THE GLORY, DESTRUCTION,

AND MEANING OF THE CITY

BEAUTIFUL MOVEMENT
William H. Wilson

From Reading In Planning Theory

Scott Campbell and Susan S. Fainstein

By. Studio Group of Jepara Regency

 PLANNING THEORY
Lecturer : Ir. Bakti Setiawan, MA, PhD

Summarized by:
Asri Samsu
Erik Zulhikman
Fathoni Abdillah
Fenty Febianti
Heru Edhi Wibowo
Purwanti

MAGISTER URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING

GADJAH MADA UNIVERSITY
2013
DANIEL H. BURNHAM & THE PLAN OF CHICAGO

 Burnham and Bennett's

magnificent Plan of Chicago
(1909) symbolized the
maturation of the City
Beautiful.
 The plan encompassed the
development of Chicago
within a 60-mile radius via a
system of radial and
concentric boulevards that
connected the center to its
outlying suburbs and linked
the suburbs one with
another.
PRINCIPAL POINTS OF THE PLAN OF CHICAGO
 The improvement of the Lake Front.
 The creation of a system of highways outside the city.
 The improvement of railway terminals and the development of
a complete traction system for both freight and passengers.
 The acquisition of an outer park system, and of parkway
circuits.
 The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within
the city in order to facilitate the movement to and from the
business district.
 The development of centers of intellectual life and of civic
administration, so related as to give coheren ce and unity to
the city.
CITY PRACTICAL CRITISM OF
THE CITY BEAUTIFUL

 Benjamin C. Marsh
 Robert A.Pope
 Cass Gillbert
 George B. Ford
 Mcfarland
BENJAMIN C. MARSH
 a New York housing reform enthusiast, recorded againts the City
Beautiful as too concern with cosmetic display for zoning,
especially limits on factory location, for height limits, efficient
transportation, parks, and playgrounds in crowded districs, and
excess condermnation.

ROBERT ANDERSON POPE

 a New York landscape architect, decried “the expenditure of
huge sums for the extensive park systems...inaccessible
improvements... made available to but a small portion of the
community – the wealthy and leisure classess, who of all
society needs these advantages the least”.
 Other speakers joined Pope in praising European, especially
German, asserted that a city planned for social benefit and
economic efficiency would be beautiful.
CASS GILLBERT
 Declared that the city beautifull is a city that is done,
completed, a city sane, and sensible that can be lived in
comfortably. If it is to be a city beautiful it will be one
naturally.
 The Source of Urban Beauty :
 adaptation to purpose
 cooperative harmony of parts.

GEORGE B. FORD
 The City Beautiful Ford charged was :
 concerned with the wealthy (too often concerned with
“superficialities” with "frills and furbelows” also "dazzling“)
 indifferent to the poor
 It was a mistake to advance the City Beautiful before
the problems of living, work and play have been solved.
 MCFARLAND
 Cities would be beautiful when they were made clean, practical
and efficient.
 Therefore truly admirable :
 both convenient and beautiful,
 both sanitary and sightly.

CRITISM ...
 Professional associations increase professionalism of planners.
 These planners held many conferences to discuss the nature of
the City Beautiful plan.
 They view the City Beautiful as caring too much to beautify the
city, too expensive, paying too much attention toward
aesthetics and will only work well for the wealthy classes,
while ignoring social problems and give little effects to poor
citizens.
 The City Beautiful was a victim of its own success, expensive
costs on Utility wires went underground and graceful street
furniture
LATER ATTACKS ON THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
 Reflected the changing relationships among :
 citizen activists,
 professional planners, and
 urban governments.
 Ideas not professionally or bureaucratically approved could be
denounced as allegedly expensive and impractical.
 The analysis rests on a number of assumptions:
• The city practical belief in the impossibility of completing city
beautiful plans.
• Failed to acknowledge the centrality of politics.
• The critics asserted a functionalist or American aesthetic
against the neoclassicism of many city beautiful designs.
 The few exceptional cities carried out only plans relating to large and
spectacular public works.
 The critics of the 1930s and 1940s molded their social and
aesthetic biases into a critical framework.
 A critical framework is doubtful whether any city beautiful plan
succeeded or failed because it was judged to be unworkable by
city practical standards.
 Manufacturing did not militate against the city beautiful. When it
involved light industry and processing.
 All this criticism poured out upon a plan devoted to unifying the
city through and expanded park and boulevard system, improved
traffic circulation, and revitalized piers, including recreation piers,
among many other proposals
 New York's city beautiful failed principally because, as its historian
demonstrated. It suffered through a long gestation.
 The failure of civic center plans, while not synonymous with an
unsuccessful. City beautiful movement calls into question its
methods and goals.
 Draper isolated five cirrumstances affecting a center's fate:
• The quality of project leadership;
• The financial situation of the city and funding methods for
the project;
• The city's legal powers;
• The degree of cooperation from potential tenants (city,
state Federal, and semipublic agencies); and
• The feasibility of the plan in physical terms.
 Design-oriented detractors of the City Beautiful have attacked its
architectural handmaiden neoclassicism.
 City Beautiful planners usually left commercial-retail cores to
their own devices, except for individual building designs and
schemes for functional defirrition and traffic relief.
 City Beautiful architects created low public buildings more useful to
the governments of their day than skyscrapers.
 City Beautiful influenced the main run of skyscraper design much
less than technology, Ground rent, labor costs, land-use controls,
and tax policy.
 More recently the City Beautiful has corne under the critical
scrutiny of Marxist historians.
 Most of the Marxist critique of the City Beautiful has been advanced
by nonmarxists:
• the relationship to imperialism;
• the thrust toward utilitarianism, Improvemerit, Social control
and civic idealism; and
• the lack of detailed concern or housing.
 The origin and spirit of the City Beautiful idea refute the Marxist
belief in beautification as the willing tool of capitalism.
 The curbs on capitalist activity involved more than those necessary
to secure public land and construct various improvements.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
 The phrase City Beautiful continued popular for years with
laymen, who applied it to a variety of planning and
improvement concerns.
 Urban beauty in architecture. landscaping. and other arts
“diffrentiates grandeur from mere size” and '"leaves its
imprint upon the very soul of citizenship,"
 "The ferment of the 1960s focused fresh attention on American
cities. A rejuvenated search for the urban" past arose from
nostalgia. Preservationism, fresh scholarship, a yearning for
individual and neighborhood stability amid a whirligig of
change , dissatisfaction with "'modem" "commercial and
domestic architeaure, and disaffection from contemporary city
planning.
 Historical scholarship on the City Beautiful era and its artifacts.
designs and planning politics continued into the 1980s.
 Simutaneously local planning staffs, planning consultants.
Commissions, city councils and critics sought to recapture their
legacy of urban beauty.
 The movement was too naive and hopeful socially and architecturally
 Environment very greatly influences human beings.
 Changes in architectural taste and in society invite us to depreciate
outmoded styles.
 Nothing else earns a cenificate of critical acuity as rapidly and easily
as an attack on the architecture of the immediate past from the
perspective of the present.
 It is equally facile and as intellectually slipshod to comllare
architecture in the mode of the good-natured City Beautiful with that
of a repressive totalitarianism.
 THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
 The City Beautiful movement was fundamentally an
urban political reform movement.
 The City Beautiful movement also illuminates some
issues of continuity and change in urban America.
 The City Beautiful assumed, without acknowledgment,
much of the Olmstedian rhetoric about the value of
urban beautification.
 City practical planners embraced beauty in the
cityscape despite their denunciations of the City
Beautiful.
 The City Beautiful movement produced the first
comprehensive plans based on a theory of the organic
city.
 It was not just the City Beautiful era in which reach
exceeded grasp. So it becomes all the more important
to remember, what the City Beautiful advocates were
reaching for an ordered society in which dignified
cooperative citizens of whatever station or calling
moved through scenes suffused with beauty.
THANK YOU, ...

JEPARA’S REGENCY TEAM - DD BATCH 11/2013

MAGISTER URBAN AND REGIONAL PLANNING
GADJAH MADA UNIVERSITY
2013