ancient cities

government planned to transform the city of
Manila into a grand capital on the model of
Washington, D.C. In 1904 it was again Burnham
who conceived a plan for Manila, which he envisioned
as a garden city featuring a blend of tropical
landscapes, grand panoramic axes, and eclectic
colonial architecture. The plan called for a linear
mall, bordered by monumental government buildings,
which was to connect the Bay of Manila with
a capitol building; a series of panoramic roads was
to radiate from the national mall. Although the
Burnham plan of Manila was never fully implemented,
the city’s underlying road network still
follows the directions set forth by Burnham.
The utopian city envisioned by the architects of
the Chicago Columbian Exposition was also a
major inspiration for Walter Burley Griffin’s plan
for Canberra, the Australian capital founded in
1908. The 1911 to 1912 international competition
for Canberra gave architects and reformist planners
the opportunity to design a brand-new city from
scratch. Most competition entries displayed their
commitment to the teachings of the City Beautiful
movement. The winning entry by Griffin bore the
hallmarks of the movement, calling for a harmonious
blend between natural landscape and grand
architectural design, with residential settlements
sporting a mix of Georgian and Mediterranean stylistic
repertoire (arches, balconies, tile roofs, and
terracotta decorations) and pleasant gardens articulated
around lakes and water. The plan for Canberra
remained largely unaccomplished: After construction
eventually got under way in the 1920s, later the
Great Depression and World War II halted building.
The Cultural Legacy of the
City Beautiful Movement
By the early 1920s the popularity of the movement
declined as the new international style of modernism
imposed a focus on pragmatism over aesthetic
and on technological innovation and functionality
over beauty and decoration.
Yet, with its emphasis on comprehensive, largescale
planning, the City Beautiful movement has
left a long lasting mark in the urban fabric of
major American cities and has set the standards for
modern and rational city planning. According to
historian Lubove, its most valuable legacy was the
ideal it embodied of the “city as a work of art.”
City Beautiful Movement
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Especially in recent times, elements of the City
Beautiful movement’s idea have been reappraised
and brought back to center stage in the planning
debates about car-free cities, smart growth, transitoriented
development, and new towns—attempts
to counteract the shapelessness of modernist urban
planning and to restore human scale, livability, and
pedestrian friendliness in the urban fabric. The
historicism and neotraditionalism of planning
movements such as the new urbanism are particularly
indebted to the legacy of the City Beautiful.
New urbanism owes its formal roots to the City
Beautiful, adopting its emphasis on the arrangement
of civic architecture, plazas, landscaped
parks, and public spaces around carefully designed
axes and grids. The City Beautiful’s long-lasting
cultural legacy is also evident in the popular favor
that classicist repertoires, vernacular architecture,
and historic revivals have encountered in recent
times, as the success of neotraditionalist design
movements has shown.
The City Beautiful movement has moreover
deeply influenced the planning of spaces of leisure
and entertainment: the Coney Island of the
early 1930s (with its magnificent revivals of vernacular
architecture) and the theme parks of
today (with their carefully designed sceneries and
their historicist revivals) are strongly indebted to
the City Beautiful movement and particularly to
Burnham’s White City. Stephen Mills has argued
that today’s Disneyland originated from the earliest
Victorian world’s fairs, in particular the
Chicago Fair and the Centennial Exposition of
1876 in Philadelphia. Again with regard to the
Columbian Exposition, Pierre De Angelis has
contended that contemporary theme parks continue
the tradition of a large-scale “urban control
zone” by adhering to two key strategies developed
at the White City: “embracing a uniform
and harmonious architectural style which suggests
consensus and contentment, and crafting a
simulation of the world which is idealized and
stripped bare of any significant risk, conflict or
controversy.”
The emphasis on order over vitality and on rigid
aesthetic rules over the spontaneity and authenticity
of the urban setting is probably one of the less
convincing elements of City Beautiful ideals. Yet,
what City Beautiful architects and planners have
accomplished in their grand plans—the built legacy