Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of Central Park and many other public spaces, left an unmistakable imprint on the American landscape. Far less familiar are his distinctive ideas about how to shape the American city--ideas that are more pertinent than ever amid today's rising outcry over urban sprawl.
Sprawl is shaping up to be an issue in the forthcoming presidential election. It is easy to see why. The public is concerned about gridlock and the relentless urbanization of the countryside. Existing communities erect barriers to growth, pushing development yet farther out; rural towns feel threatened. There is a general feeling that things are out of control. Yet there is no consensus on how growth should be accommodated. The public is alarmed at the consequences of sprawl but suspicious of the chief means of reining it in-centralized planning.
The public's confidence was soured by the planning debacles of the 1960s. High-minded urban renewal left thousands homeless; cross-town freeways fractured neighborhoods; and public housing superblocks, conceived by the best minds in the field, created high-crime zones. Faced with another round of planning "solutions," the public is right to be skeptical. Yet the suspicion of planning runs further back in time than these relatively recent events. Americans have always been uncomfortable with centralized planning. We admire European cities, but we have resisted vesting as much power in an individual as, say, Rome did in Pope Sixtus V, or Paris in Napoleon III. Instead of the grand gesture we have preferred the generic grid, plain Main Street, and its modern counterpart, the ubiquitous highway strip. This is not simply laziness. These modest planning solutions have generally provided a level playing field for "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." In the grid, or on the strip, everyone is treated equally. The house stands beside the church which is next to the drive-in restaurant. Each has equal prominence, none assumes precedence over the other.