Tools

The book’s six figures

Every figure from The Lost Art of the Plan, rebuilt as accessible web graphics with the book’s own captions and source lines, a text equivalent for each, and downloads. The same figures stand on the Tools page, where the work is.

Figure 1: A century of the American plan. The milestones this book traces, from the tenement crisis and the City Beautiful to the specialized, federally driven profession of the 1970s. Dark markers fall in Part 1; blue markers in Part 2.

Based on Peterson (2009); Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926); Davidoff (1965); Demonstration Cities and Metropolitan Development Act (1966); National Historic Preservation Act (1966); National Environmental Policy Act (1969); Housing and Community Development Act (1974).

Text equivalent

Timeline of sixteen milestones in American city planning named in this book, from the 1879 dumbbell tenement design through the 1909 Plan of Chicago, the 1926 Euclid zoning case, the Housing Act of 1949 and the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, to California's Proposition 13 in 1978.

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Figure 2: The ideal of the rational plan. The linear, step-by-step method of the City Practical planners, as this chapter describes it, and the blind spot the book identifies in it.

Text equivalent

Flow diagram of the rational comprehensive planning model described in Chapter 2: five linear steps, from collecting and analyzing data, identifying problems and setting goals, generating alternative plans and evaluating them quantitatively, to selecting the single optimal plan; a note records that the model devalued any knowledge not based on quantifiable data.

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Figure 3: The human cost of the cure. The scale of displacement under Title I and the parallel severance of neighborhoods by urban expressways, using the figures given in this chapter. The schematic is illustrative, not a map.

Based on Biles (2000).

Text equivalent

Chart and schematic for Chapter 3. Between 1949 and 1968 the homes of more than a million people were demolished in the name of urban renewal; 425,000 housing units were demolished and only 122,000 replaced, shown as two horizontal bars. A schematic, not to scale, shows a grid of city blocks before and after an expressway is routed through its center.

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Figure 4: A tower of Babel. How the post-renewal profession fractured into specialties, each tied to the federal law or local event this chapter credits with creating it.

Based on Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co. (1926); Public Works and Economic Development Act (1965); Land and Water Conservation Fund Act (1965); National Historic Preservation Act (1966); Kaiser et al. (1968); National Environmental Policy Act (1969); Housing and Community Development Act (1974).

Text equivalent

Tree diagram for Chapter 4 showing how the once-unified City Practical planner fractured into six groups of specialties: Foundational (urban design; land use and code enforcement), Megastructure (transportation; economic development), Human Scale (housing; community development), Protectors (parks and recreation; historic preservation), Guardians (environmental; community activism and empowerment) and Managers (planning management and finance), each with the law or event the chapter links to it.

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Approach	Era (as dated in text)	The planner as	Starts from	Limit this book identifies	Ch.
City Beautiful	1893–1909	Designer of a grand, comprehensive civic vision	The physical form of the city	Top-down and expert-led, with little to no public input	1
City Practical (the rational plan)	From 1910	Technician; an urban engineer	Exhaustive data collection and analysis	Devalued any way of knowing not based on quantifiable data	2
Advocacy and community activism	From 1965	Advocate for interest groups; facilitator and organizer	Plural plans; the community’s own process	Turned the planner from a creator of products into a manager of process	4
New Urbanism	Late 20th century	City-builder again	Design and the physical context	Narrowly focused on livability; limited attention to equity	5
The Artist’s Method	Today	Civic artist practicing civic craft	Witness, moral synthesis, the courage to test, critique	The book’s proposal, set out in Chapters 6–8	6–8

Figure 5: Five ways of planning the city. The approaches this book follows, in its own terms; the shaded row is the method it proposes.

Based on Davidoff (1965); Berke (2002).

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Figure 6: From chalk to capital. The four moves of the civic artist in this chapter’s transit case study, and the results the case reports. The case is an illustrative scenario in the text, not data from a named city.

Text equivalent

Four-step flow for the Chapter 8 transit case study: witness, moral synthesis, a living test on a five-mile corridor with a temporary red-paint bus lane, and the chalk-to-capital bridge that turns operating savings into a municipal bond and permanent capital works. Results of the illustrative case after four months: bus speeds up 22 percent, on-time performance from 61 to 88 percent, operator assault incidents down to zero.

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More resources

The tools these figures serve: Tools. The whole book, free: The Book page. The remedy in brief: How to fix planning. The story behind it: How we got here.