A history of American planning

Learning objectives

• Recognize the colonial and early American town plans that shaped U.S. cities, from the Laws of the Indies to the national land survey grid.
• Place the major American planning movements in chronological order and explain what problem each was responding to.
• Connect key figures (Olmsted, Burnham, Howard, Geddes, Perry, Stein and Wright, Mumford, Moses, Jacobs) to their ideas and projects.
• Explain how federal programs from the New Deal through urban renewal and the Interstate era reshaped cities.
• Describe the reactions that followed: preservation, advocacy planning, environmental planning, New Urbanism, and Smart Growth.
• Trace how the planning profession organized itself, up to the founding of APA and AICP.

Key concepts

The exam doesn't expect you to memorize every date. It expects you to know what came first, what each movement was reacting against, and who is associated with what. Think of planning history as a chain of problems and responses.

Before the movements: early town plans (1500s to 1800s)

American cities carry the imprint of plans far older than the planning profession:

• The Spanish Laws of the Indies (1573) set rules for colonial towns: a central plaza surrounded by the church and government buildings, with streets laid out in a grid. Many towns in the Southwest, such as Santa Fe and San Antonio, still show the pattern.
• William Penn's plan for Philadelphia (1682), laid out with surveyor Thomas Holme, laid a street grid across the land between the Delaware and Schuylkill rivers, with five public squares.
• James Oglethorpe's plan for Savannah (1733) organized the town into wards, each built around a small public square, a pattern that could repeat as the town grew.
• Pierre L'Enfant's plan for Washington, D.C. (1791) laid broad diagonal avenues over a street grid, linking major sites with sightlines in the Baroque manner.
• The Land Ordinance of 1785 set up the rectangular survey of the public domain west of the original states: townships 6 miles square, divided into 36 sections of one square mile (640 acres) each. It explains the grid of roads and property lines across much of the Midwest and West.
• New York's Commissioners' Plan of 1811 laid a uniform grid over most of Manhattan, favoring easy land sale over topography.

In Europe, Baron Haussmann's rebuilding of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s cut wide boulevards through the old city, with new sewers, parks, and unified building fronts. It later inspired the City Beautiful movement.

9 more sections follow in the full lesson.