The Town-Planning Movement in America

Frederick Law Olmsted
1914 The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science  
Landscape Architect, Brookline, Mass. Some appreciation of the possibilities and advantages of town planning has been current in America from early colonial times. The very act of founding a new settlement in the wilderness emphasized both the solidarity of the community-the dependence of the individual upon the success of the town as a whole-and also the importance of planning not merely to meet the temporary circumstances but rather those of the expected future town conceived in the
more » ... n. It is the combination of these two ideas which constitutes the town planning point of view, as distinguished on the one hand from that of the separate unco6rdinated planning of the several fragments that make up a town, and on the other hand from that of living from hand to mouth without any deliberate and far-seeing plans at all. Unfortunately, the conditions of frontier life at the same time made enormous demands upon the energy of the settlers for meeting their immediate necessities. As a practical result, in those communities where the initiative and control were vested in the settlers themselves, as at Boston, Hartford and New Amsterdam, the time and attention which the people actually devoted to planning for the remoter future seem to have been nearly as scanty as in the later period of more settled and stable conditions, when the possibilities of town planning became less obvious and imagination less active. In the case of settlements where the initiative and control were centralized in proprietors, especially non-resident proprietors, the claims of town planning were not so driven to the wall by the pressure of immediate necessities; and we have in William Penn's Philadelphia plan of 1682 an example of deliberate planning for . a town of large size with systematic provision for the streets, public recreation grounds, public market places and wharves required by a population considerably greater than was to be expected within a single generation. It was only a more notable example of a sort of planning of &dquofiat&dquo towns that has been by no means uncommon throughout our history. Of course, the most conspicuous example of this type, the one planned with the at The University of Iowa Libraries on June 2, 2015 ann.sagepub.com Downloaded from
doi:10.1177/000271621405100124 fatcat:pcekt5znl5bklhji3azkooz4cu