Great cities are born of and give rise to great infrastructure. Historically, city planning has been deeply rooted in infrastructure and physical planning. One of its ontological bases has been to create urban place out of space through the intermediary of infrastructure. Currently, the links between infrastructure and city planning may be described as numerous but nonstrategic and noncomprehensive, even as the bond between infrastructure and cities remains tight. In part, this is because the planning profession has left key roles in infrastructure to other professions. This article chronicles the rises and falls in the fortunes of urban infrastructure in relation to city planning.
Leonardo Benevolo, The History of the City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1975; reprint, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980).
2.
Dora Crouch, Daniel Garr, and Axel Mundigo, Spanish City Planning in North America (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
3.
J.R. McNeill and William McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History ( New York: Norton, 2003); Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London and Tokyo, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Manuel Castells, The Internet Galaxy: Reflections on the Internet, Business, and Society ( Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001).
4.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1991); Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). One can reject a strict technological determinism view of city development while at the same time acknowledging infrastructure as a direct contributor to physical urban development and to the socio-politico-economic development of the city, as infrastructure provides the conduits through which communications and goods and people flow in and through the city.
5.
Steven Graham and Simon Marvin, Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infrastructures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition (London: Routledge, 2001).
6.
Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1963; reprint Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1967).
7.
Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture I: The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd ed. (Oxford, UK : Blackwell, 2000); Castells, The Internet Galaxy.
8.
Thomas Hughes, "The Social Construction of Technological Systems," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker , Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987); Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).
9.
Joel Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy , eds., Technology and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
10.
Paul Farmer, "Change," in Planning (Chicago, IL : American Planning Association, 2009): 3-4; American Planning Association, APA National Infrastructure Investment Task Force 2009. www.planning.org/policy/infrastructure (accessed February 23, 2009).
11.
Carol Abbot and Sy Adler, "Historical Analysis as a Planning Tool," Journal of the American Planning Association55, no. 4 (1989): 467-73.
12.
Eugenie Birch, "Presidential Address," in Proceedings of the Fourth Conference in American Planning History (Hilliard, OH: Society for American City and Regional Planning History, 1991); in Mary Sies and Christopher Silver, "Planning History and the New American Metropolis," in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, ed. Mary Sies and Christopher Silver (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 449-73 (quote from p. 449).
13.
Sies and Silver, "Planning History and the New American Metropolis," 450.
14.
Benevolo, History of the City, Spiro Kostof, The City Assembled: Elements of Urban Form through History (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1992).
15.
Neil Smith, "New City, New Frontier: Lower East Side as Wild Wild West" in Variations on a Theme Park, ED. Michael Sorkin (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), 61-93 (quote on p. 64); and authors’ calculation.
16.
Benevolo, History of the City; Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961).
17.
William Cronon , Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: Norton, 1991).
18.
Jon Peterson , The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840-1917 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Peter G. Hall, Cities of Tomorrow: An Intellectual History of Urban Planning and Design in the Twentieth Century , 3rd ed. (New York: Blackwell, 2002); Robert Fishman, ed., The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000); Mel Scott, American City Planning Since 1890 (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1995); and Daniel Schaffer, ed. Two Centuries of American Planning (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Tarr and Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Networked City; Donald Krueckeberg, Introduction to Planning History in the United States (New Brunswick: Center for Urban Policy Research, 1983); Leonardo Benevolo, The Origins of Modern Town Planning.
19.
Josef Konvitz , The Urban Millennium: The City Building Process from the Early Middle Ages to the Present, 131, 1985Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press .
20.
World Bank, World Development Report: Infrastructure for Development (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1994); United Nations Center for Human Settlements (UNCHS Habitat), Cities in a Globalizing World: Global Report on Human Settlements (London: Earthscan, 2001); Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism; Michael Neuman, "Infrastructure" in Encyclopedia of the City, ed. Roger Caves (London: Routledge , 2005).
21.
Krueckeberg, Introduction to Planning History in the United States; Stanley K. Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture: American Cities and City Planning 1800-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1989).
22.
Martin Melosi , The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Domenique LaPorte, The History of Shit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
23.
Edwin Chadwick , Report from the Poor Law Commissioners on an Inquiry into the Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of Great Britain (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1842; reprint, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1965).
24.
Krueckeberg, Introduction to Planning History in the United States, 17.
25.
John Griscom , The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (New York: City of New York, 1845); John Levy, Contemporary Urban Planning (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2009).
26.
Melosi, The Sanitary City, 63.
27.
Jon Peterson , "The Impact of Sanitary Reform upon American Urban Planning, 1840-1890" Journal of Social History13, no. 1 (1979): 83-105.
28.
Stanley Schultz and Clay McShane, "To Engineer the Metropolis: Sewers, Sanitation and City Planning in Late Nineteenth Century America," Journal of American History65, no. 2 (1978): 389-411.
29.
Krueckeberg, Introduction to Planning History in the United States.
30.
Robert De Forest and Lawrence Veiller, eds., The Tenement House Problem, Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Arno Press and The New York Times, 1970).
31.
William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement in Kansas City (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1964); William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).
32.
Mel Scott, American City PlanningSince 1890 (Chicago: American Planning Association, 1995).
33.
Charles Capen McLaughlin and others, eds., The Collected Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 6 vols.
34.
John Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965).
35.
Jon Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States; Schultz , Constructing Urban Culture.
36.
Phil Patton , "Sell the Cookstove if Necessary but Come to the Fair," Smithsonian, June 1993, 38-49.
37.
Another manifestation of the city beautiful idea in Europe was spurred by Camillo Sitte’s City Planning According to Artistic Principles (1945, New York: Reinhold). This slim volume was especially influential in German-speaking lands and Northern Europe. It rekindled interest in the qualities of public spaces, notably squares and streets and their disposition in relation to the built urban fabric. Even though the text did not concern itself with infrastructure besides streets and squares, it sought to bring back the "art" to city building, which he saw to be disappearing in the shadows of functional-technical infrastructure construction (Sitte, City Planning, p. 84).
38.
Reps, The Making of Urban America; Levy, Contemporary Urban Planning.
39.
Francoise Choay , The Modern City: Planning in the 19th Century (New York: George Braziller, 1965; reprint, New York: George Braziller , 1969); Benevolo, The History of the City; Howard Saalman, Haussmann: Paris Transformed (New York : George Braziller, 1971).
40.
Choay, The Modern City, 16.
41.
Ildefons Cerdà , "The Extension of the city of Barcelona: Descriptive Memorandum of the Technical Work and Statistical Studies Carried Out by Government Order," in Cerdà: Urbs i territori: Catalog of the Exhibition Mostra Cerdà, ed. Generalitat de Catalunya (Madrid: Electa, 1996).
42.
Ildefons Cerdà , Teoría General de Urbanización y Aplicación de sus Principios y Doctrinas a la Reforma y Ensanche de Barcelona [General Theory of Urbanization and the Application of its Principles and Doctrines the Reform and Expansion of Barcelona] ( Madrid: Imprenta Española, 1867), 2 vols.
43.
Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 41.
44.
Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 2.
45.
Ibid, 3.
46.
Ibid, 6.
47.
Ibid, 22.
48.
Hughes, "The Social Construction of Technological Systems"; Tarr and Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Network City.
49.
Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture.
50.
Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 29-73.
51.
Ibid., 333 and 126.
52.
Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 69.
53.
Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett, Plan of Chicago ( Chicago: The Commercial Club, 1909 ).
54.
Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 217.
55.
Tarr and Dupuy, Technology and the Rise of the Networked City.
56.
Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 179.
57.
Nelson Lewis, The Planning of the Modern City, 1st and 2nd eds. (Brooklyn: Press of Braunworth & Co. Inc., 1916 and 1922).
58.
John Nolen, City Planning: A Series of Papers Presenting the Essential Elements of a City Plan (New York, D. Appleton, 1916).
59.
British planning pioneer Raymond Unwin remarked, "The truth is that in this work we have neglected the amenities of life. We have forgotten that endless rows of brick boxes, looking out on dreary streets and squalid backyards, are not really homes for people, and can never become such, however complete may be the drainage system, however pure the water supply, or however detailed the bye-laws under which they are built" (Raymond Unwin, Town Planning in Practice: An Introduction to the Art of Designing Cities and Suburbs [London: Unwin, 1909], 4).
60.
Christine M.Boyer, Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983): 67, 71, and 111-112.
61.
Sam Bass Warner Jr. , Streetcar Suburbs: The Process of Growth in Boston, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962; reprint Cambridge, MA: Harvard university Press, 1978); Kenneth Jackson, The Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985 ).
62.
Harold Lewis , The Planning of the Modern City, Vols. 1 and 2 (New York: John Wiley, 1949).
63.
John Nolen, City Planning: A Series of Papers Presenting the Essential Elements of a City Plan, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton, 1929).
64.
Harvey Perloff , Education for Planning: City, State and Regional (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1957).
65.
Phillip Selznick , TVA and the Grassroots: A Study in the Sociology of Formal Organization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949).
66.
Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 322.
67.
Marion Clawson , New Deal Planning: The National Resources Planning Board (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981).
68.
Once again, similar activities were undertaken in the United Kingdom. Thomas Adams prepared eight advisory regional plans between 1924 and 1932, and introduced the American idea of a parkway into metropolitan design in his work around the city of London. Patrick Abercrombie, prior to leading the development of the Greater London Plan of 1944 and the Clyde Valley Plan of 1946 for the Glasgow urban region of Scotland, produced a series of advisory regional plans in the twenties. (See Hall, Cities of Tomorrow.) They were regional designs that guided the physical form of the region, and the location and size of new or expanded settlements. Infrastructure was to do the shaping.
69.
Earl Mills , "Elements of an adequate comprehensive city planning program," Planner’s Journal2 (1936): 150-54.
70.
Edward M.Bassett, The Master Plan: With a Discussion of the Theory of Community Land Planning Legislation (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1938).
71.
Ladislas Segoe, ed., Local Planning Administration (Chicago: The Institute for Training in Municipal Administration, 1941).
72.
Lewis, Planning the Modern City (New York : John Wiley & Sons, 1949).
73.
Robert Walker , The Planning Function in Urban Government ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941).
74.
Michael Neuman , "Does Planning Need the Plan?" Journal of the American Planning Association64, no. 2 (1998): 208-220.
75.
Cliff Ellis , "Professional Conflict over Urban Form: the Case of Urban Freeways, 1930-1970," in Planning the Twentieth-Century American City, 262-79.
76.
Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier; Chester Hartman, The Transformation of San Francisco ( Totowa: Rowman and Allenheld, 1984 ).
77.
Cliff Ellis (1996) chronicles the influence of highway engineers in American city infrastructure planning. "Municipal engineers in Chicago and Detroit produced plans for express highways as early as the 1920s." Furthermore, "the federal government entered the urban freeway debates forcefully only during the 1930s," with two influential documents prepared by highway engineers in the Bureau of Public Roads: Toll Roads and Free Roads (1939) and Inter-regional Highways (1944), the latter serving as a blueprint for the 1956 Interstate and Defense Highway Act.
78.
Alan Altshuler , The City Planning Process: A Political Analysis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1965); Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal 1949-1962 ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965); Aaron Wildavsky, "If Planning Is Everything, Maybe It’s Nothing,"Policy Sciences4 (1973): 127-53.
79.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). Also, it should be noted that urban renewal did include a large dose of infrastructure provision, although this has been overlooked by some commentators.
80.
Paul Davidoff , "Advocacy and Pluralism in Planning" Journal of the American Institute of Planners31 (1965): 103-115.
81.
Ian McHarg , Design with Nature (New York : American Museum of Natural History, 1969).
82.
T.J. Kent, The Urban General Plan (San Francisco: Chandler, 1964); William Goodman and Eric Freund, Principles and Practice of Urban Planning, 4th ed. ( Washington, DC: International City Managers’ Association for the Institute for Training in Municipal Administration, 1968); Stuart Chapin Jr., Urban Land Use Planning ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1957; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1965): 965.
83.
We do not interpret estrangement to mean complete divorce or separation. See the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press).
84.
Bonnie Lindstrom , "Public Works and Land Use: The Importance of Infrastructure in Chicago’s Metropolitan Development, 1830-1970," in Suburban Sprawl: Private Decisions and Public Policy, ed. William Weiwel and Joseph Persky (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe , 2002); Steven Erie, "Los Angeles as a Developmental State," in From Chicago to L.A.; Making Sense of Urban Theory , ed. Michael Dear ( Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2002), 133-59; William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis; Harold Plat, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983); Melosi, The Sanitary City; David Perry, ed., Building the Public City (Beverly Hills, CA : Sage, 1995); Benevolo, The History of the City; Lewis Mumford, The City in History.
85.
Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism, 18.
86.
A review of the PAS Reports and books on the American Planning Association’s Web site reveals numerous documents pertaining to these infrastructure efforts. They also underscore the two observations that follow.
87.
Search terms we used in the content analysis of the plans were infrastructure, capital facilities, community facilities, public facilities, public works, utilities, transportation, circulation, wastewater, water supply, open space, parks, and recreation and other directly related systems. We examined the entire text of the following city plans: City of San Jose Planning Department, San Jose 2020 General Plan (San Jose, CA: City of San Jose Planning Department, 1994); City of Edmonton, Capital City Downtown Plan (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: City of Edmonton, 1997); Portland Metropolitan Council, Metro 2040 Growth Concept ( Portland, OR: Portland Metropolitan Council, 1994); Portland Metropolitan Council, Urban Growth Management Functional Plan (Portland, OR: Portland Metropolitan Council, 2007); City of Dallas, Forward Dallas! Comprehensive Plan (Dallas, TX: City of Dallas, 2006); City of Calgary, Imagine Calgary Plan (Calgary, Alberta , Canada: City of Calgary, 2007); Ontario Municipal Board, Toronto Official Plan (Toronto , Ontario: Ontario Municipal Board, 2007); San Francisco Planning Department, San Francisco General Plan (San Francisco, CA: San Francisco Planning Department, 1996-2009); City of Miami Planning Department, Miami 21 Code (Miami, FL: City of Miami Planning Department, 2009); City of Phoenix, General Plan for Phoenix ( Phoenix, AZ: City of Phoenix, 2001 ).
88.
Rolf Pendall , "Municipal Plans, State Mandates, and Property Rights," Journal of Planning Education and Research, 1 no. 2 (2001): 154-65; Rolf Pendall, Robert Puentes, and Jonathan Martin, Review of the Land Use Regulations in the Nation’s 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2006); Phillip Berke, David Godschalk, and Edward Kaiser, Urban Land Use Planning , 5th ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005).
89.
Charles Hoch, Frank S. So, and Linda C. Dalton , The Practice of Local Government Planning ( Washington, DC: International City Management Association , 2000).
90.
Berke, Godschalk, and Kaiser, Urban Land Use Planning.
91.
Koos Bosma and Helma Hellinga, Mastering the City: North-European City Planning 1900-2000. ( Rotterdam: NAI Publishers; The Hague: EFL Publications, 1997 ), 2 vols.; Andreas Faludi and Bas Waterhout, The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective: No Masterplan ( London: Routledge, 2002).
92.
The lead author has been to these cities and examined their plans.
93.
Housing, while a strong planning root in Europe, is not as much a root in the United States. A debated puzzle in American planning history is why housing played a lesser role (Gail Radford, 1996. Modern Housing for America: Policy Struggles in the New Deal Era. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.). We thank an anonymous reviewer for this insight.
94.
American Water Works Association (AWWA), Water Infrastructure at a Turning Point: The Road to Sustainable Asset Management (Washington, DC: AWWA, 20065); Neil Grigg, The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2002); Institute of Transportation Engineers (ITE), Transportation Planning Handbook, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: ITE, 2009); John Vogt, Capital Budgeting and Finance: A Guide for Local Governments (Washington, DC: International city Management Association, 2004). This shift goes back a long time. William Wilson’s and Martin Melosi’s meticulous analyses indicated that "beginning in the nineteenth century, municipal engineers deliberately preempted several planning areas, especially those involving sanitation, street grading and surfacing, drainage, and the oversight of [capital] improvement construction" (Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement, 285; see also Melosi, The Sanitary City).
95.
Robert Wiebe , A Search for Order, 1877-1920 ( New York: Hill and Wang, 1967).
96.
Paul Farmer, "Change," 3-4; American Planning Association (APA), National Infrastructure Investment Task Force (Chicago, IL: APA).
97.
Gabriel Dupuy , L'urbanisme des reseaux: theories et methods (Paris: A. Colon, 1991); Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism. Richard Hanley, Moving People, Goods and Information in the 21st Century ( London: Routledge, 2004); Oliver Coutard, Richard Hanley , and Rae Zimmerman, eds., Sustaining Urban Networks (London: Routledge, 2005); Rae Zimmerman and Thomas Horan, eds., Digital Infrastructures: Enabling Civil and Environmental Systems through Information Technology (London: Routledge, 2004).
98.
UNCHS Habitat, Cities in a Globalizing World; Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer, Urban Future 21: A Global Agenda for Twenty-first Century Cities (London: E& FN Spon, 2000); World Bank, World Development Report.
99.
Hall and Pfeiffer, Urban Future 21; K. Bernhart and S. McNeil, "Infrastructure and Public Works Education: One Size Does Not Fit All," Public Works Management and Policy 5, no. 4 (2001): 318-28; UNCHS, Cities in a Globalizing World; World Bank, World Development Report: Infrastructure for Development (London: Earthscan, 2001).
100.
Patrick Abercrombie , "Town Planning in Greater London: The Necessity for Cooperation,"Town Planning Review2 (1911): 261-80.
101.
Alfred Bettman , City and Regional Planning Papers ( Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946).
102.
Thomas Hughes , "The Social Construction of Technological Systems ," in The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor J. Pinch ( Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 52.
103.
Albert Noyes , "Organization and Management of a City Engineer’s Office" (1894), p. 544 in Schultz, Constructing Urban Culture, 189f13).
