The Planning Technician as Urban Visionary: Frederick Bigger and American Planning,1881-1963

Abstract

This article explores Frederick Bigger’s importance to the professionalization of American city planning and to the shaping of Pittsburgh’s urban landscape. Educated as an architect at the University of Pennsylvania and a classmate of Henry Wright’s, Bigger dedicated most of his life to establishing urban planning as a discipline in his birth-place, Pittsburgh. However, as a planning theorist as well as a practitioner, Bigger’s world embraced more than planning administration in the Steel City. He was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America who combined a keen knowledge of planning administration with a fervent belief in community planning to serve effectively as an official of the New Deal’s Greenbelt Town program and a consultant for the Federal Housing Program. Frederick Bigger’s life highlights the danger of too narrowly pigeonholing pre-World War II planners as moles or skylarks.