Reclaiming American Cities: The Struggle for People, Place, and Nature since 1900

Preface

Preface This book grows out of the earlier book and series of conferences based on it titled The Humane Metropolis: People and Nature in the 21st Century City. The twenty-seven contributors to that volume collectively introduced a new way of looking at cities, through the prism of people, place, and nature as the elements of more “humane” urban communities and regions. This perspective, which will be called “humane urbanism” in this book, refers to grassroots efforts, often supported by government, nongovernmental organizations, and foundations, to make urban places at various scales greener, safer, more healthy, efficient, equitable, and­people-friendly. This book argues that the 1990s marked a turning point or “sea change” from nearly a century of top-down, expert-driven, “one-size-fits-all” urban policies towards more protean, bottom-up sets of initiatives better adapted to local needs and resources. The old top-down order (which of course persists in various forms today) focused on the downtown, mega-projects, the automobile, and wealth generation for the white establishment. By contrast, this new era is more concerned with uplifting the lives of ordinary people, reinvigorating the places where they live, and rehabilitating local parks, streams, waterfronts, forests, and other natural phenomena in their midst. A bit of personal history to explain where this book comes from. The whole thing may have actually begun in utero and during my early childhood when my father (also Rutherford Platt but without the middle initial “H.”) was avidly becoming a self-taught naturalist based, oddly at the time, in New York City. As I grew up, he was constantly rushing off lugging cameras, specimen cases, and notebooks to botanize in New England, the American West, Greenland, New Zealand, Australia, and other far-flung settings. His writings and photographs appeared in Life, National Geographic, Scientific American, Readers Digest, and his own many books during the 1940s into the 1970s. Meanwhile, back home in Manhattan, I joined my schoolmates in prowling the streets, courtyards, and rooftops of our neighborhood and riding the subway to Yankee Stadium, Central Park, and Coney Island. I was thus a young oxymoron, pulled in one direction by my father’s fascination with Nature in the raw and in another by the city around me, its crowds, its parks, its sheer vitality. After college and a couple of years on a U.S. Navy icebreaker (I was also drawn to the polar regions), I entered the University of Chicago Law School where I became a geographer. This unexpected outcome (rather upsetting to my parents) was x Preface inspired by the posthumous influence of my uncle, Robert S. Platt, a beloved professor of geography at the university, and of his indefatigable wife, Harriet S. Platt, an ardent champion of doing your own thing. Finding torts, contracts, and wills to be not my thing, I gravitated across campus to fraternize with the ­ geography faculty and graduate students. I finished law school, taking everything available on local government, property, and the environment before crossing the Midway to pursue a doctorate in geography with a fellowship from the new U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The geography program introduced me to Gilbert F. White, a product of the university’s progressive tradition and exemplar of the scientist in service to government and public policy. With many others, I regarded Gilbert as a role model, a demanding mentor, and later a dear friend until his death in 2006.1 Further enriching the mix, during my final year in law school I met Gunnar A. Peterson, a genial Quaker who directed a fledgling organization called the Chicago Open Lands Project (later renamed Openlands). Gunnar hired me to help with legal research, first on a part-time basis and later, after I passed the bar exam, as full-time staff attorney. It proved to be a fruitful opportunity: my geography and law interests found a happy synthesis in my Openlands work, which in turn inspired and informed my doctoral thesis, The Open Space Decision Process. My main job at Openlands was to help local conservationists save threatened patches of prairie, wetlands, dunes, and forests scattered around metropolitan Chicago (such as Thorn Creek Woods, which I discuss in chapter 5). This opportunity coincided with comparable efforts in cities and suburbs across the country stimulated by William H. Whyte’s famous 1968 book, The Last Landscape.2 I also tried to be a nuisance regarding some major proposed regional projects, such as the city’s scheme...