Workers' Paradise: The Forgotten Communities of World War I

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.
Writings by Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., Manager of The Town Planning Division U.S. Housing Corporation between 1917-1919.

“Lessons from Housing Developments of the United States Housing Corporation,” Monthly Labor Review, 8: 27 – 38 (May 1919)
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Olmsted identifies the work of the USHC as part of a broad attempt to provide places for government workers to sleep, recreate, and conduct “everything relating to family and social life outside of working hours.”
Although the focus of the program was originally on the quantity of housing, experience taught the USHC that quality was vital in supporting long-term, productive workers. Indeed, he discussed the broad range impact of housing on the nation’s population:
“On the social side there is probably no other activity in the nation which does more to fix the conditions that determine the health and mold the character of our people than housing.”
Olmsted’s understanding of the importance of quality design and housing led to specific lessons for site planning:

Small-site housing design requires care to ensure high quality design and positive residential experiences.

Single-family detached housing was preferable to other building types although it was not always possible to achieve those layouts.

When apartment buildings are necessary, they should optimize “light, air, privacy, and convenience.”

In accordance with the conventional wisdom of the time, short vistas are preferable, necessitating terminating and curving streets.

Nonetheless, too much variety is possible, making a “development look like a piece of stage scenery and not like the dwellings of modern American citizens.”
Lastly, Olmsted saw the experience of the USHC as an experiment preparing for the future development of housing in the U.S.:
“They are intelligent, even if hurried, experiments on a large scale, directed toward securing the best obtainable results in the way of comfortable, healthful, pleasant living conditions for persons of limited means.”

“The Scope and Results of City Planning in Europe,” Survey, 22:14 (July 3, 1909)
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The purpose of this article is to share the history and practice of European city planning in order to yield lessons for the new American profession of planning, even though the practices must be adapted to the American context.
First, Olmsted claims that the central purpose of city planning in the past was to shape the patterns of the creation of development to ensure that they served the city as a whole, rather than merely the areas in which they are situated.
He then lauds the broader approach that has been adopted in Germany and other progressive locations:
“The ultimate purpose of city planning is . . . to direct the physical development of the city . . in such a manner that the ordinary citizen will be able to live and labor under conditions as favorable to health, happiness and productive efficiency as his means will limit.” (501)

Olmsted discusses several specific planning practices that have helped to create good cities in Europe:

Respecting the contours of the land in laying-out buildings and streets

Regulating the location of undesirable uses (such as apartment houses and saloons) to prevent the decline of property values

Creating public facilities, such as schools and playgrounds, throughout the city—by virtue of governmental disposition of the land on periphery of the cities

“City Planning,” Proceedings of the Second National Conference on City Planning, 1910 document
Olmsted directly addresses the profession of planning and the specific goals with regard to the physical form of cities.
For Olmsted, city planning is an integrated and comprehensive discipline with broad goals. The ultimate goal is to create “city conditions adapted to their attaining the maximum of productive efficiency, of health and of enjoyment of life” (285).

Olmsted describes three main areas of planning: circulation, creating spaces devoted to public purposes, and influencing private growth.
Several specific physical design principles emerge:

Street patterns should be adapted to the local environment rather than merely following a rigid, uniform plan

Beauty is an important part of city design and thus must be integrated at all stages of the planning process, rather than merely being window-dressing at the end of a process.

Civic centers should be created in every city “for the sake of convenience and of increased dignity and beauty” (287).
Finally, he suggests that further work is necessary for the planning profession to realize its potential: “What is needed is more power for [planners], more public understanding of their work, and the development of a better and broader knowledge and appreciation on their part of the technique of city planning” (285-6).
Olmsted also explains his view of the planning process and critiques the current state of planning. He laments the fact that planning often is carried out in singular visible events; rather he says that it should be a constant incremental process carried out by diligent professionals.
A diligent profession approach to planning would also lead to more regular standards of planning, unlike the rules of the time that were often “as yet tentative, unsystematic, half-hearted, and based upon no adequate recognition of the evils to be met” (288).

“City Planning,” New Boston, Volume 1, No. 2, June 1910 document
This is an excerpt of the same speech given at the Second National Conference on City Planning that appeared in the proceedings of that conference (see above).
There are several additional sections that appeared in New Boston that did not appear in the proceedings and introduce several interesting points that were not included in the above excerpt.
This publication about Boston includes ones paragraph that addresses the issue of thoroughfares, with Olmsted once again emphasizing the importance of these connections across the city.
He suggests that municipal tax strategies affect the patterns of development and the quality of buildings. Thus he suggests that the purview of planning extends beyond explicit arrangement of elements of the city and includes policies that indirectly shape it.
He notes that building codes aim, first, to ensure structural stability, second, to prevent fire, and, third, to ensure human health.
Finally, he suggests that fixed and arbitrary rules about height and setbacks do not make sense. Rather he suggests performance-based rules that regulate the relations of buildings with their neighbors based on the amount of light that can enter a building in each specific circumstance.

Bion J. Arnold, John R. Freeman, and Frederick Law Olmsted. “City Planning for Pittsburgh: Outline and Procedure. A Report.” Pittsburgh Civic Design Commission, 1910
This report was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Civic Design Commission in order to receive expert advice about the future directions of planning in the city. This document is more practical and technical than the other Olmsted writings so far and reveals less about his beliefs about the planning profession.
Despite the technical focus of the document, it reflects Olmsted’s belief that planning has many broad and important goals:
“City planning should be the forecasting and provision for securing such physical facilities, equipment and development of a city as are necessary to promote and accommodate the business, communication, transportation, health, comfort and pleasure of its citizens. City planning, as undertaken by the Pittsburgh Civic Commission, means, the city useful, convenient, economical and healthful, as well as the city beautiful.”
The report primarily focuses on the types of new infrastructure necessary to support a modern city, including building regulations. The authors note that the ability to implement the plans under discussion through legal and financial means is vital, reflecting Olmsted’s belief in the practical nature of the planning profession.
Olmsted in particular was tasked with the transportation elements of the plan. The report suggests that transportation connect all of the sub-disciplines of planning and its affect on the built environment:
“In planning such thoroughfares it will be necessary for the sake of economy to regard not only the principles of engineering and esthetics governing the design of streets in general and to study the complex and peculiar topography of the region, but also to consider in detail the value of existing improvements and land values which would be destroyed or damaged in the process of executing the plan.”
Together with all of the other technical areas of the report, transportation planning would enable the city of Pittsburgh to achieve the lofty goals stated above.

“The City Beautiful,” The Builder, Volume 101: Number 15-17, (July 7, 1911)
Although this piece is the record of a discussion by Olmsted of the location for parks and playgrounds in Montreal, the general discussion includes three sections with broad relevance:

A discussion of the importance of a transit network to a well-functioning city

A framework for the ideal distribution of recreational facilities in a city

A justification of planning and an explanation of its implementation
Olmsted believed that the goals of planning could substantially be achieved through the transportation system:
“The progress of the community and the convenience, economy, and general satisfaction with which its people can do their work and enjoy their lives, depend very largely upon the joint efficiency of these diverse parts, considered as a single interrelated system for the movement of people and commodities.”
He also identified several key features of a good transportation system:

Rapid transit

Streetcars feeding the rapid transit system, with special attention to the accommodation of this system within the street network

The shape of the street network, emphasizing that the streets ought not to be any wider than necessary because it would be a waste of land and would increase land rents excessively
The effectiveness of these elements fed into his general goals for planning:
“The speed, the range, and the economy of local passenger transportation is one of the most important factors making for comfortable and healthful homes for the mass of the people, and against the overcrowding of houses on the land and the exaction of excessive ground rents.”
In discussion the creation of a system of recreational facilities, Olmsted noted several factors that should determine the layout of such a system:

Parks should be located throughout the city, so that every home was within a quarter mile of some recreational facility

Between five and ten percent of the city should be dedicated to parks

There should be facilities for people of different ages and facilities that can be used in different seasons

These clean and healthy facilities that replace establishments like saloons and dance halls
Finally, Olmsted explained why planning was necessary and how it should be implemented:

Without planning, land owners will focus on serving only the areas they own without reference to the broader network of the city, both with regard to streets and to other general factors

The dynamic nature of the city makes planning particularly important

A permanent professional planning staff should ensure that a city plan adapts to the changing city

“A Suburban Town Built on Business Principles,” New Boston, Volume 1, #9, January 1911 document
This article describes the principles that guided the creation of Forest Hill Gardens, a planned suburb in the Borough of Queens, in New York City. The most notable feature of this suburb is the introduction of English garden features into an American suburb.
Olmsted argued that the developer of this community took advantage of city planning knowledge in creating this profitable development.
In particular, the developer implemented thoroughfares, adapted streets to topography, structured local streets to discourage through-use and to provide space for gardens, and created common areas for recreation. He noted that these features were feasible because they demanded higher prices from buyers. Because these higher prices raise questions about affordability, Olmsted explained that some of the lots contain moderate houses with shallower yards such that most units are only slightly more expensive than other similar houses in New York City.

“City Planning, A Forecast of the City to Be,” New Boston, Vol. 2, #5, Sept. 1911
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This excerpt from Olmsted’s address to the Third National Conference on City Planning addresses the way that planning should relate to changing cities.
Olmsted conceives of the instruments of planning broadly, including various elements of regulation and taxation that can have a “decided influence upon the form and character of buildings or other features of the city’s physical equipment” (172).
He acknowledges that planning—including this broad range of tools—can have negative effects, such as the untoward restriction of housing supply. Therefore, planners must carefully guide the use of these tools towards beneficial outcomes.
Given these dangers, he connected planning to the inevitable changes in cities, even in the absence of growth:
“[Changes] are absolutely normal features of healthy, vigorous municipal life. To ignore them or to regard them as exceptional and extraordinary interferences with the normal execution of a rigid city plan, made once and for all, is perhaps the worst as it is the commonest mistake in regard to the whole subject.” (174)
Instead, Olmsted conceives of city plans as administrative tools that adapt to change and help to guide the growth of cities, connecting existing institutional knowledge with changing circumstances.

“The Progress in City Planning,” Fourth National Conference on City Planning (proceedings), 1912 document
Olmsted reviews the state of the city planning at the time and makes an argument for more comprehensive and integrated planning, with two major criticisms of the current practice of planning.

Olmsted saw planning being done in subject-specific agencies that focused on parks, streets, and schools, as well as other realms. Each of these areas should be conceived as a system—e.g. a parks system rather than a collection of individual parks—and as part of a larger system of the city. He believes that it is critical to coordinate these individual planning functions.

Olmsted argues that planning should be a continuous, active process rather than reacting to individual private initiatives: “This [current] method is really a censorship upon private street plans, not a means of creative planning; but it is generally associated with an irregular succession of spasms of creative planning which design specific street improvements in the public interest, and endeavor to push them through to execution while the spasm is still active” (12).
He responds to critics that argue that city planning is ineffective: “The cure for the evils of injudicious and perfunctory official street planning is in better planning, not in a return to laissez faire methods or the method of a halting censorship of fragmentary plans made on private initiative” (14). Structural changes, Olmsted notes, will be necessary in order to institutionalize this kind of planning. In particular, permanent city planning commissions would enable continuous work on plans that integrate many different parts of city life. While less glamorous than temporary commissions, they are likely to be more effective.
Finally, while he argues strongly for integrated planning, Olmsted also notes that plans should be more flexible than they often are in order to accommodate the developments of investors.

“A City Planning Program,” Proceedings of the Fifth National Conference on City Planning (1913)
Olmsted sets out a framework for the functioning of a city planning office (CPO) that results from his understanding of planning:
“We thus conceive a city plan as a live thing, as a growing and gradually changing aggregation of accepted ideas or projects for physical changes in the city, all consistent with each other, and each surviving, by virtue of its own inherent merit and by virtue of its harmonizing with the rest.”
He sees three main roles for the CPO:

Custodian of the Plan – The CPO gathers and maintains extensive data on the physical aspects of the city, as well as on the social and legal phenomena that interact with it. The CPO also maintains the historical repository of planning reports and informal planning ideas that ought to inform new projects.

Interpreter of the Plan – The CPO indicates whether new projects are consistent with the plan. When they are not consistent, the CPO works to modify either the plan or the project.

Amender of the Plan – As conditions change in the city, the CPO modifies the plan so that it remains relevant.
Fulfilling all three of these roles in a systematic and continuous manner, properly functioning planning offices will exhibit both the positive and the negative characteristics of bureaucracies, according to Olmsted.
Olmsted argues that the planning office is a vital actor in planning, but that it must work closely with other entities. There are several other key actors:

Other government departments

Subject matter experts

Activists who will prod the planning office into more creative activities
Together the planning office and the other actors function as a complex system:
“There is no particular place of beginning, and certainly no end in sight, for we are concerned with a continuous vital process of the social organism which we call a city. The same ground must be traversed again and again. But the line of movement is not a circle. It is a hopefully rising spiral.”
Finally, Olmsted defines three ways in which such plans can be implemented: by inspiring voluntary action, by regulating activity through the state’s police power, and by operating public infrastructure.

“The Town-Planning Movement In America.” Housing and Town Planning. The Annals 51 (January 1914): 172-181

In this piece, Olmsted offers a historical review of town planning in the United States.
At a basic level, the ideas behind town planning have a long history in the United States because of the nature of settlement of a new land; however, he also explains that often the exigencies of daily life in places like Boston prevented a longer time horizons for planning. In fact, the town planning did not emerge as a self-conscious discipline until the 1890s.
He then traces the growth of planning with a focus on changes in Philadelphia and New York City, showing how planning grew more comprehensive as it moved beyond a focus on street layouts alone.
He notes several influences on American town planning:

Many American parks were located in places that mimic the historic location of European parks location of parks

English town planning helped to push American planning away from a temporarily excessive focus on the aesthetic side of planning

Social reformers rightly emphasized the importance of the places of ordinary life rather than public places with indirect influences on individuals
Finally, Olmsted relates that numerous city planning commissions were founded between 1907 and the publication of this article in 1914, pointing to future progress in the field.

“Land subdivision from the point of view of a development company,” Housing Problems in America. National Conference on Housing, 1915, p. 158-174
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Olmsted’s creates a model of land prices to help illuminate patterns of land subdivision and development. He frames this piece by suggesting that planners and reformers must account for the underlying financial forces in order to establish reasonable programs:
“I do not flatter myself that the figures I have presented solve any housing problems; but I hope they may be useful in helping us to apply our efforts in directions which are likely to be fruitful and in avoiding the pursuit of aims that are too directly opposed to mathematical and economic law” (173)
He reveals the fallacy in his own belief—held by many other reformers as well—that lots should be wider and less deep than was common. To explore this phenomenon, he creates price model for lots of various shapes. He explains that that lot price is determined by total area of the lot (because the land itself costs money) and by the street frontage (because street improvements are costly and related to the length of street). Therefore, an increase in lot width will require an even greater reduction in depth. For any location, the exact tradeoff between width and depth is determined by the relative price of land and of street improvements. That is, the cheaper land is, the more than narrow-long lots make sense.
Olmsted thus explains that, despite the wishes of reformers to the contrary, the pattern of lot development has been caused by rational economic factors. Planners still ought to care about this phenomenon, he suggests, but they should understand the underlying pattern before making alternative suggestions.
Finally, he also addresses the common understanding that speculation is causing excessive developer profits and is distorting the urban land market. Although he agrees that speculation is a problem, he shows that developer profits are far lower than is generally assumed. Olmsted argues that the conventional wisdom was actually generated by real estate boosters that laud the profitability of property investment. By contrast, he argues that the biggest problem with speculation is that speculators often to do not work to ensure that their properties are optimally productive in the short-term, thus harming the neighborhoods in which those underused properties are located.

Olmsted, Frederick Law, Jr."Introduction." [Basic Principles of City Planning]. In John Nolen (ed.), City Planning: A Series of Papers Presenting the Essential Elements of a City Plan (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916):1-18
A significant portion of this piece is based on Olmsted's speech at the 1910 National Conference on City Planning, which was summarized above. Only additional information will be noted here.
Olmsted frames his discussion by explaining that city planning is based on the idea of cities as complex, organic phenomena. It necessary to understand these interrelated aspects of cities in order to intervene in cities as planners; however, he also cautions against a paralysis caused by a need for complete knowledge about the city.
He also introduces his subject by explaining that planning is essentially the responsibility of the current generation for the future. After reviewing the three main areas of planning—circulation, public facilities, and the regulation of private development—Olmsted says that there must be a limit to these planning activities:
“And unless we make the revolutionary change of putting our main reliance on collectivism, we must avoid going so far in the collective control over private property as to make the mass of property owners feel that they are no longer free and responsible beings with their destiny in their own hands.”
Olmsted suggests the conflict between the ideal of total control—thought to be most efficient—with a democratic process should be resolved in favor of democracy:
“As long as city planning control over private property is pursued in this democratic, modest, common-sense spirit, there is no vital danger to be feared even from wholly unprecedented applications of the police power.”
With these cautions taken to heart, planning can become a successful discipline.

“Principles of Professional Practice.” Landscape Architecture, Jan. 1917, vol. 7, 88-95 document
In this piece concerning the business aspect of being a landscape architect, Olmsted distinguishes between the professional and unprofessional aspects of such a career.
The professional activities are primarily those associated with designing, managing and implementing landscape architecture. Unprofessional activities involved the setting of fixed prices, which is tantamount to speculation, and other aspects of serving as a business contractor.
Olmsted argues that landscape architects can engage in both types of activities if necessary, but that they should separate the two activities clearly in their fee structure.
Lastly, he suggests that landscape architects can avoid any difficult situations by producing good cost estimates and then completing projects within those estimates.

“What is "professional" practice in landscape architecture?” American Society of Landscape Architects. Transactions, 1909-1921, vol. 2, p. 128-136
Olmsted expands upon the principles outlined in the 1917 Landscape Architecture article summarized above. He makes a similar distinction between the professional and unprofessional activities that could be carried out by landscape architects.
Even though landscape architects may become involved with the technical implementation of projects, they should remain focused on design. He explains the importance of this focus by referring to his own practice:
“We do, however, systematically try to avoid getting our organization needlessly entangled in executive work which can be efficiently done by others and which might interfere with our proper professional concentration on problems of design” (136).
In addition to these general guiding principles, he discusses various fee structures for the work of landscape architects and suggests which structures are optimal.

Phelps Wyman

WW I Housing - Documents