Early Planning History

Early planning history

Hey everyone,

This week we looked at early planning history and the main piece of text that we were given to look at was Modernism and Early Urban Planning by LeGates & Stout, 1998

The introduction to this text covered a few main points after the industrial revolution one of these being the movement of people into major cities from rural areas and the advancements of technology used in these cities. Factories were used to bring the desperate rural people into the city for employment and there was a massive boom in the populations of many larger cities around the world. These areas that were only made to house a much lesser population became slums this being an obvious incentive to introduce planning to prevent further troubles. 

The first urban planners were used to develop strategies to erase these areas and provide places that could sustain the amount of people that had now become a problem for governments with crime and poverty resulting.When these planners were introduced Traffic management was also a key concern because of the amount of cars that were now been built and brought into the cities there would soon be massive problems with the effectiveness of the infrastructure that had previously been put in place. Planners now were taking into account a variety of aspects into the decision making processes to better the way in which people could operate within the cities.

There was a hiccup for planning at the turn of the 20^th century with the depression stunting the growth of planning as a whole. There was less money in the profession due to the lack of development and therefore less demand for planners. But this hiccup gave the profession an opportunity to diversify and expand into other areas such as construction. This overall improving the abilities of planners in the long run and after the depression had passed the profession benefited