U.S. cities are still in recovery—recovery from the devastation wrought by the automobile age and the racist planning policies that accompanied it. In terms of broader planning policy, the new paradigm is one of social justice and equity, despite the current federal government’s disavowal of that idea. The planning profession has turned to community-based planning, sometimes called Social Justice Planning, that seeks to empower communities and embrace a “do no harm” approach to planning policy. This paradigm counters decades of top-down policies guided too often by transportation engineers in service to the god of traffic flow.

It has been a long time coming. Our love affair with the automobile is as understandable as any drug addiction. Who can deny the pleasure of cruising the highway in comfort, the freedom of independence at speed, the liberty to go far and wide as you want in your own personal bubble? 

But the unforeseen consequences of traffic engineering and the racist aspects of highway design to meet these engineering needs were devastating. In the space of just 50 years (if we count from the introduction of Ford’s Model T to the 1956 Federal Highway Act), cities were transformed by traffic engineers into the “concrete jungle” of modern highway construction. Neighborhoods—primarily those of the poorest inhabitants—were demolished in the name of progress toward the 20th century automobile city. The cities of the 19th century were wrested into conformity with the needs of the car, regardless of the damage inflicted. 

It wasn’t always this way. Modern city planning in the 19th century sought to impose order on the increasingly congested and haphazard city. In particular, the post–Industrial Revolution city was a place of high density, with inhabitants living cheek-by-jowl with industry and suffering the consequences in terms of poor public health and life expectancy. 

If we look at Paris, the city as we know it today was largely created by Baron Haussmann’s Renovation (1853–1870), which transformed the Paris of the Renaissance through the creation of wide boulevards and avenues; the standardization of building facades; the implementation of modern sewage and water systems; the establishment of parks and squares; and the creation of the iconic apartment buildings we associate with Paris today. (Sadly, the 20th century saw the building of the périphérique [ring road] and the creation of the La Défense business district, developments that divided the city socially and racially.)

Central Paris was being transformed from its Renaissance history to 19th Century France, while in the U.S. similar thought went into the planning of an entirely virgin city in the form of Washington, D.C. The city was initially planned in 1791, with major efforts led by Pierre Charles L’Enfant under George Washington’s direction. The 1790 Residence Act selected the site for the new capital. L’Enfant created the original master plan, which featured a grid of streets overlaid with diagonal avenues, public spaces, and grand boulevards, the National Mall as a central ceremonial space, and a system of public squares and circles at major intersections. In 1811, the Commissioners’ Plan for Manhattan imposed a similar order on the island of New York City, laying out streets and avenues that brought a Euclidean order to the landscape and set up the context for the city’s growth. It’s easy to see why these ideas found favor: order instead of chaos; open boulevards rather than narrow alleys; grand parks that bring light and sun into the city. A rational order reflecting the stability and fortitude of the nation.

Then came the disaster of the automobile, the ultimate symbol of individualism and freedom. Once the car became affordable to most, transportation became the dominant force in city planning. It is staggering how much damage transportation planning did to cities in the short period of the life of the car. The initial price of the Model T was $825 for the Runabout model (about $30,000 in today’s dollars), and its mass production founded the “Motor City” of Detroit and the U.S. motor industry.

Pretty soon, transportation planning became the dominant paradigm at the highest levels of government. In 1944, the Federal-Aid Highway Act first authorized a national system of interstate highways. Signed by President Eisenhower and officially named the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, the legislation allocated $25 billion over 12 years and planned for 41,000 miles of highways for which the federal government would pay 90% of costs. Connecting cities across the country by highways (and thus killing off any idea of a comprehensive federal rail system) was one thing, but when the cars reached the city, the cities were not ready. Getting cities into compliance with the motor age involved extensive neighborhood destruction, pedestrian fatalities, and polluted air. But the love affair with the automobile was powerful enough to ignore those consequences. It was only with the rebellion of activists like Jane Jacobs that cities began to regain their sanity.

Jacobs’ book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) started a revolution. Her defeat of the highway plans of Robert Moses was followed in the ’70s and ’80s by others, such as Jan Gehl in Copenhagen and William H. Whyte in New York City. Both men tried to awaken city planners to the folly of car dominance, the importance of public space, and the phenomenology of city life.

These pioneers were the catalyst for the idea of “placemaking.” The relationship between social life and space, long ignored by planners and urbanists, has been a topic of study in humanistic geography and anthropology for decades. Anthropologists long understood the importance of place in human social structure and documented how social structure could be understood through its spatial organization. The work of Gehl, Kevin Lynch, Bill Hillier, David Seamon, Tim Cresswell, and others in academia brought “place” to the forefront of urban planning. At the same time, writers like Jeff Speck, Charles Montgomery, and Ray Oldenberg awakened people to the social values of good public space. Planners were also awakened to the social justice imperatives of city planning through the work of writers like David Harvey and Richard Rothstein, who drew attention to the inequities built into cities and the ideas of the citizens’ “right to the city.”

Gehl famously defined the placemaking approach to urban planning thusly: “First people, then places, then buildings—the other way around never works.” From this simple premise, placemakers have been redefining the way we approach urban planning. By first understanding social needs, we can then organize around common spaces that serve those social needs. First people, then places, then buildings (and perhaps even roads).

There is no placemaking “profession”; in fact, that’s one of placemaking’s strengths. As Terrance Johnson analyzed in his 1971 book Professions and Power, the organization of various knowledge bases and skills into professions as we now know them exists mainly to lay claim to the market for their services to the exclusion of others. Like the doctors’ “laying on of hands,” professionals claim exclusive knowledge (only they have the answer). Conversely, placemaking has no exclusive knowledge; it does not claim to hold the answer to the problem. Instead, placemaking sets out to understand social needs and identify the best way to organize space in service of those needs. “Professions” certainly play their part—whether it be architecture, landscape, economics, or management—but in placemaking, they serve the greater authority of social needs. First people, then places, then buildings (and perhaps even roads). 

This is why it can be an impossible task to plot the history of placemaking. On the one hand, it can appear as an emerging “profession”—an offshoot of city planning, perhaps—that encompasses the recent awakening to the importance of public space. And, yes, the idea of seeing public space as the armature around which to plan cities is a paradigm change in which placemakers are taking the lead. On the other hand, the social organization of space is as old as human settlement. In early human settlements, the spatial organization of communities was vital to the coherence of their social structure and was used to reinforce rules and meaning. It is only through the work of anthropologists and geographers that the importance of the social organization of space has entered the consciousness of city planners. 

Another principle of city planning that is now being reconsidered is the idea of land use segregation. That is, the idea that different uses—residential, manufacturing, business—should be separated into separate districts. In the days of heavy industry spewing toxic fumes into the air, this made sense. However, with the decline in those industries, at least in urban centers, the idea of integrating work, residential, and retail activities seems more logical. The idea of the 15-Minute City is that all needs can be reached within a 15-minute walk. What better way to approach that goal than to begin with placemaking? First people, then places, then buildings (and perhaps even roads). 

How do placemakers work? The first task has been to change the paradigm among city planners, transportation engineers, and the communities themselves to fundamentally rethink how we approach urban planning. This has been a long, ongoing struggle, pioneered by organizations such as the Project for Public Spaces in New York and Gehl in Copenhagen. That work is being expanded today into a global movement by organizations such as PlacemakingUS and PlacemakingX, the latter organization seeding a global network of placemaking organizations across the world. Sadly, there are still cities that continue to plan around the car, but the change is discernible. In cities like Paris, Barcelona, Medellin, and New York, we see the benefits of public space, not as an adjunct to city life, but as the fundamental starting point of a livable city.

Featured image: William H. Whyte, courtesy of Island Press.