Each month, The Extraordinary Times blog catches up with historians, writers, and leaders on the cultural scene. This week, we catch up with historian Henry C. Binford. Professor Emeritus at Northwestern University, Binford earned his PhD at Harvard in 1973 and is a social historian of 19th century America. He is particularly interested in urbanization and city growth, especially urban sub-communities such as suburbs, industrial areas, and “slums.” Most recently he is the author of From Improvement to City Planning: Spatial Management in Cincinnati from the Early Republic through the Civil War Decade (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2021).
* What distinguishes “improvement” versus “city planning? I put forward this distinction for two reasons. First, to highlight my focus on the “prehistory” of planning. Commonplace thinking and much of the scholarship about city planning in the United States tilts toward the twentieth century. Planning is seen as beginning in the late nineteenth century in response to sanitary, economic, and social conditions in industrial cities, and then elaborated and professionalized in the Progressive era. Infant versions of that kind of city planning appear toward the end of my book, but my main interest is in older forms of evaluating and manipulating urban space. Later kinds of American planning inherited features from earlier efforts to “manage” space: heavy reliance on public-private partnerships, a mixture of moral and material goals, and persistent belief that better spaces would produce better people. My second reason for the improvement/planning distinction is to emphasize the “pastness” of the past. Early nineteenth century Americans thought about urban space in ways unfamiliar to us. In evaluating and manipulating the spaces around them they used criteria linked to the notion of “improvement.” Most US history classes highlight the then widespread enthusiasm for “internal improvements”—roads, canals, and other infrastructure. But for people at the time improvement was a more capacious concept that included education at both individual and community levels, moral redemption, displaying and promoting good behavior, and making land and structures more appealing. It could involve governments, but it more often involved governance by both private and public actors. I propose we cannot fully understand the later emergence of planning without considering its precursors in improvement. * Why 19th century Cincinnati? Cincinnati occupied a unique place among American cities. Throughout the first half of the 19th century, it was the largest and most influential urban center away from the seacoast, and the fastest growing city in “the Great American Valley,” or Mississippi-Ohio-Missouri watershed. Established after the Revolution, and thus never occupied or shaped by French, British, Dutch, or Spanish settlers, it was the first completely new big city developed by the independent United States, and it was invested with great expectations. Unlike Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago and other urban settlements to the north, Cincinnati’s history had never been shaped by the great imperial contests over the fur trade; its prospects were thoroughly connected to the political and economic expansion of the new nation. Cincinnati in the first half of the nineteenth century was what Chicago became in the second: the wonder metropolis of the new West, a magnet for young talent, and a much-watched experiment of the urbanizing new republic. How it dealt with the challenges of growth was a matter of intense interest not only for its residents but for many people on the eastern seaboard and throughout the emerging West. * Why the underbelly—“slums,” poverty, racial segregation, disease? When I started work on this project I was interested in the history of the “slum”—a British slang word adopted by Americans. That got me into the larger history of how city residents describe, evaluate, and label space. I was curious about how, when many thousands of people in every city were propertyless, living in rental housing that was unsanitary, crowded, and disreputable, only some of those working-class neighborhoods were cursed with the label “slum.” Such denigration had to do with racial and religious characteristics of the residents, but also with how the despised areas related to more prosperous—“improved”—areas nearby. * What lessons can leaders and planners draw from urban history? In relation to what came later, the characters in my book might be considered “proto-planners.” Twenty-first century planners operate in vastly different circumstances and with much more sophisticated tools than my Cincinnatians did. Nevertheless, several readers of my book manuscript noted that I was discussing early occurrences of planning conundrums that persist through the decades. As I wrote the book, I kept thinking of [urban activist] Jane Jacobs. Although they could not foresee it, my Cincinnatians were beginning to grapple with some big questions that she and other planning critics raised in the context of mid-twentieth century urban renewal: Who gets to plan? With what goals? Through what means? With what results? At whose expense?
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AuthorMatthew Smith, PhD (History). Public Programs at Miami University Regionals. Historian of Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, & the early American republic. Archives
February 2024
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