Culture
A Brief History of the Birth of Urban Planning
The field first started in America as the purview of three very different types of thinkers.
At America's first urban planning conference, held in New York in 1898, a British planner asked whether he and his colleagues were striving for beautiful people or beautiful cities. Is urban planning about physical design, he wondered, or about making things easier for the people who live in our urban spaces?
It was an essential question for the field, which really wasn't born until the early 20th century.