This article analyzes the conceptual and historiographic differences between the closely related fields of urban history and planning history. It reviews the origins of urban history as a distinct field and argues that work in urban history falls into three broad categories dealing with civic life, individual and group relations, and the physical evolution of urban places. It identifies topics that are particularly fruitful and generate new scholarship, and suggests ways in which each of these realms of urban history raises questions of relevance to urban planning and urban policy.
Robert Fogelson, Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001).
2.
For a recent example of this mainstream history of the profession, see the section on “Planning Movements” that I prepared, in consultation with American Planning Association staff, for American Planning Association, Planning and Urban Design Standards (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2006).
3.
Carl Abbott, “Reading Urban History: Influential Books and Historians,”Journal of Urban History 21 (November 1994): 31-43.
4.
James Vance, Geography and Urban Evolution in the San Francisco Bay Area (Berkeley: Institute for Governmental Studies, University of California, 1964).
5.
and Richard C. Wade, “An Agenda for Urban History,” in The State of American History, ed. Herbert J. Bass (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1970), 43-69.
6.
and Wade, “Agenda for Urban History.”
7.
and Anthony Downs, New Futures for Metropolitan America (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1994).
8.
and Fred Siegel, The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A., and the Fate of America’s Big Cities (New York: Free Press, 1997).
9.
and Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002).
10.
and John Updike, Rabbit, Run.
11.
and James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man Made Landscape (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
12.
and Wendy Kellogg, “Nature’s Neighborhood: Urban Environmental History and Neighborhood Planning,”Journal of the American Planning Association68 (Autumn 2002): 356-370.
13.
Scott Campbell, “Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities? Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development,”Journal of the American Planning Association62 (Summer 1996): 296-312.
14.
and Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
15.
and Leonie Sandercock, Cosmopolis II: Mongrel Cities in the 21st Century (New York: Continuum, 2003).
16.
and Carl Abbott, Greater Portland: Urban Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001).
