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Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit

Donald Leslie Johnson

To cite this article: Donald Leslie Johnson (2002) Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit, Planning
Perspectives, 17:3, 227-245, DOI: 10.1080/02665430210129306

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Planning Perspectives, 17 (2002) 227–245

Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit

DONALD LESLIE JOHNSON*

University of South Australia, Box 75, Kangarilla, South Australia

It is commonly believed that the planning concept of a Neighborhood Unit was the brain-child of
Clarence A. Perry as published in 1929. However, the idea was formulated during Chicago’s reformist
and Progressive milieu in the decade before Europe’s new war by the architect William E. Drummond.
His theory and terminology were widely exhibited and published during the years 1913–22.

Introduction

In the late 1930s Shelby M. Harrison, General Director of the Russell Sage Foundation, by its
own words dedicated to ‘the improvement of social and living conditions’, oVered an opinion
that the ‘concept of the neighborhood unit’ was Žrst proposed in 1929 by Clarence Arthur
Perry [1]. Perry’s own comments in 1939 supported Harrison [2]. In the 1940s, on behalf of the
Sage Foundation, James Dahir compiled some notes on the neighborhood unit that sustained
Harrison’s opinion [3]. In 1950 Richard Dewey believed Perry’s idea ‘was given its clearest
formulation’ in 1929, and Arthur B. Gallion said Perry ‘was one of the Žrst to give some
consideration to the physical form of the neighborhood unit’. Both authors implied attribution
to Perry [4].
Francesco Dal Co in 1973 referred to ‘Clarence Perry’s concept of the neighborhood unit’ as
a – not the – source for Radburn, New Jersey, 1925–33 [5]. In the 1980s Joel Silver identiŽed
‘Perry’s seminal contribution’, the ‘neighborhood unit plan’, while William M. Rohe and
Lauren B. Gates believed that ‘Perry provided a template applicable to small-scale develop-
ment’ that oVered the possibility ‘of safe, healthy, and socially satisfying urban development’
[6]. Then, in 1997, Greg Hise advised that Perry developed ‘his neighborhood unit’ principles
in 1929 [7].
The above observations are typical of historians, sociologists and city planners when
arguing for or against the neighborhood unit as a planning system [8]. But when it is known
that neighbourhoods were the object of considerable attention nationwide c. 1898–1916, two
questions must be asked: why was the unit formalized so distant from initial and paradigmatic
attention?; and in light of that fact is it possible that the unit was conceived earlier than the late
1920s?

*Donald Leslie Johnson is an architectural historian who taught at Flinders University in Australia from 1972 until his
retirement in 1988. Prior to that he practised architecture in Seattle, Philadelphia and Tucson and taught at
Washington State, Adelaide and Arizona universities. He is the author or co-author of several books, including
Frank Lloyd Wright versus America, The architecture of Walter Burley GriYn, Australian architecture, 1901–51,
Makers of 20th Century Modern architecture and, Architectural Excursions: Frank Lloyd Wright, Holland and
Europe.

Planning Perspectives
ISSN 0266-5433 print/ISSN 1466-4518 online # 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/02665430210129306
228 Johnson

Context

Prominent among activities at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition were many
lively congresses and a vibrant World’s Parliament of Religions. They attracted thousands of
people from within the Americas and from overseas to discuss and evaluate trends in
temperance, housing, woman’s issues, education, public art, social reform and more. Much
of the programmed attention focused on responses to the disturbingly unstable urban
condition. Thereafter progressive minds directed their energies to curing the ills of America
that had been – or were being – caused by rashly expedient and helter-skelter urbanization.
During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, America’s burgeoning cities were
bursting with people, the majority foreign-born immigrants and their children. In the absence
of social stability, common decency and legal controls, commercial corruption was rampant,
political impotence normal. While entrepreneurs and politicians eagerly took advantage of the
situation, most people suVered social, psychological and physical distress in dark and dirty
factories, sordid and ramshackle housing beside fetid streets strewn with manure and garbage.
Increasingly there were reactive gestures to quantify technological problems (like sanita-
tion, water, clean air, rail and road), to seek operable principles for human urban habitation,
and to apply the newly described scientiŽc management – Taylorism as it came to be known.
As for housing, the growing inuence of a mix not of the Garden City but Garden Suburbs
from England and zoning from Germany were notable in the search for humane and rational
justiŽcations.
It is in Chicago’s progressive social and political milieu in the decade before America’s entry
into Europe’s new war that we Žnd the impetus, motivation and philosophical sustenance to
restructuring pragmatically the domestic neighbourhood, then only recently the object of
sociological study and one of those gestures.
After Washington, DC’s 1902 Commission Plan, the design of a three-man team led by
Chicago architect Daniel Burnham (basically a landscape proposal), the most synthetic event
to receive local and national scrutiny was a renaissance plan for Chicago. Burnham had
promised the ‘rich people’s’ Merchant’s Club, as it was locally known [9], to prepare a plan to
renovate the city’s horribly dishevelled lake front. After Merchant’s merged with the
Commercial Club, in 1907 they gave Burnham $US85 000 to start work on a project whose
programme would be expanded to include the entire city; he hired Edward H. Bennett as the
planning expert. To much fanfare an exhibition was held in 1908 and a book, The Plan of
Chicago released in 1909, sold at $US25 a copy.
Biographer Thomas Hines described Burnham’s aim as one ‘to rouse Chicagoans to the
cause of planning and to layout in broad strokes an orderly set of proposed improvements’. As
Burnham elliptically said, ‘good citizenship is the principal object of good city planning’ [10].
The Plan now is part of planning folklore. As initially presented, however, it was, like the
Washington 1902 scheme, another visual stage-set ordered by Francophilian classicism that
by 1909 had become so fundamental to the City Beautiful Movement. The abyss in Burnham’s
Plan, as with Washington, then San Francisco, then Cleveland, was a failure to explicitly call
for the provision of local community commerce, housing and related amenities. These were
not to involve the public purse but left by Burnham and Bennett to small business, private
agencies, philanthropy, charity.
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 229

To reformers and most progressives the Plan was seen as a agrant attempt to use tax
monies for aggrandizing self-serving politicians and their aristocratic plutocracy, as exempli-
Žed by ward bosses and the merchant princes of the Commercial Club. Indeed, after the Plan
was published, reaction to it (and the expectations of City Beautiful advisors) was forthright.
For example, city functional advocates believed that order and eYciency would produce its
own Beauty. Their view was paraphrased by historian William Wilson: ‘When cities were
made clean, practical, and eYcient, then they would be beautiful’. Even conservative architect
Cass Gilbert at the 1909 meeting of the American Institute of Architects uncharacteristically
said that, ‘A city that is done, completed, a city sane and sensible that can be lived in
comfortably. If it is to be city beautiful it will be one naturally’.
Respected New York City housing reformer and one who, with Jacob Riis and others,
fought for the institution of a ‘practical humanitarianism’, Benjamin C. Marsh said to the First
National Conference on City Planning in 1909 that the ‘gigantic cost’ for ‘civic vanity’, for the
mere ‘external adornment’ posed by the Plan was not acceptable. They could not hide urban
Žlth, foul air, disease, or the evils of pauperism, crime and degeneracy. George B. Ford,
settlement founder and Columbia University planning instructor, charged City Beautiful
movers and followers of Burnham with putting ‘superŽcialities’ and ‘frills and furbelows’
before, he emphasized, ‘the problems of living, work and play have been solved’ [11]. Back in
Illinois the Neighborhood Improvement League of Cook County was formed immediately
after publication of the Plan.
All the history and the pros and cons are well worn in analyses and rhetoric since 1909.
Regardless of major shortcomings, the Chicago Plan was a signiŽcant event of great
inuence [12]. While it fell short of comprehensiveness it also failed to draw from
preceding, more thoughtful and humanitarian propositions. Notable among those was
that generated by the non-governmental Civic League in St Louis. Their 1907 planning
document included a proposal for ‘a number of small, multipurpose civic centers scattered
throughout the city’, by the
grouping of public, semi-public, and private institution to spur ‘the mental, moral, [and] physical up
building of the neighborhood in which they are situated’. Neighborhood civic centres would supply a
‘socializing’ force in [existing] immigrant neighborhoods and encourage ‘development of neighbor-
hood feeling, the lack of which has much to do with our present corruption and ineYciency in political
life’ [13].

It must be emphasized that the scheme concerned community centres only and was not about
deŽning a neighbourhood, let alone about a design concept or ‘community blueprint’ for a
neighbourhood.
Most historians agree that sociologist Charles H. Cooley’s discussions 1898–1918 about
social integration and what he called the primary group, were instrumental in reformists’
responses to the increasing problems of the crowded commercial and industrial city,
speciŽcally in encouraging feasible neighbourhood studies. As related to this discussion,
Perry and others extracted from Cooley’s writings the following are typical:
By primary groups I mean those characterized by intimate face-to-face association and co-operation.
They are primary in several senses, but chiey in that they are fundamental in forming the social nature
and ideals of the individual . . .
The most important spheres of his intimate association and co-operation – though by no means the
230 Johnson

only ones – are the family, the play-group of children, and the neighborhood or community group of
elders . . .
Of the neighborhood group . . . at least to the rise of the modern industrial cities, it has played a main
part in the primary, heart-to-heart life of the people [14].

Cooley’s approach was social, psychological and moral; and morality and ethics were
signiŽcant factors. It was Dwight Davis of the St Louis Civic League who expressed the
Civic Center Committee’s desire for a neighbourhood’s ‘mental, moral [and] physical up
building’. Progressivism attracted Protestants who felt moral outrage at the human con-
sequences of corruption, complacency, inequities and inaction. They reactively engaged in
public exercises aimed at reform. Settlement houses were invariably Protestant foundations or
less often charitably funded socialist endeavours. Catholics and others looked internally.
In any event, taking form out of myriad promotions by many urban improvement groups,
lay and professional, disparate collective eVorts soon focused on the need to plan future
housing and domestic places; witness the rise of nationalized coalitions 1902–11, like those in
city planning, settlements, sociology, housing or parks and playgrounds [15]. Relative to a
city’s micro-communities they reached a theoretical synthesis in a semi-practical manner with
the Chicago City Club’s two national competitions of 1912 and 1914.
Following the lead of the Žrst city club incorporated in New York City 1894, progressive-
minded men from a wide variety of professions founded Chicago’s City Club in 1903. A
number were builders and designers of buildings and landscapes keen to become involved with
planning communities. Initially the club’s principal motivator was the architect Dwight
Perkins, active in local settlements and park and forest preservation. The respected landscape
architect Jens Jensen was another committed founder. So too was Charles Zueblin who, in
1891, established the Northwestern University settlement house, was president 1901–2 of the
American League for Civic Improvement, and a popular ‘civic revival’ speaker. In fact,
membership numbered in the hundreds and their success enabled the construction of a new
club building for administration, meetings, exhibitions and rooms for the Women’s City Club.

The City Club’s competitions

The competition of 1912 was probably energized by the forthcoming 1913 National Housing
Conference to be held in Chicago. It was partially subsidized by the Sage Foundation who
allowed Perry to attend. The Žrst competition was designed to ‘study’ the theoretical and
practical parameters, social and physical, of a micro-community in a suburban context with a
focus on housing; the second concerned a community centre.
The 1912 competition was prepared by City Clubers [16], with organization of the aVair
delegated to the club’s City Planning Committee chaired by Jensen. He was an advocate of
urban playgrounds and municipal parks, of course, but also a known critic of the City
Beautiful Movement. Jensen had described the Burnham and Bennett Plan of Chicago as
‘inhuman, imperialistic, and undemocratic’, a commercial venture, a ‘show city’, a ‘city of
places’ [17]. He would have approved of historian Mel Scott’s assessment of the Plan as
devised for ‘a city of a past that America never knew’ [18]. The City Club’s competition in
concept and formulation was not only a positive reformist action but a counter to the Plan’s
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 231

inherent grandiloquence that, they argued, would further the abuse of public trust, the private
sector’s corporate greed and the misuse of community Žnances.
The club’s competitions placed emphasis on the heart of family and community social
interaction; housing and its communal components. Indeed, housing was becoming the focus
of progressive planning attention by a wide variety of lay community groups and conventional
associations in America. 1910 signals shifts in thinking from the politically and commercially
dominated city centres (as initially advanced by City Beautiful advocates) to the human
condition (under the impress of reformers) and to suburban micro-communities.
Chicago’s City Club was one organization in the forefront of synthetic thought and willing
to act. It, like hundreds of other city clubs, woman’s clubs, leagues and civic associations, the
National Municipal League (formed 1894), and similarly motivated non-governmental
organizations, was committed to exploring the potentialities of reform by investigative and
practical resolve directed to law and political administration at one extreme, through to
improving concomitant domestic circumstances by intelligent design. It was a resolve City
Beautiful followers were unwilling to make until overcome by the evidential weight provided
by the rationalists.
For those with pragmatic and rational concerns intelligent design meant engaging profes-
sionals who would competently provide to the wider community (but not as yet suggesting
government sponsorship) and to real estate developers, commercial and philanthropic, an
organizational, responsible, and aesthetic reply. The club’s press release put it so: ‘to encourage
landowners and capitalists to promote social welfare by developing ideal suburbs’ [19].
The Illinois Chapter of the American Institute of Architects prepared the 1912 programme.
Their text found Burnham and Bennett’s proposal too general a ‘framework’, extraordinarily
expensive, and worried that a ‘long period of time for its execution’ obviously left quickly
developing areas of the city in jeopardy. The urgent need was not for greater commercial and
municipal display but for smaller-scaled, closely detailed plans related to community and
‘neighborhood institutions’ [20]. This is interesting for it hints of serious divisions within the
chapter: those supporting Burnham and his Plan, and those opposed who wrote the club’s
programme. But this is an aside.
The programme’s section on literature was admittedly prescriptive, describing ‘the progress
of the Garden City and Garden Suburb movement, especially in Great Britain and Germany’
[21]. That emphasis was supported by recent club-sponsored public lectures presented by
Raymond Unwin, Henry Vivian, Ewart G. Culpin, Thomas Adams, Thomas Mawson, all
British and devoted to Garden Cities. As well, there were lectures by Americans associated
with settlement houses and social and housing reforms, such as Chicagoans Graham Taylor
and Jane Addams, John Dewey (by then in New York City), Jacob Riis and Benjamin C. Marsh
(New York), Luther Gulick (Russell Sage Foundation) and Southside Bostonian Robert A.
Woods [22].
The Žnal and longest part of the programme was devoted to planning details. From
‘building and landscape architects’, engineers, and sociologists, the club asked for ‘the best
practice of the present day for laying out and improving, for residence purposes, areas in
Chicago’ then unoccupied [23]. The Illinois Chapter’s preamble to the programme stated
that land on ‘the outskirts of the city’ was being ‘rapidly built up with homes without that
intelligent direction’ so ‘necessary for the good of the city and its population. Recreation
centers and parks are not being located until population has made them absolutely
232 Johnson

necessary, nor are the essentials for good housing and for neighborhood institutions being
recognized’ [24].
The competition’s imaginary site eight miles south of central Chicago was a at quarter-
section, empty, and had a normal grid street pattern on its periphery (Fig. 1). (A quarter-
section is one quarter of a mile square and contains 160 acres, c. 65 hectares.) To the north
were located many places of work including the stinking stock and rail yards, all served by
public transport that passed on the edge streets of the site. Therefore, two necessary
ingredients of a city, work place and transport, were not internal to the design problem nor
were self-governmental and some physical infrastructure facilities.
Competitors were asked to submit drawings Žrst of their plan, and second of an aerial
perspective together with certain data. Plan requirements speciŽed functional elements such as
street layout, house lots, location of business, commerce, public gardens and open spaces,
education and religious buildings, varied recreational activities, and so forth. Jointly they
deŽned the physical structure of a fully equipped neighbourhood. Competing for a total of
$US600, submissions were due before noon on 3 March 1913.
Thirty-nine ‘sets of plans’ were juried. All the entrants were Americans except the Swedish
husband and wife team, Albert and Ingrid Lilienberg. Frank Lloyd Wright was solicited and
submitted a non-competitive proposal [25]. Twenty-six of the entries were exhibited (includ-
ing Wright’s) at the club’s premises [26].
The jury’s six positive criteria for assessment were: economy and practicality; provision for
health and sanitation; beauty (including general plan composition and architectural character)
and originality; comfort and convenience of residents; provision for social activities including
education and recreation; and commerce [27].
Three prizes were awarded. First place of $US300 went to architect Wilhelm Bernhard. He
had worked for Wright around 1912 and was described as a graduate of the Chicago
Architectural Club [28]. Bernhard’s plan (Fig. 2) was loosely based on British Garden Suburbs
of the immediate past but with some tortuous streets and awkward intersections. When
published in 1916 it was accompanied by naively primitive perspective drawings of Germanic
buildings reminiscent of Forest Hills Gardens designs of 1912 [29].
Second place was taken by a design by Boston landscape architect Arthur C. Comey, one of
the Žrst American professionals to identify himself as a city planner. He was a consultant of
some note who, beginning in 1928, taught at Harvard University. His 1913 plan was similar to
Bernhard’s but more lax, though expertly attuned to the plans of Letchworth and therefore
Forest Hills. The Lilienbergs were placed third with a symmetrical, rather beaux-arts plan [30].
When mounted in May 1913 the club’s housing exhibition contained not only selected
competition designs. There was an attempt to make it attractive to – and emotionally and
intellectually engage – various sections of Chicago society and those attending the housing
conference who might seriously respond to other visual and commentary information. A
historical section surveyed typical Chicago houses and street scenes from 1830. An examina-
tion of building department records determined typical houses constructed in 1912 and they
were displayed in photographs accompanied by oor plans. Contrarily, contemporary
‘squalid homes’, dilapidated and overcrowded tenements and the negative eVects of no
zoning controls were subjects of a photographic exhibit entitled ‘In Darker Chicago’, prepared
by the Woman’s Club and Woman’s City Club [31]. Chicago’s two cities were thereby vividly
contrasted.
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 233

Figure 1. ‘Plan of a Typical Quarter Section in the Outskirts of Chicago’ (Source: A. B.Yeomans, City
Residential Land Development. Chicago, 1916).
234 Johnson

Figure 2. ‘First Prize Plan by Wilhelm Bernhard [Architect]’ (source: A. B. Yeomans, City Residential
Land Development. Chicago, 1916).
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 235

Beside the second city’s squalor were placed some ‘remarkably attractive . . . housing
carried out in Garden suburbs’ and other recent European housing schemes. Photographs,
maps and coloured plans highlighted developments at Amsterdam, Munich and Essen, as
examples, and Britain’s Bournville, Port Sunlight, Letchworth and Hampstead Heath.
The Chicago Tribune highlighted all this and compared European eVorts with Chicago’s
makeshift reality in a series of lengthy articles that eVectively supported the concerns and
solutions oVered by the exhibition [32]. Also, for their 1913 May meeting the National
Conference on City Planning called for individuals to submit plans for a hypothetical site. It
was not a competition but a request for ideas. The programme parroted the Chicago’s City
Club’s of 1912 and only nine plans were received, all looking much like expensive Forest Hills
or Burnham’s proposed civic centre for Chicago [33]. The club’s successes also encouraged
New York City to prepare a ‘City Planning Exhibition’ for November and December 1913
with much material gathered from Chicago’s show. Advisors included Frederick C. Howe,
Mrs. V. G. (Mary K.) Simkhovitch, Charles R. Lamb, Nelson P. Lewis, Henry C. Wright, H.
van Buren Magonigle, Cass Gilbert, George B. Ford as secretary, with the British garden city
advocate Culpin again involved [34]. Similar housing and planning exhibitions were becoming
popular throughout Canada and America.
For purposes of this essay only one of the City Club’s 1912–13 entries needs to be discussed.
The most substantive and prophetic proposal was by architect William E. Drummond who
coined and deŽned the term ‘Neighborhood Unit’. He then explored how his ideal Units could
co-exist in a city’s physical and social fabric by identifying their relationship to each other, to
transport, local social activities and commerce, park lands, recreational centres, industry, a
city’s commercial core and housing (Fig. 3).
Born 1876 at Newark, New Jersey, he studied architecture for one year at the University of
Illinois, worked briey for architect Louis Sullivan and others in Chicago, and then principally
for Wright 1899–1909 where he became a central Žgure. Thereafter he set up an independent
oYce. Like Wright, Drummond was basically self-taught and proved to be a thoughtful
architect possessing considerable talent [35].
In his competition submission Drummond proposed a ‘Neighborhood Unit’, that was his
term, that could be repeated throughout the city. He envisaged ‘the whole city’ ordered by
areas ‘approximately’ the size of a quarter-section, each to be ‘regarded as a unit in the social
and political structure of the city’. (Unit: one deŽnition is, things that form a united whole.)
Deriving something from Cooley, a Unit was ‘intended to comprise an area which will
permanently exist . . . as a neighborhood or primary social circle [and to have] the usual
elementary [school] equipment’, together with ‘intellectual, recreational, and civic require-
ments’ centrally located in an ‘institute’ building. ‘In a series of units’, the architect said, there
would be ‘an alternate disposition of centers of activity which would remove as far as possible
the operation of one function from that of the other’ [36].
In plan he explained how Neighborhood Units might space themselves about a city (Fig. 3),
a portion of one area of Chicago the example, while integrating rail lines, park lands, streets,
all imprecisely bound by a belt of park lands (the dark grey areas top and bottom).
By aerial perspective Drummond proposed two types of nuclei and they alternate in an
inexact chequered pattern in his overall plan. He showed an ‘alternative scheme’ in a drawing
where two adjoining ‘units’ shared local ‘business centers’ (left and right in Fig. 4), with
slightly diVering community ‘social centers’ top and bottom [37]. (These are identiŽed by
236 Johnson

Figure 3. ‘A City Area Developed on the ‘‘Neighborhood Unit’’ Plan. (Using a Quarter-section as the
Approximate Unit Area)’. William E. Drummond, Architect. (Source: A. B. Yeomans, City Residential
Land Development. Chicago, 1916).

black squares or thick crosses in the overall plan, Fig. 3.) Neighbourhoods would be connected
by commuter rail to a zoned ‘manufacturing Belt’. Moreover he proposed low rise apartment
buildings that were to embrace central recreational areas (Fig. 5), an idea taken to over-praised
Radburn, New Jersey, ten years later.
It should be evident that neighbourhoods as the domestic areas of cities were historically
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 237

Figure 4. ‘Bird’s-eye View of an Alternative Scheme for [Neighborhood] ‘‘Unit’’ Development’. William
E. Drummond, Architect. (Source: A. B. Yeomans, City Residential Land Development. Chicago, 1916).

Figure 5. ‘Court View’ of ‘Attached Dwelling’ of an ‘Ordinary City Block’. William E. Drummond,
Architect. (Source: Western Architect, 1915).
238 Johnson

and practically apparent at the time. But Drummond’s theoretical concept was unique, potent,
provocative. His overall plan also explained its exibility in form and space.
The club’s next competition was a logical component of that in 1912. In 1914 they
announced a project ‘to secure the best architectural expression of a neighborhood center’ by
drawing on ideas put by the Community Center Movement begun c. 1911 [38] and, more
practically, by the St Louis Civic League. Potential competitors were advised that entries were
due before 9 November 1914; that there was no speciŽc site; that quasi-centres ‘going on’ in a
‘fragmentary way’ indicated a need for ‘more complete and perfect patterns’, that would
induce more eYciency and create neighbourhood ‘spirit’, ‘attractiveness’ and ‘action’ [39].
Of the twenty submissions unfortunately only a few have come to our attention. Short
public notices in March 1915 announced that New York architects Anna P. Schenck and
Marcia Mead, who had entered the 1912 competition (and were close to those involved with
Forest Hills and the Sage Foundation), collected Žrst prize for a resolution of an odd triangular
site in Bronx, New York [40].
Drummond presented a number of elements from his 1912 and 1914 entries in an article
published February 1915, a month before public announcement of the winners. We can
assume that his proposal was too theoretical to satisfy the more practical jurors. In any event
he illustrated a community centre, a ‘little Capitol’, by perspective drawing (Fig. 6).
Drummond went on to describe the Neighborhood Unit as a scheme ‘designed to bring
about a reconstruction of our social and political urban life . . .’. It was, he believed, a solution
that promoted the social value of good design, one potentially both ideal and curative.

[It] aims at a pronounced ‘individualization’ of neighborhood districts in cities . . . composed of ‘units.’

Each having a neighborhood center or ‘little capitol’.
In . . . neighborhoods, certain streets would be built up with co-related groups of apartment buildings,
semi-detached and single dwellings. This arrangement being a ‘nucleus’ or Žrst stage. The remaining
areas [i.e. vacant land] would be devoted to permanent sites for the more expensive individual dwellings.

In Figure 4 we can note grey areas empty of suggested buildings where those ‘individual’
houses might be located. Drummond then advised readers on the essentials set out by the
Community Center Movement, the St Louis document, and the City Club’s competition
programme, in part saying ‘the ‘‘little capitol’’ would have a large public meeting house,

Figure 6. Bird’s eye view of proposed ‘Neighborhood Center, Chicago’. William E. Drummond,
Architect. (Source: Western Architect, 1915).
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 239

[Fig. 4, top and bottom, or Fig. 6], school rooms, a library and halls for exhibition and
recreation, as well as gymnasia and contiguous park and play space . . .’ [41].
An exhibition of neighbourhood centre submissions was held 2 March to 15 April 1915 at
City Club premises.

Perry’s appropriation

Little of practical value or theoretical consequence occurred until around 1920 when Roderick
McKenzie concluded empirical research that illuminated the social and physical ingredients of
existing neighbourhoods. His synthetic report of 1921 is a paradigm of neighbourhood studies
and exempliŽes the Chicago school of sociology carried on by himself and the likes of Cooley,
Zueblin, Lester Ward, E. W. Burgess and Robert E. Park.
McKenzie outlined historical information about neighbourhoods from Western antiquity
onward. He then referred to biased contemporary deŽnitions by economists, sociologists,
anthropologists, moralists, social and cultural historians, and the religious. This was followed
by an accounting of expressions by current city dwellers as to what constituted their
neighbourhood, McKenzie’s ‘common-sense’ approach. From those case studies he uncovered
the social, economic and physical elements and limits of existing neighbourhoods. While
McKenzie found that ‘no other term is used so loosely or with such changing content as the
term neighborhood’, he managed to identify two essential ingredients:
. physical proximity to a given ‘object of attention’; and
. ‘intimacy of association among people living in close proximity of one another’ [42].

The object of attention in the 1912–13 competition was twofold, the commercial and
recreational areas. In 1914–15 obviously it was the multi-functional community centre.
When, in 1925, Chicago urban sociologist Robert Park spoke of the neighbourhood, he
reinforced Cooley’s interpretation and then said in Drummond phraseology; ‘In the social and
political organization of the city [the neighborhood] is the smallest local unit’. Park then
referred to the energetic Bostonian Robert A. Woods, Episcopalian minister, sociologist,
reform polemicist, and head of South End House settlement, who, in 1914, Park recalled, had
said, among other things, ‘The neighborhood is a social-unit which, by its clear deŽnition of
outline, its inner organic completeness, its hair-trigger reactions, may be fairly considered as
functioning like a social mind . . .’ [43].
Woods went on in 1917 to suggest that the neighbourhood
is the ultimate testing-place of all social remedies and reforms. It is the unit of measurement over against
which in detail they must all be set. When the city plan ceases being merely, or even chiey, a matter of
architecture, it must begin to shape itself from locality to locality . . .
And, further, that ‘The unit which we social workers refer to most often as being our primary
base of operations, is the neighborhood, the local community, the city district, the village’ [44].
Indeed, the village was a potent symbol in city planning propositions that emanated from
minds sympathetic to the romantic impulse fostered by Garden Cities.
Drawing on his own research and practical results gained by extensive settlement research,
Park supported the proposition that ‘Every neighborhood . . . may assume the character of a
240 Johnson

‘‘moral region’’ [45]. The neighbourhood was not only a physical but a social unit with an
‘intimacy of association’ possessing tastes and temperaments.
A couple of years after McKenzie’s analysis and coincident with Park, Clarence Perry
synthesised some sociological observations. Perry had been hired by the Sage Foundation in
1909 to study local community issues. From 1912 onward he resided in the socially exclusive
Forest Hills Gardens on New York’s Long Island, a Sage Foundation project that did nothing
to assuage housing problems. To an annual conference on social work in 1924 he presented a
paper that condensed previous studies and comments, and then he recommended parameters
of a neighbourhood, all conveniently Žtted within a quarter-section area.
In connection with work on the New York Regional Survey – another Sage Foundation
project – in 1929 Perry repeated and elaborated on his parameters, oVered more deŽnition,
and appropriated Drummond’s text and term of the ‘Neighborhood Unit’ [46]. Perry’s
prescriptions of 1924 and those now well known of 1929 almost duplicated the City Club’s
1912 competition programme, Drummond’s explanations, terminology and synthetic vision
and drew on the observations of Woods, McKenzie, Park and others. Perry’s often published
theoretical zoning and street plan, however, ignored existing contexts and recent planning
advances when he presented a rather naive echo of Letchworth and Forest Hills that also
included a central plaza on which seven roads converged.

Consequences

The immediate consequences of the City Club’s eVorts 1912–16 on future community
planning is less problematical than anticipated, their work well known. They promoted
Drummond’s formalized Neighborhood Unit concept while results of the competition were
widely publicized 1913–25. This is further substantiated by the following connections. Jensen
and other City Club members – Wright, Drummond, Comey and other competitors (many of
whom were or became community planners) – and advisors like Carol Aronovici, Perry and
the inuential Sage Foundation, John Nolen in 1915 and 1916, and later Werner Hegemann
and Elbert Peets in 1922 [47], and other people knowledgeable of Drummond’s proposal,
were active in the Playground and Recreation, the Community Center (a pet project of
Perry’s), Settlement, Garden City, Civic League, or other reform-minded movements, and/or
with national associations, forums and conferences such as those on sociology, housing, social
work, charities, municipal parks, education, transportation or city planning.
From the late 1910s onward Lewis Mumford was a conŽdant of people in Europe and
America involved with promoting recreation areas, park lands, social welfare planning
generally, and decentralization within regionalism. Mumford made a case in support of
continued professional awareness of Drummond’s and Chicago’s 1912–16 community
planning aVairs by referring to a paper by Raymond Unwin of 1920 to the Town Planning
Institute in London. We can recall Unwin had spoken to the City Club in 1911, noting the
community centre movement [48], and his British colleague Ewart Culpin participated in the
club’s 1913 exhibition.
Mumford believed that Perry was ‘aided . . . by the publication [in 1916] of the results of a . . .
competition held [1912–13] by the Chicago City Club’ [49]. ‘Shortly after the publication’ the
‘most fertile urban innovator of his generation’ (as Mumford characterized Unwin), put a case
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 241

‘to convert the great city into a group of small ones, each of which shall become a deŽnitely
localised community having its deŽnite area’. Unwin called it a ‘self-contained suburb’, with
‘accessible space of open country deŽning that area, and having its life mainly localised with
that area; but enjoying . . . certain opportunities both commercial, industrial and cultural,
which are beyond the reach of the individual small town’.
His proposal matched – often mimicked – Drummond in particular, more generally the City
Club competition programme. ‘In the neighborhood of a big town’, said Unwin,

there is no reason why the greater part of the life of the inhabitants should not be localised in more or less
deŽned communities having their own local government areas, their localised minor industries, shops,
markets and other businesses, and particularly their localised educational and recreational facilities.

As Drummond proposed in his ‘City Area’ plan, Unwin was to repeat: a ‘proper
apportionment of open space around each area’ will ‘emphasize the locality as a deŽned
unit’ (my emphasis). Drummond had used the word ‘park’ to describe sylvan places and open
green space between or around sections of a city, more practically reecting Arturo Soria y
Mata’s and Ebenezer Howard’s noteworthy component of decentralization that anticipated
green belts, so popular with British decentralists and American regionalists.
As Drummond thought of the Unit as a political entity, a ‘little capitol’, Unwin was to
repeat: these urban ‘units’ (again his word) could act as ‘parishes’ or ‘wards’ to ‘foster the
feeling of local unity’ [50].
As Drummond set boundaries and size, so did Perry. As Drummond (and the City Club)
called for open spaces and recreational facilities, and placed institutional buildings centrally,
so did Perry. As Drummond located commerce close to peripheral rail and traYc junctions, so
did Perry. As Drummond and the City Club suggested restricting local streets and banning
through traYc, so did Perry. As Drummond and Unwin described a ‘Unit’, so did Perry.
It can fairly be asked why the Unit idea failed to attract practical attention after publication
in 1916. There are a number of reasons that come to mind. Drummond dropped from public
view after the war to operate a small one-man oYce. There was a post-1918 conservative
reaction against Progressivism generally. In community planning there was a concentration on
new industrial towns and civic centres at one extreme, with public and private housing projects
at another: neighbourhoods ab initio fell awkwardly between. Bernhard’s plan would be seen
as naive, probably, and Forest Hills Garden’s as excessive. Nothing had changed in Chicago;
politicians were committed to Burnham’s plan under Commissioner Charles H. Wacker.
Mumford believed inaction was not in ignorance but a result of the 1917–18 war, but he said
nothing further [51]. Perhaps he saw the diversion of public attention to waging war and then
to recovery. Money post-1918 was also devoted to traYc road systems and rationalizing rail.
In addition, there was most probably an inability to see how Units could be applied, the
potential of zoning not yet fully understood.
None the less, the evidence proves Mumford was correct. Now the conclusion is clear:
Drummond’s inventive and imaginative concept of a Neighbourhood Unit 1913–16 was
paradigmatic and inuential on immediate theoretical responses. It was Drummond’s
Neighborhood Unit: Unwin borrowed it, Park was assisted by it, Perry and the Russell Sage
Foundation appropriated it. Through the inuence of the Foundation and the RPA, with
noticeable advances in municipal administration and city planning, and with endorsements of
242 Johnson

the Unit by committees to President Hoover’s 1931 Conference on Home Building and Home
Ownership (held in Washington, DC), longevity was assured. That is a story told elsewhere.

Acknowledgements

This essay ampliŽes a paper given to the 8th International Planning Society Conference, July
1998. I wish to thank Christopher Vernon (University of Western Australia) for assistance and
encouragement; for advice Gilbert Herbert (Technion: Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa),
Mervyn Miller, Herts, England, and the reader for Perspectives with editor Robert B.
Fairbanks. Except Figures 1 and 2, drawings were by William E. Drummond, Architect,
1913–15.

Notes and references

1. James Dahir, The neighborhood unit plan, its spread and acceptance. New York: Russell Sage, 1947
pp. [3]; Shelby H. Harrison, in Clarence Arthur Perry, Housing for the Machine Age. New York:
Russell Sage, 1939, pp. 11–13.
2. C. A. Perry, op. cit., passim.
3. J. Dahir, op. cit., throughout.
4. Richard Dewey, The neighborhood, urban ecology, and city planners. American Sociological
Review 15 (August 1950) p. 503; Arthur B. Gallion, The Urban Pattern. New York: van Nostrand,
1950, p. 279.
5. Francesco Dal Co, From Parks to the Region: Progressive Ideology and the Reform of the American
City, in Georgio Ciucci et al., The American City. From the Civil War to the New Deal. Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1980, p. 241. Radburn was the design product of Clarence S. Stein and Henry
Wright in collaboration with Frederick L. Ackerman, Andrew J. Thomas and James Renwick
Thomson.
6. Christopher Silver, Neighborhood Planning in Historical Perspective. APA Journal 51 (Spring,
1985) p. 165; William M. Rohe and Lauren B. Gates, Planning with Neighborhoods. Chapel Hill/
London: University North Carolina Press, 1985, p. 23.
7. Greg Hise, Magnetic Los Angeles. Planning the Twentieth-Century Metropolis. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997, p. 32.
8. The schism between physical planners, who dominated city planning post-1893, and sociologists is
outlined in R. Dewey, op. cit. [4]. Further, it could be argued that C. A. Perry, op. cit. [1], and J.
Dahir, op. cit.[1], were produced to support not only the planning principles of the Neighborhood
Unit but as a defence of the Sage Foundation’s rather elitist position prior to the 1960s.
9. Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, Chicago. The history of its reputation. New York: Harcourt
Brace, 1929, p. 312.
10. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis, Chicago and the Great West. New York: Norton, 1991,
chapter 8; Thomas S. Hines, Burnham of Chicago: architect and planner. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1974, p. 333; Mel Scott, American City Planning since 1890. Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969, pp. 100–9. On Bennett’s philosophy see David L. A. Gordon, Introducing
a city beautiful plan for Canada’s capital, Edward Bennett’s 1914 speech to the Canadian Club.
Planning History Studies 12 (1/2, 1998) pp. 13–51.
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 243

11. C. Gilbert, B. C. Marsh and G. B. Ford quoted in William H. Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, pp. 287–8.
12. Post-1911 events are outlined in Wesley Marx, The Frail Ocean. New York: Ballantine, 1967,
chapter 12; Thomas J. Schlereth, Burnham’s Plan and Moody’s Manual, city planning as progressive
reform, in Donald A. Krueckeberg (ed.) The American Planner. Biographies and Recollections. New
York: Methuen, 1983, pp. 75–99.
13. C. Silver, op. cit. [6], p. 163, who quotes Dwight F. Davis, Chairman of the St Louis Civic League’s
Civic Center Committee.
14. As selected by C. A. Perry, op. cit. [1], p. 217; and J. Dahir, op. cit. [1], p. 19; see also Lewis
Mumford, The Neighborhood and the Neighborhood Unit. Town Planning Review 24 (January,
1954) pp. 259–62; and the moralist and settlement worker Robert A. Woods, The Neighborhood in
Social Reconstruction. Journal of Sociology 19 (March 1914) pp. 577–91.
15. Useful historical studies of the period with information about Chicago, planning, and Progressivism
include Daniel Aaron, Men of good hope. A story of American Progressives. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1951; Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America 1820–1920.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978; M. Christine Boyer, Dreaming the Rational
City. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983; William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson, Jr (eds),
The Reinterpretation of American History and Culture. Washington: National Council for Social
Studies, [1973]; Charles H. Cooley, Social Organization. New York: 1909 (reprint, Glencoe: Free
Press, 1956); Margaret Crawford, Building the workingman’s paradise. New York: Verso, 1995; W.
Cronon, op. cit. [10]; James Early, Romanticism and American Architecture. New York: 1965;
George B. Ford, City Planning Progress in the United States. Washington: American Institute of
Architects, 1917; Samuel P. Hays, The Response to Industrialism: 1885–1914. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1957; Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, From Bryan to F.D.R. New York:
Knopf, 1963; R. Hofstadter (ed.), The Progressive Movement 1900–1915. New Jersey: Prentice
Hill, 1963; Arnold Lewis, An Early Encounter with Tomorrow. Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1995; Alpheus Thomas Mason (ed.), Free Government in the Making (2nd edn). New York: Oxford
University Press, 1956; Harold M. Mayer and Richard C. Wade, Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Otis Pease (ed.), The Progressive Years. New York:
Brazilles, 1962; Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, Vol. 3, The Rise of a Modern City 1871–
1893. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957; Carl Resek (ed.), The Progressives. New York:
Bobbs, Merrill, 1967; Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1995; John R. Stilgoe, Borderland, Origins of the American suburb 1820–1925. New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Robert P. Sutton (ed.), The Prairie State. A Documentary
history of Illinois . . . Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976; Robert H. Wiebe, The search for order 1877–
1920. New York/London: Macmillan, 1967; Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the model home.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; and Howard Zinn A people’s history of the United
States, New York: HarperCollins, 1999.
Louis Wirth prepared a useful contemporary bibliography in Robert E. Park, Ernest W. Burgess and
Roderick D. McKenzie, The City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1925 (reprint 1967). It
includes a section entitled Eugenics.
16. Alfred B. Yeomans, City Residential Land Development. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1916, p. 1. It includes illustrations of – with authors’ comments about – 25 entries in the 1912–13
competition. Of the 1914–15 competition entries only Drummond’s was included.
17. Robert E. Grese, Jens Jensen Maker of Natural Parks and Gardens. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1992, p. 87; G. Wright, op. cit. [15], pp. 263.
18. M. Scott, op. cit. [10], p. 108.
19. Pick winners of housing prices, Chicago Sunday Tribune (March 23, 1913), part 1, p. 21.
20. A. B. Yeomans, op. cit. [16], preface, pp. 1–2.
244 Johnson

21. Ibid., p. 5.
22. See listing of past lectures sponsored by City Club members in their Tenth Year Book (July 1, 1913).
Cf. Charles A. Beard, Recent activities of city clubs. National Municipal Review 1 (1912) pp. 431–4.
23. A. B. Yeomans, op. cit. [16], p. 1.
24. Ibid.
25. Frank Lloyd Wright, Plan by Frank Lloyd Wright, in A. B. Yeomans, ibid., pp. 95–102. A critical
analysis of Wright’s contribution is a continuing research project of D. L. Johnson.
26. Cash for model city plan. Chicago Daily Tribune (March 4, 1913) p. 7. Prize money was provided by
club president Alfred L. Baker, see Chicago’s City Planning Competition. National Municipal
Review 2 (April, 1913) p. 305; Prize-Winning Plans . . . Quarter-Section of Urban Land. American
City 8 (April, 1913) 421, and descriptions of three winners, pp. 421–7.
27. A. B. Yeomans, op. cit. [16], pp. 6–7.
28. Chicago Architectural Club, Book of the Twenty-seventh Annual Exhibition. Chicago: Art Institute
of Chicago, 1914, n.p.
29. A. B. Yeomans, op. cit. [16], pp. 10–14, pp. 108–9. Results of the competition were announced and
discussed in National Municipal Review 2 (April, 1913) pp. 305, 497–9; Construction News
(Chicago) (March 22, 1913) p. 1; and Western Architect 19 (April, 1913) pp. 39–40; John Nolen
(ed.), City Planning. New York: D. Appleton, 1916; Graham R. Taylor, Satellite Cities. New York:
D. Appleton, 1915, pp. 275–6; Robert Craik McLean, City Residential Land Development. Western
Architect 26 (January, 1917) pp. 6–8, and related plates; Book of the . . . Exhibition of the Chicago
Architecture Club, 1913, n.p., item 41 (42 not illustrated); see also David P. Handlin, The context of
the modern city. Harvard Architecture Review 2 (Spring, 1981) pp. 84–9; T. S. Hines, op. cit. [10],
chapter 14.
30. A. B. Yeomans, ibid., pp. 16–21, 109–10. The Lilienbergs were on a long-term visit to the US. He
was known to be chief of the Town Planning Commission, Goteberg, Sweden, and involved with
Swedish garden cities.
31. City Club Housing Show, Chicago Daily Tribune (March 14, 1913) p. 13; John Ihlder, Chicago City
Club’s Housing Exhibition. National Municipal Review 2 (April, 1913) pp. 497–9; John Nolen, The
Fifth National conference on City Planning, in J. Nolen (ed.), op. cit. [29], pp. 496–7; Robert
Spencer, Attack U.S. building ideas. Chicago Daily Tribune (March 27, 1913) p. 7.
32. Editorial, ‘We Will’. Chicago Daily Tribune (March 17, 1913) p. 6, and relevant pages of the daily
and Sunday Tribune to early April 1913.
33. Plans for the development of a tract on the Outskirts of a Growing City. American City 6 (June,
1913) pp. 583–5; G. R. Taylor, op. cit. [29], pp. 276–7.
34. New York’s City Planning Exhibition. American City 9 (December, 1913) 504–12.
35. H. Allen Brooks, The Prairie School. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972, pp. 7–80, 126–30,
267–73; David P. Van Zanten, Sullivan’s City. New York: Norton, 2000, pp. 80–6; Suzanne
Ganschinietz, William Drummond II. Partnership and Obscurity. Prairie School Review 6 (2, 1969);
Wilbert R. Hasbrouck, The Architectural Firm of Guenzel & Drummond, Prairie School Review 6
(2, 1969) pp. 5, 7; William E. Drummond, The work of Guenzel and Drummond. Western Architect
21 (February, 1915), reprinted as, On Things of Common Concern. Prairie School Review 1 (2,
1964) pp. 9–15.
36. William E. Drummond, Plan of . . . developed from a sketch submitted in competition, in A. B.
Yeomans, op. cit. [16], pp. 39–40.
37. The other proposed nucleus is shown in W. E. Drummond, op. cit. [35], pp. 15.
38. Announced nationally in, Chicago’s City Planning Competition. National Municipal Review 2
(April, 1913) p. 305; Neighborhood Center Competition. American City 11 (July, 1914) p. 62; and
see Arthur Coleman Comey, Neighborhood Centers, in J. Nolen (ed.), op. cit. [29], pp. 117–28.
39. Neighborhood Centers. National Municipal Review 4 (July, 1915) p. 496.
Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit 245

40. The neighborhood center competition. City Club Bulletin 8 (March, 1915) p. 1, 77; Howard
Woodhead, Chicago’s ‘Great Community Estate’ – Lessons from an exhibit. Survey 17 (April, 1915)
pp. 65–6; G. B. Ford, op. cit. [15], p. 126; and Anna Pendleton Schenck (who died unexpectedly in
1915), The Need for Neighborhood Centers . . . American City 12 (April, 1915), pp. 337–9.
41. W. E. Drummond, op. cit. [35], pp. 9–15. Other known entries the subject of D. L. Johnson’s
research.
42. R. D. McKenzie, The neighborhood: a study . . . American Journal of Sociology 27 (1921–1922), no.
III of a series; and, in book form, R. D. McKenzie The Neighborhood: A Study of Local Life in
Columbus, Ohio. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1923.
43. E. Park et al., op. cit.[15], p. 7; R. A. Woods, Pittsburgh, 1917, and paper to state meetings of the
Conference, 1917–18, in Robert A. Woods, The neighborhood in nation-building. Boston:
Houghton MiZin, 1923 (reprint New York: Arno, 1970), pp. 196, 197.
45. E. Park et al., op. cit. [15], p. 7.
46. Clarence A. Perry, The relation of Neighborhood Forces . . . from the Social Point of View, National
Conference of Social Work Proceedings. Chicago: 1924, pp. 415–21; C. A. Perry, The Neighbor-
hood Unit, A scheme of arrangement for the family Life Community. Regional Survey of New York
and Its Environs. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, Monograph 1, vol. 7, 1929; see also Terry G.
Birtles, Clarence Perry and the neighbourhood unit: welfare origins of a twentieth century urban
planning ideal. Canberra: College of Advanced Education, 1982, pp. 15–17.
47. J. Nolen, op. cit. [29], pp. 21–40; Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, The American Vitruvius: An
architects; handbook of civic art. New York: 1922 (reprint New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 1992) pp. 278.
48. Mervyn Miller, Raymond Unwin 1863–1940, in Gordon E. Cherry (ed.) Pioneers in British
Planning. London: 1981, p. 87l; and letter from Miller to this author, 13 October 1999; cf.
Miller, Raymond Unwin Garden Cities and Town Planning. London/New York: 1992.
49. L. Mumford, op. cit. [14], p. 261.
50. Raymond Unwin, Distribution, a paper presented September 1920, published in Papers and
discussions, &tc, 1920–1921, 7 (1920–21) p. 37, 40, 43–4, Town Planning Institute.
51. J. Dahir, op. cit. [1], pp. 20, n. 1; L. Mumford, op. cit. [14], p. 262.