A place set apart, alien in its beauty. Orderly rows of cars putter past the picturesque promenade, flanked on both sides by stone and wood. A little green space sticking out in the middle of the impermeable black, manicured and proper and therefore safer and carrying intangible proof that this is a place. A place that attracts many, rejects quite a few, has many detractors, but is in the shape it was meant to be.
Daniel Burnham set out with a plan to bring back some civic values into the increasingly immoral city life he was watching grow more and more squalid by the day, and by the factory. Speaking on that ill-fated plan, which Burnham dubbed the City Beautiful movement, in his book The Plan of Chicago, Carl Smith states that “just as a bad urban environment brings out the worst in people…a grand one that expressed the values of civilization and order would inculcate these ideas and thus illicit the best.”
And in one sense the first proponents of the City Beautiful Movement, who believed that creating a separate, orderly, beautiful, and awe-inspiring space within the larger city to propagate and spread civic ideals, were right that it would bring about better people. The issue was that the manner of this bringing about of better people was faulty from the start; instead of attracting those on the city’s lowest rungs of society and transforming them through osmosis and grandeur, it created a space within the larger city that only chose to accommodate those who were already really good (read: rich, high-society, etc.) people.
The plan was noble in ideology, but just another class-divider in reality. Creating spaces that intentionally exude class will only further class separations; only education and smart handling of the economy can elevate people on the socioeconomic ladder.
Smith, C. (2009). The Plan of
Chicago: Daniel Burnham
and the Remaking of
the American City. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
