the freeway-cleaved neighborhood — that produce worse outcomes than what was demolished.
Caro. The mid-century planning paradigm was implemented by operators who accumulated power beyond democratic accountability. The structural conditions (public authorities, bond covenants, press dominance) that enabled Moses-style operation are still present in contemporary American infrastructure governance.
The Jacobs critique is about what mid-century planning got wrong; the Caro critique is about how it was implemented. Together they produced the contemporary skepticism of expert-driven urban policy.
Contemporary practice
Modern American urban planning has substantially repudiated mid-century methods:
- Community participation. Federal and state law now requires extensive public participation in major planning decisions. The participation is often imperfect — capture by NIMBY interests is real — but the floor is higher than it was in 1955.
- Complete streets. Modern street design integrates pedestrians, cyclists, transit, and motorists. The mid-century motorist-first paradigm has been substantially abandoned.
- Mixed-use zoning. Modern zoning practice has moved toward allowing mixed uses, smaller lots, and accessory dwelling units. The single-use, large-lot zoning that defined mid-century suburbs is increasingly being relaxed.
- Transit-oriented development. Major cities are increasingly investing in transit and orienting new development around stations. The Moses-style assumption that highways are the modern transportation form has been substantially abandoned in policy if not always in practice.
The repudiation is incomplete. American urban form remains substantially defined by mid-century decisions. The contemporary planning profession is still working through what comes after.