“The Whole City Is Our Laboratory”: Harland Bartholomew and the Production of Urban Knowledge

Abstract

This article examines the stages by which Harland Bartholomew, one of the leading planners of the twentieth century, consolidated a professional identity by producing a corpus of specialized knowledge about the city. Between 1915, when he arrived in St. Louis, and 1950, when he retired from civil service to run his private firm, Bartholomew cultivated a professional practice through activities of widely varied scope. He grounded these activities in an urban knowledge system that disciplined the ways in which planning interventions were imagined, organized, and implemented. At the core of this system was a conception of the city as an amalgam of parts, the functions of which could be studied through the derivation of land use ratios. Using St. Louis as a laboratory, Bartholomew assembled a vision of the city and a planning methodology that paved the way for dramatic urban reconstruction after World War II.