1

Hippodamus

5th century B.C.

Hippodamus of Miletus was a Greek architect who introduced order and regularity into the planning of cities, which were intricate and confusing. For Pericles, he planned the arrangement of the harbor-town Peiraeus at Athens. When the Athenians founded Thurii in Italy, he accompanied the colony as architect. Later, in 408 B.C., he superintended the building of the new city of Rhodes. His schemes consisted of series of broad, straight streets, intersecting one another at right angles.

2

Benjamin Banneker

1731-1806

Benjamin Banneker, one of the nation's best-known African American inventors, was born in Maryland, which was then a British colony. He was the grandson of a white indentured servant from England and a former slave.

Always interested in mathematics and science, in 1753, Banneker was inspired to build his own clock out of wood based on his own designs and calculations. The clock kept accurate time until Banneker's house burned with all its contents in 1806.

Banneker taught himself astronomy and advanced math from books and instruments borrowed from his neighbors, the Ellicotts, who shared his interest. He made astronomical and tide calculations and weather predictions for yearly almanacs, which he published from 1792 to 1797. Banneker's almanacs were compared favorable with Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac. He sent a copy of the manuscript for his almanac to Thomas Jefferson, along with a letter in which he challenged Jefferson's ideas about the inferiority of blacks. Jefferson replied politely but failed to comment on either the almanac or Banneker's issues.

In 1791, Banneker was asked by Major George Ellicott to help survey the "Federal Territory," now Washington, D.C. Banneker agreed and became one of three surveyors appointed by President George Washington. For a period of three months in the spring of 1791 Mr. Banneker worked in a tent in what was then the independent jurisdiction of Georgetown. His work involved locating the boundary stones of the Federal District using his own astronomical calculations. For his scientific skills, spirit of pioneering and contribution to the establishment of the nation's capitol, we honor Banneker's memory.

3

Pierre L'Enfant

1754-1852

Pierre L'Enfant was the French architect and engineer responsible for the design of Washington, D.C. The plan of the city is based on principles employed by Andre Le Notre in the palace and garden of Versailles, where L'Enfant's father had worked as a court painter, and on Domenico Fontana's scheme (1585) for the redesign of Rome under Pope Sixtus V. Through the use of long avenues joined at key points marked by important buildings or monuments, the U.S. capital city is a symbolic representation of power radiating from a central source.

www.arlingtoncemetery.net/l-enfant.htm
www.cr.nps.gov/nr/travel/wash/lenfant.htm
www.exploredc.org/index.php?id=181

4

Baron Haussmann

1809-1891

Haussmann was a French civic planner who is associated with the rebuilding of Paris. He was born in that city of a Protestant family of German descent.

Commissioned by Napoleon III to instigate a program of planning reforms in Paris, Haussmann laid out the Bois de Boulogne, and made extensive improvements in the smaller parks. The gardens of the Luxembourg Palace were cut down to allow of the formation of new streets, and the Boulevard de Sebastopol, the southern half of which is now the Boulevard St. Michel, was built through a populous district. Additional, sweeping changes made wide "boulevards" of previously narrow streets. A new water supply, a gigantic system of sewers, new bridges, the opera and other public buildings, and the inclusion of outlying districts were among the new Haussmann's achievements. His bold handling of the public funds called forth Jules Ferry's indictment, in 1867.

www.fact-index.com/b/ba/baron_haussmann.html

5

Frederick Law Olmsted

1822-1903

Frederick Law Olmsted is widely recognized as the founder of American landscape architecture and the nation's foremost parkmaker. His first, most loved, and in many ways his best known work was his design of Central Park in New York City (1858-1876) with his partner Calvert Vaux. But Olmsted would go on to have a significant influence in the way cities and communities are built to incorporate the idea of nature and parks. He was one of the first to espouse the principles of the City Beautiful movement in America and to introduce the idea of suburban development to the American landscape.

www.jssgallery.org/Paintings/Frederick_Law_Olmsted.htm
www.fredericklawolmsted.com/

6

George Pullman

1831-1897

George Pullman was an American inventor and industrialist.

Although Pullman dropped out of school at age 14, he eventually became one of Chicago's most influential and controversial figures. He arrived in Chicago in 1855 and discovered that city streets frequently were filled with mud deep enough to drown a horse. He suggested that the houses be raised and new foundations built under them, a technique his father used to move homes during the widening of the Erie Canal. In 1857, with a couple of partners, Pullman proved his technique would work by raising an entire block of stores and office buildings.

He used his money and success to develop a comfortable railroad sleeping car, the Pullman sleeper, in 1864. Although the sleeper cost more than five times the price of a regular railway car, by arranging to have the body of slain President Abraham Lincoln transported from Washington, D.C., to Springfield on a sleeper, he received national attention and the orders began to pour in. Pullman built a new plant on the shores of Lake Calumet, several miles from Chicago. It an effort to make it easier for his employees, he also built a town with its own shopping areas, theaters, parks, hotel and library for his employees.

When business declined in 1894, Pullman cut jobs, wages and working hours. His failure to lower rents, utility charges, and the cost of products led his workers to protest. The Pullman Strike was eventually broken up by federal troops sent in by President Grover Cleveland.

www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/chicago/peopleevents/p_pullman.html
www.graveyards.com/graceland/pullman.html

7

Camillo Sitte

1843-1903

Camillo Sitte is best known among urban planners and architects for his book City Planning According to Its Artistic Principles from 1889. He strongly criticized the prevailing emphasis on broad, straight boulevards, public squares arranged primarily for the convenience of traffic, and efforts to strip major public or religious landmarks of adjoining smaller structures that were regarded as encumbering such monuments of the past.

Sitte proposed instead to follow what he believed to be the design objectives of those whose streets and buildings shaped medieval cities. He advocated curving or irregular street alignments to provide ever-changing vistas. He pointed out the advantages of what came to be know as "turbine squares" — civic spaces served by streets entering in such a way as to resemble a pinwheel in plan. His teachings became widely accepted in Austria, Germany, and Scandinavia. In less than a decade, his style of urban design came to be accepted as the norm in those countries.

sitte.tuwien.ac.at/edition.html

8

Daniel Burnham

1846-1912

Daniel Burnham was raised and educated in Chicago. He gained his early architectural experience with William Le Baron Jenney, the "father of the skyscraper." However, Burnham earned an even greater reputation for his influence as a city planner. He supervised the layout and construction of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In 1909, Burnham and his assistant Edward H. Bennett (who designed the Michigan Avenue Bridge) prepared The Plan for Chicago, which is considered the nation's first example of a comprehensive planning document. Burnham also worked on other city plans, for Cleveland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Manila, and other cities.

Burnham's most famous quote continues to inspire:

"Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die."

www.ci.chi.il.us/Landmarks/Architects/Burnham.html

9

Jacob August Riis

1849-1914

Jacob August Riis used photography and writing to reveal the terrible conditions of the urban poor in the US. He was the author of two books that looked at life in the slums of New York: How the Other Half Lives (1890) and Children of the Poor (1892). His books led to the first federal investigation of slum conditions and to changes in New York's housing laws that became national models. Riis was one of the leading housing reformers in the history of American city planning.

Source: CPC Study Manual for the 2004 AICP Examination
www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jacob_august_riis.html

10

Ebenezer Howard

1850-1928

Ebenezer Howard came to America from England at the age of 21. He settled in Nebraska, and soon discovered that he was not meant to be a farmer. He moved to Chicago and worked as a reporter for the courts and newspapers. By 1876, he was back in England, where he found a job with a firm producing the official Parliamentary reports, and he spent the rest of his life in this occupation.

Howard read widely and thought deeply about social issues, and one result was his book To-Morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (1898), reprinted in 1902 as Garden Cities of To-Morrow. This book called for the creation of new suburban towns of limited size, planned in advance, and surrounded by a permanent belt of agricultural land. Many suburbs were modeled after Howard's "Garden Cities." He believed they were the perfect blend of city and nature.

His ideas attracted enough attention and financial backing to begin Letchworth, a garden city in suburban London. A second garden city, Welwyn, was started after World War I. Their success led the British government to develop New Towns after World War II. This movement produced more than 30 communities, most significantly perhaps Milton Keynes. Howard's ideas inspired other planners such as Frederick Law Olmsted II and Clarence Perry.

www.rickmansworthherts.freeserve.co.uk/howard1.htm
www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/howard.htm
www.letchworthgardencity.net/heritage/index-3.htm

11

Patrick Geddes

1854-1932

Patrick Geddes has been described as one of the founders of modern town and regional planning. His ideas have influenced planning practice, regional economic development, and environmental management.

Geddes, a Scot, was the son of a regular soldier. He had none of the privileges of wealth or position, yet by the age of 24 he was a biologist of great promise, his research papers already published by the British Royal Society. The British Association for the Advancement of Science sent him on a research mission to Mexico, where he contracted an illness that caused temporary blindness. Even after his recovery, he was unable to continue his research, which caused eyestrain when using a microscope.

Deprived of his first outlet for study, Geddes turned to social analysis and applied his scientific methodology to the processes of economic, social and environmental change. In 1888, he took up a part-time post as Professor of Botany at University College, Dundee, and held this position until 1918. During this period, when he was based primarily in Edinburgh, he became interested in urban and regional planning and urban renewal issues.

www.edinburgh.gov.uk/libraries/artsphere/architects/geddes/geddes.html

12

Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.

1870-1957

Arguably the intellectual leader of the American city planning movement in the early twentieth century, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr. was a worthy son of a distinguished father. While still an adolescent, "Rick" Olmsted worked and studied under his father before entering Harvard. After graduation in 1894, he entered his father's firm and a year later, as the elder Olmsted's health deteriorated, he and his half­brother took it over under the name Olmsted Brothers.

His active involvement in urban planning began in 1901 with his appointment as one of four members of the Senate Park Commission with Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, and August St. Gaudens. He maintained a special interest in Washington, serving on the Fine Arts Commission from its founding in 1910 to 1918. During the First World War, he was manager for town planning in the U.S. Housing Corporation. This body planned and built near war industries a large number of housing projects, some of them approaching new towns in size. From 1926, when it was established, to 1932 he was a member of the National Capital Park and Planning Commission.

Olmsted was one of the moving figures in establishing the National Planning Conference and was its president from 1910 to 1919. When the professional members of this group and others formed the American City Planning Institute in 1917, they elected Olmsted the first president.

In the 1920s, he was also a member of the Advisory Committee on City Planning and Zoning, established by Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover. Olmsted helped design the innovative Forest Hills Gardens project in Queens, as well as the industrial town of Torrance, California. He also prepared plans for existing cities: Detroit, Utica, Boulder, New Haven (with Cass Gilbert), and Pittsburgh (with Bion J. Arnold and John R. Freeman), Rochester (with Arnold W. Brunner and Bion J. Arnold); and Newport.

www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/sontag/olmsted.htm
www.library.cornell.edu/Reps/DOCS/olmst_11.htm

13

Clarence Arthur Perry

1872-1944

Father of the "Neighborhood Unit Concept," Clarence Perry codified Raymond Unwin's designs of neighborhood. (Unwin thought of the street, the district, and the town as larger wholes.) While living in the garden suburb of Forest Hills Gardens, New York, he worked on his scheme for the "neighborhood unit" — a self-contained residential area that would be bounded by major streets, with shops at the intersections and a school in the middle. The concept for the self-contained neighborhood unit was made public with the publication of Housing for the Mechanic Age (1939). Perry also was the author of the "Regional Survey of New York and its Environs" (1929).

Source: CPC Study Manual for the 2004 AICP Examination

14

Alfred Bettman

1873-1945

Alfred Bettman is generally credited with saving zoning from constitutional defeat in Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., 272 U.S. 365 (1926).

A Harvard graduate and corporate lawyer from Cincinnati, Bettman was appalled by the municipal corruption he saw around him and decided that city planning was the key to reform. In 1915, he drafted a bill in Ohio that authorized cities to create citizen-dominated planning commissions. The law specified that once the commission adopted the plan, it could not be violated by the city council. This was the first such planning legislation in the country and set the stage for local community planning in America.

Bettman was asked to serve on Herbert Hoover's Blue Ribbon Committee to draft the Standard City Planning and Zoning Enabling Acts in 1924 and 1928. He also drafted the Tennessee Zoning and Planning Enabling Statutes (1935). He served as the first president of the American Society of Planning Officials (1934-1938), one of APA's predecessor organizations.

www.planning.org/2004conference/bettman.htm

15

Clarence Stein

1882–1975

Clarence Stein studied architecture at Columbia University and the École des Beaux-Arts. Stein worked in the office of Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue, where he assisted in the planning of the San Diego World's Fair (1915). Along with Lewis Mumford and Henry Wright, Stein was a founding member of the Regional Planning Association of America, a group instrumental in importing Ebenezer Howard's garden city idea from England to the United States. Stein and Wright collaborated on the design of Radburn, New Jersey (1928–32), a garden suburb noted for its superblock layout. Stein wrote Toward New Towns for America (1951).

www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0846615.html
www.asu.edu/caed/proceedings98/Garvin/garvin.html

16

Le Corbusier

1887-1965

Le Corbusier was without doubt the most influential, most admired, and most maligned architect of the twentieth century. Through his writing and his buildings, he is the main player in the Modernist story, his visions of homes and cities as innovative as they are influential. Many of his ideas on urban living became the blueprint for post-war reconstruction, and the many failures of his would-be imitators led to Le Corbusier being blamed for the problems of western cities in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Le Corbusier's most significant work was in urban planning. In such published plans as La Ville Contemporaine (1922), the Plan Voisin de Paris (1925), and the several Villes Radieuses (1930-36). He advanced ideas dramatically different from the comfortable, low-rise communities proposed by earlier garden city planners. During this 20-year span, he also built many villas and several small apartment complexes and office buildings.

www.open2.net/modernity/4_1.htm
www.discoverfrance.net/France/Art/Le_Corbusier/Le_Corbusier.shtml

17

Robert Moses

1888-1981

Robert Moses was the master builder of 20th century New York City. As the shaper of a modern city, his only peer is Haussmann. Although he never held elective office, Moses was the most powerful person in New York City government from the 1930s to the 1950s. Moses literally changed shorelines, built roadways in the sky, and turned vibrant neighborhoods into slums. Moses displaced hundreds of thousands of people, and contributed to the ruin of the South Bronx, the departure of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the decline of public transit. However, in a way, Moses's projects were necessary. His mistakes were in believing that "cities are for traffic," and "if the ends don't justify the means, what does?"

Despite his racism and disdain for less wealthy citizens, Moses did many jobs extraordinarily well, such as the development of Jones Beach as a public park. At a time when the public was used to Tammany Hall corruption and incompetence, Moses was seen as a savior of government. Shortly after President Franklin Roosevelt's inauguration, the federal government had millions of dollars to spend, but states and cities had few projects ready. New York City was an exception. At one point, one-quarter of federal construction dollars were being spent in New York, and Moses had 80,000 people working under him.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses

18

Lewis Mumford

1895-1988

Lewis Mumford's long life was marked by work in urban planning, history, and political and social commentary. He viewed architectural congestion as a dehumanizing influence and was instrumental in founding the Regional Planning Association of America in 1923.

His series of writings tracing the history of cities over the last 1,000 years was very successful and included The Culture of Cities (1938), The Condition of Man (1944), and The Conduct of Life (1951).

Mumford continued his prodigious output well into his later years, producing The Pentagon of Power in 1971. Mumford received the National Medal of Arts in 1986.

www.uky.edu/Classes/PS/776/Projects/Mumford/mumford.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Mumford

19

Catherine Bauer

1905-1964

Catherine Bauer was a leading member of a small group of idealists who called themselves "housers" because of their commitment to improving housing for low-income families. In her lifetime, she dramatically changed the concept of social housing in the United States and inspired a generation of urban activists to integrate public housing into the emerging welfare state of the mid-twentieth century. H. Peter Oberlander and Eva Newbrun trace her fascinating life and career in their book Houser (2000).

In the late 1920s, Bauer spent time in Paris, where she befriended Fernan Léger, Man Ray, and Sylvia Beach. Back in New York, she fell under the spell of American urban critic Lewis Mumford, who, as a mentor and lover, profoundly influenced her life. It was at his urging that she became involved with the architects of change in post-WWI Europe, among them Ernst May, André Lurçat, and Walter Gropius. Convinced that good social housing could produce good social architecture, and moved by the visible ravages of the Depression, she became a passionate leader in the fight for housing for the poor. She co-authored the Housing Act of 1937 and advised five presidents on urban strategies. Her book, Modern Housing, published in 1934, is regarded as a classic.

www.nhi.org/online/issues/books/112a.html
www.igs.berkeley.edu/publications/par/Nov1999/OberlanderNewbrun.html

20

William Levitt

1907-1994

William J. Levitt did not invent suburbia, but by producing the two-bedroom home fast, cheaply, and in enormous numbers, he changed the face and the dynamic of life in America.

The grandson of a rabbi who emigrated from Russia to Brooklyn, Levitt put affordable roofs over the families of thousands of GIs returning from World War II. On a stretch of Long Island potato fields, aptly named Levittown, the dreams of his war-weary countrymen began to take shape. Slapping together 30 or more houses a day, Levitt sold them at first for less than $7,000 apiece. The ultimate in modernity, his homes boasted refrigerators and washers and were even "television equipped," as Levitt ads crowed.

www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_22/b3885042_mz072.htm
www.levittcommercial.com/about/history.asp
www.levittownpa.org/LevittBio.html

21

Jane Jacobs

1916-2006

Jane Jacobs was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote freelance articles about the city's many working districts, which fascinated her.

In 1952, after a number of writing and editing jobs ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to U.S. geography for foreign readers, she became an associate editor of Architectural Forum. She became increasingly skeptical of conventional planning beliefs as she noticed that the city rebuilding projects she wrote about did not seem safe, interesting, lively, or economically beneficial for cities once the projects were operational. She gave a speech to that effect at Harvard in 1956, and this led to an article in Fortune magazine entitled "Downtown Is for People." This in turn led her to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was published in 1961 and permanently the debate about urban renewal and the future of cities.

Thirty years after its publication, the New York Times described The Death and Life of Great American Cities as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. ... [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."

www.people.virginia.edu/~plan303/bio.html
www.kunstler.com/mags_jacobs1.htm

22

William Whyte

1917-1999

Whyte was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He joined the staff of Fortune magazine in 1946, after graduating from Princeton University and serving in the Marine Corps. His book The Organization Man (1956), based on his articles about corporate culture and the suburban middle class, sold more than two million copies. Whyte then turned to the topics of sprawl and urban revitalization, and began a distinguished career as a sage of sane development and an advocate of cities.

In 1969, Whyte assisted the New York City Planning Commission in drafting a comprehensive plan for the city. Having been critically involved in the planning of new city spaces, he came to wonder how these spaces were actually working out. No one had researched this before. He applied for and received a grant to study street life in New York and other cities, in what became known as the Street Life Project. With a group of young research assistants, and with camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies on pedestrian behavior and city dynamics.

Whyte walked the city streets for more than 16 years. As unobtrusively as possible, he watched people and used time-lapse photography to chart the meanderings of pedestrians. What emerged from his intuitive analysis is an extremely human, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about people's behavior in public spaces (such as taking the shortest distance between two points), but seemingly invisible to the unobservant.

The core of Whyte's work was predicated on the years he spent directly observing human beings, and he authored several texts about urban planning and design and human behavior in various urban spaces. He served as an advisor to Laurence S. Rockefeller on environmental issues and as a key planning consultant for major U.S. cities, traveling and lecturing widely. He was a Distinguished Professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York and a trustee of the American Conservation Association. Whyte was active in the Municipal Art Society, the Hudson River Valley Commission, and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Task Force on Natural Beauty.

www.pps.org/info/placemakingtools/placemakers/wwhyte

23

Kevin Lynch

1918-1984

Kevin Lynch was a significant contributor to twentieth-century city planning and city design. He was educated at Yale University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and most notably, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He became a professor at MIT in 1963, and eventually earned professor emeritus status. Aside from research and teaching, Lynch was consultant to the state of Rhode Island, New England Medical Center, Boston Redevelopment Authority, Puerto Rico Industrial Development Corp., M.I.T. Planning Office, and other organizations.

Lynch produced seven books during his outstanding career. In his most famous work, Image of the City (1960), he described a five-year study that used Boston, Los Angeles, and Jersey City as case studies. His research revealed which elements in the built structure of a city are important in the popular perception of the city.

www.csiss.org/classics/content/62

24

Ian McHarg

1920-2001

Ian McHarg was one of the true pioneers of the environmental movement. Born near the gritty, industrial city of Glasgow, he gained an early appreciation of the need for cities to better accommodate the qualities of the natural environment that until then had largely been shunned. After serving in World War II, McHarg emigrated to the United States to attend Harvard University, where he earned degrees in landscape architecture and city planning. He was responsible for the creation of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

However, McHarg would not be confined to the halls of academia. In 1960, he hosted "The House We Live In" on the CBS television network — an early effort to publicize discussion about humans and their environment. The show, along with a later PBS documentary, helped make McHarg a household name.

He published his landmark book, Design With Nature, in 1969. In it, McHarg spelled out the need for urban planners to consider an environmentally conscious approach to land use, and provided a new method for evaluating and implementing doing so. Today, Design With Nature is considered one of the landmark publications in the environmental movement, helping make McHarg arguably the most important landscape architect since Frederick Law Olmsted.

www.csiss.org/classics/content/23
www.upenn.edu/gazette/0501/mcharg.html

25

Paul Davidoff

1930-1984

Davidoff founded the Suburban Action Institute in 1969. The institute challenged exclusionary zoning in the courts, winning a notable success in the Mt. Laurel case. This led to the requirement by the state supreme court of New Jersey that communities must supply their "regional fair share" of low-income housing needs. Davidoff developed the concept of "advocacy planner." He contended that a planner serves a given client group's interests and should do so openly; a planner could develop plans for a particular project and speak for the interests of the group or individuals affected by these plans.

Source: CPC Study Manual for the 2004 AICP Examination