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Robert Fishman, ed., _The American Planning Tradition: Culture and 
Policy_.Washington, DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press 2000 
(Distributed by Johns Hopkins University Press). ix + 328pp. Foreword, 
maps, photographs, notes, tables, graph, contributors, and index. 
ISBN 0-943875-95-1 (hard); 0-943875-96-X (pbk). 
 
Reviewed for H-Urban by Jon A. Peterson, [log in to unmask], Department 
of History, Queens College of The City University of New York. 
 
Is There an American Planning Tradition? 
 
_The American Planning Tradition: Culture and Policy_, edited by 
historian Robert Fishman and published under the auspices of The 
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, presents eleven 
major essays on American planning and its history by an array of 
distinguished, senior scholars.  All of the essays are of high 
quality, and several offer exceptional insights into particular 
topics.  Depending on one's interests, a reader may value this work 
either for the cumulative perspectives it develops into American 
planning or simply for its rich array of distinctive essays.  This 
review will focus on the general thrust of the book, reflecting my own 
special interest in the history of "city planning," meaning by that 
term the Progressive Era-born conception of urban planning as a 
comprehensive undertaking, best implemented by a general or master 
plan framed by experts in order to shape the development of a city 
and, often, its region. 
 
When read for its perspectives on American planning history, this book 
is both significant and problematic.  Significant, because it offers 
fresh analysis of many aspects of planning.  Problematic, because it 
begs a major question: whether there is, in fact, an American planning 
tradition and, if so, how do we characterize it?  While many authors 
have discussed planning as an activity in American history, among them 
John Reps, Mel Scott, Mary Corbin Sies and Christopher Silver, and Don 
Krueckeberg, to name a few, this work suggests that planning be 
chiefly understood as a definable body of ideas -- what the book 
subtitle calls "culture and policy"-- available to successive 
generations as an intellectual resource [1]. 
 
According to Michael J. Lacey, who directs the American Program at the 
Wilson Center and who has written the Foreword, this publication began 
as a "debate between former Center Fellows John L. Thomas and Robert 
Fishman over what to make of the deep-seated bias in the history of 
America's regional cultures against the rise of the modern metropolis 
that grew up to dominate each of them" (p. ix).  As their discourse 
brought various themes and topics into view, other scholars were asked 
to contribute.  The heroic task of defining the common ground made 
apparent by all these exchanges fell to Fishman, who has edited the 
work, written the introductory overview (Chp. 1), and furnished one of 
the ten substantive chapters. 
 
Fishman opens his introductory essay by claiming that "the American 
planning tradition" gave rise to the "older forms of cities," most 
especially the center-dominated metropolis built up during the "urban 
century" of 1830-1930 and best exemplified by early twentieth-century 
New York and Chicago (pp. 1, 6).  This phrasing suggests a unitary 
interpretation of American planning, geared to the nation's historical 
experience with the rise of great urban centers during the mid- to 
late-nineteenth century.  But reflecting his debate with Thomas, 
Fishman organizes the first sub-section of the book to highlight "two 
traditions": that of regional planning, or regionalism, as interpreted 
by Thomas (Chp. 2) versus "the metropolitan tradition" as explained by 
Fishman (Chp. 3).  Because Thomas makes the world view of Lewis 
Mumford with its deep hostility to the "imperial city" or 
"_tyrannopolis_" his basic starting point while Fishman begins, in 
effect, with the pro-metropolitan, Progressive Era planning ideas as 
expressed most prominently by Daniel H. Burnham through the 1909 Plan 
of Chicago and subsequently by Thomas Adams through the 1929/1931 
Regional Plan of New York, one wonders at points if we are only 
reading a sophisticated update of the famous exchange between Mumford 
and Adams that was occasioned by the latter plan. 
 
For example, Fishman, upholds the centralized metropolis as both a 
historic and conceptual urban form that confers "a rich legacy of 
possibilities for the economic and cultural revitalization of the 
inner city, for a balanced transportation system, the limitation of 
sprawl and other policies" (p. 23).  Thomas, by contrast, draws on 
Mumford, Benton McKaye, Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn (represented in 
this book by an inspirational essay on opportunities for planning with 
nature in present-day Boston, Chp. 11), and still others to argue for 
"the re-emerging philosophy of the commons -- land set aside for all 
the people" (p. 62).  In effect, Fishman makes the vitality of the 
early twentieth-century city his starting point, while Thomas begins 
with nature or, more accurately, a "middle ground" in which man and 
nature co-exist in a balanced setting, best exemplified, in Mumford's 
view, by a region-wide mix of town, country, and wilderness found 
during the canal era of the 1820-1850 decades.  To Mumford, at least, 
this was a "golden age." It was certainly pre-metropolitan. 
 
Without doubt, these two streams of thought about cities and their 
settings can be identified and explicated but by doing so, the book 
implicitly defines a "planning tradition" less in terms of plan-making 
activity, which has been the norm in most analysis of planning 
history, than in terms of prescriptive ideals about the form that 
human settlement should take. 
 
Much has changed since 1929 when Adams and Mumford squared off, 
however.  Neither Mumford's regionalism, which was never implemented, 
nor the center-dominated metropolis has fared well, especially since 
World War II.  The present-day American cityscape, as Fishman 
observes, now reflects the triumph of "the standardized corporate 
model" of anti-city, sprawling development (p. 83).  Today's urbanism 
is more multinodal than centered.  It is also radically transformative 
of old urban cores and radically destructive of "nature" or " middle 
ground" or what was once called countryside (nature domesticated by 
family-scale farming).  Confronting this reality, both Fishman and 
Thomas concede, as anyone must, that neither tradition has exerted 
more than fragmentary influence on present-day urban form, although 
Fishman upholds present-day Portland, Oregon, as a promising exception 
(discussed in an excellent chapter by Carl J. Abbott, Chp. 9). 
 
The further one proceeds into this bipolar discussion, especially into 
the contributing essays meant to broaden it, the more one encounters 
another, deeper reality about American planning.  Put simply, neither 
one nor two but multiple "traditions" have addressed the nation's 
urban and environmental past or, if "tradition" is too weighty a 
word, then many historically distinguishable forms of planning.  The 
contributing essays offer numerous examples, though that is not their 
intended purpose.  Specifically, Michael Lacey (Chp. 4) focuses on 
"national planning," beginning with the Gallatin Plan of 1808 for 
canals and roads and then concluding with the nationwide conservation 
initiatives of Theodore Roosevelt.  In effect, he spotlights two 
"traditions" or bodies of thought, notably the internal improvements 
program as advocated in the early nineteenth century, especially by 
Whig politicians; and scientific conservation identified with Gifford 
Pinchot. 
 
Another contributor, James L. Wescoat, Jr. (Chp. 5), sketches what can 
be seen as two more traditions -- first, "watershed" planning, which 
involves small-scale, upstream land- and water-management programs 
historically geared to soil conservation, pollution control, and 
riparian habitat protection, often as overseen by the Soil 
Conservation Service; and, second, "river basin" planning, referring 
to a long history of large-scale, downstream water development for 
purposes of navigation, flood control, dam construction, and the like, 
commonly done by the Army Corps of Engineers or the Bureau of 
Reclamation.  Westcoat, Jr., contributes a remarkably informative 
essay.  But while entitled "'Watersheds' in Regional Planning," it 
catalogues and dissects developments that seem only tangentially 
related to the socially and ecologically balanced regionalism so 
eloquently traced by Thomas. 
 
Political historian Alan Brinkley (Chp. 6), in turn, analyzes the 
National Resources Planning Board of the New Deal years, which briefly 
brought together city and regional planning thought, which emphasized 
the physical city (Fishman's metropolitan tradition) with national 
"social and economic" planning, and which had Hamiltonian roots and 
stressed national economic policy and management.  This coupling of 
two very different modes of thought, or "traditions," never worked 
out, growing more strained over time.  By 1943, economic planning 
prevailed within the Board, achieving real if watered down expression 
in the Employment Act of 1946, which set up the Council of Economic 
Advisors. 
 
Yet another form of planning is emphasized by Margaret Weir (Chp. 7) 
who analyzes the Congressional struggle in 1970-1975 over the National 
Land-Use Planning Act.  If enacted, the federal government would have 
funded land-use studies in all states willing to establish state-wide 
land-use planning procedures.  This never happened.  Significantly, 
defeat came at the hands of many groups, each holding what can been 
seen as alternative visions of both environmental intervention and 
"planning." The opponents included environmentalists who favored 
federal regulatory action over state-level planning, mayors jealous of 
their municipal prerogatives over land use, minority-group advocates 
of community-based planning and control, and corporate and other 
business interests whose power to plan their own land-sites was 
threatened. 
 
Although the essays by Lacey, Westcoat, Jr., Brinkley, and Weir all 
involve what Fishman calls "the quest for national planning" 
(his sub-section title for these essays), they describe neither a 
single subject nor outlook.  Nor do they represent explorations of the 
two "traditions" identified by the Fishman-Thomas debate.  What they 
document vividly and with considerable insight, however, is the 
weakness of the federal government as a force in shaping local life, 
including cities, and the far-reaching consequences of the federalist 
structure of American governance, especially its deliberate 
fragmentation of political authority and public initiatives, including 
planning practice itself.  In this respect, the Lacey essay is 
especially insightful in elucidating how democratic politics and 
American federalism have thwarted centralized visions of the public 
good that the planning impulse, when given national expression, 
usually upholds.  Those who have blamed the weaknesses of American 
planning chiefly on private enterprise should take note. 
 
In principle, a more centralized national government in which the 
states would have functioned as administrative units, not as political 
centers with powers of their own, might well have enabled national 
planning visions to triumph or exert greater influence.  That this was 
not the case suggests that the deepest structures of American society, 
those set forth as a consequence of the American Revolution, provide a 
major key as to why planning in the United States is in essence a 
fragmented art.  The consequence at the national level seems clear: 
whether we look at the Gallatin Plan, at Theodore Roosevelt's 
programs, or at the national land-use legislation of the early 1970s, 
little came of these initiatives, and American federalism has much to 
do with this fact. 
 
At the state and city levels of public authority, the record also 
appears weak.  For example, the New York Regional Plan of 1929/1931, 
which Fishman describes as the "zenith" of the metropolitan tradition, 
upheld a vision of a center-dominated metropolis on an unprecedented 
geographic scale but failed as a plan.  And the regionalist vision, 
with the possible exception of the Tennessee Valley Authority during 
the 1930s, met a similar fate.  This book tempts one to conclude that 
American planning history is much more a story of aspirations than 
fulfillment. 
 
However, such judgments depend on where and how one looks at the 
record.  American history is complex and multifaceted, and so is its 
planning heritage.  If the fate of the Gallatin plan suggests an 
incapacity for national initiatives, what are we to make of the 
mid-to-late twentieth century interstate highway system?  Whether we 
like this system or not, it stands out as a nationally planned and 
fully articulated network built to a very high engineering standard 
and notably successful on its own terms.  And at the state level, 
going back to the Gallatin era, we can point to DeWitt Clinton's Erie 
Canal and its imitators elsewhere as instances of consequential 
state-level transportation initiative and planning.  In truth, many 
aspects of the built environment involve planning, whether we are 
focusing on buildings, parks, waterworks, university sites, waste 
removal systems, shopping centers, airports, subdivisions, and so 
forth.  Many scholars have devoted careers to analyzing these real, if 
lesser and more specialized and often successful, forms of plan 
making, among them Paul Turner on campus design, Joel Tarr on 
wastewater technology, and Richard Longstreth on shopping centers [2]. 
 
The deepest puzzle posed by this book, when read for insight into the 
nature of American planning history, is how to comprehend this subject 
in a fruitful and historically realistic way.  Certainly, if we accept 
the assumptions of this study, it is not by focusing on the multiple 
forms of specialized plan-making just noted or to claim, as I would, 
that American planning is a fragmented art.  More sweeping 
perspectives are favored. 
 
In this respect, Fishman's thinking lies at the heart of this work and 
thus deserves special attention.  And no claim he makes is more 
fundamental than his initial assertion that the metropolis of 
1830-1930 be understood as the "creation" of a "planning tradition." 
This claim, I submit, while productive of a very imaginative 
discussion, ultimately mystifies and confuses what is ordinarily meant 
by planning. 
 
Contrary to Fishman, this reviewer sees the centralized metropolis as an 
unplanned configuration brought about by the complex interaction of 
private, market-based decisions and incremental government actions.  The 
metropolis as it grew begot a planning tradition but is not itself an 
expression of one.  Fishman is on solid ground whenever he highlights 
specific choices and actions that helped to shape the metropolis, such as 
the building of a railroad network throughout the nation's interior 
during the mid-nineteenth century or decisions by various civic elites to 
promote particular rail lines.  But the form taken by the city as a whole 
lay beyond anyone's control.  A host of private and public agents, 
operating within various geographical, technological, social, and market 
constraints, yielded the outcome.  Parts were planned but not the whole. 
Only the rare individual, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, possessed the 
genius to grasp the entire developmental pattern and to respond to it in 
influential ways.  But even his role was reactive.  At best, his schemes 
only adjusted the result.  For example, Boston would have become a 
metropolis with or without its Emerald Necklace. 
 
One drawback to assuming that the metropolis itself is planned is that 
a planner must be identified.  To his credit, Fishman tackles this 
problem.  The essays in this book, as Fishman readily concedes, make 
clear that the nation has lacked ongoing institutional structures at 
any level that make formal planning effective.  "American society," he 
asserts, "inherently lacks the stability for long-term planning or the 
social solidarity for collective action" (p. 4).  His solution, 
drawing on Alexis de Tocqueville, who marveled that America produced 
satisfactory communities without designing them, is to posit the 
concept of an "urban conversation" taking place among all the 
involved interests as "the ultimate source of authority that generated 
the outpouring of investment in roads, bridges, waterworks, schools, 
libraries, and other public facilities that so astonished Tocqueville" 
(p. 5).  Through give and take, conflict and resolution, steps and 
missteps, a common pattern was evolved. 
 
Whatever one thinks of this solution, it is an elusive, if not 
mystical, construct.  Even if we acknowledge that a consensus of sorts 
often emerged on actions to take, the inchoate processes and conflicts 
that produced it are not what most people mean by planning, especially 
when the "conversation" typically occurred outside of existing 
institutional structures.  This solution, apart from whether it 
represents an adequate definition of planning authority, has another 
potentially far-reaching, potentially fruitful consequence: it upends 
a generation of urban historical analysis that has emphasized 
transportation and communications as key determinants of urban form, 
implicit in such terms as "walking city," rail-based urbanism, or the 
"automotive city." 
 
Finally, the most serious drawback to defining the source of a 
planning tradition so loosely is to muddle our sense of what 
constitutes planning. For example, at one point, when discussing the 
suburban development that accompanied metropolitan growth, Fishman 
acknowledges the upper-middle-class bedroom suburbs of the 1900-1930 
era as "enduring ideals for suburban living" and then observes that 
"the more modest middle-class and working-class neighborhoods that 
took shape on the periphery" at about the same time represented "an 
even more impressive achievement" (p. 12).  But these lower-status 
neighborhoods, as Fishman frankly admits, citing Sam Bass Warner, 
Jr.'s _Streetcar Suburbs_, represented speculative developments, which 
is to say the virtual opposite of what is usually considered planning. 
 
Given all the values, calculations, and constraints that enter into 
speculative growth, a case might be made that growth of this sort 
served as the vehicle for an "urban conversation," thereby yielding 
the outcome so admired by Fishman.  But why call this process 
"planning," no matter how satisfactory the outcome?  Why not simply 
recognize that markets can yield positive, if unplanned results?  In 
short, a loose, permissive definition of planning by comprehending so 
much obfuscates what we commonly mean by the term.  Rigor is lost. 
Activities that most people associate with the word are marginalized; 
others that are more market-based gain undue emphasis. 
 
Throughout, Fishman makes clear that the metropolitan tradition also 
involves the more formal and familiar planning ideas of Frederick Law 
Olmsted (Sr.), Daniel H. Burnham, and Thomas Adams.  But these 
luminaries of American planning history, I would argue, should not be 
understood as creators of the metropolis but as its reformers. 
Historically, they stepped onto the urban stage only after the 
centralized metropolis had begun to emerge.  Responding to its growth, 
they devised ways to modify it, by introducing and protecting open 
space (Olmsted in many cities), by refining and integrating 
transportation arrangements (Burnham in Chicago), and by repositioning 
economic, residential, and open space functions (Adams in the New York 
region).  None of them envisioned an alternative urbanism, that is, a 
new overall pattern for human settlement.  That kind of thinking, far 
more radical and utopian, became the domain of the regionalists who 
repudiated the prevailing metropolitan pattern and opposed its 
extension. 
 
_The American Planning Tradition_, while replete with challenging and 
provocative interpretation, is much more than a disengaged scholarly 
study.  Its major premise is the failure of the present-day urban 
pattern in the United States, especially the post-metropolitan sprawl 
that has both reconfigured urbanism itself and fundamentally 
jeopardized the middle ground prized by regionalists.  In effect, 
Fishman and Thomas partially resolve the Mumford-Adams debate by 
identifying present-day urbanism as the common enemy.  Fishman, who 
has done as much any urban historian to explicate this new order, 
suggests that it is now bankrupt and near exhaustion.  Thomas, more 
realistically, notes and celebrates a gathering, almost Hegelian 
reaction to it. 
 
Fresh thinking is needed, they both agree.  Indeed, Fishman believes 
that a new conversation has already begun, some of it finding 
expression through the new urbanists, notably Andres Duany, Elizabeth 
Plater-Zyberk, and Peter Calthorpe (none of whom are directly 
represented in this volume).  Thomas simply points to the "hundreds of 
nature conservancies, land trusts, shoreline commissions, park 
planners, housing agencies, and land owner compacts across the 
nation," through whose ad hoc efforts some of the vision of the 
original regionalists is brought forward but with a more ecological as 
well as more opportunistic twists (p. 62).  In fact, both new urbanist 
and new environmentalist sensibilities inform many of the essays. 
 
This work, while sounding an alarm, is more an academic effort than a 
call to arms.  It is best seen as a scholarly resource to those who 
enter the fray or who want to understand it.  The high levels of 
historical generalization and the sophistication of argument will cut 
against popular appeal.  Some chapters, while interesting in their own 
right, do not cohere well with the whole.  Arnold R. Hirsch (Chp. 8), 
for example, offers a probing essay explaining the failure of New 
Orleans to embrace urban renewal during its heyday elsewhere in 
America.  And Judith A. Martin and Sam Bass Warner, Jr. (Chp. 10), 
analyze Oak Park in Chicago to illustrate both how local initiative 
can yield a pattern of local exceptionalism, in this case with respect 
to racial integration, which has been achieved in Oak Park though 
ignored elsewhere in America, and how on another front, that of 
locally vexed storm-water flooding and sewage pollution, a locality 
can succumb to inherited citywide infrastructure decisions and policy 
inertia, impeding newer, more environmental sensitive alternatives. 
Both chapters, however, reinforce the most powerful sub-theme of the 
book: the diversity of American planning engendered by federalist 
governance. 
 
Even if the discussions triggered by the Fishman-Thomas debate spiral 
off in unexpected directions, those who want to explore 
metropolitanism and regionalism as historically based prescriptive 
traditions and resources for current discussion will do well to 
consult this work.  Thomas's essay, in particular, is an historian's 
tour de force, illuminating both the original regionalist impulse and 
its links with present-day thinking.  Fishman's contributions, 
especially if read simply as commentary on metropolitan urbanism, 
vividly demonstrate that this heritage remains a basis for addressing 
the urban predicament as now experienced, particularly its patterns of 
sprawl and environmental devastation.  In short, this work belongs on 
the shelf of any American planning historian or activist curious about 
the historical firmament in which their ideas and aspirations are 
rooted. 
 
[1] John W. Reps, _The Making of Urban America: A History of City 
Planning in the United States_(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 
1965); Mel Scott, _American City Planning since 1890_(Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1969); Mary Corbin Sies and 
Christopher Silver, eds._Planning the Twentieth-Century American 
City_(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Donald 
A. Krueckeberg, ed._Introduction to Planning History in the United 
States_(New Brunswick, NJ: The Center for Urban Policy Research, 
Rutgers University, 1983). 
 
[2] Paul Venable Turner, _Campus: An American Planning 
Tradition_(Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The Architectural 
History Foundation, New York; The MIT Press, 1984); Joel A. Tarr, 
"Sewerage and the Development of the Networked City in the United 
States, 1850-1930,"in Joel A. Tarr and Gabriel Dupuy, eds._Technology 
and the Rise of the Networked City in Europe and 
America_(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 159-185; 
Richard Longstreth, "The Diffusion of the Community Shopping Center 
Concept during the Interwar Decades," _Journal of the Society of 
Architectural Historians_ 56 (September, 1997), 268-293; and Richard 
Longstreth, _City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the 
Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950_(Cambridge, 
Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1997). 
 
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