On Street Level: Random Thoughts on our Urban World

Discovering Urbanism has an posted excellent blog post on the 1916 textbook ‘City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots’ by Charles Mulford Robinson:

City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots by Charles Mulford Robinson was a standard textbook during the early stages of the professionalization of planning in America. Written in 1916, it only shortly followed the first formal attempts at land use planning and the creation of local planning commissions. The textbook continues the transition from the traditional urban form evident in the Garden City movement to prescriptions for a more thoroughly modernized city. Robinson was more aware of the potential and needs of the automobile than Raymond Unwin, although he still held on to the traditional notion that the street was the most important public space in urban areas. He attempted to deal with this tension by differentiating streets from each other and districts of a city from each other

This blog post touches deeply on the concepts of the hierarchy of streets and zoning outlined in the book.  Perhaps the most interesting point is on the history of zoning.   ‘City Planning with Special Reference to Planning of Streets and Lots’ discusses the uses of zoning back in the early 20th century:

There’s a common narrative about how zoning unfolded in America. First, planners needed to find ways to separate dangerous and unhealthy factories from the places where people lived. Once the legal basis for this tool was secured, it was eventually employed to separate businesses from residents. The final stage of zoning was to segregating different kinds of people from each other. That’s how we reached where we are today.

Is that last stage of zoning really surprising?  When you put this into context of the time, it makes perfect sense.  Later on, author Charles Robinson explicitly describes why such zoning was used:

“Both poor and rich are probably happier in their own environment, among their own kind, where each can live his own life in his own way, without covetousness or odious comparison.”

Robinson brings both the concepts of hierarchy of streets and zoning together when he discusses the fact that zoning helped designate wider streets for commercial zones and narrower streets for residential ones?  If you look at your own city, how many of these concepts still exist?  Can you see past evidence of concepts that may no longer apply to today’s cities.