The City Beautiful movement was essential to modern-day urban planning because it essentially shaped its core principles. The movement sought to create grandiose, large-scale building projects and monuments. However, such projects were started without regard for the inhabitants of the land on which they were built: poor people, immigrants, or African Americans (Stein, 2019). This quickly led to conflict with public interest and led to the formation of city planning commissions, intended to account for public input in city planning (Stein, 2019). However, initially, these commissions were still populated by real estate elites, who were primarily interested in using city planning to stimulate profits (Stein, 2019). Along with the monuments and grand designs built at the height of City Beautiful, their efforts led to the property values increasing (Stein, 2019). These changes marked a shift from manufacturing being the primary driving force of city development to real estate occupying this role (Stein, 2019). In turn, this increased the influence of city planning on the actual development of cities.
City Beautiful is also important to city planning because it prompted a wave of opposition that rejected authoritarian city planning in favor of smaller, community and neighborhood-based projects. This opposition drew attention to the needs of smaller urban communities and their demands, which often contradicted both City Beautiful and City Practical’s ideals (Stein, 2019). Finally, a different side of opposition argued that the issue with contemporary city planning was its impractical scale (Stein, 2019). All of these criticisms were eventually incorporated into principles of urban planning as we understand it today. As such, the City Beautiful movement’s influence on modern urban planning is creating city planning infrastructure and increasing planners’ influence; it created a base upon which future city planning developments would be built.
Reference
Stein, S. (2019). Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Verso.