City Beautiful and Garden City movements

 

White City’s beauty

 

An event rather than a city plan helped give rise to the City Beautiful movement – one of the most influential town planning models of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Architect Daniel Burnham led a team of leading American designers, including Frederick Law Olmsted, to create the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. The temporary buildings and monuments of the ‘White City’ were constructed in neo-classical style, and flanked water features and other grand public spaces. The coordinated design of the Exposition inspired Walter Burley Griffin in his planning for Canberra.

 

Revamping the metropolis

Major redevelopment schemes for big cities were another factor in the rise of modern town planning. Daniel Burnham (1846–1912) was involved in two American projects. The Senate Park Commission’s 1902 plan to revitalise L’Enfant’s plan for Washington DC attracted world-wide interest. And the 1909 plan for Chicago showed how artistic vision could fuse with pragmatic ideas about efficient cities at a metropolitan scale.