The Plan of Chicago: Daniel Burnham and the Remaking of the American City (review)

In 2005, an electronic counterpart of The Encyclopedia of Chicago featured two interpretive digital essays, one on water and the other by Carl Smith on the 1909 "Plan of Chicago" (see James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago [2004]; Janice L. Reiff, Ann Durkin Keating, and James R. Grossman, The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago [2005]; and Carl Smith, "The Plan of Chicago"). The latter essay has now been published separately as the volume under review here. The illustrations available online in the encyclopedia version are far superior; the two texts are nearly identical.

Smith, a professor at Northwestern University, has long experience in both scholarly and web publishing; he curated two exhibitions online about the Chicago fire of 1871 and the 1886 Haymarket tragedy, and he also authored Chicago and the American Literary Imagination 1880–1920 (1984) and Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (1995). Smith's treatment of the plan of Chicago contributes further to his accessible historical work. The plan's lead author, architect Daniel H. Burnham (1846–1912), collaborated with the Commercial Club of Chicago to produce in 1909 "one of the most fascinating and significant documents in the history of urban planning" (p. xv). Smith places this document in context while noting that "[as] useful as it may be to understand the Plan of Chicago as part of a long heritage of planning, it is perhaps more revealing to try and see it in terms of its particular time and place, as a contribution to a continuing discussion of what turn-of-the-century urban America was and might be" (p. 13).

Smith then distills some key contributions of the plan: the importance of thinking about infrastructure in regional terms; the belief that "a beautiful city would function more effectively than an unappealing one" for all classes of people; and "the formation of a new kind of alliance . . . between businessmen and a commercial architect [to make] comprehensive changes in the structure of a major city" (pp. 15, 71). Smith is careful to point out the underlying assumptions in the plan, which were "a top-down approach that expressed self-interested anxieties about polyglot urban democracy and a desire to impose their own vision of an orderly metropolis on immigrants and workers in the hope of asserting social control" (p. 15). The plan attempted to strike a balance between appreciating the "progress" of the city to date, and deploring the "uncontrolled development" that had created so much squalor (p. 36).

Smith is evenhanded in his analysis of the positive and negative aspects of the plan. He lauds the authors' long view and their insistence on taking action to keep their city economically competitive, while at the same time he recognizes that the elites who implemented parts of the plan did so primarily for their own gain. He also stresses how crucial it was to market the plan's proposals effectively. Charles H. Wacker, chairman of the Chicago Plan Commission, hired Walter Moody to direct the publicity campaign. Thus did innovative public relations lead to some impressive feats of engineering, such as the creation of the bilevel Wacker Drive (1924–26) and the straightening of the South Branch of the Chicago River by 1930.

Smith's final chapter considers the legacy of the Plan of Chicago, including "the idea that it is necessary to think not only big but also comprehensively" (p. 157). The plan has become "as palpable a presence for any planner or civic leader as Michigan Avenue or Grant Park" and has been recruited to support any number of varied efforts (p. 154). But its wide influence also inspired vigorous disagreements on the part of critics such as Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs. As did Jacobs, Smith acknowledges that "neither the text nor the illustrations . . . pay...